The Door
Chapter One
I HAVE WRENCHED MY knee, and for the past two weeks my days have consisted of three trays, two of them here in the library, a nurse at ten o’clock each morning with a device of infernal origin which is supposed to bake the pain out of my leg, and my thoughts for company.
But my thinking is cloudy and chaotic.
The house is too quiet.
I miss Judy, busy now with affairs of her own, and perhaps I miss the excitement of the past few months.
It is difficult to take an interest in beef croquettes for luncheon out of last night’s roast when one’s mind is definitely turned on crime. For that is what I am thinking about, crime; and major crime at that. I am thinking about murder.
What is the ultimate impulse which drives the murderer to his kill?
Not the motives.
One can understand motives.
It is at least conceivable that a man may kill out of violent passion, or out of fear, or jealousy or revenge.
Then too there are the murders by abnormals, drug addicts or mental deficients; they have their motives too, of course, although they may lie hidden in distorted minds.
And as in our case, a series of crimes where the motive was hidden but perfectly real, and where extraordinary precautions had been taken against discovery.
But I am thinking of something more fundamental than motivation.
What is it that lies behind the final gesture of the killer?
Until then he has been of the race of men. In an instant he will have forfeited his brotherhood, become one of a group apart, a group of those who have destroyed human life.
Is there a profound contempt for life itself, for its value or its importance?
Or is the instinct to kill stronger than thought, an atavistic memory from long past ages when laws had not induced suppressions?
Is the murder impulse a natural one and are all of us potential killers, so that to save extinction men have devised the theory of the sanctity of human life?
And at that last moment does this hereditary buried instinct surge triumphantly to the surface, steel the hand which holds the knife, steady the revolver, put the smile on the face of the poisoner?
There must be a something of the sort.
One thing we do know; once a man has killed, his inhibitions are destroyed. He has joined the alien clan, of which no member knows the other, and has set his face against the world.
Thereafter he is alone.
But I have found no answer.
In our case I have looked back, searching for some variation from the normal, or some instinct of weakening or remorse.
But I have found none. We know now that there were moments of terrific danger, when the whole murderous structure was about to collapse. But if there was panic then we have no evidence of it.
Each such emergency was met with diabolical ingenuity and cunning, and that cunning went even further.
It provided in advance against every possible contingency of discovery.
What long hours went into that planning, that covering of every possible clue, we can only surmise; the meticulous surveying of this and that, the searching for any looseness in the whole criminal plan, the deliberate attempts to throw suspicion elsewhere.
There must have been a real satisfaction toward the end, however, a false feeling of security, a rubbing of the hands and a certain complacency.
And then suddenly the whole carefully woven fabric was destroyed.
Strange and mysterious and bitter that must have been.
Everything provided against, and then at the last to be destroyed by a door, a thing of wood and paint with an ordinary tarnished brass knob.
Months had passed.
Hundreds of hands had touched that knob in the interval; the door itself had been painted. And yet it solved our mystery and brought destruction to as diabolical and cunning a murderer as the records of crime will show.
As I have already intimated, I live alone, in the usual sense of the word.
That is, I am more or less without family. A secretary, usually a young woman, and the customary servants form my household.
And as the first crime occurred in this household it will be as well to outline it at once.
Outside of my secretary, Mary Martin, a young and very pretty girl, the establishment at the time of the disappearance of Sarah Gittings consisted of four servants: my butler, Joseph Holmes, who had been in my employ for many years, a respectable looking man of uncertain age, very quiet; my chauffeur, Robert White, who was not white, but a negro; the cook, Norah Moriarity, and Clara Jenkins, the housemaid.
A laundress, a white woman, came in by the day, and from spring until fall a gardener named Abner Jones took care of the lawns and shrubbery.
And as my property, both houses and grounds, plays an important part in this narrative, I would better describe them also.
The house, then, sits some hundred feet back from the street.
Two stone gate posts, from which the gates have been removed, mark the entrance, and the drive circles around a grass oval before the front door.
Heavy old shrubbery, which I have not had the heart to thin out, shields me from the street and is spread in clumps over the grounds.
Thus the garage at the rear is partly screened from sight, although as was shown later, there is a clear view from it of the pantry window.
At the rear behind the garage, lies a deep ravine which has been recently incorporated into the city park system; and at one side of me lies an acre or two of undeveloped property known as the Larimer lot.
Through this, from the street and extending sharply down the hill into the park, runs a foot-path, an unpaved cut-off.
In winter when the leaves are off the trees I can see a portion of this path. Not all, for both the lot and the path are heavily bordered with old cedars.
Our first crime took place on the Larimer lot, not far from this path.
I have no near neighbors.