The Third Mystery

by James Holding

  He was an old man, a good, kindly man, and the oddities of human behavior had long since ceased to astonish him. Looking at Jane, however, he did experience a vague sense of shock. The child was bending over her father’s body in the coffin and doing something with her hands; just what, he could not immediately see.

  “What are you doing, child?” he asked with an edge of sharpness to his practiced voice.

  “To remember Papa by, Father. Is it a desecration?”

  Monsignor Lavigny moved beside her and looked down upon Maxon’s waxen face, down at ashen hands where a single camellia flower (a bloom that Maxon had favored), with a petal or two fallen loose, lay caught beneath folded fingers. He looked at Jane, who with exact economy was replacing a pair of nail scissors in a pocket of her lavender frock and then enclosing her souvenir-of-sentiment between the leaves of a gold heart locket.

  “No, little Jane. It is not a desecration.”

  “Will you bless it, please?”

  Again Monsignor Lavigny felt momentarily shaken, but in the face of such pure innocence, such faith—

  “Yes.” And after he had done so he murmured, “Our Mother full of grace, be with this little child.”

  When the cremation rites were over, Maxon’s ashes were carried out to where the Gulf Stream ever sweeps onward in its warmth and, from the fantail of the Maxon Line flagship Max-Jane, Aurelia scattered her husband’s ashes down on the frothy wake.

  As the floral wreaths followed (largely composed of Maxon’s favorite camellias) Aurelia mused again through her mental library of toxicology…arsenic remains in the body unbelievably long, and its presence may be determined several years after burial. It has even been possible to show the presence of arsenic in the ashes of cremated bodies.

  But not, Aurelia thought triumphantly, when the ashes of a cremated husband are vanished irretrievably under the Gulf Stream’s sweep. How good life was! Now. She drew Jane’s small, unlimber body within her arms and kissed the child’s cold cheek. There would be time enough for arranging about Jane after a decorous interval—after, say, a year had elapsed.

  The business of settling Maxon’s estate moved on. Its bulk was left in trust to Jane, with Aurelia as guardian until Jane should come of age, or if Jane should die before that date and be unwed the entire legacy would revert to Aurelia.

  It was the insurance policy that brought the father of Jane’s best friend Lily Blaine into the case. Will Blaine was the local investigator for Southeastern Life and, as Maxon’s policy was for a hundred thousand dollars (Aurelia being the beneficiary), a routine investigation was required.

  “It’s only a formality,” Lily explained to Jane. “It’s always done with large sums. Papa is doing it all the time.”

  Blaine’s first suspicion—no, suspicion was too strong a word; doubt would be better—was aroused during what at first he considered would be a stereotyped questioning of Dr. Campanelli. With an almost garrulous effect of self-justification the clinical course of Maxon’s illness was given by the doctor to Blaine in detail, from the initial diagnosis of jaundice to the final shift to gastric enteritis. It was a clinical course, Blaine realized, that could as easily have been true in a slow poisoning by arsenic.

  Blaine naturally was no fool. He was, perhaps, what might be called a brilliantly methodical investigator, and he was highly thought of by Southeastern Life. He felt intuitively that he recognized Aurelia as a type. Actually there was little known about her among the Yacht Club crowd—about her past, that is, which she rarely mentioned and then only in the vaguest and most general terms.

  This was all right, because it was the habit of Halcyon first to be incurious and then to take a person’s statements at their face value. But it was not all right now, in his specialized job, for Blaine. If there was any monkey business about motive, both the insurance and the Maxon wealth were obvious enough.

  The classic Robinson poisoning case in Massachusetts began to pester Blaine’s thoughts. Mrs. Robinson’s technique had seemed foolproof and for a while it was, in the sense that she had killed one after another of her kinfolk by arsenic in order to collect their life insurance policies, in which she was named as beneficiary.

  Mrs. Robinson’s method for safely casing her victims into an insurance-collectible state had been to wait with loving patience until some trivial illness of her relative made it possible for her to call in a physician. After the doctor’s mind was fairly established upon a diagnosis, Mrs. Robinson would give the arsenic, beginning with small doses. In this manner the transition of the patient to a serious condition would not be too sudden, until finally she shoved the poison to its fatal limit.

  In all her six successes the attending doctor was satisfactorily deceived by the clinical course. Mrs. Robinson had even gone a step further in her cleverness. She had never called the same physician when a new venture was cooking. It seemed incredible, but reputable, experienced medical men, one after the other, did miss the true diagnosis and cause of death—leaving Mrs. Robinson happily free to eliminate her relatives one after the other until she was finally detected in the poisoning of her own son.

  “There is a possible parallel,” Blaine said to his wife Anna, with whom he usually discussed his investigations, knowing from years of contented marriage that she was the unbelievable type of woman who never gossips.

  “Suppose there is, Will? What’s the answer? Suppose you could even prove Aurelia bought arsenic or a compound—claiming it was needed as an insecticide—what then? Could you prove she gave it to Fred?”

  “No.”

  “There isn’t a trace, not even an ash of him left.”

  “But there is a lead we still have to follow,” Blaine said. “Her past.”

  During the following week Blaine was a busy man. He utilized not only his own sources and various connections but those of Southeastern Life as well. Then he went to see Aurelia, with whom both he and Anna (principally because of the best-friends relationship between Lily and Jane) were on friendly terms.

  She received him in the sun-drenched patio, and Blaine’s impression of her current mood was that of a polite member of the cat family who had not only swallowed a feathery meal but had comfortably digested it too. She reclined on a bamboo chaise longue against a backdrop of palm trees, sand, and an ocean softly restless under the morning’s marble sky. A widow in delicate mauve cotton and painted lips of cherry red.

  “You’ve come to tell me that the check has gone through, Will?”

  “No, Aurelia, I’m afraid not just yet.”

  Her smile remained Mona Lisa as she asked, “Why not?”

  “I’ve already explained the necessity for a routine investigation.”

  “But isn’t that over?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, then?”

  “A few questions. I hate to be difficult about this.”

  “Anything, Will. I know it’s your job.”

  “About your two former husbands.”

  If Blaine had expected a reaction—he had—he was disappointed. There was none. Aurelia asked nothing about how he had found out or why he had gone to the trouble. For a galling second it almost seemed that she was on the point of laughter.

  “What about them, Will?”

  “It’s the boys at the home office. I won’t play this cute, Aurelia. They’re bothered by a similarity between your former husbands’ deaths and that of Fred. A general pattern.”

  “Pattern?”

  “Both were heavily insured, with you named as beneficiary; both were cremated, and the clinical courses of their illnesses ran pretty much the same as Fred’s.”

  “Yes, an unhappy series of coincidences. You are leading up to something specific, of course?”

  “I am. They want your permission to open the urns. I’m afraid if you won’t grant it they will insist on a court order.”

  “But of course I’ll grant it. Why not?” Her smile broadened as she added, “The urns are empty.”

  Here we
go again, Blaine thought. Right down to the wire. He did not doubt that Aurelia spoke the truth, that when the urns were opened (which they would be) there would not be a solitary ash. The method of operation was lucidly plain.

  “John,” Aurelia was saying, “John Griswold, my first husband, wished his ashes to be scattered in the Canadian woods where he loved to hunt. My second husband was a mountain-climbing enthusiast. His instructions were that his ashes should be dropped into a crevice of the Weisshorn in the Alpes Valaisannes. The urns are simply for the record, as Fred’s will be.”

  And there it was. Racked up. Exploded in his face and in the collective faces of Southeastern Life. Knocked out of the box for good. Blaine said good-by. He said the check for one hundred thousand dollars would come along sometime next week. Yes, he thought, she really had it made.

  That afternoon, as the two best friends sun-bathed on the Maxon private beach, Lily Blaine said to Jane, “Papa is worried sick. There was Key lime pie for dessert at lunch, and he didn’t even touch it.”

  “Is he worried about my stepmother?”

  “No. About you.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes. I overhear most of what they say, of course.”

  “I know you do and I think it’s a disgusting habit.”

  “Maybe it is, but that’s the way I am. I didn’t catch all of it, but Papa thinks you may be in some sort of danger.”

  “From what?”

  “I don’t know. It’s mixed up with your father’s death. Something about his ashes and the Gulf Stream and his last will and testament. One thing I did hear distinctly—he said to Mama, if there were only something left of Fred. Anything. Anything at all.”

  “There is,” Jane said.

  “Where?”

  “In my gold heart locket.”

  * * * *

  The trial of Aurelia Maxon for the poisoning of her husband began in General Sessions, Part III, Judge Bell presiding, on Thursday, March 9. It lasted for five days. In the annals of the state the case was unique. The remains of the victim, the most essential part in proving the corpus delicti, or the body of evidence that indicates the crime of homicide, appeared simply not to have existed for purposes of autopsy.

  The defense was represented by Harrison Stone, one of the South’s most able and distinguished lawyers, and the state by Assistant State Attorney M. J. Culdoon. Stone at once asked for a directed verdict on the grounds that, under the circumstances of cremation and sinking of the ashes in the ocean, no conceivable proof could be advanced that Maxon had been poisoned.

  “The state,” Culdoon countered, “will introduce evidence at the proper time that arsenic in a lethal amount was present in Maxon’s body at the time of his death.”

  The motion was denied.

  Culdoon’s array of witnesses for the prosecution included, among others, the pharmacist who had sold Aurelia the arsenic compound, the Maxon cook, two maids, and the butler, whose composite testimony was that Aurelia had insisted on nursing her husband throughout his illness as well as preparing special delicacies in the way of broths, custards, and jellies for him with her own hands.

  Harrison Stone barely bothered to cross-examine beyond pointing out that everything the witnesses said, instead of having given his client the opportunity to administer poison, simply emphasized her concern, her fondness, and her devotion to her husband. He conveyed to the jury an implication that surely they would sympathize with his impatient boredom over the cruel (to his client) absurdity and uselessness of the whole proceeding.

  It was established by the medical examiner that the clinical course of Maxon’s illness had followed the classic line of a case of slow poisoning by arsenic, and it was admitted by him, under cross-examination by Stone, that it would equally well follow the classic line of a case of toxic jaundice and gastric enteritis. A tie.

  Then Culdoon played his ace of trumps. He called Jane to the stand.

  He said, after the preliminaries, “Tell me, Jane, do you recognize this gold heart-shaped locket?”

  “Of course I do, Mr. Culdoon. Papa gave it to me for my last birthday.”

  “Do you recognize the marks put upon it in your presence when you gave it to me?”

  “Yes—the initials M. J. C. and the date.”

  “If Your Honor pleases, I would like the locket marked for identification.”

  Stone rose.

  “I am at a loss to understand, Your Honor, how a child’s birthday present can have any bearing on the case.”

  Judge Bell said pleasantly, “I am sure, counselor, that the prosecuting attorney will enlighten us on the point. The locket may be identified.”

  “And,” Culdoon said, approaching the bench, “its contents.”

  “Just a minute,” Stone said sharply. “What about its contents?”

  “With your permission, Your Honor?”

  Culdoon moved a blank sheet of paper to the desk’s edge and opened the locket, dropping its contents on the paper.

  “As you see,” he said, “it contained a lock of hair. A lock of Maxon’s hair. Hair which, having undergone expert laboratory tests and analyses, proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that Maxon’s death was caused by a lethal amount of arsenic.”

  Stone evidently was shaken but he was far too experienced to be stampeded.

  “I have no objection, Your Honor, to the locket being admitted in evidence, but as for the hair, I do object. Decidedly and strongly so.”

  “On what grounds, Mr. Stone?”

  “Primarily, sir, that there exists no basis for comparison. This evidence which Mr. Culdoon proposes to introduce is admittedly a lock of hair, and although I do not concede that it might possibly be a lock of hair impregnated with arsenic, can it be proven to have been Maxon’s hair? Can it now, under the circumstances of cremation, be compared with hair from Maxon’s head and shown that it has the same characteristics? May I paraphrase a quote on the subject from the standard work by Gonzales, Vance, Helpern and Umberger?”

  “You may.”

  “Their contention is that characteristics of scalp hairs cannot be used for personal identification, that hairs from the same scalp are similar to each other, but no two are identical, and for the purpose of individual identification mere similarity is not sufficient.”

  “I am aware of the fact, counselor. Just what is your position, Mr. Culdoon?”

  “This, Your Honor. My witness will testify that she snipped the hair from her father while he lay in his coffin and then enclosed it in the locket as a souvenir of sentiment.”

  “Scarcely legal proof,” Stone said, smiling with careful kindness over at Jane. “It would still remain the uncorroborated testimony of a child.”

  “I’m inclined to agree,” Judge Bell said. “Unless you do have positive corroboration, Mr. Culdoon?”

  “If the witness may step down? Direct examination to be continued later?”

  “Granted.”

  “I will now,” Culdoon said after Jane had returned to her seat, “call Monsignor Hubert Duval Lavigny to the stand.”

  * * * *

  “Naturally,” Blaine told his wife that evening after supper, “it nailed Stone right on the button. So far as he and Aurelia were concerned, the outcome of the trial spelled curtains. Stone did, of course, try to bull it through with a lot of fancy legal skating, but it was no use. No jury on earth would ever question the word of a monsignor of the Church.”

  “Do you know what pleases me most about the verdict, Will?”

  “What?”

  “The fact that from now on—and I thank God for it—little Jane is safe.”

  THE YELLOW MOTH, by Fred M. White

  Being One of the Adventures of Drenton Denn, Special Commissioner

  CHAPTER I

  Drenton Denn stood watching the points of flame dragging along the Cuban coast. Under the cloak of the night rottenness and corruption lay hidden. The cat was still playing with the mouse, and concrete humanity had grown jaded with the spe
ctacle. The whole thing had mattered little to Europe so long as wheat was down firm at 40s. again.

  But it mattered a great deal to Drenton Denn, seeing that he was a war correspondent of mark. Copy lay yonder back beyond the sandhills, facing Port Indigo—copy palpitating with new horrors and sensations. Slowly the Spaniards were being starved into submission, chaos and worse reigned in Port Indigo, and Denn meant to sketch the crimson horrors of it on his note-book, despite the rigid regulations forbidding the landing of a single man from the American fleet there.

  For strange stories had come like fugitives across the bay to the blockading fleet. The infamous Don Macdona had made his headquarters in Port Indigo. He was holding high court there with the scum of the island. Sooner or later this hybrid tyrant and bloodsucker would fall into the hands of Uncle Sam, and be shot out of hand. Being a fatalist and a sybarite, he was plucking the flowers that time allowed to him.

  Carpe diem. This picturesque polyglot reeked in the nostrils of a continent. Of all the gaudy insects born of the refuse heap there were none more gaudy than Macdona. Who he was or whence he came nobody knew or cared. Certainly he throve from the Cuban miasma. He had established himself in the deserted palace of the Cagas at Port Indigo, and there he had gathered a choice selection of adventurers and, incidentally, adventuresses about him.

  All these things and more had Drenton Denn gathered from a native who had swum out to the Maryland battleship and there died the next morning, incontinently babbling o’ strange things. Yellow moths and Macdona! And why yellow moth? In some way a yellow moth seemed to be mixed up with the new scourge devastating Port Indigo.

  Under cover of the darkness lay some of the finest material that ever made the future of journalistic enterprise. Obviously Denn’s duty pointed thither. For authority and service regulations your born correspondent cares nothing. Denn was going to see those yellow moths, the heralds of a new and strange disease, for himself.