question the poor girl at the hospital. Her story was simple enough in
itself, but it certainly complicated matters considerably without
throwing much light on the case. She had been busy because her day was
full, and she had yet to dress the hair of Miss Blaisdell for her play
that night. Several times she had been interrupted by impatient
messages from the actress in her little dressing-booth, and one of the
girls had already demolished the previous hair-dressing in order to
save time. Once Agnes had run down for a few seconds to reassure her
that she would be through in time.
She had found the actress reading a newspaper, and when Kennedy
questioned her she remembered seeing a note lying on the dresser.
“Agnes,” Miss Blaisdell had said, “will you go into the writing-room
and bring me some paper, a pen, and ink? I don’t want to go in there
this way. There’s a dear good girl.” Agnes had gone, though it was
decidedly no part of her duty as one of the highest paid employes of
the Novella. But they all envied the popular actress, and were ready to
do anything for her. The next thing she remembered was finishing the
coiffure she was working on and going to Miss Blaisdell. There lay the
beautiful actress. The light in the corridor had not been lighted yet,
and it was dark. Her lips and mouth seemed literally to shine. Agnes
called her, but she did not move; she touched her, but she was cold.
Then she screamed and fled. That was the last she remembered.
“The little writing-room,” reasoned Kennedy as we left the poor little
hair-dresser quite exhausted by her narrative, “was next to the sanctum
of Millefleur, where they found that bottle of ether phosphore and the
oil of turpentine. Some one who knew of that note or perhaps wrote it
must have reasoned that an answer would be written immediately. That
person figured that the note would be the next thing written and that
the top envelope of the pile would be used. That person knew of the
deadly qualities of too much phosphorised ether, and painted the gummed
flap of the envelope with several grains of it. The reasoning held
good, for Agnes took the top envelope with its poisoned flap to Miss
Blaisdell. No, there was no chance about that. It was all clever, quick
reasoning.”
“But,” I objected, “how about the oil of turpentine?”
“Simply to remove the traces of the poison. I think you will see why
that was attempted before we get through.”
Kennedy would say no more, but I was content because I could see that
he was now ready to put his theories, whatever they were, to the final
test. He spent the rest of the day working at the hospital with Dr.
Barron, adjusting a very delicate piece of apparatus down in a special
room, in the basement. I saw it, but I had no idea what it was or what
its use might be.
Close to the wall was a stereopticon which shot a beam of light through
a tube to which I heard them refer as a galvanometer, about three feet
distant. In front of this beam whirled a five-spindled wheel, governed
by a chronometer which erred only a second a day. Between the poles of
the galvanometer was stretched a slender thread of fused quartz plated
with silver, only one one-thousandth of a millimetre in diameter, so
tenuous that it could not be seen except in a bright light. It was a
thread so slender that it might have been spun by a microscopic spider.
Three feet farther away was a camera with a moving film of sensitised
material, the turning of which was regulated by a little flywheel. The
beam of light focused on the thread in the galvanometer passed to the
photographic film, intercepted only by the five spindles of the wheel,
which turned once a second, thus marking the picture off into exact
fifths of a second. The vibrations of the microscopic quartz thread
were enormously magnified on the sensitive film by a lens and resulted
in producing a long zig-zag, wavy line. The whole was shielded by a
wooden hood which permitted no light, except the slender ray, to strike
it. The film revolved slowly across the field, its speed regulated by
the flywheel, and all moved by an electric motor.
I was quite surprised, then, when Kennedy told me that the final tests
which he was arranging were not to be held at the hospital at all, but
in his laboratory, the scene of so many of his scientific triumphs over
the cleverest of criminals.
While he and Dr. Barren were still fussing with the machine he
despatched me on the rather ticklish errand of gathering together all
those who had been at the Novella at the time and might possibly prove
important in the case.
My first visit was to Hugh Dayton, whom I found in his bachelor
apartment on Madison Avenue, apparently waiting for me. One of
O’Connor’s men had already warned him that any attempt to evade putting
in an appearance when he was wanted would be of no avail. He had been
shadowed from the moment that it was learned that he was a patient of
Millefleur’s and had been at the Novella that fatal afternoon. He
seemed to realise that escape was impossible. Dayton was one of those
typical young fellows, tall, with sloping shoulders and a carefully
acquired English manner, whom one sees in scores on Fifth Avenue late
in the afternoon. His face, which on the stage was forceful and
attractive, was not prepossessing at close range. Indeed it showed too
evident marks of excesses, both physical and moral, and his hand was
none too steady. Still, he was an interesting personality, if not
engaging.
I was also charged with delivering a note to Burke Collins at his
office. The purport of it was, I knew, a request couched in language
that veiled a summons that Mrs. Collins was of great importance in
getting at the truth, and that if he needed an excuse himself for being
present it was suggested that he appear as protecting his wife’s
interests as a lawyer. Kennedy had added that I might tell him orally
that he would pass over the scandal as lightly as possible and spare
the feelings of both as much as he could. I was rather relieved when
this mission was accomplished, for I had expected Collins to demur
violently.
Those who gathered that night, sitting expectantly in the little
armchairs which Kennedy’s students used during his lectures, included
nearly every one who could cast any light on what had happened at the
Novella. Professor and Madame Millefleur were brought up from the house
of detention, to which both O’Connor and Dr. Leslie had insisted that
they be sent. Millefleur was still bewailing the fate of the Novella,
and Madame had begun to show evidences of lack of the constant
beautification which she was always preaching as of the utmost
importance to her patrons. Agnes was so far recovered as to be able to
be present, though I noticed that she avoided the Millefleurs and sat
as far from them as possible.
Burke Collins and Mrs. Collins arrived together. I had expected that
there would be an icy coolness if not positive enmity between them.
They were not exactly cordial, though somehow I seemed to feel that now
that the cause of estrangement was removed a tactful mutual friend
might have brought about a reconciliation. Hugh Dayton swaggered in,
his nervousness gone or at least controlled. I passed behind him once,
and the odour that smote my olfactory sense told me too plainly that he
had fortified himself with a stimulant on his way from the apartment to
the laboratory. Of course O’Connor and Dr. Leslie were there, though in
the background.
It was a silent gathering, and Kennedy did not attempt to relieve the
tension even by small talk as he wrapped the forearms of each of us
with cloths steeped in a solution of salt. Upon these cloths he placed
little plates of German silver to which were attached wires which led
back of a screen. At last he was ready to begin.
“The long history of science,” he began as he emerged from behind the
screen, “is filled with instances of phenomena, noted at first only for
their beauty or mystery, which have been later proved to be of great
practical value to mankind. A new example is the striking phenomenon of
luminescence. Phosphorus, discovered centuries ago, was first merely a
curiosity. Now it is used for many practical things, and one of the
latest uses is as a medicine. It is a constituent of the body, and many
doctors believe that the lack of it causes, and that its presence will
cure, many ills. But it is a virulent and toxic drug, and no physician
except one who knows his business thoroughly should presume to handle
it. Whoever made a practice of using it at the Novella did not know his
business, or he would have used it in pills instead of in the nauseous
liquid. It is not with phosphorised ether as a medicine that we have to
deal in this case. It is with the stuff as a poison, a poison
administered by a demon.”
Craig shot the word out so that it had its full effect on his little
audience. Then he paused, lowered his voice, and resumed on a new
subject.
“Up in the Washington Heights Hospital,” he went on, “is an apparatus
which records the secrets of the human heart. That is no figure of
speech, but a cold scientific fact. This machine records every
variation of the pulsations of the heart with such exquisite accuracy
that it gives Dr. Barron, who is up there now, not merely a diagram of
the throbbing organ of each of you seated here in my laboratory a mile
away, but a sort of moving-picture of the emotions by which each heart
here is swayed. Not only can Dr. Barron diagnose disease, but he can
detect love, hate, fear, joy, anger, and remorse. This machine is known
as the Einthoven ‘string galvanometer,’ invented by that famous Dutch
physiologist of Leyden.”
There was a perceptible movement in our little audience at the thought
that the little wires that ran back of the screen from the arms of each
were connected with this uncanny instrument so far away.
“It is all done by the electric current that the heart itself
generates,” pursued Kennedy, hammering home the new and startling idea.
“That current is one of the feeblest known to science, for the dynamo
that generates it is no ponderous thing of copper wire and steel
castings. It is just the heart itself. The heart sends over the wire
its own telltale record to the machine which registers it. The thing
takes us all the way back to Galvani, who was the first to observe and
study animal electricity. The heart makes only one three-thousandth of
a volt of electricity at each beat. It would take over two hundred
thousand men to light one of these incandescent lamps, two million or
more to run a trolley-car. Yet just that slight little current is
enough to sway the gossamer strand of quartz fibre up there at what we
call the ‘heart station.’ So fine is this machine that the
pulse-tracings produced by the sphygmograph, which I have used in other
cases up to this time, are clumsy and inexact.”
Again he paused as if to let the fear of discovery sink deep into the
minds of all of us.
“This current, as I have said, passes from each one of you in turn over
a wire and vibrates a fine quartz fibre up there in unison with each
heart here. It is one of the most delicate bits of mechanism ever made,
beside which the hairspring of a watch is coarse. Each of you in turn,
is being subjected to this test. More than that, the record up there
shows not only the beats of the heart but the successive waves of
emotion that vary the form of those beats. Every normal individual
gives what we call an ‘electro-cardiogram,’ which follows a certain
type. The photographic film on which this is being recorded is ruled so
that at the heart station Dr. Barron can read it. There are five waves
to each heart-beat, which he letters P, Q, R, S, and T, two below and
three above a base line on the film. They have all been found to
represent a contraction of a certain portion of the heart. Any change
of the height, width, or time of any one of those lines shows that
there is some defect or change in the contraction of that part of the
heart. Thus Dr. Barron, who has studied this thing carefully, can tell
infallibly not only disease but emotion.”
It seemed as if no one dared look at his neighbour, as if all were
trying vainly to control the beating of their own hearts.
“Now,” concluded Kennedy solemnly as if to force the last secret from
the wildly beating heart of some one in the room, “it is my belief that
the person who had access to the operating-room of the Novella was a
person whose nerves were run down, and in addition to any other
treatment that person was familiar with the ether phosphore. This
person knew Miss Blaisdell well, saw her there, knew she was there for
the purpose of frustrating that person’s own dearest hopes. That person
wrote her the note, and knowing that she would ask for paper and an
envelope in order to answer it, poisoned the flap of the envelope.
Phosphorus is a remedy for hysteria, vexatious emotions, want of
sympathy, disappointed and concealed affections—but not in the
quantities that this person lavished on that flap. Whoever it was, not
life, but death, and a ghastly death, was uppermost in that person’s
thoughts.”
Agnes screamed. “I saw him take something and rub it on her lips, and
the brightness went away. I—I didn’t mean to tell, but, God help me, I
must.”
“Saw whom?” demanded Kennedy, fixing her eye as he had when he had
called her back from aphasia.
“Him—Millefleur—Miller,” she sobbed, shrinking back as if the very
confession appalled her.
“Yes,” added Kennedy coolly, “Miller did try to remove the traces of
the poison after he discovered it, in order to protect himself and the
reputation of the Novella.”
The telephone bell tinkled. Craig seized the receiver.
“Yes, Barron, this is Kennedy. You received the impulses all right?
Good. And have you had time to study the records? Yes? What’s that?
Number seven? All right. I’ll see you very soon and go over the records
again with you. Good-bye.”
“One word more,” he continued, now facing us. “The normal heart traces
its throbs in regular rhythm. The diseased or overwrought heart throbs
in degrees of irregularity that vary according to the trouble that
affects it, both organic and emotional. The expert like Barron can tell
what each wave means, just as he can tell what the lines in a spectrum
mean. He can see the invisible, hear the inaudible, feel the
intangible, with mathematical precision. Barron has now read the
electro-cardiograms. Each is a picture of the beating of the heart that
made it, and each smallest variation has a meaning to him. Every
passion, every emotion, every disease, is recorded with inexorable
truth. The person with murder in his heart cannot hide it from the
string galvanometer, nor can that person who wrote the false note in
which the very lines of the letters betray a diseased heart hide that
disease. The doctor tells me that that person was number—”
Mrs. Collins had risen wildly and was standing before us with blazing
eyes. “Yes,” she cried, pressing her hands on her breast as if it were
about to burst and tell the secret before her lips could frame the
words, “yes, I killed her, and I would follow her to the end of the
earth if I had not succeeded. She was there, the woman who had stolen
from me what was more than life itself. Yes, I wrote the note, I
poisoned the envelope. I killed her.”
All the intense hatred that she had felt for that other woman in the
days that she had vainly striven to equal her in beauty and win back
her husband’s love broke forth. She was wonderful, magnificent, in her
fury. She was passion personified; she was fate, retribution.
Collins looked at his wife, and even he felt the spell. It was not
crime that she had done; it was elemental justice.
For a moment she stood, silent, facing Kennedy. Then the colour slowly
faded from her cheeks. She reeled.
Collins caught her and imprinted a kiss, the kiss that for years she
had longed and striven for again. She looked rather than spoke
forgiveness as he held her and showered them on her.
“Before Heaven,” I heard him whisper into her ear, “with all my power
as a lawyer I will free you from this.”
Gently Dr. Leslie pushed him aside and felt her pulse as she dropped
limply into the only easy chair in the laboratory.
“O’Connor,” he said at length, “all the evidence that we really have
hangs on an invisible thread of quartz a mile away. If Professor
Kennedy agrees, let us forget what has happened here to-night. I will
direct my jury to bring in a verdict of suicide. Collins, take good
care of her.” He leaned over and whispered so she could not hear. “I
wouldn’t promise her six weeks otherwise.”
I could not help feeling deeply moved as the newly reunited Collinses
left the laboratory together. Even the bluff deputy, O’Connor, was
touched by it and under the circumstances did what seemed to him his
higher duty with a tact of which I had believed him scarcely capable.
Whatever the ethics of the case, he left it entirely to Dr. Leslie’s
coroner’s jury to determine.
Burke Collins was already making hasty preparations for the care of his
wife so that she might have the best medical attention to prolong her
life for the few weeks or months before nature exacted the penalty
which was denied the law.
“That’s a marvellous piece of apparatus,” I remarked, standing over the
connections with the string galvanometer, after all had gone. “Just
suppose the case had fallen into the hands of some of these
old-fashioned detectives—”
“I hate post-mortems—on my own cases,” interrupted Kennedy brusquely.
“To-morrow will be time enough to clear up this mess. Meanwhile, let us
get this thing out of our minds.”
He clapped his hat on his head decisively and deliberately walked out
of the laboratory, starting off at a brisk pace in the moonlight across
the campus to the avenue where now the only sound was the noisy rattle
of an occasional trolley car.
How long we walked I do not know. But I do know that for genuine
relaxation after a long period of keen mental stress, there is nothing
like physical exercise. We turned into our apartment, roused the sleepy
hall-boy, and rode up.
“I suppose people think I never rest,” remarked Kennedy, carefully
avoiding any reference to the exciting events of the past two days.
“But I do. Like every one else, I have to. When I am working hard on a
case—well, I have my own violent reaction against it—more work of a
different kind. Others choose white lights, red wines and blue feelings
afterwards. But I find, when I reach that state, that the best
anti-toxin is something that will chase the last case from your brain
by getting you in trim for the next unexpected event.”
He had sunk into an easy chair where he was running over in his mind
his own plans for the morrow.
“Just now I must recuperate by doing no work at all,” he went on slowly
undressing. “That walk was just what I needed. When the fever of
dissipation comes on again, I’ll call on you. You won’t miss anything,
Walter.”
Like the famous Finnegan, however, he was on again and gone again in
the morning. This time I had no misgivings, although I should have
liked to accompany him, for on the library table he had scrawled a
little note, “Studying East Side to-day. Will keep in touch with you.
Craig.” My daily task of transcribing my notes was completed and I
thought I would run down to the Star to let the editor know how I was
getting along on my assignment.
I had scarcely entered the door when the office boy thrust a message
into my hand. It stopped me even before I had a chance to get as far as
my own desk. It was from Kennedy at the laboratory and bore a time
stamp that showed that it must have been received only a few minutes
before I came in.
“Meet me at the Grand Central,” it read, “immediately.”
Without going further into the office, I turned and dropped down in the
elevator to the subway. As quickly as an express could take me, I
hurried up to the new station.
“Where away?” I asked breathlessly, as Craig met me at the entrance
through which he had reasoned I would come. “The coast or Down East?”
“Woodrock,” he replied quickly, taking my arm and dragging me down a
ramp to the train that was just leaving for that fashionable suburb.
“Well,” I queried eagerly, as the train started. “Why all this secrecy?”
“I had a caller this afternoon,” he began, running his eye over the
other passengers to see if we were observed. “She is going back on this
train. I am not to recognise her at the station, but you and I are to
walk to the end of the platform and enter a limousine bearing that
number.”
He produced a card on the back of which was written a number in six
figures. Mechanically I glanced at the name as he handed the card to
me. Craig was watching intently the expression on my face as I read,
“Miss Yvonne Brixton.”
“Since when were you admitted into society?” I gasped, still staring at
the name of the daughter of the millionaire banker, John Brixton.
“She came to tell me that her father is in a virtual state of siege, as
it were, up there in his own house,” explained Kennedy in an undertone,
“so much so that, apparently, she is the only person he felt he dared
trust with a message to summon me. Practically everything he says or
does is spied on; he can’t even telephone without what he says being
known.”
“Siege?” I repeated incredulously. “Impossible. Why, only this morning
I was reading about his negotiations with a foreign syndicate of
bankers from southeastern Europe for a ten-million-dollar loan to
relieve the money stringency there. Surely there must be some mistake
in all this. In fact, as I recall it, one of the foreign bankers who is
trying to interest him is that Count Wachtmann who, everybody says, is
engaged to Miss Brixton, and is staying at the house at Woodrock.
Craig, are you sure nobody is hoaxing you?”
“Read that,” he replied laconically, handing me a piece of thin
letter-paper such as is often used for foreign correspondence. “Such
letters have been coming to Mr. Brixton, I understand, every day.”
The letter was in a cramped foreign scrawl:
JOHN BRIXTON, Woodrock, New York.
American dollars must not endanger the peace of Europe. Be
warned in time. In the name of liberty and progress we have
raised the standard of conflict without truce or quarter
against reaction. If you and the American bankers associated
with you take up these bonds you will never live to receive
the first payment of interest.
THE RED BROTHERHOOD OF THE BALKANS.
I looked up inquiringly. “What is the Red Brotherhood?” I asked.
“As nearly as I can make out,” replied Kennedy, “it seems to be a sort
of international secret society. I believe it preaches the gospel of
terror and violence in the cause of liberty and union of some of the
peoples of southeastern Europe. Anyhow, it keeps its secrets well. The
identity of the members is a mystery, as well as the source of its
funds, which, it is said, are immense.”
“And they operate so secretly that Brixton can trust no one about him?”
I asked.
“I believe he is ill,” explained Craig. “At any rate, he evidently
suspects almost every one about him except his daughter. As nearly as I
could gather, however, he does not suspect Wachtmann himself. Miss
Brixton seemed to think that there were some enemies of the Count at
work. Her father is a secretive man. Even to her, the only message he
would entrust was that he wanted to see me immediately.”
At Woodrock we took our time in getting off the train. Miss Brixton, a
tall, dark-haired, athletic girl just out of college, had preceded us,
and as her own car shot out from the station platform we leisurely
walked down and entered another bearing the number she had given
Kennedy.
We seemed to be expected at the house. Hardly had we been admitted
through the door from the porte-cochere, than we were led through a
hall to a library at the side of the house. From the library we entered
another door, then down a flight of steps which must have brought us
below an open courtyard on the outside, under a rim of the terrace in
front of the house for a short distance to a point where we descended
three more steps.
At the head of these three steps was a great steel and iron door with
heavy bolts and a combination lock of a character ordinarily found only
on a safe in a banking institution.
The door was opened, and we descended the steps, going a little farther
in the same direction away from the side of the house. Then we turned
at a right angle facing toward the back of the house but well to one
side of it. It must have been, I figured out later, underneath the open
courtyard. A few steps farther brought us to a fair-sized, vaulted room.
V
THE PHANTOM CIRCUIT