The Craig Kennedy Scientific Detective MEGAPACK ®. Brander Matthews
“in criminal jurisprudence, I find an even more simple and more subjective test which has been recently devised. Professor Stoerring of Bonn has found out that feelings of pleasure and pain produce well-defined changes in respiration. Similar effects are produced by lying, according to the famous Professor Benussi of Graz.
“These effects are unerring, unequivocal. The utterance of a false statement increases respiration; of a true statement decreases. The importance and scope of these discoveries are obvious.”
Craig was figuring rapidly on a piece of paper. “This is a certain and objective criterion,” he continued as he figured, “between truth and falsehood. Even when a clever liar endeavors to escape detection by breathing irregularly, it is likely to fail, for Benussi has investigated and found that voluntary changes in respiration don’t alter the result. You see, the quotient obtained by dividing the time of inspiration by the time of expiration gives me the result.”
He looked up suddenly. “Armstrong, you are telling the truth about some things—downright lies about others. You are a drug fiend—but I will be lenient with you, for one reason. Contrary to everything that I would have expected, you are really trying to save that poor half-witted girl whom you love from the terrible habit that has gripped you. That is why you held out the quarter of the one hundred tablets. That is why you wrote the note to Mrs. Sutphen, hoping that she might be treated in some institution.”
Kennedy paused as a look of incredulity passed over Armstrong’s face.
“Another thing you said was true,” added Kennedy. “You can get all the heroin you want. Armstrong, you will put the address of that place on the outside of the note, or both you and Whitecap go to jail. Snowbird will be left to her own devices—she can get all the ‘snow,’ as some of you fiends call it, that she wants from those who might exploit her.”
“Please, Mr. Kennedy,” pleaded Armstrong.
“No,” interrupted Craig, before the drug fiend could finish. “That is final. I must have the name of that place.”
In a shaky hand Armstrong wrote again. Hastily Craig stuffed the note into his pocket, and ten minutes later we were mounting the steps of a big brownstone house on a fashionable side street just around the corner from Fifth Avenue.
As the door was opened by an obsequious colored servant, Craig handed him the scrap of paper signed by the password, “A Victim.”
Imitating the cough of a confirmed dope user, Craig was led into a large waiting room.
“You’re in pretty bad shape, sah,” commented the servant.
Kennedy nudged me and, taking the cue, I coughed myself red in the face.
“Yes,” he said. “Hurry—please.”
The servant knocked at a door, and as it was opened we caught a glimpse of Mrs. Garrett in negligee.
“What is it, Sam?” she asked.
“Two gentlemen for some heroin tablets, ma’am.”
“Tell them to go to the chemical works—not to my office, Sam,” growled a man’s voice inside.
With a quick motion, Kennedy had Mrs. Garrett by the wrist.
“I knew it,” he ground out. “It was all a fake about how you got the habit. You wanted to get it, so you could get and hold him. And neither one of you would stop at anything, not even the murder of your sister, to prevent the ruin of the devilish business you have built up in manufacturing and marketing the stuff.”
He pulled the note from the hand of the surprised negro. “I had the right address, the place where you sell hundreds of ounces of the stuff a week—but I preferred to come to the doctor’s office where I could find you both.”
Kennedy had firmly twisted her wrist until, with a little scream of pain, she let go the door handle. Then he gently pushed her aside, and the next instant Craig had his hand inside the collar of Dr. Coleman, society physician, proprietor of the Coleman Chemical Works downtown, the real leader of the drug gang that was debauching whole sections of the metropolis.
CHAPTER XXVIII
THE FAMILY SKELETON
Surprised though we were at the unmasking of Dr. Coleman, there was nothing to do but to follow the thing out. In such cases we usually ran into the greatest difficulty—organized vice. This was no exception.
Even when cases involved only a clever individual or a prominent family, it was the same. I recall, for example, the case of a well-known family in a New York suburb, which was particularly difficult. It began in a rather unusual manner, too.
“Mr. Kennedy—I am ruined—ruined.”
It was early one morning that the telephone rang and I answered it. A very excited German, breathless and incoherent, was evidently at the other end of the wire.
I handed the receiver to Craig and picked up the morning paper lying on the table.
“Minturn—dead?” I heard Craig exclaim. “In the paper this morning? I’ll be down to see you directly.”
Kennedy almost tore the paper from me. In the next to the end column where late news usually is dropped was a brief account of the sudden death of Owen Minturn, one of the foremost criminal lawyers of the city, in Josephson’s Baths downtown.
It ended: “It is believed by the coroner that Mr. Minturn was shocked to death and evidence is being sought to show that two hundred and forty volts of electricity had been thrown into the attorney’s body while he was in the electric bath. Joseph Josephson, the proprietor of the bath, who operated the switchboard, is being held, pending the completion of the inquiry.”
As Kennedy hastily ran his eye over the paragraphs, he became more and more excited himself.
“Walter,” he cried, as he finished, “I don’t believe that that was an accident at all.”
“Why?” I asked.
He already had his hat on, and I knew he was going to Josephson’s breakfastless. I followed reluctantly.
“Because,” he answered, as we hustled along in the early morning crowd, “it was only yesterday afternoon that I saw Minturn at his office and he made an appointment with me for this very morning. He was a very secretive man, but he did tell me this much, that he feared his life was in danger and that it was in some way connected with that Pearcy case up in Stratfield, Connecticut, where he has an estate. You have read of the case?”
Indeed I had. It had seemed to me to be a particularly inexplicable affair. Apparently a whole family had been poisoned and a few days before old Mr. Randall Pearcy, a retired manufacturer, had died after a brief but mysterious illness.
Pearcy had been married a year or so ago to Annette Oakleigh, a Broadway comic opera singer, who was his second wife. By his first marriage he had had two children, a son, Warner, and a daughter, Isabel.
Warner Pearcy, I had heard, had blazed a vermilion trail along the Great White Way, but his sister was of the opposite temperament, interested in social work, and had attracted much attention by organizing a settlement in the slums of Stratfield for the uplift of the workers in the Pearcy and other mills.
Broadway, as well as Stratfield, had already woven a fantastic background, for the mystery and hints had been broadly made that Annette Oakleigh had been indiscreetly intimate with a young physician in the town, a Dr. Gunther, a friend, by the way, of Minturn. “There has been no trial yet,” went on Kennedy, “but Minturn seems to have appeared before the coroner’s jury at Stratfield and to have asserted the innocence of Mrs. Pearcy and that of Dr. Gunther so well that, although the jury brought in a verdict of murder by poison by some one unknown, there has been no mention of the name of anyone else. The coroner simply adjourned the inquest so that a more careful analysis might be made of the vital organs. And now comes this second tragedy in New York.”
“What was the poison?” I asked. “Have they found out yet?”