“Yes, yes. That seems quite probable,” Detective Dugan agreed.
Holmes continued. “Dr. Lavey, who had employed Mary for the last two years, said Mary never had visitors and had no signs of any friends or relatives. It might be noted that whenever a person seems to have no friends or relatives, the fact is almost surely just the opposite: that the person has friends or relatives of very formidable and oppressive natures whom the apparently lonesome soul wishes to avoid at all costs. It was a fact at hand that Mary had been distracted and depressed in recent weeks, which I surmised was a product of fearing the return of some old element in her life from which she was surely hiding. But to return to the kitten: I suspected that the gift was from one of the housemaid’s supposedly nonexistent friends, perhaps one that Mary accidentally met while out in Boston. This feeling was confirmed when, taking possession of Mollie, I determined through a little research that she was a mix of an Angora and a Coon-two quite expensive and prized breeds of cat, often the winners, in fact, of the premium in recent years of Boston cat shows. It was sound logic that little Mollie had come, therefore, from a fashionable region of Boston, a suspicion made stronger upon examining a map drawn up by Watson of the locations of Mary’s errands in her final weeks. Choosing a place near where Mary had been on an errand in the days before receiving the kitten, Dr. Watson will now remember that we watched from a restaurant window as two young women, aristocrats to the core, stopped at Mollie filled with surprise and recognition. Their surprise was enhanced when Mollie behaved as though she did not know them and had never before seen them. You see, I counted on the fact that Mollie’s mother had given birth to more than one kitten and, hoping that at least some of the physical traits of Mollie’s brothers or sisters would be superficially similar, she would be mistaken for having escaped from her home nearby.
“I had arranged for the services of several of Mrs. Smith’s Kindness Club boys to follow any persons who exhibited unusual interest in the kitten while she remained tied on the street. This occurring, the boys sent me back a note that night that the two fashionable young Brahmins had knocked at a nearby mansion and saw to their surprise
“Telephoning this woman, who had retired to a house by the shore for the summer months, I inquired to whom she had given the second kitten with prismatic eyes.
“‘Why, to my poor dear friend Mary,’ she said to me.
“‘Forgive me, madam, I am a stranger here. Is it customary for a woman of society to have a friend who is a housekeeper?’
“‘No, Mr. Holmes, it is certainly not. Mary Painting was a school friend of mine when we were mere girls. We had all heard she had married and moved west. When I happened to see her on the street in the dress of a housemaid, my heart broke for her! She seemed aloof and nervous. My house girl, Betsy, said she had recognized the woman I had been speaking with from the intelligence office, and believed she kept a position with a Dr. Lavey over the last years. I thought having one of our beautiful kittens would bring her cheer.’
“‘So you left Mollie the kitten for her?’
“‘Not I, Mr. Holmes! That doctor resided in a neighborhood I do not dare enter myself without an acute loss of reputation. I had one of my domestics give her to Mary. Mollie, is that what she named her? Why, that sounds like a housemaid. Why not just name the poor thing Biddy!’
“From that point on, my path ahead to resolving Dr. Lavey’s case was quite clear thanks to what Mollie’s former owner had revealed. I consulted the city records and found that a Mary Painting had married one George Fitzbeck five years ago. The name immediately meant something to me. When I was in Maine last week, attending to personal affairs, I had read in the newspaper there about the fugitive George Smith who was wanted for murdering a deputy sheriff in Brunswick after a daring escape. Smith had been in prison there for bigamy and forgery, and had pretended to be insane so that he would be transferred to the asylum, where he easily managed an escape. The sheriff’s men had found him with a stolen horse when Smith, without warning, fired from behind some rocks and blew off the deputy’s head. The newspaper had listed several of Smith’s aliases which included
“Whether or not Mary Painting knew what kind of man her lover was when she married him in her youth, we shall leave to the imagination. She moved with him out west, as her old Boston friends had correctly heard, where his criminal history records several outstanding warrants for horse theft in his youth and, later, for bigamy. When she recognized the extent of his character, or perhaps found out about his other wives, she returned to Boston and assumed a new name-Mary Ann Pinton-in order to hide. Penniless and likely disavowed long ago by her Boston family, she concealed herself in a humble station a universe away from her Beacon Hill girlhood, as a housemaid who told her employer she had never been married and had no family. There she remained safely hidden.”
“Until Fitzbeck escaped,” I said.
“Correct, Watson. Mary read of the escape and feared for her life. We have heard from Dr. Lavey that she had become distracted and emotionally shattered in the very weeks after his escape, and often locked herself in her room. Nor, we can safely imagine, did she feel she could tell Dr. Lavey without losing her station for lying about her history. Mary feared more than anything that her husband would find her, and she was right. Through means Detective Dugan may ascertain later in questioning the murderer, the fugitive discovered her whereabouts. Entering the house by the rear door, he found Mary in the kitchen. From Detective Dugan’s accurate examinations of the injuries, I suspect Fitzbeck was attempting to convince her to leave with him, when she refused and tried to scream. He covered her face with his hand to stop her from screaming as he continued his attempt to persuade, but in her struggling against him his grip became harder, smothering her mouth and nose and suffocating her. When Dr. Lavey, in his habitual haze of opium, finally heard a noise and started down the stairs, the fugitive fled. The fugitive did not know he had just killed the girl, I might add.”
“Astounding, Mr. Holmes! But how did you know the murderer would be found in our prison?” Detective Dugan asked.
“Quite easy, Detective Dugan. I assumed it was likely the ruffian waited near the house hoping to find a time to speak again with Mary. When he heard shouting for the police, he fell into a panic. It has been my longstanding observation that the instinct of even the hardened criminal when panicked returns to his earliest form of offense-in this case, horse theft. I knew from Mrs. Smith that, in addition to the usual work of the Boston police, the Animal Rescue League had begun to place a secret service of detectives around Boston to diminish the terrible effect of horse theft on the unwilling beasts. Therefore, I did not think it unlikely that by the morning, the stolen horse, if there were one, would have been traced to its captor. Now, Fitzbeck knows enough of police to know that if he resisted and was captured, he would be investigated closely and in all probability found to be a wanted fugitive. However, if he went quietly, protesting that he mistook the horse as his own, and giving a false name, he would be handed a perfunctory sentence of a few months. I telephoned the police in Maine to retrieve George Smith’s Bertillon measurements, and then asked that Watson bring them to you with instructions to gather the prisoners that met those specifics.”
“But Mr. Holmes, you were able to identify the murderer without looking at his face! I could hardly believe it!”
“Detective Dugan, I did this not to put on a spectacle, but because I knew nothing of what George Fitzbeck, or George Smith, looked like. A forger, by rule, is quite skilled at changing his appearance through small adjustments in habits of grooming and hygiene. However, knowing that he had fooled the police in Maine into transferring him to an insane asylum, I examined his hands and arms. Criminals wishing to appear insane will usually chew off their fingernails or make cuts across their wrists that appear to be suicidal marks but in fact remain superficial and harmless. These marks could not be concealed even three or four weeks later. Our man, I found, had both of these on him, and was taken in as a horse thief. Concluding that while in prison he had not yet heard that his encounter with Mary had left her dead, I counted on further confirmation of his identity on my mention of Mary’s decease-as you saw with your own eyes.”
“There is one point I don’t understand,” I interjected, turning to our hostess. “Mrs. Smith, when we arrived here you were quite adamant that a cat could not be taken out of this building unless it is to a permanent home. Yet, you allowed Mollie to come with us to be used as an accessory in this case.”
“I am not deaf to reality, Dr. Watson,” Mrs. Smith replied forthrightly. “Our donations in these first months have
