me? Even if you cannot take up the case to which I have devoted my
life, tell me what to do. I am enclosing a check for expenses, all I
can spare at present.
Sincerely yours,
NELLA GODWIN.
“Are you going?” I asked, watching Kennedy as he tapped the check
thoughtfully on the desk.
“I can hardly resist an appeal like that,” he replied, absently
replacing the check in the envelope with the letter.
XXIII
THE DEATH HOUSE
In the early forenoon, we were on our way by train “up the river” to
Sing Sing, where, at the station, a line of old-fashioned cabs and
red-faced cabbies greeted us, for the town itself is hilly.
The house to which we had been directed was on the hill, and from its
windows one could look down on the barracks-like pile of stone with the
evil little black-barred slits of windows, below and perhaps a quarter
of a mile away.
There was no need to be told what it was. Its very atmosphere breathed
the word “prison.” Even the ugly clutter of tall-chimneyed workshops
did not destroy it. Every stone, every grill, every glint of a sentry’s
rifle spelt “prison.”
Mrs. Godwin was a pale, slight little woman, in whose face shone an
indomitable spirit, unconquered even by the slow torture of her lonely
vigil. Except for such few hours that she had to engage in her simple
household duties, with now and then a short walk in the country, she
was always watching that bleak stone house of atonement.
Yet, though her spirit was unconquered, it needed no physician to tell
one that the dimming of the lights at the prison on the morning set for
the execution would fill two graves instead of one. For she had come to
know that this sudden dimming of the corridor lights, and then their
almost as sudden flaring-up, had a terrible meaning, well known to the
men inside. Hers was no less an agony than that of the men in the
curtained cells, since she had learned that when the lights grow dim at
dawn at Sing Sing, it means that the electric power has been borrowed
for just that little while to send a body straining against the straps
of the electric chair, snuffing out the life of a man.
To-day she had evidently been watching in both directions, watching
eagerly the carriages as they climbed the hill, as well as in the
direction of the prison.
“How can I ever thank you, Professor Kennedy,” she greeted us at the
door, keeping back with difficulty the tears that showed how much it
meant to have any one interest himself in her husband’s case.
There was that gentleness about Mrs. Godwin that comes only to those
who have suffered much.
“It has been a long fight,” she began, as we talked in her modest
little sitting-room, into which the sun streamed brightly with no
thought of the cold shadows in the grim building below. “Oh, and such a
hard, heartbreaking fight! Often it seems as if we had exhausted every
means at our disposal, and yet we shall never give up. Why cannot we
make the world see our case as we see it? Everything seems to have
conspired against us—and yet I cannot, I will not believe that the law
and the science that have condemned him are the last words in law and
science.”
“You said in your letter that the courts were so slow and the lawyers
so—”
“Yes, so cold, so technical. They do not seem to realise that a human
life is at stake. With them it is almost like a game in which we are
the pawns. And sometimes I fear, in spite of what the lawyers say, that
without some new evidence, it—it will go hard with him.”
“You have not given up hope in the appeal?” asked Kennedy gently.
“It is merely on technicalities of the law,” she replied with quiet
fortitude, “that is, as nearly as I can make out from the language of
the papers. Our lawyer is Salo Kahn, of the big firm of criminal
lawyers, Smith, Kahn.”
“Conine,” mused Kennedy, half to himself. I could not tell whether he
was thinking of what he repeated or of the little woman.
“Yes, the active principle of hemlock,” she went on. “That was what the
experts discovered, they swore. In the pure state, I believe, it is
more poisonous than anything except the cyanides. And it was absolutely
scientific evidence. They repeated the tests in court. There was no
doubt of it. But, oh, he did not do it. Some one else did it. He did
not—he could not.”
Kennedy said nothing for a few minutes, but from his tone when he did
speak it was evident that he was deeply touched.
“Since our marriage we lived with old Mr. Godwin in the historic Godwin
House at East Point,” she resumed, as he renewed his questioning.
“Sanford—that was my husband’s real last name until he came as a boy
to work for Mr. Godwin in the office of the factory and was adopted by
his employer—Sanford and I kept house for him.
“About a year ago he began to grow feeble and seldom went to the
factory, which Sanford managed for him. One night Mr. Godwin was taken
suddenly ill. I don’t know how long he had been ill before we heard him
groaning, but he died almost before we could summon a doctor. There was
really nothing suspicious about it, but there had always been a great
deal of jealousy of my husband in the town and especially among the few
distant relatives of Mr. Godwin. What must have started as an idle,
gossipy rumour developed into a serious charge that my husband had
hastened his old guardian’s death.
“The original will—THE will, I call it—had been placed in the safe of
the factory several years ago. But when the gossip in the town grew
bitter, one day when we were out, some private detectives entered the
house with a warrant—and they did actually find a will, another will
about which we knew nothing, dated later than the first and hidden with
some papers in the back of a closet, or sort of fire proof box, built
into the wall of the library. The second will was identical with the
first in language except that its terms were reversed and instead of
being the residuary legatee, Sanford was given a comparatively small
annuity, and the Elmores were made residuary legatees instead of
annuitants.”
“And who are these Elmores?” asked Kennedy curiously.
“There are three, two grandnephews and a grandniece, Bradford, Lambert,
and their sister Miriam.”
“And they live—”
“In East Point, also. Old Mr. Godwin was not very friendly with his
sister, whose grandchildren they were. They were the only other heirs
living, and although Sanford never had anything to do with it, I think
they always imagined that he tried to prejudice the old man against
them.”
“I shall want to see the Elmores, or at least some one who represents
them, as well as the district attorney up there who conducted the case.
But now that I am here, I wonder if it is possible that I could bring
any influence to bear to see your husband?”
Mrs. Godwin sighed.
“Once a month,” she replied, “I leave this window, walk to the prison,
where the warden is very kind to me, and then I can see Sanford. Of
course there are bars between us besides the regular screen. But I can
have an hour’s talk, and in those talks he has described to me exactly
every detail of his life in the—the prison. We have even agreed on
certain hours when we think of each other. In those hours I know almost
what he is thinking.” She paused to collect herself. “Perhaps there may
be some way if I plead with the warden. Perhaps—you may be considered
his counsel now—you may see him.”
A half hour later we sat in the big registry room of the prison and
talked with the big-hearted, big-handed warden. Every argument that
Kennedy could summon was brought to bear. He even talked over long
distance with the lawyers in New York. At last the rules were relaxed
and Kennedy was admitted on some technicality as counsel. Counsel can
see the condemned as often as necessary.
We were conducted down a flight of steps and past huge steel-barred
doors, along corridors and through the regular prison until at last we
were in what the prison officials called the section for the condemned.
Every one else calls this secret heart of the grim place, the death
house.
It is made up of two rows of cells, some eighteen or twenty in all, a
little more modern in construction than the twelve hundred archaic
caverns that pass for cells in the main prison.
At each end of the corridor sat a guard, armed, with eyes never off the
rows of cells day or night.
In the wall, on one side, was a door—the little green door—the door
from the death house to the death chamber.
While Kennedy was talking to the prisoner, a guard volunteered to show
me the death chamber and the “chair.” No other furniture was there in
the little brick house of one room except this awful chair, of yellow
oak with broad, leather straps. There it stood, the sole article in the
brightly varnished room of about twenty-five feet square with walls of
clean blue, this grim acolyte of modern scientific death. There were
the wet electrodes that are fastened to the legs through slits in the
trousers at the calves; above was the pipe-like fixture, like a
gruesome helmet of leather that fits over the head, carrying the other
electrode.
Back of the condemned was the switch which lets loose a lethal store of
energy, and back of that the prison morgue where the bodies are taken.
I looked about. In the wall to the left toward the death house was also
a door, on this side yellow. Somehow I could not get from my mind the
fascination of that door—the threshold of the grave.
Meanwhile Kennedy sat in the little cage and talked with the convicted
man across the three-foot distance between cell and screen. I did not
see him at that time, but Kennedy repeated afterward what passed, and
it so impressed me that I will set it down as if I had been present.
Sanford Godwin was a tall, ashen-faced man, in the prison pallor of
whose face was written the determination of despair, a man in whose
blue eyes was a queer, half-insane light of hope. One knew that if it
had not been for the little woman at the window at the top of the hill,
the hope would probably long ago have faded. But this man knew she was
always there, thinking, watching, eagerly planning in aid of any new
scheme in the long fight for freedom.
“The alkaloid was present, that is certain,” he told Kennedy. “My wife
has told you that. It was scientifically proved. There is no use in
attacking that.”
Later on he remarked: “Perhaps you think it strange that one in the
very shadow of the death chair”—the word stuck in his throat—“can
talk so impersonally of his own case. Sometimes I think it is not my
case, but some one else’s. And then—that door.”
He shuddered and turned away from it. On one side was life, such as it
was; on the other, instant death. No wonder he pleaded with Kennedy.
“Why, Walter,” exclaimed Craig, as we walked back to the warden’s
office to telephone to town for a car to take us up to East Point,
“whenever he looks out of that cage he sees it. He may close his
eyes—and still see it. When he exercises, he sees it. Thinking by day
and dreaming by night, it is always there. Think of the terrible hours
that man must pass, knowing of the little woman eating her heart out.
Is he really guilty? I must find out. If he is not, I never saw a
greater tragedy than this slow, remorseless approach of death, in that
daily, hourly shadow of the little green door.”
East Point was a queer old town on the upper Hudson, with a varying
assortment of industries. Just outside, the old house of the Godwins
stood on a bluff overlooking the majestic river. Kennedy had wanted to
see it before any one suspected his mission, and a note from Mrs.
Godwin to a friend had been sufficient.
Carefully he went over the deserted and now half-wrecked house, for the
authorities had spared nothing in their search for poison, even going
over the garden and the lawns in the hope of finding some of the
poisonous shrub, hemlock, which it was contended had been used to put
an end to Mr. Godwin.
As yet nothing had been done to put the house in order again and, as we
walked about, we noticed a pile of old tins in the yard which had not
been removed.
Kennedy turned them over with his stick. Then he picked one up and
examined it attentively.
“H-m—a blown can,” he remarked.
“Blown?” I repeated.
“Yes. When the contents of a tin begin to deteriorate they sometimes
give off gases which press out the ends of the tin. You can see how
these ends bulge.”
Our next visit was to the district attorney, a young man, Gordon
Kilgore, who seemed not unwilling to discuss the case frankly.
“I want to make arrangements for disinterring the body,” explained
Kennedy. “Would you fight such a move?”
“Not at all, not at all,” he answered brusquely. “Simply make the
arrangements through Kahn. I shall interpose no objection. It is the
strongest, most impregnable part of the case, the discovery of the
poison. If you can break that down you will do more than any one else
has dared to hope. But it can’t be done. The proof was too strong. Of
course it is none of my business, but I’d advise some other point of
attack.”
I must confess to a feeling of disappointment when Kennedy announced
after leaving Kilgore that, for the present, there was nothing more to
be done at East Point until Kahn had made the arrangements for
reopening the grave.
We motored back to Ossining, and Kennedy tried to be reassuring to Mrs.
Godwin.
“By the way,” he remarked, just before we left, “you used a good deal
of canned goods at the Godwin house, didn’t you?”
“Yes, but not more than other people, I think,” she said.
“Do you recall using any that were—well, perhaps not exactly spoiled,
but that had anything peculiar about them?”
“I remember once we thought we found some cans that seemed to have been
attacked by mice—at least they smelt so, though how mice could get
through a tin can we couldn’t see.”
“Mice?” queried Kennedy. “Had a mousey smell? That’s interesting. Well,
Mrs. Godwin, keep up a good heart. Depend on me. What you have told me
to-day has made me more than interested in your case. I shall waste no
time in letting you know when anything encouraging develops.”
Craig had never had much patience with red tape that barred the way to
the truth, yet there were times when law and legal procedure had to be
respected, no matter how much they hampered, and this was one of them.
The next day the order was obtained permitting the opening again of the
grave of old Mr. Godwin. The body was exhumed, and Kennedy set about
his examination of what secrets it might hide.
Meanwhile, it seemed to me that the suspense was terrible. Kennedy was
moving slowly, I thought. Not even the courts themselves could have
been more deliberate. Also, he was keeping much to himself.
Still, for another whole day, there was the slow, inevitable approach
of the thing that now, I, too, had come to dread—the handing down of
the final decision on the appeal.
Yet what could Craig do otherwise, I asked myself. I had become deeply
interested in the case by this time and spent the time reading all the
evidence, hundreds of pages of it. It was cold, hard, brutal,
scientific fact, and as I read I felt that hope faded for the
ashen-faced man and the pallid little woman. It seemed the last word in
science. Was there any way of escape?
Impatient as I was, I often wondered what must have been the suspense
of those to whom the case meant everything.
“How are the tests coming along?” I ventured one night, after Kahn had
arranged for the uncovering of the grave.
It was now two days since Kennedy had gone up to East Point to
superintend the exhumation and had returned to the city with the
materials which had caused him to keep later hours in the laboratory
than I had ever known even the indefatigable Craig to spend on a
stretch before.
He shook his head doubtfully.
“Walter,” he admitted, “I’m afraid I have reached the limit on the line
of investigation I had planned at the start.”
I looked at him in dismay. “What then?” I managed to gasp.
“I am going up to East Point again to-morrow to look over that house
and start a new line. You can go.”
No urging was needed, and the following day saw us again on the ground.
The house, as I have said, had been almost torn to pieces in the search
for the will and the poison evidence. As before, we went to it
unannounced, and this time we had no difficulty in getting in. Kennedy,
who had brought with him a large package, made his way directly to a
sort of drawing-room next to the large library, in the closet of which
the will had been discovered.
He unwrapped the package and took from it a huge brace and bit, the bit
a long, thin, murderous looking affair such as might have come from a
burglar’s kit. I regarded it much in that light.
“What’s the lay?” I asked, as he tapped over the walls to ascertain of
just what they were composed.
Without a word he was now down on his knees, drilling a hole in the
plaster and lath. When he struck an obstruction he stopped, removed the
bit, inserted another, and began again.
“Are you going to put in a detectaphone?” I asked again.
He shook his head. “A detectaphone wouldn’t be of any use here,” he
replied. “No one is going to do any talking in that room.”
Again the brace and bit were at work. At last the wall had been
penetrated, and he quickly removed every trace from the other side that
would have attracted attention to a little hole in an obscure corner of
the flowered wall-paper.
Next, he drew out what looked like a long putty-blower, perhaps a foot
long and three-eighths of an inch in diameter.
“What’s that?” I asked, as he rose after carefully inserting it.
“Look through it,” he replied simply, still at work on some other
apparatus he had brought.
I looked. In spite of the smallness of the opening at the other end, I
was amazed to find that I could see nearly the whole room on the other
side of the wall.
“It’s a detectascope,” he explained, “a tube with a fish-eye lens which
I had an expert optician make for me.”
“A fish-eye lens?” I repeated.
“Yes. The focus may be altered in range so that any one in the room may
be seen and recognised and any action of his may be detected. The
original of this was devised by Gaillard Smith, the adapter of the
detectaphone. The instrument is something like the cytoscope, which the
doctors use to look into the human interior. Now, look through it
again. Do you see the closet?”
Again I looked. “Yes,” I said, “but will one of us have to watch here
all the time?”
He had been working on a black box in the meantime, and now he began to
set it up, adjusting it to the hole in the wall which he enlarged on
our side.
“No, that is my own improvement on it. You remember once we used a
quick-shutter camera with an electric attachment, which moved the
shutter on the contact of a person with an object in the room? Well,
this camera has that quick shutter. But, in addition, I have adapted to
the detectascope an invention by Professor Robert Wood, of Johns
Hopkins. He has devised a fish-eye camera that ‘sees’ over a radius of
one hundred and eighty degrees—not only straight in front, but over
half a circle, every point in that room.
“You know the refracting power of a drop of water. Since it is a globe,
it refracts the light which reaches it from all directions. If it is
placed like the lens of a camera, as Dr. Wood tried it, so that
one-half of it catches the light, all the light caught will be
refracted through it. Fishes, too, have a wide range of vision. Some
have eyes that see over half a circle. So the lens gets its name.
Ordinary cameras, because of the flatness of their lenses, have a range
of only a few degrees, the widest in use, I believe, taking in only
ninety-six, or a little more than a quarter of a circle. So, you see,
my detectascope has a range almost twice as wide as that of any other.”
Though I did not know what he expected to discover and knew that it was
useless to ask, the thing seemed very interesting. Craig did not pause,
however, to enlarge on the new machine, but gathered up his tools and
announced that our next step would be a visit to a lawyer whom the
Elmores had retained as their personal counsel to look after their
interests, now that the district attorney seemed to hare cleared up the
criminal end of the case.
Hollins was one of the prominent attorneys of East Point, and before
the election of Kilgore as prosecutor had been his partner. Unlike
Kilgore, we found him especially uncommunicative and inclined to resent
our presence in the case as intruders.
The interview did not seem to me to be productive of anything. In fact,
it seemed as if Craig were giving Hollins much more than he was getting.
“I shall be in town over night,” remarked Craig. “In fact, I am
thinking of going over the library up at the Godwin house soon, very
carefully.” He spoke casually. “There may be, you know, some
finger-prints on the walls around that closet which might prove
interesting.”
A quick look from Hollins was the only answer. In fact, it was seldom
that he uttered more than a monosyllable as we talked over the various
aspects of the case.
A half-hour later, when he had left and had gone to the hotel, I asked
Kennedy suspiciously, “Why did you expose your hand to Hollins, Craig?”
He laughed. “Oh, Walter,” he remonstrated, “don’t you know that it is
nearly always useless to look for finger-prints, except under some
circumstances, even a few days afterward? This is months, not days. Why
on iron and steel they last with tolerable certainty only a short time,
and not much longer on silver, glass, or wood. But they are seldom
permanent unless they are made with ink or blood or something that
leaves a more or less indelible mark. That was a ‘plant.’”
“But what do you expect to gain by it?”
“Well,” he replied enigmatically, “no one is necessarily honest.”
It was late in the afternoon when Kennedy again visited the Godwin
house and examined the camera. Without a word he pulled the
detectascope from the wall and carried the whole thing to the
developing-room of the local photographer.
There he set to work on the film and I watched him in silence. He
seemed very much excited as he watched the film develop, until at last
he held it up, dripping, to the red light.
“Some one has entered that room this afternoon and attempted to wipe
off the walls and woodwork of that closet, as I expected,” he exclaimed.
“Who was it?” I asked, leaning over.
Kennedy said nothing, but pointed to a figure on the film. I bent
closer. It was the figure of a woman.
“Miriam!” I exclaimed in surprise.
XXIV
THE FINAL DAY
I looked aghast at him. If it had been either Bradford or Lambert, both
of whom we had come to know since Kennedy had interested himself in the
case, or even Hollins or Kilgore, I should not have been surprised. But
Miriam!
“How could she have any connection with the case?” I asked
incredulously.
Kennedy did not attempt to explain. “It is a fatal mistake, Walter, for
a detective to assume that he knows what anybody would do in any given
circumstances. The only safe course for him is to find out what the
persons in question did do. People are always doing the unexpected.
This is a case of it, as you see. I am merely trying to get back at
facts. Come; I think we might as well not stay over night, after all. I
should like to drop off on the way back to the city to see Mrs. Godwin.”
As we rode up the hill I was surprised to see that there was no one at
the window, nor did any one seem to pay attention to our knocking at
the door.
Kennedy turned the knob quickly and strode in.
Seated in a chair, as white as a wraith from the grave, was Mrs.
Godwin, staring straight ahead, seeing nothing, hearing nothing.
“What’s the matter?” demanded Kennedy, leaping to her side and grasping
her icy hand.
The stare on her face seemed to change slightly as she recognised him.
“Walter—some water—and a little brandy—if there is any. Tell
me—what has happened?”
From her lap a yellow telegram had fluttered to the floor, but before
he could pick it up, she gasped, “The appeal—it has been denied.”
Kennedy picked up the paper. It was a message, unsigned, but not from
Kahn, as its wording and in fact the circumstances plainly showed.
“The execution is set for the week beginning the fifth,” she continued,
in the same hollow, mechanical voice. “My God—that’s next Monday!”
She had risen now and was pacing the room.
“No! I’m not going to faint. I wish I could. I wish I could cry. I wish
I could do something. Oh, those Elmores—they must have sent it. No one
would have been so cruel but they.”
She stopped and gazed wildly out of the window at the prison. Neither
of us knew what to say for the moment.