The Case of the Lavender Gripsack

by Harry Stephen Keeler

  “That is all, Professor Adgate.” Elsa turned to Vann.

  “Will you wish to cross-examine—your witness?”

  “No,” said Vann curtly, and rose majestically. “Your Honor,” he said, addressing the Bench directly—whereupon Adgate started immediately climbing down off the witness stand. “I now make a motion that all the testimony just ad­duced in the last twenty minutes or so be ruled out and stricken from the records. Since it deals with matters not scientifically accredited in the field of crimin—”

  Penworth raised a hand. He looked stern—and tired.

  “Unfortunately, Mr. Vann, Science goes ahead in criminological matters just as it does in medicine, surgery, astronomy, and—and biology. And when we start to bar it out of a courtroom, we are identifying ourselves with the Middle Ages. Now you, yourself, put Professor Adgate on the stand tonight as the foremost scientific criminologist in America. He, in turn, vouches for a scientific fact and cites its scientific ‘proving’—and we may assume the fact in question is ‘proven.’ And we may—but here is the real point, Mr. Vann. Should I rule this evidence out now—at this particular time—you know—and I know—that the minute this trial is over, you yourself, in your own office—will be conducting the identical test which Miss Colby is obviously intending to introduce into this trial. And you know, and I know, that if—though to my mind that ‘if’ is a purely fanciful hypothesis—but, nevertheless, if—as a fanciful hypothesis—the test were to go against you, Mr. Vann, then McGurk would never go to trial for kidnapping and murder. For in the face of such destruction of your corpus delicti—and the fact that McGurk’s own attorney, Fleming Wiles, could mandamus a tooth from that skull in a trial of McGurk—could elicit the same thing you did—the conviction of McGurk would be knocked skyhigh—by your own Professor Adgate, his book, and that thesis. And—anyway, Mr. Vann, since, after all, the real person being tried here tonight is McGurk—yonder Doe being more or less a sub-issue designed to give us the skull found on him as legal evidence against McGurk—isn’t it best that we officially learn here and now—at the expense of Miss Colby—that we have clear sailing ahead for McGurk’s prosecution ?”

  “But,” objected Vann, “a scientific fact without any explanation seems to me—”

  “Do you accept the fact that the moon’s same side always faces the earth?”

  “Why, of course,” said Vann. “But—”

  “Well—why does it?”

  “I don’t know,” pronounced Vann curtly. “But—”

  Penworth again raised a hand.

  “No, Mr. Vann, quite aside from our mutual implied agreement tonight to lean over backward in this trial so far as giving this defendant his whole quota of so-called ‘rights’—and even more—we might as well do, here and now, the identical thing that, otherwise, you yourself will be doing, this very night, in your own office—providing, of course, that you could—could hornswoggle Miss Colby out of her lamp yonder. Indeed, Mr. Vann, in your capacity as a prosecutor, I’m going to cheer you up a bit now—and even cheer Miss Colby up also—but cheer her up academically only. For to Miss Colby I’ll go on record as saying—” he turned to her “—as saying that this Court accepts unqualifiedly the findings, under ultra violet light, on that straight tube now in Mr. Mullins’ hands. In short, it accepts it as containing powder from a tooth of that skull; it accepts, in advance, the findings from it—under ultra-violet light.” Elsa’s face brightened. Now Penworth turned to Louis Vann. “And to you, Mr. Vann, I’ll say that, regardless of any and all such findings, I shall give John Doe the chair! For no matter what Miss Colby might do with all the teeth and ultra-violet lamps in the world, Doe hasn’t disproved by one whit his commis­sion of that crime to obtain that skull. Supposedly Wah Lee’s. And the only thing that an obverse finding could prove at best would be that the skull Moses Klump unearthed was, by some mischance, the skull of some white man instead of Wah Lee’s. And now you both know in advance the practical outcome of the test. And I not only suggest, Miss Colby, that you proceed with it—but I actually order you now to make it.”

  “But, of course, Your Honor,” Vann objected, “there is the matter of—” He turned and surveyed Elsa searchingly, keenly, piercingly, almost as though trying to figure how much brains she had packed under her red hair, “Okay,” he said, with hopeless suddenness, and sat down.

  “Carry through, Miss Colby,” Penworth ordered her. “By doing what you intended to do: exposing both of the glass tubes in Mr. Mullins’ hands to ultra-violet light. But remember that my decision in this case is made—regardless of the outcome of your test.”

  “Yes, Your Honor,” Elsa said humbly. “But remember, Your Honor, you are so convinced in your own mind that Wah Lee’s skull is involved here tonight, that you can’t—that is, what I mean to say is that if you really were to find out that that skull is the skull of the Swedish gigolo, ‘Blinky’—” Penworth, smiling broadly, was nevertheless shaking his head firmly. “I’ll carry on,” said Elsa hastily. “With my test. Which will involve, naturally, exposing to the ultra-violet light a control tube—that circular tube fixed for Dr. Sun Chew May, and containing a known Chinese tooth ground up—but only as a control or basis of comparison. That—together with the straight specimen tube fixed for Miss Cohenstein, from a tooth of yonder skull.”

  She looked about her, and spied a wall socket in the wall which stood in back of her. “Do you think, Officer Mullar­ky,” she said, holding out the plug of the electrical cord that was attached to her ultraviolet lamp, “that that chain connect­ing you with my client is long enough to permit you to–”

  “Sure, Miss.” And Mullarky took the plug, and amidst some violent clanking of the chain which fastened himself and the court’s prisoner together, stuck it clumsily in. Elsa had not yet snapped the tiny switch in the top of the tin casing which would send the current through the actual mercury-vapor-filled lamp within.

  “Defense Exhibit A now, if you please, Mr. Mullins,” she said boldly. “And also, of course, Defense Exhibit D1.” Silently—and the entire courtroom was like a graveyard at midnight of a windless night! Mullins handed Elsa the straight glass tube that had been prepared for and under the auspices, so to speak, of Rebecca Cohenstein; and the cir­cularly bent glass tube, prepared as a “control.” One fragile tube in each hand, Elsa now gazed speculatively at the brilliantly lighted chandelier, then over at the locked door of the room to next which lay, obviously, the snap switch for those lights.

  “Inspector Scott,” she begged, “since you’re custodian of the key which locks us all in here—and are closest to that wall switch as well—I wonder if you’d also be so kind as to be—well—director of lighting!”

  “Gladly,” Scott grunted. And rising, placed his back against the wall, with his right hand loosely draped upon the switch, waiting. “I think now—yes—the lights may go out,” Elsa ordered, in a faint voice.

  Swiftly, the entire battery of lights in that great chandelier commenced fading away, the loud click made by Scott’s snapping of the wall switch still echoing in the large room, so profound was the silence; the scores of filaments glowed hotly, though momentarily, in the last stage of that fading—then seemingly vanished altogether. The interior of the room was now black as jet.

  Groping just a little, Elsa managed to slip the precious straight glass tube which was in her right hand halfway or so between the pages of one of her books; for here it would not roll off and break. And with her now free hand—and groping again—she found the switch in the top of her lamp, and snapped it on. The darkness of the room remained un­changed, unaltered. Due—so Elsa naïvely be­lieved!—to the fact that not yet had she removed the tin cap from the nozzle of her rented lamp. But, knowing now where the lamp was, and how it was pointing, she moved herself slightly to her own left where, she knew, her test—however and whatever it should turn out to be—would be visible to Judge and entire courtroom, bar n
one. To all, that is, but Mullins now in back of her—and her own client, John Doe; both of whom she had no doubt would be craning their necks around her body once that beam of bright light poured forth from her lamp.

  Her hand, still near the switch, felt much heat pouring out of the lantern now. And, with a sigh, she removed from the nozzle of the lamp its tin cap. Waiting, cap in hand, to see a conical beam of bright white light stand forth from that un­covered nozzle, exactly like the conical beam crossing a moving picture theatre during a show.

  And when she did not, she gave a curious little silent internal laugh. Realizing that the light was pouring forth all right—and in a cone—only it was invisible!

  Into the probable cone of that invisible beam of light, Elsa now slowly brought her left hand, her thumb and index finger lightly holding the circular tube containing the powder ground from the tooth of one Kong Lung, son of Kong Wah Fa and Tsura Loy Kong. But the rays from that lamp—per­haps due to interposition of cunningly ground quartz lenses of certain curvatures—were compacted into a smaller and more intense cone than Elsa had surmised. But suddenly her hand did enter it. And glowed ghastly pale—that little hand of hers—with a peculiar bluish-grey tint. Like the hand of one of Dracula’s sisters! Or some eerie wraith—from the land of the dead.

  But the thing in the fingers of that hand—that ringshaped glass tube containing the ground-up Chinese tooth—glowed heartily, with a healthy yellow—symbolic almost of the race it represented—and as though shaming, in its hue, the pale sickly bluish-grey hand which held it.

  Elsa heard herself speaking, as from a distance, and faintly. “As Your Honor perceives,” she was saying, “the powder used as ‘control’ glows precisely as Professor Adgate’s writings and testimony say it should: Yellow!”

  She paused. And then added: “And now, Your Honor, I’ll illumine the—the powder from the—the test tooth!”

  And now, leaning over that invisible cone, and finding the book that safely held her other tube, and withdrawing that tube, Elsa prepared to bring it within the revealing beam of invisible light. Vertically, between her thumb and index finger, she held the tube firmly—having the strange idea, as she did so, that the skull, in back of her on Mullins’ desk, from whom the powder in that tube had been ground, was sarcastically watching the performance straight through her own body. And suddenly that hand moved squarely into the beam of invisible light, wraithlike like the other hand—bluish-grey and corpse-like, like the first. Except that—between its bluish-grey thumb and equally bluish-grey index finger—glowed vividly a vertical two-inch streak of lumi­nous fire!

  But “fire” which—thank God!—was not in any sense of the word “yellow”—as had been that which had emanated from the ring. For this vertical streak of glowing lumi­nosity—this seemingly drawn-out spark—was red: a pulsing, glowing, luminescing, effulgent flame red! Proving by its utterly un­mistakable hue that not only was that skull, which had been bandied about this courtroom tonight, not the skull, of Wah Lee—but also that it was not the skull, either, of one “Blinky,” a Swede!

  Proving, in short, that it was the skull of some negro—identity unknown!

  CHAPTER XX

  “—Did Feloniously Open—”

  Amidst the suffocating silence filling the entire room, Elsa slowly brought up the ring-shaped “control” tube. But it was not needed to show the pronounced, decided red of that vertical tube. That latter tube was able to speak by itself—and alone!

  For possibly ten full seconds, however, did she hold them both in the ultra-violet beam. Then, faintly, she said—and she did feel very faint now: “The lights—please—Inspector Scott.”

  They came on almost instantly. And Scott, a dazed expression on his jowls, his lower jaw actually open, slid back into his end seat.

  “I—I think this is all, Your Honor,” Elsa said, turning toward Judge Hilford Penworth. “I know, of course, what you said—in advance—about your inevitable de­cision. And I remember, also, my request to waive final address, And I shall attempt to give none. But I have, Your Honor, one more exhibit to complete my—”

  “One more exhibit?” said Penworth gruffly. “But—”

  “Yes, Your Honor. The indictment in this case! Or—or is an indictment an implied exhibit in any trial which is held upon that indictment? You might have to instruct me on that point. Your Honor. Since—but anyway you saw the proof just now—which proof you have put yourself on your own court records as willing to accept—that the skull which was taken off my client today is the skull of a Negro. Oh yes, I admit—” and Elsa’s voice grew a little bitter “—I admit that he lied to me again. He—he can’t, it seems, speak without lying. Although at that—” And her tone tempered itself “—he did say, at that, in his last words to me, just that it—it positively wasn’t the skull of Wah Lee. Yes, he did that. Anyway—” She picked up the folded white paper which lay on the table in front of. her. “I want to readjust part of the indictment in this case—Indictment No. 42,666—of which Mr. Mullins holds, I believe, the original—from my own third-carbon copy. And which runs—”

  And Elsa read off slowly:

  “—said John Doe did, sometime between the hours of sundown and sunrise of those two respec­tive dates, feloniously abstract from the safe of Louis J. Vann the skull of one Wah Lee, son of Wah Lung, proprietor of the restaurant known as the Inn of the Golden Dragon in Chicago, and O Lora Wah, deceased, but formerly of Chicago; and, to prevent being hindered or apprehend­ed in the theft of the skull of the same said Wah Lee, did murder Adolph Rei—”

  Elsa looked up, and put her paper down.

  “Since the indictment, Your Honor, states that my client there stole the skull of Wah Lee, and that to ‘pre­vent being hindered or apprehended in the theft of the skull’ of that same individual,—my client murdered Adolph Reibach—well, Your Honor, since the skull is not that of Wah Lee, then my client did not ‘feloniously steal Wah Lee’s skull,’ nor murder anybody to prevent being hindered or apprehended in ‘the theft of Wah Lee’s skull,’ and he cannot be convicted of such crimes. At least,” Elsa hastened to qualify, “on this par­ticular indictment. On an indictment that might have speci­fied an unknown Negro’s skull, or even just ‘a skull’—well, that would have been another thing. But my client cannot, Your Honor, I maintain, be convicted tonight on this indict­ment. And I am certain that against any judge in the entire world—in any country—sentencing him, I could sue out a writ of no less than—”

  Louis Vann was on his feet.

  “If Your Honor please,” he began, in rolling tones which presaged the greatest flow of oratorical logic—and doubt­lessly false logic, at that—of his career, “in the use of terms commonl—”

  But Penworth stayed the huge flow at its very inception.

  “Save your words, Mr. Vann,” he said dryly. “Unfor­tunately—or fortunately for the defendant in this case—Miss Colby is right. Unerringly—and one hun­dred per cent so! I did not myself bother tonight to read the indictment in this case. It did not even occur to me to do so. But the small part that Miss Colby has read aloud is, I’m sorry to say, sufficient in itself. The Court realizes, of course, how, in the face of almost certitude that that skull was Wah Lee’s skull, you specified it to be thus in your indictment today, so that, on conviction of this defendant, the case against McGurk would be one hundred per cent—well—waterproof—and, as it’s also sometimes said: ‘sewed with steel wires three ways across the board!’—and in perfect line with that Illinois Supreme Court decision of today. But, unfortunately, Mr. Vann, the very certitude of verbal expression with respect to having the case against McGurk waterproof, now knocks the State’s case skyhigh—against John Doe! In the light of the ineluctable proof tonight that that skull isn’t Wah Lee’s. Isn’t, in any sense, whatever, the skull of any Chinese! Nor are any technicalities open, either, to the State—as has been this particular one, to the def
ense—with respect to the fact that the indictment does not actually specify Wah Lee to have been a Chinese. For it specifies him to be the son of Wah Lung, ‘proprietor of the restaurant known as the Inn of the Golden Dragon in Chicago,’ and Mrs. O Lora Wah. And Mr. Wah Lung, yonder, who, by his own testimony set forth to­night, is the proprietor of that same restaurant, is—as anybody here in the room perceives—as full-blooded a Chinese as ever existed. And I would not allow you to waste your own time, Mr. Vann, in putting him on this stand only to have him confirm that his estimable wife—whose pictures I, at least, have seen—and about whose life, in China, in Mr. Wah’s home village—I have heard so much, was likewise completely Chinese. And so the State’s case is knocked skyhigh. Oh yes it is, Mr. Vann.” This to Vann, whose mouth was opening preparatory to issuing some sort of definite objection. “I could not face my confrères in the Jurists’ Club were I to rule otherwise; were I to sentence a man for a crime when the indictment specif­ically specified a different crime. I happen to know—yes—ahem—that I’m sometimes called ‘Ultra-Legal’ Penworth; but this is one time I’ve got to be—well—just plain legal! Ordinary, everyday legal. The defend­ant here tonight lied all right to the Court—and he evidently lied all over again to his own attorney—for the color of that test specimen’s glow under ultra-violet light was certainly not that which we have learned tonight would come from a tooth specimen taken from a once ‘blond and handsome’ Swedish gigolo. Hardly! And anyway,” he broke off, “Miss Colby’s point is correct. Doe did not, under any conditions, steal Wah Lee’s skull, nor murder anybody to prevent being appre­hended in the stealing of it; and you may, or may not—as you wish—bring a new indictment against Doe, specifying in that indictment just ‘a skull’ instead of ‘the skull of Wah Lee, a Chinese’ and—”