There had been no new developments in the death of Florence Gunther.
The bullet had been fired at close range, and from the left.
The point of entry was a neat hole, but on the other side there had been some destruction.
He was inclined to believe with Dick that she had been shot while in a car, and in front of or near my property.
“Even a head wound bleeds some,” he explained, “and that sort of wound is generally pretty—well, pretty messy.
Of course that may be wrong.
She may have been stunned first like Sarah Gittings; and killed in the country somewhere.”
He got up to go, and as he stood there with the light shining down on his bald head, I saw that like the rest of us he looked tired and depressed.
“There are times,” he said, “when I don’t like this job of mine.
And this is one of them. Take you.
Take little Miss Judy.
She’s got troubles enough just now, and the chances are that in a day or two we’re going to add to them.”
“You’re going to arrest Jim Blake?”
“I’m going to do just that, Miss Bell.
I don’t mind telling you that we think we’ve got the motive.
Maybe you know about it, maybe you don’t.
But we’ve got the motive now, and we know he was on that hillside that night.
Only I’d like to find that sword-stick first.”
He was on his way to the door when I stopped him.
“How did you know I had burned that carpet, Inspector?”
“Well, somebody had burned it, and it looked as though you might be the guilty party.”
“But how did you know?”
He gave me a whimsical glance.
“Did you ever examine one of those things, Miss Bell?
Well, I’ll tell you something maybe you don’t know.
That carpet had snaps—or buttons—on it to fasten it to the floor; and those snaps are metal.
They won’t burn.
A smart man now, going carefully through certain ashcans, can find them without any trouble.”
He turned, his hand on the door knob.
“But I’ll say this to you Miss Bell, in confidence.
I’d like to know why you burned that carpet.
I’d been over that car myself with a magnifying glass the day after Florence Gunther was killed.
If you found anything in it, you’re smarter than I am.”
I could only stare at him in silent stupefaction.
“Never mind, then,” he said. “You think it over.
There’s no hurry.”
And with that he left.
It was only after he had gone that I remembered the shoes he had meant to examine.
I had two days in which to think that over, although thinking did me no good whatever.
I had burned the carpet and thus put a weapon against Jim in the hands of the District Attorney, and no statement by the Inspector that he had found nothing suspicious on or about it would alter that.
They would believe, as he believed, that I had found something incriminating there which they had overlooked.
But mingled with this was a sense of relief.
If they had not found the oil stains on the day after Florence’s murder it was because they were not there.
Those two days, however, were all I could bear.
I saw nobody, heard nothing.
It was as though there had been no murder of our poor Sarah, or of Florence; as though there had been no mysterious unknown, able to enter my house at will on some equally mysterious errand.
But by the third day, Tuesday, I began to relax.
Nobody had been arrested.
Life was once more a quiet round of breakfast tray, lunch and dinner.
I even prepared to go over my notes on my father’s biography, as a matter of morale; that poor endeavor we all make in trouble to provide some sort of protective mechanism for the mind.