But there is a very fair arrangement; a trust fund with a substantial income.
Not large. Substantial.
Of course this is in confidence.
I am one of the executors.”
And I saw that this last pleased him; that it was a vote of confidence, as well as providing certain emoluments; that already he saw his name in the press everywhere; the size of the estate, the inheritance tax royalty calculated.
“Mr. Alexander Davis and the Guaranty Trust Company, executors.”
He leaned back and patted his substantial abdomen.
“Howard was a money maker,” he said.
“A lot of people are going to be surprised.”
I was not listening very attentively. I was thinking of Mary and of that conversation with the night watchman, and after Alex Davis had taken his complacent departure I wandered into Katherine’s study and looked about me.
The desk was cleared.
There was no sign of those small personal belongings which she was wont to keep by her.
Nor were they in the drawers of the desk, or any place else.
It came to me with a shock of surprise that Mary Martin had gone, and gone for good.
Jim arrived at noon the next day, for the funeral.
Save for a certain pallor—he had been in the house for over three weeks—he seemed much as usual; impeccably dressed, with a black tie and a black band on the left sleeve of his coat.
I had no chance whatever to talk to him.
He went at once to Katherine’s room, and their luncheon was served to them there.
Only during the solemn process of carrying Howard’s body downstairs was he seen at all until after the services.
But that seems to have been sufficient.
Some time in that slow and affecting progress Jim came face to face with an individual whom I was later to know as Charles Parrott, a man of middle age, with a cap drawn low over his face.
This Parrott was carrying in the chairs usually provided for such occasions, and was opening them and placing them in rows, and as Jim passed him he gave him a long steady look. Jim did not notice him, apparently.
I was not there at the time.
The name Charles Parrott meant nothing to me.
But in due time Charles Parrott was to play his own part in our tragedy, to make his own contribution to the tragic denouement which was to follow.
For Charles Parrott, introduced by Dick by methods of which I have no knowledge, was the night watchman of the building.
And he identified Jim Blake as being of the same build and general appearance as that visitor to Howard whom he had admitted two nights before.
True, he stubbornly refused under oath to make a positive statement.
“He’s the same build.
He looks like him.
But that’s as far as I go.”
So Jim moved about, unsuspicious, changing the flowers, softening the lights, and Parrott watched him.
He disappeared when Jim had gone upstairs again, to remain with Katherine and Judy during the services.
Wallie was not asked to join them.
He was left to sit alone, where he chose.
A cruel thing, perhaps; a stupid thing certainly.
Katherine had taken the strongest affection he had ever felt, the deepest grief, and flung them back in his face.
So he sat alone, rigid and cold during the services, and stood alone at his father’s grave.
However he had wavered before, some time then he made his decision.
He went that night to call on Alex Davis, sitting complacent and smug in his library, and slammed out only a half hour later, leaving Alex in a state bordering on apoplexy.
Half an hour later Alex Davis was frenziedly ringing the bell of the apartment and demanding to see Katherine.
He was admitted and taken up to her, but Judy and I knew nothing of all this until later.
Judy had determined to talk to Jim, and asked me to be present in the library.
“I can’t stand it any longer,” she said.
“He was here.
Why doesn’t he speak up?
He must know that watchman saw him.
Even if father was—was alive when he left, why doesn’t he say something?”
But Jim’s reaction to her first question was a surprise to both of us.
He denied, immediately, categorically, and almost violently, that he had made any visit to Howard Somers on the night of his death.