The Mystery & Suspense Novella

by Fletcher Flora

  Trant had trained himself to avoid definite expectation; yet as he faced the man within he felt a momentary surprise. For at first he could see in Kanlan only a portly, quiet man, carelessly dressed in clothes a knowing tailor had cut. But as his eyes saw clearer he perceived that the portliness was not of flesh but of huge muscles, thinly coated with fat, that the plump, olive-skinned cheeks concealed a square, fighting jaw, and that his quiet was the loll of the successful, city-bred animal, bound by no laws but his own—but an animal powerful enough to prefer to fight fair. His heavy lids lifted to watch listlessly as Trant opened his suit case and took out the instruments for the test.

  The galvanometer consisted merely of a little dial with a needle arranged to register on a scale an electric current down to hundredths of a milliampere. Trant attached two wires to the binding posts of the instrument, the circuit including a single cell battery. Each wire connected with a simple steel cylinder electrode. With one held in each hand, and the palms of the hands slightly dampened to perfect the contact, a light current passed through the body and swung the delicate needle over the scale to register the change in the current. Walker, and even Captain Crowley, saw more clearly now how, if it was a fact that moisture must come from the glands in the palm of the hand under emotion, the changes in the amount of the current passing through the person holding the electrodes must register upon the dial, and the subject be unable to conceal his emotional change when confronted with guilty objects. Kanlan, comprehending nothing, but assured by Walker’s nod that the test was fair, put out his hands for the electrodes.

  “You’re wrong, friend,” he said, quietly. “I don’t know your game. But I ain’t afraid, if it’s on the square. Of course, I ain’t sorry he’s dead, but—I didn’t do it!”

  Trant glanced quickly at the dial. A current, so very slight that he knew it must be entirely imperceptible to Kanlan, registered upon the scale; and having registered it, the needle remained steady.

  “Watch it!” he commanded; then checked himself. “No; wait.” He felt in his pocket. Removing the newspaper which he had there, still folded at the account of the escape of the convict Johanson, he looked about for some place to put it, and then laid it upon Kanlan’s knee. He took a little phial from his pocket, uncorked it as if to oil the mechanism about the galvanometer, but spilled it on the floor. The stifling, sickening odor of banana oil pervaded the cell; and as Kanlan smiled at his clumsiness, Trant took his watch from his pocket and—with the gamester still watching him curiously—slowly set it forward an hour. The needle of the galvanometer dial, in plain view of all, waited steady in its place. The young psychologist glanced at it satisfiedly.

  “Well, what’s the matter with the show?” Crowley jeered, impatiently. “Commence.”

  “Commence, Captain Crowley?” Trant raised himself triumphantly. “I have finished it.” They stared at him as though distrusting his sanity. “You have seen for yourself the needle stand steady in place,” Trant continued. “Inspector Walker “—he turned to the friendly superior officer as he recognized the hopelessness of explaining to Crowley—“I understood, of course, when I asked you to bring me here that, even if my test should prove conclusive to me, yet I could scarcely hope to have the police yet accept it. I shall let Miss Allison know that Kanlan can have had no possible connection with the crime against Mr. Bronson; but I understand that I can clear Kanlan in the eyes of the police only by giving Captain Crowley,” Trant bowed to that astounded officer, “the real murderer in his place.”

  “You say you have made the test, Trant?” Walker challenged, in stupefaction. But before Trant could answer, Crowley pushed him aside, roughly, and stooped to the satchel which Sweeny had brought.

  “Of course he hasn’t, Walker!” he answered, disgustedly. “He don’t dare to, and is throwing a bluff. But I’ll show him, with his own machine, too, if there’s anything to it at all!” The captain stooped and, pulling from the opened valise a photograph of the spot where the murder was committed, he dashed it before Kanlan’s face. Instantly, as both the captain and inspector turned to Trant’s galvanometer needle, the little instrument showed a reaction. Up it crept, higher and higher, over the scale of the dial, as the sweat, surprised by the guilty picture from the gambler’s hands, made the contact with the electrodes in his palms and the current flowed through his body.

  “See! So it wasn’t all a lie!” Crowley pointed triumphantly to the instrument. He stooped again to the satchel and put a photograph of the body of the murdered attorney before the suspect’s eyes. The ‘stolid Kanlan still held the muscles of his face firm and no flush betrayed him; but again, as Crowley, Sweeny, and Walker excitedly stared at the galvanometer needle it jumped and registered the stronger current. Crowley, with a victorious grunt, lifted the blood-stained coat of the murdered attorney and rubbed the sleeve against Kanlan’s cheek. At this, and again and again with each presentation of objects connected with the crime, the merciless little galvanometer showed an ever-increasing reaction. Trant shrugged his shoulders.

  “Jake, we got the goods on you now!” Crowley took the gambler’s chin roughly between his tough fists and pushed back his head until the uneasy eyes met his own. “You’d best confess. You killed him!”

  “I did not!” Kanlan choked. “You’re a liar! You killed him. I knew it, anyway. If you were a nigger you’d have been lynched before this!”

  For the first time since Crowley took the test into his own hands, Trant, watching the galvanometer needle, started in surprise. He gazed suddenly at Kanlan’s olive face, surmounted by his curly black hair, and smiled. The needle had jumped up higher again, completing Crowley’s triumph. They filed out of the cell, and back to the little office.

  “So I proved him on your own machine,” Crowley rejoiced openly, “you four-flushing patent palmist!”

  “You’ve proved, Captain Crowley,” Trant returned quietly, “what I already knew, that in your previous examinations with Kanlan, and probably with the rest also, you have ruined the value of those things you have there for any proper test, by exhibiting them with threats again and again. That was why I had to make the test I did. I tell you once more that Kanlan is not the murderer of Bronson. And I am glad to be able to tell Miss Allison the same thing, as I promised her, at the very earliest moment.” He picked up the telephone receiver and gave the Allisons’ number. But suddenly the receiver was wrenched from his hand.

  “Not yet,” Inspector Walker commanded. “You’ll tell Miss Allison nothing until we know more about this case.”

  “I don’t ask you to release Kanlan yet, inspector,” Trant said quietly. Crowley laughed offensively. “That is, not until I have proved for you the proper man in his place.” He drew a paper from his pocket. “I cannot surely name him yet; but picking the most likely of them from what I read, I advise you to re-arrest Caylis.”

  Crowley, throwing himself into a chair, burst into loud laughter. “He chose Caylis, Sweeny, did you hear that?” Crowley gasped. “That’s in the same class as the rest of your performance, young fellow. Say, I’m sorry not to be able to oblige you,” he went on, derisively, “but, you see, Caylis was the only one of the whole sixteen who couldn’t have killed Bronson; for he was with me—talking to me—in the station, from half past one that morning, half an hour before the murder, till half past two, a half hour after!”

  Trant sprang to his feet excitedly. “He was?” he cried. “Why didn’t you tell me that before? Inspector Walker, I said a moment ago that I could not be sure which of the other fifteen killed Bronson; but now I say arrest Caylis—Caylis is the murderer!”

  Captain Crowley and Sweeny stared at him again, as if believing him demented.

  “I would try to explain, Inspector Walker,” said Trant, “but believe me, I mean no offense when I say that I think it would be absolutely useless now. But—” he hesitated, as the inspector turned coldly away. “Inspector Walker, you said this mor
ning you knew Kanlan from his birth. How much negro blood is there in him?”

  “How did you know that?” cried Walker, staring at Trant in amazement. “He’s always passed for white. He’s one eighth nigger. But not three people know it. Who told you?”

  “The galvanometer,” Trant replied, quietly, “the same way it told me that he was innocent and Crowley’s test useless. Now, will you rearrest Caylis at once and hold him till I can get the galvanometer on him?”

  “I will, young fellow!” Walker promised, still staring at him. “If only for that nigger blood.”

  But Crowley had one more shot to make. “Say, you,” he interrupted, “you threw a bluff about an hour back that the man who killed Bronson got the idea from the News. Sweeny, here, has been having these fellows shadowed since weeks before the murder. Sweeny knows what papers they read.” He turned to the detective. “Sweeny, what paper did Kanlan always read?”

  “The News.”

  “And Caylis—what did he never read?”

  “The News,” the detective answered.

  “Well, what have you for that now, son?” Crowley swung back.

  “Only thanks, Captain Crowley, for that additional help. Inspector Walker, I am willing to rest my case against Caylis upon the fact that he was with Crowley at two o’clock. That alone is enough to hang him, and not as an accessory, but as the principal who himself struck the blow. But as there obviously was an accessory—and what Crowley has just said makes it more certain—perhaps I had better make as sure of that accessory, and also get a better answer for the real mystery, which is why and how Bronson left his house and went in that direction at that time in the morning, before I give Miss Allison the news for which she is waiting.”

  He took his hat and left them staring after him.

  An hour later Trant jumped from a North Side car and hurried down Superior Street. Two blocks east of the car line he recognized from the familiar pictures in the newspapers the frescoed and once fashionable front of the Mitchell boarding house, where Bronson had lived. He was seeing it for the first time, but with barely more than a curious glance, he went on toward the place, a block east, where the attorney’s body had been found. He noted carefully the character of the buildings on both sides of the street.

  There was a grocery, between two old mansions; beyond the next house a cigar store; then another boarding house, and the electroplater’s shop before which the body was found. The little shop, smelling strongly of the oils and acids used in the electroplater’s trade, was of one story. Trant noted the convenient vestibule flush with the walk, and the position of the street lamp which would throw its light on anyone approaching, while concealing with a dark shadow one waiting in the vestibule.

  The physical arrangement was all as he had seen it a score of times in the newspapers; but as he stared about, the true key to the mystery of Bronson’s death came to him magnified a hundred times in its intensity. Who waited there in that vestibule and struck the blow which slew Bronson, he had felt from the first would be at once answerable under scientific investigation. But the other question, how could the murderer wait so confidently there, knowing that Bronson would come out of his house alone at that time of the night and pass that way, was less simple of solution.

  He glanced beyond the shop to the house where, Inspector Walker had told him, the questionable Mrs. Hawtin lived. Beyond that he saw a sign—that of a Dr. O’Connor. He swung about and returned to the house where Bronson had boarded.

  “Tell Mrs. Mitchell that Mr. Trant, who is working with Inspector Walker, wishes to speak with her,” he said to the maid, and he had a moment to estimate the parlor before the mistress of the house entered.

  A white-faced, brown-eyed little boy of seven, with pallid cheeks and golden hair, had fled between the portieres as Trant entered. The room was not at all typical of the boarding house. Its ornament and its arrangement showed the imprint of a decided, if not cultivated, feminine personality. The walls lacked the usual faded family portraits, and there was an entire absence of ancient knickknacks to give evidence of a past gentility. So he was not surprised when the mistress of this house entered, pretty after a spectacular fashion, impressing him with a quiet reserve of passion and power.

  “I am always ready to see anyone who comes to help poor Mr. Bronson,” she said.

  The little boy, who had fled at Trant’s approach, ran to her. But even as she sat with her arms about the child, Trant tried in vain to cloak her with that atmosphere of motherliness of which Miss Allison had spoken.

  “I heard so, Mrs. Mitchell,” said Trant. “But as you have had to tell the painful details so many times to the police and the reporters, I shall not ask you for them again.”

  “Do you mean,” she looked up quickly, “that you bring me news instead of coming to ask it?”

  “No, I want your help, but only in one particular. You must have known Mr. Bronson’s habits and needs more intimately than any other person. Recently you may have thought of some possible reason for his going out in that manner and at that time, other than that held by the police.”

  “Oh, I wish I could, Mr. Trant!” the woman cried. “But I cannot!”

  “I saw the sign of a doctor—Doctor O’Connor—just beyond the place where he was killed. Do you think it possible that he was going to Doctor O’Connor’s, or have you never thought of that?”

  “I thought of that, Mr. Trant,” the woman returned, a little defiantly. “I tried to hope, at first, that that might be the reason for his going out. But, as I had to tell the detectives who asked me of that some time ago, I know that Mr. Bronson so intensely disliked Doctor O’Connor that he could not have been going to him, no matter how urgent the need. Besides, Doctor Carmeachal, who always attended him, lives around this corner, the other way.” She indicated the direction of the car line.

  “I see,” Trant acknowledged, thoughtfully. “Yet, if Mr. Bronson disliked Doctor O’Connor, he must have met him. Was it here?” He leaned over and took the hand of the pallid little boy. “Perhaps Doctor O’Connor comes to see your son?”

  “Oh, yes, Mr. Trant!” the child put in eagerly. “Doctor O’Connor always comes to see me. I like Doctor O’Connor.”

  “Still, I agree with you, Mrs. Mitchell,” Trant raised his eyes calmly to meet the woman’s suddenly agitated ones, “that Mr. Bronson could scarcely have been going to consult Doctor O’Connor for himself in such a fashion and at—half past one.”

  “At two, Mr. Trant,” the woman corrected.

  “Ten minutes after, to be exact, if you mean when the watch was stopped!” The woman arose suddenly, with a motion sinuous as that of a startled tiger. It was as though in the quiet parlor a note of passion and alarm had been struck. Trant bowed quietly as she rang for the maid to show him out. But when he was alone with the maid in the hall his eyes flashed suddenly.

  “Tell me,” he demanded, swiftly, “the night Mr. Bronson was killed, was there anything the matter with the telephone?”

  The girl hesitated and stared at him queerly. “Why, yes, sir,” she said. “A man had to come next day to fix it.”

  “The break was on the inside—I mean, the man worked in the house?”

  “Why—yes, sir.” The maid had opened the door. Trant stopped with a smothered exclamation and picked up a newspaper just delivered. He spread it open and saw that it was the five o’clock edition of the News.

  “This is Mrs. Mitchell’s paper,” he demanded, “the one she always reads?”

  “Why, yes, sir,” the girl answered again.

  Trant paused to consider. “Tell Mrs. Mitchell everything I asked you,” he decided finally, and hurried down the steps and back to the police station.

  In the room where the desk sergeant told him Inspector Walker was awaiting him Trant found both Crowley and Sweeny with the big officer, and a fourth man, a stranger to him. The stranger was
slight and dark. He had a weak, vain face, but one of startling beauty, with great, lazy brown eyes, filled with childlike innocence. He twisted his mustache and measured Trant curiously, as the blunt, red-headed young man entered.

  “So this is the fellow,” he asked Crowley, derisively, “that made you think I sent a double to talk with you while I went out to do Bronson?”

  “Will you have Caylis taken out of the room for a few moments, inspector?” Trant requested, in reply. The inspector motioned to Sweeny, who led out the prisoner.

  “Where’s your accessory?” asked Crowley, grinning.

  “I’ll tell you presently,” Trant put him off. “I want to test Caylis without his knowing anything unusual is being tried. Captain Crowley, can we have the brass-knobbed chair from your office?”

  “What for?” Crowley demanded.

  “I will show you when I have it.”

  At Walker’s nod Crowley brought in the chair. It was a deep, high-backed, wooden chair, with high arms; and on each arm was a brass knob, so placed that a person sitting in the chair would almost inevitably place his palms over them. As the captain brought in the chair, Trant opened his suit case and took out his galvanometer, batteries and wires. Cutting off the cylinder electrodes which Kanlan had held in his hands during the test of that morning, Trant ran the wires under each arm of the chair and made a contact with each brass knob. He connected them with the battery, which he hid under the chair, and with the galvanometer dial, which he placed behind the chair upon a table, concealing it behind his hat.

  He seated himself in the chair and grasped the knobs in his palms. With his hands dry no perceptible current passed through his body from knob to knob to register upon the dial.

  “Scare me!” he suddenly commanded the inspector.

  “What?” Walker bent his brows.

  “Scare me, and watch the needle.”

  Walker, half comprehending, fumbled in the drawer of a desk, straightened suddenly, a cocked revolver in his hand, and snapped it at Trant’s head. At once the needle of the galvanometer leaped across the scale, and Crowley and Walker both stared.