The Monkey God | Page 6

temperature rose several degrees--enough to thaw the very top of the ground--before the snow commenced, and for the first half-hour or so the flakes were wet. This sleet has been coming down only the last hour, maybe a little less. So I say somebody walked through the snow just after it began, got a scum of sand on his shoes and hid in this case without stopping to wipe his boots. He could stand here and see everything going on in the room through the slits in the cabinet door."
Dr. Nesbit smiled ironically as he shook his head. "You may be able to take a piece of skull and build a man from it, or reconstruct a dinosaur from a splint of thigh-bone, Professor Forrester," he conceded, "but I'm not ready to admit you've reconstructed a case of burglary and murder here."
"Then look at this," the Professor urged, leading the way back to the library and indicating the wall beneath the window. "This is the window that everybody agrees opened mysteriously just as the lights went out. Now, here on the baseboard, if you'll look closely, you'll find exactly such sand stains as are on the cabinet floor. And here--" he indicated the faint smudges on the wall-- "are the foot marks where somebody took a running start, braced his feet first against the board, then the wall, and with his hands holding the window sill, swarmed up and yanked the casement open. And here--" he pointed triumphantly to the sill-- "are other marks, not much more than dabs of sand, I'll grant you, but still marks, where the fellow rested his feet on the sill before he started to leap to the ground outside."
"But you're assuming too much," Nesbit objected. "These marks might easily have been made some other way. I know my house is forever getting all sorts of spots and splotches on it, no matter how hard my wife scrubs and dusts."
Forrester snorted in disgust. "Can't you use your eyes at all?" he demanded. "Look at this, and this, and this--" he thrust the envelopes in which his specimens were stored under the coroner's nose--"the sand in each of those envelopes is identical. If the cabinet was stained with yellow sand, and the wall with red and the window sill with black or gray smut, I'd agree with you; but all the stains are made by the same material. I tell you, whoever hid in that cabinet ran from the museum to the library and made his escape through the window when the lights went out! See here, let's prove it. Call everybody who was present when Milsted died and ask them, separately, if they can remember whether or not the library door opened about the same time the confusion preceding the shooting began."
DR. NESBIT stepped to the door and summoned the six witnesses to the tragedy, admitting them one at a time and asking each the question suggested by the Professor. Rosalie and three others recalled there had been a faint squeak "as though a door was being opened carefully" before Milsted had appeared to go berserker. One of the others thought the museum door had opened a little--"blown by a draft," she assumed--while the sixth witness remembered nothing of the sort.
"That's the best proof in the world that the door did open," the Professor insisted. "If every one of them had agreed it did, we might have assumed your question suggested their answers-- human memory is a tricky thing, at best--and that they thought they recalled something which actually didn't happen; but diverse testimony in such a case is its own best proof."
"'Saul, Saul, almost thou persuadest me,'" Coroner Nesbit protested with a laugh. "Seriously, though, Professor, you've got me thinking. I still believe this is a suicide, but everything you've suggested could have happened just as you say-- maybe."
"'Maybe' be hanged!" the Professor blazed! "It did, I tell you!"
"But what about Herman, or whatever its name was, that led to the tragedy?" Nesbit asked, half of himself, half of the professor. "As I understand it, Milsted claimed someone had stolen some sort of heathen idol from his museum and was throwing a catch-the-low-down-cuss party when he was--when he shot himself."
"I was coming to that," Forrester answered. "When Mr. Milsted first accused one of us of stealing the statue of Hanuman, I thought he might be indulging in some ill-timed joke, or staging a show with some ulterior motive. He was a queer sort, and I never fancied him very much. But I'm convinced now the jewel really was stolen, and stolen by the person who hid in the cabinet and escaped through the window and murdered Milsted."
"How do you make that out?" Nesbit wanted to know. "Nobody's seen the thief, or the stolen property,