"Have you heard about the murder of Montgomery Marshall?"
"Only the few details that I picked up in the lobby just now. But a case of that kind is entirely out of my line, you know."
"Ordinarily it would be," agreed the other, "but here"s something that I think puts a different complexion on things," and he extended a bloodstained sc.r.a.p of paper for Preston to examine.
"That was found under the dead man"s hand," the chief continued. "As you will note, it originally formed part of the wrapping of a special-delivery parcel which reached Montgomery about eight o"clock last night--just before the house was locked up, in fact. Tino, the Filipino servant, signed for it and took it in, placing it upon the table in the room in which his master was found this morning. The sc.r.a.p of paper you are holding is just enough to show the postmark "Sacramento"--but it"s quite evident that the package had something to do with the murder."
"Which is the reason that you want me to look into it, eh?"
"That"s the idea. I knew that you were in town, and the very fact that this box came through the mails makes it necessary for the Post-office Department to take cognizance of what otherwise would be a job for the police force alone. Am I right?"
"Perfectly," replied Preston. "Provided you have reason to believe that there was some connection between the special-delivery package and the crime itself. What was in the box?"
"Not a thing!"
"What?"
"Not a thing!" repeated the chief. "Perfectly empty--at least when we found it. The lid was lying on the table, the rest of the box on the floor. The major portion of the wrapping paper had been caught under a heavy paper weight and it appears that Montgomery, in falling, caught at the table to save himself and probably ripped away the sc.r.a.p of paper I have just given you."
"But I thought his body was found near the door?"
"It was, but that isn"t far from the table, which is jammed against the wall in front of one of the windows. Come on up to the house with me and we"ll go over the whole thing."
Glad of the excuse to look into a crime which appeared to be inexplicable, Preston accompanied the chief to the frame dwelling on the outskirts of town where Montgomery Marshall, hermit, had spent the last three years of his life.
The house was set well back from the road, with but a single gateway in a six-foot wall of solid masonry, around the top of which ran several strands of barbed wire.
"Montgomery erected the wall himself," explained the chief. "Had it put up before he ever moved into the house, and then, in addition, kept a bunch of the fiercest dogs I ever knew."
"All of which goes to prove that he feared an attack," Preston muttered.
"In spite of his precautions, however, they got him! The question now is: Who are "they" and how did they operate?"
The room in which the body had been found only added to the air of mystery which surrounded the entire problem.
In spite of what he had been told Preston had secretly expected to find some kind of an opening through which a man could have entered. But there was none. The windows, as the Postal operative took care to test for himself, were tightly locked, though open a few inches from the bottom. The bolt on the door very evidently had been shattered by the entrance of the police, and the dark-brown stain on the rug near the door showed plainly where the body had been found.
"When we broke in," explained the chief, "Montgomery was stretched out there, facing the door. The doctor said that he had been dead about twelve hours, but that it was impossible for the wound in his hand to have caused his death."
"How about a poisoned bullet, fired through the opening in the window?"
"Not a chance! The only wound on the body was the one through the palm of his hand. The bullet had struck on the outside of the fleshy part near the wrist and had plowed its way through the bone, coming out near the base of the index finger at the back. And it was a bullet from his own revolver! We found it embedded in the top of the table there." And the chief pointed to a deep scar in the mahogany and to the marks made by the knives of the police when they had dug the bullet out.
"But how do you know it wasn"t a bullet of the same caliber, fired from outside the window?" persisted Preston.
For answer the chief produced Montgomery"s revolver, with five cartridges still in the chambers.
"If you"ll note," he said, "each of these cartridges is scored or seamed. That"s an old trick--makes the lead expand when it hits and tears an ugly hole, just like a "dum-dum." The bullet we dug out of the table was not only a forty-five, as these are, but it had been altered in precisely the same manner. So, unless you are inclined to the coincidence that the murderer used a poisoned bullet of the same size and make and character as those in Montgomery"s gun, you"ve got to discard that theory."
"Does look like pulling the long arm of coincidence out of its socket,"
Preston agreed. "So I guess we"ll have to forget it. Where"s the box you were talking about?"
"The lid is on the table, just as we found it. The lower portion of the box is on the floor, where the dead man apparently knocked it when he fell. Except for the removal of the body, nothing in the room has been touched."
Stooping, Preston picked up the box and then proceeded to study it in connection with the lid and the torn piece of wrapping paper upon the table. It was after he had examined the creases in the paper, fitting them carefully around the box itself, that he inquired: "Do you notice anything funny about the package, Chief?"
"Only that there"s a hole at one end of it, just about big enough to put a lead pencil through."
"Yes, and that same hole appears in the wrapping paper," announced Preston. "Couple that with the fact that the box was empty when you found it and I think we will have--"
"What?" demanded the chief, as Preston paused.
"The solution to the whole affair," was the reply. "Or, at least, as much of it as refers to the manner in which Montgomery met his death. By the way, what do you know about the dead man?"
"Very little. He came here some three years ago, bought this place, paying cash for it; had the wall built, and then settled down. Never appeared to do any work, but was never short of money. Has a balance of well over fifty thousand dollars in the bank right now. Beyond the fact that he kept entirely to himself and refused to allow anyone but Tino, his servant, to enter the gate, he really had few eccentricities. Some folks say that he was a miser, but there are a dozen families here that wouldn"t have had any Christmas dinner last year if it hadn"t been for him--while his contribution to the Red Cross equaled that of anyone in town."
"Apart from his wanting to be alone, then, he was pretty close to being human?"
"That"s it, exactly--and most of us have some peculiarity. If we didn"t have we"d be even more unusual."
"What about Tino, the servant?" queried Preston.
"I don"t think there"s any lead there," the chief replied. "I hammered away at him for an hour this morning. He doesn"t speak English any too well, but I gathered that Montgomery picked him up in the Philippines just before he came over here. The boy was frightened half out of his senses when I told him that his master had been killed. You"ve got to remember, though, that if Tino had wanted to do it he had a thousand opportunities in the open. Besides, what we"ve got to find out first is how Montgomery met his death?"
"Does the Filipino know anything about his master"s past?" asked Preston, ignoring the chief"s last remark.
"He says not. Montgomery was on his way back to the States from Africa or some place--stopped off in the islands--spent a couple of months there--hired Tino and sailed for San Francisco."
"Africa--" mused the Postal operative. Then, taking another track, he inquired whether the chief had found out if Montgomery was in the habit of getting much mail, especially from foreign points.
"Saunders, the postmaster, says he didn"t average a letter a month--and those he did get looked like advertis.e.m.e.nts. They remembered this special-delivery package last night because it was the first time that the man who brought it out had ever come to the house. He rang the bell at the gate, he says, turned the box over to Tino, and went along."
"Any comment about the package?"
"Only that it was very light and contained something that wabbled around. I asked him because I figured at the time that the revolver might have been in it. But the Filipino has identified that as Montgomery"s own gun. Says he"d had it as long as he"d known him."
"Then all we know about this mysterious box," summarized Preston, "is that it was mailed from Sacramento, that it wasn"t heavy, that it had a hole about a quarter-inch wide at one end, and that it contained something that--what was the word the special-delivery man used--"wabbled"?"
"That"s the word. I remember because I asked him if he didn"t mean "rattled," and he said, "No, wabbled, sort o" dull-like.""
"At any rate, that clears up one angle of the case. The box was not empty when it was delivered! Granting that the Filipino was telling the truth, it was not empty when he placed it on the table in this room!
That means that it was not empty when Marshall Montgomery, after locking and bolting his door, took off the wrapping paper and lifted the lid!
You"ve searched the room thoroughly, of course?"
"Every inch of it. We didn"t leave a--"
But the chief suddenly halted, his sentence unfinished. To the ears of both men there had come a sound, faint but distinct. The sound of the rattling of paper somewhere in the room.
Involuntarily Preston whirled and scrutinized the corner from which the sound appeared to have come. The chief"s hand had slipped to his hip pocket, but after a moment of silence he withdrew it and a slightly shamefaced look spread over his face.