by Otto Penzler
“You don’t want to talk to him, then?” I whispered as we neared the front door.
“I do not, neither do I wish to tell indecent stories to the priest as he elevates the Host. The one would be no greater sacrilege than the other, but—ah?” he broke off, staring at a small framed parchment hanging on the wall. “Tell me, my friend,” he demanded, “what is it that you see there?”
“Why, it’s a certificate of membership in the Rangers’ Club. Clark was in the Army Air Force, and—”
“Très bien,” he broke in. “Thank you. Our ideas sometimes lead us to see what we wish when in reality it is not there; that is why I sought the testimony of disinterested eyes.”
“What in the world has Clark’s membership in the Rangers got to do with—”
“Zut!” he waved me to silence. “I think, I cogitate, I concentrate, my old one. Monsieur Evens—Monsieur Wolkof, now Monsieur Clark—all are members of that club. C’est très étrange. Me, I shall interview the steward of that club, my friend. Perhaps his words may throw more light on these so despicable doings than all the clumsy, well-meant investigations of our friend Costello. Come, let us go away. Tomorrow will do as well as today, for the miscreant who fancies himself secure is in no hurry to decamp, despite the nonsense talked of the guilty who flee when no man pursueth.”
WE FOUND COSTELLO waiting for us when we reached home. A very worried-looking Costello he was, too. “We’ve checked th’ fingerprints on th’ sash-weight, sir,” he announced almost truculently.
“Bon,” the Frenchman replied carelessly. “Is it that they are of someone you can identify?”
“I’ll say they are,” the sergeant returned shortly. “They’re Gyp Carson’s—th’ meanest killer th’ force ever had to deal with.”
“Ah,” de Grandin shook off his air of preoccupation with visible effort, “it is for you to find this Monsieur Gyp, my friend. You have perhaps some inkling of his present whereabouts?”
The sergeant’s laugh was almost an hysterical cackle. “That we have, sir, that we have! They burnt—you know, electrocuted—him last month in Trenton for th’ murder of a milkwagon driver durin’ a hold-up. By rights he should be in Mount Olivet Cemetery this minute, an’ by th’ same token he should ’a’ been there when the little Clark girl was kilt last night.”
“A-a-ah?” de Grandin twisted his wheat-blond mustache furiously. “It seems this case contains the possibilities, my friend. Tomorrow morning, if you please, we shall go to the cemetery and investigate the grave of Monsieur Gyp. Perhaps we shall find something there. If we find nothing we shall have found the most valuable information we can have.”
“If we find nothin’—” The big Irishman looked at him in bewilderment. “All right, sir. I’ve seen some funny things since I been runnin’ round with you, but if you’re tellin’ me—”
“Tenez, my friend, I tell you nothing; nothing at all. I too seek information. Let us wait until the morning, then see what testimony pick and shovel will give.”
A SUPERINTENDENT AND two workmen waited for us at the grave when we arrived at the cemetery next morning. The grave lay in the newer, less expensive portion of the burying ground where perpetual care was not so conscientiously maintained as in the better sections. Scrub grass fought for a foothold in the clayey soil, and the mound had already begun to fall in. Incongruously, a monument bearing the effigy of a weeping angel leaned over the grave-head, while a foot-stone with the inscription OUR DARLING guarded its lower end.
The superintendent glanced over Costello’s papers, stowed them in an inner pocket and nodded to the Polish laborers. “Git goin’,” he ordered tersely, “an’ make it snappy.”
The diggers’ picks and spades bored deep and deeper in the hard-packed, sun-baked earth. At last the hollow sound of steel on wood warned us their quest was drawing to a close. A pair of strong web straps was let down and made fast to the rough chestnut box in which the casket rested, and the men strained at the thongs to bring their weird freight to the surface. Two pick-handles were laid across the violated grave and on them the box rested. With a wrench the superintendent undid the screws that held the clay-stained lid in place and laid it aside. Within we saw the casket, a cheap, square-ended affair covered with shoddy gray broadcloth, the tinny imitation-silver name plate and crucifix on its lid already showing a dull brown-blue discoloration.
“Maintenant!” murmured de Grandin breathlessly as the superintendent began unlatching the fastenings that held the upper portion of the casket lid. Then, as the last catch snapped back and the cover came away:
“Feu noir de l’enfer!”
“Good heavens!” I exclaimed.
“For th’ love o’ God!” Costello’s amazed antiphon sounded at my elbow.
The cheap sateen pillow of the casket showed a depression like the pillow of a bed recently vacated, and the poorly made upholstery of its bottom displayed a wide furrow, as though flattened by some weight imposed on it for a considerable time, but sign or trace of human body there was none. The case was empty as it left the factory.
“Glory be to God!” Costello muttered hoarsely, staring at the empty casket as though loath to believe his own eyes. “An’ this is broad daylight,” he added in a kind of wondering afterthought.
“Précisément,” de Grandin’s acid answer came back like a whipcrack. “This is diagnostic, my friend. Had we found something here it might have meant one thing or another. Here we find nothing; nothing at all. What does it mean?”
“I know what it means!” The look of superstitious fear on Costello’s broad red face gave way to one of furious anger. “It means there’s been some monkey-business goin’ on—who had this buryin’?” he turned savagely on the superintendent.
“Donally,” the other returned, “but don’t blame me for it. I just work here.”
“Huh, Donally, eh? We’ll see what Mr. Donally has to say about this, an’ he’d better have plenty to say, too, if he don’t want to collect himself from th’ corners o’ a four-acre lot.”
Donally’s Funeral Parlors were new but by no means prosperous-looking. Situated in a small side street in the poor section of town, their only pretention to elegance was the brightly-gleaming gold sign on their window:
JOSEPH DONALLY
FUNERAL DIRECTOR & EMBALMER
SEXTON ST. ROSE’S R.C. CHURCH
“See here, young feller me lad,” Costello began without preliminary as he stamped unceremoniously into the small, dark room that constituted Mr. Donally’s office and reception foyer, “come clean, an’ come clean in a hurry. Was Gyp Carson dead when you had his funeral?”
“If he wasn’t we sure played one awful dirty trick on him,” the mortician replied. “What’d ye think would happen to you if they set you in that piece o’ furniture down at Trenton an’ turned the juice on? What d’ye mean, ‘was he dead’?”
“I mean just what I say, wise guy. I’ve just come from Mount Olivet an’ looked into his coffin, an’ if there’s hide or hair of a corpse in it I’ll eat it, so I will!”
“What’s that? You say th’ casket was empty?”
“As your head.”
“Well, I’ll be—” Mr. Donally began, but Costello forestalled him:
“You sure will, an’ all beat up, too, if you don’t spill th’ low-down. Come clean, now, or do I have to sock ye in th’ jaw an’ lock ye up in th’ bargain?”
“Whatcher tryin’ to put over?” Mr. Donally demanded. “Think I faked up a stall funeral? Lookit here, if you don’t believe me.” From a pigeon hole of his desk he produced a sheaf of papers, thumbed through them, and handed Costello a packet fastened with a rubber band.
Everything was in order. The death certificate, signed by the prison physician, showed the cause of death as cardiac arrest by fibrillary contraction induced by three shocks of an alternating current of electricity of 7½ amperes at a pressure of 2,000 volts.
“I didn’t have much time,” Donally volunteered. “The prison do
ctors had made a full post, an’ his old woman was one o’ them old-fashioned folks that don’t believe in embalmin’, so there was nothin’ to do but rush him to th’ graveyard an’ plant him. Not so bad for me, though, at that. I sold ’em a casket an’ burial suit an’ twenty-five limousines for th’ funeral, an’ got a cut on th’ monument, too.”
De Grandin eyed him speculatively. “Have you any reason to believe attempts at resuscitation were made?” he asked.
“Huh? Resuscitate that? Didn’t I just tell you they’d made a full autopsy on him at the prison? Didn’t miss a damn thing either. You might as well try resuscitatin’ a lump o’ hamburger as bring back a feller which had had that done to him.”
“Quite so,” de Grandin nodded. “I did but ask. Now—”
“Now we don’t know no more than we did an hour ago,” the sergeant supplied. “I might ’a’ thought this guy was in cahoots with Gyp’s folks, but th’ prison records show he was dead, an’ th’ doctors down at Trenton don’t certify nobody’s dead if there’s a flicker o’ eyelash left in him. Looks as if we’ve got to find some gink with a fad for grave-robbin’, don’t it, Dr. de Grandin?
“But say”—a sudden gleam of inspiration overspread his face—“suppose someone had dug him up an’ taken an impression of his fingerprints, then had rubber gloves made with th’ prints on th’ outside o’ th’ fingers? Wouldn’t it be a horse on th’ force for him to go around murderin’ people, an’ leave his weapons lyin’ round promiscuous-like, so’s we’d be sure to find what we thought was his prints, only to discover they’d been made by a gunman who’d been burnt a month or more before?”
“Tiens, my friend, your supposition has at least the foundation of reason beneath it,” de Grandin conceded. “Do you make search for one who might have done the thing you suspect. Me, I have certain searching of my own to do. Anon we shall confer, and together we shall surely lay this so vile miscreant by the heels.”
“AH, BUT IT has been a lovely day,” he assured me with twinkling eyes as he contemplated the glowing end of his cigar that evening after dinner. “Yes, pardieu, an exceedingly lovely day! This morning when I went from that Monsieur Donally’s shop my head whirled like that of an unaccustomed voyager stricken by sea-sickness. Only miserable uncertainty confronted me on every side. Now”—he blew a cone of fragrant smoke from his lips and watched it spiral slowly toward the ceiling—“now I know much, and that I do not actually know I damn surmise. I think I see the end of this so tortuous trail, Friend Trowbridge.”
“How’s that?” I encouraged, watching him from the corners of my eyes.
“How? Cordieu, I shall tell you! When Friend Costello told us of the murder of Monsieur Wolkof—that second murder which was made to appear suicide—and mentioned he met death at the Rangers’ Club, I suddenly recalled that Colonel Evans, whose death we had so recently deplored, was also a member of that club. It struck me at the time there might be something more than mere coincidence in it; but when that pitiful Monsieur Clark also proved to be a member, nom d’un asperge, coincidence ceased to be coincidence and became moral certainty.
“ ‘Now,’ I ask me, ‘what lies behind this business of the monkey? Is it not strange two members of the Rangers’ Club should have been slain so near together, and in such similar circumstances, and a third should have been visited with a calamity worse than death?’
“ ‘You have said it, mon garçon,’ I tell me. ‘It is indubitably as you say. Come, let us interview the steward of that club, and see what he shall say.’
“Nom d’un pipe, what did he not tell? From him I learn much more than he said. I learn, by example, that Messieurs Evans, Wolkof and Clark had long been friends; that they had all been members of the club’s grievance committee; that they were called on some five years ago to recommend expulsion of a Monsieur Wallagin—mon Dieu, what a name!
“ ‘So far, so fine,’ I tell me. ‘But what of this Monsieur-with-the-Funny-Name? Who and what is he, and what has he done to be flung out of the club?’
“I made careful inquiry and found much. He has been an explorer of considerable note and has written some monographs which showed he understood the use of his eyes. Hélas, he knew also how to use wits, as many of his fellow members learned to their sorrow when they played cards with him. Furthermore, he had a most unpleasant stock of stories which he gloried to tell—stories of his doings in the far places which did not recommend him to the company of self-respecting gentlemen. And so he was removed from the club’s rolls, and vowed he would get level with Messieurs Evans, Clark and Wolkof if it took him fifty years to do so.
“Five years have passed since then, and Monsieur Wallagin seems to have prospered exceedingly. He has a large house in the suburbs where no one but himself and one servant—always a Chinese—lives, but the neighbors tell strange stories of the parties he holds, parties at which pretty ladies in strange attire appear, and once or twice strange-looking men as well.
“Eh bien, why should this rouse my suspicions? I do not know, unless it be that my nose scents the odor of the rodent farther than the average. At any rate, out to the house of Monsieur Wallagin I go, and at its gate I wait like a tramp in the hope of charity.
“My vigil is not unrewarded. But no. Before I have stood there an hour I behold one forcibly ejected from the house by a gross person who reminds me most unpleasantly of a pig. It is a small and elderly Chinese man, and he has suffered greatly in his amour propre. I join him in his walk to town, and sympathize with him in his misfortune.
“My friend”—his earnestness seemed out of all proportion to the simple statement—“he had been forcibly dismissed for putting salt in the food which he cooked for Monsieur Wallagin’s guests.”
“For salting their food?” I asked. “Why—”
“One wonders why, indeed, Friend Trowbridge. Consider, if you please. Monsieur Wallagin has several guests, and feeds them thin gruel made of wheat or barley, and bread in which no salt is used. Nothing more. He personally tastes of it before it is presented to them, that he may make sure it is unsalted.”
“Perhaps they’re on some sort of special diet,” I hazarded as he waited for my comment. “They’re not obliged to stay and eat unseasoned food, are they?”
“I do not know,” he answered soberly. “I greatly fear they are, but we shall know before so very long. If what I damn suspect is true we shall see devilment beside which the worst produced by ancient Rome was mild. If I am wrong—alors, it is that I am wrong. I think I hear the good Costello coming; let us go with him.”
Evening had brought little surcease from the heat, and perspiration streamed down Costello’s face and mine as we drove toward Morrisdale, but de Grandin seemed in a chill of excitement, his little round blue eyes were alight with dancing elf-fires, his small white teeth fairly chattering with nervous excitation as he leant across the back of the seat, urging me to greater speed.
The house near which we parked was a massive stone affair, standing back from the road in a jungle of greenery, and seemed to me principally remarkable for the fact that it had neither front nor rear porches, but rose sheer-walled as a prison from its foundations.
Led by the Frenchman we made cautious way to the house, creeping to the only window showing a gleam of light and fastening our eyes to the narrow crack beneath its not-quite-drawn blind.
“Monsieur Wallagin acquired a new cook this afternoon,” de Grandin whispered. “I made it my especial business to see him and bribe him heavily to smuggle a tiny bit of beef into the soup he prepares for tonight. If he has been faithful in his treachery we may see something, if not—pah, my friends, what is it we have here?”
We looked into a room which must have been several degrees hotter than the stoke-hole of a steamer, for the window was shut tightly and a great log fire blazed on the wide hearth of the fireplace almost opposite our point of vantage. Its walls were smooth-dressed stone, the floor was paved with tile. Lolling on a sort of divan made of heaped-up cushion
s sat the master of the house, a monstrous bulk of a man with enormous paunch, great fat-upholstered shoulders between which perched a hairless head like an owl’s in its feathers, and eyes as cold and gray as twin inlays of burnished agate.
About his shoulders draped a robe of Paisley pattern, belted at the loins but open to the waist, displaying his obese abdomen as he squatted like an evil parody of Mi-lei-Fo, China’s Laughing Buddha.
As we fixed our eyes to the gap under the curtain he beat his hands together, and as at a signal the door at the room’s farther end swung open to admit a file of women. All three were young and comely, and each a perfect foil for the others. First came a tall and statuesque brunette with flowing unbound black hair, sharp-hewn patrician features and a majesty of carriage like a youthful queen’s. The second was a petite blonde, fairylike in form and elfin in face, and behind her was a red-haired girl, plumply rounded as a little pullet. Last of all there came an undersized, stoop-shouldered man who bore what seemed an earthern vessel like a New En gland bean-pot and two short lengths of willow sticks.
“Jeeze!” breathed Costello. “Lookit him, Dr. de Grandin; ’tis Gyp Carson himself!”
“Silence!” the Frenchman whispered fiercely. “Observe, my friends; did I not say we should see something? Regardez-vous!”
At a signal from the seated man the women ranged themselves before him, arms uplifted, heads bent submissively, and the undersized man dropped down tailor-fashion in a corner of the room, nursing the clay pot between his crossed knees and poising his sticks over it.
The obese master of the revels struck his hands together again, and at their impact the man on the floor began to beat a rataplan upon his crock.
