Colonel Hilliston’s voice broke through my ruminations. “Anybody like to play roulette?” he asked. “I’ve got a set-up here, so if you wish—”
A chorus of enthusiastic assent drowned out his invitation, and in a minute a roulette wheel and cloth were spread across the beautiful buhl table, and Hilliston took his place as croupier. Plaques were placed upon the numbered squares, and: “Le jeu est fait, messieurs et dames, rien ne va plus,” he sang out nasally.
The little ball clicked round the spinning wheel, and: “Vingt-deux, noir, messieurs et dames—” he chanted.
The play was rather high. My American conscience and Scottish ancestry revolted at the sums I lost, but my losses were as nothing beside those of Miss Ditmas. She hung in breathless interest above the table, her dark eyes dilated, her small, white teeth clamped sharply on her carmine lower lip.
“Le jeu est fait, messieurs et dames—what the devil?” Colonel Hilliston broke off his nasal chant as the lights winked out and the room was drenched in sudden, utter, blinding darkness.
“Nejib, Nejib—lights!” It seemed to me there was a thin, hysterical quality in Hilliston’s voice as he called the butler.
A soft hand clasped on mine with a grip so strong it startled me, and Miss Ditmas’ low-breathed whisper fluttered in my ear. “Doctor Trowbridge, I—I’m afraid it got in!”
There was a gentle whistling sound and a gentle draft of air swept on my face, as though an open hand had fanned swiftly past my features, and I thought I heard someone move past me in the dark and stumble clumsily against the roulette table.
“Lights, ’illiston effendi?” murmured the butler, appearing at the doorway with a silver candelabrum in each hand.
No answer came from Colonel Hilliston, and the fellow moved silently across the room, the aura of luminance from his burning tapers preceding and surrounding him.
“Look, look—oh, dear God, look!” rasped Margaret Ditmas in a choking whisper, then broke off in a wail of mortal terror. It was a terrifying sound, a little, breathless squeak of mortal fear that thinned into a sick, shrill wail of horror. It seemed to hang and linger in the air like the tintinnabulation of a softly beaten gong, until at last I did not know if I still heard it or only thought I did—and would go on thinking that I heard that dreadful, shrilling cry of agonizing panic ever after.
And well she might cry out, for in the center of the roulette table stood the head of Colonel Hilliston. It stood there upright on its severed neck, white eyeballs glaring at us in the flickering candlelight, mouth gaping open as though to frame a cry.
Beneath the table lay the headless trunk, half sprawled, half crouched, one hand extended on the Turkey carpet, the other clasped about the table-leg, as though it sought to drag the body upward to the missing head. Blood was gushing from the severed jugulars and carotids, blood stained and soaked the carpet at our feet and splashed the tip of Jules de Grandin’s patent-leather evening pump, and, amazingly, a tiny drop of blood hung like a jewel from the crystal prisms of the ceiling chandelier which swung above the table whence the head stared at us with a sort of silent accusation.
“BUT, MY DEAR MAN!” Captain Chenevert of the state constabulary, who had come dashing from the Keyport barracks with two troopers in answer to de Grandin’s call, hooked his thumb beneath his Sam Browne belt and gazed at us in turn with something like the look he might have given to a romancing child. “You tell me you were all assembled in the drawing-room when suddenly the lights went out and when that heathen butler—what’s his dam’ name? Nejib?—came in with candles, there was Hilliston without his head? Absurd! Preposterous!”
“Parbleu, you are informing us?” de Grandin answered with elaborate sarcasm. “Nothing more utterly bizarre was ever fished up from the vapors of an opium-smoker’s dream—but there it is. Including Doctor Trowbridge and myself and the late Colonel Hilliston, there were eight persons in that room. You have heard the evidence of seven, while the eighth bears mute but eloquent testimony of the murder. We are all agreed upon what happened: There is light, there is sudden darkness, then there is light again—and there is Colonel Hilliston without his head. Name of a devil, it is crazy; it is impossible; it does not make sense, but there it is. Voilà tout!”
“See here, you fellows,” I put in; “Maybe this may have some bearing on the case, though I don’t see how.” Then, briefly, I told them of my conversation with Miss Ditmas at the table, her hand-clasp in the dark and her terrified declaration: “I’m afraid it got in!”
“By George, that is interesting; we’ll have her in again,” said Captain Chenevert; but:
“Non, not yet; one little moment, if you please,” objected Jules de Grandin. “Me, I have what you call the hunch.”
Crossing to the secrétaire, he tore a sheet of note-paper across, then with a match sopped up a little drying blood from the sodden carpet and traced the silhouette of a curved, sharp-pointed dagger on the paper. “Delay your summons for a little while, if you will be so kind,” he urged, waving the paper back and forth to hasten drying. “Now, call her in, if you will.”
He laid the gruesome picture face-downward on the table beside the objects taken from the dead man’s pockets, and lit a cigarette as a trooper ushered Margaret Ditmas in.
“Mademoiselle,” he began as she looked at us inquiringly, “we have made an inventory of Monsieur le Colonel’s effects, the little things he carried in his pockets. Perhaps you can identify them. Here are his keys: you recognize them? No?”
“No,” she replied, scarcely glancing at the thin gold chain with its appended key-ring.
A little wad of crumpled banknotes followed, a cigarette lighter, knife, card case, cigarette case, and always, “No, I do not recognize it,” she returned as each was shown to her.
Then: “Last of all, we came on this,” de Grandin told her. “A strange thing, surely, for a gentleman to have,” he turned the sheet of writing-paper with its scarlet dagger up, and held it toward her.
Her face went ghastly at the sight. “You—you found that on him?” she exclaimed. “The Red Knife of Has—”
Like a football player tackling an opponent, de Grandin launched himself upon her, grasping her about the knees and hurling her backward several feet before they fell together in a heap upon the floor. And not a fraction of a second had he been too soon, for even as he threw her back, the ceiling chandelier dropped downward like a striking snake, there was a gleam of steel and the click of closing metal jaws; then up the fixture leapt again and was once more the harmless glass-hung thing which it had been before.
“Pardonnez-moi, Mademoiselle, I did forget that you were standing where the colonel stood, de Grandin told Miss Ditmas as he helped her to her feet. “I hope you are not hurt—but if you are, your injury is slighter than it would have been had I not acted roughly.”
“Shaunnessy, Milton!” shouted Chenevert. “Did anybody move?”
“Sir?” asked Trooper Shaunn. “Did the captain call?”
“I’ll tell the cock-eyed world he did,” the captain answered angrily. “You were on guard in the library, weren’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did anybody leave the room?”
“No, sir.”
“Anybody get up, press a button or lean against the wall, or anything like that?”
“No, sir. Everyone was seated. No one moved until you called.”
“All right. How about you, Milton?”
“Sir?”
“You were in the hall outside this room. See anybody?”
“No, sir; not a soul.”
“Bring that butler to me, and bring him pronto.”
A moment later Trooper Milton came back with the butler, who, arrayed in rubber apron, his sleeves rolled to the elbows had obviously been engaged in the matter-of-fact occupation of washing the silver when summoned.
“Where were you just now?” the captain asked.
“In the pantry, please,” the other answered. “Me, I alwa
ys wash the silver after dinner. The kitchen maids the dishes wash when they come in the morning.”
“Humph; you were the only one of the help here tonight?”
“Tonight and every night, please. The cook, the chamber maids, the kitchen girls, they all go home at sundown. Only I remain to serve the dinner and to close the house at night. Me, I sleep here.”
“Know the combinations of those door- and window-locks?”
“No, please. ’lliston effendi, he knows them only. You shut them so—they lock. But only he can open them.”
“U’m; how long have these locks been here?”
“I not knowing, Captain effendi. I come here from Damascus with Colonel ’lliston when he come here. He engage to hire me there. I veree good butler and valet, me; serve in the finest English families, and—”
“All right; we’ll look into your references later. What are you, an Arab or a Turk or—”
“Captain, effendi!” the butler’s protest was instinct with injured pride. “Me, I am Armenian. I very good Christian, me, I go to Christian school at—”
“All right, go back to the pantry now, and see you don’t leave it unless you have permission.”
“Hearing and obeying,” replied the other, and turned with a deep bow.
“Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle,” Captain Chenevert declared. “I sure will. This dam’ case gets tougher by the minute. Now we know how Hilliston was killed, but who the devil worked that guillotine, and who installed it, and—say, Doctor de Grandin, d’ye suppose—”
A crash of breaking crockery, a wild, despairing scream and the noise of heavy objects crashing into one another drowned his question out.
“It’s in th’ pantry!” Trooper Milton shouted and raced down the long hall with the captain, de Grandin and me at his heels.
“Can’t budge th’ door!” he grunted as we stopped before the pantry entrance. “Seems like something’s wedged against it—”
“Here, let me help,” Chenevert cut in, and together they threw their shoulders against the white-enameled door.
It gave slowly, inch by stubborn inch, but at last they forced it back enough to let them in.
The pantry was a ruin. Across the door a heavy table had been pushed, the china closet had been overturned, and scattered on the white-tiled floor were bits of Colonel Hilliston’s choice silverware. Also upon the tiles there spread a great red stain, growing fainter and more faint as it approached the window, which, to our surprise, was open.
“Good Lord,” the captain muttered, “they—whoever it was got Hilliston with that infernal beheading-machine—got that poor Armenian, too! Run outside, Milton; see if you can find any trace of the body.”
De Grandin stooped and scooped a little of the blood from the floor into a bit of envelope he drew from his pocket; then, surprisingly, he fell to examining the pantry walls, completely ignoring the blood train leading to the window.
“Not a chanst o’ findin’ anything out there, sir,” Trooper Milton reported. “It’s rainin’ cats an’ dogs, and any trail they mighta left when they drug ‘im away’s been washed completely out.”
“I was afraid of that,” Chenevert responded with a nod. “What’s next, Doctor de Grandin?”
“Why, I think we might as well go home,” the little Frenchman answered. “You have the name and address of every person present; besides, I am quite sure the murderer has gone. I have made memoranda of some things you might investigate tomorrow, and if you’ll kindly give them your attention we shall see each other here tomorrow afternoon. Possibly we shall know more by then.”
“O.K., sir. How about that Ditmas dame? Think we’d better give her another going over? She’s hiding something, and unless I miss my guess, she knows plenty.”
The Frenchman pursed his lips and raised his shoulders in the faint suspicion of a shrug. “I do not think that I would question her tonight,” he answered. “Her nerves are badly out of tune, and she might easily become hysterical. To-morrow evening, I think we may learn something of real value from her.”
“O.K.,” the other repeated. “We’ll do whatever you say, but I’d put her on the griddle now if it were left to me. See you about three o’clock tomorrow? Right-o.”
“WELL, I CHECKED UP on those matters, sir,” the captain told de Grandin when we met in the Hilliston drawing-room next afternoon. “It seems the work was done by a Greek or Armenian, or some kind of Syrian named Bogos; he installed the electrical fixtures, and, of course, this chandelier, along with all the other paraphernalia—”
“And how much more? one wonders,” de Grandin interjected in a whisper.
“What’s that?”
“Nothing of importance. You were saying—”
“This Bogos chap put in all the fixtures on Colonel Hilliston’s orders, written from abroad, but when we went to Harrisonville to interview him, he’d skipped.”
“Decamped?”
“Evaporated. Left with no forwarding address, you might say. Indeed, when we got to running over his activities, it appears that Hilliston’s was the only job he ever did. And he left as soon as it was finished.”
“U’m? This is of interest.”
“You bet your neck it is. Looks as though this Bogos guy—his name shoulda been spelled ‘bogus’—installed a lot of stuff not in Hilliston’s specifications. What d’ye think?”
“I think it very likely,” returned the Frenchman. “Now, if your men are ready, let us inspect Exhibit A of the machinery of murder.”
With hammer and cold chisel two mechanics attacked the frescoed ceiling of the drawing-room, twenty minutes work bringing the diabolical device to light. Concealed behind the innocent-looking mask of a prism-hung chandelier was a pair of strong steel jaws, razor-sharp, and working on oil-bathed bearings. How it was actuated there was no means of telling without tearing down the entire wall and ceiling of the room, but a single glance was sufficient to tell us that when the thing was dropped and the jaws sprung, it was powerful enough to bite through anything less resistant than a bar of iron. Measuring the cable on which it operated, we determined that it was designed to fall and gnash its metal jaws at a height of five feet from the floor.
“Colonel Hilliston was six feet one,” Chenevert commented. “Allowing for an inch or so of neck, it was just made to slice his head off right below the chin. And say, wasn’t that Ditmas girl lucky when you barged into her? The thing woulda bitten the top right off her head.”
He took a turn across the room; then: “She was about to spill something when it started to drop on her, too,” he added. “Something about some sort o’ knife when you showed her that picture you’d made. Now, how the devil was it timed so nicely, and who worked it?”
“Let us inspect the butler’s pantry,” answered Jules de Grandin irrelevantly.
“Last night,” he told us as we halted in the room from which the butler had been taken, “I made an examination of these walls while you were looking at the blood stains on the floor. Do you observe that clock?” He pointed to a small electrical chronometer set in the wall.
“Yeah, I see it. What about it?”
“Look closely at it, Monsieur le Capitaine. Does not it seem unusual?”
Chenevert examined the timepiece from several angles, tapped it tentatively with his forefinger, finally compared it with his watch. “It’s half a minute fast, that’s all I see,” he answered.
“Ah bah, you are like the idols of the heathen who having eyes see not!” de Grandin told him irritably. “See how it has been fastened to the wall? Screwed? Non. Cemented? Again non. Riveted? Mais non—it hangs on hinges. Now see.” With a quick jerk he drew the timepiece forward like a door, disclosing a small cavity beneath it. In this there hung a little disk of hard black rubber, like a telephone lineman’s ear-piece, and in the very center of the hole there was a circular lens shaded by an apron of black metal.
“Look into it,” he ordered, and hold the ’phone against your ear.”
I gazed across the captain’s shoulder as de Grandin left the pantry. In a moment I beheld him, as though seen through the large end of a pair of opera glasses, standing by the table where Hilliston had met his death.
“It is a kind of periscope,” he told us as he re-entered the pantry. “Could you hear me when I spoke to you?”
“Yes, distinctly,” answered Chenevert. “You said, ‘Do not press the button at the bottom, if you please.’”
“Exactement. Now do you and good Friend Trowbridge go into the drawing-room and see what happens.”
Obediently we walked to the parlor, and as Chenevert hailed, “All right, Doctor,” we heard a sharp and wasp-like buzzing in the ceiling whence the men had moved the hidden guillotine.
“It is as simple as the alphabet when once one masters it,” the Frenchman told us. “One in this ninety-times-accursed pantry sees what happens in the drawing-room. Also, he hears the conversation there. Now, if you look there by that china closet, you will see a little metal door. What does it hide?”
“I’ll bite,” said Chenevert.
“A fuse-box, by blue! You see? Standing here, before this spy-hole, one can reach out and disconnect the lighting-wires from the drawing-room, from that whole section of the house, indeed, at a single motion. Then, when darkness falls upon the parlor, one does but press this button, and pouf! someone has his head decapitated with neatness and dispatch. Not only that, by the motion of the guillotine, the head is placed upon the table for all to look at when the lights go on again. Ingenious; ingenious as the schemes of Satan, n’est-ce-pas?”
“Why, then, that’s what caused the little breath of air I felt against my face,” I told him. “It was the guillotine dropping within an inch or so of me. Great heavens—”
“Ah bah, an inch was quite enough to spell the difference between life and death for you, my friend,” he told me with a grin.
A Rival from the Grave Page 20