"What are we to think of that? Only one thing. I have often wondered why the thing wasn't done before. In fact I have been waiting for it to occur. There is an invention that makes it almost possible to strike a man down with impunity in broad daylight in any place where there is sufficient noise to cover up a click, a slight 'Pouf!' and the whir of the bullet in the air.
"I refer to this little device of a Hartford inventor. I place it over the muzzle of the thirty-two-caliber revolver I have so far been using – so. Now, Mr. Jameson, if you will sit at that typewriter over there and write – anything so long as you keep the keys clicking. The inspector will start that imitation stock-ticker in the corner. Now we are ready. I cover the pistol with a cloth. I defy anyone in this room to tell me the exact moment when I discharged the pistol. I could have shot any of you, and an outsider not in the secret would never have thought that I was the culprit. To a certain extent I have reproduced the conditions under which this shooting occurred.
"At once on being sure of this feature of the case I dispatched a man to Hartford to see this inventor. The man obtained from him a complete list of all the dealers in New York to whom such devices had been sold. The man also traced every sale of those dealers. He did not actually obtain the weapon, but if he is working on schedule-time according to agreement he is at this moment armed with a search-warrant and is ransacking every possible place where the person suspected of this crime could have concealed his weapon. For, one of the persons intimately connected with this case purchased not long ago a silencer for a thirty-two-caliber revolver, and I presume that that person carried the gun and the silencer at the time of the murder of Kerr Parker."
Kennedy concluded in triumph, his voice high pitched, his eyes flashing. Yet to all outward appearance not a heartbeat was quickened. Someone in that room had an amazing store of self-possession. The fear flitted across my mind that even at the last Kennedy was baffled.
"I had anticipated some such anti-climax," he continued after a moment. "I am prepared for it."
He touched a bell, and the door to the next room opened. One of Kennedy's graduate students stepped in.
"You have the records, Whiting" he asked.
"Yes, Professor."
"I may say," said Kennedy, "that each of your chairs is wired under the arm in such a way as to betray on an appropriate indicator in the next room every sudden and undue emotion. Though it may be concealed from the eye, even of one like me who stands facing you, such emotion is nevertheless expressed by physical pressure on the arms of the chair. It is a test that is used frequently with students to demonstrate various points of psychology. You needn't raise your arms from the chairs, ladies and gentlemen. The tests are all over now. What did they show, Whiting?"
The student read what he had been noting in the next room. At the production of the coat during the demonstration of the markings of the bullet, Mrs. Parker had betrayed great emotion; Mr. Bruce had done likewise, and nothing more than ordinary emotion had been noted for the rest of us. Miss La Neige's automatic record during the tracing out of the sending of the note to Parker had been especially unfavorable to her; Mr. Bruce showed almost as much excitement; Mrs. Parker very little and Downey very little. It was all set forth in curves drawn by self-recording pens on regular ruled paper. The student had merely noted what took place in the lecture-room as corresponding to these curves.
"At the mention of the noiseless gun," said Kennedy, bending over the record, while the student pointed it out to him and we leaned forward to catch his words, "I find that the curves of Miss La Neige, Mrs. Parker, and Mr. Downey are only so far from normal as would be natural. All of them were witnessing a thing for the first time with only curiosity and no fear. The curve made by Mr. Bruce shows great agitation and-"
I heard a metallic click at my side and turned hastily. It was Inspector Barney O'Connor, who had stepped out of the shadow with a pair of handcuffs.
"James Bruce, you are under arrest," he said.
There flashed on my mind, and I think on the minds of some of the others, a picture of another electrically wired chair.
CASE OF THE HEADLESS MUMMIES
Sax Rohmer
Sax Rohmer (1883-1959), forever immortal for his creation of the arch-villain of mystery literature, Fu Manchu, was equally well-known for his many detective novels featuring sleuths like the resourceful Paul Harley (Bat-Wing1921), the ultra-French Gaston Max (The Yellow Claw 1915), and the dream detective, Moris Klaw. The Fu Manchu books, beginning with The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu (1913) are themselves full of mystery and detection, with super-sleuth, Commissioner Sir Denis Nayland Smith of Scotland Yard, tracking down and foiling the multitudinous plots of his fiendish foe. The Moris Klaw stories are a different kettle of fish entirely. Assisted by his beautiful, spiritually-developed daughter, Isis, Klaw visits the scene of a crime, absorbs the clues and atmosphere, then quite literally sleeps on the matter (a sound psychological technique, according to contemporary scientific research) – with the solution usually revealing itself in a dream. Moris Klaw appeared in only one volume of stories, The Dream Detective (1920), but it was immediately recognized as a classic and has been highly-prized by mystery fans ever since.
I.
The mysteries which my eccentric friend, Moris Klaw, was most successful in handling undoubtedly were those which had their origin in kinks of the human brain or in the mysterious history of some relic of ancient times.
I have seen his theory of the Cycle of Crime proven triumphantly time and time again; I have known him successfully to demonstrate how the history of a valuable gem or curio automatically repeats itself, subject, it would seem, to that obscure law of chance into which he had made particular inquiry. Then his peculiar power – assiduously cultivated by a course of obscure study – of recovering from the atmosphere, the ether, call it what you will, the thought-forms – the ideas thrown out by the scheming mind of the criminal he sought for – enabled him to succeed where any ordinary investigator must inevitably have failed.
"They destroy," he would say in his odd, rumbling voice, "the clumsy tools of their crime; they hide away the knife, the bludgeon; they sop up the blood, they throw it, the jemmy, the dead man, the suffocated poor infant, into the ditch, the pool – and they leave intact the odic negative, the photograph of their sin, the thought-thing in the air!" He would tap his high yellow brow significantly. "Here upon this sensitive plate I reproduce it, the hanging evidence! The headless child is buried in the garden, but the thought of the beheader is left to lie about. I pick it up. Poof! he swings – that child-slayer! Triumph. He is a dead man. What an art is the art of the odic photograph."
But I propose to relate here an instance of Moris Klaw's amazing knowledge in matters of archeology – of the history of relics. In his singular emporium at Wapping, where dwelt the white rats, the singing canary, the cursing parrot, and the other stock-in-trade of this supposed dealer in oddities, was furthermore a library probably unique. It contained obscure works on criminology; it contained catalogues of every relic known to European collectors with elaborate histories of the same. What else it contained I am unable to say, for the dazzling Isis Klaw was a jealous librarian.