It was noticeable, however, that the hatless young man was suffering from a cold. He sneezed and made an abortive attempt to blow his nose, and then took something from his pocket and held one nostril after the other while he inhaled deeply and quickly. A student standing nearby happened to be looking at him idly while this went on. She then transferred her attention to the street, but for a few seconds only.
The young man appeared to be strangling, he grasped his throat, stumbled a step or two and fell full-length on the sidewalk. For seconds more his companions in waiting stood stunned, and then there was a concerted rush toward him. Whatever had been in his hand fell unnoticed and rolled or was kicked toward the street. He was still making convulsive movements. Somebody took off a raincoat, rolled it and thrust it under his head; somebody else raced across to the Low-Cost Drugstore to telephone; out of the street which had seemed almost deserted a minute before, dozens of people appeared to crowd around the prostrate figure.
The ambulance came, and a police officer who interrogated the original members of the group on the corner and found that no two of them could agree as to just what had happened. The young man died on the way to Herrick Hospital, to the great disgust of the ambulance interne. The doctor on Emergency began a routine check, frowned, bent close, and sniffed the dead man’s nostrils and upper lip.
A few hours later, under the chill bright lights of a deserted street intersection, two uniformed policemen went methodically along the curb, peering down into the gutter and turning over scraps of newspaper and crumpled cigarette packages. They found part of what they were looking for in a spot where it might have been crushed, a dozen times over, by feet or the wheels of cars, and yet had by chance remained intact. Its other part lay in the doorway of a hardware store, half-flattened but with its mechanism still recognizable.
The laboratory expert worked on it when the first light of a November dawn was just graying the windows. He said, “For cripes’ sake, I never saw anything like this one before. Take a look, Slater, but don’t sniff it too hard.”
The object was a small metal inhaler with a screw top. Its under portion, which had contained a volatile substance to shrink the nasal mucosa, had been cut off at the base and neatly resoldered, after another substance had been introduced. The replacement was crystalline cyanide, and a tiny ampule of acid had been set among the crystals. Against the ampule had rested a long and minutely narrow tongue of metal, passed through the hole in the top of the inhaler and fastened at the upper end to the inside of the screw cover.
“Give that top a twist,” said the expert, “which you have to do to unfasten it, and that tongue breaks the ampule of acid. It’s a portable gas chamber. The guy must have taken two good whiffs and got his bronchial passages full of it before he knew what smelled funny.”
“He’d get enough of it, the doc says,” contributed Slater in a deep voice that set the laboratory glass humming. “He died without regaining consciousness.” He stood up and exchanged glances with the expert. “Looks like a job for us, all right.”
At seven a.m. Inspector Nelsing began to issue instructions. The dead man had carried full identification, so that was no problem. His department at the University was notified, a carefully edited story was released to radio and newspapers, and at ten-thirty Nelsing was looking over a collection of personal papers, one of which gave him a considerable start.
He reached for the telephone.
***
Todd McKinnon opened a glass-topped door on the second floor of the Hall of Justice, and looked down a short corridor of offices. “Inspector Nelsing in?” he asked a tweed-clad member of the force.
“He’s busy at the moment. Will you wait?” said the young inspector, with the monumental courtesy of a Berkeley policeman.
“I’ll be out in the rotunda. Tell him it’s McKinnon, about the Hartlein business.” Todd turned away, glancing at a small woman hung with bead necklaces, who had been hovering at this end of the main hall and darting sparrow-bright glances at the door he had just closed. He recalled his wife’s vivid description of the Majendie household, and his mind sprang to attention.
The little woman was pattering after him. “Excuse me,” she said breathlessly, “but did I hear you say Hartlein? And what’s the name of the officer to talk to about him? Nelsing? I want to see him too.”
“Then let’s sit down here.” Todd indicated a bench at the head of the broad staircase. The woman nodded jerkily and came to rest on the bench, her beads rattling as she arranged her coat. She was breathing fast, and the muscles around her eyes were taut. “Tragic thing about his death, wasn’t it?” said Todd conventionally.
“Tragic? Oh, no; in the spheres where vibrations meet there is no tragedy, but an unalterable rightness,” said Joan Godfrey with solemnity. “Truth has enfolded him now, although only last night he was struggling against it, he was speaking in negation of the Words. That terrible laughter, I have heard it before, when a Warning is given and denied.” She darted a glance at Todd. “Our Mental Leader is not given Long Prophecy, as the first one was, but so often, so often!— the simple mundane words she speaks are Truth in Perfection. She warned him about his heart, you know.”
Miss Godfrey’s voice came out of its holy hush and turned into the chirp of an impassioned gossip. “Dear Mrs. Majendie, so motherly, she saw him panting and coughing after that trip up our hill, which he took much too fast, it’s almost a mile straight up hill from the bus line. And then he grew so intense, he was suffering a dreadful distortion of Truth; you know, that in itself would be enough to set up warring vibrations within him. No, I was not surprised when I heard on the radio that he had been touched by a ray from the cosmos, but it seemed that the police—I suppose they are the only ones to handle such cases?—the police wondered where he had been just before his passing in, and so of course it was my task in Truth to give them the story.”
Todd sat still and let it pour over him. He was rather adept at evoking confidences, but never before had a few casual words brought forth such a flood of talk. Miss Godfrey swept on.
“At the time I wondered how Mrs. Majendie could sit there so quietly, with such dignity, and listen to the dreadful things he said about her and about the Beyond-Truth—blaming her, Mr., Mr.—?”
“McKinnon.”
“Mr. McKinnon, for the failure of his marriage, and in the next breath admitting that he had meant it to be marriage in the world sense, and that he had told Cass what he intended! The dear girl was strong then, but he would not accept her dismissal, and he has come back over and over in this past year, trying to make her forget what she knows of the Truth—oh, I know how many times, it is my task in Truth to watch. I’ve been afraid for her,” Miss Godfrey confided with a glittering look at Todd. “Only last week she went out quietly at night, and it was given to me to know where she went: to his rooms, and of course it was my task to follow, sometimes it is laid upon us to remind one who is in temptation, but I could not go in or stay as long as she did; Cass and Ryn do not understand about these tasks, and they—if they complain to—” For the first time her voice wavered, and a brown hand moved nervously among the chains of beads. Then she took on new confidence. “I was reassured that time, because the voices were not loving at all. Not sharp like a quarrel, but low and heavy and hoarse, so I knew. She was safe for that night. And then the poor blind young man accused Chloe Majendie, as if it were a fault on her part! I shouldn’t have been surprised if the Ray had touched him then and there. The things he said were terrible. Terrible, Mr. McKinnon. I called it blasphemy, yes indeed I did; I stood up and leveled my finger at Hugh Hartlein—” She leveled it at the long desk across the rotunda, and the sergeant behind it gave her a startled look “—and I said it was blasphemy. And dear Chloe would not let me go on, she only smiled and told him that he would injure his nasal tissues if he used his inhaler so often, and that she had never interfered in his affairs but that she disliked seeing him impair his health. And that was when he l
aughed, Mr. McKinnon, like the crackling of thorns, and went away, along the cliff path in the dark. But the Ray did not touch him until there were witnesses to see how the scoffer is punished.”
Miss Godfrey sat breathing fast and nodding to herself. Slater, Nelsing’s assistant, had just come down the corridor from the Homicide Division; he caught Todd’s eye and flashed a quizzical look from him to his companion. The police, Todd reflected, were used to loony witnesses.
“Is Inspector Nelsing free now?” he asked Slater gravely. “I think this lady was here before me, with some information that he’ll want.”
Slater inquired the lady’s name in a bass voice that struck booming echoes from the stairwell, sketched a bow and led her away. As they went, the free flow of Miss Godfrey’s voice continued. “He came to me from Beyond, at dawn,” she was saying, “defeated and submissive. Truth had enfolded—”
Todd shook his head as if emerging from a dive, and lit a cigarette. He’d been flattering himself when he imagined that his manner had evoked Miss Godfrey’s confidences; if he hadn’t been there she would have seized upon the desk sergeant or the first person who came in to pay a traffic fine. Now Nelsing was getting it. He’d give a good deal, he told himself, to see Nelse being enfolded by Truth.
“How’d you like your Marvelous Female Witness?” he asked the Inspector maliciously, half an hour later.
“Oh God,” said Howard Nelsing simply. “We’ve had plenty of ’em before, but never as insane as this one. Have a chair, Mac.” He sat down himself, a ruggedly handsome man in his late thirties, and fixed his friend with a keen blue gaze. “She may have let a few bits of the truth show through, here and there—”
“World-truth, you mean.”
“Yes, that’s the only kind that interests me just now. I guess Hartlein did go to see old Mrs. Majendie last night. I’ll pay her a call myself, but I hope to heaven this screwball dame will stay in the next room.” He leaned forward to offer Todd a cigarette. “That reminds me, Mac, I called up Georgine a few minutes after you’d left the house. She said she wouldn’t mind if I did some interviewing there.” Todd blinked. “The Johnson girls were down here this morning, pretty much upset about Hartlein’s death. One of them was married to him, you know, and they were both in a state of incoherence. I didn’t want to send ’em home, their street is thick with reporters already.”
“Good Lord, Nelse, are you softening up?” Nelsing had always held a poor opinion of womankind, considering them unreliable, cowardly, and without conscience in law-breaking.
Inspector Nelsing shook his head. “Not I. I told you, though, I’d known them on campus, and I can stretch a point for personal friends. They suggested you, themselves. Nobody can get at them, and I can talk to them later when they’ve calmed down. Neither of them had seen Hartlein for some time, so there couldn’t have been any funny business.”
“H’m,” Todd said. “You think there was funny business?”
“You tell me. What was the check for?”
Todd told him. Beyond the glass walls of the cubicle men moved quietly and busily; across from the window rose the cream-colored bulk of the City Hall, with pigeons now and then swooping down from its roof to strut in the open court between. The fantastic story that Hugh Hartlein had unfolded on that windy night ten days ago seemed doubly incredible in these surroundings; yet as Nelsing heard it he began to frown, and his forefinger executed a rhythmic and quite unconscious tapping on his desk.
“They came around on purpose to tell you that Hartlein was neurotic?” he said when Todd had finished.
“Looked that way. I’d guess that they knew Hartlein had that bee in his bonnet about the Hand of God murders, that he’d discussed it with them and that they’d threatened him with dire things if he so much as mentioned it to the police. Hartlein quibbled, and brought me the story; I think he’d heard that I lay all my humble offerings in your lap.” Nelsing snorted, but Todd went on imperturbably, “Then Georgine let slip that remark about the Hand of God, and the Johnsons knew that Hartlein had told somebody. So—prove that he’s an unstable character, and the yarn doesn’t get repeated. I’d never have wasted your time with it, if he hadn’t died.”
“Would you have come round with it if I hadn’t called you?”
“Probably not. You haven’t given out the details about the inhaler, have you?”
Nelsing shook his head. “Did the Johnson girls intimate that Hartlein was the suicide type?”
“Not in my hearing.”
“What do you think yourself?”
“From my one passage with him, I’d say it was possible.”
“Would he leave a note?”
“A suicide note? Pages of it.” Todd’s hard gray eyes kindled. “You didn’t find one?”
“Not so far,” Nelsing admitted grudgingly. “There wasn’t one on him, nor in his room. He’s got a mother up in Yreka, I gather; he might have mailed it to her, they do that sometimes.” He stood up, and opened the door. “Slater; anyone else to see me? Okay, I’m leaving for a while. Call me at Mac’s if anything turns up.” He picked up his hat. “Got your car, Mac?”
“No. I’ll take a lift home, if you’re not driving the wagon.” Todd, following Nelsing down the stairs, hesitated. “Look here, Nelse, how about letting me have a look at Hartlein’s room? It can’t be far from here, it’s down Grove.”
Nelsing gave him a sidelong look. “My God, you writers,” he said in resignation. “Come on, then. We’ve been over it pretty thoroughly.” He added, as his car engine purred into life, “I wish to heaven I knew whether this case really comes into our department.”
Todd grinned. He told himself that that remark, from Nelsing, was the equivalent of a fictional detective ominously muttering, “I don’t like this, there is some hidden evil that we haven’t uncovered yet.” That, in fact, was what he would have liked to say himself. There were vague pricklings of discomfort…
“The fellow was living on the cheap, wasn’t he?” he observed, as the car drew up before a scabrous old frame house which many years before had probably been painted yellow. “I thought the University had a list of decent living quarters for faculty.”
“That’s up to the members themselves,” said Nelsing dryly. “Hartlein was a thrifty soul. Come on, Mac, there’s just time for a quick look.” He led the way down a walk that led beside a half-basement floor, and the dried stalks of thick-growing bulb plants rustled against his legs as he strode. “Here,” he said in the same tone, as they rounded the corner, “is where our Miss Godfrey insists she stood and heard voices, in one of those all-seeing visions of hers.” Todd digested this in silence. Joan Godfrey had not included this detail in the information she poured over him. Nelsing opened a ground-level door which gave on a dank passageway, and turned the handle of an inner door on the left.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE ROOM WAS cheerless enough in all conscience. There were limp, drab curtains of the kind which a landlady hangs as a gesture and a bachelor does not notice, and a carpet faded to colorless lozenges. “Not much to steal, he never kept it locked, or the outside door either,” said Nelsing. The men stood in the doorway, both looking about them with attention, but the looks were different: Nelsing observed minutely, although he had already examined the room that morning; Todd absorbed, and thought irrelevantly that the bindings of textbooks lent less color to a room than any other type of book, and that the frame which enclosed the photograph of a middle-aged woman was at once expensive and surpassingly ugly. It was the room’s only ornament, if you could call it that.
“That’s Mrs. Hartlein of Yreka, I suppose,” he murmured, and remembered a snatch of conversation from the Johnson girls’ visit: something about that awful mother of his; he doesn’t like her himself. That picture frame was arresting, somehow, like a grand gesture made sullenly. Or was that a contradiction in terms? The woman in the picture looked at once avid and imperious. She would exact tribute, and this son wouldn’t refuse it.
&
nbsp; “Nelse,” he said, “where did you find that check of mine?”
Nelsing gave him a brief glance charged with intelligence. “In a desk drawer with a couple of insurance policies, a bank book, and a marriage certificate. Nothing else.”
“It doesn’t seem that valuable, unless—he meant to call attention… He’d made me, in a way, a repository of his suspicions.”
“I thought of that while you were telling me the story. We were meant to ask you, in case of his death, what the check was for.” Nelsing turned decisively. “Seen enough?”
“Just a minute more.” Todd stood motionless, with that look of attention which his wife likened to the raising of a radio aerial. What was the feeling of this room? Not convivial bachelordom, not the concentration on study that would ignore physical untidiness; the place was neat, too neat and barren. The only impression he could gather was a curious and indefinable one of despair.
He shook his head and said abruptly, “All right, I’m through.” They turned to the door, Nelsing swung it open and they stepped out into the dingy hall.
It was no longer untenanted. David Shere was standing by the entrance door as if he had just come in. He looked startled and angry and suspicious in almost equal parts. “Who the hell are you? What are you doing in there?” he said.
“I’m from the Berkeley Police Department,” said Nelsing crisply.
“Well, you’re not, McKinnon!”
“—Doing a routine check-up after the sudden death of Hugh Hartlein,” Nelsing went on as if he had not spoken. “Were you coming to see him?”
The Smiling Tiger Page 5