“Fly, my friend, hasten to the telephone and advise the good Sergeant Costello what has occurred,” he admonished. “I would that he meets us at the professor’s house. Pardieu, if some scoundrel has taken the life of that so great scholar, I, Jules de Grandin, will track him down and deliver him to justice—yes, though he takes refuge beneath the throne of Satan himself!”
Ten minutes later we were riding furiously toward the sinking moon over the smooth macadam road which led to The Beeches.
HER PRETTY YELLOW HAIR in attractive disorder, an orchid negligée drawn over her filmy nightdress—and French-heeled satin mules of the same color on her little white feet, Alice Butterbaugh met us in the wide reception hall of The Beeches, a very much frightened and entirely inarticulate butler at her elbow.
“Oh, Dr. Trowbridge,” she sobbed, seizing my arm in both her small hands, “I’m so glad you got here! I—” She started back, folding the negligée across her diaphanous nightrobe as she became aware of de Grandin’s presence. “This is Dr. Jules de Grandin, my dear,” I introduced. “He is a member of the faculty of the University of Paris, and has been stopping with me for a while. He will be of great assistance in case it develops your uncle met with foul play.”
“How do you do, Dr. de Grandin?” Alice acknowledged, extending her hand. “I am sure you will be able to help us in our trouble.”
“Mademoiselle,” de Grandin bowed his sleek blond head as he pressed his lips to her fingers, “commandez-moi: j’ suis prêt.
“And now”—his air of gallantry fell from him like a cloak as he straightened his shoulders—“will you be good enough to take us to the scene and tell us all?”
“I’d gone to bed,” the girl began as she led the way toward her uncle’s library. “Uncle Frank was terribly excited all afternoon after he received that letter, and when he came back from Harrisonville he was still boiling inwardly. I could hardly get him to eat any dinner. Just as soon as dinner was over he went to the library where he has been keeping the latest addition to his collection of mummies, and told me he was going to begin unpacking it.
“I went to bed about half-past eleven and called good-night to him through the library door as I passed. I went to sleep almost immediately, but something—I don’t know what, but I’m sure it was not a noise of any kind—woke me up a few minutes after two. I lay there trying to get back to sleep until nearly three, then decided to go to the bathroom for a bromide tablet. As I walked down the passage I noticed a light shining out of the library door into the lower hall, so I knew the door must be open.
“Uncle never left the door unclosed when he was working, for he hated to have the servants look in at him, and they would stand in the passage and stare if they thought he doing anything with his mummies—it seemed to fascinate them. Knowing Uncle’s habits, I thought he had gone to bed without shutting off the light, and went down to turn it out. When I got here I found—” She paused beside the door with averted eyes and motioned toward the room beyond.
Professor Butterbaugh lay on his back, staring with sightless, dead eyes at the glowing globes of the electric chandelier, his body straight and stiff, legs extended, arms lying at his sides, as though he had fallen backward from an upright position and remained immovable since his fall. Despite the post-mortem flaccidity of his features, his countenance retained something of the expression it must have worn when death touched him, and, gazing at his face, it seemed to me he looked more startled than frightened or angry. Nowhere was there evidence of any sort of struggle; not so much as a paper was disturbed on the big, flat-topped desk beside which the dead scientist lay, and the only witness testifying to tragedy was the still, inert remnant of what had been one of the world’s foremost Egyptologists some three or four hours before.
“Beg pardon, Miss Alice,” the pale-faced man-servant, trousers and coat pulled over his night-clothes, tip-toed toward the professor’s niece, “there’s a gentleman outside, a Sergeant Costello, from the police department—”
“The police!” the girl’s pallid face went paler still. “Wh—what are the police doing here—who told them?”
“I—I don’t know, Miss,” the serving man stammered.
“I did notify the good sergeant, Mademoiselle,” de Grandin announced, looking up from beside the professor’s body.
“Send him to me at once, immediately, right away,” he ordered the butler, and walked quickly to the door to greet the burly, red-headed Irishman.
“Holà, my friend,” he called as the detective crossed the hall, “we have here a wicked business to investigate. Some miscreant has struck down your famous fellow townsman from the back, and—”
“H’m, from th’ back, is it?” Costello replied, looking meditatively at Butterbaugh’s supine form. “An’ how d’ye make that out, Dr. de Grandin? Seems to me there’s no marks o’ violence on th’ body at all, an’ th’ pore gentleman died from natural causes. Apoplexy, it was, belike. He was a peppery-tempered old divil, God rest his soul!”
“Apoplexy, yes,” de Grandin agreed with a mirthless smile, “since apoplexy is only a general name for the condition more definitely called cerebral hemorrhage. Behold the cause of this apoplexy, my friend.” Stooping, he raised the professor’s head, pointing to the occipital region. Against the dead man’s smoothly brushed iron-gray hair lay a stain of blood, scarcely larger than a twenty-five cent piece, and so meager in its moisture that the Turkish rug on which the head had rested showed hardly any discoloration. Parting the hair, de Grandin showed a small, smooth-edged wound about the caliber of an ordinary lead-pencil, a bit of whitish substance welling up to the very edge of the opening and all but stopping any blood-flow from inside the head.
“Gun?” Costello bent to examine the puncture.
“I do not think so,” the Frenchman replied. “Had a shot been fired from a pistol at close range or a rifle from a distance the bullet would probably have gone out of the head, yet there is only one wound here. Had a firearm of low power, unable to drive the missile through the head, been used, the bone would have shattered at the point of entrance, yet here we have a clean-cut wound. No, my friend, this injury is the result of some hand-weapon. Besides, Mademoiselle Butterbaugh was in the house, as were also the servants, yet none recalls having heard a shot fired.
“Mademoiselle,” he rose from his examination of the body, “you did mention that your uncle was unwrapping a certain mummy tonight. This mummy, where is it, if you please?”
“I—I don’t know,” the girl faltered. “I thought it was in here, but—”
“But it is not,” de Grandin supplied dryly. “Come, mes amis, let us search for this missing cadaver. There are times when the dead can tell us more than the living.”
We crossed the library, passed between a pair of heavy brocade curtains, and entered a smaller room walled with smooth plaster, its only furniture being a series of glass cases containing small specimens of Egyptiana and a rank of upright mummy cases standing straight and sentinel-like against the farther wall. “Howly mither!” Costello exclaimed, his native brogue cutting through his acquired American accent, as he pointed one hand toward one of the mummy cases, signing himself piously with the cross with the other.
The center figure in the rank of mummies stood in a case somewhat taller than its fellows, and, unlike the others, was not hidden from view by a coffin lid, for the cover from its case had fallen to the floor, disclosing the mummy to our gaze. The body had been almost entirely denuded of its bandages, the face, arms and lower portion of the legs having been freed, so that, had it been a living man instead of a corpse, neither walking nor the use of the arms would have been impeded by the linen bands which remained in place. This much I saw at a glance, but the cause of Costello’s outcry was not plain until I had looked a second time. Then I added my amazed gasp to the big Irishman’s exclamation, for in the right hand of the dead thing was firmly grasped a rod of polished wood tipped by a hawk’s head executed in metal, the bird’s beak be
ing some three inches in length, curved and sharp as the hooked needles used by upholsterers to sew heavy fabrics. Upon the metal point of the beak was a faintly perceptible smear of blood, and a drop of the grisly liquid had fallen to the floor, making a tiny, dark-red stain at the mummy’s desiccated feet.
And on the mummy’s face, drawn by the embalming process into a sort of sardonic grin, was another reddish smear, as, though the dead thing had bent its lips to the wound inflicted by the instrument clutched in its dead hand.
“Pardieu, Friend Trowbridge, I think we need look no farther for the weapon which took Monsieur Butterbaugh’s life,” de Grandin commented, twisting the end of his mustache with a nervous gesture.
“Wuz this th’ mummy th’ professor wuz workin’ on?” Costello demanded, turning to the butler, who had followed us to the door of the specimen room.
“Oh, my Gawd!” the servant exclaimed with a shudder as he beheld the armed and sneering cadaver standing in its case, one mummified foot slightly advanced, as though the thing were about to step into the room in search of fresh victims.
“Never mind th’ bawlin’,” Costello ordered; “answer me question. Wuz this th’ mummy Professor Butterbaugh wuz unwrappin, when—when it happened to him?”
“I don’t know, sir,” the servant quavered. “I never saw the thing before, an’, s’welp me Gawd, I never want to see it again. But I think it must be the one Dr. Butterbaugh had in mind, for there are five mummies there now, and this mornin’, when I came in to open the blinds, there were only four standin’ against the walls and one was layin’ on the floor over by the door.”
“Humph, guess this is th’ one, then,” Costello replied. “Go outside there an’ git th’ other servants. Tell ’em I want to question ’em, an’ don’t tell what you’ve seen here.”
De Grandin walked quickly to the grinning mummy and examined the pointed instrument in its hand minutely. “Très bien,” he murmured to himself, giving the relic room a final appraising glance.
“Aren’t you going to look into those other mummy cases?” I asked as he turned to leave.
“Not I,” he denied. “Let Sergeant Costello busy himself with them. Me, I have other matters of more importance to attend to. Come, let us examine the servants.”
The cook, a large and very frightened Negress, a diminutive and likewise badly frightened colored boy who tended the garden and acted as chauffeur, two white maids, both safely past the heyday of youth, and the butler composed the domestic staff of The Beeches. Costello marshaled them in line and began a series of searching questions, but de Grandin, after a single look at the crowd, approached the sergeant and excused himself, saying we would talk the matter over the following morning.
“Thank you, sor,” Costello acknowledged: “I take it kindly of ye to see that I got th’ first look-in on this case before anny of th’ newspaper boys had a chanst to spoil it. I’ll be comin’ over to your house tomorrow an’ we’ll go over all th’ evidence together, so we will.”
“Très excellent,” de Grandin agreed. “Good night, Sergeant. I am not sure, but I think we shall soon have these murderers beneath the lock and key of your so efficiently strong jail.”
“Murderers?” Costello echoed. “Ye think there wuz more ’n one of ’em, then, sor?”
“Parbleu, yes; I know it,” de Grandin responded. “Good night, mon vieux.”
“WELL, DR. DE GRANDIN,” Sergeant Costello announced as he entered my office the following afternoon, “we’ve got about as far as we can with th’ case.”
“Ah,” de Grandin smiled pleasantly as he pushed a box of cigars across the table, “and what have you discovered, cher Sergent?”
“Well, sor,” the Irishman grinned deprecatingly, “I can’t rightly say we’ve found out much of annythin’, precisely. F’r instance, we’ve found that somebody forged Professor Butterbaugh’s signature to th’ letter to th’ Elgrace Monument Works. We put it under a lens at headquarters today, an’ you can see where th’ name’s been traced as plain as daylight.”
“Yes,” de Grandin encouraged. “And have you any theory as to who forged that letter, or who killed the professor?”
“No, sor, we haven’t,” the detective confessed. “Between you an’ me, sor, that Miss Alice may know more about th’ business than she lets on. I wouldn’t say she wuz exactly glad to see me when I come last night, an’, an’—well, she hasn’t been anny too helpful. This mornin’, when I wuz puttin’ th’ servants through their paces agin, to see if there wuz anny discrepancies between th’ stories they told last night an’ what they might be sayin’ this time, she ups an’ says, says she, ‘Officer,’ she says, ‘you’ve been over all that before,’ she says, ‘an’ I’ll not have my servants hu-milly-ated,’ she says, ‘by havin’ you ask ’em every few hours which one of ’em killed me uncle.’
“So I ups an’ says, ‘All right, Miss. I don’t suppose you have anny suspicions concernin’ who killed him?’ An’ she says, ‘Certainly not!’ just like that. An’ that wuz that, sor.
“Now, don’t you be gittin’ me wrong, Dr. de Grandin an’ Dr. Trowbridge. Miss Butterbaugh is a high-toned lady, an’ all that, an’ I’m not makin’ anny wise cracks about her bein’ guilty, or even havin’ guilty knowledge: but—”
The sharp staccato of my office ’phone cut his statement in half. “Hello?” I called tentatively, as I lifted the receiver.
“Sergeant Costello; I want to speak to Sergeant Costello,” an excited voice demanded. “This is Schultz speaking.”
“All right,” I replied, passing the instrument to the sergeant.
“Hello?” Costello growled, “Yes, Schultz, this is Costello, what’s—what? When? Oh, it did, did it? Yes, you bet your sweet life I’ll be right over, an’ you’d best git busy and cook up a sweet young alibi by th’ time I git there, too, young felly me lad!
“Gentlemen,” he turned a blank face to us, “that wuz Schultz, th’ uniformed man I’d left on duty at Th’ Beeches. He tells me that mummy—th’ one with th’ little pickax in its hand—has disappeared from th’ house, right before his eyes.”
“Tout les démons!” de Grandin cried, springing from his chair. “I expected this. Come, my friends; let us hasten, let us speed, let us fly! Parbleu, but the trail may not yet have grown cold!”
“I WAS MAKING MY ROUNDS, as you told me, sir,” Patrolman Schultz explained to Sergeant Costello. “I’d been through the house and looked in on that queer-lookin’ mummy in the little room, and seen everything was in order, then I went out to the garage. Julius, the chauffeur, was telling me that he was going to quit his job as soon as the police investigation was done, ’cause he wouldn’t dare live here after what’s happened, and I was wondering if he was suffering from a guilty conscience, or what, so I stopped to talk to him and see what he’d say. I couldn’t a’ been outside more than fifteen minutes, all told, and I came right back in the house; but that mummy was clean gone when I got back.”
“Oh, it wuz, wuz it?” Costello answered sarcastically. “I don’t suppose you heard it hollerin’ for help while it wuz bein’ kidnaped, or annythin’ like that while you wuz out Sherlock Holmesin’ th’ chauffeur, did you? O’ course not! You wuz too busy, playin’ Ol’ King Brady to pay attention to your regular duties. Well, now, young felly, let me tell you somethin’. We’ll find that missin’ mummy, an’ we’ll find him toot sweet, as Dr. de Grandin would say, or badge number six hundred an’ eighty-seven will be turned in at headquarters tonight, d’ye git me?”
He turned on his heel and walked toward the house, leaving the crestfallen young patrolman staring helplessly after him.
We were about to follow him when the rattle of a Ford delivery wagon on the gravel driveway drew our attention. A young man in white apron and jacket jumped from the machine and approached the service porch, a basket of groceries on his arm.
“Sorry to keep your order waitin’,” he told the cook as he handed her the hamper and a duplicate sales slip for her
signature, “but I liked to got kilt comin’ up th’ road about twenty minutes ago. I was drivin’ out th’ pike slow an’ easy when a big touring car shot outa th’ lane an’ crowded me into the ditch. If I hadn’t had my foot on th’ gas an’ been able to skedaddle outa th’ way before they ran me down I’d most likely a’ been killed, an’ maybe th’ cake-eater an’ Sheba in th’ other car, as well.”
“Where was it you had this so close escape?” de Grandin asked, approaching the youth with an ingratiating smile.
“Down th’ road a piece,” the other replied, nothing loth to dilate on his adventure. “You know, there’s a lane that skirts th’ edge of Professor Butterbaugh’s place an’ runs out to th’ pike near Twin Pines. There’s a tall hedge growin’ on each side of th’ lane where it comes out on th’ pike, an’ these folks musta been throwin’ a neckin’ party or sumpin up there, for they was runnin’ in low—kind o’ sneakin’ along—not makin’ a bit o’ noise till they was within a few feet of th’ main road, then they stepped on her for fair, an’ come out into th’ highway runnin’ like a scairt dawg.”
“Indeed?” de Grandin raised sympathetic eyebrows. “And did you notice the people in this car? They should be arrested for such actions.”
“I’ll say I noticed ’em,” the grocery boy answered with an emphatic nod. “The sheik who was drivin’ was one o’ them lounge-lizards with patent leather hair, an’ th’ Jane was little an’ dark, with big eyes an’ a sort o’ sneery look. She was holdin’ sumpin in her lap; looked like it might o’ been another girl’s head, or sumpin. Anyways, it was all covered up with cloth. An’ they didn’t even excuse theirselves for crowdin’ me into the ditch—just went on down th’ road toward Morristown like greased lightnin’.”
The Horror on the Links Page 24
