“You saw him die,” he interrupted. “Would you certify the cause of death?”
“It looked like some sort of heart seizure, there was marked cyanosis, labored breathing, difficulty in enunciation—”
“Agreed,” he broke in, “but what was it that he said as we assisted him?”
“Oh, something about someone’s waiting for him; you know what strangely garbled statements dying people make. The boy was agonizing, dying. His entire system of co-ordination was deranged, the nerves connecting thought and speech were short-circuited—”
He prodded me with a stiff forefinger. “Three persons, three members of a single family, have met death within a month. In every case the cause assigned was heart failure, an almost meaningless term, medically speaking. In no instance was there any history of cardiac disturbance; in one case the deceased was certified as being in sound health within a day or so of dying. No autopsies were had, nothing but objective symptoms led the doctors to ascribe the deaths to heart conditions. Now a young and healthy man succumbs in the same way. Tell me, if you were asked to give his cause of death, would you say it was heart failure?”
“Yes,” I answered. “If it were impossible to have an autopsy and I could not have his medical history, I’d say, with no other evidence than that we have at present, that his death was due to heart failure.
His noncommittal exclamation was half a swallow, half a grunt.
“NOW THEN,” HE FACED me at the dinner table the next evening, “we are somewhat farther in our quest.”
“Are we? I didn’t know we had one.”
“Indubitably. The so strange deaths among the famille Shervers, the equally inexplicable dispatch of the young mortuarian, the insistence on heart failure as the cause of each—ah bah, they did not make the sense. They outraged my ideas of propriety, they intrigued me. Yes. Assuredly.”
“And so—”
“And so I got permission to attend the autopsy on the young man’s body at the morgue today.”
“And the finding was—”
“A failure of the heart, by blue!”
“I take it you do not agree?”
“Name of a piebald porcupine, my friend, you take it right! I begged, I pleaded, I entreated them to analyze the poor one’s blood, for it was of a chocolate color, and I thought I smelled a characteristic odor. But would they do it? Non! Parnell, the coroner’s physician, he laughed at me. At Jules de Grandin! ‘See,’ he said while grinning like a dog, ‘here are the heart. It have ceased to function. Therefore it was a failure of the heart which killed him.’
“There was nothing one could do. One was present as a guest, and entirely without official status. And so I made him a most courteous bow. ‘Monsieur,’ I said, ‘permit me to congratulate you on your sublime ignorance.’ Thereupon I came home to my dinner.”
For upward of an hour he was busy in the surgery, and I had begun to wonder if he planned to spend the evening there when he emerged in shirt sleeves, his cuffs rolled back and a look of exultation on his face.
“Behold, observe, give attention,” he commanded as he waved a test-tube like a banner shaken out in triumph. “When Parnell l’idiot de naissance refused to test the poor young undertaker’s blood I held my lips—as much as could have been expected—but though my tongue was circumspect my hands were not. Oh, no; I was a thief, a pilferer, a criminal. I filled a little so small vial with blood wrung from a sponge and hid it in my pocket. I have subjected it to an analysis, that blood, and these things I have found: The blood are chocolate brown, not red as blood should be; on distillation I found tiny yellow globules which smelled of crushed peach kernels; when ether had been added and permitted to evaporate I found an aniline apparent by its odor, and the isonitrille test confirmed its presence. What do you say to that, hein?”
“Why, it sounds like poisoning by nitrobenzol, but—”
“Précisément, that but, he puts an obstacle before us, n’est-ce-pas? That nitrobenzol, he kills quickly; one cannot take him in his mouth, then walk around while he awaits his action. No. He acts by making it impossible for blood to take up oxygen, therefore his victims have the blue face—cyanosis. Yes?”
“Yes, of course, but—”
“Very well, then. If this odor of the kernel of the peach has not been smelled, and we see his victim fall, we might be led to think he suffered failure of the heart, n’est-ce-pas?”
“That’s so, but—”
“Bien oui. Here in this mortuarian we have a case which might be heart failure. It misleads my good Friend Trowbridge, who is nobody’s fool, it misleads that sale chameau Parnell who is everybody’s fool, but it does not mislead me. Oh, no. I am a very clever fellow, and follow where my nose directs. Now, if the young man dies of nitrobenzol poisoning, and everyone but Jules de Grandin thinks he dies of a weak heart, are it not entirely possible those members of the Shervers family succumbed to the same subtle poison? Are it not even probable?”
“Possible, of course,” I nodded, “but not highly probable. In the first place, there’s no earthly reason for any of them to have committed suicide, yet nitrobenzol’s not the kind of drug one can administer murderously. Its characteristic odor and sharp bitterness of taste would warn intended victims. Besides, we were right beside him when that poor boy died. One moment he was well, next instant he was falling in profound narcosis, and within two minutes he was dead. No one could have given him the poison; he could not have taken it himself and walked across the room to attempt to open the window. No, I’m afraid your theory isn’t tenable, de Grandin.”
He regarded me a moment, round-eyed as a puzzled tom-cat. At length: “You said the young mortician bore resemblance to the Monsieur Shervers in whose funeral he participated? We may have something there. Is it not possible some evilly-intentioned person mistook him for a member of the Shervers family, and struck him down—”
“By administering C6H5NO2 in broad daylight, without anybody’s seeing him?” I asked sarcastically.
“Précisément. Exactly as you say.”
“But that is utterly fantastic—”
“I quite agree with you. It is. But fantasy may be fact, too. If a thing exists we must accept it, whether it is capable of proof or otherwise. Meantime”—methodically he turned his cuffs down and snapped the fastenings of his smoked pearl links—“let us go and tender our condolences to survivors of the Shervers family. It would be a gracious gesture—and we may find out something which we do not know at present.”
OLD EUSTACE SHERVERS COWERED in the tufted Turkish armchair set before the fireless fireplace of the stiffly formal parlor of the house where he had brought his bride some six and sixty years before when, a young lieutenant fresh from service under Farragut, he had come home from war to take his place in the importing business founded by his Anglo-Indian father. He was a pitiable figure, vulture-bald and crippled with arthritis, half blind with presbyopia, bent with the weight of eighty-seven years. Almost destitute of blood-kin, too, for all his family had preceded him except his great-grandson Elwood, Jepson’s son, back from school in England to attend his father’s funeral, and still at home when tragedy deprived him of his uncle. Now the old man fumbled with his blackthorn cane and stared at us with blue, almost blind eyes.
“Yes, gentlemen,” he said in the cracked voice old age imposes on its victims, “it almost seems a curse is on our family. First came Robert’s death, from heart failure, they said, though he seemed as vigorous as anyone could be, then Jepson, and now Truman. Jepson wanted more insurance, you know, and when the doctors said it was his father’s heart that killed him he went down at once for examination. The doctors looked him over carefully, and certified his health as perfect. His application for $50,000 more insurance was approved, although the policies had not been issued when they found him dead in his car on the Pelham Road.
“Now Truman’s gone the same way. He’d been designated for examination for the Marine Corps, and the naval surgeons gave him perfect rat
ings. Although he’d studied hard to pass his written tests, he’d kept in perfect trim, and apparently he was in the best of health. Why, on the day before the night he died he played six games of squash and won them all. Could anyone about to die of heart failure have done that?”
“It seems unlikely, Monsieur,” de Grandin answered as he gazed with more curiosity than courtesy at the family portraits hanging on the walls. Abruptly: “Who is that one, if you please?” he asked, nodding to an oval picture done indifferently in oils and representing a young man in scarlet tunic piped with blue, a small mustache and rudimentary goatee.
His sudden change of subject shocked me hardly more than his unconcealed curiosity, and I saw old Shervers draw his bloodless lips across his false dentition at the exhibition as he answered rather stiffly, “That is my father, sir, Captain Hardon Jennings Shervers of the artillery corps of the British India Company, who fought with marked distinction through the Mutiny and helped to execute the white man’s justice on the bloody dogs who massacred the women in the Cawnpore dungeons. He emigrated to America shortly afterward and engaged in Oriental trade—”
“Pardonnez-moi, Monsieur, is one to understand your father was commander of a battery which blew the Mutiny ringleaders from the cannon’s mouth?”
“That is correct, sir. I was a lad at the time, but I well remember how the terror of those executions spread throughout all India, how the Hindoos cringed away in fear whenever a sahib passed”—his purblind eyes turned backward on the savage memory and his rheumatism-knotted fingers tightened on the silver knob of his thorn stick—“I tell you, gentlemen, not for a century will those heathen forget what we did to them that day!”
“Tiens, I damn think you have right, mon ancien,” de Grandin murmured; then, irrelevantly: “Tell me, if you please, how did your most respected father die?”
Once more the old man’s withered lips were puckered back against his false teeth as though a drawstring tightened them. “He died of heart disease.”
“And had he suffered long with the complaint?”
“He had not; no, sir. Like my son and grandsons, he was in what seemed to be good health up to the time he died. He passed away while sleeping.”
“One sees.” For a moment he was silent, studying the bent old man as an Egyptologist might took upon some relic of a vanished time and race. At length he rose and bowed with Continental courtesy. “Thank you for your information, and again we ask you to accept our sympathy,” he said.
“NOM D’UN NOM D’UN nom d’un nom,” he muttered as we drove home, “it is a puzzle with two tails we have here, good Friend Trowbridge! I have grasped one of them, but the other still eludes me.”
“What the deuce?” I queried.
“Precisely, exactly, quite so. I ask the same. Consider: We have here a family descended from a British officer who officiated at the blowing from the guns of Sepoy Mutineers. We heard the old one boast about the white man’s vengeance and say that never in a hundred years would Indians forget. Tenez, I think he spoke more truly than he knew when he said that, for the corollary of the white man’s vengeance is the vengeance of the Indian. If they hold the memory of those executions for a hundred years who shall say they do not hold the thought of retribution for an equal time?”
“But holding grudges and satisfying them aren’t necessarily the same thing.”
“Mais non, but think: Old Monsieur Shervers’ father died of heart disease. He was in good health, there were no warning symptoms, but he died. So did his grandsons. In every case it was the same. All were apparently in good health, all were stricken dead by heart disease. Even the young mortician who had the sad misfortune to resemble one of them was smitten by the same malady, apparently. Mordieu, coincidence’s arm is long, but these happenings pull it out of joint. It does not make the sense. Death is not obliged to give us notice of our dispossession from our bodies, but usually he does so. Not so with these ones. First they are strong and vigorous; then pouf! they are not even sick. They die. What is the answer?”
“But your blood tests seem to indicate the undertaker died of nitrobenzol poisoning.”
“They do, indeed, and I should like to wager that if we could perform similar tests upon the others’ blood we’d find that they too died of just that sort of ‘heart disease.’ I am convinced these so-called natural deaths are most unnatural. That dying lad was not delirious when he declared one was waiting for him by the window.”
“Who was it, have you any idea?”
“Not the slightest, or, to be more accurate, only the slightest. I think that I can guess what he was, but who? Hélas, non. I grope, I feel about with searching fingers like the blind man who has lost his dog and stick, but darkness shuts me in on every side. I am at fault. It is as well that it grows late. Let us go to bed and sleep upon the problem. Tomorrow I may see more clearly.”
“IT IS UNFORTUNATE WE could not see young Monsieur Elwood last night,” de Grandin told me at the breakfast table next morning. “He might have added something to the old one’s statement which would help us understand the case. Old people have their eyes set on the past; the modern viewpoint might be helpful—”
“I’ll call and ask him to drop over,” I volunteered. “We’d better not go over there, it might excite the old man.”
Picking up the breakfast room telephone I dialed the Shervers’ number, heard the smooth purr of the dial tone give way to the rhythmic buzzing of the automatic signal; then, “Hello?” I called as a woman’s muffled voice came to me on the wire. Queer, I thought, it seemed almost as if her words were choked with crying, but:
“Good Lord!” I dropped the monophone back in its cradle and stared at Jules de Grandin in incredulous dismay.
“Comment?” he looked up from his plate of sausages and cakes.
“Eustace Shervers died last night. They say that it was—”
“Non! Do not tell me; let me guess; it was the heart disease, n’est-ce-pas?”
“That makes the fourth death in a month—”
“And unless we act with speed a fifth will follow quickly, I damn think!”
Dashing to the telephone he called the Martin Funeral Home, found that the old man’s body had not yet been taken from his house, and with a muttered farewell ran full-tilt toward the front door and out into the street as though he were pursued by all the fiends of Pandemonium.
In half an hour he was back and shut himself up in the surgery. Occasionally I could hear the clink of glass on glass mingled with the low hum of his voice as he sang his private and entirely indecent version of a French translation of Saint James’ Infirmary Blues. When he emerged there was a look of triumph on his face as he thrust a test-tube forward for inspection. “C’est tout de même,” he declared. “The old one’s blood test shows the same reaction as the poor young mortuarian’s. He too was poisoned by administration of nitrobenzol, and died of ‘heart disease’.”
“How’d you get a specimen—” I began, but he waved my question airily aside.
“One does not serve for years as agent of le sûreté and not learn tricks, my friend. I met the body of Monsieur Eustace as it came to the embalming-room. I requested that I be allowed to look at it, and while no one was looking I filled a syringe with his blood. Voilà. I brought it back with me; I tested it, and here it is, with every evidence of poison in it.”
“But why, how—” I began.
“Why? C’est tout simple. The father’s sins were visited upon the son—and on the sons’ sons and their sons. The white man’s vengeance which old Eustace boasted of last night begot the vengeance of the Hindoos. Did he not say they never would forget? Parbleu, it seems that they have not!
“As to the how, the modus operandi of the poisonings, that is for us to find, but find it out we must, unless we wish to see the funeral of the last one of the Shervers family.”
“SURELY, YOU’RE NOT SERIOUS, Doctor?” Young Elwood Shervers looked curiously at the small Frenchman. “Why, it’s utt
erly preposterous! Who would want to wipe the Shervers family out? We’ve never injured anyone that I can think of, and as for a family curse, or Nemesis, as you have termed it, it’s too absurd to talk about. Of course, I’m grateful for your interest, and all that sort o’ thing, but—well, we’re English stock, you know. If we were French or Irish we might have family Dames Blanches or banshees, but” —the slightest trace of patronage showed in his voice—“we’re not, and we haven’t. And that’s definitely that.”
De Grandin took a quick puff at his cigarette and narrowed his eyes against the smoke, looking hard at Elwood. “Monsieur, this is no laughing matter, I assure you. Inspect the record, as your so magnificent Al Smith advises: Your first American ancestor fell victim to a heart attack, yet no one suspected he was menaced by the ailment. Your father and your uncles died, all in the prime of health, two of them with fresh certificates of health from doctors trained and paid to find the slightest defect. ‘Heart, disease—heart failure,’ the cause of death is given as monotonously as the chanting of an auctioneer who invites bids—”
“Oh, yes, we’ve been all over that,” young Shervers interrupted. “But it’s not a bit of use, sir. There must have been a strain of cardiac weakness somewhere, although no one suspected it. When Truman died, the strain and shock were just too much for poor old Grandpa Eustace. The wonder is the poor old chap hung on so long. Now, I’m a different temperament, I’m—”
“You are most woefully mistaken, Monsieur. Granting sorrow joined with shock to bring death to your relatives, what of the other one, the young mortuarian who died in this house during your uncle’s funeral?”
Elwood fumbled at the red and blue necktie which marked him as a public school man. “Coincidence?” he muttered.
“Coincidence, my friend, is what the fool calls fate,” de Grandin shot back. “The coincidence which caused the young man’s death was that he happened to resemble Truman Shervers. We saw him cross the room to raise a window; we saw him stagger back as though he had been struck; we heard him say that someone waited for him at the window; we saw him die within two minutes. And did he also die of heart disease? By blue, he did not! Listen carefully:
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