The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck (16 page)

Daisy murmured assent, and then said, “Oh, before I forget, Davy. I saw the prescription Wyck gave to Sylvia Jones.”

“How did you get to see that? Those things are supposed to be dark secrets.”

“I used my eyes,” she said. “I mean this way,” and she ogled me shamelessly. “I just wangled it out of the soda clerk. All it contained was salt, powdered chalk and oil of wintergreen mixed with water. He was just stalling her off, poor youngster.”

It was already quite dark. I felt Daisy shiver, as she stood with her shoulder close to mine, and a corresponding tremor went through me too.

“Scared?” I asked, putting an ostentatious, protective male arm around her waist.

“No, chilly. Winter’s on the way. I hate it, don’t you? Summer’s such a swell time of the year.”

“That reminds me, Daisy. I’d like one more look at that ruined farm, before it’s snowed under. Let’s take a picnic up there some Sunday afternoon and poke around, providing I’m still at large.”

“Good notion,” she said. “I’ll do it if you’ll promise to ask Biddy and Dr. Alling those questions, in the morning.”

“All right, if I get a decent chance.”

I was taking two regular meals a day still at Dr. Alling’s, but usually had breakfast with Biddy. Over my third cup of coffee I said, “By the way, Biddy, they’ll be trying to account for where some of us where that night when Wyck disappeared. I want to make sure I don’t pull any boners. Did you see me when I was lying around unconscious?”

“No, Mr. David. I come home and found not a sowl in the house, at all. They’d already taken ye to the hospital. But before all that, before it—happened—Dr. Alling comes in, lookin’ funny at me, and asks how Mike is. On the way home, he was, he said. I was too upset in me nerves to sleep. He says, ‘You go out, Mrs. Connell, and take a walk. I’ll watch Mike for ye,’ he says. So I did that, and when I come back, there was nobody there. And I run to the hospital, and they—they told me thin.”

“What had been the trouble, that you asked Dr. Alling to come?”

“It was himself that came, without askin’. He said he’d been workin’ late at the school, like the night before, and thought he’d stop by before goin’ to bed.”

With that ingenuous account for a starter, I went on to Dr. Alling’s private laboratory. He scarcely acknowledged my “Good morning.” I fiddled around with some notes and was putting a sheet of paper in the typewriter when he looked up.

“Saunders,” he said, his attitude as brisk as it had been preoccupied at first, “I’m called out of town on the most urgent business. Kent tells me you’re subpoenaed for tomorrow’s inquest. Everybody in town who has a knowledge of embalming is in some degree a suspect. The job was badly done, with insufficient fluid, so even the students who have only a theoretical knowledge of the process are under suspicion. Keep your eyes and ears open for me, during the public part of the procedure. I have Dr. Kent’s permission for you to make a transcript of the report. I am not sure how soon I shall return; but when I do, I shall want it at once. The very existence of this school is threatened. I’ve give my whole life, Saunders, to the task of making it possible for the country regions of this state to have the best of general practitioners. Last spring, before the legislature adjourned, I went down twice and had the utmost difficulty in killing a bill for investigation, in committee.”

He rose, his hands shaking. I wished Daisy could be there as he continued, “These men don’t know what they do! For the sake of a few foolish notions they’re willing to risk shutting off the fountainhead of health of this state. Good young doctors won’t come here from other schools, to work for less than a pittance in our small towns. As it now is, we can train men to go back to their home communities, men who couldn’t afford to go anywhere else to get their training. Well, the legislature won’t meet again till next February, unless the governor calls a special session. I’m going down, prepared to do something that is against my deepest moral convictions, Saunders, in the hope that it will keep that man Tolland from calling upon the governor for a special session, which he threatens to do in this telegram.”

He picked up the yellow sheet, but it fell at once from his trembling fingers. “I’m prepared to readmit his nephew, Prendergast, over the unanimous negative decision of my own faculty. Well, I shall require them to vote favorably, and we shall turn out one bad doctor, if it will save the school.”

He quieted, and spoke more normally. “Be very careful what you say at the inquest. Dr. Kent will do his duties unflinchingly. Therefore, I must caution you to try to be a perfect witness. Answer his questions in the simplest possible fashion, embodying all that he asks for. I advise you to volunteer nothing at this stage.

“Working with me, you have gathered facts about Dr. Wyck that are unknown to others. It would be unwise, for example, for you to tell him what you told me about Dr. Wyck’s talk of devils to Mike Connell. If his questions make the answer unavoidable, give it. But there are three reporters up from Boston this morning who would seize upon that for a most dangerously sensational story. The average reader simply does not realize that the study of demonology is a vexing phase of psychiatry. The newspapers would make it into a Roman holiday. Later on, the time will come when you and I can speak. But I hope you share my sincere conviction that there are features of this crime which cannot possibly be resolved by the usual public methods.

“Ah, and one more thing. Be very sure that Daisy Towers is similarly cautioned. You two have been seen together a lot recently, and if she knows as much as she usually does about what happens in this town, it may be that she already has more facts on hand than the coroner will learn. Have I made myself clear?”

I was thus at last confronted with a perfect excuse, not only to get an answer to Daisy’s question of the night before, but also to invite a showdown.

“I think so,” I answered, resolving to risk it, “but there’s one specific thing. I gather that the murder was committed on the night of Wyck’s disappearance, and that the suspects will be asked for alibis. If I am technically a suspect, how far should I go in describing my own whereabouts between the faculty meeting and the time I was taken to the hospital?”

“Tell no more than necessary to establish your whereabouts, and only as much as you are asked for.”

“Should I confess that my clothes were ripped and my face bruised when I came into your presence and explain why? Or should I let it be assumed that my condition, when I arrived at the hospital, was all due to Mike’s mauling?”

“I make no special cases at all, Saunders,” he said, half impatiently. “Give the briefest possible truthful answer to anything you’re asked. If I am asked to describe your appearance upon arrival, I shall tell them just what I remember of it, no less, no more.” He paused, and added, “But—I do not foresee the likelihood of being asked.”

I was so perplexed by this attitude that I quite forgot to press on to the question of whether or not he had come in answer to a call from Biddy. Later is seemed hardly necessary, as her testimony corroborated the fact that there had been no phone call recorded, and it was not conceivable that she would have left Mike alone, after midnight, to fetch a physician in any other way, when there was a phone in the house.

Dr. Alling picked up his hat, and said, “I’m driving down to Portland. Expect me back any time after tomorrow noon. You’ve got several days’ work on these slides to keep you busy.”

For the rest of the day I occupied myself by preparing glass mounts or slides of tissues taken from the various monsters born during the summer. I examined carefully the slides from the fused lower extremities of the symmeli. The ordinarily delicate skin was thickened and scaly—and the small, newly formed sweat glands, usually so numerous, were sparse and in many places absent. In a normal newborn infant bone has begun to form, but these creatures showed instead only a curious embryonic type of cartilage. The muscular structures were similarly primitive, subhuman. Not knowing the real source, one would have called these tissues from an extinct creature, midway between the lower forms and man, rather than what they probably were—atavistic flesh from a human type modified by obscure and powerful forces.

I no longer wondered that Prexy was so fascinated by the elusive causation of such results. Determination of these factors, and their control, would not only aid in suppressing the birth of monsters, which are rare in any event, but could be used to alter the direction of human evolution, or to quicken its progress toward the utopia of which we dream. Bu the same token, in unscrupulous hands, such findings could be turned to the most terrifyingly evil uses.

Late in the afternoon my thoughts were running riot with the implications of the theme, and I decided to go out for a short walk to cool off. On the way down I heard a noise in the basement, and investigated. It proved to have been made by the sheriff, who was still poking around for clues and fingerprints in the vault.

“You, hey?” he aid, thrusting out his neck and peering shrewdly. “D’ ye know any old saws?”

“Some,” I said, trying to meet his annoying suspicion with levity.

“Yeah, so do I, Mister—yeah, Mister—Saunders, ain’t it? I was jus thinkin’ of one. Funny, and you comin’ right along like that.”

He turned and puttered some more, and then said, “Yes, yes. Old saw, but a true one. Murderers haunt the scene o’ the crime.”

It was not a fear of the sheriff, but rather of the coroner, that made me sleep uneasily. Dr. Kent was an officer not only of the county, but of the state. Several times a year he was called from Altonville to make expert analysis of the organs of persons who had died under suspicious circumstances. As I dressed and ate a leisurely breakfast, I was under no illusions that the inquest, set for 9:30 A.M., would be anything other than a tense ordeal.

When I reached the town hall, the sheriff placed me in a small cubicle next to the magistrate’s courtroom. Charlie was already there, wishing that he had never got back from the war alive.

“Don’t be a fool, Charlie,” I said. “Anyway, I’m in Dutch as much as you are, certainly.”

“No, you’re not, Doc,” he said. “The sheriff looked over all that packin’ I pulled out o’ the door. Covered with fingerprints, and every one of ’em mine. If anybody else had of changed it, would ’a’ been smooched out, if he’d ’a’ used gloves. All them nice white lead joints I put on the leaky places in the chlorine pipes, every one o’ them had my fingerprints, and nobody else’s. The sheriff says I’m gonna hang. Christ, Doc, I didn’t do it. I didn’t do a thing.”

“Don’t pay attention to the sheriff, Charlie,” I advised. “He tries to scare everybody into a confession that way. He’s done it with me too.”

“No kiddin’, Doc?” He made a great effort to feel comforted.

Just then Marjorie Wyck was shown in. Her conduct was at an opposite extreme from Charlie’s—her “Good morning” precise and unemotional. She sat down and abstracted herself from the situation as completely as if we had all disappeared. I could not detect, on her almost classically molded features, the faintest flicker of emotion. I had a weird mental image of her, abstractedly going about the business of embalming her own father, with no more actual attention than she would pay to the preparation of a chicken roast.

This bizarre vision was broken when a deputy came to summon me before the coroner and his jury. As I was leaving by the inner door, Biddy Connell was shown in at the outer one, mumbling and protesting. “Mr. David,” she cried, hurrying up to me, “tell them I didn’t have anything to do with—”

I turned in time to place my finger on her lips and say, “Just answer the questions they ask you, Biddy. Don’t spend any time saying what you didn’t do. Promise?”

“Oh, all right then,” she said, flouncing down in a chair, her new dress bulging sadly in the back, where she had missed a couple of buttons. My last glimpse was of Charlie, staring at Biddy with his eyes positively popping.

The door closed behind me. Dr. Kent smiled reassuringly and motioned me to a chair. The jurors were grouped at his left. At his right sat the sheriff and the town clerk. Two of the jurors, a haberdasher’s clerk and a fruit seller, I recognized. The other four were strangers.

When I had been sworn, Dr. Kent said, “Mr. Saunders, please tell these gentlemen, simply but fully, the circumstances leading to the discovery of Dr. Wyck’s body.”

I was annoyed to realize that my voice sounded shrill as I told what has already been set down in this narrative, beginning when Charlie hailed me, and omitting of course any reference to my thoughts or suspicions. The coroner asked a few questions to clarify points of which I had already spoken. He paused and studied the paper before him, looking toward me once or twice, and then pursed his lips. I steeled myself to meet an embarrassing query, but he said only, “Thank you. You will remain where you are. I may have further questions for you.”

As no other witness was permitted to stay after finishing his testimony, I had the choice of thinking either than an exception was being made for me at Dr. Alling’s request or that I was the most suspected of all, slated for a final cross-examination in which a knowledge of the other witnesses’ depositions might help to embarrass and entangle me.

Marjorie was the second to be called. She answered with coolness and brevity, concluding that she had last seen her father at about twenty minutes to ten on the evening of April 3rd, and had heard footsteps, which she took for his, descending the porch stairs a few minutes later. Her description of the contents of the bundle, except for the one or two trivial omissions, coincided with the official listing made by the sheriff. When Dr. Kent referred to this document to refresh her memory, she agreed with it in its entirety, and gave the opinion that she knew of nothing else which might have been on her father’s person just before his death. Incidentally, the two blue books and the missing five hundred dollars, clues known to Dr. Alling, Daisy and myself, were not referred to at any time during the inquiry, or in any of its documents.