Clues for Dr. Coffee, page 3
“Couldn’t the brain damage have been due to the same blows which caused the face wounds and produced the deceased’s unconsciousness?”
“No, sir,” said Dr. Coffee, who then proceeded to explain at great length—in order, he hoped, to give Max Ritter time to get from the airport—why the coroner was wrong. Even when there is no skull fracture, he said, a blow violent enough to produce coma usually tears the membranes surrounding the brain or injures the brain surfaces, causing bleeding. In the case of Miss Ingersoll he had found no massive hemorrhages, no lacerations, no blood in the spinal fluid. The brain damage was caused, he repeated, by the lack of life-sustaining oxygen; by monoxide poisoning.
“I wish you would explain to the jury, Doctor,” said the coroner smugly, “just how and where Miss Ingersoll managed to inhale this monoxide you talk about, inasmuch as the gas company okayed the Riverside Motel heaters just last week.”
“A very good question,” Dr. Coffee replied. “In fact, I have suggested to Police Lieutenant Ritter that he try to find the answer. Here’s the lieutenant now. You might ask him what he’s found.”
Max Ritter’s advance down the aisle was almost a lope. He made rubbery grimaces at the coroner as he eased his angular body into the pew beside Dr. Mookerji. Then his facial muscles relaxed into an expression which, since it was a shade less mournful than usual, suggested to Dr. Coffee that the detective was quietly digesting a large canary.
A moment later the lieutenant had replaced the pathologist in the witness chair, and was answering the coroner’s question.
“Sure, there’s a flue,” he said. “Only the flue’s clogged up. Somebody climbs the roof of Cabin Ten and stuffs an old pair of work jeans down the pipe. I find ladder marks in the snow on the eaves, and footprints in the snow on the roof. And since there’s no fresh snow in the prints, they must of been made after ten-fifteen Wednesday night, when it stops snowing, and before two-thirty Thursday morning when the cops get there. We keep a watch on the cabin ever since.
“Moulage? Sure, we made moulds, but they ain’t accurate on account of the sun melted the edges of the prints some. Anyhow, we don’t need any. Those jeans got a Toledo store label in ’em, also a laundry mark. So I fly to Toledo and get the local cops to help me trace the laundry mark to a young guy who a year ago runs a gas station and moves in with a pretty little brown-eyed blonde he calls his wife but who the landlady says signs the rent checks with the name of Anne Ingersoll. The landlady tells me that about four months ago this Anne Ingersoll draws all her money out of the bank and gives it to this guy who used to be her high-school sweetheart. Seems he tells her that if she’ll buy him the gas station, they can really get married. Only—when he gets the dough, he takes a powder instead of the marriage vows, and it takes her a month to find him.
“Seems she finds he comes to Northbank and plunks down Anne’s money as first payment on the Riverside Motel. I check with the county clerk’s office here and I find the deed to the Riverside Motel is in the name of a guy named—”
There was a commotion at the back of the chapel. Heads were craned. Shouts of “Where’s he going?” and “Stop him!” echoed from the stained-glass windows. The coroner pounded his gavel until his chins quivered and grew three shades redder. Dr. Mookerji remarked to Dr. Coffee, “Gentleman with scarlet hairs is quite nimble sprinter.” Several jurors stood up, visibly shocked by the realization that they were not only confronted by murder but by a diabolically ingenious murder which not only disposed of an irksome responsibility but placed the blame logically upon another man.
“As I was sayin’,” Max Ritter continued when he could make himself heard, “the name is Wendell Schaeffer, who, by the way, ain’t runnin’ very far. I got people waitin’ outside for him. Any more questions, Coroner?”
There were no more questions. The jury was ready to retire. The assistant district attorney arose to suggest that the coroner direct the jurors to bring in an open verdict, inasmuch as the state was ready to go to trial as soon as an indictment could be drawn and the medical and police evidence correlated.
Fred Best bolted across the aisle and threw his arms around his wife. Betty kissed him soundly. Arm in arm, they approached Dr. Coffee who was shaking Max Ritter’s hand.
“You don’t know how grateful I am to you, Doctor, and to the lieutenant,” said Betty effusively. “If this had turned out any other way, I’d have felt all my life that I’d betrayed Fred.”
“Betrayed me?” Best frowned. “I don’t get it, darling.”
Betty Best opened her handbag and presented her husband with a gold initialed tie clasp.
“I found it on the bedroom rug right after you left to go back to the motel. You might think I’d deliberately sent you back into a trap.”
Max Ritter fixed Mrs. Best with a curious, insistent stare. “It all goes to show,” he said wryly, “what faith will do. If you hadn’t had such confidence in your husband, I might not of dug so deep into this case.”
“Most wanning to cockleshells of heart,” exclaimed Dr. Motilal Mookerji, “to discover human confidence and scientific microscope on same side of judicial fence.”
“Old Flame” appeared in Ellery Queens Mystery Magazine under the title “Murder in a Motel.”
No Taste For Tea
Dr. Coffee had never laid eyes on Quentin Laird until the night of Laird’s twenty-ninth—and last—birthday. Until that moment, Laird had been a number on a rack of test tubes, a set of microscopic slides, an unusual case referred by the pathologist of Northbank’s Veterans Hospital to Dr. Daniel Webster Coffee, pathologist at Pasteur Hospital.
At second hand, Dr. Coffee knew that Laird had been a young teataster when the draft boards began scraping the bottom of the barrel in the middle 1940s, that the Northbank draft board had not considered tea tasting an essential occupation, and that Laird had fought his war with the CBI command in Assam, where he could duck into a nearby tea plantation when off duty. Some time after his return home and his discharge, Laird had entered the Veterans Hospital with a malady which was diagnosed as pulmonary TB. It was a natural error because the symptoms and the X-ray pictures were characteristic. When the Army pathologist couldn’t isolate any Koch’s bacilli, however, he called on Dr. Coffee,whose microscope picked up an oval yeastlike fungus cell known as Monilia.
Learning Laird’s civilian profession and the geography of his military service, Dr. Coffee made the diagnosis of bronchomoniliasis—teataster’s cough. After three months of radiotherapy and heavy doses of potassium iodide, Laird left the hospital, and—so the pathologist thought at the time—Dr. Coffee’s life.
Dr. Coffee had completely forgotten about the teataster for more than a year, until the day Laird’s sister Ellen walked into the pathology lab of Pasteur Hospital in a state bordering on nervous collapse. It was the day before Quentin’s birthday.
“You saved my brother once, Doctor,” she said. “And you’re going to have to save him again. Will you?”
“Relapse?” Dr. Coffee’s long fingers brushed his undisciplined sandy hair back from his pensive frown.
“No. He’s going to kill himself.”
Dr. Coffee chuckled sympathetically as though to say, This doesn’t sound like a case for pathology, but I like your appealing brown eyes and your quick, wistful smile and the wavy brown hair that frames your fine young face. Regardless of your brother, I’d like to help you.
“People who talk about committing suicide rarely do,” he said.
“You don’t know Quentin,” the girl said. “He will. He’s got a Japanese pistol he brought home from the Far East. You see, he can’t work at his job any more. He was a teataster—and for ten days now he’s lost his sense of taste. That’s possible, isn’t it?”
The pathologist nodded. “The medical term is ageusia. Everybody has a minor form of it when he gets a cold. Or smokes too much.”
“Quentin doesn’t smoke.”
“Or it could be an involvement of the ninth nerve, but that’s rare. Why doesn’t he go back to the hospital for a checkup?”
“He’d die first! Mr. Phelps—that’s his boss at the Great Indo-Cathay Tea Company—told him to take a few weeks off and go away for a while. But he just sits at home and mopes and reads Sanskrit. Quentin is.… Well, he’s a … a.…”
“A rather sensitive young man, I gather,” said Dr. Coffee, who really meant: He’s a spoiled brat, certainly a neurotic, possibly psychotic, and probably in need of psychiatry rather than pathology. He added: “Has your brother ever married, Miss Laird?”
“Never. Quentin has lived with me ever since our parents were both killed in an auto accident.”
So that’s it, the pathologist thought. No wonder the girl seems so upset. There’s more emotional involvement here than mere sisterly concern. Perhaps there’s some sort of latent Byronic attachment in the making. … He said:
“You’re an extremely attractive young lady, Miss Laird, and yet you’re not married, either. Does your attitude toward your brother—your feeling of responsibility, I mean, of vicarious motherhood, so to speak—have anything to do with the fact that you’re still single?”
“Oh, no!” Ellen Laird colored slightly. “Of course, that’s what Bill Albertson says, but it’s not so. Not really.”
“I take it Bill Albertson is in love with you and wants to marry you, but balks at marrying your brother, too. Right?”
“Please, Doctor!” The girl’s eyes flashed. “I don’t see that my personal affairs have anything to do—”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry. Just what do you want of me, Miss Laird?”
“I want you to talk to Quentin as a friend. Could you and Mrs. Coffee come over tomorrow night after dinner. It’s Quentin’s birthday. Do you play bridge?”
“My wife says not,” Dan Coffee said. “However, Mrs. Coffee is in New York visiting her sister. I’ll come.”
“Oh, thank you!” Ellen Laird threw her arms impetuously around his neck and kissed him on the cheek.
When the girl had left, the pathologist strolled across the laboratory to the workbench at which Dr. Motilal Mookerji sat on a high stool, snipping off bits of spleen with scissors and popping them into a jar of formalin. Dr. Mookerji, the resident pathologist at Pasteur Hospital, possessed degrees from Calcutta University, a vast knowledge of microbiology and biochemistry, a spheroidal silhouette, and a highly individualistic approach to the English language. He was not aware of Dr. Coffee’s presence until the chief pathologist tugged playfully at the tail of his pink turban.
“With your tropical background, Doctor,” Dan Coffee said, “you must be familiar with teataster’s cough.”
“Quite,” said Dr. Mookerji. “Same is somewhat prevalent in northerly portions of native Bengal and Brahma-putra Valley, where causative fungus inhabits tea leaves.”
“Have you ever heard of brain lesions or cranial nerve involvement in moniliasis?”
“Recollection is negative,” said the Hindu resident. “Have never seen case of monilia fungus wandering in cranial bloodstream. What, please, are cerebral symptoms?”
“The patient seems to have lost his sense of taste. And since I made the original diagnosis, I’m going to follow through.”
“Am wishing you sevenfold blessing of Ganesh, who is Vedantic god of good luck and learning,” said Dr. Mookerji.
On his way home that night, Dr. Coffee stopped off at the public library for an armful of books destined to give him a theoretical background on tea and the tasting thereof. Before he fell asleep he had learned the difference between fermented, semifermented, and green teas, between the congous and the Darjeelings, the oolongs and the Ceylons. He learned that ever since the Tea Inspection Act of 1897, no tea is admitted to the United States unless it passes the standards fixed by a board of Government Tea Examiners.
He did not learn from his books why the devil the Northbank branch of the Great Indo-Cathay Tea Co., nearly a thousand miles from the point of importation, had to have its own teataster, but he got the answer next morning from Robert Phelps, the big, bluff, ruddy-faced manager of Indo-Cathay’s blending and packing plant on the outskirts of town.
“Northbank is the center of an extensive hardwater region of the Middle West,” Phelps explained. “We make a special blend here for the hardwater market—more Assam and other robust teas which will give the same standard Indo-Cathay flavor even when brewed with local water.”
Laird? One of the best teatasters in the business.
“I’m worried about the boy,” Phelps said. “He had one of the cleanest palates I ever encountered. What do you suppose is wrong with the lad, Doctor?”
“I’m trying to find out.”
“Do you suppose it could be psychosomatic? I mean.… Well, I suppose you know about his situation at home?”
“Vaguely. Tell me more.”
“I’m very fond of them all. You know Bill Albertson works here, too. Head of our shipping department.”
“That’s the chap who’s in love with Laird’s sister?”
“Yes. Laird and Albertson used to be close friends, but they barely speak now. Ellen has always mothered Quent and doesn’t much like the idea of throwing him out after she marries Albertson, which is what Albertson insists on. So Laird sits tight and holds up the marriage and probably develops guilt feelings about it. Could a conflict like that produce symptoms like the loss of taste, Doctor?”
“Possibly. But we’d have to rule out physical causes first. Could I see where Laird works? I’ve never seen a tasting room before.”
The temporarily deserted bailiwick of Quentin Laird was a small ground-floor room at the rear of Indo-Cathay’s main building. In the center of the room stood a large circular table on which a dozen thin china bowls were arranged in pairs around the rim. A number of metal canisters were stacked in the center of the table. Phelps touched the edge of the table and it revolved slowly on its axis—so that the teataster sitting between a two-foot-tall gleaming chromium cuspidor and a stationary stand containing his standard teas for comparison could go quickly from one taste impression to another without getting up.
“Where did Laird keep his cheese?”
“Cheese?” Phelps stared.
“I read somewhere that when a teataster felt his palate getting tired, he would nibble cheese or nuts or something.”
“Yes, some do. Laird used to take a sip of almond-and-barley water to freshen up his taste buds.”
“And this fellow Albertson? Where’s his office?”
“Just inside the warehouse, across the areaway there.” Phelps pointed. “Want to speak to him?”
“Not now.” The pathologist shook his head. ‘Til probably be seeing him tonight.”
Quentin Laird’s birthday was a lugubrious affair, without even the melancholy gaiety of a wake. Dr. Coffee wished gloomily he had not come. Even the weather was foul—a stormy night full of rain and the sound and fury of wind-lashed trees—the perfect night to go to bed with Dumas père’s monumental cookbook and read of gastronomic delights, rather than worry over a teataster who could no longer taste.
Quentin Laird turned out to be the limp, under-nourished, overwrought, self-pitying young man that Dr. Coffee had imagined. He was self-consciously esthetic with pale blue eyes and scarcely any eyebrows. He was much more interesting, Dr. Coffee thought, when he had been merely a case history, a number in the laboratory. Yet there was no denying the fact that the pallid young man was generating a heavily charged atmosphere as electric as a summer storm.
When the cut paired Quentin Laird and Bill Albertson as partners, Dr. Coffee could practically smell the ozone. Albertson was a thick-set, saturnine character with a bulldog jaw and sheep’s eyes. The jaw was for Laird and the eyes were for Ellen. After Laird had given a double raise on a king and a singleton (down three at four spades doubled), the jaw was working overtime.
Ellen Laird was nervously playing the mother hen, trying desperately, with much clucking, to extend her protective wings over both chicks. She was not doing very well when the doorbell rang and Robert Phelps came in, accompanied by a gust of rain and a whine of wind.
Phelps had two bottles of champagne under one arm, a dripping umbrella under the other, and a vibrant happy birthday in his throat. He had started to sing “Happy Birthday to You” before the icy silence enveloped him and frost began to form on his vocal cords. He handed the bottles to Ellen.
“Just off the ice,” he boomed jovially. “Pop the corks.”
“The birthday boy can’t taste anything,” Albertson growled.
“I’ll pop the corks,” Laird snapped. “Glasses, Ellen.”
“But, Quent, you never drink cham—”
“Tonight I’m being dragged screaming into my thirtieth year,” Laird interrupted. “Get the glasses, Ellen.” He turned to Dr. Coffee. “I’ve been protecting my taste buds for years, and what’s happened to them? Tonight I think I’ll get slightly stinko. Okay with you, Doctor?”
“Fine idea,” Dr. Coffee said. “Happy birthday.”
Laird emptied three quick glasses while Dr. Coffee was sipping his first. Ellen put down her glass after drinking a birthday toast, disappeared into the kitchen and came back with a cup of tea.
“I don’t suppose anyone else wants tea,” she said.
Laird put an arm around his sister, leaned over her shoulder and sniffed the cup.
“Tea?” he gibed. “That’s the Earl Grey I brought home last week. It’s not tea; it’s perfume.”
He reached for the cup, touched it to his lips twice, then handed it back. A curious smile flickered across his face as he turned slowly to Phelps.
“Bob,” he said gravely, “I think my taste is coming back.”
“Congratulations. Then this is a happy birthday.”
“Maybe I’ll go to the plant tonight.” Laird’s peculiar smile was back, twisting the corners of his lips. His pale eyes seemed to be laughing at Phelps. “I’ve got lots of back work to do.”
