Erle Stanley Gardner
The Case of the Musical Cow
Foreword
When the Massachusetts Police have a particularly tough murder case they call in Dr. Alan R Moritz.
Dr. Moritz considers himself primarily a pathologist. I look upon him as a scientific detective. Whatever he is, he has a razor-keen mind.
Where a less perceptive mind would hack away at an objective, Dr. Moritz, with his keen mental perception, cuts through to his objective with the precision of a micrometer knife slicing off a laboratory specimen.
Some men who have a string of degrees after their names have difficulty in applying what they know. They can teach but they can’t perform.
Dr. Moritz, however, is different. His mind is a highly trained scientific instrument of exact precision. His education consists of no mere array of facts gleaned from the pages of books, but is truly a background of encyclopedic knowledge. His mind is constantly, insistently probing in its search for truth.
As a pathologist, he might well be content merely to examine the vital organs and determine the cause of death, to study the bones of a skeleton and ascertain the age, height and sex. But he does far more than this. When he probes beneath a skeleton in search of clues in the grass, he functions as a scientific detector of crime; his investigations are remorselessly thorough.
He will quite likely come up with some dry, broken blade, which to the uninitiated seems nothing but a piece of withered grass. It is the detective insight of Dr. Moritz which enables him to know that this blade of grass was broken during a struggle which preceded the murder; that the botanical laboratory will be able to tell him this particular vegetation matures during the last week in July, and that it was broken about a week before maturity.
Then quite casually Dr. Moritz will suggest to the police that they start searching for a man about 55, who is susceptible to arthritis of the spine and of the right knee, and as a result walks stiffly and with a slight limp; a man who left his home about the 25th of July, and has not been seen since.
But what interests me more than anything else is the manner in which Dr. Moritz can hold a class spellbound while he lectures in a conversational tone of voice.
People learn and remember the things in which they are interested. They are prone to forget the things which fail to interest them.
During my career as a trial lawyer, I learned the necessity of holding the interest of a jury during an argument, and I am free to confess that I resorted to gesture, pose, change of pace, voice inflection, even the baiting of opposing counsel, in order to accomplish my purpose. Therefore, when I was privileged to enroll in one of Dr. Moritz’s classes on Homicide Investigation at the Harvard Medical School Seminars, I could not help but marvel at the manner in which this man had the undivided attention of the class without using a single bit of oratorical trickery. There were virtually no gestures, no raising of the voice, no motion of the body. Dr. Moritz sat calmly at the head of the table and talked. While from time to time he has an interesting trick of changing the pace of his voice, the thing which really holds the interest of his audience is the manner in which the man catalogs, classifies, and expresses his ideas. His thoughts are interesting because the man himself is interesting. He sees beneath the surface, and I think he is impatient of any theory which cannot be put to practical use.
I am aware that it is popular to belittle the police in a detective novel. The reader closes the book with a sigh, saying to himself, “Well, I wasn’t quite as smart as the detective, but at least I was a lot smarter than that dumb cop.”
And because this approach has come almost stereotyped in the field of mystery fiction he cumulative effect of hundreds of such stories has been manifestly unfair to the police. In this book I have, therefore — and perhaps by way of atonement — tried to portray the State Police as they actually are: an extremely efficient body of men who are a credit to their profession.
In getting an authentic background, I observed the State Police in half a dozen of the eastern states. I slept in their barracks, I attended their training classes, I went out on road patrol, and I tagged along while they were investigating crimes.
I hope that the reader will find the picture of the police in this book to his liking, and that, to some extent, it may atone for the almost universal portrayal of police as stupid, bungling incompetents.
Herewith I convey my respects to a marvelous body of men, and to Dr. Alan Moritz for the work he has done in helping train many of these men so that they are more familiar with the extent to which expert medical minds can assist them in their investigations.
And above all, I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness to Dr. Alan Moritz for an intellectual stimulation which has meant fully as much to me as the instruction I received while attending the Seminars at which he has lectured.
And so I dedicate this book to: Dr. Alan R Moritz
Dr. Alan R. Moritz
Chapter 1
Several large cities now boast that a person standing on this or that corner will eventually meet everyone he knows. Originally intended as an index of cosmopolitan background, this specious claim has degenerated into the advertising slogan of a dozen chambers of commerce.
But one thing is certain: any American tourist in Paris who sits at the sidewalk tables of the Café de la Paix sooner or later will meet every fellow passenger who has not as yet taken off on one of the beaten paths of tourist travel to Switzerland, England or Italy.
Rob Trenton, occupying a sidewalk table for the second consecutive afternoon, consuming Cinzano at intervals carefully spaced so that he could maintain perpetual occupancy of his table, realized, to his disgust, that the law of averages is a treacherous thing. Every one of the shipboard bores he had avoided on the trip across insisted on dropping into the vacant chair beside him, telling him at length what he should see in Paris. But the one person Rob wanted desperately to see failed to show up.
Linda Carroll had been shrouded in mystery from the start. On shipboard she had been friendly and cordial, yet he had never been able to get her to talk about herself or her background. She had casually mentioned the Hotel Lutetia in Paris, but when Rob called at the hotel he found that she was not registered, had not made any reservations, and, so far as could be ascertained, had not even attempted to get a room.
So Rob, having made a fruitless canvass of the different hotels where she might be stopping, had resorted to the expedient of waiting at the Café de la Paix, his eyes restlessly searching with such singleness of purpose that even the generous display of legs by the French girl cyclists failed to hold his attention for more than a fleeting glance.
And then, in the second afternoon, she suddenly appeared with Frank and Marion Essex, a couple they had met on shipboard, and said, “Oh, there you are! I’d heard you were spending most of your time warming a chair here. Would you like to make a fourth?”
Robert Trenton’s head began nodding involuntarily as he was getting to his feet. “A fourth at bridge, poker, or what?” he asked. “Won’t you sit down?”
He pulled out a chair for Linda, and the four sat around the table. Trenton caught the eye of a waiter and gestured.
Linda Carroll said, “A fourth for a tour in my car. I brought it over with me, you know. Frank and Marion are coming along, and I find that by installing one of those roof racks so we can carry all our baggage on top I’ve room for a fourth. We’re going all through Switzerland, then back to Paris, and will catch the boat at Marseilles. It’ll be a four weeks’ trip.”
“We’ll split expenses four ways,” Frank Essex added. “Only it’s understood that the three of us are to pay all the car expenses — gasoline, repairs, tires, and I’d like to make an allowance to Linda of so much a mile...”