The Million-Dollar Suitcase Part 23

"Jerry," Worth took the book out of my hand and laid it on the table, "what you want to do is to forget this--dirt--that you've been reading, and go at this thing without prejudice. If you open any trails and they lead in my direction, don't be afraid to follow them. This thing of trying to find a criminal in some one that my father has already deeply injured--some one that he's made life a h.e.l.l for--so that suspicion needn't be directed to me, makes me sick. If I'd allow you to do it, I'd be yellow clear through."

That was about the longest speech I'd heard Worth Gilbert make since his return from France. And he meant every word of it, too; but it didn't suit me. This "Hew to the line" stuff is all right until the chips begin whacking the head of your friend. In this case there wasn't a doubt in my mind that when a breath of suspicion got out that Thomas Gilbert had not killed himself, that minute would see the first finger point at Thomas Gilbert's son as the murderer. So I grumbled,

"Just the same, Edwards has something on his mind about last night."

"He has--and it's pretty nearly tearing him to pieces," Worth admitted, but would go no further.

"He was here last night, I'm sure--and Mrs. Bowman was with him," I ventured.

Barbara, who had been sitting through this her eyes on Worth, turned from him to me and p.r.o.nounced, gently,

"Yes, he was here, and Laura was with him."

"Bobs!" Worth spoke so sternly that she glanced up startled. "I'll not stand for you throwing suspicion on Jim."

"Did I--do that?" her lip trembled. Worth's eyes were on the fire.

"Don't quarrel with the girl," I remonstrated. Barbara had told me the visitor; I covered my elation with, "She's only looking out for your safety."

"I can look out for myself," curtly. He turned hard eyes on us. It made me feel put away from him, chucked out from his friends.h.i.+p. "And I never quarreled with anybody in my life. Sometimes--" he turned from one to the other of us, speaking slowly, "Sometimes I seem to antagonize people, for no reason that I can see; and sometimes I fight; but I never quarrel."

"No offense intended--or taken," I a.s.sured him hastily. My heart was full of his danger, and I told myself that it was his misery spoke, and not the true Worth Gilbert. But a very pale and subdued Barbara said tremulously,

"I guess I'd better go home now," suggesting, after the very slightest pause, "Mr. Boyne can take me."

"Don't, Bobsie." Worth's voice was gentle again, but absent. It sounded as though he had already forgotten both of us, and our possible cause of offense. "Go to the house with Jerry. I'll bar the door and follow."

"Can't I help with that?" I offered.

"No. Eddie will give me a hand if I need it. Go on. I'll be with you in a minute."

CHAPTER XIII

DR. BOWMAN

But it was considerably more than a minute before Worth followed us to the house. We walked slowly, talking; when I looked back from the kitchen porch, Worth had already come outside, and I thought Eddie Hughes was with him, though I heard no voices and couldn't be sure on account of the shrubbery between.

Getting into the house we found that Chung had the downstairs all opened up through, lights going, heat turned on from the bas.e.m.e.nt furnace; everywhere that tended, homelike appearance a competent servant gives a place. On the hall table as we pa.s.sed, I noticed a doctorish top coat, with a primly folded m.u.f.fler laid across it.

"Dr. Bowman is here," Barbara said hardly above her breath.

We listened; no sound of voices from the living room; then I got the tramp of feet that moved back and forth in there. We opened the door, and there were the two men; a queer proposition!

Bowman had taken a chair pretty well in the middle of the room. It was Jim Edwards whose feet I had heard as he roamed about. No word was going between them; apparently they hadn't spoken to each other at all; the looks that met or avoided were those strange looks of persons who live in lengthened and what might be termed intimate hostility.

"Ah--Boyne--isn't it?" Bowman greeted me; I thought our coming relieved the situation. He shook hands, then turned to Barbara with, "Mrs.

Thornhill said you were here; I told her I would bring you back with me."

I rather wondered not to hear him insist on being taken at once to the study, but his next words gave the reason. He'd reached Santa Ysobel too late for the inquest itself, but not too late to make what he informed us was a thorough investigation of everything it treated of.

Barbara and I found places on the davenport; Edwards prowled up and down the other end of the room, openly in torment. Those stormy black eyes of his were seldom off Bowman, while the doctor's gray, heavy-lidded gaze never got beyond the toes of the restless man's moving boots. He had begun a grumbling tale of the coroner's incompetence and neglect to reopen the inquest when he, the family physician, arrived, as though that were important, when Worth came in.

Instantly the doctor was on his feet, had paced up to the new master of the house, and began pumping his arm in a long handshake, while he pa.s.sed out those plat.i.tudes of condolence a man of his sort deals in at such a time. The stuff I'd been reading in those diaries had told me what was the root and branch of his friends.h.i.+p with the dead man; it made the hair at the back of my neck lift to hear him boasting of it in Jim Edwards' presence, and know what I knew. "And, my dear boy," he finished, "they tell me you've not been to view the body--yet. I thought perhaps you'd like to go--with me. I can have my machine here in a minute. No?" as Worth declined with a wordless shake of the head.

I hoped he'd leave then; but he didn't. Instead, he turned back to his chair, explaining,

"If Mrs. Thornhill's cook hadn't phoned me, when Mrs. Thornhill had a second collapse last night, I suppose I should be in San Francisco still. The coroner seemed to think there was no necessity for having competent medical testimony as to the time of death, and the physical condition of the deceased. I should have been wired for. The inquest should have been delayed until I arrived. The way the thing was managed was disgraceful."

"It was merciful." Jim Edwards spoke as though unwillingly, in a muttered undertone. Evidently it was the first word he'd addressed to Bowman--if he could be said to address him now, as he finished, "I hadn't thought of an inquest. Yet of course there'd be one in a case of suicide."

Bowman only heard and wholly misconstrued him, s.n.a.t.c.hing at the concluding words,

"Of course it was suicide. Done with his own weapon, taken from the holster where we know it always hung, fully loaded. The muzzle had been pressed so close against the breast when the cartridge exploded that the woolen vest had taken fire. I should say it had smouldered for some time; there was a considerable hole burned in the cloth. The flesh around the wound was powder-scarred."

Worth took it like a red Indian. I could see by the glint of his eye as it flickered over the doctor's face, the smooth white hands, the whole smooth personality, that the boy disliked, and had always disliked him.

Yet he listened silently.

I rather hoped by leading questions to get Bowman to express the opinion that Thomas Gilbert had been killed in the small hours of the morning.

Circ.u.mstances then would have fitted in with Eddie Hughes. Eddie Hughes was to me the most acceptable murderer in sight. But no--nothing would do him but to stick to the hour the coroner had accepted.

"Medical science cannot determine closer than that," he was very final.

"The death took place within an hour preceding midnight."

"You are positive it couldn't be this morning?" I asked.

"Positive."

Well, Dr. Bowman's testimony, if accepted at the value the doctor himself placed upon it, would clear Worth of suspicion, for the lad was with me at Tait's from a few minutes past ten until after one; and Jim Edwards, now pacing the floor so restlessly, had also been there the greater part of that time. I had had too much experience with doctor's guesses based on _rigor mortis_ to let it affect my views.

In the minute of silence, we could hear Chung moving about at the back of the house. The doctor spoke querulously.

"Never expect anything of a Chinaman, but I should think when the chauffeur found the body he might have had sense enough to summon friends of the family. He could have phoned me--I was only in San Francisco."

"He could have phoned me at the ranch," Jim Edwards' deep voice came in.

"You? Why should he phone for you?" Bowman wheeled on him at last. "I was the man's physician, as well as his close friend. Everybody knows you weren't on good terms with him. Gad! You wouldn't be here in this house to-night, if he were alive."

In the sort of silence that comes when some one's been suddenly struck in the face, Worth crossed to Edwards and laid an arm along his shoulders.

"I've asked Jim to stay in my place, here, in my house, while I'm away over Monday--and he can do as he likes about whom he chooses to have around."

Bowman gradually got to his feet, his face a study.

"I see," he said. "Then I'll not trespa.s.s on your time any longer. I felt obliged to offer my services ... patients of mine ... for years ...

in affliction ..." a gleam of anger came into his fishy eyes. "I've been met with d.a.m.ned insolence.... Claiming of the house before your father's decently in his grave." He jerked fully erect. "Leave your affairs in the hands of that degenerate. If he doesn't do you dirt, you'll be the first he's let off! Come, Miss Barbara," to the girl who sat beside me, looking on mutely observant.