The Mystery Megapack: 25 Modern and Classic Mystery Stories

by Talley, Marcia

  “‘Maybe’ be hanged!” the Professor blazed! “It did, I tell you!”

  “But what about Herman, or whatever its name was, that led to the tragedy?” Nesbit asked, half of himself, half of the professor. “As I understand it, Milsted claimed someone had stolen some sort of heathen idol from his museum and was throwing a catch-the-low-down-cuss party when he was—when he shot himself.”

  “I was coming to that,” Forrester answered. “When Mr. Milsted first accused one of us of stealing the statue of Hanuman, I thought he might be indulging in some ill-timed joke, or staging a show with some ulterior motive. He was a queer sort, and I never fancied him very much. But I’m convinced now the jewel really was stolen, and stolen by the person who hid in the cabinet and escaped through the window and murdered Milsted.”

  “How do you make that out?” Nesbit wanted to know. “Nobody’s seen the thief, or the stolen property, for that matter—”

  “Oh, yes, somebody has,” Forrester corrected, drawing the little golden image with its ruby eyes and nostrils from his pocket and handing it to the astonished coroner. “I found this outside in the snow, directly under that window, just where a person, jumping from that height and landing on slippery ground, might have dropped it. I wish you’d take official charge of it for a few days and tell no one about it till you hear from me.”

  Briefly he described his search for clues outside the house, the finding of the idol and the finger marks where its loser had made a hurried hunt for it.

  “Well, I’ll be—this trick is yours, Professor,” the young doctor agreed. “I’m still holding to the hypothesis of suicide, but we’ll impanel no jury tonight, or until I’ve had time to perform an autopsy on the body. Can I reach you by phone if I need you?”

  “Of course,” the Professor assured him.

  “All right. I’ll take the names and addresses of everyone present, and dismiss ’em, pending the inquest. Whether you’re right or wrong, Professor, you’ve given me more mental gymnastics this evening than I’ve had since I attended the University.” He held out his hand with a genial smile. “Good-night, sir.”

  * * * *

  “Lambert Nesbit speaking, Professor,” a cheerful voice announced at the telephone, shortly after noon the following day. “Pick up the marbles; you win.”

  “Eh, how’s that—” Professor Forrester began, but the coroner was bursting with information and refused to be interrupted.

  “I autopsied Milsted’s body this morning,” he continued, “and everything points to your theory of murder. In fact, it couldn’t have been suicide. When I removed the skull cap I found a bullet had passed through the frontal bone slightly to the left of the frontal suture, penetrating the left superior frontal lobe of the brain, piercing the proecentral fissure with a downward course, and traveling almost to the horizontal fissure of Sylvinus. Do you get me, or am I too technical?”

  “Not at all,” Forrester assured him. “Remember, Nesbit, I was studying comparative anatomy, putting in six hours a week in the dissecting room, when you were learning to spin a top and play marbles for keeps. Go on, what else did you find?”

  “Well, first off, I realized that it would have been impossible for a man to shoot himself in that manner unless he held the stock of the pistol above the level of his head—I experimented on myself by holding a gun with the muzzle touching my forehead where the wound in Milsted’s head was. He might have done it by bracing the barrel against his head and pulling the trigger with his thumb, but, as you demonstrated last night, Milsted was clutching the pistol with the rigidity of a cadaveric spasm, which must have occurred at the moment of death, and his forefinger was on the trigger. There wasn’t a Chinaman’s chance of his shifting his grip on the stock between the shot and the time death ensued, for he must have died instantly from that wound.”

  “My boy,” Forrester assured him, “I’m beginning to have hopes of you. It was hard to convince you last night, but I’ll admit you’re not one of those thick-headed zanies who persist in error just for the sake of making fools of themselves.”

  “Thanks,” the coroner replied dryly. “But you ain’t heard nothin’ yet. When I compared the bullet in Milsted’s brain with a cartridge from the magazine of his pistol, I found the lethal missile was a soft lead, conical bullet of about 20-20 caliber, while Milsted’s gun is a Lüger and shoots a .25 cupro-nickel-coated bullet. I was talkin’ with a lieutenant in the State Constabulary about it today, and he told me those guns have a muzzle velocity of about twelve hundred feet a second, and if Milsted had shot himself with his own gun the bullet would have gone clear through his head and probably through the wall behind him, as well.”

  “I could have told you that,” Forrester replied. “Have you any other information?”

  “Not right now; but there’s not much doubt Milsted was murdered. What sticks in my craw, though, is who did it, and why, and why the devil didn’t anyone hear a second shot? D’ye reckon both parties could have fired at once, so the two reports sounded like one?”

  “Um; that’s possible,” Forrester agreed, “but you’ll remember that five of the six witnesses to the tragedy fail to recall seeing anything resembling a man at the window when Milsted died, and they’d not have been apt to miss seeing a pistol flash. No, I don’t think—here, wait a minute! How long can you postpone the inquest?”

  “Well, there’s no limit prescribed by law, but the jury has to be sworn super visum corporis—on viewing the body, you know—and we can’t keep poor old Milsted above ground indefinitely, waiting to swear in the jury. Tell you what I’ll do, if you say. I’ll impanel a jury, swear ’em in over the body, and then continue the inquest subject to call. I can get away with that, all right. What were you going to suggest?”

  “Take that bullet you found in the brain down to Roach’s sporting goods store and have one of their arms experts look at it. I noticed an English air-pistol on display in their window the other day, and it strikes me an air-gun might be the explanation to the whole affair. If the murder had been committed with one of those weapons we’d have about the same amount of mystery we have here, for the thing would probably shoot with practically no sound and would make no flash. These guns are comparatively new in this country, but I daresay they’re fairly well known in the British possessions.”

  “You think the murderer was an Englishman, then?”

  “Not exactly that, but I’ve got what you’d probably call a ‘hunch,’ Nesbit.”

  “Good enough. We’ll play it through. I’ll see what Roach’s man has to say and report later. We can hold the inquest up a week or so if necessary, while we gumshoe around for more dope.”

  “I don’t think we’ll need wait that long,” the Professor told him, as he hung up the phone and resumed marking a pile of examination papers.

  * * * *

  “Missy buy pretty fancy work?” a round-faced young man with somnolent eyes, clad in a threadbare overcoat and rather decrepit fez, demanded the following afternoon, when Rosalie answered the ringing of the front doorbell.

  “No, I—” the Professor’s pretty ward began, then checked her refusal, half spoken, as her large, topaz eyes suddenly narrowed the tiniest fraction of an inch. “Come in,” she invited. “I won’t promise to buy anything; but I’ll look.”

  “Miss like my things much,” the peddler announced confidently, as he followed her down the hall and into the living room. “See—” he opened an imitation alligator-hide suitcase and displayed the usual stock in trade of the itinerant Armenian huckster—“very pretty, very cheap, Miss. I t’ink you like buy some, mebbe so.”

  Attracted by the voices, Professor Forrester put down his book and strolled into the living room, leaving the study door open behind him.

  “Shopping again?” he asked with a twinkle in his eye.

  Rosalie had spent almost a year in occidental freedom since the Professor rescued her from the entourage of a certain villainous half-caste from Singapore, and the avidity with
which she conformed to the Western custom of permitting women to buy their own finery had caused the Professor more than a little amusement.

  “Yes, Uncle Harvey,” she returned, throwing him a radiant smile. “This gentleman says he’s from Armenia, and he has some of the loveliest things.”

  Forrester looked with astonishment from the girl to the mass of miscellaneous horrors spread on the floor. Even a layman could see these alleged Madeira and Normandy scarves and Egyptian table covers were of the home-brewed variety, the sort which are stamped out, thousands at a time, by machinery in New Jersey, and foisted on a credulous public by smooth-spoken knaves from the Levant.

  The Professor, who knew the home industries of every people in the world as well as he understood their dialects, could recognize the counterfeits with one eye closed, and Rosalie, who had spent ten years of her life in the heart of the East should certainly have been the last one to be deceived by such crude forgeries. Yet there she stood, apparently enraptured, and begged the vendor to display more of his atrocities.

  “This very ni-ce piece work,” that worthy commended, throwing a cotton cloth thickly encrusted with machine embroidery over his right arm so that it swathed him from shoulder to wrist. “This made ’specially for ladies who like nice things.”

  His stock patter swept rapidly on, detailing the manifold perfections of the luncheon cloth, but his sleepy eyes traveled round the room, glanced through the open door of the study, and rested on a tiny brass paper weight which stood on the Professor’s desk. The knick-knack was an inexpensive piece of Japanese work, executed in polished brass, and represented a diminutive monkey in the act of holding his paws before his mouth—one of the familiar “speak no evil” symbols to be found in every curio store. Just then it glittered in a ray of the afternoon sun as though it were burnished gold instead of hammered brass. The young man’s eyes shone with a sudden fierce light of jubilation as they encountered the toy, and he moved a step nearer the study door.

  “Ye-es, this very nice cover for nice lady’s table—” he drawled, fumbling in the side pocket of his overcoat beneath the cotton cloth which still draped his arm.

  “Darwaza bundo!” Rosalie exclaimed shrilly.

  The peddler started as though stung by a yellow-jacket, his right arm writhing under the covering of the sheet of embroidery like a snake beneath a blanket.

  With a furious movement he whipped the cloth from his shoulder, wrenched something from his pocket and wheeled, backing toward the study with long, cautious steps.

  “Look out, Uncle Harvey!” Rosalie’s warning came sharply. Next instant she launched herself across the room like a fury, rushing between the Armenian and the astonished Professor.

  “Dog, son of filth, unworthy offspring of a he-goat and a bad smell!” she spat at the hawker in a torrent of Hindustani, her amber eyes glowing balefully, her lovely mouth distended like that of an angry cat.

  There was a flash of steel in the afternoon sunlight, something like a flickering flame leaped to life in the girl’s right hand and swept forward and down like a cracking whiplash. The peddler screamed with amazement and pain and dropped the object he had half drawn from his pocket.

  Rosalie’s slim, silk-and-satin-shod foot shot out, kicking the thing out of reach as she menaced the wounded huckster with a ten-inch, wavy-bladed Malay kris.

  “Tie him up, Uncle Harvey,” she bade, thrusting her knife forward to within an inch of the Armenian’s belt buckle, then, to the peddler, “Stand still, grandson of a toad, or by the Three Holy Ones, I shall slit your unclean throat and pour forth your vile blood as an offering to Kali!” The peddler followed her advice to the letter, though his frightened glance turned this way and that, any direction but toward the girl’s fierce eyes and the glittering, razor-sharp blade of her dagger.

  Seizing a length of lace from the open suitcase, Forrester hastily twisted it into a rope and trussed the huckster’s elbows behind him—a far more effective manner of binding than strapping the wrists together—then tore a length from one of the cotton embroideries and bandaged the fellow’s wounded wrist.

  “Sit down,” he ordered curtly, motioning the captive to a chair; then to Rosalie: “I hope you know what you’re about, young woman. If you’ve run amuck, we’re in for a tidy little lawsuit, if not for a criminal prosecution.”

  “Hou!” Rosalie laughed, lapsing into oriental vernacular, which she still did under the stress of excitement. “Behold, my lord, what your slave has discovered.” With a quick fillip, she removed the fez from the peddler’s head, displaying a small device in red painted on his forehead near the hairline.

  It was a small crescent which nearly enclosed a tiny disc within its horns, and Forrester started at the sight. “Good heavens!” he exclaimed. “Why, it’s the caste mark of a follower of Siva!”

  “Yes, my lord, it is nothing less,” the girl replied with a triumphant smile. “When this base-born descendant of a hyena and a mangy female monkey appeared at my master’s house, wishing to show me his detestable wares, I was about to send him on his way, but the day is warm for winter and he put up his hand to wipe his brow, so that I did behold the caste mark for an instant as he put back his cap. Many an Armenian have I seen—we had hundreds of them in Singapore—but never have I beheld one who wore the sign of Siva.

  “Then I did remember, master of my life, how the villainous Chandra Roi (may the vultures devour his eyeballs!) sometimes hired these Siva fellows to do his filthy work when even the Chinamen would not, and I knew this one came to my master’s house for no good.

  “Two nights ago when Milsted Sahib spoke of the loss of his image of Hanuman, the others knew not what he referred to, but you and I, my lord, knew that Hanuman is the Monkey God of the people of Hind, and though in this land the monkey dances to the music of hand organs, in India he is a very sacred beast.

  “I knew, too, that Milsted Sahib was killed by someone, for did I not behold him shooting at a thing which perched in his window-place, as though Hanuman himself had come to claim his image? And was he not himself shot down? Men do not die from bullets from their own guns when those guns are pointed away from them.

  “Also I knew that you went outside the house after the murder, and, though the others saw nothing when you returned, Mumtaz Banjjan dwells in the shadow of her lord’s bounty, and his every mood is as plain to her as print upon a book’s page. She could see he was excited, and also pleased by something he had found, and there was no further mention of the stolen god. Therefore Mumtaz Banjjan placed herself near the door while her master and the Doctor Sahib talked in the library, and overheard much which passed between them. She knew he had found the god and given it to the young Nesbit, and she heard of the marks of some other person’s search for that same idol in the snow. All these things Mumtaz treasured in her memory, and when she beheld the mark of Siva upon this accursed one’s brow she bethought her that he must have seen her master pick up the god and take it into the house with him. Therefore, she thought, this one had come here to steal the god back, perhaps to murder her master as he also murdered Milsted Sahib. So she did invite him into the house with fair words that she might watch him, and she saw his unholy eyes light upon the little monkey of brass in the room where my lord reads from great books and writes on paper, which he, being but a pig and an ignorant fellow, doubtless mistook for the very god he stole from Milsted Sahib. And when she saw him reach into his pocket beneath the cloth he held upon his arm she knew he sought some weapon.

  “So Mumtaz cried out ‘Darwaza bundo’ which, as my lord knows, means only ‘shut the door,’ in Hindustani; but it was enough. The lowborn one recognized the words, and betrayed himself, and Mumtaz cut his wicked hand before he could do injury to the master who holds both her body and her soul as lightly in his hand as a child holds a rattle.”

  “Um; so I see,” Forrester commented, “and a very neat piece of work you did, too, my dear. But you might have been shot.”

  “Forrester S
ahib is Mumtaz Banjjan’s master, and Mumtaz Banjjan is his slave,” the girl replied, lowering her head humbly. “He is the light of her eyes and the breath of her nostrils and the blood of her heart. What does it matter if the slave dies, so the master lives?”

  “Never mind the compliments,” Professor Forrester waved his hand wearily. He had long since given up trying to convince Rosalie that she must not call herself his slave. “Just at present I require information. How is it you had that kris so handy?”

  Rosalie’s—or Mumtaz Banjjan’s—face lit with a smile. “I belong to my lord, the mighty Forrester Sahib,” she announced primly, “if he chooses not to salute my lips I shall go to my grave unkissed; but there are certain young men who think not so. In Singapore I learned that the kris is a sharp tongue which argues well; therefore, when the young men urge me to do what they call ‘pet,’ if I cannot rebuff them with my laughter or my hands, I wear that which will convince them. The American clothes are clumsy for such a purpose—I cannot wear the knife at my belt—therefore I conceal it in the back of my dress, between my shoulders.”

  “You little savage!” Professor Forrester chuckled, as he stooped to recover the pistol she had kicked into the corner of the room. Whimsically, he remembered that certain desperadoes of the early Wild West were wont to conceal their Bowie knives in the collars of their coats, and wondered what effect Rosalie’s sudden production of a murderous Malay short sword would have at some afternoon tea.

  He held the captured pistol to the light and examined it closely. It was a heavy, blue steel weapon with a thick barrel upon which a smaller calibered tube was set. By breaking the stock, after the manner of a revolver, a plunger was withdrawn from the larger barrel, and when the stock was jammed back in place the plunger was thrust into the tube again, compressing sufficient air in the chamber to drive a light bullet with a velocity equal to that of a black-powder pistol. Across the stock was engraved the word Lübeck.