CHAPTER XXVIII

THE BLACK SMUDGE

Along the ribbon-smooth road Doctor Bushnell shot the car at a lively clip; one couldn't blame him, of course, for thinking of his private practice, and one of his patients had been telephoning for him all morning. He would have been the last man to hurry the Gilmore case to a legal finish, if he had thought there was anything to be gained by prolonging the investigation; but he considered that the affair had been solved to all reasonable satisfaction.

In less than five minutes they arrived at Greenacres, and hardly had the three men stepped from the machine to the porch of the house when Kirklan Gilmore, evidently having seen them from a window, came rushing out, both hands stretched out toward the artist. There were tears in his eyes, and his voice was husky, trembling with emotion.

"Thank God, Victor!" he cried. "I've just heard the whole inside of things from a man, the New York detective, that you're cleared, absolutely cleared! You don't know what a relief it has been to me, although I never did think, even when things were the blackest, that you did it."

"And I appreciate your loyalty, Kirklan," answered Sarbella. The hands of the two men remained clasped.

"Forgive me, Victor, for thinking last night that you--that you and Helen----"

"That there had been an--ah--affair between your wife and me," finished Sarbella. "Yes, I was afraid that my silence would put dark thoughts into your head, but----"

"Why didn't you tell me?" broke in Gilmore, and a peculiar expression convulsed his features. "Why didn't you tell me last night, out in the study, that she was the woman over whom your brother----"

Sarbella shook his head.

"No! I could not in honor do that," he protested. "You were my friend, and the woman was your wife. My lips were sealed. She was your wife; you loved her."

Kirklan Gilmore's face was still white, haggardly drawn, but he was no longer the broken wreck of a man, tottering upon the brink of a mental collapse, that he had been some hours before. He seemed to have recovered from the first over-powering shock of horror; Doctor Bushnell's course in placing him under the influence of a sedative had apparently been a most wise one.

At Sarbella's words his lips twitched piteously, but he managed to keep control of himself.

"No," he said slowly, huskily, "I was in love with--with the woman I thought her to be--in love with an ideal, a creation of my own imagination. The woman I thought her to be did not exist--except in my own infatuated fancies. And she was not my wife. She----Oh, what a nightmare it's been--what a nightmare!"

Doctor Bushnell stepped swiftly to his side and, taking his arm, urged him toward the house.

"Keep a grip on yourself, Kirklan," he murmured in a kindly, paternal tone. "It's been a pretty terrible business, old man, but that thing we mortals call fate has cut a lot of the strings to the tangle for you. It is better that things are as they are; it saves a vast number of troublesome complications. It saves--well, trucking a lot of mire through the courts."

Gilmore compressed his lips and lowered his head. "Yes," he agreed dully, "you're right about that; it saves the courts."

"Buck up, Kirklan! As you say, the woman you thought her to be did not exist."

"Ah," murmured Victor Sarbella, "but losing an ideal is one of the hardest things in life."

The novelist, leaning a little on the doctor's friendly arm, made his way slowly into the house. Sarbella and Wiggly Price followed.

"Have all the legal details been satisfied?" asked Gilmore, as he lowered himself into a chair. "There is, of course, no question but that----"

"But that Haskins killed her," finished Doctor Bushnell. "Absolutely none, Kirklan. There remains now only the inquest--a double inquest in this case. One jury will suffice for both; the verdict, of course, is a foregone conclusion."

There fell a brief silence, Gilmore's eyes staring straight in front of him, with a dull, vacant expression. No doubt he was thinking of the bronze-haired, beautiful woman who lay upstairs, cold in death--the woman who might have been.

"Everything has become quite clear to me," he said slowly, more as if speaking to himself. "She was making a visit to this Haskins in New York day before yesterday, when Atchinson saw her on the street. She must have gone there in answer to a letter that my butler tells me she received that morning."

"Atchinson?" Doctor Bushnell asked inquiringly.

"My publisher," Gilmore replied. "Since she was employed by the publishing firm before our marriage, Atchinson knew her quite well. He said it was she, but I thought he must be mistaken. She had told me that she was going to motor into the country. I wonder how it would have all come out if the man, Haskins, had not been trapped in the storeroom?"

No one responded to that musing question. Withdrawn unobtrusively into one corner, Wiggly had again taken the lump of tallow from his pocket and was meditatively rubbing his fingers over it. Suddenly his attention centered upon those black specks that he had taken for granted were dirt, caused, perhaps, by a soiled shoe sole pressing down on it, as it had lain upon the floor of the room upstairs; he saw now that those dark, almost pin-point discolorations were imbedded into the substance. This, however, increased rather than solved the puzzle.

"The district attorney has come, hasn't he?" asked Doctor Bushnell. "I took it for granted that it was his car I saw at the side of the driveway, as we came up."

Kirklan Gilmore nodded absently. "Yes," he said, "a young fellow--the assistant district attorney, I believe. Lasker, I think his name is. He's upstairs looking around with that detective fellow, Sergeant Fish."

"Tish," corrected the physician. "Quite a game sort, Tish; it was he who shot Haskins."

Again Gilmore nodded. "So he told me," he said.

"I think I'll go upstairs," added the physician. "It won't be long now until the men who are to serve on the jury arrive." He glanced at Wiggly with a patronizing sort of smile. "Are you coming up with me to look for more--more hairpins, young man?"

The newspaper man smiled grimly.

"I'll go up with you," he said, "but it's not hairpins that I'm mainly interested in right now; it's this confounded piece of tallow." He turned his eyes toward the novelist and thought he saw a sudden tightening of Gilmore's muscles, a suppressed start. He was not so sure about it. "Tell me, Mr. Gilmore, were candles used frequently in the house here?"

Gilmore did not reply for a moment. "Candles?" he murmured. "Why, my dear sir, what a peculiar question. I don't believe I understand."

Doctor Bushnell, moving toward the stairway, paused with a brief, discounting laugh.

"Our enthusiastic newspaper friend, Kirklan," he explained, "thinks we haven't begun to get at the bottom of things. He's found a few pieces of tallow candle on the floor of the room upstairs; he's trying to attach some importance to it--just because he doesn't hit upon a ready explanation to it, I suppose. I'm afraid we've humored him a little too much, in gratitude for the first assistance that he gave us in identifying your wife."

Gilmore was frowning slightly.

"And I'm afraid that I can't help him explain his little mystery, doctor," he said. "So far as I can recall, there aren't any candlesticks in Helen's room; nor in my room, which is adjoining. Still"--he paused for a moment--"it does occur to me, gentlemen, that the third floor has never been wired for electricity; the storeroom is so seldom visited. If Haskins had wanted to have a light up there, a candle would have afforded about the only possible illumination for him."

"Ah!" exclaimed the doctor. "See, Price, there's the explanation for you! The woman must have got Haskins a candle, and he carried it down with him when he shot her. He probably mashed it underfoot and----"

"No, that will hardly do," Wiggly interrupted with a quick negative jerk of his head. "In the first place, I can't believe that Haskins would have been fool enough to have taken a light with him to the storeroom; too much chance of the illuminated window attracting attention. Secondly, this tallow was broken into a good many small pieces; the trodding of a foot on a candle wouldn't do that; it would only have mashed it, and it wouldn't have scattered it several places about the room."

Doctor Bushnell shrugged his shoulders. "Oh, what matter!" he exclaimed impatiently. "Whatever explanation there is would probably be absurdly simple."

Before the physician could gain the stairs, Sergeant Tish and the assistant district attorney were coming down. The latter was a youngish, blond fellow, with rimless spectacles glistening in front of pale-blue eyes; one could see that he appreciated the gravity of the situation and the importance of his own official position, and that, beneath his outward pretense of grim poise, he was a rather nervous and inexperienced young man.

One look at young Lasker told Wiggly how futile it would be to approach him with any theory calculated to upset the accepted situation; the lawyer's words confirmed this impression.

"Ah, Doctor Bushnell!" he exclaimed, frowning his best official frown and clearing his throat several times. "I have just been over the ground with Sergeant Tish, who has been kind enough to lay all of the facts before me--in quite a comprehensive manner. I have canvassed the evidence thoroughly. I quite agree with you, doctor, that but one sensible hypothesis can be drawn. I would even call it more than an hypothesis. The evidence is quite clear-cut and incontrovertible. Sergeant Tish's markmanship has--fortunately for him, however--cheated the electric chair of its grim function. There can be no question of Haskins' guilt; absolutely no question."

"In spite of hairpins, tallow, and such stuff," grunted Tish, with a grin at Wiggly, evidently taking a keen delight in belittling him. The young assistant district attorney glanced at the newspaper man and lifted his hands in a gesture of depreciation.

"So this is the journalist you were telling me about. If positive evidence were lacking, my dear sir, it might be very well to bear these things in mind, but in a clear-cut case of this kind such minor trifles become entirely irrelevant and immaterial. Any other theory than that of Haskins' guilt is absolutely untenable. I am willing, Doctor Bushnell, that the inquest shall proceed with the evidence in hand."

"I think I hear Presley's bus coming along the road now," nodded the doctor. "He's bringing the men from the village."

From outside there came the sound of the lumbering, noisy conveyance, bearing the coroner's jury. All attention at the moment was focused in this direction, and Wiggly, without a word to any one--he was playing an absolutely lone hand now--made for the stairs. No one registered any objection to his taking another visit to the second floor, but halfway up he turned and saw Kirklan Gilmore's eyes fixed upon him in a sort of set, expressionless stare. Was it expressionless? Wiggly had a feeling that the blank look might be concealing a degree of--well, perhaps of wary apprehension.

"Humph!" Wiggly said under his breath. "Gilmore was downstairs when his wife was killed; he couldn't have had a hand in it, and yet, dash it all, I did get a reflex from him when it came to mentioning the tallow. And he was pretty prompt in trying to find an explanation for the stuff being in the room. I wonder----" But what he wondered was too vague even for his thoughts. Passing on up the steps to the head of the stairs, he let himself into the murdered woman's bed-chamber.

"I don't know what I can expect to find more than I have," he told himself discouragingly, "but the old line in the copy book used to tell me: 'If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.' Here goes for another try. Gilmore was startled when I mentioned tallow candles. Why?"

Obviously that question could never be answered until he found out for himself what part the tallow had played in the tragedy, until he had explained its mysterious presence in the room. He walked about the room slowly several times and then dropped to hands and knees, crawling back and forth, his eyes close to the rug, picking up all of the tallow that he could find. Presently he had quite a little accumulation of the stuff, gathered from a surprisingly wide radius.

The palm of his hand was pricked by a sharp surface hidden from view in the nap of the rug--another fragment of the broken vase. The vase hadn't impressed him greatly; for that was one thing that could be explained. As Tish had suggested, if it hadn't been tipped from the table, Helen Gilmore might have flung it at the murderer in a desperate effort at self-defense.

Yet, as he was about to toss aside the fragment of porcelain, his jaw sagged, and a startled exclamation came from his parted lips, for there clung to what had once been the inside of the vase, a small particle of tallow!

"Gosh!" breathed Wiggly, his ears twitching violently. "The tallow was inside of the vase when it was broken! The two go together; I'd never thought of that. By George, I've been missing something!"

The shattered porcelain vase had, in light of this discovery, taken on a real importance within Wiggly's mind. Hastily he began crawling on hands and knees about the room, retrieving every piece of it that he could find. When he had got together all of it he could find, he placed all the pieces on the table, with the tallow in a separate pile and, drawing up a chair, sat down and began to study it. Still no inspirational solution flashed through his mind; he began at nowhere and ended at the same place. Times without number he handled the pieces, absently sorting and resorting them, and at last, with a hopeless sigh of defeat, he realized that an explanation was beyond his powers of either deduction or imagination; he was simply beating his head against a stone wall.

"Its no use!" he muttered under his breath. "Possibly I'm wrong after all! Possibly----"

Outside the closed door in the hall he heard voices. Bates had come upstairs to call Joan Sheridan and her mother to attend the proceedings down in the library. Wiggly wondered if they would ask him to testify; probably not. Doctor Bushnell and the assistant district attorney would not want him upsetting things and confusing the accepted explanation by flinging his unproven theories at the jury.

For a moment or so the newspaper man debated.

"I know I've no authority to do it, and I will probably get thrown out on my ear, if I'm caught at it; but I've got a notion to have one more try."

Leaving the piece of broken vase and the lumps of tallow on the table where he had been studying them with so little result, he turned toward the door, slipping quietly into the hall. The sound of voices came up the open stairway; Doctor Bushnell, in his capacity as deputy coroner, was swearing in the jury.

Wiggly made for the wing of the house where he knew Joan Sheridan's room to be. He had never rid himself of the notion that she knew something about the murder that she would never tell unless it was forced from her unwilling lips; and the only force to which she would respond would be evidence.

Her room was unlocked. He let himself in with the unconscious stealthiness that overtakes a man who finds himself entering unbidden places. Closing the door gently behind him, the reporter straightway went about the business in hand, which was to determine whether or not the room might not reveal something that would incriminate Joan Sheridan.

First, he went to the girl's dressing table; the top of it, except for some silver-backed toilet articles, was barren; but in the right-hand drawer he did find hairpins. Quickly he compared them with the one in his pocket; they were of the same size, color, and pattern. As alike as the proverbial two peas in a pod; yet that in itself was slim proof, for, as Joan herself had said, all hairpins are so much alike. He had to have more than that--a great deal more than that.

Wiggly was closing the drawer when he noted for the first time the black smudge on his finger--a smallish streak which flecked free from the skin, as he rubbed at it with the ball of his thumb.

"Hello!" he exclaimed under his breath. "What's that? Where did I get it?" With a curious and puzzled frown he stared at the dark spot on his finger, as he continued to fleck off the black, grainy particles. He lifted his hand to his nose and sniffed, and, as he caught the faint, but unmistakable, odor, his ears fairly did a dance at the sides of his head.

"Great guns," he whispered. "It's powder--burned gunpowder! Where did I get that?" His bulging eyes swept the dressing table and the only articles that he had touched since coming into Helen Gilmore's room. And then he thought of the candle tallow and the black specks that had mocked him with their enigma. Slowly, through a fog of bewilderment and incredulity, there pierced a dawning light of understanding. He had solved the murder!