The Mystery of the Fiddling Cracksman Read online

  The East Chicago Avenue police are of the opinion that if Strong was not the victim of his own excitement, then the thief is a dangerous lunatic of some sort, rather than a professional cracksman. They have communicated with the superintendents of the Elgin, Dunning, and Kankakee State hospitals in order to learn whether any patients are reported missing from there in the past few weeks.

  That was the end of the unusual news story. Twice Billy Hemple read it through; then tossed the sheets on the floor. He sat, pondering, and his face, though troubled at something, carried a look of assured knowledge that could only be carried on the face of an author whose book burlesqued all drama and melodrama, from the Nickel Detective Magazine up to Monte Cristo itself.

  “Crazy as a bedbug, that fiddling housebreaker, all right,” he said, nodding. “That is, if it wasn’t all a wild dream in the brain of a scared butler. Mad as a March Hare, that night-prowling catgut scraper, for there isn’t an explanation this side of Sam Hill to account for a bird playing tunes to a safe.” The author of Mr. Monte Zenda of Graustark paused. “But no wonder Laral’s agitated and unstrung. Three burglarizations of homes of persons named John Craig. Three! And all of the John Craigs, in the bargain, minus any middle initial. And her father—a fourth John Craig—and likewise minus a middle initial—out of town! If she’s been reading the papers, I’m thinking she’s got a right to have the jitters. And I’d say that—”

  He stopped abruptly as the grandfather’s clock chimed the hour of 8:30. Then, without any further delay, he seized his hat and left the house.

  CHAPTER II

  “Paid in Full”

  Outside, Billy Hemple hurried from his Oakenwald Avenue rooming house in the heart of semi-fashionable Kenwood, to the 42nd Place station of the South Side L-Road, and, boarding an express, was inside the Loop within fifteen minutes. There, at the Adams Street platform, teeming with travelers heading in all directions, he transferred to the Ravenswood “L,” and settled down in a seat for the long, rattling ride clear out to the northwestern city limits.

  Past interminable streets, where tall iron poles bearing huge high-power tungsten bulbs blazed almost upon the “L”-tracks themselves, and past interminable more streets where low posts bearing round frosted globes instead, twinkled far below in the darkness, the train thundered for a half hour, and when the guard called “Montrose Avenue” Hemple rose hurriedly from his seat and left the coach. Under a friendly electric bulb on the dark “L” platform, he fumbled in his pocket and withdrew a short handwritten note. It ran:

  DEAR BILLIAM: Have at last pitched my shingle out in the weeds of Montrose and Ridgeway Avenues—No. 3736 Montrose Avenue, to be exact—and am now ready to garner in a few shekels far from the busy marts of trade. So far, though, plenty of patience—but no patients!

  Am sitting in my office here like a spider waiting for his first fly—but waiting is as far as it gets. However, to jump from the ridiculous to the sublime, I should like to say that I’ll have that hundred for you if you can call at my new diggings—say—Friday night. Will you come—and break the loneliness?

  PETER (M.D.!)

  With a second glance at the street number mentioned, he smiled, and replaced the boyish communication in his pocket. He left the “L” platform and boarded a rickety, old-fashioned Montrose Avenue street car below. He endured its swayings and teeterings and groanings until it reached the 3700s, and there dismounted. The neighborhood, punctuated here and there by vacant, weed-grown lots, was quite obviously newly built up, consisting of little orange brick structures, only two stories in height, a store on the first floor, a flat on the second; and bungalows stretching away in both directions on the intersecting streets.

  To Hemple, however, the neighborhood was far from unfamiliar, for he had been in that region dozens of times, by different routes, visiting Laral Craig. He found No. 3736 in short order. It was a low two-story building of orange brick, like the others. A bakery, closed at this time of night, occupied the ground floor; a glass doorway at the side, led to a single upstairs apartment. And blazoned on the glass door in gloriously prominent gold letters was the announcement: “Peter Schultz, M.D. Physician and Surgeon. Office hours, 9 a.m to 9 p.m.”

  Hemple, turning the handle of the glass door, smiled to himself. “The spider isn’t losing any chances on the fly,” he commented. “Nine a.m. to nine p.m. Some hours for a doctor!”

  He climbed the neatly scrubbed inside stairway, and at the top, pressed a polished brass push button. The door swung open almost instantly, revealing a young man framed in the doorway. His hair was dark; his blue eyes wide open; his face a frank, ingenuous one; although in its handsome well-cut features, there was a pronounced suggestion of great depth of thought and inherent coolness, should the necessary testing crisis ever arrive. In one hand, a finger holding the place, was a ponderous medical volume whose gold-lettered title, “Criminal Psychology, by August Stutz, M.D.,” stared out at Hemple from the doorway.

  The man in the doorway blinked towards his visitor for a second; then he flung wide the door. “For Heaven’s sake, old horse, what—what are you doing out in the weeds at 9:30 p.m.? Come in! Welcome to my new camp. Didn’t expect you tonight this late.”

  Hemple stepped inside, finding himself in a neat little sitting room furnished with a parchment-shaded student’s lamp, a reading table, a few comfortable-looking chairs, and a bright rug partly covering the polished hardwood floors; on the windows were clean, stiffly starched lace curtains. One door opened into a consulting room equipped with a collapsible operating table, a wash bowl and a glass case filled with a few simple surgical instruments; the other door gave a view into a bedroom, and the condition of the brass bed showed only too plainly that it had been made up by a bachelor.

  “I hadn’t expected to call tonight,” remarked Hemple, sitting down in the nearest chair; “but I’m on my way over to see that wonderful girl of mine I’ve often spoken of to you. She lives in the 4500s on North Lawndale, about a block east and a block north of here. So I stopped in for a minute or two.”

  Peter Schultz dropped into a chair across from his visitor and gazed at him quizzically. “Lord, Billy, what a jolt you gave me! I thought you were a patient, sure. I’ve been twiddling my thumbs for a week now, itching to cure somebody. For God’s sake, Bill, haven’t you something the matter with you—your liver, your lungs or something? I’ll pay you a dollar and a half cash for the privilege of doctoring you.”

  Hemple shook his head, laughing. “Not a thing, Peter. Absolutely nothing wrong, I’m sorry to say, with the old machinery!” He leaned back. “And there never has been, seemingly, since you and I met each other playing golf in Jackson Park. I guess I was a poor acquaintance for a Northwestern Medical University student, just completing his Cook County interneship, to pick up!” He looked around appraisingly at the neatly furnished bachelor apartment. “Some diggings you’ve got here, Peter. Cost you much?”

  The other smiled. “Not so much,” he said, briefly. “Out in the weeds. Low rent, you know. Have a woman come in and straighten up every morning. Fifty cents a day for that. Furnishings set me back the worst. Two hundred down and the rest installment. Now I’ve got to earn something from that six-year medical course and pay for ’em.”

  Again Hemple allowed his gaze to roam over the trim little apartment. “On the square, old boy, I know it’s none of my business, but I’ve always been puzzled as to how you could plow through medical school—and an interneship, to boot, that hadn’t a dollar’s remuneration attached to it—without any income. Your people have been dead since I knew you, and you’ve never mentioned anything about their leaving you anything. And now—all the nifty furnishings. Not angry, are you, old boy? I’m just a little curious, and too frank to pretend not to be. How—how do you do it?”

  Over the other’s face came a strange look. “Well, Bill,” he said with evident reluctance, “I have something—that is to
say—a little income from my people or rather from—” He stopped, apparently conscious that he was getting tangled in his expression. “Fact of the matter, Bill, is that I had enough left me to get through school—and that confounded salary-less interneship!—but that doesn’t mean it will last always.” His face clouded up. It was plain that he was really reflecting an unspoken doubt about certain aspects of the future. “I figure I’ve—well—I’ve got to make myself go on my own steam, now.”

  Hemple looked searchingly at him as he spoke. Whereupon Schultz’s eyes wavered to the floor. And though it was the young doctor himself who resumed the conversation, he had changed the subject completely.

  “What’s the dope on your book, Bill?”

  “It’s to be printed within less than two weeks,” Hemple replied briefly. “And officially published in—I think—three weeks. You’re to get a ‘ottygraffed’ copy—and you’re not to ask any questions about it—even its title—till you do.”

  “Can’t you give a guy an advance idea?”

  “Say! I didn’t even let my own girl know what the fool book was about. Although I intend to tonight—because it’s on the basis of that book—and the option books that are tied up to it—that I’m going to marry her. And nary an idea about the book have I given her thus far. And the same goes for you. For when I send someone a first-book of mine, I want ’em to read it—and not to have their curiosity on it all dulled months ahead.”

  “I see.” And Dr. Peter Schultz, M.D. added, a bit disgruntledly: “The amount of time on my hands, I don’t mind saying, is such that I could read twelve books a day—with no trouble.” He paused, thinking. “How will her father take to having an author for a son-in-law? What’s his business?”

  “Oh—he’s retired.”

  “Wealthy?”

  “Gosh—no! He and his daughter live very modestly. I gather he has a wee bit put by in investments, and that’s all. In fact, he’s—in a sense—an author himself.”

  “An author—what—”

  “Just in a sense, you understand. He’s doing a long, involved work on mathematics. One of these things that take 8 or 9 years to write. He’s an Oxford graduate, you know; majored in science—or something like that. In fact, he was a ‘Fellow’ at Oxford—whatever that is! Anyway, he got an idea, many years ago, that instead of breaking up mathematics into a lot of separate branches like arithmetic, geometry—both plane and solid—algebra, trig, calculus and so forth, and teaching them all as different studies, they could be merged—psycho­logically, you understand?—in such a way that kids, getting their very first lesson in two plus two equals four could also be getting hold of the algebraical concept of x; and that the same youthful mind—along about three years later—could actually begin to absorb the principles of calculus. He had it all sort of laid out in his mind. A slow job, because he has to invent special problems and illustrations that cover several angles of math at the same time instead of the one like the farmer who sold so many bushels of wheat for so many dollars a bushel. Sort of problems like—like how much per acre would a man’s farm be worth if the size of the globe was shrinking to the size of a pinhead—and at the time of the problem had gotten down to the size of an orange. See?—the idea of calculus dragged into arithmetic. And there’s the whole story. A labor of love, of course. For his publishers don’t anticipate selling but a few thousand copies of his work—but that’s O.K. with him.”

  “Why such a limited sale? Now a medical textbook—”

  “Because his book will never get adopted as a textbook for practical study. Not in his lifetime, that is. Maybe several decades from now—yes—when the pedagogic world wakes up—and we have a new deal educationally just as that chap Roosevelt back there in ’33, some seven years ago, gave us a new deal economically. Every educator in America, of course, will buy a copy of Merged Mathematics, the New Psychological Approach to the Physical Sciences—if for no other reason than just to try to poke holes in it—but when it comes to adopting the system in schools and colleges—why—never! For it will chop countless hours out of math—several years, in fact—and that means countless less teachers and profs will be needed in classrooms.” Billy Hemple paused. “No, the girl’s father is one fine scout—and for me a hundred per cent.”

  “Then the good old course of true love is running smooth,” commented Peter Schultz, rubbing his hands together hopefully. “Which is exactly what I want it to do. Marriage—yours as well as anybody else’s—means babies that have to be brought into the world, and babies have croup, measles, dip–”

  “Whoa, Peter! Have a heart! Don’t be so realistic. Please let things take their own course, won’t you?”

  “Be it so,” intoned Peter.

  A momentary silence now fell on the two. And Hemple glanced meaningfully at his watch. Peter had said nothing thus far about the hundred, and Billy didn’t like the idea of introducing it himself.

  “Well,” he stated, after a disconcerting pause, “I’m sorry I can’t stay longer, Peter, but this is only a hello call. For I’m on my way to visit the girl now, as I think I told you; and it’s getting on near 10, so I’ll be going. And I’ll be in again.” He rose.

  “Hey—wait!” said the embryo physician. “Didn’t I tell you I had some’at for you? That hundred which you were kind enough to lend me? I’ll clean it up tonight, according to my letter.”

  “No hurry—” began Hemple politely; but the other interrupted him with a shake of his head.

  “Yes; might as well square it up now. Might borrow it back again one of these days. Maybe out of the advance royalties on your next book.”

  “If, as and when received,” replied Billy Hemple lugubriously. And said no more.

  Peter Schultz rose, and stepping over to his reading table, close to where Billy Hemple stood, slid open its solitary drawer and withdrew a flat tin box, the cover of which he unlocked with a key on his key ring. Inside, as Hemple could see, were a few envelopes and papers. From the top of the pile Schultz withdrew one which showed the flash of a stamp as he turned it over. Inserting his fingers in the open end of it, which had been torn off, and fumbling there a second, he extracted a crisp yellow bill with the numeral “100” on the right-hand corner. He held it out. “Thanks, Bill, very muchly. Just mail me my I.O.U. tomorrow.” Hemple took the crisp bank note.

  “I’ve just got—” Schultz began; but he stopped short as the phone bell in the little corridor outside rang sharply. He paused a moment and, tossing the envelope back in the tin box, face down, stepped out of the room to the phone and raised the receiver. Hemple staring down at the letter a little curiously and yet disinterestedly, found himself regarding a huge, bulky seal of green wax which had closed the flap together. And staring thus at the wax itself, he found himself scrutinizing, in spite of himself, the impression in that wax. It was exceedingly clear-cut, that impression, and it presented a most striking design for a seal—a long, barbaric-looking shield held in the paw of a tiger or a lion, for the five claws themselves were visible projecting around the edge. On the face of the shield were three simple six-pointed stars, and a peculiar arrangement of bars, which seemed to have no discernible significance.

  His cursory examination of it from where he stood was interrupted by a bang of the receiver and a groan in the outer corridor, followed by Schultz’s appearance. “Wrong number, curse the luck, Bill! My heart was jammed between my tonsils. Thought sure somebody was sick.” He sighed. “Well, better luck next time, maybe.” He returned to the table and, with a momentary inspection of the envelope’s contents, shut down the cover of the tin box and locked it.

  Hemple stood a moment looking at him curiously; then he took up his hat and turned to the door. “Thanks, Peter. I’ll mail you back your I.O.U. tomorrow, marked ‘Paid in Full.’ And I’ll be in next week to have a longer talk.”

  “Wish you would,” said the other. “Got nothing to do but read up in
the sidelines of medicine now. Call me up anyway.”

  He closed the door and Hemple went down the steps to the street. Outside in the night air he wrinkled up his forehead in a peculiar frown.

  “It’s none of my fool business,” he said softly to himself, “but—but how the devil does he do it? His parents were poor working people, living over on the West Side. And in a rented cottage, at that—as he let slip once. And that stamped and addressed envelope he put back in that tin box tonight—if there was one yellow hundred-dollar bill in it, there were three altogether. A puzzler—and how! And discuss it, he evidently doesn’t wish to do—even with me.”

  He paused a moment pondering over the matter. Then he jammed his hat down over his head and hurried around the corner, dismissing the subject from his mind. Before he had taken ten steps, he was whistling a lively tune, for two blocks away—or three, if one walked about the big, dark unlighted prairie that ran from the dead end of Lawndale Avenue to Montrose Avenue—was the built-up section of that same Lawndale Avenue, and the most wonderful girl in the world.

  CHAPTER III

  More Than a Coincidence

  A short walk, skirting the big one square block in which the city had not yet installed either street lights, streets or sewer connections, brought Hemple to the 4500-section of Lawndale Avenue, a long street filled with bungalows and cottages situated at unusually wide distances from each other, and dotted with low concrete lamp posts at intervals of a half block.

  He forged straight across the street towards one cottage in particular, covered with morning-glory vines and with a little porch, along the railing of which were flower-boxes. A neat gravel path ran from an ornamental swinging iron gate to the house itself, and a few porch rockers were silhouetted against the lamplight of the front parlor. Even before the gate had clanged back into position, a girl appeared in the doorway and held open the door for the newcomer.