The Waxworks Murder

One Card for Cyanide

Bencolin sat silent for a moment, staring at the carpet. Nobody spoke. We all felt the presence of a mad, stocky old man with a gold-headed cane; we all saw the tight line of his jaw, and his unwavering eyes.

'Is it strange, then,' the detective asked, softly, 'that he should continue this symbolism of his? That, after he had stabbed his daughter, he should put her body into the arms of - the satyr? He was offering her there as a kind of sacrifice. He had seen the satyr when he came down those stairs. He knew of the dummy wall, and the door to the passage. Even the lights extinguished did not destroy his plan. You know what happened. It was decreed that Mademoiselle Augustin should put on the lights again when his daughter was in the passage; he saw her, he struck, and Mademoiselle Prevost opened the boulevard door just then. Oh, yes, you know all that.

'But do you see now why he took the silver key from her and why he was searching for it? Because the Martel name must be preserved! He could offer his daughter to his own blind gods. He could dump her there in the satyr's arms, for the world to see; left in a dingy waxworks, as befitted her. But the vengeance must be a thing between himself and his blind gods solely. He had avenged the ghosts. But the world must not be allowed to know why. It was his secret. If the silver key were found, the police would trace it. It would be blazoned forth to the world that a Martel woman was a whore and a procuress....'

Bencolin smiled grimly. He passed a hand over his eyes and now his steady voice grew a little bewildered.

'Explain it? I don't try, beyond what I've told you. He killed Galant because he naively fancied that Galant was the only person who might betray what was known about his daughter, and brand her publicly. So - again I merely quote what he said over the telephone - he sent a note to Galant. He asked for an appointment, and said he was prepared to pay to protect his daughter's name. He arranged to meet Galant in the passage, after which (he said) Galant could take him into the club to the office for payment. And Galant's shrewd, prudent soul remembered that appointment even when his apaches were searching for Jeff there; even when an informer was present, Galant must take time off to go and see this man....

'Monsieur Martel hid in the waxworks once more. And once more he left by the boulevard door, shortly before you, Mademoiselle Augustin, and you, Jeff, escaped. The same knife avenged both crimes.'

Chaumont said, hoarsely: 'I believe it. I have to believe it. But his telling you this over the phone! - Do you mean to say he deliberately confessed, when he'd done all this?'

'That comes under the head of what I still believe to be the wildest part of this crime.' Bencolin had sat with his hand shading his eyes; now he whipped it away and turned to me. 'Jeff, when we visited his home this afternoon, did you realize that all the time he was deliberately giving us an even chance - a gambler's chance - to guess?'

'You've said that before,' I muttered. 'No, I didn't.'

'Well, and there's the glory of it! He was waiting for us, waiting with a full stage set. Think back, now. ... You remember how unnaturally poised he was, how motionless, how he greeted us with a poker face ? And do you remember what he was doing? He sat there and twisted in his hand, full under our eyes - what ?'

I tried to remember. I saw the lamplight, the rain, the man's frozen glance, and in his hand ...

'It looked,' I said, 'like a piece of blue paper.'

'It was. It was a ticket to this museum.'

The appalling realization struck me between the eyes. The blue tickets! which I had thought about ever since I thought of Mademoiselle Augustin sitting in her glass booth

'There, in front of our eyes,' Bencolin explained carefully, 'he flourished a proof that he had been here to this museum. He was working again according to his code. He would not tell us. But the code said he should not strike, like a thug, and slink away. He would place before the police sufficient evidence. If they were too blind to see it - he had done his duty. I said before, and I say again, that he is the strangest murderer within my experience. But he didn't stop with that. He did two other things.'

'What?'

'He told us that he had been accustomed to going, every week, for forty years, to the home of a friend to play cards. He said that he went there on the night of die murder. All we needed to do was to check that statement, and we should have found it false. It would have been proof complete, an absence which his friend could not conceivably have failed to notice. But I, dunderhead, never thought of it then! And then, to finish it, he offered us the most subtle suggestion of all. He knew we must have found those bits of glass from the broken wrist watch in the passage. And do you remember what he did?'

'Well? Go on!'

'Think back, now. We were just about to leave. What happened ?'

'Why ... the grandfather clock began to strike . . . '

'Yes. And he glanced at his wrist, on which there was no watch. Then, to emphasize that fact, he frowned, and looked up at the grandfather clock. Jeff, no plainer piece of pantomime was ever described. A habit - he looks at his watch, finds it gone, and naturally raises his eyes to the clock.'

The thing was so blatantly, glaringly plain as I looked back; as I considered those carefully weighed answers, all calculated to tell us just enough; all part of a huge gambling game which he had played....

'Several times,' continued Bencolin, 'he almost weakened. That was when his wife would burst out wildly. It took an almost superhuman self-control to sit and listen to that from the mother of his daughter ... the daughter he had stabbed. At the end, he had to dismiss us rather abruptly. Even he could stand just so much.'

'But what are you going to do?' demanded Chaumont. 'What have you done?'

'Just before I came here to-night,' Bencolin said, slowly, 'after I had heard what had happened, I telephoned Monsieur Martel. I told him I knew, I told my evidence, and I asked him to supply certain gaps.'

•Well?'

'He complimented me.'

'Isn't there a limit,' snapped Marie Augustin, 'to your showmanship, monsieur? Aristocracy, bah! The man is a murderer. He has committed as callous and brutal a crime as any I ever heard of. And do you know what you have done ? You've given him a chance to escape.'

'No,' said Bencolin, calmly. 'But that is what I am going to do.'

'You mean to say — !'

Bencolin got to his feet. His face wore a thoughtful and deadly smile.

'I mean,^’ he said, 'that I am going to subject this gentlemanly gambler to the worst test I have ever imposed on anybody. It may cost me my office. But I told you I would judge him by his own standards. I will judge him by the Martels. ... Mademoiselle, has your telephone an extension cord? Can it be brought out here and put on this table?'

'I don't think I understand.'

'Answer me! Can it?'

She rose stiffly, tightening her lips, and went to a curtained archway at the back of the room. In a moment she was back with a telephone, yanking after it savagely a length of wire. She set it down on the table beside the lamp.

'If monsieur,' she said frigidly, 'will condescend to tell us why he could not himself go into the other room and--'

'Thank you. I should like you all to hear this. Jeff, do you mind letting me sit in that chair?'

What was he up to? I rose and backed away, but he motioned us all close to the table, and twitched the newspaper off the shade of the lamp. The faces of my companions sprang out of gloom: Chaumont bent forward, his arms hanging limply and his eyes screwed up; Marie Augustin rigid and waxen pale; her father mumbling incoherently to some dream behind his red-rimmed eyes.

'Alio!' said the detective leaning back in his chair with the phone. 'Allo! Invalides twelve-eighty-five. ... '

His half-shut eyes were fixed on the fire. One leg swung with a rhythmic motion. Outside, a car whirred past in the rue Saint-Appoline. There came a screech of gears, the slur of another car skidding past it, and a burst of profanity. The noises were intensified in this stuffy room; they beat through the thick curtains with a kind of hysteria.

'That - that's the Martel number,' Chaumont said.

'Allo! Invalides twelve-eighty-five? Thank you. I should like to speak to the colonel....'

Another pause. Augustin brushed the sleeve of his nightgown across his nose, his snuffle was very loud.

'He will be sitting alone in his library now,' the detective said, musingly. 'I told him to expect this message. ... Yes? Colonel Martel? .. . This is Bencolin speaking.'

He held the instrument away from his ear. The place was so very quiet that you could hear distinctly the reply from the telephone. There was something eerie, something ghastly and disembodied, about that voice. It was small and almost squeaky, but very calm.

'Yes, monsieur!' it said. 'I was waiting for your call.'

'I spoke to you a while ago.. . .'

'Yes?'

'I told you that I should be compelled to order your arrest.'

'Naturally, monsieur!' The voice was rasping, rather impatient.

'I mentioned the scandal which must attend your trial. Your name, your daughter's name and your wife's, kicked around in the dirt, and gloated over; yourself telling your knowledge and your decision in a crowded court-room, with flashlights going off, and workmen eating sausage while they gaped at you. ...'

He had spoken still thoughtfully. The rasping voice cut him short:

'Well, monsieur?'

'And I asked you whether you had any poison in the house. You replied that you had cyanide, which is swift, monsieur, and painless. You also said —'

He held the telephone up so that the cold voice grew even louder.

'And I say it again, monsieur,' snapped Colonel Martel, 'that I am prepared to pay for what I have done, I am not afraid of the guillotine.'

'That is not the question, Colonel,' the detective said, gently. 'Suppose you gained my permission to drink instant oblivion ... ?'

Marie Augustin took a step forward. Bencolin turned with a fierce exclamation on his lips; she fell back, and he went on quietly:

'You have won the sportsman's right to do so - if you will take a sportsman's chance.'

'I do not understand.'

'If you were to drink that cyanide, Colonel, you would have atoned. I could keep the whole thing quiet. The connexion of your daughter with that club, her past deeds of all kinds, your own acts - in short, everything pertaining to the affair - would never be known. I swear it. And you know that my word is good.'

Even over those miles of wire you could sense a hiss of indrawn breath. You could feel the bulky old man stiffen in his great chair.

'What - what do you mean?' the voice said, rather hoarsely.

'You are the last of your great line, Colonel. The name would still mean honour for all of those who have borne it. All of them! And if I, the representative of the police, told you that you have satisfied justice - that you had left your name, Colonel, your name' - his words were cool, pointed like little sharp knives - 'high and clean against all attack . .. whereas, otherwise, how they could chuckle and leer in all the little houses! How the shopkeeper would smack his lips over the harlotry of your daughter. ...'

'For God's sake,' Chaumont whispered, starting forward, 'stop torturing him!'

' ... The harlotry of your daughter, her mean little part as a white-slaver and pimp. ... And I could save you all this, Colonel, honourably and easily, if you would still take a gambler's chance!'

The voice was breaking. It said huskily:

'Still I don't see ...'

'Well, let me explain. Have you that cyanide at hand?'

The voice whispered: 'It is in my desk. In a little bottle. Sometimes in the last months I have thought.. .'

'Take it out, Colonel. Yes, do as I say! Take it out now, and set it on the desk in front of your eyes. Instant death, honourable death, is there. Look at it for a moment.'

There was a pause. Bencolin's leg had begun to swing faster; his tight smile broadened, and his eyes smouldered.

'You see it? A flash, and you die. A father, grieving with sorrow over the death of his daughter, has died and left for all of them a great name. Now - have you a deck of cards there? ... No, I am not joking! ... You have? Excellent. Now, monsieur, this is what I propose....

'You shall draw two cards at random. The first for me, the second for you. You are there alone. No one shall ever know what these cards are - but you shall tell me over this phone....'

Chaumont let out a gasp. The monstrous significance of this dawned on me suddenly.

Bencolin went on: 'If the card which you draw for me is higher than your own, you shall lock up that cyanide and wait for the arrival of the police. Then - the horrors of the trial, the mud, the scandal, and the guillotine. But if your card is the higher, you shall drink the cyanide. And I swear on my oath that no single word of this whole affair shall ever become known. ... You were a gambler before. Colonel. Do you dare to be one now? ... Remember, as I say, that I take your word. Not a living soul will ever know the cards you draw.'

For a long time there was no reply. The little nickelled telephone hung there in Bencolin's hand, become now a terrible thing. I pictured the old man in his dusky library, his bald head gleaming in the lamplight, his tight jaw buried in his collar, and the shaggy-hung eyes staring at the bottle of cyanide.... The tin clock ticked steadily....

'Very well, monsieur,' the voice said. You could sense a breaking-point close at hand. The voice became dry, hardly audible: 'Very well, monsieur. I will accept your challenge. A moment until I get the cards.'

Marie Augustin breathed, 'You devil! ... You're — '

She was clasping her hands together. All of a sudden her father let out a sort of giggling laugh which was horrible. His red eyes goggled with admiration, and you could hear the joints crack in his fingers as he rubbed his hands together. His head continued its bobbing; he seemed to be nodding in appreciation. .. .

More dragging ticks of the clock, another coal that rattled in the fireplace, and the distant cry of an auto horn. .. .

‘I am ready, monsieur,' the voice from the telephone squeaked, loudly and clearly.

'You shall draw, then, for me - and think what it means.⁵

(Gardens of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, rustling tattered leaves in the night. The gleaming backs of the cards, and a hand fumbling at them.)

I almost jumped out of a crawling skin when the voice announced:

'Your card, monsieur, is the five of diamonds.'

'Ah,' said Bencolin, 'not very high, Colonel! It should be easy to beat that. So very easy. And now think of all I have told you, and draw for yourself.'

His half-closed eyes travelled up mockingly to mine. ...

Tick-tick, tick-tick, terrible little tin blows on the silence. Gears of a car screamed and whizzed past the windows; Augustin cracked the joints of his fingers....

'Well, Colonel?' asked the detective, raising his voice slightly.

There was a rasp in the telephone. Chaumont whirled with a pale face.

'My card, monsieur —'

The squeaky voice faltered. You could hear a gasp. ... Then there was a little tremble, as of breath through lips curled in a smile; and a small crash of glass dropped on hardwood.

The voice, clear and firm and courteous, rang out: 'My card, monsieur, is the three of spades. I shall await the arrival of the police.'

the end