The Classic Mystery Novel

by Dorothy Cameron Disney

  “Morley was at once out of the reckoning; he had known the Fultons for only the past three years. To consider the negro, Perry Carpenter, would have been absurd. Withers, of course, was beyond suspicion. Everything pointed to Bristow.

  “With that decision last Wednesday afternoon, I went to Number Five and got all the finger-prints visible on the polished surfaces of the chair which was handled, overturned, in the living room the night of the murder. Fortunately, this polish was inferior enough to have been made gummy by the rain and dampness that night; and, in the stress of the few days following, had been neither dusted nor wiped off.

  “Bristow did not touch this chair the morning the murder was discovered. In fact, he cautioned everybody not to touch it.

  “Reliable witnesses say he didn’t touch it between then and the time I got the finger-prints. He declares he was never in the bungalow before he entered it in response to Miss Fulton’s cry for help.

  “I found on the chair the finger-prints of five different persons, four afterwards identified: Miss Fulton, the coroner, Miss Kelly and Lucy Thomas. The fifth I was unable to check up then.

  “I did so later, in Washington.

  “It was identical with the print of Bristow’s fingers on the glass top of a table in his hotel room there. I didn’t depend on my own judgment for that. I had with me an expert on finger-prints. And finger-prints, as you all know, never lie.

  “All this established the fact, beyond question, that Bristow had been secretly in the living room of Number Five before, or at the time of, the commission of the crime.”

  He paused, giving them time to appreciate the full import of that chain of facts.

  For the space of half a minute, the room was a study in still life. The sound of Fulton’s grating teeth was distinctly audible. Bristow made a quick move, as if to speak, but checked the impulse.

  “In Washington,” Braceway resumed, “he had the hemorrhage. It was faked—a red-ink hemorrhage. Before the arrival of the physician who was summoned, Bristow had ordered a bellboy to wrap the ‘blood-stained’ handkerchief and towel in a larger and thicker towel and to have the whole bundle burned at once.

  “This, he explained to the boy, was because of his desire that nobody be put in danger of contracting tuberculosis.

  “By bribing the porter who had been directed to do the burning, I got a look at both the handkerchief and the towel. They were soaked right enough, thoroughly soaked—in the red ink.

  “The physician was easily deceived because, when he came in, all traces of the so-called blood had been obliterated. Altogether, it was a clever trick on Bristow’s part.

  “His motive for staging it and for arranging for a long and uninterrupted sleep was clear enough. There was something he wanted to do unobserved, something so vital to him that he was willing to take an immense amount of trouble with it. Golson’s detective bureau let me have the best trailer, the smoothest ‘shadow,’ in the business—Tom Ricketts.

  “At my direction he followed Bristow from the Willard Hotel to the electric car leaving Washington for Baltimore at one o’clock. Reaching Baltimore at two-thirty, Bristow pawned the emeralds and diamonds at two pawnshops. He caught the four o’clock electric car back to Washington, and was in his room long before six, the hour at which his nurse, Miss Martin, was to wake him.

  “On the Baltimore trip he had a left leg as sound as mine and wore no brace of any kind. He did wear a moustache, and bushy eyebrows, which changed his appearance tremendously. Also, he had changed the outline of his face and the shape of his lips.

  “While he was in Baltimore, I searched the bedroom in which he was supposed to be asleep.

  “Miss Martin, in whom I had been obliged to confide, helped me. We found in the two-inch sole of the left shoe, which of course he did not take with him, a hollow place, a very serviceable receptacle. In it was the bulk of the missing Withers jewelry, the stones unset, pried from their gold and platinum settings.

  “They are, I dare say, there now.”

  The two policemen stared wide-eyed at Bristow. He was, they decided, the “slickest” man they had ever seen.

  “You see why he executed the trick? It was to establish forever, beyond the possibility of question, his innocence. Plainly, if an unknown man pawned the Withers jewelry in Baltimore while Bristow slept, exhausted by a major hemorrhage, in Washington, his case was made good, his alibi perfect.

  “You can appreciate now how he built up his fake case against Perry Carpenter, his use of the buttons, his creeping about at night, like a villain in cheap melodrama, dropping pieces of the jewelry where they would incriminate the negro most surely, and his exploitation of the ‘winning clue,’ the finger nail evidence.

  “Furthermore, he gave Lucy Thomas a frightful beating to force from her the statement against Perry. In this, he was brutal beyond belief. I saw that same afternoon the marks of his blows on her shoulders. They were sufficient proofs of his capacity for unbridled rage. The sight of them strengthened my conviction that, in a similar mood, he had murdered Mrs. Withers.”

  “The negro lied!” Bristow broke in at last, his words a little fast despite his surface equanimity. “I subjected her to no ill treatment whatever. Anyway”—he dismissed it with a wave of his hand—“it’s a minor detail.”

  Braceway, without so much as a glance at him, continued:

  “And that gave me my knowledge of her being a partial albino. She has patches of white skin across her shoulders, and Perry, in struggling with her for possession of the key to Number Five, had scratched her there badly. That, I think, disposes of the finger nail evidence against Carpenter.

  “The rest followed as a matter of course. An examination of Major Ross’ collection of circulars describing those ‘wanted’ by the police of the various cities for the past six years revealed the photograph of Splain. Bristow has changed his appearance somewhat—enough, perhaps, to deceive the casual glance—but the identification was easy.

  “I then ran over to New York and got the Splain story. I knew he was so dead sure of having eluded everybody that he would stay here in Furmville. But, to make it absolutely sure, I sent him yesterday a telegram to keep him assured that I was working with him and ready to share discoveries with him. And I confess it afforded me a little pleasure, the sending of that wire. I was playing a kind of cat-and-mouse game.”

  Bristow put up his hand, demanding attention. When Braceway ignored the gesture, he leaned back, smiling, derisive.

  “Morley’s embezzlement and its consequences gave me a happy excuse for keeping on this fellow’s trail while he was busy perfecting the machinery for Perry’s destruction. The man’s self-assurance, his conceit—”

  “I’ve had enough of this!” Bristow cut in violently, exhibiting his first deep emotion. He turned to Greenleaf:

  “Haven’t you had enough of this drool? What’s the man trying to establish anyhow? He talks in one breath about my having changed the outline of my face and the shape of my mouth, and in the next second about recognizing as me a photograph which he admits was taken at least six years ago!

  “It’s an alibi for himself, an excuse for not being able to prove that I’m the man who pawned the jewelry in Baltimore! It’s thinner than air!”

  But Greenleaf’s defection was now complete.

  “Go on,” he said to Braceway. The more he thought of the full extent to which the embezzler had gulled him for the past week, the more he raged.

  “Not for me! I don’t want any more of the drivel!” Bristow objected again, his voice raucous and still directed to Greenleaf. “What’s your idea? I admit I’m wanted in New York on a trumped-up charge of embezzlement. This detective, by a stroke of blind luck, ran into that; and, as I say, I admit it.

  “You can deal with that as you see fit; that is, if you want to deal with it after what I’ve done for law and order, and for you, i
n this murder case.

  “But you can’t be crazy enough to take any stock in this nonsense about my having been connected with the crime. Exercise your own intelligence! Great God, man! Do you mean to say you’re going to let him cram this into you?”

  He got himself more in hand.

  “Think a minute. You know me well, chief. And you, Mr. Fulton, you’re no child to be bamboozled and turned into a laughing stock by a detective who finds himself without a case—a pseudo expert on crime who tries to work the age-old trick of railroading a man guilty of a less offense!”

  “This is no place for an argument of the case,” Braceway said crisply. “Mr. Abrahamson, tell us what you know about this man.”

  “It is not much, Mr. Braceway,” the Jew replied; “not as much as I would like. I’ve seen him several times; once in my place when he was fixed up with moustache and so forth, and twice when he was fixed up with a beard and a gold tooth; once again when he was sitting out here on his porch.”

  Abrahamson talked rapidly, punctuating his phrases with quick gestures, enjoying the importance of his role.

  “Mr. Braceway,” he explained smilingly to Greenleaf, “talked to me about the man with the beard—talked more than you did, chief. You know Mr. Braceway—how quick he is. He talked and asked me to try to remember where and when I had seen this Mr. Bristow. I had my ideas and my association of ideas. I remembered—remembered hard. That afternoon I took a holiday—I don’t take many of those—and I walked past here. ‘I bet you,’ I said to myself—not out real loud, you understand—‘I bet you I know that man.’ And I won my bet. I did know him.

  “This Mr. Splain and the man with the beard are the same, exactly the same.”

  Bristow’s smile was tolerant, as if he dealt with a child. But Fulton, his angry eyes boring into the accused man, saw that, for the first time, there were tired lines tugging the corners of his mouth. It was an expression that heralded defeat, the first faint shadow of despair.

  “You have my story, and I’ve the facts to prove it a hundred times over,” Braceway announced. “Why waste more time?”

  “For the simple reason,” Bristow fought on, “that I’m entitled to a fair deal, an honest—”

  On the word “honest” Braceway turned with his electric quickness to Greenleaf, and, as he did so, Bristow leaned back in his chair, as if determined not to argue further. His face assumed its hard, bleak calm; his cold self-control returned.

  “Now, get this!” Braceway’s incisive tone whipped Greenleaf to closer attention. “You’ve an embezzler and murderer in your hands. He admits one crime; I’ve proved the other. The rest is up to you. Put the irons on him. Throw him into a cell! You’ll be proud of it the rest of your life. Here’s the warrant.”

  He drew the paper from his hip pocket and tossed it to the chief.

  “Get busy,” he insisted. “This man’s the worst type of criminal I’ve ever encountered. Not content with blackmailing and robbing a woman, he murdered her; not satisfied with that, he deliberately planned the death of an innocent man because he, in his cowardice, was afraid to take the ordinary chances of escaping detection. By openly parading his pursuit of breakers of the law, he secured secretly his opportunity to excel their basest actions. He—”

  Quicker than thought, Braceway lunged forward with his cane and struck the hand Bristow had lifted swiftly to his throat. The blow sent a pocket knife clattering to the floor. A policeman, picking it up, saw that the opened blade worked on a spring.

  The accused man sank back in his chair. The gray immobility of his face had broken up. The features worked curiously, forming themselves for a second to a pattern of mean vindictiveness. His right hand still numbed by the blow, he took his handkerchief with the left and flicked from his neck, close to the ear, a single red bead.

  “Search him,” Braceway ordered one of the officers.

  Bristow submitted to that. When he looked at Braceway, his face was still bleak.

  “You’ve got me,” he said in a tone thoroughly matter-of-fact. “I’m through. I’ll give you a statement.”

  “You mean a confession?”

  “It amounts to that.”

  “Not here,” Braceway refused curtly. “We’ve no stenographer.”

  “I’d prefer to write it myself anyway,” he insisted. “It won’t take me fifteen minutes on the typewriter.” Seeing Braceway hesitate, he added: “You’ll get it this way, or not at all. Suit yourself.”

  The detective did not underestimate the man’s stubborn nerve.

  “I’m agreeable, chief,” he said to Greenleaf, “if you are.”

  “Yes,” the chief agreed. “It’s as good here as anywhere else.”

  Darkness had grown in the room. Abrahamson and the policeman pulled down the window shades. Greenleaf turned on the lights.

  Bristow limped to the typewriter and sat down. Braceway opened the drawer of the typewriter stand and saw that it contained nothing but sheets of yellow “copy” paper cut to one-half the size of ordinary letter paper.

  Every trace of agitation had left Bristow. Colour crept back into his cheeks.

  Braceway and Greenleaf watched him closely. They had the idea that he still contemplated suicide, that he sought to divert their attention from himself by interesting them in what he wrote. They remembered the boast he had made in the cell in New York.

  He felt their wariness, and smiled.

  CHAPTER XXIX

  THE LAST CARD

  He worked with surprising rapidity, tearing from the machine and passing to Braceway each half-page as he finished it. He wrote triple-space, breaking the story into many paragraphs, never hesitating for a choice of words.

  “My name is Thomas F. Splain.

  “I am forty years old.

  “I am ‘wanted’ in New York for embezzlement.

  “Fear is an unknown quantity to me. I have always had ample self-confidence. The world belongs to the impudent.

  “I learned long ago that no man is at heart either grateful, or honest, or unselfish.”

  With a turn of the roller, he flicked that off the machine and, without raising his head, passed it to Braceway. The detective glanced at it long enough to get its meaning and handed it to Fulton. When it was offered to Greenleaf, he shook his head.

  The chiefs rage had reached its high point. To his realization of how perfectly he had been duped, there was added the humiliation of having two members of his force as witnesses of its revelation.

  “If he makes a move,” he thought savagely, fingering the revolver in the side pocket of his coat, “I’ll kill him certain.”

  The man at the machine wrote on:

  “After leaving New York, I was caught in a street accident in Chicago, suffering a broken nose. Thanks to my physicians—an incompetent lot, these doctors—I emerged with a crooked nose.

  “That was a help. I then had all my teeth extracted. Knowing dentistry, I saw the possibilities of disguise by wearing differently shaped sets of teeth.

  “Note my heavily protruding lower lip—and, at rare intervals, my hollow cheeks.

  “Also, there’s your gold-tooth mystery—solved!

  “As a disguise, the gold tooth is admirable. I mean a solid, complete tooth of gold, garish in the front part of the mouth.

  “It unfailingly changes the expression; frequently, it degrades and brutalizes the face. Try it.

  “Using my crooked nose as an every-day precaution, I always straightened it for night work. Forestier taught me that—great man, Forestier; marvellous with noses.

  “He is now piling up a fortune as make-up specialist for motion pictures in Los Angeles—has a secret preparation with which he ‘builds’ new noses.

  “Changing the colour of my eyes was something beyond the police imagination.

  “I got the trick from a man in Cincinn
ati—another great character. Homatropine is the basic element of his preparation.

  “Some day women will hear of it and make him rich. He deserves it.”

  Fulton, after he had read that, looked at Braceway out of tortured eyes. This turning of his tragedy into jest defied his strength.

  “That’s enough of that,” Braceway raised his voice above the clatter of the typewriter. “Get down to the crime, or stop!”

  “By all means,” Bristow assented.

  Flicking from the roller the page he had already begun, he tore it up and inserted another.

  “I met Enid Fulton six years ago at Hot Springs, Virginia. She fell in love with me.

  “I had always known that a rich woman’s indiscretions could be made to yield big dividends. She was a victim of her—”

  Braceway’s grasp caught the writer’s hands.

  “Eliminate that!” he ordered sternly. “It’s not necessary.”

  Bristow, imperturbable, his motions quick and sure, tore up that page also, and started afresh:

  “Later she believed I had embezzled in order to assure her ease and luxury from the date of our marriage.

  “Her exaggerated sense of fair play, of obligation, was an aid to my representations of the situation.

  “Although she no longer loved me and did love Withers, my hold on her, rather on her purse, could not be broken.

  “She gave me the money in Atlantic City and Washington. I played the market, and lost. I no longer had my cunning in dealing with stocks.

  “I came here as soon as I had learned of her presence in Furmville. At first, she was reasonable. Abrahamson knows that. I pawned several little things with him.

  “At last she grew obstinate. She argued that, if she pawned any more of her jewels, she would be unable to redeem them because her father had failed in business.

  “But I had to have funds. Several times I pointed this out to her when I saw her in Number Five—always after midnight, for my own protection as well as hers.

  “Finally, my patience was exhausted. Last Monday night, or early Tuesday morning, I told her so, quite clearly.