Chapter 15

An hour later we were speeding back to New York. Kennedy had no apparatus to work with out at Goodyear and could not improvise it. Winslow agreed to keep us in touch with any new developments during the few hours that Craig felt it was necessary to leave the scene of action.

Back again in New York, Craig took a cab directly for his laboratory, leaving me marooned with instructions not to bother him for several hours. I employed the time in a little sleuthing on my own account, endeavouring to look up the records of those involved in the case. I did not discover much, except an interview that had been given at the time of the return of his expedition by Borland to the Star, in which he gave a graphic description of the dangers from disease that they had encountered.

I mention it because, though it did not impress me much when I read it, it at once leaped into my mind when the interminable hours were over and I rejoined Kennedy. He was bending over a new microscope.

“This is a rubber age, Walter,” he began, “and the stories of men who have been interested in rubber often sound like fiction.”

He slipped a slide under the microscope, looked at it and then motioned to me to do the same. “Here is a very peculiar culture which I have found in some of that blood,” he commented. “The germs are much larger than bacteria and they can be seen with a comparatively low power microscope swiftly darting between the blood cells, brushing them aside, but not penetrating them as some parasites, like that of malaria, do. Besides, spectroscope tests show the presence of a rather well-known chemical in that blood.”

“A poisoning, then?” I ventured. “Perhaps he suffered from the disease that many rubber workers get from the bisulphide of carbon. He must have done a good deal of vulcanising of his own rubber, you know.”

“No,” smiled Craig enigmatically, “it wasn’t that. It was an arsenic derivative. Here’s another thing. You remember the field glass I used?”

He had picked it up from the table and was pointing at a little hole in the side, that had escaped my notice before. “This is what you might call a right-angled camera. I point the glass out of the window and while you think I am looking through it I am really focusing it on you and taking your picture standing there beside me and out of my apparent line of vision. It would deceive the most wary.”

Just then a long-distance call from Winslow told us that Borland had been to call on Miss Ruth and, in as kindly a way as could be, had offered her half a million dollars for her rights in the new patent. At once it flashed over me that he was trying to get control of and suppress the invention in the interests of his own company, a thing that has been done hundreds of times. Or could it all have been part of a conspiracy? And if it was his conspiracy, would he succeed in tempting his friend, Miss Winslow, to fall in with this glittering offer?

Kennedy evidently thought, also, that the time for action had come, for without a word he set to work packing his apparatus and we were again headed for Goodyear.

XVI

THE BLOOD TEST

We arrived late at night, or rather in the morning, but in spite of the late hour Kennedy was up early urging me to help him carry the stuff over to Cushing’s laboratory. By the middle of the morning he was ready and had me scouring about town collecting his audience, which consisted of the Winslows, Borland and Lathrop, Dr. Howe, Dr. Harris, Strong and myself. The laboratory was darkened and Kennedy took his place beside an electric moving picture apparatus.

The first picture was different from anything any of us had ever seen on a screen before. It seemed to be a mass of little dancing globules. “This,” explained Kennedy, “is what you would call an educational moving picture, I suppose. It shows normal blood corpuscles as they are in motion in the blood of a healthy man. Those little round cells are the red corpuscles and the larger irregular cells are the white corpuscles.”

He stopped the film. The next picture was a sort of enlarged and elongated house fly, apparently, of sombre grey color, with a narrow body, thick proboscis and wings that overlapped like the blades of a pair of shears. “This,” he went on, “is a picture of the now well known tse-tse fly found over a large area of Africa. It has a bite something like a horse-fly and is a perfect blood-sucker. Vast territories of thickly populated, fertile country near the shores of lakes and rivers are now depopulated as a result of the death-dealing bite of these flies, more deadly than the blood-sucking, vampirish ghosts with which, in the middle ages, people supposed night air to be inhabited. For this fly carries with it germs which it leaves in the blood of its victims, which I shall show next.”

A new film started.

“Here is a picture of some blood so infected. Notice that worm-like sheath of undulating membrane terminating in a slender whip-like process by which it moves about. That thing wriggling about like a minute electric eel, always in motion, is known as the trypanosome.

“Isn’t this a marvellous picture? To see the micro-organism move, evolve and revolve in the midst of normal cells, uncoil and undulate in the fluids which they inhabit, to see them play hide and seek with the blood corpuscles and clumps of fibrin, turn, twist, and rotate as if in a cage, to see these deadly little trypanosomes moving back and forth in every direction displaying their delicate undulating membranes and shoving aside the blood cells that are in their way while by their side the leucocytes, or white corpuscles, lazily extend or retract their pseudopods of protoplasm. To see all this as it is shown before us here is to realise that we are in the presence of an unknown world, a world infinitesimally small, but as real and as complex as that about us. With the cinematograph and the ultra-microscope we can see what no other forms of photography can reproduce.

“I have secured these pictures so that I can better mass up the evidence against a certain person in this room. For in the blood of one of you is now going on the fight which you have here seen portrayed by the picture machine. Notice how the blood corpuscles in this infected blood have lost their smooth, glossy appearance, become granular and incapable of nourishing the tissues. The trypanosomes are fighting with the normal blood cells. Here we have the lowest group of animal life, the protozoa, at work killing the highest, man.”

Kennedy needed nothing more than the breathless stillness to convince him of the effectiveness of his method of presenting his case.

“Now,” he resumed, “let us leave this blood-sucking, vampirish tse-tse fly for the moment. I have another revelation to make.”

He laid down on the table under the lights, which now flashed up again, the little hollow silver cylinder.

“This little instrument,” Kennedy explained, “which I have here is known as a canula, a little canal, for leading off blood from the veins of one person to another—in other words, blood transfusion. Modern doctors are proving themselves quite successful in its use.

“Of course, like everything, it has its own peculiar dangers. But the one point I wish to make is this: In the selection of a donor for transfusion, people fall into definite groups. Tests of blood must be made first to see whether it ‘agglutinates,’ and in this respect there are four classes of persons. In our case this matter had to be neglected. For, gentlemen, there were two kinds of blood on that laboratory floor, and they do not agglutinate. This, in short, was what actually happened. An attempt was made to transfuse Cushing’s blood as donor to another person as recipient. A man suffering from the disease caught from the bite of the tse-tse fly—the deadly sleeping sickness so well known in Africa—has deliberately tried a form of robbery which I believe to be without parallel. He has stolen the blood of another!

“He stole it in a desperate attempt to stay an incurable disease. This man had used an arsenic compound called atoxyl, till his blood was filled with it and its effects on the trypanosomes nil. There was but one wild experiment more to try—the stolen blood of another.”

Craig paused to let the horror of the crime sink into our minds.

“Some one in the party which went to look over the concession in the Congo contracted the sleeping sickness from the bites of those blood-sucking flies. That person has now reached the stage of insanity, and his blood is full of the germs and overloaded with atoxyl.

“Everything had been tried and had failed. He was doomed. He saw his fortune menaced by the discovery of the way to make synthetic rubber. Life and money were at stake. One night, nerved up by a fit of insane fury, with a power far beyond what one would expect in his ordinary weakened condition, he saw a light in Cushing’s laboratory. He stole in stealthily. He seized the inventor with his momentarily superhuman strength and choked him. As they struggled he must have shoved a sponge soaked with ether and orange essence under his nose. Cushing went under.

“Resistance overcome by the anesthetic, he dragged the now insensible form to the work bench. Frantically he must have worked. He made an incision and exposed the radial artery, the pulse. Then he must have administered a local anesthetic to himself in his arm or leg. He secured a vein and pushed the cut end over this little canula. Then he fitted the artery of Cushing over that and the blood that was, perhaps, to save his life began flowing into his depleted veins.

“Who was this madman? I have watched the actions of those whom I suspected when they did not know they were being watched. I did it by using this neat little device which looks like a field glass, but is really a camera that takes pictures of things at right angles to the direction in which the glass seems to be pointed. One person, I found, had a wound on his leg, the wrapping of which he adjusted nervously when he thought no one was looking. He had difficulty in limping even a short distance to open a window.”

Kennedy uncorked a bottle and the subtle odor of oranges mingled with ether stole through the room.

“Some one here will recognize that odour immediately. It is the new orange-essence vapour anesthetic, a mixture of essence of orange with ether and chloroform. The odour hidden by the orange which lingered in the laboratory, Mr. Winslow and Mr. Strong, was not isoprene, but really ether.

“I am letting some of the odour escape here because in this very laboratory it was that the thing took place, and it is one of the well-known principles of psychology that odours are powerfully suggestive. In this case the odour now must suggest the terrible scene of the other night to some one before me. More than that, I have to tell that person that the blood transfusion did not and could not save him. His illness is due to a condition that is incurable and cannot be altered by transfusion of new blood. That person is just as doomed to-day as he was before he committed—”

A figure was groping blindly about. The arsenic compounds with which his blood was surcharged had brought on one of the attacks of blindness to which users of the drug are subject. In his insane frenzy he was evidently reaching desperately for Kennedy himself. As he groped he limped painfully from the soreness of his wound.

“Dr. Harris,” accused Kennedy, avoiding the mad rush at himself, and speaking in a tone that thrilled us, “you are the man who sucked the blood of Cushing into your own veins and left him to die. But the state will never be able to exact from you the penalty of your crime. Nature will do that too soon for justice. Gentlemen, this is the murderer of Bradley Cushing, a maniac, a modern scientific vampire.”

I regarded the broken, doomed man with mingled pity and loathing, rather than with the usual feelings one has toward a criminal.

“Come,” said Craig. “The local authorities can take care of this case now.”

He paused just long enough for a word of comfort to the poor, broken-hearted girl. Both Winslows answered with a mute look of gratitude and despair. In fact, in the confusion we were only too glad to escape any more such mournful congratulations.

“Well,” Craig remarked, as we walked quickly down the street, “if we have to wait here for a train, I prefer to wait in the railroad station. I have done my part. Now my only interest is to get away before they either offer me a banquet or lynch me.”

Actually, I think he would have preferred the novelty of dealing with a lynching party, if he had had to choose between the two.

We caught a train soon, however, and fortunately it had a diner attached. Kennedy whiled away the time between courses by reading the graft exposures in the city.

As we rolled into the station late in the afternoon, he tossed aside the paper with an air of relief.

“Now for a quiet evening in the laboratory,” he exclaimed, almost gleefully.

By what stretch of imagination he could call that recreation, I could not see. But as for quietness, I needed it, too. I had fallen wofully behind in my record of the startling events through which he was conducting me. Consequently, until late that night I pecked away at my typewriter trying to get order out of the chaos of my hastily scribbled notes. Under ordinary circumstances, I remembered, the morrow would have been my day of rest on the Star. I had gone far enough with Kennedy to realise that on this assignment there was no such thing as rest.

“District Attorney Carton wants to see me immediately at the Criminal Courts Building, Walter,” announced Kennedy, early the following morning.

Clothed, and as much in my right mind as possible after the arduous literary labours of the night before, I needed no urging, for Carton was an old friend of all the newspaper men. I joined Craig quickly in a hasty ride down-town in the rush hour.

On the table before the square-jawed, close-cropped, fighting prosecutor, whom I knew already after many a long and hard-fought campaign both before and after election, lay a little package which had evidently come to him in the morning’s mail by parcel-post.

“What do you suppose is in that, Kennedy?” he asked, tapping it gingerly. “I haven’t opened it yet, but I think it’s a bomb. Wait—I’ll have a pail of water sent in here so that you can open it, if you will. You understand such things.”

“No—no,” hastened Kennedy, “that’s exactly the wrong thing to do. Some of these modern chemical bombs are set off in precisely that way. No. Let me dissect the thing carefully. I think you may be right. It does look as if it might be an infernal machine. You see the evident disguise of the roughly written address?”

Carton nodded, for it was that that had excited his suspicion in the first place. Meanwhile, Kennedy, without further ceremony, began carefully to remove the wrapper of brown Manila paper, preserving everything as he did so. Carton and I instinctively backed away. Inside, Craig had disclosed an oblong wooden box.

“I realise that opening a bomb is dangerous business,” he pursued slowly, engrossed in his work and almost oblivious to us, “but I think I can take a chance safely with this fellow. The dangerous part is what might be called drawing the fangs. No bombs are exactly safe toys to have around until they are wholly destroyed, and before you can say you have destroyed one, it is rather a ticklish business to take out the dangerous element.”

He had removed the cover in the deftest manner without friction, and seemingly without disturbing the contents in the least. I do not pretend to know how he did it; but the proof was that we could see him still working from our end of the room.

On the inside of the cover was roughly drawn a skull and cross-bones, showing that the miscreant who sent the thing had at least a sort of grim humour. For, where the teeth should have been in the skull were innumerable match-heads. Kennedy picked them out with as much sang-froid as if he were not playing jackstraws with life and death.

Then he removed the explosive itself and the various murderous slugs and bits of metal embedded in it, carefully separating each as if to be labelled “Exhibit A,” “B,” and so on for a class in bomb dissection. Finally, he studied the sides and bottom of the box.

“Evidence of chlorate-of-potash mixture,” Kennedy muttered to himself, still examining the bomb. “The inside was a veritable arsenal—a very unusual and clever construction.”

“My heavens!” breathed Carton. “I would rather go through a campaign again.”

XVII

THE BOMB MAKER

We stared at each other in blank awe, at the various parts, so innocent looking in the heaps on the table, now safely separated, but together a combination ticket to perdition.

“Who do you suppose could have sent it?” I blurted out when I found my voice, then, suddenly recollecting the political and legal fight that Carton was engaged in at the time, I added, “The white slavers?”

“Not a doubt,” he returned laconically. “And,” he exclaimed, bringing down both hands vigorously in characteristic emphasis on the arms of his office chair, “I’ve got to win this fight against the vice trust, as I call it, or the whole work of the district attorney’s office in clearing up the city will be discredited—to say nothing of the risk the present incumbent runs at having such grateful friends about the city send marks of their affection and esteem like this.”

I knew something already of the situation, and Carton continued thoughtfully: “All the powers of vice are fighting a last-ditch battle against me now. I think I am on the trail of the man or men higher up in this commercialised-vice business—and it is a business, big business, too. You know, I suppose, that they seem to have a string of hotels in the city, of the worst character. There is nothing that they will stop at to protect themselves. Why, they are using gangs of thugs to terrorise any one who informs on them. The gunmen, of course, hate a snitch worse than poison. There have been bomb outrages, too—nearly a bomb a day lately—against some of those who look shaky and seem to be likely to do business with my office. But I’m getting closer all the time.”

“How do you mean?” asked Kennedy.

“Well, one of the best witnesses, if I can break him down by pressure and promises, ought to be a man named Haddon, who is running a place in the Fifties, known as the Mayfair. Haddon knows all these people. I can get him in half an hour if you think it worth while—not here, but somewhere uptown, say at the Prince Henry.”

Kennedy nodded. We had heard of Haddon before, a notorious character in the white-light district. A moment later Carton had telephoned to the Mayfair and had found Haddon.

“How did you get him so that he is even considering turning state’s evidence?” asked Craig.

“Well,” answered Carton slowly, “I suppose it was partly through a cabaret singer and dancer, Loraine Keith, at the Mayfair. You know you never get the truth about things in the underworld except in pieces. As much as any one, I think we have been able to use her to weave a web about him. Besides, she seems to think that Haddon has treated her shamefully. According to her story, he seems to have been lavishing everything on her, but lately, for some reason, has deserted her. Still, even in her jealousy she does not accuse any other woman of winning him away.”

“Perhaps it is the opposite—another man winning her,” suggested Craig dryly.

“It’s a peculiar situation,” shrugged Carton. “There is another man. As nearly as I can make out there is a fellow named Brodie who does a dance with her. But he seems to annoy her, yet at the same time exercises a sort of fascination over her.”

“Then she is dancing at the Mayfair yet?” hastily asked Craig.

“Yes. I told her to stay, not to excite suspicion.”

“And Haddon knows?”

“Oh, no. But she has told us enough about him already so that we can worry him, apparently, just as what he can tell us would worry the others interested in the hotels. To tell the truth, I think she is a drug fiend. Why, my men tell me that they have seen her take just a sniff of something and change instantly—become a willing tool.”

“That’s the way it happens,” commented Kennedy.

“Now, I’ll go up there and meet Haddon,” resumed Carton. “After I have been with him long enough to get into his confidence, suppose you two just happen along.”

Half an hour later Kennedy and I sauntered into the Prince Henry, where Carton had made the appointment in order to avoid suspicion that might arise if he were seen with Haddon at the Mayfair.

The two men were waiting for us—Haddon, by contrast with Carton, a weak-faced, nervous man, with bulgy eyes.

“Mr. Haddon,” introduced Carton, “let me present a couple of reporters from the Star—off duty, so that we can talk freely before them, I can assure you. Good fellows, too, Haddon.”

The hotel and cabaret keeper smiled a sickly smile and greeted us with a covert, questioning glance.

“This attack on Mr. Carton has unnerved me,” he shivered. “If any one dares to do that to him, what will they do to me?”

“Don’t get cold feet, Haddon,” urged Carton. “You’ll be all right. I’ll swing it for you.”

Haddon made no reply. At length he remarked: “You’ll excuse me for a moment. I must telephone to my hotel.”

He entered a booth in the shadow of the back of the cafe, where there was a slot-machine pay-station. “I think Haddon has his suspicions,” remarked Carton, “although he is too prudent to say anything yet.”

A moment later he returned. Something seemed to have happened. He looked less nervous. His face was brighter and his eyes clearer. What was it, I wondered? Could it be that he was playing a game with Carton and had given him a double cross? I was quite surprised at his next remark.

“Carton,” he said confidently, “I’ll stick.”

“Good,” exclaimed the district attorney, as they fell into a conversation in low tones.

“By the way,” drawled Kennedy, “I must telephone to the office in case they need me.”

He had risen and entered the same booth.

Haddon and Carton were still talking earnestly. It was evident that, for some reason, Haddon had lost his former halting manner. Perhaps, I reasoned, the bomb episode had, after all, thrown a scare into him, and he felt that he needed protection against his own associates, who were quick to discover such dealings as Carton had forced him into. I rose and lounged back to the booth and Kennedy.

“Whom did he call?” I whispered, when Craig emerged perspiring from the booth, for I knew that that was his purpose.

Craig glanced at Haddon, who now seemed absorbed in talking to Carton. “No one,” he answered quickly. “Central told me there had not been a call from this pay-station for half an hour.”

“No one?” I echoed almost incredulously. “Then what did he do? Something happened, all right.”

Kennedy was evidently engrossed in his own thoughts, for he said nothing.

“Haddon says he wants to do some scouting about,” announced Carton, when we rejoined them. “There are several people whom he says he might suspect. I’ve arranged to meet him this afternoon to get the first part of this story about the inside working of the vice trust, and he will let me know if anything develops then. You will be at your office?”

“Yes, one or the other of us,” returned Craig, in a tone which Haddon could not hear.

In the meantime we took occasion to make some inquiries of our own about Haddon and Loraine Keith. They were evidently well known in the select circle in which they travelled. Haddon had many curious characteristics, chief of which to interest Kennedy was his speed mania. Time and again he had been arrested for exceeding the speed limit in taxicabs and in a car of his own, often in the past with Loraine Keith, but lately alone.