“I’ve come,” he said simply. “And I’ve much to tell you.” He looked about him. The tiny bench on the vine-covered stoop looked inviting. He beckoned to it. “Get a wrap, honey, and we’ll sit out here. That Indian summer I hear so much of must be coming after these cold, wet days we’ve had.”
She was back in a minute with a loose scarf thrown over her shoulders. She sat down beside him on the bench. He lost no time in telling her the whole story complete, from beginning to end, omitting nothing yet condensing many parts into a few salient details. When he finished, he added:
“So now everything is solved but the mystery of how Paddon, Rothblume and Lee were sent to their deaths, how Eaves was trapped after all his precautions, and a something — a mysterious something in which poor Roslyn Van Etten must some way be concerned. All of these, and other things, I think we shall know to-morrow. For the present, all that counts is that your mother’s unfortunate finanical problem is solved.” He pressed in her hands the slip of paper which Lionel has signed — the judgment note for $19,500. “There, dear girl,” he explained, “is Lionel’s promise to buy from your mother so many shares of American Airplane Stabilizer Stock. It is more than a promise — it is a receipt for the stock and an agreement to pay, now due, with judgment confessed in the printed lines at the bottom. Take it at once in the morning to any good attorney, have it rushed through at once, judgment secured and recorded against the Eaves estate, now owned by Lionel. It’s the least he can do. Practically all of what he will inherit will be money illegally gained. This is but a tithe of the restitution that he should be forced to make. But unfortunately no law exists that can force him to disgorge everything. Now the assets of the company, consisting of options, legal rights, patent promotion rights, and what not, if not the Clarkson Court house, the lot, Eaves’s cash in bank, and so forth, will be ample to pay this note and a dozen more like it. But you must not let it remain around the house. Take it to a lawyer and have it recorded against Lionel at once. Remember, now! Morning — without fail.”
She fingered the crisp slip of paper wonderingly. “How good you have been, Jason,” she breathed. “And how wonderful — how much you have accomplished.”
He looked at her hungrily. “And is there no answer other than that?” he asked curiously. “No — no reward?”
He could see her smile tenderly as the light from a near-by street lamp played through the stems of the vines, almost denuded of their leaves.
“Of course, Jason. The barrier is removed. That was my only problem. When — when do you want to collect?”
“At the window of the marriage licence clerk in the city hall to-morrow at noon?” he said, half queryingly. “Then to the church for the finishing up?”
Without a word she snuggled into his arms, and he hugged the silk-clad form to him with all his hungry might.
“At the marriage licence clerk’s window in the city hall — to-morrow at noon,” she repeated, nestling against his coat collar in blissful silence.
For a long minute he held her to him. Then he disengaged her hands. “How happy we should be,” he said. “Lionel has cleared me in the public eye. I still own my one-half interest in the Folwell-Schierling rotogravure disk. Your mother’s fortunes are restored to her. And no more dealings with that tricky stock for either of us as long as we live.”
They sat for a moment in silence.
“Listen,” said Folwell suddenly. A distant church bell was striking a single reverberating chime. “It is one in the morning. Or is it two? And what will the neighbours say?”
“It is two o’clock,” she replied. She rose and took his hands as he stood up with her. “Did you ask what the neighbours will say, Jason? What can they say. By the time they reach the saying, it will be merely uninteresting talk about — ” She stopped.
“About whom?”
“About Mr. and Mrs. Jason T. Folwell.”
He laughed joyously. Then he leaned over and kissed her affectionately.
“To-morrow at noon,” he said.
“To-morrow at noon,” she repeated.
He ran lightly down the steps as she turned into the house. He looked back to see her wave to him in the doorway, partly illumined by the glow from the parlour lamp. His brain whirled with happiness. How black and hopeless it had all seemed the day after Eaves’s death. And how different everything seemed now. He reached his room at two-thirty in the morning. He set his alarm clock for nine. He climbed into bed. He was lost, it seemed to him, in an instant. And he came back to earth only to find the bright morning sunlight playing upon his coverlid, and the rangling, jangling alarm beating furiously in his ears.
Hastily he dressed, yet in his best, for this was his wedding day. He left the house, walking with an elastic step that surprised him. Six hours though his sleep had been, it had been dreamless, deep, profound. His brain felt keen, clear, even exhilarated. He ate breakfast at a quick lunch counter in the Loop. Then he turned his footsteps toward detective headquarters on the southernmost fringe of that great beehive of activity. He reached the entrance of the tall greystone building at the same instant with McIlroy, who was coming from the other direction.
He exchanged greetings with the bureau head, and accompanied him to the upper floor and along the corridor that led to his offices.
Inside was a bustle of activity. Men were running to and fro. A score of reporters, as well as some camera men armed with cameras, stood in knots about the door of McIlroy’s office. Cigarette and cigar smoke was everywhere in evidence, and copious clouds of it poured over the transom of the office to which McIlroy was leading the way. Conversation stopped instantly as McIlroy threaded his way toward the door of his suite. Four reporters besieged him instantly, while the rest looked on, straining to catch every word.
“Chief, aren’t we going to get anything on this Goose Island battle of last night?”
“Nothing just now, boys,” McIlroy answered quietly. “Stay around awhile, however, and I’ll give you everything we have on it.” He opened the door and nodding to Folwell to precede him, closed out the hounds of the Press completely.
In the large room that adjoined the ante-room they were confronted by an interesting scene. Two blue-coats lolled by the window which looked out on an adjoining roof. One guarded the door. At a table near the window sat the man who but eleven hours before had been fighting off a dozen armed officers on Goose Island. His recently bare torso was now covered with a neat white silk shirt, and a flaming red silk tie dropped from the neckband. His black-bearded face was calm, the skin was clean, the beard itself had been combed, and he sat back in a chair, smoking a cigarette with long, clean fingers that trembled not an iota. A white-faced young fellow, slim in build, sat at the other side of the table, close to a typewriter, riffling over nine or ten sheets of crisp, closely-typed paper, each of which carried at the bottom, a bold, black, flourishing signature. Beyond doubt, even to Folwell, those sheets were Bresloff’s death warrant — his signed confession. Kelsey, tired but triumphant, sat on a reversed chair, his elbows leaning on its back. Delamater and Lyons, equally weary-looking and equally triumphant-appearing, hovered in the background, Sitting on the edge of the table, a rubber-tipped hammer in his hand, was a keen-faced man with crisp, close-cropped moustache and gold-rimmed eye-glasses through which he watched the prisoner carefully, and standing across the room, a supercilious scientific smile on his face, also watching the man with the black beard and the flaming red silk tie, was a professional-appearing individual with high cheek-bones, still higher forehead and eyes that were deep and thoughtful.
Kelsey looked up at the entrance of the two newcomers. “Good morning, chief,” he said, springing to his feet. He inclined his head toward the Russian, whose gaze had travelled back to the sunlight-covered roofs without, and made a peculiar waving motion of the fingers which was intelligible, evidently, only to those of the force.
McIlroy appeared to comprehend immediately. For a few seconds he stood, his brow crease
d into fine wrinkles, studying the man in the flaming red tie. Then he strode across the room and ran his eye hastily over the sheaf of typewritten sheets. He looked across at the Russian, who returned his gaze sneeringly, unflinchingly. “This is your confession, Bresloff, is it not?”
Feodor Bresloff’s answer came in a smooth, well-modulated voice, yet one, which carried in its tones a smouldering bitterness. His words bore the well-marked accents of the Slav. “It is my confession, sir, if you wish to call it that. I am but sorry that I could not have had a bit longer of freedom. I could then have given you several more pages to your precious document.”
McIlroy studied him a moment. Then he motioned to the two bluecoats by the window. “Take him downstairs. If we need him later we’ll have him brought up again.”
The taller of the two policemen beckoned. The Russian rose and with a contemptuous glance about the entire assemblage, followed them. Out of the room they passed, and McIlroy, taking off his coat and hat, dropped into a nearby armchair.
“Well, let’s hear the story. Was there much trouble to get the confession?” He fixed his gaze on Kelsey.
“Very little, chief. He talked freely at four this morning. He signed the sheets at seven. I had him brought up again at nine so that Dr. Goldbeck and Dr. Brazleton could look him over.”
McIlroy turned his gaze first to one of the two medical men, then to the other.
“Well, gentlemen, what do you think of the case? I presume you’ve read his confession — which I haven’t as yet.”
He of the gold-rimmed eyeglasses and the close-cropped moustache spoke up. “I have no doubts whatever regarding his legal status, inspector.”
McIlroy turned his attention to the owner of the deep and thoughtful eyes. “Have you, too, formed an opinion on the case, Dr. Brazleton?”
The man addressed as Brazleton smiled. “Your man Bresloff is a constitutional neurotic and psychotic, inspector. And he has had a financial blow that would have undermined the reason of neurotics less stable than he. For years he must have been a potential paranoiac. Now, of course, he’s a marked example of paranoia itself. I’ve sent a hundred like him to the Chester Hospital for the Criminally Insane. His attitude, his replies to my questions, his heredity as he details it, and his history confirm my diagnosis of that rather common mental disorder with its marked rationalism upon all points but the one on which it uses its adder’s sting. Your man, inspector, will never see the light of a penitentiary. He’s a dangerous man-killing lunatic and any jury will send him to the Chester hospital for life. When the defence calls me in his case, I shall have to testify thus to his mental condition.”
McIlroy half-nodded. “Somewhat as I imagined when I first heard Folwell’s description of the anonymous letters sent to Bresloff’s victims.” He turned to the other medical man. “And you, Dr. Goldbeck? You agree with Dr. Brazleton?”
The psychiatrist addressed shifted the gold-rimmed eyeglasses on his nose. “With all due respect to my professional colleague, I am willing to go on the witness-stand at any date and testify for the State’s Attorney that this man is not a paranoiac at all. There is no hint of the persecutory phase of that mental disease. And that must be present, or we cannot diagnose his case as insanity at all. He is, yes, a constitutional inferior — a neurotic — but his crimes were nothing else than the result of his brooding, of his desire to use a secret in his own possession, to use his power to right a set of business conditions which he thought should not go on. He shows the true spirit of the neurotic — the characteristic bolstering up of the ego-consciousness by the exhibition of power, of secret hidden power. The peremptory commands which preceded his first three crimes was symptomatic. But, inspector, a neurotic is not insane. No court has ever yet held so, nor will. Then take into consideration the phase, the purely selfish phase, seen in his contemplation of the fourth crime, the one in which he must profit and profit well. There we have the true criminal — the individual who reaps something from his deed and so plans it. Bresloff will go to the chair.”
“Then you contend he has no defence in the line of insanity, Dr. Goldbeck?”queried McIlroy.
“Precisely. And I will say so on the witness-stand,” added Goldbeck. “I have seen in my practice paranoiacs by the hundreds. This man is not one.”
“And you, doctor?” asked McIlroy, turning to Brazleton with the slightest trace of irritation hovering over his own lips.
“A lunatic of a rare and dangerous type,” said Brazleton calmly. “As Adler says: ‘We do not have to have the actual persecutory delusion to have paranoia; we can have its symbolical substitute.’ “He yawned. “Call in Read, Patrick, Gill, Kuh. See if they don’t corroborate me.”
McIlroy threw up his hands with a gesture of despair. “Let us hear the confession. I’ll mail you each a voucher for your time. I’m grateful for your running over here this morning, but when you experts disagree the county is generally in for a good long trial. This man Bresloff is one of those fellows who, if we try to convict him, can get a dozen alienists who will testify he’s a nut; and who, if under ordinary circumstances was being tried in a county court on the point of whether he should run the streets or be sent to Kankakee Asylum, could find a dozen or more alienists — assuming that he had the money — who would swear to high heaven that he was sane. There’s one of the reasons why I pay taxes on my little bungalow on Dakin Street — for long-drawn-out trials that eat up the State’s money.” He turned to the slim-built youth. “Parkley, tell us the gist of this confession. You’ve taken it down once in shorthand and typed it once. Never mind reading it. Give us the story in your own words.”
CHAPTER XX
THE SILENT DEATH
YOUNG Parkley, the detective bureau stenographer, leaned back from the table and crossed his legs. Picking up the sheaf of typewritten sheets he ran his eye over the introductory lines. At length he spoke:
“Bresloff’s story is a strange one — as strange a one as I’ve ever taken down in this room. In the first place, he’s been going under the name of Michaelovitch for several years. Andrev Michaelovitch is the name he’s worked under here in Chicago. Says he got into some minor trouble in the East some time back, and had to drop Feodor Bresloff, his right name. So much for that. He gives his birthplace as Moscow, Russia, and his home town as Syracuse, New York. States he has one daughter living, now in the New York State Hospital for the Insane at Buffalo.”
“Hmph,” said McIlroy, with a side glance at Dr. Goldbeck. “I’ve a notion that fact will go a long way toward saving him from the chair. Well, go on Parkley.”
“Yes,” the young fellow continued, glancing down at the paper, evidently to see whether he had omitted any of the preliminary data. “Bresloff tells us that back in the fall of 1918 he was just about to sell the secret of a poisonous gas called dia-cyanosine to the United States Government. The gas in question was hydrocyanic acid vapour stabilized by a method which he had discovered so that it will not break down under extremes of temperature, handling, concussion and so forth. His negotiations were almost completed when the Armistice was signed, and the whole transaction, amounting to $100,000, was called off by some economical executive of the committee for disbursement who, as Bresloff bitterly accuses, would probably have paid a hundred million for defensive aeroplanes that could never be used. Efforts to get the deal through failed after troops began to be withdrawn from France. Negotiations with agents of foreign countries always got mysteriously called off before they even reached any kind of a head. And Bresloff tells us that he began to drink heavily, so much so that he was no longer able to hold a job at the fine chemical research work he had thus far been engaged in. When prohibition came on, Bresloff managed, nevertheless, to get as much decent stuff to drink, as ever before by scientifically distilling his own whisky. He came to Chicago about six months ago. And it was here, about a month after his arrival, that he came upon a copy of a monthly publication called Riswold’s Magazine, containing an article exposing thirteen
Chicagoans under the caption ‘The Thirteen Kings of Crooked Chicago Finance.’ He read the article a score of times, and at length began to brood upon the fact that these men named in the article were piling up fortunes by fleecing the unwary, while he, who had actually created a worthwhile protective device for the American Government during an emergency, had received nothing.”
“Paranoia,” commented Brazleton.
“Revenge,” snorted Goldbeck.
“Hmph!” grunted McIlroy, apparently aggravated at the lack of professional agreement between the two specialists. And speaking to no one in particular, he added: “I still can’t see why he couldn’t market his discovery to some of the other big powers like Great Britain or France. Unlike us over here, they’re always sitting close to possible war.”
“He says,” spoke up Kelsey quietly from his chair, “just as I told you in the cab last night: after the Armistice nobody was interested. The immediate emergency was over — and their own chemists had been making fast progress in the meantime.”
“I think,” spoke up Folwell diffidently, “that as a graduate of a technical college — a British one — and with considerable education myself in organic chemistry, I can explain it by saying that right at the close of that war during which I was just a boy, a number of new highly-deadly gases were being evolved simultaneously on both sides of the ocean. Lewisite in America, developed by Dr. W. Lee Lewis of North Western University, this city; also Adamsite, invented by Dr. Roger Adams of the University of Illinois, or diphenylamine chlorarsine — each depending on arsenic for the toxic agent. Also trichlornitromethane — or superchloropicrin. The French at the same time evolved their higher forms of chloracetone and bromacetone which they called Martinite. As for my own country, Great Britain, I might say that it is no secret at all that she has from 1918 on to date evolved several different stable cyanic gases — one from cyanogen chloride — that can be shown, by chemical equations alone, to combine with greater speed than even H-CN with complex organic material such as living human flesh. And speed in combining with the living flesh molecule means killing properties, deadliness.”
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