Craig Kennedy Stories quotes

“

It has always seemed strange to me that no one has ever endowed a professorship in criminal science in any of our large universities.

”

I will begin what I have to say by remarking that the tracing out of a crime like this differs in nothing, except as regards the subject-matter, from the search for a scientific truth.

The forcing of man’s secrets is like the forcing of nature’s secrets.

Both are pieces of detective work. The methods employed in the detection of crime are, or rather should be, like the methods employed in the process of discovering scientific truth. In a crime of this sort, two kinds of evidence need to be secured.

“To my mind, Walter, it would be the height of the dramatic—far more dramatic than sending a bullet into a man.

Any fool can shoot a pistol or cut a throat, but it takes brains to be up-to-date.

”

“

Here in my hand, gentlemen, I hold the price of a woman’s beauty.

”

At last he turned to me and said, “

Walter, here is a ghost caught in the act.

”

“Thank you, Inspector. I don’t know what I’d do without your help,” said Kennedy, eagerly taking four small vials from him. “

Science is all right, but organisation enables science to work quickly.

And quickness is the essence of this case.”

Kennedy himself was so deeply absorbed that I had merely said good evening as I came in and had started to open my mail. With an impatient sweep of his hand, however, he brushed the whole mass of newspapers into the wastebasket.

“It seems to me, Walter,” he exclaimed in disgust, “that this mystery is considered insoluble for the very reason which should make it easy to solve⁠—the extraordinary character of its features.”

Inasmuch as he had opened the subject, I laid down the letter I was reading. “I’ll wager I can tell you just why you made that remark, Craig,” I ventured. “You’re reading up on that Wainwright-Templeton affair.”

There was no tourniquet that would confine the poison now in the scratch across his face. Back of those lacklustre eyes he heard and knew, but could not move or speak. His voice was gone, his limbs, his face, his chest, and, last, his eyes.

I wondered if it were possible to conceive a more dreadful torture than that endured by a mind which so witnessed the dying of one organ after another of its own body, shut up, as it were, in the fullness of life, within a corpse.

I looked in bewilderment at the scratch on his face. “How did he do it?” I asked.

But nothing but a most thorough cleaning can conceal them from the Uhlenhuth test, even when they are apparently wiped out.

It is a case of Lady Macbeth over again, crying in the face of modern science, ‘Out, out, damned spot.’

“I was able with sufficient definiteness to trace roughly a course of blood-spots from the fireplace to a point near the door of the living-room. But beyond the door, in the hall, nothing.”

I was burning with curiosity, but somehow, by a perverse association of ideas, I merely reproached Kennedy for not taking enough rest.

“Oh,” he smiled. “If I hadn’t been working last night, Walter, I couldn’t have rested at all for thinking about it.”

When we arrived at the field Norton was already there with his head bandaged. I thought him a little pale, but otherwise all right. Jaurette was sulking, but Sinclair had finished the repairs and was busily engaged in going over every bolt and wire.

“Are you going Saturday night?”

“I am afraid to go and afraid to stay away,” was the reply, and the voice of the fifty-thousand-dollars-a-season tenor was as human as that of a five-dollar-a-week father, for at bottom all men, high or low, are one.

“ ‘We will not fail as we did Wednesday,’ ” reread Craig. “What does that mean?”

No, I can think of no one. I know you Americans often speak of the Black Hand as a myth coined originally by a newspaper writer. Perhaps it has no organisation. But, Professor Kennedy, to me it is no myth.

What if the real Black Hand is any gang of criminals who choose to use that convenient name to extort money? Is it the less real? My daughter is gone!

”

Apparently satisfied with his scrutiny, Kennedy got up to go, complimenting the proprietor on his wine. I could see that Kennedy had made up his mind as to his course of action.

“How sordid crime really is,” he remarked as we walked on down the street.

“Look at that place of Albano’s. I defy even the police news reporter on the Star to find any glamour in that.”

One of the ladies was playing on the piano as we entered. It was a curious composition—very rhythmic, with a peculiar thread of monotonous melody running through it.

The playing ceased, and all eyes were fixed on us.

Kennedy kept very close to Torreon, apparently for the purpose of frustrating any attempt at a whispered conversation with the señora.

Yet there was nothing voluptuous or sensual about it. I was raised above earthly things. Men and women were no longer men and women—they were brilliant creatures of whom I was one.

It was sensuous, but not sensual.

I looked at my own clothes. My everyday suit was idealised. My hands were surrounded by a glow of red fire that made me feel that they must be the hands of a divinity.

It was what, in college, we used to call “good football weather”⁠—a crisp, autumn afternoon that sent the blood tingling through brain and muscle.

Kennedy and I were enjoying a stroll on the drive, dividing our attention between the glowing red sunset across the Hudson and the string of homeward-bound automobiles on the broad parkway. Suddenly a huge black touring car marked with big letters, “P.D.N.Y.,” shot past.

In fact, they were sleek, well-fed, typical prosperous New Yorkers rather inclined to the noticeable in dress and carrying their avoirdupois as if life was an easy game with them. Most of them evidently belonged to the financial and society classes.

There were no tragedies; the tragedies were elsewhere⁠—in their offices, homes, in the courts, anywhere, but not here at the club.

Here all was life, light, and laughter.

It is only when one deals with infinitely large numbers of coups that one can count on infinitely small variations in the mathematical results. This game does not go on for infinity—therefore anything, everything, may happen.

Systems are based on the infinite; we play in the finite.

”