Sing Sing Nights Read online

  Professor Silvester reported that he had failed both to discover or to capture the Vergitilla Phyleas.

  JOHNSONIAN INSTITUTE.

  He handed the yellow slip to MacTavish, and while the other read it turned his attention to the second telegram. Its contents ran:

  Vergitilla Phyleas belongs to the round-tail group of moths. Absolutely.

  PROFESSOR HANS SCHWENMAUER.

  MacTavish looked up from the second telegram. “What does it mean?” he asked. “We know that Silvester captured the Vergitilla Phyleas — you and me both saw it, label, box, and all — yet he reported to the Johnsonian Institute, who employed him, that he failed in the hunt to see one or to capture one. Why did he conceal it?”

  “Mac,” said Casperson, ignoring the question, “can you shoot up to Ernst Court and get that specimen of the Vergitilla Phyleas, and then come straight to the Eldredge residence, where I’ll be waiting? I think I’ll be able to throw light on why the professor might have been murdered by the Jap, but why, at the same time, the Jap was not the one who did it or who knows anything about it!”

  CHAPTER XIX

  SEPARATING THE SNARL

  WITH a frown of perplexity, the detective got up. “I’ll play the cards as you ask me, my boy; but I don’t fathom what you’re driving at. You want me to get the Vergitilla and then come straight to the Eldredge home? That it?”

  Casperson nodded. “Exactly. And right away.” He fumbled in his pockets and withdrew a nickel. “And pardon me a second, Mac, till I ‘phone a certain party.”

  Dropping his nickel in the slot of the instrument and consulting his notebook, he asked for Superior 4449. A woman’s voice responded, whereupon he asked for Mr. Arthur Sennet. A moment later he was talking with the latter.

  “Arthur, any news on the judges’ decision?”

  “None,” was the dolorous answer. “I’m in touch with the old address where I lived.”

  “I see. Well, it occurred to me this afternoon that, if the decision had been rendered late last night, the congratulatory telegram — if there’s to be any — might not be sent out to the winner — whoever the lucky chap may be — until some time to-day. In that case, if we still feel confident, and I do, something might come to-night. I’m leaving now for Number 1400 Lake Shore Drive, the Eldredge home, where I’m likely to be for several hours. If anything comes, you might send the news to me there by boy, ‘phone, telegraph, or wireless! Will you do that?”

  “Gladly, Wilk. I’ll come myself, jump through the front window, and let out a whoop like a wild Indian. Number 1400 Lake Shore Drive — the Eldredges. O.K.”

  Casperson and MacTavish parted at Dearborn Avenue and Walton Place. Evening was dropping down over the city, and the low frosted globe lights along Dearborn Avenue were flaring into being when Casperson reached the Eldredge mansion and hurried up the steps. To Brayley, who answered the door, he said that he wished to see Rufus Eldredge himself.

  “He was expecting you, Mr. Casperson,” said the butler. “Come right in.”

  The butler led the way down the hall to the library, where he switched on a splendid table lamp, which cast a subdued glow over the rich leather furniture and the busts of bronze and marble. Leaving him alone, the servant went on to the dining room. Presently Eldredge, at his elbow Malcolm and Shirley, her eyes wide open in surprise, appeared in the doorway.

  The elder man paused a moment. Then a grim, sardonic smile spread over his lips. “Glad you reconsidered things, Casperson,” he said. “Thought you’d realise, after you thought it over, that the whole thing was a hare-brained stunt.”

  Casperson looked at him coldly. “Mr. Eldredge,” he said. “I have not come to make the confession you suppose. May I have the attention of all of you for a few minutes, or am I interrupting dinner? If so, I’ll — ”

  The door-bell rang. A moment later Brayley appeared in the doorway of the library, at his shoulder MacTavish, bearing in his hand a stout paper parcel which showed plainly the square outlines of the glass box which housed the Vergitilla Phyleas.

  “Oh, you are here, Mac,” was Casperson’s greeting to the detective. “Mr. Eldredge, Malcolm, and Shirley, let me present Mr. MacTavish, of the Chicago police department.”

  “How do you do, Mr. MacTavish? Hope you’ve come to throw some light on the matter of my daughter’s necklace.”

  “No,” said Casperson. “Mr. MacTavish hasn’t come for that reason.” He waited until all had seated themselves, including MacTavish. A pause of profound curiosity ensued before he spoke. “Last night,” he began slowly, “I was called away from this place by a message written in the most erratic handwriting I have ever seen, with instructions to go to a certain number on Ernst Court at once. Whether that handwriting was disguised, and whether the ink was of a vanishing kind, in order to cover up the matter afterward, is something that we must investigate here to-night before I leave. Enough to say that, when I got to Ernst Court, I found a dead man — Professor Silvester — who had been murdered in his study by a shot in the back. And that calling away of me by that message has thrown upon me the suspicion of being a thief — a suspicion which thus far I haven’t been able to remove.”

  Casperson retold in detail what he had just related, this time describing the decoy card to the last word, his peculiar costume, the fact that he, with initials W.C., held an important relationship with one whose initials were A.S. From there he went on to the murder, his later investigations of the day, his calling upon Diana Silvester, the visit of Moonface to his room, and his and MacTavish’s trip over to the Plaza Hotel. He omitted not a detail of his movements since the preceding night, and, when he paused for the second time, the mutterings of Rufus Eldredge under his breath were audible to everyone in the room.

  “Great Heaven!” he speculated, “and I thought that Cawthorne was a gentleman, an upright man!” He shook his head wearily as Casperson outlined, word for word, the quarrel and later the conversation between the two crooks in Room 555 of the Plaza.

  After waiting for all these facts to sink into the consciousness of his hearers, Casperson went on: “Now, there is no doubt from that conversation that Cawthorne was to receive something from Silvester — something he had arranged to have and which was to cost him around ten thousand dollars. And there is no doubt, either, that Cawthorne is what we call an international rogue; his theft of the consular paper in Buenos Aires shows the kind of work he does — the international kind. Cawthorne is no petty lifter of diamonds and trinkets such as the more dexterous Moonface is. Of all this we can be assured. But I am not yet certain in my mind as to whether Cawthorne stole that necklace and whether his quarrel with Moonface was a piece of rare acting.

  “But two things have been brought out thus far in my investigations, particularly at Miss Diana Silvester’s,” Casperson continued. “First, that the professor was visited by a man of Cawthorne’s description many times in his St. Clair Street home. In fact, we may say definitely that a visit was made yesterday morning, Miss Diana herself having stated as much. A mere description is not entire proof, so I am going to add this fact: Cawthorne came to that ball costumed as a yellow moth. He accidentally or carelessly used the back of a round-cornered blue ticket to jot down his next address for Silvester, the two evidently feeling it necessary to keep in touch with each other all the time for some reason. The words on the ticket — MacTavish has seen them — run; ‘My address after Monday, Ontario Hotel.” The reverse side of the card shows a receipt for a deposit on a yellow moth suit, and I have located both the house and the clerk who wrote it out. Professor Silvester, however, had placed it in his private lock drawer with his Vergitilla Phyleas, his giant tropical moth; MacTavish and I found it there. So is it all clear, the perfect chain? Remember, all this was my first indication that there was, or might have been, another yellow moth at your ball last night.”

  Casperson paused and gazed about him. “The second thing brought out by my conversation with Diana Silvester,” Casperson went
on, “was that the professor had seen someone watching his St. Clair Street house that night from behind a tree-trunk across the way, and he had returned much agitated. He went up to Diana’s second-floor room and watched in the darkness. After a while he lighted the gas, and in all probability the fellow fled. Anyway, after Silvester left his house for the second time he went to Ernst Court, with his own plans now crystallised. If that white card was not a decoy in disguised handwriting, then it might be possible that Professor Silvester wrote a very erratic hand. He rang for a messenger boy and sent that white card to Cawthorne at the ball — Cawthorne, who had. referred to this masquerade ball, and whose costume the professor either recalled from the conversation or else happened to know from the front side of the blue card on which Cawthorne had written, ‘My address after Monday, Ontario Hotel. ‘But the question would naturally remain: Why did he use invisible ink on the white card?”

  No one proffered an answer, and Casperson resumed: “Well, now that you have all the facts that I have, what deductions can we make? There were narrow tissue-paper strips used in Silvester’s laboratory for holding down delicate coloured wings of drying-moth specimens. And you’ve heard that the professor, paralysed by his wound, rubber-stamped the message, ‘Find Ushi — he knows.’ And you know that Ushi Yatsura, the Jap, was arrested at the depot boarding a train for the West. He claims that he left Ernst Court on account of a financial disagreement, and pretends that he knows nothing of Silvester’s death. Whether we accept it or not, it need make no difference just now as to why Silvester was killed.

  “The main thing, of course, is to ascertain what there was between Cawthorne and Professor Silvester that Cawthorne hasn’t even yet divulged to his pal, Moonface. We know that Cawthorne had something on the professor; that he knew Silvester came from some little town, that under his right name he had forged a will which had successfully swindled a brother of his out of everything; that he had sold out the estate and then disappeared to pursue his moth hobby under another name and in every corner of the world. That much gives us the source of any pressure which Cawthorne might have exerted on Silvester. Diana Silvester says that of late her father had been tight in money matters — inclined to cut out many expenditures. Was his stolen fortune of years back vanishing, threatening to put an end to his expensive career of collecting moths?

  “We know,” went on Casperson, “that there has been but one important addition to the professor’s big collection during the last few months — that of the Vergitilla Phyleas, the giant tropical moth. Under the auspices of the Johnsonian Institute, of which he was a member, but his trip under which was probably financed by himself, he spent two months down in the region between Costa Rica and Colombia hunting around trying to get the famous nocturnal specimen which appears but once in every twenty-one years or so, and which was due at the time he arrived there.”

  Casperson drew two telegrams from his pocket. “And yet I have two peculiar telegrams here — one from the Johnsonian Institute saying that Silvester reported failure on his quest, the second from Professor Hans Schwenmauer, an international expert on Lepidoptera at the University of California, saying that the Vergitilla Phyleas belongs to the round-tail group of moths. But, as MacTavish will show you when he unwraps that paper, Professor Silvester carried back to the United States, in a glass box, a splendid specimen of the true Vergitilla Phyleas. You may read the red-stamped card at the bottom, if you doubt it. What can we make of it? Why did he report to the Johnsonian Institute that failure had crowned his quest? Simply because he had not captured the Vergitilla Phyleas, after all, and dared not present the giant moth he did capture to the Johnsonian Institute or exhibit it to any man who was an expert on moths. The telegram from Professor Hans Schwenmauer proves it.” He turned to MacTavish.

  “Mac, open the box, and let us see the fateful moth.”

  CHAPTER XX

  VERGITILLA OR ORALIA?

  MACTAVISH stepped to the library table with the flat, square package he had kept on his knee throughout the discourse. There he unwrapped it, and exposed the glass-encased box with its flat cork bottom, the gorgeous, giant moth with winds outspread, and the white card below it giving its name and other scientific data. All in the library crowded around it, marvelling at its colours and its enormous size.

  Casperson resumed his talk: “Let me say that I was fortunate enough to-day to extract from much scientific stuff in the encyclopedia that there are two groups of moths — those with the round hind wings and those with wings of the swallow-tail variety which come out in a well-defined tongue or finger like a coat-tail. Professor Schwenmauer, of the University of California, says in his telegram emphatically that the Vergitilla belongs to the round-tail group — yet this thing, labelled Vergitilla Phyleas, has a prominent swallow-tail on each wing. All we can deduce, therefore, with this authoritative information, is that this is some more common variety of rare moth which resembles it. And the one which resembles the Vergitilla most, in size and markings, according to Bertram, who has written a treatise on moths, is the Oralia Purpura.”

  No one made any reply to this significant statement. Then Casperson took up once more the thread of his strange explanation.

  “So, as I say, we can only see that this is a spurious Vergitilla; that only by pretending to have captured what he came after could Silvester get out of this particular region in Central America with what he went after — or better, with the side line he went for. For Aloysius Silvester, hard up in his finances and absolutely conscienceless so far as things external to his erratic profession went, had a side line in addition to capturing the Vergitilla — a commission to perform for one Wellington Cawthorne — a commission which was to net him ten thousand dollars profit, and the results of which Cawthorne, the international rogue, claims to be able to turn over for a hundred thousand dollars.

  “And one last word: If you are not familiar with Central American geography you have not yet guessed that the region where this moth appears every twenty-one years — the habitat designated as ‘The territory running from Eastern Costa Rica to Western Colombia’ — is nothing else but the republic of Panama.”

  Picking up a metal paper-weight on the table, he leaned across that richly carved piece of furniture and made a sharp, quick blow which broke the glass over the gorgeous specimen. Picking up the sharp fragments from the box and laying them on a magazine, no one saying a word, so tense was the interest, he reached down and gingerly felt the huge front wings of the moth. Then taking hold of them carefully, one in each hand, he moved them back and forth till suddenly something surprising happened. They loosened — they came off, each bearing at the base what appeared to be a strip of beads of hardened glue, with some of the hairs of the body still adhering to them. With a half smile of satisfaction Casperson turned them over in his fingers and laid them out on the table.

  The under sides were white. From the texture alone it could be seen easily that the wings were nothing but paper cut to shape and painted in various rich colours on the upper side. And all over the two white surfaces were fine black lines, equally fine red loops, diagrams, crosses of various shapes and proportions, conventional signs of different sorts, with undulating lines running back and forth. Here and there actual distances between points were given by tiny broken arrows; again, a minute compass scale showed the precise directional relation between two symbols. But what was most startling of all, not to mention enlightening, the very key to the strange tangle, was the tiny table meticulously lettered at the bottom of one of the wings, in letters no larger than diamond-point, which read:

  A gasp ran over the group around the table. Casperson glanced up, his gaze travelling curiously from one face to the other. “And there you have it,” he said calmly. “An up-to-the-minute detailed chart showing the vital points of strength and weakness of that whole strategic region; a chart by which — let us say, merely for a military example — Japan, for instance, planning an attack on Australia, could first demolish the Canal in
a few hours, cutting off the main section of Great Britain’s fleet entirely; or, as a further example, a chart by which this same Yellow Power could cut the United States’ military capabilities squarely in half before attacking her, a chart for which Cawthorne in touch with international agents of many powers, not to mention Nippon herself, could get a neat fortune; yet a chart which only the old harmless professor, wandering up and down the region on both sides of the Panama Canal under the auspices of a nationally respected scientific institution, with his steel spectacles and his butterfly net, his kit, and his camping outfit, could prepare and compile at his leisure almost under the very eyes of the soldiers and military guards. He — ”

  “Good God!” broke in Malcolm, whitening, “I — I — and I was to marry Diana Silvester — his daughter. I — I never — ”

  MacTavish turned on him sharply. “Then what about the vanishing ink? Quick! We’re looking for information now. How about that secret ink in your fountain-pen?”

  Malcolm Eldredge stared at the plain-clothes man, dull eyed. Then he said bitterly: “Yes, the secret ink. Diana and I both used it to write to each other; our letters haven’t been getting the privacy they should have, in either one’s home. She and I both had a supply. Hers was kept in the desk in her upstairs room. Mine I kept in a special fountain-pen. It fades out soon after it dries, but reappears if the paper is heated and kept hot. As to the mysterious man that was hanging around St. Clair Street last night, it was I. I was waiting to see Diana as soon as the old professor left the house. He refused to let her have any company in her home.”

  Casperson laughed. “That explains everything, MacTavish. Silvester got panic-stricken and thought that Malcolm here, hiding in the darkness across the street, was some secret agent of the United States Government watching him. After peering out in the gloom and seeing that the watcher had moved away, he lighted the gas, took a blank card, and wrote a message to Cawthorne to come to the laboratory at once. And, in doing so, he accidentally used Diana Silvester’s bottle of vanishing ink. As to why he did it, he was frightened, as I said, and decided to get rid of the dangerous Panama Canal map that very night if he could get any money at all from Cawthorne.”