I could tell by the look that crossed Kennedy’s face that at last a ray of light had pierced the darkness. “Have you any spirits of turpentine in the office?” he asked.
The coroner shook his head and took a step toward the telephone as if to call the drug-store in town.
“Or ether?” interrupted Craig. “Ether will do.”
“Oh, yes, plenty of ether.”
Craig poured a little of one of the blood samples from the jar into a tube and added a few drops of ether. A cloudy dark precipitate formed. He smiled quietly and said, half to himself, “I thought so.”
“What is it?” asked the coroner eagerly. “Nux vomica?”
Craig shook his head as he stared at the black precipitate. “You were perfectly right about the asphyxiation, Doctor,” he remarked slowly, “but wrong as to the cause. It wasn’t carbon monoxide or illuminating-gas. And you, Mr. Whitney, were right about the poison, too. Only it is a poison neither of you ever heard of.”
“What is it?” we asked simultaneously.
“Let me take these samples and make some further tests. I am sure of it, but it is new to me. Wait till tomorrow night, when my chain of evidence is completed. Then you are all cordially invited to attend at my laboratory at the university. I’ll ask you, Mr. Whitney, to come armed with a warrant for John or Jane Doe. Please see that the Wainwrights, particularly Marian, are present. You can tell Inspector O’Connor that Mr. Vanderdyke and Mrs. Ralston are required as material witnesses—anything so long as you are sure that these five persons are present. Good night, gentlemen.”
We rode back to the city in silence, but as we neared the station, Kennedy remarked: “You see, Walter, these people are like the newspapers. They are floundering around in a sea of unrelated facts. There is more than they think back of this crime. I’ve been revolving in my mind how it will be possible to get some inkling about this concession of Vanderdyke’s, the mining claim of Mrs. Ralston, and the exact itinerary of the Wainwright trip in the Far East. Do you think you can get that information for me? I think it will take me all day tomorrow to isolate this poison and get things in convincing shape on that score. Meanwhile if you can see Vanderdyke and Mrs. Ralston you can help me a great deal. I am sure you will find them very interesting people.”
“I have been told that she is quite a female high financier,” I replied, tacitly accepting Craig’s commission. “Her story is that her claim is situated near the mine of a group of powerful American capitalists, who are opposed to having any competition, and on the strength of that story she has been raking in the money right and left. I don’t know Vanderdyke, never heard of him before, but no doubt he has some equally interesting game.”
“Don’t let them think you connect them with the case, however,” cautioned Craig.
Early the next morning I started out on my quest for facts, though not so early but that Kennedy had preceded me to his work in his laboratory. It was not very difficult to get Mrs. Ralston to talk about her troubles with the government. In fact, I did not even have to broach the subject of the death of Templeton. She volunteered the information that in his handling of her case he had been very unjust to her, in spite of the fact that she had known him well a long time ago. She even hinted that she believed he represented the combination of capitalists who were using the government to aid their own monopoly and prevent the development of her mine. Whether it was an obsession of her mind, or merely part of her clever scheme, I could not make out. I noted, however, that when she spoke of Templeton it was in a studied, impersonal way, and that she was at pains to lay the blame for the governmental interference rather on the rival mine-owners.
It quite surprised me when I found from the directory that Vanderdyke’s office was on the floor below in the same building. Like Mrs. Ralston’s, it was open, but not doing business, pending the investigation by the Post-Office Department.
Vanderdyke was a type of which I had seen many before. Well dressed to the extreme, he displayed all those evidences of prosperity which are the stock in trade of the man with securities to sell. He grasped my hand when I told him I was going to present the other side of the post-office cases and held it between both of his as if he had known me all his life. Only the fact that he had never seen me before prevented his calling me by my first name. I took mental note of his stock of jewellery, the pin in his tie that might almost have been the Hope diamond, the heavy watch chain across his chest, and a very brilliant seal ring of lapis lazuli on the hand that grasped mine. He saw me looking at it and smiled.
“My dear fellow, we have deposits of that stuff that would make a fortune if we could get the machinery to get at it. Why, sir, there is lapis lazuli enough on our claim to make enough ultramarine paint to supply all the artists to the end of the world. Actually we could afford to crush it up and sell it as paint. And that is merely incidental to the other things on the concession. The asphalt’s the thing. That’s where the big money is. When we get started, sir, the old asphalt trust will simply melt away, melt away.”
He blew a cloud of tobacco smoke and let it dissolve significantly in the air.
When it came to talking about the suits, however, Vanderdyke was not so communicative as Mrs. Ralston, but he was also not so bitter against either the post-office or Templeton.
“Poor Templeton,” he said. “I used to know him years ago when we were boys. Went to school with him and all that sort of thing, you know, but until I ran across him, or rather he ran across me, in this investigation I hadn’t heard much about him. Pretty clever fellow he was, too. The state will miss him, but my lawyer tells me that we should have won the suit anyhow, even if that unfortunate tragedy hadn’t occurred. Most unaccountable, wasn’t it? I’ve read about it in the papers for old time’s sake, and can make nothing out of it.”
I said nothing, but wondered how he could pass so lightheartedly over the death of the woman who had once been his wife. However, I said nothing. The result was he launched forth again on the riches of his Venezuelan concession and loaded me down with “literature,” which I crammed into my pocket for future reference.
My next step was to drop into the office of a Spanish-America paper whose editor was especially well informed on South American affairs.
“Do I know Mrs. Ralston?” he repeated, thoughtfully lighting one of those black cigarettes that look so vicious and are so mild. “I should say so. I’ll tell you a little story about her. Three or four years ago she turned up in Caracas. I don’t know who Mr. Ralston was—perhaps there never was any Mr. Ralston. Anyhow, she got in with the official circle of the Castro government and was very successful as an adventuress. She has considerable business ability and represented a certain group of Americans. But, if you recall, when Castro was eliminated pretty nearly everyone who had stood high with him went, too. It seems that a number of the old concessionaires played the game on both sides. This particular group had a man named Vanderdyke on the anti-Castro side. So, when Mrs. Ralston went, she just quietly sailed by way of Panama to the other side of the continent, to Peru—they paid her well—and Vanderdyke took the title role.
“Oh, yes, she and Vanderdyke were very good friends, very, indeed. I think they must have known each other here in the States. Still they played their parts well at the time. Since things have settled down in Venezuela, the concessionaires have found no further use for Vanderdyke either, and here they are, Vanderdyke and Mrs. Ralston, both in New York now, with two of the most outrageous schemes of financing ever seen on Broad Street. They have offices in the same building, they are together a great deal, and now I hear that the state attorney-general is after both of them.”
With this information and a very meagre report of the Wainwright trip to the Far East, which had taken in some out-of-the-way places apparently, I hastened back to Kennedy. He was surrounded by bottles, tubes, jars, retorts, Bunsen burners, everything in the science and art of chemistry, I thought.
I didn’t like the way he looked. His hand was unsteady, and his eyes looked badly, but he seemed quite put out when