The jacques futrelle meg.., p.2
The Jacques Futrelle Megapack, page 2
“No,” I replied. “What was it?”
“You were poisoned,” he said. “The poison was a deadly one—corrosive sublimate, or bichlorid or mercury. The shock was very severe; but you will be all right in—”
“Poisoned!” I exclaimed, aghast. “Who poisoned me? Why?”
“You poisoned yourself,” he replied testily. “It was your own carelessness. Nine out of ten persons handle poison as if it was candy, and you are like all the rest.”
“But I couldn’t have poisoned myself,” I protested. “Why, I have had no occasion to handle poisons—not for—I don’t know how long.”
“I do know,” he said. “It was nearly a year ago when you handled this; but corrosive sublimate is always dangerous.”
The tone irritated me, the impassive arrogance of the little man inflamed my reeling brain, and I am not sure that I did not shake my finger in his face. “If I was poisoned,” I declared with some heat, “it was not my fault. Somebody gave it to me; somebody tried to—”
“You poisoned yourself,” said The Thinking Machine again impatiently. “You talk like a child.”
“How do you know I poisoned myself? How do you know I ever handled a poison? And how do you know it was a year ago, if I did?”
The Thinking Machine regarded me coldly for an instant, and then those strange eyes of his wandered upward again. “I know those things,” he said, “just as I know your name, address, and profession from cards I found in your pockets; just as I know you smoke, from half a dozen cigars on you; just as I know that you are wearing those clothes for the first time this winter; just as I know you lost your wife within a few months; that you kept house then; and that your house was infested with insects. I know just as I know everything else—by the rules of inevitable logic.”
My head was whirling. I stared at him in blank astonishment. “But how do you know those things?” I insisted in bewilderment.
“The average person of today,” replied the scientist, “knows nothing unless it is written down and thrust under his nose. I happen to be a physician. I saw you fall, and went to you, my first thought being of heart trouble. Your pulse showed it was not that, and it was obviously not apoplexy. Now, there was no visible reason why you should have collapsed like that. There had been no shot; there was no wound; therefore, poison. An examination confirmed this first hypothesis; your symptoms showed that the poison was bichlorid of mercury. I put you in a cab and brought you here. From the fact that you were not dead then I knew that your system had absorbed only a minute quantity of poison—a quantity so small that it demonstrated instantly that there had been no suicidal intent, and indicated, too, that no one else had administered it. If this was true, I knew—I didn’t guess, I knew—that the poisoning was accidental. How accidental?
“My first surmise, naturally, was that the poison had been absorbed through the mouth. I searched your pockets. The only thing I found that you would put into your mouth were the cigars. Were they poisoned? A test showed they were, all of them. With intent to kill? No. Not enough poison was used. Was the poison a part of the gum used to bind the cigar? Possible, of course, but not probable. Then what?” He lowered his eyes and squinted at me suddenly, aggressively. I shook my head, and, as an afterthought, closed my gaping mouth.
“Perhaps you carried corrosive sublimate in your pocket. I didn’t find any; but perhaps you once carried it. I tore out the coat pocket in which I found the cigars and subjected it to the test. At some time there had been corrosive sublimate, in the form of powder or crystals, in the pocket, and in some manner, perhaps because of an imperfection in the package, a minute quantity was loose in your pocket.
“Here was an answer to every question, and more; here was how the cigars were poisoned, and, in combination with the tailor’s tag inside your pocket, a short history of your life. Briefly it was like this: Once you had corrosive sublimate in your pocket. For what purpose? First thought—to rid your home of insects. Second thought—if you were boarding, married or unmarried, the task of getting rid of the insects would have been left to the servant; and this would possibly have been the case if you had been living at home. So I assumed for the instant that you were keeping house, and if keeping house, you were married—you bought the poison for use in your own house.
“Now, without an effort, naturally, I had you married, and keeping house. Then what? The tailor’s tag, with your name, and the date your clothing was made—one year and three months ago. It is winter clothing. If you had worn it since the poison was loose in your pocket the thing that happened to you tonight would have happened to you before; but it never happened before, therefore I assume that you had the poison early last spring, when insects began to be troublesome, and immediately after that you laid away the suit until this winter. I know you are wearing the suit for the first time this winter, because, again, this thing has not happened before, and because, too, of the faint odor of moth balls. A band of crape on your hat, the picture of a young woman in your watch, and the fact that you are now living at your club, as your bill for last month shows, establish beyond doubt that you are a widower.”
“It’s perfectly miraculous!” I exclaimed.
“Logic, logic, logic,” snapped the irritable little scientist. “You are a lawyer, you ought to know the correlation of facts; you ought to know that two and two make four, not sometimes but all the time.”
THE FIRST PROBLEM
That strange, seemingly inexplicable chain of circumstances which had to do with the mysterious disappearance of a famous actress, Irene Wallack, from her dressing room in a Springfield theater in the course of a performance, while the echo of tumultuous appreciation still rang in her ears, was perhaps the first problem which was not purely scientific that The Thinking Machine was ever asked to solve. The scientist’s aid was enlisted in this case by Hutchinson Hatch, reporter.
“But I am a scientist, a logician,” The Thinking Machine had protested. “I know nothing whatever of crime.”
“No one knows that a crime has been committed,” the reporter hastened to say.
“There is something far beyond the ordinary in this affair. A woman has disappeared, evaporated into thin air in the hearing, almost in sight, of her friends. The police can make nothing of it. It is a problem for a greater mind than theirs.”
Professor Van Dusen waved the newspaper man to a seat and himself sank back into a great cushioned chair in which his diminutive figure seemed even more childlike than it really was.
“Tell me the story,” he said petulantly, “All of it.”
The enormous yellow head rested against the chair back, the blue eyes squinted steadily upward, the slender fingers were pressed tip to tip. The Thinking Machine was in a receptive mood. Hatch was triumphant; he had had only a vague hope that he could interest this man in an affair which was as bizarre as it was incomprehensible.
“Miss Wallack is thirty years old and beautiful,” the reporter began. “As an actress she has won high recognition not only in this country but in England. You may have read something of her in the daily papers, and if—”
“I never read the papers,” the other interrupted curtly. “Go on.”
“She is unmarried, and as far as anyone knows, had no immediate intention of changing her condition,” Hatch resumed, staring curiously at the thin face of the scientist. “I presume she had admirers—most beautiful women of the stage have—but she is one whose life has been perfectly clean, whose record is an open book. I tell you this because it might have a bearing on your conclusion as to a possible reason for her disappearance.
“Now the actual circumstances of that disappearance. Miss Wallack has been playing in Shakespearean repertoire. Last week she was in Springfield. On Saturday night, which concluded her engagement there, she appeared as Rosalind in ‘As You Like It.’ The house was crowded. She played the first two acts amid great enthusiasm, and this despite the fact that she was suffering intensely from headache to which she was subject at times. After the second act she returned to her dressing room and just before the curtain went up for the third the stage manager called her. She replied that she would be out immediately. There seems no possible shadow of doubt that it was her voice.
“Rosalind does not appear in the third act until the curtain has been up for six minutes. When Miss Wallack’s cue came she did not answer it. The stage manager rushed to her door and again called her. There was no answer. Then, fearing that she might have fainted, he went in. She was not there. A hurried search was made without result, and the stage manager finally was compelled to announce to the audience that the sudden illness of the star would make it impossible to finish the performance.
“The curtain was lowered and the search resumed. Every nook and corner back of the footlights was gone over. The stage doorkeeper, William Meegan, had seen no one go out. He and a policeman had been standing at the stage door talking for at least twenty minutes. It is therefore conclusive that Miss Wallack did not leave by that exit. The only other way it was possible to leave the stage was over the footlights. Of course she didn’t go that way. Yet no trace of her has been found. Where is she?”
“The windows?” asked The Thinking Machine.
“The stage is below the street level,” explained Hatch. “The window of her dressing room, Room A, is small and barred with iron. It opens into an air shaft that goes straight up for ten feet, and that is covered with an iron grating fixed in the granite. The other windows on the stage are not only inaccessible but are also barred with iron. She could not have approached either of these windows without being seen by other members of the company or the stage hands.”
“Under the stage?” suggested the scientist.
“Nothing,” the reporter went on. “It is a large cemented basement which was vacant. It was searched, because there was of course a chance that Miss Wallack might have become temporarily unbalanced and wandered down there. There was even a search made of the flies—that is the galleries over the stage where the men who work the drop curtains are stationed.”
There was silence for a long time. The Thinking Machine twiddled his fingers and continued to stare upward. He had not looked at the reporter. He broke the silence after a time. “How was Miss Wallack dressed at the time of her disappearance?”
“In doublet and hose—that is, tights,” the newspaper man responded. “She wears that costume from the second act until practically the end of the play.”
“Was all her street clothing in her room?”
“Yes, everything, spread across an unopened trunk of costumes. It was all as if she had left the room to answer her cue—all in order even to an open box of chocolate-cream candy on her table.”
“No sign of a struggle, nor any noise heard?”
“No.”
“Nor trace of blood?”
“Nothing.”
“Her maid? Did she have one?”
“Oh, yes. I neglected to tell you that the maid, Gertrude Manning, had gone home immediately after the first act. She grew suddenly ill and was excused.”
The Thinking Machine turned his squint eyes on the reporter for the first time.
“Ill?” he repeated. “What was the matter?”
“That I can’t say,” replied the reporter.
“Where is she now?”
“I don’t know. Everyone forgot all about her in the excitement about Miss Wallack.”
“What kind of candy was it?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know that either.”
“Where was it bought?’”
The reporter shrugged his shoulders; that was something else he didn’t know.
The Thinking Machine shot out the questions aggressively, staring meanwhile steadily at Hatch, who squirmed uncomfortably. “Where is the candy now?” demanded the scientist.
Again Hatch shrugged his shoulders.
“How much did Miss Wallack weigh?”
The reporter was willing to guess at this. He had seen her half a dozen times.
“Between a hundred and thirty and a hundred and forty,” he ventured.
“Does there happen to be a hypnotist connected with the company?”
“I don’t know,” Hatch replied.
The Thinking Machine waved his slender hands impatiently; he was annoyed. “It is perfectly absurd, Mr. Hatch,” he expostulated, “to come to me with only a few facts and ask advice. If you had all the facts I might be able to do something; but this—”
The newspaper man was nettled. In his own profession he was accredited a man of discernment and acumen. He resented the tone, the manner, even the seemingly trivial questions, which the other asked. “I don’t see,” he began, “that the candy even if it had been poisoned as I imagine you think possible, or a hypnotist could have had anything to do with Miss Wallack’s disappearance. Certainly neither poison nor hypnotism would have made her invisible.”
“Of course you don’t see!” blazed The Thinking Machine. “If you did, you wouldn’t have come to me. When did this thing happen?”
“Saturday night, as I said,” the reporter informed him a little more humbly. “It closed the engagement in Springfield. Miss Wallack was to have appeared here in Boston tonight.”
“When did she disappear—by the clock, I mean?”
“The stage manager’s time slip shows that the curtain for the third act went up at nine-fortyone—he spoke to her, say, one minute before, or at nine-forty. The action of the play before she appears in the third act takes six minutes; therefore—”
“In precisely seven minutes a woman, weighing more than 130 pounds, certainly not dressed for the street, disappeared completely from her dressing room. It is now five-eighteen Monday afternoon. I think we may solve this crime within a few hours.”
“Crime?” Hatch repeated eagerly. “Do you imagine there is a crime then?”
Professor Van Dusen didn’t heed the question. Instead he rose and paced back and forth across the reception room half a dozen times, his hands behind his back and his eyes cast down. At last he stopped and faced the reporter, who had also risen.
“Miss Wallack’s company, I presume, with the baggage, is now in Boston,” he said. “See every male member of the company, talk to them and particularly study their eyes. Don’t overlook anyone, however humble. Also find out what became of the box of chocolate candy, and if possible how many pieces are out of it. Then report here to me. Miss Wallack’s safety may depend upon your speed and accuracy.”
Hatch was frankly startled. “How—” he began.
“Don’t stop to talk—hurry!” commanded The Thinking Machine. “I will have a cab waiting when you come back. We must get to Springfield.”
The newspaper man rushed away to obey orders. He didn’t understand them at all. Studying men’s eyes was not in his line; but he obeyed nevertheless. An hour and a half later he returned, to be thrust unceremoniously into a waiting cab by The Thinking Machine. The cab rattled away toward South Station, where the two men caught a train, just about to move out for Springfield. Once settled in their seats, the scientist turned to Hatch, who was nearly suffocating with suppressed information.
“Well?” he asked.
“I found out several things,” the reporter burst out. “First, Miss Wallack’s leading man, Langdon Mason, who has been in love with her for three years, bought the candy at Schuyler’s in Springfield early Saturday evening before he went to the theater. He told me so himself rather reluctantly; but I—I made him say it.”
“Ah!” exclaimed The Thinking Machine. It was a most unequivocal ejaculation. “How many pieces of candy are out of the box?”
“Only three,” explained Hatch. “Miss Wallack’s things were packed into the open trunk in her dressing room, the candy with them. I induced the manager—”
“Yes, yes, yes!” interrupted The Thinking Machine impatiently. “What sort of eyes has Mason? What colour?”
“Blue, frank in expression, nothing unusual at all,” said the reporter.
“And the others?”
“I didn’t quite know what you meant by studying their eyes, so I got a set of photographs. I thought perhaps they might help.”
“Excellent, Excellent!” commented The Thinking Machine. He shuffled the pictures through his fingers, stopping now and then to study one, and to read the name printed below. “Is that the leading man?” he asked at last, and handed one to Hatch.
“Yes.”
Professor Van Dusen did not speak again. The train pulled into Springfield at nine-twenty. Hatch followed the scientist without a word into a cab.
“Schuyler’s candy store,” quickly commanded The Thinking Machine. “Hurry.”
The cab rushed off through the night. Ten minutes later it stopped before a brilliantly lighted candy store. The Thinking Machine led the way inside and approached the girl behind the chocolate counter.
“Will you please tell me if you remember this man’s face?” he asked as he produced Mason’s photograph.
“Oh, yes, I remember him,” the girl replied. “He’s an actor.”
“Did he buy a small box of chocolates of you Saturday evening early?” was the next question.
“Yes. I recall it because he seemed to be in a hurry; in fact, I believe he said he was anxious to get to the theater to pack.”
“And do you recall that this man ever bought chocolates here?” asked the scientist. He produced another photograph and handed it to the girl. She studied it a moment while Hatch craned his neck, vainly, to see.
“I don’t recall that he ever did,” the girl answered finally.
The Thinking Machine turned away abruptly and disappeared into a public telephone booth. He remained there for five minutes, then rushed out to the cab again, with Hatch following closely.
“City Hospital!” he commanded.
Again the cab dashed away. Hatch was dumb; there seemed to be nothing to say. The Thinking Machine was plainly pursuing some definite line of inquiry, yet the reporter didn’t know what. The case was getting kaleidoscopic. This impression was strengthened when he found himself standing beside The Thinking Machine in City Hospital conversing with the house surgeon, Dr. Carlton.
