For five years Reiland had seen his young companion almost daily; first as a freshman in the elementary psychology class—a red-haired, energetic country-boy, ill at ease among even the slight restrictions of this fresh-water university. The boy’s eager, active mind had attracted his attention in the beginning; as he watched him change into a man, Trant’s almost startling powers of analysis and comprehension had aroused the old professor’s admiration. The compact, muscular body, which endured without fatigue the great demands Trant made upon it and brought him fresh to recitations from two hours sleep after a night of work; and the tireless eagerness which drove him at a gallop through courses where others plodded, had led Reiland to appoint Trant his assistant just before his graduation. But this energy told Reiland, too, that he could not hope to hold Trant long to the narrow activities of a university; and it was with marked uneasiness that the old professor glanced sideways now while he waited for the younger man to finish what he was saying.
“Dr. Reiland,” Trant went on more soberly, “you have taught me the use of the cardiograph, by which the effect upon the heart of every act and passion can be read as a physician reads the pulse chart of his patient, the pneumograph, which traces the minutest meaning of the breathing; the galvanometer, that wonderful instrument which, though a man hold every feature and muscle passionless as death, will betray him through the sweat glands in the palms of his hands. You have taught me—as a scientific experiment—how a man not seen to stammer or hesitate, in perfect control of his speech and faculties, must surely show through his thought associations, which he cannot know he is betraying, the marks that any important act and every crime must make indelibly upon his mind—”
“Associations?” Dr. Reiland interrupted him less patiently. “That is merely the method of the German doctors—Freud’s method—used by Jung in Zurich to diagnose the causes of adolescent insanity.”
“Precisely.” Trant’s eyes flashed, as he faced the old professor. “Merely the method of the German doctors! The method of Freud and Jung! Do you think that I, with that method, would not have known eighteen months ago that Lawton was innocent? Do you suppose that I could not pick out among those sixteen men the Bronson murderer? If ever such a problem comes to me I shall not take eighteen months to solve it. I will not take a week.”
In spite of himself Dr. Reiland’s lips curled at this arrogant assertion. “It may be so,” he said. “I have seen, Trant, how the work of the German, Swiss and American investigators, and the delicate experiments in the psychological laboratory which make visible and record the secrets of men’s minds, have fired your imagination. It may be that the murderer would be as little, or even less, able to conceal his guilt than the sophomores we test are to hide their knowledge of the sentences we have had previously read to them. But I myself am too old a man to try such new things; and you will not meet here any such problems,” he motioned to the quiet campus with its skeleton trees and white-frosted grass plots. “But why,” he demanded suddenly in a startled tone, “is a delicate girl like Margaret Lawrie running across the campus at seven o’clock on this chilly morning without either hat or jacket?”
The girl who was speeding toward them along an intersecting walk, had plainly caught up as she left her home the first thing handy—a shawl—which she clutched about her shoulders. On her forehead, very white under the mass of her dark hair, in her wide gray eyes and in the tense lines of her straight mouth and rounded chin, Trant read at once the nervous anxiety of a highly-strung woman.
“Professor Reiland,” she demanded, in a quick voice, “do you know where my father is?”
“My dear Margaret,” the old man took her hand, which trembled violently, “you must not excite yourself this way.”
“You do not know!” the girl cried excitedly. “I see it in your face. Dr. Reiland, father did not come home last night! He sent no word.”
Reiland’s face went blank. No one knew better than he how great was the break in Dr. Lawrie’s habits that this fact implied, for the man was his dearest friend. Dr. Lawrie had been treasurer of the university twenty years, and in that time only three events—his marriage, the birth of his daughter, and his wife’s death—had been allowed to interfere with the stern and rigorous routine into which he had welded his lonely life. So Reiland paled, and drew the trembling girl toward him.
“When did you see him last, Miss Lawrie?” Trant asked gently.
“Dr. Reiland, last night he went to his university office to work,” she replied, as though the older man had spoken. “Sunday night. It was very unusual. All day he had acted so strangely. He looked so tired, and he has not come back. I am on my way there now to see—if—I can find him.”
“We will go with you,” Trant said quickly, as the girl helplessly broke off. “Harrison, if he is there so early, can tell us what has called your father away. There is not one chance in a thousand, Miss Lawrie, that anything has happened to him.”
“Trant is right, my dear.” Reiland had recovered himself, and looked up at University Hall in front of them with its fifty windows on the east glimmering like great eyes in the early morning sun. Only, on three of these eyes the lids were closed—the shutters of the treasurer’s office, all saw plainly, were fastened. Trant could not remember that ever before he had seen shutters closed on University Hall. They had stood open until, on many, the hinges had rusted solid. He glanced at Dr. Reiland, who shuddered, but straightened again, stiffly.
“There must be a gas leak,” Trant commented, sniffing, as they entered the empty building. But the white-faced man and girl beside him paid no heed, as they sped down the corridor.
At the door of Dr. Lawrie’s office—the third of the doors with high, ground-glass transoms which opened on both sides into the corridor—the smell of gas grew stronger. Trant stooped to the keyhole and found it plugged with paper. He caught the transom bar, set his foot upon the knob and, drawing himself up, pushed against the transom. It resisted; but he pounded it in, and, as its glass panes fell tinkling, the fumes of illuminating gas burst out and choked him.
“A foot,” he called down to his trembling companions, as he peered into the darkened room. “Some one on the lounge!”
Dropping down, he hurried to a recitation room across the corridor and dragged out a heavy table. Together they drove a corner of this against the lock; it broke, and as the door whirled back on its hinges the fumes of gas poured forth, stifling them and driving them back. Trant rushed in, threw up the three windows, one after the other, and beat open the shutters. As the gray autumn light flooded the room, a shriek from the girl and a choking exclamation from Reiland greeted the figure stretched motionless upon the couch. Trant leaped upon the flat-topped desk under the gas fixtures in the center of the room and turned off the four jets from which the gas was pouring. Darting across the hall, he opened the windows of the room opposite.
As the strong morning breeze eddied through the building, clearing the gas before it, while Reiland with tears streaming from his eyes knelt by the body of his lifelong friend, it lifted from a metal tray upon the desk scores of fragments of charred paper which scattered over the room, over the floor and furniture, over even the couch where the still figure lay, with its white face drawn and contorted.
Reiland arose and touched his old friend’s hand, his voice breaking. “He has been dead for hours. Oh, Lawrie!”
He caught to him the trembling, horrified girl, and she burst into sobs against his shoulder. Then, while the two men stood beside the dead body of him in whose charge had been all finances of this great institution, their eyes met, and in those of Trant was a silent question. Reddening and paling by turns, Reiland answered it, “No, Trant, nothing lies behind this death. Whether it was of purpose or by accident, no secret, no disgrace, drove him to it. That I know.”
The young man’s oddly mismated eyes glowed into his, questioningly. “We must get President Joslyn,” Reiland said. “And Marga
ret,” he lifted the girl’s head from his shoulder, while she shuddered and clung to him, “you must go home. Do you feel able to go home alone, dearie? Everything that is necessary here shall be done.”
She gathered herself together, choked and nodded. Reiland led her to the door, and she hurried away, sobbing.
While Trant was at the telephone Dr. Reiland swept the fragments of glass across the sill, and closed the door and windows.
Already feet were sounding in the corridors; and the rooms about were fast filling before Trant made out the president’s thin figure bending against the wind as he hurried across the campus.
Dr. Joslyn’s swift glance as Trant opened the door to him—a glance which, in spite of the student pallor of his high-boned face, marked the man of action—considered and comprehended all.
“So it has come to this,” he said, sadly. “But—who laid Lawrie there?” he asked sharply after an instant.”
He laid himself there,” Reiland softly replied. “It was there we found him.”
Trant put his finger on a scratch on the wall paper made by the sharp corner of the davenport lounge; the corner was still white with plaster. Plainly, the lounge had been violently pushed out of its position, scratching the paper.
Dr. Joslyn’s eyes passed on about the room, passed by Reiland’s appeal, met Trant’s direct look and followed it to the smaller desk beside the dead treasurer’s. He opened the door to his own office.
“When Mr. Harrison comes,” he commanded, speaking of Dr. Lawrie’s secretary and assistant, “tell him I wish to see him. The treasurer’s office will not be opened this morning.”
“Harrison is late,” he commented, as he returned to the others. “He usually is here by seven-thirty. We must notify Branower also.” He picked up the telephone and called Branower, the president of the board of trustees, asking him merely to come to the treasurer’s office at once.
“Now give me the particulars,” the president said, turning to Trant.
“They are all before you,” Trant replied briefly. “The room was filled with gas. These four outlets of the fixture were turned full on. And besides,” he touched now with his fingers four tips with composition ends to regulate the flow, which lay upon the table, “these tips had been removed, probably with these pincers that lie beside them. Where the nippers came from I do not know.”
“They belong here,” Joslyn answered, absently. “Lawrie had the tinkering habit.” He opened a lower desk drawer, filled with tools and nails and screws, and dropped the nippers into it.
“The door was locked inside?” inquired the president.
“Yes, it is a spring lock,” Trant answered.
“And he had been burning papers.” The president pointed quietly to the metal tray.
Dr. Reiland winced.
“Some one had been burning papers,” Trant softly interpolated.
“Some one?” The president looked up sharply.
“These ashes were all in the tray, I think,” Trant contented himself with answering. “They scattered when I opened the windows.”
Joslyn lifted a stiletto letter-opener from the desk and tried to separate, so as to read, the carbonized ashes left in the tray. They fell into a thousand pieces; and as he gave up the hopeless attempt to decipher the writing on them, suddenly the young assistant bent before the couch, slipped his hand under the body, and drew out a crumpled paper. It was a recently canceled note for twenty thousand dollars drawn on the University regularly and signed by Dr. Lawrie, as treasurer. But as the young psychologist started to study it more closely, President Joslyn’s hand closed over it and took it from Trant’s grasp. The president himself merely glanced at it; then, with whitening face, folded it carefully and put it in his pocket.
“What is the matter, Joslyn?” Dr. Reiland started up.
“A note,” the president answered shortly. He took a turn or two nervously up and down the room, paused and stared down at the face of the man upon the couch; then turned almost pityingly to the old professor.
“Reiland,” he said compassionately, “I must tell you that this shocking affair is not the surprise to me that it seems to have been to you. I have known for two weeks, and Branower has known for nearly as long—for I took him into my confidence—that there were irregularities in the treasurer’s office. I questioned Lawrie about it when I first stumbled upon the evidence. To my surprise, Lawrie—one of my oldest personal friends and certainly the man of all men in whose perfect honesty I trusted most implicitly—refused to reply to my questions. He would neither admit nor deny the truth of my accusations; and he begged me almost tearfully to say nothing about the matter until the meeting of the trustees to-morrow night. I understood from him that at, or before, the trustees’ meeting he would have an explanation to make to me; I did not dream, Reiland, that he would make instead this”—he motioned to the figure on the couch, “this confession! This note,” he nervously unfolded the paper again, “is drawn for twenty thousand dollars. I recall the circumstances of it clearly, Reiland; and I remember that it was authorized by the trustees for two thousand dollars, not twenty.”
“But it has been canceled. See, he paid it! And these,” the old professor pointed in protest to the ashes in the tray, “if these, too, were notes—raised, as you clearly accuse—he must have paid them. They were returned.”
“Paid? Yes!” Dr. Joslyn’s voice rang accusingly. “Paid from the university funds! The examination which I made personally of his books, unknown to Lawrie—for I could not confess at first to my old friend the suspicions I held against him—showed that he had methodically entered the notes at the amounts we authorized, and later entered them again at their face amounts as he paid them. The total discrepancy exceeds one hundred thousand dollars!”
“Hush!” Reiland was upon him. “Hush.”
The morning was advancing. The halls resounded with the tread of students passing to recitation rooms. Trant’s eyes had registered all the room, and now measured Joslyn and Dr. Reiland. They had ceased to be trusted men and friends of his as, with the quick analysis that the old professor had so admired in his young assistant, he incorporated them in his problem.
“Who filled this out?” Trant had taken the paper from the hand of the president and asked this question suddenly.
“Harrison. It was the custom. The signature is Lawrie’s, and the note is regular. Oh, there can be no doubt, Reiland!”
“No, no!” the old man objected. “James Lawrie was not a thief!”
“How else can it be? The tips taken from the fixture, the keyhole plugged with paper, the shutters—never closed before for ten years—fastened within, the door locked! Burned notes, the single one left signed in his own hand! And all this on the very day before his books must have been presented to the trustees! You must face it, Reiland—you, who have been closer to Lawrie than any other man—face it as I do! Lawrie is a suicide—a hundred thousand dollars short in his accounts!”
“I have been close to him,” the old man answered bravely. “You and I, Joslyn, were almost his only friends. Lawrie’s life has been open as the day; and we at least should know that there can have been no disgraceful reason for his death.
“Luther,” the old professor turned, stretching out his hands pleadingly to his young assistant, as he saw that the face of the president did not soften, “Do you, too, believe this? It is not so! Oh, my boy, just before this terrible thing, you were telling me of the new training which could be used to clear the innocent and prove the guilty. I thought it braggadocio. I scoffed at your ideas. But if your words were truth, now prove them. Take this shame from this innocent man.”
The young man sprang to his friend as he tottered. “Dr. Reiland, I shall clear him!” he promised wildly. “I shall prove, I swear, not only that Dr. Lawrie was not a thief, but—he was not even a suicide!”
“What madness is this, Trant,�
�� the president demanded impatiently, “when the facts are so plain before us?”
“So plain, Dr. Joslyn? Yes,” the young man rejoined, “very plain indeed—the fact that before the papers were burned, before the gas was turned on or the tips taken from the fixture, before that door was slammed and the spring lock fastened it from the outside—Dr. Lawrie was dead and was laid upon that lounge!”
“What? What—what, Trant?” Reiland and the president exclaimed together. But the young man addressed himself only to the president.
“You yourself, sir, before we told you how we found him, saw that Dr. Lawrie had not himself lain down, but had been laid upon the lounge. He is not light; some one almost dropped him there, since the edge of the lounge cut the plaster on the wall. The single note not burned lay under his body, here it could scarcely have escaped if the notes were burned first; where it would most surely have been overlooked if the body already lay there. Gas would not be pouring out during the burning, so the tips were probably taken off later. It must have struck you how theatric all this is, that some one has thought of its effect, that some one has arranged this room, and, leaving Lawrie dead, has gone away, closing the spring lock—”
“Luther!” Dr. Reiland had risen, his hands stretched out before him. “You are charging murder!”
“Wait!” Dr. Joslyn was standing by the window, and his eyes had caught the swift approach of a limousine automobile which, with its plate glass shimmering in the sun, was taking the broad sweep into the driveway. As it slowed before the entrance, the president swung back to those in the room.
“We two,” he said, “were Lawrie’s nearest friends—he had but one other. Branower is coming now. Go down and prepare him, Trant. His wife is with him. She must not come up.”
Trant hurried down without comment. Through the window of the car he could see the profile of a woman, and beyond it the broad, powerful face of a man, with sandy beard parted and brushed after a foreign fashion. Branower had succeeded his father as president of the board of trustees of the university. At least half a dozen of the surrounding buildings had been erected by the elder Branower, and practically his entire fortune had been bequeathed to the university.
The Mystery & Suspense Novella Page 18