VITHE POISON GAS
Aglanceat my watch was sufficient to assure me that I should have no time for further inquiries if I wanted to meet Kennedy before going down to the office of Hastings. I wanted to do that, too, for I felt sure that Craig would talk more freely to me than to the rest, and my interest in the affair had by this time become insatiable.
Accordingly, I retraced my steps to the laboratory. Kennedy was still at work, partly over some reactions in test-tubes, but mostly using the strange three-tubed instrument I had noted. As I outlined to him rapidly what I had discovered and the plain inferences to be drawn from it, he listened attentively, still working.
“Very good,” was Kennedy’s sole comment as I concluded my story. “That’s very interesting—possibly very important. It begins to look as though Maddox had been in some one’s way andthat that some one was taking no chances in order to ‘get’ him.”
“What have you discovered so far?” I hesitated, not sure yet whether he was willing to talk, for Kennedy never said anything, even to me, until he was perfectly sure of his ground.
“Marshall Maddox was not drowned, at least,” he vouchsafed.
“Not drowned?” I repeated, more to lead him on than because I was surprised.
“No. Whatever was the cause of his death, he was not killed by drowning. The lungs and stomach show that. In fact, I knew at Westport that he might have died a natural death or might even have been a suicide. But he certainly did not die of drowning. Only more careful tests than either the coroner or I could make at Westport were necessary.”
“How did it happen, then?” I continued, emboldened by his apparent readiness to talk.
Kennedy took a bottle with a ground-glass stopper and held it up so that I could see its greenish-yellow contents. Then he pulled out the stopper, covered with vaseline, for an instant and shoved it back again.
The instant was enough. A most unpleasant odor filled the laboratory. I felt a sense of suffocation in the chest, an irritation in the nose andthroat, as though by the corrosive action of some gas on the air passages.
“If we could only have seen him before he died,” continued Kennedy, “I suspect we should have found his face as blue as it was when we did see him, his lips violet, his pulse growing weaker until it was imperceptible, and perhaps he would have been raising blood. It would have been like an acute bronchitis, only worse. Look.”
From a little pin prick which he made on his own thumb Craig squeezed out a drop of blood into a beaker containing some distilled water.
“This is a spectroscope,” he explained, touching the instrument I had noticed. “I think you are acquainted with it in a general way. Blood in water, diluted, shows the well-known dark bands between what we call ‘D’ and ‘E.’ These are the dark bands of oxyhemoglobin absorption. Now, I add to this, drop by drop, the water from that bottle which I uncorked. See—the bands gradually fade in intensity and finally disappear, leaving a complete and brilliant spectrum devoid of any bands whatever. In other words, here is a substance that actually affects the red coloring matter in the blood, bleaches it out, and does more—destroys it.”
I listened in amazement at the fiendish nature of his discovery.
“Marshall Maddox was overcome by the poison gas contained in a thin-shelled bomb that was thrown through his state-room window. The corrosion of the metal in the room gave me a clue to that. Then—”
“But what is this poison gas?” I demanded, horrified.
Kennedy looked at me fixedly a moment. “Chlorine,” he replied, simply; adding, “the spectroscope shows that there is a total absence of pigment in the blood. You can readily see that it is no wonder, if it has this action, that death is sometimes so rapid as to be almost instantaneous. Why, man alive, this thing destroys without the possibility of reconstitution! It is devilish in the quantity he inhaled it.”
I could only gasp with surprise at the discovery.
“But how was it done?” I repeated. “You think a bomb was thrown through the open port?”
“Without a doubt. Perhaps, as you guessed, from a boat outside, the roof of a cruiser, anything, as far as that end of it goes. Whoever did it might also have entered the room in the same way.”
“Entered the room?” I asked.
“Yes, wearing a mask composed of several layers of gauze impregnated with glycerinated solution of sodium hypophosphate. That is oneof many substances used. All that was necessary was to wet the mask with water and adjust it. It would have served a double purpose—to protect the wearer’s life as well as his identity.”
Amazed at Kennedy’s powers of reconstruction from evidence that looked so slender, I merely waited for him to proceed.
“Then whoever it was probably rifled his clothes and so obtained the keys to the building and the office. From the brief-case they must have extracted the copies of the telautomaton plans. After that it was a simple matter to throw the body overboard in the hope that the affair might possibly be covered up as an accident or suicide. In the course of the night the wind cleared the room of the gas. They did not reckon, however, on what science can discover—or if they did, cared little. After that, I suppose, some one went to New York, perhaps in a high-powered car.”
“Mito couldn’t have gone to New York—and got back again,” I exclaimed, impulsively, recalling that Mito had been seen ashore that night without apparent reason.
“Mito may or may not have played his part,” was all that Kennedy would comment.
He left me wildly speculating. Was Mito a cog in the wheel, of which Paquita and the gang suspectedby Burke were other cogs? Was Shelby Maddox also a cog, willingly or unwillingly? Could he have got away from the yacht and got back again? A host of unanswered questions raced through my mind. But Kennedy had said all that he was prepared to say now.
“We had better be going,” he remarked, calmly, “if we are to keep that appointment with Hastings and Burke.”
He was evidently much more interested in what Burke might turn up than in his own investigation, which was quite natural, for what he had told me was already an old story to him, and his restless mind craved to be speeding toward the solution of the mystery.
Half an hour later Kennedy and I entered the office of Hastings. I looked about curiously. There were, as in many lawyers’ offices, two private offices for the members of the firm, while outside was a large room for the clerks, the stenographers, and the telephone girl.
As we were welcomed by Hastings in his own office I wondered what the walls might have heard. Marshall Maddox and his lawyer must have had many conferences there during the time that Maddox was planning his great coup in the munitions company.
“Burke hasn’t arrived yet,” remarked Hastings,nervously. “I’ve been expecting him any moment. I wonder what is keeping him?”
There was no way of finding out, and we were forced to sit impatiently.
A few moments later we heard hurried footsteps down the hall and Burke burst in, his face flushed with excitement.
“This thing is devilish,” he exclaimed, looking keenly at Hastings. “I must be in your class.”
“How’s that? Did some one shoot at you?” queried the lawyer.
“No, but I came within an ace of being poisoned.”
“Poisoned?” we inquired, incredulously.
“Yes. You know I started to find that night watchman. Well, I found him. He knows nothing—and I think he is telling the truth. But after I had questioned him I made him admit that sometimes he takes a meal in the middle of the night. Of course he has to leave the front hall of the ground floor unguarded to do so. I figured that the robber might have got in and got away during that time. And I guess I’m right.
“After that I saw the policeman who walks the beat at night. I thought he was going to prove a better witness. He remembers, under questioning, seeing a speedster that stopped around the next corner and was left there standing sometime—about the time that the robbery must have taken place, if I am right. He thought it was strange and hung about.
“When the fellow who drove the car came back the policeman walked over. The fellow offered no explanation of leaving his car on the street at such an hour, except that he had stopped to shift a shoe that had blown. Then he asked where there was an all-night lunch-room. The policeman directed him and the fellow thanked him and drove off in that direction.”
“But the poisoning,” prompted Craig. “How did that happen?”
“I’m coming to it. Well, I thought at once of going to the lunch-room and inquiring. You see, I thought I might check up both the night watchman’s story and the cop’s. So I went in and it happened that the night man was just going to work. I hadn’t had anything to eat since this morning and I ordered a sandwich and a cup of coffee. I left the coffee standing on a little table while I talked to the man behind the counter.
“I found out from him that the night watchman had been there, all right. But he didn’t remember any one in a speedster. In fact, I hadn’t expected that he would. I don’t believe the fellow went there.
“Anyhow, when I went to look for my coffee I noticed something on the lip of the cup. It looked like sugar, and I recollected that I hadn’t put any sugar in the coffee. Besides, this looked like powdered sugar, and I wouldn’t have put powdered sugar in when there was lump sugar. I tasted a bit of it. It was bitter—very bitter. Here’s some of it.”
Kennedy took from Burke a few particles of a white powder which he had carefully preserved in a piece of paper and began examining the particles closely.
“There were lots of people coming and going at the lunch-room,” went on Burke, “but I didn’t pay much attention to any of them.”
Kennedy had placed just a particle of the powder on his tongue, and was now making a wry face. As he turned toward us he exclaimed, “Strychnine!”
“See?” nodded Burke, excitedly. “I thought it was some poison. I knew there was something wrong.”
Burke looked at Kennedy fixedly. There could be no doubt now that we were watched. Some one was evidently desperate to prevent discovery. First the attack had been leveled at Hastings. Now it was Burke. Who would be next? I thinkwe all realized that we were marked, though none of us said anything at the time.
Burke looked over questioningly at Kennedy.
“I’ve found out how Maddox was killed,” volunteered Craig, understanding the query implied in his glance.
“Indeed—already?” interrupted Hastings, to whom Kennedy was already frankly incomprehensible.
“How?” demanded Burke, checking himself in time to protect himself from setting forth a theory of his own, for Burke was like all other police detectives—first forming a theory and then seeking facts that confirmed it.
Eagerly both Burke and Hastings listened as Kennedy repeated briefly his discoveries of the spectroscopic tests which he had already told me.
“Gassed, by George!” muttered Burke, more puzzled than ever. “I may as well admit that I thought he had been thrown overboard and drowned. The shot at Mr. Hastings rather confirmed me in the rough-neck methods of the criminal. But this burglar’s microphone and the strychnine have shaken my theory. This fellow is clever beyond anything I had ever suspected. And to think of his using gas! I tell you, Kennedy, we don’t know what to expect of criminals these days.”
Burke shook his head sagely. At least he had one saving grace. He realized his own shortcomings.
“How about the speedster?” reverted Kennedy, passing over the subject, for both Craig and I had a high regard for Burke, whatever might be his limitations. “What did the patrolman say the fellow in the speedster looked like?”
Burke threw up his hands in mock resignation. “As nearly as I could make out, he looked like a linen duster and a pair of goggles. You know that kind of cop—doomed always to pound pavements. Why, it might have been anybody—a woman, for all he knew.”
“I think we’ve been away from Westport long enough,” concluded Kennedy. “Perhaps our unexpected return may result in something. A speedster—h’m. At least we can look over the garage of the Harbor House.”
I remember that I thought the words of little consequence at the moment. Yet, as it proved, it was a fateful statement made at this time and place.