The Stolen War Secret/Chapter 5

HIS thing has begun to take on the nature of an epidemic,” exclaimed Craig that afternoon after luncheon as he glanced at the early edition of the evening papers which had arrived at Westport and had been delivered to Colonel Sinclair.

On the first page stared the headline:

We bent over and read the strange and hasty account:

There was much more to the account, and the mystery with which the Coroner surrounded the affair had evidently impressed the newspapers with the idea that they had a big story.

Colonel Sinclair was palpably upset by the news.

“First it is Valcour,” he exclaimed in unfeigned alarm, “now Neumeyer. Where will it end? Why, Neumeyer and I were old friends. He has visited me often out here. We have traveled together in Mexico. In fact it was with his assistance and advice that I gathered many of these curios which you see in this very room.”

He waved bis hand about at the wonderful collection he had made, for he was no mean student himself.

“A great man—Neumeyer,” he continued, rummaging among some papers, “a student and a practical man, both.”

Sinclair had drawn out a packet of letters and from it selected one.

“That’s the sort of man he was,” he said, spreading the letter out. “I don’t mind you fellows knowing this, for I can trust you not to let it go further. These are letters he wrote me from Mitla several months ago, before the present trouble became so acute down there that he had to leave for New York.”

The letter certainly showed that the two had been on intimate terms. The Professor wrote:

“That’s the sort of fellow Neumeyer was,” commented Sinclair thoughtfully, “always delving about and bringing up something not only of scientific value but of practical value as well. I’m going up to the city with you, if you are going,” he added.

Kennedy had already despatched a wire to Dr. Leslie, telling him where we were and asking him to hold things in their present condition until we could get back.

THE coroner was waiting for us at the station when we arrived.

“I’m glad to see you,” he greeted us after the introductions were over. “I’ve been trying to get you, Kennedy, all day.”

He was plainly perplexed and made no effort to conceal it as he hurried us into his official car which was waiting there.

“Such a sight as I saw when I got there,” he exclaimed as we crowded into the car and sped uptown. “There, in his big desk chair sat Neumeyer, absolutely rigid, the most horribly contorted look on his face that I have ever seen—half of pain, half of fear.

“Before him lay a book of beautiful colored plates of inscriptions published by the National Museum of Mexico City. He had evidently been studying them.

“Well, I walked over and bent down to touch him. His hand was cold, of course. As nearly as I could make out, he must have been dead six or eight hours at least, perhaps longer.”

Sinclair had been listening intently but had said nothing. He was impatient of every delay, but at last we reached Neumeyer’s.

The Professor had occupied a back room and an extension on the first floor of a private house which he rented, using the ex tension as a study and miniature museum of his own.

We entered the little private museum which all night had guarded its terrible secret. The very atmosphere of tragedy in it sent a shudder over me, and Sinclair was nervous and shaken.

Kennedy began at once by examining the body which had been moved by the Coroner from the chair and was lying, covered up, on a couch.

In the fleshy part of the back of the neck, just below the left ear, was a round, red mark, with just a drop of now coagulated blood in the center.

As I caught sight of it, I could not help exclaiming involuntarily—

“Just the same as that on Madame Valcour!”

Kennedy said nothing, but squeezed out from the little wound on Neumeyer’s neck a few drops of liquid on another little glass microscope slide from the emergency-case in his pocket.

“You say most of his work had been carried on in Mitla?” asked Kennedy, looking about at the crowded room.

“Not all of it,” replied Sinclair. “A year ago he was in Yucatan. But this year he had been in Mitla, until the rebels made it dangerous. After that he spent some time at the pyramids near Mexico City, but even that became dangerous and he came back here. But it was Mitla that he was most interested in.”

“You were familiar with what he had here, I presume?” went on Kennedy.

“Very,” answered Sinclair.

“Then I wish that you would look through the room and see if there is any thing missing. I am going outside in the back yard under the windows to look about.”

Sinclair began carefully running over the stuff.

In the yard Kennedy first looked about to get the general bearings of the house. It was several houses in from the corner, but comparatively easy to reach over the back-fences from the side street.

Under the window of the extension, which had been back of and a little to one side of Neumeyer’s chair, was a clump of bushes, and as Kennedy approached, in order to see whether it would be possible to climb up to the window, he pushed aside the fronds of leaves.

Suddenly he bent down, I thought at first to look for footprints. Instead, he picked up a short cylinder, an inch or so long and a little more than half an inch in diameter. It was on what looked to me like a thin reed stick three or four inches long, and the cylinder itself was of a light buff-brown.

Who had dropped it, I wondered?

He gave a glance upward which assured him that it was entirely possible for any one of somewhat more than ordinary agility to reach the window-sill by a leap and then pull himself up to it. Then he released the bushes and rejoined me.

“What is it?” I asked.

Kennedy was looking at the little reed stick, on the end of which was the small buff-brown cylinder. He turned it over and over, noticing a place where a minute fragment had evidently been broken off.

Finally he dug his nail into it. The mass was comparatively soft. As he rubbed his nail gingerly over the tip of his tongue, he puckered his face and quickly rubbed his tongue vigorously with his handkerchief, as if the taste had been extremely acrid.

“Even that little speck that adhered to my nail,” he observed, “makes my tongue tingle and feel numb yet.”

He turned without a word further and re-entered the house, mounting the steps to the quarters occupied by Neumeyer.

“Have you discovered anything yet?” he asked of Sinclair who was still busily engaged going over the archeologist’s treasures.

“I can’t say,” answered Sinclair slowly. “There was an inscription over which Neumeyer and I had puzzled a great deal—on a small block of porphyry. I don’t see it.”

“It came from Mitla?” asked Kennedy casually.

“Yes,” replied Sinclair, still rummaging in the mass of stuff.

Mitla, as I already knew, was south of the city of Oaxaca, in the state of that name; and there, I recalled, were situated the properties and the railroad interests of Sinclair, in which Mrs. Hawley had told us she too was interested.

In the ruined palaces of Mitla was the crowning achievement of the old Zapotec kings. In fact, no ruins in America, I had heard, were more elaborately ornamented or richer in material for the archeologist.

As Kennedy himself looked about, we could see that Neumeyer had brought up porphyry blocks on which was much hieroglyphic painting, peculiarly well preserved in that dry atmosphere. There were many sculptured stones and mosaics. Here were jugs, there were cups, vases, all sorts of utensils. Many of the articles had a religious significance, and there were little figures of gods and sacrificial stones. In fact there was packed on shelves and into corners of the room enough stuff almost to equip a fair-sized museum.

One thing I noticed now which had not attracted my attention at first in our surprise. It was an idol, a hideous thing, which sat on the desk directly in front of where Neumeyer had been seated. Squatted and coiled about it were frogs and snakes.

I could not help feeling that this terrible image was a fitting piece to have accompanied the gruesome occupant of the narrow room during his long vigil. Indeed, the mere sight of it sent a shudder over me. If I had been inclined to the superstitious, I might certainly have been pardoned for believing that it had in some way wreaked its revenge upon the man for having disturbed the resting-places of the private and public deities of this long-dead race. However, not being superstitious, I knew that it must have been something very much alive, though diabolical in its nature, which had really been the cause of the tragedy.

DR. LESLIE reappeared, bringing the caretaker of the house, an old woman.

“Did the Professor have any visitors yesterday?” asked Kennedy as the care-taker paused on the threshold of the now ghastly little room, completely unnerved by the tragedy that had been so close without her apparently knowing it. “Did you see any one about who looked suspicious or hear any noises?”

“In the afternoon,” she replied slowly, “a rather pretty, dark woman called and asked for the Professor. She seemed very disappointed when she found that he was out.”

“Did she look like a Mexican?” asked Kennedy.

“Well, I can’t say, sir. She might have been partly Spanish, but she was different from most of them.”

“Did she leave any name?”

“No. But she seemed to be much interested in seeing him. She asked several questions about him and then went away. That was all I saw of her and I didn’t see any one else about.”

We had evidently got all we could from the old caretaker.

“I hardly place much reliance on what she says,” remarked Kennedy when she had gone. “She’s too near-sighted. It might have been a Mexican Indian for all we know. That’s usually the way. The people who have a chance to help you are so unobservant.”

Dr. Leslie showed plainly that he was perplexed.

“I’ll tell you, Kennedy,” he confessed after a moment, “that’s a good deal the way I feel about this case. I’m far from satisfied with the progress that my own assistants are making with that Valcour case, too.”

I saw a half smile of satisfaction flit over Craig’s face. He had expected it. But the flicker was only momentary and quickly suppressed.

“As far as they can determine,” went on the Coroner, “there is absolutely no clue to her death. I thought at first that it must be a poison. But if it is, it must have been one of the most subtle, for apparently every trace of it has vanished.”

He shook his head doubtfully.

“I know she could not have been asphyxiated, as I told you at the Vanderveer, for there was no illuminating gas in the room. Yet in some respects she looked as if she had been. I have gone over all the possibilities of suicide and of poisoning, but”

He shrugged his shoulders and left the remark unfinished.

“In other words, you have no clue yet,” supplied Kennedy.

“Well, it might have been heart trouble, I suppose,” remarked Dr. Leslie.

“Hardly. She looked strong that way. No—off hand, unless you have discovered something yourself, I shouldn’t be inclined to say that it was anything organic.”

Leslie gave no evidence of having discovered a thing.

“Then too,” he resumed, “they tell me she was intimate with a lot of these refugees from Mexico. I have thought it might be some new kind of tropical disease.”

He paused again, then went on sheepishly—

“I must confess that I don’t know. The fact is I had my own theory about it until not long ago. That is why I wanted to see you so much after this Neumeyer affair occurred too.”

“What do you mean?” asked Craig, evidently bent on testing his own theory by the weakness of that of some one else. “What was your idea?”

“I thought at first,” pursued Dr. Leslie, “that we had at last a genuine ‘poisoned needle’ case. In some respects it looked like it.”

“But,” objected Kennedy, “clearly this was not a case of white slavery or anything of that nature. No, it impresses me as a case of murder pure and simple. Have you tested for the commonly used poisons?”

Dr. Leslie nodded.

“Yes, and there was no poison,” he said, “absolutely none that any of our tests could discover, at least.”

A silence of a few moments ensued, in which the coroner was apparently turning something over in his mind, seeking just the way to phrase it. Kennedy said nothing.

“You realize, Kennedy,” said the coroner at last, clearing his throat, “that we have no very good laboratory facilities of our own to carry out the necessary investigations in cases of homicide and suicide. We are often forced to resort to private laboratories. Now, sir—if we might—appeal to you?”

“I should be only too glad to assist you, Doctor,” answered Kennedy quickly.

“Thank you,” responded Dr. Leslie, evidently much relieved, for he had been thinking of the time when a few days hence the newspapers might be criticizing his office for not having obtained results.

He gave some orders regarding the disposition of the body of Neumeyer, and we left the house together with Sinclair who had fallen into a brown Study.

“I shall send the necessary materials to your laboratory,” concluded the coroner as we parted.

“Fine,” agreed Kennedy.

Sinclair seemed to have nothing that he could add to what had already been discovered and we left him, after finding out at what hotel he usually stopped. Burke too excused himself, saying that he had a few matters that he wanted to run down personally.

“Why should any one want to steal old tablets of Mixtec inscriptions?” I asked thoughtfully of Kennedy as we left the others. “As nearly as I can make out, that is about the only motive that any one has even suggested for the murder of Neumeyer. Surely they couldn’t have a sufficient value, even on appreciative Fifth Avenue, to warrant murder.”

“As far as that goes,” replied Kennedy sententiously, “it is incomprehensible. Yet we know that people do steal such things. The psychologists tell us that they have a veritable mania for possessing certain curios. However, it may be possible that there is some deeper significance in this case,” he added, his face wrinkled in thought. “For instance, there was that letter Neumeyer wrote to Sinclair. He might have discovered something that really had a practical value.”

It was, to me, a new aspect of the affair that an archeologist might possess something that appealed to the cupidity of a criminal.

“Then too,” went on Craig, “there is the problem of who this mysterious woman-caller may have been. I thought it might be Ruiz—but I doubt it. At present I’m inclined to believe that it was some one whom we haven’t yet connected with the case. At any rate, I think tonight I’ll see what sort of welcome we may get at the cabaret. Are you game?”

“Go as far as you like,” I replied.

I was now thoroughly aroused to solve the riddle. The further we went the more incomprehensible it seemed. How and by whom the beautiful Madame Valcour and now Professor Neumeyer had met their deaths seemed to me to remain as great a mystery as ever.