Dr. Poggioli: Criminologist (The Lost Classics Book 14)

by T. S. Stribling

  “Y-yes, sir,” explained Mordag, lowering his voice. “Last night I asked the matron on my floor to watch my door. I paid her three dollars to move her chair where she could see if anybody went in.”

  “And she saw nothing?”

  “Nothing at all.”

  The docent in criminology pondered.

  “Let me see, a bellboy brought up your bags; another, possibly, some ice water—”

  “Some cracked ice,” corrected the sandy man. “I’m Scotch.”

  “H-m-m—there were two chances there.”

  “Yes, but how would they know what to put in the note?”

  “Have you got one of the things?”

  For answer Mordag reached in his pocket and brought out a folded handkerchief. He handed it to Poggioli gingerly as if he were afraid of it.

  His manner caused the psychologist to unfold the handkerchief with care. Inside was a strip torn from the edge of a newspaper. On this edge was written a message as cryptic as its mode of appearance. It bore the following rigmarole—

  7200—2.37—3645—BLASHFIELD—

  VINE—23—POPLAR—LOISETTE—VENDIG.

  Beneath this was a sentence written in French. The docent read the figures twice.

  “Do you understand what this means?”

  “Well, no-o—not all. My train was due to get into Columbus at 2.37 this

  morning—” He stood studying his own note over Poggioli’s shoulder. “I’m rooming at the Vendig and I think the Vendig is on Loisette Street, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, and the station is on Vine,” added the psychologist. “The other streets must have been on your route to the hotel.”

  “I suppose so—I hardly ever understand all of a note.” The docent had become interested in the missive.

  “Look here, 7200 could easily be the number of the locomotive that pulled your train; 3645 Blashfield might be a street address.”

  “Yes, it might.”

  Suddenly Poggioli held the note perfectly still.

  “Do you happen to read French?” he asked in a different tone. “No, I don’t know French.”

  “Do you know what this bottom sentence means?”

  “No; what does it mean?”

  “I was just asking you,” said Poggioli. “I’m as ignorant as you of French—”

  He looked around him, then refolded the note in the handkerchief and placed it in his own pocket.

  “This is more interesting than a dead cat,” he said in a different tone. “I’ve decided to go down with you after all. Now I’ve got to run back up to the office for a moment and leave word that I’ll be absent from the laboratory for three days.”

  “Three days!” ejaculated the sandy man, looking curiously at Poggioli. “Why three days?”

  “Oh, I have to set a time limit and I might as well be liberal with myself.” He turned toward the stairs.

  “Do you want me to wait here for you?” called Mordag, with a sharp protest in his voice.

  “Do you want to come with me?”

  “N-no—not with the windows and everything—”

  “Listen,” said Poggioli cheerfully, “you stand here in the cloakroom. I’ll lock the door from the outside and take the key with me. When you hear me put this key in the door again you may know that it is I, and you needn’t feel jumpy about it.”

  “Well, all right,” agreed Mordag.

  The atmosphere the fellow had wrought caused Poggioli to look up and down the hallway in both directions. He would not have been greatly surprised to see a heavy man; but the corridor was empty. The docent started quickly up the steps listening intently as he went. On the upper floor it suddenly occurred to him that he had not searched the closet to make sure it was empty. He believed it was. He was morally certain it was empty, but the note Mordag had showed him was so extremely odd, and sinister—for the fellow to know the very locomotive number that brought Mordag to Columbus . . .

  If this Professor La Plesse were hanging about the university waiting for Mordag to come out, it was not impossible for him to have secreted himself in the cloakroom. The sheerest possibility of caging the poor harried devil of a man with his arch tormentor stopped Poggioli, turned him around and sent him running back down the steps for another look into the room.

  He paused at the door, tapped faintly and said in a low tone— “I’m back just for a moment—”

  The next instant a muffled scream broke from inside the door. “Mr. Poggioli! Oh, Mr. Poggioli! Here he is—come at last!”

  The psychologist jerked out his key, made two efforts before he unlocked the door.

  When it was open he saw Mordag backed away among the cloaks, almost on the verge of collapse.

  “What’s the matter? Where is he?” cried Poggioli, breathing sharply. “Oh—oh—that was you?”

  “Yes, I just wanted to—to see if the cloakroom was empty; it struck me a man might be hiding—”

  Mordag drew long, shaken breaths.

  “No, no; he isn’t in here. He—he doesn’t have to get behind anything to—to hide. He just—melts away.”

  “I see,” said Poggioli, giving a brief laugh. “I didn’t know his habits.”

  He locked the door again and set off upstairs once more. On his way up he paused to reread the French at the bottom of the note. He had remembered it correctly. The sentence read—

  “You have three more days to live.”

  II

  IN THE taxicab on the way to the Hotel Vendig Mr. Henry Poggioli attempted to soothe the nervousness of his client. He began talking about the five hundred white rats which he had in the university laboratory. He was experimenting, he said, on their diet. It was remarkable, the influence of diet on the functioning of both rats and men.

  “Now you, for example—” proceeded the docent, warming to his theme—“if you would eat more rice—unpolished rice—and fruits, you wouldn’t be so jumpy.”

  “Not even if somebody were trying to kill me?” asked Mordag in a gray tone. “Now, now,” advised the docent, “get your mind off of that.”

  The taxicab in which the men rode, moved and stopped, in unison with a great flock of cars, to the stop and go signals of the traffic lights.

  Poggioli observed his companion’s nervous glances among the other motors, and finally he protested this also.

  “Look here, Mordag; as a psychologist I advise you to shake off this continual edginess. You need a rest.”

  Mr. Clayman Mordag leaned back among the cushions in an attempt to relax, but every honk made him glance around.

  “Listen,” begged Poggioli. “At least don’t watch the trucks. You know the fellow is not in a truck; nor a car, either, for that matter. It is extremely illogical, Mordag, for you to be afraid of meeting this La Plesse in a perfectly empty room and, simultaneously, in a street full of cars.”

  “If he wasn’t in the house he is likely to be in the street.”

  Poggioli leaned forward with the satisfaction of a pedagogue cornering a pupil. “That is just what I wanted you to say. There you introduce the theory of probability. At this moment there must be at least two thousand cars in this street, divided into blocks containing about a hundred and twenty cars each.

  Now the probability that you are in the same block with this Professor La Plesse— that is, assuming that he entered a car at the same moment we did; which, within itself, is a ridiculous assumption; but assuming he did—the probability that he would be in the same block with you, is—let me see—a hundred and twenty into two thousand—”

  But the docent did not work out this ratio because he saw his client was not listening. As a matter of fact, the scientist was not greatly interested himself. He sat quiet for a minute or two, trying to think up a more comforting line of dialectic. Finally he said—

  “Look here, if La Plesse really gets into your apartment every night and seriously intends to commit foul play, why doesn’t he just do it and have it over with?”

  “I—I think he wa
nts it to—to look like I—killed myself,” said Mordag, wetting his lips.

  “This might be indicated if on his first visit he had murdered you, but after you have advertised the situation to me and to the hotel force—”

  “Maybe he really hopes to make me kill myself.”

  There was more color to this. Poggioli mused a moment, then said:

  “If that’s all, we can checkmate his whole plan of terrorism by a proper diet. It may interest you to know that suicides are recruited mainly from the meat eating nations. Now if you—”

  “Or he may not want to kill me at all. He may be doing this just to torture me.” Poggioli gave up his attempt to interest Mordag in impersonal speculations on the situation.

  “He may not want to kill you,” he suggested dryly, “for fear of getting himself hanged.”

  The sandy haired man looked blankly at the psychologist. “For fear of getting himself hanged?”

  “Certainly; that’s not a pleasant idea.”

  “Why, they couldn’t hang him, Mr. Poggioli.”

  “Why couldn’t they hang him?” demanded the psychologist, losing his patience.

  “Because they’d have to keep him in jail for awhile—at least they’d have to keep him in a death cell for three nights before they hanged him, and—and he wouldn’t stay; he’d just walk out.”

  Poggioli drew a breath, looked at Mordag, ready to break loose; then he blew out his breath because he saw it was no use. Then, after all, on the next reaction he did fling out—

  “Mordag, you are the most complete imbecile!” The sandy man lifted a hand.

  “I know it, I know it,” he cried nervously. “I don’t expect anybody to believe it unless they’ve seen him do it hundreds of times, like I have.”

  “Get out of the cells of the condemned?” cried Poggioli.

  “Once he got out of a death cell,” said Mordag. “I believe it was at Leavenworth. Lemme see—” He reached in his pocket and drew out his leather case of clippings again.

  “Put ’em up! Put ’em up!” snapped the psychologist. “And don’t look at those damned things any more!”

  Mordag put back his case.

  “I thought you wanted to know where he did it.”

  “It was an exhibition trick, wasn’t it—to draw a crowd to his performance. The sheriff wasn’t really trying to hang him, was he?”

  “No, of course not. But the understanding was that the turnkey would keep him in the death cell until after the performance at the theater that night—if he could.”

  “And he got out and arrived at the theater on time?”

  “Yes, and they had the death watches and everything right by the cell. The men said they could see him lying on his bunk right up to ten minutes of nine— that was when he was to go on the stage. Then, all of a sudden, he wasn’t there. And out he steps in the theater in full evening dress, a good fifteen blocks away, and went on with his performance—Here, I’ll read you what the Leavenworth papers said—”

  “For God’s sake keep those clippings in your pocket, or chuck ’em out the window. You know how that was done, don’t you?”

  “No, of course I don’t.”

  “By famuli.”

  “Family?”

  “No, famuli—I mean confederates, assistants, helpers.”

  The sandy haired man picked nervously at the upholstering and glanced about at a passing car, then he said—“I was his assistant for two years.”

  “Oh!” ejaculated Poggioli in an altered tone. “And you say you don’t know how he did it?”

  “Why, no-o. All I did was to put his tables and balls and boxes and things on the stage at the right time. Once I had seen him buried in the cemetery in a casket, and the casket in its box. And I thought sort of creepy, ‘Well, you won’t show up this time;’ but when I gave his cue—you know, straightened the black velvet top on his table—out of the wings in his evening clothes he stepped, looking as good as ever.”

  “Then he had another helper.”

  “Rose.”

  “Who was she?”

  “At that time she was the professor’s wife.”

  “But she’s not his wife now?”

  “No—” Mordag stared for once absently into the crowded street—

  “No, she’s not now.”

  Poggioli appraised the change that had come over the ex-assistant. “Well,” he suggested, “what about this Rose?”

  “I know she didn’t help him. We did the same things.”

  “You mean to say his own wife didn’t understand his tricks?”

  “No, she didn’t. Why lots of times me and Rose talked about his tricks and wondered how he did ’em.”

  “She could have pretended she didn’t know.” Mordag gave his momentary twist of a smile.

  “I think she would have pretended to him before she would to me.”

  “Oh, I see.” Poggioli nodded, looking steadfastly at his client. “And you say, I believe, that finally he—divorced her?”

  “Yes,” nodded the thin man, staring. “Rose and me were very good friends— she never really got along with the professor. You know he was one of those heavy men who—who really never need anybody much.”

  “I see; but you and Rose were—friends?”

  “Yes, we were friends.” A muscle in Mordag’s lean cheek twitched.

  “And that’s the reason—well, of the trouble between La Plesse and his wife. That’s why you jump off of the New York train at Columbus—and find your water glass poisoned next morning?”

  “He didn’t treat Rose right. You needn’t look at me that way, sir, I—”

  Here Mordag broke off his stammering defense. His jaw dropped. He stared at something in the street and gasped in a whisper.

  “Oh, my God, sir—”

  The fright of the man sharpened Poggioli’s nerves. The whole street of cars were standing still under a red light. The docent searched among them.

  “Which one’s he in; where is he?”

  “That blue car—right there . . .”

  Poggioli saw a blue limousine. In it were three persons—a man, a woman and a child. The man was a heavily bodied person of the type who has become corpulent through success. He held a coin toward the child. As the little girl reached for the piece of silver the coin simply vanished, in full view, without any screening of the fingers whatsoever. It was an amazing enough trick to have made the docent marvel if the situation itself had not been so extraordinary. The psychologist heard the woman give a puzzled laugh and ask in French—

  “How do you do that, Jacques? But that’s a silly question.”

  The next moment the whistle blew and the parade moved forward.

  Poggioli whirled and said to the chauffeur through the hole in the glass partition—

  “Keep up with that blue limousine until you reach the first traffic cop, then stop!”

  Mordag leaned forward and pulled at Poggioli’s arm.

  “For God’s sake, don’t do that. Turn off at the first corner; take me to a—a flying field.”

  The chauffeur had caught his fares’ excitement.

  “What do you want me to do, sir?” he called through the glass, at the same time watching the jam.

  “Follow that blue car! Get to a cop! Mordag, the only way to end this situation is to end it!”

  “The blue car,” repeated the chauffeur. “Yes—follow it!”

  Just then a break in the traffic allowed the lane containing the blue car to pass rapidly up the street. The chauffeur attempted to edge his cab into this open lane. A protest of honking set up from the rear. He was forced back into his own path on pain of being hit.

  “Damn the luck!” cried Poggioli, glaring at the cars with the right of way. “The damned egocentric American public; no matter how urgent a man’s needs may be—life or death—no man in a car will give you an inch!”

  He saw the blue car getting completely away. He pressed his face against the glass partition.

  “
Get the license number, chauffeur. Can you see it? Get it before he’s gone.”

  Just then a lucky gap in the vehicles gave both men a view of the metal sheet. It was Ohio 143–734.

  “Call it out to me,” cried Poggioli through the glass. “I want to check up on it.” The driver called it out. The psychologist noted it down on an envelope.

  “All right, my boy,” he said, turning to Mordag. “That’s the first step in Professor La Plesse’s undoing. Hurry on, chauffeur, to that first officer you see yonder!”

  The chauffeur aimed straight at the man in blue. The traffic guard jumped aside.

  “Where are your eyes? Do I look like a speedway? Want to lose your license, you dumb fathead?”

  Poggioli leaned out of the window and beckoned with such urgency the officer hushed his sarcasm and came to the car.

  “What the hell do you want, stopping the traffic—”

  “I want you to halt all the traffic—everything in sight—and arrest that blue limousine at the end of this block.”

  The guard looked up the street, then at Poggioli.

  “Who are you?”

  “A criminologist.”

  “A what?”

  “Listen, the man in that blue limousine is a potential murderer!” The policeman stared.

  “Who did you say he had murdered?”

  “Nobody yet, but he is going to murder—”

  “Listen, what’s your name and address?”

  Poggioli gave it, then immediately wished he had not done so.

  “Well, move along,” ordered the bluecoat sharply, drawing out his summonses. “You can’t hold up the traffic because somebody is going to murder somebody else. My Gawd, you’d never get a car through Columbus if you stopped traffic

  on that account!” He made a full arm swing at the chauffeur. “Move along; you ought to know better than to stop for a thing like that. Want to lose your license?”

  The chauffeur jammed his accelerator so hard his car began bucking. Poggioli was beside himself.

  “Of all damnable systems—”

  Mr. Mordag was immensely relieved.

  “You wouldn’t have got him if you had stopped his machine.”