CHAPTER XXXV

Artemus Baxter Hears a Fact or Two

Halsey did not speak for a moment. Instead, he got up out of his chair and took a few turns up and down the floor, hands behind his back, marshaling his thoughts for another meticulously painstaking recountal of a long and intricate tangle of events. At last he dropped back into his chair. “All right, old man. Here’s something that hairs on pestles and stopped cuckoo clocks and ultra-violet rays won’t give. It’s stuff that little Johnny Jump-up-first-on-the-job got—and had partly, at that, in the bargain.”

Whereupon he began with the beginning of that day, from the time he started to his uncle’s and entered that express company auction, to the later visit of the Jap, and on up past the bewildering sequence of the day’s events. As he talked, the newspaperman leaned forward in his Morris chair, farther and farther; his cigar went out in his tense interest. And Halsey left out nothing. Everything, clear up to his discovery of Proctor’s body amid the wreckage of his test tubes and the spilled Mazoru-Ikeuna, as well as his finding of both heel indentation and brass medal where the latter had been flung under the wire-wound chair, he detailed. He even took his story on further—to his visit to the Turkish bath and the high spots of the discussion between himself and Roger Halsey, in particular the manner is which it had been so easy for outsiders to follow him early that day. At last he was done. He took from his coat pocket the piece of hard white electric-furnace lining, and tossed it over to the other.

“There it is,” he said briefly. “And she’s in the room adjoining. They do say she’ll come out O.K., though.”

Baxter, lump of hard refractory paste in hand, made but one comment: “Some story for fair, Halse.” He examined the heel indentation in the piece of plaster-like substance. “Well, this shows glaringly conclusively, doesn’t it, that some outfit—some outfit either with that Jap, or on his tail, connected your 810½ Tower Court and Proctor’s laboratory together very neatly. This is the damning link all right. Wonder who she’s playing with, poor kid?”

“She’s playing with the wrong bunch, it seems,” said Halsey dryly, “for the big fellow with the brown goatee didn’t pull his blow much when he knocked her out.”

“’Twould have been a ludicrous thing in a way, eh, Halse, if the big fellow had been playing the game for the same outfit who was using her, and had merely unknowingly handed a little confederate of his own the count of ten! Halse, when she passed you back that card with the Mazoru-Ikeuna label drawn out on its uppermost side, did you catch any kind of look in her bewitchingly wondrous orbs? I say bewitchingly wondrous, because you dilated at some length on the charm of those—er—purple-velvet eyes.”

“Did I? Do tell! Well, answering your query, I must say that she seemed to take me in really critically for the first time. The impression it gives me right now in retrospect, is that her gaze was the gaze of one who was sent here knowing only that there was a bottle of some sort of Jap liquid in this house, but that she wasn’t given—or didn’t have—the identity of the lodger who had it; and that she knew at that moment, for the first time, that I would be the one she’d have to direct her efforts at.”

“Not like the big boy with the goatee who saw the afternoon run glinting down through the top of that folding door crack over there, and thence through the top of the liquid, and knew exactly which room he was to make for, eh?”

“No. Say, Artemus, what’s the last news on that gray Cyclops car? Did it really manage to slip through that mesh of squad cars and traffic coppers? Why—the info for catching it was on the police radio before he could have gotten a half-mile away in any direction.”

Baxter opened his breast pocket and took from it a small clipping which had been tarn from an evening paper. Its pink tint indeed proclaimed it to have been part of an Evening Brevities, one of the tabloid sheets. “Here’s the final outcome,” he said. “Seven o’clock edition. The Scandal Horn itself! I remembered your asking me to get that specific information from police radio earlier today—so I recognized the story the minute I lamped it tonight.”

Halsey took the clipping. It was brief, as was to be expected in Evening Brevities. It was headed simply:

GRAY GHOST CAR ELUDES PERFECT POLICE RING

and the only real worth-while information, apparently, held in its two hundred words was that neither had the owner of the car been arrested in his machine, nor had the deserted machine itself been picked up anywhere. In fact, the paragraph stated that a Mrs. Mehitable Loris, owner of a rooming-house at Number 1008½ Tower Court, had been knocked down by a sneak thief, described fully by an Adolf Turtzenganger, a Tower Square mendicant, who saw the man execute the bit of violence and speed away in his waiting Cyclops car.

Halsey smiled in spite of himself. But at length his smile faded. “Well, that’s the end of that then,” he commented grumpily. “If they’d have gotten that bird we might have had—”

“—the man who killed Proctor?” said Baxter.

“Or else the man who handed Hemingway the pestle,” amended Halsey laconically. “Gad, Artemus, wouldn’t your Sherlockdom down there be wild if they knew the dazzling connections that exist between this apparent landlady-slugging job and this Bush Bourse murder?”

“What I find myself wondering,” remarked Baxter dreamily, ignoring the question, “is whether Proctor might have been murdered for the contents of that blue test tube instead of just to prevent his analyzing it?”

“Well, it went down in the crash, luckily,” Halsey rejoined succinctly, “and distributed itself into the circumambient atmosphere. The aqueous or solvent part of it, anyway. The only thing I can see that might make that Mazoru-Ikeuna valuable is about a half-pound of radium in each liquid ounce.”

Baxter smiled: “Sherlockdom were wondering if he had any radioactive stuff on his premises that thieves might want to steal. But the radioactometer, brought along by Herr-Professor Hockstader with his ultra-violet lamp shows no radio-active stuff in the entire chemical laboratory. No radium. Had there been any in the fat test-tubeful you say you gave Proctor, it would still be in the blue residue left. Yes, the stain. Hockstader stood his machine, I recall, right over part of that blue deposit on the soapstone shelf. Its flicker-vanes never even sighed. And the machine will show radium, you know anywhere within 40 feet of itself.”

“Then that’s out.”

“Yes. Indubitably.” Baxter paused, a frown between his eyes. “Since the Jap had in his possession the name of your much-required Hemingway—his card, in fact—it seems to confirm the probability that the Jap himself, rather than some other individual or clique, is back of Proctor’s murder—may have been actually in on it; if not, then that he provided sonic further helper, white or yellow, to go along with Hemingway. But that hip fellow with the goatee! Damn! They all move in and out like checkers—but always toward Mazoru-lkeuna, in amounts large or small. There’s a devilishly obscure tangle of motives, facts and people around that stuff, Halse, and this heel indentation, connecting Proctor’s lab and your domicile here, plus Hemingway’s name at Proctor’s dead fingers and on this Honorable Meester Sumiko’s card here that you’ve been carrying casually about in your pockets, show only that Proctor’s death was a more or less inevitable result of that tangle—but throw nary light on who are radii, and who are cross-ties, in that web.” He was silent again. “So Proctor, as you told your uncle, was a clever verbal poker player when it came to getting at the bottom of any yarn told him?”

“The cleverest ever, Artemus. If some individual or even some outfit sent up that Hemingway white man to bunk Proctor a little on the matter of the blue liquid—Wen would have gotten facts out of him like a dip extracts wallets at a Labor Day parade. Most naïve he could be—but clever as hell all the while. Proctor should have been a prosecuting attorney. He’d have made a reputation just extracting facts out of lying witnesses for the opposition. Instead, however, he devoted his career to extracting information as to the constituency of unknown chemical compounds, and so forth.”

Baxter rocked gently to and fro, humming a little tune. Suddenly he spoke:

“Halse, you say you found this girl, who’s in the next room, sitting on the bench at the top of your steps when you got back from that impromptu television performance you horned in on at the Electrical Manufacturers’ Temple?”

“Yes.”

“Have you any idea of exactly what time that was?”

“I have—exactly. It was a few minutes after half-past two—two minutes after, to be precise.”

“How the devil do you happen to be so sure?”

“Because the taxi-chronometer read three minutes after the half. And the driver asked me, when I paid him off, if I could tell him whether his chronometer was right or not. I looked at my wrist watch—and told him he was right, outside of being only a minute fast.”

“I see. Well, Halse, that girl obviously wasn’t on hand during the actual murder—making three people present, instead of two—since the killing took place five blocks away, and after you descended on her, as well. In fact, when you came upon her, Proctor, who didn’t leave the Empress Eugenie Cafe till a quarter after two, probably hadn’t quite even reached Bush Bourse. Or else was just entering his lab. But Halse, her presence in that laboratory some time previous to when you found her does threaten to change the whole murder picture.”

“In what way?”

“If, by the remotest of chances, she had handled that pestle. For that would at once withdraw one set of finger prints.”

“Well—that’s true. But what can we do to find out anything on that—without blowing the whole inside stuff we have to the department?”

“Hm. Let’s see. I think that’s easy enough at that, Halse. For one thing, I always jot down the thumb formula of any set of finger prints of record in any case—that is, when the Doctors de Crime are willing to give it to me! And Sinjohn had no objections this evening.” Baxter withdrew a notebook from his breast pocket, and opened it up. “There were no thumb prints in this case, because in both instances the pestle was gripped by the right hand, and the thumb overlay the right index finger. But I’ve got the index finger formula of each of those sets: of impressions scrawled down here—all more or less Greek to me, of course. And there’s a kid over in my boarding house—about seventeen—who’s kicked in with a hundred dollars for a mail-order course in Dactyloscopy. Of course he can’t get a job on a fool mail-order course like that. But he knows his stuff pretty well. And once before he figured out perfectly for me the formula of a finger print I snitched off a drunk nigger locked up over in the Grand Crossing police station. And the drunk nigger—ar I’d had a hunch—was Mose Dryly, the suspect in the Baier Murder Case. You may not remember it. I wasn’t sufficiently ahead of the police to scoop ’em. But if I could catch this girl’s prints—just her right index finger—I could phone you back tonight before midnight where we stand. But how can I get the print?”

“Why not step back in,” said Halsey in a low voice, “and tell the nurse you’re from North Central police station—fly-mug—and have to take a record of all accident cases in the district in case of death—and no identification. She saw us come in together—but that doesn’t mean anything. And I’ll back it up if she asks me afterward. Here—” Halsey rose, and stepped to his telephone table. He opened the shallow drawer it contained. “Here’s an ink pad, and a note-pad of little blank sheets. I’ll stay put here in the meantime, so as not to crab your game.”

“Fine. I’ll do just what you describe.”

Baxter slipped the ink pad in one side coat pocket, and the note pad of blank sheets in the other. Cap on head, he left the room, closing the door quietly behind him. He was gone for a full minute or so. There was no conversation, however, in the adjoining room. Halsey waited, curiously. At length the newspaperman returned and doffed his cap again, He grinned.

“Our case, happily, remains—as ’twas!” he said. “Two men were present on the job.”

“How come? You don’t mean to say you figure out fingerprint formulae right from—from the—the—well—the subject?”

“No. Say, that patient in there is a darned pretty thing, Halse. Mighty cute-looking! Lying as quiet as the grave, though, hardly breathing. Though breathing regularly, I will say. Well, I had a good chance to feast my eyes—because she was alone. The nurse had stepped downstairs, I guess, leaving the door just an inch ajar. So I unhooked the reading light hanging on the head of the bed, swung it around down to her fingertips to conduct operations, and snapped it on. She’s in such a stupor that she hardly knew I turned her fingers about. But Halse—her right index finger is a ‘zero’—or what I, with my limited finger-print ‘terminology—call a ‘double-zero’—that being a person who has no finger.”

“Why,” put in Halsey belligerently, “she’s got fingers. Dainty little fingers, too. She’s—”

“Come, come, don’t get belligerent. Of course she’s got fingers. But Halse, sometime in her past life she’s fallen or tripped with one hand against something red hot—or perhaps even white hot. I imagine it happened when she was a kid in rompers. And the balls of both her index and second finger are smoothly scarified—burn scar tissue, it is—the ridges entirely destroyed at the centers and irregularly for quite a ways out. You can see it plainly with your naked eye. I tried a print—but it came out solid where the most important part of a pattern should be. So that eliminates her, Halse, as having even touched that pestle. For the two index finger prints on tap downtown are fully recordable, decodable, formulizable. Neither one is a zero, double zero, or anything like that. See?”

“Yes. And I’m glad to hear it,” added Halsey. “For we’re holding out badly enough on the police as it is, without clouding up that killing further.”

The newspaperman sank back in his chair. He was silent again. Again he hummed that reflective little tune.

“What time,” he asked suddenly, “are you to go back and get the translation of those Russian letters on that brass geegaw? That seems to me to be the clue extraordinary—to have a damned odd story back of it. From your description of it, I can’t fathom what sort of piece of jewelry it is.”

“Well, I skipped a small part of that in telling you the facts,” explained Halsey, “but knowing that Alexis Orski, the man who is president and grand mogul of this opposing commercial firm I told you about, was a native-born Russian, and needing a quick translation of it so that I’d have the whole deck of cards ready for you when you came at 8 tonight, I took the daring chance of going straight to him and killing two birds with one stone. I hoped not only to get a quick translation of it, but to see the damned blackguard who’s trying to do me out of a little fortune of $90,000.”

Baxter smiled. “That was certainly killing two birds all right, all right, with one brass stone! But when do you get to see Orski? To my mind, that medal may mean something vital that will help to solve a part or all of this tangle.”

“Well, that was his place I just called up. As I told you, he went off today through another door without helping me out, and took the medal with him. Maybe I’ll get a letter from him at the Sun tomorrow, addressed ‘Sportfellow,’ with the translation in it. Maybe again I won’t. There’s no reason in the world for Orski’s not giving it. It’s nothing to him, of course. His man, however, says that Senor Orski had to take a flying trip out of town—I don’t know whether he meant a quick trip, or a trip by air—but that I’d have to call the offices tomorrow. So—tomorrow it is, confound it.”

“Well, it’ll have to be then. For you let yourself in for that, when you allowed that valuable clue to slide out of your hands—even though it went only thirty feet away. However, don’t look so crestfallen, Halse. After all, so far as I can see, this thing is developing into a news beat that shouldn’t by any means break so early as tomorrow morning’s edition. We wouldn’t think of spilling this stuff right now and spoiling it all. We want to hand Vinegar and Paprika a real worked up front page story, complete from A to Izzard.”

“You feel pretty certain then, Artemus,” Halsey asked troubledly, “that the Jap will show tomorrow morning as per schedule?”

“I do. Hell’s a-popping to recover that stuff. That is, your Jap will show if he was not personally involved in that Bush Bourse murder; by that I mean if no finger prints in that laboratory can possibly be tied to him. If any can be, then mark my words an emissary will come along instead—another Jap, very possibly. If either Sumiko—or the substitute, in the other event—are nabbed here by concealed Sherlocks because you, theoretically, have just happened to remember the name on the back of that card, whether or not you’ve even retained the slip of pasteboard, and because you have seen the later more detailed newspaper accounts concerning Proctor’s murder and have apprised the police tonight that an Oriental gent left a card here today with the same name on it that Proctor left scrawled on the floor—the captive will have his bland story about the brother in Tokyo, and he’ll stick to it till hell freezes over. If it’s a Jap prisoner, nothing will ever shake anything else out of him. They don’t even emote when the lie-detector is hooked onto their blood-pressure and respiration! And they cover themselves neatly, always. Yes, Halse, I’m convinced in my bones that somebody will show tomorrow morning—on the dot.”

“Just how convinced are you,” asked Halsey curtly, “that a burglar may not come a-burgling in my boudoir here tonight—or that a flock of trained Japs, working up on each other’s shoulders like Zouave acrobats, may not clamber up and over my front window sill?”

Baxter laughed. “After that murder story has broken, the way it has? Will any person—or persons unknown—take a chance on clambering squarely up into a troop of waiting Sherlocks here, and clinching it 100-percent thereby that they’re pulling a deep and desperate game, and therefore giving the last possible prima facie evidence that they’re criminally involved in that murder which occurred five blocks or so from here? No!”

“No? No—unless the fool Jap—he was a sort of broken-down prematurely oldish beggar—hasn’t got next yet to the fact that he did leave a nasty link behind him connecting him with the Proctor murder. I think, with you, though, that he will remember he did—but will be in doubt whether I didn’t toss the card out right away, much less give any attention to its reverse side. However, I’m putting my window down from the top tonight, instead of up from the bottom, and sticking in the ancient burglar spike you see hanging over there as well. Also I’m sleeping tonight with my clay-pigeon automatic under my pillow—and God help the human pigeon, white or yellow, who tries to sashay inside here. He’ll find worse than a troop of your so-called Sherlocks from the bureau.”

“Don’t kill off a piping swell story like this one threatens to become,” said Baxter apprehensively, “by stopping anybody’s mouth with hot lead. Have a heart, Halse! Have a heart. For we’re going to play some interesting poker of our own tomorrow, as I shall relate. But now let me have a look at that bottle. I’m more than interested in the fatal bluing.”

“I’ve got it locked up in my storage niche downstairs,” said Halsey, “which niche not even an Ouija board could discover from its companion niches on each aide. It, and that skullbox, as Leets, the English actor, described the wooden container to be in that cablegram I laid on the arm of your chair a while back, and which you haven’t read. I’ll—”

But at this juncture a timid knock sounded on the door of the room, and Halsey, opening it, displayed to both their gazes a negro girl in lace apron, with white teeth and rolling black eyes.

“Mist’ Halsah, Mis’ Mohley done git back from Elgin uhly from huh sistah’s weddin’. Uhliah dan w’at she fink she ’uz gonna git back. An’ she wantin’ to see you ’bout dat young lady you rent de fus’ flo’ back pahloh to today. She readin’ uf huh Bible and she vehy upset at de repotahs an’ policemans dat been pestifyin’ de place. An’ she ketched ol’ Mist’ Daladieh a-makin’ coffee on a ’lectric plate in his room when she snu’k up dis ebenin’ to de fo’th flo’ to look aroun’. Afta’ dat she des’ on de wah path fo’ anybody’s sculp. An’ on top o’ all dis, Mist’ Halsah, de gyardnah ovah at de Squa’ done stop in tonight, an’ tol’ huh dat huh cat done been kicked off de front po’ch today by dat robbah. She—she vehy mad. If ’twasn’t dem Beetitudes she’s readin’ right now in de Good Book, I clah to goodnes’ I fink she giv’ ev’body in de house notice to move.”

“Thanks, Chloe. I’m going down anyway to my storeroom locker and I’ll drop in at Mrs. Morely’s headquarters at once.”

The negro girl vanished down the basement stairs. Halsey turned back to his companion, “Make yourself comfortable, Artemus, and—no, don’t make yourself comfortable. Go upstairs on the second floor to a room that has the figure 8 gilded on its door. To the back of the hall up there. The room is empty. It belonged to an Armenian gentleman who departed our cultured precincts here some time back. We’ll do our examining of that bottle away and far from the front of this house. I sally forth, in fact, to bring to you now that very object. And I go also to do some profoundly artful explaining to a pious lady who’s as austere as your own dear city ed. Your ed.—not mine, thank the Lord. Boy, I’ve got to watch my step now. In addition to maybe losing 90,000 cold dollars, I maybe am going to lose my happy home as well. Lord only knows. Well, see you later in No. 8 upstairs.”

And closing the door on Baxter, who sat regarding him amusedly, Sir Alfred Leets’ cablegram in his hand, Halsey wound his way troubledly down the basement stairs.