The Room Under the Stairs

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 848, 17 December 1929, Page 5

The Room Under the Stairs

The Baffling Story of a Man Who Read of His Own Murder.

By j

Herman Landon

Copyright by G. Howard Watt. Serialised by Ledger Syndicate.

CHAPTER VIII (continued) "S-i-m-o-n C-a-b-e-1.” For a time he stood rigid, gazing tit the. characters on the paper, knuckles whitening as he gripped the edge of the desk. The clumsily formed and yet startlingly legible letters neemed to symbolise a dread that had teen ever present despite his efforts o fight it down. Littleby’s words, living a new and more appalling wist to the tragedy on the hillside, recurred to him. What did it mean, this sinister inscription on a scrap of white paper pinned to his wall? A threat, a warning, an ill-natured reminder? He could not know, but at least one thing was certain. He could no longer evade the fact that someone knew—or at least, guessed—his secret. It was equally obvious that someone had stolen into his house during his absence and left this dolorous reminder on his wall. It was a crude bit of melodramatic claptrap, but effective nevertheless. And what could be the object? He found no answer, but he seized eagerly upon the one tangible clue contained in the inscription. Someone knew t hat he was'Poul Forrester. The realisation left him strangely calm, instead of terrifying him as it might have done under different circumstances. He was no longer dealing with shapeless shadows; he had found something substantial at last. He unfastened the paper and concealed It in a dravtrer of his desk, then turned out the gas and went to bed. The last image in his consciousness was not the writing on the wall, but the bewildering loveliness of little Miss Gray. He was up early the next morning. The world, or as much of it as he could see from his window, was full of sunshine and fresh breezes. His muscles, as he performed his usual morning calisthenics, were found to be ia excellent trim. His mind was keen and fresh, as it it had shaken off an abysmal spell during the night. After a cold shower and quick shave he went down to breakfast. “Glorious day,” he confided to Mrs. Blossom. "The weather prediction is rain, air,” remarked the housekeeper gloomily. “The weather man is a chronic Pessimist. By the way, were there any callers after I left the house yesterday?” "Only an insurance agent. I wasn’t going to let him in, but there was no

getting lid of him. These agents are a pest.” "An infernal nuisance,” Dean agreed. “You didn't admit him to my workroom, I hope?” “Certainly not, sir,” with asperity. “I never go in there myself, except to clean up on Saturday mornings. I know my orders.” “To be sure, Mrs. Blossom,” said Dean soothingly. “You are very good about protecting my privacy, and I appreciate it. You didn’t let that pestiferous agent out of your sight while he was in the house?” A vigorous negative was on the housekeeper's lips, but she held it back as a concession to strict veracity. “Only for a moment or two. He asked me for a drink of water, and, of course, I couldn't refuse him.” “Of course not. Asked you for a drink of water, did he? And you fetched it from the cooler in the dining room, I take it. H’ni. Tell you what you do, Mrs. Blossom. If he should come back when I am out, ask him to call again. In view of the uncertainties of life I may be interested in a moderate amount of insurance. Your coffee is excellent this morning. Another cup, please.” The housekeeper gave him a sad, puzzled look. There were times when Dean’s whims were beyond her, and so she merely nodded when her employer, rising from the table, told her he expected to be absent for most of the day. CHAPTER IX. DETAILS THAT MEAN LITTLE — OR MUCH Arriving in the city, Dean decided to call on Shane. He did not feel he had played quite fairly with his friend. There were so many angles of the case that threatened to swamp his thoughts whenever his mind dwelt on them, and he did not know how to broach them to the lieutenant. He had tried once, in an indirect way, while stating his hypothetical solution of the mystery, and the lieutenant had laughed at him. With the two pieces of glass it was different. They were at least tangible, and he could talk about them with Shane without laying himself open to suspicion or ridicule. He t;ook the precaution of telephon- | ing police headquarters from a public ■ booth to see if the lieutenant was in. After a brief delay Shane was finally located in the Bureau of Ideutifica- | tlou, and he told Dean to come over ■at ouce. The novelist boarded a car, and fifteen minutes later he found his friend poring over a set of records in an oflice located in the basement of the building. “What luck?” asked Dean. Shane raised his eyes and regarded him with a shade less than his usual candour. “Oh, so-so. I've been trying to check up on one or two things in Lamont’s confession.” “Then there is a doubt in your mind?” “Not exactly a doubt. All the statements in the confession hang together, and until yesterday I thought the case was closed. Then, last evening, Lamont pulled that queer stuff before he collapsed, and I started wondering. It can’t cut any ice as far as the facts in the case are concerned, but—. Well, I’m still wondering.” He looked at the novelist with a scowl on his broad face, as if his bewilderment were partly due to him. “What's up, Dean?” Dean sat down and unfolded his handkerchief, exposing the two pieces of glass. Shane gave him a puzzled glance, looked at the smaller of the two fragments, dropped it, then examined the. larger one.

• Looks like a piece from a watch crystal,” he observed, holding the

bevelled edge to the light. “Where did you find it?” “In the sitting-room in the Forrester house. The two pieces were lodged in a crack in the floor.” Shane lifted his blue eyes from the fragment of glass and gave Dean a curious glance. “So, you went back there. Didn’t you get enough atmosphere the first time? Well, what do you see in this piece of glass?” “Nothing yet,” said Dean, glad that Shane had not inquired how he had entered the Forrester house. “I am not sure it means anything. There is just one little point in my mind that I want to clear up. Shane, will you let me see the watch you found in the room under the stairs?” The lieutenant whistled softly. “You’re off oil the wrong track. Even if this piece of glass came off the watch I found, it wouldn’t mean anything. It didn’t though. The crystal of that watch isn’t broken.” “I know, but please let me see it.” Shane produced the watch, with the air of one humouring a child. It was an open-face timepiece, and Dean unscrewed the rim and took out the crystal, then placed it on a sheet of paper and drew a circle around it with a pencil. Finally he laid the larger of the two fragments against the periphery of the circle. He shook his head. * “So much for that,” he said, a trace of excitement in his voice. “They don’t match. This broken piece has a smaller degree of curvature than the crystal belonging to the watch.” “Well, what of it?” demanded Shane, who had watched him in a mood of mingled amusement and impatience. “Having a smaller degree of curvature, it must have been larger crystal. Consequently, it belonged to a larger watch than the one you found in the room under the stairs, probably one of the kind that used to sell for a dollar before the war.” Shane eyed him uncomprehendingly. “Supose you tell me what you are driving at?” “Only this. It looks as if, at one time or another, a watch crystal was broken in the room where Lamont says he killed Paul Forrester. If I were to chuck the facts and draw on my imagination, N I should say the accident happened during the struggle between Forrester and his murderer.” Shane looked as if he were trying very hard to keep his patience. “But you have said yourself that the broken piece doesn’t fit Forrester’s watch.” With a faint smile Dean looked up at the detective. “It doesn’t fit the watch you found in the room under the stairs,” he said with a slow emphasis. The detective grunted, but suddenly he sat back in his chair and stared. His eyes had a dazed look, as if a staggering idea had come to him. “But that’s crazy!” he declared at length. “There isn’t a shred of sound fact to support such a wild idea.” Dean still smiled. “Yet you picked the idea out of my head before I had time to put it into words.” “Makes no difference.' It’s just one of these woozy things that look all right in fiction, but have no place in a world of hard facts. Why, for all you and I know a dozen watch crystals may have been broken in that house.” “It has stood vacant for over five years,” Dean pointed out, “so this particular crystal must have been broken either at the time of the murder or shortly before. By the way, remember the fictitious solution I gave you yesterday?” “It was as full of holes as a sieve. You said you could fill in all of them but one.” “And I think I could plug up that one with this piece of glass. Just now my mind isn’t equal to the performance, though. See you later.” Dean was off, and with an intent look on his face the lieutenant picked up the watch he had found in the room under the stairs. For a long time he regarded it closely. “It’s crazy as the dickens,” he declared fretfully, concluding a long and twisted train of thought, “but nothing else explains the way Lamont looked at Dean just before he collapsed. H'm. Next time I see Dean I'm going to ask him. just for fun, if there’s a scar on the light side of his neck.”

CUL-DE-SAC After a solitary luncheon Dean took a train to Kew Gardens and visited the notary who had witnessed Lamont’s confession. He found the man in a real, estate office only a few blocks from Dennis Littleby’s residence. He was a busy little man, bald and fat, riding high on the crest of the realty boom sweeping that section, and the brief interview was punctuated by several telephone calls. “Have you known Mr. Littleby long?” inquired the novelist. “What's that? Known him long?” Don’t know him at all except by reputation. They tell me he won't look at a case unless he's paid a retaining fee of a thousand on the spot.” “I understand he sent for you when he wanted a notary to witness Lamont’s confession.” “So he did. It was thought his friend -would cash in that night, £o naturally he sent for a notary living in the neighbourhood.” Dean nodded. The explanation seemed sufficient. He leaned forward a little out of his chair, hesitating before he put his next question. “Was there anything about the confession that seemed suggestive to you —queer in any way?” “What’s that?” The notary’s comfortably rounded body bristled. “Anything queer about it? If there had been, do you suppose I would have put my seal on it?” “Certainly not,” Dean hastened to say, for he could see that the man had a keen regard for the proprieties and the responsibilities of his position. “It just occurred to me that you might have noticed something that didn’t strike you as peculiar until afterward.” The notary gave him a long, wondering look, then shook his bald head. “No, nothing like that. Everything was straight and aboveboard — just a simple case of a man wanting to go into the next world with a clear conscience. Why did you ask?” Dean explained that he had certain interests at stake that he could not go into at present, thanked the notary and started for the door. He liad accomplished nothing beyond substantiating his previous impression that the circumstances of Lamont’s confession contained nothing of a doubtful character. At the door he turned back, impelled by an impulse that he could not understand, and looked diffidently at the notary, already absorbed in a mass of papers. “Just one more question,” lie said, in the tone of one who realises that his words must sound idiotic. “Did Lamont act as if any sort of pressure was exerted on him?” The. notary jerked up his head and stared blankly for a moment. “What’s that? Pressure? Say, what are you driving at?” Then he laughed in a mollified way as he saw Dean’s disarming smile. “No, nothing like that. He acted like a man who had something on his mind and couldn’t get rid of it quick enough. It there was any pressure, it was his own conscience.” He paused, and his goodhumoured eyes wandered off into space. “There was one funny thing, though, come to think of it. Not that it mattered as far as the confession is concerned, but it struck me afterward as kind of queer.” “Yes?” said Dean expectantly as the man hesitated. The notary scratched the side of his bald head. “Lamont comes from out West, doesn’t he?” “So I understand.” “Don’t you suppose people use telephones out there?” Dean smiled at the simple question; then, as a recollection came to him, he stiffened suddenly. “Without doubt they do,” he said as calmly as he could. “Why?” “Well, there’s a telephone beside Lamont’s bed. I caught him looking

at it once,, just before he put his signature on the paper. He acted as if he’d never spen such a thing before. He seemed actually scared of it, as if he was afraid it might blow up. Funny, wasn’t it?” “Very,” Dean admitted, his whole body tingling as he recalled a similar observation made by himself at Lamont’s b.edside. Shane had remarked upon it, too, stating that Lamont had looked at the instrument as if he expected to “fly up and bite him,” and now it appeared the notary had observed the same thing. “But of course it didn’t mean anything,” the notary hastened to say, once more turning to the papers on his desk. “People do act queer at times like that. Good-day, sir.” CHAPTER X. A VISIT TO THE DOCTOR Dean took his leave with heavy thoughts thronging his mind. He was almost inclined to share the notary’s opinion that Lamont’s peculiar attitude toward the telephone was duly a dying man’s vagary. What else, indeed, could it mean? Dean had read and heard many curious things about the delusions that precede death, weird and astonishing fancies that distort the fading realities of life. Doubtless the explanation was to be found there. He walked slowly, drinking in the sunshine and the breezes as if they were an antidote for the clouded condition of his mind. His inquiries seemed to have led him into a blind alley bounded by the solid rock of incongruities and contradictions. Where should he turn next? An inscription on a brightly polished brass plate in a window suggested a makeshift solution. He stopped at a corner and looked uncertainly at a handsome three-storey residence bordered on two sides by well-kept lawn. “John P. Ballinger, M.D.,” read the sign in the window, and he recalled that this was the name of the physician who was attending Lamont. On a reckless impulse he ascended the steps and rang. A young man, fresh and crisp in the uniform of a physician’s attendant, admitted him, and after a brief wait he was ushered into the consultation room of Dr. Ballinger, a powerfully built man, in his early forties, with an infectious smile on cleanshaven lips, and a magnetic twinkle in his fine grey eyes. He had short, crisp hair that was almost black, but shaded into a premature tinge of grey at the sides. The office, small but cheerful, and simply furnished was just the sort that one would expect a suburban practitioner with a limited practice to maintain. “What seems to be the trouble?” he asked briskly, measuring Dean with a gaze that had little of the diagnostician in it. The novelist felt vaguely embarrassed. The physician, as well as his surroundings, breathed a candour and openness that seemed to suggest that he had come to the wrong place. “I fear I am here under false pretences,” he confessed. “I didn’t come to you as a patient.’” “Then have a smoke,” said the doctor, genially, reaching into a drawer for a box of Havanas. Dean lighted one while he cudgelled his brain for an excuse, finally deciding on a direct approach. “How is Lamont this morning?” he inquired. Something—it might have been only surprise at the blunt question —flickered for an instant in the physician’s eyes, then was gone. He did not speak until he had lighted his cigar and exhaled a few times. “So, you’re interested in Lamont. Curious case! He had a sinking spell last night, but rallied slightly after midnight. He may live through the day, if uo unforseen developments set in. Are you a relative of his?” Dean confessed that he was not, and a look of hazy remembrance dawned in the physician’s eyes. “Ah, I seem to place you now. You write fiction. That’s a thing I never read. All I have time for is the medical journals, and a few squints at the newspapers.” Dean nodded. He was often amused at people's apologies for their unfamiliarity wdth his output; it was as if they were trying to plead extenuation for a crime of omission. Then he recalled Lieutenant Shane’s shrewd deduction in regard to Lamont's teutacious hold on life.

“What do you suppose is keeping Lamont alive?” he asked. Dr. Ballinger seemed surprised, not at the question itself, perhaps, but at the fact that it should have come from a layman. “Heaven knows. That’s what I have been asking myself. I am administering stimulants, of course, but they would ordinarily be insufficient in such a case. What has kept him alive for the last forty-eight hours is a mystery to me.” “Has his daughter arrived yet?” Ballinger smiled oddly. “No; and in asking that question you may have hit the nail squarely on the head. We had a wire from Miss Lamont three days ago stating she was starting for New York immediately. Can’t imagine what is delaying the young lady. One thing is certain, though. Lamont is alive at this moment simply because he refuses to die. There are cases like that. His daughter's absence may have something to do with it. He may have something important to tell her.” “In other words,” Dean suggested, “the confession didn’t quite clear his mind. There is something else that’s troubling him.”

“Perhaps so, though I don’t see i what it could be. I consulted Little- | by on that same point, but he had no explanation to offer.” Dean hesitated as before a plunge. “Pr. Ballinger, is it your firm conviction that Lamont made his confession of his own free will and while in sound mind?” The physician looked startled, then laughed. “Why ask me? As far as I can see, his mind is clear as a beli, but you needn’t take my word for it. Littleby Insisted on having him examined by one of the best alienists in the State. He thought Lamont’s mind might be affected, and he didn't wish his old friend to place himself in a false light by confessing a crime of which he was innocent. As for your suggestion of coercion, it is simply ridiculous.” Dean agreed that it was. Lamont had repeated the essentials of his confession in the presence of himself and Shane, even adding a few details to the original story, and there had not been the slightest indication of coercion then. Dean had asked the question knowing haw absurd it must sound to Dr. Ballinger, only because he seemed to have exhausted every other sensible and impossible theory. He made one more faltering attempt, detailing for the physician’s benefit what Shane, the notary and himself had observed regarding Lamont’s apparent dread of the telephone at his bedside. “I hadn’t noticed it,” said Ballinger, looking interested. "It is quite possible, though. There may be some remote form of suggestion that affects him that way. It is possible that at

one time in his life a telephone instrument figured in some disastrous episode or other, and now, in his weakened condition, the recollection brings him a shock. Nothing very peculiar in that. I once knew a dying man who went into hysterics at the sound of a violin. I must speak to Littleby about having the telephobc removed. Not that it can possibly prolong Lamont’s life much further. His death is only a question of hours." Dean fell silent. Every thought that rose in his mind seemed to rebound against a wall of rock. Feeling that he could not decently presume further on Ballinger’s hospitality, he thanked the genial physician and took his leave. “I’ve enjoyed our little chat, said the doctor, following him to the door. “It is stimulating to come in contact with a mind like yours.” Dean, walking away from the house, could not be sure whether Doctor Ballinger had complimented him or given 1 him a sly dig. (To be Continued Tomorrow.)