by Rufus King
“Were you, Mrs. Chanin?”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“Tell me, please.”
“Are you familiar with those old-fashioned china figures which come apart?”
“No, Mrs. Chanin.”
“Their base is a jar, and the top part lifts off and forms a lid. Robert found one of them in the attic. He brought it down and showed it to me. There were matches in it—that type of match, Doctor. He said there were enough to kill everyone in the house. Naturally, I accepted the reference as to fire.”
“Robert took the matches?”
“He took the jar into his room. I imagine it is still there.”
“Have you any idea how he would know of the poisonous nature of phosphorus?”
“Not specifically of phosphorus—”
“But poisons?”
“He has spoken of poisons. He was reading, only last week, that book on toxicology which you just referred to.”
“Mrs. Chanin—”
“Doctor?”
“We both of us are faced with making a grave decision. I am satisfied that an autopsy will bear out my contention that your husband died from phosphorus poisoning. I suggest that several lucifer match heads were introduced into his portion of salad, because phosphorus has the taste and odor of garlic and because the consistency of the match heads would be comparable to the brittle consistency of a radish. Concerning my own decision, I have no alternative. I must instruct the coroner that an autopsy should be performed.”
“And mine, Doctor?”
“Whether to accuse Robert of the crime or to confess to it yourself.”
He had once in the hills seen an adder contract stiffly and then stay tensed while weighing the advantage of a lunge. Her slight laugh, when it came, did not dissolve the picture. Her eyes returned to the door.
“Are you seriously suggesting, Doctor, that after all I’ve done for that rotten, drunken, degenerate young fool—after I’ve made myself sick with having to shield Arthur from Robert’s fool excesses—you speak of decisions? Yes, I’ll accuse him—list his hatred of his brother—brand his motive as the hope that with Arthur dead he could get Arthur’s money through my weakness, my forced sympathy—”
Abruptly, she was still.
Waiting.
The shot was muted by the ceiling and the heavy walls, but its identity was unmistakable.
Something like a sigh escaped her.
“It’s better that way, Doctor. Robert was listening, you see. He was standing at the door.”
He continued to sit there quietly, looking at her.
“Why don’t you go to him?” she said sharply. “Perhaps you can save him!”
“Your influence over Robert was stronger than I thought. Don’t you wan him to die, Mrs. Chanin, too?”
The tension was like the hush before thunder.
“You fool!” she said impulsively.
“No, Mrs. Chanin. I know how things are. I know how you purposely debauched him with money and encouragement until he idolized you and became a drunken slave in his adoration of you.”
Her voice had the texture of glare ice.
“Why?”
“To make Robert the logical suspect if your husband’s death should, by some fluke, be recognized as murder when you killed him.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know that swimming instructor’s name, Mrs. Chanin, but I do know that his hair is blond and that your hair and Mr. Chanin’s hair is black.”
Her lips grew hard and tight and revealed her teeth unpleasantly. She struck him a vicious slap across the face.
“I called you a fool, Doctor, and you are one.” Her voice rose to the exultant, ungovernable pitch of a paranoiac. “Robert’s suicide is a confession of guilt. Nothing can touch me now; not you, not the law, not even God, Doctor.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Chanin.”
“What?”
“For having just confessed your guilt.”
Her grimace became more sickening.
“Where are your witnesses, Doctor?”
Then, again, she looked toward the door. Flames burned hotly in her head as Robert came into the room and two men. She noticed absently that one of the men carried a notebook and a pencil. She heard someone talking and believed that it was Dr. Starr, saying, “I don’t think you’ve met District Attorney Heffernan, Mrs. Chanin. And this is his stenographer, Aleck Jones.”
* * * *
A clock struck four, and daybreak thinned the dark sky toward the east.
Miss Wadsworth placed the steaming cup of black coffee on the desk. He asked her to sit down. He told her of the difficulties involved in obtaining a conviction in homicides from poison unless the poisoner could be forced to confess. He told of his arrangement with the district attorney and with Robert in regard to the revolver shot. He asked her to make a note regarding a wedding present for Robert and his wife. He said that Robert was again under his care and that there would be excellent hope for a lasting cure, now that the law had removed the cancerous growth that had been killing his soul. He said that he was desperately tired and that she must be desperately tired and that both of them had better call it a day.
“There’s just one thing, Doctor.”
“Yes, Miss Wadsworth?”
“You were going to fill in the death certificate as an ordinary case of acute gastroenteritis just before Mr. Robert Chanin came here. Do you mind my asking what made you change your mind, what made you realize it was murder?”
“Moonlight.”
“But there was no moon tonight, Doctor.”
“I know. That’s just the point.”
He told her of the darkened bathroom seen through the open doorway of Arthur Chanin’s room, of the lambent glow like pale moonlight that had illumined some patch of moisture at the base of the wide marble washstand, where Arthur had been violently ill, of the habit of such stomach matter to glow faintly in the dark in cases of phosphorus poisoning. He told her he had accepted it automatically as a reflection of the moon and had dismissed it from his mind until Greentree had been telephoning, then he had noticed through the window that the night was black and that there was no moon, and so, in connotation with the lucifer match that had still been burning in Robert’s fingers—Yes, on the whole, it had verged on the perfect crime.
THE CASE OF THE SUDDEN SHOT
The bullet was lead and had been activated by the comparatively low velocity of a revolver shot, comparative, that is, with one from an automatic or a machine gun or a rifle. But its job had been thorough.
Dr. Colin Starr listed it for his own satisfaction as a lung wound involving the perforation of a large trunk of the pulmonary vein, with profuse bleeding into the chest cavity and with death occurring within a few minutes. He felt that the coroner, when he came, would concur.
The bullet’s caliber he placed at .38, a “short.” Attached to it was what he believed would prove to be a splinter of rib, and he thought that the track would pass uneccentrically through the chest.
The tip of the bullet protruded from the exit hole.
He looked thoughtfully at the pattern and amount of blood which stained the immediate area where the body lay.
He said to Patrolman Brostrom, “Hunt up a reading glass, will you? Try the library. Ask a servant, if you have to, but don’t disturb Mrs. Fraley.” He saw the damp prelude to nausea on Brostrom’s stolid face. “Take a shot of whisky or brandy before you come back.”
“I certainly will, Doctor.”
Brostrom left the living room. It was a pleasant room, set in the gracious tranquility of an earlier day and unchanged through four generations of Fraleys. Its French windows opened onto lawn and the moist, still air of a summer daybreak. Beyond the lawn lay the acres of the Fraley estate, walled off at their western end from the fairways of the co
untry club’s golf course and at the east by Ludington Road and the Muskingum River.
On the floor of the room was the body, naked except for a brief pair of swimming trunks, lanky with youth and topped by the lean, spiritual face of Dean Ludington. Eleven feet away from it, on the edge of an Aubusson carpet, was the revolver.
Starr looked at the thin perfection of the platinum wrist watch which Bob Chanin had insisted on giving him after he had solved, last June, the lucifer-match murder of Bob’s brother. It was half-past four.
He took the pearl-handled magnifying glass from Patrolman Brostrom, who looked better, and asked Brostrom to move a reading lamp onto the floor beside the body.
Starr adjusted the lamp’s shade so that light shafted young Ludington’s brown torso. He confirmed his belief that the splinter adhering to the lead bullet was rib bone.
He turned his attention to the entrance wound and, with the delicate application of an instrument from his bag, collected some minute bits of cloth. He placed them on a prescription blank, folded the blank and put it in his pocket.
A siren wailed through the quiet of the night.
“That’ll be the boys,” Brostrom said.
* * * *
Starr’s report to District Attorney Thomas Heffernan was brief. Aleck Jones, Heffernan’s stenographer, took it down as they stood drinking steaming black coffee in the dining room.
He, Starr said, had been awakened by a telephone call from the Fraley home shortly before half-past three. Mrs. Chesterton Fraley was on the wire and had told him in a voice broken with hysteria that she had heard a shot. She had got out of bed and run downstairs and into the living room where the lights were on. She had found her young neighbor, Dean Ludington, on the floor dead. She had found her son, Jock Fraley, in the washroom that opened off the main hall being desperately, violently ill. Jock was beside her right then, while she telephoned, in a state of collapse.
Starr had dressed and come, the dressing taking ten minutes, the two-mile ride three. He had reached the Fraley’s about ten of four.
Patrolman Brostrom, who covered Ludington Road on a motorcycle, was already there, having been interested in the untimely lights that burned in the Fraley house and in one shriek from a neurotic maid. Starr had found Mrs. Fraley and her son in the library. She had pulled herself together, but the anguish and worry stamped on her face made her look like death. Jock Fraley was a wreck both mentally and physically.
Jock Fraley had confessed to the crime.
“It’s a rotten shame,” Heffernan said, “letting kids go haywire like that. It’s the parents’ fault, I say, and still that boy has to take the rap for it. Maybe if his father were living things would be different. How old is he, anyhow, Colin?”
“He was twenty-two last May.”
“What sort of shape is he in now?”
“He’s better.”
“What was he? Just blind drunk?”
“No, it wasn’t entirely liquor. He’d been smoking marijuana.”
“I’ve heard some of that filthy stuff was around.”
“Jock didn’t know he was smoking it. He doesn’t know where he got the cigarettes.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“I think it does, Tom. I think so because there are several things about Dean Ludington’s death that make sense just as queerly. There’s a bare chance Jock didn’t do it.”
“Listen, Colin, he said he did it. Did you get the idea he was covering for somebody?”
“No, that sort of heroic idiocy just doesn’t happen. Jock thinks he did it all right, but here’s the point, Tom: he doesn’t know why.”
“I get it. Accidental homicide while under the influence of liquor, or else a temporary-insanity plea.”
“Jock just hasn’t got that kind of a mind, and you know it.”
“I know he’s confessed. I also know a confession isn’t worth a damn without corroborative evidence. Well, there’s plenty.”
“Feel like loosening up?”
“Sure, why not? I’m not trying to railroad the boy, but I’ve got to use common sense. You examined the body, so you know the wound must have been a contact one and that the body was naked except for swimming trunks.”
“I took some of the bits of cloth from the entrance wound.”
“So has the coroner, and so the gun was fired through cloth, through a coat pocket.”
“There’s no hole in any pocket of the tuxedo jacket Jock was wearing when I got here.”
“I know that. But there’s a bullet hole and a flame burn in the pocket of a tweed jacket of Jock’s that was hanging in his clothes closet.”
“You’re arguing that he changed his coat just to shoot Dean Ludington?”
“Can you name me accurately any seven things a drunk will do when he’s out on his feet?”
“No, I can’t.”
“All right. My bet is that microphotographs of the cloth bits that were taken from the wound will check with the cloth of the tweed jacket.”
“And what was the motive?”
“Listen, Colin, people have got tight and shot other people dead for nothing more than a word or two so frequently that it’s a headache. The police blotters of any town of any size crawl with it. Dean Ludington takes a dip in his swimming pool. We know that because his trunks are wet. He comes over here and starts jawing with Jock in the living room, and Jock shoots him. What they jawed about I’ll find out when I put the screws on Jock.”
“Let me take a crack at him first, will you? I yanked him through grippe last winter and I’ve glued him together every time he’s fallen of his horse. He does it so frequently I suspect Windsor blood. He’ll talk to me. Really talk.”
“All right, go ahead.” Heffernan stared at Starr sharply. “What’s at the bottom of this? What’s bothering you?”
“Take a good look at the blood pattern on that carpet,” Starr said, “then tell me if it means what I think it does.”
* * * *
Jock Fraley was lying on his bed. A white tuxedo jacket lay across the back of a chair. His shoes were oft. His plain, wholesome young face, topped by a shock of chestnut hair, looked better but not much. Mrs. Fraley had seen to his jacket and shoes. She sat beside the bed, in wool and marabou, a quiet frail woman with quiet hands and tortured deep gray eyes.
“Shall I leave, Doctor?”
“Would you mind, Mrs. Fraley?”
“Of course not.”
“Feel any better, Jock?”
“Guess so, Colin.”
“Figured any reason yet for shooting Dean?”
“I just remember the gun being in my hand when I came to. The sound of the shot must have snapped me out of it. I don’t know how long I’d been out on my feet. Ever get that way, Colin?”
“Once, on absinthe, and only once.”
“Fierce, isn’t it?”
“Terrible. Your best friends all tell you the next day just what you did and just what you said. I know I blocked traffic for a while by sitting in front of a street car and making noises like a cow.”
“Sure enough?”
“Yes. My medical-school days. Fortunately they preceded the current trend toward euthanasia or I wouldn’t be here now, trying to get you out of this mess.”
“Thanks, Colin, but I don’t want any temporary-insanity-plea stuff. I want to take what’s coming to me. Why wouldn’t I? He was Elsa’s brother, wasn’t he?” The spoken sound of her name itself was enough to start him crying. “I want to die, Colin.”
“All right. You will in time. What good will it do Elsa?”
“We got engaged last week.”
This was news. Elsa Ludington was nineteen and one of the prettiest kids in town, as well as being in line to inherit one of the largest fortunes in the state. “You kept it pretty quiet,” Starr said.
&
nbsp; “Elsa wanted it that way until her folks got back. Nobody knows, only Phil.”
“Which Phil?”
“Phil Taylor.” Jock turned his face to the wall. “Phil was engaged to her secretly and she broke it off when she told him about me, about how she suddenly knew it had always been me only I’d been such a damn clam about it. Phil took it like a brick. How quick does it take, Colin? I mean counting the trial and everything?”
“I guess they can make it pretty fast if you ask them to. Listen, you young damn fool, you pulled a blank and some pretty queer things happened during it, until the sound of a sudden shot snapped you out of it. I’m going to fill that blank in. Blow your nose and get down to business.”
“Huh!”
“Was it your revolver?”
“Yes. It’s an old one that belonged to Dad.”
“Where is it kept?”
“In the desk in the library.”
“Who knows that?”
“Anybody in the crowd, I guess. We’ve used it plenty for target practice.”
“Give me the exact setup for last evening.”
“From when?”
“From when you started to get a bag on.”
“That was at Spinelli’s.”
Spinelli’s was the roadhouse currently in vogue among the men and women of the town’s youngest set, the set’s average age centering around a mature eighteen. It boasted the stickiest band in Ohio and should, Starr thought, be gently removed from the local scene with a few judicious sticks of dynamite.
“Who was there?”
“Everybody, Colin.”
“That’s fine. Suppose you break them down into small pieces?”
“But what’s the use? Nothing but a miracle could change my having done it.”
“All right, we’ll look for a miracle. We’ll also look for the rat who set the stage. And stop wasting time. Who was there?”
Starr’s voice was strengthening, like the bracing feel of cold water when you plunge in, sweating, on a hot summer’s day, and the tension loosened a little on Jock’s face.
“Elsa was with me,” he said, “and Dean had that new bolt of lightning who’s staying with the Atchinsons along, and Frank and Polly Atchinson were with us, and Phil joined us too.”