Swindled!: The 1906 Journal of Fitz Morgan Page 4

  “Understood,” I said, but thought, Oh, just tell us, you big baby!

  “We’re scheduled to stop in Cincinnati in three hours,” William Henry began. “But Dr. Freud believes the man, while still unconscious, is out of danger. The amyl nitrate has blocked the destructive power of the cyanide without killing him. Dr. Freud thinks he would be better off remaining on the train until San Francisco, where he can receive the best medical care.”

  If I’d had the time, I would have loved to have visited the palace of Fans-Home of the Cincinnati Reds base-ball team!

  Since William Henry seemed willing to share information, I asked, “Who else had access to this car?”

  “This Pullman belongs to the government.”

  I said impatiently, “Yes, we know. But who else had access?”

  “Well, I did. And Agent Howard, of course.”

  “And the other man?” I asked.

  He blinked. “What other man?”

  I scowled at him. “Yesterday, at Pennsylvania Station, I saw two men board this Pullman. In fact, they dropped a dollar bill, which I was trying to return to them this morning.”

  “You’re full of balloon juice. I haven’t seen anyone else in this car.”

  Balloon juice? Who did he think he was talking to? “That only means you haven’t seen the other man,” I hissed between clenched teeth. “It doesn’t mean that he hasn’t been here.”

  William Henry mouthed the words “balloon juice” to Judge and made a face as if indicating that I was crazy.

  I felt my fingers curl into fists.

  “But Agent Howard did have a cat!” Judge blunted, cutting through the tension. “I saw a man carrying a cat last night when he passed through our car to the dining car. The poor thing was very still and looked like it was sick. It must be frightened and is hiding, because I haven’t seen it since.”

  “Not to worry.” I leaned down to pat Teddy, who had been sleeping at my feet. His big head rose groggily.

  “Cat. Find cat, Teddy. Find cat,” I said to him out loud. But Teddy just looked at me, wagging his tail. He was waiting for me to give him a hand signal in Teddyspeak. With my right hand I pointed sharply away from me, the signal for FIND.

  He didn’t budge. Find what? his eyes asked.

  I glanced at William Henry, and wished he wasn’t watching this. Then, I turned back to Teddy and made the signal for CAT. I stuck out my tongue and put two fingers behind my head like pointy ears.

  William Henry burst out laughing and I felt my face redden, but it was worth it. Teddy understood the signal. He began to sniff around the room. Finding nothing that interested him, he propped himself on his hind legs and used his front paws to turn the brass doorknob. It took a few little hops to reach the knob, but when he got the door open, Teddy trotted off to check the rest of the train.

  Teddy would love this!

  HOUSE DETECTIVE : PAVLOR UNIVERSITY

  BASIC CANINE DETECTION SKILLS 101

  COURSE DESCRIPTION: In this class you will learn the secret of training your four-legged friend to crack your next case.

  1) Practice with your dog in a room filled with different objects.

  2) In a commanding voice, say “Find ball,” and whatever you want Fido to find.

  3) When Fido gets near the ball, reward him with food. Congratulations.Fido knows what “ball” is.

  4) Say, “find ball,” again. This time, wait for Fido to bring the ball to you and give him more food. Now Fido knows he should bring the ball you to get more treats.

  William Henry chortled. “I believe I can die a happy man, for now I’ve seen everything. You might just as well have asked that old shoe to find the cat.”

  I had my doubts about Teddy–the smell of a piece of cheese would be enough to distract him from his mission. But I didn’t want to give William Henry the satisfaction of knowing that. “Don’t die yet. You’ll want to see me crack this case first,” I said coolly.

  I wanted to show him he was dealing with a skilled detective, so I continued in my professional-sounding voice. “We should write down what we know so far. It will help us focus.”

  Taking a pen from the desk, I wrote:

  What we know so far:

  1.Agent Howard has been poisoned.

  2.Two men boarded government Pullman. Only one has been seen since.

  3.Suspect may still be on the train.

  4.Agent’s cat may be on the train.

  The three of us looked at the list.

  William Henry tapped the paper with one grease-stained finger. “There are 173 people on board this train. How can we determine who the criminal is?”

  “Simple,” I answered, talking off the top of my head. I wanted to regain some ground with William Henry, and so I tried to sound confident. “We narrow down that large number to a smaller number of suspects.”

  He arched a blonde eyebrow doubtfully. “Yes, but how?”

  “We figure out what kind of people commit a crime like poisoning and make a description of their personality traits.” I gained steam as I spoke. “Then we compare that description to the passenger list. Whoever doesn’t match that description, we eliminate.”

  “That’s brilliant!” Judge cried. “They did something similar in the Jack the Ripper case in London almost twenty years ago.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “We have to create a criminal profile! Let’s go back to the laboratory compartment and begin.”

  Once there, we settled onto the comfortable chairs

  LONDON TIMES,1889.

  WHO IS JACK THE RIPPER?

  George B. Philips , a police surgeon in London ,England, was the first person to make a personality profile in an attempt to catch a criminal, Dr.Philips was trying to catch none other then Jack the Ripper, the Killer who murdered seven women in London in 1888. After looking at the wounds of the third victim, Dr. Philips determined that the killer must have a medical background.

  Later, Police surgeon Thomas Bond contradicted this profile. He examined the last victim of jack the Ripper and said, “In each case, the mutilation was inflicted by a person who had neither scientific nor anatomical knowledge.” Bond suggested the police hurt for an ordinary, neatly dressed man who was middle-aged. He said a man of “great coolness and daring” committed the crimes.

  While both profiles give police a certain type of person to look for, Jack the Ripple has not been caught.

  This case fascinates me!

  and couches. William Henry disappeared for a moment. He came back carrying a small tray of tea and biscuits, and we helped ourselves. Outside, the early evening sky had grown overcast, but I could still make out the midwestern prairie our train was traveling through. The flat landscape seemed to go on forever.

  Setting my cup and saucer on a table, I went to a small chalkboard and wrote CRIMINAL PROFILE.

  “Where do we begin?” Judge asked.

  “If we are trying to track the criminal,” I said, “I think it’s important to look at the crime.”

  “It was a crime of poison,” Judge said immediately, and I wrote CRIME IS POISON.

  “Well,” William Henry said, “to know something about poison, I would think you’d have to be educated.”

  “True,” Judge agreed. While I didn’t want to give the porter too much credit, I wrote EDUCATED on the chalkboard under CRIMINAL PROFILE. “What else?” I asked.

  “You can poison someone from a distance,” Judge said.

  William Henry nodded. “Yes, it is not like using a gun or a knife, where you have to be near the victim. You can simply leave the poison somewhere, perhaps in food or drink. This could mean our suspect does not like to be around other people.”

  I wrote ANTISOCIAL on the board. But this seemed fairly obvious. After all, poisoning someone wasn’t exactly a friendly thing to do.

  “I have something I’d like to add,” I said. I wrote the word ACCESS on the board. “Our criminal would have to have access to the scene of the crime. And I can only thi
nk of one person in this room who fits that description.”

  William Henry’s face turned dark.

  “Now, now,” Judge said, trying to cut through the tension again.

  “Who else had the opportunity and the ability to enter the Pullman–”

  “Enough!” William Henry suddenly shouted. And then as if catching himself, he said more quietly, “It’s late. Miss Pinkerton has to take her leave and go to her bedroom.”

  “I will do no such thing,” Justine cried. “We’re making real progress here.”

  But William Henry wouldn’t waver. He held up his pocket watch as if to show us it was time itself that made the demand.

  However, he did cave in to one of Judge’s wishes: I was allowed to sleep in one of the spare sleeping compartments. Thinking about the hard bench in the coach car, I eagerly accepted the invitation.

  As I write this, I am basking in luxury in one of the Pinkertons’ sleeping compartments. It’s not very wide–I can almost touch the walls on either side at the same time if I stretch out my arms. But a person could sleep here happily every night. It has clean, fresh sheets over a mattress of soft down. Comfy, feather-stuffed pillows are heaped on top. And I have my own private bathroom!

  Even in the middle of all this comfort, though, something is nagging at me. I can’t help but wonder about William Henry. He had access to the government Pullman car, and he seems to match the description of our profile. Did he cut the investigation short because of his duty to Judge–or because I was getting too close to the truth?

  April 15, 1906

  This morning, I was once again awakened by the shouts of a girl–but now it was Judge, knocking loudly on my door. “Get up, Fitz! Meet me in the laboratory!”

  I sat up in the amazing comfort of pillows and soft sheets. Why did rich people ever get out of bed? And I winced. Looking out the window, I saw the sun hadn’t risen yet, and an orange-colored mist clung to the ground.

  Getting myself together, I examined my appearance in the mirror to make sure I was the character I wanted to be that day. Then I headed out the door. The thought of solving the mystery of who poisoned Agent Howard added a little bounce to my step.

  Judge was tapping her foot as I entered the laboratory. A purple pin in the shape of a peacock was shining on her gray blouse. “There’s bread, strawberry jam, and orange juice on the table by the window,” she said. “We can eat breakfast as we work.”

  As I helped myself to a piece of the delicious-smelling bread slathered with jam, she demanded impatiently, “What is our first task?”

  I had to bite back a laugh. Judge might take it the wrong way if I told her that she reminded me of Teddy when he was waiting to sink his teeth into a bone.

  I finished the toast quickly, wiped my hands on a napkin, and went to the work desk. I took the dollar bill I’d found on the platform from my pocket. “I want to find out who was in the government Pullman car around the time of the poisoning,” I told Judge. “William Henry says only Agent Howard and he had access. But I think someone else was there.”

  “How do we prove that?” Judge asked.

  “By comparing the fingerprint we got from the broken teacup to a print from the dollar bill I found in the station.” As I spoke, I powdered the bill. “If the finger-prints from the teacup and the dollar bill don’t match, that might mean there was more than one person in the government Pullman.”

  Normally, a bill would be covered with many prints as it passed from person to person. But this bill was crisp, as if it had not been in circulation for long. I found only two very good prints. One of them could be mine, I knew.

  I lifted the two prints from the dollar bill. Then I placed the slide under the microscope next to the one containing the teacup fingerprint and began a step-by-step comparison.

  The print from the teacup matched one of the prints from the dollar bill!

  “What does it mean?” Judge asked.

  I explained that the same person who held the teacup must have handled the dollar bill, too. That meant this person was one of

  HOW TO COMPARE FINGERPRINTS

  Here are different types of fingerprints groups:

  Mine has a whorl!

  AGENT KNOW-IT-ALL’S: If you are comparing one fingerprint to others, start by identifying a main feature of the fingerprint. Does it have a whorl? A loop? Or an arch? After you finger that out ,Compare it to other prints.

  the two people I saw boarding the government Pullman yesterday.

  Judge didn’t seem impressed. “But the prints probably belong to Agent Howard,” she said. “He might have dropped the dollar bill that you found, and later, he could have picked up the teacup. That would mean that William Henry could still be correct, there was only one person on board the government car–Agent Howard.”

  “But you’re making an assumption,” I explained. “We don’t know if the matching prints belong to Agent Howard. They might be someone else’s. If we had a print from Agent Howard we could–”

  “Dr. Freud won’t let you near him,” Judge said, shaking her head. “This morning I went to check on Agent Howard. He’s been moved to a compartment in the sleeping car. Dr. Freud wouldn’t even let me look at him. He said the agent needed rest.

  A good detective thinks fast. “There must be a way to get his fingerprint,” I said. “I still believe that there was someone else in that Pullman–”

  “Ayyyyyyyyyy!”

  A heart-stopping scream pierced the air.

  “What in the world?” Judge asked, her eyes wide.

  It was almost impossible to say where the scream had come from. But it had cut through the clanking of the train and made its way to the laboratory compartment of the Pinkerton Pullman.

  “Noooo!!!” Another scream, full of terror and anger, tore through the air. I felt cold fear squeeze my body.

  “Someone needs our help,” I said.

  Judge gave a tiny nod. And with that, we rushed toward the door.

  But before we could get there, it was thrown open by William Henry.

  His eyes were wild. His shirttail had come untucked and stuck out of his pants. On anyone else this might not have been noticeable. Yet on a person who was always so in control of his appearance, it was unnerving.

  Was William Henry the criminal after all? Had he come to attack us?

  “Stay back,” I said, starting to warn Judge.

  That’s when William Henry announced in a somewhat shaky voice, “I think another passenger has just been poisoned!”

  Of course it’s strange, but I was relieved in a way.

  A poisoning meant the danger was outside the room, not standing right there with us.

  “That’s awful!” Judge shouted.

  The three of us hurried from the room, heading toward the front of the train and the screams.

  “Nooo! Ohhhh! My baaaaby! Help me, oh help me!”

  The cries grew louder as we raced through the sleeper and the first-class car, where riders were looking at one another with confusion and fear.

  When we ran into the coach car where my seat was located, I spotted Mrs. Notabe. She was sitting on the floor toward the front.

  Still wearing her long black gloves, she cradled the limp body of her small daughter. Asyla’s face was ashen. Her head was tilted back at an odd angle, and a line of spittle ran down her chin. Dr. Freud was kneeling over the little girl, one hand on her wrist to check her pulse.

  Judge, William Henry, and I stopped about three feet away, halted by the force of Mrs. Notabe’s eyes, which flashed with rage. From this angle, I could see Asyla clearly. It seemed that William Henry had been correct about the poisoning. The little girl’s fingernails and lips were a bright cherry red. I felt certain that if Mrs. Notabe had allowed me to get any closer, I would have smelled the odor of bitter almonds on Asyla’s breath. But I knew if I moved closer, Mrs. Notabe would have scratched my eyes out, like a lioness defending her wounded cub.

  Who on earth would poison a small
child? It was now very clear that we were up against a ruthless criminal.

  Dr. Freud stood up and turned to William Henry. “Bring me my bag at once. I must administer amyl nitrate to this child. In the meantime, we will give her fluids to–”

  “You fool!” Mrs. Notabe hissed at him and pushed him back. “Get away from her! You would give fluids to the victim of cyanide poisoning? Is it your intention to kill my daughter? Get back!” Then turning her burning eyes on the rest of us, she shouted “All of you! I will care for my child!”

  Just then Mr. Spike arrived. “What’s this?” he asked, shocked at seeing the limp Asyla in her mother’s arms. And then he quickly added in his syrupy voice, loud enough for the passengers to hear, “Seems someone else has a stomachache!”

  Mrs. Notabe turned to Mr. Spike with her lips drawn back in a grimace. “If you take one more step in our direction–”

  William Henry must have sensed that the situation might grow violent. He turned to us and said to Judge, “I want no arguments from you. Go to your dining car, and I will bring lunch to you.”

  Judge appeared tempted to argue, but she kept her mouth shut, and we both turned back toward the Pinkerton Pullman.

  “Did you notice anything strange about all that, beyond the obvious, I mean?” I asked her as we walked through the first-class car.

  “Yes.” Judge nodded. “How did Mrs. Notabe know that her daughter had been poisoned by cyanide? That’s something most people wouldn’t know unless they have medical training.”

  “Or a detective background,” I added. “I’ll bet she knows more about Asyla’s poisoning than she let on. I don’t think she’s being completely honest.”

  Judge glanced at me. “Well, she’s not alone is she?”