Drury Lane’s Last Case

25 Murder

The sun beamed and the fire was out. The smoke had dissipated overnight. Only the charred embers, the heap of wreckage like a prehistoric mound, and the scorched trees remained to tell of the explosion the evening before. Firemen and police were busy digging about in the ruins. One man, a dark quiet fellow with a sharp eye, was directing operations. He seemed particularly anxious to get the débris cleared away so that he could descend into what remained of the cellar.

They looked on from the edge of the trees, a warm early-morning wind blowing their clothes about. Bolling watched the workmen grimly.

“See that bird over there with the eagle eye? He’s a bomb expert. Thought I might as well do this right while I was doing it. I want to know how this damn thing happened.”

“Do you mean to say he’ll find something in that rubbish?” demanded Rowe.

“That’s what he’s here for.”

The workmen made huge progress. In a short time the wreckage had been cleared out of the hole in the ground and passed from hand to hand to make a ragged heap thirty feet away. When the cellar had been sufficiently excavated to permit descent, the quiet man scrambled into the pit and disappeared. He emerged after ten minutes, looked about as if measuring the circumference of the explosion, and vanished again, this time among the trees. When he returned he dived into the cellar again. On his third appearance he wore a look of quiet satisfaction and he carried in his two hands a heterogeneous mess of small iron fragments, rubber, glass, and wire.

“Well?” demanded Bolling.

“Here’s the evidence, Chief,” said the bomb expert casually. He held up a small piece of clock-like apparatus. “Time-bomb.”

“Ah,” said Mr. Drury Lane.

“Crude, home-made. Set by a clock to go off at six. Swell charge of trinitrotoluol — TNT.”

The same question leaped to the lips of Patience, Rowe, and Lane. It was Lane, however, who said sharply: “When was the bomb planted?”

“Six p.m. Sunday, if this went off at six last night. It was a twenty-four hour bomb.”

“Six o’clock Sunday,” repeated Patience slowly. “Then it was planted before Maxwell was assaulted Sunday night!”

“Looks as if you were right, Pat,” murmured Rowe. “If whoever set the bomb knew the document was in the house, then he planted it to destroy the document. That means he knew it was in the house but didn’t know exactly where. It’s hard to take—”

“Focal point of the explosion,” said the expert, spitting at a blackened rock, “was the cellar.”

“Ah,” said Lane again.

“The second visitor, the one who got the document out of the little secret compartment,” said Patience with a thoughtful squint at Lane, “couldn’t have been the one who set the bomb. That’s obvious. That second visitor knew where the document was; the bomb-setter didn’t, as you’ve just said, Gordon...”

She was interrupted by a hoarse shout from one of the workmen digging in the ruins of the cellar. They all turned quickly.

“What’s the matter?” cried Bolling, breaking into a run.

Three men were stooping over something, their heads just visible above the lip of the excavation. One of them turned, white and shaking. “There... there’s a body in here, Chief,” he croaked. “And from the — the looks of him he was murdered.”

The young people dashed through the blackened ashes to the rim of the foundation. Lane followed slowly behind, pale and worried.

Rowe took one look and turned to shove Patience roughly away. “No good, Pat,” he said huskily. “You’d better go off there under the trees. It’s — not nice.”

“Oh,” said Patience; and her nostrils flared nervously. Without another word she obeyed.

The men stared, fascinated, down into the pit. One workman, a young red-cheeked policeman, crept off to a corner of the cellar and bent double, trembling and sick... The remains were fearfully charred, wholly beyond semblance to human form; a leg and an arm were horribly missing, and the clothes were completely burned away.

“How do you know,” asked Lane harshly, “that he’s been murdered?”

An older man in uniform looked up, lips compressed. “He wasn’t so burnt I can’t see the holes,” he said.

“Holes?” choked Rowe.

The man sighed queerly. “Three holes. Neat as hell in his belly. Those are bullet holes, mister, and don’t forget it.”

Three hours later Lane, Chief Bolling, Patience, and young Rowe were seated silently in the office of the District Attorney at White Plains. An urgent call had been sent through for a vehicle and arrangements made to cart the corpse off to the Medical Examiner’s office in White Plains, the county seat. Bolling would permit no one to touch the body beyond the handling necessary to assemble the scattered remains. A search had been conducted for fragments of clothing, particularly buttons, which might provide a clue to the murdered man’s identity in the absence of more specific identification; but the body had been in the vortex of the explosion and the searchers soon gave up. It was a miracle, the bomb expert said cheerfully, that the body had not been smashed to atoms.

They sat about the district attorney’s desk staring at the object upon it. It was the only article taken from the dead body which might be construed as a clue. It was a wrist-watch of British manufacture, a cheap timepiece with a leather strap; it would have been futile to attempt to trace it. Nothing remained of the glass except a single triangular bit of glass clinging to the frame. The alloy metal of which the watch was made had not suffered from the explosion, except for its smoky blackish appearance. There was one thing about it, however, which was odd. The hands stood fixed at 12.26; and there was a deep gash on the face. This gash had not only bitten into the number 10 but extended beyond the 10 into the very metal of the frame.

“That’s a funny one,” said the District Attorney, a youngish man with worried eyes. “Didn’t you tell me, Bolling, that the body was found face down and the arm on which this watch was strapped was folded under the body?”

“That’s right.”

“Then the gash on the edge of the dial wasn’t made by the explosion.”

“There’s something else too,” murmured Patience. “The explosion occurred at six o’clock; if it had caused the watch to stop then the hands should show six o’clock. But they don’t.”

The district attorney surveyed her with admiration. “Right! I never thought of that, to tell the truth. Inspector Thumm’s daughter, did you say?”

The Medical Examiner came in hurriedly — a bald little man with a pink face and tender jowls. “Hello, hallo! Well, I suppose you want the good news. I’ve just finished looking over that mess inside.”

“He was murdered, wasn’t he?” asked Rowe eagerly.

“Yes, indeed. Of course in the condition of the corpse it’s hard to tell, but it’s my opinion that he’s been dead about thirty-six hours, which would make the time of death approximately midnight Sunday.”

“Midnight Sunday!” Patience stared at Rowe, and he stared back. Mr. Drury Lane stirred a little.

“That checks pretty well with the wrist-watch,” remarked the District Attorney. “Twelve-twenty-six. The watch must have stopped during the murder-period. He was killed at twenty-six minutes past twelve early Monday morning.”

The bald little man continued: “He was shot from the front, at very close range. Three slugs.” He tossed three smashed and shapeless bullets on the desk. “Funny thing about the gash on that watch. There’s a corresponding gash on the wrist which cut pretty deep. The wrist-gash starts just where the gash on the watch leaves off.”

“In other words,” asked Rowe, “you think the same blow caused the gashes on both wrist and watch?”

“That’s the ticket.”

“Then there’s our ax-wielder,” muttered Rowe with a hard glitter in his eyes. “Or at least it’s somebody who used an ax... Doctor, could these gashes have been caused by a small ax?”

“Sure. Couldn’t have been a knife. Anything with a broad blade and a handle for leverage.”

“Then that’s settled,” grunted Bolling. “Somebody used an ax to carve this bird, hit him over the wrist, broke his watch and stopped it, wounding the wrist at the same time; and then, I suppose in a fight, filled his belly full of lead.”

“There’s something else, too,” said the doctor. He produced from his pocket a small key wrapped in tissue paper. “One of your men, Bolling, just brought this in. Found in a scrap of trouser-pocket they managed to dig up in the ruins near the body. It’s been identified by somebody—”

“Maxwell?”

“Man who took care of the house? Yes. Maxwell identified it as the original key to the front door.”

“The original!” cried the young people in chorus.

“Funny,” muttered Bolling. “Hold on a minute.” He seized the district attorney’s telephone and called his headquarters in Tarrytown. He spoke shortly to some one, then replaced the receiver. “Sure enough. My man tells me Maxwell said this was Dr. Ales’s key. The one that the masked man took from Maxwell the night he tied him up in the garage was just a duplicate.”

“The only original?” breathed Patience.

“That’s what Maxwell said.”

“Then I don’t think there’s any doubt about it,” said the District Attorney with a sigh of satisfaction. “The corpse must be that of Dr. Ales.”

“Indeed?” murmured Lane.

“You don’t think so?”

“A key, my dear sir, doesn’t make an owner. However, I suppose it’s logically possible.”

“Well, I’m busy,” said the Medical Examiner. “Only one other thing. I suppose you want a description of this cadaver. Five feet eleven, sandy or blond hair, must have weighed somewhere around a hundred and fifty-five pounds, and he was anywhere from forty-five to fifty-five years old. I couldn’t find any identifying marks.”

“Sedlar,” whispered Patience.

“On the dot.” Rowe spoke brusquely. “One of the men involved in this case, an Englishman, Dr. Sedlar, disappeared from his hotel in New York City on Saturday. That description fits him perfectly!”

“You don’t say!” growled Bolling.

“I do say. At the same time there seems to be a confusion of identities. This man Sedlar has been accused of being Dr. Ales—”

“Then there’s the answer,” said Bolling hopefully. “Don’t forget the corpse was carrying around Dr. Ales’s key. If Sedlar was Ales, then everything’s hunky-dory.”

“I’m not so sure, on second thought,” muttered Rowe. “There are really only two possibilities, and we’re muddling about here because we haven’t analyzed thoroughly enough. The first possibility is that Sedlar and Ales are the same man, as you say, Mr. Bolling, in which case the corpse — which is remarkably like both — clears up the major mystery of both men’s disappearance. But if Sedlar and Ales aren’t the same, then there’s only one conclusion to come to: they bear an uncanny resemblance to each other! We’ve been evading that conclusion because it seems... er... pulpy and penny-dreadfulish; but I don’t see how you can get around it.”

Lane said nothing.

“Well,” grumbled Bolling, struggling to his feet, “all this talk may get you people somewhere, but it leaves me with a headache. All I want to know is: Whose corpse is this, Dr. Ales or that Englishman Sedlar’s?”

On Wednesday morning two things of importance occurred. Inspector Thumm returned victorious from Chillicothe, Ohio, his jewel thief caught and safely behind bars; and the mystery of the “uncanny resemblance” was solved.