The Monkey God | Page 7

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, for that matter--"
"Oh, yes, somebody has," Forrester corrected, drawing the little golden
image with its ruby eyes and nostrils from his pocket and handing it to

the astonished coroner. "I found this outside in the snow, directly under
that window, just where a person, jumping from that height and landing
on slippery ground, might have dropped it. I wish you'd take official
charge of it for a few days and tell no one about it till you hear from
me."
Briefly he described his search for clues outside the house, the finding
of the idol and the finger marks where its loser had made a hurried hunt
for it.
"Well, I'll be--this trick is yours, Professor," the young doctor agreed.
"I'm still holding to the hypothesis of suicide, but we'll impanel no jury
tonight, or until I've had time to perform an autopsy on the body. Can I
reach you by 'phone if I need you?"
"Of course," the Professor assured him.
"All right. I'll take the names and addresses of everyone present, and
dismiss 'em, pending the inquest. Whether you're right or wrong,
Professor, you've given me more mental gymnastics this evening than
I've had since I attended the University." He held out his hand with a
genial smile. "Good-night, sir."
"LAMBERT NESBIT speaking, Professor," a cheerful voice
announced at the telephone, shortly after noon the following day. "Pick
up the marbles; you win."
"Eh, how's that--" Professor Forrester began, but the coroner was
bursting with information and refused to be interrupted.
"I autopsied Milsted's body this morning," he continued, "and
everything points to your theory of murder. In fact, it couldn't have
been suicide. When I removed the skull cap I found a bullet had passed
through the frontal bone slightly to the left of the frontal suture,
penetrating the left superior frontal lobe of the brain, piercing the
proecentral fissure with a downward course, and traveling almost to the
horizontal fissure of Sylvinus. Do you get me, or am I too technical?"

"Not at all," Forrester assured him. "Remember, Nesbit, I was studying
comparative anatomy, putting in six hours a week in the dissecting
room, when you were learning to spin a top and play marbles for keeps.
Go on, what else did you find?"
"Well, first off, I realized that it would have been impossible for a man
to shoot himself in that manner unless he held the stock of the pistol
above the level of his head--I experimented on myself by holding a gun
with the muzzle touching my forehead where the wound in Milsted's
head was. He might have done it by bracing the barrel against his head
and pulling the trigger with his thumb, but, as you demonstrated last
night, Milsted was clutching the pistol with the rigidity of a cadaveric
spasm, which must have occurred at the moment of death, and his
forefinger was on the trigger. There wasn't a Chinaman's chance of his
shifting his grip on the stock between the shot and the time death
ensued, for he must have died instantly from that wound."
"My boy," Forrester assured him, "I'm beginning to have hopes of you.
It was hard to convince you last night, but I'll admit you're not one of
those thick-headed zanies who persist in error just for the sake of
making fools of themselves."
"Thanks," the coroner replied dryly. "But you ain't heard nothin' yet.
When I compared the bullet in Milsted's brain with a cartridge from the
magazine of his pistol, I found the lethal missile was a soft lead,
conical bullet of about 20-20 calibre, while Milsted's gun is a LŸger
and shoots a .25 cupro-nickel-coated bullet. I was talkin' with a
lieutenant in the State Constabulary about it today, and he told me
those guns have a muzzle velocity of about twelve hundred feet a
second, and if Milsted had shot himself with his own gun the bullet
would have gone clear through his head and probably through the wall
behind him, as well."
"I could have told you that," Forrester replied. "Have you any other
information?"
"Not right now; but there's not much doubt Milsted was murdered.
What sticks in my craw, though, is who did it, and why, and why the

devil didn't anyone hear a