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Page 37
I was disappointed. It seemed to me that he had made
comparatively little progress so far.
"There's one thing," he added. "Samples of the body fluids of the
victim have been sent down by the coroner at Tarrytown and I have
analyzed them. While I haven't decided what it was that killed
Stella Lamar, I am at least convinced that it has something to do
with these towel spots. They are not exactly the same--in fact, I
should say they were complementary, or, perhaps better,
antithetical."
"The mark wasn't made by the needle which scratched her, then?"
"That's what I thought at first, that the point used had been
wiped off on the towel. Then I decided that the spots had nothing
to do with the case at all. Now I believe there is some
connection, after all."
"I--I don't understand it," I protested.
"It's very baffling," he agreed, absent-mindedly.
"If the towel wasn't used to clean the fatal needle," I went on,
"then it may have been used before they went out instead of
afterward."
"Exactly. As a matter of fact, if I had not been so confused
yesterday by all the details of the case, by the many people
involved, I would have noticed at a glance that the blood spots
on the towel could not come from some one using it to wipe the
needle. And any hypothesis that it had been used out in Tarrytown
was ridiculous, because Miss Lamar was only scratched faintly and
lost no blood. If I had been a little more clever I might have
been altogether too clever. I might possibly have thrown the
towel away, because there certainly was no logical reason for
connecting it with the crime."
"Just when do you suppose Stella was pricked?" I asked.
"That's a vital consideration. Just now I do not know the poison
and so cannot tell how quickly it acted." He began to put aside
his various paraphernalia. "Suppose we go at this thing by a
process of deduction rather than from the end of scientific
analysis." He sat on a corner of the bench. "What do we find?" he
began.
"While I've been working here with the test tubes and the
microscope I've been trying to reconstruct what must have
happened, trying to trace out every action of Stella Lamar as
nearly as it is possible for us to do so. I don't think we need
to go back of their arrival at the house, for the present. They
seem to have been there a long while before the taking of the
particular scene, since there were twelve other scenes preceding
and since it requires time to put up the electric lights and make
the connections, as well as to set the cameras, take tests,
rearrange the furniture, and all the rest of it.
"They arrived at the house in two automobiles; with the exception
of Phelps, who was there already, and Manton, who came in his own
limousine. That means that Miss Lamar had company on the trip
out, the principals probably riding with each other in one car.
At the house they were all more or less together. There were
people about constantly and it would seem as if there was small
opportunity for anyone to inflict the scratch which caused her
death. I don't mean that it would have been impossible to prick
her. I mean that she would have felt the jab of the point. In all
likelihood she would have cried out and glanced around. Take a
needle yourself, sometime, Walter, and try to duplicate the
scratch on your own arm in such a way that you would not be aware
of it.
"So you see I'm counting upon some sort of exclamation from Miss
Lamar. If she were inoculated with the poison with other folks
about, it is sure some one would have remembered a cry, a
questioning glance, a quick grasp of the forearm--for the nerves
are very sensitive in the skin there--"
"No one did recall anything of the kind," I interrupted.
"It is from that fact that I hope to deduce something. Now let's
follow her, figuratively, to her little dressing room. This was a
part of the living room where the rest waited. It is not a
certainty, but yet rather a sure guess, that if she had received
a scratch behind those thin silk curtains her cry would have been
heard. What is even more plausible is that she would have hurried
out, or at least put her head out, to see who had pricked her.
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