It would have been utterly impossible for Hen Smitz to have sewed himself into the casing, not only because it bound his arms tight to his sides, but because the burlap was lapped over and sewed from the outside. This, once and for all, ended the suicide theory. The question was: Who was the murderer?
As Philo Gubb turned away from the bier, Undertaker Bartman entered the morgue.
‘The crowd outside is getting impatient, Mr Gubb,’ he said in his soft, undertakery voice. ‘It is getting on toward their lunch hour, and they want to crowd into my front office to find out what you’ve learned. I’m afraid they’ll break my plate glass windows, they’re pushing so hard against them. I don’t want to hurry you, but if you would go out and tell them Wiggins is the murderer they’ll go away. Of course there’s no doubt about Wiggins being the murderer, since he has admitted he asked the stock-keeper for the electric-light bulb.’
‘What bulb?’ asked Philo Gubb.
‘The electric-light bulb we found sewed inside this burlap when we sliced it open,’ said Bartman. ‘Matter of fact, we found it in Hen’s hand. O’Toole took it for a clue and I guess it fixes the murder on Wiggins beyond all doubt. The stock-keeper says Wiggins got it from him.’
‘And what does Wiggins remark on that subject?’ asked Mr Gubb.
‘Not a word,’ said Bartman. ‘His lawyer told him not to open his mouth, and he won’t. Listen to that crowd out there!’
‘I will attend to that crowd right presently,’ said P Gubb, sternly. ‘What I should wish to know now is why Mister Wiggins went and sewed an electric-light bulb in with the corpse for.’
‘In the first place,’ said Mr Bartman, ‘he didn’t sew it in with any corpse, because Hen Smitz wasn’t a corpse when he was sewed in that burlap, unless Wiggins drowned him first, for Dr Mortimer says Hen Smitz died of drowning; and in the second place, if you had a live man to sew in burlap, and had to hold him while you sewed him, you’d be liable to sew anything in with him.
‘My idea is that Wiggins and some of his crew jumped on Hen Smitz and threw him down, and some of them held him while the others sewed him in. My idea is that Wiggins got that electric-light bulb to replace one that had burned out, and that he met Hen Smitz and had words with him, and they clinched, and Hen Smitz grabbed the bulb, and then the others came, and they sewed him into the burlap and dumped him into the river.
‘So all you’ve got to do is to go out and tell that crowd that Wiggins did it and that you’ll let them know who helped him as soon as you find out. And you better do it before they break my windows.’
Detective Gubb turned and went out of the morgue. As he left the undertaker’s establishment the crowd gave a slight cheer, but Mr Gubb walked hurriedly toward the jail. He found Policeman O’Toole there and questioned him about the bulb; and O’Toole, proud to be the center of so large and interested a gathering of his fellow citizens, pulled the bulb from his pocket and handed it to Mr Gubb, while he repeated in more detail the facts given by Mr Bartman. Mr Gubb looked at the bulb.
‘I presume to suppose,’ he said, ‘that Mr Wiggins asked the stock-keeper for a new bulb to replace one that was burned out?’
‘You’re right,’ said O’Toole. ‘Why?’
‘For the reason that this bulb is a burned-out bulb,’ said Mr Gubb.
And so it was. The inner surface of the bulb was darkened slightly, and the filament of carbon was severed. O’Toole took the bulb and examined it curiously.
‘That’s odd, ain’t it?’ he said.
‘It might so seem to the non-deteckative mind,’ said Mr Gubb, ‘but to the deteckative mind, nothing is odd.’
‘No, no, this ain’t so odd, either,’ said O’Toole, ‘for whether Hen Smitz grabbed the bulb before Wiggins changed the new one for the old one, or after he changed it, don’t make so much difference, when you come to think of it.’
‘To the deteckative mind,’ said Mr Gubb, ‘it makes the difference that this ain’t the bulb you thought it was, and hence consequently it ain’t the bulb Mister Wiggins got from the stock-keeper.’
****
Mr Gubb started away. The crowd followed him. He did not go in search of the original bulb at once. He returned first to his room, where he changed his undertaker disguise for Number Six, that of a blue woolen-shirted laboring-man with a long brown beard. Then he led the way back to the packing house.
Again the crowd was halted at the gate, but again P Gubb passed inside, and he found the stock-keeper eating his luncheon out of a tin pail. The stock-keeper was perfectly willing to talk.
‘It was like this,’ said the stock-keeper. ‘We’ve been working overtime in some departments down here, and Wiggins and his crew had to work overtime the night Hen Smitz was murdered. Hen and Wiggins was at outs, or anyway I heard Hen tell Wiggins he’d better be hunting another job because he wouldn’t have this one long, and Wiggins told Hen that if he lost his job he’d murder him – Wiggins would murder Hen, that is. I didn’t think it was much of anything but loose talk at the time. But Hen was working overtime too. He’d been working nights up in that little room of his on the second floor for quite some time, and this night Wiggins come to me and he says Hen had asked him for a fresh thirty-two-candle-power bulb. So I give it to Wiggins, and then I went home. And, come to find out, Wiggins sewed that bulb up with Hen.’
‘Perhaps maybe you have sack-needles like this into your stockroom,’ said P Gubb, producing the needle Long Sam had given him. The stock-keeper took the needle and examined it carefully.
‘Never had any like that,’ he said.
‘Now, if,’ said Philo Gubb – ‘if the bulb that was sewed up into the burlap with Henry Smitz wasn’t a new bulb, and if Mr Wiggins had given the new bulb to Henry, and if Henry had changed the new bulb for an old one, where would he have changed it at?’
‘Up in his room, where he was always tinkering at that machine of his,’ said the stock-keeper.
‘Could I have the pleasure of taking a look into that there room for a moment of time?’ asked Mr Gubb.
The stock-keeper arose, returned the remnants of his luncheon to his dinner-pail and led the way up the stairs. He opened the door of the room Henry Smitz had used as a workroom, and P Gubb walked in. The room was in some confusion, but, except in one or two particulars, no more than a workroom is apt to be. A rather cumbrous machine – the invention on which Henry Smitz had been working – stood as the murdered man had left it, all its levers, wheels, arms, and cogs intact. A chair, tipped over, lay on the floor. A roll of burlap stood on a roller by the machine. Looking up, Mr Gubb saw, on the ceiling, the lighting fixture of the room, and in it was a clean, shining thirty-two-candle-power bulb. Where another similar bulb might have been in the other socket was a plug from which an insulated wire, evidently to furnish power, ran to the small motor connected with the machine on which Henry Smitz had been working.
The stock-keeper was the first to speak.
‘Hello!’ he said. ‘Somebody broke that window!’ And it was true. Somebody had not only broken the window, but had broken every pane and the sash itself. But Mr Gubb was not interested in this. He was gazing at the electric bulb and thinking of Part Two, Lesson Six of the Course of Twelve Lessons – ‘How to Identify by Finger-Prints, with General Remarks on the Bertillon System.’ He looked about for some means of reaching the bulb above his head. His eye lit on the fallen chair. By placing the chair upright and placing one foot on the frame of Henry Smitz’s machine and the other on the chair-back, he could reach the bulb. He righted the chair and stepped onto its seat. He put one foot on the frame of Henry Smitz’s machine; very carefully he put the other foot on the top of the chair-back. He reached upward and unscrewed the bulb.
The stock-keeper saw the chair totter. He sprang forward to steady it, but he was too late. Philo Gubb, grasping the air, fell on the broad, level board that formed the middle part of Henry
Smitz’s machine.
The effect was instantaneous. The cogs and wheels of the machine began to revolve rapidly. Two strong, steel arms flopped down and held Detective Gubb to the table, clamping his arms to his side. The roll of burlap unrolled, and as it unrolled, the loose end was seized and slipped under Mr Gubb and wrapped around him and drawn taut, bundling him as a sheep’s carcass is bundled. An arm reached down and back and forth, with a sewing motion, and passed from Mr Gubb’s head to his feet. As it reached his feet a knife sliced the burlap in which he was wrapped from the burlap on the roll.
And then a most surprising thing happened. As if the board on which he lay had been a catapult, it suddenly and unexpectedly raised Philo Gubb and tossed him through the open window. The stock-keeper heard a muffled scream and then a great splash, but when he ran to the window, the great paper-hanger detective had disappeared in the bosom of the Mississippi.
Like Henry Smitz he had tried to reach the ceiling by standing on the chair-back; like Henry Smitz he had fallen upon the newly invented burlaping and loading machine; like Henry Smitz he had been wrapped and thrown through the window into the river; but, unlike Henry Smitz, he had not been sewn into the burlap, because Philo Gubb had the double-pointed shuttle-action needle in his pocket.
Page Seventeen of Lesson Eleven of the Rising Sun Detective Agency’s Correspondence School of Detecting’s Course of Twelve Lessons, says: –
In cases of extreme difficulty of solution it is well for the detective to re-enact as nearly as possible the probable action of the crime.
Mr Philo Gubb had done so. He had also proved that a man may be sewn in a sack and drowned in a river without committing wilful suicide or being the victim of foul play.
CLARE KENDALL
Created by Arthur B Reeve (1880-1936)
Arthur B Reeve was one of the most popular and widely read writers of crime fiction in early twentieth-century America. His most famous character was Craig Kennedy, ‘The Scientific Detective’, one of whose adventures is recorded in the next story in this anthology. Reeve was a prolific author and also created a number of other detectives, including two female sleuths. The better known of these is Constance Dunlap who appeared in a 1913 collection of interlinked short stories. In that same year, Reeve also published a series of magazine stories about Clare Kendall, who works as a private investigator. He returned to the character occasionally in later work and she even plays a role in a Craig Kennedy tale, ‘The Woman Detective’, where she is described as ‘a tall, striking, self-reliant young woman with an engaging smile’. ‘The Mystery of the Stolen Da Vinci’ is an intriguing and entertaining period piece. Describing the theft of a Da Vinci portrait, it was written at a time when the artist’s most famous work had indeed been stolen. The Mona Lisa went missing from the Louvre in 1911 and was only recovered in November 1913. The story also shows that Clare Kendall had the same interest in cutting-edge technology as Reeve’s more famous detective, Craig Kennedy. She solves the mystery using a telegraphone, a device for recording sound which had, as she remarks in the narrative, been recently patented by Valdemar Poulsen, ‘The Danish Edison’.
THE MYSTERY OF THE STOLEN DA VINCI
‘Cut from the frame, the most precious treasure of my whole collection – da Vinci’s lost Ginevra Benci.’
Lawrence Osgood, the American Medici, as the press called him, was standing with Clare Kendall in his private gallery, ruefully regarding a heavy gilt frame which now enclosed nothing but jagged ends of canvas fringing the careful backing on which had hung the famous portrait.
‘And today I received this letter,’ he added, spreading out on a sixteenth-century table a note in a cramped foreign script. ‘What do you make of it?’
It bore neither date nor heading, but as Clare read the signature, she exclaimed, ‘La Mano Nera – the Black Hand!’ Hastily she ran through it:
‘We have heard,’ it read, ‘that you have lost a famous painting. It can be restored to you if you will see Pierre Jacot of Jacot & Cie, the Fifth Avenue dealers. Jacot knows nothing of it yet but this afternoon a woman will let him know how the picture can be secured. It will be returned on payment of $50,000 as we direct. It is useless to try to trace this letter, the messengers we employ or any other means we take to communicate. Such an effort or any dealings with the police will provoke a tragedy and the picture will be lost to you forever. – La Mano Nera.’
‘A woman will let him know,’ repeated Clare, turning the letter over and looking at it carefully. ‘Apparently there is nothing about this note that gives a clue, not even the postmark.’
‘Do you think Jacot himself could have anything to do with it?’ asked Osgood slowly. ‘I have known Jacot a long time, but I didn’t think he knew I owned La Ginevra.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Clare in surprise.
‘It was the companion picture to Mona Lisa, painted about the same time,’ explained Osgood thoughtfully. ‘It disappeared a few years after da Vinci died and was only recently discovered, after centuries, in an old chapel in Italy. Mona Lisa was stolen; now Mona Ginevra is gone also.’
‘Was anything else taken?’ asked Clare, surveying the rich store of loot collected from all ages.
‘I don’t know yet. Until my curator, Dr Grimm, and his assistant, Miss Latham, have gone over the catalogue and checked things up. It looks now as if the thief, whoever he was, had confined his attention to this fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian corner. The modern crook, you know, has an eye for pictures. Anyhow, this one went straight for the da Vinci which cost me a quarter of a million at a secret sale in London.’
‘Secret?’
‘Yes, that is why I didn’t say anything to the police or the newspapers. The crook must have known the facts. It was smuggled out of Italy by a London dealer after its discovery; they have very strict laws there about taking such things out of the country. You see, I hoped in some way to have it fixed up so that I would get a clear title in the end, for I can’t afford to have people make me out a pirate. I could have fixed that, all right. Here’s a photograph of the canvas.’
Clare swiftly studied the face which the master had painted as a companion to the famous portrait which had hung so long and attracted so many worshipers at the Louvre. There was a hard, cruel sensuousness about the beautiful mouth which the painter seemed to have captured beneath the very oils. Masked cleverly in the penetrating hazel eyes was a sort of Medusa-like cunning, a cunning which combined with the ravishing curves of the neck and chin transfixed the observer even of a photograph.
Osgood saw that Clare, with her woman instinct, had caught the spirit of the portrait, as that subtle fascination over the human mind which is exercised by the art relics of the past.
‘What crimes a man might commit under the spell of a woman like that!’ he mused, then added, half smiling, ‘Even for her portrait I was ready to risk a certain degree of reputation. Now someone risks his own liberty to kidnap her.’
‘The infatuation in this case,’ commented Clare quietly, scanning the letter again, ‘is of the kind that holds for ransom, not for love. I should like very much to look over your museum. Have you any idea how the thief gained entrance?’
‘No, that is another inexplicable feature. Apparently everything was safely locked, and as for Dr Grimm, I would trust him with the whole collection. Shall I ask him to accompany us about?’
‘By all means.’
Narrowly she watched the curator as they proceeded, chatting, from room to room of wonders. Dr Grimm was a middle-aged man, rather good-looking in spite of his huge tortoise-shell spectacles and the slight stoop to his shoulders. He had an air that suggested the savant and epicurean combined.
Carefully Clare went over every lock and bolt of the big private gallery. At last in the basement, after what had seemed a fruitless search, they came to a strong door by which rubbish was removed to the street. A low exclamat
ion from Clare called attention to some steel filings which had collected in a corner and had evidently been overlooked by someone in cleaning.
She began tapping the door. Suddenly with her nail she dug directly into what looked on the surface like painted steel. There, over the lock, was a little hole in the heavy door, puttied up and carefully painted over.
‘How could that have been done?’ exclaimed Osgood.
‘By an electric drill,’ she answered, glancing about. ‘It must have been attached to that light socket up there outside the door. Very clever, too.’
Dr Grimm said nothing, but it was evident from his face that he felt relieved that the robbery had no longer the appearance of being an inside job.
‘What would you advise me to do!’ inquired Osgood, as they retraced their steps.
‘Negotiate,’ decided Clare tersely. ‘Offer half the demand at first. Only, don’t pay – yet.’
‘I wonder if Jacot did have anything to do with it?’ reiterated Osgood.
‘I should like to see him before you begin negotiations,’ answered Clare noncommitally. ‘By the way, from your end I would suggest that it is safer to put the matter in the hands of Dr Grimm and let him manage it with Jacot.’
That afternoon Clare and Billy Lawson, with a small grip, sat in the lobby of the Prince Henry, just around the corner from Jacot’s. She had telephoned hastily to Lawson and had briefly stated the facts in the case.
‘You will stay here, Billy,’ she planned in conclusion. ‘Keep this grip of mine. I will call up from Jacot’s, if I need you; and will have you paged as Mr Winterhouse. Then bring the grip over.’
Jacot’s, enjoying an excellent patronage, opened on Fifth Avenue just a few feet below the street level. Jacot himself was a slim Frenchman, well preserved, faultlessly dressed.
‘I am the agent of Mr Winterhouse, a western mine owner and connoisseur,’ volunteered Clare on entering the shop. ‘May I look around?’
American Sherlocks Page 21
