Clues for Dr. Coffee, page 6
Lieutenant Ritter had been sympathetic but not very. Hidden atop a rafter in the Woods garage he had found an eight-millimeter Walther, the barrel fouled by recent firing. So, while Flora Woods sobbed and the younger Woods howled like air-raid sirens, Rittter took the cabbie downtown to the lockup.
It was almost a week later, with Jerry Woods still behind bars, that Flora Woods had parked her children in Dr. Coffee’s laboratory.
Dr. Coffee stuck out his long underjaw at the test tubes as he held them up to the fight one by one and replaced them in the rack. He sighed audibly. “Are you sure of your controls, Doctor?”
Dr. Mookerji wagged his turbaned head twice to the left, signifying an emphatic affirmative. “Quite,” he said.
“Then why the devil don’t we get at least one positive reaction?” the pathologist demanded of the universe. “Dog, horse, cow, pig, cat, sheep—all negative. Are we going to have to send for some anti-kangaroo serum?”
“You are perhaps suspecting Australian murderers, Doctor?”
“I’m falling down on my promise to Mrs. Woods,” Dr. Coffee said. “And I suspect that my wife is not overjoyed at the prospect of baby-sitting for the Woods brats indefinitely. I hate to think that the habeas corpus is mightier than the precipitin test, but my brightest hope right now is that they won’t dig up a corpus delicti and will have to turn Woods loose.”
The corpus delicti was found that night. At eleven o’clock Ritter phoned Dr. Coffee: “Going to bed? … Well, put your pants back on, Doc. I’ll pick you up in ten minutes.”
A dozen miles beyond the western outskirts of Northbank, where a secondary road wound back from the river through the rolling hills to become a weed-grown cart track, a shabby coupe without license plates stood beside a tumbled-down shack. It was in the shack, Ritter explained as he drove up with the pathologist, that two young uranium hunters had stumbled upon a grim discovery that had not made their Geiger counter click.
Police emergency lights flooded the scene. Tatters of fog drifted across the curtain of brilliance, twisting and squirming like tormented wraiths. The lights drove the night from broken windows and a doorless doorway, illuminating streamers of cobwebs and the usual obscene litter that accumulates in deserted shanties.
The beams converged on the body of a man, sprawled on his back, arms outstretched, eyes closed. Even in death he had a sort of waxen handsomeness, a bloodless, debonair smile with which to greet eternity. There was little doubt that the dead man was Jock McMann, alias Pete Mannock. He matched the FBI photos. Just to make sure, however, Ritter had sent for Emily Mannock.
Dr. Coffee had been examining the corpse for five minutes when Emily arrived. Flanked by two plain-clothes men, she strode into the glare of lights with the swinging walk of a musical comedy soubrette making an entrance. She smiled and batted her eyes at her audience, nodded curtly to Lieutenant Ritter, took one look at the dead man, shrieked, and crumpled into a limp, silent heap.
“Well, Doc,” said Max Ritter, after Emily had been revived to a state of quivering, sobbing incoherence, “I guess this trumps your no-murder theory, don’t it?”
“Does it, Max? A week ago this woman was so sure her husband was dead she gave you hell for not rushing right out to find the body. Tonight she sees the body and goes into shock. What does it mean?”
“It means we charge Jerry Woods with murder,” Ritter said.
“Don’t, Max.”
“The D.A. insists. Soon as we get a corpus delicti, the D.A. says he draws the complaint.”
“The D.A. is sticking his neck out a mile,” Dr. Coffee said. “Let’s take another look at the corpus. Don’t you think the deceased looks remarkably unbloody in view of that gory welter in River Street? I see no stains on the clothes, which practically rules out a body wound. And I don’t see any bullet wounds on the face or head.”
“Don’t I read somewhere that a bullet can go in a guy’s ear so that nobody notices any hole at first?”
“Possible, Max. In which case we would recover the bullet at autopsy.”
“Then maybe this bird is shot through the ear a week ago in River Street. Maybe he does all his bleeding in River Street and then, after he dies, he stops bleeding. And if there’s any blood on his face it gets wiped off when the killer brings the body out here from River Street a week ago.”
“This man didn’t die in River Street a week ago, Max. He’s in rigor mortis right now.”
“Shouldn’t he be, Doc? He’s dead, ain’t he?”
“Rigor usually starts wearing off about forty-eight hours after death,” the pathologist explained. “In three days it’s gone. This man is supposed to have been killed a week ago, but see how rigid his limbs are.” He tried to flex the left arm, then the fingers. Suddenly he bent closer to examine a long, ridgelike ulcer that started at the base of the thumb and crossed the palm of the left hand. He rocked back on his haunches, looked up at Ritter, and opened his mouth in a grimace of silent laughter. “Max, I’m a fool,” he said. “I’ve just found out why all my tests went wrong.”
“I don’t get it, Doc.”
“Max, help me persuade the coroner to let me do the autopsy. There must be one, because the D.A. will want a bullet to match the Walther pistol if he’s going to try Woods for murder. And the coroner won’t have to worry about the hundred-dollar autopsy fee. This one will be on me.”
“Think you’ll find the bullet, Doc?”
“I think I’ll find plenty. And tell the D.A. to keep his shirt on and well buttoned.”
“I’ll do my best, Doc. But we’ll have to work fast. He’s getting antsy.”
Doris Hudson met Dr. Coffee as he stepped out of the elevator on his return to the surgical wing from his weekly teaching session with the internes. She handed him a slip of paper, as she walked along beside him.
“Two phone calls, Doctor. Lieutenant Ritter says to tell you that Woods will be arraigned on a first-degree murder charge at four o’clock this afternoon. Then some matron from the city jail phoned with a message from Mrs. Woods. Seems Mrs. Woods won’t pick up the kids tonight. She was arrested for driving a cab without a hacking license and she’s still in jail because she refuses to divert grocery money to hire a lawyer or pay a fine.”
Dr. Coffee slammed the lab door behind him with an exasperated bang. He said: “Call up and find out what the fine is, and I’ll send a check over by messenger. I’d like her to be in court this afternoon. Where are the sections from the Mannock autopsy?”
“Dr. Mookerji has the slides.”
The pathologist swung a leg over a stool next to the Hindu resident and switched on the reflecting light behind the second of two microscopes on the work-bench. Dr. Mookerji passed him a tiny rectangle of thin glass, which he slid under the nose of the ’scope.
“Kindly examine lung section,” the Hindu said, “noting extensive necrotic areas in alveolar walls.”
“Typical.” Dr. Coffee’s eyes were glued to the twin lenses.
“Furthermore,” Dr. Mookerji continued, passing more slides, “observe similar high mortality among cells in liver, spleen, and lymph nodes. Also please note predominance of mononuclear cells in tissue from ulcer at point of entry.”
“No doubt about it.” Dr. Coffee twisted the focusing knob. “Doris, pack a microscope and a set of these slides in my bag. I’m going to take them to court.”
Dr. Coffee hurried across the nearly empty court-room. He was relieved to note that the judge was not yet on the bench. He nodded briefly to Max Ritter, sitting outside the rail between the flashy brunette Mrs. Mannock and the washy blonde Mrs. Woods. He strode past the two reporters lounging in the jury box, past the bald, chubby Jerry Woods sitting inside the rail between two uniformed policemen, past the protesting bailiff who tried to bar his way to the judge’s chambers.
To the surprised magistrate just donning his judicial robes, the pathologist gasped: “Sorry to bust in like this, Your Honor, but I wanted to stop this man Woods’s arraignment. I want—”
“The defendant Woods has until now refused counsel,” the judge interrupted, his white mustache bristling. “The court has not yet appointed an attorney to defend him. So if you will please retire—”
“I’m not a lawyer, Your Honor. I’m a pathologist—Daniel Coffee of Pasteur Hospital. At the coroner’s request, I performed an autopsy on the deceased in this Woods case. I’ve just finished my microscopic diagnosis. I think I can prevent the prosecutor from making a fool of himself.”
“I see.” The judge sat down, leaned forward on his elbows until the wide black sleeves of his gown dripped over the edge of his desk. He pushed a button and spoke into the intercom. “Ask the prosecutor in the Woods case to come in.”
When the dapper, frowning deputy district attorney bustled into the judge’s chambers, His Honor said: “Hendrix, meet Dr. Coffee. The doctor says you’re about to make a fool of yourself, and he offers to stop you. Do you consent to the dismissal of the murder charge against one Gerald Wilson Woods?”
“I—I—certainly not, Your Honor.” The prosecutor flushed. “I think I have enough evidence to go to trial. I have motive. I have an empty cartridge found on the scene of the crime which fits the weapon found in possession of the defendant, and for which, the coroner informs me, Dr. Coffee himself will produce the bullet recovered from the body of the victim.”
“The coroner misinformed you,” Dr. Coffee said. “I told him that if there was a bullet, I would recover it at autopsy. As a matter of fact, there was no bullet in the body, no gunshot wound whatever. The deceased was not shot.”
“Really?” The judge sat up. “What killed him?”
“Poetic justice, Your Honor.”
The judge leaned back, glared, and flapped the wings of his black gown. “Doctor, you are flirting with contempt charges—”
“Not at all, Your Honor. If you will give me five minutes, I think I can prove that nobody was responsible for Pete Mannock’s death but himself—with the possible exception of Mrs. Mannock, who is sitting outside in the courtroom, and who, I think, will corroborate my statements.”
“Very well, then. Five minutes—if counsel has no objection.”
“No objection, Your Honor,” said the prosecutor.
The pathologist sat down and crossed his long legs.
“Ever since he escaped from the Nevada penitentiary, Mannock was a hunted man, constantly on the jump,” he said. “It must have been exasperating to Mrs. Mannock to live in a suitcase, to take menial jobs and Uve in mean surroundings just to create a inask of respectability—of mistaken identity. I suggest she served Mannock with an ultimatum that she would leave him for good if they were forced to run away again. She kept her bags constantly packed as a reminder of this threat. So Mannock decided on a new deal—with a stacked deck.
“He traced Jerry Woods to Northbank. He came here to kill two birds with one stone. He would establish prima-facie evidence of his own death, so that he could stop living as a perpetual fugitive. And, by framing Woods for an imaginary murder, he would even old scores with him for turning state’s evidence.
“So Mannock went into the hills back of the river and shot a rabbit or two with his Walther. He saved an empty cartridge to leave in his apartment, and he planted the Walther in Jerry Woods’s garage. Then he made a shambles of his apartment with rabbit blood and left a clear set of his own fingerprints on the door, knowing that transmission of the prints to the FBI would revive the whole Nevada story and point a finger at Jerry Woods. He was now ready to hide out and await developments.
“At this point, Your Honor, I failed Jerry Woods. Although my lab indicated the blood in the apartment was not human blood, I was unable to identify it exactly—because the precipitin test we were using is based on antiserum produced in laboratory rabbits and naturally gave no reaction to rabbit blood.
“The rabbit, however, had the last word. While Pete Mannock was bleeding his carcasses, the knife cut into the palm of his left hand, infecting him with tularemia. Tularemia—rabbit fever—is fatal in one case out of twenty. Mannock was the twentieth. A few days after his disappearance he must have experienced sudden chills, fever, and headache. His lymph glands grew large and painful. He was laid low with prostration. Alone and without care, he quickly developed tularemic pneumonia and died—only a day or so before we found him, since he was still in rigor mortis.
“Now, Your Honor, I have here microscopic sections from the organs of the deceased to prove my points. If Your Honor will permit me to set up this microscope, I should be pleased to show the court and the district attorney—”
“Never mind!” The judge stood up. “Hendrix, if you’ll go on outside, I’ll open court so you can step up and ask that charges be dismissed. I’ll oblige. Thank you, Doctor.”
When it was over, Flora Woods vaulted the rail into the inner enclosure. She threw her arms around the prisoner, kissed him resoundingly on his bald spot, then bestowed a more tender buss upon his lips.
“You lucky stiff!” she said. “I ought to kiss Dr. Coffee, too. You ought to be very thankful to him, too. And to Mrs. Coffee.”
“I’m sure it’s the other way around,” Dan Coffee said.
“It’s Julia who will be thankful that—uh—that you and the children will soon be together again. I—Hey, Max, where’s Emily?”
Lieutenant Ritter turned around just in time to see a flash of color—which may have been the impertinent flick of Mrs. Mannock’s skirt disappearing through the rear door of the courtroom.
“Let her go.” The detective shrugged. “I don’t think I can build an airtight case against her for obstructing justice. She has a perfect alibi for the night Mannock disappeared.”
“I suppose so,” said Dr. Coffee wistfully. “But I was hoping she might have remembered Pete Mannock’s recipe for hasenpfeffer.”
“Stacked Deck” appeared in Ellery Queens Mystery Magazine under the title “A Case of Poetic Justice.”
The Swami Of Northbank
The precise little man with the bald head and the rimless octagonal eyeglasses told a strange story. His name, he said, was Duncan Floyd and he represented the Great Lakes and Southern Underwriters who had insured Sandra Farriston’s diamond earrings for $50,000. He was worried about Sandra’s earrings in connection with a Hindu crystal-gazer who called himself Zygon, the Swami of Northbank.
“The only swami in Northbank I know of,” said Max Ritter, lieutenant of police detectives, “is Dr. Motilal Mookerji, and he don’t tell fortunes. He’s resident in pathology at Pasteur Hospital. Came here from Calcutta on a scholarship. What have you got on this Zygon?”
Floyd had nothing definite on Zygon except that he fitted the pattern of a coterie of swindlers frequently popping up in small cities. The swindler would be handsome and exotically dark. Endowed with second sight, crystal vision, and other occult powers, he preyed on well-fixed middle-aged women. Sometimes he used a jewel thief as accomplice.
“Madam,” he would say, “you have come to consult me about a diamond ring. The ring was not stolen. You left it in such-and-such washroom. The maid picked it up before you returned, but terrified at being accused of theft, she has not dared dispose of it. She has hidden it—”
At this point the crystal ball would go dark and only a thumping big fee would make it light up again to reveal the hiding place. The ring, of course, would be there. One miraculous feat of divination like this was usually enough in a small city to assure the swami of a large and opulent clientele—until things got too hot and he moved on to cooler and greener fields.
“Has this bird Zygon been pulling stuff like that in Northbank?” Lieutenant Ritter asked.
“Not that I’ve been able to learn,” the insurance man said.
“Then what do you expect the police department to do?”
“Sandra Farriston is giving a reception tonight,” Floyd said. “Some big-shot concert manager is here from New York and Northbank is turning out to gawk and kowtow. His name is Sewell. Sandra will wear her earrings, of course, and Zygon has been invited to put on some kind of séance. The idea gives me goose pimples. I’d feel better if some of your boys were there.”
“I’ll look into the matter,” the detective said.
Ritter’s first look took him to the sixth floor of the Northbank Trust Co. building where Zygon, wholesaler of dreams and broker in the occult, conducted his business. The office door, which bore the simple device “Zygon—Consultation by Appointment,” was situated between a dentist and an advertising agency, thus giving a feeling of security to clients with guilty secrets or scoffing husbands. Beyond the mundane portal Ritter found himself in an eerie, dimly lighted atmosphere reeking of incense. Black velvet drapes parted and a slim, bronzed, dark-eyed man with a tightly wound white turban asked in a soft voice:
“You desire to consult Zygon?”
“I’m looking for the dentist,” Ritter replied.
“Next door,” said Zygon.
Ritter backed out mumbling apologies and memorizing Zygon’s features and build. He would be able to recite to himself a perfect portrait parlé when he examined rogues’ gallery photos later. Meanwhile he would call on Sandra Farriston.
Sandra lived on Indian Hill, which had been a fashionable part of Northbank at the turn of the century. Its old frame houses—with their hip roofs, their shingled turrets and cupolas, their gables and dormer windows dripping with gingerbread—were still nostalgically impressive in spring and summer when the Boston ivy was in leaf and concealed their need for paint. Sandra’s house had its own special impressiveness. It was not merely the home of a music teacher who eked out a bare subsistence drilling scales and trills into Northbank brats; it was the shrine of Sandra’s glamorous past, the sphinx temple of her enigmatic present.
