Persons Unknown Part 8

The young man was aware at once of being a local celebrity. His evidence was to be one of the treats of the day. Not even the attack upon Christina had created a much greater stir. He took his place; and, "At last," said the coroner, "we are, I believe, to hear from somebody who saw _something_."

Herrick told his story almost without interruption. He was listened to in flattering silence; the young author had never had a public which hung so intently on his words. The silence upon which he finished was still hungry.

The coroner drew a long breath. "We're greatly obliged to you, Mr.

Herrick. And now let us get this thing straight. It was one o'clock or thereabouts that Mr. Ingham began to play?"

They established the time and they went over every minutest detail of changing spirit in Ingham's music.

"That crash which waked you for the second time--do you think it could have been occasioned by an attack on Mr. Ingham?--that he may have been struck and thrown against the piano?"

"Oh, not at all. It was a perfectly deliberate discord, a kind of h.e.l.lish eloquence."

"Ah! I'm obliged to you for that phrase, Mr. Herrick." And again he was asked--"That gesture which so greatly impressed you--do you think you could repeat it for us?"

Herrick quelled the impulse to reply, "Not without making a d.a.m.ned fool of myself," and subst.i.tuted, "I can describe it."

"Kindly do so."

"She threw her arm high up, as high as it would go, but at a very wide angle from her body, and at that time her hand was clenched. But while the arm was still stretched out, she slowly opened her fingers, as if they were of some stiff mechanism--and it seemed to me that it was the violence of her feeling they were stiff with--until the whole hand was open, like a stretched gauntlet."

"Well, and then, when she took down her hand?"

"She drew it in toward her quickly; I had an idea she might have covered her face."

"And then she disappeared?"

"Yes; but she seemed to dip a little forward."

"As if to pick something up?"

"Well, not as much as from the floor; no."

"From a chair, then, or the couch?"

"Possibly."

"She would, standing at the window, have been some five or six feet from the piano, where Ingham sat?"

"I should say about that."

"Mr. Herrick, are you absolutely sure that this was not until after the shooting?--this forward dip?"

"After? No, it was before!"

"Ah--And directly after the shot the lights went out?"

"Directly after. Almost as if the shot had put them out."

"Now, Mr. Herrick, you have testified that from, as you say, the vague outline of the hair and shoulders and the slope of her skirts, and from the fact that when she raised her arm there was a bit of lace, or something of the kind, hanging from her sleeve, you were perfectly sure that this shadow was the shadow of a woman. Yet you still could not in the least determine anything whatever of her appearance. That I can quite understand. But didn't you gather, nevertheless, some notion of her personality?"

Herrick avoided Deutch's eye. He said--"I don't think so."

"That extraordinary movement, then, did not leave upon you a very distinct impression?"

"In what way?"

"An impression of a lady not much concerned with social constraint or emotional control; and of a very great habitual ease and flexibility in movement."

Herrick managed to smile. "I'm afraid I'm no such observer as all that.

Perhaps any lady, within sixty seconds of committing murder, is a little indifferent to social constraint."

The coroner looked at him with a slight change of expression. "Well, then, let us put it another way. You would not expect to see your mother, or your sister, or any lady of your own cla.s.s, make such a gesture? No? Yet you must often have seen an actress do so?"

"That doesn't follow!" Herrick said. His flush resented for Christina the slur that his words overlooked. And suddenly words escaped him. "You answered the previous question yourself, remember! Be kind enough not to confuse my evidence with yours!"

The coroner studied him a long time without speaking, while the young man's color continued to rise, and at length came the comment, "I'm not falling asleep, Mr. Herrick. I'm only wondering what charming influence has been at work with the natural appet.i.te, at your age, for discussing an actress."

"Ask me that later, outside your official capacity," said Herrick hotly, "and we'll see if we can't find an answer!"

"Mr. Herrick, why, on the morning after the murder, did you take down Miss Hope's photograph from over your desk?"

"Because, never having met Miss Hope, it was a photograph I had no right to. I took it down when I learned the ident.i.ty of the original. I didn't want its presence to be misconstrued by cads."

"Thank you. That will do. Hermann Deutch, if you please."

Herrick retired, ruffled and angry at himself; and Deutch, in pa.s.sing him, cast him a clinging glance, as of a fellow conspirator, that he found strangely indigestible. At Christina, he could not look.

It did not take the coroner two minutes to make hay of Mr. Deutch. Not, indeed, that he was able to extract any very damaging admissions. The superintendent said that he was wakened by his wife, who had herself been wakened by the 'phone. He had held the before stated conversation with Mr. Bird, and, not being able to get the elevator, had walked upstairs, being joined in the office by a policeman. The rest of his proceedings were unquestionable. But the coroner, an expert in caricature and bullying and the twisting of phrases, by making him appear ridiculous, managed to make him appear mendacious; this was the easier because every now and then there was a slip in the sense of what he said, as if he had forgotten the meaning of words; he certainly perspired more than was at all persuasive; he soon began to stumble and to contradict himself about nothing; his slight accent thickened and, in a syntax with which his German tongue was habitually glib, but not accurate, he was soon making errors laughably contemptible to a public that presumably expressed itself with equal elegance in all languages.

So that presently, when he was sufficiently harrowed, the coroner drew from him an admission; not only had Ingham frequently entertained ladies at his supper-parties, but complaints had been made to Deutch by various tenants, and these complaints he had not transmitted to the owners of the apartment house. The most searching inquiry failed to connect Christina with these parties, but the inference was obvious.

"I didn't,"--Mr. Deutch burst forth--"keep 'em quiet any because she was there. She wouldn't have touched such doings, not with the sole of her foot. But I didn't want the gentleman she was engaged to should be put out of the house when I was running it, after her recommending it to him, on my account!" His eyes and his voice were full of exasperated tears. "He'd have told her one lie and yet another and another, and she'd have believed him, and he'd have wanted her to fight me. Not that she would. But he was fierce against her friends, any of 'em. And I didn't want she should have no more trouble than what she had with him already."

"Very kind of you. Nature made you for a squire of dames, Mr. Deutch.

Miss Hope, now,--you are a particularly old friend of hers, I believe.

And I understand you would do a great deal for her."

"I'd do anything at all for her."

"I see." All that was crouching in the coroner coiled and sprang. "Even to committing perjury for her, Mr. Deutch. Even to concealing a murder for her sake?--Silence!" he commanded Christina's friends.

In the sudden deathly stillness Deutch lifted his head. He looked at the coroner with the eyes of a lion, and in a firm voice he replied, "Say, when you speak like that about a lady, Mr. Coroner, you want to look out you don't go a little too far."

"I am about to call a witness," said the coroner, with his cold laugh, "who will go even farther. Joseph Patrick, please!"

Joe Patrick was the night-elevator boy.

People stared about them. No witness. The coroner's man came forward, saying something about "telephoned--accident--get here shortly."

"See that he does,--The day-elevator boy in court!"