The Mystery Megapack: 25 Modern and Classic Mystery Stories

by Talley, Marcia

  “But it looked to me as though he were shooting toward the window, not at himself,” Rosalie protested. “I’m sure the flash was directed away from him.”

  “Then how do you account for—that?” Carpenter asked almost roughly, pointing dramatically to the figure lying face downward on the handsome Persian rug.

  Mr. Milsted lay prone as he had fallen, one arm oddly twisted beneath him, the other extended full length beyond his head, the stock of a German Army automatic grasped convulsively in his hand. His right cheek rested against the nap of the rug, and the Professor, bending down to look into his face, observed a small, round hole, about the caliber of a lead pencil, some two inches or so above the eyebrows and almost in the center of the forehead. The rim of the wound was a little discolored, as though from a bruise, and the center was slightly depressed, forming a shallow cup or crater, while a mass of thick, clotted matter, grayish white mixed with blood, showed within the tiny, deadly circle. One or two drops of blood—no more—had trickled from the wound and lay upon the carpet.

  “Um?” Forrester rose slowly from his contemplation and pinched his narrow chin between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. “How do you account for it? That’s the question.” Thrusting his hand into his jacket pocket, he drew out a short-stemmed briar pipe, stuffed it to overflowing with long cut tobacco and began puffing furiously. “I don’t think we’ll accomplish much huddled in here,” he suggested. “Suppose you join the others. The officers should be here any moment, now.”

  As the door closed behind the others, Professor Forrester wheeled and stepped quickly into the museum. It was a small, square room entered by a single door of heavy, iron-bound oak, and lighted by a single small, heavily barred window. About its sides were ranged the tall glass-fronted specimen cases, all strongly fastened with Yale locks, while a small, compact safe and two tall, sheet-steel cabinets stood against the wall directly beneath the window. In the center, under the ceiling electrolier, was a table of polished mahogany on which lay a handkerchief covering two small objects. The Professor lifted the cloth, disclosing a small brass inkwell and stamp box.

  “Milsted certainly intended giving the guilty man every chance,” he commented softly to himself. “No one coming in here could say whether the handkerchief had covered two or three things before, and the fact that the cloth was already resting on two other things would partially disguise the fact that the idol had been returned. Yes, he was pretty decent about it, poor chap.”

  Replacing the square linen, he stared speculatively about the room. “Now, let’s see,” he murmured. “The Hanuman statue couldn’t have been much bigger than this inkwell or stamp box, smaller, perhaps. Anyone could have carried it easily in his pocket. H’m; very interesting.”

  Strolling over to the safe, he bent forward and examined it, even testing its lock tentatively, first taking the precaution to cover the knob with his handkerchief, lest his fingerprints show on the polished metal. The lock was fastened, and he next turned his attention to the upright metal cabinets. They were nearly six feet high by eighteen inches wide and about two feet deep. One was filled with a miscellaneous assortment of papers, old letters and kindred junk, while the other was empty, even its shelves having been removed, leaving a space available for storage about as large as the interior of an upended mummy case.

  Again the Professor stooped, examining the cabinet’s interior carefully. “Umpf,” he inquired of the empty room, “what’s this?” On the smoothly painted floor of the case were four crescent-shaped ridges of sand and fine gravel, paired off in two sets of two each, their concave sides facing, and about seven inches distant from each other. Taking an envelope from his pocket the Professor carefully scooped part of the sand into it, then closed the cabinet door and returned to the library.

  Approaching the window, which had blown open as the lights went out, he examined its white-enameled sill closely, collected a few grains of sand from it, and bent down to observe the wall and baseboard immediately under it.

  His search was rewarded, for, so faint as to be scarcely noticeable, but perceptible to one who knew what he looked for, was a tiny, dirty-yellow stain on the white baseboard, and two more, one about two feet below and ten to eleven inches to the left of the other, against the gray wall paper.

  Mentally the Professor blessed his untidy habit of using his pockets for correspondence files as he brushed specimens of these stains into two more envelopes and scribbled identifying notations on each container.

  “Now,” he informed himself as he knocked the ashes from his pipe into the fire, “we’ll have a look around the outside of the house before the police begin to ask embarrassing questions.”

  The wind was howling like a thousand banshees with ulcerated teeth, lashing the tall, somber cedars, which lined the Milsted driveway, till they bent almost double before its force, and hurling sheets of mingled snow and sleet against the house walls and window panes. The entire north wall of the Milsted mansion was encrusted with storm-castings as the Professor, muffled to the eyes in his motoring coat and with his fur cap pulled well over his ears, forced his way through the tempest to the spot beneath the library window.

  “No chance of finding anything here,” he admitted reluctantly as he threw the beam of his electric torch against the ice-covered clapboards. “Any traces are as dead as the dodo. You couldn’t track an elephant through this storm. I might as well get back to—ah?” He broke his soliloquy short with a sharp, interrogative exclamation as his foot came in contact with some tiny object imbedded in the half-frozen snow.

  Dropping to his knees, he played his electric light over the glacial mass at his feet, dug his fingers through the sleet-crust and exhumed a tiny, glistening object about an inch and a half in length and surprisingly heavy for its size. No need to speculate on the nature of his discovery. The little golden statue, representing a squatting monkey, and exquisitely executed in gold, the face ornamented with rubies, told him at a glance what it was. Hanuman, the Monkey God, was found.

  The flashlight’s ray disclosed something else. About the spot where the Professor had stumbled over the jewel somebody else had been clawing furiously, for the half-obliterated marks of frantic fingers were plainly visible in the snow. Only desperate haste, biting cold and unrelieved darkness had prevented the other from finding the statuette which the Professor had come upon accidentally.

  “Hum,” Forrester remarked as he shut off his flashlight and rose, “this is interesting; mighty interesting. Would be worth while trying to find any tracks?”

  Two minutes’ attempt convinced him it would not. Sheltered from the full fury of the storm by the house, the snow where the monkey’s statue had been lost retained the ridges made by the questing fingers which missed what the Professor found; but three feet distant the drifting flakes and lashing sleet obliterated Forrester’s own tracks almost as soon as he made them. To seek any person who had passed that way, even a few minutes before, was as bootless an undertaking as attempting to trace a ship across the Atlantic by her wake. “No go,” he admitted, after wrestling with the gale for ten yards or so; “better get in and thaw out.”

  “Find anything?” demanded young Carpenter as the Professor relieved himself of cap and ulster and held his hands to the hall fire, flexing and stretching his fingers to restore circulation.

  “Umpf,” responded the Professor, bending closer to the blaze and disdaining a glance at his questioner.

  “Nut!” muttered Carpenter to the young woman beside him. “Darndest nut I ever saw, racing around in this storm looking for God-knows-what. Reckon the old fool expects to find out why Milsted shot himself?”

  If the Professor heard Mr. Carpenter’s uncomplimentary remarks he gave no sign of resentment. Turning from the fire as soon as the younger man had withdrawn, he hurried to the library, and with only the corpse of his late host for company, fell to comparing the bits of earth he had salvaged from the steel cabinet, the window sill and the library walls and b
aseboard.

  “Hello, Professor Forrester; what are you doing here?” queried a sharp-featured young man as he entered the library and put a portmanteau down on the table. “Lookin’ for traces of the Pyramid-builders?”

  Forrester regarded the newcomer sharply through the lenses of his neat, rimless pince-nez. “I don’t believe I—” he began, but the other interrupted with a laugh.

  “Of course, you don’t,” he agreed. “I didn’t expect you would. I’m Nesbit—Lambert Nesbit, B. S., in ’20, and M.D., in ’24. Never had any of your classes, but used to see you on the campus and on the platform at commencements.”

  “Oh!” the Professor responded. “And you’re—”

  “Yep, I’m the coroner. Practice wasn’t goin’ any too good when I got out, for I just missed the flu epidemic and folks wouldn’t get sick to accommodate me, so I busted into politics and got myself elected to this job. They tell me outside you’ve been keepin’ the nest warm for me.”

  “I’ve made a few—er—observations,” Forrester admitted. “Have you questioned anybody?”

  “I’ll say I have,” the coroner retorted with a twinkle in his eye. “Got two state troopers to ride herd on ’em, and put ’em through their paces in great shape. Gosh, they’re one scared crowd! Everybody agrees Milsted shot himself, but if I asked any one of ’em, ‘Why did you kill him?’ I’ll bet a dollar he’d break down and confess.

  “Well”—he turned to the body with a brisk, professional air—“I wonder why the old coot did kill himself?”

  With the deftness of long practice, covering the repugnance he felt for his task with a running fire of cynical comment, the young physician examined the remains, noted the position of the wound, the pistol in the dead hand and the posture of the body.

  “Plain as a pike-staff,” he announced, rising and dusting his trousers knees. “Never saw an opener case of suicide in my life, but, as Bobbie Burns would say,

  “‘One thing must still be greatly dark,

  The reason why he did it.’”

  “I shouldn’t be too cock-sure it’s suicide if I were you,” Professor Forrester replied.

  “Eh? The devil you say!” Dr. Nesbit shot him a quick glance. “Why not?”

  “Look at that wound again.”

  “Thanks; I’ve already had a fine, grandstand view of it. Right through the frontal bone, slick and clean as a whistle.”

  “But did you see any powder brand around it?” Forrester insisted. “Remember, in the nature of things, Milsted couldn’t have held that gun more than a foot from his head, and at that distance, even with smokeless powder, there would have been some burning of the tissues, or at least a scarification of the skin from the powder gases.”

  “Hum; by the Lord Harry, Professor, you’re right!” the young official admitted. “I overlooked it. Still—”

  “Try to take that pistol from his hand,” the Professor persisted.

  “He’s certainly holding it,” the coroner admitted as he rose after tugging futilely at the weapon clasped in the dead man’s fingers. “Rigor mortis set in early—”

  “Rigor fiddlesticks!” Forrester scoffed. “Feel his jaw and neck, man; that’s where the stiffening would begin, if it were rigor mortis. You’ll find those muscles still flaccid.”

  “Right you are,” Dr. Nesbit agreed as he prodded the dead man’s facial muscles with a practiced forefinger. “But how do you account for his grasping that gun so—”

  The Professor sighed in exasperation. “Did you ever hear of the condition known as cadaveric spasm?” he asked sharply. “That’s a perfect example of it. You know, as a physician—or you ought to, if you don’t—that when death takes place suddenly, especially from injury to the nervous system, as in this case, where the brain was pierced, the body, or parts of it, notably the hands, become rigid almost immediately. I remember once coming on the body of a poor chap who’d been murdered in the Gobi desert. Some brigands had shot him through the head from behind as he was in the act of eating a piece of mutton, and, though his body had almost completely mummified when we found him, he was still grasping the sheep bone as if it were a pole of a galvanic battery.”

  “Right-o,” the coroner gave a short, affirmative nod. “Absolutely right, Professor. This man was shot through the brain, too, as you say. But that’s one of the surest indicia of suicide, you know. No murderer could put that gun in his hand after killing him and make his fingers grasp it as they do.”

  “Exactly,” Forrester nodded in his turn. “But suppose that instead of shooting himself, Milsted had drawn his gun to shoot at someone else, and actually fired one shot before, or just as, the other potted him. What then? Wouldn’t we have just the conditions we find here?”

  “Yes,” Nesbit conceded, “but the facts don’t match your theory. Only one shot was heard, and all the testimony, with one exception, is to the effect that there was nobody for Milsted to shoot at, even if there’d been someone to shoot him.”

  “Right,” Forrester replied, “and it’s my ward, Miss Osterhaut, who says Milsted fired toward the window just before he fell. I’d take her word against a dozen of these scatter-brained young fools’ testimony. She has been brought up to observe things, and do it accurately.”

  “But—”

  “And here’s something else for you to chew on,” the Professor continued, brushing aside the half-uttered protest—“look at these—”

  Leading the way to the museum he opened the empty cabinet and directed his companion’s gaze to the faint marks on its floor. “Recognize ’em?” he demanded.

  “Can’t say I do.”

  “Very well, then. I’ll tell you. They’re footprints. Somebody who had been walking through the snow, before it was deep enough to cover the ground completely, was standing in that cabinet today. You can make out the heel-and toe-prints of his shoes, and here you can see where the sand and gravel has been spread out in a film over the metal where the snow melted from his boots. It’s a glacial silt-deposit in miniature. That dates his visit. It didn’t start snowing till nearly six o’clock this afternoon, and the ground was frozen hard as bed-rock up to an hour or so before the storm began. The temperature rose several degrees—enough to thaw the very top of the ground—before the snow commenced, and for the first half-hour or so the flakes were wet. This sleet has been coming down only the last hour, maybe a little less. So I say somebody walked through the snow just after it began, got a scum of sand on his shoes and hid in this case without stopping to wipe his boots. He could stand here and see everything going on in the room through the slits in the cabinet door.”

  Dr. Nesbit smiled ironically as he shook his head. “You may be able to take a piece of skull and build a man from it, or reconstruct a dinosaur from a splint of thigh-bone, Professor Forrester,” he conceded, “but I’m not ready to admit you’ve reconstructed a case of burglary and murder here.”

  “Then look at this,” the Professor urged, leading the way back to the library and indicating the wall beneath the window. “This is the window that everybody agrees opened mysteriously just as the lights went out. Now, here on the baseboard, if you’ll look closely, you’ll find exactly such sand stains as are on the cabinet floor. And here—” he indicated the faint smudges on the wall—“are the foot marks where somebody took a running start, braced his feet first against the board, then the wall, and with his hands holding the window sill, swarmed up and yanked the casement open. And here—” he pointed triumphantly to the sill—“are other marks, not much more than dabs of sand, I’ll grant you, but still marks, where the fellow rested his feet on the sill before he started to leap to the ground outside.”

  “But you’re assuming too much,” Nesbit objected. “These marks might easily have been made some other way. I know my house is forever getting all sorts of spots and splotches on it, no matter how hard my wife scrubs and dusts.”

  Forrester snorted in disgust. “Can’t you use your eyes at all?” he demanded. “Look at this, an
d this, and this—” he thrust the envelopes in which his specimens were stored under the coroner’s nose—“the sand in each of those envelopes is identical. If the cabinet was stained with yellow sand, and the wall with red and the window sill with black or gray smut, I’d agree with you; but all the stains are made by the same material. I tell you, whoever hid in that cabinet ran from the museum to the library and made his escape through the window when the lights went out! See here, let’s prove it. Call everybody who was present when Milsted died and ask them, separately, if they can remember whether or not the library door opened about the same time the confusion preceding the shooting began.”

  Dr. Nesbit stepped to the door and summoned the six witnesses to the tragedy, admitting them one at a time and asking each the question suggested by the Professor. Rosalie and three others recalled there had been a faint squeak “as though a door was being opened carefully” before Milsted had appeared to go berserker. One of the others thought the museum door had opened a little—“blown by a draft,” she assumed—while the sixth witness remembered nothing of the sort.

  “That’s the best proof in the world that the door did open,” the Professor insisted. “If every one of them had agreed it did, we might have assumed your question suggested their answers—human memory is a tricky thing, at best—and that they thought they recalled something which actually didn’t happen; but diverse testimony in such a case is its own best proof.”

  “‘Saul, Saul, almost thou persuadest me,’” Coroner Nesbit protested with a laugh. “Seriously, though, Professor, you’ve got me thinking. I still believe this is a suicide, but everything you’ve suggested could have happened just as you say—maybe.”