Black Moon Page 5

  A sheet of clean white paper spread across the surgery table made background for the miscellany of fine refuse which he emptied from the sweeper’s bags. Microscope to eye, he passed a glass rod vigorously rubbed with silk back and forth across the dust heap. Attracted by the static charge fine bits of rubbish adhered to the rod and were subjected to his scrutiny. As he completed his examination I viewed the salvage through a second microscope, but found it utterly uninteresting. It was the usual hodgepodge to be culled by vacuuming a broom-cleaned room. Tiny bits of paper, too fine to yield to straw brooms’ pressure, little flecks of nondescript black dust, a wisp or two of wool fiber from the cheap rug, the trash was valueless from any viewpoint, as far as I could see.

  “Que diable?” With eyes intently narrowed he was looking at some object clinging to his glass rod.

  “What is it?” I demanded, leaning closer.

  “See if you can classify it,” he returned, moving aside to let me look down through the viewhole of the microscope.

  It was a strand of hair three-quarters of an inch or so in length, curled slightly like a human body hair, but thicker, coarser in its texture. Reddish rusty brown at tip, it shaded to a dull gray at the center and bleached to white transparency about the base. I saw it was smooth-scaled upon its outer surface and terminated in a point, showing it had never been cut or, if clipped, had sufficient time to grow to its full length again.

  “Let us proceed,” I heard him whisper as he moved his polished rod again across the heap of sweepings. “Perhaps we shall discover something else.”

  Slowly he moved the rod across the furrowed edges of the dust heap, pausing now and then to view a fresh find. A splinter of straw, a tiny tag of paper, fine powdered dust, these comprised his salvage, till: “Ah?” he murmured, “ah-ha?” Adhering to the rod there was another wisp of hair, almost the counterpart of his first find, except it was more nearly uniform in color, dull lack-luster rust all over, like an aged tomcat’s fur, or the hair of some misguided woman who has sought a simulation of her vanished youth by having her gray tresses dyed with henna.

  “What—” I began, but he waved me silent with a nervous gesture as he continued fishing with his rod. At last he laid the rod aside and began to winnow the dust piles through a fine wire screen. Half an hour’s patient work resulted in the salvaging of two or three small chocolate-colored flakes which looked for all the world like grains of bran and when field close to our noses on a sheet of folded paper gave off a sweetly penetrating odor.

  “You recognize them?” he asked.

  “Not by sight. By their smell I’d say they contained musk.”

  “Quite yes,” he nodded. “They are musk. Crude musk, such as the makers of perfumery use.”

  “But what should that be doing in a young girl’s room—”

  “One wonders with the wonder of amazement. One also wonders what those hairs did there. I should say the musk flakes were contained in the brown envelope the elevator boy delivered to Mademoiselle Lefètre. As for the hairs—”

  The tinkle of the telephone broke off his explanation. “Yes, my sergent, it is I,” I heard him answer. “He is? Restrain him—forcefully, if necessary. I shall make the haste to join you.

  “Come, let us hurry,” he commanded as he set the ’phone down.

  “Where, at this hour o’ night, for pity’s sake?”

  “Why, to the morgue, of course. Parnell, the coroner’s physician, insists on making an autopsy on the body of Miss Henrietta Sidlo within the hour. We must look at her first.”

  “Who the devil was Miss Henrietta Sidlo?” I asked as we commenced our hurried journey to the city morgue.

  “The so attractive blond young woman who was killed because she could not mind her business and keep from the room we had forbidden her to enter.”

  “What makes you so sure she was killed? She might have fallen from the window, or—”

  “Or?” he echoed.

  “Oh, nothing. I just had a thought.”

  “I rejoice to hear it. What was it, if you please?”

  “Perhaps she thought as you did, that Miss Lefètre had climbed to the roof, and tried to emulate the feat experimentally.”

  I had expected him to scout my theory, but he nodded thoughtfully. “It may be so,” he answered. “It seems incredible that one should be so foolish, but the Sidlo girl was nothing if not unbelievable, n’est-ce-pas?”

  BENEATH THE SEARING GLARE that flooded from the clustered arclights set above the concave operating-table in the morgue’s autopsy room her body showed almost as pale as the white tiles that floored and walled the place. She had bled freely from the nose and ears when skull and brain were smashed at once, and the dried blood stained her chin and cheeks and throat. De Grandin took spray-nosed hose and played its thread-like stream across her face and neck sponging off the dried blood with a wad of cotton. At length: “What is it that you see?” he asked.

  Where the blood and grime had washed away were five light livid patches, one some three inches in size and roughly square, and extending from it four parallel lines almost completely circling the neck. At the end of each was a deeply pitted scar, as if the talons of some predatory beast had sunk into the flesh.

  “Good heavens,” I exclaimed; “it’s terrible!”

  “But naturally. One does not look for beauty in the morgue. I asked you what you saw, not for your impression esthetique.”

  I hesitated for a breath and felt his small blue eyes upon me in a fixed, unwinking stare, quizzical, sardonic; almost, it seemed, a little pleading. Long years ago, when we had known each other but a day, he and I had stood beside another corpse in this same morgue, the corpse of a young girl who had been choked and mauled to death by a gorilla. “Sarah Humphreys—” I began; and:

  “Bravo, bravissimo!” he whispered, “You have right, my friend. See, here is the bruise left by the heel of his hand; these encircling marks, they are his fingers; these jagged, deep-set marks the wounds left by his broken nails. Yes, it is so. There is no thumb print, for he does not grasp like men, he does not use his thumb for fulcrum.”

  “Then those hairs you found when you swept up the room—”

  “Précisément. I recognized them instantly, but could not imagine how they came there. If—one moment, if you please!”

  Bending quickly he took the dead girl’s pale plump hands in his and with his penknife tip skimmed underneath the rims of her elaborately lacquered nails, dropping the salvage into a fresh envelope. “I think that we shall find corroboration in a microscopic test of these,” he stated, but the bustling entrance of the coroner’s physician cut him short.

  “What’s going on here?” Doctor Parnell asked. “No one should touch this body till I’ve finished my examination—”

  “We do but make it ready for you, cher collègue,” de Grandin answered with fictitious mildness as he turned away. Outside he muttered as we climbed into my car: “There are fools, colossal fools, damned fools, and then there is Parnell. He is superlative among all fools, friend Trowbridge.”

  Three-quarters of an hour later we put the scrapings from the dead girl’s nails beneath a microscope. Most of the matter was sheer waste, but broken and wedged firmly in a tiny drop of nail stain we came upon the thing we sought, a tiny fragment of gorilla hair.

  “Tiens, she fought for life with nature’s weapons, cette pauvre,” he murmured as he rose from the examination. “It is a pity she should die so young and beautiful. We must take vengeance for her death, my friend.”

  AMBER BROCADE CURTAINS HAD been drawn against the unseasonably chilly weather and a bright fire crackled on the hearth of the high-manteled fireplace of the lounging-room of the Lefètre home in Nyack. Harold Lefètre greeted us restrainedly. Since dinnertime the day before he had been interviewed by a succession of policemen and reporters, and his nerves and patience were stretched almost to the snapping-point.

  “There isn’t anything that I can add to what you’ve been already
told,” he said like one who speaks a well-learned piece. “Emerline was just past seventeen, she had no love affairs, wasn’t especially interested in boys. Her scholastic standing was quite good, though she seldom got past B grades. She was not particularly studious, so it couldn’t have been a nervous breakdown forced by overstudy. She stood well enough in marks not to have been worried over passing her examinations; she was happy in her home. There is no reason, no earthly reason I can think of, for her to disappear. I’ve told you everything I know. Suppose you try looking for her instead of quizzing me.”

  Costello’s face flushed brick-red. He had been against the interview, expecting a rebuke would be forthcoming.

  De Grandin seemed oblivious to Lefètre’s censure. His eyes were traveling round the charming room in a quick, stock-taking gaze. He noted with approval the expensive furniture, the bizarre small tables with their litter of inconsequential trifles, cinnabar and silver cigarette-containers, fashionable magazines, bridge markers, the deep bookshelves right and left of the big fireplace, the blurred blues and mulberries of the antique china in the unglassed cabinets. In a far, unlighted corner of the room his questing glance seemed resting, as though he had attained the object of his search. In apposition to the modern, western, super-civilized sophistication of the other bric-à-brac the group of curios seemed utterly incongruous; a hippopotamus leg with hoof intact, brass-lined to form a cane stand and holding in its tube a sheaf of African assagais. Above the group of relics hung a little drum no bigger than a sectioned coconut, with a slackly tensioned head of dull gray parchment. “Monsieur,” the Frenchman suddenly demanded, “you were in Africa with Willis Cogswell in 1922?”

  Lefètre eyed him sharply. “What has that to do—”

  “It was Monsieur Cogswell’s daughter who vanished without trace three months ago, n’est-ce-pas?”

  “I still don’t see—”

  “There were three members of your African adventure, were there not: yourself, and Messieurs Cogswell and Everton?”

  Anger flamed in our host’s face as he turned on Costello. “What has all this got to do with Emerline’s case?” he almost roared. “First you come badgering me with senseless questions about her, now you bring this ‘expert’ here to pry into my private life—”

  “You did not part with Monsieur Everton in friendship?” de Grandin broke in imperturbably. Then, as if his question were rhetorical: “But no. Quite otherwise. You and he and Monsieur Cogswell quarreled. He left you vowing vengeance—”

  “See here, I’ve had enough of this unwarranted—”

  “And ninety days ago he struck at Willis Cogswell through the dearest thing that he possessed. Attend me very carefully, Monsieur. You have heard that shock caused Monsieur Cogswell to collapse, that he died of a heart seizure two days following his daughter’s disappearance—”

  “Of course, he did. Why shouldn’t he? He’d been suffering from angina for a year, had to give up business and spend half his time in bed. His doctor’d warned him anything exciting might prove fatal—”

  “Précisément. He fell dead in his library. His butler found him dead upon the floor—”

  “That’s true, but what—”

  De Grandin drew a slip of folded paper from his pocket. “This was in your friend’s hand when the butler found him,” he answered as he held the missive toward our host. It was a piece of coarse brown paper, torn, apparently from a grocery bag, and penciled on it in black chalk was one word: Bokoli.

  The anger faded from Lefètre’s face; fear drained his color, left him gray.

  “You recognize the writing?” asked de Grandin.

  “No, no, it can’t be,” Lefètre faltered. “Everton is dead—we—I saw him—”

  “And these, Monsieur, we found among the sweepings from your daughter’s room,” de Grandin interrupted. “You recognize them, hein?” Fixed with adhesive gum to a card of plain white paper, he extended the gorilla hairs we’d found the night before.

  Utter panic replaced fear in our host’s face. His eyes were glassy, bright and dilated as if drugged with belladonna. They shifted here and there, as though he sought some channel of escape. His lips began to twist convulsively.

  “This—this is a trick!” he mumbled, and we saw the spittle drooling from the corners of his mouth. “This couldn’t be—”

  His hands shook in a nervous frenzy, clawing at his collar. Then suddenly his knees seemed softening under him, and every bit of stiffness left his body so that be fell down in a heap before the hearth, the impact of his fall rattling the brass tools by the fireplace.

  Involuntarily I shivered. Something evil and soft-footed seemed to shuffle in that quiet room, but there was no seeing it, no hearing it, no way of knowing what it was; only the uncanny, hideous feel of it—clammy, cold, obscenely leering.

  “Now—so!” de Grandin soothed as he lowered his flask from the reviving man’s lips. “That is better, n’est-ce-pas?”

  He helped Lefètre to a chair, and, “Would it not be well to tell us all about it?” he suggested. “You have had a seething pot inside you many years, Monsieur; it has boiled, then simmered down, then boiled again, and it has brought much scum up in the process. Let us skim it off, comme ça”—he made a gesture as if with a spoon—“and throw it out. Only so shall we arrive at mental peace.”

  Lefètre set his face like one who contemplates a dive in icy water. “There were four of us on safari through Bokoliland,” he answered; “Cogswell, his wife Lysbeth, a Boer settler’s daughter, Everton and I. We’d found the going pretty rough; no ivory, no trading fit to mention, no gold, and our supplies were running low. When we reached Shamboko’s village the men were all out hunting, but the women and old men were kind to us and fed and lodged us. In normal circumstances we’d have waited there until the chief came back and tried to do some trading, but on the second evening Everton came hurrying to our hut half drunken with excitement.

  “‘I’ve just been to the Ju-Ju house,’ he told us. ‘D’ye know what they’ve got there? Gold! Great heaps and stacks o’ yellow dust, enough to fill our hats and pockets, and a stack o’ yellow diamonds bigger than your head. Let’s go!’

  “Now, the Bokoli are a fairly peaceful folk, and they’d take a lot from white men, but if you monkey with their women or their Ju-Ju you’d better have your life insurance premiums all paid. I’d seen the body of a man they’d ‘chopped’ for sacrilege one time, and it had put the fear o’ God in me. They’d flayed the skin off him, not enough to kill him, but the torment must have been almost past standing. Then they’d smeared honey on the raw nerve ends and staked him down spread-eagled in a clearing in the jungle. The ants had found him there—millions of the little red ones—and they’d cleaned the flesh off of his bones as if they had been boiled.

  “I wasn’t having any of that, so I turned the proposition down, but the others were all for it. Finally I yielded and we sneaked down to the Ju-Ju house. It was just as Everton had said. The gold was piled in little pyramidal heaps before the idol in a semicircle, with the diamonds stacked up in the center. The offerings must have been accumulating over several centuries, for there’s little gold in the Bokoli country, and no diamonds nearer than five hundred miles. But there the stuff was, ready for our taking.

  “We stuffed our haversacks and pockets and set out for the coast within an hour, anxious to put as many miles as possible between us and the village before the medicine man paid his morning visit to the Ju-Ju and found out what we’d done.

  “Everton began to act queer from the start. He’d sneak away from camp at night and be gone hours at a time without an explanation. One night I followed him. He made straight for a clearing by the river and sat down on the grass as if waiting someone. Presently I saw a shadow slipping from the bush and next moment a full-grown gorilla shambled out into the moonlight. Instead of rushing Everton the monster stopped a little distance off and looked at him, and Everton looked back, then—think I’m a liar if you wish—they
talked to one another. Don’t ask me how they did it; I don’t know. I only know that Everton addressed a series of deep grunts to the great beast and it answered him in kind. Then they parted and I trailed him back to camp.

  “Three days later the Bokoli caught us. We’d just completed dinner and were sitting down to smoke when all at once the jungle seemed alive with ’em, great strapping blacks with four-foot throwing spears and bullhide shields and vulture feathers in their hair. They weren’t noisy about it. That was the worst of it. They appeared like shadows out of nowhere and stood there in a ring, just looking at us. Old Chief Shamboko did the honors, and he was as polite about it as the villain in a play. No reproaches for the diamonds and the gold dust we’d made off with, though they must have represented his tribe’s savings for a century or more. Oh, no, he put it squarely to us on the ground of sacrilege. The Ju-Ju was insulted. He’d lost face. Only blood could wash away the memory of the insult, but he’d be satisfied with one of us. Just one. We were to make the choice. Then he walked back to the ring of warriors and stood waiting for us to announce which one of us would go back to be flayed alive and eaten up by ants. Pretty fix to be in, eh?”

  “You made no offer to return the loot?” de Grandin asked.

  “I’ll say we did. Told him he might have our whole trade stock to boot, but he wasn’t interested. The treasure we had taken from the temple had been tainted by our touch, so couldn’t be put back, and only things dug from the earth were suitable as offerings to the Ju-Ju, so our trade stuff had no value. Besides, they wanted blood, and blood was what they meant to have.”

  “One sees. Accordingly—?”

  “We tossed for it. Lysbeth, Cogswell’s wife, drew out a coin and whispered something to her husband. Then he and Everton and I stood by as she flipped it. Cogswell beat us to the call and shouted ‘Heads!’ And heads it came. That left Everton and me to try.