Читать книгу Murder of a Startled Lady - Charles Fulton Oursler - Страница 16

It was hard to keep my mind on the routine work that morning. By ten o'clock the Commissioner and I were at our desks with plenty to do—so busy a programme, in fact, that Colt asked me to call off until the next day the talk he meant to have with Professor Gilman.

"But tell him to keep himself within call," he cautioned.

He was in a peppery mood, at first; something unusual for him. No doubt he had read the morning stories about the return of Florence Dunbar; she was registered at the Plaza, but had denied herself to all reporters. I thanked God the tales of cruelty and wife beating the papers carried that morning did not come from her. They were bad enough, as they were; undoubtedly they had kept Colt awake all night; between his old love and his new mystery, Thatcher Colt was a tormented soul. I felt sure, a dozen times that Saturday morning, he was on the point of telephoning her at the Plaza. But he resisted those first temptations by flinging himself into his daily work.

There was much to be done that Saturday—a conference with harbour police officers on new navigation laws; a reorganisation of the safe and loft squad; threat of a new gang war in Brooklyn; a pow-wow on revised traffic regulations. At noon Colt was to give a ju-jitsu demonstration at the Police Academy; later he was to lunch with a maiden aunt of his from Beacon Hill, a gay old harridan who belonged to the Daughters of the American Revolution but in secret smoked Uncle Willie cigars. The string of appointments already made for the afternoon Colt also wanted shifted to the morning; we must do a full day's work in half the time for the Chief was resolved to keep that appointment with Mr. Fitch; to get back to the weird atelier of the crime sculptor and watch his modelling from death to life.

Fortunately for Colt's plans, the Headquarters reporters had not learned as yet about the finding of the box or its contents. We still had learned very little; there was no report from the men set to trace the scarf, the dress, or the box. But a dressmaker had matched the goods of the dress, and had made up something like a replica; the duplicate frock had been sent, post-haste, to Mr. Fitch. We had not even received the report on the past records of the Reverend Washington Irving Lynn and his wife. It looked to me as if we were making slow progress, but I changed my mind before the afternoon was over.

To begin with, we did get back to the mansion of Mr. Fitch on time. Cherry Hill on this Saturday afternoon was a cold, bright arena of charging trucks and snorting motors; noise, dust and bad smells. It was a wonder to me that Mr. Fitch ever heard his own doorbell, but he did and received us with that same air of thwarted politeness; nothing about him had changed in those intervening five hours; he was still in his bathrobe and fur moccasins, his thin black hair was no less and no more oil-soaked and greasy; his pallor, his haunted eyes, his limping gait, his distaste for us and the work we made him do, just as before.

"How far have you got along?" asked Colt, as we followed Mr. Fitch down the corridor.

"Not very far, I'm afraid. I found two other very small traces of hair—not much, but enough to be samples for a wig. I had to guess how much hair she had—and how she combed it, too, but sometimes I am fortunate in such matters," he finished drearily.

"How long will the whole job take?"

Mr. Fitch turned at the doorway and in the shadows spread out eloquent and quite clean hands.

"I don't know that. You must realise how much work there is to a thing like this. First I had to sterilise the skull in a solution of formaldehyde. Then I had to make a neck for her. I used a curtain pole for that——"

"A curtain pole? For a neck?" I repeated involuntarily.

"Yes. You'll see. I planed the curtain pole down to fit the foramen magnum——"

"What's that?" I interjected.

"It's your opening, sir, through which your spinal column joins your skull. Come right in and see."

I nodded, coughed, and for a little while I asked no more questions.

We entered the living room; I removed my coat and sat down on the nearest soapbox and glanced at our skull, grimly smiling from its latest perch on the top of a stack of magazines. Colt sat in the red felt chair while Mr. Fitch stood before the chimney piece and held up a curtain pole of imitation quartered golden oak; he managed it with the bravura air of a drum major.

"This curtain pole is to be our lady's support—I shall slip the skull over the curtain pole, with some of the pole projecting up inside. The part of the pole below the head will go into that old soapbox on which Mr. Abbot is sitting—I have used it for many such cases."

I stood up and nodded affably.

"Then comes the real work," rattled on Mr. Fitch, lifting the skull from the heap of magazines. "If you will feel behind your ears, Mr. Colt—and now I speak as an anatomist—you will touch some long prominences which anatomists call the mastoid processes. Here they are on the young lady's head. Here. Now right in there—and there—I am going to insert two radio tubes."

His pale face beamed at our astonishment.

"Yes, radio tubes!" he chirped. "Wedged against the curtain pole inside, these radio tubes help form a kind of T-stand on which the skull will hang in place—ready for the artist."

Mr. Fitch had been demonstrating as he talked. Now he had the pole in my soapbox. On the pole rested the skull, the lifeless radio tubes in the lifeless head, so that it swung easily, with a kind of gentle mocking at all three of us, daring us to repeat what its first Maker had done—to make it look human, even beautiful.

Meanwhile, Mr. Fitch turned his back on the swinging head and dipped his fingers in a wooden salad bowl.

"Vaseline!" he explained. "You need it when you work with clay putty like this——"

He shoved forward a tin pan full of the gray mess.

"Does she begin to look like anything in your own mind?" asked Thatcher Colt. "Did you dream over her—and get an image to start with?"

Mr. Fitch shook his head despondently.

"I'm doing very well, I suppose," was the melancholy reply. "It's going to be an interesting job, too. But I haven't had any sleep. Ever since you left here I have been working on that mental image and it's been awful slow going."

His hands came up from the tin pan, filled with the raw material of his modelling and he began to slop a little of the putty on the forehead and cheeks of the death's-head.

"You see, Mr. Colt, I have to spread it very sparingly—and then I smooth the thin coat with my fingertips to the very contour of the bone. The trick is that I have to bring out the curves. Now there's the problem—the curves, the indentations, the tournure. And very slowly, Mr. Colt, I add more and more, stopping every now and then—to—well, watch me now—— You have in this sort of work to feel the flesh and muscles of your own face, like this, see? That's all the guide you've got. And that's all you need. Isn't it an incredible and lamentable way for an artist to have to make a living, Mr. Colt?"

Yet Mr. Imro Acheson Fitch loved his thaumaturgy. Pride was in every tremor of his voice.

"Is she beginning to look like anything?" Colt repeated.

"Well, it depends on what you call anything," Mr. Fitch answered, standing back. "See for yourself. I don't think a Hollywood director would pick her right now for the front row, but——"

"But already she looks human?"

"Exactly! The nose is what is bothering me. You see, Mr. Colt, noses are divided, according to the way I divide them anyways, into four different classes. There's the straight nose, the convex nose, the concave nose, and then there's the hook nose—the latter especially prevalent in New York.

"Now, speaking as an anatomist, the line of your nose bone as it shoots out from your forehead is what decides the kind of nose it's going to be. Mr. Colt, just try it for yourself. Put your fingers on your nose. Feel along the cartilage as it joins the bone and you will see how you can gauge the direction it is taking—on Mr. Colt's nose he would feel a straight direction, but you, Mr. Abbot, would feel—a sort of gradual slanting down and in because you have a convex nose—a sort of dish effect.

"To an expert like me that tells even more. It tells what the end of the nose will be like and even the tip. Take this young thing's nose, for instance. It has a tiny but thick end like a little knob."

Mr. Fitch's voice simpered a little; all this time he was working over the skull with hands of great tactile sensitiveness, his manner that of a hierophant intent upon heavenly mysteries.

"Yes," Colt said sceptically. "I see all that. But how will you know how long to make the nose?"

"Ah, Mr. Colt, that is a very special secret—but I don't mind telling you. Speaking as an anatomist, the length of the nose from the bridge to the base is fixed by the size of the roots of the teeth."

I whistled. Here I sat in a house near Brooklyn Bridge, in the midst of more than seven million people huddled on three sides of me, seven million human beings and not a wagonload of them knew that such things as these could be done. Most of the seven million still believed that life was commonplace and held no more mysteries, no more miracles, and yet Mr. Fitch had more to tell us—much more to show us:

"Now watch. I am going to discover something else about this lady. I stick a pencil against the eye socket slantwise right down to the cheek bone. Know why I did that? I did it to tell whether her eyes were bulging or deep-set—very important to make her look real. You try that on yourself. You put a pencil against the eye socket slantwise down to the cheekbone and you'll see that there's barely enough room for the eyelashes to brush against it. The pupils of the eyes are located by resting a pencil against the bridge of the nose. Placed there, it covers both pupils. Hold a pencil from the cheekbone down to the jawbone; allowing a little more fullness and you have the curves of the face. Eyebrows begin on the inside corner of the eye socket. Run your fingers along the upper edge of the socket until they turn down at the end. I'm ready now to put on her eyebrows. But her lips—they are going to give me a little trouble. I shall have to work that out. You see, if the upper teeth protrude there will be a full upper lip. If the bottom teeth recede, the lower lip will recede considerably. Prominent teeth below mean a full lower lip. Anyhow——"

But we were destined never to hear the end of that remark. An old-fashioned wall telephone in the corridor outside set up a bronchial ringing. Headquarters calling Thatcher Colt.

The Commissioner must leave at once. As predicted, the war of gangdom had blazed up again. These were the days when criminals who had lost their liquor rackets were turning to policy and clearing-house numbers, fake lottery tickets and the crooked new shindig called bagatelle. To seize the mastery of these million dollar gyps, three gangs were at grips; only an hour before they had greased and loaded their machine guns; in Chinatown's Pell Street, the Mott Haven railroad yards in the Bronx, and in Flatbush bullets sped and gangsters fell. In Brownsville, of Brooklyn—Brownsville, largest of all Jewish cities in the world—a thug's woman lay on the steps of a synagogue, bleeding there from a slit throat. Suddenly all over town criminals fought among themselves as if the police did not exist. So we rushed away from Mr. Fitch and his half-human image.

For the rest of that afternoon, Colt, his dark eyes heated with rage, worked like a general in the field. More, as New York has not forgotten, he was wounded in the shoulder when we were fighting our way across a roof and finally cornered Dutch Durmont, leader of the Grand Concourse mob. It was the best marksman in Centre Street who shot him—Thatcher Colt deputised as a peace officer by his own subordinates; he put a bullet under Dutch Durmont's heart and the gangster who had killed four policemen toppled off the roof, seven stories to the back yard of a Fifty-fifth Street gin-mill. That was a rough day in New York's history. Colt's was a slight but nasty wound; throughout the rest of the foundling bones investigation he was to wear his arm in a sling.

Not until ten o'clock at night did we find ourselves again in that silent, over-lighted back street called Cherry Hill. Again Mr. Fitch peered at us, door on guard; we entered his hallway, with its odour of garlic and beer; we came to that amusement room of his; we stopped on its threshold, all of a sudden, startled and enlivened at the object we saw in the centre of the room.

Mr. Fitch's work was finished. The skull was no longer a skull but a face. Near it was a lamp illuminating the girlish countenance that now looked us straight in the eye. More alive than dead she seemed. A girl with a kind of high-forehead, oval-delicate prettiness. The blue eyes seemed startled, but the red lips were parted in what looked like a good-natured smile. She was wearing a dress that was also taken from the life—the duplicate of the frock found in the box. In a green dress she stood there, a wax-works image, but with something real to her that no wax-works image ever had; her bones were genuine. The sight of that half-alive image gave me a curious feeling. Perhaps it was because I was tired. Yet I did not think so. I think rather it was because this was the nearest thing to a resurrection I had ever seen. Here what was once a skeleton had now the appearance of young and buoyant vitality. The skull, under the patient hands of Mr. Fitch, had seemed for a while to hover between life and death—but now it had a running substitute for flesh and colour and even a kind of beauty. Yes—in that false image, that waxen face and wig and the glass eyes and pearl ear-rings—there was a rich and disturbing illusion of life; it was not the fake perfection of a shop window dummy that we saw, but health, youth, character, personality—a certain sauciness in the lips and in the perturbed gleam that seemed to come from under the long dark lashes. Colt looked at that palingenesis of girlhood, whistled softly to himself and said:

"She was beautiful. And she looks so excited. I wonder why?"

I could have believed it, if the head had spoken an answer.

"Mr. Fitch," went on Thatcher Colt, "in the annals of crime this job of yours will go down as a masterpiece. Here she is—much, I feel certain, as she was."

Fitch rubbed his hands, crackled his knuckles and giggled.

"Thanks, thanks, Mr. Commissioner. Tell Mr. Dougherty that, will you—and his pal, Mr. O'Toole, too. I'd like the two of them to know... I beg your pardon, Mr. Colt——"

The Commissioner's raised hand had silenced the crime sculptor. Colt was bending over, studying the waxen face intently; his own face, now turned to Mr. Fitch, was puzzled.

"Mr. Fitch, would you mind telling me what this is?" He pointed to a round, dark spot to the right of one corner of the mouth.

Mr. Fitch leaned forward and considered his own handiwork thoughtfully.

"That? Oh—that mark! You mean the little spot here on the cheek?"

"Exactly. What is that? A blemish?"

"Oh, no. That is a crack in the material—a bubble. I see what you mean now—it's like a little wart."

"It is. It startled me, too."

"May I ask why, Mr. Colt?"

"Because it gave the most vivid, unexpected effect of reality to the whole face. It was the sort of thing you could not possibly have deduced—as an anatomist."

"Of course not."

"You're sure it was just a bubble?"

"Yes, I am."

"Did you ever leave this image in this room alone?"

"Never."

"Think now—sure?"

"Well, then, let me say for not more than ten minutes at a time."

"I see."

Colt gave the painted wax face a distrusting glance.

"Oh, I suppose it was nothing," he muttered half to himself, while Mr. Fitch repaired the cheek of the figure and rubbed the blemish quite away. "And yet—the thing that troubles me is that the face, the very blemish, even, seemed familiar.... Well, Tony—there's our job cut out for us. Who was she? We've got to find that out—and right away. Who was the last person to see her alive? And when? Vital questions—and we've got to get the answers quickly."

Mr. Fitch edged forward, wiping his hands on a towel.

"I wish you could find it in your heart to let me help you, Mr. Colt," he ventured, with a glance of simple daring at the Commissioner.

"How do you think you could help?"

"I don't know—lots of ways. I'm not as dumb as these politicians think. I would like to show them what I can do. I've always thought I would make a good detective—as an assistant to a man like yourself."

"You've already helped," said Colt heartily, as he reached for his overcoat.

"And I can help again. You're going to need it, too."

"What makes you say that?"

"You sat here last night and told me how all this happened—spirit mediums, messages——"

"Well?"

"Well, I know sleight-of-hand and magic, and that's what these mediums use. That's what you want to watch out for."

Colt smiled and they shook hands.

"First-rate suggestion, Mr. Fitch. When I get back to the ghostly side of this investigation, I shall certainly call on you. Good-night!"

"But, Mr. Colt——"

"Yes?"

"I have a suggestion to make right now."

"Yes?"

"Why not have a photograph made of my little job here—give it to all the newspapers—and then wait for an identification——"

Colt, who had been bent over again, examining carefully the slant of the girl's cheek, looked up quickly and shook his head.

"No!" he said decidedly. "I must caution you once more, Mr. Fitch—don't tell anybody about this girl—yet. I have most excellent reasons."

Whatever his excellent reasons were, Colt kept them to himself. Mr. Fitch nodded blankly. Perhaps he had counted on seeing his name in the papers as one of his solitary amusements.

"Whatever you say, Mr. Commissioner."

"Now I am taking this work of art of yours over to Police Headquarters. Cover it over with a sheet, first, will you? Thanks. Good-morning, Mr. Fitch—send your bill to Mr. Abbot. And I will send for you when I need you."

In spite of his bandaged shoulder, and arm in a sling, Colt insisted on helping me carry the restored dead girl down to the car. Here we had our difficulties. The figure was practically life size and could be introduced into the car only with the greatest caution; we had to put her in the rear seat and lay her, face up, against the upholstered back of the front seat. With his free hand Colt steadied her, and cautioned Neil to drive very slowly to Headquarters. Once we had her settled on the seat, I leaned back and closed my eyes. Crazy notions, mad questions, crawled in my head.

It was now midnight and colder, if possible, than the night before. What would Colt do next? Would they some day bury the dead girl in a grave in the condition to which Mr. Fitch had transformed her—or strip away the wax and just bury the bones? As I thought of these matters, I nodded and fell into a doze. For a jouncing moment I dreamed of Mr. Fitch—only now he was trying to cover a tarantula with clay putty—a large, venomous hairy spider that was weaving its own web of plasteline and pigments, and in the centre of the web was a human heart that would not be made to beat.

A hand touched my arm, and Thatcher Colt was speaking to me:

"Tony, wake up. We can't sleep to-night. Telephone Betty you won't be home. We've got work to do."