Murder Is Suggested

by Frances

  “Right,” Bill said. “Ever know a time a lot wasn’t, sergeant? That half of it gets thrown away?”

  “There’s that,” Mullins agreed. They got out of the car and crossed the street and walked up it to the two Elwell houses. They went down two steps to the entryway of the Oldham house and rang the doorbell. They rang it several times, and waited some minutes, and Mullins said, “Too bad we haven’t got a search warrant.”

  “Very,” Bill said, and Mullins took a leather container of keys out of his pocket and tried one of three. “Right on the nose,” Mullins said. “Comes from living right.” He turned the key and they went into the Oldham house.

  It was quiet. They listened, not disturbing the quiet.

  “Have another try at the bell,” Bill told Mullins, and Mullins reached back through the open door and pushed. The bell rang loud in the house. It rang several times.

  “We could yell,” Mullins said, and closed the door behind them.

  “We could,” Bill said. “We won’t. If there’s anybody here, they heard the bell. If they wanted visitors—” He left it unfinished.

  There was nobody in the two large rooms on the ground floor; nobody in the kitchen, nobody—dead or alive—in the single bathroom. They went up a flight. The front room—Mrs. Oldham’s living room—was empty. So was the bedroom off it—a bedroom with a single window on the street; a narrow room. There was nobody in the bathroom off the corridor which led to the rear of the house; nobody in the two rooms there, the larger obviously Faith’s, the smaller apparently a guest room. There were only two closets, one for each of the larger rooms. Mrs. Oldham had a good many dresses in hers; Faith had fewer. Hope Oldham’s dresses, Bill thought, were “younger” dresses than her daughter’s. There was nobody, dead or alive, in either closet.

  “There’s the basement,” Mullins said. He spoke in a very low voice.

  “Go and look,” Bill said, and Mullins went downstairs, very quietly, and looked and came back after a few minutes and shook his head.

  They climbed the last flight, and Mullins took the key case out. But Bill Weigand patted air with his hand and then put an ear to the heavy door. After a moment, he stepped aside and motioned Mullins, and Mullins put an ear to the door. He stepped back in turn and they moved several steps down the flight.

  “Can’t get the words,” Mullins whispered. “Can you?”

  Bill shook his head. They went back to the door. Mullins eased a key into the lock, nodded, and turned gently—very gently, very slowly. There was a tiny metallic sound. They waited. Nothing happened.

  Tenderly, by fractions of the inch, Mullins pushed the door open. A crack was enough for the moment.

  The voice inside the laboratory of the late Professor Jameson Elwell went softly on.

  12

  The cab stopped and they went, single-file, Hope Oldham first, between parked cars. Mrs. Oldham was, as she crossed the sidewalk, groping in her big bag. She did not pause, did not wait for Pam and Jerry North. She bent down a little, putting a key in the lock, turning the key. She pushed the door open and they went into the Elwell house and then Hope Oldham called her daughter’s name.

  And there was no answer. She called again, and no sound but her voice broke the silence in the house. Jerry found a switch; a muted light came on in a ceiling fixture.

  “We’re—” Hope said, and turned and looked at the Norths, her eyes seeming to pick up the light. “We’re too late,” she said.

  But Jerry shook his head at that.

  “If they’re here,” he said, “if he brought her here as—for the reasons you think—to hypnotize her—to—”

  He stopped.

  “To what,” he said. “What exactly?”

  She looked at him, and seemed amazed.

  “Why,” she said. “Get her to say—make her think—that she killed the professor. Get her to confess. I thought—didn’t I say that?”

  “No,” Jerry said. “But—if he’s trying that, he’ll probably try in this laboratory. Where, as you say, it’s all arranged. Set up. And—the lab’s soundproofed.”

  “Yes,” Pam said, and now she led—led up the stairs. She went very quickly, very lightly. They followed her, Jerry last.

  Pam hesitated momentarily on the second-floor landing, glanced at two closed doors. But then she went on up the next flight. Of course she was right, Jerry thought; if they were to find anything, anyone, it would be in Jameson Elwell’s office, or in the laboratory beyond it. He had a stubborn doubt that they would find anything, anybody. The further they went with it, the more improbable it seemed—all of it seemed.

  The door to the professor’s office was closed. Pam tried it; it was not locked. The door opened inward and opened silently. It also opened on a dark room, and Pam, now, stopped in the doorway. There was a little light, sifting up from he foyer light below.

  Jerry hesitated for a moment. Then he reached around Pam, groping for the light switch and found it and again hesitated. Then he pushed the tumbler up. A light went on on the desk—a light in a metal cone. There was no one in the room. But the door to the “closet”—to the passage to the laboratory—was partly open. There was no sound in the room and they heard nothing from the laboratory beyond it. Presumably because the door at the other end of the short corridor, the passage between filing cases, was closed.

  Jerry had been in the office only twice—once when he had gone there to talk to Elwell about the book; again when Jamey had given them dinner and, after it, asked if they would like to see where he conducted most of his experiments—his experiments, that was, in hypnotism. “Not cats,” he had explained, and Pam had a little lost interest, but gone along all the same.

  The door at the rear of the “closet” was, Jerry remembered, a sliding door. So it might be possible—

  He went first, now; went between the filing cases in the corridor and reached for the hollowed handhold in the sliding door, and stopped with his fingers in it. Then he put an ear to the door. There was a faint murmur beyond it; the murmur, he thought, of a woman’s voice.

  He turned back. Mrs. Oldham and Pam stood at the doorway, watching. He beckoned Hope Oldham, used sign language. She put an ear to the door, listened, stepped back. She started to speak, but Jerry tapped his lips with a forefinger, and they went back into the office.

  “It’s her voice,” Hope Oldham said, in a whisper. “I was—we’ve got to stop it. Before he—”

  She did not finish.

  “First,” Pam said, after it was evident that the older woman was leaving words hanging, “first we ought to find out what—what’s really going on. By listening.”

  She looked at Jerry.

  “Without his knowing,” Pam explained, to, it occurred to Jerry, the backward.

  They could, at any rate, try. Jerry went across the room, flicked off the light. He groped among shadows to the “closet” and into the little corridor and this time they went behind him, Hope first, then Pam. He put fingers back in the handhold and began, gently, to pull the door to the side. “If it makes a noise,” Jerry thought, “I’ve had it—if it makes a noice and Hunter’s really this desperate character Hope Oldham thinks he is.” Jerry had, then, the unhappy conviction that Hunter probably was just that. What had before—only moments before—seemed entirely improbable seemed now, as the door began slowly to move, altogether too likely. Hunter would hear the door, and Hunter would still have the gun and—

  As the crack widened, Jerry moved a little to one side. But then he realized that, by so doing, he put Pam and Mrs. Oldham in the line of prospective fire, and sighed silently, and moved back. Couldn’t let the so-and-so shoot Pam.

  The door made no sound. When it was open a few inches, and as the murmuring voice became the sound of words, spoken softly, Jerry stopped his pressure on the door. There was space enough to look through, now; they could see, and hear, what they needed to see and hear.

  There was a single soft light in the room. It, too, glowed in a metal cone; the
cone was pointed toward the wall, reflected from it softly.

  Faith Oldham lay on her back on a couch. Hunter sat beside her, faced toward her (so that his back was to the “closet” door, which was a break). He sat with his right leg stiffly out in front of him. (So, he wouldn’t move quickly, when he moved; which was another break.)

  The tape recorder was on the table beside the couch.

  “—of mother,” Faith said, in a soft voice, with the intonation of one who ends a sentence. For a moment there was silence. Then Hunter, not much more than a dark shadow against the lighted wall, reached toward the tape recorder. There was a faint click and an almost imperceptible humming began.

  “You are Faith Oldham,” Hunter said, and spoke very quietly, very slowly and very gently. “You are in an hypnotic trance. You are Faith Oldham, and you are sleeping soundly and you will not waken until I tell you. Then you will waken easily and feel rested and refreshed.”

  “Yes,” Faith said. She did not move, and her eyes were closed. But her voice was quite a normal voice. It was also an oddly contented voice. “I will not waken until you tell me.”

  “When you do wake up,” Hunter said, in the same soothing voice, “you will remember everything that is happening now. You will remember you have been in a trance and what I said and what you said to me. Do you understand that, Faith?”

  “I—” the girl said, and then hesitated. “I will remember?”

  “Yes,” Hunter said. “I am making a recording of what we are both saying. You do not mind if I make a recording?”

  “No,” Faith said. “That’s all right, Carl.”

  Her tone, the whole grouping of her words, was so natural, so much what one might have expected from a person awake, that Jerry North wondered, fleetingly, whether this was a charade—a charade played for their benefit. Or—and this was more probable—for the benefit of the tape recorder. But then this, he thought, would be a preposterous overproduction. It had been going on before they came; he was almost certain that Hunter did not, now, know that they were there. If a charade for the recorder only, why the couch, the closed eyes? The recorder would not register that the eyes were closed. If for the recorder, why not sit somewhere in comfort—Hunter certainly did not look comfortable—and read lines into it? He groped briefly through his few, and rather dim memories of Elwell’s book; came up with something. Good subjects in hypnosis behaved, spoke, so naturally that no one could detect hypnosis.

  Jerry’s thoughts ran under the words of the two in the laboratory. He heard the words.

  “You have been hypnotized before,” Carl Hunter said. “You remember that now. Do you remember that?”

  “Yes,” Faith said. “Now I remember. But—I’m not supposed to remember. When I’m awake I won’t remember.”

  “This time you will remember,” Carl Hunter said. “Do you understand me, Faith? When you wake up this time, you will remember all that has happened. You will waken when I tell you to, and you will remember all that has happened. Do you understand me, Faith?”

  “I understand.”

  “Jamey hypnotized you before,” Hunter said. “That is right, isn’t it? He explained what he wanted to do and you went into a trance—went to sleep. As you are now.”

  “Yes,” she said. “It happened four or five times.”

  “That was Professor Jameson Elwell? That is the one you mean when you say Uncle Jamey.”

  “That’s a silly thing to say, Carl,” the girl said. “Who else would I mean?”

  “I know,” Carl said.

  “And,” Faith said, “you asked me all this just now. Just before.”

  It was obvious enough to Jerry; to the others waiting in the wings. This time it was for the record; this time to make a record to be heard by others. But—Jerry thought—could anything really be done with such a recording? For whatever purpose Hunter wanted to use it? It didn’t seem—

  “I know,” Hunter said. “Jamey hypnotized you several times. He always told you that when you waked up you would not remember. And, that if somebody asked you, you would deny you had ever been hypnotized. Isn’t that right, Faith?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “But now you remember,” Hunter said. “You remember all about the other times, don’t you?”

  “I remember,” Faith said.

  “He hypnotized you to help you. Isn’t that right, Faith?”

  “So I could be myself,” the girl said. “That’s what he told me. When he waked me up, I would be myself. I would not be under—under—”

  She hesitated. For the first time there seemed to be a struggle in her mind; conflict in her mind.

  “Under the influence of somebody else,” Hunter said. “Who, Faith?”

  She hesitated.

  “Who, Faith?”

  “Hope.”

  Hope Oldham drew in her breath sharply, almost as if she had been struck. She moved. Jerry took her arm, pressed hard, and she looked up at him. There was just enough light for him to see her face; she formed words with her lips, without sound. “I told you,” the lips said.

  “Who is Hope?”

  “Why do you ask that?” the girl said. “You know, Carl.”

  “Who?”

  “My mother.”

  “Why do you call her Hope?” Hunter said, softly, the voice very soothing.

  “She wants me to.”

  “Why? Do you know why? Did Jamey tell you why?”

  “He said I must understand why. That that was part of what I had to do to—to be myself. He said I must decide whether it was to—to tie us more closely together. Not only as mother and daughter—as contemporaries. To draw me back into her life. He said—he said that children and parents break apart as the children grow. He said the way cells divide, and that that is the way things are meant to be, so that each person can be himself. He said that if that seemed right to me, I must—must have the strength to make it right. Whatever appeal she made.”

  Holding her arm, trying to quiet her, to keep her from the movement that seemed imminent, Jerry could feel Hope Oldham’s body move convulsively. He pressed more firmly.

  “Go on, Faith,” Hunter said. “What else did he tell you about this? And—did he tell you much the same thing each time he hypnotized you? You were willing for him to hypnotize you, weren’t you?”

  “I was—I felt guilty,” Faith said, seeming to answer the last question first. “After—after you and I met. Because it seemed wrong and she kept saying it was wrong, and that it was my duty to—to her.”

  “Your duty to do what?”

  “To marry Arnold. But after we met—”

  She stopped at that. Jerry had, momentarily, a feeling that Hunter had pressed her too far. Sometimes—another dim memory from Elwell’s book—didn’t the best subjects awaken, unexpectedly, when pressed too far? When the mind encountered a block?

  Hope Oldham pulled at Jerry’s arm with her free hand, and gestured, and he bent down to her. Her lips were against his ear, he could feel her breath on his ear.

  “You see what they did?” she whispered, and even with her lips so close he could just hear her. “What he’s doing now? The—poison? We’ve got to stop—”

  Jerry shook his head quickly. He reversed their positions. “Wait,” Jerry whispered. “Wait!”

  He was not sure she would.

  “Let him give himself away,” Jerry whispered. If that wouldn’t do it, nothing would. She pulled back a little and stared at him in the dim light. He couldn’t tell anything from her face.

  She should be willing to wait, Jerry thought; should even be eager to wait. Because Hunter was, methodically—and for the record!—proving that what Hope Oldham had charged was true; that Elwell, and now Hunter himself, had worked to influence Faith’s young—unsure, too trusting—mind; had sought to come between the girl and her mother.

  “What else did he tell you?” Hunter asked. He had been silent for some seconds. Possibly, Jerry thought, to let the block in the girl’s min
d dissolve. “About you and your mother?”

  “That was all,” Faith said. “Oh—he said it each time and told me to remember, but not remember I remembered. Once he said that animals were wiser about parents and children. Mother cats, he said, know when it is time for kittens to be on their own, and push them away when it is time. And that if the kittens stay around and grow up, the mother cat just thinks of them as other cats, and lets them be other cats. He said that, of course, that was a good deal to ask of humans.”

  Again, Hope Oldham snatched in her breath. Jerry could not tell whether in indignation or, as seemed equally possible, satisfaction at a point proved.

  “Faith,” Hunter said, “did you know that Jamey was sick? That he wasn’t going to live more than a few months? Did he tell you that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was that when you were in a trance?”

  “Yes, Carl.”

  “And told you that you would not remember that, either, after he had waked you up?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he tell you that he was going to leave you money?”

  “Yes, he told me that. He said he knew that we needed money and—and—”

  Again it seemed as if her mind were blocked.

  “Go on, Faith,” Hunter said. “Go on. You are to remember everything, Faith. Everything.”

  “That if I had money of my own I wouldn’t need to feel—responsible. Responsible about that. That it wouldn’t need to be part of any decision I made.”

  “But you were to forget that, too, when you were awake? That he had said he was going to leave you money in his will?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he say why he wanted you to forget it?”

  “No, Carl. But it wasn’t that, especially. I wasn’t to remember anything when I waked up. Was to deny that I had ever been hypnotized.”

  “I know,” Hunter said. “Faith, did you ever do anything you couldn’t explain to yourself—or to anybody—after Jamey hypnotized you? During the period he was hypnotizing you? How long was that, by the way?”

  “About two weeks,” she said. “You mean, when I was awake? You mean posthypnotic suggestion, don’t you?”