by Frances
4
From the other bed there were small sounds—sounds chiefly of rustling. There were also certain sighing sounds, and a small—obviously smothered—cough. Jerry North lengthened his breathing, approximated a mild snore. There was, from the other bed, the slight sound of someone turning over. This was followed by a somewhat louder sign. Jerry, under the covers, looked at the illuminated dial of his wrist watch. It showed twenty minutes of three.
“Oh, dear,” Pam North said, in the soft voice of one who, driven almost beyond endurance, is still considerate of those more fortunate, those who can sleep. There were further sounds. Pam had, evidently, turned over on the other side. There was a swishing sound. Pam had, undoubtedly, thrown off excess covering. There was silence for a few minutes, but Jerry did not sleep. Jerry waited. There was a louder sigh, and a longer sigh. There was a small sound of creaking. Pam was sitting up in bed, preparatory—it must be assumed—to pulling the covers back again.
“All right, Pam,” Jerry said, and sat up in his own bed, and turned on the light between their beds. At which Pam said, “Ouch!” and covered her eyes. “I tried not to wake you up,” Pam said and turned to look at him. He said nothing. “All right,” she said. “I tried to wake you up. Inadvertently.”
“I know,” Jerry said. “It’s all right. I’ll—”
“Jerry!” Pam said. “Of all the—no.” Jerry put his legs back in bed. “Anyway, not yet,” Pam said.
Jerry shook a cigarette loose from a package on the night table and held it out to Pam, who took it. He lighted hers, lighted one for himself.
“All right,” he said. “I don’t know who killed Jamey. And I feel the same way about it you do. And—I’m as wide awake now as you are. And—you’ve thought of something. At”—he consulted his watch again—“fifteen minutes of three.”
“I can’t help that,” Pam said. “And probably it’s all wrong. But—this posthypnotic whatever it is.”
“Oh, lord,” Jerry said. “Suggestion. You want to read the book?”
“Why should I?” Pam said. “It’s a very long book. And you’ve read it. Division of labor, sort of. That sharing which is part of every true—”
“Pam!”
“—except that some people can sleep through anything.” Pam said.
For a moment Jerry had the uneasy feeling that he had carried things too far. He looked at Pam. She wasn’t cross. Intent, but not cross.
“Whatever I knowest, thou shalt know,” Jerry said. “Or we’ll get the book and read it aloud to each other.”
“All right,” Pam said. “You can get somebody to break a clock. Could you get somebody to—kill?”
“You,” Jerry said, “think of the damnedest things. At three o’clock in the morning. No, according to Elwell, and he says that that’s the consensus.”
“Are they sure?”
“Of course they—” Jerry said, and stopped. “Well—” he said.
They were sure enough, and a long series of experiments had been made—including several by Elwell himself. But there was one flaw in all the experiments. They weren’t real—couldn’t, obviously, be real. The only real experiment would involve real murder, which would be carrying things rather far. So they had tried to duplicate reality without actually achieving it. They had tried it with rubber daggers—but rubber daggers would hardly feel real to anyone, let alone to a person in hypnosis when, many think, perceptions are heightened. They had tried it with real daggers, but the “victim” behind a barrier of “invisible” glass. But—was the glass really invisible? They had tried it with guns loaded with blanks. But—did the operator unconsciously reveal to the subject that the gun held only blanks?
Under these simulated conditions, some subjects apparently tried to kill. Most authorities doubted that, with actual killing possible, any subject would murder—unless, presumably, he had murder already in his mind.
“So?”
“Suppose,” Pam said, “this Mr. Hunter, under posthypnotic suggestion, broke a valuable clock because Jamey had told him the clock wasn’t any longer valuable. Was worthless.”
“All right,” Jerry said. “Supposed.”
“Suppose Jamey did know that he—he was going to die. That he—he wasn’t any longer valuable. To himself. That for somebody to kill him would be—what’s the long word?”
“Euthanasia. No, I doubt it, Pam. And—it would have been a dirty trick. Jamey didn’t play dirty tricks.”
“Oh,” Pam said, “he’d leave a record of some sort, exonerating whoever did it. Because—that would be the point, wouldn’t it? Of the final experiment? To prove that, under certain circumstances—very special circumstances—a person who had been hypnotized could be told to kill?”
Jerry doubted several things—one, that any explanation Jamey might leave behind would, legally, exonerate the person who killed him. Two—that anyone, most of all Jameson Elwell, would think the point important enough for so drastic a proof. Three—that it would have worked anyway.
“‘Hold then my sword and turn away thy face,
‘While I do run upon it. Wilt thou, Strato?’
and Strato did, as I remember it.”
“But before that somebody—I forget who—had said, ‘Not on your life.’ Said—wait a minute—‘That’s not an office for a friend, my lord.’” Jerry spoke with some triumph.
“It could be,” Pam said, “that Strato was the better friend, my lord. My God—I’m beginning to talk like Shakespeare.”
Blank verse, Jerry told her, is infectious. It happens even to writers of prose—unwary writers of prose.
“All right, Pam said. “What I said can still be true. And—the more somebody loved Jamey, the more likely he would be to—to do what Jamey wanted. Save him from—from long pain. Pain without hope.”
“I doubt—” Jerry said, and stopped. “All right,” he said. “I still don’t believe it. I’ll admit—” He stopped again. “Damn,” Jerry said, in a tone aggrieved. “He would have left a statement,” he said.
“Of course. In his files. Or—Jerry. Perhaps he made it orally—on the tape recorder and—and somebody wiped it off! Or whatever you do to a tape.”
“You can,” Jerry said, “think of the damnedest things.” He said if not without admiration. He ground out his cigarette and at once lighted a fresh one, having, it occurred to him, thought of a damnedest thing himself.
“Suppose this,” he said. “Suppose somebody—anybody you like; this man Hunter for example—killed Elwell, just in the ordinary course of events. And—”
“Jerry!” Pam said. “The ordinary course—”
“Ssh,” Jerry said. “You’ve had your supposes. This man doesn’t want to be caught. But—suppose he is. With overpowering evidence against him. He says it certainly looks bad but he doesn’t remember anything about it. And then—‘If I did it, it was because he’d hypnotized me and made me do it, and I can prove that he did hypnotize me often and once made me break a clock.’ I don’t know whether it would get him off entirely, but if he could make it stick it would be—well, an extenuating circumstance, at the least.”
He looked at Pam, who nodded, who said, “That’s a very good suppose, dear,” but seemed to be thinking of something else—something that smudged the clarity of her mobile face. He waited.
“Faith Oldham loved him,” Pam said, slowly. “We both felt that—as a girl might love a father. A very good father—a wise father. I think she might have done almost anything he asked, feeling he knew best. And—I wonder if he ever hypnotized her, Jerry? And if—”
Her clear voice faltered a little.
“I hope it isn’t that way,” Pam North said. “Will you get me a phenobarbital, Jerry?”
Bill Weigand got to his office at a little before nine Thursday morning. Sergeant Mullins had been there earlier; Sergeant Mullins had been active, on two fronts.
Precinct detectives, who had been active even earlier, had got the name of a doctor from Professor Elwell
’s address book. Mullins, by telephone, had run the doctor to earth—specifically, to his hospital rounds. Yes, he had been consulted by Professor Elwell from time to time, over a period of years. If they wanted more than that—how did the doctor know Mullins was who he said he was? If he was, didn’t the police know that doctors do not talk about patients?
Mullins himself was patient, tactful. Professor Elwell was dead. So the point of secrecy was hardly relevant. He had been shot to death, so the previous condition of his health had nothing to do with the end of his life. So—
“Doctors are stuffy,” Mullins told Bill Weigand. “Wasted ten minutes getting around to it. No, he didn’t know Elwell had anything seriously wrong with him. Matter of fact, he hadn’t seen Elwell for some three years and then it was about nothing much, and Elwell seemed O.K.”
“What was it then?”
Not that it mattered.
“Cat bit him,” Mullins said. “You fool around with cats—Minor infection. Doc treated it.”
It didn’t matter.
“People ought to leave cats alone,” Mullins said. “Speaking of which—did you know Jerry North published the professor’s last book?”
“Yes,” Bill said and to that, after a considerable pause, Mullins said, “Oh,” in a certain way. “Not,” he added, “that they’re not nice people, Loot. Only—”
“This doctor wouldn’t know whether Elwell had been to see another man?”
“No. I asked him. He said he doubted it, but it was up to anybody what doctor he went to.”
Mullins had read from the preliminary autopsy report—read words over which he had stumbled slightly. Would Elwell necessarily have known that he was ill, or how ill he was? Not necessarily; in fact, probably not. In another few months—
“The accident?”
“Somebody,” Mullins said, “ought to do something about the Merritt Parkway.”
It was a statement with which Bill Weigand did not disagree. But it was not clear that, in the violent death of Elizabeth Elwell, twenty-four years and two months old when her life ended during the early morning of April twenty-sixth, the inadequacies of the Merritt had been much involved.
A Jaguar, being driven toward New York at around eighty, had gone out of control, crossed the center strip, crashed into a sedan headed east. A man and a woman, driving home to Norwalk after the theater in New York, and an after-theater supper, had been killed in the sedan. Elizabeth Elwell had been killed in the Jaguar—more exactly, had been killed as she was thrown from it to unrelenting pavement. Her fiancé, one Rosco Finch, in the Jaguar beside her, had been only slightly injured.
Finch and the girl had been driving back to New York after a party in Westport.
“Finch drunk?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Mullins said. “Finch wasn’t driving. The girl was driving. She had a few drinks but not enough to make her drunk. If she had normal resistance. Concentration in the blood”—Mullins consulted notes—“a little less than a tenth of a per cent. Just lost control.”
It had not been on a curve, but on a straightaway. It had, however, happened just as the Jaguar came over the top of a Merritt Parkway hill. Something might, of course, have showed up ahead—a car moving slowly in the fast lane, for example. The Jaguar’s brakes had gone on just before it left the pavement and ploughed into the grass of the center strip. Finch didn’t remember seeing anything, but he wasn’t watching the road with much attention. In fact, he thought he had been dozing.
“Her car?”
It had been Finch’s car.
“But she was driving?”
“That’s what he says.” Mullins looked at Bill Weigand and raised his eyebrows.
“Nothing,” Bill said. “Oh, it’s usually the passenger who gets thrown out. But not always.”
“He was, apparently,” Mullins said. “First. Landed on the grass. It was soft, the way it is in spring. You think it ties in?”
It didn’t seem to.
They drove from Twentieth Street north to Forty-fourth, and across to the Harvard Club. Mr. Foster Elwell was waiting for them in the lounge. The lounge had an unawakened air.
Foster Elwell was a big man; an athlete who had softened with the years. There had, obviously, been a good many years—at a guess, Foster Elwell was several years older than his brother had been. He had a ruddy face and, probably, a blood pressure. He got out of a deep chair with the quickness of a man who rejected physical defeat. (Which conceivably, Bill thought, was not too good for him.)
He looked from Bill to Mullins and back to Bill, and his eyes questioned.
“No,” Bill said. “We don’t know yet, Mr. Elwell.”
“It’s a knockout,” Foster Elwell said. “I don’t mind telling you it’s a knockout. A thing like this. To happen to Jamey.” He shook his head. “Jamey,” he repeated. “Of all the people in the world.”
Which was almost always said; which was almost always poignant, as it was now. Somebody else—somebody far away—somebody read about in the newspapers. Such distant things could be believed.
“Any way I can help. Any damn way at all,” Foster Elwell said. “Get my hands on the son of a bitch who’d do a thing like that.”
“We’ll get him,” Bill promised, and hoped they would. They almost always did. Of course, there had been another Elwell and they hadn’t. Which was a coincidence without meaning. Which had better be.
“I’ll do anything I can,” Foster Elwell said. “I don’t know what it’ll be. My brother and I—we were close enough, but we didn’t see each other a lot. Know what I mean? Once a month, maybe—once every six weeks. Last time was—” He thought. “Labor Day,” he said. “He came out to the place.”
He knew of no enemies his brother might have had, of no circumstance in his brother’s life which might have led to this. Everybody liked Jamey; he couldn’t imagine anybody not liking Jamey. And the things Jamey did for people—
“Right now,” he said, “my son Jimmy’s in college because—” He stopped, as if he had started something he preferred not to finish. “All right,” he said, “I’m retired. We’ve got just about enough to live on decently. I don’t say we wouldn’t have put Jimmy—he’s our youngest—through college somehow, but all the same—And he helped with Janet. She’s married now. Fine young man but they’re out in Scranton and—”
He stopped.
“Getting along,” he said. “Have to expect it, I suppose. Fact is, this whole thing’s got me—fuzzy. Having a cocktail, Grace and I were, just like any evening and the telephone rings and—I tell you, captain, it’s a knockout. I know I sound like a meandering old fool. But—”
It was natural, Bill said, and that Elwell was not meandering. And what Elwell said about his brother echoed what everybody said.
“He must,” Bill said, “have been a fine man.”
“The best.”
“He had a good deal of money?”
“Yes. Funny thing, isn’t it? Here he was, a professor—supposed not to know about things like that. And here I am—or was—a broker. Supposed to know a lot. And he starts with his part of what dad left us and everything he invested in—wow! And I start with the same amount and—well, there you are. Doesn’t make much sense, but there you are.”
“Do you happen to know how he left his money? We’ll check up on that, of course, but if you happen to know?”
“Yes,” Elwell said. “Told me that last time I saw him. Split four ways—my kids, there’s Foster and Jimmy and Janet, and this daughter of his old friend. Girl named—” He hesitated.
“Faith Oldham?”
“That’s it. Faith Oldham. All to the younger generation. A great believer in the younger generation. Always doing something to help kids. And now some son of a bitch—”
It was evident, then, that something had occurred to the big man.
“Hey,” he said, and leaned forward in his chair. “What the hell’re you getting at? About how he left his money? Sounds to me as if you—�
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Bill shook his head.
“Not getting at anything,” Bill said. “One of the things we always have to find out about. You can understand that, Mr. Elwell. A routine thing.”
“Better be,” Elwell said, but then leaned back. “Sure,” he said. “I realize you have to ask about it.”
About those who stand to profit, directly or indirectly. It was as good a time as any other, and Foster Elwell wouldn’t like it. Foster Elwell didn’t like it; said, “Now what the hell business is that—” and stopped. He said, O.K., he hadn’t spent all the previous day in Westport. He had driven in to New York to have lunch with a friend—“on business, I’ve still got a little business”—and back after lunch. He had lunched in midtown; he was not sure what time he had started to drive back, but it must have been around three, because he had got home between four-thirty and five. It had been about five-thirty, or a little later, that the telephone had rung, and it had been the city police to tell him. And if Weigand wanted to check up on him, he could ask the man he had lunched with and the man was—
Mullins jotted down the name of the man, as he had jotted down a number of things.
“Mr. Elwell,” Bill said, “did you know your brother was a sick man? A very sich man?”
Elwell shook his head. He said, “How sick?”
“He would have lived six months,” Bill said. “Perhaps a year.”
Elwell said, “Jesus,” and then, “What a lousy break.” And then, “I suppose it showed up in the autopsy?”
“Right,” Bill said. “You didn’t know about it? He never said anything about it?”
“No,” Foster Elwell said, and spoke in a dull voice. “Last time I saw him, he looked fine. Said he felt fine. And all the time—” He shook his head and there was uneasiness in his face, the shadow of fear. You get along and it comes closer; each new example brings it closer still.