Murder by Reflection

by H. F. Heard

  “Those crimson plates?”

  “Well, I completed that piece of work. I won’t take you into that. It isn’t necessary—at least not yet. Briefly, what it did was to make me sure, through a photograph that she let me take of her, that Mrs. Heron, though she might be a nervously dyspeptic type, was not going to have serious organic trouble—at least for a considerable time—not, at least, that basic serious trouble which we call cancer.”

  Doc was now pretty rigid. The exhumation was complete.

  “Judge, therefore, my surprise when I heard that she had died quite quickly of leukemia, or some similar, and rapid degeneration of the blood. I knew two other small facts—nothing in themselves, but, taken together, and put beside these which I have mentioned, strangely disturbing, at least to me.”

  Doc, it was obvious, was now joining in the state of disturbance.

  “The first was that the young man, with some abruptness, terminated his research, ceased to have that room as his laboratory and that shortly after, Mrs. Heron occupied it, and shortly after, again, she dies.”

  Doc emitted some sounds which proved attention but did not call for answer.

  “My next step was, therefore, to consult with you, asking you to inquire of her doctor whether he was at all surprised at what had taken place. I understand he convinced you that we were busybodies.”

  Doc sighed and shifted uneasily. “I couldn’t leave the matter there, feeling as I did. Incidentally, young Heron had told me what I guess Dr. Hertz told you, that he, Heron, had himself had functional, not organic, blood trouble through using certain short-wave radiations. I doubt if, then, he even thought of that fact as being able to be used as cover. But you see how handy it proved, indeed how it may actually have made him feel safe, safe to strike. Because, after that, Dr. Hertz would naturally say to any inquiring busy-bodies, that he knew young Heron had had functional blood trouble and that he knew also that Mrs. Heron neither had any such trouble—but a trouble quite common at her age—nor was she exposed to such radiations. He was calling regularly and there were nurses in the house. Everything was medically aboveboard. Young Heron could not be shooting at her with blood-pressure-raising rays.

  “The safest place is where the last shot hit, says the motto. The safest defense—as a conjurer shows you the hand with which he is not tricking you—is to consult the family doctor about an odd but not too dangerous illness you have, which is near to, but quite different from the deadly illness you later employ for murder. Dr. Hertz, who, as we know, is young and clever and rather impatient with nonprofessionals”—Doc winced a little—“would naturally be so pleased that he knew of the out-of-the-way blood-pressure wave-length connection that he would be all the more likely to pooh-pooh still another and stranger danger of which he had never heard. The coincidental improbability of there being two such queer link-ups between wave-lengths and disease would keep him from being suspicious, or friendly to the suspicions of others.

  “So there was only one thing more to do. You were kind enough to humor me and able to assist me. It was clear to me that there was just a chance that I might get the extra proof, the final link in the chain of evidence which might persuade you to revise your verdict. To get that I would have to photograph the room.”

  “But what use could that be? How could you think that would help?”

  “I know it must have seemed odd—the veriest and most literal ‘shot in the dark.’ But you know I’m always reading up research—the kind of odd bits that don’t perhaps ever get built up into general knowledge and out into the textbooks. I seemed to remember an article and some correspondence that appeared some time ago in one of the small journals on radioactive research. It came back into my mind because it was among some that I had lent to young Heron when he was interested in such research, and, when the periodicals were returned and I was refiling them, out of one dropped some cigarette ash. I rather think his mother did not like him smoking about the house and that he smoked when he worked up in his lab. Anyhow, I, who don’t smoke, don’t like ash interlarded between the pages of my papers. So I opened and shook it out of the seams. Sure enough, where there was quite a little deposit was an article on the subject I was recalling in my mind.”

  Stretching back to the laboratory bench, he picked up a small periodical with closely printed double-columned pages. It was open and still on the inner margin could be seen the gray smudge of compressed cigarette ash.

  “This communication is really a letter from a correspondent. The writer is reporting certain findings which he has collected on the interesting and insufficiently studied subject of ‘saturation.’ He notes that in a number of small country hospitals a curious effect has been observed. It is that when the room used for X-ray work had been in use for some time, the photographs—or skiagraphs—taken there began to show curious markings, striations. The cause of these is pretty clear. In these poorly endowed hospitals, to save expense, the walls were not treated—that is to say, instead of being sheathed in lead, they were simply painted and left as they were, with their original boarding or plaster. Though the X-ray tube would, of course, be in the middle of the room, not directed at the walls, nevertheless, in time, the rays set loose in the room were soaked up by the walls, stored, and then, as it were, re-echoed back, poured out again, until they stained and spoiled the plates which were being exposed in the center of the room.”

  Kermit replaced the pamphlet on his laboratory bench.

  “You see,” he said, facing Doc’s anxious eye, “we know that young Heron read and pondered that correspondence. We know that he was using small, strong tubes, new ones of high power and that he had them fixed to the wall of the big north upstairs room in Plantation House. We know that he dismantled them. We know that Mrs. Heron’s bed-head was placed precisely where these tubes had played at short range. Can you wonder that I asked if I might take that photo? Can you be surprised that it shows these striations? Are you now incredulous that I feel a suspicion that amounts almost to certainty? Leukemia is often thought to be nothing but cancer of the blood, cancer in the blood cells themselves.”

  Doc said nothing to these questions. Evidently Kermit had something more to tell.

  “As it happens, I know the clerk at the local office of the Electric Light and Power Company, a good electrical engineer who helped me quite a lot when I was fitting up this little place. After you had let me out of Plantation House, on my way home, I called on him at his office. I asked him if he would tell me as a matter of calculation what it cost nowadays to light a big house, say such as Plantation House. He remarked that it was funny that I should ask such a question. As a matter of fact, he had just been making up the account to send it in, as the old lady had died. Of course he had heard that they lived in a fancy feudal way with a flock of colored servants, who no doubt left the lights on all night. Still if they had flood-lit the place outside, as well, from sunset to dawn, they’d hardly have a bigger bill. ‘Just don’t know how they could have burned up all that current,’ he said. I didn’t feel under any obligation to enlighten him.” Kermit had concluded looking out the window. Now he turned to Doc again. “But I felt quite certain that I must show you the photo.” He pointed to the negative propped up against the window. “I did feel the necessity of explaining to you why that photograph, which looks simply like a spoiled exposure, has been spoiled by an invisible deadly stain. Those shadowy gray streakings are more sinister than any ghost—for I never heard of a ghost that killed save by fright. Those streakings are the prints of an intangible hand of murder.”

  “And he’s loose,” reflected Doc after a while. “He’ll not come back.”

  “I believe he will,” differed Kermit.

  “Then we’ll have to act. But can we get a conviction?”

  “I’m not at all sure. I’m not at all sure that we could prove he killed her. You’ve turned Dr. Hertz into a witness en his side. And I don’t even know whether he faced up to the question of what he was actually doing. M
ost of us don’t, if we can give ourselves the benefit of the doubt. And he’s a weak creature. He probably played with the notion that he was really only experimenting—that the treatment might actually help the fussy, ailing woman. And there are always two people in such a crime—there is the murderer but there is also the murderee. Some people provoke killing—their whole relationship was, I suspect, one of very dangerous tensions.”

  They were silent a little.

  Then Kermit added, “And do you want a scandal in the city? This is much worse than what you feared. Here’s a first-rate murder mystery. A rich young man murders his mother. He’s got plenty of money, will fight for his life and whoever wins, justice or he, the town will lose, hands down. It’s sunk with a story like this around its neck. It would be notorious for a decade and, maybe, become the first of the southern ‘ghost-towns,’ towns that seemed once to have the future at their feet and now have the past silting up to their first-floor windows.”

  “But we can’t leave a murderer at large.”

  “I doubt if he’ll do another. I know, some murderers, like man-eating tigers, do get a taste for just killing. But murderers differ as much as nonmurderers. Men who kill out of sudden jealousy are well known often to make good-conduct prisoners, if they get a life sentence. This man was obsessed, I believe, with the feeling that the elder woman was imprisoning him, was suffocating him in that out-of-the-present house. He struck out because he felt that he was being sunk.”

  “Oh, you can’t let crime get by like that!”

  “Well, as I’ve said, many unstable women have been the cause of their own deaths by murder. Mrs. Heron was eating the spirit of the weak fellow out of him alive.”

  “You mean to say the fish isn’t to blame if it chokes the man who is swallowing it! That won’t do. That’s only casuistry.”

  “It isn’t my only argument for not taking, or rather not attempting to take, legal action. There’s the good name of the little city certainly damaged for the thin chance of getting a conviction. And I have another reason. I promise you this: I’m not going just to let the matter rest. I’m going to do something about it. Then, if I fail, we will again discuss what further must be done. He will return, I’m sure. When he does, will you please send him up to me?”

  “All right,” said Doc, rising heavily to his feet. “All right; but it’s this sort of thing that takes the heart out of one. Why should it happen here, just as we are getting on all together so well!” And he went off grumbling and sighing down the path.

  Chapter XVI

  The Hermit was right. One morning, a fortnight later, he heard the chugging of Doc’s motor stop under his terrace-edge, and a few minutes later its owner’s head appeared. Before the body followed the expected message was delivered. Arnoldo was not only back; he would be coming up tomorrow.

  “Why,” panted Doc, sitting down on the porch bench, “he was as quiet and sure as if I knew nothing; as though there were nothing to know; so quiet and sure that I began to doubt myself and feel that if I wished long enough it might be true and he might be clear. Wished me good-day; thanked me for keeping the house under lock and key; said he was glad to be back.

  “I couldn’t look at him, considering what we seem to have found out in his absence. He went through his mail easily and quietly—no hurry or snatch, not a waver in his hand; and when I looked over his shoulder, not a tilt of the eyebrow to see if I was watching him. I say it again, I began to be uncertain what we knew or thought We knew.

  “Perhaps, if I hadn’t felt that uncertainty I couldn’t have had the nerve to ask him to come up and see you. But everything seemed so normal, so unsuspicious, that I felt it would sound natural enough. So I brought it out simply and plumb. You’d like to see him when he was back; would he go up and pay you a visit?

  “‘I’ll go tomorrow,’ he said, just as anyone might say if they had plenty of time on their hands and an empty, easy mind. He was so damned at his ease, as I say, I was shaken, so shaken that I thought I’d try a little test to see if I could shake him.

  “‘Oh,’ I said, ‘if you’ve time on your hands, Dr. Hertz tells me there’s another person who’d be glad of a call and the better for a visit.’ He looked up, but not suspiciously.

  “‘Miss Gayton,’ I said. At that he actually blushed a bit. And, do you know, I felt sorry for the boy—especially as I’d just run across Dr. Hertz and on my asking he’d given me the latest bulletin.

  “‘She’s up in a sanatarium near here,’ I reported. He seemed really quite concerned.

  “I didn’t pass on the full news I’d had. Dr. Hertz told me that she was in a bad way. Night they moved her up she’d had a bad hemorrhage. And the queer thing is—Dr. Hertz tells me it’s commoner than we know—up at the ‘san’ they think it isn’t actual T.B. but cancer which has lately attacked an old damaged area on the lung. He told me something about the blood-platelet count and what it could signify. But that’s very technical.”

  Kermit, even at that moment, could not help being amused by Doc’s innocent pretensions—his pleasure at being able to think of himself as a colleague and the ingenuous way whereby, under the pretense of professional secrecy, he disguised the limits of his knowledge. He would have been even more amused had he realized that even this information had been given by Dr. Hertz as an act of contrition because of the impatience he had shown with the kindly old town-confidant.

  “So,” summed up Kermit, “he was upset but in a completely rational, un-self-concerned way. That doesn’t seem to indicate the moral imbecile, quite.”

  “Well, anyhow, he’s coming to see you tomorrow,” said Doc, rising, “and I’ll surely be interested to know what you can make of it all.”

  Kermit’s visitor came the next day at noon. Doc had been right. He seemed quite at his ease, asked what research was now being done, and when asked to have lunch before they went into the laboratory, cheerfully agreed. He ate well, talked of his holiday—as he called it—and volunteered that he had no future plans at present.

  Kermit reflected, “He’s now convinced himself that it was all an accident, a coincidence. What he did and what happened had no causal relation. Still, there is the hyphen of his wish; he did want something to happen which did happen. We’ll see his reaction to a question or two.”

  They did not hurry, though: sitting over their luncheon, Kermit at length brought the conversation round to coincidences. Yes, that was well received. Arnoldo gave it as his opinion that people were always seeing connections where in fact there were only random contingencies. Science, he declared, cleared away a great deal of that sort of late superstition: Post hoc, propter hoc. Kermit agreed: It is always probability; no case can be fully proved; we can only make it extremely likely.

  He rose. “Let’s look over the lab.”

  Arnoldo stretched, remarked on how good the weather was, and strolled in after him.

  “The first thing that I’d been wanting to show you,” said Kermit, bending over a file-drawer with his back to his visitor, “is a success which I had with some work which I thought at first wasn’t going to pan out.”

  He took out some folders and laid them on the laboratory bench under the window.

  “You remember,” he said, opening the folders and showing that they contained photographic negatives, “I took some photographs of your mother and yourself. The ones of the house were, of course, standard color photography. But I was making experiments with another lens and sensitized emulsion and that was very experimental.”

  “I remember,” came Arnoldo’s voice. “You put us against one of the big mirrors and my mother asked whether a little cone on the top of your camera was something to record the voice as well.”

  “I’ll show you the camera in a moment. I’ve greatly improved the method—at least in speed and precision. I can show you that, by comparing these earlier studies with one done now. I’m going to ask you if I may, for that purpose, take one now.”

  “Certainly.” Arnoldo’s
reply was faintly interested. Then, with a smile, “I’m hardly in studio clothes”—looking at his already crumpled store suiting.

  “This room isn’t a noble background, either,” answered Kermit. “But the important element in the backing we have here also.” He pointed to a long mirror standing against the wall. “If you will stand against that, looking at the light, we shall have enough illumination, at least of the kind that this sort of plate requires.” Arnoldo still obeyed with a certain ease.

  “You see the same little trumpet pointing at you from the top of the camera. It emits short-wave radiation. The mirror, I believe, makes some kind of resonance, or invisible reflection. I don’t know, but think that must be so. Anyhow, it gives results which I can’t account for otherwise, or get otherwise.”

  Arnoldo was interested but quite self-composedly. Kermit’s head disappeared under the black velvet shroud. There were the old-fashioned cluckings, shiftings, and clickings. He emerged holding the big rosewood “slide” in his hand.

  “I won’t be more than a few moments developing,” he remarked, as he went into his little darkroom at the laboratory’s end.

  “All right,” remarked Arnoldo carelessly, and he wandered toward the living-room door. In the darkroom Kermit spared one moment before settling down to his actual work. There was a small red-glass shutter in the door—no more than an eyepiece filled with a dense ruby glass. It had a small shutter, but, before drawing this across, the photographer took one observation of the laboratory which he had just left. Yes, Arnoldo was strolling off to the other side of the house. He had not troubled, when left alone, even to glance at the files lying on the bench, the files which he must remember held the special photographs of himself and his dead mother.