Part 13 (1/2)

Kennedy did not seem, at least at present, to give this phase of it anything like the weight he credited to the frenzied financial relations the case was uncovering.

It was true, as I learned later, that Manton was at that very moment doing perhaps as much as anyone else ever did to discredit the picture game in Wall Street.

X

CHEMICAL RESEARCH

The following morning I found Kennedy up ahead of me, and I felt certain that he had gone to the laboratory. Sure enough, I found him at work in the midst of the innumerable scientific devices which he had gathered during years of crime detection of every sort.

As usual, he was surrounded by a perfect litter of test tubes, beakers, reagents, microscopes, slides, and culture tubes. He had cut out the curious spots from the towel I had discovered and was studying them to determine their nature. From the ma.s.s of paraphernalia I knew he was neglecting no possibility which might lead to the hidden truth or produce a clue to the crime.

”Have you learned anything yet?” I asked.

”Those brownish spots were blood, of course,” was his reply as he stopped a moment in his work. ”In the blood I discovered some other substance, though I can't seem to identify it yet. It will take time. I thought it might be a drug or poison, but it doesn't seem to be--at least nothing one might ordinarily expect.”

”How about the other spots, not the Chinese yellow?”

”Another problem I haven't solved. I dissolved enough of them so that I have plenty of material to study if I don't waste it. But so far I haven't been able to identify the substance with anything I know.

There's a lot more work of elimination, Walter, before we're on the road to the solution of this case. Whatever stained the towel was very unusual. As near as I can make out the spots are of some protein composition. But it's not exactly a poison, although many proteins may be extremely poisonous and extremely difficult to identify because they are of organic nature.”

I was disappointed. It seemed to me that he had made comparatively little progress so far.

”There's one thing,” he added. ”Samples of the body fluids of the victim have been sent down by the coroner at Tarrytown and I have a.n.a.lyzed them. While I haven't decided what it was that killed Stella Lamar, I am at least convinced that it has something to do with these towel spots. They are not exactly the same--in fact, I should say they were complementary, or, perhaps better, ant.i.thetical.”

”The mark wasn't made by the needle which scratched her, then?”

”That's what I thought at first, that the point used had been wiped off on the towel. Then I decided that the spots had nothing to do with the case at all. Now I believe there is some connection, after all.”

”I--I don't understand it,” I protested.

”It's very baffling,” he agreed, absent-mindedly.

”If the towel wasn't used to clean the fatal needle,” I went on, ”then it may have been used before they went out instead of afterward.”

”Exactly. As a matter of fact, if I had not been so confused yesterday by all the details of the case, by the many people involved, I would have noticed at a glance that the blood spots on the towel could not come from some one using it to wipe the needle. And any hypothesis that it had been used out in Tarrytown was ridiculous, because Miss Lamar was only scratched faintly and lost no blood. If I had been a little more clever I might have been altogether too clever. I might possibly have thrown the towel away, because there certainly was no logical reason for connecting it with the crime.”

”Just when do you suppose Stella was p.r.i.c.ked?” I asked.

”That's a vital consideration. Just now I do not know the poison and so cannot tell how quickly it acted.” He began to put aside his various paraphernalia. ”Suppose we go at this thing by a process of deduction rather than from the end of scientific a.n.a.lysis.” He sat on a corner of the bench. ”What do we find?” he began.

”While I've been working here with the test tubes and the microscope I've been trying to reconstruct what must have happened, trying to trace out every action of Stella Lamar as nearly as it is possible for us to do so. I don't think we need to go back of their arrival at the house, for the present. They seem to have been there a long while before the taking of the particular scene, since there were twelve other scenes preceding and since it requires time to put up the electric lights and make the connections, as well as to set the cameras, take tests, rearrange the furniture, and all the rest of it.

”They arrived at the house in two automobiles; with the exception of Phelps, who was there already, and Manton, who came in his own limousine. That means that Miss Lamar had company on the trip out, the princ.i.p.als probably riding with each other in one car. At the house they were all more or less together. There were people about constantly and it would seem as if there was small opportunity for anyone to inflict the scratch which caused her death. I don't mean that it would have been impossible to p.r.i.c.k her. I mean that she would have felt the jab of the point. In all likelihood she would have cried out and glanced around. Take a needle yourself, sometime, Walter, and try to duplicate the scratch on your own arm in such a way that you would not be aware of it.

”So you see I'm counting upon some sort of exclamation from Miss Lamar.

If she were inoculated with the poison with other folks about, it is sure some one would have remembered a cry, a questioning glance, a quick grasp of the forearm--for the nerves are very sensitive in the skin there--”

”No one did recall anything of the kind,” I interrupted.