Here was this amazing message from the dead man. Its wording, indeed, offered the irrational impression of having been written after death.
Garth thought rapidly. Granted its accusation, the note must have been scrawled between the firing of the shot and the moment of Taylor's death. But a murderer, arranging this appearance of suicide, would have given Taylor no opportunity. On the other hand, the theory that Taylor had written the note before killing himself, perhaps to direct suspicion to some innocent person, broke down before the brief wording, its patent incompleteness. One possibility remained. Garth could imagine no motive, but another person might have prepared the strange message.
A number of books littered the reading table at the side of the bed. Garth examined them eagerly. He found a blank page torn from one—the sheet which Taylor had clenched in his fingers. In another was Taylor's signature. When Garth had compared it with the message on the crumpled paper no doubt remained. Taylor himself had written those obscure and provocative words.
Garth found the pencil on the floor beneath the bed, as if it had rolled there when Taylor had dropped it. The place at the moment had nothing else to offer him beyond an abnormally large array in the bath room of bottles containing for the most part stimulants and sedatives. They merely strengthened, by suggesting that Taylor was an invalid, his appearance of suicide.
The coroner and Taylor's doctor, who came together, only added to the puzzle. The coroner declared unreservedly for suicide, and, in reply to Garth's anxious question, swore that no measurable time could have elapsed between the firing of the shot, which had pierced the heart, and Taylor's death. The physician was satisfied even after Garth confidentially had shown him the note.
"Mr. Taylor," he said then, "understood he had an incurable trouble. Every one knows that his wife, whom he worshipped, had practically left him by going to California for so long. It may have appealed to a grim sense of humour, not unusual with chronic invalids, to puzzle us with that absurdly worded note. I might tell you, too, that Mr. Taylor for some time had had a fear that he might go out of his head. Perpetually he questioned me about insanity, and wanted to know what treatment I would give him if his mind went."
Garth, however, when they had left, went to the library on the lower floor and telephoned headquarters. The inspector agreed that the case held a mystery which must be solved.
Garth walked to the embrasure of a high colonial window. The early winter night was already thick above the world. The huge room was too dark. There was a morbid feeling about the house. He had noticed that coming in, for the place had offered him one of those contrasts familiar to New York, where some antique street cars still rattle over sonorous subways. The Taylor home was a large, colonial frame farmhouse which had eventually been crowded by the modern and extravagant dwellings of a fashionable up-town district. In spite of its generous furnishings it projected even to this successful and materialistic detective a heavy air of the past, melancholy and disturbing.
Garth sighed. He had made up his mind. The best way to get at the truth was to accept for the present the dead man's message at its face value. He turned on the single light above the desk in the center of the room. He arranged a chair so that the glare would search its occupant. He sat opposite in the shadow and pressed a button. Almost at once he heard dragging footsteps in the hall, then a timid rapping at the door. The door opened slowly. A bent old man in livery shuffled across the threshold. It was the servant who had admitted Garth on his arrival a few minutes earlier. The detective indicated the chair on which the light fell.
"Sit down there, please."