The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck (30 page)

“I am unaware of some of the exact time sequences. I stayed in the faculty room until everyone else was leaving. Dr. Wyck had already left. I went out at about the same time as Dr. Alling, and walked directly to the lunch wagon on Atlantic Street. After pausing there for not more than three or four minutes to purchase cigarettes, I went on to the hospital gates, turned north, walked about two miles to the second of two little bridges, paused there five minutes or so, and then climbed the hill, emerging into a pasture. I lost my way there, stumbled around for hours probably, before finding a trail leading down over the first little bridge. I walked back to town. My watch, when I consulted it under the hospital gates, read about 1:20 A.M. I went at once to the Connells’, remained there perhaps half an hour, and was then taken to the hospital, from which I was not released until it was nearly midday.”

Q. What was your purpose in setting out on this peregrination?

A. To take a walk.

Q. Do you make a practice of taking long walks in the dark?

A. No, sir.

Q. Why did you do so on this occasion?

A. I was nervous from the strain of a faculty meeting full of unpleasantness, and also from staying up late to attend my sick landlord.

Q. You wish to put this preposterous story on record to account for your conduct and whereabouts on the night of a murder in which you are suspected of complicity?

A. My wishes have not been consulted in the matter. I have truthfully answered your question.

Q. Very well. When did you last see Gideon Wyck alive, and where?

A. At about quarter to eleven that night, no the second little bridge. I have already mentioned.

Q. Oh. Then you accompanied him that far?

A. I followed him unobserved.

Q. Why did you follow him?

A. Because he had been acting strangely, and I suspected that he was in ill health. When I chanced to see him leave his house and walk into the Bottom Road, I was intrigued by the mystery of such action on the part of a very sick man.

Q. What caused you to lose sight of him at the bridge?

A. He was carried up the hill in a car, away from me.

Q. Still alive?

A. When I last saw him.

Q. Can you tell us who drove the car? Did you recognize the driver?

A. Yes.

Q. Who?

A. The young man who was in jail with me last night.

Q. Are you positive?

A. Absolutely positive.

Q. You tried to follow the car on foot?

A. Yes.

Q. Why?

A. For the same reasons that I had followed Dr. Wyck in the first place, with more curiosity added.

Here the prosecutor consulted the report of the first inquest, and asked, “Why did you withhold these facts before?”

A. Because I was asked no questions to which they would make a relevant answer.

Q. Are you aware that it is an offense against the state to withhold the knowledge of a crime?

A. I am.

Q. Then you admit withholding knowledge of a crime?

A. I do not. There was no crime of any kind committed in my presence. No one knew positively that a crime had been committed until five months later. I myself have no knowledge of what happened to Dr. Wyck after the car proceeded up the hill.

Q. And it did not occur to you that this information would be of use to the authorities?

A. It did occur to me, sir.

Q. Then why did you not volunteer it?

A. It made necessary the volunteering of what I knew to be an unsubstantiated alibi. And I was asked not to reveal it by Dr. Alling.

Q. Then you conspired with Manfred Alling to conceal knowledge of a crime?

A. No, sir. I had no knowledge of the commission of a crime.

Q. Did he have such knowledge?

A. I never knew, until we were both arraigned at the magistrate’s court, last Thursday evening. His admission that he embalmed the boy seems to indicate that he did have knowledge of the crime, all along.

Q. He never told you, or gave you cause to suspect him?

A. He never told me. At times I suspected him, but I also suspected ten or twelve other people, most of them for better reasons.

Q. Who were they?

A. I consider the question improper.

At this point Coroner Kent nodded, and said, “So do I.”

I have given the above testimony as the only means of showing that Muriel’s name never was mentioned in my testimony, despite the fact that I answered all questions directly. It seemed best not volunteer anything that might lead to the necessity of describing my trip to New York. Several leading questions were asked to try to make me confess that I had seen Wyck at an hour later than 10:45 that evening, and I had to rehearse a number of times my actual progress on the way back to town. But the rest of my testimony brought out nothing that has not already adequately been described to the reader—and all of it concerned only the fatal night.

Biddy was next called. Her testimony provided the first real surprise of the hearing. She did not tangle herself up nearly so much as before. Her alibi had not been asked for at the original inquest. Now, when she was requested to give it, she merely said that Dr. Alling had told her to go for a walk for half an hour, some time late at night, and that she had done so. She had walked up Atlantic Street, past the school building, to the middle of town, and had returned again by the same route. The county prosecutor then inquired:

“Mrs. Connell, did you enter the medical school building coming or going, while you were out for a walk?”

A. No I did not.

Q. Did you see any lights in the building?

A. Not to notice them.

Q. Did you see any car standing outside the building?

A. I don’t think— Yes, I did that, now I remember.

Q. Please describe the car.

A. It was a big one. The reasons I remember was because it had a dog thing on the front end of it.

A series of questions then established the fact that the “dog thing” was a radiator-cap ornament.

Q. (By the county prosecutor) Do you know who owns the car you described?

A. It might be and it might not be that man’s car. (Witness indicating Coroner Kent.)

The next page or two of the trial record indicated that Biddy was conducted to a window and indentified a car parked in front of the school at the time of the inquest as “maybe the same one. It’s got a dog like it.” In a series of curt answers, the coroner acknowledged that the car was his own, offered himself in the capacity of an ordinary witness, and suggested that the county prosecutor take over the full conduct of the inquiry. The suggestion was declined.

No other new testimony of significance was introduced until the appearance on the stand of Dr. Alling.

Q. (By Coroner Kent) Dr. Alling, the county prosecutor informs me that you were unwilling to answer a general question about your activities in the early morning of April 4, 1932, until you had an opportunity to display certain pieces of concrete evidence. Are you now prepared to make a general answer, or would you prefer a series of specific queries?

A. If the sheriff will produce a package sent by my lawyers, I am ready to give a general answer and to be cross-questioned later.

Q. Thank you, Dr. Alling. Will you please tell us anything which might have a bearing upon the Wyck case, that occurred in your presence during the period from 9:30 P.M. April 3, 1932, to 12:00 noon of April 4, 1932?

As the first part of his answer, Dr. Alling alluded to the baffling nature of Mike’s ailment, and described how he and I had been called in by Biddy at the time of Mike’s second mysterious attack of pain, on the morning of April 3rd. He referred only casually to the faculty meeting, mentioning that at its conclusion he had walked directly to his home, accompanied by Richard Prendergast, a student, and Senator Tolland.

“I did not notice the exact time when Mr. Prendergast and Senator Tolland left my house,” Dr. Alling continued. “Probably it was a little before eleven o’clock. I stayed up, working in my study, until midnight, when Dr. Wyck rang my doorbell. Although he never had spoken about it, I had had good reason to suspect that he was a very sick man. He lowered himself into a chair, and said, ‘Fred, I’m about at the end of my strength, and I’m just on the verge of what may be a tremendously important scientific discovery. You’ve got to help me with it.’ Of course I was willing, and asked how. ‘You may think me mad,’ he said to me, ‘You mustn’t. This is extremely important—the first wonderful step in a whole new field of inquiry.’ He was very earnest, ‘Fred,’ he said, ‘I want you to sit up all night with Mike Connell, and make the most scrupulous scientific report of his conduct from one o’clock till morning.’ I reminded him that he himself had seemed very little interested in Mike, that very morning, as Mrs. Connell had said she had phoned him in vain to come to attend her husband. But Dr. Wyck assured me that the significance of Mike’s attacks had occurred to him only tardily, late in the afternoon.

“Well, I had reasons to think that Wyck’s mind was failing, but I also was highly interested in Connell’s amazing symptoms. I agreed to go to the Connells’ at one A.M. Dr Wyck then gave me the key to his office, and told me to stop in there as soon as I came from the Connells’ and compare the prediction I would find there with the actual events that had happened. As a final precaution, he synchronized our watches exactly, and urged me to keep a minutely careful record of the beginning and enduring of any unusual symptoms. I offered to drive him home, but he insisted that the walk would benefit him.

“When I reached the Connell home, Mrs. Connell complained that she had been unable to sleep for two nights. I knew that she needed relief from her vigil as a prelude to sleep, and told her to walk around for half an hour. At 1:23 A.M. Mr. Saunders, who lived at the Connell house, came in. He had been there not more than a minute when Connell began to have the most violent maniacal symptoms. I had little time to keep track of the time, and impulsively smashed my watch down on the table, to stop it with at least the first important time element on record. Saunders was knocked unconscious by the maniac, and I was physically inadequate to the situation. Connell dashed from the house. I phoned the hospital, and was taken there with Saunders. After reassuring the staff that I was unhurt, I left without an examination of any sort, and hat put my car away and locked the garage before I remembered that Dr. Wyck had said an explanation would be found in his office. I felt chilled, and decided to warm myself by walking to the medical school building. The doors proved to be unlocked, a fact which argued that someone was still in the building. As I had seen no light in front, I assumed it must be Dr. Wyck. The door of his office was ajar, and a light was burning. I found him apparently asleep at his desk, his head resting on his right forearm. A closer look showed that blood was trickling from the back of his neck, and that his left wrist was encased in a leather wristlet capable of translating pulse beats into electrical impulses. In a drawer of the desk was the school’s kymograph, arranged to register these pulse beats.

“My first reaction, of course, was the thought that my colleague had been murdered. Then I caught sight of a letter on the desk, addressed to me. May I have it, Mr. Palmer?”

The sheriff meanwhile had broken the seals of a large package which had been impounded with Dr. Alling’s lawyers. He drew out of it the kymograph, and several documents. Dr. Alling read the letter, which I reproduce in full:

Dear Fred:

I want you to be the recipient of my remains, literary, scientific, corporeal. My daughter is to have my tangible property. Today I have been given the sardonic opportunity to use, as the materials of my last experiment, my own life. I cannot live more than a few more months, and they would be sour ones for me and for the immediately contiguous part of the cosmos.

Mike Connell, as you know, has been a regular blood donor. About twenty-four hours ago, Peter Tompkins died with some of Mike’s blood in his veins. A few minutes before the fact of Peter Tompkins’s death was ascertained, Mike himself had suffered extraordinary paroxysms. We do not know exactly when the Tompkins boy died, but there is a startling inference that the paroxysms in Mike were a direct reaction to the fact that some of his own blood was at that moment suffering pain of death, so to speak, in another body.

You will think at once of numberless cases when recipients of blood have died without any effect upon the donor. But Connell’s case is separate, because this reaction occurred only after the arm from which the blood was drawn off was amputated. The nervous system at the point where the arm was severed was the center of the attack.

Now, Fred, we don’t know what death is. We don’t know what the relationship is between the life of a supposedly self-sufficient organism in the blood stream and the life of the whole complex community of cells of which it is a part. This reaction in the arm of Mike Connell, under unique conditions, is, I believe, the first definite opportunity science has had to make a deliberate experiment in the nature of life and death.

I realized this, alas, only after I had let a second similar phenomenon, this morning, slip by unobserved. Thus it becomes my privilege to give my own life to death, in order that you may observe and record the result. As I told you earlier in the day, I have received more blood from Mike than anyone else has. I have transfused about three liters of blood into myself. As this is several times as much as in the case of the Tompkins boy, the reaction should be correspondingly more pronounced, should it not?

I have set your watch and mine in synchronism. The second hand on mine is 17 seconds faster than on yours. At this point, 1:00 A.M. precisely (with my second hand at 60, yours at 43), I have set the school’s kymograph in motion. The error in two trial revolutions is –3 seconds in 15 minutes. The needle of the kymograph is actuated by my pulse in the usual way.

Before commencing to write this letter, I swallowed ten grams of veronal, which already is numbing my perceptions, and which should kill me within a few hours at most. The moment of my death will be accurately recorded on the drum of the kymograph. You will be able to observe the time of the consequent reaction (if any) on Connell. The implications, if the experiment results positively, I leave to your scientific acumen as a trust and a legacy.