did raise a furor. Mr. Jackson, a cotton broker of fifty, was in blooming health when he sat down at the dinner table on his return from his office. Three quarters of an hour later he was dead. Christopher McKee went and saw. He acknowledged to himself ruefully that he didn’t conquer. He talked to Mrs. Jackson, he talked to Mrs. Fenway’s relatives, he talked to the guests who had been at the cocktail party and to the servants. At the end of twelve hours of intensive work he ended up where he had started, which was no place—except for the autopsies. Mrs. Fenway and the cotton broker had died of poison. The poison was hydrocyanic acid. There was no cyanide either in Mrs. Fenway’s Greenwich house or on her person; there was none in the Jackson apartment. There was no reason why either of them should have been killed. Yet they were both dead. Suicide was out of the question. Had they bumped into the chain lightning of practically instant annihilation by accident or was there design behind it?
Alice Camber marched out of McKee’s memory onto the stage. He went into the chambermaid’s death more closely and in person. Her symptoms, described in detail by two of her fellow workers, paralleled the symptoms that cyanide would have produced. He decided that there was a lethal link between the chambermaid, the wealthy social widow from Greenwich and the cotton broker of Park Avenue, a link that sprayed death from its hidden coils. The conclusion was obvious and terrible. There was a poisoner loose in New York, an unidentified and anonymous poisoner who struck right and left without ostensible discrimination, unchecked and at will.
The difficulties of isolating this killer were enormous. Neither Mrs. Fenway nor Mr. Jackson had ever been at the Hotel Sandringham nor had they known Alice Camber in any other setting. The Sandringham was a large and busy hotel with a transient trade, and Alice’s duties had brought her into contact with a number of guests. Except for a hangover, she was all right when she left home. It was from one or through one of the guests that she must have obtained the poison that killed her. A check on the Sandringham’s patrons was begun. Meanwhile, warnings were sent out to every precinct in the city to be on the alert for the first traces of a sudden illness. For one whole day nothing happened. Late on the afternoon of December the fourth the call for which McKee had been waiting and which he had been fearing came in. The poisoner had claimed a fourth victim. A woman had been stricken in the ladies’ room on the upper level in Grand Central Station.
She wasn’t dead—yet. The Scotsman was out from behind his desk and shoveling into his coat almost before the receiver settled into its cradle. Everything was in readiness. He said, “Pierson, Kent, Fellowes,” quietly, and the three men in the outer room jumped to their feet and followed the Inspector’s swift flight down the stairs and out into the bitter winter dusk of the dingy side street. The Cadillac was parked at the curb between the wan green lights. The detectives piled in. McKee said “Grand Central” to the man at the wheel and the long black car leaped forward.
“You think it’s safe, Doctor?”
“As safe as it will ever be, Inspector.”
“You’re not going to be able to save her?”
“There’s a chance. It’s a very slight one.”
It was eight o’clock on the morning of December the sixth and more than forty hours had passed since the woman stricken in Grand Central had been hurried to the room in Bellevue that had been prepared in advance. The latest victim was a Mrs. Carpenter of Bridgeport, Connecticut, a comely, childless, well-to-do matron in her fifties. Her husband had been communicated with. He was confined to bed with a broken hip and hadn’t been able to get to his wife’s side, but McKee had talked to him by telephone.
The facts concerning Mrs. Carpenter were as meager and uninformative as those embracing the three previous victims. Mrs. Carpenter had come to New York on the morning of the day she was stricken to do some Christmas shopping. Her course had been easy to trace, from the packages she carried and those sent to her home: a succession of stores, luncheon at Schraftt’s, more shopping and resultant fatigue. She hadn’t been feeling well when she entered the women’s room. One of the attendants did remember that.
Alice Camber hadn’t been well, either, nor had Mrs. Fenway. Mr. Jackson, according to his wife, had also confessed to a slight headache on returning from the office. The Scotsman had already formulated a theory. It was only that. There wasn’t an iota of testimony with which to back it up. The other victims, Alice Camber, Mrs. Fenway and Mr. Jackson, had been dead when the police arrived on the scene and could tell no tales. It was a tale that had to be told; the necessity was commanding. Through the long night, pacing up and down the hospital corridor, McKee had waited for word that Mrs. Carpenter could be interviewed. His stenographer, Kent, was with him. McKee said, “I’ll be as brief as I can, Doctor,” and the doctor opened the door and the two officials entered the white-walled room.
The Scotsman was shocked at what he saw. Cyanide isn’t kind to its takers. He stood on one side of the high white bed, Kent on the other. The doctor was beside Kent, a nurse flanked McKee.
“Mrs. Carpenter,” the Inspector spoke softly to the woman lying on pillows, her wasted face a sharp skeleton mask. “Will you tell us what happened to you?” He repeated the question half a dozen times. It was a horrible thing to have to do; it had to be done.
At first there was no response. Then a change came over the suffering mask. It was very slight. The blue lips moved. No sound came through but the hand on the coverlet, cyanosis tinging it, was lifted. Mrs. Carpenter tried to touch her forehead with fumbling blue fingers.
He had been right. McKee said to Kent, “Headache,” and, as Kent wrote, he said more loudly to Mrs. Carpenter, “You were in the waiting-room at Grand Central and you were tired from shopping. You had a headache, and someone gave you something for your head.”
The slightest sketch of a nod rewarded that.
“The person who gave you the medicine was a friend, someone you knew?”
No response.
“It was a stranger who gave you the medicine. The stranger was a woman. You met this woman in the ladies’ room while you were waiting for your train.”
Nod again.
“Mrs. Carpenter…” McKee paused. To ask a dying patient to describe a perfect stranger with the wealth of detail that would be necessary, if a successful search and identification were to be made, was an almost hopeless task. The Scotsman took it in sections, relying on trial and error and on Mrs. Carpenter’s constantly weaker response or lack of it to keep him on the right track. At the end of three quarters of an hour he had established that the medicine given to the woman in the bed wasn’t a liquid and that the poisoner was neither young nor old, had black hair and was tall. Just before coma set in Mrs. Carpenter unexpectedly spoke. The blue lips parted. The eyes fastened on the ceiling were almost sightless but the sick woman struggled. A single syllable finally issued from her wrenching throat. It was “pod” or “perd.”
They had done all they could there in that room. McKee returned to the office. He studied Kent’s notes. He forgot the others, Alice Camber and Mrs. Fenway and Mr. Jackson, and concentrated on Mrs. Carpenter, fiercely. Pod…Perd…Pardon? She wasn’t a woman who would have had to ask forgiveness; she had neither the make-up nor the temperament for it. He put prefixes in front of the broken syllable she had uttered. He put suffixes after it. Late, very late that night, it came to him, sailing into memory like a kite out of the blue. He had been questioning Mrs. Carpenter about the poisoner’s clothing, and Mrs. Carpenter hadn’t answered at all. And then from the depths of her immobility she had brought up that single syllable. That was what it was, a syllable, part of a word, he was sure of it.
Busy transcribing his notes at the far
