The Third Mystery

by James Holding

  DROPS OF DEATH, by George Allan England

  Originally published in Munsey’s Magazine, January 1922.

  I

  At his desk in the little private room of the offices where he carried on his business as a commission merchant in grains and cereals, Weldon Forrester was reading a letter which greatly astonished him. It ran thus:

  Dear Sir:

  You are named in the will of Dr, Townsend Veazey, recently deceased, as one of the beneficiaries. Dr. Veazey has willed you two small oriental rugs, a number of books, pamphlets, and reports, and some apparatus. Kindly indicate where you would like the bequest sent, and oblige,

  Very truly yours,

  Cosslet & Melville.

  The light of a sunshiny winter’s day, coming through the window near his desk, showed Forrester to be an alert-looking man of thirty, a trifle lean, with incisive eyes, and with dark hair that had already retreated a little from a well-shaped forehead.

  “Hm!” grunted Forrester. “Rugs, books, apparatus—funny!”

  Very carefully he looked over the letter, but there was no P. S. Its message was final. Forrester’s mouth—firm-lipped, the mouth of a doer of deeds—curved in a sardonic smile.

  “Devilish funny!” he repeated.

  From the outer offices drifted the chatter of typewriters under the fingers of busy girls. Three years ago there had been but one girl and a dingy little place on Crampton Street. Now Forrester employed a dozen girls and a staff of other workers. He had gone far in three years.

  He laid the lawyers’ letter on his desk, contemplatively lighted a cigar, and grew reflective.

  “The doctor always said he was going to leave me a bunch of coin,” thought he. “Not that I need it now; but every little bit makes just a little bit more.”

  Emphatically Weldon Forrester did not need legacies. He had all the legacy he needed in his “go-get-it” spirit.

  Proof of that lay in what he had accomplished since he and old Mogul Edgerton, of the Fiduciary Assurance and Annuity Company, had disagreed, and Edgerton had fired him. Now Forrester had his hand on a big percentage of all the Argentine wheat entering the States, >and was reaching for more. He could write his check for six figures, which might soon be seven. America is like that to you, sometimes, if you strike her just right.

  “Wonder whatever happened to the doctor to change his mind about remembering me with something nice!” pondered Forrester. “He always liked me, ever since I sold him an annuity against his will—always liked to have me drop in for a chat on scientific stuff. The old boy could make chemistry and poisons more interesting than a magazine story. Good fellow, all right! Well, he’s gone—and there’s been another slip between the cup and the lip, somehow.”

  Forrester dismissed the letter from his mind and plunged back into work. Outside, the morning traffic and bustle of the city’s vast market blurred the air with confusion. Trucks grumbled over slushy cobbles, motor-horns moaned, buyers and sellers of produce chaffered busily. Forrester forgot all about the letter, and all about Dr. Townsend Veazey.

  At lunch, however, in the grill-room of the Lockwood Inn, he read the letter over again.

  “Wonder if the doctor had any money when that heart-attack took him?” thought Forrester. “Wonder if he blew it on that other big annuity he was thinking about, after all?”

  Lunch over, he threaded narrow, crowded ways to the Horsman Building and went up to the offices of the Fiduciary on the eleventh floor. With the assurance of a one-time employee, joined to that of a successful man who feels himself at home everywhere, he walked down the corridor and turned into an office that bore on its ground-glass door the legend:

  ELI WORMWOOD, ACTUARY

  Eli, all alone in his office, looked over his desktop and his gold-rimmed glasses simultaneously as he smiled a superannuated welcome.

  “Hello, Forrester! Got some business for us?” he asked thinly.

  “Never no more!” Forrester held up a solemn hand, and sat himself down in the best chair. “I’m off that stuff now. Did a little of it, a while after I quit here, but never again! Why should I go around with a tin bill on, picking up the chicken-feed of annuity commissions, when I’ve got my trough full of grain? Answer—I shouldn’t, and won’t. Best little thing old Mogul ever did for me was when he gave me the air!”

  “So it seems,” agreed Wormwood, rubbing a hawk’s-bill nose. “You drive a rather better car than he does now, I hear.”

  “Hope so. By the way, Wormwood, I dropped in to offer you a position—not a job, but a position. I need a man ’way up in figures to take charge of a new cost-system I’m installing. I’ll better your present salary, whatever it is. You were mighty good to me when I was a cub in the insurance game, and I’m not forgetting it. Well, what say?”

  The wizen actuary shook his head.

  “Mighty fine of you, Forrester, and I’m no end obliged, but I can’t change now. At fifty-nine a man’s riveted to routine. Insurance is the breath of life to me. Guess I’m aboard this ship till she sinks or I die. Hope she lasts as long as I do!”

  Forrester pricked up his ears at that.

  “Of course she’ll last,” said he, with a quick glance. “I’ve heard the Fiduciary never put across as many annuities in a year as she has this past one.”

  “Yes,” agreed Eli; “but there’s not much profit in annuities, the way people hang on.”

  “You mean, as the old saying is, that annuitants never die?”

  “Seems so. Seems as if, when folks—especially old ones—sink their cash with us, and know we’ve got to pay ’em a good round income all the rest of their lives, they just quit worrying and get fat and healthy. Only way I can account for Methuselah and the Bible patriarchs is that they all must have had annuities!”

  “They don’t all live forever,” commented Forrester. “There’s Dr. Veazey that’s just died—heart failure, I think it was. He had one of your annuities, and he was only about seventy-six.”

  “And four months, nine days,” supplemented Wormwood. “And what’s more, he took out another big one—paid eighty-five thousand for it—only about a fortnight before he died; but it’s the exception that proves the rule, you know.”

  “Lucky strike for the Fiduciary,” smiled Forrester.

  “We need it. We’ve been hard hit since the war.”

  “No! Is that so?”

  “Yes, sir,” affirmed the actuary. “Our stock’s hardly paying three and a half, and it used to run six and seven. Mogul’s let a lot of clerks and supernumeraries out, and he’s tightening up all round. Fact is, the general business depression has got us, too. Just between you and me, Forrester, my own position’s none too secure.”

  “Well,” smiled Forrester, standing up, “if you need another, you’ve got my address. Got to be on my way now. My cereal story’s never done. Busy! It never rains but it pours. So long!”

  All the way back to South Commercial Street, Forrester was pondering:

  “So Veazey took another big annuity on his own hook, did he? That’s why all the legacy I got was two rugs, some books, and apparatus, eh? I was a chump to tell him about annuities and to sell him one! I’m out of luck—but,” he added, “Veazey was worse out of luck. To sink eighty-five thousand dollars in a money-back-if-you-live proposition, and then in two weeks have your heart give out—some tough game!”

  II

  Three days later, in the restaurant of Aspinwall Chambers—a bachelor-apartment establishment where he dwelt in no inconsiderable style—Forrester paused over his breakfast as he came upon an item in his morning Chronicle. With knit brows he read the item, then murmured:

  “Well, I’ll be darned if here isn’t another one!”

  The paragraph recorded the death, apparently from heart failure, of an old maiden lady, Miss Cynthia Grush. Miss Grush had for many years lived at 274 Muir Terraces, in company with rather a formidable houseful of cats. The news of this death would have been absolutely devoid of interest to Forrester
if he had not happened to remember that only a few weeks before he left the Fiduciary Miss Grush had taken out an annuity under rather odd circumstances.

  With his penknife, Forrester neatly cut out the item. He put it carefully into his pocketbook.

  “Queer old bird she was,” said he. “Really seemed to believe that wheeze about annuitants never dying. Seemed to think that having an annuity would insure her almost indefinite life. Well, she’s gone now, all right, and the Fiduciary’s in luck again to the tune of about fifty-five thousand dollars I”

  Then, his eye catching the shipping news, where he saw recorded the proximate arrival of the grain-steamer Mariposa, from Buenos Aires, he forgot all about Cynthia Grush and the Fiduciary.

  That evening he found a parcel-post package awaiting him at the door of his apartment. He opened it in his little den.

  “Two rugs, extremely small,” he took stock. “One bunch of technical books, pamphlets, and reports. A microscope and some slides. Thanks, doctor! Most of this stuff is about as useful to a commission merchant as two tails to a hen. Thus end my great expectations; but thanks, just the same!”

  He spread the rugs on his floor, put the books and reports on his shelves, and tucked the microscope into a closet.

  “Poor old doc!” said he. “Your investment of eighty-five thousand dollars didn’t do you much good, did it?”

  For a while he remained pondering, his face clouded by an odd expression.

  III

  A few days after the beginning of the new year, Forrester’s Evening Standard informed him that one Simeon Langstroth, of the fashionable Randol Park section, had died of heart failure.

  “Well now!” said Forrester. “The people I sold annuities to, in the old days, seem to be out of luck. I remember I landed this old boy for thirty thousand. Of course, that was rather a small one for the Fiduciary, which specializes on high-class trade and big policies—quality, not quantity of clientele. Wonder if Langstroth’s been taking out any more lately!”

  At noon Forrester dropped in at the City Hall and looked up some data in the files of the registrar of vital statistics. When he came out of the building, his lips were rather tight. All afternoon Miss Brewster, his private secretary, noticed that he seemed abstracted.

  That evening, at the Commerce Club, a long-distance call reached him from Crompton & Marvin, his New York agents. Urgent business impended. Forrester phoned Miss Brewster to “carry on” in his absence, and took the midnight train to New York. There his business lengthened out to three days, arranging for some shipments of hard wheat from the new Trenque Lauquen fields in the Pampa district. Forrester clean forgot all about annuities, heart failure, and the Fiduciary.

  Then, all at once, the finger of fate reached out and tapped him on the shoulder again.

  That tap was disguised as a small item at the bottom of page five of the Courier, which he was reading at lunch. The item said:

  Portsmouth. N. H., Jan. 7—Willard Rockwood, of Newington, died at his home yesterday, aged seventy-four. Mr. Rockwood formerly conducted the Springvale Dairy Farm, but retired from business about eight years ago. Death was caused by heart failure. The deceased was a member of the Grange, Odd Fellows, and Masons, and is survived by a brother, Gallatin K. Rockwood, of this city.

  “Well, I will be damned!” exclaimed Forrester. “Another one!”

  A few days later he again visited the registrar’s office, where he carefully ran over the deaths for the preceding week. This process he repeated a week later, and again after still another week. At the back of his brain—when business could be thrust aside—a tiny spark was glowing. Day by day the spark brightened to a flame almost of conviction.

  It was toward the beginning of February that the grain merchant once more dropped in at the offices of the Fiduciary and paid another visit to old Eli Wormwood.

  “Yes, I’ve got some business for you this time,” he answered the actuary’s question.

  “Good!” approved Eli. “We need it, right enough. The way they’ve been hammering our stock and prying into our securities, on top of the general slump in business, makes every dollar count now.” The old man blinked over his glasses. “So you’ve brought us in something, eh? Well, even though you’ve piled up more money than most of us even dream about, I suppose you can still use that little four-percent agent’s commission?”

  Forrester waved a disclaiming hand.

  “None in this for me, this time,” he answered.

  “How’s that?”

  “The commission’s going to you.”

  “To me?” asked Wormwood, visibly brightening.

  “If you want it. I’ll place the business through you. I’m taking out an annuity for myself.”

  “Good idea!” the actuary approved. “But of course, at your age, the rate’s pretty low. Twenty-nine, are you?”

  “Thirty, the 5th of last June.”

  “Hm! Thirty years, seven months, twenty-five days. Your interest-rate will only be 4.608 percent, giving you an annual income of forty-six dollars and eight cents for each thousand dollars invested.”

  “I know all about that. It seems small, but an annuity is about the safest place where I can invest a little cash. What I’m going to sink with you will clear me forty-six hundred and eight dollars a year, and no worry about it.”

  “What?” ejaculated the old man, blinking with excitement. “You don’t mean you’re going to put in a hundred thousand dollars?”

  Forrester nodded.

  “That’s a tidy four thousand for you in commission,” he added. “You don’t mind, do you?”

  Old Wormwood turned a little paler even than usual, and his lips trembled visibly as he answered:

  “I—I oughtn’t to—I can’t—”

  “Nonsense! You can, and will.”

  “But you can act as your own agent, Forrester, and save the four thousand dollars. You still have your license.”

  “Yes, and I still have a very lively sense of gratitude for many a good tip you slid me when I was in this game. Come on now, Wormwood, don’t let any personal considerations do you out of four thousand good simoleons! Get me an application-blank and take my check. No physical examination in writing an annuity. The company don’t care how punk the applicant’s health is. Punker the better, for the company, eh?”

  “Yes, that’s so,” admitted the actuary, getting up. “Since all money paid for annuities goes to the company as its absolute property, of course it’s to the company’s interest to have the annuitant die as soon as possible. That sounds harsh, but it’s the strict business principle that governs the annuity game. I—I’ll write this business for you, Forrester. We’ll have it over in no time. Just a minute, please.”

  Shaking and a trifle dazed, the old man shuffled out of the office and went for an application-blank. He was almost stunned at having four thousand dollars drop into his hand out of a clear sky.

  Forrester lighted a long, thin cigar, and peered through smoke at the ceiling.

  “Sometimes it costs a penny to get at the inside facts,” he mused; “but it’s worth the penny. After all, as an investment, an annuity can’t be beat. Now we shall see what we shall see!”

  IV

  Immediately after the issuing to him of the annuity which was to yield him an income of four thousand six hundred and eight dollars, payable quarterly, Forrester installed in his apartment on the third floor of Aspinwall Chambers a rather ingenious set of electric wiring. This wiring he devised himself. It was all most carefully concealed.

  Forrester so arranged it that when the current was on, no door or window in the apartment could be moved without causing the system to function. He took particular pains with the connections that he made on the two windows communicating with the fire-escape.

  When the alarm was sprung, it operated a slight, tingling shock between poles that could be strapped to his ankle as he lay in bed. The current could be broken by a switch under his pillow, where also he planted a businessli
ke revolver, fully loaded with .44-caliber cartridges.

  In addition to all this, Forrester rigged a push-button at his bedside, which would turn on all lights in the apartment. Moreover, he put a first-rate alarm-clock into the alarm circuit, and so wired it that when the clock-hands reached any desired point, instead of the alarm sounding, the shock would be thrown on. Thus he was enabled to test the shock. A full week of trials convinced him that it would inevitably wake him from even the soundest sleep.

  He also tried the doors and windows many times. Any disturbance of them invariably caused the shock to operate. Furthermore, Forrester trained himself to wake up quietly in response to the shock—not to start or turn over or utter a sound.

  When he had everything working to his complete satisfaction, he disconnected the alarm-clock from the circuit; but he never went to bed, even a single night, without strapping the poles of his little apparatus to his right ankle and making certain that it would work. He took the greatest care that none of the wiring should be visible.

  Thus he waited, and winter lagged toward spring. Business continued much as usual. So did Forrester’s very moderate social affairs.

  Ordinarily he spent his evenings alone, smoking and reading. His tastes were omnivorous. The books and pamphlets bequeathed him by Dr. Veazey lasted him almost a fortnight. He followed them with the “Outline of History,” by Wells.

  Now and then he visited the Bureau of Vital Statistics at the City Hall; but whatever it was that he discovered there, or did not discover, he kept very much his own property.

  And so the weeks passed, and still nothing happened.

  “It would be a pity, wouldn’t it,” thought Forrester, “if the spider should have got his parlor all ready, and there shouldn’t be any fly to walk into it?”

  There was, however, a fly, and very much of a fly, at that, as we shall now immediately see.

  V

  It was in the early morning of March 3, six weeks and four days after the issuance of the annuity, that Forrester was roused from a dreamless sleep, being awakened at about a quarter past two o’clock by the faint, insistent tingle of the current on his ankle.