Murder Is Pathological

by P. M. Carlson

  “Yes. I see.”

  “You know how to pick up a rat?”

  “I can learn.”

  “Hand on her back, like this. Good, you’ve got it. Thumb and forefinger holding the head, so. Fingers under the belly. Good. That way they can’t bite, you can control the head.”

  “They bite?” Nick looked uneasily at the placid white creature in his hand. She did have quite a pair of incisors.

  “Nah. Not these. They’ve been handled a lot, tame as pussycats. But some of the experimentals get a little short-tempered when they haven’t been fed. Or the ones that are deprivation-raised, like the ones I was telling you about of Professor Moore’s. Bundle of nerves. They hadn’t been handled, you see, they were pretty edgy when they finally were picked up.” He signed for Nick to replace the rat and put back the cage. Then he leaned back against the steel table grinning at Nick. “Or the brain-operated ones. My God, I’ll never forget those eight rats Weisen was working with a few years ago! I couldn’t believe it. Holy terrors. They were deprivation-raised to start with. Then he destroyed a little bit of their brain, I think he called it the septal region. My God! They were vicious! Berserk! Bit everything in sight, jumped all over the place squealing. One of my assistants dropped one on the table when it bit him, and the damn thing jumped down to the floor, squealing like a pig, and started biting us all, actually chased us around the lab with those sharp teeth. Look!” He rolled down his sock to show white lines on his ankle. “Still scarred.”

  “God,” said Nick, half-amused. Hitchcock could use this. Gib’s leathery face wrinkled into a smile.

  “Well, we told Dr. Weisen if he ever did that again we’d have to charge for a hardship post.’’

  Nick grinned. “What did he say?”

  “He just laughed, said he saw our point. Never did do it again. I guess he’d found out what he wanted. Anyway, they stay gentle if they’re handled a lot, so don’t be afraid. Whenever we’ve got deprivation-raised rats we put a red circle on their cage cards. And usually the experimenters don’t want us in the room anyway until the job is over.”

  “That’s fine with me.”

  “If you have to handle one that’s fasting or something and you’re worried, you can wear gloves. Those heavy jobs in the supply cabinet. But generally if you move slowly and soothingly there’s no problem. Just try to avoid scaring them.”

  “Right.” Nick had wandered over to look out the big west windows, equipped with special shutters to keep out the solar heat when necessary. They were open now, and in the light from the eaves of the building he could make out a row of evergreens, and beyond them the old barracks-style building he had wondered about on the way in. “What’s that?” he asked.

  “That building? That’s the old lab. We use it for storage now. It’s pretty good, still vermin-proof. But it isn’t much good as a lab. The wiring is inadequate for modern equipment, and there’s no way to control temperature very precisely or even to separate clean and dirty areas. Anyway, you won’t have to worry about it. Dr. Weisen and I check supplies in and out. About three years ago one of the custodians was caught pilfering stuff from there, and ever since Weisen has kept the keys himself. There won’t be any work for you there; we don’t even have to clean it all that often.”

  “Fine. Are there any other buildings I should know about?”

  “Nope. This is the only one. There’s a kennel out back to the south, but it’s unoccupied now. Nothing else around, except for an old well house. I guess this used to be a farm or something. Our only neighbors are off west there about a mile on this road. But east of here and south it’s mostly state forest, all the way to the highway. Pretty boring.”

  “Is it good for hiking? I like hiking.”

  “Yeah, it’s probably okay for that. I noticed you walked in here.”

  “Right. My friend dropped me off down the road.” Actually he had parked in the Pine Tree Tavern lot a mile up the highway, cracked the windows open for Zelle, and walked here to the lab. He had picked up a restaurant matchbook in the parking lot as he left and had slipped it to Maggie along with his car keys as she grudgingly shook his hand. She’d take care of things.

  “Well, if you get tired of walking, there’s a minibus from campus every hour in the daytime.”

  “Yeah. It’ll be fine,” said Nick. “You know, after the city this is sort of like a country vacation. I mean, I’m sorry I can’t get to see my brother any sooner. But since I have to be here, I’ve decided to enjoy the change.”

  “Right. Well, I’m sure this will work out for all of us.” The little man looked him over, hopeful but still cautious.

  “Is there anything else I should know?” asked Nick.

  “Well, Rick, I’ve told you about these odd things that happened. It’s never been this way, never. The most unusual thing in my whole ten years working with lab animals was those rats of Dr. Weisen’s. Oh, I mean we’ve had odd animals from time to time. Goats, vervet monkeys, snakes. Mostly mice and rats, some dogs and cats. But the human problems have always been little ones. The worst was that pilfering I told you about. A couple of guys showed up drunk occasionally. One fellow had terrible arthritis but refused to quit. You know. Not this vicious kind of thing.”

  “Yeah, I see.”

  “I mean, our whole purpose is to keep the animals as happy as we can. That may sound silly. We give these poor rats tumors and brain damage and electric shocks and so forth. But it’s for a good reason, you see. The way Dr. Weisen explains it, we can’t do experiments on humans. I mean, who would volunteer to get a brain tumor? But people really do get them. And so to help those people we have to start with animals.”

  “Yeah, I see what you mean.”

  “But if we’re going to do these things to them, we at least should keep them comfortable, make their lives as easy as we can and their deaths as painless as we can. You know, really, these rats here are a lot luckier than wild rats, who get killed by a painful poison or by some cat ripping them apart or something.”

  “Yeah, that’s true.”

  “My philosophy is, keep them as healthy and comfortable as we can. And we have ways to kill them painlessly. Gas, drugs, cervical dislocation, depending on what they’re going to be used for.”

  “That’s why that bunch of Dr. Weisen’s is so upsetting.”

  “God, those poor mangled creatures! I just couldn’t believe it. Had to be someone really sick.” The black eyes bounced around the hall, settled on Nick again at last. “Rick, can you take care of yourself in a fight?”

  “Yeah. Unless the other guy has a gun or a knife or something like that.” Actually, he’d done all right against knives in his day too.

  “Good. I’m not saying you’ll need to. But if you catch anyone messing with these animals, let ‘em have it.”

  “Okay.’’ Nick followed Gib from the breeder room and along the main hall. “Do you think Norman’s death was connected to this other stuff?”

  “No, no, of course not.” But Gib looked frightened. “It has to be an accident. Coincidence.”

  “Yeah, look, Gib, you can level with me. I won’t quit. I need this job too much. I worked as a bouncer once, in a New York City bar.” This was true. An actor between jobs survives however he can, and Nick was big and cool-headed and quick, qualities valued by bar owners as well as by theatre directors. Nick added, “It’s just that I can handle it better if I know what I’m getting into.”

  “Yeah.” Gib looked glum for a minute. Then he said, “Look, it really has to be coincidence. I mean, first, Norman would never have killed those rats himself. He just wouldn’t. And even if he did, no one would take revenge on him like that. They’d be angry, report him, give him the sack. Not crowd him off the road.”

  “Suppose he didn’t kill them, but he knew who did?”

  “Well, then he would have said something, right? And he didn’t. Look, Rick, of course I’ve wondered about this. But nobody around here is like that. It’s just coincidence.”


  Nick said sympathetically, “Still, it must make your job that much tougher.”

  “Brother, you said it! And those university administrators give us peanuts for this job in the first place. With all this—” Gib caught himself and shrugged. “Well, it’s not all that tough, really. Okay, now, let’s check the east end.”

  The big room at the eastern end of the lab was similar to the breeding room at the west end but was set up to harbor larger animals. The only occupants were several cats in roomy wire crates. “Dog and cat room,” explained Gib. “We don’t have much going on now. Just Professor Iglesias’s cats. He’s studying something about sleep. Just check their water, they’re fed in the daytime.”

  A little hall led off one end of the cat room. “What’s that?” asked Nick, indicating a low door with an elaborate lock and a porthole window.

  “Gas chamber,” said Gib.

  “What?”

  “For euthanizing larger animals. We put them in there and turn on the cyanide. It used to be a decompression chamber too, but the pressure meter went haywire and Weisen hasn’t been able to get the administrators to give him funds to fix it yet.”

  “Cyanide. Isn’t that pretty dangerous?”

  Gib grinned. “They say it smells like bitter almonds. They also say if you can smell it you’re already dead. One good inhalation is all it takes to knock you out. So yeah, I’d say it’s dangerous. But it’s quick, and the chamber there has a good exhaust that detoxifies it afterward. Of course I’d rather use decompression. But I don’t control the purse strings.”

  “God. Is the gas just kept around?”

  “Hell, no. We mix it on site. A bowl of sulfuric acid and a pulley you work from outside that dumps potassium cyanide pellets into it. It’s perfectly safe.”

  “The animals don’t suffer?”

  “I told you, it’s quick. It’s a lot better than ether; that burns their lungs before they die. Ether is explosive too, so we don’t keep much around. Anyway, don’t worry about it. Not part of your job.”

  “I’m just not used to thinking about it, I guess.”

  “Well, it takes a few days. You’ve got a feel for animals, I could tell by the way you handled that rat. But this is a good death, if you can say that about death. Quick. And the animals have to go. They’re expensive to feed and keep, and once they’ve been used no one wants them. I mean, look at these cats. Out there all over the nation Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Public are letting dear little Pussy have just one litter of dear little kittens. Then they find out no one else wants them. So the animal shelter has to euthanize them, or they may even drown them themselves. And those are cute little kittens. How could these cats compete with them? Who wants a cat with a hole in its skull?”

  Nick saw then that, like Barbara Burke’s rats, the cats had steel plates for electrodes implanted in their heads. He nodded. “I see. But God, this research better be worth it.”

  “Yeah.” Gib nodded. “These scientists are pretty good about it. And you have to remember, these cats would be dead already if we weren’t using them. Dead, or suffering in a wild life, starving and sick. We make their lives generally comfortable and their deaths painless. Maybe they don’t live as well as a pet with a good master. But they live better than most, and die better than most too.”

  “Yeah. I understand.” With my head, thought Nick.

  “Okay. Back over here, your last job,” said Gib, leading the way back out of the cat room. “We try to do most of the animal work and cleaning during the day, but you’ll have to manage the floors and wastebaskets and incineration. The service door to the trash bins is over there.’’ He pointed to a big door at the east end of the building. “And here’s the incinerator. We run it every night, for sanitation purposes. Here, I’ll show you.”

  There was a small stack of bags with forms attached to them. “You tear off the forms and sign them, and pile the bags in here, like so. Lock these doors, push the buttons, twist the handle, and presto chango.” He was scrawling his own name on all the forms he’d taken off, and clipping them to a board he was carrying. “And that’s it. The forms go into that box outside the technician’s office, and we file them. That way we’ve got a record of every animal from the time it’s born until it meets its maker.”

  “I see,” said Nick. There were animals in the bags, then. He was grateful that he didn’t have to look too hard at what he was doing in this task. He turned away and changed the subject. “Listen, how often will I have to go into the clean area? I mean, a guy can only take so many showers.”

  “Right.” Gib laughed. “We all cheat a little on the showers, only take one the first time on the shift, unless we’ve been handling soiled bedding or something. But always put on a clean coverall.”

  “Sounds fair.”

  “And that’s all I can think of now. Let’s take a nap, do rounds again at two to check things. Got everything you need?”

  “Yeah, I’m all right. Should one of us stay awake, maybe?”

  “We aren’t guards, Rick. We should stay alert for odd things, of course, but our job is to keep the animals healthy and the lab clean. Dr. Weisen and I are real clear on that. If he decides he needs a guard, he’ll hire one. We just take care of the animals.”

  “Okay, I understand. See you in a little while.”

  “Right.” Gib headed for the cot in the technician’s office.

  Nick walked back past the entrance to the cluster of storage rooms that included his—Norman’s—bedroom. He made up the bed with sheets Gib had brought him, went across the hall to the bathroom that was incorporated into the shower locks, and returned to undress and switch off the light. He was deeply tired. As he stretched out on the bed—it wasn’t bad—he slowly began to return to himself. Rick’s brother in Chicago, his need for money, his life as a custodian, became mythical again. It was hard to shed Rick completely; even in the dark, Nick was aware of his brown skin. But in the blackness he could begin to feel like Nick again. A rather sad, excited, hopeful, despairing Nick, aching from worry and lack of sleep. God, no wonder, he’d been up since three a.m. at Carmen’s, hadn’t he? Quite a day.

  He tried to relax, but his mind kept circling edgily, gnawing at problems. The strange surroundings. The troubling fate of the man whose bed he now occupied. The many unfamiliar duties he suddenly had to learn. The welcome Maggie had given him, and the abrupt rejection. He had to find out why. That was his real problem. He’d let Rick handle the murder and sabotage.

  Was he really any better off now than he had been this morning, as her friend? Strangely, he felt that he was. Their feelings were in the open now; that was a step forward. And, forced to choose between banishing him by exposing his disguise, or allowing him to help search for the truth about Norman’s death from Rick’s peculiarly useful position, she had chosen to let him help. Angry, insulting, but loyal to Norman and sensible enough to see the advantages of Nick’s plan. Even to the extent of accepting responsibility for Zelle. And sometime soon they would talk. Things in flux were always unsettling, even painful, but they could—maybe—come to a happier resolution than the one this afternoon.

  They’d better, he thought, to make up for these weeks of cleaning up rat shit.

  Like all buildings at night, the lab made its own secret noises. A steady hum, probably the air supply. Overlaid on that, little creaks and rustlings. Made sense, the building was filled with mice and rats, hundreds of tiny intelligences. Nocturnal animals, at least wild ones were. Maybe these tame ones were also at their peak now. Unlike Nick, who was thoroughly groggy. Through a crack in the curtains by his head, he could see scattered stars against the velvety country sky. The weather had cleared, except for little, smudgy clouds blowing across part of the sky. The stars came and went behind them. Odd. He flicked the curtains a little further apart to see better, and realized what was happening. The smoke from this building was drifting on the light wind. The incinerator.

  God, thought Nick, I’m sleeping in a cremat
orium.

  But he did sleep.

  VI

  Almost everyone is innocent, Monica told herself firmly. And furthermore, Norman’s death was an accident, a coincidence. She should not waste time in fruitless suspicion of her colleagues and even her roommate. She should get on with her work, treat everyone normally, and avoid dangerous topics. That was why she said, “Tell me about your friend Nick,” as Maggie drove her to the lab Friday morning. Monica would be staying for twenty-four hours or more, because it was her night to stay and check the animals.

  “He’s hard to describe.”

  “I’ve seen that Elson Beer thing. So I know what he looks like.”

  Maggie laughed. “He doesn’t look like that often. He’s an actor, Monica. A real one. I don’t know what he’s like. He’s a million people.”

  “There’s no off-stage person?”

  “Well, yeah, but it may be one of the million.”

  “His dog is well-adjusted. He can’t be too freaky,” observed Monica sagely, from long experience with animals.

  Maggie grinned. “Yeah, she’s great. You think that means he’s okay?”

  “Can’t fool animals.”

  “Oh, I bet Nick could.”

  “Is he special? Mary Beth said that you and he—”

  Monica stopped herself. Dark with anger, the blue eyes flashed at her, then turned back to the road. “Yeah? What did fucking Mary Beth say?”

  “Oh, nothing. She wanted to keep me from putting my foot in it. She failed.” So much for avoiding dangerous topics.

  Maggie stared at the road.

  Monica said, “Look, I’m sorry, okay? I like you, I was curious, that’s all.”

  “Okay, okay.” Maggie glared at the sensual May greens of the passing landscape as though the source of her problems were out there. After a moment she added, with obvious difficulty, “I’m excessively prickly on the subject. Monica, have you been in love?”