Jacques Futrelle Short Stories Volume 3 (2 of 100)

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Mystery of the Grip of Death (CONT'D)

Uncontrollable terror glittered in the stranger�'s eyes, but none noted it. All were intently looking into the hall waiting for something.

“Medical Examiner Barry and Detective Mallory are up there now,” volunteered the bystander. “The body will be coming out in a minute.”

Then an awed whisper went around: “It�'s coming.”

The stranger stood peering on as the others did.

“Do they know who did it?” he asked. His voice was tense, and he fiercely repressed a quaver in it.

“No,” said his informant. “I heard, though, that a fellow had been up in Boyd�'s room to-night, and the man who had the next room heard them talking very loud. They had been playing cards.”

“Did the man go out?” asked the stranger.

“Nobody saw him if he did,” was the reply. “I guess, though, the police know who he was, and they�'re probably looking for him by this time. If they don�'t know, Mallory�'ll find him out all right.”

“Great God!” exclaimed the stranger between his tightly compressed lips.

The other man turned and looked at him curiously.

“What�'s the matter?” he asked.

“Nothing, nothing,” said the stranger, hurriedly. “Look, there it comes—that�'s all. It�'s awful, awful, awful.”

The big policeman in the door stepped to one side, and men came out bearing a litter, on which lay a grim, grisly something that had been a man. It was covered with a sheet. Beside it were Detective Mallory and Medical Examiner Barry. The little knot of onlookers was silent in the presence of death.

The stranger looked, looked as if fascinated by the horrid thing which lay there, watched them put the litter into the police ambulance, heard the Medical Examiner give some instructions and then Detective Mallory re-entered the house. The wagon drove away.

Turning suddenly, the stranger strode quickly down the avenue to the first corner. There he turned away and was swallowed up in the darkness. After a moment, from a distance, came the sound of a man�'s footsteps, running.



II

Several newspaper men, among them Hutchinson Hatch, went over the scene of the crime with Detective Mallory. It was a square, corner room on the second floor. The furniture consisted only of a bed, a table, a wash stand, chairs, there was no carpet to cover the gaping cracks in the floor, no curtains on the two windows.

The building was old and poorly constructed. Here a part of the cornice was sagging and broken, there the walls were mouldy; the ceiling was blotched with smoke, over by the steam radiator rats had gnawed a hole big enough to put one�'s fist in, the single-stemmed gas jet was grimy with dirt.

Of the two windows one was in the back wall and one in the side. Hutchinson Hatch trailed around the room with Detective Mallory. He saw that the two windows were securely fastened down with a sliding catch over the middle of the lower sash; there were no broken panes so that one leaving by the window might have reached in and fastened it after him.

Mr. Mallory explored the closet, but found only the things that belong to a poor man: clothing, an old hat, a battered trunk. There was no opening, the walls were solid. Then Mr. Mallory went to the door that had been smashed in. It was the only door except that of the closet. There was no transom.

Mr. Mallory and the reporter looked at this door a long time. It had been fastened when the police came—barred with an iron rod from one side to the other—held in round, iron sockets, set in the door facing. Neither of the sockets was open at the top; the bar had to be pushed through one straight on across the door into the other.

Thus early in the investigation Hutchinson Hatch saw this problem. If the windows were fastened inside and the murderer could not have passed out that way; if the door was fastened inside with an iron bar in both sockets and the murderer could not have gone that way—What then?

Hatch thought instinctively of a certain scientist and logician of note. Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen, Ph. D., M. D., LL. D., etc., so-called The Thinking Machine, whom he had occasion to know well because of certain previous adventures in which the scientist had accomplished seemingly impossible things.

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