Chapter 11
In the meantime, the mail that came out the day after the event could have carried the warning letter. It could also have carried the same letters that Mrs. Lewis had written on December 31, 1891 and that Bacigalupi says he did not take to the station because he believed there was no reason because her death had already occurred.
Here, then, is the third unknown that appears in this story: a third character cloaked in mystery who makes the intrigue of this drama more entangled by sending anonymous letters to other people involved in this process. They insist it is a crime of poisoning Mrs. Isabel Lewis. There is a difference, however, between his acts and two other mysterious events: 1) Hewner’s appearance clandestinely embarking on the George W. Elder in the late hours of the night protected by Mrs. Lewis and Dockendorff who are waiting for him at the Callao pier. 2) The presence of that character that Mrs. Martin saw in the bedroom of Mrs. Lewis in the Hotel Maury, and perhaps also noticed coming hastily down the stairs by the steward Lopez..
Hewner is not associated with the crime itself. The participation that he has had, apart from having taken advantage of the voyage of the merchant steamer to avoid the action of his plaintiffs pursued before the Courts of Peru, may refer to the commercial aspect that we have seen when Mrs. Lewis returned from California to Lima
The man seen by Mrs. Martin could be involved, but could also happen to be some stranger to the crime, or a hallucination of Mrs. Martin that people who suffer from a true neurosis that disturbs the balance of the mental faculties.
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As to the suicide, it is precisely the desire that Mrs. Lewis could have to take advantage of the insurance in favor of her children. We reject this idea of suicide. How then could she recommend Baciglaupi to collect the policy, or to give her children their value under suicidal premeditation? The provisions suicidal people make for after they have taken their own life can include as much as they want except the concealment of the fact of their voluntary death. They know that their mortal remains will have to be identified. The suicidal person chooses to leave this earth by his/her own hand, does not believe the earth or people worthy to live among any longer, that there is a better place where happiness is certain and not a mere illusion and love is certain and eternal, where the truth dwells if the suicidal person is a believer in the immortality of the afterlife. If he/she does not believe in immortality, because he/she considers his/her torments and the endless stings of pain too distressing and would rather return to nothingness; but he/she always wants to leave a testimony of his/her act.
Under this concept, Mrs. Lewis could only decide to ingest poison, resolving to renounce the insurance so that her children would not benefit from the policy that she had only purchased it a few months ago. She may have been under the influence of a serious mental disturbance that would bring her into madness, but which was not noticed by Mr. Agnoli’s diagnosis on the eve of her death nor by the friends that surrounded her in her last moments of life.
Thus, when this process is ruled out by the Judge of the Court, the Union Central will not pay the insurance if the verdict is suicide. The unhappy Mrs. Lewis will be sacrificed to a banal, almost implausible passion, deprived of the amount that it represents, of her jewels, of the other insurance of the Chicago company, of the Letters of Exchange and the value of the opium that she brought from California, that is still missing. Her children, whom she has always thought of, the only people she missed when coming to Peru and to whom she sent, through her friend Kate, the only expression of tenderness that can be seen from her in the last words that have been preserved of her in indelible characters.
The declaration that her friend Kate has made before the Justice of the United States shows the spirit of Isabel in which it can be seen that, more than by a passionate impulse, she was dominated and worried by a mercantile speculation. Complying with the summons issued by the Judge, Dr. Arias, to the city of Chicago, Dr. James Gaggin, Court Judge of Cook County, Illinois, conducted the following interrogation:
Judge: What is your name?
Kate: Kate Wheeler
Judge: Age?
Kate: Thirty-eight years.
Judge: Occupation?
Kate: Housewife
Judge: Did you know Mrs. Isabel Lewis?
Kate: Yes, since March 1890.
Judge: Where?
Kate: In San Francisco, California.
Judge: How did you meet her?
Kate: I met her because she was my neighbor.
Judge: On what date did she separated from the neighborhood?
Kate: At the end of ’91.
Judge: Have you seen her since then?
Kate: I never saw her again.
The Judge changes the formula of the interrogation to an exposition of facts of which the questioned one is aware. She says in regard to the Judge’s question, that Isabel had expressed to her the need to come to Peru to settle definitively the commercial matters that she had pending with Dockendorff and to collect from him an amount of money that he owed her. That for this purpose she had shipped to him several goods that would double the capital employed.
The Judge continues the interrogation after hearing this exposition of Kate.
Judge: Did Mrs. Lewis ever indicate to you that she intended to commit suicide?
Kate: Not in words.
Judge: In what way?
Kate: Pointing to her chest.
Judge: And did she show you any objects?
Kate: No. I grabbed her to remove whatever was in her chest that might be a poison.
Judge: And did you get it?
Kate: No, because she herself told me she had nothing.
The Judge insists on getting an explicit statement about the poison and suicide intentions. Kate expresses ignorance of all knowledge about the acquisition of poison, and to insist that Mrs. Lewis showed great anxiety for her commercial affairs in Peru; but she does not give evidence of suicidal intentions in her.
In this interrogation, the text inserted by the Judge of the Crime of Lima, Dr. Arias, to the Judge of Chicago has been somewhat altered. There are only few alterations from the original that shall appear in the proceedings.
Kate, then, who is the person to whom Isabel communicated her intimate affections, for whom she had opened her heart without reservations so as to make her aware of the Dantesque indifference she had for her husband, Captain Lewis. Kate did not hear her speak of suicide which is in harmony with the last written confidences made to her by Isabel and which Kate ignored when she gave her statement to the Chicago Judge.
The substantial part of the interrogation transcribed by the Judge of Lima to the Justice of North America is dedicated to discovering the acquisition of a poison by Mrs. Lewis. It is, therefore necessary to obtain an autopsy in order to determine judicially whether the death has come from the ingestion of a poison, or from the mistake of Dr. Agnoli’s medical treatment, or from an acute crisis produced by mitral insufficiency. If any of these were the case, it would remove all the signs of criminality, ending in an absolute dismissal
Therefore, the solution depends on the analysis and conclusions contained in the medical-legal opinion of the professors of the faculty of medicine who have been appointed for this purpose.