Dr. Poggioli: Criminologist (The Lost Classics Book 14) Page 19

  “Do?” said Lynch. “Good as the Bank of England! Better than it is now. Tell ’em to come on, Lambert. Tell ’em we ride on courtesy cards.”

  The girl herself did not share in the general rejoicing over the card. She came up to the psychologist and asked in an apprehensive tone—

  “Mr. Poggioli, do you believe papa has—has gone into such an awful business?”

  The scientist shook his head.

  “I don’t think so, Miss Maddelow.” Lynch turned on the investigator.

  “You don’t think so. Why do you think the Sea Maid is on her way to Cuba—

  or the Bahamas? Is it a pleasure trip?”

  “That’s odd,” admitted Poggioli. “I can form no theory to fit the facts.”

  “Fit what facts? If a man’s going to Cuba, he’s going to Cuba, isn’t he?”

  “I mean,” returned the psychologist with dignity, “it does not explain the color left out of the concrete column, or the surplus cement in the mixing vat, or the lead pencil mark around the advertisement.”

  “What’s that got to do with the facts we know?”

  “They contradict what you call the facts we know.”

  “Contradict how?”

  “Listen; if a careful man like Mr. Maddelow were leaving home on a hazardous expedition, he would put everything in shipshape. He would have put dye in the concrete, cleaned up the refuse and filed Tom Snodgrass’s note in his vault. And you can not imagine a reason for his making a pencil mark around his advertisement. None of these details agrees with your theory that he has turned rum runner.”

  Here Miss Laura dropped her hands with a gasp.

  “Oh I know what’s happened,” she said weakly, and caught Mr. Poggioli’s arm for support.

  She was a pretty girl, and the scientist asked very sympathetically what was her idea.

  “I—I know papa won’t be on that boat when we catch it.”

  “Why do you think so?”

  “He—he’ll be gone. He’ll pretend he fell overboard. You know, the policy—so it will look like an accident. That’s why he was so excited and forgot everything.”

  Mr. Poggioli attempted to comfort her from a psychological angle.

  “You are wrong, Miss Maddelow; the reactions of persons contemplating suicide are extreme orderliness. A suicide never forgets to do anything.”

  The girl simply shook her head, sobbing. “I just know papa has drowned himself.”

  At this point a droning made itself audible in the library and swiftly grew into the roar of an airplane. The group hurried out on the great pier that had been designed for an ocean-going yacht. The flying boat grew rapidly in the sky and a few minutes later took the water and came foaming up to the dock.

  The party got aboard; the two motors popped half a dozen times like pistol shots, then started roaring again. The plane moved forward, climbed up on the wavetops, then swung loose from the water and dropped Biscayne Bay slowly beneath her.

  As the plane stormed higher, the blue tourmaline sea stitched to the red tapestry of the city by a yellow thread of beach extorted a breath of admiration from every one except the flyer. He began bewailing his lack of trade, explaining to Lambert that the tourists didn’t have the money to fly.

  On the second seat Lynch and Sandley were astonished at the transparency of the sea. They thought some sharks were mullets until the aviator set them right.

  In the rear seat Laura Maddelow was saying to Mr. Poggioli— “We’re doing all this j-just to find out that—that papa is—is—”

  “Look here, Miss Laura,” advised the psychologist cheerfully, “instead of bewailing your father as dead, you’d better think of something to say to him.”

  “Something to say—what do you mean?”

  “I mean some argument to get him to come back home with you. I think he’ll tell us to mind our own affairs.”

  “Oh, Mr. Poggioli, do you really think papa will be aboard?”

  “He couldn’t possibly have jumped overboard as you fear.”

  “Why couldn’t he?”

  “Because James, the hired man, would have turned around and started back to Miami. If we overtake the boat still going south, your father is bound to be well and alive.”

  The girl brightened at the theory.

  At this point Lynch and Sandley dominated the cabin by shouting and making violent gestures.

  “Yonder’s the Sea Maid! Yonder she is, big as life!”

  Both Poggioli and Miss Maddelow peered forward through the small windows. The pilot began laughing.

  “Yeh,” he shouted back, “and she’s a whole lot bigger than life. That’s the Arequipa—she sailed from Miami yesterday evening.”

  Sure enough, the distant vessel increased in size, became the ground plan of a ship with its bridge marked across deck, dots for masts and smoke trailing out of circles that represented funnels.

  This view of the Arequipa produced a vertiginous feeling of height. Miss Maddelow shut her eyes against it. On the forward seat Mr. Lambert became enthusiastic. He shouted to the pilot:

  “That gives me an idea! Why not sell real estate from an airplane? A salesman could show his prospect exactly how far his home would be from the golf course.”

  “Yes,” called the aviator, “and if he wanted it closer, all he’d have to do would be to take him higher.”

  “Say,” went on Lambert more seriously, “why not form a company here in Miami to sell real estate from airplanes? I got a slogan for our organization— just popped into my head. Listen to this: ‘We Sell Florida From the Sky; not the Sky from Florida’.”

  “Man, it’s a knockout,” said the aviator. “Means more and says less than any slogan I ever heard.”

  Their conversation was interrupted by Lynch’s shouting to Sandley to look at the white gull below. Then the aviator cried:

  “That’s no gull. That’s a speedboat. Those wings you see are sprays of water. That’s bound to be the Sea Maid.”

  “What’s he running like that for?” shouted Sandley. “Suppose he’s been hitting that pace ever since he left Miami?”

  “No, he’d be farther on than he is now,” replied Poggioli. “Then what’s he in such a rush about?” demanded Lynch.

  “Oh, the Emperor thinks we’re a Government plane full of customs men,”

  hazarded Sandley. Poggioli objected.

  “Why would he evade a customs plane? He can’t have a stock of liquor aboard now. He’s still going South.”

  “All right, what do you say he’s running for?” Lynch demanded tartly of the psychologist.

  “I don’t know. I can’t think of any reason for Mr. Maddelow’s running from a plane. It doesn’t seem to co-ordinate with anything.”

  Their remarks were lost in the swoop of the plane to take the water close to the boat. The speedboat itself was hurling aside sheets of spray as it shot across the waves. The motors of the two vessels roared a mighty duet in the empty ocean. Just then Laura Maddelow cried out:

  “Look, look! Yonder’s James sitting by himself in the cockpit. Oh, papa’s drowned! I knew he would be. He’s drowned himself.”

  “No, he’s not, Miss Laura,” shouted Lynch. “He’s in the cabin. He knows it’s us and he’s ashamed to show himself.”

  The girl shook her head.

  “I’m sure he would be outside. Oh, I know he’s dead!”

  The plane was now twenty or thirty feet above the water and quite near the Sea Maid. An outbreak of shouting burst from the tiny windows of the airplane: “James! Wait there, James! Where’s papa, James? Stop the boat, James; where’s the Emperor?”

  The pontoons struck the waves and sent a deluge over the flying Sea Maid. The man, Tom Snodgrass, cut off his engines. His boat slowed down and he sat staring up at the wide spread of wings with a colorless face. As the door of the airplane opened and the passengers climbed out on to the boat the man of all work exclaimed:

  “So that is you-all? Who else you got in there—Mr. Pogg
ioli?” Sandley turned to the psychologist in amazement.

  “By George, the fellow guessed you were inside!”

  “James, James, is papa with you?” cried Miss Maddelow. The face of the man of all work changed.

  “M—Miss Laura,” he stammered, “I—I shore hate to tell you, but—but your pappy slipped an’ fell overboard this mornin’ a little before good daylight. We wasn’t forty miles out o’ Miami.”

  The news of Brompton Maddelow’s death plunged the group into the most diverse reactions. The daughter fainted. The men fell into a quandary whether to return her to Miami on the speedboat or in the plane. Eventually they transferred her to the boat where she regained consciousness, but lay on a couch in the cabin with her eyes closed.

  Lynch and Sandley put on expressions of concern, but Poggioli could see they were excitedly happy that their speculation in the villa had ended in such undreamed-of good fortune.

  The hired man protested against turning the Sea Maid about and going back to Miami. He said the boat belonged to him, that he had given a note which he held against Mr. Maddelow for the vessel. His objections were overruled, indeed they were hardly noticed under the urgent necessity of a millionaire’s family. They told him he must come back to Miami and certify to the death of his employer on the insurance claim; after that he could take the boat and do what he pleased with it.

  “Why didn’t you turn back at once when Mr. Maddelow fell overboard?” inquired Lynch.

  “I wanted to get to Nassau and bring back enough stuff to pay for the gas,” explained the man of all work. “We went in debt for the gas.”

  “Mr. Maddelow had a courtesy card. Why didn’t he use that?” asked Lynch. “Why, I suppose he forgot it,” said Snodgrass.

  “Mr. Maddelow must have been quite excited, wasn’t he?” asked Poggioli of the hired man.

  “Yes, sir, he was,” returned Snodgrass, looking carefully at the psychologist. Poggioli lolled in the cockpit and considered the ashes of his cigar as the speedboat flung the miles astern. Lynch and Sandley went into the cabin to see about Miss Maddelow.

  “By the way, Mr. Snodgrass,” pursued the psychologist, “the moment our plane stopped you called to know if I were aboard. That was odd. How came you to think of me?”

  “I had the morning paper, sir. I had just got through readin’ about you. Then I looked up and there come an airplane, lickety-split, and it just came over me all of a sudden that you was in it after me—”

  “Why did you think I would be in it?”

  “Because I knew the folks would want to trace up the governor and I knew you was the only man in town who could figger out where he went.”

  Mr. Poggioli nodded at these correct deductions. It seemed an extraordinary truth for Snodgrass to have hit upon. Mention of the paper set the psychologist off on another tack.

  “Speaking of the paper, it was you who marked the Sea Maid’s advertisement in the Herald, wasn’t it?” The investigator drew from his pocket the clipping and handed it to the helmsman.

  Snodgrass took it with a slight frown on his leathery face. “I don’t know. I might of. What makes you ask me?”

  “It simply puzzled me. I couldn’t understand why the ad was marked, but of course you did it because you wanted to purchase the boat. You paid him the note you held against him for it?”

  “Yes, I did.” The man of all work nodded briefly.

  “I’m surprised you got the boat, at that. The ad said cash.”

  “He made a good thing out of it,” explained Snodgrass uneasily. “My note was sixty dollars bigger’n the price he asked in the paper.”

  “So Maddelow did object to taking the note straight as so much cash?”

  “He did till I discounted him the sixty dollars and interest.”

  “M—huh—” The criminal investigator sat nodding his head. “What strikes me as odd—if Maddelow wanted to go in the rum running business, what made him sell his boat at all?”

  The hired man twisted on the cushion in the cockpit.

  “Now I can explain that, too. He said he was afraid to risk his boat, and I said, ‘I’ll take it off’n your han’s, an’ it’s my loss if it gits pinched.’ That’s what I told him.”

  “So you had no trouble trading with him?”

  “If the governor hadn’t wanted to trade, I don’t reckon he would of,” returned Snodgrass surlily.

  The psychologist sat looking absently at the speeding waves, rearranging the bits of evidence into a more rational design. Finally he said: “Brompton Maddelow was a heavy man, wasn’t he? Weighed about a hundred and eighty pounds?”

  Snodgrass looked at his catechist suspiciously. “Didn’t you never see him?”

  “No. I was simply making a guess. If you don’t care to tell me—”

  “Oh, I don’t mind tellin’ you. That’s about right, I reckon. I don’t see how you guessed so clost if you never seed him.”

  “Well, if you must know,” said the scientist with a little laugh, “I guessed it from the cement left over in the vat.”

  The hired man thought a moment. “Oh, from his tracks in the vat?”

  “No, from the amount of cement left in the vat.”

  “The amount left in? I don’t see what that’s got to do with it.”

  “And by the way,” interrupted the criminologist, “that last column you and Mr. Maddelow put up—your employer was so excited about this trip he forgot to put any red dye in the mixture. It’s just plain yellow. When we get home, Snodgrass, you’ll have to tear down that column and mold a new one.”

  To this the hired man made no reply, but sat wetting his lips with his tongue, staring across the waves with his hand on the wheel.

  Mr. Poggioli got up and went into the cabin. Sandley and Lynch were just coming into the cockpit again. The psychologist went to the girl’s side, thinking of the simple yet macabre riddle he had solved. He wondered how he would ever tell her. Explain it to her brother, perhaps, and let Gary . . . In the midst of his preoccupation he heard a shout on deck. He turned and ran back. Lynch was holding the tiller and his eyes were starting from his head.

  “Mr. Poggioli,” he cried, “he slipped and fell overboard!”

  “Who did?”

  “James.”

  The psychologist looked astern. “Where is he now?”

  “Why, he’s gone. While I was holding the wheel for him, I saw a fin. I called to him to look at it. I said, ‘James, look at that shark.’ At that very minute he slipped and fell overboard.”

  “Did you throw him a buoy?”

  “Yes, yonder it is now—back yonder where you see those two fins moving about.” Sandley interrupted:

  “Mr. Poggioli, how will this affect our proof of Mr. Maddelow’s death? If we haven’t got James, who saw him go overboard?”

  The criminologist made a sick gesture.

  “It’s easy to prove his death. Maddelow’s body is in the last column of the colonnade. He and James had a fight over whether Maddelow would accept his own note of hand for the Sea Maid. Of course, Maddelow wanted cash to pay on his life insurance. In the fight Maddelow was killed. Snodgrass dropped his body in the mold and poured concrete over it.”

  PRIVATE JUNGLE

  On the southbound express out of Tampa, the bride in the seat just ahead of Mr. Henry Poggioli was of the velvety prettiness characteristic of the Spanish strain in Florida women; and so the criminologist had fallen into conversation with the husband.

  After they had talked on for some bit, the men telling their names and occupations after the fashion of American travelers, Poggioli was wondering how he could draw the girl into the conversation and hear the quality of her voice, when she looked around and asked with interest:

  “And you are a criminologist?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Blackmar.”

  The girl hesitated. “I wonder—I wonder, Mr. Poggioli, you being a criminologist, if you could prove that somebody didn’t do what he is accused of?”

  A quir
k of humor went through Poggioli at the prevailing need of human beings for the service of criminologists. Here was this girl returning from her honeymoon! Aloud he said: “Someone accused of a crime, Mrs. Blackmar?”

  “Elora—” warned the husband in an undertone.

  A renewed rattling of the rain against the car window gave Mr. Poggioli a chance to veer politely from what appeared to be a delicate matter between husband and wife.

  “Does it rain like this all through the wet season in Florida?” he asked.

  Mr. Blackmar began explaining that it usually came in squalls like the present, when the girl interrupted with unmistakable earnestness:

  “Yes, a crime, Mr. Poggioli, a very dreadful crime—at least the accusation of one.” This headed the conversation once more toward shoals.

  Poggioli answered gravely:

  “Wouldn’t proving a man’s innocence be a case for a lawyer rather than a problem for a psychologist, Mrs. Blackmar?”

  “This has nothing to do with courts,” returned the bride, disturbed. “It’s a tale, a rumor that keeps floating around El Jobe-An—why, it happened more than sixty years ago.”

  The psychologist showed surprise. “Would it be possible today to verify and settle such an old rumor?”

  “That’s the point,” explained the bride earnestly: “a psychologist might do it. You understand how people’s minds work; you could show that Grandfather’s mind couldn’t possibly have worked—”

  The young husband interrupted again with some concern: “Which grandfather, Elora?”

  “Grandfather Blackmar, of course, Julian; I’m a Blackmar now.”

  It may have been the bride’s emotion, or her dark dramatic eyes, or small eloquent hands; but at any rate, on this rather vague mission, Mr. Poggioli eventually got off the train with the Blackmars at El Jobe-An.

  At the way station a gloomy negro driver in an ancient motorcar awaited the couple. Presently this equipage set forth amid an endless level of lean pines and palmettos following a lane of reddish-brown water which represented a public road in this part of Florida during the wet season.