“Well, I’m damned; I sure am!” Costello ruefully admitted as he completed the investigation and prepared to notify Coroner Martin. “This looks like another one o’ them cases wid no reason a-tall for happenin’, Dr. de Grandin, sor. Ye can see for yerself how it is, now. Why should anyone want to murder that pore young gur-rl like that, an—” He lapsed into moody silence, drumming silently on the polished top of the telephone table as be waited for central to make his connection with the coroner.
“H’m, one wonders,” de Grandin murmured, half to Costello, half to himself, as he snapped the mechanism of his pocket lighter and thrust the tip of an evil-smelling French cigarette into the cone of blue flame. But from the dancing lights in his small round eyes and the quick, imitable manner in which the ends of his carefully waxed blond mustache twitched, I knew he had already formulated a theory and bided his time to put it into words. “Come, Friend Trowbridge,” he urged, tugging at my elbow. “There is nothing more we can accomplish here; besides, I greatly desire drink. Let us go.”
2
“TIENS, MY FRIEND, IT seems the old year died in a welter of blood last night,” de Grandin remarked the following morning as he pushed back his coffee cup and lighted an after-breakfast cigarette. “Regard this in the morning’s news, if you please.” He passed a copy of the Journal across the table, indicating the article occupying the right-hand column of the front page. Taking the paper, I read:
TORTURERS KILL GUARD IN ROBBERY
Novice Yeggs Slash Watchman
to Learn Safe Combination
He Did Not Know
The body of William Lucas, 50-year-old night watchman at the Eagle Laundry, 596 Primrose Street, was found early this morning on the company’s loading platform. He had been tortured to death because he would not reveal the combination of the firm’s safe. The safe had not been opened.
When found, the body had a slash on each hand, one on the sole and instep of each foot, another across the throat under the chin, and a deep knife wound in the back. In a vacant lot behind the laundry detectives found a stained paper bag containing a brace and bit, a glass cutter, a wire cutter, a metal trimmed stiletto sheath and a pair of low shoes.
The attempted safe robbery was so wholly the work of novices that police were able to reconstruct the crime in its entirety. The murderers, police said, left a multitude of clues. At least two men entered the building in Primrose Street before the last truck was parked in the sheds at nine o’clock last night. The robbers evidently knew that heavy collections were made by drivers on their final routes and that the money could not be banked until after the holiday, hence there would be a substantial amount in the office safe.
The yeggmen laid out their kit of cheap tools some time after midnight, took off their shoes and tiptoed after the watchman as he made his rounds. They found him in the rear of the building as he was punching the clock in the dynamo room, and forced him to accompany them to the office, where the torture began.
While one of the burglars tortured and questioned Lucas in vain the other turned to the safe and tampered with it. The lifted handles bear the impress of red-stained fingers.
Some time during the torture Lucas died. The coroner’s physician will say today whether he died as a result of the slash in his throat, the wound in his back, or whether he bled to death from the many smaller wounds inflicted on different parts of his body.
The murderers dumped the body into a laundry basket and dragged it through the building to the landing platform. A trail of stains led the police along the way. On the loading platform, where the body was abandoned, one of the thugs left a most incriminating clue. The floor bore the mark of a large foot with long, prehensile toes, clearly outlined in crimson. This print definitely establishes the fact that there were at least two robbers, as the low shoes found in the bundle with the burglars’ tools were too small to fit the footmark. They must have belonged to the other robber, who also tiptoed in stockinged or bare feet after the unfortunate watchman.
Lucas, police said, was tortured to reveal something he did not know. The combination of the safe had not been entrusted to him.
“Why,” I exclaimed, “that’s villainous! The idea of torturing that poor fellow! It—”
“Sure, Dr. Trowbridge, sor, ’tis bad enough, th’ blessed saints know but ’tis sumpin’ we can sink our teeth into, at any rate,” announced Costello’s heavy voice from the doorway. “’Scuse me for sneakin’ in on ye like this, gentlemen,” he apologized, “but it’s crool cold outside this mornin’ an’ I thought as how ye wouldn’t mind if I let meself in unannounced like, seein’ th’ door wuz unlocked annyhow.”
“Bien non, by no means,” de Grandin assured him, motioning to a chair. “Tell me, my friend, is this press account accurate?”
The detective nodded over the rim of the cup of steaming coffee I had poured him. “Yes, sor,” he returned. “I wuz in charge at th’ laundry, an’ checked th’ facts up wid th’ reporters before they shot their stuff in. They’re right this time—for a wonder. Praise be, we’ve got clear sailin’ in a case at last. None o’ yer mysterious, no-motive crimes here, sor. Just a case o’ plain petermen’s wor-rk, an’ done be amatoors, in th’ bargain. It looks open-an’-shut to me.”
He fumbled in his pocket a moment, producing two narrow slips of paper. “I got a couple o’ subpoenas from th’ coroner for you gentlemen,” he announced, handing us the summonses to appear at the inquest on the death of Adelaide Truman, “but if ye’d like to run over to th’ Eagle Laundry an’ look th’ place over before ye tell what ye know to Coroner Martin, I’d be happy to take ye. I’ve got a police car waitin’ outside.”
“By all means,” de Grandin assented eagerly. “This latest case of yours, my friend, it is a bit too obvious. It is altogether possible that someone makes the practical joke at our expense.”
THE DEAD NIGHT WATCHMAN was not a pretty sight. However inexperienced they might have been as burglars, his assassins had done their murdering with the finesse of veterans. To me the only question was whether the unfortunate man died from the gaping slash across his throat or the deep incision which pierced his back just under the vertebral extremity of his left scapula. Either would have been almost instantly fatal.
De Grandin gave the body little more than passing notice. Instead he hastened to the office where the atrocity had been committed, and cast a fierce, searching glance about, rushed to the single window and sent the shade sailing upward with a jerk of the cord, finally dropped to his knees and began examining the floor with the nervous intensity of a terrier seeking the scent of a vanished rat.
I watched him in amazement a moment, then turned to rejoin Costello, but his sudden elated exclamation brought me to a halt. “Voilà!” he cried, springing to his feet. “Triomphe; I have found it; it is here! Pardieu, did I not say so? Assuredly. Behold, my friend, what the good Costello and his fellows failed to see, and would not have recognized, had they done so, was not hidden from Jules de Grandin. By no means. Regardez-vous!”
In the palm of his outstretched hand lay a tiny cruciform thing, two burnt matches bound together in the form of a cross with a wisp of scarlet silk.
“Well?” I demanded, for the little man’s shining eyes, quivering nostrils and excited manner indicated he placed great importance on his find.
“Well?” he echoed. “Non, my friend, you are mistaken; it is not well, or rather it is very well, indeed, for I now begin to understand much. Very damn much, indeed. This so detestable thing”—he indicated the crossed matches in his palm—“it is the key to much which I began dimly to perceive last night when Friend Costello strung together his so strange series of seemingly meaningless and unrelated crimes. Certainly. I now think, at least I believe—”
“All ready, gentlemen?” Sergeant Costello called. “We’ll be gittin’ over to th’ coroner’s, if ye’re all done. Th’ boys are finished wid th’ fingerprints an’ measurements, an’ they’ll be comin’ from th’ morgue for
th’ pore felly out yonder before long.”
DE GRANDIN SAT WRAPPED in moody silence as the big police car bore us toward the coroner’s. Once or twice he made as though to speak, but appeared to think better of it, and leaned back in his seat with tightly compressed lips and knitted, thoughtful brows. At last:
“What d’ye think of it all, Dr. de Grandin, sor?” Costello asked tentatively. “Have ye formed any theory yet?”
“U’m,” de Grandin struck a match, carefully shielding its orange flame with his cupped hands as he set his cigarette alight, then expelled a double column of smoke from his nostrils. “I shall not be greatly astonished, mon vieux, if the man who slew Mademoiselle Truman last night and the miscreant who did the unfortunate Lucas to death shortly afterward prove one and the same. Yes, I am almost convinced of it, already, though a careful search of the poor dead ones’ antecedents must be made before we can be certain.”
“Arrah!” Costello looked his incredulity. “D’ye mean th’ felly that murdered th’ pore gur-rl an’ tried to rob th’ laundry wuz th’ same?”
“Précisément. Furthermore, I am disinclined to believe that any robbery was intended at the Eagle Laundry. Rather, I think, it was a carefully calculated murder—an execution, if you please—which took place there. The bloody hand-prints on the safe door, the new and wholly inadequate burglars’ tools so left that the police could not help but find them, the very obviousness of it all—it was the camouflage they made, my friend. Mordieu, at this very moment the miscreants lie snugly hidden and laugh most execrably at our backs. Have a care, villains, Jules de Grandin has entered the case, and you shall damn laugh on the other side of your mouths before all is done!” He struck his knee with his clenched fist, then continued more quietly: “There is much more to this case than you have seen, my Sergeant. By example, there is that patchwork corset, and the two burned matches—”
“A corset—two burnt matches!” Costello’s tone indicated rapidly waning confidence in de Grandin’s sanity.
“Exactly, precisely; quite so. In addition there is the murder of the innocent young clergyman, the stealing away of a helpless little baby, and much more devilment, which as yet we have not seen. Sergeant, my friend, these crimes without reason, as you call them, are crimes with the best—or worst—reason in the world, and this latest killing which you so stubbornly persist in thinking part of an unsuccessful burglary, it too is a link in the chain. These things are but the tail-tip of the serpent. This monstrous body we have yet to glimpse.”
“Glory be to God!” ejaculated Costello with more force than piety as he bit off an impressive mouthful of chewing tobacco and set to masticating it in methodical silence.
3
I SAW BUT LITTLE MORE of Jules de Grandin that day. As soon as his brief testimony before the coroner had been concluded he excused himself and disappeared on some mysterious errand. Dinner was long over and I was preparing to turn in for some much-needed sleep when his quick step sounded in the hall and a moment later he burst into the study, eyes gleaming, mustache fairly on end with excitement. “Mort dun bouc vert!” he exclaimed as he dropped into a chair and seized a cigar from the humidor; “this day I have run back and forth and to and fro like a hound on the trail of a stag, my friend! Yes, I have been most active.”
“Find out anything?” I asked.
“Assuredly yes. More than I had hoped; much more,” he declared. “Attend me: The poor Mademoiselle Truman whose so tragic death we witnessed, she was not born here. No, she was a native of Martinique. Her parents, Americans, lived in Fort de France, and she was but the merest babe when Pelée erupted so terribly in 1902, killing nearly every living being in the capital. Both her father and mother perished in the catastrophe, but she was rescued through the heroism of a native bonne who fled inland and found such shelter as none but she and her kind could. For the next five years the child dwelt as a native peasant among the blacks, speaking Creole, wearing native clothes, nourished by native food and—worshiping native gods.
“Do you know Martinique, my friend? It is most beautiful; lovely as the island where Circe dwelt to change men into swine before destroying them utterly. A curse lies on those lovely islands of the Antilles, my friend, the curse of human bondage and blood drawn by the slave-driver’s lash. Wherever Europe colonized and brought black slaves from Africa she brought also the deadly poison of the jungle Obeah. In North America it was not so. Your Negroes grew up beside the whites, a pleasant, loyal, glad-hearted race; but in the islands of the Caribbean they interbred with the savage Indians and grew into fiends incarnate. Yes. Consider how they rose against their masters, exterminating man and woman and tender, helpless babe; how they marched on the European settlements with the bodies of white infants impaled upon their pikes for standards, and slew and slaughtered—till even their insatiable blood-lust was slaked.
“Very well. That they had just cause for revolt no one can deny. It is not pleasant, even for a savage, to be stolen from his home and made to serve as slave in distant lands, and the sting of the whip is no less painful to a black back than to a white one; but the dreadful aspects of their revolts, the implacable savagery with which they killed and tortured, that is something needing explanation. Nor is the explanation far to seek. Beside their bonfires, far back amid the hills, they practised weird rites and made petition to strange and awful gods—dread, bestial gods out of darkest Africa, more savage still than the savages who groveled at their altars. It was from these black and blood-dewed altars that the insurgent slaves drew inspiration for their atrocities.
“Nor is that dread religion—Vôdunu, Obeah, or by whatever savage name it may be called—dead by any means. Today the Marines of your country fight ceaselessly to put it down in Haiti; the weak-spined Spanish government, and after it the forces of the Republic, have been powerless to stamp it out from the Cuban uplands; the Danish West Indies and the Dutch colonies turned their faces and declared there was no such thing as voodoo in their midst; and France has had no better luck in Martinique. No. The white man governs there; he can never hope to rule.
“Now, the aborigines of Martinique were known as the Caribs. A terrible folk they were—and are. Your very English word ‘cannibal’ comes from them, since cariba was what Columbus’ sailors said when referring to the abominations of the Caribs when they returned to Spain. There are those who say that the Caribs were rooted out in the war waged on them by the French in 1658. It is, hélas, not so. They fled back to the hills, and there they mated with the blacks, producing a race tenfold more terrible than either of its parents. These are those who keen the voodoo chant before black altars in the uplands, who burn the signal fires at night, and, upon occasion, make sacrifices of black goats, or white goats without horns, to their deities. They keep the flame of hatred for the white man undying, and it was because of that the native nurse-woman risked her life to save poor little Baby Adelaide from the volcano.
“Ha, I see your question forming. ‘Why,’ you ask ‘should she have risked her life to bear away the offspring of her master; why should she so carefully rear that little girl child when the holocaust of Pelée’s eruption was done?’ Ah, my friend, subtle revenge is sweet to the half-breed Carib as to the white man. That a child of the dominant and hated blancs should be reared as a Carib, taught their language, imbued with their thoughts, finally trained and initiated into their abominable religion and made to serve as priestess at their dreadful sacrificial rites—ah, that, indeed, would be a fit requital for all the woes her ancestors had undergone at the white man’s hands. Yes.
“And so it was. For five years—the formative period of her life—poor Mademoiselle Adelaide lives as a Creole. When she was at last so steeped in savage lore that never, while life should last, could she throw away the influence, the ‘faithful nurse’ returned to Fort de France with her story of having rescued and nurtured the orphaned child of her employers. Relatives in America were located by colonial authorities and the little girl brought here
—and with her came her faithful bonne, her foster-mother, old Black Toinette of the Caribs.”
He rose abruptly, took half a turn across the study floor, then stopped and faced me almost threateningly.
“And Toinette was a mamaloi of the voodooists!” he fairly hissed.
“Well?” I demanded, as be continued to stand staring fixedly at me.
“‘Well’ be everlastingly burned in the lowest subcellar of hell!” he flared back. “It is not well. It is most damnably otherwise, my friend.
“Mademoiselle Adelaide was never allowed to forget that whatever gods she might pay outward homage to, the real gods, the great gods, were Damballah, Legba and Ayida-Wedo. When she was but a little child she astonished her Sunday School teacher by making such an assertion in answer to a catechism question, and when she was a grown young woman, eighteen years of age, her aunt, with whom she lived, surprised her and her aged nurse fantastically dressed and making worship to an obscene thing carved in the likeness of a serpent. The old woman was instantly dismissed; though, in gratitude for her services, she was given a pension; but poor Mademoiselle Adelaide’s aunt tells me her niece paid many secret visits to old Toinette’s dwelling, and what went on behind the closed doors of that house can better be conjectured than described, I fear.
“Now, attend me: Those who have traveled in Haiti have often been struck by certain oddnesses of dress, sometimes exhibited by the peasant women, dresses sewn over with crazy-quilt patterns, not beautiful, but most bizarre. Such patchwork is worn as penance, sometimes sewn to a corset of irritative substance, as by example, the fiber of certain species of gourds. When so worn it is at once an evidence of penance and purification, like the hair-shirts of certain monastic orders in mediæval times. Now, undoubtlessly, for some reason old Toinette ordered Mademoiselle Adelaide to wear that damnable garment of voodoo penance last night. Remember, the old nurse never for an instant lost her dominance over the poor child. No. The constant irritation of the sharp-pronged corset against her tender skin induced a fainting fit. I, who have traveled much and observed much, at once recognized the thing for what it was, and bade her tell us how it came that she wore it. She refused, but one who watched her through the window feared she was about to speak, and stopped her mouth with blood.”
The Devil's Rosary Page 39
