The murder of Hubert Gaunt shocked the city principally because of its grotesquerie.
Amos Bluefield had been a citizen of note, an item that had enhanced the theatricality of his demise; but Hubert Gaunt, as far as anyone could discover, was not a citizen at all. He was simply a man dead in extraordinary circumstances. A man tagged with a tiny placard similar to that which had announced the murder of Bluefield. Every amateur detective in the metropolis shook his head sagely when he read about that placard, and observed that there must be a connection somewhere between the two.
The name of the second victim had been found where names are usually found when men are done to death by other men. It was written on a label sewed to the lining of his inside pocket. The pocket contained nothing else of interest. The garment of which it was a part, however, proved to be of some importance in itself. Outfitted with strange pockets, in sleeves and tails, it was almost certainly, the police pointed out, the coat of a professional gambler.
But how had a professional gambler come to die mounted upon the bronze horse of Burke of Antietam?
As in the case of Amos Bluefield, no single clue was found upon the man’s body to indicate the nature or method of his death. A small, fair man of possibly forty years, he lay—when found—stiffly twisted across the bronze horse, in the valley made by the rearing neck of the animal and the upright form of the bronze rider.
The trade mark of the murderer, the newspapers reported, had been recovered from the heap of canvas. It was unlike that found by Rufus Ker on the door of Bluefield, Incorporated, in that there was no second message. It was a simple statement of fact: “Dead Man Inside!” The words had been lettered, not written, and there was no other clue to the author of the crime.
The late editions of the evening papers, which carried the full account of the sensational event, carried also the report of the coroner’s jury in the case of Amos Bluefield. As might have been predicted, an open verdict had been returned. The suspicious nature of the case was stressed and action recommended to the police.
The police, distracted by the new horror, responded with their only trump card. The murderer of Amos Bluefield had been seen, they said, and by a woman—by the daughter, in fact, of Professor Chandler W. Moment of the University of Chicago.
“Perhaps,” said the chief of police to the reporters, “that will hold you for a ‘moment’!” And he smiled happily at his own little joke.
Thereafter, for a time, the life of Holly Moment became a bit of a burden. Only her sense of duty saw her through the ordeal with tailored stride. It was true that she had little to contribute—but she was charming. The camera men photographed her from every possible angle and in all parts of the house. They even endeavored to persuade her that it was her duty to be photographed outside the premises of Bluefield, Incorporated, pointing to the spot upon the window behind which she had seen the murderer’s eyes. Miss Moment, however, knew the extent of her responsibility to the public.
This most engaging feature of the case “broke,” in the vernacular of the press, for the Sunday papers, and Holly Moment viewed her features on the second page with more attention than ever she had given them in her glass. She was more than a little shocked by the excitement her simple tale had created. Her father, when the press men clamored at the door, thoughtfully retired to his library and would not emerge. He had, as he had so often asserted, a grand passion for minding his own business.
The murder of Hubert Gaunt had its effect also in other quarters. Rufus Ker—the elderly dotard who had opened the chapter of crime by his unfortunate discovery of the wax model of “The Ambassador” in a closet, seven-and-a-half minutes after he had seen it in the window—was released by the police and went immediately to bed.
There was no earthly reason to suppose that he had murdered Gaunt and, in point of fact, it was admitted, he could not have done so. He had been taken into custody on Friday morning. The body of Gaunt had been unveiled, with ceremonies, on Saturday afternoon. But as late as six o’clock Friday evening there had been no corpse across the bronze horse of Thaddeus Burke, in Lincoln Park. Workmen had testified to this: workmen who had finally adjusted the shrouds around horse and rider.
Thus Rufus Ker, since by the police theory he could not have committed the first murder without having also committed the second, was automatically out of the picture.
The relief to Rufus Ker was considerable.
In a sense, the same line of reasoning should have applied to the other clerks in the Bluefield establishment; but for some reason—possibly because they were younger men—it did not. None of them, however, had been taken into custody. Their homes merely had been shadowed by plainclothes detectives and their wives terrorized by telephone calls from the newspapers. Those who had no wives had, naturally enough, gone to call upon their sweethearts; and these had been trailed by cumbersome dicks, to and from the trysts.
One clerk, greatly daring, had ventured to celebrate his vacation by going to a theater—that was Phildripp—and his particular tracker enjoyed a very good comic opera at the expense of the production.
The murder of Hubert Gaunt, indeed, was a sort of mixed blessing. It at once simplified the case and made it harder.
What the hell, as the chief of police earnestly asked, could Gaunt have had to do with Bluefield?
The county of Cook—that is to say, in effect, Chicago—being of a pious and Sabbatarian impulse, does not call its inquests on Sunday. The bulky newspapers of that day, in consequence, announced that the inquest upon the body of Hubert Gaunt would be held on Monday afternoon. The autopsy performed upon the body of Amos Bluefield had revealed nothing of a suspicious nature, it was pointed out, but in view of this second death mystery, so obviously akin to the first, a more thorough post mortem might be expected in both cases.
All the Sunday papers printed reproductions of the two death notes and indicated the similarities in the lettering. With reference to fingerprints, it was asserted that too much confusion existed for anything like a satisfactory clue. The square of paper taken from the shroud of General Burke had been soaked by rain and torn by the falling canvas. That removed by Rufus Ker from the door of Bluefield, Incorporated, had been crushed by Rufus Ker, in his zealous frenzy, and was covered with the finger prints of Rufus Ker.
So much for summary.
There remained a safety pin. Curiously, the notice pinned to the shroud of Thaddeus Burke had been affixed to its background by a safety pin.
The almost immoral similarity of safety pins, however, was also explained by the press.
Professor Chandler W. Moment and his daughter read the accounts in the newspapers with the careful attention of participants in epochal events. They were both deeply interested in the new development and both heartily sick of their own part in the case. It had been a wearying day when at length the hour came to retire.
“Why, after all,” asked the professor thoughtfully, “should any sane murderer, having committed his crime, take it into his head to look out of the window?”
He still harped occasionally on that original incident. From it had dated all other nuisances.
“Whatever his reason may have been, he did it,” said the professor’s daughter. “Probably he wasn’t a sane murderer. He may have been insane. And what makes you think he had already committed his crime? He may even then have been waiting for Mr. Bluefield to come in. Anyway, I think it’s just what he would have done. He was there in the darkness, behind that window. He heard footsteps outside—Stephen’s and mine—and he peeked out to see what was going on. Probably he’d have looked out even if he hadn’t heard us. Possibly he was just getting ready to leave the place or to stick up his notice. Naturally, he’d want to be certain he wasn’t observed. When you’re a murderer, I imagine looking before you leap becomes a sort of subconscious action.”
Miss Moment was getting a little tired of having her word doubted. The chief of police had seemed a bit skeptical. Young women seeking notoriety were not a novelty in his life, he had hinted.
“Well,” observed the professor, at length, “it is, to say the least, an extraordinary case.” He repeated: “An extraordinary case!”
As he was preparing to ascend the stairs he used the adjective again. “What an extraordinary thing it would be, my dear, if the whole mystery were to be resolved by a safety pin!”
It was at that instant that the telephone bell rang for the eleventh time that day. Reporters who for years have been calling men up at three in the morning to inquire into the state of their health or the amount of their embezzlement get to be hardened animals.
Professor Moment answered.
“Yes?” he said. And a moment later: “Good God, no! Certainly not!”
“What is it, Father?” asked his daughter.
“The Courier & Examiner wants to know if you will look at the body of Mr. Gaunt and try to say whether his face resembles the one you saw looking out of that window.”
“Absurd!” said his daughter. “Tell them I shall do nothing of the sort. I am through with the whole case.”
Professor Moment merely hung up the receiver.
“I almost wish I had not gone to the police at all—now,” continued his daughter spitefully.
“I almost wish neither of them had been murdered,” said Professor Chandler W. Moment.