The Almost Perfect Murder Part 15

"Well, she wanted me to settle a lump sum on her."

"Had you promised to do so?"

"Not exactly promised. I couldn't seem to get the money together. I gave it all to Ram Lal."

"How much?"

"A hundred thousand for the crystal. I was trying to get two hundred thousand together to purchase a site for the temple. n.o.body knew about the money I gave him. That was a secret between Ram Lal and me."

"I wonder if it was!" remarked Mme. Storey. "... How about Liptrott?" she went on.

"Oh, just a harmless lunatic," said Mrs. Julian impatiently. "I've been keeping him for years. There's that machine of his. Supposed to restore youth. He's always after me to start a company to manufacture it. Once I thought there was something in it, but latterly Mrs. Bracker and Dr. Cushack seemed to be doing me so much good I hadn't much time for Liptrott."

"So Dr. Cushack has been doing you good, too," said Mme. Storey.

Mrs. Julian paused and her fat face started to work like a child's about to cry. "I thought he was," she wailed. "But my family doctor says he's just been feeding me morphine! ... Cushack said it was a rare drug called adrianum. He imported it from the Great Gobi desert in China, and it cost five hundred dollars a gram.... Oh, it made me feel so good!" she added, dissolving into tears altogether.

"I don't doubt it," said Mme. Storey. "You need a nurse."

"I know it!" wailed Mrs. Julian. "I have the heart of a child!"

"For goodness' sake why don't you make friends with decent people?" asked Mme. Storey.

"n.o.body likes me except the people I give money to," mourned Mrs. Julian.

My employer and I looked at each other. It was only too true!

"Where did you meet Cushack?" asked Mme. Storey.

"At one of Mrs. Piper's teas. She always has such clever people. He attracted me from the first because he talked so intellectually. I adore intellect. Had diplomas from all the best foreign universities. He had a new theory. Toxi-therapy, he called it."

"It's new all right," murmured my employer.

"You know, it means fighting poison with poison. It certainly sounded convincing. I asked him if my nervousness came from a poison, and he said certainly, and told me of this wonderful new drug. And after he had been to see me a few times I took some."

"You let him give you a poison!" exclaimed Mme. Storey.

"Oh, he took some himself first," said Mrs. Julian with her innocent baby stare. "He carried around the most terrible poisons, and took them quite freely, because he had made himself immune."

Mme. Storey could only shake her head. "How about Ram Lal?" she asked. "Did you meet him at a tea?"

"No, he wrote asking me to help the starving millions in India. No thought of self. I didn't pay any attention to his first letters; I get so many! But later he said something that proved he was psychic."

"What was that?"

"Oh, you'll only laugh. He wrote that the feeling kept coming to him that I was starving too, in the midst of my riches, and he was holding a thought of spiritual sustenance in his mind."

"So you asked him to call."

"Yes. Oh, my dear, if you could have seen him you wouldn't scoff. So thin and emaciated; his great eyes burning with an other-worldly light! He had spent years in abstinence and meditation."

"Seems to have put on flesh since," murmured Mme. Storey.

"Well, yes, a little.... But, oh, my dear! a true mystic! There was a little crystal on my desk, just an ornament. His gaze fastened on it and he began to read the past and the future. Imagine my joy!"

"How about the starving millions in India?"

"Well, we found that the reports were much exaggerated."

"The truth is," said Mme. Storey relentlessly, "Ram Lal's brown skin went no farther than his neck and wrists. I am informed by the police that his right name was Sam Gumpel. He was the son of an East Side tailor who threw him out years ago because he wouldn't work."

Mrs. Julian buried her face in her hands. "No! No!" she wailed. "I will not believe it! Oh, spare me my last illusion!" But in her heart she knew it was true.

"I a.s.sume you paid all these people by cheque?" said Mme. Storey.

Mrs. Julian, weeping, nodded her head.

"Then I want you to make me a list from the stubs of all the sums you have given them with the dates."

She promised to do so.

"Last year," said Mme. Storey severely. "I found you in the hands of a witch-doctor and a woman who called herself a physi-meliorator. What has become of them?"

"I sent them away," whimpered Mrs. Julian. "Bunbury caught them faking and told me."

"With you," my employer went on, divided between pity and exasperation, "life seems to be just one d.a.m.n faker after another. What's to become of you if you go on like this? I can't spare the time to get you out of your sc.r.a.pes."

"What am I to do?" wailed Mrs. Julian in one of her rare bursts of honesty; "anybody with a slick tongue can get around me!"

"Hire a watch dog to stand between you and such people. Get an incorruptible woman for a secretary; one who will tell you the truth!"

"Where could I find such a one?"

"I'll find her for you.... But mind you, if you fire her for telling you the truth, I swear I'll have you declared incompetent by the courts!"

"Oh, I'll do anything you say, Rosika! Anything!"

V Inspector Rumsey was in our office to report on what the police had been doing, and to confer with my employer. I should point out that Mme. Storey's connection with this case was purely ex officio. It was entirely a police matter, and she worked with them merely because her reputation was involved owing to that confounded telephone call.

At the same time we were quietly busy on our own account. Crider and Stephens, two of our best men, had been detailed to watch the Julian house and to report on all who entered or left it. I had verified the sale of the hypodermic needle to Mrs. Bracker. Mme. Storey had sent for a transcript of the examination of the three suspects by the police, and was studying it. Psychology is her forte.

Everything still waited on the result of the autopsy. Dr. Chisholm, the toxicologist who was conducting it, had promised to meet the Inspector in our office at eleven.

"What progress have you made since I saw you?" asked Mme. Storey.

"I have been progressing backward," the Inspector bitterly answered.

She laughed and pushed the cigarettes towards him. "Well, it isn't the first time we've been stumped, old friend."

"It seems as if there was a regular conspiracy to baulk me!" he went on, pounding his thigh. "Matson, who runs the homicide bureau in the district attorney's office, won't act. Says the case is a mare's nest. In short, he leaves me holding the bag. On the other hand, the three suspects have engaged Jim Shryock to represent them. The cleverest and most unscrupulous shyster in New York! He's been a thorn in my side for years!"

"Has he made any move?"

"Yes. He's given me forty-eight hours to have his clients arraigned before a magistrate, or he'll swear out writs of habeas corpus, he says. When there is a suspicion of murder a magistrate would hold them upon the least bit of evidence. But I haven't even that. Shryock knows that he has me!"

"Oh, well," said Mme. Storey soothingly, "the result of the autopsy may force him to change his tune."

"I don't know," said Rumsey darkly. "He seems d.a.m.n sure of himself."

"What have you learned about these people?"

"Very little. On the woman's cards she gave her address as the Hotel Vandermeer. I found for a fact that she had been living there nearly a year. An expensive suite. The management denied that she's been carrying on any business in the hotel."

"They would say that anyhow."

"Sure. She had her own telephone. The servants said she had no visitors. I found cocaine in powder form in her room, so I a.s.sume she is an addict. Nothing to throw any light on her past except half a dozen family photographs. I'm trying to trace them through the names of the photographers that appear on the cards."

"Here's a lead," said Mme. Storey. "I find that Mrs. Bracker purchased a hypodermic needle from the firm of Almon and Emory on February fourth. She presented an order for it signed by Dr. A. Cushack."

Rumsey sat up with a jerk. "Good!" he cried. "Then it was her needle that we found on her. It implicates them both. Now we have the beginning of a case!"

"We may have," said Mme. Storey cautiously.

"As to the Doctor," the Inspector went on, "I have had the contents of his medicine case a.n.a.lysed, and the so-called poisons turn out to be harmless. Common salt; coloured water; alcohol and the like. One contained morphine but not in sufficient quant.i.ty to kill. The fellow was actually speaking the truth!"

"Even a liar has to sometimes," murmured Mme. Storey.

"I visited his office; a single room in a commercial building on Forty-Second Street. There was chemical paraphernalia lying about; retorts, bottles, etc. No drugs. Nothing to show he had been working there lately."

"Probably cleaned up in expectation of a search," suggested Mme. Storey.

"No doubt," said Rumsey gloomily.

"Did you question the office cleaners?" she asked.

"Not yet."

"I'll do that when we learn the result of the autopsy."

"Very well.... There were no letters or personal papers," he resumed. "To my surprise, his diploma turned out to be genuine. He was graduated from Jefferson five years ago, and admitted to practice in this state the same year."

"You have inquired at the college?"

"Yes. Members of the faculty identified him from a photograph. Was remembered as a sharp lad but an indifferent student. Not well liked."

"And Liptrott?" asked Mme. Storey.

"I have been able to piece together a fairly complete life story for him. Has lived at the Sanford House on West Eleventh Street for many years. An ancient hotel now much run down. Has several important inventions to his credit, but the money he got for them has been spent long ago. He is alone in the world now. Is considered slightly cracked by his a.s.sociates in the hotel.

"There is no doubt that he has gone deeply into the nature of electrical phenomena. I had an expert from the G.E. laboratories to study his machine. Could make nothing of it. Says it appears to be a senseless conglomeration of tubes and wires and magnets. But he will not swear there is nothing in it without having some knowledge of what Liptrott was after. The longer you study electricity, he says, the greater respect you have for its possibilities."

"Quite," said Mme. Storey.

"I found cocaine in liquid form in Liptrott's room," said the Inspector, "but no needle. He's evidently an addict too. He's been whining for it all day. I don't know what's coming to the world!"

"Oh, the world is much as it always was," returned Mme. Storey. "These people belong to a special cla.s.s, moral invalids; it's natural they should turn to drugs to buoy them up.... I suggest you give him a needle to steady him," she went on. "Bring him up here with his machine before lunch, and let him give you and me a demonstration."

Rumsey agreed.

"What have you learned about Ram Lal?" she asked.

"A month ago he rented a house on West Seventy-Ninth Street near Columbus Avenue. No one there when I entered it yesterday. Had been lavishly furnished in Oriental style. According to the neighbours he employed several servants, but they had vanished. I found nothing that threw any light on the manner of his murder."

Promptly at eleven the buzzer sounded in the outer office announcing the coming of Dr. Chisholm. He was the most famous toxicologist in New York and a good all-round man. We had had dealings with him before.

I led him into Mme. Storey's room. His face was giving nothing away. The Inspector jumped up eagerly. He could scarcely wait for polite greetings to be exchanged.

"Well, doctor?"

Dr. Chisholm spread out his hands deprecatingly. "The result of the autopsy is nil," he said. "I cannot tell you what killed Ram Lal."

It was a bitter disappointment. Inspector Rumsey dropped back into his chair with a grunt. My employer carefully knocked the ash off her cigarette.

I pushed forward a chair for the doctor. For a moment there was silence in the room. Finally Mme. Storey said incredulously: "A man dies, and with all the resources of science at your command you cannot say why!"

"He died because his heart stopped beating," he replied. "I don't know why it stopped."

"No trace of poison in his blood?"

"None whatever."

"Or in his stomach?"

"None."

"How could he have been poisoned through the stomach?" put in Rumsey.

"To be sure," said Mme. Storey; "but I didn't want to overlook anything.... But do men die like that?" she went on to the doctor. "Without any apparent reason for it?"

"Oh, yes, Madame."

"Healthy men?"

"Few men over forty can be said to be perfectly healthy. His lungs showed some infiltration due to old tubercular lesions. His heart was a little enlarged, but without any pericarditis. There were also some suspicious spots in the pelvis. All common conditions."

"But none of them sufficient to have caused death?"

"Not ordinarily."