The Silent Bullet | Page 4

it can be prevented. But as
for running the criminal himself down, scientifically, relentlessly--bah!
we haven't made an inch of progress since the hammer and tongs
method of your Byrnes."
"Doubtless you will write a thesis on this most interesting subject," I
suggested, "and let it go at that."
"No, I am serious," he replied, determined for some reason or other to
make a convert of me. "I mean exactly what I say. I am going to apply
science to the detection of crime, the same sort of methods by which
you trace out the presence of a chemical, or run an unknown germ to
earth. And before I have gone far, I am going to enlist Walter Jameson
as an aide. I think I shall need you in my business."
"How do I come in?"
"Well, for one thing, you will get a scoop, a beat,--whatever you call it
in that newspaper jargon of yours."
I smiled in a skeptical way, such as newspapermen are wont to affect
toward a thing until it is done--after which we make a wild scramble to
exploit it.
Nothing more on the subject passed between us for several days.

I. The Silent Bullet

"Detectives in fiction nearly always make a great mistake," said
Kennedy one evening after our first conversation on crime and science.
"They almost invariably antagonize the regular detective force. Now in
real life that's impossible--it's fatal."
"Yes," I agreed, looking up from reading an account of the failure of a
large Wall Street brokerage house, Kerr Parker & Co., and the peculiar
suicide of Kerr Parker. "Yes, it's impossible, just as it is impossible for
the regular detectives to antagonize the newspapers. Scotland Yard
found that out in the Crippen case."
"My idea of the thing, Jameson," continued Kennedy, "is that the
professor of criminal science ought to, work with, not against, the
regular detectives. They're all right. They're indispensable, of course.
Half the secret of success nowadays is organisation. The professor of
criminal science should be merely what the professor in a technical
school often is--a sort of consulting engineer. For instance, I believe
that organisation plus science would go far to ward clearing up that
Wall Street case I see you are reading."
I expressed some doubt as to whether the regular police were
enlightened enough to take that view of it.
"Some of them are," he replied. "Yesterday the chief of police in a
Western city sent a man East to see me about the Price murder: you
know the case?"
Indeed I did. A wealthy banker of the town had been murdered on the
road to the golf club, no one knew why or by whom. Every clue had
proved fruitless, and the list of suspects was itself so long and so
impossible as to seem most discouraging.
"He sent me a piece of a torn handkerchief with a deep blood-stain on
it," pursued Kennedy. "He said it clearly didn't belong to the murdered
man, that it indicated that the murderer had himself been wounded in
the tussle, but as yet it had proved utterly valueless as a clue. Would I
see what I could make of it?

"After his man had told me the story I had a feeling that the murder was
committed by either a Sicilian labourer on the links or a negro waiter at
the club. Well, to make a short story shorter, I decided to test the
blood-stain. Probably you didn't know it, but the Carnegie Institution
has just published a minute, careful, and dry study of the blood of
human beings and of animals.
"In fact, they have been able to reclassify the whole animal kingdom on
this basis, and have made some most surprising additions to our
knowledge of evolution. Now I don't propose to bore you with the
details of the tests, but one of the things they showed was that the blood
of a certain branch of the human race gives a reaction much like the
blood of a certain group of monkeys, the chimpanzees, while the blood
of another branch gives a reaction like that of the gorilla. Of course
there's lots more to it, but this is all that need concern us now.
"I tried the tests. The blood on the handkerchief conformed strictly to
the latter test. Now the gorilla was, of course, out of the question--this
was no Rue Morgue murder. Therefore it was the negro waiter."
"But," I interrupted, "the negro offered a perfect alibi at the start, and--"
"No buts, Walter. Here's a telegram I received at dinner:
'Congratulations. Confronted Jackson your evidence as wired.
Confessed.'"
"Well, Craig, I take off my hat to you," I exclaimed. "Next you'll be
solving this Kerr Parker case for sure."
"I would take a hand