THE FOLLOWING DAY DE Grandin and I set out for the North, accompanied by the Ducharmes. Clarimonde traveled closely veiled, and we occupied a drawing-room suite on the B. & O. fast train which bore us from Washington to Harrisonville. The first night in New Jersey was spent at my house, Clarimonde keeping closely to her room, lest Nora McGinnis, my faithful but garrulous Irish household factotum, behold her mutilated features and spread news of them along the kitchen-door telegraph line.
A suite of rooms at Mercy Hospital was engaged the following day, and true to his promise, de Grandin took up residence in the institution, eating sleeping and passing his entire time within half a minute’s walk of his patient.
What passed in the private operating-room Ducharme’s money made possible for his daughter’s case I did not know, for the press of my own neglected practise kept me busy through most of the daylight hours, and de Grandin performed his work unassisted except by three special nurses who, like him, spent their entire time on duty in the special suite secured for Clarimonde.
Nearly three months passed before my office telephone shrilled one bright Sunday morning and de Grandin’s excited voice informed me he was about to remove the bandages from his charge. Ten minutes later, out of breath, with haste, I stood in the comfortably furnished sitting-room of Clarimonde’s suite, and stared fascinated at the little Frenchman who posed and postured beside his patient like a lecturer about to begin his discourse.
“My friends,” he announced, sweeping the circle composed of Ducharme, the nurses and me with twinkling eyes, “this is one of the supreme moments of my life. Should my workmanship be successful, I shall proceed forthwith to get most vilely, piggishly intoxicated. If I have failed”—he paused dramatically, then drew a small, silver-mounted automatic pistol from his pocket and laid it on the table beside him—“if I have failed, Friend Trowbridge, I beseech you, write in the death certificate that, my suicide was induced by a broken heart. Allons.”
With a pair of surgical scissors he slit the outermost layer of bandages about the girl’s face and began unwinding the white gauze with slow, deliberate movements.
“A-a-ah!” The long-drawn exclamation came unbidden from all of us in chorus.
The wrinkled, blotched, leather-like skin which had covered the girl’s face had, by some alchemy employed by de Grandin, been bleached to an incredibly beautiful shade of light, suntanned écru, smooth as country cream and iridescent as an alloy of gold and platinum. Above a high, straight brow of creamy whiteness her soft auburn hair was loosely dressed in a gleaming diadem of sun-stained metallic luster. But it was the strange, exotic molding of her features which brought our hearts into our eyes as we looked. Her high, straight forehead continued down into her perfectly formed nose without the slightest indication of a curve—like the cameo-fine formation of the most beautiful faces found on recovered artistic treasures of ancient Greece. With consummate skill the Frenchman had made the enlargement of her eyes an ally in his work, for while he had somewhat decreased the length of the cuts with which Ruiz had mutilated the girl’s eyes, he had left the openings larger than normal and raised them slightly at the outer corners, imparting to the face which would have otherwise been somewhat too severe in its utter classicism a charming hint of Oriental piquancy. The mouth was still somewhat large, but perfect in its outline, and the lips were thin, beautifully molded lines of more than usual redness, in repose presenting an expression of singular sweetness, retracting only slightly when she smiled, giving her face an expression of languid, faint amusement which was as provocative in its appeal as the far-famed smile of Mona Lisa.
“My God—Clarimonde, you’re beautiful!” Ducharme cried brokenly, and stumbled across the floor to drop kneeling before his daughter, burying his face in her lap and sobbing hysterically.
“Pipe d’une souris!” de Grandin pocketed his pistol and bent above his patient. “Jules de Grandin and none other shall have the first kiss from these so beautiful lips!” He placed a resounding salute upon the girl’s scarlet mouth, then turned toward the adjoining room.
“Behind that door,” he announced, “I have secreted several pints of the hospital’s finest medicinal brandy, Friend Trowbridge. See to it, if you please, that I am not disturbed until I say otherwise. For the next four and twenty hours Jules de Grandin shall be delightfully engaged in acquiring the noblest case of delirium tremens the institution’s staff has ever treated!”
Stealthy Death
1. The Second Murder
“PARADE—REST! SOUND OFF!” PLAYING in quick time, the academy band marched the field, executed a perfect countermarch and returned to its post at the right of the ordered ranks of cadets. As the bandsmen came to a halt the trumpets of the drum corps, gay with fringed tabards, belled forth the slow, appealing notes of retreat, and: “Battalion—’tention! Present—arms!” came the adjutant’s command as “The Star-Spangled Banner” sounded and the national color floated slowly from its masthead.
Jules de Grandin’s white-chamois gloved right hand cupped itself before his right ear in a French army salute, his narrow, womanish shoulders squared back and his little, pointed chin thrust up and forward as the evening sun picked half a thousand answering beams from the burnished bayonets on the presented rifles. “Parfait, exquis; magnifique!” he applauded. “C’est très beau, that, my friend. You have here a fine aggregation of young men. Certainly.”
I nodded absently. My thoughts were not on the stirring spectacle of the parade, nor upon the excellence of Westover Military Academy’s student body. I was dreading the ordeal which lay before me when, the parade dismissed, I must tell Harold Pancoast of his father’s awful death. “He’ll take it better than you, Doctor Trowbridge!” the widow had whispered between tremulous lips, and:
“Poor boy, this is tragic!” the headmaster had told me deprecatingly. “Won’t you wait till after parade, Doctor? Pancoast is Battalion Adjutant, and I think it would be kinder to let him complete his duties at parade before we break the news.”
“Confound it!” I complained bitterly more than once; “why did they have to give me this job? The family lawyer, or—”
”Mais non, my friend,” de Grandin comforted. “It is the way of life. We are born in others’ pain; we perish in our own, and between beginning and end stands the physician. We help them into the world, we watch beside their sickbeds, we make their exits into immortality as painless as possible—at the last we stay to comfort those who remain. These are the obligations of our trade.” He sighed. “It is, hélas, too true. Had kindly heaven given me a son I should have sternly forbid him to study medicine—and I should most assuredly have cracked his neck had he done otherwise!”
The last gold rays of the dying October sun were slanting through the red and russet leaves of the tree-lined avenue leading to the administration building as we waited in the headmaster’s office for young Pancoast. At last he came, sauntering easily along the red-brick walk, plainly in no haste to answer the official summons, laughing as only carefree youth can laugh, and looking with more than friendly regard into the face of his companion. Indeed, she was a sight to brighten any eye. A wistful, seeking look was on her features, her fine dark hair lay round her delicate, pale face like a somber nimbus, and the Chinese coat of quilted black satin she wore against the light evening chill was lined and collared with soft orange-pink which set off her brunette pallor to perfection. “Parbleu, he chooses nicely, that one,” de Grandin approved as the lad bade his companion adieu with a smart military salute and turned to mount the steps to the headmaster’s sanctum.
I drew a deep breath and braced myself, but I might have known the boy would take the blow like the gentleman he was. “Dead—my Dad?” he murmured slowly, unbelievingly as I concluded my evil tidings. “How? When?”
“Last night, mon pauvre,” de Grandin took the conversation from me. “Just when, we do not know, but that he met his death by foul play there is no room for doubting. The steel of the assassin struck him
from behind—a sneaking, cowardly blow, but a mighty one, mon brave—so that he died instantly, without pain or struggle. It is for us—you and us—to find the one responsible and give him up to justice. Yes. Certainly. You accept the challenge? Good! Bravely spoken, like the soldier and the gentleman you are; I do salute you—” He drew himself to rigid attention, raising his hand with precise military courtesy.
Admiringly, I saw the Gallic subtlety with which he had addressed the lad. Had I been telling him, I should have minimized the tragic aspects of his father’s death as much as possible. The Frenchman, on the contrary, had thrown them brutally before the boy, and then, with sure psychology, diverted thoughts of grief and horror by holding out the lure of vengeance.
“You’re right!” the youngster answered, his chin thrust forth belligerently. “I don’t know who’d want to harm my Dad—he never hurt a fly that didn’t bite him first—but when we find the one who did it, we—by God, sir, we’ll hang him high as Haman!”
Arrangements were quickly made. Indefinite leave was granted Harold, and I parked my car before his dormitory while he completed hurried packing for the journey to his desolated home.
“Strikes me he’s taking an unconscionable time to stuff his bags,” I grumbled when we had waited upward of an hour. “Perhaps he’s broken down, de Grandin—I’ve seen sturdier lads than he collapse like deflated balloons in similar circumstances—will you excuse me while I run in and see if he’s all right?”
The little Frenchman nodded and I hastened to the upper-story room young Pancoast shared with a classmate.
“Pancoast? No, sir,” his roommate replied to my hurried inquiry. “He came in about an hour ago and told me his trouble, then stuffed his gear into his kit bag there”—he indicated the great pigskin valise resting in a corner of the room—“and said he had to see some one before he left for home. I thought perhaps he’d decided to go on without his grip and would send for it later. Terrible thing, his father’s death, wasn’t it, sir?”
“Quite,” I answered. “You’ve no idea where he went, or why, I suppose?”
The lad colored slightly. “I—” he began, then stopped, embarrassed.
“Out with it!” I ordered curtly. “His mother’s on the verge of collapse at home, and he’s needed there. It’s the better part of three hours’ steady drive, too.”
“I’m not sure, sir,” the cadet answered, evidently of divided mind whether to hold fast the confidence imposed in him or break the school’s unwritten law in deference to the emergency. “I’m not certain where he went, but—well, he’s been pretty spoony on a femme ever since the semester started, and—maybe—he ran over to say good-bye. But it shouldn’t take him this long, and—”
”All right,” I broke in brusquely, “never mind the details. Where’s this young woman likely to be found? We’re in a hurry, son.” I bent and seized the waiting kit-bag as I spoke, then paused significantly at the door.
“I haven’t her address, sir,” the lad replied, “Panny never mentioned it to me, but you’ll be likely to find him down in Rogation Walk—that’s the little lane south of the campus by the old Military Road, you know—they usually meet there between retreat and tattoo.”
“Very well, I’ll hunt him there,” I answered. “Thanks for the information. Good-night.”
HAROLD PANCOAST LAY AS he had fallen, his uniform cap, top down, on the bricks of the shaded walk, the black-braided collar and gray shoulders of his blouse stained rusty red. Transversely across the back of his head, where hair-line joined the neck, gaped a long incised wound from which blood, already beginning to congeal, was welling freely, and in which there showed a trace of the grayish-white of cerebro-spinal fluid. His hands were stretched above him and clenched convulsively. The blow which struck him down must have been a brutally powerful one, delivered with some sharp, heavy instrument and wielded with monstrous force, for it had hacked its way half through the atlas of his spine and, glacing upward, cut deeply in the lower occiput. No need to ask if he were dead; the guillotine could scarcely have worked with more efficiency upon the poor lad’s neck.
As I gazed at him in horror another horror crept over me. Though I had not inspected his father’s injuries, Parnell, the coroner’s physician, had described them with the ghoulish gusto of his trade, and there before me on the son there lay the very reproduction of the wound which cost the father’s life not twenty hours earlier!
“Good heavens!” I gasped, and my pounding heart-beats almost stopped my breath. “This is devilish!”
I turned and raced along the quiet, tree-rimmed walk in search of Jules de Grandin.
2. The Third Murder
“SURE, DOCTOR DE GRANDIN, sor, ’tis, th’ divil’s own puzzle we’ve got here, an’ no mistake,” confided Detective Sergeant Jeremiah Costello as he knocked an inch of ash from his cigar and turned worried blue eyes on the diminutive Frenchman. “First off, we’ve got th’ murther o’ this here now Misther Pancoast—an’ th’ divil’s own murther it were, too, sor—an’ now we’ve got th’ case of his kid to consider; though, th’ blessèd saints be praised, that case is what ye might call academic, since it happened outside me jurisdiction entirely, an’ catchin’ o’ th’ scoundrel as done it is none o’ me official business, unless, belike—”
Jules de Grandin nodded shortly. “It is very exceedingly belike, indeed, my friend,” he interrupted. “Consider, if you please. What are the facts?” He raised his small left hand and spread the fingers fanwise, then counted on them in succession. “First we have this Monsieur Pancoast the elder, a fine and honest gentleman, if all reports be true. Very good. Night before last he leaves the dinner table for a meeting of his lodge, and drives off in his motor car. He shows no sign of worriment at the meeting; he is his usual smiling self. Very well. Precisely at eleven o’clock he leaves, for they have worked the third degree, and food is being served, but he is on a diet and can not stay to eat. That is too bad. Two fellow members see him enter his sedan and drive away toward home. What happens afterward we do not surely know; but in the morning he is found beside the door of his garage, face downward on the ground, and weltering in blood. His neck is chopped across the back, his spine is all but severed and the instrument of death has cloven through his skull and struck the corpus dentatum of his brain.”
He nodded solemnly. “‘Why has this thing been done?’ I ask. To find the criminal in this case means we must find the motive, but where can it be found? We can not say. This Monsieur Pancoast is a most estimable citizen, a member of the church and of the Rotary Club, a bank director, a one-time city councilman. Yet he is dead—murdered. The case is veiled in mystery.
“Eh bien, if the father’s case is obscure, what shall we think of the son’s? A fine young man, who had harmed no one, and whom no one could reasonably wish to harm. Yet he, too, is dead—murdered—and murdered with the same strange technique as that which killed his father.
“Attend me: You, Sergent, have seen much killing, both in war and peace; Trowbridge, my friend, you are a surgeon and anatomist; can either of you match the wounds which slew these poor ones in all of your experience?”
I shook my head. “Not I,” I answered. “I can understand how a blow might be delivered in such a way as to cut the tip of the spine, or how the base of the skull could be cut through, but these wounds are beyond me. Parnell described Pancoast’s injuries to me, and it seems they were identical with Harold’s. His opinion was that no such upward-slanting blow could have been struck unless the victim lay prone, and even then the weapon used would have to be curved, like a carpenter’s adz, for instance, to permit the course these incisions followed.”
“Ah bah, Parnell, he is an old woman in trousers!” de Grandin shot back. “Better would he exercise such talents as he has in a butcher shop, I think. Consider him: He says the victim must be prone. Grand dieu des cochons! Did we not examine the poor petit Monsieur? But certainly. And did we not find him stretched face downward on the earth? Yes,
again. But with his tight-clenched hands above his head, as though he clutched at nothing while he fell? Of course. His attitude was one of having fallen, and he who lies upon the earth must find it impossible to fall. Voilà, he was killed standing; for had he lain flat upon the ground when he was struck, he must inevitably have writhed in reflex death-agony when that blow shore through his spine and skull; but standing he would have made a single wild clutch for support, then stiffened as he fell upon his face. His nerves and muscles were disposed to hold him upright, and when death comes from sudden wounding of the brain, reaction of rigidity is almost instant. You have seen it, Sergent; so have I. A soldier in the charge, by example, is drilled through the head by a rifle ball. He staggers on a step or two, perhaps, and then he falls, or it is better to say he topples forward, stiff and straight as though at attention, and hours afterward his poor, dead hands still grasp his musket tightly. But if that same man lies on the earth when he meets death that way, the chances are nine hundred in a thousand that he will twist and writhe, at least in one final spasm, before he stiffens. But certainly. It is for that reason that the condemned one is strapped tight to the cradle of the guillotine. If he were not, the reflex nervous action consequent upon decapitation—which is no more than a sudden injury to the spine, my friends—would surely cause him to roll sidewise on the scaffold floor, and that would rob the execution of its dignity. Yes, it is undoubtlessly so.”
The Best of Jules de Grandin Page 26
