The Dream Doctor - Arthur Benjamin Reeve

Скачать книгу

write it, and if he did he surely is a wonder at disguising his hand. I doubt if any one could disguise what the rayograph shows. Now, for instance, this is very important. Do you see how those strokes of the long letters are—well, wobbly? You'd never see that in the original, but when it is enlarged you see how plainly visible the tremors of the hand become? Try as you may, you can't conceal them. The fact is that the writer of this note suffered from a form of heart disease. Now let us look at the copy that Collins made at the Novella."

      He placed the copy on the table of the rayograph. It was quite evident that the two had been written by entirely different persons. "I thought he was telling the truth," commented Craig, "by the surprised look on his face the moment I mentioned the note to Miss Blaisdell. Now I know he was. There is no such evidence of heart trouble in his writing as in the other. Of course that's all aside from what a study of the handwriting itself might disclose. They are not similar at all. But there is an important clue there. Find the writer of that note who has heart trouble, and we either have the murderer or some one close to the murderer."

      I remembered the tremulousness of the little beauty-doctor, his third-rate artificial acting of fear for the reputation of the Novella, and I must confess ​I agreed with O'Connor and Collins that it looked black for him. At one time I had suspected Collins himself, but now I could see perfectly why he had not concealed his anxiety to hush up his connection with the case, while at the same time his instinct as a lawyer, and I had almost added, lover, told him that justice must be done. I saw at once how, accustomed as he was to weigh evidence, he had immediately seen the justification for O'Connor's arrest of the Millefleurs.

      "More than that," added Kennedy, after examining the fibres of the paper under a microscope, "all these notes are written on the same kind of paper. That first torn note to Miss Blaisdell was written right in the Novella and left so as to seem to have been sent in from outside."

      It was early the following morning when Kennedy roused me with the remark: "I think I'll go up to the hospital. Do you want to come along? We'll stop for Barron on the way. There is a little experiment I want to try on that girl up there."

      When we arrived, the nurse in charge of the ward told us that her patient had passed a fairly good night, but that now that the influence of the drug had worn off she was again restless and still repeating the words that she had said over and over before. Nor had she been able to give any clearer account of herself. Apparently she had been alone in the city, for although there was a news item about her in the morning papers, so far no relative or friend had called to identify her.

      Kennedy had placed himself directly before her, ​listening intently to her ravings. Suddenly he managed to fix her eye, as if by a sort of hypnotic influence.

      "Agnes!" he called in a sharp tone.

      The name seemed to arrest her fugitive attention. Before she could escape from his mental grasp again he added: "Your date-book is full. Aren't you going to the Novella this morning?"

      The change in her was something wonderful to see. It was as though she had come out of a trance. She sat up in bed and gazed about blankly.

      "Yes, yes, I must go," she cried as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Then she realised the strange surroundings and faces. "Where is my hat—wh-where am I? What has happened?"

      "You are all right," soothed Kennedy gently. "Now rest. Try to forget everything for a little while, and you will be all right. You are among friends."

      As Kennedy led us out she fell back, now physically exhausted, on the pillow.

      "I told you, Barron," he whispered, "that there was more to this case than you imagined. Unwittingly you brought me a very important contribution to a case of which the papers are full this morning, the case of the murdered actress, Blanche Blaisdell."

      The Beauty Shop

       Table of Contents

      Layout 2

      ​

      IV

      The Beauty Shop

      IT was only after a few hours that Kennedy thought it wise to try to question the poor girl at the hospital. Her story was simple enough in itself, but it certainly complicated matters considerably without throwing much light on the case. She had been busy because her day was full, and she had yet to dress the hair of Miss Blaisdell for her play that night. Several times she had been interrupted by impatient messages from the actress in her little dressing-booth, and one of the girls had already demolished the previous hair-dressing in order to save time. Once Agnes had run down for a few seconds to reassure her that she would be through in time.

      She had found the actress reading a newspaper, and when Kennedy questioned her she remembered seeing a note lying on the dresser. "Agnes," Miss Blaisdell had said, "will you go into the writing-room and bring me some paper, a pen, and ink? I don't want to go in there this way. There's a dear good girl." Agnes had gone, though it was decidedly no part of her duty as one of the highest paid employés of the Novella. But they all envied the popular actress, and were ready to do anything for her. The next thing she remembered was finishing the coiffure she was working on and going to Miss Blaisdell. ​There lay the beautiful actress. The light in the corridor had not been lighted yet, and it was dark. Her lips and mouth seemed literally to shine. Agnes called her, but she did not move; she touched her, but she was cold. Then she screamed and fled. That was the last she remembered.

      "The little writing-room," reasoned Kennedy as we left the poor little hair-dresser quite exhausted by her narrative, "was next to the sanctum of Millefleur, where they found that bottle of ether phosphoré and the oil of turpentine. Some one who knew of that note or perhaps wrote it must have reasoned that an answer would be written immediately. That person figured that the note would be the next thing written and that the top envelope of the pile would be used. That person knew of the deadly qualities of too much phosphorised ether, and painted the gummed flap of the envelope with several grains of it. The reasoning held good, for Agnes took the top envelope with its poisoned flap to Miss Blaisdell. No, there was no chance about that. It was all clever, quick reasoning."

      "But," I objected, "how about the oil of turpentine?"

      "Simply to remove the traces of the poison. I think you will see why that was attempted before we get through."

      Kennedy would say no more, but I was content because I could see that he was now ready to put his theories, whatever they were, to the final test. He spent the rest of the day working at the hospital with Dr. Barren, adjusting a very delicate piece of ​apparatus down in a special room in the basement. I saw it, but I had no idea what it was or what its use might be.

      Close to the wall was a stereopticon which shot a beam of light through a tube to which I heard them refer as a galvanometer, about three feet distant. In front of this beam whirled a five-spindled wheel, governed by a chronometer which erred only a second a day. Between the poles of the galvanometer was stretched a slender thread of fused quartz plated with silver, only one one-thousandth of a millimetre in diameter, so tenuous that it could not be seen except in a bright light. It was a thread so slender that it might have been spun by a miscroscopic spider.

      Three feet farther away was a camera with a moving film of sensitised material, the turning of which was regulated by a little flywheel. The beam of light focused on the thread in the galvanometer passed to the photographic film, intercepted only by the five spindles of the wheel, which turned once a second, thus marking the picture off into exact fifths of a second. The vibrations of the microscopic quartz thread were enormously magnified on the sensitive film by a lens and resulted in producing a long zigzag, wavy line. The whole was shielded by a wooden hood which permitted no light, except the slender ray, to strike it. The film revolved slowly across the field, its speed regulated by the flywheel, and all moved by an electric motor.

      I was quite surprised, then, when Kennedy told me that the final tests which he was arranging were not to be held at the hospital at all, but in his ​labatory, the scene of so

Скачать книгу