Free Fair Warning by Mignon Good Eberhart

Marcia!”
    When would Beatrice tell what she had seen? When would she point to Marcia and say, “There is the murderer—she killed her husband, and I saw her in the act of doing it—I saw her with her two hands on the knife.”
    “So that’s your story,” Beatrice had said.
    There was a hideous crescendo of sound around the corner, which dwindled suddenly, lower and lower, and stopped. Ancill passed through the hall, hurriedly. Somewhere a bell rang long, sharp peals.
    Rob said urgently, “Be sure not to tell about pulling out the knife, Marcia. No one need know. Remember!”
    Had he forgotten Beatrice? Beatrice with her fiery white face and lowering eyebrows over those strangely clouded eyes.
    There were voices in the hall. The tread of heavy feet.
    But it was only the vanguard from the cruising car. Two bulky men in blue with fresh pink faces who halted on the threshold and looked at them and then entered the room. Behind them Ancill had brought a sheet which he unfolded deferentially. Emma Beek, her eyes little and piglike, was peering into the library from beyond those blue figures.
    They were polite and, after they’d looked at the thing there on the floor, and had heard where and how he had been found, they permitted Ancill to cover it.
    The white bandages on the right foot caught their attention, and one of them said, “What’s this—has he been sick?”
    The doctor explained briefly.
    “So you call it suicide,” said one of them in a detached way.
    “The knife was in the wound.” The doctor lighted another cigarette.
    “How about this fractured skull? Doesn’t look as if a fall on carpet like this ought to do it.”
    “No, it doesn’t. Unless he struck the arm of the chair. But it’s certainly fractured.” He shrugged and added, “Fractures are queer—can’t always tell what will do it or what won’t.”
    The policeman had no expression at all. But he said, looking at the outline below the sheet, “Looks like murder to me. Phone the L Street Station, Mawson. Then take a look around the house.” Revolvers had quite suddenly appeared in their hands. They were huge black things, heavy and menacing and inexpressibly out of place in that room. In that house. Mawson nodded and went away. The other policeman said, “I’ll have to ask you to wait right here, please. You can sit down.”
    He waited, too, pretending not to watch them. Dr. Blakie smoked. Beatrice stared at the sharp outlines of the thing under the sheet. Marcia sat like a white stone image in a chiffon gown. Once or twice someone spoke, but the presence of the policeman in the most extraordinary way entirely prohibited talk. That and the sheer stunning weight of the thing that could not have happened but had.
    And all at once the police came, in a deluge of roaring cars and uniforms and strange men pouring into the house. Men in uniforms, men in plain clothes; men with boxes and bags and clusters of huge silver bulbs like electric bulbs filled with stuff that gleamed like tinfoil. All of it flooding into the hall—through the house—upon them.
    But they all seemed to know exactly what to do. It was the more overwhelming because there was no confusion. And in the center of the orderly, matter-of-fact activity was a sort of directing nucleus composed of three men: a fat man with a doctor’s bag and a shining bald head, a thin policeman with bars on his shoulders, and a little dark man, who wore plain clothes, failed to remove his hat, and looked very bored.
    The whole thing was extraordinarily real. Marcia didn’t need the moment’s glimpse of a policeman’s picking up a cherry-colored taffeta wrap from the floor near the french doors and looking at it to convince her of its reality. Or the consciousness of the stain on the green ribbon of Beatrice’s gown. Or the pressure of Rob’s hand on her wrist. It was terribly real. It was happening. Police, all over the house. Ivan, on the floor, the cause of it.
    The little dark man