American Sherlocks

by Nick Rennison

  ‘What is it?’ The question was chorused by the excited men.

  ‘The address of the man who murdered Cartwright and Miss Reynolds!’

  IV

  Before the gasps of amazement, the ejaculations of incredulity could become coherent questions, Thornley Colton had turned and made his way from the office, light stick dangling idly from his fingers. Dazedly they followed him from the theatre and into the waiting automobile. He had located the murderer of Cartwright and the girl! They were dumb with the wonder of it. Swiftly, unerringly, the blind man had found the murderer whose very being they had not suspected a short time before. To the men who had followed every step of the problemist, who had seen things that he could not see, the finding seemed magic comparable only to the magic of the pistol that had apparently flown from the air to deal its death. There was a new expression on the face of the chief of detectives now. The scowl was gone; the sarcastic curve of lips had vanished. In their place had come wonder, tinged with awe toward the man who had builded a wonderful structure of truth from the pieces he and his hundred men had either discarded or had not seen.

  The car turned into Forty-fourth, passed the brownstone houses where every door bore its sign: ‘Table Board. Furnished Rooms.’ A red-headed boy ran out into the street, and the chauffeur slowed up.

  ‘It’s t’ree houses down, Mr Colton.’ The Fee’s voice fairly trembled with excitement. ‘He’s on the top floor. Kin I go with yuh?’

  Colton nodded and stepped down from the machine. ‘We’ll walk the rest of the way,’ he told them. He started, the bright-eyed boy at his elbow.

  They mounted the steps of a brownstone house, and Colton rang the bell. A frowsy-haired lady in a grease-spotted kimono opened the door. The smell of cooking onions assailed their nostrils; somewhere within a piano banged out a ragtime tune; a raucous voice screeched: ‘I call her Little Hy’cinth, but her name’s M’Swigg’; from the depths of the house a squeaky clarinet piped off-key opera.

  ‘Profesh’n?’ snapped the lady of the kimono suspiciously before anyone had a chance to speak.

  ‘We want to see Signor Delvetoi,’ said the blind man quietly.

  Sydney Thames never remembered the short colloquy that followed; never recollected just how they entered the house. Signor Delvetoi! That name drove everything else from his mind. Once more he saw the black-clothed, black-bearded man at the theatre; again he saw the whirling knives flashing from the darkness into the beam of the calcium to bury their points beside the woman of the golden frame; once more came to his mind the wonderful skill that had directed those keen-pointed knives toward their target of living flesh – to brush a cheek and not even scratch it.

  Then he found himself following the others up the narrow stairs. In the second floor hallway a fat, greasy-faced woman murmured husky endearments to a monkey in her arms, while a goose waddled at her side. A dozen discordant tunes came from the closed rooms. This was the place they had come to arrest a murderer!

  On the third floor Thornley Colton stopped and knocked on a door panel. Thames could feel the tenseness of the men’s bodies as they crowded up close to the door as it slowly opened. Standing before them, framed in the light that came into the hallway from the room, stood a big man in a stained red bath-robe that trailed the floor behind the worn carpet-slippers. His head was bald, and across the skull ran a livid scar; his face was a deep-lined, jaundiced yellow.

  ‘We want you for the murder of Cartwright and the girl at the theatre.’ That was all Colton said, and his voice was low.

  For an instant the face of the man went a fish-belly white; then murderous red rage leaped to the cheeks, and darted from the slit eyes.

  ‘You devils!’ he shrieked.

  The red robe was flung back; but with a movement as quick as light itself Colton’s hand darted out, closed with a grip of steel on a wrist, and the red robe whirled as the man spun to his knees.

  ‘Better handcuff him,’ advised the blind man quietly, as he pushed aside the fallen knife with the thin cane that had warned him of the murderous movement. The handcuffs clicked on the knife-thrower’s wrists as the chief dragged him to a chair.

  ‘So you’re the one, eh?’ The detective chief tried to make his tone casual, but he could not keep the wonder from his eyes, or voice.

  ‘Oh, you got me right,’ sneered the knife-thrower.

  ‘How did you do it?’ put in Rogers dazedly. The picture he had seen the night before was still in his mind.

  A cunning light leaped to the half-closed eyes of the red-robed man. ‘D’you want to hear the whole thing?’ he asked. ‘You might as well,’ he boasted. ‘I’ll never swing for it.’

  ‘Go ahead,’ growled the chief, drawing his chair up closer and placing his revolver on his knees. The knife-thrower grinned sneeringly.

  ‘Well,’ he began, and his evil eyes seemed to gloat at them. ‘I’m the only man in the world that could have pulled the trick. It took years of practice to get it down pat, but there’s Indian blood in me, mixed with the Irish. They don’t know much about me in this country, and I didn’t want them to, till I got Jim Cartwright. But in Europe I’m the best in the business, and I’m the only one that could ever plant five knives in a spot the size of a half-dollar at thirty feet, and do it on the level.’

  There was boasting in the tone, but to Sydney Thames, who had seen his amazing work of the night before, it was not idle boasting.

  ‘The story of why I killed Cartwright is the same old game: I had a woman and he took her. She wasn’t much good, only a doll-faced fool, and there was a squalling kid that got on my nerves; but she was mine, body and soul.’ The listening men gritted their teeth at the tone, and he sneered at them for it. ‘Cartwright took her, and I went after them both. I had a little money, I was headin’ the olio in a burlesque. Before I started I went in a place along the river front in Chicago, where I was. I musta showed my roll, because – now I don’t expect you to believe what’s comin’, and I don’t give a damn whether you do or not!’ There was sullen defiance in the voice. ‘But I woke up in a hospital I never saw before, and the nurse talked German! It was in Berlin, and it was ten years after! Oh, it wasn’t anything new, the doctors told me. One of the Windy City thugs had lead-piped me for my roll; you can see the scar I got. Something cracked in my head then, and when I woke I’d just been in a German train smash-up. The doctors said the bump I got there straightened me out.

  ‘I remembered everything after a while. I was doin’ a knife-throwin’ act. Some wop had picked me up when I didn’t know my own name, and brought me to Europe with him. Somehow the kink had kept me off the booze, and I was even better than him, and he was the best in the world, bar none. He died a few months after I got out, and I copped his layout. We’d been rehearsin’ a stunt that was going to make ’em all sit up. The Flyin’ Death, we called it, and we threw pistols instead of knives. We had a blank board at one end of the stage, and a target at the other. We’d stand in the centre, let it fly at the blank board, duck, and the butt striking would jar down the trigger, and the bullet’d go over our heads and hit the bull’s-eye three times out of five. It was big stuff! But I wasn’t satisfied, because I wanted to hit the bull’s-eye every time. I was goin’ to play that act fer one man; the one that stole my wife and ten years out of my life. So I put in two more years on the Continent, still practisin’. If you looked at the nicks in the pistol-butts you can see how many times they’d been used.

  ‘When I got so I couldn’t go wrong I came to the States. I learned I was dead – one of the thugs that got my coin and papers, I guess. But that suited me right down to the ground. I found Cartwright was the big cheese in the business, but I couldn’t find the wife, or the kid. I wanted to get them, too; ten years don’t make no difference to me.’ Again came the sneer to the evil, yellow face, as his eyes caught their looks of horror and disgust. ‘I spent a year touring here before I coul
d book Cartwright’s house. I wanted to get him right before everybody’s eyes. That’s why I had that dark act. He was up to the rehearsal in the mornin’ with a kid that looked something like the woman he stole, but it wasn’t my kid, because he made it plain he was only her manager. You can bet he’d a showed it if he had claims. I heard him make a date for the box after her act, and that looked good to me, because I’d get him right beside her.

  ‘Under the knives for the spotlight act was the pistol with a real cartridge, of course. I only used minichure ones with a pinch of powder for the act. The guns was balanced special in Germany, and the front sights was off the barrels so they could slide out of my hand. I could see the white of the girl’s waist and his shirt between every knife-throw, because I waited a few seconds each time to get ’em right. Then, when I knew I couldn’t make a mistake, I let the gun fly. I was goin’ to have the butt hit the wall in back of him, and the bullet catch him between the shoulders. It was easy, because I was above him on the stage, and I thought there couldn’t be any suspicion because I was in front of him, and he’d be shot in the back. But that darn’ fool kid,’ he spat out snarlingly, ‘had to have his hands on the hanging just when the gun hit, and throw it off enough to kill the girl.’

  Sydney Thames gasped audibly.

  ‘It wasn’t my fault she was in the way, but a little thing like that wasn’t going to keep me from gettin’ the man I wanted. I got another of the guns out of my prop trunk and went after him. I couldn’t get him right until I heard the other feller arguin’ with him in front of the rathskeller. I ducked around to the side-door. I’d been in there before, but I’d had my black stage-whiskers and wig on, and the waiter didn’t know me. I played drunk, and gave the waiter a five-spot for a drink, and told him not to turn on the booth-light.

  ‘Cartwright faced my booth, but I was in the dark. They started to whisper. The waiter was out of sight, and the bartender was sleepin’. I had the gun ready for five minutes. This man bent down – and I let her fly. There wasn’t going to be any mistake this time, because I was going to put another half turn on the gun and make it jam its muzzle against his heart. No chance of missin’ that way! And he saw the gun comin’ when it was too late to dodge! And he knew me then! And the last thing he ever saw was me grinnin’ at him! It was a cinch to slope out in the excitement after.’

  There was silence in the room when he had finished. From beyond the closed door came the discordant medley of the tinny piano, the screeching clarinet, the hoarse-voiced singers. Before them a manacled man, with sneers in his voice, and boasts, and snarls, had just told them of the man whose death he had accomplished with such fiendish cunning; of the innocent girl whose life he had destroyed.

  ‘Do you mean to say that you could fling those pistols as accurately as all that?’ demanded the chief, who was a policeman, first, last, and all the time. The case, to him, had ceased to be one of human emotions, of sorrow and tragedy; it was a matter of proof, of conviction. Such is the policeman’s philosophy of life – and death.

  ‘Do you want me to prove it?’ taunted the murderer. ‘There’s the other pistol for the act on the bureau. It ain’t loaded. Get it and I’ll show you.’

  ‘Better take his word,’ suggested Colton warningly.

  ‘I’ll see that he plays no tricks,’ boasted the chief. It was his case now. He got the pistol from the bureau. ‘I’ll take one cuff off, and I’ll have this gun on you every second!’ he snapped.

  The knife-thrower leered at him with his bloodless lips, and the slit eyes shone with an exultant gleam. He took a stubby pencil from his bath-robe pocket and drew a small circle on the blank wall. He walked to the other end of the room, the chief watching him like a hawk. The pistol dangled from the man’s hand as he turned. A snap of the arm, and it became a flying whirl of blue. The muzzle struck the exact centre of the small circle, the hammer snapped down, and for an instant the gun seemed suspended against the wall before it jangled to the floor.

  ‘God! That’s what I saw last night!’ choked Rogers.

  The knife-thrower picked up the pistol. ‘It’s just as easy to make the butt strike first, with the muzzle pointed at me, as it should have pointed at Cartwright’s back last night.’

  The commissioner watched every move as he walked to the end of the room.

  Suddenly Colton’s voice rang out:

  ‘Don’t let him throw that pistol!’

  The chief jumped from his chair as the red arm swung.

  A line of fire leaped from the blank wall toward the scarlet-robed figure across the room. The explosion echoed and re-echoed in the room. The pistol clattered on the bare boards under the small circle it had struck so unerringly. On the butt were flakes of the white plaster where it had been driven into the wall. The red robe seemed slowly to crumple as the knife-thrower sank to the floor; and as they ran to where he lay, the lips twisted in an evil leer of triumph, the slit eyes gleamed their gloating.

  ‘I told you I’d never swing for it!’ he sneered up at them. ‘Palming that cartridge was easy. I used to be a magician – when my name was – Kelly!’

  V

  ‘Yes, Sydney, he paid the price the State puts on murder, and I guess it is just as well.’ A fleeting smile crossed Colton’s thin lips for an instant. ‘But the chief is naturally angry that such a spectacular murderer should escape his clutches so easily. My keen ears caught the click of the breech as he put in the cartridge. But I was too late; he had waited until the last second.’

  The two men were in the library of the old-fashioned house, where the blind man had come to spend his regular afternoon four hours in darkness that meant insurance against the splitting headaches too-long-continued light on his sensitive, sightless eyes always caused. The knife-thrower had lived but a few minutes, for his skill had not failed him, and the bullet had pierced one of his lungs. Rogers had gone to arrange for the funerals of Cartwright and the daughter he had loved. They were to be side by side in death, and the story would go to their graves. On that the men had agreed in the big bare room where the last act of the tragedy had been played.

  ‘How did you ever connect the knife-thrower with the murders?’ asked Sydney finally.

  ‘Your story of the shooting in the box, as you told it to me while we were waiting for the panic to cease in the theatre, gave me the first clue,’ explained the blind man thoughtfully. ‘The fact that you saw the face of Nelson so plainly told me that the flash must have crossed his body, and, in groping his way in the darkness, his right hand must have been on the hangings. Shrimp’s enthusiastic description of the knife-thrower’s act told me how wonderful it was, and – he was the possibility.

  ‘Then the murder of Cartwright was the proof needed. There could be no explanation but that of a thrown pistol for the thing Rogers saw. And the two pistols being identical was the last link. But no one would believe the theory without irrefutable proof. That I got, first by the nicked-up butts of the guns, showing how long they had been used in practice. Then Rogers’s story of Cartwright told me the guilty person. But then came the necessity of explaining where he had been all the years. I sent Shrimp to the stage entrance to get the knife-thrower’s address and locate him. He did, and, being a boy, he aroused not the slightest suspicion when he made an inquiry at the house. I knew also that at least one of the two employees of the rathskeller must have known another man had been on hand when the murder was committed. I had to go there to see why they had withheld the information from the police. The explanation was logical enough, but the police would never have seen it. Then I had to go to the theatre and find the place where the butt of the gun had struck on the wall. The finding was more of a job than I thought. In his excitement the boy must have moved the hangings a foot, for the scar in the velvet was a foot lower than I should have found it. And you must remember that it was a scar that no eye could have seen, one that could only be found with a microscope, or supersen
sitive fingertips like mine. Then came the message from Shrimp, whom I had told to call me up either at the rathskeller or the theatre.’

  Silence came in the darkened room. When Thornley Colton spoke again his voice was low, solemn, its tone one of reverent wonder. ‘The death of that girl is one of the higher mysteries, Sydney. Was she murdered because of a terrible mistake, or did a merciful Providence send a thoughtless, foolish boy to grope in the darkness at just the right instant to deflect that pistol, and send the bullet into her back? She died in the happiest moment of her life; joy was in her heart and on her lips. If the pistol had not been turned by the moving velvet, Cartwright would have died. Her whole story would have had to come out then; she would have heard it bandied by unclean lips on the street-corners; to know that her father, the father who did not even recognize her, was a murderer. A merciful Providence? I’ll always wonder, Sydney.’

  LEDROIT CONNERS

  Created by Samuel Gardenhire (1855-1923)

  Conners, an upper-crust private investigator working in New York, is, in many ways, a very Holmes-like figure, although Conan Doyle’s great detective would be unlikely to approve of this American counterpart’s methods. Conners depends on intuition rather than deduction, rapidly forming his conclusions about a case and then working backwards to get the evidence to confirm them. He is a sophisticated, metropolitan man but his background is, to say the least, unusual. He was born in the Canadian wilderness where his Native American mother died, the victim of a wolf attack, and was then brought up by his father. The eight stories featuring LeDroit Conners, told by a Watson-like associate and admirer, were first published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1905 and then collected in a single volume entitled The Long Arm the following year. They were the work of Samuel Gardenhire, a Missouri-born lawyer who had turned to writing fiction in middle age. His first novel, Lux Crucis, a historical epic about St Paul, was published in 1904. The tales of LeDroit Conners are untypical of Gardenhire’s fiction – he wrote no other crime stories – but they remain very readable.