HE passing of the hours had served only to complicate the Hamilton case. At the outset it had been pregnant with the unusual, but not fraught with any very great mystery. Now, however, the aspect had altered.
In the beginning David Carroll had before him the fact of the murder and three persons who confessed to the crime. In addition to that he had a notorious criminal whose coincidental presence at the scene of the shooting had fastened about him a web of circumstantial evidence sufficient to convict before the most open-minded jury.
But now it had changed. Proof, of an almost incontrovertible nature, had been furnished that neither Eunice Duval nor her fiancé had killed Hamilton; the bullet from the revolver which Eunice had used had been located at a point where it could not have gone had either Badger or Hartigan fired it. It was fairly well settled that Vincent Harrelson had not fired. And Badger’s shot had been accounted for as the one which had wounded Hartigan.
There was the matter of the six seconds of darkness, already explained by Hartigan’s perfectly plausible confession that he had extinguished the lights to facilitate his escape and turned them on again after being shot so as to avoid detection in his sanctuary behind the screen. It had also been pretty well proven that three shots were fired; Badger’s and Eunice’s in the first few seconds of darkness, neither shot of which struck Hamilton, and the fatal shot, which was fired immediately after the lights went on.
By a simple process of deduction, that shot must have been fired by Hartigan; yet, if it were true that Badger’s bullet had found its mark in Hartigan’s arm, the burglar’s contention that he had not fired at all must be believed. His wrist was shattered by the bullet, and firing a revolver with that hand would have been out of the question, and investigation had fairly well proven that Hartigan was not capable of shooting with his left hand.
On the face of the evidence it seemed patent that Hartigan must be the guilty man, yet Carroll entertained grave doubts. He wanted to know more about the yegg whom Donaldson had addressed so familiarly as “Lefty” and there was still the butler to be accounted for. Besides, the maid had insisted stubbornly that in spite of her hysteria she had noticed that the sound of the final shot was clearer and more distinct than its predecessors—she immediately had asserted that it must have come from the garden.
They had left the maid upstairs in the care of Mrs. Faber, and of Maggie, the cook. They assembled in the living room, Carroll and two of his men—the third having Hartigan in a chair on the veranda; Eunice and Vincent Harrelson; Police Commissioner Hall and Denson, the lawyer. And last, but undeniably not least, was Barrett Rollins, chief of the city’s plain-clothes detective force.
Rollins was seated near the door through which Hamilton and young Vincent had struggled just before the former was killed. His straight-legged chair was tilted back against the wall, his broganed feet battered viciously against the slender legs, a rank pipe was clenched firmly between his none-too-even teeth—unlighted. His clothes, although very quiet and immaculately pressed, gave a subtle impression of untidiness—it may have been the narrow collar or the crooked set of his tie; but, whatever it was, the professional detective seemed out of place in the picture.
Furthermore, he was nervous and fidgety, and that despite the fact that he was making a visible effort to keep himself under control. Hall, glancing at him not unkindly—for he admired the man’s indomitable will and unflinching courage even while he detested him personally—imagined that he was still chafing at the bit, disgusted with Carroll’s elevation to a position above him on the present case.
And, yet, Hall was glad now that he had summoned Carroll’s aid. If he had done nothing else, Carroll had at least proved that the three original confessors—two of whom really believed their guilt —had not killed Hamilton. He had not done it with any display of mental pyrotechnics, with any pussy-footing around with an eye glued to a magnifying glass; yet he had done it. His methods had been simple to the point of being ludicrous—as he himself had explained, he had simply set out to marshal all facts and separate the relevant from the irrelevant, then to weigh the pros and cons of the former in the balance.
Rollins, Hall fancied, would have done nothing of the kind. From the moment Rollins had appeared at headquarters close on to midnight of the previous day, he had stubbornly—almost too stubbornly—maintained that Red Hartigan was the murderer.