Dr. Poggioli: Criminologist (The Lost Classics Book 14) Page 4

  “My own chest!” ejaculated the matron, looking down at the box in her hands. “Yes, and in order to keep the number of pearls correct, she took out one of your paste pearls. She gave this to Taprobane to keep until they were ready to sail, then she meant to exchange them again and get away with the real pearl. In the meantime, if a paste pearl were found on Taprobane, they could convict him of nothing.”

  Mrs. Gelleman looked around at her maid who was standing transfixed, all white eyes.

  “Chrysomallina, did you do such a wicked thing?”

  “No, no, señora, you know I didn’t—you know I didn’t.”

  “I can’t believe it myself,” cried Mrs. Gelleman, looking first at Chrysomallina and then at her jewel case.

  “It’s true enough,” said Poggioli, quite satisfied. “Just look inside and assure yourself. Mr. Gonzalez there has the paste pearl which your maid took out.”

  Mrs. Gelleman looked at the chest again, then at the men, then slowly opened the box. All three of the men came closer and looked into it. Poggioli put in a finger and touched a shimmering gem which he had not seen that morning. “This one, isn’t this a new pearl in your collection?”

  Mrs. Gelleman ran the tip of her tongue over the small red circle of her babyish lips.

  “Why, no—no,” she said. “I—I’ve had that pearl all the time.”

  “Seraphina,” ejaculated the pearl factor, “I never did give you such a pearl as that; I couldn’t have afforded it.”

  “No, you didn’t dear—uh—mother gave me this one a long time ago.”

  “You never showed it to me before!”

  “No, no, I never did—but I was talking to Mr. Poggioli this morning about how my mother loved pearls. Don’t you remember that, Mr. Poggioli? I was asking you if my desire for pearls wasn’t inherited. You remember that, don’t you? You said you didn’t think it was, and I said I thought it was. We had quite an argument about this pearl—you must remember—No, Chrysomallina wouldn’t have done such a thing as that. She has been in my service for—oh, for a long time. You may go now, Chrysomallina. I won’t need you any more. I’ll lock the pearls in the trunk myself.”

  And Mrs. Gelleman closed her box.

  SHADOWED

  A Compilation from the Case: Ohio State University vs. Henry Poggioli, Ph.D. As made from the notes of the Rev. Mr. Lemuel Z. Bratton, by T. S. Stribling.

  FOREWORD BY THE COMPILER

  THE resignation, or to put it baldly, the dismissal of Mr. Henry Poggioli from the docentship of criminal psychology at the Ohio State University, not only caused one of the widest and bitterest newspaper discussions since the Scopes trial, but it was a shocking disappointment to Mr. Poggioli’s classmen and friends. The actual article which Mr. Poggioli wrote for the American Journal of Psychology and which led to his academic downfall has been too widely circulated in America, and indeed throughout the civilized world, to need reproduction here.

  Mr. Poggioli’s trial, which was transferred from Columbus to Dayton, Ohio, in what was perhaps an impossible attempt to obtain a fair and impartial trial, is a cause célèbre which will not soon be forgot in educational circles. The formal charge against him, of disrespect for the canons of the university, and scientific heresy, was, as every one knows, soon lost in personal bitterness and recrimination. Something else also was lost: the strange and abnormal happenings on which Mr. Poggioli based his article and so involved himself in scandal and final dismissal. The educational world was so shocked that a docent in a leading university should be so lost to the conventions of his position as to assert in public print if not an actual belief in, then at least to hypothesize the possibility of the existence of a God; I say the educational world was so shocked that it has completely overlooked the amazing and sinister facts upon which Mr. Poggioli reached so unheard of a conclusion.

  These facts it has been the good fortune of the transcriber to reassemble; not with an idea of reviving that bitter and acrimonious controversy, but simply to present the record to that broader court of public opinion before which even the regents assembled in Dayton eventually must bow.

  The transcriber obtained these facts from the notes of the Reverend Mr. Lemuel Zimcoe Bratton, a Tennessee revivalist, who was closely associated with

  Mr. Poggioli in his defense. It was the Reverend Mr. Bratton, who, in the course of the proceedings, so amusingly wrung from the president of a great American university the admission that though he had heard of the Bible he had never seen a copy. The facts themselves, upon which Mr. Poggioli sought to base his defense, were ruled out of the evidence by the Dayton court on the ground that they had no bearing on the specific charges against Mr. Poggioli, of disrespect for the canons of the university and of scientific heresy. In this stand, however, even the counsel for the defendant felt the court was justified and made no serious effort to have the actual facts read into the record of the case.

  This hiatus in public knowledge, the transcriber undertakes to fill. However, he must hasten to add that he has transposed the Reverend Mr. Bratton’s notes both in time and space in order to enhance the dramatic and literary effect of the narrative.

  The girl from the office brought a card into the laboratory and, after standing among the cages of white rats for several moments, found a favorable opportunity to hand it to Mr. Poggioli.

  The docent in criminal psychology took the card with a touch of protest in his manner. “I have instructed you, Janet—” he began, then broke off, looking at the name— CLAYMAN MORDAG

  It was somehow a depressing four syllables. Poggioli drew his thumb across the engraving as a kind of test of his visitor’s financial and social standing.

  “I have told you, Janet,” he continued on the sentence he originally had started, “that I don’t want to waste time seeing people with cases. I’m not a detective. I’m a psychologist.”

  “Yes, sir, but—but they know you’re a criminologist, too, Mr. Poggioli,” ventured the girl.

  “Well, what of that?”

  “It—it seems to me,” hesitated Janet, “that the trouble this Mr. Mordag is in would have something to do with criminology.”

  “About the same relation that a colicky baby bears to the mortality tables.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “So you can go back to the office and tell him that I can’t see him.”

  “I—didn’t leave him in the office,” said the girl.

  “Where did you leave him?”

  “In the cloakroom.”

  Poggioli came to a pause and looked at the girl. “Why did you leave him in the cloakroom, Janet?”

  “Well—he asked if I would mind if he waited for you in a room without any windows in it.”

  “And you put him in the cloakroom?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The docent in criminology glanced at the card again, then started for the front of the building.

  “Really—really, Janet, that’s the dumbest thing— Why, he won’t be there!”

  “Why won’t he?”

  “By now he has run through the pockets of the coats, and gone,” forecasted the docent. “Janet, you are the—”

  “I’ll bet he has,” cried the office girl, shocked at her own gullibility.

  The two hurried toward the front of the building. As they went the docent ventured—

  “It is barely possible the fellow is suffering from agoraphobia—”

  Janet made no reply to this. She had developed too much poise to inquire the meaning of a polysyllable in a psychological laboratory.

  Poggioli went downstairs and found Mr. Clayman Mordag just inside the cloakroom on the first floor.

  “Oh, you did come,” ejaculated the visitor in a tone of profound relief. “The girl didn’t think you would; I was about to give you up.”

  Poggioli looked over the stranger’s thin face, sandy hair and high, narrow forehead. “As a matter of fact,” said Poggioli, seeing that the coats were safe, “I have just come down to excuse
myself, Mr. Mordag.” The visitor became distressed at once.

  “You aren’t going to take my case?”

  “Mr. Mordag, I have five hundred white rats in this laboratory on fifty different diets—”

  “Mr. Poggioli!” exclaimed the thin man with a desperate note in his voice. “Isn’t a man’s life worth more than five hundred white rats?”

  “Yes, yes,” agreed the psychologist, withdrawing a little from the man’s insistence. “But there are professional agencies for the protection of life and property, Mr. Mordag; the police, private detectives—”

  The thin man lifted a protesting hand, glanced up and down the corridor. “Mr. Poggioli, you might as well try to sweep out the air with a broom—a

  detective—” he shook his head—“I had hoped a psychologist might help me. If a psychologist can’t, or won’t—” The man spread out his hands and dropped them.

  “Are you in personal distress, or danger?” asked the docent, his curiosity aroused by the stranger’s extraordinary manner.

  “I am; I am indeed, Mr. Poggioli. Only this morning I barely escaped—” He broke off again in his disconnected fashion. “I am followed about all the time— everywhere I go—” He glanced up and down the hallway again and instinctively moved deeper into the doorway of the closet.

  “You mean you are shadowed?”

  “Yes; oh, yes—all the time.”

  “You don’t mean here—at this moment?”

  “Yes; every single moment of the day and—and night, too, I suppose.” Poggioli glanced around and then said in a somewhat different tone— “Well, at this particular moment you may be sure that nobody is shadowing you.”

  Mr. Mordag smiled, the faint mirthless smile of utter disbelief. “In the morning—when I get the note—you’ll see.”

  So many odd revelatory half-phrases cropped out in the visitor’s remarks that the psychologist began trying to piece them into something coherent.

  “If you would like you can stand completely inside the cloakroom door, Mr. Mordag. Yes, that’s all right. Now you were saying something about this morning you barely escaped—escaped what?”

  The sandy man was well inside the cloakroom now. “Being poisoned,” he said in a low tone.

  “Who tried it?”

  “The man who follows me.”

  “Do you know who he is?”

  “Why, Mr. Poggioli, of course I know who my enemy is. His name—his name is—La Plesse.” This last, the visitor concealed in the cloakroom whispered.

  The psychologist pondered a moment or two. “But he didn’t succeed in his purpose?”

  “No; he poured a tiny bit in my drinking glass. It just happened that my cat mewed for water while I was still in bed. I got up, took a little in the glass and poured it in the cat’s saucer. When I glanced at it again—it was dead.”

  “Where are you staying?”

  “At the Hotel Vendig, on the eighteenth floor.”

  “I suppose after the death of your pet you had the hotel authorities investigate to see who had been in your apartment?”

  Mordag shook his head.

  “Why, Mr. Poggioli, there is no more use in placing a guard to keep watch for him than—than to try to control the thoughts that pass through a man’s mind.”

  The psychologist smiled.

  “Your similes are expressive enough, Mr. Mordag, but let us hope they exaggerate the facts. Let me see—how long have you been in the Vendig?”

  “I came there last night.”

  “Last night!” ejaculated the docent in surprise.

  “Yes, I registered there last night—after midnight. I was traveling to New York on a through ticket. But at some city west of here our train stopped. When I felt it stop I looked out between the curtains of my berth and I saw him come in the door. By good luck he passed through into the car back of mine. So I dressed as quickly as I could, got my bags and got off here in Columbus.”

  “Then you believe after this, he got off here in Columbus also, followed you to the Vendig, found your room, put a potion in your drinking glass?”

  Mr. Mordag stood nodding slowly and watching Poggioli with questioning eyes. “At least you see why it is no earthly use for me to apply to the police, or the private detectives. When I tell them what happens they simply look at me as you are doing. Sometimes they tell me to call tomorrow; or say they are sorry they can’t do anything for me; or that they are very busy.”

  “And just why did you think a psychologist—” began Poggioli curiously. “Professor La Plesse is a mind reader,” said the sandy man in his monotone. “Oh, I see,” nodded Poggioli, looking carefully at the man.

  Clayman Mordag gave another of his wintry smiles. “No, you don’t see—I know what that means, too. Here, would you mind looking at these—”

  He ran a hand into his coat pocket and drew out a leather case. He opened this and displayed a collection of newspaper clippings. They were theatrical columns clipped from a score or more of papers throughout the South and West. They began usually, “Professor La Plesse Mystifies Audience,” or “Herman La Plesse Finds Long Missing Jewels.” They were all of a tenor. Nearly every write-up bore a picture of the thaumaturgist himself, a heavily bodied man with a Van Dyke beard, and the wide face and full eyes of a strongly animal man.

  “This—this,” said Poggioli, tapping one of the notices, “is all right for a newspaper to run. And believe, too, if one has the taste for that sort of thing. But, Mr. Mordag, this building is the psychological department of the Ohio State University. Not only the instructors, but every undergraduate devotes himself to the best of his ability to strictly scientific material. Now, for you to ask me to investigate the doings of a charlatan—” Poggioli shook his head and handed back the clippings.

  The visitor seemed somehow to sink into himself at this ultimatum.

  “You mean,” he said in a hopeless voice, “that how he got into my room and poisoned my glass isn’t scientific material?”

  “If he did that—if he could do it—yes. But to go off on a wild goose chase— Now, just for example, Mr. Mordag, suppose the faculty of the Ohio State University should investigate every sea serpent yarn it read in a newspaper . . .”

  “I—I can show you the dead cat, Mr. Poggioli,” faltered Mordag. “It—it’s a

  Persian cat. It’s still up in my apartment.”

  “I believe you have a dead cat in your room,” admitted the docent, “but cats have fits and just die; and you are nervous and expecting—For instance, you are standing here in this cloakroom now because it has no windows.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You imagine you are being watched here at this moment while we are entirely alone.”

  “I know I’m being watched,” admitted Mordag in a low voice. “My note will prove that in the morning.”

  “Well, now, that is the reason why I can’t spend time investigating the death of your cat. You are not in a mental state to give unbiased evidence; and, moreover—”

  As Poggioli uttered this “moreover” he heard a faint step at the top of the stairs. Mordag started painfully and peered up the ascending flight. Poggioli himself was startled. He stepped out into the hall where he commanded a better view of the stairway. Then he called out sharply:

  “Confound it, Janet—moving around up there like a ghost . . . Haven’t you gone back to the office yet?”

  The girl upstairs made no reply, but the two men could hear her walking away. Poggioli looked at the sandy man’s wide eyes.

  “You see that’s why you aren’t reliable; you translate everything into this Professor La Plesse.”

  “N-n-no; I—I didn’t think that,” stammered Mordag. “N-nobody thought that b-but you, Mr. Poggioli. I—I knew it wasn’t him. T-the noise just made me jump, t-that’s all.”

  “Well, how did you know it wasn’t he?” asked Poggioli.

  “B-because when I—I see him, he—he don’t make any more noise than the sunshine falling on a g-grave
.”

  “I see,” nodded Poggioli faintly amused. “It was my mistake.”

  “Yes, sir—You didn’t really see anything up there, did y-you?”

  “Just Janet.”

  “I—I’ll bet it’s in the note tomorrow morning.”

  “You’ve mentioned that once or twice, Mr. Mordag,” observed the psychologist. “Just what do you mean by note in the morning?”

  “I get a note from him every morning,” said the sandy haired man, his uneasiness taking a new tack.

  “You don’t mean it?” exclaimed Poggioli with vivacity in his voice.

  “Yes, I do. Why?” queried Mordag, catching the docent’s hopeful inflection. “Why, my dear man,” cried Poggioli, “that puts the fellow squarely in the hands of the Federal postal authorities. You won’t have to go an inch farther to lock him up in Atlanta anywhere from ten to twenty years.”

  “Why will the postal authorities do that?” asked Mordag, all at sea.

  “For using the mail to threaten, blackmail or put in fear—”

  “Oh, he doesn’t use the mail.”

  “If he doesn’t it seems the hotel management ought to catch him.”

  “He doesn’t use the hotel boxes either—they’re in my pockets.”

  “The notes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Every morning?”

  “Yes, I look for one every morning. If I can’t find it, I—it makes me nervous. I—I just keep looking till I do.”

  “For God’s sake!” ejaculated the psychologist. “He gets into your room every night—leaves a note in your pockets—”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You never see him when he comes in?”

  “He doesn’t come in till I’m asleep.”

  “Can’t you pretend you’re asleep?”

  “Oh, Mr. Poggioli, you know Professor La Plesse would know it if I was pretending that I was asleep. That’s ridiculous, Mr. Poggioli.”

  “Did you ever have any one else watch for him instead of yourself?”