Rather Cool for Mayhem, page 6
Suddenly I stopped. I had felt an unfamiliar snap beneath my foot, a sharp, brittle, almost metallic sound quite unlike the crackling of dead twigs. I stopped, brushed aside the dry leaves, and came up with two flat, black, vitreous fragments. They were roughly triangular, and covered about half of the palm of my hand.
“What have you found?” Grace asked.
“I didn’t know. I turned over one of the fragments. The reverse side was closely etched with fine grooves, like a phonograph record.
“Looks like a broken recording,” Grace volunteered.
“Right,” I said. “And from my limited experience with recordings for broadcast while striving for our country, I would say that it was an audition disc—acetate on a glass base.”
I scrutinized the fragments carefully. They were free from dust or rain marks, so I judged they had not been long in the woods, perhaps only over night.
“Let’s look for more,” I said. “And be careful to pick them up by the edges, if you find any. They may have fingerprints.”
We found plenty. They had been scattered over an area of some hundred square yards between the point I had stopped and the road, like seed flung to the wind. We picked up about twenty similar black fragments, some no larger than my little fingernail, some half as big as a match book. Grace collected them in her green beret, so we wouldn’t have to handle the pieces more than necessary.
“Whatever this was, it’s certainly smashed all to hell,” I said. “And if it was a recording, we’ll never find enough pieces to tell us what it’s all about. We’ve got only about a tenth of it here.”
“Should I throw it away, then?”
“Good lord, no!” I grabbed the beret. “I think this is the first real clue to Norman’s murder we’ve found.”
“Why, Jim?”
“Don’t you remember that a little while ago Bob Stewart said he had seen Norman leaving the inn, walking to your cabin with a large flat package under his arm, like a big thin book?
“Suppose the package contained a recording. Suppose the recording was something that Norman had cooked up himself, that when it was played back, it would recite unflattering or incriminating facts about the murderer. Suppose the murderer knew this was going to happen and was determined to prevent it. Suppose the recording was so incriminating that the man who made it had to be killed and the disc destroyed. After killing Norman, the murderer would then smash the disc beyond possible recognition and scatter the pieces through the woods here before he got back into his car and drove away.”
Grace nodded gravely. “You could be right, Jim. The disc could be the ‘sensational entertainment’ promised for our mysterious cocktail party. In that case, it must have been Norman himself who sent those telegrams inviting people for cocktails.”
“Exactly. And I think McKay ought to know about this—but quick.”
We started down the hill on the double.
Chapter Seven
When we got back to the inn, there was no one in the bar but a hulking, raw-boned goliath with a bald head, pale blue eyes, and bushy blond eyebrows. The goliath wore a bartender’s apron. He was taking down the chairs that had been stacked on the tables.
“Bar ain’t open yet, Miss Boyd,” he said. There was a slight Teutonic D quality in the pronunciation of his T’s.
“We know, Karl. We’re not thirsty,” Grace said. “Jim, this is Karl Vogel, the best bartender within six miles of Blindman’s Lake.”
“I’ll give him the martini test later,” I said. “Where’s Captain McKay, Karl?”
“He’ll be right back,” Karl said. “He just went to see a guy about an airedale.”
A sound like a rushing express train followed by a prolonged gurgling as of a nearby babbling brook testified to the acoustic properties of the Lakeside Bar and the paper-like qualities of the adjoining walls.
The barman grinned as Captain McKay appeared an instant later. The captain did not grin back. He was probably acting according to regulations. I am not sure that the New York State Troopers’ Manual has specific instructions to cover the case of a superior officer’s zipper becoming caught, entangled, or otherwise incapable of function while said officer is in uniform and on duty in a public place, but I am sure there must be some general rule about an officer discouraging levity or other demonstrations prejudicial to the dignity of said officer, should said officer find himself in an awkward, embarrassing, or other unusual situation not of his own making. Anyhow, Captain McKay scowled.
He continued scowling even after the faulty zipper, yielding to superior force and respect for constituted authority, had inexplicably resumed its function of protecting the modesty and decency of the law.
“Well?” thundered Captain McKay. “Now what?”
Grace held out her beret.
“Captain, we’ve found an important clue,” she said. “Look.”
McKay looked, but his persisting scowl gave him the appearance of a fastidious housewife trying to determine whether the strange substance just deposited upon the living room rug by the family dog was organic or inorganic.
“What the hell is this?” he demanded.
I told him the best I could. I explained where we had found the fragments of broken recording, and what I thought they might mean. I was halfway through my explanation when McKay shouted:
“Karl, can’t we get a little light in this dismal dump?”
“Why, sure, Captain.”
The bartender ambled over to a switch and the room was immediately bathed in the gaudy but subdued glow peculiar to so many roadside taverns. I don’t know who is responsible for the theory that red and purple lights, if the rays are directed at walls and ceiling and do not shine directly on the paying customers, must evoke a cozy, aphrodisiacal mood, but I do know it is not true at mid-morning of an autumnal Sunday. The lights made all faces look ghastly. Grace, who couldn’t possibly be so unlovely, showed external symptoms of having inadvertently eaten some rare, venomous fungi. And Captain McKay looked as though he had just been fished from East River several weeks after his decease.
“Put ’em out, Karl,” McKay said. “I can see better without your Tunnel-of-Love illumination.”
“So it seems obvious,” I concluded, “that Norman himself must have sent those telegrams inviting people to cocktails at Blindman’s Lake.”
“Not only obvious,” McKay said as the bar resumed its normal half-gloom, “but pretty late confirmation of what I’ve known for certain for hours. I knew last night that the telegrams had been phoned from a pay-station. So it was simple enough to trace the number, and find witnesses who had heard some particular phone booth making like a Swiss bellringer while enough coins were deposited to pay for the telegrams.”
“Sure, it was simple,” said Karl the bartender. “I tell the captain this morning that Dr. Norman send his telegrams from the phone booth in the corner over there.” He grinned as though proud to dispel the idea that McKay had brought off any miracle of deduction. “Friday afternoon the doctor ask me for five bucks in change. I give him quarters. He goes into the booth. I don’t hear what he says, but for ten minutes I get a pretty little earful of bong-bongs while the doctor is putting quarters in the coin phone.”
“So you knew Norman,” I said. “For long?”
“Years,” Karl replied. “I remember him from the first because he always drinks gin and bitters.
“Did you see him yesterday just before he was killed?” I asked. “Did you see him leaving the inn with a flat package under his arm?”
“Look, Lawrence,” McKay interrupted. “I’m conducting this investigation. And I’ve already questioned Karl.”
“Sorry,” I said, reaching for the beret full of recording fragments. “Then I’ll work on this angle myself.”
“You’ll work on nothing, unless it’s breaking rocks for the highways.” McKay pulled the beret back out of my reach.
“I’ll work on whatever I feel like,” I said.
“Anyhow, I want my beret.” Grace grabbed from the other side.
McKay won this round, too. He walked to the bar, emptied the litter of black triangles into a paper napkin, and handed the beret back to Grace.
“I’ll follow this up,” he said, “as soon as the county boys get here. I’m expecting the D.A. and his gang pretty soon, and I suppose the sheriff and his boys will want to get in the act, too.”
While we were engaging in our childish tug-of-war over the chips of glass and acetate which might very possibly determine the question of life or death for someone, the Hurleys drifted into the bar. At least, Dr. Hurley drifted in with the current. Betty Hurley rode the crest of the wave like a surf boy. She reached the tide mark with a swish of skirts, a flutter of eyelashes, a friendly gesture of forearm and elbow, and a “Hi, folks.”
McKay turned on his Great Stone Face until Betty’s wave of friendliness had beat itself out against the cold barrier of impersonality.
“Were you looking for me?” McKay asked.
“As a matter of fact,” said Dr. Hurley, whose post was five paces to the rear of his squaw, “I was wondering if you were not looking for me?”
“Why?” countered Captain McKay.
“Well, I—During breakfast this morning my wife made a somewhat ambiguous remark that I thought might have been misconstrued. But apparently you overlooked it.”
“I don’t overlook anything,” McKay said.
“Then I can’t understand why you didn’t question me immediately,” Dr. Hurley said.
“I don’t overlook anything,” McKay repeated. “But I thought I’d wait to see how long you’d worry about it before you came around to tell me of your own free will and accord. The time lag might be very significant. You want to tell me of course, Doctor, what your wife really meant when she made that crack about the death of her first husband.”
“Well, yes.”
McKay indicated one of the dingy booths, and the Hurleys marched in and sat down as stiffly as if it were a church pew.
I pinched Grace’s arm. “We better be going,” I said.
Dr. Hurley half rose from the straight-backed bench.
“Please stay,” he said. “I’d like to have witnesses to the fact that I’m making a voluntary statement. I don’t want to be confronted later with distorted versions of what I’ve said.”
I looked at McKay. He was still wearing his granite mask. So we stayed.
Dr. Hurley locked his fingers in front of him on a table which bore a rich patina of eager hands and damp glass-bottoms. He was a small, precise, important-looking man, just oozing bedside manner—a carbon copy of five hundred other Upper East Side Manhattan physicians with their bare basic minimum of skill and their warm, resonant, remunerative optimum of personality. I could easily picture his waiting room in the East Sixties, crowded with neurotic, well-to-do women reading back numbers of Fortune, Harper’s Bazaar and the New Yorker beside the electric-lighted tropical fish, sitting for hours with their chronic colitis and various insomnias, just for ten minutes of Dr. Hurley’s reassuring professional touch on their plump, ailing persons.
“I was in no hurry to speak to you, Captain McKay,” Dr. Hurley said, “because I knew you would call on me as soon as you had finished your more important preliminaries. My story has no bearing upon the murder, actually, but if you came upon it independently, you might think it somehow pertinent—which it is not—and mistakenly jump to the conclusion that I was hiding something from you—which I am not. Now—”
“Let’s get to the point,” McKay interrupted impatiently. “Does your story in any way concern Dr. Norman?”
Dr. Hurley moistened his lips. “Have you found anything among Dr. Norman’s effects which might indicate that it does?”
“You tell me,” McKay said stolidly.
“Gladly. I can tell you that Dr. Norman figures prominently and unpleasantly in the story I am about to tell. Despite his unpleasant role, it was at that time that I first began to admire Dr. Norman. Until then I had merely disliked him. I still admire him greatly, for he was a very talented man, but were he alive today, I should still dislike him greatly.”
“I thought you were going to tell me about Mrs. Hurley’s first husband,” McKay said.
“Indeed I was. Mr. Shoemaker—that was Mrs. Hurley’s first husband—was indeed a patient of mine. He was a sufferer from periodic attacks of jaundice, and at the time of his last attack, I was diagnostically certain that his jaundice was being caused by gall stones which had finally lodged in the common duct. As he was in considerable pain, I recommended immediate surgery, possibly a simple cholecystotomy, possibly a cholecystenterostomy, depending on—”
“Let’s keep this to words of five syllables,” McKay broke in. “My Latin’s lousy.”
“I believe you’d find Greek more helpful in this case. However, I apologize for becoming technical.” Dr. Hurley’s smile was not at all apologetic. “I merely mean to say that I recommended an immediate gall-bladder operation, although I could not be certain of the exact nature of the operation until I had entered the abdomen and discovered the conditions of the gall bladder and the nature of the obstruction in the common duct.”
Dr. Hurley paused, drew a deep breath, and looked about him to appraise the interest of his audience.
“And so you entered the abdomen,” McKay said.
“I rushed Mr. Shoemaker to a hospital which I shall not identify except to say that Dr. Norman was then director of its pathological laboratories,” Dr. Hurley said with a grimace. “I sent specimens to the lab for the usual routine tests, then, since Mr. Shoemaker was in great pain, I had him removed to the operating room almost immediately.
“I had already made my incisions and was tying off the blood vessels when Dr. Norman came storming into the operating room, without even troubling to make himself sterile. He abused me loudly in front of all the internes, the nurses and the anesthesiologist. He shouted something like, ‘How dare you begin an operation without waiting for my laboratory report? Do you want to commit murder?’ I reminded Dr. Norman that as attending physician I had made a diagnosis which called for an emergency operation and that as the surgeon I could operate whenever I saw fit.
“Then Dr. Norman screamed, ‘Don’t you know that it may be murder to operate on a patient still in a jaundiced condition? Don’t you know, Dr. Hurley, that when the common bile duct is obstructed, bile does not reach the intestine? That without bile, the blood does not absorb Vitamin K, and that without Vitamin K the body will not produce prothrombin, and that without prothrombin the blood will not clot? Don’t you know that, Dr. Hurley?’
“I am frank, and somewhat ashamed, to admit that I did not know it, Captain McKay. Very few of us in the medical profession knew it then. Vitamin K had been discovered in Denmark only a few years before, and very little was known here about the mechanics of blood clotting—except for a few brilliant laboratory meri like Dr. Norman. Well, there is frequently a natural hostility between surgeon and pathologist, particularly when their diagnoses do not agree, or when the pathologist is an uncouth and pugnacious young man like Norman. And I was in no mood, in the midst of a delicate operation, for a lesson in blood chemistry from a young upstart with whisky on his breath. There was nothing I could do except go ahead with the surgery.”
“And the patient died?” Captain McKay inquired.
“I must say, with all due modesty, that the operation was skilfully performed,” said Dr. Hurley, ignoring the captain’s remark. “Dr. Norman himself, after the autopsy, told me he had never seen a more perfect example of cholecystotomy. But, as you say, Captain, the patient was dead within forty-eight hours. He died of internal bleeding. Dr. Norman was right. The blood simply did not clot. Once the hemostats had been removed and the incision closed, there was hemorrhage in all the area of surgery. The poor man bled to death.”
Dr. Hurley paused. With a gold-mounted nail file at the end of his watch chain he attacked an imaginary hangnail on his long right index finger. It was a frontal attack, with all resources committed and no quarter given. The non-existent hangnail would probably have been filed down to the bone if McKay had not tossed out a question to interrupt the action.
“Then you admit you were in error?” the captain asked.
“It was a tragic error,” Dr. Hurley said. “We don’t make errors like that now, luckily. We have learned the role of the laboratory in surgery of this type. But I have never ceased feeling guilty about Mr. Shoemaker’s death. Possibly my feeling of guilt was to some extent responsible for the attention I paid Mr. Shoemaker’s widow at first, but I assure you that our marriage a year later was entirely the result of the purely extraneous circumstance of my having fallen in love with her.”
Dr. Hurley flashed a smile that would have passed for a symptom of perfect domestic bliss on any husband-and-wife television breakfast program. He leaned over and gave his wife a therapeutic squeeze that somehow reminded me of the great volcanic ardors that must be smouldering beneath the quiescent cinder cone of Henry Pennington’s cold dignity. Then the doctor resumed the hazardous business of his self-manicure, as he continued:
“I am telling you the whole story now as proof of my good faith, since the only other man who could have told you is dead.”
Captain McKay grunted. “What about the internes who were present at the operation?” he asked.
Dr. Hurley did not look up from his fast-vanishing fingernail. “They would tell you nothing,” he said. “They are practicing physicians themselves now, and medical men always forget the mistakes of their colleagues. There is such a thing as professional ethics, Captain—except for men like Dr. Norman.”
“So you really are afraid,” McKay said, “that Norman may have left his own version of this case behind.”
“I said nothing of the sort.” Dr. Hurley bristled.
“The first thing you asked when you came down here ten minutes ago was whether we found anything in Dr. Norman’s effects that concerned you. Would his version have been different from the story you’ve just told me?”
