Arthur B. Reeve Crime & Mystery Boxed Set. Arthur B. Reeve
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 disposes of my theory that Schloss robbed himself," remarked Winters reluctantly. "But the struggle here, the sleeve of the dress, the pistol--could he have been shot?"
"No, I think not," considered Kennedy. "It looks to me more like a case of apoplexy."
"What shall we do?" asked Winters. "Far from clearing anything up, this complicates it."
"Where's Muller?" asked Kennedy. "Does he know? Perhaps he can shed some light on it."
The clang of an ambulance bell outside told that the aid summoned by Winters had arrived.
We left the body in charge of the surgeon and of a policeman who arrived about the same time, and followed Winters.
Muller lived in a cheap boarding house in a shabbily respectable street downtown, and without announcing ourselves we climbed the stairs to his room. He looked up surprised but not disconcerted as we entered.
"What's the matter?" he asked.
"Muller," shot out Winters, "we have just found Mr. Schloss dead!"
"D-dead!" he stammered.
The man seemed speechless with horror.
"Yes, and with his grips packed as if to run away."
Muller looked dazedly from one of us to the other, but shut up like a clam.
"I think you had better come along with us as a material witness," burst out Winters roughly.
Kennedy said nothing, leaving that sort of third degree work to the detective. But he was not idle, as Winters tried to extract more than the monosyllables, "I don't know," in answer to every inquiry of Muller about his employer's life and business.
A low exclamation from Craig attracted my attention from Winters. In a corner he had discovered a small box and had opened it. Inside was a dry battery and a most peculiar instrument, something like a little flat telephone transmitter yet attached by wires to earpieces that fitted over the head after the manner of those of a wireless detector.
"What's this?" asked Kennedy, dangling it before Muller.
He looked at it phlegmatically. "A deaf instrument I have been working on," replied the jeweler. "My hearing is getting poor."
Kennedy looked hastily from the instrument to the man.
"I think I'll take it along with us," he said quietly.
Winters, true to his instincts, had been searching Muller in the meantime. Besides the various assortment that a man carries in his pockets usually, including pens, pencils, notebooks, a watch, a handkerchief, a bunch of keys, one of which was large enough to open a castle, there was a bunch of blank and unissued pawn-tickets bearing the name, "Stein's One Per Cent. a Month Loans," and an address on the Bowery.
Was Muller the "fence" we were seeking, or only a tool for the "fence" higher up? Who was this Stein?
What it all meant I could only guess. It was a far cry from the wealth of Diamond Lane to a dingy Bowery pawnshop, even though pawnbroking at one per cent. a month--and more, on the side--pays. I knew, too, that diamonds are hoarded on the East Side as nowhere else in the world, outside of India. It was no uncommon thing, I had heard, for a pawnbroker whose shop seemed dirty and greasy to the casual visitor to have stored away in his vault gems running into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
"Mrs. Moulton must know of this," remarked Kennedy. "Winters, you and Jameson bring Muller along. I am going up to the Deluxe."
I must say that I was surprised at finding Mrs. Moulton there. Outside the suite Winters and I waited with the unresisting Muller, while Kennedy entered. But through the door which he left ajar I could hear what passed.
"Mrs. Moulton," he began, "something terrible has happened--"
He broke off, and I gathered that her pale face and agitated manner told him that she knew already.
"Where is Mr. Moulton?" he went on, changing his question.
"Mr. Moulton is at his office," she answered tremulously. "He telephoned while I was out that he had to work to-night. Oh, Mr. Kennedy--he knows--he knows. I know it. He has avoided me ever since I missed the replica from-"
"Sh!" cautioned Craig. He had risen and gone to the door.
"Winters," he whispered, "I want you to go down to Lynn Moulton's office. Meanwhile Jameson can take care of Muller. I am going over to that place of Stein's presently. Bring Moulton up there. You will wait here, Walter, for the present," he nodded.
He returned to the room where I could hear her crying softly.
"Now, Mrs. Moulton," he said gently, "I'm afraid I must trouble you to go with me. I am going over to a pawnbroker's on the Bowery."
"The Bowery?" she repeated, with a genuinely surprised shudder. "Oh, no, Mr.