Murder on the Palisades

Front matter

MURDER ON THE PALISADES

MURDER ON THE PALISADES

By Will Levinrew

Foreword

FOREWORD

Having two idle hours on my hands, I went into a billiard room formerly on the southwest corner of Broadway and Fiftieth Street, New York, where I played billiards with an old man of seventy-six. The final score was: Old Man, 250; Myself, 63.

The wound to my vanity was considerably soothed when I learned that there is not an amateur in the world who can beat this old man. His name is Maurice Daly; he won the world championship in 1873. He complains that his eyes are not as good as they used to be.

My interest was aroused. I began to recall the names of the old men of whom I had heard or read, who, at such a ripe age, could coördinate mind and muscle to the extent that Mr. Daly did.

I discussed the matter with my friend James Hale, who is now an important executive in a radio company. It was Hale who furnished me the material for "The Poison Plague."

Hale was a newspaperman for twelve years and he is a mine of information.

When I mentioned the Daly incident, Hale did not react at all with the enthusiasm I had hoped to evoke. He said:

"Rather unusual, of course, but not startling. The top notch professionals can beat him. It is true there are only about ten men in the world who can do it, but there are ten.

"Professor Herman Brierly is much more remarkable than that. He, at the same age as Maurice Daly, has not his superior in the world. What is still more remarkable than that is that this applies to a great many lines of human endeavor. Many scientists have said of him that he 'specializes in almost every exact science.' This is literally true of Herman Brierly.

"Aside from his vast store of knowledge, he can and does correlate, coördinate and apply what he knows to whatever problem he happens to have at hand.

"Professor Brierly has a passion for pure thought. He is impatient with the common brand of ignorance and the ordinary man's loose methods of talking and thinking. A great many specialists have consulted him on matters pertaining to their own chosen specialty, with profit to themselves.

"He used to hate newspapers," continued Hale with a grin. "And he still does, and newspapermen, principally for their inaccuracy in handling scientific matters and the fact that they give only such little space to matters that to him are of such vital importance.

"It was a tough job to induce him to leave his experiments for a while to solve that ghost mystery that gave the police so much trouble. Later came the poison plague which you described in your story. Since then I have, through his assistant, John Matthews, who was a classmate of mine, got his interest engaged in a number of police matters.

"Did you keep a record of all that, Jimmy?" I asked.

"Yes, I did. I was going to be a writing man you know, but this firm convinced me that I could be just as happy and make more money, if I employed my literary gifts at advertising copy."

"May I use your material?" I asked eagerly.

"Sure, W. L., help yourself." Jimmy brought out a sheaf of notebooks and scraps of copy paper. The following is one of the stories I found recorded among those notes with a fair degree of accuracy, sufficient, at any rate, for my purpose.

Chapter 1

CHAPTER I

The maw of "Iron Man" Hite's large wastebasket was receiving its daily contribution. The truly remarkable thing about the daily mass of the city editor's rejected material was the similarity of one day's grist to that of every other day. Anonymous communications; long rambling two-column accounts of unimportant events, social and otherwise; the perennial, ever-present product of the persistent publicity man. These ran from the theft of the thirty-a-week chorine's $250,000 in gems, to the high curative and therapeutic value of the most recent find in shoe leather.

Hite's right hand was hovering over the basket with a slip of paper, while his left hand was reaching toward the pile of mail on his desk, when something—something that he described to himself later as a hunch—caused him to stop and scan again the slip of paper he was about to throw away.

"Hey, Mac, look at this!" He pushed the note across the desk to his assistant. The latter looked at it, read it, read it again and then looked inquiringly at his chief. "Well, what about it?"

"What do you make of it?"

Mac shrugged, shook his head and passed the note back. Hite picked it up once more and look at it frowningly, half annoyed with himself for paying any attention to an anonymous communication.

The note was a plain, unruled sheet of cheap paper, evidently torn from a notebook. It bore the following message, without salutation or signature.

Conrad Manx, Jr., will die of meningitis.

He will be number א.

Aside from the strangeness of the communication itself, it had a physical peculiarity that arrested Hite's attention. The message was made up of individual letters of unequal size that had evidently been cut from either headlines or advertisements of a newspaper, and pasted on the sheet. This gave the message an uneven, erratic appearance.

"What's that character on the bottom, Mac, do you know?"

Again Mac shrugged his shoulders.

Hite turned toward the busy, noisy room and yelled:

"Hey, which of you guys knows Tibetan, or Sanskrit, or Hebrew, or Chinese, or something?"

A voice answered, "Bacon, here, knows languages, including English and American and maybe the Scandihuvian."

"Bacon, what's that character on the bottom of the message?"

"That's the Hebrew Alef, corresponding to the Roman A."

"What does the writer mean by number Alef?"

"That's the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet and is also used to designate the numeral 1."

"Give it back here," Hite growled.

His annoyance with himself was increasing for giving any time or attention at all to an anonymous message. He was violating an almost inviolable rule of his with reference to that kind of message. Unsigned communications always found their way into the wastebasket without further thought. But this one intrigued him. He could not ascribe it to his "nose for news," the newspaperman's sixth sense. He admitted to himself regretfully that it was pure hunch. His annoyance mounted when he saw that the envelope, showing a local postmark, was addressed in the same manner—with single letters pasted side by side to make the address. Holding the envelope and note uncertainly above the wastebasket, he, with sudden resolution, tucked both into a pigeonhole and went at his daily morning grind.

Three hours later, all the assignments having been apportioned and his desk cleared, he took the note from its pigeonhole and once more studied its unusual characteristics. Because it was late Monday morning, when real news was scarce and many men on his staff were largely idle, he came to a sudden decision and called James Hale to his side.

"Hey, Jimmy," handing him the note, "ramble around and see what you can find on this."

Jimmy looked at the note and expostulated vehemently.

"Aw, chief. An anonymous communication!"

Hite looked at him and his beetling eyebrows twitched aggressively.

"Too bad, Jimmy. I know that the Yanks and the Senators are playing a crucial game in a crucial series and I appreciate your commendable desire to see Ruth slam one into the right field bleachers, but this paper isn't paying you to see baseball games. We have an expensive sporting department for that. I want that story if there is a story. And may I remind you before you start that this is a daily paper we're runnin' and not a quarterly periodical." This was one of Hite's familiar formulas.

Jimmy's look of shocked, virtuous innocence was a triumph in histrionic art.

"Why, chief, baseball game, I wouldn't dream—"

"Oh, yeah, of course not. I know you wouldn't, not on a work day. Awful of me to think it. Doing you a terrible injustice, I know. But run along now or I'll drop you out of the window."

At the door, Jimmy, who was looking at the slip of paper with interest, his resentment now absorbed in the deeper absorption of the good newspaper man in a promising story, stopped and turned back.

"Say, chief, know who this bird is?"—pointing to the name on the message.

Hite looked and shook his head slowly, doubtfully. "Can't say I do. Name is familiar, though. Wait a minute. Isn't Conrad Manx the fellow who was decorated by Congress for distinguished valor, wounded in the head, and nearly died?"

Jimmy nodded, his resentment now completely forgotten.

"Say, chief, there may be something in this after all. I'm on my way. S'long."

Since Professor Brierly's happy solution of the Poison Plague that had caused such widespread misery and distress about a year before, Jimmy had kept closer than ever to his old schoolmate, John Matthews, Professor Brierly's assistant. It was natural, therefore, that at a time like this that ill-assorted pair should enter his mind.

The perfunctory greeting of the two old friends hid from the casual observer the deep underlying affection and respect that bound them.

Lo, Jimmy, old horse. Want me to solve any more mysteries, or did you come to invite me to lunch?"

"Came to do both. What do you make of this?" He handed the sheet of paper to the young scientist. After scrutinizing the message closely, Matthews pointed to the character at the end of the message and asked, "What's this?"

"That's a er-er—that's the first letter in the Hebrew alphabet and stands for the A. Our philological shark in the office says it is also used for the numeral one."

"Well, what's it all about, what can I do about it?"

"In the first place, what is meningitis?"

"Oh, that?" Matthews answered with a grave face. "It's an inflammation of the meninges, the meningeal membrane."

"Is that so! Now don't be so damn smart and technical. Tell me in plain, unadorned, simple English just what it means."

"Oh, 'scuse me. I forgot that to your ignorant lay mind such simple words and phrases don't mean anything. I also forgot that all the newspaperman needs to know is how to spell the word 'alleged' and a lot of adjectives. Well, generally, meninges means a covering sheath. Specifically, in Anatomy, it means the sheath covering the brain and sometimes the spinal cord. The inflammation of this sheath is meningitis and it often proves fatal. Now that you know this, what are you going to do with it?"

"I nosed around a little—"

"Nosed around is right," murmured Matthews.

"If you weren't as big as an elephant," said Jimmy regretfully, balling his fist. "Anyhow, I made inquiries before I came here and I find that Conrad Manx, Jr., is in first-class health. Could you forecast that a person would die of meningitis?"

"Why, I sure could. I could also foretell which one of your hundred to one parlays would click. I could foretell just what the weather will be on the afternoon of March twenty-seventh, twenty-one-thirty-eight. I can foretell the exact shade and size of the mole on your future wife's left eyebrow. I can also foretell that if you keep on bothering me with such questions, you are going out on your ear. Now, what the devil are you—"

"No, seriously, Jack," Jimmy interrupted his friend's tirade, "what I mean is, if someone had designs on a person's life, could he induce meningitis, in the same way, say, that he could inoculate one with an infectious disease?"

"I doubt it very much, Jimmy. Not in a big healthy adult. Still, that's merely my opinion. If you want the last word on the matter, you better ask his nibs there." His thumb pointed toward an inner room, which housed Professor Brierly and his experiments.

"No, thanks," said Jimmy hastily. He had a quick vision of the irascible old man being disturbed during an important experiment to be bothered with what to him would be a "trivial, trifling, idle question." He had experienced that kind of thing before and he did not feel that the present instance warranted the risk of one of the old man's fiery explosions of wrath. "I'll take your word for it, Jack. See you again. Oh, by the way, I promised you lunch. Come along."

"Can't now, Jimmy. Got some work to do. Some other time."

Followed three hours of exhaustive probing and searching, during which Jimmy acquired a lot of information but, as he himself put it, "no story." When he was crossing 163rd Street, headed downtown, his mind wandered wistfully eastward toward the Yankee Stadium, where he knew the game to be under way. When the subway train came to 116th Street, he resolved suddenly to interrupt his trip downtown by a stop at Columbia University. This was largely because Jimmy was a conscientious reporter, once he was on a story. He did this in a last desperate hope that he could carry back to the office at least some small evidence that he had been on the job.

Arrived at that institution, he was shown the way to the Philological Department and was fortunate enough to find an authority on Hebrew.

"What is this character, doctor?"

"Well, it will pass for an Alef," smiled the bespectacled young-old man, peering at the anonymous note.

"What do you mean, 'it will pass for an Alef'? Isn't it an Alef?"

"Well, if you took the simple Roman A and printed it so that the thin portions of the letter were thinner; the heavy, shaded portions more heavily shaded; the angles greater, and if you added a few flourishes, you would have an A of course. In just that way is this an Alef. What made me smile is that it is so long since I have seen the letter made just that way. I am trying to remember just where and when I saw it. I seem to recall something odd in connection with this letter. Oh, I see—" He was now holding the sheet of notepaper parallel with his eyes and was gazing intently at it.

"What is it?" urged Jimmy, his newspaper sense aroused.

The scholar was still staring closely at the sheet. Then he turned it over and looked at the reverse side.

"Why, don't you see?" asked Dr. Moyer. "This letter is a tracing. Hold it parallel to your eyes and you'll see it. Then turn it over and you will see the deeper indentation made by the tracing. Very carefully traced, too. I am still trying to remember something strange in connection with the source of this particular Alef. But never mind, I daresay it is unimportant.

"Did you say you were a newspaper man? Ah, and you are seeking a 'story,' as you call it. Well," smiling mischievously, "you are trying to trace the writer of this note; you should not have much difficulty. The source from which this Alef was traced is undoubtedly out of print. If, among the hundred odd millions of persons in this country you find the possessor of the book, pamphlet, brochure, or other source from which this character was traced, there is at least an excellent chance that he is the writer of this note."

"You may be right," assented Jimmy. "Will you try to remember where you saw this odd Alef?"

"Oh, indeed I shall. I should like to remember for my own sake. There is something odd in connection with this that I should like to recall. Unimportant, perhaps, but odd, nevertheless."

Jimmy left Dr. Moyer and soliloquized.

"Yeah, fine clue. Language shark half remembers something about a book or something that he doesn't remember at all. And if I find what he doesn't remember, I'll have something. Easy, cinch!"

Arrived at the office, he went to the copy desk and told Bacon what the man at the uni- versity had said about the Hebrew letter. Bacon agreed with this after another look at the note, but he did not know much about it, did not care, and begged Jimmy not to bother him. Jimmy went along to report to Hite.

"I've got all the dope, chief, but there's no story."

"What's the dope?"

"This Conrad Manx, Jr., the chap this note is about, is the oldest son of Dr. Manx, big consulting physician. Conrad was in the war and got so badly wounded they thought he would die. Had his skull smashed and it was a tough job to bring him around, but so far as I could learn, he is in pretty good health now.

"Dr. Manx is practically retired, although he still goes out occasionally for consultations. His present wife is his second wife; I picked up some scandal in connection with his second marriage. His present wife had been married before. Dr. Manx was the family physician for her folks before she was married the first time, and later Dr. Manx's first wife died, in childbirth. Dead about five years when the second Mrs. Manx's husband died. The only ground for the scandal I could dig up was that the present Mrs. Manx and Dr. Manx showed unseemly haste in getting married after her first husband died. She is considerably younger than he. She had no children by her first marriage, but there was a boy born to her about six years ago.

"Shortly after she gave birth to this child, she suffered an attack of something that left her completely paralyzed from the hips down. She gets about in a wheel chair. Dr. Manx's first wife died about twelve years ago. There are two daughters, the older one married to a David Mooney. The Mooneys, with their year-old son, are living at the home of Dr. Manx. Mooney, I understand, doesn't do much of anything. Dabbles in an amateur way in some of the doctor's research work, which the old man is carrying on rather extensively, now that he has retired from active practice. David is interested in a lot of things—real estate, brokerage, theatrical agencies—all in an amateur way.

"The younger daughter is about nineteen, at Vassar. There is the twelve-year-old boy Harry, whose birth caused his mother's death. There is the six-year-old Frank, half-brother to the others; and last but not least, comes Robert.

"All the neighbors have a great deal to say about Robert. I guess this is pretty much because Robert never seemed to take to the neighbors. He didn't like them and took no pains to hide it. He is about twenty-two or three and considered a sort of black sheep. He quarreled with every member of the family, particularly with his father about the stepmother, and he was away for a long time. He was practically forced to leave home, but came back recently. The quarrel was not the usual thing in such a case, about his not being friendly enough to his stepmother. No; it seems that he was the only member of the family who has been rather friendly with her of late. At any rate, he seems to be a quarrelsome chap, with a disposition about as sweet as old vinegar.

"There are also some stories about the doctor's amorous affairs with patients, and so forth, but no more than is said of almost any physician, or of most any man, for that matter.

"Then there is a housekeeper, an old Swedish amazon; been in the family since the old man married. Was originally the maid and the only maid. There is a chauffeur, a maid with a French name, a rather sprightly dame, the neighbors say; a gardener, and a woman who comes in three or four times a week—laundress, I guess. The laundress is the only one who does not sleep on the premises. The house is queer and it is in a queer place. Know where Dyckman Street ferry is?"

Hite nodded.

"Well, on the Jersey side of the ferry, halfway up the road leading to Englewood Cliffs, there is a new road going north on a ledge of the cliff and running parallel to the river. This is called the Hendrik Hudson Drive. About a mile this side of Alpine, where the road ends, it leads up to the top of the Palisades, where there is another unimproved road running above the Hendrik Hudson Drive and also parallel to the river. This is an old wood road. On the river side of it there are a number of old large houses, right on the edge of the cliff overlooking the river. Dr. Manx's home is one of these. It occupies the entire area on a point or bay of rock on each side of which there is a deep chasm running almost sheer down to the Hendrik Hudson Drive. The house is a big, rambling, two-story structure. Built, as it is, near the edge of the cliff, with only a yard and garage separating it from the edge, the only view the inhabitants could have of the river is either from the rear windows of the house or from the roof. They therefore had a flat roof built on which there is quite a garden. Lately this roof garden has been converted into a sort of combination garden and gym, with several varieties of gym apparatus. Mrs. Manx spends a lot of time there. She gets to the roof by a sort of lift or elevator that was built expressly for her purpose. She gets about unaided in her wheel chair."

Then Jimmy briefly related the result of his errand at Columbia University.

"That's about all, chief. As I told you, there is no story. Young Manx is in perfect health and my friend Matthews scoffs at the idea of anyone giving him meningitis with murderous intent."

"Did you go into the house, Jimmy?"

"No, I couldn't do that, could I? How could I go in and ask when their son was going to die of meningitis! I got all this information from some gabby neighbors."

Hite nodded and looked at the note silently for a minute. Then he dropped it into the wastebasket and curtly told Jimmy to go home, himself putting on his hat and coat preparatory to leaving.

Three weeks later, an undertaker sent in an obituary notice announcing the death of Conrad Manx, Jr. The cause of death was given as meningitis.

Chapter 2

CHAPTER II

Thus began what was to be one of the most gruesome, and, at the same time, most grotesque series of events that criminal history has ever recorded. And Hite and his staff were like raging maniacs. Hite had what is meat and drink to the newspaperman—a good story, and he was not able to use it. He compared himself to a man dying of thirst, tied hand and foot and securely gagged, at the edge of a cool, burbling brook.

With the high regard for the ethics of his profession that was one of his principal characteristics, he could not see his way clear to using a story based on nothing more tangible than an anonymous note. And the worst feature of the case was that he did not even possess the note. It had gone into the wastebasket after Jimmy's report and its recovery was a more hopeless task than finding the proverbial needle in a haystack.

Much against his inclination, he communicated with one of his colleagues on another paper in the hope that the other had received a similar note. He was neither disappointed nor surprised when he received a negative answer. The man he asked had either not received such a message or, if he had, he had thrown it away and forgotten it. Hite did the usual thing in such a case; he sent out two of his star men to unearth what they could in the matter. He did this perfunctorily, not being very hopeful of getting any tangible results.

Jimmy's first visit this time was to District Attorney McCall. Since their intimate contact during the Poison Plague, a genuine friendship had developed between the two. This friendship was founded on mutual respect. When McCall had listened carefully to the whole story, he asked, "This home of Dr. Manx is in New Jersey, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"Then what in the name of common sense have I got to do with it? What status have I in this matter?"

"None, Mac, and I know it. I merely came here to get your professional opinion. Here is a hypothetical question you lawyers love so much. If this home were in your jurisdiction and I brought this story to you and if you believed it, and a lot of other ifs, what would you do in the matter?"

"Nothing!" promptly answered McCall. "Not a thing. What could I do? You come to me with a story of an anonymous note with a Hebrew numeral, that forecasts someone's death—not death by violence, mind you, but death by a disease, that physicians say could not readily be induced. What could I do in the matter? If this prophecy had been concerned with a death by violence or poison, I might stretch my powers and authority and take official cognizance, but not here. This weird prophecy you speak of, and the death itself, is in all probability a mere coincidence."

"Coincidence your aunt's kitten! I love to hear you practical-minded lawyers talk, when it suits you to substantiate a certain theme. I suppose you put that in the category with 'evidence,' 'proof,' et cetera! You and I know a great many things are true that you could not prove to the satisfaction of a judge and jury, not the kind of proof a superior court would not upset, anyway.

"Here is a simple little thing. You've stud- ied mathematics, of course, and you know that the product of two minuses is plus, don't you?"

Jimmy paused until McCall nodded affirmatively.

"Prove it!" shot out Jimmy. After waiting to get the proper effect in the growing expression of perplexity that spread over the official's features, Jimmy continued.

"Do you know how few persons out of a million get meningitis? Do you know that even the highly developed serum they have discovered is ineffective in combating certain types of this disease?"

McCall looked at his friend in half-grim amusement.

"My, Jimmy, what I wouldn't give for such an imagination! No wonder you are such a darn good newspaperman. How you would love to make a story out of this!"

"Do you mean to say," sputtered Hale, "that after all I've said you could not see your way clear to take some official action?"

"My dear, imaginative young friend, do you realize that if we took cognizance of every crazy anonymous note that came to the papers or to us, we would need a policeman for every inhabitant?" Then he continued to murmur, half to himself, "Smart man, this James Hale is. He wants someone to take official action in the matter. Official action becomes public action and therefore public property. Public property is, well, it is public property, meaning newspaper property. This would, of course, make a fine story for the bright young reporter, James Hale. Smart! Brilliant! He is—"

The younger man stood up in speechless indignation.

"Oh, you can go to—er—er, you go to read Blackstone!" And he walked out, slamming the door.

The result of his next two visits to physicians being negative, Jimmy decided to tackle Matthews once more in the hope that he could get a helpful inkling from Professor Brierly. When Matthews was told of the recent developments in the case, he consented to take his friend in to the old man. Jimmy once more experienced the half-pleasurable tingle that meeting the professor always gave him. The first glance of the old man's eyes always affected him much as would a mild current from a galvanic battery. He, as well as others, al- ways felt the scientist's remarkable personality.

He noted again, as if for the first time, the small, exquisitely formed body, not over five feet tall; the tiny hands and feet, bushy, snow-white hair, bushy black brows over dark blue eyes so deeply sunken in their sockets as to seem jet black; the high, fresh complexion rarely found except in infancy. He nodded with less than his usual curtness in recognition of Jimmy's presence. Jimmy drew back when he saw that the old man was talking to a visitor, but his friend, by a nod, assured him that it was all right. He introduced Jimmy to the caller, a pathologist from one of the hospitals.

"Professor," explained Matthews, "Mr. Hale has a story that I believe might interest you." The old man nodded toward the newspaperman, looking at him inquiringly.

With the newspaperman's ability to get to the heart of a story without unnecessary detail, Jimmy framed his story in two sentences. He began:

"Three weeks ago our office received an anonymous communication stating that a certain person would die of meningitis. This—"

He got no further. Professor Brierly waspishly interrupted him.

"What of it? Why should a newspaper have nothing better to waste its time on, and the time of its valuable reporters?"—looking sarcastically at Jimmy—"than to pay attention to an anonymous note. Particularly, why should you waste my time on it?"

Jimmy finished his story.

"This morning we received an obituary notice of this man's death—by meningitis."

If the reporter expected to surprise Professor Brierly with this startling statement, he was disappointed. The old man received it indifferently.

"Well, why not? This merely confirms the theme we have often discussed, about the possibilities latent in a scientific criminal. But the note—" He paused in thought a moment, then shrugged impatiently. "You will have to excuse me, Mr. Hale. I have no time for such trifles. I am not a detective. Go to your police, this is their work."