The Expert Detective
Walker kept two dog-eared magazines in a pigeonhole of his desk,
with a story marked in each. He kept them, he said, to reduce
enthusiasm, as a doctor keeps a drug to reduce a fever. They were
handed, with the regularity of a habit, to two types of visitors who
annoyed him: those persons who volubly admired the professional
detective; and that other class who assured him that the inspired
amateur, as, for example, some local prosecutor in a criminal case,
could outwit the acutest counselors of darkness.
I include the two stories in their instructive order.
* * * * *
The State had completed its case.
The conviction of the prisoners seemed beyond question.
Incident by incident, the expert detective, Barkman, had coupled up
the circumstantial evidence until it seemed to link the prisoners
inevitably to the crime. He was a big man, with eyes blue like a
piece of crockery, a wide face and a cruel, irregular jaw. One felt
that no sentiment restrained him; that he would carry out any
undertaking to its desperate end.
He sat now in the witness chair. He was the last witness for the
State, and, now that the case was complete, he had been turned over
for cross-examination.
It was afternoon. A sheet of sunlight entering through open windows
lay on the court room. It was a court room of a little city in the
South; a city but newly awakened to industrial activities, and the
conduct of its administration of justice still adhered to older and
more deliberate forms.
The court room was crowded with people down to the very railing that
separated the attorneys’ tables from the crowd.
The judge, a tall man, with a long, mild, unhealthy face, sat on the
bench. To the right of him and a step below was the clerk. The jury
were in chairs along the wall to the left of the bench. And between
the bench and jurors sat the witness.
The prosecuting attorney was before his table, a little to the right
of the first step to the bench. There were law books on his table,
and two polka-dot handkerchiefs lying loosely on some papers. The
man was no longer concerned with these articles. He sat back from
the table, his fingers linked together, his face lifted as in some
reflection.
Farther to the right, in two chairs against the railing, were the
prisoners. One, a big old man with a splotched, dissipated face and
his hair cropped close to his skull. Folds of fat lay along the base
of his neck, partly concealed by a white silk handkerchief held in
place under his chin by a long old-fashioned garnet pin. His
companion was a little, thin, fox-faced man who moved nervously in
his chair.
The most striking figure in the court room was the attorney for the
prisoners.
He sat between them, a chair’s width in advance, before his table.
There was nothing whatever on this table except an ink pot, two pens
and a big blotting sheet. There was also a thick pad of foolscap
paper provided for the convenience of the attorney in taking any
note of the testimony, but there was no word written on it.
The lawyer was a huge bulk of a man. He sat relaxed in his chair.
His thick, black hair was brushed smoothly. It was of an oily,
glossy blackness. His big, thick features were putty-colored, as
though the man’s skin had no vitality. His eyes were very nearly
closed; his mouth sagged open, the thick lips holding a cigar that
was not lighted.
Every detail of his dress was immaculate and arranged with extreme
care.
The man was perhaps sixty, but, in the big relaxed body and heavy
face, age was indefinite. He now took the cigar out of his mouth and
laid it down on the table. He moved like one coming out of a dream.
He had not immediately taken charge of the witness when the
prosecutor had released him for examination. But now, finally, at
the judge’s words, “Proceed, Colonel,” he at last looked up.
“You are an expert detective, Mr. Barkman.”
The voice had a strange dwindling whine as though it came from some
cavernous depth in the man’s immense body.
The witness looked about with a vague smile. “Well, Colonel,” he
said, “I have had some experience.”
“You have had a great deal of experience. You were Chief of Police,
then you set up a detective agency. You have had a lot of experience
in criminal investigation. And you have usually been right.”
This was generous treatment when the reverse was indicated.
The detective was not conspicuous for the confidence of the
community in a profession too often subject to cloud. His employment
in the bank affairs had followed from his intimate association with
Halloway, an association, as all knew, resulting from the handling
of a questionable matter in the banker’s private life.
The bank did not require a retained detective.
Was this man’s sinecure gratitude in the banker, or a sort of
blackmail? Here was material with which a reflection on the witness
could have been assembled. But the attorney chose rather to admit
the man’s superior mental acumen in criminal affairs.
The witness moved in his chair. “Well, Colonel,” he said, “I try to
be right.”
“And you have nearly always been right,” continued the attorney. “In
the Deal case you maintained that the decedent had not been killed
by a bullet fired from a cellar grating at a hundred yards along the
street east of the man’s window, and it was afterward shown that the
trajectory of a bullet fired from that point would have crashed into
an electric light midway of the distance. And in the Littlewood
case, you said the evidences of a struggle were manufactured,
because the slant of wood fibers in the broken window sash showed
that the pressure had been exerted from within the room and not from
without.”
The voice ascended into a lighter drawl with a facetious note in it.
“You have had a lot of experience, and you have had a lot of work,
but you have not got rich at it. You would like to be rich, wouldn’t
you?”
The witness laughed. “I suppose everybody would like to be rich,
Colonel.”
The attorney smiled, a big, loose, vacuous sort of smile.
“Old Bill,” he said, “here behind me, and Lyin’ Louie would like to
be rich, but they are more likely to be hanged.” He laughed again.
“You are not afraid of being hanged, Mr. Barkman?”
Everybody laughed. The eccentricities of this attorney were one of
the attractions of the court room. They were good-naturedly
overlooked by the officers of the court, who had been associated
with the man for a lifetime in an old-fashioned civilization,
leisurely and considerate.
The attorney made a gesture as of one putting by a pleasantry of the
moment.
“This was a very ingeniously constructed crime?”
The witness was now in an excellent humor. “I’d say it was,
Colonel,” he replied. “It was slick enough to fool me.”
“Ah!” The attorney continued. “I had forgotten that. It was your
theory in the beginning that the president of the Trader’s Bank, Mr.
Halloway, had accomplished the robbery himself, and, afterward,
dropped dead in his own house. He lay on the floor, when the body
was discovered, by the side of the library table. It was thought
that in falling his head had struck the heavy carved foot of the
table, causing the injury to the skull that resulted in death. The
physicians first called in were inclined to agree with that theory.
The immense strain of a criminal adventure might have caused the
accident after the man had returned to his house. Emotional
cataclysms have been known to bring on attacks of acute indigestion
or the rupture of a defective heart.”
“Sure, Colonel,” the witness assented, “that’s what the thing looked
like; and I was fooled about it; I admit it. There was no evidence
of a struggle in the room. It was only after Doctor North said the
man had been killed by a blow, probably with the poker, that I got
onto the right track.”
The attorney made a drawling assent.
“Yes,” he said, “that was a bad find.”
His voice went again into a strange laugh.
“It was mighty near a hangin’ find for Old Bill and Lyin’ Louie! You
got on better then, Mr. Barkman. You found two polka-dot
handkerchiefs that had been stuffed down into a vase in the library,
and then you found Old Bill and Lyin’ Louie. Now you are goin’ to
hang ’em, I reckon.”
There was a suppressed giggle in the court room. It was not shared
by the prisoners.
The big, old man of the close-cropped skull plucked the attorney by
the sleeve and spoke in an audible whisper.
“Looka here, Colonel,” he said, “I thought you was defendin’ us.”
The attorney replied, a higher note in his deep drawl.
“Yes,” he said, “that’s what I am doing. But you’ve got no sense,
Bill! You never had any sense. If you had had any sense you would
not have been in the pen-i-ten-tia-ry house. There was no reason for
you going to the pen-i-ten-tia-ry. Old Lansky tried to make a
bank-cracker out of you—I was in the cell with him on the night he
was hanged—he said you had no sense. He said you would never make
anything but a fence, and a damned poor fence ... that’s what he
said, Bill.”
He interrupted the long narrative by getting ponderously on his
feet. He reached out and took the two handkerchiefs from the table
of the prosecuting attorney and laid them down on his own.
Then he addressed the witness.
“Now, Mr. Barkman,” he said, “I’d like you to tell us precisely what
you think happened on the night of the twenty-seventh. I want you to
reconstruct this crime for us. I want you to show us just how Old
Bill and Lyin’ Louie went about this thing.”
The witness moved as though rearranging himself in his chair. He
shifted his shoulder a little to one side and he looked around
toward the jury.
“Well, Colonel,” he said, “I think I can tell you just exactly what
happened.”
He was not expecting to be interrupted. But he was interrupted by a
sort of explosive assent.
The big attorney was looking at him, resting his huge body on both
hands, on the table. The witness was for a moment disconcerted, then
he went on:
“It was like this,” he said, “as I figure it out. Everybody knows
that Old Bill was a bank-cracker.”
Again there was a sort of booming interruption.
“He was never a good bank-cracker,” the lawyer exploded; “he was a
poor bank-cracker. He was such a damn poor bank-cracker that he got
into the pen-i-ten-tia-ry house!”
The witness laughed.
“Anyway, Colonel,” he said, “when Louie drifted in here, the two of
them fixed up this game and they carried it out slick.”
Again the lawyer introduced an interruption.
“Now, that is just what I am anxious to know, Mr. Barkman. I am
anxious to know precisely what they did and how they did it. I want
to know, in detail, everything that happened that night.”
“Well,” replied the witness, “this is the way I figure it out,
Colonel, and I think it’s straight dope: these men fixed up their
plan and Louie hung around until he found that the bank president
was alone in his house. That was the night his family went to the
Springs. It was in the newspapers. Everybody knew it. Then about
midnight they went up to Mr. Halloway’s house.”
“And how did they get into the house?” inquired the lawyer.
“That was no trouble,” said the witness. “They rang the bell. They
wanted Mr. Halloway to come down just as he did come down, with his
dressing gown on, like he was found dead in the library.”
The attorney had changed his posture. He was idly fingering the two
polka-dot handkerchiefs.
The witness went on:
“When Mr. Halloway opened the door, one of these crooks jammed a
pistol against him. They shut the door and marched him into the
library. And there they told him what they were going to do. They
held him up, right there in the library, and forced him to give them
the combination to the bank safe.”
“And how were they to know,” inquired the attorney, “that the
combination which the banker gave them was the correct one? Would
not his impulse be—would not any one’s impulse be—to give an
incorrect combination of figures?”
The witness laughed.
“Old Bill would know the trick,” he said. “They would ask the banker
to give the combination. They would write it down as he gave it;
then they would wait a little while and ask him again, and if he had
made it up, he would not be able to remember. That’s an old trick.
It was done in the North Hampton bank robbery, where they burned the
cashier’s feet for lying.”
The big attorney swung around toward his clients.
“Did you ever hear of that, Bill?”
“No,” said the prisoner, “I never did.”
Again the attorney laughed that vague, futile laugh.
“I believe you, Bill,” he said, “although nobody else does—I’m paid
to believe you.”
He turned back to the witness.
“What happened then?”
The big prisoner with the folded white handkerchief for a cravat was
mumbling incoherently.
The attorney paid no attention.
He looked at the witness. “Go on, Mr. Barkman,” he said. “What did
they do next?”
“Well,” said the witness, “when they had got the correct combination
written down, they put a gun against Mr. Halloway and made him go
over to the telephone. They made him call up the watchman at the
bank and tell him just what he has sworn here Mr. Halloway told him
that night: that his child was sick and the doctor wanted him to
come right home. Mr. Halloway had to say just what they told him to
say, because there they stood with a gun against him. They could
hear every word he said. The bank watchman asked him what he could
do about leaving the bank, and they made Mr. Halloway say to him
over the telephone, to go ahead out to his house at once and that he
himself would drive over in his car and stay in the bank until the
watchman got back; then they hung up the receiver.”
The lawyer put a query:
“How do you suppose they were standing while Mr. Halloway was
calling the bank?”
The witness got up.
“Mr. Halloway was of course facing the telephone and the man with
the gun was standing behind him with the muzzle jammed against his
back. That would be the way they would be standing.”
He was about to sit down, but the lawyer interrupted him:
“Just a minute.”
He turned to the prisoner sitting on his left.
“Louie,” he said, “I want you to go over to Mr. Barkman and show us
just how you were holding that pistol against the banker’s back
while he was talking over the telephone. We’ll say Mr. Barkman’s the
banker.”
Everybody in the court room was astonished at this slip of the
attorney.
It would appear that he, like every one else, was convinced of the
guilt of the prisoners, and that this conviction had thus
unconsciously appeared in his words.
The man seemed not to realize what he had said. But the prisoner saw
it at once.
“Colonel,” he objected, “how can I show him how it was done when I
didn’t do it?”
The attorney made an exasperated gesture.
“Oh, Louie,” he said, “you are such a liar that nobody believes
anything you say. Do what I tell you.”
Then he stooped over the prisoner.
“Just a moment, Judge,” he explained; “I have got to encourage my
client.”
He whispered something in the man’s ear.
The prisoner rose and went over to the witness; he took him by the
shoulders and turned him around toward the judge, so that his back
was to the jury. He moved him until he got him in precisely the
position which he wished and then he thrust his long forefinger in
the man’s back, with the other fingers doubled up.
“How’s that, Colonel?” he said.
“Well,” said the attorney, “what do you think about it, Louie? Do
you think it’s O.K.?”
“Sure,” said the prisoner.
Then he came back and sat down in the chair.
The whole court room was amused and astonished. It was as good as a
theater.
The attorney returned to his examination of the witness.
“Proceed, Mr. Barkman,” he said. “What did they do next? Did they
make Mr. Halloway go over to the bank? His car was seen there and he
was, himself, seen going in, by some persons passing at the end of
the street. He was alone. How did they make him go over there alone,
accomplish the robbery, and come back to his house?”
Again the witness smiled shrewdly.
“They didn’t make him do it,” he said. “Old Bill there, he’s about
the size of Mr. Halloway.”
He turned about to the jurors.
“Mr. Halloway was a man, as you all know, about as big as I am. Old
Bill put on the banker’s hat and his long light overcoat. The
runabout stood under the porte-cochère outside. He went out, got in
this car and drove it over to the bank. He had the banker’s key to
the door and he had the combination to the safe, so he went in,
opened the safe, picked out the money and brought it back with him.”
The attorney suddenly interrupted.
“Now, there,” he said, “right there. Why did they take only big
bills and not smaller currency? There were twenty thousand dollars
taken in big bills—five-hundred and one-thousand-dollar bills. Why
did they take that and not the smaller currency?”
“I can explain that,” said the witness. “You see they had to hide
this money after they got it—they had to look out for that; they
might have to move pretty quickly. They could not trust anybody to
keep it for them and they were afraid to conceal it, so they would
have to carry it around with them. That’s the reason they took big
bills.”
“Ah,” said the attorney, “I understand it now. It puzzled me a lot.
I could not see what they meant by taking big bills and leaving the
rest of the money; but it’s clear now.”
He swung suddenly around to the prisoners. “Louie,” he said, “you
never told me that.”
The creature grinned, his face broken into a queer extended smile.
But the big prisoner to the right showed evidence of no such
conciliatory mood.
He got up.
“Judge,” he said, “we’re bein’ double crossed. I paid the Colonel,
here, a hundred dollars in honest money to defend us, and just look
what he’s doin’ to us.”
Everybody laughed.
The lawyer turned about and spoke to the man as he might have spoken
to an impertinent child.
“Sit down, Bill,” he said. “Louie knows that I am making a proper
defense, don’t you, Louie?”
The little fox-faced man continued to grin. But he said nothing.
“Now, Bill,” the lawyer went on gently as to a child, “Louie’s got
some sense; not much. He learned how to open registered envelopes,
when he started in to be a mail clerk, by watching the post-office
inspectors rolling a pen handle under the flap; and he learned to
feel for money in the envelope before he opened it. The post-office
inspectors taught him that. Louie had sense enough to learn it. He
learned it well. He can tell the feel of a bill through the thickest
envelope that was ever mailed. But you are a fool, Bill; Lansky told
me that. Nobody but a fool, after he robbed the Norristown bank,
would have hidden the money in the loft of an abandoned schoolhouse,
with a trail of cinders leading from the window up to the trap in
the ceiling. Anybody but a fool would have wiped his feet off before
he climbed in the window.”
The whole court room was convulsed with laughter; even the judge
smiled.
Nothing could have been more of the essence of comedy than these
passages between the attorney and his client.
The big lawyer turned again to the witness. “Now, Mr. Barkman,” he
said, “what did they do when Bill got back with the money?”
“They finished the job,” replied the witness.
“Well,” said the attorney, “what did they do?”
“It is clear what they did,” replied the detective; “they killed Mr.
Halloway with the fire poker, then they hid the two handkerchiefs
they had over their faces when they came in, and then they got out
of town.”
The witness sat back in his chair as though he had finished with his
testimony.
The big attorney stood up. The whole aspect of the man, as by the
snap of a switch, had undergone a transformation. The huge bulk of
him was vital. His heavy slack face was firm.
“Mr. Barkman,” he said, “why did the men who killed Hiram Halloway
wear no masks on their faces?”
“They did wear masks on their faces—they’re on the table before
you.”
The lawyer did not look down at the articles before him. His voice
was now hard and accurate like the point of a steel tool.
“Take it as a hypothetical question then. Suppose they wore no
masks. What would that fact indicate?”
The attorney for the State rose.
“I object,” he said. “There must be evidence in the case tending to
support the assumed facts in a hypothetical question.”
“The evidence shall be presently indicated,” replied the lawyer.
The judge passed on the objection at once.
“The Colonel promises to point out the evidence later. He may go on;
the witness has been introduced as an expert.”
The lawyer again faced the man in the chair. He repeated his
question.
The witness seemed doubtful.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“You don’t know! Reflect, Mr. Barkman. Would it not mean that the
person or persons who accomplished this criminal act felt that they
were so well known to Hiram Halloway that no ordinary disguise could
conceal their identity?”
The witness did not immediately reply, and the lawyer went on:
“And is not this the reason why Hiram Halloway was killed?”
“Why he was killed!” repeated the man in the chair.
“Yes, precisely the reason. One must credit even a common thief with
some intelligence. No one uselessly adds the crime of murder to a
lesser crime. Masked assassins wholly unknown to the decedent would
have gagged and bound him. It would have answered their purpose as
well. But not the purpose of a known, unmasked assassin. Safety for
him lay only in the banker’s death.”
The attorney added:
“That death was so unavoidably necessary—to cover the identity of
the assassin—that the evidences of an accidental death were arranged
with elaborate care. Is it not true?”
The witness had been twisting his feet about; his face uncertain.
Now it took on a dogged look.
“It’s true that the thing was a slick job.”
The attorney took one step toward the witness. “Now, Mr. Barkman,”
he said, “can you tell me why assassins who had so carefully staged
this tragedy to appear accidental should leave behind them two
handkerchiefs, with eye-holes cut in them, thrust carelessly into a
vase on a table? They might be found, and that discovery would, at
once, negative the theory of accidental death.”
“They wanted to get rid of the masks.”
“But if they wore no masks? Is it not inconceivable that they would
have placed them there to jeopardize all that they had so carefully
planned?”
The witness was watching the attorney, the dogged look deepening in
his face.
“If they didn’t wear masks, of course they wouldn’t have put them
there—it would have been a fool thing.”
The attorney moved out closer to the witness. The point, as one
might say, of his voice seemed to sharpen.
“Now, Mr. Barkman, if these masks were not put into the vase on the
table by the assassins, then they were put there by somebody else;
and if they were not put there on the night of the robbery, they
were put there later; and if they were put there by some one later,
it was one who had access to the house later; and if they were put
there by one having access to the house after it was established the
banker did not die from a natural cause, then they were put there to
deceive.”
He paused, and his final sentence descended like a hammer:
“And the deception in presenting false evidence of _two_ men would
consist in the fact that but _one_ man had, in fact, accomplished
the crime.”
The prosecuting attorney was on his feet.
“Your honor,” he said, “this is all built up on the theory that the
assassins did not wear masks. There is no evidence to support such a
theory. The handkerchiefs that the assassins took off of their faces
and hid in the vase are here in the case for everybody to see.”
The attorney for the prisoners put out his hand and took up the two
polka-dot handkerchiefs which were lying on the table before him.
“It is the cleverest criminal,” he said, “who always makes the most
striking blunder. The accomplished assassin of Lord William Russell
carried away the knife with which his victim was supposed to have
cut his own throat. When the human intelligence, set on murder,
undertakes to falsify the order of events, the absurdity of its
error increases with its cunning.”
He shook the two handkerchiefs out and stretched them in his
fingers.
“They are here for everybody to see,” he echoed, “and if everybody
will look, he will see that these two handkerchiefs were never tied
around the faces of assassins; he will see—everybody—that, while
these handkerchiefs have eye-holes cut in them, the corners of them
are as smooth and uncreased as though they had been ironed; if they
had been tied around the faces of assassins, they would show the
strain and the fold of the knot!”
He turned now toward the judge.
“Your Honor,” he said, “the elaborate ingenuity of this whole
criminal plan is utterly beyond the feeble intelligence of these
prisoners. It is the work of some competent person; some person well
known to the decedent; some person who knew a disguise to be
useless; some one who had access to the house and was able to set up
the evidence of a second theory after the first had failed—such an
one was the assassin of Hiram Halloway.”
There was absolute silence in the court room. The witness sat
gripping the arms of his chair, his face distended as with some
physical pressure.
The big attorney, at the end of his significant pause, added a final
sentence:
“And now, that we have found the money, we can name the man!”
The prosecuting attorney, utterly astonished, put the question, the
answer to which the whole court room awaited:
“Found the money! Where?”
The big lawyer sat down in his chair; his huge body relaxed; his
face assumed its vague placidity and his voice descended into its
old, deep-seated, dwindling whine:
“It’s sewed up in the lining of Mr. Barkman’s coat. Lyin’ Louie felt
it when he posed him for the jury.”