Flynn’s Weekly Detective Fiction. Vol. 27, No. 1, September 17, 1927
- Автор: Valentine, Corley H. W.
- Год: 1927
- Язык: английский
- Год: The Red Star News Company
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Flynn’s Weekly Detective Fiction. Vol. 27, No. 1, September 17, 1927». Краткое содержание книги:
“Now run out. I’ll be as quick as I can, then I’ll tell you what I’ve found. Give your nose and throat another good flushing with the atomizer, as I’m going to do, in the meantime!”
He closed the door into the laboratory a moment later, and all I could do was to follow his instructions and wait for his verdict.
I had not long to wait; the laboratory door soon opened. Ruggles had taken off the face mask and the skin rubber gloves he always wore when making his more dangerous examinations, and he was drying his hands on a towel.
“Just as I thought,” he said; “enough germs of Amazon fever on that letter to give the disease to fifty men.”
“On the letter?” I asked.
“Yes — put there by the man who wrote the letter and did not sign it.”
“There must be finger-prints.”
“Yes, but they will probably prove to be only those of Richard Grew, the victim. The man, who staged this, wouldn’t be fool enough to leave finger-prints.”
“Then all we get from this letter is the fact that it held enough Amazon fever germs to kill Grew and forty others?”
“No,” Ruggles said, “the letter tells us far more than that; it tells us that the man who wrote this letter knew there was no need of his signing the letter; and this corroborates Grew’s own statement — he said that the man had struck and that his blow was sure; the writer of the letter knew that his victim would know who had struck him down.”
The telephone rang then and Ruggles answered it. It was Dr. Whittimore, calling up from the hospital to say that Richard Grew had just died without recovering consciousness and that his malady had been diagnosed, by the hospital experts, as Amazon fever.
“Don’t tell his daughter,” Ruggles said, “until I have had a talk with her. Be sure of this and have the others there understand it — I must talk with her before she is told. What?” There was a pause. Then Ruggles went on:
“Well, of course, it can’t be helped now, but I am afraid that a grave mistake has been made. She undoubtedly is at her home, and Crane and I will go right over. Thanks, Whittimore. Oh, of course, you’ll record the name and number of any calls that come in asking how Mr. Grew is. Yes, that’s the ticket!”
Ruggles rang off and turned to me, saying: “One of the young doctors notified Miss Grew of her father’s death and she has all but collapsed — rushed to the hospital, not allowed to see her father for fear of contagion, and all that; had to be taken back to her home with a nurse.
“The family doctor, Spaulding, happened to come in, and, of course, got the facts and gave the nurse and all the hospital staff, including Whittimore, particular thunder. Spaulding is taking care of Miss Grew at the Grew home and now we’ve got to go there and see her.”
As we entered our car and drove in the direction of West Seventy-Sixth Street, toward the address which Richard Grew had given us, Ruggles said:
“We’ve got to move very carefully, Dan, for the man who killed Grew by giving him those germs in that letter knows you and me and, having failed in his first attempt to kill us, will soon try again.”
“You say he tried to kill us? When?”
“Why, when he shot that poison gas through the keyhole into our living room.”
“But I don’t see how that proves that he was trying to kill us.”
“Don’t you? Look at it this way! The man knew that Grew was as good as dead from the germs on the letter. The poison gas was for you and me, and if we’d breathed a little of it, we’d have been dead as the petrified bodies the scientists dig up among the ruins of Pompeii.
“It was what is known as Saccari’s gas, invented by an Italian: it gives off, for the first moment, the odor of almonds and that odor is harmless; that was the odor I got and it warned me. In another minute or two we’d have been dead as Hector.”
“But,” I said, “if his poison gas was so deadly and so sure, why didn’t this man go to Grew’s house, late some night, and gas him to death in his bedroom? That would have been much easier and quicker than hunting up these Amazon fever germs and getting them into Grew’s system by the medium of a letter.”
“That’s perfectly true,” Ruggles admitted. “The fact that our man killed Grew in this roundabout way shows that he had some compelling reason for doing it — probably to throw suspicion on some other man, Dan. See if I’m not right.”
“Do you think we shall find out anything from Miss Grew?” I asked.
“Nothing to-night, I think. I should not be surprised if the family doctor refuses to let us see her, at least until considerably later in the evening.”
Ruggles looked at his watch. “It’s only six now. I thought it much later. We’ll get dinner first, then go to the Grew home right after that. I hate to intrude on her at such a time, but whatever she can or will tell us now we can use to the greatest advantage.”
“What will you do if the doctor, Spaulding, Whittimore said, didn’t he, won’t let us see her?”
“That depends on what sort Dr. Spaulding is. We can’t tell that until we’ve seen him.”
At half past seven, we rang the doorbell at the Grew home and we were received by Dr. Spaulding. He was medium-sized, slender, energetic, and in his late forties, restless, rather handsome, and accustomed, evidently, to carrying things with a high hand.
He said at once; “I am glad to see you, Mr. Ruggles and—” He looked at me, bowed, and waited for Ruggles to introduce me. “Of course, Mr. Crane,” the doctor said, frankly holding out his well-shaped hand to me. “I should have remembered, as I do now, what the newspapers said of your part in the capture of Foley, the murderer.”
“It was an interesting case,” I said, “and Foley gave us some busy moments when the show-down came.”
Dr. Spaulding nodded, then turned to Ruggles and said: “Sit down, both of you, won’t you? You will excuse me for standing, but this tragedy has upset me a good deal. Grew and I were such old friends, and to have him go off like this — I can hardly believe it, even now!”
The family doctor took a turn about the room, then came back to where we were sitting and stood, facing us, leaning on the center table before the open fireplace.
“You did not know Mr. Grew well. I did, and yet at times I felt as if he were the completest stranger. He would go away for weeks, months at a time, taking only his daughter, and wandering with her—”
“Had he visited Africa before his recent trip there?” Ruggles asked abruptly.
“Oh, yes, I suppose so,” Dr. Spaulding replied in a way which showed me he had not paid the least attention to Ruggles’s latest question. “I know your record, Mr. Ruggles, and that was why I sent Grew to you.
“He insisted that he was ill, but I examined him without discovering a sign of anything. When it seemed to me that he was in deadly terror of some one, and that soon became evident, I realized that it was a case where he needed you more than he needed his family doctor — so I gave him your address and sent him to you.”
“What did he say,” Ruggles asked, “which made you think he stood in deadly terror of any one?”
“He kept telling me,” Dr. Spaulding replied, “that some one, whose name he told me he dared not give me, had poisoned him through the means of a letter and that, as a result, he was coming down with a fatal illness.
“I repeat: I examined him then, and found no trace of anything beyond an extreme excitation of the nervous system. I sent him to you, then, hoping that he would tell you more than he told me and that you could either laugh him out of a delusion, if you believed his case that, or be enabled, by what he confided to you, to get on the track of his enemy, in case you concluded that he actually had one.