Surely, thought the lieutenant, the man was a little mad. But for a moment the wild idea occurred to him that possibly the fellow could make a diamond! For weeks the papers had been giving him a lot of publicity and his several demonstrations before all sorts of men had been most successful. But no hard-boiled police lieutenant could swallow that stuff! The chap was a crook, despite his reputation and his social position.
Chapter II
The Ghost Violin
“What is it you wish me to do if I attend your dinner tonight, professor?” asked the lieutenant after a moment during which he sat studying the room.
“Nothing,” said Wheatland grimly. “Just come and watch and wait. There will be plenty for you to do. After dinner we come in here, all of us, for the demonstration. I lock the door with the combination only you, my wife and I myself know. If Caresse has told this man she loves he will not dare to use it lest he brand himself.”
“Give me the list of your guests,” said the lieutenant, interested in spite of his incredulity; conscious of a thrill that was not entirely pleasant. Something seemed to warn him that he was standing on the threshold of danger.
Drawing a bit of paper toward him the professor wrote rapidly a list of names and addresses.
“Linda Price, my wife’s oldest friend,” he told Williams, touching the first name with his pencil tip. “A charming girl. Runs a fashionable tea shop. Not because she has to, but because she must be busy. She and Caresse will be the only women present. It is the men who interest me. You see, without the diamond expert, whom we may except since I have only met him once and Caresse not at all, there are four. I am not eliminating from this list young Frisby, the reporter on the News. Caresse went to school with him, although we do not see much of him. Then there is Philip Farren, my lawyer, Will Clinton, the chemist, and Eddie Harmer, who lives on his money. One of these men, lieutenant, is coming here to-night to put a finish to me, to make it possible for himself to win my wife, and to take the formula. Of this formula there is only one copy. Any one would think that I would naturally have another in a safe deposit box or some place as secure. But, no. If I die, my wife is not to have this formula. No one is. My secret of manufacturing diamonds dies with me. Caresse and her lover will not benefit by the fruits of my brain after they have rendered me powerless.”
The lieutenant put the list of guests slowly into his pocket. He seemed undecided about something.
“Do you mean to tell me,” he asked, “that your wife is in the plot to murder you?”
The professor’s face twisted grimly.
“I think that if I am killed, Caresse will know by whom and why,” he said deliberately. “I wanted you to know that. Her beauty and charm are quite unusual. There is something magnetic and potent about her personality. You will not believe that she can be capable of deception. But if I am murdered to-night, I have given you the motive. Remember that. That is more than you often get, lieutenant, before a crime has been committed!”
“But what makes you think that your wife is in love or that she is aware of these warning notes?” asked Williams.
“I know my wife,” said the professor grimly, “and you do not. And you never will. Don’t flatter yourself that you ever will, no matter what comes out of all this. But she cannot fool me.”
Lieutenant Williams, who had solved many strange cases, and was accustomed to many weird stories, simply stared at the professor. He could not imagine a man who knew that his end was near, acting as he was acting.
“The formula,” went on the professor calmly, “is typed upon a small square of paper. It is secreted in this room. Not even Jock knows where it is. If I am killed, not even Caresse, frantically searching, will find it.”
The lieutenant’s face showed varying emotions. He did not believe the professor quite sane. And yet, if the man could not make the diamonds in that absurd crucible, he must have a pretty store of the gems somewhere about! And what was his game? Nothing could make young Williams believe that any man could manufacture genuine diamonds.
And this murder stuff—
In any ordinary case he would have given any one who told him such a yarn the laugh long since, but Professor Wheatland was different. If he called on the police for help, he must be given help. He could not afford to forget the coming dinner party and laugh it off, and then have a hurry call come in to headquarters during the evening from the Wheatland mansion. But it was something new to the head of the murder squad to be summoned to the scene of crime before the crime had taken place, and that by the victim himself! No, he would not dare pass this up.
“You have no idea in what manner this criminal will approach you, professor?” he asked as he rose.
“Not the slightest.”
“Very well,” said the lieutenant with sudden decision. “I will attend your dinner to-night, professor, and study your guests with interest, you may be sure. If anything happens to you, you can be certain too, that we will get the man, no matter how clever he has been. Are you armed?”
“It would be of no use,” said Wheatland, with a strange smile. “A gun would do me no good against this danger, I somehow know. But if you advise it, I will carry one.”
“I certainly do advise it,” said the lieutenant with sharp suspicion. “There is nothing quite so comforting as an automatic in one’s pocket.”
As he spoke he swung upon the professor with a start, a very unpleasant sensation creeping up his spine. For in the air about them, inside that close cell-like apartment, there was growing the sound of a violin, a magnificent violin, and the thing it played was Chopin’s “Funeral March!”
“Great Scott!” cried Williams. “What is that?”
The professor had grown rather ghastly. He wiped his damp forehead and tried to smile.
“I didn’t want to tell you about that,” he said in a shaking voice. “I hear it all the time. It — more than the notes — has me rather rattled. Every now and then that cursed violin plays that depressing thing. You’ve no idea how it affects one.”
“But your wife — she plays?” asked Williams, rather bewildered.
“Not at all. Caresse is not musical. We have no radio and no musical instrument of any sort in the house. This is the ninth or tenth time I have heard the thing. At night it is hideous, when I am down here alone.”
The sound of the violin was dying out. Exquisitely played, it was growing fainter, and even as the lieutenant, using the combination he remembered, wrenched open the door, it ceased.
The softly carpeted corridor stretched away in both directions, entirely empty. There were no doors near the professor’s workroom.
“You have looked for this violin?” he asked the professor, as he returned to the room.
“Certainly,” said Wheatland still mopping his brow. “I have done all that mortal man can to solve its mystery. Of course it is a human agency, and it is not the thought of ghosts which upsets me, lieutenant. It is the thought of my own death with my work unaccomplished, and my wife and her lover triumphing.”
Chapter III
A Murderer Defied
Dinner at the Wheatlands’. The long table, set in a room which was a triumph of paneling and tapestries, was weighed down with silver, exquisite china and glass. A delicate garden of orchids and ferns ran straight down the middle of it. Candlelight shed a soft glow over the women’s gowns, the men’s white shirt fronts, the silently moving figures of the two men serving, the pugilistic Jock and another man whom Lieutenant Williams did not know. A breath of flowers drifted in from the gardens through the open French windows.