“Too much for my head,” said McIlroy dazedly. He nodded at Parkley. “Go on with the story.”
“Well,” said Parkley, again glancing over the typewritten sheet, “at the time he got hold of the Riswold exposé he was working as an automobile mechanic in a garage near Monroe and Wells. Johnston’s Loop Garage. Pretty much down and out, you see, chief. He managed, though, to pick up considerably more than a mere garage helper’s salary because Johnston was a periodical alcoholic, and Bresloff, in addition to making enough whisky in his own still for his own needs, made enough more to sell to Johnston at three dollars a pint, pretending that he obtained it through a friend. Now, about those thirteen crooked kings of finance, exposed in Riswold’s Magazine. Well, Bresloff found that five of them kept their cars in Johnston’s garage. The reason? Well, figure it out yourself, chief. Monroe and LaSalle is the principle corner of the brokerage business in Chicago, and Johnston’s, at Monroe and Wells, was one of the nearest places to keep cars during the day.
“And so,” Parkley’s voice went on, “one night, after a drunken spree, the impulse came to Bresloff to drive the whole thirteen out of business — to clean up Chicago’s ‘Wall Street.’ Think of it, chief! One drunken ex-chemist and automobile mechanic cleaning up LaSalle Street!” Parkley paused to give the proper dramatic effect to his own comment, to his superior. Then he went on: “This was in August. Straightway he sent a message to Perry L. Paddon that unless Paddon closed his business inside of a week, he would be draped in crêpe as was one of the kings which were in the deck of cards he sent to Paddon.”
“I see,” murmured McIlroy. “The fate of kings, eh? There’s your European for you every time, doctors. Has to embellish every kind of threat with a fantastic name like ‘Star of the Night,’ and some kind of pictorial terrorism. I suppose you call it symbolism, or some other kind of a scientific term.” He paused. “Now to discover just how he was going to kill off these gentlemen who had their cars in the garage where he worked. How was he going to do it, Parkley?”
“By this device here,” said a man standing against the wall close to the door which led to McIlroy’s private office. The door itself had opened a moment previously, but everybody had been absorbed in the confession which Parkley was relating. Now all eyes turned to the speaker. Folwell recognized him at once. It was Lyons, the big plain-clothes man who had given him the permission to visit Roslyn Van Etten’s body and whom, with Flannery, McIlroy had left behind the night before to examine the partially wrecked premises of No. 1124 Hickory Avenue. Lyons stooped over and from the corner near the radiator raised up a thing familiar to everybody in the room: a heavy automobile tyre. But it differed from automobile tyres as commonly seen. The open slot around the inside had been neatly vulcanized together by a tough strip of rubber. From a tight hole in the casing came a long, thick, tough rubber tube, at least eight feet in length, about three-quarters of an inch in external diameter, and very flexible considering its appearance of toughness. At the end of the rubber tube was a ball, or bulb of the same material, perhaps an inch in diameter. From his vest-pocket Lyons then withdrew a small metallic object which he held up so that McIlroy could see. To Folwell, studying it perplexedly with his mechanically trained eye, it seemed nothing more than a tiny steel screw-clamp of some sort, to the underside of which had been soldered or brazed a segment of a triangular file whose one exposed edge, by careful grinding, had been sharpened till it constituted a veritable knife-edge. Lyons spoke. “This, chief, and this, constitute the ingenious device by which Bresloff managed not to kill his victims, but to make them kill themselves!”
“The devil you say,” ejaculated McIlroy. For the fraction of a minute he studied the heavy tyre with its long tube terminating in the stout rubber bulb, and then the tiny clamp with the sharpened improvized knife-edge affixed to it. At length his gaze shot back to the youth fingering the typed sheets. “Let’s hear Bresloff’s explanation of his device first,” he ordered briefly.
“His device for making away with his man was simple and yet mighty ingenious, as Lyons over there has just said,” declared young Parkley, warming up to his subject, seeing that he was the centre of attention of a whole roomful of people. “Bresloff first obtained an automobile tyre similar to those on the machine of the man he had picked out for his victim. Working in his shop on the second floor of the shack he rented on Goose Island, he cemented to the inner tube a long tube of tough but flexible rubber, allowing it to come out through a tight snug hole in the casing on one side of the tyre. The casing itself he sealed up completely along the inner edge. The other end of this long tube he vulcanized to a small round rubber bulb made of cloth-lined, very tough rubber. Then, deflating the bulb with a pressure of his thumb, he strangulated the tube close to it by winding a foot of tight steel wire around and around it. So much for that. He next manufactured a special and small clamp on the underside of which, with its sharp edge pointing downward, was a broken bit from a triangular file ground to a knife-edge. You’ve just seen it in Lyons’ hands. So much for this part of it. Now among the chemical paraphernalia with which Bresloff experimented in his sober moments in his shack was something for which he must have had to sell a good many pints of whisky to Johnston, his employer, for its value is around forty dollars. He calls it a Mueller-Reinhold double-throw gas inflater. It’s a diminutive pump, run by a very small gasoline engine, which will receive any sort of gas or vapour in its inlet, and pump it through its outlet into a reservoir of any sort. It has a capacity for loading up a reservoir to a point of sixty pounds pressure per square inch, after first creating a vacuum in that reservoir by running in reverse direction. Now do you get it, chief? He simply manufactured on a small scale, with test tubes, retorts, distillers, hydrocyanic acid vapour, using sulphuric acid and potassium ferrocyanide, each of which material he could purchase in large quantities with no trouble. The process he used was what he calls ‘fractional distillation.’ As fast as it came from his retorts, to which were connected the tubes of other retorts manufacturing his stabilizing components, it passed into the pump which forced it into the empty, airless, automobile tyre and continued so pumping it for hours, until that tyre with its connecting tube was holding at a pressure of sixty pounds per square inch a vast quantity of pure dia-cyanosine.”
Parkley stopped. McIlroy drew his brows together in a studious look. “A vast quantity, eh?” He turned to Brazleton.
“Doctor, just how deadly is hydrocyanic acid vapour, anyway?”
“Mighty deadly, inspector, just as the young man from the British technical college, across the room, says.” Brazleton turned to Goldbeck. “Wasn’t it Scheele, the great Swedish chemist, doctor, who fell dead on the floor of his laboratory after getting one inhalation of H-CN?”
“Scheele it was,” responded Goldbeck.
McIlroy directed his next question to young Parkley again. “Where did this tiny metal screw-clamp with the improvized knife edge on its under surface come in?”
“That he merely screwed on to the stem of the brake pedal of the car owned by his victim. It was usually fastened ‘way at the top and hidden completely by the wide flat pedal itself. The affixed knife edge pointed downward. In fact, the position of the clamp was determined so that the sharpened cutting edge on its under surface could just accomplish its special work when the brake pedal was depressed to its fullest extent!“
“All this time, chief,” put in Kelsey by way of explanation, “Johnston, the owner of Johnston’s Loop Garage was lying drunk in the office of his place of business. A lad of sixteen years was keeping the books, and this fellow Bresloff was alone in full charge out in the section where the cars were kept. I recall going in to Johnston’s garage one day to get some points on a stolen automobile case. I found him lying like a pig underneath his own desk, snoring, with his head in his own waste-paper basket.”
“Yes, and drunk on the very booze he was buying from his own mechanic,” added Parkley.
“Now let’s get the fu
ll of this story,” demanded McIlroy. “On the stem of the footbrake, just underneath the pedal or perhaps elsewhere, was clamped this tiny arm or dewdad with its piece of triangular knife sharpened to a keen edge. All right for that. And it was placed on the car of Bresloff’s victim, on the day he had picked out for that victim to die?”
Parkley nodded. “Exactly. All that was needed beyond this was to substitute for the fifth, or emergency tyre of the car, the specially prepared tyre Bresloff had brought down from his workshop in his shack on Goose Island. That tyre, you’ll recall, was filled with dia-cyanosine at sixty or more pounds pressure, and had attached to it a long conveying tube with a closed rubber bulb on the end. It was no trick to saw the tyre lock on the back of the machine and substitute the prepared tyre. In one case he actually substituted an entire fifth wheel, with his prepared tyre all fixed on it, for a fifth wheel and emergency tyre on the back of one car. Now here’s where the man’s devilish cunning showed up. He always waited for a chill, rainy day before making preparations to let the blow fall on his victim. This enabled him to close up all the glass side-windows of the car, or, as in the case of one very old-fashioned make of auto involved in this fatal case, to button up the canvas flap, which he did to every last button. And the chill and rain insured that their owner would keep the windows closed. As for the wind-shield, he closed it too, and with a monkey-wrench proceeded to jam it so that it couldn’t be opened. Thus the car presented a closed compartment, not air-tight, perhaps, but a man-trap, considering the situation. As for the special tyre he had put on the rear, he ran the long conveying tube along underneath the car, fastening it by loops of copper wire to the underbody of the machine, and brought the rubber bulb up into the machine itself so that it lay unobstrusively on the floor of the car. In two instances the makes of the machines allowed him to poke it up through the brake slot itself; in the two other cases he drilled a hole in the floor at the point required. At any rate, once up inside, he unwound the length of wire by which he had temporarily strangulated, as it were, the tube, and the rubber bulb became as hard as a rock, part of an enclosed system bearing pressure of sixty pounds per square inch at every point. This bulb he fastened into place by a dab of quick-hardening glue, directly at the point where the sharpened knife-edge would press against it — and with a slight slicing motion too! — if the footbrake were depressed to the point of maximum brakage. He’d experimented a great deal with the sharpness of that knife edge and the toughness of the bulb. He knew that it takes customarily, on account of traffic snarls and stoplights, about fifteen full depressions of the foot brake for a car to get clear through and out of the Loop in the rush hour. And he sharpened it just enough that about from a dozen to fifteen pressures of knife against bulb would cut into the latter’s interior. And there you are, chief.”
A long whistle escaped from the old Scotsman, upon whom evidently for the first time had dawned the ingenuity of the mechanism. Folwell, who already in his mind’s eye saw every detail of the working of a mechanical device far different from anything which he had ever encountered in his prosaic practice, leaned forward, taking in every detail of Parkley’s description. The rest of the assemblage watched their chief with looks of triumph upon their faces.
“Plain as your nose,” commented McIlroy at length. “The poor devil that was scheduled for death would drive out of the garage on a rainy night, cooped up in a closed space on wheels and carrying his own tank of dia-cyanosine fastened on his back, so to speak. He’d reach several spots throughout the Loop where he’d have to jam on the footbrake full force. And sooner or later he’d jam it down for the twelfth or fifteenth time — perhaps to avoid a collision —
and the knife edge would slice its final distance into the hard rubber bulb, and — ”
“The bulb would rip like an exploded tyre,” finished Parkley. “The closed space in the car would fill like lightning, with dia-cyanosine, spouting out at sixty pounds pressure, odourless, colourless, and fatal — far more so than anything used in the big European war. If the victim leaned forward over the wheel to examine the point where the hissing was coming from, he would get a volume of it square in the face. If he continued driving, to extricate himself from the tangle which had caused him to jam down the footbrake that last fatal time, the car would fill up so fast that it became a veritable death-trap. Either way the victim was done for.”
There was a long silence in the room as every man appeared to digest this plan of the lone individual to clean up Chicago’s “Wall Street.” It was broken by Kelsey.
“There you have the whole thing in a nutshell, chief. Delamater, who you sent out last night just before we all started for the raid, to visit each of these dead promoters’ homes and try and piece together matters, brought back enough info’ for us to fill out the entire story. First you’ll ask: Why didn’t the fact of each of these four men, murdered as we knew after Folwell’s talk to us on the morning after Eaves’s death, having left the Loop in his automobile on the night of each man’s death, show up to us what you called ‘the greatest common divisor'? In fact, right there’s one of the truly surprising things in this case that have given me a terrific jolt, and which will remain in the back of my mind as long as I investigate crimes for the rest of my days. And it’ll make you ponder, too, chief, on the ways o’ Fate versus criminology. As for Eaves, of course he met his death in his office. Naturally no suspicion would have been directed toward the fact of Eaves driving a car, for what connection could such a thing have with a stabbing? All right. Then why no mention ever made of Lee’s car? Why was Lee found dying in his vestibule and his car safe and snug in the garage next to the flat building where he lived? We’ll come to that when we piece together the events of the night Lee died. Why no mention made of Rothblume’s car by his widow and daughter? The very best reasons in the world, chief. And we’ll come to that too in its right order. In fact, chief, we’ll briefly reconstruct the story of their deaths, beginning with Perry L. Paddon.” And pausing, he added cryptically: “And when we’re done, if anybody thinks the case is entirely over — well, maybe he’s got another think coming. And that’s that!”
CHAPTER XXI
PUPPETS AT THE WHEEL
KELSEY paused a moment to bite off the end of a long black cigar. Lighting it, he continued:
“Paddon,” he declared, “drove out of Johnston’s Loop Garage on the night of the 10th of August. It was a chill, rainy night. He was in a Radek car, wind-shield up and all glass sides as well, up as far as they could go, this having been done of course by Bresloff. Paddon must have used his footbrake a good deal, even in getting from that garage to the lower approach of the new Quincy Street turnbridge. But as he approached that incline he either heard the warning bell of the open bridge sounding or else got into a near collision where the traffic crosses on those two terribly narrow streets, Market and Quincy. Whichever it was, he jammed on his footbrake full force — and once too often. Pop — sizz! Can you hear it, chief, when that bulb, finally cut into, ripped literally into two halves from the pressure of the escaping gas? Did he lean over to see what was wrong and get too good lungfuls of it? We don’t know exactly. All we know is that, seated at the steering-wheel, he went up that approach at thirty miles an hour. No sign of the chain across the street was present, chief. You know Quincy Street, I dare say. And over he shot into the river. When he was found floating with his eyes open, he was dead. And nobody knew, even from the staring eyes, that he was dead of cyanide poisoning — and dead, at that, before ever he shot into the river. You know how they dragged the river and got up his machine? Late last night we interviewed Mike Malloy, the dredge man who did the work next morning. Mike remembers how the hook of the dredge first brought up the extra tyre, all torn and ripped loose from its fastenings and covered with mud, and how they tossed it back into the river so as to hurry up the work of getting the machine itself. Now that tyre with the attached tube might-a been a clue. As it was, it was lost.
“Now about
Rothblume,” Kelsey continued. “Rothblume, remember, who was found practically dead in the bushes on west edge of Tower Square, was thought by his widow to have gone over there from his office to look at some property he owned on Tower Place. Well, he did nothing of the kind. All he did was to drive out of Johnston’s Loop Garage on the night of August 21st in his glass-enclosed Wesselton limousine. He had been negotiating with a man by the name of Horace Wainwright, living near Logan Square, for the sale of that car. On the day of his death, the car and money were supposed to change hands. We’ve interviewed this Wainwright. He tells us that he changed his mind that afternoon about the transaction, concluding the price too high, and ‘phoned Rothblume that the deal was off. So Rothblume, who had been informing his wife and daughter all along that the machine was to be sold that day, and who was supposed to come home that night on the street cars pending the purchase of a new and different machine, started home in the identical machine after all. Only they didn’t know it. They never knew it. Indeed, Rose and Leah Rothblume knew nothing about Rothblume’s business affairs nor his bank account. So far as they could know after his body was found, the car had been sold and the cheque for it was banked. Hence no mention ever made by them about automobiles. Natural enough, after all, wasn’t it? Parkley, give the chief the next instalment of Bresloff’s confession so I can go ahead.”
The Fourth King Page 23
