The Key to Nicholas Street Read online

  Matthew sat down on the edge of the sofa, and, I was glad to see, Bettina took one look at him and very deliberately walked to the other side of the room, to the hard chair there, uncomfortable as it was. Then Harry sat down on the sofa with Matthew, and Morten pulled the piano stool out and perched on it sucking that old pipe of his and acting as if he were busy figuring out some kind of riddle and hoped we wouldn’t bother him at it. And, of course, Miss Junie, who was never one to miss a trick, came in and waited near the doorway, giving me a look out of the corner of her eye to see if I would notice this.

  “Junie,” I said to her, very nicely, of course, because it was easy enough to understand her popping with curiosity. “I’m sure you heard Mr. Ten Eyck say he wanted to talk to us privately, so if you just finish off in the kitchen, and close the door there …”

  She was already about-facing when Morten pointed his finger at her. “No,” he said, “you stay here, young lady. And,” he said, pointing to the chair near the doorway, “you better sit down. It might be a little while.”

  Talk about giving a girl ideas of her own importance! “Morten,” I pointed out, “Junie has a houseful of work to do, and if you would kindly let her mind her own business it can be done by the time you’re through acting like some detective out of a storybook.”

  “It can wait,” he said, and I could just see him saying that to May when she had her sleeves rolled up ready to tend to her housework. But the way he was acting up I decided to just sit back and close my mouth like a trap.

  “Now,” Morten said, and looked around at all of us, “I’d like to do some serious talking about this business next door, and then maybe ask some questions.”

  He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a handful of stuff which he laid out neatly on the floor in front of him. From where I sat I could see that one of the things was that handle from the screen door which had been in Katherine Ballou’s fist, and the sight of it sent a shudder through me. Then there was a raggedy little chunk of wood, a small gray chamois bag, and finally a crumpled piece of paper which he smoothed out carefully and folded in half before laying it down.

  “This might look like I’m going to do some kind of magic act,” Morten remarked, “and maybe in a way I am. Because these little things here change one picture into another right while you look.

  “One picture is of a young lady who is all alone in a house, and who had to go down to her cellar for something. Dr. Greenspan says that when we saw her she was dead at least six bours, maybe eight, maybe a little more. That meant she started down to that cellar between one o’clock in the morning and four o’clock in the morning. Maybe that’s a funny time for a young lady to go down to her cellar, but we found that this young lady came in from the city very late, and that she sometimes worked at painting pictures all night long. So we can figure that maybe there was something in the cellar she wanted for the painting.

  “Whatever the reason, she started down to the cellar, and because she was wearing silly shoes she tripped and fell at the head of the stairs, right by the screen door on the landing. She grabbed the handle of the door, it came off in her hand, and down she went to the bottom and was killed.”

  Harry put his face in his hands at this, but Morten paid him no attention, just looked squarely at me. “Anyhow,” said Morten, “that’s one picture.”

  “And,” said I, “it happens to be the way I would have explained it if anybody had asked me. Although,” I told him straight out, “I wouldn’t need to have everybody sitting around like a bunch of wooden Indians while I made a fuss over it.”

  Morten shook his head slowly at me. “Yes?” he said. “But now watch what happens to that picture.”

  He jabbed the stem of his pipe at the handle of the screen door lying there on the floor. “That was in the young lady’s hand,” he said, “and I’d like to ask you, Lucille, if you don’t think it’s strange for somebody to fall down a flight of stairs and still hold on to something like this?”

  “Maybe,” I said, “and maybe not. How can you tell what a body’ll do at a time like that?”

  “Why do you say ‘a body’?” he demanded suddenly.

  I sat bolt upright. “Morten Ten Eyck,” I said, “you know as well as I do that’s just a manner of speaking!”

  “Oh,” he said, and then appeared to brush the matter aside. “Then I’ll tell you it’s very unlikely someone falling down like this would want to hold something in her hand when she would need both hands to break her fall. And beyond that is the fact that this young lady could not possibly pull the handle from the door! I looked at the door, and it’s made of good wood like my own screen doors. It would take someone very strong to even start the handle loose. Somebody so strong,” and he pointed the pipe toward that little chunk of wood on the floor, “that he could even rip a piece of wood loose from the door if he tried hard enough.”

  “‘He’?” I said. “But it was in her hand.”

  “And that’s where Dr. Greenspan comes in again,” said Morten. “He found the back of the lady’s hand all bruised, the way it would be if her hand stuck hard in the handle here, and the back of her hand pushed up against the door. And there were bad bruises on her shoulder and arm, too, the kind she’d get from a hand pulling at her while she was holding on to that handle.”

  He held up a hand to stop me from speaking. “If you’re going to say those bruises could come from her falling, Lucille, you can forget that. Those bruises were finger marks; that woman died of a broken neck; and I think she died there at the top of the stairs and not at the bottom. And I also think you see how the picture changes. Instead of a young lady who wants to go down to her cellar it looks like we have a young lady, and a man, very strong, and maybe she didn’t want to go down to the cellar at all. Certainly not the way she did go.”

  Maybe that was the kind of humor that Harry thought was so remarkable when Morten used it at Rotary, but I didn’t find anything funny in it right then.

  “You mean,” Bettina said numbly, “she was killed. Killed by somebody and no accident at all.” And it was easy to see that although she didn’t want to, that although she was struggling against it, her eyes were being turned slowly toward Matthew Chaves there on the sofa.

  I was praying for her then. If she could only understand what her gesture meant, if she could only see that just to have such suspicions of a man meant he was all wrong for her, surely she would squarely face the decision she was fumbling and bumbling about since I had opened my heart to her that morning.

  Her precious Matthew had to go, I had made that plain as day to her, and while I hardly expected her to tell him, “It was nice knowing you, and here’s the door,” in just so many words, she would have to talk it over with him and say something that amounted to that before I set head to pillow that night. It’s one thing when a man walks into your home, sloven and mean as he might look at a glance, and you’re given to understand that he has a fine job and a chance of doing even better for himself, and quite another when you find out that he’s had to leave the job under a cloud and taken up work that pays barely enough to keep him, much less a wife and family.

  What does a mother with any heart think then? She thinks to herself, I have a daughter who’s such a mouse that she’s afraid to even lift her eyes when some nice, presentable young man—Charlie McIntyre, or that Oliver boy around the corner—says hello to her. And if having Matthew Chaves around will give her a better opinion of herself and put a little backbone into her, well, no harm done. And if Charlie McIntyre or Paul Oliver happens to notice that there’s some man thinks enough of Bettina to be sitting on her porch every time they pass by, well, it might put an idea or two into their heads. That’s what a mother thinks when she lies awake in the dark hours trying to find some way to smooth the path ahead of her children.

  In my opinion, it was Harry’s encouragement that led her to carry things right up to talk about marriage.

  “I like the man, Lucille.” That was Har
ry for you.

  “Father says it’s up to me only.” My daughter, no less.

  And mother, of course, had to be the bad one.

  Well, it was not the first time. Father was the one who gave the candy, and mother the one who gave the medicine, and when all the tears were dried no one seemed to be any the worse for it, although I never dreamed the time would ever come when I had to tell Bettina about her father, and show him to her as he really was. And the irony of it being that the woman was dead in her cellar the very moment I was speaking the words.

  No matter about that, Bettina had to face the fact that Harry’s opinions were worth no more than what Harry himself was worth as far as decency and respectability were concerned. And Matthew’s ranting and raving at the breakfast table should certainly have settled everything for her, except that she still shied away from making the final break. Part of it, of course, was the whole business of Katherine Ballou’s sudden death which had shaken Bettina up dreadfully, and which Morten wasn’t making any easier to bear. And part was her own good nature, I am sure, since even as a child she could never bring herself to hurt any creature, no matter how justified she would have been.

  But watching her as Morten talked I didn’t doubt that it was just a matter of her finding the right words to put Matthew Chaves in his place once and for all. She sat there with her hands folded on her lap, and her lips tight together, and her eyes stealthily slanted toward Matthew, and only when Morten said to her, “I’m afraid you’re right, Bettina. The woman was killed by someone, and no accident at all,” did she look away quickly. She tried to say something, but it stuck in her throat, and when Morten looked at her puzzled she cleared her throat hard, and then managed to say, “You mean, a prowler. It was a prowler,” in the sort of flat, expressionless way she would have read out, “I-have-a-cat,” to the children in her class.

  Morten sucked in his lips, and rubbed his finger along his nose, and looked up at the ceiling, and finally said, “Well now, let’s make believe you’re a prowler, Bettina. A big strong tough from Five Corners maybe who heard that this lady’s house is empty a lot of the time, and she has so much money, and you say to yourself, ‘Aha, I’ll go there and clean the place out.’

  “But when you get into the house you find the lady is there, and so because you are afraid you kill her. But before the lady finds you, and after she is dead, you can do just what you want in the house. And in the kitchen, three steps up from the landing where the side door is, and right on the kitchen table in front of you, is this.” And Morten reached down, picked up the chamois bag, and spilled out everything it held into his hand.

  There must have been a dozen pieces there at least, and all of them looked expensive to me. I could make out the ring she usually wore with the emerald set into it, and another ring with a huge diamond in it, and a pair of pearl earrings, and then Morten slid everything back into the bag.

  “And next to this,” he said, “is a pair of lady’s gloves, but since you’re a smart prowler you know that lady’s gloves aren’t worth stealing anyhow. But next to that is a pocketbook and in it is about five hundred dollars in nice clean bills. Now you tell me, Bettina, do you go out and leave this little bag and that money in the pocketbook on the kitchen table?”

  “If I was frightened enough,” said Bettina. “If I knew I had killed somebody …”

  “Oh,” said Morten, “but when you went into that house you knew you were breaking in, and you knew you were going to rob someone.”

  “But it’s different to kill somebody!” Bettina flared up. “If that happened all I’d think about would be to run away. As far as I could and as fast as I could, but just get away. And what would I care about any money or jewelry then!”

  The way she shouted it out, the way she acted as if all this were real and important to her, and not just Morten’s manner of getting to a conclusion in his usual roundabout way, well, it took me clean by surprise. And then I understood. She was making it her business to grab hold of anything that would help Matthew, would keep him out of the picture as far as possible. Why, the way she looked and acted right then, if she could have gone out on the street and found some miserable tramp, innocent as the day was long for all she cared, and he would have said he did it she would have sold her soul to him on the spot! My daughter, if you please.

  “Bettina,” I told her, “please don’t raise your voice like that.” And then I said to Morten, “As far as I can see, Morten, you’re trying to show us that if someone set out to rob the house next door he would have done it, no matter what. And I must say, I can’t see anything to argue with in that.”

  He nodded at me very pleased, as I knew he would be. Morten is one of those men who can’t abide coming right out with the point of what he wants to say, but must build up to it like somebody building a house, brick by brick. And Bettina’s carrying on as she had, left him standing there, so to speak, with a brick in his hand and no place to put it. However, before he could say whatever he was going to say to me Matthew Chaves cut in suddenly.

  “There are other motives,” he said, “for someone breaking into the house.”

  “Yes?” said Morten.

  “An attractive woman,” said Matthew, “alone in a house …”

  He let his voice trail off, and I didn’t even realize what he was driving at until I saw Morten turn red and then throw a hasty glance toward Junie and Bettina and me as if to see how we were taking this.

  “Well now,” Morten finally said, very embarrassed, “that’s something to consider in any such case, but I hardly think it applies here any more than robbery, and I’ll show you why.”

  He turned to Junie, who sat straight up in her chair and looked scared to death. “When you went into the lady’s house,” he said, “to take care of the water heater, did you go in the side door?”

  “Yes, sir,” Junie said, so faint you could hardly hear her.

  “Was it locked?”

  “I have a key,” Junie said. “Miss Ballou gave it to me.”

  “But did you have to use the key?” Morten said in such a sharp voice that the poor child looked as if she wanted to break out crying. “Are you sure you had to use the key?”

  “Oh, yes. It’s such a stiff lock, kind of old-fashioned, and it’s an awful lot of trouble. I had to keep twisting at it and rattling the door ….”

  “This morning?”

  “That’s what I’m telling you about, Mr. Ten Eyck,” Junie said. “It was worse than ever this morning. I …”

  Morten cut her off just like that with her mouth open and the words starting to tumble out of it in the way Junie has when she gets wound up. He looked over at us.

  “Now,” he said, “we’ll go over some more of the picture.” He ticked off points on his fingers. “There are two doors in the house: the front door was locked and bolted; the side door was locked. All the windows in the house were properly locked with safety catches. I checked each one myself, so I know for sure. But there was someone in the house with the lady, somebody who didn’t have to break in, but could walk right in like a gentleman.”

  “Or lady,” Matthew suggested very softly.

  Morten looked at him very deliberately over his glasses, and you could just see the wheels turning in Morten’s head.

  “Why do you say that?” he finally asked.

  “Because,” Matthew said, “you seem to feel that since whoever did it was strong only a man could be involved. But,” said Matthew in his nastiest way, “I’ve seen some remarkably strong women in my time.”

  “Yes?” said Morten with more patience than I would have, I can tell you.

  “A woman out of her mind with anger or fear can be as strong as any man, at least for enough time to do a lot of damage,” said Matthew. “And, my friend, that isn’t just theory.”

  Morten thought that over and then looked at Matthew as solemn as an owl. “When I’m done here,” he said, “I’ll make it my business to see if any female lunatics have escaped from
the local asylum,” and it was with deep satisfaction that I saw Matthew set his teeth hard and look black as a thundercloud.

  Morten shook his head. “No,” he told us, “I think we’re safe in saying it was a man, and we can also say it was a man who came into the house one of three ways.”

  He held up three fingers to illustrate. “One, he was with the lady when she came in. Or, two, it was somebody who knew her so well that when he knocked or rang she would let him in. Or, three, it was somebody who had a key to that side door. Now,” he said, “has anyone here any ideas on which it might be?”

  Any ideas? I had been standing at my bedroom window listening to the Jackson Avenue Church toll midnight when that big Cadillac swung into the driveway with its headlights blinding me for the moment. An idea had struck me then, and it was back now as vivid and hard to shake as the glare of the headlights had been.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I opened my mouth, but closed it again without speaking. That was all Morten needed before he was on me, quick as a wink.

  “You were going to say something, Lucille?”

  “No,” I said, and then I said, flustered, “well, yes. Yes, Morten. I think I ought to say that I was standing at the bedroom window upstairs when Miss Ballou drove in about midnight. And there was a man in the car with her, I am sure there was.”

  Morten looked as gratified as if I had poked my finger right into someone’s face and said, “There is the murderer.”

  “Do you know him?” he said. “Who was he?”

  And I had to explain that, what with the reckless way the woman swung the car into the driveway, and the way the headlights shone into my eyes when the car bounced up on the curb, it was impossible to make out anything very well. “But,” I said, “I am positive now there was a man sitting there in the front seat with her. Without a jacket and in his shirt sleeves. I am positive of that.”