Murder, as a rule, is a secret profession. The idea of the average murderer is to abolish his victim and then escape with what speed he may be able to muster. It is his ardent wish to remain unknown. He hopes and perhaps prays that he has left no clues behind that will betray him to the police.
Sometimes a murderer more cunning than the average practitioner will leave a deliberate trail for the detectives to follow. This, obviously, is more than likely to be false—at any rate, misleading.
The case of the “Dead Man Murders,” as it was quaintly called by the newspapers, was of another kind. There had been secrecy, to be sure—of a sort. Invitations had not been issued to the murders; but certainly the world had been invited to attend the investigation. The newspapers again were filled with it.
Of deliberate clues, so to call them, there were perhaps three: three squares of white paper, marked with ink. They had ticketed, in each of three instances, the unique tomb of the murdered victim. They were not, however, particularly helpful. Anybody can print letters with a pen, and nearly everybody’s attempt will be more or less like the other fellow’s.
One thing seemed certain, now—that the three murders were the work of a single hand; at least, of a single brain. To the police, another thing seemed obvious—that that brain was diseased. It is always easy and distracting to cry “Lunatic!” when a piece of villainy is out of the usual groove.
The press recalled a series of sanguinary crimes in Vienna, in 1916, the work of a madman who had been subsequently discovered in an asylum. He had contrived his incarceration very cleverly on other grounds.
Saxon, however, was still dubious.
“Bunk!” he observed heartily. “All bunk, Rainfall! To the extent that any man who commits murder is crazy, I suppose this fellow is—but the whole thing looks to me like some sort of a come-on.”
“Yes?” Rainfall was lazily interested. “How so?”
They were in a taxicab, returning from the inquest.
“It’s too evidently what he would like people to believe—what he expects the police to believe. In every case, except maybe that of Lear, he set up a background of sheer lunacy. Bodies in windows and on statues! Even Lear’s case smacked of it. What’s the word for that kind of a psychosis? Exhibitionism?”
“No,” smiled the physician. “He certainly isn’t exhibiting himself, whatever else he’s doing.” After a moment he asked: “Well, what do you think, Howard? I’m open to conviction, although it does look like insanity to me.”
“How about egotism?” The sporting editor of the Telegram chuckled. “Of course, that’s first cousin to insanity!” He sobered. “Well, I’ll tell you what I think: I think the fellow who did those three crazy jobs was a smart fellow—a fellow with an imagination. Therefore it’s going to require an imagination to catch him. Three men, apparently unassociated, fantastically murdered and their bodies exposed in public places! Lear’s wasn’t, perhaps, but I’ll gamble the murderer would have preferred to kill Lear in the middle of the stage— in full view of the audience. Only, that way, he could hardly have hoped to escape. But he left his card—didn’t he?—to indicate that the same man was at work. Every deed was labeled—and very whimsically labeled, if you ask me—to call attention to the singleness of purpose involved. There’s a phrase for you—singleness of purpose! I’m getting rhetorical. Here’s another: all three murders were the work of a single hand which, in effect, now boasts of what it has done, calls upon the world to witness, and defies detection.”
He smiled a little at his own enthusiasm and asked: “How’s that?”
The physician shrugged. “One man may have murdered Bluefield in his shop at night. One man may have murdered Lear in his dressing room yesterday—although how he managed it is a caution. But one man didn’t murder Hubert Gaunt, then lift his body onto that iron horse. He couldn’t! That required help.”
Saxon was taken aback. “You may be right,” he admitted. “One man could have done it, I think; but it would have been quite a chore. Quite a chore! By George, I can almost see him trying it!”
“He’d have needed a stepladder and a corps of assistants,” said Rainfall.
“Gaunt wasn’t such a big fellow, though,” argued the newspaper man. “Rather small, wasn’t he? Oh, I don’t know! Who am I to play detective?”
He was silent for a moment, while the cab sped northward. Suddenly he began to speak again.
“Why do you suppose Lear sent us tickets for that particular performance, Rainfall?”
“Eh?” The physician was startled. “I was just thinking the same thing myself. Great minds! You think there was something more than coincidence in it, then?”
“Don’t you? I can’t help wondering. It seems such an extraordinary coincidence.”
“It does,” agreed Rainfall. “His physician and a famous newspaper man! It almost looks as if he had been expecting something to happen and was preparing for emergencies.”
“Well, it’s a valid thought,” said Saxon.
“Another thing,” said the doctor: “Is it your idea that Lear knew those other fellows—Bluefield and Gaunt?”
“He almost had to, didn’t he?”
“Because the murderer planned to kill all three? It doesn’t necessarily follow. But if Lear knew them, why didn’t I?”
“I suppose Lear had friends or acquaintances unknown to you. Why not?”
“I’ve known Lear, as I told you, since he came to me—a patient—years ago. I’ve corresponded with him, off and on, for a long time. I’ve seen him whenever he was in town. I was his friend and—as far as Chicago is concerned—I was his physician. Surely I would have heard their names mentioned.”
“I don’t think so.” Saxon shook his head. “Lear may have had reasons for not mentioning them. He needn’t have told you everything about himself. If Bluefield and Gaunt were ‘wrong,’ as may have been the case, he wouldn’t have mentioned them to you. Did you know his name was Stacey, not Lear?”
“Yes, he told me that, years ago.”
“It wouldn’t mean anything, of course.” Saxon was thoughtful. “Lots of actors change their names. Patrick Lear! What a name, eh? Almost too perfect for his part in life. It simply couldn’t have been his own.”
Rainfall laughed. “The Lear, I believe, is from Aristophanes.”
Saxon looked at his companion reproachfully. For a time they fell silent again, while the cab jolted on its way toward the Gatacre Memorial Hospital.
“Yes,” said the newspaper man, at length, “the fellow who did all this had imagination, Rainfall. What an advertising man he would have made! What a novelist! Bluefield, a millionaire recluse and haberdasher, sitting dead in his own shop window! Gaunt, a gambler and a mystery, sprawled dead across a bronze horse in the city’s principal park, waiting exhibition at the hands of a schoolgirl! Lear, the nation’s most popular romantic actor, dead in his dressing room, before a mirror, while a thousand people wait for his appearance on the stage. What a beginning for a mystery story! I wonder what form his confession will take.”
“His confession?” echoed Rainfall.
“His mind appears to be fantastic. On the heels of what he has already shown us, we are entitled to look for something unusual in the way of a denouement. Perhaps he will disguise himself as a sky writer and smoke his confession across the clouds—just before he disappears forever behind one of them. I believe that has not yet been done, even in fiction.”
The physician smiled wryly. “Perhaps he will disguise himself as a ton of coal and be delivered at your door,” he said. “You are gifted with a trifle of imagination yourself, Howard.”
Howard Saxon laughed. “My employers,” he admitted, “have often accused me of the same crime.”
The open verdict returned by the coroner’s jury, they agreed, was the only thing that could have been returned. Where the inquisitive Kipp had left off, it was the business of the police to begin.
“They’ll get farther following up the Lear case than they will with the others,” said Saxon.
“And you may depend on it,” said Rainfall, “they will keep a none too friendly eye on everybody concerned: Mrs. Lear, Moore, Sultan, you, I, the housekeeper—what was her name?—Ballantyne!—and particularly, I should say, on that stage detective, Ridinghood. He will be almost notably suspect. Not that he is any more involved than anybody else, but because he played the part of the detective. Without being aware of it, the police mind inclines toward paradox.”
He laughed shortly. “What a name that would be for a murderer, Howard! Ridinghood! Little Red Ridinghood! Can’t you see the newspapers? It would be reversing the fairy tale with a vengeance.”
Saxon laughed also. “A good enough name for a detective, too. They ought to have let him keep it for the play.” After a time, he added soberly: “There’s one thing I haven’t told you, Rainfall. There was one really smart man at that inquest, today. Not you and not me. He was that reporter who asked the last question put to Moore. Kipp let on it was his own question, but it wasn’t. The fact is, that square of paper was dropped on the floor of Lear’s dressing room after the herd had entered.”
“The deuce it was! What makes you so certain?”
“Because it wasn’t on the door, and it wasn’t on the floor, when you and I entered. I said nothing about it at the inquest. I’m no super-Hawkshaw or anything silly like that. Amateur detectives give me a pain. But if I’ve learned anything at all from experience I’ve learned to use my eyes. I used them when we entered that room.”
“Well?”
“The paper wasn’t anywhere around. In other words, it was dropped there, where it was found, after we all had entered—and why not by the murderer himself?”