10:32 p. m.—Pictures in Dust
Lieutenant Valcour stared for a puzzled instant at the white face.
“What do you mean, Cassidy?” he said.
“Honest to God, Lieutenant, I mean just what I say.”
“But that’s impossible.”
Cassidy went even further. “It’s sacrilege,” he said.
“Nonsense,” Lieutenant Valcour said sharply. “You have simply
misunderstood Dr. Worth. It is possible that Mr. Endicott was not dead
at all but in some state of catalepsy. No one, Cassidy, can bring back
the dead.”
“I’m glad to hear you say so, sir.”
“Then let us go in.”
“Must I go back in there, too?”
“You must. Forget the fact that you’re a superstitious Irishman,
Cassidy, and remember that you’re a cop. Cops, as you’ve been told
more times than one, should be noble, firm, and perpetually cool,
calm, and collected.”
“Sure now, you’re kidding.”
“Tut, tut.”
“Well, and I’ll try, Lieutenant—but cripes!”
“But nothing,” advised Lieutenant Valcour as he opened the door to
Endicott’s room.
The effect was shockingly garish. All shades had been removed from
their lamps, and the various details of the furnishing stood out in
the painful white light brightly clear.
Andrews was alone. He stood near the bed upon which Endicott had been
placed, looking in rather shocked bewilderment at the body. Lieutenant
Valcour joined him. A blanket had been drawn up to Endicott’s chin,
and the face which remained exposed looked very waxlike—very
still—very much like a dead man’s indeed.
“This is the damnedest thing, Valcour.”
“What is, Chief?”
“They say there’s a chance that this man isn’t dead. Worth is going to
operate.”
“Operate? But Dr. Worth himself admitted that the heart had stopped
beating after testing with a stethoscope. What sort of an operation?”
“Worth’s going to inject adrenaline into the cardiac muscles.”
“I wonder just how much value there is in that stuff.”
“Well, unless Endicott’s been poisoned, the medical examiner and Worth
both seem to think there’s a chance. They feel there’s no harm in
trying, anyway. It sounds silly to me, but they reminded me of that
recent case in Queens—you probably read about it—where a man had been
pronounced dead for six hours and was revived. Of course, they said he
wasn’t really dead, just as they now think that Endicott may not be
really dead. No one can bring back the dead.”
Lieutenant Valcour threw a bland look to Cassidy, who was standing in
as convenient a position to the hall door as he could possibly get.
“They say,” Andrews went on, “that adrenaline’s been used off and on
for years. Worth says they try it quite often when a baby is born
‘dead.’ Sometimes it starts the heart pumping and the baby lives.”
Lieutenant Valcour shrugged. “It will make things pretty simple for us
if it works with Endicott,” he said. “He can make a statement and
prefer charges himself. Where is everybody?”
“The medical examiner and Worth are downstairs telephoning and making
arrangements for the operation. My men have finished and have gone
back to headquarters. There wasn’t any sign of forcing an entry, so it
looks like an inside job, if there was any job. I tell you, Valcour,
if it wasn’t for your suggestion that robbery was a motive, or for
that note that might have been a threat, I’d drop the whole thing.
It’s a different matter if the adrenaline doesn’t work and an autopsy
proves poison or something. Find out much from Mrs. Endicott?”
“Enough to be interested in learning more. Want the details?”
“Later, if I have to get to work on the case. You want to keep on
handling it?”
“Yes.”
“Go ahead. Call for any outside stuff you want us to check up on for
you. I’ll send you a report on the brushes and comb as soon as they
finish with them downtown.”
“You going, Chief?”
“No use in my sticking around, Valcour. We haven’t a case yet, really,
that calls for any Central Office work. Hell, according to those two
six-syllable specialists downstairs, we haven’t even got a corpse.
Robbery there may have been, and it’s your precinct—so go to it. I’ll
find out from the medical examiner when he gets back how the operation
turned out, and if there’s going to be an autopsy. If poisoning is
proved and you haven’t pinned it on anyone by then, I’ll get on the
job again. I suppose you’ll see that the people in the house are given
the once-over?”
“Certainly, Chief.”
“I’ll run along then. Good luck, Valcour.”
“Thank you, Chief.”
Andrews left the room and closed the door.
“I bet he’s got a date,” said Cassidy.
“He’d stay here if he had twenty dates, if he thought it was
necessary,” said Lieutenant Valcour.
“Well, I wish I had a date.”
“You’ll have a whole vacation if you don’t brace up. I’m going to take
a look in that cupboard, now that Endicott’s no longer in it.”
Even a cupboard seemed preferable to Cassidy to being in the room.
“Can’t I help you, sir?” he said with almost fervent politeness.
“No, Cassidy, you can’t. You can stay just where you are.”
“Oh, very well, sir.”
Lieutenant Valcour picked up a straight-backed chair and took it into
the cupboard with him. He held a sincere respect for the Central
Office men, but at the same time felt that their work was too
methodically routine to permit their darting along interesting
tangents or wasting their time in strolls along bypaths that might
lead to fertile fields. There was no criticism in his mind at all. He
admired the system that had been established, and the expert
functioning of its units and departments. He knew very well that its
average of successes was greater than its average of failures. But it
was deficient in that elusive, time-taking, and sometimes expensive
thing known as the “personal equation.” It remained, at its best, a
machine.
A certain amount of carelessness, too, ran in the general plan. In
many cases some things were slurred over, some missed entirely. This
again was not surprising when one considered that the personnel was
recruited largely from the more intelligent men in the ranks.
Intelligent, yes, but hardly specialists, nor could one in all
fairness expect them to be.
When working on a case they functioned along two distinctly separate
but parallel lines. One department of specialists handled the
technical and chemical investigation of material things and clues
found on the scene of the crime—just as the brushes and comb were
shortly to be examined by the proper men down at Central Office. A
second department dealt with the human aspect—examining witnesses,
looking up all friends or connections of the victim; a large,
competent organization that would stretch feelers, no matter how many
were necessary, to every contact point of the victim’s life within the
city, and from whose findings some possible motive could be
established and some possible suspect or group of suspects be evolved.
The two branches would then compare notes, and if a satisfactory
amount of evidence had been obtained by the technical department to
establish a case against one or several of the suspects, arrests would
be made or the suspects brought in for questioning. According to the
temperament and station of the suspects, one of the various forms that
go to make up the properly dreaded third degree would be employed and
a confession obtained. The work of the Central Office would then be
finished, and the case up to the prosecutor.
Lieutenant Valcour was glad that in the present instance the homicide
chief had felt it useless to set in motion the machinery of the second
branch until more definite developments should occur. The case
interested him. Mrs. Endicott interested him—her astonishing beauty,
her mind, her contradictions—Roberts—Marge Myles—three women who
offered an assurance of satisfying an almost blatant curiosity he
possessed for discovering the source springs of human behaviour. This
talk about reviving Endicott and Endicott himself making a
statement—well, perhaps. But until it was accomplished he preferred to
think of Endicott as a corpse, the case a definite homicide, and of
possible suspects right in the house.
Lieutenant Valcour concentrated his attention upon the cupboard. There
were shelves along the back of it, the lowest one being at the height
of a man’s head. Numerous suits of clothes were hanging from beneath
this lowest shelf. He stood on the chair and played his flashlight
along the top of it. There was nothing there but an accumulation of
dust. He felt a distinct and highly satisfactory thrill when he noted
that streaks showed where the dust had very recently been rubbed away,
as if somebody had deliberately wiped both his hands in it. It linked
with the dirty cake of soap. Andrews had said nothing about the
streaks. It was pretty obvious that the Central Office men had
overlooked them—had casually observed that the shelves were empty and
had let the matter go at that.
Lieutenant Valcour began to feel quite pleasant and informed himself
gravely that a deduction was in order. For a happy moment he
considered the possibility of that curious and sinister Oriental
influence that crops up so perennially in the very finest of murder
cases—of Cassidy’s murder cases: that elusive figure swathed in gray,
whitely turbanned above coffee-coloured skin, who has a penchant
toward religious fanaticism the esoteric rites of which involve dust.
This breath-shocking villain would ultimately be trapped by the bright
detective through the wretch’s occult passion for this dust. Had one,
Lieutenant Valcour wanted to know, such an enigma to deal with here?
No, he informed himself sternly, one knew damned well one had not. But
in the place of such a handy and beautiful deduction—what?
He stared at the dust and began to see pictures in it: a crouching
person tormented by hate or fear, or both, who knows that Endicott is
going to open the cupboard door. What, in the name of the lighter
humorists, to do? The person dreads recognition. Is there no disguise?
No, curse it—but yes—the dust! The person’s hands are smeared, and by
means of the hands, the face . . .
“Ain’t there _nothing_ I can do for you, Lieutenant?”
Lieutenant Valcour sighed and got down from the chair.
“Yes, Cassidy,” he said. “You can take this chair and put it over by
the hall door. Then you can sit down.”
“Very well, Lieutenant,” said Cassidy bitterly. “But when you’re in
that cupboard there ain’t nobody in the room with me but that live
corpse.”
“Then sit where you can’t see it.”
“Cripes, Lieutenant, I don’t _have_ to see it. I get the chills just
thinking about it.”
“You’ll get the gate, Cassidy, if you don’t snap out of it.”
“All right, sir, but if you come out and find me keeled over, don’t
blame me.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it, Cassidy.”
Lieutenant Valcour reëntered the cupboard. He examined the corner in
which Endicott had been slumped. The suits on the hangers had fallen
back a little into shape. He carefully went through their various
pockets. They were empty, and from the rumpled condition of their
linings he knew that they had been hastily gone through before.
Perhaps the Central Office men had done so, but he doubted it. They
would concern themselves pretty exclusively with the effects taken
from the clothes Endicott had been wearing at the time of the attack.
It interested him to note that the suits against which Endicott’s body
had been slumped showed evidence of having been searched with the
rest. It confirmed his theory that that was what the attacker had been
doing when caught in the cupboard by Endicott’s sudden appearance in
the bedroom, and it also strengthened his theory of the ingenious use
of dust from the shelf top as a disguise.
Shoes lined a low shelf along the bottom of one side, and hat boxes
occupied a corresponding shelf on the other. Lieutenant Valcour
dismissed the possibility that the particular hat he was searching
for—the one that Endicott was wearing or intended to get at the moment
of the attack—would be in a box. Perhaps it was in the cupboard Mrs.
Endicott spoke about downstairs in the entrance hall. The point kept
nagging at him irritatingly, and he considered it important enough to
go down and find out.
Cassidy barely restrained himself from clutching Lieutenant Valcour’s
arm by the hall door.
“Honest to God, you ain’t going to leave me in here alone,
Lieutenant?”
“Honest to God, Cassidy, I am.”
Lieutenant Valcour went out. Cassidy took one bleak look at his
charge, the living corpse, carefully crossed the fingers of both his
hands, and sat down.
“I just knew,” he muttered truculently, “that this case was going to
be one of them printed damn things.”