Man Sinister

“Both statements are partly correct. Will you tell me what this is all leading up to?”

Conroy spoke for the first time. “A servant girl — Ellen Holecomb — went to Mr. Cranford’s room this morning to call him to breakfast. She knocked on the door. It wasn’t securely latched, and swung open. She found Mr. Cranford on the floor of his room. Dead. Poisoned. Murdered.”

I rode with Conroy back to Northland Avenue. We entered a house heavy with the hush of death. Ellen, with eyes red and swollen from weeping, let us in and closed the front door behind us.

“Has your brother returned?” Hagan asked her gently.

“No, sir.”

Hagan motioned me into the parlor. I entered and saw Harold. He was slumped in a chair, an old, tired man of thirty. In his gaze, as it fell on me, was no warmth, no sign of recognition. But then his eyes spoke an agonized question: Why, Steve? Did you do it?

I put my hand on Harold’s shoulder. What could be said at a time like this? Harold nodded and left the room, in a daze.

“I wish you’d bring me up to date on the details,” I said to Conroy.

He sat down in an overstuffed chair. “Like the captain told you,” he said, “the girl found him. He must have been dead there in his room since before midnight. Unless the autopsy turns up something different, we’re betting that Mr. Cranford was killed with chloral hydrate administered in a drink of whisky. You know anything about poisons?”

“No.”

“Well, alcohol steps up the action of chloral-hydrate. Like hitting somebody over the head with a sledge-hammer. Mild doses of the stuff are used in sleeping capsules. That girl, Ellen, tells us that a doctor gave Mr. Cranford a prescription several weeks ago. Mr. Cranford had the girl get the prescription refilled day before yesterday. We found the bottle, empty, and called the druggist. Chloral hydrate.”

Conroy lit a cigarette and replaced the package in his pocket. He went on then, “Naturally we thought of suicide, but the captain won’t believe that Mr. Canford was the kind of man to take his own life.”

My mind was leap-frogging, trying to make a connection. Harold in flight. McGinty. The nearly worthless painting of a girl waif who’d tried to commit suicide off a New York City dock. The shooting of McGinty. The blank wall I’d encountered there in the bungalow. Now the murder of Papa Joe, the most unreasonable happening of all. I couldn’t imagine how it could possibly be tied in with the rest.

Chapter VI

My insides began a transmutation to cold jelly as I considered motives. Harold would not have killed his own father. It was just as unlikely that Vera would have. Ellen and Wilfred had just as little reason. Papa Joe had been their bread and butter, and they were accustomed to his tirades.

Even if McGinty could have slipped into the house here, for some reason wanting Papa Joe out of the way, he couldn’t have known where the poison was. To have him accidentally find it and prepare a drink, somehow knowing that Papa Joe would drink it, was stretching the wildest laws of chance and coincidence far beyond the breaking point. Anyway, McGinty was after Harold, not Papa Joe.

Lucy Quavely had been in the house the night before, but what possible reason could she have for murdering Papa Joe? Besides, she wouldn’t take a chance of blighting the Quavely name, no matter how much she might want to kill somebody.

And that extremely unpleasant process of elimination left only one person. My shoulder had been stiff this morning when I woke. If Hagan discovered my black and blue marks and in any way could learn that I’d received them last night when Papa Joe struck me with his cane, I could picture that police captain’s reaction.

Panic crawled into my throat. I lighted a cigarette when I caught Conroy watching me closely, walked over to a chair and sat down.

“You’re sure you’ve leveled with us, Martin?” he asked me shrewdly. “About the quarrel you had with the old man and all the other details?”

“I’m positive.”

Conroy settled back in his chair. “When we find Wilfred we might pick up a lead. When did you see him last?”

“Late yesterday.”

So Wilfred was gone and Hagan had been unable so far to find him. The jelly didn’t suddenly turn to flesh and blood again, but I had the thought that Wilfred’s disappearance might remove some of the pressure from me, give me a little time to do something. Just what, I didn’t know. All I knew that Hagan didn’t know was that business about McGinty and the empty bungalow. Harold wouldn’t let the police in on that, of course, and certainly Vera would accede to his wishes and remain silent. She would go a long way to protect him. She had already proved she would stick to her man when the going got rough.