The Craig Kennedy Scientific Detective MEGAPACK ®. Brander Matthews
at the office,” supplied Kennedy. “That’s what it was about. Perhaps he hasn’t been able to get away yet. But I had the appointment. Ah, I see a telephone in the hall. May I?”
He had stepped politely in, and by dint of cleverly keeping his finger on the hook in the half light, he carried on a one-sided conversation with himself long enough to get a good chance to look about.
There was an air of quiet and refinement about the apartment in the Recherche. It was darkened to give the little glowing electric bulbs in their silken shades a full chance to simulate right. The deep velvety carpets were noiseless to the foot, and the draperies, the pictures, the bronzes, all bespoke taste.
But the chief objects of interest to Craig were the little square green baize-covered tables on one of which lay neatly stacked a pile of gilt-edged cards and a mahogany box full of ivory chips of red, white and blue.
It was none of the old-time gambling places, like Danfield’s, with its steel door which Craig had once cut through with an oxyacetylene blowpipe in order to rescue a young spendthrift from himself.
Kennedy seemed perfectly well satisfied merely with a cursory view of the place, as he hung up the receiver and thanked the maid politely for allowing him to use it.
“This is up-to-date gambling in cleaned-up New York,” he remarked as we waited for the elevator to return for us. “And the worst of it all is that it gets the women as well as the men. Once they are caught in the net, they are the most powerful lure to men that the gamblers have yet devised.”
We rode down in silence, and as we went down the steps to the street, I noticed the man whom we had seen watching the place, lurking down at the lower corner. Kennedy quickened his pace and came up behind him.
“Why, Winters!” exclaimed Craig. “You here?”
“I might say the same to you,” grinned the detective not displeased evidently that our trail had crossed his. “I suppose you are looking for Schloss, too. He’s up in the Recherche a great deal, playing poker. I understand he owns an interest in the game up there.”
Kennedy nodded, but said nothing.
“I just saw one of the cappers for the place go out before you went in.”
“Capper?” repeated Kennedy surprised. “Antoinette Moulton a steerer for a gambling joint? What can a rich society woman have to do with a place like that or a man like Schloss?”
Winters smiled sardonically. “Society ladies today often get into scrapes of which their husbands know nothing,” he remarked. “You didn’t know before that Antoinette Moulton, like many of her friends in the smart set, was a gambler—and loser—did you?”
Craig shook his head. He had more of human than scientific interest in a case of a woman of her caliber gone wrong.
“But you must have read of the famous Moulton diamonds?”
“Yes,” said Craig, blankly, as if it were all news to him.
“Schloss has them—or at least had them. The jewels she wore at the opera this winter were paste, I understand.”
“Does Moulton play?” he asked.
“I think so—but not here, naturally. In a way, I suppose, it is his fault. They all do it. The example of one drives on another.”
Instantly there flashed over my mind a host of possibilities. Perhaps, after all, Winters had been right. Schloss had taken this way to make sure of the jewels so that she could not redeem them. Suddenly another explanation crowded that out. Had Mrs. Moulton robbed the safe herself, or hired some one else to do it for her, and had that person gone back on her?
Then a horrid possibility occurred to me. Whatever Antoinette Moulton may have been and done, some one must have her in his power. What a situation for the woman! My sympathy went out to her in her supreme struggle. Even if it had been a real robbery, Schloss might easily recover from it. But for her every event spelled ruin and seemed only to be bringing that ruin closer.
We left Winters, still watching on the trail of Schloss, and went on uptown to the laboratory.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE BURGLAR’S MICROPHONE
That night I was sitting, brooding over the case, while Craig was studying a photograph which he made of the smudge on the glass door down at Schloss’. He paused in his scrutiny of the print to answer the telephone.
“Something has happened to Schloss,” he exclaimed seizing his hat and coat. “Winters has been watching him. He didn’t go to the Recherche. Winters wants me to meet him at a place several blocks below it Come on. He wouldn’t say over the wire what it was. Hurry.”
We met Winters in less than ten minutes at the address he had given, a bachelor apartment in the neighborhood of the Recherche.
“Schloss kept rooms here,” explained Winters, hurrying us quickly upstairs. “I wanted you to see before anyone else.”
As we entered the large and luxuriously furnished living room of the jeweler’s suite, a gruesome sight greeted us.
There lay Schloss on the floor, face down, in a horribly contorted position. In one hand, clenched under him partly, the torn sleeve of a woman’s dress was grasped convulsively. The room bore unmistakable traces of a violent struggle, but except for the hideous object on the floor was vacant.
Kennedy bent down over him. Schloss was dead. In a corner, by the door, stood a pile of grips, stacked up, packed, and undisturbed.
Winters who had been studying the room while we got our bearings picked up a queer-looking revolver from the floor. As he held it up I could see that along the top of the barrel was a long cylinder with a ratchet or catch at the butt end. He turned it over and over carefully.
“By George,” he muttered, “it has been fired off.”
Kennedy glanced more minutely at the body. There was not a mark on it. I stared about vacantly at the place where Winters had picked the thing up.
“Look,” I cried, my eye catching a little hole in the baseboard of the woodwork near it.
“It must have fallen and exploded on the floor,” remarked Kennedy. “Let me see it, Winters.”
Craig held it at arm’s length and pulled the catch. Instead of an explosion, there came a cone of light from the top of the gun. As Kennedy moved it over the wall, I saw in the center of the circle of light a dark spot.
“A new invention,” Craig explained. “All you need to do is to move it so that little dark spot falls directly on an object. Pull the trigger— the bullet strikes the dark spot. Even a nervous and unskilled marksman becomes a good shot in the dark. He can even shoot from behind the protection of something—and hit accurately.”
It was too much for me. I could only stand and watch Kennedy as he deftly bent over Schloss again and placed a piece of chemically prepared paper flat on the forehead of the dead man.
When he withdrew it, I could see that it bore marks of the lines on his head. Without a word, Kennedy drew from his pocket a print of the photograph of the smudge on Schloss’ door.
“It is possible,” he said, half to himself, “to identify a person by means of the arrangement of the sweat glands or pores. Poroscopy, Dr. Edmond Locard, director of the Police Laboratory at Lyons, calls it. The shape, arrangement, number per square centimeter, all vary in different individuals. Besides, here we have added the lines of the forehead.”
He was studying the two impressions intensely. When he looked up from his examination, his face wore a peculiar expression.
“This is not the head which was placed so close to the glass of the door of Schloss’ office, peering through, on the night of the robbery, in order to see before picking the lock whether the office was empty and everything ready for the hasty attack on the safe.”
“That