“Today we returned and took our dead from the polluting atmosphere of Butterbaugh’s house—while your stupid police looked on and saw nothing.
“How you discovered us we do not know, but may the lightnings of Osiris blast you; may Apepi, the serpent, crush your bones and the pestilence of Typhon wither your flesh! May—”
A convulsive shudder ran through him, he half rose from the bench, then slid forward limply, his hands clutching futilely at the withered hands of the mummy which grinned sardonically into his face.
I glanced hastily toward the girl, who had sat silent during her brother’s narrative. Her jaw had dropped, her head sagged forward on her breast, and her eyes stared straight before her with the inane, fixed stare of the newly dead.
De Grandin studied the three bodies before us a long moment, then turned to Costello. “You will make what report is necessary, my friend?” he asked.
“Sure, I will, sor,” the detective assented, “an’ I got to hand it to ye for cleanin’ up th’ mystery so neat, too; but, beggin’ your pardon, how d’ye intend makin’ good on your promise to ship these here dead corpses back home?”
De Grandin smiled quickly. “Did you not hear him demand my promise to ship his ashes to Egypt?” he asked. “When the official formalities are concluded, we shall have them cremated.”
“EXCUSE ME FOR BOTHERIN’ you, Dr. Jules de Grandin,” Costello apologized as we concluded dinner at my house that evening, “but I ain’t eddycated like you an’ Dr. Trowbridge here, an’ there’s a lot o’ things that’s plain as ABC to you gentlemen that don’t seem to mean nothin’ at all to me. Would you mind tellin’ me how you figured this here case out so easy, an’”—his florid face went a shade redder—“an’ excuse me for tryin’ to git funny with you this afternoon when you wuz tellin’ th’ kind o’ hair th’ gink we must find had?”
“Yes, de Grandin,” I urged, “tell us; I’m as much in the dark as Servant Costello.”
“Glory be,” the Irishman exclaimed fervently, “then I’m not the only dumb-bell in th’ party!”
De Grandin turned his quick, elfish smile on each of us in turn, then knocked the ashes from his cigar into his coffee cup.
“All men have two eyes—unless they have one,” he began, “and all see the same things; but not all do know what it is that they see.
“When we did go to that Professor Butterbaugh’s house after he had been murdered, I did first observe the size, appearance and location of the wound whereof he died; next I did look very carefully about to see what autograph his murderers had left. Believe me, my friends, all criminals leave their visiting cards, if only the police can read them.
“Très bien, I did find that in the professor’s right hand were clutched four or five short, black hairs—straight, glossy hairs, with traces of pomade still upon them.
“Now, at the Faculté de Médicine Légal, to which I have the honor to belong, we have spent much time in the study of such things. We know, for example, that in case of sudden death, especially where there has been injury done the nervous system, the body undergoes an instantaneous rigidity, making the dead hand grasp and firmly hold any object within its reach. Thus we have found soldiers, shot on the field of battle, firmly holding their rifles; suicides clutching the pistols with which they have ended their lives, or, occasionally, drowned bodies grasping grass, weeds or gravel. Also we have learned that fragments of clothing, hair or other foreign substances clutched in a dead man’s hand—unless they be from his own attire or person—indicate the presence of some other person at the instant of death, and hence point to murder rather than suicide.
“Again, we have paid much attention to the evidence borne by the location of wounds. Friend Trowbridge,”—he turned to me—“will you be so good as to take up that spoon, stand behind me, and make as though you would dash out my brains with it!”
Wonderingly, I picked up a spoon, placed myself behind him, and struck him quickly, though lightly, on the head.
“Bon, très bon!” he exclaimed. “Make careful note where your blow did fall, my friend.—Now, Sergent, will you do likewise?”
Costello obeyed, and I could not repress a start of surprise. The blow struck by Costello came into contact with the Frenchman’s sleek light hair less than an inch from where my spoon had struck.
“You see?” de Grandin grinned delightedly. “Almost always it is so. Wounds of the head from axes, hammers and the like are almost invariably found on the left parietal area if the assailant is in front, if he stands behind his victim the injury will usually be found on the right side of the occiput—where both of you unconsciously struck me.
“Very well. When I did examine Professor Butterbaugh’s death wound I knew he was struck down from behind.
“Excellent, so far. But if he was killed from the back, how came those hairs grasped in his hand? He could not have reached behind to seize his murderer, the hairs would not have been so clutched had the murderer first confronted him, then rushed behind to strike the fatal blow, and that wound could not possibly have been given by one standing before him. Voilà, there were two persons, at least, present when the professor died.
“The weapon used we found in the hand of that mummy which did grin like the cats of Cheshire, and on his lips we found a smear of blood. That, coupled with the professor’s experiences in Egypt, the so mysterious tombstone which he had not ordered, and which said, ‘Beware the Wrath of the Gods,’ and the fact that no robbery had been attempted—all convinced me it was a killing of revenge.
“C’est beau! I did examine those hairs under the microscope while my good Trowbridge slept that night. Their color and texture excluded the possibility of their belonging to the professor or to any of his servants, they could not have come from the mummy’s head, for he was shaven-pated, and the condition of their ends—which was slightly rounded—showed they had been cut by a barber some two weeks hence.
“I say to me: ‘Suppose some person have come from Egypt to kill this Professor Butterbaugh; suppose he have come on the sea some three or four weeks; suppose, again, he are a wealthy, fastidious man, what would be one of the first things he would do when he came to shore?’
“I answer: ‘Parbleu, he would undoubtlessly have his hair cut!’
“‘Correct,’ I reply. ‘And could he arrange to kill the professor and order a tombstone in two weeks?’
“‘He could,’ I respond.
“Very well. I have argued so far with myself and decided we must look for two people, one of them, at least, with brunette hair which have been cut some two weeks ago, both of them, probably, dark-skinned, because they are probably Egyptian, but not black, because the hair say he belong to a white man.
“Where shall we find these murderers in a nation of one hundred million people of many different complexions?
“‘I do not know; but I shall try,’ I promise me, and then—cordieu!—and then we meet that so charming lad from the grocery shop who tells us of the couple in the speeding car and of the young woman who holds some wrapped-up thing in her lap.
“The mummy is missing, these people speed, there are wheel tracks and footprints of a most suspicious kind in the lane by the professor’s house—Friend Trowbridge and I have seen them—parbleu, why are not these two runaways the persons we seek?
“We did seek them, my friends, and we did find them; and though that ancient snake did cheat your executioner, we did exact their lives in payment for that of Professor Butterbaugh.”
He smiled contentedly as he resumed his seat and poured a thimbleful of glowing crême de menthe over the crushed ice in his liqueur glass.
“Justice, my friends,” he pronounced, “she is hard to evade. When she are accompanied by Jules de Grandin—grand Dieu, she are invincible!”
The Man Who Cast No Shadow
1
“BUT NO, MY FRIEND,” Jules de Grandin shook his sleek blond head decidedly and grinned across the breakfast table at me, “we will go to this
so kind Madame Norman’s tea, of a certainty. Yes.”
“But hang it all,” I replied, giving Mrs. Norman’s note an irritable shove with my coffee spoon, “I don’t want to go to a confounded tea party! I’m too old and too sensible to dress up in a tall hat and a long coat and listen to the vaporings of a flock of silly flappers. I—”
”Mordieu, hear the savage!” de Grandin chuckled delightedly. “Always does he find excuses for not giving pleasure to others, and always does he frame those excuses to make him more important in his own eyes. Enough of this, Friend Trowbridge; let us go to the kind Madame Norman’s party. Always there is something of interest to be seen if one but knows where to look for it.”
“H’m, maybe,” I replied grudgingly, “but you’ve better sight than I think you have if you can find anything worth seeing at an afternoon reception.”
The reception was in full blast when we arrived at the Norman mansion in Tuscarora Avenue that afternoon in 192–. The air was heavy with the commingled odors of half a hundred different perfumes and the scent of hot poured jasmine tea, while the clatter of cup on saucer, laughter and buzzing conversation filled the wide hall and dining room. In the long double parlors the rugs had been rolled back and young men in frock coats glided over the polished parquetry in company with girls in provocatively short skirts to the belching melody of a saxophone and the drumming rhythm of a piano.
“Pardieu,” de Grandin murmured as he viewed the dancers a moment, “your American youth take their pleasures with seriousness, Friend Trowbridge. Behold their faces. Never a smile, never a laugh. They might be recruits on their first parade for all the joy they show—ah!” He broke off abruptly, gazing with startled, almost horrified, eyes after a couple whirling in the mazes of a foxtrot at the farther end of the room. “Nom d’un fromage,” he murmured softly to himself, “this matter will bear investigating, I think!”
“Eh, what’s that?” I asked, piloting him toward our hostess.
“Nothing; nothing, I do assure you,” he answered as we greeted Mrs. Norman and passed toward the dining room. But I noticed his round, blue eyes strayed more than once toward the parlors as we drank our tea and exchanged amiable nothings with a pair of elderly ladies.
“Pardon,” de Grandin bowed stiffly from the hips to his conversational partner and turned toward the rear drawing room, “there is a gentleman here I desire to meet, if you do not mind—that tall, distinguished one, with the young girl in pink.”
“Oh, I guess you mean Count Czerny,” a young man laden with an ice in one hand and a glass of non-Volstead punch in the other paused on his way from the dining room. “He’s a rare bird, all right. I knew him back in ’13 when the Balkan Allies were polishing off the Turks. Queer-lookin’ duck, ain’t he? First-class fightin’ man, though. Why, I saw him lead a bayonet charge right into the Turkish lines one day, and when he’d shot his pistol empty he went at the enemy with his teeth! Yes, sir, he grabbed a Turk with both hands and bit his throat out, hanged if he didn’t.”
“Czerny,” de Grandin repeated musingly. “He is a Pole, perhaps?”
His informant laughed a bit shamefacedly. “Can’t say,” he confessed. “The Serbs weren’t asking embarrassing questions about volunteers’ nationalities those days, and it wasn’t considered healthful for any of us to do so, either. I got the impression he was a Hungarian refugee from Austrian vengeance; but that’s only hearsay. Come along, I’ll introduce you, if you wish.”
I saw de Grandin clasp hands with the foreigner and stand talking with him for a time, and, in spite of myself I could not forbear a smile at the contrast they made.
The Frenchman was a bare five feet four inches in height, slender as a girl, and, like a girl, possessed of almost laughably small hands and feet. His light hair and fair skin, coupled with his trimly waxed diminutive blond mustache and round, unwinking blue eyes, gave him a curiously misleading appearance of mildness. His companion was at least six feet tall, swarthy-skinned and black-haired, with bristling black mustaches and fierce, slate-gray eyes set beneath beetling black brows. His large nose was like the predatory beak of some bird of prey, and the tilt of his long, pointed jaw bore out the uncompromising ferocity of the rest of his visage. Across his left cheek, extending upward over the temple and into his hair, was a knife-, or saber-scar, a streak of white showing the trail of the steel in his scalp, and shining like silver inlaid in onyx against the blue-black of his smoothly pomaded locks.
What they said was, of course, beyond reach of my ears, but I saw de Grandin’s quick, impish smile flicker across his keen face more than once, to be answered by a slow, languorous smile on the other’s dark countenance.
At length the count bowed formally to my friend and whirled away with a wisp of a girl, while de Grandin returned to me. At the door he paused a moment, inclining his shoulders in a salute as a couple of debutantes brushed past him. Something—I know not what—drew my attention to the tall foreigner a moment, and a sudden chill rippled up my spine at what I saw. Above the georgette-clad shoulder of his dancing partner the count’s slate-gray eyes were fixed on de Grandin’s trim back, and in them I read all the cold, malevolent fury with which a caged tiger regards its keeper as he passes the bars.
“What on earth did you say to that fellow?” I asked as the little Frenchman rejoined me. “He looked as if he would like to murder you.”
“Ha?” he gave a questioning, single-syllabled laugh. “Did he so? Obey the noble Washington’s injunction, and avoid foreign entanglements, Friend Trowbridge; it is better so, I think.”
“But look here,” I began, nettled by his manner, “what—”
“Non, non,” he interrupted, “you must be advised by me, my friend. I think it would be better if we dismissed the incident from our minds. But stay—perhaps you had better meet that gentleman, after all. I will have the good Madame Norman introduce you.”
More puzzled than ever, I followed him to our hostess and waited while he requested her to present me to the count.
In a lull in the dancing she complied with his request, and the foreigner acknowledged the introduction with a brief handclasp and an almost churlish nod, then turned his back on me, continuing an animated conversation with the large-eyed young woman in an abbreviated party frock.
“And did you shake his hand?” de Grandin asked as we descended the Norman’s steps to my waiting car.
“Yes, of course,” I replied.
“Ah? Tell me, my friend, did you notice anything—ah—peculiar, in his grip?”
“H’m.” I wrinkled my brow a moment in concentrated thought. “Yes, I believe I did.”
“So? What was it?”
“Hanged if I can say, exactly,” I admitted, “but—well, it seemed—this sounds absurd, I know—but it seemed as though his hand had two backs—no palm at all—if that means anything to you.”
“It means much, my friend; it means a very great deal,” he answered with such a solemn nod that I burst into a fit of laughter. “Believe me, it means much more than you suspect.”
It must have been some two weeks later that I chanced to remark to de Grandin, “I saw your friend, Count Czerny, in New York yesterday.”
“Indeed?” he answered with what seemed like more than necessary interest. “And how did he impress you at the time?”
“Oh, I just happened to pass him on Fifth Avenue,” I replied. “I’d been up to see an acquaintance in Fifty-ninth Street and was turning into the avenue when I saw him driving away from the Plaza. He was with some ladies.”
“No doubt,” de Grandin responded dryly. “Did you notice him particularly?”
“Can’t say that I did, especially,” I answered, “but it seems to me he looked older than the day we met him at Mrs. Norman’s.”
“Yes?” the Frenchman leaned forward eagerly. “Older, do you say? Parbleu, this is of interest; I suspected as much!”
“Why—” I began, but he turned away with an impatient shrug. “Pah!” he exclaimed
petulantly. “Friend Trowbridge, I fear Jules de Grandin is a fool, he entertains all sorts of strange notions.”
I had known the little Frenchman long enough to realize that he was as full of moods as a prima donna, but his erratic, unrelated remarks were getting on my nerves. “See here, de Grandin,” I began testily, “what’s all this nonsense—”
The sudden shrill clatter of my office telephone bell cut me short. “Dr. Trowbridge,” an agitated voice asked over the wire, “can you come right over, please? This is Mrs. Norman speaking.”
“Yes, of course,” I answered, reaching for my medicine case; “what is it—who’s ill?”
“It’s—it’s Guy Eckhart, he’s been taken with a fainting fit, and we don’t seem to be able to rouse him.”
“Very well,” I promised, “Dr. de Grandin and I will be right over.
“Come on, de Grandin,” I called as I shoved my hat down over my ears and shrugged into my overcoat, “one of Mrs. Norman’s house guests has been taken ill; I told her we were coming.”
“Mais oui,” he agreed, hurrying into his outdoors clothes. “Is it a man or a woman, this sick one?”
“It’s a man,” I replied, “Guy Eckhart.”
“A man,” he echoed incredulously. “A man, do you say? No, no, my friend, that is not likely.”
“Likely or not,” I rejoined sharply, “Mrs. Norman says he’s been seized with a fainting fit, and I give the lady credit for knowing what she’s talking about.”
“Eh bien,” he drummed nervously on the cushions of the automobile seat, “perhaps Jules de Grandin really is a fool. After all, it is not impossible.”
“It certainly isn’t,” I agreed fervently to myself as I set the car in motion.
Young Eckhart had recovered consciousness when we arrived, but looked like a man just emerging from a lingering fever. Attempts to get a statement from him met with no response, for he replied slowly, almost incoherently, and seemed to have no idea concerning the cause of his illness.
The Horror on the Links Page 26
