Читать книгу Murder of a Startled Lady - Charles Fulton Oursler - Страница 14

Table of Contents

It was four-thirty in the morning and graveyard cold. The dim gorge of Seventieth Street was empty. No lights were in the windows of the Chalfonte or the Bradford apartment houses; Dorb's corner drug store was locked and dark; and in the whole long block there was no sound except our footfalls on the cement sidewalks and the purr of the motor of Colt's limousine, as Neil McMahon, our sleepless and many-scarred chauffeur, thrust the stick into gear.

The suitcase of bones was at our feet and I could hear the pieces rattle as the car plunged west on Seventieth Street, turned sharply south into West End Avenue, heading downtown to Cherry Hill Place, wherever that was. I had never heard of it before, until Colt gave the curt direction to Neil McMahon; having given it, the chief sat back in the car, drew a fur robe over both of us and smoked his pipe in silence. Before the ride was over he was to be exceptionally garrulous, but it was not until we had raced across Fourteenth Street that he spoke at all.

"So you do not remember Mr. Imro Acheson Fitch?" he began accusingly. "Nor his remarkable agnomen of crime sculptor? Don't you recall that Italian——"

"Wait, Chief—I believe I do remember. Wasn't that the case of a brush salesman?"

"Quite. The problem there was very like the one we have here. The skeleton of a man was found—head bashed in with a shovel—clothes burned—apparently no way to make an identification. But Fitch, who worked on the case, had a peculiar theory about skulls—he believed they could be reconstructed. And he did it."

"Seems like black magic. After all—a skull is just a skull——"

"And still Mr. Fitch—no one ever calls him anything but Mr. Fitch—Mr. Fitch took the Italian's skull, modelled it over with clay, painted it up, put a wig on it—and the man was identified."

"Voodoo!" I insisted.

"Right," chuckled Thatcher Colt. "The art of Mr. Fitch does seem a little demoniac when you consider it calmly. And yet the whole thing is quite scientific—based on the fact that no two skulls are even remotely alike to the trained eye—and that on every death's-head a face is latent, like an undeveloped fingerprint. It needs only the knowing eye of an anatomist, and the skill of an artist to bring it out."

"It needs a genius," I protested.

"Right again," smiled the Commissioner. "Mr. Fitch is a queer sort of genius—that's why he could not get along with those Tammany Hall politicians. They could never understand him in a thousand years—for at heart the man is an artist. He hates this kind of job we are going to ask him to do and you can't much blame him for that. Any man with the strange speciality of restoring old death's-heads has a right to feel offended at life. No little boy looks forward eagerly to such a career. In fact, Mr. Fitch once confessed to me that his boyhood ambition was to be a wood-carver—he wanted to create wooden Indians for cigar stores. But by the time he learned to carve, the wooden Indians were a vanished race."

"Has he a sense of humour, Chief?"

"None, probably. You see, he is really a thwarted personality. He wanted to be an artist. But his parents sent him to a polytechnic institute. He was made to study electrical engineering but he hated it so, he ran away and found work with a stone-cutter. He cut his first tools on epitaph lettering and later he was graduated into the junior guild of angel makers, weeping graces and broken pillars. It was then he studied at nights at the Art Students League. But cemetery sculpture saddened what was originally a buoyant if simple and quiet nature; Mr. Fitch wanted gaiety, not sorrow; wide, not long, faces; white, green, blue, yellow, pink, orange—anything but black, anything but crepe—he did not want to make any more monuments for tearful people dressed in mourning. This explained his sudden flight from Jericho—an unwalled village in middle Long Island. Determined to find gaiety, Mr. Fitch went to Coney Island, where for a while he was a barker, learned to do sleight-of-hand tricks, magic and juggling on the platform in front of side shows—but finally he saved enough to realise the dream that had brought him to Coney Island—he bought a concession as a sand artist. Old Boardwalk loafers, the real critics of sand artists, were a unit in declaring that Mr. Fitch's Statue of Liberty, his Niagara Falls, and his Chariot Race from Ben Hur were among the immortal accomplishments of beach modelling. Dimes and quarters in great heaps were tossed down to Fitch; nevertheless tragedy still barked at his heels. His talent was observed; people talked, and soon a job was offered him. It was a job he did not want but Mr. Fitch had two snaggle-toothed parents back home—so how could he, with a clear conscience, turn down an offer that would more than treble his income? In justice to his parents he sold his sand studio concession, he retreated from the Boardwalk, deserting his true metier and retiring from the open air and the sun to a stinking shack behind the façade of Surf Avenue—an atelier in which he now turned out life-like models for the Chamber of Horrors. How Mr. Fitch hated these abominable tasks. He who had run away to find fun and laughter and sunshine and self-expression was condemned to knit his brow over all the tortures the fiendish mind of the Chamber's manager could excavate from Sunday supplement literature or invent out of his own head. Mr. Fitch made wax and clay models of Australian bushmen roasting the tender babies of Baptist missionaries over a slow fire; of Landru killing one of his frail victims while he kissed her—of gangsters lying naked and dead on a morgue slab—of poor Starr Faithful washed up on the strand—these were the works of the middle period of Mr. Imro Acheson Fitch.

"But after a few years he felt he could not stand it any longer and so confided in his friend, Police Captain Christensen, that he felt it was time for him to run away again. Not right away, but later that same week, Captain Christensen got an idea. He had been assigned to the case of an unidentified skull—and he took it down, one lunch time, and showed it to Mr. Fitch. The sculptor glared at it over a dish of chicken livers. But Captain Christensen kept saying what a pity it was that no human being was bright enough to put the face back on the head. That started it. Like an enchanter of old, Mr. Fitch went to work. He restored the face of the murdered Enzo Valenzi to a semblance of life—enough for quick identification. After that, Mr. Fitch's whole life was changed. Members of the Homicide Squad, not only of New York, but throughout the country, are always putting Mr. Fitch to work over their latest find of bones. Often substantial rewards come to him. Now Mr. Fitch has his laboratory in an old backstreet house to which we are coming very shortly; he lives in its three stories, upstairs and down, all alone; he spends his spare time growing flowers in the backyard, playing the radio, winding the phonograph, reading magazines, doing everything to make himself forget this horrible third phase of his artistic career. Never a sociable creature, he tried to become one; he joined his precinct Democratic club, sought to mingle with the boys in the back room, meddled foolishly in local politics and last spring got bounced by the powers that be."

"That's why Dougherty did not want him on this job?"

"Perhaps!" remarked Colt cryptically. "Anyway, we can't let political squabbles stand in the way of results. We are good Democrats but we want these bones identified—so we want Mr. Imro Acheson Fitch. And here we are!"