Chang was seized for questioning and made no denial of the fact that he had gone in heavily for toxicology; but he explained that he used his poisons on squirrels exclusively. The skeptical District Attorney felt justified in accusing him of attempted murder, and he was thrown into the county jail to await the action of the grand jury.
Questioning Chang had so little result that, after six days of defeat, the District Attorney “called in Schindler.” His assistant, Elbert Gallagher, laid the case before him as far as the investigation had gone.
Mrs. Churchill insisted that Chang was innocent, though she did suggest that he might have overheard her tell the Reeveses that practically all of her money would go to them. She had failed to mention Chang as one of her heirs and he might have decided to get rid of the Reeves couple, who stood between him and the wealth he had hoped for.
He might have. But“might have” is not enough to satisfy the demands of the law. A possible motive was evident, and the supply of poisons was there; but there was a gap between “He might have” and “He must have.”
The District Attorney’s office had found out that Chang had bought poison once under an assumed name, but nobody had ever seen him administer any, and he could always claim accident. The District Attorney’s office had found out also that the acetate of lead discovered in the cellar had been previously kept in a mayonnaise jar in the cupboard alongside a mayonnaise jar full of baking soda. In the same cupboard Chang kept the arsenic and the cyanide of potassium. Mrs. Churchill kept one key to that cupboard, and Chang another.
The other members of the household, the maid, the gardener, the doctor, and the nurse were easily eliminated from suspicion.
Ray Schindler promptly arranged for George Harned, one of his operatives, to be arrested for “first degree murder while attempting a robbery.” Under the name of George Adams he was thrown into the cell next to Chang. George put up a hard fight before he could be forced into his cell.
Learning how Mrs. Churchill’s husband had died years before in Florida, Ray sent another of his operatives down to St. Petersburg to see what he might turn up there. He learned also that, when Lawrence Churchill’s personal effects were shipped North from Florida, most of his clothing was missed from one of the trunks. It had been insured and Mrs. Churchill had put in a claim for $475. The company’s investigator decided that there had been no burglary; but some plumbers who had been working in the house might have carried off the clothes. The company settled the claim for $375. The District Attorney’s detectives had found in Chang’s papers when they searched his room a receipt for three cases of personal effects shipped to a man in Korea.
This interested Ray, and he cabled agents in Japan to look into the matter and see if the man in Korea had received any of Lawrence Churchill’s clothes. In due course of time he had a cablegram saying that the Chinese-Japanese war made it impossible to undertake any investigations in Korea.
Investigation nearer home disclosed that the Korean house-boy had accounts in seven different banks, in Florida, New York City and in the vicinity of White Plains. The deposits totalled more than $5,000.
From the Florida operative came word that Chang was notorious for extorting commissions from tradespeople under threats of not giving them the family trade. A detective in St. Petersburg was reminded of a Greek who had poisoned a Chinese rival and he was sure that Chang had got his idea from the Greek, who also kept a box of arsenic alongside a box of soda on his shelf. Furthermore, the Greek had been acquitted.
But the St. Petersburg doctor who had attended Churchill furiously denied that he could have been poisoned. Still, doctors have made mistakes. The graveyards are full of them.
In the meanwhile, George Reeves and his wife were recovering in the hospital; and the charge of murder dwindled to one of attempted murder. Also, Mrs. Churchill came back from Pennsylvania breathing fire. She was sure that Chang was innocent and that the doctor was responsible. The doctor admitted that he had been administering a drug containing some arsenic, and the District Attorney’s office was beginning to doubt that Chang was guilty at all.
Ray was not sure himself and asked about the two wills Mrs. Churchill had made. In the first one she had left all her money to old family friends and servants, with $2,000 for Chang. In the second will, practically all her money went to the Reeves couple. Chang was cut down to $200. But there was no evidence that Chang knew the details of either of the two wills.
There were many other developments that led Ray and his men along thorny paths ending nowhere. All he had proved thus far was that Chang had broken the law against poisoning squirrels.
One day, George Harned came to his office, having been led from his cell under the pretext that he was to have a long conference with his lawyer. He told Ray of his difficulties in even scraping acquaintance with Chang. After a long delay Chang had protested that his secrecy with the poisons was due entirely to his fear of being arrested for poisoning squirrels. Later, he admitted that he kept the acetate of lead and the baking soda in marmalade jars alongside each other with only a little pencil mark on the poison jar to distinguish it in his own eyes from the harmless soda jar.
Somehow this convinced Ray that Chang was a deliberate poisoner. He tried to figure out how an Oriental mind would work. In Florida Chang had learned of a Greek who got rid of a Chinaman by letting him take poison “by mistake.” He had not been punished. Ergo, a Korean might poison two Americans “by mistake” and get off. That was why Chang had fixed his pantry cabinet so that mistakes would be easy to make and easy to explain.
Ray had Chang’s diary translated by a retired missionary to Korea, but it gave no hint of murdering anything but squirrels. Ray had a dictograph installed in a ventilator in Chang’s cell. Then Ray went to Chang’s cell in person. Harned introduced him as his lawyer and advised Chang to consult him while Harned went out into the prison yard.
Chang was cordial to Ray and bewailed the hard lot of a foreigner in this country. In answer to Ray’s questioning about the poisons, Chang still insisted that they were for the squirrels only. When Ray tried to get him to admit some hatred for George Reeves, and his wife, the Korean evaded every snare. But he did ask Ray how long a sentence he might receive if he were convicted.
Ray was soon convinced of Chang’s guilt; but baffled as to the way of proving it. When he climbed the stairs to see how the records ran, he learned that there had been practically none made. A crowd of women prisoners on the third floor had kept up a continuous hullaballoo that made it inaudible.
In desperation Ray decided to put on an elaborate trap in the form of a mock trial. He has said that he never took an idea from fiction except in the case of “The Hound of the Baskervilles”; but he may have unconsciously cribbed an idea from that well known Whodunit in blank verse called “Hamlet,” wherein that Danish detective put on a play within a play to trap the king into admitting that he had murdered his brother.
Ray had taken his inspiration from the fact that the Korean had said he was worried about how to behave in a courtroom. So Ray, the playwright and impresario, made up a little troupe composed of Harned and three prisoners who were in for minor offenses and who had taken a dislike to Chang.
In Ray’s scenario, Harned was to suggest that they rehearse Chang on how to behave in an American courtroom. One of the fellow-prisoners would be judge, another would be the defense counsel, the third would be the District Attorney; and he promised to make it as hard as possible for Chang, so that the Korean would meet no surprises when he faced the real D.A.
Under ordinary jail conditions such a mock trial would have met with difficulties. But in this case the sheriff cooperated, and the guards were kept busy elsewhere. The obstreperous women overhead were kept in their cells.
After much delay below, the dictograph brought up to Ray the word that the trial had started. Chang was in the witness box and “District Attorney” Harned began a fierce cross-examination.
“State to the jury why, wh
en, and where you bought poisons and what excuses you gave the druggists.”
Chang’s answer was familiar:
“I don’t remember.”
But as Harned kept probing him he confessed that he had used the name “Charley Ching” when he bought the lead, and “Dan Song” when he bought the cyanide.
Harned went after him about putting poisons in marmalade jars and keeping them next to bicarbonate of soda: “Suppose someone with an upset stomach had gone to get some bicarbonate of soda and had taken poison by mistake while you were out of the house.”
“That would be too bad,” said Chang, and tittered when he said it.
Harned thundered: “You find it funny, eh. Two people are in the hospital near death from poison and you are in jail for poisoning them. How do you think the jury is going to like that joke?”
This sobered Chang and he grew confused as to the time of the purchases. He admitted that he prepared the food for Reeves and his wife as well as for Mrs. Churchill.
Badly rattled, Chang said that he served Mrs. Churchill’s food on a plate with a little chip on the edge. And he admitted that he had taken the lead poison down to the cellar only after the serious illness of George Reeves and his wife. Harned shot at him:
“Then you could have been using that lead poison on the food you prepared for Mr. and Mrs. Reeves for weeks before you took it to the cellar.”
To this Chang made no reply and Harned said:
“You’ll have to do better than that when you come before the real District Attorney.”
Later Chang admitted that the nurse called in to attend Reeves and his wife had taken the poison upstairs instead of the soda, and he had not mentioned it for fear of getting into trouble. It was then that he put the lead downstairs. When Harned snapped:
“Did Mrs. Reeves seem sicker after the nurse gave her the lead?”
“Yes, she very sick,” Chang confessed. Then he broke off, “You just trying to make me say what I not going say. I don’t feel so good. I go to bed.”
This ended the trial. It had shown at least that Chang had been careful to distinguish between the food he served his mistress and that he served to Mr. and Mrs. Reeves. He had confessed that on at least one occasion he had handed the nurse the lead poison when she asked for soda.
Chang could never be persuaded to take part in another mock trial. At last the real trial came on. Mr. and Mrs. Reeves had to appear in court in wheel chairs. The trial was long and slow. At the end of five weeks, the jury stayed out for twenty hours before it compromised on two verdicts of guilty for “Second-degree assault!” But this was enough for the judge to sentence Chang to a five to ten year imprisonment and a $2,000 fine to be worked out at $1 a day. At the end of his sentence, Chang was to be deported.
Soon after he entered Sing Sing prison, Mrs. Churchill died. George Reeves and his wife, inheriting everything, sold the White Plains house and moved back to their old home.
The indefatigable defense lawyer now attempted to get Chang out of prison on a writ of habeas corpus. This necessitated a journey from Sing Sing to Yonkers. The judge’s room was on the fifth story. Papers were placed before Chang to sign, and his handcuffs were removed for a moment.
The moment was long enough for him to brush his lawyer aside and plunge from the fifth story window to his instant death. The press reported his suicide as proof of his guilt.
Ray Schindler thinks that Chang certainly tried to kill the Reeves couple, and possibly had poisoned Churchill in Florida, his motive being in each case to remove an obstacle to the wealth he felt he would inherit from Mrs. Churchill.
In Ray’s opinion, however, Chang’s suicide was due to no remorse or sense of guilt, but to the ghastly failure of his prolonged efforts at great riches. He had suffered the one intolerable humiliation for an Oriental. He had lost face.
Chang had walked four hundred miles and crossed the ocean to reach America, where everybody is a millionaire. After all sorts of toil and prospecting he had worked his way into the home of a near-millionaire. The man had died —probably by request—leaving only the widow between Chang and two-thirds of his million. Then a niece and her husband had come between Chang and his goal. He had them on the way out when a specialist carted them off to the hospital and the police carted Chang, the near-millionaire, off to the jail. It will never be known how long he would have let Mrs. Churchill live, once he had her alone.
In court Chang learned for the first time that his cell mate Harned was really one of Schindler’s detectives who had made a fool of him in a mockery of a mock trial. Chang suffered five weeks of the agonizing suspense of the court room, then twenty hours of pendulating between hope and despair while the jury debated.
The jury had found him guilty of a second-degree assault. His long, long dreams of wealth, and his most earnest efforts to attain it scientifically had ended in the dismal gray walls of Sing Sing. He was to toil there for years and then be thrown back to Korea where he started from, as penniless as when he left.
So Chang no longer had a name. He had no “face.” He was just a number. It is not easy to kill oneself in Sing Sing; but when he reached that high window in Yonkers it looked out on the sky. He dived into it.
What little remorse tormented him must have been mainly for being duped into that mock trial by that mock cell mate.
The Moral in this case would seem to be; whether you are an Oriental or an Occidental, if you find yourself in a cell, don’t trust a cell mate.
15.
THE TYPEWRITTEN KIDNAPPER
The only blow ever struck at Ray Schindler caught him in the face and was delivered by a young woman. He calls it his “only wound-stripe” and he got it, not from a criminal he was pursuing, but from the pretty girl in whose behalf he was working.
It was a kidnapping case and when Ray was called in he feared that the police would never succeed in running down the villain who had been foiled once but boasted that he always accomplished his purposes.
The highway between New York City and Atlantic City resembles a racetrack in the speed of its motorists. In one small town through which these four-wheeled rockets are always zooming, the passage of one big car was marked by the scream of a young woman. She was found lying in the doorway of a large building. Hysterically she told how the driver of the big car had tried to drag her into it. When she had resisted and screamed, he had sped away, leaving her with a tom frock and a scratched arm.
The police secured a confused story from her, then began to scour the state for the car. It was something like looking for a piece of flying timber in a Kansas cyclone. So the Judge called in Schindler. He found the girl at the office of the District Attorney. She was being interviewed by the Chief of Police and two of his staff. She was saying that the man who had molested her looked so like a Spaniard that she was sure he was one. Also, he had a uniformed chauffeur who might have been another Spaniard.
The police took their departure, leaving the girl to the Judge, the District Attorney, and Ray. The Judge introduced Ray, and his preliminary inspection revealed that the young woman, about twenty-four years old, might well prove irresistible even to a Spaniard. In response to his soothing queries she explained that, though she had never seen her assailant before, she had had four or five letters from him.
She had kept all but the first of them. In that one he had stated that he was “a young Spanish duke, or prince, or something.” She didn’t believe it, of course; but that was what he had said. He told her that he had seen her as his car passed and she had appealed to his Latin ideals; furthermore, that when the Latins took a great liking for anything or anyone, they never rested till they had “accomplished their purposes.”
In his second letter he had announced an intention to come after her and carry her off to his castle in Spain.
When Ray asked if anyone else had seen these letters, she said that she had shown two of them to Harry—the young man she was engaged to. He was the proprietor of a music store.
/> Some of the letters she had not let him see because they were so passionate that they might have driven him to doing something desperate. She confessed, however, that, instead of being excited by the ones she did show him, Harry had said that somebody was playing a joke on her.
It was the least tactful thing a man could say to his betrothed, but she said that she was tempted to agree with Harry till she received the last letter from the Spaniard in which he said that he was coming for her, and that he always accomplished his purposes. Even that dark threat had not impressed her young man.
Then it happened. As she was walking to the postoffice to mail a letter, a big car stopped short, the door opened, a dark stranger stepped out, and said,
“Don’t be alarmed. I haven’t come for you yet; but I want you to take a little ride with me and talk things over.”
She was evidently a girl whose mother had properly warned her not to step into the cars of strange gentlemen, especially swarthy gentlemen; for she pulled away from his clutch. He seized her again so violently that he tore her dress and her arm, but, when she screamed, he fled in his big car driven by the swarthy chauffeur. She was so agitated that Ray told her to go home and get a good night’s rest.
The next morning Ray called on her and asked if he might have a look at the letters. The girl’s parents were in a state of nerves and her eighteen-year-old brother had seized a rifle and gone forth to hunt down the villain. The letters were typewritten and the girl consented to lend them to Ray for further study.
He hurried them away to his New York office with instructions to find out what make of typewriter had been used.
While awaiting this report, Ray called on the girl’s young man at his music store. The young man was almost excessively placid and was still not quite convinced that such letters were possible in this day and age. Under Ray’s deft questioning he also confessed that the girl was impatient to get married at once; while he wanted to wait till he had saved up enough money to support his wife in the style that she was accustomed to dreaming of. He seemed to be in no hurry for that blissful day.
The Complete Detective Page 23
