The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck (28 page)

The sheriff’s just back from a trip, having located all three of the fellows in last year’s class who had moved over the state border to serve their interneships. He got the prints of all of them, and none resembled those on his precious light bulb. That leaves nobody but Muriel Finch (who’s dead), Dick Prendergast, and Coroner Kent. The light bulb clue, of course, isn’t worth a damn, but the sheriff won’t be convinced of it until he has everybody fingerprinted. He has three lists: every student who was in school when Wyck was killed—every member of the faculty at that time—and every interne and nurse and hospital attendant.

There is now only one person left on each of the lists. The rest are all crossed off. Of course, Prendergast and Alling might just possibly be in cahoots about that period after the faculty meeting when they were supposed talking things over at Alling’s house for an hour. They might have done it then, and the prints might be Prendergast’s. But no, that can’t be. Dick’s cast-iron alibi had him all the way down to Shoulder Lake before midnight, with two check-ups on the way. He’s certainly out of it. There’s nobody really left, out of the sheriff’s list, except Kent. Wouldn’t it be a beautiful surprise if the nitwit old sheriff actually proved to have been right, and found that the last man left on his list was the one who had put the prints on that bulb! Nobody even knows whether Kent has an alibi, and he and Charlie are the ones who knew most about the vault. Kent had a key to it of his own. I wonder.

Marjorie Wyck and Ted Gideon are still on my private list. The sheriff doesn’t know about Ted, and he already has Marjorie’s prints. I wish I could decide whether Alling and Daisy are trying to frame me because they honestly believe my alibi is the bunk, or whether they’re doing it to cover their own guilt. I, like a lamb for the shearing, have told them my whole story, and neither of them has confided in me. Daisy has never even pretended to account for her own whereabouts, that night. And I gave Alling all the evidence to convict me of murdering Muriel, if he wants to use it. Good God!

I got my marks today. I’ll graduate all right, if I can stay out of jail long enough. I would have done better if I had spent less time scribbling on this story, night after night, when I should have been studying.

11:50 P.M., Wednesday
3rd May, 1933

This has been the sheriff’s field day, for fair, and another of my convictions has gone haywire. Here’s how it happened. Dick Prendergast had been wearing gloves all year, to assert his right not to be fingerprinted without due process of law. This afternoon, he and I heard a yell of “Oh, Doc,” from Charlie, and went down to the preparation room. This year the supply of stiffs fell way off, but we found Charlie with three of them on his hands. The bodies had remained undiscovered for two or three days, and were rather gamey before they reached us. One we dunked in the formaldehyde pit, too far gone to bother with. The other two we embalmed.

Dick, of course, took off his trick gloves to put on rubber ones while helping in the process. These we strip off by seizing them at the cuff and pulling them inside out. He pulled off the right one with his left hand, and had placed his fingers of that hand against the other glove, to pull it off too, when I, quite by accident, struck my elbow against a reagent bottle on the shelf beside the sink. Dick caught it in his right hand as it fell, said, “Look out what you’re doing, you clumsy dope,” and set it back on the shelf. At that moment, like a flash out of nowhere, the sheriff pounced upon it.

Dick grabbed for the bottle, but the sheriff whipped out a gun. “Don’t you go assaultin’ an officer of the law,” he said by way of warning, “or I’ll pot ye one through the head, with my friend Saunders here for a witness to self-defense. Save the state a heap o’ trouble, gettin’ you hung the usual way.”

Dick then backed off, with a shrug, and said, “You’ll lose your job, Palmer, for this little act. Go ahead, I’ll have the same witness to prefer charges against you of illegal methods.”

“Nothin’ illegal about pickin’ up a bottle and lookin’ at it,” the sheriff commented. “Here, Saunders, have a look here.”

To my amazement, I noticed a set of prints resembling those on the light bulb, and sung around quickly to see what Dick would be doing. But he was quite nonchalantly washing his hands.

“What’d he have on his hands to make these here white prints?” Sheriff Palmer inquired suspiciously. “Young feller, was you crawfishin’ after all, when you showed me what kind o’ prints embalming fluid would make? Speak up.”

The prints were cloudy white, like the ones on the original bulb. Then the explanation dawned on me. When I had made the test with embalming fluid, for the sheriff, last fall, there had been nothing on my fingers but the fluid itself. But Dick’s fingers, before he touched them to the damp left glove, had been covered with talcum powder, which we always dusted inside the rubber gloves to keep them from sticking. The fingers of his right hand, still covered with the fine powder, had touched the damp left glove just long enough to convert the film of dry powder into a thin layer of pasty stuff, which had served to impress on the reagent bottle a set of clear, white, opaque prints.

I explained this to the sheriff, in my own defense. He grunted, took out his little book, and crossed off Prendergast’s name.

“Thought I had ye, at first,” he said. “What the devil did ye put me to all this trouble fer, all year, ye young jackass? Them wasn’t your prints on the bulb.”

Dick grinned at him cheerfully, and said, “Just to defend the Bill of Rights against illegal usurpation of power by petty officers of the law. Shall we call it quits, Sheriff? I won’t sic the senator on you, if you’ll quit follow me around. Shake?”

The sheriff snorted. “Hey, you,” he said to me. “Did ye ever notice Coroner Kent with a strip o’ stickin’ plaster round his right thumb?”

“Why—yes. I think there was something the matter with his thumb the last time he performed a post. He usually does most of the cutting for himself. But he didn’t even put on gloves last time. HE just pointed things out with his scalpel, and I remember that his thumb was bandaged.”

“Yeah? Now, just when was that?”

“Last Friday evening.”

“When’d he do the last thingummy, before that one?”

“I don’t think he’s done but that one since Jarvis died.”

“Um. And ye never noticed his thumb bandaged but that once?”

“Not to remember it.”

“Um. Well, I have. That right thumb o’ his has been bandaged for a long time. Ye couldn’t possible figger out any idee why he’d keep it bandaged, could ye? Don’t say a word. Mustn’t ever say anythin’ ag’in that high an’ might character, around here, young feller.”

The more I reflected, the more startling became the assumption that the sheriff, by his slow, sly method, might actually have narrowed down his list of suspects in a purely logical way. The one who least wanted to be fingerprinted should be the longest to evade Sheriff Palmer’s efforts. Prendergast, the runner-up in the game, had been driven as usual by his stubborn belief in an abstract principal. Anyone who could hold out longer than Dick must have even better reasons. And Coroner Kent is the only person whose fingerprints have not been observed out of all that list of students, faculty, and hospital attendants. The sheriff himself seems satisfied that Muriel had a good alibi, even though her name is not yet actually crossed off. But no one knows, at this moment of writing, what Kent’s alibi is.

Moreover, Dick and I have unwittingly proved, in our little gloves and bottle act, that those fingerprints on the bulb in all probability really were put on by the murderer, after he had embalmed the body and was hurrying to leave the scene of his crime. He had been so hasty that he had paused in the process of pulling off his gloves to give the bulb the twist which may yet betray him. I wonder.

At any rate, it’s to my advantage to help out the sheriff in any way I can, before Daisy and Alling “precipitate the dénouement,” as he so pleasantly put it—the dénouement which they seem to have cooked up to incriminate me. Tomorrow Alling gives his annual lecture. May it choke him. Of course, I’ve had to aid, all along, in the work of preparing his damned slides for him. He’s kept up his acting pretty well too.

When I saw Daisy tonight, I couldn’t help being a bit sarcastic, no matter how foolish it was of me. But I don’t think she suspected anything. She took it the same way as before, instead of flaring up. I wish to hell I didn’t still have a lingering idea that I love her, in spite of what she’s done. The alluring little bitch.

10:14 P.M., Thursday
4th May, 1933

Well, they’ve got me. I’m writing this in jail. I don’t see that it makes any difference whether anybody sees me writing here or not. Daisy knows all about my diary. Perhaps I should tell the sheriff to go get it, before Daisy does. It’s got stuff in it that would make things look pretty sour for Alling, if they were known. Even she doesn’t know what I do about that dry-cleaning machine, and the missing kymograph.

Now let’s see if I can remember just what happened, tonight. About noon the town began to be pediculous with doctors from all over the state. Last year, it was Wyck who helped with the slides. This year it was I, and it’s my only important duty thank God, for some time.

The lecture began at 7:30 in the evening, on this last day of school. The crowd was mainly visitors. When I came in, early, to get the projecting machine ready, I found the sheriff there ahead of me, lurking for an unobtrusive chance to get the prints of Coroner Kent.

Alling’s subject was a report of researches in direct injection into the blood stream of various chemicals to ameliorate arteriosclerosis. The slides were mainly microphotographs of arterial tissue, stained to compare the effects of different chemicals. He outlined the problems and then signaled for the first slide. Just at this point I noticed Marjorie Wyck coming in. She took a seat in the back row. I wondered at her interest.

The projector was a standard balopticon that permits one slide to be changed while the other is in focus. I was, from long practice, handling them by the extreme edge to keep the illuminated surfaces clean. The lecture was nearing its end, when I noticed that one slide was disfigured near the center, by the prints, evidently, of a thumb on one side and of a forefinger on the other. Thinking only that Alling would be provoked at my carelessness in permitting a dirty slide in the box, I ran the slide holder back immediately, permitting the former slide to reappear on the screen, while I hastily pulled out the offending glass oblong to clean it. As I picked up the chamois from the box, Sheriff Palmer leaped on the stand, seized my wrist, and took the slide from me.

“Hey, what are you doing?” I asked.

“So I got ye at last, Mr. Crawfisher. Accessory after the fact, and mebbe better charges. Tryin’ to destroy state’s evidence.”

It then dawned on me that the prints had been recognized by the sheriff as those for which he had been hunting all through the school year. But whose were they? The bell in the booth began to ring insistently for another slide. But Palmer was slipping a handcuff on me. The idea flashed into my mind that this must be the trick Daisy and Alling had cooked up against me. Either that, or somebody else had made the “plant” and had duped them into suspecting me. Could it have been Marjorie? Did that explain her tardy entrance at the lecture?

“Hey, Dr. Alling,” the sheriff yelled. “You better get another feller up here to work this here shebang. I’m arrestin’ this gent Saunders.”

At once the room was in an uproar. Alling slithered up the crowded aisle and demanded an explanation. He acted as if he had not noticed the disfigured slide at all, which could have been true, as he had faced the audience while speaking, and turned only occasionally to illustrate his words with a pointer. The sheriff insisted that he would say nothing until he preferred charges formally before a magistrate. Alling then turned and said in a shrill voice, “Gentlemen, the lecture will go on. Please be seated.” Turning back to me, he added, “I am unutterably distressed, Saunders. I shall come down to confer with you immediately when the lecture is over.”

“Don’t trouble yourself,” I said.

“Oh, well, I see. Of course, I’ll come right away.”

But I insisted magnanimously that there was no point in spoiling a good lecture. With a fine show of reluctance, he agreed. A few minutes later the sheriff was grinning at me through a cell door.

“Wal, I allus knew it’d come to this, sooner or later, Mister Crawfish Saunders. The best thing for you to do is sign a confession right now. The law’s nicer to guys that give it the least trouble.”

In about twenty minutes Judge Cole, the magistrate, arrived and I was conducted, handcuffed, into the police courtroom. All the way the sheriff tried to bully me into confessing something, but ha to give up and charge me with willfully attempting to destroy evidence, with full foreknowledge of its significance. I pointed out that it was my duty to clean any dirty slide before showing it, and truthfully declared that I had not noticed anything about the fingerprints except that they were a blemish. The sheriff established, however, that I had seen photographs of the prints on the bulb, and had evinced sufficient interest in the matter to make it extremely unlikely that I would not have recognized the elusive print, wherever found. I said quite honestly that I had not had time or a sufficient reason to examine the fingerprints. I just saw prints, and assumed that they must be my own. Therefore I immediately commenced to clean them. But the magistrate examined the original bulb, and the slide, and seemed convinced that they were made by the same person. I was then asked whose the fingerprints were, and of course said that I did not know. Judge Cole decided to hold me in one thousand dollars bail for a further hearing. The sheriff brought me back to my cell, where I am now writing. And here comes Alling now. Hey! I wonder if Alling showed those slides to Kent—are they Kent’s prints?

About Midnight, Same Evening
4th May 1933

Here I am back again. There doesn’t seem to be anybody with a thousand dollars in this town who would risk bailing me out. Just as well, because I wouldn’t be accountable for my actions. I’ll try, however, to set down just what happened.