“You are squeamish, Mr. Searles,” said Moris Klaw, wagging a long finger at me. “You squeam. You are not yet recovered from the blue face of the murdered. Ah, well! it is horrible.”
The body had been removed and we had been to view it. Now we stood in the studio where the crime had taken place, and although some time had elapsed since we had left the mortuary, I confess that I was not entirely myself. Dusk was come and we had turned up the studio lights. A faint mist hung in the place, for the fog had grown denser.
I looked about me at half-completed pictures: groups; studies for magazine jackets; portraits of children and of women--and the ghastly face seemed to rise up before me, the distorted face of the man whose hand would never touch again the brushes of his craft.
“It isn’t the first time I’ve seen a strangling case,” said Grimsby, “but it’s the first time I’ve seen marks like that.”
“Ah! really!” Moris Klaw rumbled, turning to him. “Never before, eh, like that? You interest me, my friend; you begin to notice. Your intellect it expands like a sunflower in the sun. What is it that you see different in those marks?”
Grimsby stared hard, painfully uncertain whether to regard the words as a compliment or a joke, but finally:
“The pressure was greater,” he replied. “The murderer must have had amazing strength.”
“Ah, yes!” Moris Klaw removed his hat and stared reflectively into the crown thereof. “Amazing strength? And the surgeon, what does he think?”
“He thinks the same.”
“Ah! but no more, eh? Amazing strength only?”
Grimsby figuratively pricked up his ears.
“I don’t quite follow you, Mr. Klaw,” he said. “Did you notice something else?”
Moris Klaw placed his hat upon a little table.
“I did take notice of some other thing, Mr. Grimsby,” he replied, “and for a moment I had dreams that you synchronize with me. It is a complimentary mistake which I make. Please forgive me. This ashtray”--he took up an ashtray from the table beside his hat--“is of great interest. You are agreeable, Mr. Searles”--turning to me--“that it is of great interest?”
I stared rather helplessly. It was a common brass ashtray containing match sticks and cigarette ends. I could see nothing unusual about it, and so presently I shook my head.
“Ah!”
Moris Klaw inserted two long yellow fingers gingerly and plucked out a cigarette stump. He replaced the tray and held up the stump.
“Behold!” he said, “what I find!”
Grimsby now was frankly amazed and not a little angry. As for myself, familiar though I was with Klaw’s peculiar methods, I could not divine at what he was driving.
“My friends,” he continued, looking from one to the other of us, and holding up the cigarette stump as a lecturer holds up a specimen, “the cigarette, a vice which has killed many men. I have known a woman to hang because of a hairpin, but men and women, too, many of them, because of a cigarette.”
He opened a bulging pocket-case and tenderly deposited the stump inside. As he was about to close the case:
“One moment, Mr. Klaw!” said Grimsby. “If that is evidence--though I can’t for the life of me see how it can be…”
“But I see!” cried Moris Klaw--“I, the old foolish from Wapping, behold in this the hangman’s rope!”
He closed the case.
“But----” Grimsby began again.
“But me no buts!” Moris Klaw implored. “In my hands it is the evidence, in your hands it is the cigarette stump. But listen!” A bell rang. “It is Isis. I had arranged with her to meet me here. Perhaps, Mr. Grimsby, you would be so good as to open the door?”
Grimsby obeying with alacrity, the beautiful Isis presently entered, exquisitely gowned. She gave me smiling greeting, this lovely daughter of a singular father, and whilst Grimsby deferentially held the door wide open, managed to introduce into the studio, without brushing it against the sides of the door, a large brown paper bag.
“Ah!” Moris Klaw exclaimed, “it is my odically sterilized cushion. Place it here, my child.” He indicated a spot upon the floor. “My other engagements do not allow of my sleeping here for more than two hours, but, in that time, I shall hope to recapture the etheric storm in the mind of the slayer or the last great emotion in the brain of the slain. Something, certainly, I shall get, for this was no common crime.”
From its paper wrappings Isis Klaw took a red silk cushion and placed it upon the spot where the dead man had been found.
I turned aside, shuddering. That any human being, having seen what we had seen that day, could lie down and, above all, could sleep upon that haunted spot, was almost more than I could believe. Yet such was Moris Klaw’s intention, and that he would carry it out I did not doubt.
“Isis, my child,” he said, “awake me in two hours.”
Removing his caped coat and revealing the shabby tweed suit which he wore beneath it, he spread the garment on the carpet, stretched his gaunt shape upon it, and rested his head on the red cushion.
“Gentlemen,” he said in his queer, rumbling tones, “leave me to my slumber. When I awake, I perhaps shall know something more about the man who smoked”--he tapped long fingers upon his breast pocket--“this cigarette.”
We went out of the studio through the door leading to the garden. Isis was last to leave and I heard her father’s voice:
“Isis, my child, be pleased to extinguish the lights.”
So, leaving the eccentric investigator to his dark and ghastly vigil, we went up to the house; and, taking pity upon Grimsby, whose anxiety to talk to Isis was almost pathetic, I sought out Parker, the dead artist’s manservant, and endeavoured to obtain from him some useful information. In this, however, I was wholly unsuccessful.
“He hadn’t an enemy in the world, sir,” the man declared emotionally. “He was the best employer I’ve ever had or am ever likely to have. I don’t deny that he had his little affairs, sir, but there was nothing that left a nasty taste behind. Believe me, there was no woman in it, like the Scotland Yard men tried to make out.”
And indeed, the more I considered the facts of the case, the more inexplicable these became.
For instance, there were no signs of a struggle. If one had taken place the murderer had removed all traces of it before leaving. Upon the fingerprint evidence which Scotland Yard hoped to obtain, I based little hope of result. But the astute perceptions of Moris Klaw had undoubtedly enabled him to pick up a clue where no one else had found one; and strange though his behaviour appeared to be, I had good reason to know that his subconscious mind, termed by him “the astral negative,” rarely failed to obtain some record under conditions such as those which, he maintained, prevail upon the scene of a crime of violence.
When at the appointed time we returned to the studio, we found it to be brightly lighted, and entering, discovered Moris Klaw engaged in squirting verbena upon his high, bald forehead. He stooped and picked up the caped coat.
“Ah, my friends,” he said, “there are many laws governing the functions of mind which have yet to be classified. I think so; yes. Why is it that some emotions register”--he waved his long hands in the air--“indelibly; others, impermanently, and some, not at all? I ask myself the question, and no one replies. We are, then, ignorant, and stupid. To-night”--he lowered his voice--“I do murder with my bare hands! Yes! I am the assassin! My motive----”
“Yes, yes!” cried Grimsby, eagerly.
“No, no!” Moris Klaw frowned at him. “My motive beats in my brain, my second brain, my subconscious brain. Myself I do not see, nor my victim; but I hear, I hear. I hear a sound!”
“A sound,” Isis whispered. “Do you mean a horrible sound--his death cry?”
“No, no!” her father assured her. “I hear a beautiful sound.”
