THE ARROW POISON
Far into the night Craig was engaged in some very delicate and minute
microscopic work in the laboratory.
We were about to leave when there was a gentle tap on the door. Kennedy
opened it and admitted a young man, the operative of the detective
agency who had been shadowing Bernardo. His report was very brief, but,
to me at least, significant. Bernardo, on his return to the museum, had
evidently read the letter, which had agitated him very much, for a few
moments later he hurriedly left and went downtown to the Prince Henry
Hotel. The operative had casually edged up to the desk and overheard
whom he asked for. It was Señora Herreria. Once again, later in the
evening, he had asked for her, but she was still out.
It was quite early the next morning, when Kennedy had resumed his
careful microscopic work, that the telephone bell rang, and he answered
it mechanically. But a moment later a look of intense surprise crossed
his face.
“It was from Doctor Leslie,” he announced, hanging up the receiver
quickly. “He has a most peculiar case which he wants me to see—a
woman.”
Kennedy called a cab, and, at a furious pace, we dashed across the city
and down to the Metropolitan Hospital, where Doctor Leslie was waiting.
He met us eagerly and conducted us to a little room where, lying
motionless on a bed, was a woman.
She was a striking-looking woman, dark of hair and skin, and in life
she must have been sensuously attractive. But now her face was drawn
and contorted—with the same ghastly look that had been on the face of
Northrop.
“She died in a cab,” explained Doctor Leslie, “before they could get
her to the hospital. At first they suspected the cab driver. But he
seems to have proved his innocence. He picked her up last night on
Fifth Avenue, reeling—thought she was intoxicated. And, in fact, he
seems to have been right. Our tests have shown a great deal of alcohol
present, but nothing like enough to have had such a serious effect.”
“She told nothing of herself?” asked Kennedy.
“No; she was pretty far gone when the cabby answered her signal. All he
could get out of her was a word that sounded like ‘Curio-curio.’ He
says she seemed to complain of something about her mouth and head. Her
face was drawn and shrunken; her hands were cold and clammy, and then
convulsions came on. He called an ambulance, but she was past saving
when it arrived. The numbness seemed to have extended over all her
body; swallowing was impossible; there was entire loss of her voice as
well as sight, and death took place by syncope.”
“Have you any clue to the cause of her death?” asked Craig.
“Well, it might have been some trouble with her heart, I suppose,”
remarked Doctor Leslie tentatively.
“Oh, she looks strong that way. No, hardly anything organic.”
“Well, then I thought she looked like a Mexican,” went on Doctor
Leslie. “It might be some new tropical disease. I confess I don’t know.
The fact is,” he added, lowering his voice, “I had my own theory about
it until a few moments ago. That was why I called you.”
“What do you mean?” asked Craig, evidently bent on testing his own
theory by the other’s ignorance.
Doctor Leslie made no answer immediately, but raised the sheet which
covered her body and disclosed, in the fleshy part of the upper arm, a
curious little red swollen mark with a couple of drops of darkened
blood.
“I thought at first,” he added, “that we had at last a genuine
‘poisoned needle’ case. You see, that looked like it. But I have made
all the tests for curare and strychnin without results.”
At the mere suggestion, a procession of hypodermic-needle and
white-slavery stories flashed before me.
“But,” objected Kennedy, “clearly this was not a case of kidnaping. It
is a case of murder. Have you tested for the ordinary poisons?”
Doctor Leslie shook his head. “There was no poison,” he said,
“absolutely none that any of our tests could discover.”
Kennedy bent over and squeezed out a few drops of liquid from the wound
on a microscope slide, and covered them.
“You have not identified her yet,” he added, looking up. “I think you
will find, Leslie, that there is a Señora Herreria registered at the
Prince Henry who is missing, and that this woman will agree with the
description of her. Anyhow, I wish you would look it up and let me
know.”
Half an hour later, Kennedy was preparing to continue his studies with
the microscope when Doctor Bernardo entered. He seemed most solicitous
to know what progress was being made on the case, and, although Kennedy
did not tell much, still he did not discourage conversation on the
subject.
When we came in the night before, Craig had unwrapped and tossed down
the Japanese sword and the Ainu bow and arrow on a table, and it was
not long before they attracted Bernardo’s attention.
“I see you are a collector yourself,” he ventured, picking them up.
“Yes,” answered Craig, offhand; “I picked them up yesterday at Sato’s.
You know the place?”
“Oh, yes, I know Sato,” answered the curator, seemingly without the
slightest hesitation. “He has been in Mexico—is quite a student.”
“And the other man, Otaka?”
“Other man—Otaka? You mean his wife?”
I saw Kennedy check a motion of surprise and came to the rescue with
the natural question: “His wife—with a beard and mustache?”
It was Bernardo’s turn to be surprised. He looked at me a moment, then
saw that I meant it, and suddenly his face lighted up.
“Oh,” he exclaimed, “that must have been on account of the immigration
laws or something of the sort. Otaka is his wife. The Ainus are much
sought after by the Japanese as wives. The women, you know, have a
custom of tattooing mustaches on themselves. It is hideous, but they
think it is beautiful.”
“I know,” I pursued, watching Kennedy’s interest in our conversation,
“but this was not tattooed.”
“Well, then, it must have been false,” insisted Bernardo.
The curator chatted a few moments, during which I expected Kennedy to
lead the conversation around to Señora Herreria. But he did not,
evidently fearing to show his hand.
“What did you make of it?” I asked, when he had gone. “Is he trying to
hide something?”
“I think he has simplified the case,” remarked Craig, leaning back, his
hands behind his head, gazing up at the ceiling. “Hello, here’s Leslie!
What did you find, Doctor?” The coroner had entered with a look of awe
on his face, as if Kennedy had directed him by some sort of necromancy.
“It was Señora Herreria!” he exclaimed. “She has been missing from the
hotel ever since late yesterday afternoon. What do you think of it?”
“I think,” replied Kennedy, speaking slowly and deliberately, “that it
is very much like the Northrop case. You haven’t taken that up yet?”
“Only superficially. What do you make of it?” asked the coroner.
“I had an idea that it might be aconitin poisoning,” he said.
Leslie glanced at him keenly for a moment. “Then you’ll never prove
anything in the laboratory,” he said.
“There are more ways of catching a criminal, Leslie,” put in Craig,
“than are set down in the medico-legal text-books. I shall depend on
you and Jameson to gather together a rather cosmopolitan crowd here
to-night.”
He said it with a quiet confidence which I could not gainsay, although
I did not understand. However, mostly with the official aid of Doctor
Leslie, I followed out his instructions, and it was indeed a strange
party that assembled that night. There were Doctor Bernardo; Sato, the
curio dealer; Otaka, the Ainu, and ourselves. Mrs. Northrop, of course,
could not come.
“Mexico,” began Craig, after he had said a few words explaining why he
had brought us together, “is full of historical treasure. To all
intents and purposes, the government says, ‘Come and dig.’ But when
there are finds, then the government swoops down on them for its own
national museum. The finder scarcely gets a chance to export them.
However, now seemed to be the time to Professor Northrop to smuggle his
finds out of the country.
“But evidently it could not be done without exciting all kinds of
rumors and suspicions. Stories seem to have spread far and fast about
what he had discovered. He realized the unsettled condition of the
country—perhaps wanted to confirm his reading of a certain inscription
by consultation with one scholar whom he thought he could trust. At any
rate, he came home.”
Kennedy paused, making use of the silence for emphasis. “You have all
read of the wealth that Cortez found in Mexico. Where are the gold and
silver of the _conquistadores?_ Gone to the melting pot, centuries ago.
But is there none left? The Indians believe so. There are persons who
would stop at nothing—even at murder of American professors, murder of
their own comrades, to get at the secret.”
He laid his hand almost lovingly on his powerful little microscope as
he resumed on another line of evidence.
“And while we are on the subject of murders, two very similar deaths
have occurred,” he went on. “It is of no use to try to gloss them over.
Frankly, I suspected that they might have been caused by aconite
poisoning. But, in the case of such poisoning, not only is the lethal
dose very small but our chemical methods of detection are _nil_. The
dose of the active principle, aconitin nitrate, is about one
six-hundredth of a grain. There are no color tests, no reactions, as in
the case of the other organic poisons.”
I wondered what he was driving at. Was there, indeed, no test? Had the
murderer used the safest of poisons—one that left no clue? I looked
covertly at Sato’s face. It was impassive. Doctor Bernardo was visibly
uneasy as Kennedy proceeded. Cool enough up to the time of the mention
of the treasure, I fancied, now, that he was growing more and more
nervous.
Craig laid down on the table the reed stick with the little darkened
cylinder on the end.
“That,” he said, “is a little article which I picked up beneath
Northrop’s window yesterday. It is a piece of _anno-noki_, or _bushi_.”
I fancied I saw just a glint of satisfaction in Otaka’s eyes.
“Like many barbarians,” continued Craig, “the Ainus from time
immemorial have prepared virulent poisons with which they charged their
weapons of the chase and warfare. The formulas for the preparations, as
in the case of other arrow poisons of other tribes, are known only to
certain members, and the secret is passed down from generation to
generation as an heirloom, as it were. But in this case it is no longer
a secret. It has now been proved that the active principle of this
poison is aconite.”
“If that is the case,” broke in Doctor Leslie, “it is hopeless to
connect anyone directly in that way with these murders. There is no
test for aconitin.”
I thought Sato’s face was more composed and impassive than ever. Doctor
Bernardo, however, was plainly excited.
“What—no test—_none?_” asked Kennedy, leaning forward eagerly. Then, as
if he could restrain the answer to his own question no longer, he shot
out: “How about the new starch test just discovered by Professor
Reichert, of the University of Pennsylvania? Doubtless you never
dreamed that starch may be a means of detecting the nature of a poison
in obscure cases in criminology, especially in cases where the quantity
of poison necessary to cause death is so minute that no trace of it can
be found in the blood.
“The starch method is a new and extremely inviting subject to me. The
peculiarities of the starch of any plant are quite as distinctive of
the plant as are those of the hemoglobin crystals in the blood of an
animal. I have analyzed the evidence of my microscope in this case
thoroughly. When the arrow poison is introduced subcutaneously—say, by
a person shooting a poisoned dart, which he afterward removes in order
to destroy the evidence—the lethal constituents are rapidly absorbed.
“But the starch remains in the wound. It can be recovered and studied
microscopically and can be definitely recognized. Doctor Reichert has
published a study of twelve hundred such starches from all sorts of
plants. In this case, it not only proves to be aconitin but the starch
granules themselves can be recognized. They came from this piece of
arrow poison.”
Every eye was fixed on him now.
“Besides,” he rapped out, “in the soft soil beneath the window of
Professor Northrop’s room, I found footprints. I have only to compare
the impressions I took there and those of the people in this room, to
prove that, while the real murderer stood guard below the window, he
sent some one more nimble up the rain pipe to shoot the poisoned dart
at Professor Northrop, and, later, to let down a rope by which he, the
instigator, could gain the room, remove the dart, and obtain the key to
the treasure he sought.”
Kennedy was looking straight at Professor Bernardo.
“A friend of mine in Mexico has written me about an inscription,” he
burst out. “I received the letter only to-day. As nearly as I can
gather, there was an impression that some of Northrop’s stuff would be
valuable in proving the alleged kinship between Mexico and Japan,
perhaps to arouse hatred of the United States.”
“Yes—that is all very well,” insisted Kennedy. “But how about the
treasure?”
“Treasure?” repeated Bernardo, looking from one of us to another.
“Yes,” pursued Craig relentlessly, “the treasure. You are an expert in
reading the hieroglyphics. By your own statement, you and Northrop had
been going over the stuff he had sent up. You know it.”
Bernardo gave a quick glance from Kennedy to me. Evidently he saw that
the secret was out.
“Yes,” he said huskily, in a low tone, “Northrop and I were to follow
the directions after we had plotted them out and were to share it
together on the next expedition, which I could direct as a Mexican
without so much suspicion. I should still have shared it with his widow
if this unfortunate affair had not exposed the secret.”
Bernardo had risen earnestly.
“Kennedy,” he cried, “before God, if you will get back that stone and
keep the secret from going further than this room, I will prove what I
have said by dividing the Mixtec treasure with Mrs. Northrop and making
her one of the richest widows in the country!”
“That is what I wanted to be sure of,” nodded Craig. “Bernardo, Señora
Herreria, of whom your friend wrote to you from Mexico, has been
murdered in the same way that Professor Northrop was. Otaka was sent by
her husband to murder Northrop, in order that they might obtain the
so-called ‘Pillar of Death’ and the key to the treasure. Then, when the
_señora_ was no doubt under the influence of _sake_ in the pretty
little Oriental bower at the curio shop, a quick jab, and Otaka had
removed one who shared the secret with them.”
He had turned and faced the pair.
“Sato,” he added, “you played on the patriotism of the _señora_ until
you wormed from her the treasure secret. Evidently rumors of it had
spread from Mexican Indians to Japanese visitors. And then, Otaka, all
jealousy over one whom she, no doubt, justly considered a rival,
completed your work by sending her forth to die, unknown, on the
street. Walter, ring up First Deputy O’Connor. The stone is hidden
somewhere in the curio shop. We can find it without Sato’s help. The
quicker such a criminal is lodged safely in jail, the better for
humanity.”
Sato was on his feet, advancing cautiously toward Craig. I knew the
dangers, now, of _anno-noki_, as well as the wonders of _jujutsu_, and,
with a leap, I bounded past Bernardo and between Sato and Kennedy.
How it happened, I don’t know, but, an instant later, I was sprawling.
Before I could recover myself, before even Craig had a chance to pull
the hair-trigger of his automatic, Sato had seized the Ainu arrow
poison from the table, had bitten the little cylinder in half, and had
crammed the other half into the mouth of Otaka.