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Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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Amazing Stories, October 1935,
with "The Chemistry Murder Case"
Our readers will be glad to get a story involving a cryptogram and one which is at the same time from the hand of Dr. Breuer. Being chemically disposed, Dr. Breuer used a very distinctive system.
ISAIAH CULP, Curator of the Chemistry Building, was opening doors of rooms and laboratories early in the morning, to let in air.
The little gray-bearded man had a merry twinkle in his eyes and a heart big enough to hold all of the students, instructors and professors that constantly came and went through the huge edifice. Many of the students thought he ought to be a professor, for he certainly seemed to know enough about Chemistry. But he preferred to look after all of his people and the building that housed their work.
He went cheerfully along opening doors, when suddenly he stopped with a jerk with one of them half-way open, and hurriedly slammed it shut. It was the door of the laboratory is which the young Dr. Seeley was carrying on a special piece of research. Mr. Culp recognized the sweet, penetrating odor of hydrocyanic acid. It had welled out of the door, as though the room were full of it.
Mr. Culp took a gas-mask down from the wall, as though that were part of his everyday work, and carefully put it on and adjusted it. Then, looking like a human being with a strange monster's head, he opened the door again. He plunged into the laboratory, walked quickly across the room, and began opening windows, one after another, to their full width. After a broad breeze was pouring freshly through the room, he stopped to look around.
He was not unprepared for his next discovery. The body of the young Dr. Seeley was sprawled from his stool across his desk, its head lolling and its arms flung out in an attitude too grotesque to mean anything but death. Under one hand was a mass of crushed glass and some crystals dried in streaks on the table. Under the other was a letter-size sheet of paper covered with chemical symbols. Just beyond the fallen man's arms was a Kipp gas generator, with its three bulging bellies. Its outlet stopcock was open, but the fluids in it were clear and quiet.
Mr. Culp took in these details at a glance, and also the fact that the entire laboratory was otherwise in order. He stood a moment longer looking; then tore off his gas-mask The shock of seeing the cheerful young instructor, the brightest among the younger. scientific men on the faculty, unexpectedly flung out in death, paralyzed him for a moment. He could not reason what to do next. However, he knew the Chancellor of the University well, well enough to know that the Chancellor would take a personal interest in an occurrence of this sort, and that he would undoubtedly censure Mr. Culp severely if the matter were not brought first of all to his attention. Mr. Culp walked downstairs and called the Chancellor on the telephone.
It was early. It took time to get the Chancellor on the telephone and more time to get the shocking message through to the Chancellor's dazed comprehension.
While he was talking to the Chancellor on the telephone, Mr. Culp listened with his other ear, and heard the outside door of the building, open twice, and footsteps of someone walking down the corridor and up the stairs. They were not the footsteps of any of his janitors, he knew, as he crowded his discovery into the receiver for the Chancellor. They were students. It was early for students. The first steps were undoubtedly a young man's, and the second, quite as certainly, a girl's. Mr. Culp hurried quietly up the stairs as soon as he was through telephoning.
He reached the second floor just in time to see the young man come out of the door of Dr. Seeley's laboratory, pale and furtive. It was John Brusiloff, a brilliant student, but an eccentric fellow.
"Wha—what's happened?" Brusiloff gasped as he saw Mr. Culp.
"Your guess is as good as mine," Mr. Culp replied cheerfully, having by this time recovered full equilibrium. "But, since you've been in there, you will have to stay right here."
"How long?" asked the student anxiously. "I—I've got work to do."
"Work stops sometimes, for you, and for others. Perhaps it won't be long. Who else is in the building?"
"Miss Shane."
"Ah, Roth," Mr. Culp said to one of his janitors whose head appeared above the stair. "Stay here with Mr. Brusiloff. And nobody is to go in or out of that laboratory."
Mr. Culp started out to look for the girl. Miss Shane was one of the student-instructors, and had a great deal of ability. She also had as much beauty as she had ability; her reddish-bronze hair, her opal-clear skin with an occasional freckle, her clear, deep-blue eyes had made captive of the hearts of many of the masculine population of the Chemistry Building. Mr. Culp found her at work in her rubber apron, in an adjoining laboratory.
She seemed absorbed, and looked up at him very crossly as he came in. He bade her good morning and went out again, satisfied with the fact that he had located her. As he came out, he saw approaching Dr. Kane, the head of the Chemistry Department, and, behind him, the Chancellor. In another moment the outer door slammed again, and a physician came hurrying up the stairs, whom the Chancellor greeted as "Dr. North." The group of them went into Dr. Seeley's laboratory, and stood for a moment behind the sprawling body.
"Deplorable!" breathed the Chancellor.
"A brilliant young man," commented Dr. Kane, head Professor of Chemistry.
The physician studied a moment.
"I suppose Mr. Culp is certain that he smelled hydrocyanic acid?" he asked.
Dr. Kane smiled.
"Mr. Culp isn't such a bad chemist," he said. "If Mr. Culp said it was hydrocyanic acid, you can dependably base your further assumptions on that fact."
"The pink color of the body," Dr. North continued, "and the dark blue lips and finger-nails, confirm poisoning by hydrocyanic acid. That, I suppose, is what it came from," he added, nodding toward the Kipp generator.
"To check it up, we can examine the contents," Dr. Kane began, and then went on more swiftly, "Wait. We can make sure very quickly."
He went out, and in a few minutes came back with a tiny white mouse.
He put the mouse in a beaker, which he held up to the outlet stopcock of the Kipp generator. With another beaker he poured a half liter of water into the top of the Kipp, displacing the small amount of residual gas that was trapped within, and forcing it out into the beaker containing the mouse. In a few seconds the mouse was dead.
"Such a ridiculously simple accident," Dr. Kane murmured.
"Science claims its martyrs now and then," the Chancellor added reverently.
Then they looked up and saw Miss Ada Shane standing beside them staring at he dead body. She was pale and rigid, but did not seem as much moved by the situation as were the men. Her wide, blue eyes were expressionless. No one seemed to know what to say next.
A scramble of mincing footsteps in the corridor aroused them. A succession of little flutey squeaks, a swish of fluffy, pale-green and cream skirts and sleeves and cloaks, a slow suffusion of perfume—and Mrs. Seeley, wife of the murdered man, stood there in front of them.
"Oh! oh!" she gasped. "Where is he?"
She had dark hair, brown eyes that danced like sunlight on a brook, and a vacant, baby-like face. As soon as she saw the awkwardly disposed body, that had not yet been touched, her features collapsed like a wet rag, and screwed up into a sour, tense expression. Somehow, even though it was a wife's sorrow, none of them sympathized deeply with her, as she broke out into a childish blubber, and threw herself on the body.
As she did so, it slid heavily to the floor with a thud. Beakers and test-tubes on the desk crashed. Mrs. Seeley's arm was imprisoned under the weight of the dead man's shoulder.
A number of piercing shrieks rent the air of the laboratory until assistance released her. Miss Shane stuck her chin out in the air, and walked haughtily from the room.
Mrs. Seeley was deposited in a collapsed condition on a bench.
Mr. Culp was trying in a clumsy, masculine way to comfort her, when he suddenly stopped, and a curious expression came over his face. He stared at the desk with its broken glassware and its exhausted Kipp generator, and the dead man at the foot of it. He hurried, almost leaped to the side of the corpse, looked at it closely, finally turned it over, looked under it, under the desk. He shook his head and looked blank.
"If you will excuse us a moment, gentlemen," he finally said, taking the Chancellor by the arm, and leading him far enough away so that his whispers would not be intelligible to the others.
"Yes?" said the Chancellor, mystified.
"That sheet of notes is gone!" Mr. Culp exclaimed.
"Notes!" repeated the Chancellor vacantly, trying to comprehend.
"There was a sheet of chemical formulae under his hand when I first came in. Now it is nowhere. It has disappeared."
"Somebody took it, you mean?" The Chancellor was wide-eyed. Such goings-on in his own University!
"There is no other possibility," Mr. Culp answered. "Furthermore—!"
"Yes?" said the Chancellor. "Furthermore?"
"Would Seeley set up a Kipp generator for hydrocyanic acid—?" he demanded. "But, you are not a chemist. No chemist would do that. It is too dangerous. Seeley was no fool. He was one of our best men. Seeley would not generate hydrocyanic acid in a Kipp!"
"What do you mean?" The Chancellor was plainly frightened at some idea or other.
"Seeley was working on a piece of research. A big thing. A new explosive. The government was in on it. He used a Kipp generator. But he used it for carbon-dioxide or some nitrogen compound. There is no use for hydrocyanic acid in making explosives."
"Are you a chemist?" the Chancellor said. "I thought you were the Curator of this building."
"I learn chemistry as I go along," Mr. Culp replied. "Do you think that is enough suspicion for calling the police?"
"Well ask the doctor. Doctor North!"
Doctor North, after having the suspicious matters of the lost paper and the incongruous Kipp generator explained to him, stated that he would refuse to sign a death certificate, and a coroner's inquest would be necessary. Mr. Culp, as he called the police, suggested that the Chemistry building be promptly surrounded. He gave orders to his janitors to let no one out of the building.
Then followed another hideous gap of embarrassed, horrible silence. Mrs. Seeley had sat up rigid on her bench, and her sobs caused every one to start suddenly at unexpected intervals. She suspected from the appearance of the faces of some of the men, that something suspicious was up. No one knew just how much time passed in a horrible nightmare, until a great many heavy steps were heard pounding about stairways and corridors throughout the building.
The police inspector made straight for the party. He was a disappointment to Mr. Culp, who liked people. The police inspector was not people; he was a cog in a system. He was punctiliously polite, but had no personality. He operated like a very efficient machine—a pump, or a motor, or something. Mr. Culp decided that if the mystery were to be solved, someone with some human interest would have to get up on his toes.
A LITTLE court of inquiry was organized on benches and chairs, with all the persons heretofore concerned, present. The Inspector presided, totally incongruous among the glittering glassware, the delicate balances, the huge and tiny flasks of colored solutions. Only the dead man near him seemed to belong, when he began his systematic inquiry. It all went according to Hoyle.
How long has he been dead? Who saw him last? Did he have any enemies—
"It is extremely difficult to say how long," the doctor was first to answer. "There is no rigor mortis. The pink appearance is deceptive. But the body is cold, or rather the same temperature as the room. It must be many hours, anyway."
"Hm. Very accurate." The Inspector did not appreciate niceties of scientific distinction. "Madam, when did your husband leave home this morning?"
Mrs. Seeley shrank from the sudden question.
"He—he—he didn't."
"What do you mean?" The Inspector leaned toward her.
"He—he wasn't at home all night."
"Well!" The Inspector spoke as though she had committed a crime in not having called him about that the night before. "Weren't you worried?"
"I'm always worried." The baby-face went red and askew again before it was hidden in a handkerchief.
Mr. Culp was studying people again. He wondered. Seeley was brilliant, an intellectual hard-hitter and swift-mover. And this baby-faced moron, this pink- and-white plaything! How did Seeley ever endure living with her? Why had he ever married her in the first place? Queer thing, marriage? He had never married, himself. All these students and professors were his wife and family.
But the baby-faced wife was talking: "He often stays in the laboratory all night. I have to stay alone." Much weeping.
The Inspector was already asking of everyone:
"When did you see him last?" He sent down several deputies to ask the same question of all in the building.
"He was here when I locked up yesterday evening," Mr. Culp said.
"In class yesterday forenoon," Brusiloff answered.
"Yesterday afternoon when I dismissed the laboratory class," Miss Shane said.
The Inspector turned back to Brusiloff.
"Are you an American citizen?" he demanded gruffly.
"No." Brusiloff certainly had a foreign look. His hair was long and queerly cut. An intensely black mustache made a black line in the middle of his upper lip.
His pronunciation showed effort, as well as the effect of a mother tongue which needed harsher and flatter consonants and broader vowels than our own language calls for.
"Who is paying your expenses in school?" the Inspector continued. He gave the impression of an inexorable information-mining machine.
"Oh, friends in Russia."
"That sounds suspicious as hell," the Inspector said, though his tone was even and mechanical. He whispered awhile together with Culp.
"I've always considered him a harmless fellow and a rather good chap, though sullen and eccentric," Culp said, "I've always liked him. He belongs to the University Communist Society and takes an active part in their work. The organization has nearly been in trouble several times, and stays just within the letter of the law. He is studying organic chemistry—and has also done some work on explosives."
"Aha!" Nothing dramatic about the Inspector's tone could be detected, even though the words pointed that way. "And you say the professor here was working on explosives, and a page of his notes is gone?"
Mr. Culp nodded.
"Well, take him, Sergeant. It looks suspicions."
THE Sergeant was a big, straight man, hard as iron. Brusiloff's struggle was short and ineffectual, yet adequate to leave behind it a mass of smashed glassware and stains of solutions creeping over the floor, and also pained and anxious looks upon the faces of the Chancellor and the head of the Chemistry Department, Dr. Kane, whose hearts were broken by the loss of property. Also there were shrieks from Mrs. Seeley.
Eventually the Sergeant marched Brusiloff up face-to-face with the Inspector; the prisoner's arms were locked behind him, with the Sergeant's elbows.
"Now," demanded the Inspector, "where are the notes?"
"I haven't got them," surlily answered the Russian. "I wish I had."
"Search!" the Inspector commanded succinctly. The foreign student's person was promptly and effectively frisked; the desk was gone over again. Officers were sent out of the room to check up Brusiloff's desk and outer wraps. Brusiloff laughed.
"You're wasting your effort," he sneered. "Then you'll all feel like fools."
"You mean you have sent it off already?"
The Inspector showed the first sign of emotion—anger, "That is possible, of course."
"It is a very important thing," the Chancellor said nervously. "The Government is in the secret. Very strange, for a careful man like Seeley to leave it lying about."
"No," said the Inspector. "Remember this must have happened in the middle of the night, when he thought he was alone."
The Inspector sent out messages to the postal authorities to watch the mails for the Chemistry notes.
Brusiloff laughed again. He made them a long speech, which was not interrupted because no one knew just what to say.
"The wrong track. Americans are stupid. What need is there to murder for a few notes, in a country where they take murder so seriously? Only madmen and people overcome by passion will murder. If he had some notes I wanted, I could get them easily. Without his knowing. But I have studied his work, and he has nothing. Nothing worth while yet. You are fools. This is no political deed. There is passion in it. Jealousy perhaps. Americans are cold. They do not understand human hearts. This looks like a woman's job. Where I live, we see them so often, we understand them. Even the children understand them."
The Inspector stared blankly. Several people moved as though to speak. He motioned them to be quiet. Finally he blurted, in a way quite inconsistent with his usual composure.
"Who then?"
"How hell I know?"
"If you don't know, shut up. We don't need your advice. Take him away, and I'll get out a suspicion warrant against him."
As he was led out, Brusiloff turned and said backwards over his shoulder:
"All fools. Can't see what is plain because you don't know people. A man like Seeley. He has brains. Energy. A silly child for a wife. Do you think that is all of the story? How simple you are! Look around you. Investigate the intelligent and good-looking women about Professor Seeley. Ever heard of such a thing as jealousy? That causes more murders than explosives and formulas."
The Sergeant shook him roughly by the shoulder and pushed him out of the door. The eyes of all of the group were turned upon Ada Shane. She was somewhat pale, so that her rare freckles shone brightly against her opalescent skin; and her lips were just a little tight. But otherwise she was composed.
Then, eyes traveled on toward Mrs. Seeley. She was the complete picture of horrified abjectness. For a moment Mr. Culp and the Inspector whispered together. Then the Inspector turned upon Mrs. Seeley.
"Was your husband ever unfaithful to you?"
It was a tactless question, quite out of keeping with the Inspector's well-groomed exterior. Especially was it an unfair question to a woman who, with all deference, was none too brilliant. In reply, she bent forward and wept.
The Inspector contemplated her for a moment, and repeated, possibly a little more gently:
"Did your husband have affairs with other women?"
Then Mrs. Seeley exploded. She stood up and pointed a rigid hand and arm at Ada Shane, and screamed out in a tense voice:
"That hussy there. Shameless. Always with him. And he was always talking about her. Just because she was good at chemistry." Her voice got higher pitched and her words came more rapidly. "He forgot me. Neglected me—"
She stopped a moment and went on more quietly:
"Finally, I told him the other day, if he didn't—"
The Inspector stiffened to hear the rest of it; and, seeing this, Mrs. Seeley stopped. Her eyes went wide-open; her breath came fast. An expression of fear slowly crept over her countenance.
"What?" demanded the Inspector.
"I have a simpler suggestion," said Mr. Culp. "Remember that I came in here and saw the notes. Then I was out for a while. But, from the time I came back, that desk and that body have never been out of my sight. Therefore, the notes must have been taken during the time that I was out. Now, during that period, there were only two other people in the building beside myself, Brusiloff and Miss Shane. We are convinced that Brusiloff does not have them. That leaves—"
The Inspector stepped up to Miss Shane.
"I'm sorry," he said apologetically, with genuine regret in his voice. "A murder is a serious thing, and we cannot lose time sending for a woman searcher."
Miss Shane stood up haughtily. The Inspector, with much embarrassment but none the less thoroughness, ran his hands over Miss Shane's person. If she had had a paper concealed on her, he would have found it. Then he turned questioningly to Mr. Culp.
"Her office," said Mr. Culp. He looked sorrowfully at Miss Shane. One could see that he would have preferred to have the crime fixed on himself rather than on her.
Miss Shane moved convulsively. The Inspector nodded to the ever-present Sergeant. In a moment Miss Shane's chin was pointing straight out again and her face was set like a mask. Mr. Culp led the Sergeant to Miss Shane's office, which was in a small room across the corridor. The others could hear the whacking of drawers and the rustling of papers. In a moment Mr. Culp came back. He took the Inspector and Dr. Kane with him into Miss Shane's office. Dr. North asked to be excused and started down the stairs.
Miss Shane's office was a tiny room, containing only her desk and a bookcase. Mr. Culp picked a sheet of paper off the desk and held it up to Dr. Kane. It was covered with chemical symbols. Mr. Culp's attitude savored of the dramatic.
Dr. Kane glanced at the sheet perfunctorily and looked wearily away. But in a moment he looked again. Then he peered intently, and bent over to do so. Finally he took the sheet and studied it. This is what he saw:
Mrs. Seeley stared at him in blank terror.
"What?" shouted the Inspector. "What did you tell him?"
Mrs. Seeley was weeping again.
"You think I killed him," she blubbered. "I didn't. I didn't do it. I loved him. He was mine—"
"What did you tell him?" the Inspector shouted.
"Tell him?" She was dazed by his shouting insistence.
"Oh, Oh-h—" the Inspector roared. Then he calmed down, realizing that this attitude would do no good. "You said that the other night you told him, if he didn't—what did you tell him?"
Mrs. Seeley looked defiantly.
"You think I killed him. I didn't kill him."
"Barnes reports that two students whom he questioned saw Mrs. Seeley coming from the Chemistry Building at eleven o'clock last night."
"Now talk," said the Inspector, "or I'll send you to jail to think it over. What did you tell your husband the other day? Did you threaten to kill him?"
"Oh, no!" shrieked Mrs. Seeley, and began to tremble.
Mr. Culp intervened.
"She couldn't have done this," he interceded. "This sort of a murder requires a good knowledge of chemistry. Now, I happen to know that Mrs. Seeley doesn't—well, isn't—well enough trained in chemistry to think of such a thing, or to be able to carry it out."
The Inspector considered. It looked as though Mr. Culp, as usual, was correct. Mrs. Seeley did not look capable of an ingenious murder of this sort.
"If you'll tell me," he said to her, "what you said to your husband, and what you were doing at the Chemistry Building last night, I'll let you go home."
"I told him," Mrs. Seeley said eagerly, "that if he didn't love me, I'd go back to my mother."
"And what did he say?" the Inspector asked.
"He put his arms around me," Mrs. Seeley sniffled, "and kissed me and petted me"—a sniffle—"and now he's dead." She sobbed several times.
"And what were you doing here at night?"
"I walked over here with him, because he insisted he had work to do. I sat and watched him at work a while, and then went home. But I felt better."
"Sergeant," said the Inspector, "see that Mrs. Seeley is taken home and left in the hands of friends."
"Good old Inspector," said Mr. Culp to himself.
"What next?" demanded the Inspector more gruffly than ever.
Mr. Culp suggested timidly: "When Dr. Kane is up against a scientific puzzle, he takes every item that he knows and learns all about each, gathers all the information he can. Especially the things that look rather unusual or queer. Here we have two. The lost chemistry notes or formulae, and"— bending over to whisper quietly—"the affair between Dr. Seeley and Miss Shane. Now, those notes. I just glanced at them. There was something queer about them. I can't say what. But in the back of my mind there is a fleeting impression of something bizarre, wrong, queer, about them. And we ought to know more about the queer way in which they disappeared."
"We'll have them." The Inspector was all action again. "No one went out. They must still be in the building. We'll find them if we have to take the building apart."
THE Chancellor started violently at this, and then calmed himself.
"Why—why—" stammered the worthy, gray-headed Dr. Kane. "This is rubbish. This is—preposterous. This is silly. This is hodge-podge."
He paused for lack of breath. He looked blankly around him—puzzled, mortified—as though some awful disgrace had fallen upon his department, worse than the murder of one of its most promising members.
"What does it mean?" asked that human interrogation point, the Inspector.
Mr. Culp shrugged his shoulders. But he did not look blank.
"It means nothing. Someone must have gone stark insane." Dr. Kane was about to crumple up the paper, when Mr. Culp caught his hand, and retrieved the paper.
"Well?" demanded the Inspector. "At least tell me whose handwriting it is."
"Miss Shane's," said Mr. Culp and Dr. Kane almost together. "Then she must have gone insane and killed him," the Inspector concluded.
"I have an answer that might be it a little more logical," Mr. Culp said.
"Waiting," said the Inspector sarcastically.
"This is nothing new to me. I've been Curator here twenty-seven years. These students have all seemed like my children. I've seen these things before."
"Well, spill it!" The Inspector was losing his rigid discipline.
"Nothing more nor less," Mr. Culp said, "than a cipher code in chemical symbols, for lovers to communicate with. As I said, I've picked them up years ago—"
"A CIPHER!" The Inspector seized it eagerly, and studied it intently for a while. His head followed the lines from side to side and there was a rapt expression on his face.
"Hm!" he finally said. "Cryptograms are not my line. But it'll be easy. I'll bet Jackson will have it in an hour. He's an expert on solving cryptograms."
The Inspector stepped out in the corridor, and the rumble of his orders came back indistinctly into the little office.
Dr. Kane was still puzzled.
"What do you mean? A cipher?" He could not get his mind down to it.
Mr. Culp smiled.
"Merely that the kids use chemical symbols for letters of the alphabet, to keep their precious love-letters a secret."
Dr. Kane did not speak, but his neck relaxed. Finally a thought occurred to him.
"But what has that to do with this, with Seeley dead?"
"Perhaps nothing," Mr. Culp replied. "But we've got to know what it says, anyway."
"Mighty suspicious," the Inspector said. "First seen on Seeley's desk, and then snaked away secretly, and now found on Miss Shane's desk. I'm telling you that note is going to tell us something." Undoubtedly, the strain was telling upon the Inspector's previously excellent English.
"Better bring Miss Shane in here," he added to the Sergeant who stood just without the door.
Miss Shane came in and sat down. She remained pale and rigid.
"Looks bad, young woman," the Inspector said, to break the embarrassed silence. "Better tell me what you know."
A haughty silence answered him.
Something over an hour passed. Outdoors, the campus twittered and muttered with various little sounds, and the sun grew brighter through the window. The little office was gloomy and close.
Its occupants were tense and embarrassed. Occasionally the Inspector tried a question: "What did you do it for?" Or a comment:
"I can't believe that you"—looking admiringly at her blond beauty—"would do a thing like that."
Only frozen silences rewarded his efforts. Occasionally a faint tremor shook the thin and projecting portions of the girl's garments. Mr. Culp's lips moved frequently, as though they were saying, voicelessly:
"Poor child!"
Once she started suddenly in her seat The Inspector seized her arm. Then he walked over and locked the door and put the key in his pocket.
FINALLY Jackson came. He hammered on the door and reported by name. The door was unlocked to admit him, and locked again when he was inside. All the occupants looked at him eagerly, except Miss Shane, who continued to stare intently at the floor.
"Give me a hard one some day, sir," Jackson said.
"You mean," gasped Dr. Kane, "that you have deciphered that cryptogram this quickly?"
"Easy," said Jackson proudly.
"But how?"
"Well, you see"—Jackson was less apt at explaining than at doing—"you count the most numerous character, which in a note of this length ought to be 'e'. And you guess out combinations, such as 'the', and—"
"Perhaps the explanation will wait," suggested the Inspector. "Or, Professor, if you will read Poe's 'Gold Bug,' you will find the method described in detail. The real clever thing here was for Mr. Culp to recognize it as a cipher."
The Inspector glanced at the two sheets that Jackson had given him. One was an alphabet containing the equivalents of all the characters in the note. The other was a translation of the note. He studied it a moment, and then raised his eyebrows.
"Did you write this?" he asked Miss Shane.
More defiant silence.
"It was found under Dr. Seeley's hand."
Defiant silence.
"You were in love with Dr. Seeley."
Defiant silence.
"I arrest you for the murder of Professor Seeley, and I warn you that anything you may say may be—"
At this point Miss Shane toppled suddenly to the floor. There was just enough room to hold her prostrate body with part of it on several toes. Mr. Culp bent down to help her.
"She is all right," he said. "Just fainted. Let her alone and she will be up in a moment."
They all eagerly looked at the two sheets. The alphabet that Jackson had worked out was as follows:
THE translation of the cryptogram was typewritten out, as follows:
AGAIN I TELL YOU THAT I CANT STAND YOUR MAKING LOVE TO THAT DOLL FACED WIFE OF YOURS. I LOVE YOU. YOU HAVE SAID YOU LOVE ME. I WANT YOU FOR MYSELF. IF I EVER FIND OUT THAT YOU HAVE BEEN MAKING LOVE TO HER I SHALL KILL YOU AND HER BOTH. YOUR MONOVALENT AFFINITY.
"You see," said the Inspector to Dr. Kane—somehow, over the girl's prostrate body he did not feel like thrusting his interpretation upon Mr. Culp— "how it all happened, now?"
"I—I—am not sure," Dr. Kane replied.
"Well, this wife of his calls him down one night, and he pets her to make up. They walk to the laboratory together, and probably pet a little there, and Miss Shane catches them at it. So she fixes up the poison gas for them. But, accidentally, the wife leaves, and doesn't get the gas."
Dr. Kane was too overcome to speak.
"She got the wrong victim," the Inspector continued. "But it often happens that people who tinker with murder have trouble—"
On the floor beneath them, as they intently discussed the problem, were rustles, and then a click. It was the click of the catch on the door of the lower compartment of the laboratory desk. A bubbling and a faint hiss came up to their ears. Mr. Culp whirled suddenly. To his trained ears the sounds were ominous.
Miss Shane was on hands and knees. The door of the lower compartment was open, and her hand was extended into it. Within was a Kipp generator, bubbling in full activity. As they looked, amazed and paralyzed, she sank down to the floor in collapse. In an instant they noted the pink of the skin and the blue of the lips.
Mr. Culp caught his breath and held it. He bent over and reached toward the Kipp generator to shut it off, but sank to the floor before he reached it. Professor Kane comprehended instantly what was going on, and also bent over to shut off the generator, his face blue from holding his breath. He had caught the sweet, penetrating odor of hydrocyanic acid. He fell across Mr. Culp.
In the meantime the Inspector was furiously reaching for his key. He swayed as he pointed it toward the keyhole. Finally he went to the floor without having succeeded in inserting it, adding himself to the heap with the girl at the bottom.
Jackson looked wildly about, like a rat trapped in a poisoned hold. His instinctive action was to take out his whistle and blow a furious blast upon it. But that needed a deep breath, and after the whistle blast, down he went, across the heap of people.
Instantly the door knob rattled and heavy crashes rained on the door. In twenty seconds from the time that the whistle was blown, five forms were dragged out and laid in a row in the corridor, and Dr. North was hurrying back up the stairs. Police officers were pumping at them with artificial respiration and one or two respirators.
Dr. North went down the row and spoke to them.
"The men will be all right in an hour. But the woman is dead. Save yourself any further trouble."
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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