American fiction -- 20th century; Detective and mystery stories
"Of course," she said, "a sort of Cave of Adullum." Then she rose and
looking at him from under her eyelids added, "But if a man’s clever
enough to get to the Cave of Adullum I should think he’d be too clever
to stay there."
She turned and took her coat from the chair back. George made a jump to
help her and the old man heaved himself up, breaking out with renewed
apologies for the trouble he’d given her. They were like people
separating after a social function, he bland and courteous, she gracious
and deprecating.
"If I could be of any service to you I’d be only too glad. But"—she gave
that little shrug of her shoulders—"I’m so unimportant. A poor working
woman whose orbit happened by chance to cross those of two great
luminaries."
"There’s nothing for anybody to do but us," said George, standing behind
her and holding out her coat. "And we’ll do it. You’ll see some morning
in the paper that we’ve got our hands on Barker—the high-class sneak."
He and his father worked so well together that he told me afterward he
knew the old man would be watching her. He was and so was I, and at
those words I saw the rich color spread to her forehead and again that
flash, like a leap of flame, shine in her eyes. She knew it too and
dropped her lids over it, but the color she couldn’t control and it
glowed in crimson on her cheeks as she answered with a sort of soft
tolerance:
"Oh, Mr. Whitney, hunting criminals has made you unjust." Then as the
coat slipped on she flashed a look at him over her shoulder, "But I
don’t think it’s real! The profession requires a pose."
George was quite bowled over. He had no answer and she knew it, turning
from him with a smile and moving toward the door. Halfway there the old
man stopped her.
"Oh, by the way—one thing more that nearly slipped my memory. You no
doubt saw in the papers that Harland is supposed to have spent the
half-hour before he jumped, in the corridor of your floor. Did you see
him there—as you left, I mean?"
"I?" she raised her eyebrows in artless, surprised query. "No, I’d gone
before he came down. I left about six, or maybe a little before."
"Um!" he nodded. "You were probably in the elevator."
"Yes, probably—" her purse dropped from her hand to the floor. We all
started forward to pick it up but she was too quick for us and had it
before any of us could reach it. As she righted herself from the sudden
stoop her face was deeply flushed. "Yes, of course, I must have been in
the elevator," she finished with a slight gasp as if the quick movement
had impeded her breathing.
"I see, of course," agreed the chief moving beside her to the door. "It
merely interested me as a student of morbid psychology. I’d like to have
known how a man of Harland’s type looked, moved, comported himself,
while such a struggle went on in his mind."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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