Murder by the Clock

By Rufus King.

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I

8:37 p.m.—Spring 3100

Mrs. Endicott thought for a moment of simply dialling the operator and saying, “I want a policeman.”

It was what the printed notices in the telephone directory urged one to do in case of an emergency. But it wasn’t an emergency exactly, nor—still exactly—was it a policeman she wanted. She wanted a detective, or an inspector, or something; a man to whom she could explain her worry about Herbert, and who could do something about it if he agreed with her that Herbert was in danger.

Mrs. Endicott had never had any personal contact with the police. Whenever she thought about it at all she thought of the force as an efficient piece of machinery, the active parts of which one observed daily from one’s motor as healthy and generally good-looking young men who controlled traffic. She knew that there was a patrolman whose beat carried him past their door. Upon thinking suddenly about it she realized that she had only seen this man twice or three times at most during the past year. She knew that Herbert always left a ten-dollar gold piece to be given him by one of the maids at Christmas, and a check for twenty dollars as a subscription to some enterprise vaguely designated as the “fund.”

She wondered momentarily whether the police characters she had seen in various plays, while at the theatre with Herbert, were true to life. Most of the characters had been brutal, in spite of a pleasant tenderheartedness reluctantly betrayed toward the final curtain, and just at present she wanted quiet, competent understanding—not brutality.

It occurred to her that a private investigator might be better, but she was uncertain as to the extent of their official powers. She decided to rely on the police, because the police could do something if they agreed with her that something ought to be done.

Mrs. Endicott looked up the telephone number of police headquarters and dialled Spring 3100. She grew nervous while waiting.

“This is Mrs. Herbert Endicott speaking,” she said, when an undeniably masculine voice answered. It was an impersonal, efficient voice with no overtones about it. “Will you please connect me with your detective department? … I beg your pardon? Oh.” She gave the number of her house on East Sixty-third Street between Fifth and Madison avenues.

“This is Mrs. Herbert Endicott speaking,” she began again, upon a second voice’s saying, “Hello,” “and I am worried about Mr. Endicott. I wonder whether you could send someone up to talk it over with me. … No, he hasn’t disappeared. I know exactly where he has gone, but I have reason to believe that something might happen to him. … Yes, it’s the Mr. Endicott who has been in the papers recently in connection with Wall Street. … Around in a few minutes? But I thought police headquarters were down on Centre Street. … They transferred the call to the precinct station? Really. … Oh, thank you.”

Mrs. Endicott replaced the receiver on its hook. She felt distinctly impressed at the efficiency with which her request had been so instantly transferred to the place where it could be handled competently and with dispatch.

The living room where she had been telephoning was on the second floor of the house. She left it and went to her dressing room, which was toward the rear of a corridor on the same floor. She gave her appearance a preoccupied inspection before a pier glass. The soft and uneven lines of the jade chiffon of her dress would offer a satisfactory mask, she felt, for the nervous tenseness of her body. She renewed the red on her upper lip where she had been biting it. She returned to the living room, lighted a cigarette, and picked up a novel which she did not read.

She smoked three cigarettes.

Her sense of aloneness became stifling. The conceit grew upon her nervous condition that she had changed places with the furniture. She had become inanimate and the furniture endowed with attributes of life, as if her being were under the influence of some dispassionate regard by something that had no eyes with which to see. It was nonsense—nonsense. She never should have listened—at least not attentively—to that wretched old woman. She could very well just have given the appearance … one had to be polite …

Mrs. Endicott moved restlessly to one of the draped windows and stared down on the silent street. About her stretched the city of New York, and yet her environment could not have been quieter in some cabin in the woods. Not as quiet. Her memory swerved to that hellish week with Herbert in the forests outside of Copenhagen … what on earth was the name of that little watering place … Trollhättan? … No, that was in Sweden. Names never mattered. She looked up for a while at a slender slice of night sky horizoned by cornices across the street. It was heavy with stars that held her as if they were so many magic mediums arranged in heaven for the express purpose of granting her earthbound wishes. Wishes? She shrugged. She released the drapes, and they settled into place.

A maid opened the living-room door and came in.

“A lieutenant from the precinct station, madam.”

“All right, Jane. Ask him to come up here. Did he give his name?”

“Lieutenant Valcour, madam, I think he said.”

“Try and be more careful in the future about getting names.”

“Yes, madam.”