The Dark Angel Read online

  “Ah bah!” he countered hotly. “That chair-seat is a scant half-meter high, her feet swung at least four inches from the floor; she could not possibly have dropped a greater length than sixteen inches. Her weight was negligible—I lifted her a moment since—not more than ninety-five or ninety-eight pounds, at most. A drop so short for such a light woman could not possibly have broken the spine. Besides, this fracture is high, not lower than the atlas or the axis; the ligature about her neck encompassed the second cervical vertebra. The two things do not match. Non, my friend, this is no suicide, but murder cleverly dressed to simulate it.”

  “Your brandy, sir.” Wilbur halted at the door, keeping his eyes averted resolutely from the quiet form upon the couch.

  “Merci bien,” de Grandin answered. “Put it down, mon vieux; then, call Monsieur the Coroner and tell him we await him. If the other servants have not yet been appraised of Madame’s death it will do no harm to let them wait till morning.”

  “Poor Arabella!” I murmured, staring with tear-dimmed eyes at the pathetic little body underneath the coverlet. “Who could have wanted to kill her?”

  “Eh bien, who could have wanted to steal Mademoiselle Alice away? Who wanted to obtain the Devil-Worshippers’ marriage belt? Who sent the strange veiled lady following after us to tell us that our quest was vain?” he answered, bitter mockery in his tones.

  “Good heavens, you mean—”

  “Precisely, exactly; quite so. I mean no more and certainly no less, my friend. This is assuredly the Devil’s business, and right well have his servants done it. Certainly.”

  JOHN MARTIN, COUNTY CORONER and leading mortician of the city, and Jules de Grandin were firm friends. At the little Frenchman’s earnest entreaty he drove Parnell, the coroner’s physician, to perform an autopsy which corroborated every assumption de Grandin had made. Death was due to coma induced by rupture of the myelon, not to strangulation, the post-mortem revealed. Moreover, though Parnell rebelled at the suggestion, Robert Hartley, chief bio-chemist at Mercy Hospital, was called in to make a decimetric test of Arabella’s liver. Carefully, de Grandin, Martin and I watching him, he macerated a bit of the organ, mixed it with lampblack and strained it through a porcelain filter. While Parnell sulked in a corner of the laboratory the rest of us watched breathlessly as the serous liquid settled in the glass dish beneath the filter. It was clear.

  “Well, that’s that,” said Hartley.

  “Mais oui, c’est démontré,” de Grandin nodded.

  “Umpf!” Parnell grunted in disgust.

  The ruddy-faced, gray-haired coroner looked interrogatively from one to the other. “Just what’s been proved, gentlemen?” he asked.

  “Absence of glycogen.” Hartley answered.

  “Murder, parbleu!” de Grandin added.

  “Nothing—nothing at all.” Parnell assured him.

  “But—” the coroner began more bewildered than ever.

  “Monsieur,” de Grandin cut him short, “glycogen, or liver-sugar represents the stored up energy of muscular strength in the machines we call our bodies. When it is plentiful we are strong, active, hearty—what you call filled with pep. As it is depleted we become weakened. When it is gone we are exhausted. Yes.

  “Undoubtlessly a woman being strangled would make a tremendous last muscular effort to fight off her assailant. Such an effort, lasting but a little minute, would burn this muscle-power we call glycogen from her liver. Her reservoir of strength would be drained.

  “Am I not right?” he turned for confirmation to Hartley, who nodded slow agreement.

  “Very well, then. Now, the experiment Doctor Hartley has just performed shows us conclusively that glycogen was practically absent from Madame Hume’s liver. Had it been present in even small quantities the filtered liquid would have been cloudy. Yes. But it was clear, or very nearly so, as you did observe with your own two eyes. What then?

  “Simply this, mordieu: She fought—frenziedly, though futilely—for her life before the vile miscreant who killed her drew his roomal tight about her throat and with his diabolically skillful knuckles broke her neck. It was the tightening strangle-cord which prevented outcry, though the chair we found overturned was undoubtlessly turned over in the struggle, not kicked aside by her after she had adjusted the hangman’s noose about her neck. No; by no means. Had she been self-hanged there would be ample store of glycogen found in her liver; as it is—” he paused, raising shoulders, elbows, and eyebrows in a shrug of matchless eloquence.

  “I—see,” said Mr. Martin slowly.

  But the jury did not. Doctor Parnell’s lukewarm reception of de Grandin’s theory, Hartley’s refusal to testify to anything save that there was a lack of glycogen found in the liver, and the cleverness with which the stage had been set to give plausibility to suspicion of suicide combined to forge a chain of circumstantial evidence which all the little Frenchman’s fiery oratory could not break. Suicide—dead by her own hand while of unsound mind—was the consensus of the jury.

  5. The Missing Child

  HEADLINES SCREAMED ACROSS THE country: “MOTHER SLAYS SELF AS COPS HUNT VANISHED CHILD”—“BROKEN HEART MAKES MOTHER SEEK DEATH”—“LOVE-CRAZED WOMAN SUICIDES AS DAUGHTER DISAPPEARS”—these were among the more conservative statements which faced Americans from Maine to Oregon as they sat at breakfast, and for a time reporters from the metropolitan dailies were as thick in our town as hungry flies around an abattoir. At length the hue and cry died down, and Arabella’s death and Alice’s strange disappearance gave way on the front page to the latest tales of scandal in municipal administration.

  Jules de Grandin shut himself in the study, emerging only at mealtime or after office hours for a chat with me, smoked innumerable vile-smelling French cigarettes, used the telephone a great deal and posted many letters; but as far as I could see, his efforts to find Alice or run down her mother’s murderers were nil.

  “I should think you’d feel better if you went out a bit,” I told him at breakfast one day. “I know finding Alice is a hopeless task, and as for Arabella’s murderer—I’m beginning to think she committed suicide, after all, but—”

  He looked up from the copy of the Morning Journal he had been perusing and fixed me with a straight, unwinking stare. “The police are co-operating,” he answered shortly. “Not a railway station or bus terminal lacks watchers, and no private cars or taxis leave the city limits without submitting to a secret but thorough inspection. What more can we do?”

  “Why, you might direct the search personally, or check up such few clues as they may find—” I began, nettled by his loss of interest in the case, but he cut me short with a quick motion of his hand.

  “My friend,” he told me with one of his Puckish grins, “attend me. When I was a little lad I had a dog, a silly energetic little fellow, all barks and jumps and wagging tail. He dearly loved a cat. Morbleu, the very sight of Madame Puss would put him in a frenzy! How he would rush at her, how he would show his teeth and growl and put on the fierce face! Then, when she had retired to the safety of a pear tree, how he would stand beneath her refuge and twitch his tail and bark! Cordieu, sometimes I would think he must surely burst with barking!

  “And she, the scornful pussy, did she object? Mille fois non. Safe in her sanctuary she would eye him languidly, and let him bark. At last, when he had barked himself into exhaustion, he would withdraw to think upon the evils of times, and Madame Puss would leisurely descend the tree and trot away to safety.

  “I would often say to him: ‘My Toto, you are a great stupid-head. Why do you do it? Why do you not depart a little distance from the tree and lie perdu? Then Madame Puss may think that you have lost all interest and come down; then pouf! you have her at your mercy.’ But no, that foolish little dog, he would not listen to advice, and so, though he expended great energy and made a most impressive noise, he never caught a cat.

  “Friend Trowbridge, I am not a foolish little dog. By no means. It is not I who do such things. Here in th
e house I stay, with strict instructions that I be not called should any want me on the telephone; I am not ever seen abroad. For all of the display I make, I might be dead or gone away. But I am neither. Always and ever I sit here all watchful, and frequently I do call the gendarmes to find if they have discovered that for which we seek. I know—I see all that takes place. If any makes a move, I know it. But those we seek do not know I know. No, they think Jules de Grandin is asleep or drunk, or perhaps gone away. It is best so, I assure you. Anon, emboldened by my seeming lethargy, they will emerge from out their hiding-place; then—” His smile became unpleasant as he clenched one slender, strong hand with a gesture suggestive of crushing something soft within it. “Then, pardieu, they shall learn that Jules de Grandin is not a fool, nor can they make the long nose at him with impunity!” He helped himself to a second portion of broiled mackerel from the hot-water dish and resumed his perusal of the Journal. Suddenly:

  “Ohé, misère, calamité, c’est désastrieux!” he cried. “Read here my friend, if you please. Read it and tell me that I am mistaken!”

  Hands shaking with eagerness, he passed the paper to me, indicating a rather inconspicuous item in the lower left-hand corner of the third page.

  CHILD VANISHES FROM BAPTIST HOME

  Shortly after one o’clock this morning Mrs. Maude Gordon, 47, a matron in the Harrisonville Baptist Home, was awakened by sounds of crying from the ward in which the younger children of the orphanage were quartered. Going quickly to the room the woman found some of the older children sitting up in bed and crying bitterly. Upon demanding what was wrong she was told that a man had just been in the place, flashed a flashlight in several of the children’s faces, then picked Charles Eastman, eight months, from his crib which stood near the open window, and made off with him.

  The matron at once gave the alarm, and a thorough search of the premises was made, but no trace of the missing child or his abductor could be found. The gates of the orphanage were shut and locked, and the lodgekeeper, who was awakened by the searching party, declared it would have been impossible for anyone to pass in or out without his knowledge, as his were the only keys to the gates beside those in the main office of the home, and the keys were in their accustomed place on his bureau in his bedroom when the alarm reached him. The home’s extensive grounds are surrounded by a twelve-foot brick wall, with an overhang on either side, and climbing it either from the outside or from within would be almost impossible without extension ladders.

  The Eastman child’s parents are dead and his only living relative so far as known is an uncle, lately released from the penitentiary. Police are checking up on this man’s movements during the night, as it is thought he may have stolen the child to satisfy a grudge he had against the mother, now dead, whose testimony helped convict him on a charge of burglary five years ago.

  “Well?” I asked as I laid the paper down. “Is that what you read?”

  “Hélas, yes. It is too true!”

  “Why, what d’ye mean—” I began, but he cut in hurriedly.

  “Perhaps I do mistake, my friend. Although I have lived in your so splendid country for upward of five years, there is still much which is strange to me. Is it that the sect you call the Baptists do not believe in infant baptism—that only those of riper years are given baptism by them?”

  “Yes, that’s so,” I answered. “They hold that—”

  “No matter what they hold, if that be so,” he interrupted. “That this little one had not been accorded baptism is enough—parbleu, it is much. Come, my friend, the time for concealing is past. Let us hasten, let us rush; let us fly!”

  “Rush?” I echoed, bewildered. “Where?”

  “To that orphan home of the so little unbaptized Baptists, of course,” he answered almost furiously. “Come, let us go right away, immediately, at once.”

  MAINTAINED BY LIBERAL ENDOWMENTS and not greatly taxed by superfluity of inmates, the Baptist Home for Children lay on a pleasant elevation some five miles out of Harrisonville. Its spacious grounds, which were equipped with every possible device for fostering organized play among its little guests were, as the newspaper accounts described, surrounded by a brick wall of formidable height with projecting overhangs flanging T-wise, from the top. Moreover, in an excess of caution, the builder had studded the wall’s crest with a fringe of broken bottle-glass set in cement, and anyone endeavoring to cross the barrier must be prepared not only with scaling ladders so long as to be awkward to carry, but with a gangway or heavy pad to lay across the shark-tooth points of glass with which the wall was armored. De Grandin made a rapid reconnaissance of the position, twisting viciously at his mustache meanwhile. “Ah, hélas, the poor one!” he murmured as his inspection was completed. “Before, I had some hope; now I fear the worst.”

  “Eh?” I returned. “What now?”

  “Plenty, pardieu—a very damn great plenty!” he answered bitterly. “Come, let us interview the concierge. He is our only hope, I fear.”

  I glanced at him in wonder as we neared the pretty little cottage in which the gatekeeper maintained his home and office.

  “No, sir,” the man replied to de Grandin’s question, “I’m sure no one could ’a’ come through that gate last night. It’s usually locked for th’ night at ten o’clock, though I mostly sit up listenin’ to th’ radio, a little later, an’ if anything real important comes up, I’m on hand to open th’ gates. Last night there wasn’t a soul, man or woman, ’ceptin’ th’ grocery deliveryman, come in here after six o’clock—very quiet day it was, ’count th’ cold weather, I guess. I wuz up a little later than usual, too, but turned in ’bout ’leven o’clock, I should judge. I’d made th’ rounds o’ th’ grounds with Bruno a little after seven, an’ believe me, I’m here to tell you no one could ’a’ been hidin’ anywhere without his knowin’ it. No sir!

  “Here, Bruno!” be raised his voice and snapped his fingers authoritatively, and a ponderous mastiff, seemingly big enough to drag down an elephant, ambled in and favored us with a display of awe-inspiring teeth as his black lips curled back in a snarl.

  “Bruno slept right beside my bed, sir,” the gatekeeper went on, “an th’ winder wuz open; so if anyone had so much as stopped by th’ gate to monkey with it, he’d ’a’ heard ’em, an’—well, it wouldn’t ’a’ been so good for ’em, I’m tellin’ you. I recollec’ once when a pettin party across th’ road from th’ gate, Bruno got kind o’ suspicious-like an’ first thing any of us knew he’d bolted through th’ winder an made for ’em—like to tore th’ shirt off th’ feller ’fore I woke up an called ’im off.”

  De Grandin nodded shortly. “And may one examine your room for one little minute, Monsieur?” he asked courteously, “We shall touch nothing, of course, and request that you be with us at all times.”

  “We-ell—I don’t—oh, all right,” the watchman responded as the Frenchman’s hand strayed meaningfully toward his wallet. “Come on.”

  The small neat room in which the gatekeeper slept had a single wide window opening obliquely toward the gate and giving a view both of the portal and a considerable stretch of road in each direction, for the gatehouse was built into, and formed an integral part of the wall surrounding the grounds. From window-sill to earth was a distance of perhaps six feet, possibly a trifle less.

  “And your keys were where, if you please?” de Grandin asked as he surveyed the chamber.

  “Right on the bureau there, where I put ’em before I went to bed last night, an’ they wuz in th’ same place this mornin’ when they called me from th’ office, too. Guess they’d better ’a’ been there, too. Anyone tryin’ to sneak in an’ pinch ’em would ’a’ had old Bruno to deal with, even if I hadn’t wakened, which I would of, ’count of I’m such a light sleeper. You have to be, in a job like this.”

  “Perfectly,” the Frenchman nodded understandingly as he walked to the window, removed the immaculate white-linen handkerchief from his sleeve and flicked it lightly across the sill. “
Thank you, Monsieur, we need not trouble you further, I think,” he continued, taking a bill from his folder and laying it casually on the bureau before turning to leave the room.

  At the gateway he paused a moment, examining the lock. It was a heavy snap-latch of modern workmanship, strong enough to defy the best efforts of a crew of journeymen safe-blowers.

  “C’est très simple,” he murmured to himself as we left the gate and entered my car. “Behold, Friend Trowbridge.”

  Withdrawing the white handkerchief from his cuff he held it toward me. Across its virgin surface there lay, where he had brushed it on the watchman’s window-sill, a smear of yellow powder.

  “Bulala-gwai,” he told me in a weary, almost toneless voice.

  “What, that devil-dust—”

  “Précisément, my friend, that devil-dust. Was it not simple? To his window they did creep, most doubtlessly on shoes with rubber soles, which would make no noise upon the frozen ground. Pouf! the sleeping-powder is tossed into his room, and he and his great mastiff are at once unconscious. They remove his keys; it is a so easy task. The gate is unlocked, opened; then made fast with a retaining wedge, and the keys replaced upon his bureau. The little one is stolen, the gate closed behind the kidnappers, and the spring-latch locks itself. When the alarm is broadcast Monsieur le Concierge can swear in all good conscience that no one has gone through the gate and that his keys are in their proper place. But certainly; of course they were. By damn, but they are clever, those ones!”

  “Whom do you mean? Who’d want to steal a little baby from an orphan’s home?”

  “A little unbaptized baby—and a boy,” he interjected.

  “All right, a little unbaptized boy.”

  “I would give my tongue to the cat to answer that,” he told me solemnly. “That they are the ones who spirited Mademoiselle Alice away from before our very eyes we can not doubt. The technique of their latest crime has labeled them; but why they, whose faith is a bastardized descendant of the old religion of Zoroaster—a sort of disreputable twelfth cousin of the Parsees—should want to do this—non, it does not match, my friend. Jules de Grandin is much puzzled.” He shook his head and pulled, so savagely at his mustache that I feared he would do himself permanent injury.