The box from japan, p.29
The Box from Japan, page 29
“Quite so. I’ll remember that too.”
“Now is there anything I can bring from the drugstore, either now or later, for Miss Loris?”
The striped-clad woman shook her head: “Nothing just now, Mr. Halsey. I have all the necessary drugs in my case, and Dr. Anders cautioned me that his injection of Myolpin will probably not wear off, so far as her stupor goes, for from 24 to 30 hours. He told you of that, did he not? It’s a drug that, so far as we are roughly able to guess its therapeutic action, has a sort of constricting or contracting action on the capillaries in the membranes of the brain—something like ephedrin when locally applied to the nasal membranes, or—well, you’ve heard of adrenalin, too, probably?”
“Yes, he told me about it. Is she all right?”
“I’m sure she is. Breathing very light, but very regularly The Myolpin is almost a specific for her particular kind of trauma. It’s the one thing that will sidetrack brain concussion and even brain fever. She has received a terrible blow, that’s certain. I’ve removed her clothing now—I found a very charming blue silk nightgown in her traveling bag—and put that on her. Everything is all right, Mr. Halsey, as right as it—can be.”
“Good. I’m glad of that.”
He took his departure. He hurried along Tower Court to Chicago Avenue, and thence west on that street, which grew somewhat busier and more active as he passed Rush, Wabash, State and Dearborn. Entering the low Clark Street entrance of the old lemon-colored office building with its many Teutonic-like turrets scattered here and there, he rang the bell several times on the elevator shaft in which he had ascended earlier in the day, only to discover after a couple of rings that right in front of his nose was a faded sign which read: “Out of Order. Walk Up.” And as he digested its contents he heard from far down at the bottom of the double shaft the clank of wrenches against intricate machinery.
He wasted no more time in trying to summon the car which, unlike its companion that had stood darkened and immobile on the foyer landing itself when he had called earlier that day and which stood there even now, in fact, undoubtedly had been stalled on a higher floor, and commenced instead the long trudge to the fifth floor—the sixth, did one count that last notch of the journey which one had to walk anyway: from fifth to “clerestory.” Reaching the fifth floor, he passed a tow-headed janitor mopping up, who greeted him with a friendly “Watch yer step, mayster—the floor she is slipp’ry”; and threading his way over the slippery tessellated blocks of tiny marble to the base of the narrow iron stairway which carried one up to the penthouse or roof structure itself, he ascended it, hand on iron rail. Pushing in one of the two swinging doors at the top, he stepped inside, a grin of greeting on his face, but before he got more than one foot over the threshold he stopped dead in his tracks, startled to the point where he gave a perceptible jump. For the fraction of a second he stood thus, his eyes protruding from his head. Then he spun like a flash on his heel and dashed down the narrow flight of steps till he collided with the janitor whom he had passed coming up, now moving his bucket with its mop-squeezing mechanism to a new position on the hard, patterned floor.
“You—you saw me come up just now?” he stammered hurriedly.
The Swede—for such he undoubtedly was—stared, mop in hand: “Yass, Aye see you. Vy?”
“Then don’t forget it—whatever you do,” Halsey warned. “And skip downstairs fast as hell—and get a doctor—or anybody that you can get. For your tenant upstairs, Proctor the chemist, has been murdered in his laboratory!”
CHAPTER XXV
A Message from the Dead
The Swede, mop ludicrously in hand, dripping soapy water, stared in helpless dumbfoundment at Halsey.
“Mayster Proctor murde—”
“Yes, murdered. Dead. I’m certain of it. Bring a doctor though anyway. Hurry, man. Hurry. I’ll be back upstairs.” And Halsey turned like a top and dashed up that narrow flight of iron stairs again.
This time he pushed his way in through the swinging doors, undeterred by the ugly sight which had met his eyes the first time the fraction of a minute before. Halfway between the door and the laboratory bench, on the floor with its huge square white tiles, lay Proctor’s body clad in its rubber apron. The black, slightly curly hair and the dark skin of the back of the neck showed only too plainly his identity. One side of the head was red with blood, and a trail of the sticky red drops ran from where the body lay sprawled on its stomach clear back to a point far across the room near the opposite wall. Indeed, it was more than plain that Proctor had crawled from the point where he had been struck down clear fifteen or eighteen feet and then had collapsed utterly.
Halsey was kneeling at Proctor’s body in an instant, but it was as he had instinctively known when he had dashed down the stairs to summon the Swedish janitor. The young chemist was dead. The swarthy tint to his neck, a natural concomitant as it was to his curly black hair, suggested falsely that warm blood still coursed through his veins, but the back of that neck, to Halsey’s experimental touch with the tips of two fingers, was cold, cold indeed. Proctor had been struck down beyond doubt some time earlier in the afternoon. And unconsciousness, followed by death, had intervened as he had crawled a full eighteen feet across the room trying to get to the outer hallway.
Dazedly Halsey rose to his feet. He gazed slowly around the laboratory trying to assure himself that this was not some grotesque illusion; that he was face to face with murder itself. And he became suddenly struck by the atmosphere of total confusion which the well-regulated laboratory bore, in comparison to its condition when he had left it at 12:30 that day or shortly thereafter. Test tubes were scattered and broken into bits, bottles were overturned; iron ring stands and Bunsen burners lay on the floor. One of the heavy acid containers had been shoved far out of line from its original position against the wall as he recalled it from that noon hour. There was every sign that two human beings, one of whom was the dead man lying on his face on the floor, had struggled and surged back and forth among those fragile implements of science.
Halsey’s eyes, traveling over the farther laboratory shelf, halted at the sight of a huge and irregular vivid blue area on the smooth stone surface of that shelf. That the area had been an oily azure puddle a short while ago, and that the puddle had entirely evaporated leaving only the brilliant stain of some dissolved pigment, was more than evident. It had been, indeed, nothing more nor less than a puddle of Mazoru-Ikeuna! The picture it presented on that soapstone shelf, moreover, proclaimed that the huge test tube full of that unknown Japanese liquid, which Halsey had left, had never been analyzed, for the wooden holder of the test tube had been accidentally overturned in the struggle—either before the struggle commenced, or while it was going on. Just when the overturning had taken place there was no telling, but the large blue area on the soapstone shelf spread forth fan-like from the glasseous mouth of the overturned test tube itself, showing that it was the precious Mazoru-Ikeuna and that that sample at least had been irretrievably lost in this laboratory so far as mixing it with reagents and dropping it in retorts went. It was decidedly easy to follow its course. The brilliantly colored liquid had first poured entirely over the white form-slip on which Proctor had jotted Halsey’s initials and affixed to the edge of the test tube, undoubtedly entirely obscuring the mere black from Proctor’s pencil. After gathering in its first puddle, held in leash by some high inherent surface tension, it had broken bounds after finding some invisible slope in the laboratory shelf, and had run in an undulating path to a point far down the laboratory table where it turned suddenly, betraying how it had found a road to the edge, dripping from there into a sticky pool on the floor. Sticky at first, no doubt: now only a big bright blue stain, that was all, with outward-radiating spatter-lines showing how it had splashed as it dripped. Its hydrogenous or solvent constituent had now entirely vanished. But Halsey’s eyes, following the crooked path taken by the liquid, came to rest on something else. During that short visit he had made here during the noon hour, Proctor, after washing them up at the sink, had deposited on the working shelf his stone mortar and pestle, the former appreciably higher than its own diameter, and none too stable therefore. No longer now, though, did they stand upright, handle of pestle protruding from mortar in exact accordance with the conventional drugstore sign, the world over. For the mortar was overturned, exactly where it had stood, and the pestle now lay on the slatestone shelf, but in a position a considerable distance from its companion piece, and, although not in contact now with the evaporated blue streamlet, or what had once been the fairly fluidic streamlet, showed a generous blue stain along one entire side of its grayish colored handle—an irregular stain, to be sure, but one which indicated only too plainly by its presence and its one-sidedness that the pestle had been the object which, rolling some distance from the overturned mortar, and to a stop, had first diverted the longitudinally meandering thick stream of mysterious blue off into a path at right angles to itself, and thence to the floor. That the pestle constituted, moreover, the weapon with which Proctor had been dealt a smashing blow on the skull, seemed plain, for it now lay not at the point where the stream had turned, but on the very edge of the soapstone shelf where the slightest touch would send it crashing onto the expensive tile flooring beneath. And overwhelmed as he was by the scene, Halsey realized that Proctor himself, had he used his two archaic utensils again, would never have left the pestle in such a precariously unstable position, any more than he would have let that chromatic stream, had he himself overturned that test tube, smear up his beautiful sandpapered shelf and white floor.
Still dazed, Halsey walked over to the shelf, and surveyed matters more closely. The form slip attached to the overturned test tube, and bearing his address, was now illegible just as he had surmised, being dyed in most of its entirety a deep bright blue with the exception of one corner from which stared the printed black letters “SAMP—” which were, as Halsey, remembered, part of the words “SAMPLE FROM.” But surveying things as he did, he took exceeding care, though, to touch nothing. Nothing. Thus far things had happened so rapidly that the Swedish janitor had either not yet reached a doctor, or else, on account of the broken elevators, one he had summoned had not yet reached the top floor. Whereupon something told Halsey to note the time carefully, and his eyes roved at once to the great cuckoo clock whose arrogant cuckoo had piqued him so markedly earlier in the day.
Here again—and had his eyes not been hopelessly riveted to Proctor’s body when he had entered that laboratory, he would surely have noted it then—were the indisputable signs of the struggle. The clock was badly awry on the wall. The lead-weighted wooden pendulum had been jerked completely off, as though one of the two participants in the unequal fight had reached out his hand to steady himself as he was falling. The hands of the clock stood exactly at 19 minutes to 3. At 2:41, then, or a few seconds before or after, the blow had been struck that had felled Proctor. Indeed, if the pendulum had not been jerked off by Proctor’s assailant, then—and this seemed borne out by the fact that the blood spots started near the base of the timepiece—Proctor had dropped in his tracks right there, and in falling had reached out a hand wildly and grabbed that oscillating plumb, only to pull it and its long stick entirely off, and to twist the clock above violently off from its normal position on the wall.
Stupidly waiting for help to come from below, Halsey walked uneasily around the dead man’s body, trying to collect his wits. Strangely disquieting thoughts were beginning to enter his mind. He had given Proctor a generous amount of the blue Mazoru-Ikeuna to analyze. Was it possible that his own quarters on Tower Court had been carefully watched that morning by a confederate, white or yellow, of the wily Jap who had climbed openly aboard the Chicago Avenue street car, and that he had been in turn followed a few minutes after from Tower Court back to his Monroe Street workshop—whose location, incidentally, he had guarded from the Jap—and from there to the laboratory in Bush Bourse? It was possible, of a certainty, for he had taken the State Street subway to his workshop; and in turn the Clark Street subway to Bush Bourse; a number of people had boarded the train with him at the first embarkation, and a very, very large number at the second. And on the latter leg of that trip, he had furthermore carried the striking Oriental box openly and unwrapped under his arm. If this were the case, then had somebody, the same someone who had shadowed him, after some watching downstairs for Proctor’s return from his noon hour absence, entered the laboratory and killed the young chemist? He shook his head helplessly, The theory, startling as it was, was subject to no corroboration, and probably never could be, for no way would ever exist for knowing whether he had been followed. No way—except this mere supposition—existed by which he could be even reasonably certain that outsiders had established the existence of a connection between one, Carr Halsey, and one, Wendell Proctor—between 810½, Tower Court and the pent-house of Bush Bourse. Of a surety, that was the thing that would have to be proven, to make certain that that blue oily liquid had been in some way the direct cause of Proctor’s death. That blue oily liquid! He shook his head again, miserably. What in God’s name was there about it that gave to it its fatal proclivity for causing death and violence to follow constantly in its wake? It came upon him at this moment that the advantages to him in that blue liquid toward finding Clifford Hemingway were advantages that were costing a tremendous lot—to other people!
He took a few more steps ’round the body again, and on this circuit his foot crunched against something hard on the floor. At first sight he could not exactly discern what his foot had struck, for the whiteness of the thing was practically that of the whiteness of the tile against which it lay. But making out its outline at last, he stooped over mechanically and picked it up. For a second he did not perceive just what it was, but as his eyes roved instinctively to the electrical furnace across the room he discovered its identity. It was one of the smaller gobs of white refractory lining which lay about on the tile flooring at various distances from the mixing trough, and it had been oddly flattened out by the impact of someone’s heel. Now it was hard as a rock; it had solidified much as plaster of Paris does.
But as he stared down at the indentation in it, his eyes opened wider. Inside, where the heel had struck—and it had been not a French heel, but a sensibly broad heel—was a peculiar impression shaped like a little half moon with a five-pointed star touching it; nothing else, in fact, but the mark of an ultra-fancy heel plate used to prevent too rapid wear of the most vulnerable portion of a shoe. He thought puzzledly, intensely, bewilderedly. There was something strikingly familiar—terribly familiar—in that curious design, yet where on earth would he ever have seen a five-pointed star touching a—Now his mind-gropings stopped with an appalling jolt, and his breath left him with a curious little jerk. He recalled more than well now where he had seen that design before. It was a heel plate; and it was on the heel of a certain dainty shoe. And that shoe, in turn, he had withdrawn himself, sole upward, noting the newness of everything about it, from the silken foot of a girl who lay in a sunny room only four short blocks away. When he had stared naïvely at that upturned shoe, scrutinizing it guilelessly to see how new or how old it was, he had not been conscious of certain insignificant details that had impressed themselves on his subconscious observance. But one of those points now sprung to the forefront of his mind. The left upper point of the five-pointed star had been broken off about halfway from its base, because of a defectively cast plate, or else had never even been on the plate. He gazed down at this reversed impression. The identical point of this star, were it reversed, was absent.
The same star! The same heelplate!
His proof had come quicker than he thought; his proof that some person, or persons unknown, in the outside world—some one person, at the least, other than himself—had known of a connection established that day between Carr Halsey and Wendell Proctor; between 810½ Tower Court and the penthouse laboratory of Bush Bourse. So he had been followed, after all? And this girl’s heel had unwittingly betrayed that following.
His face bore a grim, wretched look. What strange web of circumstance, what bizarre pattern of relationship, was Fate weaving back of the scenes? Exactly what part was Miss Loris playing in that web? What, indeed, had she been doing in this place? And only now for the first time, strangely, was he struck by the fact which should, he realized, have struck him before—yet which hitherto had not even entered his mind: had she been a stranger in Chicago, how would she ever have strayed to little secluded, out-of-the-way Tower Court in her search for lodgings? What kind of a tangle was she involved in—what kind of an international tangle, perhaps—connected with that bottle of dark, oily Mazoru-Ikeuna?
And now, far downstairs, he heard many footsteps tramping. The Swedish janitor was coming at last with someone. He hastily slipped the hard piece of refractory lining into his coat pocket. He stepped over to the body and stood looking down at it. “Poor, poor Wen,” he murmured. “Murdered—to stop your mouth—or else your chemical manipulations on that cursed sample of blue liquid. Murdered. And yet why? Why? Was it only to destroy the evidence—or was it to stop your mouth in the bargain? Or did they try to get that sample back first by a lot of hooey? And did you play your old clever Wendelian game of verbal poker with ’em—your old ‘naïveté game,’ as you always called it, which took in the smartest bunk artists that ever tried to put anything over on you? I wonder. I wonder if by any chance you did trick ’em into putting just a card or two too many on the table? Jupiter, if you ever tricked ’em into a word-fest, they were sunk! And if you did, no wonder they had to hand you the count. No won—”
