American Sherlocks

by Nick Rennison

  Pandemonium followed instantly. A chair crashed over in the darkness across the theatre; clear above the cries of the panic-stricken men and women came the scream of a man:

  ‘My God! I didn’t do it! I didn’t! I didn’t!’

  The scream stopped. ‘Lights!’ frenziedly called someone from the darkness.

  They came. In the box opposite, Sydney Thames saw Cartwright struggling with the man whose face he had seen so distinctly in the pistol’s flash. On the floor of the box, face downward, was the girl of the violin. Between her shoulders, on the white shirt waist, was a widening splotch of crimson.

  II

  The girl was dead. The white-coated ambulance surgeon who examined her had shaken his head, and refused to take her in the ambulance. The morgue waggon had taken the body but a short time after the police reserves had beaten their way through a mob of thousands to arrest the white-faced, hysterical prisoner, who cried his innocence through lips battered by the fist of Cartwright.

  In the precinct station the prisoner had collapsed, and Cartwright told his story. He had heard a slight noise, and swung around in his chair. At that instant came the flash of the pistol behind him. He heard the man drop it, and he leaped to grapple with him. Yes, he knew the prisoner; name was Nelson, a half-baked kid, who had bothered Miss Reynolds for months. Yes, this was Miss Reynolds’s first engagement; her first appearance on any stage. He was her manager. No, nothing else. Emphatically!

  The prisoner, brought around roughly, swore that he was innocent. He had known Miss Reynolds for months, they had been friends in Europe. She had asked him to be present at her first appearance, and at the end of her act he had gone to meet her at the stage entrance. It was there that he was told that she had an engagement with Cartwright. That this made him wild with jealousy he admitted; he knew Cartwright by reputation, and Miss Reynolds was but a girl, innocent, unsophisticated.

  He had walked around outside the theatre for about fifteen minutes, then he had decided to go to the box and demand an explanation. The theatre was in darkness for the knife-throwing act, but he knew his way. His hand had been on the black velvet hangings when he stopped. And the revolver flash had come from the air not a foot ahead of him. No, he could not explain how the shot had been fired. No one could have moved from the spot where the pistol had been, because the weapon dropped on his toe!

  He was taken away to a cell on a charge of murder.

  Cartwright, leaving the station when the last of the curious crowd had drifted away, seemed to have aged ten years since the tragedy. He was haggard, the grim, hard smile that had been characteristic was gone, his big hands trembled. He tried in vain to get permission to remove the girl’s body from the morgue immediately. But the law demanded that the coroner see it first; and the official was out of town.

  Cartwright remembered his political friends. He tried to locate a dozen over the telephone and failed. Then, by chance, he met the one man in the city who could help him; the one man among the four millions whom he could trust: Theodore Rogers, the theatrical lawyer, a friend for thirty years.

  He tried to tell Rogers what he wanted, but his nervousness made his words a jumble.

  ‘What is it, Jim? What’s the trouble?’ Rogers shook him, and he looked into his eyes anxiously.

  Cartwright told him of the shooting. ‘And, by God, Ted!’ he finished passionately. ‘I won’t rest a minute till I see that devil in the electric chair! God! To kill a girl like that!’

  The lawyer looked at him curiously. This was not the cool, suave Cartwright he had known so long.

  Cartwright read the look on the lawyer’s face, and the thoughts behind it. ‘Not that! I swear it’s not that, Ted!’ he choked.

  ‘Come, have a drink,’ pleaded Rogers, pulling him toward the lighted entrance of a rathskeller.

  ‘With that girl on a slab in the morgue?’

  ‘One drink,’ insisted Rogers. ‘You are worse than useless this way. Come!’

  He dragged Cartwright down the steps. The clock over the bar said half-past two, and the leather-seated booths were in darkness. But drinks could be had. The barman dozed, and the lone waiter yawned as he carried a tray toward the booths in the rear. Rogers led the theatrical man to a seat at the side of the room in front of the bar, ordered whisky, and waited patiently until Cartwright had gulped down the liquor.

  ‘Now tell me about it, Jim,’ demanded Rogers.

  Cartwright, as near the end of the leather seat as he could get, glanced at the dark booths in the back, then turned and surveyed the front of the place. The rathskeller was empty, except for the dozing barman and the waiter, who had gone into one of the front booths to figure his day’s checks.

  ‘Don’t think – what you’ve been thinking about me and that girl, Ted.’ There was almost pathetic pleading in the manager’s voice; it was pitched so low that even the lawyer at the other side of the narrow table could scarcely hear. ‘She was – a daughter to me – the daughter of the only woman I ever loved.’

  Rogers stared. This from the man Broadway thought it knew!

  ‘Remember twenty years ago?’ continued Cartwright, in that same low, pleading voice.

  ‘The girl I took away from Kelly, that drunken burlesque magician?’

  The lawyer nodded, a look of understanding in his eyes.

  ‘You know we loved each other, and we ran away; she, and I, and the six months old kid,’ he went on. ‘You know how she died: killed in the C & O wreck two hours out of Chicago, two hours after we started – and the kid under her body, alive! I guess that’s what woke me up. All I thought about after that was making money for the kid. I put her with good people, and I didn’t tell them who she was, or who I was. When she got old enough to understand, I adopted her legally. But she never knew who her father and mother were. I couldn’t tell her about the drunken sot that died in the Chicago alcoholic ward. A thing like that would have spoiled her.

  ‘She was born with music in her. I kept her away from me and the people that knew me. I sent her abroad. And tonight was her try-out! I wanted to see if she could face the lights, because I wouldn’t have her laughed at by the highbrows if she couldn’t make good. And she did! God, how they went wild! I wouldn’t tell a soul that she was my adopted daughter – until tomorrow. Now –’ He fingered his whisky glass with twitching hands.

  Theodore Rogers, whose heart was reputed to be of stone, felt a lump in his throat. He pushed his gloves from the table, so in bending he would get the needed instant to hide his feelings. Something made him jerk up his head! He saw –

  The roar of the pistol in his ears deafened him. He cried out as the long-barrelled gun recoiled across the table and struck him, butt foremost, on the chest. His glass was crashed to a hundred pieces as the pistol fell on the table before him. The white shirt front of Cartwright was black, a small circle of fire glowed in the linen; on his face was an awful look of horror as his head pitched forward on his arms.

  And then Rogers understood what his eyes had first seen; the picture that had lasted but the hundredth part of a second, perhaps, but which would be graven on his mind for a lifetime.

  He had seen the pistol against Cartwright’s heart, with nothing to hold it there; the recoil of the explosion had driven it across the table before it fell, because no human hand had grasped it; no finger had pulled the trigger!

  III

  In the darkness of his library Thornley Colton paced back and forth. The cigarette-end glowed and died as he puffed thoughtfully. Each detail of the girl’s murder at the theatre, described to him by the excited Sydney, while panic had raged above them and below them in the playhouse the night before, was being visualized by the wonderful brain that so unerringly found logic in seeming absurdity; explanation in apparent impossibility – because that brain had never been tricked by seeing eyes.

  The murder of the girl had moved him mightily;
the stilling forever of that wonderful music seemed more a crime against the world than against an individual. And as he paced the curtained room the mosaics of detail became a complete picture, and he knew – knew – that the man who had left their box so hurriedly the night before; the man whom Sydney had seen fire the shot, was guiltless of the murder!

  He turned to face the door as hurried footsteps proclaimed to his trained, supersensitive ears that Sydney Thames was approaching.

  ‘Cartwright has been murdered!’ cried the red-cheeked secretary breathlessly. ‘It happened too late for the morning papers, but The Fee got some early extras of the evening editions with full details.’

  ‘Where? How?’ asked Colton.

  ‘In an up-town rathskeller. He was shot by Theodore Rogers, the lawyer.’

  ‘He was not,’ corrected the blind man quietly,

  ‘How did you hear of it?’ demanded Sydney, in surprise.

  ‘This is the first intimation I had of such a thing, but your statement was just a little too positive; your voice told me that you believe Rogers guilty because of the utter impossibility of the story he must have given the police.’

  Sydney flushed. ‘But his story is crazy, insane!’ he insisted.

  ‘Perhaps if I heard it –’ suggested Colton.

  Excitedly, with utter disbelief in his voice, Sydney Thames told of the unheld pistol Rogers swore he saw; of its firing with no finger near the trigger; of its recoil, and fall.

  ‘Of course the police arrested him,’ continued Sydney. ‘Cartwright held a lot of Rogers’s paper. That’s the motive. They’ve got a clear case, as clear as the one against the love-crazed kid who shot the violinist.’

  ‘Just as clear,’ echoed Colton slowly. Then: ‘But haven’t you withheld the fact that the pistols used in both murders are exactly alike?’

  ‘How – did you know – that?’ gasped Sydney. Many times he had heard the blind man make such amazing statements, but they always startled him.

  ‘Because both crimes were committed by the same man in the same way!’

  ‘But Nelson, the kid who shot the girl, was locked up in a cell,’ protested Thames.

  ‘Exactly,’ admitted the blind man. ‘But he killed Cartwright as surely as he murdered the girl.’

  It was several seconds before the meaning of that sentence struck Sydney. ‘He shot that girl in the back!’ rebelled Thames. ‘I saw his face over the flash of the pistol. Even he admits that no one else could have fired it, because it fell on his toe!’

  ‘Rogers swears that no one did fire the bullet which killed Cartwright,’ reminded Colton. ‘And the pistol fell on the table in front of him.’

  ‘That’s impossible,’ asserted Thames emphatically. ‘Someone must have held the gun. Someone must have pulled the trigger. There can be no explanation of what he says he saw. The days of ghosts and black magic have passed.’

  ‘But not the days of black murder,’ retorted Colton. ‘There is no black art, ghosts, or hypnotism in the murders of last night. The method is unique, that’s all.’

  He picked up the slim, hollow stick he always carried. ‘I’m going to find that murderer,’ he said. ‘A man who could kill a girl like that is either a fiend or a hideous blunderer. I think it’s the latter. Will you call the machine?’

  The big automobile was always ready for instant service, day or night, and ten minutes later they were on their way down town. Beside the driver, eager-eyed, joyful, was The Fee. Colton had promised to let him help on the case, and the boy’s cup of happiness was full. The Fee had but two heroes: Thornley Colton in real life; Nick Carter in his favourite fiction.

  ‘We’ll go to police headquarters first,’ decided Colton. ‘The prisoners will be there this morning, and I’d like to question Rogers.’ Then he got from Sydney all the details the papers had given of Cartwright’s murder.

  The Fee found a friendly doorman when they reached police headquarters and prepared to have the time of his life. Colton’s card secured them grudging admittance to the office of the chief of detectives. The chief, like his men, had all the professional’s scorn for the amateur, but he knew the blind man, with his wide acquaintance with influential people, was not a person to antagonize. And the police had found Rogers a different proposition from the youth whose infatuation had led him to the dark box and the murder charge. The lawyer was well known, and his story demanded respect despite the utter impossibility of the thing he described. Of course, the barman and the waiter had been arrested as witnesses, but they had not seen the actual shooting. The barman had been dozing, and the waiter had been busy in a front booth. The shot had aroused them.

  ‘Going to give us some more pointers?’ asked the chief tolerantly, when he had shaken hands with Colton and nodded curtly to Sydney.

  ‘I’d like to look into that double-murder case a bit,’ confessed the problemist, paying no attention to the tone.

  ‘You mean the two murders committed last night,’ corrected the chief gruntingly. ‘Nothing to ’em. We’ve got the goods on young Nelson. Twenty people in the three front rows saw him do it. And Rogers’s fool story is enough to hang any man.’ The real detective’s scorn for the criminal whose methods are crude came to his voice. ‘He might have got away with a suicide story – Cartwright was all broken up about the girl – but Rogers swears it wasn’t suicide, because the manager’s hands were not near the pistol when it was fired. He says Cartwright’s look was one of horror, as if he’d seen his end coming, and couldn’t get away from it.’

  ‘He did see his death coming,’ put in Colton quietly; ‘and I think that during the last instant he lived he realized at whose hand it came.’

  ‘You think he got wise to Rogers at the end, eh?’ guessed the chief.

  ‘No!’ The negative was sharp. ‘Rogers had no more to do with the murder than you or I. Cartwright was killed by a man who had been planning the murder for years; the death of the girl was a terrible mistake.’

  The chief jumped from his chair. ‘What do you know?’ he demanded.

  ‘Nothing – definitely. With a little help from you I think I can show you the real murderer.’

  ‘You can’t show me any murderer but Rogers and Nelson,’ snapped the chief, with an air of finality. ‘Because you can’t convince me or anybody else that a man could see what Rogers says he saw. A pistol with no hand near it. It’s impossible! It’s dam’ foolishness!’ He snorted.

  Unconsciously Sydney Thames found himself nodding confirmation. That was the whole thing: an impossibility. No one had been near Cartwright but Rogers. The girl had been shot in the back, and no one could have been behind her but Nelson. This last Sydney knew, and had seen.

  ‘Let me see the pistols which killed Cartwright and the girl, and I’ll convince you that the same man murdered both,’ offered Colton.

  ‘Duplicate guns aren’t so rare,’ instantly resented the chief. This man was practically telling him that he didn’t know his business!

  ‘Those two pistols – and others that may be in the possession of the murderer – are the only ones of their kind in the world!’

  ‘Look at ’em, then.’ The chief grabbed them from his desk. ‘They’re a standard German make, single-shot target pistols, blued steel, with barrels six inches long, numbered and sold all over Europe.’

  Colton took the two pistols, and Sydney drew his chair closer to see.

  ‘In the first place,’ began the blind man, as his thin, supersensitive fingers examined one gun, while the other lay on his knees, ‘murderers don’t usually have this kind of pistol. They can’t be carried in any ordinary pocket, and’ – his forefinger-tip rested over the shallow slot near the muzzle – ‘you never before saw target pistols without front sights!’

  ‘Took ’em off so they wouldn’t catch in the pocket,’ grunted the chief knowingly.

  Colton’s lips curved i
n a smile. ‘An ingenious theory,’ he grunted. ‘Have you one to fit the banged-up appearance of these butts?’ He held out the pistol and indicated the nicks and scratches.

  ‘Been used to hammer nails,’ declared the chief, exaggerated weariness in his voice. ‘Gun owners use ’em that way sometimes, like a woman uses a hairbrush. Nothing to that.’

  ‘Yes there is! No gun owner in the world ever drove a nail by holding a gun vertically, hand on the barrel, and pounding it up and down like a pile driver! See, the hard usage doesn’t show on the bottom of the butt, as it would have done had the pistol been swung as a hammer. The dents and scratches are all on the outside edge!’

  The chief took the extended gun. The sarcastic smile on his lips faded as he tried the two ways of holding it. The blind man was right! No driving of nails could have made nicks and scratches where they were on this pistol! ‘What’s that got to do with the murder?’ he growled.

  ‘Everything,’ answered the problemist shortly. He took the other pistol on his palm. ‘Didn’t it strike you that these were two finely balanced pistols, even for target use?’ Before the chief could reply Colton shot another inquiry: ‘Didn’t you wonder at the fact that both triggers had been filed to a hair so that the slightest jar would cause the hammer to fall? See!’ He cocked the pistol and jammed the muzzle against the chief’s desk.

  The hammer clicked down sharply. He tried it again, this time jamming the butt down on a chair arm. Once more the hammer snapped on the empty chamber.

  The chief’s jaw dropped. ‘That’s how those nicks were made!’ he ejaculated, shocked from his supercilious attitude. The lightning-like questions, the proving of fact after fact by Colton, had disconcerted him. In ten minutes the man who was sightless had shown him details that neither his keen eyes nor the eyes of his hundred men had seen, and Colton had made of those details startling, vivid possibilities.