CHAPTER V.
A FOUNDATION OF FACTS.
When the two men were comfortably settled in the reporter's study, Sturgis produced pipes, tobacco and writing materials.
"There now," said he, as he prepared to write, "I shall begin with what I shall call the Cab Mystery. The data in this case are already plentiful and curious. I shall read as I write, and you can interrupt for suggestions and criticisms, as the points occur to you. In the first place, then, the dead man is about fifty years old, and was employed in some commercial house or financial institution, probably as bookkeeper, at a fairly good salary."
"Hold on there, Sturgis," laughed Thurston. "I thought you were going to build up a solid foundation of facts before you allowed your imagination to run riot!"
"Well?" inquired the reporter in apparent surprise.
"Well, the only fact you have mentioned is the approximate age of the dead man. The rest is pure assumption. How can you know anything certain about his occupation and the amount of his salary?"
"True; I forgot you had not followed the steps in the process of induction. Here they are: the dead man's sleeves, on the under side below the elbow, were worn shiny. This shows that his occupation is at a desk of some kind."
"Or behind a counter," suggested Thurston quizzically.
"No. Your hypothesis is untenable. A clerk behind a counter does occasionally, it is true, lean upon his forearms. But incessant contact with the counter leaves across the front of his trousers an unmistakable line of wear, at a level varying according to the height of the individual. This line was not present in the case of the man in the cab. On the other hand, his waistcoat is frayed and worn at the level of the fourth button from the top. Therefore I maintain that he was in the habit of working at a desk. Now the trousers, although not new, are not baggy at the knees, though free from the seams which would suggest the effect of pressing or of a trousers stretcher. Conclusion, the desk is a high one; for the man stood at his work. Most men who work standing at high desks are bookkeepers of one kind or another. Therefore, as I said before, this man was probably a bookkeeper. Now, as to his salary; I do not pretend to know the exact amount of it, of course. But when a man, who was evidently not a dude, has his clothes made to order, of imported material, and when his linen, his hat and his shoes are of good quality, it is fair to infer that the man's income was comfortable.
"I proceed with the arrangement of my data:
"Secondly: the man in the cab died of a wound caused by a bullet fired at very close quarters. Indeed, the weapon must have been held either against the victim's body, or, at any rate, very near to it; for the coat is badly burned by the powder."
"On these points at least," assented Doctor Thurston, "I can agree with you. The bullet probably penetrated the upper lobe of the left lung."
"Yes," added Sturgis, "and it passed out at the back, far below where it went in."
"What makes you think it passed out? The wound in the back may have been caused by another bullet fired from the rear."
"That hypothesis might be tenable, were it not for this."
With these words, the reporter pulled out his watch, opened the case, and with the blade of a penknife took from the surface of the crystal a minute object, which he handed to the physician.
"Look at it," said he, pushing over a magnifying glass.
Doctor Thurston examined the tiny object carefully.
"A splinter of bone," he said at last.
"Yes. I found it on the surface of the wound in the back. How did it get there?"
"You are right," admitted the physician; "it must have come from within, chipped from a rib and carried out by the bullet which entered from the front."
"I think there can be no doubt as to that. Now, the bullet does not seem to have been deflected in its course by its contact with the rib, for, as far as I have been able to judge by probing the two wounds with my pencil, their direction is the same. This is important and brings me to point three, which is illustrated by these diagrams, drawn to scale from the measurements I took this afternoon."
As he said these words, the reporter handed his friend a sheet of paper upon which he had drawn some geometrical figures.
"The first of these diagrams shows the angle which the course of the bullet made with a horizontal plane; the second represents the inclination from right to left. The former of these angles is nearly sixty, and the latter not far from forty-five degrees. The inclination from right to left shows that the shot was fired from the right side of the dead man. Now then, one of two things: Either it was fired by the man himself, the weapon being held in his right hand; or else it was fired by an assassin who stood close to the victim's right side. The first of these hypotheses, considered by itself, is admissible; but it involves the assumption of an extremely awkward and unusual position of the suicide's hand while firing. On the other hand, the dead man is tall—six feet one inch—and to fire down, at an angle of sixty degrees, upon a man of his height, his assailant would have to be a colossus, or else to stand upon a chair or in some other equally elevated position, unless the victim happened to be seated when the shot was fired."
"Happened to be seated!" exclaimed Thurston astounded, "why, of course he was seated, since he was in the cab."
"That brings up point four, which is not the least puzzling of this interesting case," said Sturgis impressively; "the shooting was not done in the cab."
"Not done in the cab!"
"No; otherwise the bullet would have remained in the cushions; and it was not there."
"It might have fallen out into the street at the time of the collision," suggested Thurston.
"No; I searched every inch of the space in which it might have fallen. If it had been there I should have found it, for the spot was brilliantly lighted by an electric light, as you remember."
The physician pondered in silence for a few minutes.
"With all due respect for the accuracy of your observations, and for the rigorous logic of your inductions, Sturgis," he asserted at last with decision, "I am positive that the man died seated, for his limbs stiffened in that position."
"Yes," assented Sturgis, "and, for that matter, I grant you that he breathed his last in the cab; for in his death struggles he clutched in his left hand the curtain of the cab window, a piece of which remained in his dying grasp. I merely said that he was not shot in the cab."
"Then how did he get there?" asked the physician.
"Your question is premature, my dear fellow," replied Sturgis, smiling; "it must remain unanswered for the present. All we have established as yet is that he did get there. And that being the case, he must have been assisted; for, wounded as he was, he could not, I take it, have climbed into the cab by himself."
"Certainly not," agreed Thurston.
"Point five," resumed Sturgis, "the right arm was broken just above the wrist."
"Yes," said the physician, "I thought at first that the arm might have been broken in the collision with the cable car; but the discoloration of the flesh proves conclusively that the fracture occurred before death."
"Precisely. Now, it is possible that the man broke his arm when he fell, after being shot; but the contused wound looks to me as if it had been made by a severe blow with some blunt instrument."
"Possibly," admitted Thurston.
"This broken arm, if we can place it in its proper chronological position, may prove to be of some importance in the chain of evidence," mused Sturgis. "If the fracture occurred before the man was shot, that, of course, excludes the possibility of suicide; but, on the other hand, it also brings in an obstacle to the hypothesis of murder."
"How so?"
"Because we have settled, you will remember, that the shot was fired from the right of the victim, and close to him. Now, if he did not fire the shot himself, the person who did must have reached over his right arm to do so. In that case, unless the victim was asleep or stupefied, would he not instinctively have raised his arm in self-defence, and thus deflected the weapon upward?"
"Evidently."
"Well, it is idle to speculate on this line for the present. Let us come to point six. You remember I called your particular attention to the cabman. Do you still think he was only drunk?"
"No," replied Thurston; "while he had unquestionably been drinking heavily, he also showed symptoms of narcotic poisoning."
"Then the presumption is that he had been drugged by those who wished to place the wounded man in his cab. I observed him closely and I am satisfied that he knows as little about his dead passenger as we do. He probably knows less about him, at all events, than the young man in the sealskin cap who gave the police the slip during the excitement which followed the overturning of the cab."
Sturgis paused a moment.
"This, I think," he continued, "covers all the evidence we have thus far collected in the Cab Mystery. It is quite satisfactory, as far as it goes, for it is circumstantial evidence, and, therefore, absolutely truthful. In the Knickerbocker Bank Mystery, we have as yet no satisfactory data whatever; for everything we have heard concerning it has its origin in the fallible evidence of witnesses, and has, moreover, reached us third or fourth hand. There is, however, one fact that may, or may not, prove to be important. Have you noticed that these two mysteries are contemporaneous, and, therefore, that they may be related?"
"Do you think there is any connection between the two?" inquired Thurston, interested.
"I do not allow myself to think about it at all as yet," replied Sturgis; "I simply note the fact, that, so far as time is concerned, the Cab Mystery could be the sequel to the Knickerbocker Bank Mystery—that is all. Facts, my dear boy, are like words. A word is only an assemblage of meaningless letters until it becomes pregnant with sense by context. So, a fact, which, standing by itself, has no meaning, may, when correlated with other facts, become fraught with deep significance."
"And now," he continued, after a pause, "I think our work is concluded for the present. I shall be able to lay it aside for the night. Let me offer you a glass of sherry. Pleasant evening we spent at Sprague's to-night. I have a great admiration for him as an artist, and a great fondness for him as a man. Most of his friends are strangers to me, though. You know I have very little time to indulge in social dissipation. By the way, who is that Doctor Murdock with whom I have made this bet?"
"Oh! he is a physician, though now retired from practice. He devotes himself entirely to scientific research, especially in the domain of chemistry. He has made some important discoveries in organic chemistry, and they say he has succeeded in proving some of the supposed elementary metals to be compounds. He has quite an enviable reputation in the scientific world. I understand he is a remarkable man."
"That is evident at a glance. He showed himself this evening to be a clear thinker and a brilliant speaker. I should say he was something of a genius, and I should judge, moreover, that he was a man of magnificent nerve, capable of the most heroic actions, or——"
Sturgis hesitated.
"Or——?" asked Thurston.
"Or of the most infamous cruelty and crime. It all depends upon whether or not his great mental attributes are under the control of a heart; a point upon which I am somewhat in doubt."