“Here?” he said.
“Why, it’s madness.
Why should I have come like that?
You’ve lost your good common sense, Judy.”
“Some one was here and used your name.
He telephoned on the way, from somewhere in the country.”
When she had told her story, however, he looked ghastly.
Not only was there the implication that Howard had been murdered, but there was the terrible possibility which the situation held for himself.
What was he to do, where to turn?
To go to Katherine and demand that the body be exhumed?
And that with the police watching him, and maybe poison to be found?
All that he must have thought of, sitting there so neat and dapper in his chair.
“It’s terrible,” he said. “It’s all terrible.
And this night watchman?
He says he recognized me?”
“He says the man was your height and build.”
Suddenly he was savagely angry.
“And so this fellow, this Parrott—he’s in the secret, is he?
He’s been brought here to look me over!
Good God, Judy, do you want to send me to the chair?
I wasn’t here.
How the hell could I get here?
I’ve been sick for weeks.
If somebody came here that night, using my name and impersonating me, he was a liar and an impostor, and before God I believe he was a murderer too.
Why should I have come here in the night?
I could come at any time.”
Then he quieted, although he was still shaking.
“Does your mother know anything of all this?”
“Nothing.”
“Then keep it from her.
You can do that much.
She is in great trouble.”
“So am I in great trouble,” said Judy bitterly.
“But I suppose that doesn’t matter.”
He looked at her.
“You believed it, did you?
Do you still believe it?”
“I don’t know.
No, of course not.”
“Judy,” he said, more gently, “what motive could I have?
What possible reason?
Your father was my friend.
To put the thing boldly, what could I possibly gain by his death?
By any of these deaths?”
And as if in answer to his question a footman knocked at the door and said that Katherine wanted to see him in her room.
I have no picture of that scene, but I can see it: Katherine frozen in her chair and Alex Davis walking the floor, and after a habit of his snapping his fingers as he walked.
Into that scene Jim was projected, and in the forcible language he was told what Wallie had said.
Briefly, Wallie had claimed that, during his illness the summer before, his father had made a second will.
That this will was in Howard’s safe deposit box at the bank in New York, and the copy in the hands of Waite and Henderson, Mr. Waite having personally drawn it, here in my own city.
By this will, Wallie received no trust fund and no annuity, but a full half of the estate, and the previous will had been revoked.