“It’s nice to see you again, Miller.” Younger’s voice was no different from Millersburg. “We haven’t been answering the door. Mr. Rodgers hasn’t been well enough for receiving.”
“I’m sorry.” Miller stood at the side of the bed. He had to say something to cover the gap since he’d last seen Younger. “I was surprised to see you here in Millersburg.” That was all, it made it so simple. No mention of Allendale, his own disgrace all that had happened.
“And I’m surprised to see you, miller. I thought you’d crawled into a hole and pulled it in after you, how’s Julie?”
“Julie is fine.” Miller said. He looked at the shaving mug, the razor on the table, then at the stubbled face of the sunken cheeked man in bed. Rodger’s was changed from the picture of him in Albert Smith’s desk, the South American group picture. But a resemblance clung, around the eyes, the cast of the face, the line of the jaw, something remained an indestructible something that had probably been there when he was a newborn child.
“I was just shaving Mr. Rodgers,” Younger explained. “Mr. Rodgers, this is John Miller. I’ve told you about him, you know the fellow who used to be a doctor at that place outside town? Millersburg, there was some unfortunate trouble there.” Younger was so kind.
“Oh yes, yes.” the voice was thin strained. He nodded his head reminiscently as if he understood completely. Miller grimaced, “There are some things I’d like to get straightened out, Mr. Rodgers.” these decisive things meeting a problem, tackling it that was what he needed, “you were Paul Allen’s closest friend?”
“Oh, you know about Allen” Younger said. “Did you know him?”
Miller reached for the chain on the lamp beside the bed, turning on the light was a nervous action to release the tension within him.
Younger caught his arm, “please.” he lowered his voice concernedly in the sober manner of a physician discussing a patient. “Mr. Rodgers can’t take the light.”
“I’m sorry.” He hadn’t been interested in turning on the light, but that was the way you did injury sometimes, by merely forgetting all people were not alike. “That’s one thing we’ll have to arrange when he appears for the reading of the will,” Younger went on, “do you know about the will? You were attending Mr. Allen perhaps?”
Younger was malicious in bringing that up as if he didn’t know what had happened at Allendale. “I’m no longer a doctor, Younger.” There was some satisfaction in stating it boldly defiantly. “I’m here as a friend of Albert Smith.”
“Oh, yes I was sorry to hear about Albert.” Younger stepped to the room’s window and lowered the shade. “Tropic sunlight, the degeneration of the retina,” he murmured. “How’s that Mr. Rodgers? There’s really too much light in here even now.” Younger said, “I had put the shade up on account of the shaving.”
The bed’s rumpled blankets made dark pockets of shadows; Rodger’s beard stubble face looked paler. His thin white hair was a fringe around his shining skull. Miller looked at Rodger’s hands lying inertly on the cover. “You were close to Paul Allen, Mr. Rodgers,” Miller said. “I understand you were influential in molding his ideas, his outlook.”
“I was a minister.” Rodgers said.
Rodgers, a minister, but he had been in trouble with a girl; Daniels had said that was why he’d gone to South America.
“You had a son?” Miller asked. He should have said, “Child”. He didn’t know it was a son. “What makes you say that? I have no children!”
“But your wife was going to have a child.” He was prying, being crude, offensive. Rodgers voice was ragged. “I know I’m not perfect. I try to live the best I know, but I have made mistakes, yes transgressions.”
“Then you did have a child with that women?”
“There are some who don’t understand. They think a minister is above human frailty, above human appetites and passions as the apostle Paul said. It is better to marry than to burn.” He was silent for a moment, “Yes, I had a son though I say I haven’t because to me, he’s dead you see! To me he’s dead. His mother was a servant girl, simple, scheming, beautiful and possessed of the devil, oh but I’ve paid for that.”
“I’m sorry,” Miller said. Alvin Rodgers sniffed away tears, “I’m all right. I haven’t seen the boy in years, blessedly for all of us; I think he is in truth dead.”
Younger drew Miller toward the door. “What have you come here for?” He whispered. “You’re just causing trouble.” The huge doctor’s voice dropped even lower. “The kid was no good, a mental case and his mother, well you know the kind, morals charges.” Younger his hand on the door knob firmly directed Miller out.
“Doctor Younger,” Rodgers thin cracked voice spoke from the bed. “Yes, Alvin.” Younger said.
“I would like to speak a few words with Mr. Miller, alone.” Younger let his fingers drop from Millers arm.
“Would you leave the room, Doctor?” Rodgers insisted.
“Sure,” Younger walked through a door into an adjacent room, shut the door. Miller stood where he was.
“Come here,” said the man on the bed, as a dying father might call to his child, “have you a moment to spare an old man?” Miller stood beside the bed.
“Do you know the lawyer, Benny Godley?” Rodgers asked.
“It will be such an effort for me to appear at Paul Allen’s house, will you use your influence with Godley? I wish to grant doctor Younger power of attorney to act for me; it is such a simple thing.” Miller waited.
Rodgers breath came haltingly, “I’m really afraid to go to that house, I know that crew well.”
“Rodgers!” Miller exclaimed.
Rodgers laughed weakly, despairingly, “a smooth one, that Daniels. On his dying bed he will be dangerous, woe to the blood he has on his head! Do you know what he has done?”
“I heard he lost his leg during the war taking a ship to Murmansk.”
“Murmansk? Heaven bless us! Do you know where he really lost it? Gun-running! He was gun running arms as long ago as the Spanish Civil War. Smuggling arms to France! Daniels was on the loyalist side, and all the time betraying them, may god have mercy on him. Using South America as a base for contracting foreign agents, doing their ill bidding, now he’s probably,”
The bald man’s thoughts strayed, his squinting eyes blinked, and his face grew more sober. “I know this doctor Younger, I have here is no good,” he said, “He’s not even a doctor anymore. Do you know that he served time in the penitentiary for malpractice?”
His face was eager, like a gossiping child’s, “but I need a bodyguard as much as I need a doctor, and you can see for yourself he’s capable; Weighs 240 and strong as a titan. Younger was a friend of my boys, when he was a patient for a while at a sanitarium called Allendale. I understand you were a doctor there too. Oh, yea I heard Younger whispering to you at the door that my boy was a mental case. I may be on my back and half blind, but I still have my hearing and my sense.”
He cocked his head slyly, “You know, Younger didn’t set my leg, Smith that local doctor did. The night before he died, Younger a doctor! He’d kill the dead.”
“I’ll speak to Godley.” Miller said. He touched the man’s thin shoulder soothingly, “we’ll get this will business over and done with.”
The man nodded, “Did you know I was the one person to whom Paul Allen confided his affairs and he didn’t even tell me he was leaving his money to this bunch? But I know those I can trust, Godley he’s a good man.
Outside the bright light speared Miller’s eyes. He walked on his thoughts occupying all of his consciousness. Paul Allen must have gone to Allendale with Rodgers when Rodgers had met Albert, and became interested in setting him up as a doctor in Millersburg. The pieces of the puzzle were fitting neatly. His first impression or Rodgers had unfavorable, perhaps because of his proximity to Younger. But his first impressions were often wrong; he hadn’t liked Albert at the first meeting.
Yet Rodgers said Godley was honest, Godley honest?
But he realized it was contradictory enough to be true. Paul Davis was alone in the sitting room of the mansion when Miller returned there. He quickly tossed off the last of some liquor in a tumbler and set the glass on the mantel.
“Sunshine today,” he said, “but bad weather is coming up, aches can be pretty bad.” It was the first time Miller had seen the almost perpetually drunk man drinking.
“Where have you been Miller?”Davis seemed years older than he had the night before. “I’ve been turning over rocks for you.” His rumpled clothes looked slept in and his face might have been made of gray putty. “I need your help in handling Godley.”
“Godley! Has something happened?
Paul Davis’s look was sharp; he led the way from the house out onto the verandah. “Last night, while the rest of us were sleeping, that Mendez was prowling around. A bug in my brain is beginning to tell me he let out the bats.”
“He could have you know, as a trick to distract us while he was up to something somewhere else.” Miller replied.
Miller remembered, “I saw someone prowling myself, but Mendez was with you and Jimmy Marks at the time. It was when you all went to put the bats back in the zoo, and see if you could find out how they got out.”
“But he didn’t go back to the zoo with us Miller; he turned those bats over to me and the state cop. Said he had to go somewhere. He didn’t say about what.”
“I saw someone in the shrubbery.” Miller said.
“Maybe he hid something there, in this screwy game you can’t tell what might happen.”
They rounded the side of the house; sitting in a tubular chair drawn up against the zoo compound wall was Jose Mendez. Apparently taking the sun, his head tilted up to catch its warming rays.
“I think I’ll ask him what he did after he left you at the zoo.” Said Miller.
Let’s go see what he says.”
“What do you think he’ll say?”
“I’ll ask him.” Miller said. He walked over to the man, “hello Mendez, taking in the sun?” The man’s eyes were wide glazed.
“Mendez, what’s the matter? Mendez?” Mendez was dead.
Chapter Thirteen
Sergeant Sammy of the state police arrived with his two troopers John and Jerry. They were followed shortly by coroner Watson accompanied by the same photographer who had been with him after Albert Smith’s death. There was little question as to what had ended Mendez life. Two punctures in the back of the South American’s neck told the story. There was also a puncture in the soft pocket of his left collar bone.
The wall against which Mendez sat consisted of lashed together peeled poles. But the poles being crooked had gaps of as much as three or four inches between them. Miller started to point out the significance of that to Watson, but the coroner only scratched his head and walked away from Miller, busy with thoughts of his own.
Captain Joseph Daniels, propped firmly on his crutches, watched from a broken circle of troopers and townsman whose deputy badges apparently has served as their admission. Daniels eyes were fixed on the dead man as they might have been fixed on a distant point of land. Paul Davis continuously, nervously cleared his throat. Looking at Angelia Parker, standing on her toes to see over a trooper’s shoulder, Miller almost expected to hear her hiss, sh-h-!” at Davis, as she might at a disturbing neighbor in a theater. There was no evidence of her hysteria of the night before.
Miller glimpsed Sally Daniels walking aimlessly along the line of La Querencia’s fence. He understood that she did not want any sight or part of this thing. If it weren’t for her father, she likely would her ready to forswear her share of Allen’s money much though it might mean to her, perhaps Miller thought. She stayed within sight of the scene because she feared greater fright and loneliness away from it.
Jimmy Marks suddenly came into Miller’s mind, he too was lonely and possibly afraid Miller looked for him and then saw that the coroner was momentarily idle, as he waited for the photographer to get an angle.
“You see those wide spaces between the stockade poles, Doctor Watson?” Miller asked. “There’s plenty clearance for a hand to come through.”
“Eh, what’s that?”
“Somebody could have been on the other side in the zoo,” Miller went on, “a killer could have sneaked up and stabbed Mendez through the poles.” His charge attracted Sammy’s notice.
“Like this?” The sergeant thrust his own outsize clenched hand at the space Miller indicated. It would not squeeze through, “naaah!” he tried it at several places.
“Your hands twice the size of anybody else’s.” Miller put his own fist through the opening.
The coroner scratched his grey beard; Sammy shook his broad head emphatically.
“Yeah mister, but remember if anybody stuck their hand through there, like you say they woulda been holding an ice pick or something to do the stabbing with, and that woulda made their fist that much bigger, naaah!”
Watson took Sammy’s dismissal as his own cue to ignore Miller. He waited till the photographer tool his flash photo and then studied the holes in the dead man’s neck, pressing the soft flesh between his fingers and exuding sluggish purple blood.
“Some bats were loose here last night, the sergeant tells me.”
“They’re back in their cages now.” Paul Davis volunteered.
It surprised Miller that Davis had spoken. Davis he decided was trying to justify his presence by participation.
“Are you sure the bats were recaptured?” Watson turned from the body, standing to his full height. He was not a tall man and his beard; Miller noticed covered a receding chin.
“I checked,” Davis said. “Both bats are still in there.”
“How do you know there weren’t three or four or even five bats in that cage?” Watson’s eyes were wide with the inspiration back of his question, and his false teeth clicked as he spoke.
“As a matter of fact there were five bats.” Davis said. “You’re right, the young fellow whose caretaker here told me there were more bats loose when we caught the two last night, but he said they wouldn’t fly off, and it would be easier to get them by day when they were blinded by light.”
“Does it make any difference if some of those bats are around?” Miller asked. “What are you trying to get at Doctor Watson? Are you trying to say this man wasn’t stabbed and that those bats did that to him?”
Watson turned to the state police sergeant, he pursed his lips. “We’ll get the hearse and take him over to my place for a complete autopsy.” He glanced at Miller, “If it’s murder, you can be sure we’ll act.” Miller turned away; Paul Davis stepped abreast of him.
“Do you think he really intends making an examination?” He asked earnestly.
“I don’t see why he should, when he’s already convinced bats are responsible.” Miller replied.
He felt Davis abruptly cut away from him. The suddenness of the action sobered Miller’s anger, was something wrong? Had what he said annoyed Davis? And if so why? Davis was moving purposefully toward the house. Where was Davis going? What sudden decision had he made?
Miller saw Sally, she stopped at his approach. “For some reason,” he said, “the police refuse to recognize murder around here. They intimate Mendez was killed by vampire bats; but at least there’s going to be an autopsy that’s something.” He took her arm, “let’s get out of this place,” he said, “let’s walk towards town.” They left the gate and crossed the bridge over the railroad tracks, Miller was aware she was waiting for him to speak, but his tongue was tied.”Sally,” he said finally. “How much do you know about your father?”
She stopped. Her body stiff. “Don’t be angry, Sally I’ve heard things I don’t believe, but you’ve said yourself you’ve known your father only for the last year or two. Your mother’s family disapproved of her marriage to him because he was a seaman, are you sure there was no other reason?”
She looked at him, “that’s the only reason I know.”
“You
don’t know much about your father, that’s all I mean.” He saw the glassiness of tears coming into her eyes, “What he’s been, what he’s done.”
I’ve been told your father was a gun runner that he worked with foreign agents in South America.” She said nothing, he knew it was true.
“I’m sorry, Sally.”
“He’s old,” she said, “He’s ill.”
“We don’t have to stick up for our parents.”
“What a terrible thing to say!” She turned away from him with a fierce bounce of her brassy hair.
“We’ve enough to do, answering for ourselves.” That made it clearer to her. “We can’t be responsible for our parents or what they think or do.”
“Dad’s been a confused man, a bitter man; but he’s changed now that I’m with him. He’d know if he did anything wrong now it would hurt me. He had no direction before and he’s not been mixed up in any of this business, please believe me!”
He hadn’t meant to imply, necessarily that her father had been. He started Sally walking, “I’m sorry I had to say those things,” he said, “but I had to get it straight.”
He turned her south; the sidewalk under the sycamores was tagged with tattered leaves. “Where are we going?” Her hand held his arm.
“I saw Alvin Rodgers this morning.” Miller said.
“We were leaving the tavern last night McGinnis, we saw a big fellow remember?” As if she could have forgotten. “I told you he’d been a doctor in Allendale at the same place I was connected with.” How nicely evasive! Last night he’d laid bare his inner self for her; now he was acting as if nothing had happened in Allendale, “Well I went to see Alvin Rodgers, this fellow Doctor Younger is with Rodgers, taking care of him.”
.”Alvin Rodgers has a broken leg.”
“Yes, and Rodgers said Albert set the leg for him the night before Albert was found dead; I think it may be important.”
They walked on silently when Miller stopped. They were in front of the house that had been Albert Smith’s home and office. “I didn’t know you were going to bring me here,” Sally said.
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