Murder by the clock

It was what the printed notices in the telephone directory urged one to do in case of an emergency. But it wasn’t an emergency exactly, nor—still exactly—was it a policeman she wanted. She wanted a detective, or an inspector, or something; a man to whom she could explain her worry about Herbert, and who could do something about it if he agreed with her that Herbert was in danger.

Mrs. Endicott had never had any personal contact with the police. Whenever she thought about it at all she thought of the force as an efficient piece of machinery, the active parts of which one observed daily from one’s motor as healthy and generally good-looking young men who controlled traffic. She knew that there was a patrolman whose beat carried him past their door. Upon thinking suddenly about it she realized that she had only seen this man twice or three times at most during the past year. She knew that Herbert always left a ten-dollar gold piece to be given him by one of the maids at Christmas, and a check for twenty dollars as a subscription to some enterprise vaguely designated as the “fund.”

She wondered momentarily whether the police characters she had seen in various plays, while at the theatre with Herbert, were true to life. Most of the characters had been brutal, in spite of a pleasant tender-heartedness reluctantly betrayed toward the final curtain, and just at present she wanted quiet, competent understanding—not brutality.

It occurred to her that a private investigator might be better, but she was uncertain as to the extent of their official powers. She decided to rely on the police, because the police could do something if they agreed with her that something ought to be done.

Mrs. Endicott looked up the telephone number of police headquarters and dialled Spring 3100. She grew nervous while waiting.

“This is Mrs. Herbert Endicott speaking,” she said, when an undeniably masculine voice answered. It was an impersonal, efficient voice with no overtones about it. “Will you please connect me with your detective department? . . . I beg your pardon? Oh.” She gave the number of her house on East Sixty-third Street between Fifth and Madison avenues.

“This is Mrs. Herbert Endicott speaking,” she began again, upon a second voice’s saying, “Hello,” “and I am worried about Mr. Endicott. I wonder whether you could send someone up to talk it over with me. . . . No, he hasn’t disappeared. I know exactly where he has gone, but I have reason to believe that something might happen to him. . . . Yes, it’s the Mr. Endicott who has been in the papers recently in connection with Wall Street. . . . Around in a few minutes? But I thought police headquarters were down on Centre Street. . . . They transferred the call to the precinct station? Really. . . . Oh, thank you.”

Mrs. Endicott replaced the receiver on its hook. She felt distinctly impressed at the efficiency with which her request had been so instantly transferred to the place where it could be handled competently and with dispatch.

The living room where she had been telephoning was on the second floor of the house. She left it and went to her dressing room, which was toward the rear of a corridor on the same floor. She gave her appearance a preoccupied inspection before a pier glass. The soft and uneven lines of the jade chiffon of her dress would offer a satisfactory mask, she felt, for the nervous tenseness of her body. She renewed the red on her upper lip where she had been biting it. She returned to the living room, lighted a cigarette, and picked up a novel which she did not read.

She smoked three cigarettes.

Her sense of aloneness became stifling. The conceit grew upon her nervous condition that she had changed places with the furniture. She had become inanimate and the furniture endowed with attributes of life, as if her being were under the influence of some dispassionate regard by something that had no eyes with which to see. It was nonsense—nonsense. She never should have listened—at least not attentively—to that wretched old woman. She could very well just have given the appearance . . . one had to be polite . . .

Mrs. Endicott moved restlessly to one of the draped windows and stared down on the silent street. About her stretched the city of New York, and yet her environment could not have been quieter in some cabin in the woods. Not as quiet. Her memory swerved to that hellish week with Herbert in the forests outside of Copenhagen . . . what on earth was the name of that little watering place . . . Trollhättan? . . . No, that was in Sweden. Names never mattered. She looked up for a while at a slender slice of night sky horizoned by cornices across the street. It was heavy with stars that held her as if they were so many magic mediums arranged in heaven for the express purpose of granting her earthbound wishes. Wishes? She shrugged. She released the drapes, and they settled into place.

A maid opened the living-room door and came in.

“A lieutenant from the precinct station, madam.”

“All right, Jane. Ask him to come up here. Did he give his name?”

“Lieutenant Valcour, madam, I think he said.”

“Try and be more careful in the future about getting names.”

“Yes, madam.”

Mrs. Endicott lighted another cigarette. Her sense of having done the proper thing began to desert her in a rush. The police had a habit of finding things out—unexpected things, irrelevant to any matter on hand. She was sure of it, and wondered on what she based the knowledge: books, hearsay. She would have to be careful, but after all, a person with intelligence—— He was standing in the doorway.

“My maid,” she said, “wasn’t sure of your name. Is it Valcour?” She noticed with a sense of relief that he was not in uniform and that he had left his hat and overcoat downstairs. Mrs. Endicott had an aversion to discussing things which fringed on possible intimacies with people who were hatted and coated. He was a mild elderly man with features that were homely but not undistinguished, well dressed in tweed, and not smoking a cigar. He affected her with a quieting sense of reassurance.

“Valcour is correct, Mrs. Endicott. I happened to be leaving for home when your call was put in, so I stopped in personally instead of sending a detective as you suggested.”

The faint trace of cultured precision in his speech made her suspect foreign origin. She was sensitive to voices, and while not exactly collecting them, they almost amounted with her to a hobby. They were an essential part in the attraction she felt toward certain people, and it would have been within the bounds of possibility for her to have fallen in love with a voice.

“You are of French origin, Lieutenant?”

“French-Canadian, Mrs. Endicott. I became naturalized twenty years ago.”

She offered her hand. They sat down. Now that he was here she felt that the necessity for hurry had vanished; his air of official protection had erased it. She wondered how it would be best to begin: just where to plunge into the foggy mass that composed her worry.

Lieutenant Valcour accepted a cigarette and lighted it. He was agreeably impressed with Mrs. Endicott and with the room. Both were unusual, and the competent foundation in culture he had acquired at McGill University in his youth enabled him to place them at a proper evaluation. The furniture was low set in design and severely simple, the general effect one of spaciousness and repose oddly marred by a muted undernote of harshness. It was not bizarre. He suspected it, correctly, of being modernistic. Mrs. Endicott herself had the startlingly clear perfection of features one occasionally finds in blondes. He decided that her age centred on twenty-five. Beneath her authentic beauty—her face seemed planed in pale tones of pink ice—there would be a definite substrata of metal. He noted that the six cigarette butts crushed in the vermilion lacquered tray on a small table beside her chair had not been smoked beyond a few puffs each. A clock standing on the broad-shelved mantel of the fireplace struck nine.

“My husband,” Mrs. Endicott said abruptly, “has been gone now exactly two hours.”

Lieutenant Valcour smiled amiably and settled himself a little less formally in his chair. His manner presented itself to her as a freshly sponged slate upon which she could trace any markings that she might choose.

“He left here at seven o’clock this evening,” Mrs. Endicott said, “to go to the apartment of a woman with whom he thinks he is in love. Her name is Marge Myles, and her apartment is on the Drive.”

Lieutenant Valcour’s smile seemed to offer both consolation and an apology.

“I’m afraid there isn’t very much we can do for you,” he said. “It’s always private inquiry agents who handle work of that—well, of that rather delicate character.”

“No—I haven’t made myself plain.” Mrs. Endicott’s indeterminate thoughts began to crystallize. “I’m not looking for evidence to secure a divorce. This woman is nothing of any permanence, but I’m afraid of her—of what she might do to Herbert.” Then she added, as if the simple statement in itself would insure his comprehension, “You see, I’ve seen her.”

“With him?”

“Yes. They were lunching at the St. Regis. Herbert always was a fool about those things. She’s foreign-looking—the Latin type.” Mrs. Endicott felt the need for being meticulously explicit. “Her eyes are like the black holes you see in portraits of Spanish women. They’re the entire face; everything else blurs into a nonessential whiteness. This woman’s eyes are like that—like weapons. I know she’s the sort who would kill if she got stirred up over something—got jealous or something. People do get jealous enough to kill,” she ended.

“Frequently.” Lieutenant Valcour stored away in his memory the broken nail on the little finger of Mrs. Endicott’s left hand. The uniform perfection of detail in the rest of her appearance made it stand out jarringly. “This is all most unfortunate,” he said sympathetically, “but I still doubt whether there is anything we could do. If there were only something definite—say a threat, for example—we’d be very glad to investigate it and to offer Mr. Endicott suitable protection.”

Mrs. Endicott stood up. The abruptness of the movement spread the folds of chiffon that streamed from a bow on her left shoulder, and Lieutenant Valcour’s deceptively indifferent eyes lingered on bruise marks that showed blue smears upon white skin before the chiffon fell back into place.

“Would you come with me to my husband’s room?” Mrs. Endicott said.

“Certainly.”

“There’s something there I’d like to show you—to ask you what you think about it.”

Lieutenant Valcour followed Mrs. Endicott along the corridor that led past her dressing room. A door beyond this opened into her bedroom, and directly across the corridor from it was the door to Endicott’s room. The blank end of the corridor served as a wall for the bathroom, which connected the two bedrooms and turned them into a suite which ran the width of the rear of the house.