form to the work bench. Frantically he must have worked. He made an
incision and exposed the radial artery, the pulse. Then he must have
administered a local anesthetic to himself in his arm or leg. He
secured a vein and pushed the cut end over this little canula. Then he
fitted the artery of Cushing over that and the blood that was, perhaps,
to save his life began flowing into his depleted veins.
“Who was this madman? I have watched the actions of those whom I
suspected when they did not know they were being watched. I did it by
using this neat little device which looks like a field glass, but is
really a camera that takes pictures of things at right angles to the
direction in which the glass seems to be pointed. One person, I found,
had a wound on his leg, the wrapping of which he adjusted nervously
when he thought no one was looking. He had difficulty in limping even a
short distance to open a window.”
Kennedy uncorked a bottle and the subtle odor of oranges mingled with
ether stole through the room.
“Some one here will recognize that odour immediately. It is the new
orange-essence vapour anesthetic, a mixture of essence of orange with
ether and chloroform. The odour hidden by the orange which lingered in
the laboratory, Mr. Winslow and Mr. Strong, was not isoprene, but
really ether.
“I am letting some of the odour escape here because in this very
laboratory it was that the thing took place, and it is one of the
well-known principles of psychology that odours are powerfully
suggestive. In this case the odour now must suggest the terrible scene
of the other night to some one before me. More than that, I have to
tell that person that the blood transfusion did not and could not save
him. His illness is due to a condition that is incurable and cannot be
altered by transfusion of new blood. That person is just as doomed
to-day as he was before he committed—”
A figure was groping blindly about. The arsenic compounds with which
his blood was surcharged had brought on one of the attacks of blindness
to which users of the drug are subject. In his insane frenzy he was
evidently reaching desperately for Kennedy himself. As he groped he
limped painfully from the soreness of his wound.
“Dr. Harris,” accused Kennedy, avoiding the mad rush at himself, and
speaking in a tone that thrilled us, “you are the man who sucked the
blood of Cushing into your own veins and left him to die. But the state
will never be able to exact from you the penalty of your crime. Nature
will do that too soon for justice. Gentlemen, this is the murderer of
Bradley Cushing, a maniac, a modern scientific vampire.”
I regarded the broken, doomed man with mingled pity and loathing,
rather than with the usual feelings one has toward a criminal.
“Come,” said Craig. “The local authorities can take care of this case
now.”
He paused just long enough for a word of comfort to the poor,
broken-hearted girl. Both Winslows answered with a mute look of
gratitude and despair. In fact, in the confusion we were only too glad
to escape any more such mournful congratulations.
“Well,” Craig remarked, as we walked quickly down the street, “if we
have to wait here for a train, I prefer to wait in the railroad
station. I have done my part. Now my only interest is to get away
before they either offer me a banquet or lynch me.”
Actually, I think he would have preferred the novelty of dealing with a
lynching party, if he had had to choose between the two.
We caught a train soon, however, and fortunately it had a diner
attached. Kennedy whiled away the time between courses by reading the
graft exposures in the city.
As we rolled into the station late in the afternoon, he tossed aside
the paper with an air of relief.
“Now for a quiet evening in the laboratory,” he exclaimed, almost
gleefully.
By what stretch of imagination he could call that recreation, I could
not see. But as for quietness, I needed it, too. I had fallen wofully
behind in my record of the startling events through which he was
conducting me. Consequently, until late that night I pecked away at my
typewriter trying to get order out of the chaos of my hastily scribbled
notes. Under ordinary circumstances, I remembered, the morrow would
have been my day of rest on the Star. I had gone far enough with
Kennedy to realise that on this assignment there was no such thing as
rest.
“District Attorney Carton wants to see me immediately at the Criminal
Courts Building, Walter,” announced Kennedy, early the following
morning.
Clothed, and as much in my right mind as possible after the arduous
literary labours of the night before, I needed no urging, for Carton
was an old friend of all the newspaper men. I joined Craig quickly in a
hasty ride down-town in the rush hour.
On the table before the square-jawed, close-cropped, fighting
prosecutor, whom I knew already after many a long and hard-fought
campaign both before and after election, lay a little package which had
evidently come to him in the morning’s mail by parcel-post.
“What do you suppose is in that, Kennedy?” he asked, tapping it
gingerly. “I haven’t opened it yet, but I think it’s a bomb. Wait—I’ll
have a pail of water sent in here so that you can open it, if you will.
You understand such things.”
“No—no,” hastened Kennedy, “that’s exactly the wrong thing to do. Some
of these modern chemical bombs are set off in precisely that way. No.
Let me dissect the thing carefully. I think you may be right. It does
look as if it might be an infernal machine. You see the evident
disguise of the roughly written address?”
Carton nodded, for it was that that had excited his suspicion in the
first place. Meanwhile, Kennedy, without further ceremony, began
carefully to remove the wrapper of brown Manila paper, preserving
everything as he did so. Carton and I instinctively backed away.
Inside, Craig had disclosed an oblong wooden box.
“I realise that opening a bomb is dangerous business,” he pursued
slowly, engrossed in his work and almost oblivious to us, “but I think
I can take a chance safely with this fellow. The dangerous part is what
might be called drawing the fangs. No bombs are exactly safe toys to
have around until they are wholly destroyed, and before you can say you
have destroyed one, it is rather a ticklish business to take out the
dangerous element.”
He had removed the cover in the deftest manner without friction, and
seemingly without disturbing the contents in the least. I do not
pretend to know how he did it; but the proof was that we could see him
still working from our end of the room.
On the inside of the cover was roughly drawn a skull and cross-bones,
showing that the miscreant who sent the thing had at least a sort of
grim humour. For, where the teeth should have been in the skull were
innumerable match-heads. Kennedy picked them out with as much
sang-froid as if he were not playing jackstraws with life and death.
Then he removed the explosive itself and the various murderous slugs
and bits of metal embedded in it, carefully separating each as if to be
labelled “Exhibit A,” “B,” and so on for a class in bomb dissection.
Finally, he studied the sides and bottom of the box.
“Evidence of chlorate-of-potash mixture,” Kennedy muttered to himself,
still examining the bomb. “The inside was a veritable arsenal—a very
unusual and clever construction.”
“My heavens!” breathed Carton. “I would rather go through a campaign
again.”
XVII
THE BOMB MAKER
We stared at each other in blank awe, at the various parts, so innocent
looking in the heaps on the table, now safely separated, but together a
combination ticket to perdition.
“Who do you suppose could have sent it?” I blurted out when I found my
voice, then, suddenly recollecting the political and legal fight that
Carton was engaged in at the time, I added, “The white slavers?”
“Not a doubt,” he returned laconically. “And,” he exclaimed, bringing
down both hands vigorously in characteristic emphasis on the arms of
his office chair, “I’ve got to win this fight against the vice trust,
as I call it, or the whole work of the district attorney’s office in
clearing up the city will be discredited—to say nothing of the risk
the present incumbent runs at having such grateful friends about the
city send marks of their affection and esteem like this.”
I knew something already of the situation, and Carton continued
thoughtfully: “All the powers of vice are fighting a last-ditch battle
against me now. I think I am on the trail of the man or men higher up
in this commercialised-vice business—and it is a business, big
business, too. You know, I suppose, that they seem to have a string of
hotels in the city, of the worst character. There is nothing that they
will stop at to protect themselves. Why, they are using gangs of thugs
to terrorise any one who informs on them. The gunmen, of course, hate a
snitch worse than poison. There have been bomb outrages, too—nearly a
bomb a day lately—against some of those who look shaky and seem to be
likely to do business with my office. But I’m getting closer all the
time.”
“How do you mean?” asked Kennedy.
“Well, one of the best witnesses, if I can break him down by pressure
and promises, ought to be a man named Haddon, who is running a place in
the Fifties, known as the Mayfair. Haddon knows all these people. I can
get him in half an hour if you think it worth while—not here, but
somewhere uptown, say at the Prince Henry.”
Kennedy nodded. We had heard of Haddon before, a notorious character in
the white-light district. A moment later Carton had telephoned to the
Mayfair and had found Haddon.
“How did you get him so that he is even considering turning state’s
evidence?” asked Craig.
“Well,” answered Carton slowly, “I suppose it was partly through a
cabaret singer and dancer, Loraine Keith, at the Mayfair. You know you
never get the truth about things in the underworld except in pieces. As
much as any one, I think we have been able to use her to weave a web
about him. Besides, she seems to think that Haddon has treated her
shamefully. According to her story, he seems to have been lavishing
everything on her, but lately, for some reason, has deserted her.
Still, even in her jealousy she does not accuse any other woman of
winning him away.”
“Perhaps it is the opposite—another man winning her,” suggested Craig
dryly.
“It’s a peculiar situation,” shrugged Carton. “There is another man. As
nearly as I can make out there is a fellow named Brodie who does a
dance with her. But he seems to annoy her, yet at the same time
exercises a sort of fascination over her.”
“Then she is dancing at the Mayfair yet?” hastily asked Craig.
“Yes. I told her to stay, not to excite suspicion.”
“And Haddon knows?”
“Oh, no. But she has told us enough about him already so that we can
worry him, apparently, just as what he can tell us would worry the
others interested in the hotels. To tell the truth, I think she is a
drug fiend. Why, my men tell me that they have seen her take just a
sniff of something and change instantly—become a willing tool.”
“That’s the way it happens,” commented Kennedy.
“Now, I’ll go up there and meet Haddon,” resumed Carton. “After I have
been with him long enough to get into his confidence, suppose you two
just happen along.”
Half an hour later Kennedy and I sauntered into the Prince Henry, where
Carton had made the appointment in order to avoid suspicion that might
arise if he were seen with Haddon at the Mayfair.
The two men were waiting for us—Haddon, by contrast with Carton, a
weak-faced, nervous man, with bulgy eyes.
“Mr. Haddon,” introduced Carton, “let me present a couple of reporters
from the Star—off duty, so that we can talk freely before them, I can
assure you. Good fellows, too, Haddon.”
The hotel and cabaret keeper smiled a sickly smile and greeted us with
a covert, questioning glance.
“This attack on Mr. Carton has unnerved me,” he shivered. “If any one
dares to do that to him, what will they do to me?”
“Don’t get cold feet, Haddon,” urged Carton. “You’ll be all right. I’ll
swing it for you.”
Haddon made no reply. At length he remarked: “You’ll excuse me for a
moment. I must telephone to my hotel.”
He entered a booth in the shadow of the back of the cafe, where there
was a slot-machine pay-station. “I think Haddon has his suspicions,”
remarked Carton, “although he is too prudent to say anything yet.”
A moment later he returned. Something seemed to have happened. He
looked less nervous. His face was brighter and his eyes clearer. What
was it, I wondered? Could it be that he was playing a game with Carton
and had given him a double cross? I was quite surprised at his next
remark.
“Carton,” he said confidently, “I’ll stick.”
“Good,” exclaimed the district attorney, as they fell into a
conversation in low tones.
“By the way,” drawled Kennedy, “I must telephone to the office in case
they need me.”
He had risen and entered the same booth.
Haddon and Carton were still talking earnestly. It was evident that,
for some reason, Haddon had lost his former halting manner. Perhaps, I
reasoned, the bomb episode had, after all, thrown a scare into him, and
he felt that he needed protection against his own associates, who were
quick to discover such dealings as Carton had forced him into. I rose
and lounged back to the booth and Kennedy.
“Whom did he call?” I whispered, when Craig emerged perspiring from the
booth, for I knew that that was his purpose.
Craig glanced at Haddon, who now seemed absorbed in talking to Carton.
“No one,” he answered quickly. “Central told me there had not been a
call from this pay-station for half an hour.”
“No one?” I echoed almost incredulously. “Then what did he do?
Something happened, all right.”
Kennedy was evidently engrossed in his own thoughts, for he said
nothing.
“Haddon says he wants to do some scouting about,” announced Carton,
when we rejoined them. “There are several people whom he says he might
suspect. I’ve arranged to meet him this afternoon to get the first part
of this story about the inside working of the vice trust, and he will
let me know if anything develops then. You will be at your office?”
“Yes, one or the other of us,” returned Craig, in a tone which Haddon
could not hear.
In the meantime we took occasion to make some inquiries of our own
about Haddon and Loraine Keith. They were evidently well known in the
select circle in which they travelled. Haddon had many curious
characteristics, chief of which to interest Kennedy was his speed
mania. Time and again he had been arrested for exceeding the speed
limit in taxicabs and in a car of his own, often in the past with
Loraine Keith, but lately alone.
It was toward the close of the afternoon that Carton called up
hurriedly. As Kennedy hung up the receiver, I read on his face that
something had gone wrong.
“Haddon has disappeared,” he announced, “mysteriously and suddenly,
without leaving so much as a clue. It seems that he found in his office
a package exactly like that which was sent to Carton earlier in the
day. He didn’t wait to say anything about it, but left. Carton is
bringing it over here.”
Perhaps a quarter of an hour later, Carton himself deposited the
package on the laboratory table with an air of relief. We looked
eagerly. It was addressed to Haddon at the Mayfair in the same
disguised handwriting and was done up in precisely the same fashion.
“Lots of bombs are just scare bombs,” observed Craig. “But you never
can tell.”
Again Kennedy had started to dissect.
“Ah,” he went on, “this is the real thing, though, only a little
different from the other. A dry battery gives a spark when the lid is
slipped back. See, the explosive is in a steel pipe. Sliding the lid
off is supposed to explode it. Why, there is enough explosive in this
to have silenced a dozen Haddons.”
“Do you think he could have been kidnapped or murdered?” I asked. “What
is this, anyhow—gang-war?”
“Or perhaps bribed?” suggested Carton.
“I can’t say,” ruminated Kennedy. “But I can say this: that there is at
large in this city a man of great mechanical skill and practical
knowledge of electricity and explosives. He is trying to make sure of
hiding something from exposure. We must find him.”
“And especially Haddon,” Carton added quickly. “He is the missing link.
His testimony is absolutely essential to the case I am building up.”
“I think I shall want to observe Loraine Keith without being observed,”
planned Kennedy, with a hasty glance at his watch. “I think I’ll drop
around at this Mayfair I have heard so much about. Will you come?”
“I’d better not,” refused Carton. “You know they all know me, and
everything quits wherever I go. I’ll see you soon.”
As we drove in a cab over to the Mayfair, Kennedy said nothing. I
wondered how and where Haddon had disappeared. Had the powers of evil
in the city learned that he was weakening and hurried him out of the
way at the last moment? Just what had Loraine Keith to do with it? Was
she in any way responsible? I felt that there were, indeed, no bounds
to what a jealous woman might dare.
Beside the ornate grilled doorway of the carriage entrance of the
Mayfair stood a gilt-and-black easel with the words, “Tango Tea at
Four.” Although it was considerably after that time, there was a line
of taxi-cabs before the place and, inside, a brave array of
late-afternoon and early-evening revellers. The public dancing had
ceased, and a cabaret had taken its place.
We entered and sat down at one of the more inconspicuous of the little
round tables. On a stage, at one side, a girl was singing one of the
latest syncopated airs.
“We’ll just stick around a while, Walter,” whispered Craig. “Perhaps
this Loraine Keith will come in.”
Behind us, protected both by the music and the rustle of people coming
and going, a couple talked in low tones. Now and then a word floated
over to me in a language which was English, sure enough, but not of a
kind that I could understand.
“Dropped by a flatty,” I caught once, then something about a
“mouthpiece,” and the “bulls,” and “making a plant.”
“A dip—pickpocket—and his girl, or gun-moll, as they call them,”
translated Kennedy. “One of their number has evidently been picked up
by a detective and he looks to them for a good lawyer, or mouth-piece.”
Besides these two there were innumerable other interesting glimpses
into the life of this meeting-place for the half-and underworlds. A
motion in the audience attracted me, as if some favourite performer
were about to appear, and I heard the “gun-moll” whisper, “Loraine
Keith.”
There she was, a petite, dark-haired, snappy-eyed girl, chic, well
groomed, and gowned so daringly that every woman in the audience envied
and every man craned his neck to see her better. Loraine wore a
tight-fitting black dress, slashed to the knee. In fact, everything was
calculated to set her off at best advantage, and on the stage, at
least, there was something recherche about her. Yet, there was also
something gross about her, too.
Accompanying her was a nervous-looking fellow whose washed-out face was
particularly unattractive. It seemed as if the bone in his nose was
going, due to the shrinkage of the blood-vessels. Once, just before the
dance began, I saw him rub something on the back of his hand, raise it
to his nose, and sniff. Then he took a sip of a liqueur.
The dance began, wild from the first step, and as it developed, Kennedy
leaned over and whispered, “The danse des Apaches.”
It was acrobatic. The man expressed brutish passion and jealousy; the
woman, affection and fear. It seemed to tell a story—the struggle of
love, the love of the woman against the brutal instincts of the thug,
her lover. She was terrified as well as fascinated by him in his mad
temper and tremendous superhuman strength. I wondered if the dance
portrayed the fact.
The music was a popular air with many rapid changes, but through all
there was a constant rhythm which accorded well with the abandon of the
swaying dance. Indeed, I could think of nothing so much as of Bill
Sykes and Nancy as I watched these two.
It was the fight of two frenzied young animals. He would approach
stealthily, seize her, and whirl her about, lifting her to his
shoulder. She was agile, docile, and fearful. He untied a scarf and
passed it about her; she leaned against it, and they whirled giddily
about. Suddenly, it seemed that he became jealous. She would run; he
follow and catch her. She would try to pacify him; he would become more
enraged. The dance became faster and more furious. His violent efforts
seemed to be to throw her to the floor, and her streaming hair now made
it seem more like a fight than a dance. The audience hung breathless.
It ended with her dropping exhausted, a proper finale to this lowest
and most brutal dance.
Panting, flushed, with an unnatural light in their eyes, they descended
to the audience and, scorning the roar of applause to repeat the
performance, sat at a little table.
I saw a couple of girls come over toward the man.
“Give us a deck, Coke,” said one, in a harsh voice.
He nodded. A silver quarter gleamed momentarily from hand to hand, and
he passed to one girl stealthily a small white-paper packet. Others
came to him, both men and women. It seemed to be an established thing.
“Who is that?” asked Kennedy, in a low tone, of the pickpocket back of
us.
“Coke Brodie,” was the laconic reply.
“A cocaine fiend?”
“Yes, and a lobbygow for the grapevine system of selling the dope under
this new law.”
“Where does he get the supply to sell?” asked Kennedy, casually.
The pickpocket shrugged his shoulders.
“No one knows, I suppose,” Kennedy commented to me. “But he gets it in
spite of the added restrictions and peddles it in little packets,
adulterated, and at a fabulous price for such cheap stuff. The habit is
spreading like wildfire. It is a fertile means of recruiting the
inmates in the vice-trust hotels. A veritable epidemic it is, too.
Cocaine is one of the most harmful of all habit-forming drugs. It used
to be a habit of the underworld, but now it is creeping up, and
gradually and surely reaching the higher strata of society. One thing
that causes its spread is the ease with which it can be taken. It
requires no smoking-dens, no syringe, no paraphernalia—only the drug
itself.”
Another singer had taken the place of the dancers. Kennedy leaned over
and whispered to the dip.
“Say, do you and your gun-moll want to pick up a piece of change to get
that mouthpiece I heard you talking about?”
The pickpocket looked at Craig suspiciously.
“Oh, don’t worry; I’m all right,” laughed Craig. “You see that fellow,
Coke Brodie? I want to get something on him. If you will frame that
sucker to get away with a whole front, there’s a fifty in it.”
The dip looked, rather than spoke, his amazement. Apparently Kennedy
satisfied his suspicions.
“I’m on,” he said quickly. “When he goes, I’ll follow him. You keep
behind us, and we’ll deliver the goods.”
“What’s it all about?” I whispered.
“Why,” he answered, “I want to get Brodie, only I don’t want to figure
in the thing so that he will know me or suspect anything but a plain
hold-up. They will get him; take everything he has. There must be
something on that man that will help us.”
Several performers had done their turns, and the supply of the drug
seemed to have been exhausted. Brodie rose and, with a nod to Loraine,
went out, unsteadily, now that the effect of the cocaine had worn off.
One wondered how this shuffling person could ever have carried through
the wild dance. It was not Brodie who danced. It was the drug.
The dip slipped out after him, followed by the woman. We rose and
followed also. Across the city Brodie slouched his way, with an evident
purpose, it seemed, of replenishing his supply and continuing his round
of peddling the stuff.
He stopped under the brow of a thickly populated tenement row on the
upper East Side, as though this was his destination. There he stood at
the gate that led down to a cellar, looking up and down as if wondering
whether he was observed. We had slunk into a doorway.
A woman coming down the street, swinging a chatelaine, walked close to
him, spoke, and for a moment they talked.
“It’s the gun-moll,” remarked Kennedy. “She’s getting Brodie off his
guard. This must be the root of that grapevine system, as they call it.”