Adventure Tales #4. Seabury Quinn
it to the astonished coroner. “I found this outside in the snow, directly under that window, just where a person, jumping from that height and landing on slippery ground, might have dropped it. I wish you’d take official charge of it for a few days and tell no one about it till you hear from me.”
Briefly he described his search for clues outside the house, the finding of the idol and the finger marks where its loser had made a hurried hunt for it.
“Well, I’ll be—this trick is yours, Professor,” the young doctor agreed. “I’m still holding to the hypothesis of suicide, but we’ll impanel no jury tonight, or until I’ve had time to perform an autopsy on the body. Can I reach you by phone if I need you?”
“Of course,” the Professor assured him.
“All right. I’ll take the names and addresses of everyone present, and dismiss ’em, pending the inquest. Whether you’re right or wrong, Professor, you’ve given me more mental gymnastics this evening than I’ve had since I attended the University.” He held out his hand with a genial smile. “Good-night, sir.”
*****
“Lambert Nesbit speaking, Professor,” a cheerful voice announced at the telephone, shortly after noon the following day. “Pick up the marbles; you win.”
“Eh, how’s that—” Professor Forrester began, but the coroner was bursting with information and refused to be interrupted.
“I autopsied Milsted’s body this morning,” he continued, “and everything points to your theory of murder. In fact, it couldn’t have been suicide. When I removed the skull cap I found a bullet had passed through the frontal bone slightly to the left of the frontal suture, penetrating the left superior frontal lobe of the brain, piercing the proecentral fissure with a downward course, and traveling almost to the horizontal fissure of Sylvinus. Do you get me, or am I too technical?”
“Not at all,” Forrester assured him. “Remember, Nesbit, I was studying comparative anatomy, putting in six hours a week in the dissecting room, when you were learning to spin a top and play marbles for keeps. Go on, what else did you find?”
“Well, first off, I realized that it would have been impossible for a man to shoot himself in that manner unless he held the stock of the pistol above the level of his head—I experimented on myself by holding a gun with the muzzle touching my forehead where the wound in Milsted’s head was. He might have done it by bracing the barrel against his head and pulling the trigger with his thumb, but, as you demonstrated last night, Milsted was clutching the pistol with the rigidity of a cadaveric spasm, which must have occurred at the moment of death, and his forefinger was on the trigger. There wasn’t a Chinaman’s chance of his shifting his grip on the stock between the shot and the time death ensued, for he must have died instantly from that wound.”
“My boy,” Forrester assured him, “I’m beginning to have hopes of you. It was hard to convince you last night, but I’ll admit you’re not one of those thick-headed zanies who persist in error just for the sake of making fools of themselves.”
“Thanks,” the coroner replied dryly. “But you ain’t heard nothin’ yet. When I compared the bullet in Milsted’s brain with a cartridge from the magazine of his pistol, I found the lethal missile was a soft lead, conical bullet of about 20-20 caliber, while Milsted’s gun is a Lüger and shoots a .25 cupro-nickel-coated bullet. I was talkin’ with a lieutenant in the State Constabulary about it today, and he told me those guns have a muzzle velocity of about twelve hundred feet a second, and if Milsted had shot himself with his own gun the bullet would have gone clear through his head and probably through the wall behind him, as well.”
“I could have told you that,” Forrester replied. “Have you any other information?”
“Not right now; but there’s not much doubt Milsted was murdered. What sticks in my craw, though, is who did it, and why, and why the devil didn’t anyone hear a second shot? D’ye reckon both parties could have fired at once, so the two reports sounded like one?”
“Um; that’s possible,” Forrester agreed, “but you’ll remember that five of the six witnesses to the tragedy fail to recall seeing anything resembling a man at the window when Milsted died, and they’d not have been apt to miss seeing a pistol flash. No, I don’t think—here, wait a minute! How long can you postpone the inquest?”
“Well, there’s no limit prescribed by law, but the jury has to be sworn super visum corporis—on viewing the body, you know—and we can’t keep poor old Milsted above ground indefinitely, waiting to swear in the jury. Tell you what I’ll do, if you say. I’ll impanel a jury, swear ’em in over the body, and then continue the inquest subject to call. I can get away with that, all right. What were you going to suggest?”
“Take that bullet you found in the brain down to Roach’s sporting goods store and have one of their arms experts look at it. I noticed an English air-pistol on display in their window the other day, and it strikes me an air-gun might be the explanation to the whole affair. If the murder had been committed with one of those weapons we’d have about the same amount of mystery we have here, for the thing would probably shoot with practically no sound and would make no flash. These guns are comparatively new in this country, but I daresay they’re fairly well known in the British possessions.”
“You think the murderer was an Englishman, then?”
“Not exactly that, but I’ve got what you’d probably call a ‘hunch,’ Nesbit.”
“Good enough. We’ll play it through. I’ll see what Roach’s man has to say and report later. We can hold the inquest up a week or so if necessary, while we gumshoe around for more dope.”
“I don’t think we’ll need wait that long,” the Professor told him, as he hung up the phone and resumed marking a pile of examination papers.
*****
“Missie like buy ve’y pretty fancy work?” a round-faced young man with somnolent eyes, clad in a threadbare overcoat and rather decrepit fez, demanded the following afternoon, when Rosalie answered the ringing of the front doorbell.
“No, I—” the Professor’s pretty ward began, then checked her refusal, half spoken, as her large, topaz eyes suddenly narrowed the tiniest fraction of an inch. “Come in,” she invited. “I won’t promise to buy anything; but I’ll look.”
“Missie like my t’ings ve’y much,” the peddler announced confidently, as he followed her down the hall and into the living room. “See—” he opened an imitation alligator-hide suitcase and displayed the usual stock in trade of the itinerant Armenian huckster—“ve’y pretty, ve’y cheap, Missie. I t’ink you like buy some, mebbe so.”
Attracted by the voices, Professor Forrester put down his book and strolled into the living room, leaving the study door open behind him.
“Shopping again?” he asked with a twinkle in his eye.
Rosalie had spent almost a year in occidental freedom since the Professor rescued her from the entourage of a certain villainous half-caste from Singapore, and the avidity with which she conformed to the Western custom of permitting women to buy their own finery had caused the Professor more than a little amusement.
“Yes, Uncle Harvey,” she returned, throwing him a radiant smile. “This gentleman says he’s from Armenia, and he has some of the loveliest things.”
Forrester looked with astonishment from the girl to the mass of miscellaneous horrors spread on the floor. Even a layman could see these alleged Madeira and Normandy scarves and Egyptian table covers were of the home-brewed variety, the sort which are stamped out, thousands at a time, by machinery in New Jersey, and foisted on a credulous public by smooth-spoken knaves from the Levant.
The Professor, who knew the home industries of every people in the world as well as he understood their dialects, could recognize the counterfeits with one eye closed, and Rosalie, who had spent ten years of her life in the heart