“Did I hear the witness call for a hammer and a cold chisel?” he said. He held up the two tools in question. “There’s a carpenter workin’ in the corridor. Here they are.”
“Give them to me,” called the witness desperately, and now his voice had become faint — as that of a man who had been spent by his own terror. The crumpled, folded letter that he had taken from his bosom in the witness-box he thrust blindly into the hands of the nearest man, who happened to be only a stripling of a court stenographer, but who at once handed it up to the judge. The tools conveyed inside the enclosure by the bailiff who had brought them from the outer corridor Venson literally snatched from the man’s hands. The ex-servant glanced out at the gloomily overcast skies. “The — that — that tall lamp now,” he half gasped to the clerk.
The clerk lugged from around his desk a tall vertical brass adjustable lamp which stood on the floor at the edge of his swivel chair. It held a single large bulb in a reflector mounted on a flexible brass stem, and from behind it dragged its trailing black cord. This the clerk placed where Venson’s gesture indicated, and snapping on its light adjusted its bulb and reflector so that the illumination from it fell directly upon the top of the big safe lying diagonally across his desk. That this was exactly what Venson wanted was proven by the witness’s next move, for, his hands trembling, his own self now as silent as that tense silence about him, he fitted the edge of the metal chisel into the edge of the safe, an inch or so below its top surface and at a point above what was the left of the two upper gargoyle-like dragon faces.
“Crash!” the hammer fell on the head of the chisel. He worked the chisel out by violent see-sawings from right to left, and moved it an inch from its former position. “Crash!” — the blow of metal on metal. Around and around a certain area he moved, with mighty blows that caused the chisel edge to eat savagely a path into the ancient unyielding wood, and he moved as a man who even himself did not exactly know what he was going to find, but who possessed the desperate knowledge that here was the one thing that was going to save him from a terrible fate.
And now those clouds which all morning had been scudding, racing past outside, appeared to conspire suddenly to make of this new development in the Chalmers murder trial a scene belonging to the theatre itself, for in these last few minutes they seemed to coalesce into that Cimmerian blackness which precedes a downpour of rain. Spectators, principals in this strange trial — except Venson — court attachés, jurymen, all became thrust off as it were, into another world, fused by darkness into a formless, gloom-shrouded audience, watching in silence a lighted stage consisting of no more than the top of an ancient wooden safe, a stage in whose illumination worked a sole actor — the perspiring witness — playing his part in the bright glare of a single footlight.
And of a sudden, even as the ominous rumble of thunder rolled across the blackness outside, the work of hammer and chisel came to sudden fruition in that circle of light. A piece of teakwood, thick and black, a piece whose length equalled the entire thickness of the safe from front to back, whose width was perhaps eight inches, detached itself from the top of the safe directly over the left of the upper two Chinese gargoyles, and splitting away from the rest of the top, revealed that that supposedly deep solid block comprising the massive roof of the strong-box was by no means a solid block. For a large polished opening lay beneath the place from which the heavy piece of wood had been detached. And what was revealed in that opening caused a tremendous stamping and shuffling of feet in the back of the court-room, indicating that the spectators, as one man, were clambering to their feet in the darkness of their part of this theatre, and pressing forward to the very rail of the court, craning necks to see even more of what was shown in the circle of light occupied by the trembling witness.
In the long recess directly behind the Chinese gargoyles — that recess which could be seen to extend almost to the rear of the safe — was fixed an ancient flintlock pistol, held rigidly upright in old bronze clamps, green with age. The extremely long barrel of the pistol terminated, as at least those to the left of the court-room could see, in the actual eye of the gargoyle, and, moreover, its black aperture became the eye-socket itself. But that eye-socket, it appeared, had been stopped up by a piece of blue inlay plucked from one of the many other spots in the safe door itself where inlays were missing, and hammered into the cavity; that this had been done by an artisan rather than an artist was indicated by the fact that in this gargoyle only the two eyes did not match tint as in the three others. The humorous cylindrical nose of this gargoyle, likewise, could be seen to terminate on the other side of the front wall of the recess in a wooden cylinder of larger diameter, into which a peg had been driven fastening a leather thong; and this thong in in turn ran through three simple pulleys seemingly cut from a piece of bone, to the trigger of the ancient firearm where it was fastened. The thong even now was taut, tense, and, affixed as it was so that it stood out at right angles to the larger cylinder within, it was obvious that either way the gargoyle nose was twisted, the thong must tend to be wound upon the cylinder only to be tightened, and to draw that deadly hammer down upon its steel flashpan with its powder-impregnated fuse leading directly into the barrel of the pistol through a touch-hole.
It was not this, however, neither the pistol nor the Machiavellian mechanics of it, which caused the craning of necks, the clatter of many feet pressing forward to the rail of the court. Nor was it even the ancient roll of parchment-like material lying in two loops of thong to one side of the recess. What caused a sudden buzz of excited comment to pass over the entire court-room was the old dried-up human hand, reddish-brown in colour, shrunken, shrivelled, stiff, its knuckles — human knuckles! — bulging within the desiccated fibres comprising the flesh — its white nails indicating only too plainly that a bit of a man’s body had been preserved by the ancient arts of China, perhaps absorbed — who knows — from Egypt herself. And the index finger of that shrunken, embalmed hand — that hand which, like the pistol, was held up in age-old green clamps — had been crooked ironically around the trigger of the pistol and there tied forcibly with a bit of leather thong!
The witness, breath coming fast now, due to his terrific exertion with hammer and chisel, stepped back, his tools in his hand. A wide-awake bailiff strode forth into the circle of light and detached from the two loops within the recess the roll of parchment, which for a second he held undecidedly, then handed up to the judge. And even as he did so, the witness tumbled into a dead faint into the arms of the nearest bluecoat, his tools clattering to the floor.
With only a glance at this unexpected interruption, Judge Lockhart snapped on the desk lamp of his high desk and, unrolling the parchment, ran his eyes over it. In turn he examined that earlier paper handed up by the youthful court reporter who had taken it from Venson’s fingers. Then he looked up from the two documents.
“I believe,” he said quietly, addressing his words to the entire court-room, “that as soon as this witness comes out of his collapse and finishes what he undoubtedly knows about this case, this trial will be at an end. For in the face of these two papers” — he held up the crumpled letter which Venson had produced on the stand, then the parchment roll — “I shall have to send the case to the jury with instructions to bring in a verdict of acquittal for the present defendant. It is now evident, I regret to say, that the testimony brought in by the defence to-day, but ruled out as irrelevant, is not irrelevant after all. Mr. Ballmeier, you may have to have a new indictment drawn up if you prefer to prosecute further in the case of Rupert van Slyke, sole living descendant of Captain Kidd, for it would appear that that famous pirate’s mortal enemy, Captain Josiah Quarlbush, has wiped out the Kidd family by a bullet fired half-way around the world and across two centuries of time!”
CHAPTER XXVII
A PACKET FOR A LADY
A FLAT motor truck, carrying a heavy receptacle of carved Chinese wood, partly covered with a tarpaulin and accompanied by three heavy-jawed
court bailiffs smoking black cigars, rolled through the Chicago Loop, out across the river at Jackson Boulevard and over on to the great West Side, driving straight against the big red ball of fire that marked the end of a strange day in the Chicago courts. Following the motor truck leisurely, stopping in the traffic when traffic brought the truck to a stop, slowing when the truck slowed, and speeding up when the truck darted across a street, a cab slowly went, carrying three occupants, a man and two women.
The man sat between the two women, and each member of the little trio appeared to be busy with his or her own thoughts. The sun had dropped beneath the smoky western fringe of the city as the motor truck in advance of the cab drew up far out on West Jackson Boulevard at a fashionable greystone residence. And the driver of the cab, as though instructed, also drew to the kerb down the street and waited.
A ring at the bell of the house by the truck driver, and a man clad in a blue silk dressing-gown, a pipe in his hand, answered the door. A moment’s colloquy, and the three bailiffs at a signal from the driver, hopped down off the truck, took off their coats, and as the owner of the house threw wide the door, they all, taking each a corner of the Chinese safe, lugged it up the stairs and inside the house. In a moment or two they reappeared, wiping off their hands, one of the men folding up a receipt, and soon the truck had turned and was headed back to the Loop again.
Now the waiting cab drew up the hundred or so feet remaining and, stopping in front of the same house, its three occupants got out. Together the three went slowly up the steps. Again, at their ring, came the man in the same blue silk dressing gown. A little girl, cunning, black-curled, with great brown eyes, peeped timidly at the visitors from around the banister post of the inside stairway.
“Mr. Leslie van Slyke, I believe?” said the spokesman for the trio standing outside. “Mr. Rupert van Slyke’s cousin?”
“The same,” said the man in the dressing-gown.
“Crosby — David Crosby — is my name,” said the caller. “Could we have a few words with you?”
The man in the silk dressing-gown opened the door wide. “Most certainly.” He led the way, once the three callers were inside, into a large library at the end of the hall, fitted with leather chairs, old engravings on the wall, a fireplace, many, many books, and one object which seemed to strike a strange, foreign, and even discordant note — an article which had just come into the place from a dusty truck outside — a great safe of polished and inlaid black Chinese wood. “Be seated, if you will,” he invited.
He closed the door, and, looking about him to see that all his callers were seated, he too dropped into a chair, waiting curiously. Crosby was the first to speak.
“Mr. van Slyke, this lady to my right I shall not introduce to you by name, on account of certain personal wishes of her own with respect to her interest in this case. Sufficient to say that I can vouch most highly for her. The young lady to my left is Miss Lindell Trent, a personal friend of both of us.”
Mr. Leslie van Slyke, rising, acknowledged with a courteous bow the introductions to each lady. Crosby inclined his head toward the Chinese safe at the side of the room. “It is about that,” he observed, “about that safe over there, of which many dozens of photographs have been flashlighted for the evening and morning newspapers, that I have come to see you. And I notice that it has been returned very promptly to you with the close of the trial.”
“Yes,” said Leslie van Slyke. “I exacted a solemn agreement from the State’s attorney that before I would allow the safe to go to court as an exhibit, it would be returned to this house the identical minute the trial was definitely and conclusively over.”
“So I understand now,” Crosby nodded. “May I first ask you a question or two before you perhaps ask me a good many? Have you at any time since Rupert’s death had any offers for that safe?”
Leslie van Slyke stroked his chin. “I have,” he said at length. “I would venture to say that I have had at least five offers from different sources, generally agents acting for some unknown principal.”
“The offers were not very large, I take it?”
“Not large enough, considering the value of the thing artistically — from a Chinese angle — and as a genuine Cheng antique,” said Leslie van Slyke. “The highest offer was around 1,000 dollars. A curio dealer advised me to hold it at 1,800 dollars, and so I told the last agent.”
“What was in it, if I may ask, when you took it over with the rest of Rupert van Slyke’s estate?”
“Only a few insignificant papers, a bottle of ink, and — well” — Mr. Leslie van Slyke regarded the ladies a little hesitatingly, then completed his sentence — “and a packet of French photographs which I promptly burned.”
“I see.” Crosby’s eyes left the safe and the loose piece of teakwood lying crosswise over its now partly open top, and riveted themselves curiously on his host. “Mr. van Slyke, if you were in St. Charles to-day, then of course you were not present at the trial?”
Leslie van Slyke shook his head. “No, I left early this morning and got back only at four o’clock. My servant girl tells me that many friends rang the house this afternoon with word that extras were on the street as early as two o’clock, bearing just the news in six-inch high letters,’ Chalmers Acquitted!’ But I am still more or less in the dark about many things, as the boy who delivers the paper here at night never gets here till near dark himself! I did at least get an inkling about why this antique has come back damaged, although” — he glanced ruefully at the safe — “although I suppose some curio artisan can repair it?”
“Yes,” assented Crosby, “the safe can be repaired, but what it did can never be repaired by the hand of man.” He paused. “How much did you hear, Mr. van Slyke?”
“Well,” said the other, “all my friend told me was how you broke that fellow Venson, one of the least to be suspected of the State’s witnesses, and broke him so badly that he collapsed in court and revealed everything that’s out in the evening papers. Anyway, Mr. Crosby, you’ve done a wonderful thing — for to bring truth out of darkness is an achievement supreme. There is one thing that I can’t understand, though, Mr. Crosby. It’s this: what led you to suspect Venson sufficiently to dig back deeper into his alibi, and also to determine to attack his story with a trick?”
“Ah,” said Crosby with a smile, “nobody knows that.” He grew serious. “Mr. van Slyke, I’m glad to answer that question to you alone.” He paused. “You will not find the following precept set forth in any books on logic, but it is one of several that I have garnered together during the years, for use in my legal practice. And it is this: It is always logical to suspect the story of one who claims to have been one of the actors in a coincidence. But since coincidences do happen in life, the story of a participant therein may be gospel truth. But last night I was to learn for the first time that Edward Venson was, if we were to accept the facts as he gave them, an actor in two coincidences. But I’ll explain.
“Now I always implicitly believed Chalmers’ alibi about that murder — and I merely assumed that Venson’s identification of him as the red-haired intruder was a mistaken identification confusing him with the real red-haired murderer. But last night Chalmers was forced by the rush of circumstances to tell me the absolute truth: that he did go to your cousin’s house — even went up the tree to the window — but never even entered your cousin’s library. At once I noted the coincidence existing: that two red-haired men, therefore, had both gone to that house that night, and Venson had grappled with one of them. Perhaps that coincidence could have been made acceptable to me, but my genealogical investigations had already revealed to me that Venson’s ancestry could be traced back to where it took the name of Quarlbush. I was, of course, bluffing in my later denunciation of him in court when I told him I had traced him clear back to Captain Josiah Quarlbush. At any rate, Quarlbush was the name of a man who had been sorely injured by Captain Kidd, your cousin’s progenitor. And there again Venson, a supposed chance servant of R
upert’s was part and parcel of a coincidence. Now if the mathematical chances that a person can participate in a single coincidence is one in a hundred, the chance that he will participate in a double coincidence is the square of that, or one in ten thousand: therefore I determined that neither of these things were coincidences: that Venson’s service with your cousin must have come about through his actually being a descendant of Captain Quarlbush and his seeking your cousin out, and his grappling with a red-haired man must be a fairy tale. Why did he invent it? Well, I sprang my bizarre motive to-day in the court-room — but its chief utility proved to be merely to help break Venson’s nerve. At any rate, when I perceived that Venson was an actor in two coincidences, I trained every gun I could invent on him and him alone. Does that answer your question?”
Leslie van Slyke nodded. “It does,” he replied. “I see. I see plainly. But remember though, Mr. Crosby,” he added with a half-smile, “I know less of what happened to-day, perhaps, than one of the newsboys now on the streets down town. My friend was not very coherent. Exactly what did happen in my cousin’s house that night when he met his death?”
“Well,” said the lawyer, “that’s the big story the evening papers are carrying. Suppose I tell it to you from Venson’s viewpoint.”
Crosby paused and then went on. “Venson left Noonan, the patrol-man, at a quarter to ten instead of five minutes after, as Noonan had testified. He trotted back to the North Oakley Avenue residence. He had a penchant for cats, it seems, and on the way he picked up a striped one which returned his intentions by turning on him and clawing him down the face, leaving three long scratches. He went on to the house and let himself in.
“At the sound of the front door, your cousin called down to him: ‘Venson, come up to the library and bring the pliers with you. I’m going to make an experiment on this damned safe.’ So to the tool-box in the basement Venson went, and thence upstairs again with the pliers your cousin had demanded.
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