VI
That day was Thursday. Nothing else happened that day.
Friday morning I was awakened by the noise of my bedroom door being opened violently.
Martin, the thin-faced valet, came dashing into my room and began shaking me by the shoulder, though I was sitting up by the time he reached my bedside.
His thin face was lemon-yellow and ugly with fear.
“It’s happened,” he babbled. “Oh, my God, it’s happened!”
“What’s happened?”
“It’s happened. It’s happened.”
I pushed him aside and got out of bed. He turned suddenly and ran into my bathroom. I could hear him vomiting as I pushed my feet into slippers.
Kavalov’s bedroom was three doors below mine, on the same side of the building.
The house was full of noises, excited voices, doors opening and shutting, though I couldn’t see anybody.
I ran down to Kavalov’s door. It was open.
Kavalov was in there, lying on a low Spanish bed. The bedclothes were thrown down across the foot.
Kavalov was lying on his back. His throat had been cut, a curving cut that paralleled the line of his jaw between points an inch under his ear lobes.
Where his blood had soaked into the blue pillow case and blue sheet it was purple as grape-juice. It was thick and sticky, already clotting.
Ringgo came in wearing a bathrobe like a cape.
“It’s happened,” I growled, using the valet’s words.
Ringgo looked dully, miserably, at the bed and began cursing in a choked, muffled, voice.
The red-faced blonde woman—Louella Qually, the housekeeper—came in, screamed, pushed past us, and ran to the bed, still screaming. I caught her arm when she reached for the covers.
“Let things alone,” I said.
“Cover him up. Cover him up, the poor man!” she cried.
I took her away from the bed. Four or five servants were in the room by now. I gave the housekeeper to a couple of them, telling them to take her out and quiet her down. She went away laughing and crying.
Ringgo was still staring at the bed.
“Where’s Mrs. Ringgo?” I asked.
He didn’t hear me. I tapped his good arm and repeated the question.
“She’s in her room. She—she didn’t have to see it to know what had happened.”
“Hadn’t you better look after her?”
He nodded, turned slowly, and went out.
The valet, still lemon-yellow, came in.
“I want everybody on the place, servants, farm hands, everybody downstairs in the front room,” I told him. “Get them all there right away, and they’re to stay there till the sheriff comes.”
“Yes, sir,” he said and went downstairs, the others following him.
I closed Kavalov’s door and went across to the library, where I phoned the sheriff’s office in the county seat. I talked to a deputy named Hilden. When I had told him my story he said the sheriff would be at the house within half an hour.
I went to my room and dressed. By the time I had finished, the valet came up to tell me that everybody was assembled in the front room—everybody except the Ringgos and Mrs. Ringgo’s maid.
I was examining Kavalov’s bedroom when the sheriff arrived. He was a white-haired man with mild blue eyes and a mild voice that came out indistinctly under a white mustache. He had brought three deputies, a doctor and a coroner with him.
“Ringgo and the valet can tell you more than I can,” I said when we had shaken hands all around. “I’ll be back as soon as I can make it. I’m going to Sherry’s. Ringgo will tell you where he fits in.”
In the garage I selected a muddy Chevrolet and drove to the bungalow. Its doors and windows were tight, and my knocking brought no answer.
I went back along the cobbled walk to the car, and rode down into Farewell. There I had no trouble learning that Sherry and Marcus had taken the two-ten train for Los Angeles the afternoon before, with three trunks and half a dozen bags that the village expressman had checked for them.
After sending a telegram to the agency’s Los Angeles branch, I hunted up the man from whom Sherry had rented the bungalow.
He could tell me nothing about his tenants except that he was disappointed in their not staying even a full two weeks. Sherry had returned the keys with a brief note saying he had been called away unexpectedly.
I pocketed the note. Handwriting specimens are always convenient to have. Then I borrowed the keys to the bungalow and went back to it.
I didn’t find anything of value there, except a lot of fingerprints that might possibly come in handy later. There was nothing there to tell me where my men had gone.
I returned to Kavalov’s.
The sheriff had finished running the staff through the mill.
“Can’t get a thing out of them,” he said. “Nobody heard anything and nobody saw anything, from bedtime last night, till the valet opened the door to call him at eight o’clock this morning, and saw him dead like that. You know any more than that?”
“No. They tell you about Sherry?”
“Oh, yes. That’s our meat, I guess, huh?”
“Yeah. He’s supposed to have cleared out yesterday afternoon, with his black man, for Los Angeles. We ought to be able to find the work in that. What does the doctor say?”
“Says he was killed between three and four this morning, with a heavyish knife—one clean slash from left to right, like a left-handed man would do it.”
“Maybe one clean cut,” I agreed, “but not exactly a slash. Slower than that. A slash, if it curved, ought to curve up, away from the slasher, in the middle, and down towards him at the ends—just the opposite of what this does.”
“Oh, all right. Is this Sherry a southpaw?”
“I don’t know,” I wondered if Marcus was. “Find the knife?”
“Nary hide nor hair of it. And what’s more, we didn’t find anything else, inside or out. Funny a fellow as scared as Kavalov was, from all accounts, didn’t keep himself locked up tighter. His windows were open. Anybody could of got in them with a ladder. His door wasn’t locked.”
“There could be half a dozen reasons for that. He—”
One of the deputies, a big-shouldered blond man, came to the door and said:
“We found the knife.”
The sheriff and I followed the deputy out of the house, around to the side on which Kavalov’s room was situated. The knife’s blade was buried in the ground, among some shrubs that bordered a path leading down to the farm hands’ quarters.
The knife’s wooden handle—painted red—slanted a little toward the house. A little blood was smeared on the blade, but the soft earth had cleaned off most. There was no blood on the painted handle, and nothing like a fingerprint.
There were no footprints in the soft ground near the knife. Apparently it had been tossed into the shrubbery.
“I guess that’s all there is here for us,” the sheriff said. “There’s nothing much to show that anybody here had anything to do with it, or didn’t. Now we’ll look after this here Captain Sherry.”
I went down to the village with him. At the post office we learned that Sherry had left a forwarding address: General Delivery, St. Louis, Mo. The postmaster said Sherry had received no mail during his stay in Farewell.
We went to the telegraph office, and were told that Sherry had neither received nor sent any telegrams. I sent one to the agency’s St. Louis branch.
The rest of our poking around in the village brought us nothing—except we learned that most of the idlers in Farewell had seen Sherry and Marcus board the southbound two-ten train.
Before we returned to the Kavalov house a telegram came from the Los Angeles branch for me:
Sherry’s trunks and bags in baggage room here not yet called for are keeping them under surveillance.
When we got back to the house I met Ringgo in the hall, and asked him:
“Is Sherry left-handed?”
He thought, and then shook his head. “I can’t remember,” he said. “He might be. I’ll ask Miriam. Perhaps she’ll know—women remember things like that.”
When he came downstairs again he was nodding:
“He’s very nearly ambidextrous, but uses his left hand more than his right. Why?”
“The doctor thinks it was done with a left hand. How is Mrs. Ringgo now?”
“I think the worst of the shock is over, thanks.”