“Mr. Jamieson does not believe me,” Gertrude said drearily. “Halsey, if the worst comes, if they should arrest you, you must—tell.”
“I shall tell nothing,” he said with a new sternness in his voice. “Aunt Ray, it was necessary for Jack and me to leave that night. I can not tell you why—just yet. As to where we went, if I have to depend on that as an alibi, I shall not tell. The whole thing is an absurdity, a trumped-up charge that can not possibly be serious.”
“Has Mr. Bailey gone back to the city,” I demanded, “or to the club?”
“Neither,” defiantly; “at the present moment I do not know where he is.”
“Halsey,” I asked gravely, leaning forward, “have you the slightest suspicion who killed Arnold Armstrong? The police think he was admitted from within, and that he was shot down from above, by someone on the circular staircase.”
“I know nothing of it,” he maintained; but I fancied I caught a sudden glance at Gertrude, a flash of something that died as it came.
As quietly, as calmly as I could, I went over the whole story, from the night Liddy and I had been alone up to the strange experience of Rosie and her pursuer. The basket still stood on the table, a mute witness to this last mystifying occurrence.
“There is something else,” I said hesitatingly, at the last. “Halsey, I have never told this even to Gertrude, but the morning after the crime, I found, in a tulip bed, a revolver. It—it was yours, Halsey.”
For an appreciable moment Halsey stared at me. Then he turned to Gertrude.
“My revolver, Trude!” he exclaimed. “Why, Jack took my revolver with him, didn’t he?”
“Oh, for Heaven’s sake don’t say that,” I implored. “The detective thinks possibly Jack Bailey came back, and—and the thing happened then.”
“He didn’t come back,” Halsey said sternly. “Gertrude, when you brought down a revolver that night for Jack to take with him, what one did you bring? Mine?”
“No. Yours was loaded, and I was afraid of what Jack might do. I gave him one I have had for a year or two. It was empty.”
“If that isn’t like a girl!” he said. “Why didn’t you do what I asked you to, Gertrude? You send Bailey off with an empty gun, and throw mine in a tulip bed, of all places on earth! Mine was a thirty-eight caliber. The inquest will show, of course, that the bullet that killed Armstrong was a thirty-eight. Then where shall I be?”