the maid out at the country-club. Katie Golstien. You been reading ’bout her in the papers in ’at Charley Kincaid case. She’s the maid. Katie Golstien. She’s the maid at the country-club what found the body of Miss Bannerman.’
‘So Katie was Miss Catherine Jones’ nurse?’
‘Yes ma’am.’
Going home, stimulated but unsatisfied, I asked my companion a quick question.
‘Were Catherine and Marie good friends?’
‘Oh, yes,’ he answered without hesitation. ‘All the girls are good friends, here, except when two of them are tryin’ to get hold of the same man. Then they warm each other up a little.’
‘Why do you suppose Catherine hasn’t married? Hasn’t she got lots of beaux?’
‘Off and on. She only likes people for a day or so at a time. That is—all except Joe Cable.’
Now a scene burst upon me, broke over me like a dissolving wave. And suddenly, my mind shivering from the impact, I remembered what Marie Bannerman had said to me in the dressing-room: ‘Who else was it that saw?’ She had caught a glimpse of some one else, a figure passing so quickly that she could not identify it, out of the corner of her eye.
And suddenly, simultaneously, I seemed to see that figure, as if I too had been vaguely conscious of it at the time, just as one is aware of a familiar gait or outline on the street long before there is any flicker of recognition. On the corner of my own eye was stamped a hurrying figure—that might have been Catherine Jones.
But when the shot was fired, Catherine Jones was in full view of over fifty people. Was it credible that Katie Golstien, a woman of fifty, who as a nurse had been known and trusted by three generations of Davis people, would shoot down a young girl in cold blood at Catherine Jones’ command?
‘But when the shot was fired, Catherine Jones was in full view of over fifty people.’
That sentence beat in my head all night, taking on fantastic variations, dividing itself into phrases, segments, individual words.
‘But when the shot was fired—Catherine Jones was in full view—of over fifty people.’
When the shot was fired! What shot? The shot we heard. When the shot was fired … When the shot was fired …
The next morning at nine o’clock, with the pallor of sleeplessness buried under a quantity of paint such as I had never worn before or have since, I walked up a rickety flight of stairs to the Sheriff’s office.
Abercrombie, engrossed in his morning’s mail, looked up curiously as I came in the door.
‘Catherine Jones did it,’ I cried, struggling to keep the hysteria out of my voice. ‘She killed Marie Bannerman with a shot we didn’t hear because the orchestra was playing and everybody was pushing up the chairs. The shot we heard was when Katie fired the pistol out of the window after the music was stopped. To give Catherine an alibi!’
I was right—as everyone now knows; but for a week, until Katie Golstien broke down under a fierce and ruthless inquisition, nobody believed me. Even Charley Kincaid, as he afterward confessed, didn’t dare to think it could be true.
What had been the relations between Catherine and Joe Cable no one ever knew, but evidently she had determined that his clandestine affair with Marie Bannerman had gone too far.
Then Marie chanced to come into the women’s room while Catherine was dressing for her dance—and there again there is a certain obscurity, for Catherine always claimed that Marie got the revolver, threatened her with it and that in the ensuing struggle the trigger was pulled. In spite of everything I always rather liked Catherine Jones, but in justice it must be said that only a simple-minded and very exceptional jury would have let her off with five years. And in just about five years from her commitment my husband and I are going to make a round of the New York musical shows and look hard at all the members of the chorus from the very front row.
After the shooting she must have thought quickly. Katie was told to wait until the music stopped, fire the revolver out the window and then hide it—Catherine Jones neglected to specify where. Katie, on the verge of collapse, obeyed instructions, but she was never able to specify where she had hid the revolver. And no one ever knew until a year later, when Charley and I were on our honeymoon and Sheriff Abercrombie’s ugly weapon dropped out of my golf-bag on to a Hot Springs golf-links. The bag must have been standing just outside the dressing-room door; Katie’s trembling hand had dropped the revolver into the first aperture she could see.
We live in New York. Small towns make us both uncomfortable. Every day we read about the crime-waves in the big cities, but at least a wave is something tangible that you can provide against. What I dread above all things is the unknown depths, the incalculable ebb and flow, the secret shapes of things that drift through opaque darkness under the surface of the sea.
Your Way and Mine.
Woman’s Home Companion (May 1927)
One spring afternoon in the first year of the present century a young man was experimenting with a new typewriter in a brokerage office on lower Broadway. At his elbow lay an eight-line letter and he was endeavoring to make a copy on the machine but each attempt was marred by a monstrous capital rising unexpectedly in the middle of a word or by the disconcerting intrusion of some symbol such as $ or % into an alphabet whose membership was set at twenty-six many years ago. Whenever he detected a mistake he made a new beginning with a fresh sheet but after the fifteenth try he was aware of a ferocious instinct to cast the machine from the window.
The young man’s short blunt fingers were too big for the keys. He was big all over; indeed his bulky body seemed to be in the very process of growth for it had ripped his coat at the back seam, while his trousers clung to thigh and calf like skin tights. His hair was yellow and tousled—you could see the paths of his broad fingers in it—and his eyes were of a hard brilliant blue but the lids drooping a little over them reinforced an impression of lethargy that the clumsy body conveyed. His age was twenty-one.
“What do you think the eraser’s for, McComas?”
The young man looked around.
“What’s that?” he demanded brusquely.
“The eraser,” repeated the short alert human fox who had come in the outer door and paused behind him. “That there’s a good copy except for one word. Use your head or you’ll be sitting there until tomorrow.”
The human fox moved on into his private office. The young man sat for a moment, motionless, sluggish. Suddenly he grunted, picked up the eraser referred to and flung it savagely out of the window.
Twenty minutes later he opened the door of his employer’s office. In his hand was the letter, immaculately typed, and the addressed envelope.
“Here it is, sir,” he said, frowning a little from his late concentration.
The human fox took it, glanced at it and then looked at McComas with a peculiar smile.
