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She was right. Peter was scratching at the door of Mr. Ladley's room, although I had left the door closed and Peter in the hall. I let him out, and he crawled to me on three legs, whimpering. Mr. Howell bent over him and felt the fourth. "Poor little beast!" he said. "His leg is broken!"
"Every murderer fears the dark. And our friend of the parlor bedroom is a murderer, Mrs. Pitman. Whether he hangs or not, he's a murderer." The mirror affair, which Mr. Holcombe called a periscope, was put in that day and worked amazingly well. I went with him to try it out, and I distinctly saw the paper-hanger take a cigarette from Mr. Ladley's case and put it in his pocket. Just after that, Mr.
Although the idea of murder had not entered my head at that time, the slipper gave me a turn. I picked it up and looked at it a black one with a beaded toe, short in the vamp and high-heeled, the sort most actresses wear. Then I went back and knocked at the door of the front room again. "What the devil do you want now?" he called from beyond the door. "Here's a slipper of Mrs. Ladley's," I said.
Then, "Is this Ladley's writing?" he asked me in a curious voice. "Yes." I glanced at the slip. Mr. Holcombe had just read from his note-book: "Rope, knife, slipper, towel, clock." The slip I had found behind the wash-stand said "Rope, knife, shoe, towel. Horn " The rest of the last word was torn off. Mr. Howell was staring at the mantel. "Clock!" he repeated. It was after four when Mr.
"I have asked you not to interrupt me," he said, with his pen in his hand. His eyes fell on the coat. "What's that?" he asked, changing color. "I think it's Mrs. Ladley's fur coat," I said. He stood there looking at it and thinking. Then: "It can't be hers," he said. "She wore hers when she went away." "Perhaps she dropped it in the water." He looked at me and smiled.
Howell since your arrest?" "No, sir. He has been out of the city." I was so excited by this time that I could hardly hear. I missed some of the cross-examination. The district attorney pulled Mr. Ladley's testimony to pieces. "You cut the boat's painter with your pocket-knife?" "I did." "Then how do you account for Mrs. Pitman's broken knife, with the blade in your room?"
Graves thought as I did. Temple Hope, called to the inquest, said she had never heard of one, and Mr. Ladley himself, at the inquest, swore that his wife had had nothing of the sort. I was watching him, and I did not think he was lying. And yet the hand was very like Jennie Brice's. It was all bewildering. Mr. Ladley's testimoney at the inquest was disappointing.
Ladley's arrest my house was filled up with eight or ten members of a company from the Gaiety Theater, very cheerful and jolly, and well behaved. Three men, I think, and the rest girls. One of the men was named Bellows, John Bellows, and it turned out that he had known Jennie Brice very well. From the moment he learned that, Mr. Holcombe hardly left him.
"Wait a moment," said the voice. There was a hum of conversation from the other end, and then another man came to the telephone. "Can you find out where Miss Brice has gone?" "I'll see." I went to Ladley's door and knocked. Mr. Ladley answered from just beyond. "The theater is asking where Mrs. Ladley is." "Tell them I don't know," he snarled, and shut the door.
Ladley's dog whose body was found half buried in the basement fruit closet, brought back to me the strange events of the other flood five years ago, when the water reached more than half-way to the second story, and brought with it, to some, mystery and sudden death, and to me the worst case of "shingles" I have ever seen. My name is Pitman in this narrative.
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