top of the panel. Julie took just a moment to see what her own face was like in the mirror above the fireplace before coming under Mrs. Palet’s critical glance.
Mrs. Palet came into the room, rattling her newspaper in front of her. Her protruding eyes found new fascination in Julie who was now a relative, if only by marriage, of a murder victim.
“Of course, you’ve seen the papers, Julie, but then you haven’t seen what Doctor saw.” Mrs. Palet always referred to her husband as ‘Doctor’. She said, “You know Doctor is a friend of Michel’s, the coroner. Doctor went with Michel to the Pedlow house after the corpse had been discovered.”
Mrs. Palet’s red hands fluttered over her ample bosom as though looking for a pin. Actually, this seemed to help her get her breath.
“You see, Doctor talked with the policeman who broke into the house after the neighbors decided there must be something wrong with Mr. Pedlow.
“The first thing that happened when the patrolman opened the door, was the cats. They came out in a streak—all seven of them. You see, they’d been shut up with the corpse ever since Monday night, and they were all half wild with hunger.”
Mrs. Palet’s eyes rolled horribly.
“It wasn’t a pleasant sight, as my husband put it to me. Mr. Pedlow’s body had been in the house for almost three days, slowly putrefying. Doctor said the odor inside was nauseating—”
Julie felt her head start to swim. Mrs. Palet rushed forward.
“Oh, my dear! You’re not going to faint? You’re not going to keel over, are you?”
Julie had gripped the back of a chair for support, and she wasn’t at all sure that she wasn’t going to keel over, as Mrs. Palet put it. She allowed the doctor’s wife to help her sit down.
“Well, Julie, you just mustn’t look on the black side of it, dear,” Mrs. Palet said, going toward the door. “After all, your husband Harvey is a mighty lucky man, especially now that Harvey’s money has all been moving one way—out. Don’t you think?”
Julie couldn’t speak. She just waved toward the door.
“Harvey is the only possible heir, isn’t he?” Mrs. Palet persisted. “And that’s what you’ve got to think of, because Mr. Pedlow certain wasn’t anything to you, and you can always use money.”
“Mrs. Palet,” Julie faltered, “will you please just go?”
“Of course, dearie. I do have to get supper, don’t I?”
After the door had closed on Mrs. Palet, the telephone rang. It proved to be a call from the telegraph office, which had received a wire for her from Harvey. It stated that he had seen a newspaper dispatch about his uncle’s death but would be unable to come for the funeral because of the importance of his negotiations in Washington.
Julie was disappointed, and the knowledge that she would be alone for several more days heightened her uneasiness. She wanted to cry but the tears wouldn’t come. She moved wearily into the bedroom, sat down in front of her dressing table, and absently removed her makeup. And then, with methodical care, she put it back on again.
She knew she was behind the eight ball, and there wasn’t much she could do to get around it except look beautiful. She couldn’t think her way out, for her mind was a riotous tumult of nagging thoughts and impressions.
The doorbell rang again. Julie knew instinctively the police were outside. She had to decide instantly whether to tell the unbelievable truth or to pretend ignorance of the whole thing.
“In a minute!” she called sweetly to whoever it was at the door.
Bending close to her mirror, she picked up her lipstick with steady fingers. She couldn’t tell the truth. She couldn’t because of the twenty thousand wagging tongues that would be saying the same things that Mrs. Palet had said.
Twenty thousand people would be jumping at the same conclusion, supplying the same motive for murder. She couldn’t hope to convince anybody that she had struck Uncle Charley in self defense when there was such a perfect motive for deliberate murder.
Julie blotted off surplus lip rouge on a cleansing tissue. Then she walked unhurriedly into the living room and opened the door for a stout, gray-haired man in police uniform.
He mumbled his name in his embarrassment, but Julie immediately forgot it. However, she did hear him state that he was the chief of the force.
“I won’t bother you long,” he promised before bothering her at all. “I just want to know when you expect your husband home.”
She answered that readily enough. And the chief wanted to know if Harvey would realize anything from his uncle’s will. Julie couldn’t say. She just didn’t know anything about it, but probably if there was a will Harvey would be mentioned.
The chief meditated on that for a while and concluded that he’d have to get a court order and have a look at the will himself. Then he took out of his pocket a pair of slim-nosed pliers. Radio nippers, he called them.
“The plumber found these down a drain tile just outside Charley Pedlow’s front door,” the chief explained. “That was Tuesday. The plumber came late Monday evening to locate a stoppage that had been flooding Charley’s basement. He pulled a downspout and got to exploring and figured the stoppage was in the tile. He didn’t have time to work on it then, but got to work Tuesday morning. These nippers were down the drain and they aren’t the plumber’s.”
Julie frowned at the pliers.
“I don’t see what that has to do with anything.”’
“Plenty. Maybe you saw in the papers that somebody worked on the lock on Charley Pedlow’s door. That’s a snap lock. When you slam the door it locks, but the key isn’t much. You could reach through the keyhole with nippers like these, get hold of the key, and twist it from the outside. That’s what was done. Nipper marks on the tip of the key.”
“But—”
Julie checked herself in time. She had been about to say that the person who had worked on Charley Pedlow’s lock had been frightened away by her arrival, and that after the prowler had left, Uncle Charley had been very much alive.
The prowler couldn’t have returned with the nippers because he had dropped them when Julie’s arrival had surprised him. That was the metallic ringing she had heard—the pliers bouncing from the stoop. And then she had heard a duller sound, which was the pliers falling into the open drain.
The chief regarded Julie carefully, his eyes bright and sharp. “You’ve never seen these nippers, I suppose?”
Julie shook her head. “We haven’t any tools around here except a hammer to hang pictures with. My husband is absolutely helpless mechanically.”
The chief smiled broadly and hoisted himself out of the chair.
“Guess I don’t have to bother you any longer,” he said. “Many thanks.”
When he was gone, Julie was left small consolation. The police were on the wrong track. But suppose they made an arrest—some guiltless person who might have been trying to break
