A Puzzle for fools

by Patrick Quentin

  I was going to hurry back to Green when I felt stealing over me that sensation of delight which we all feel when we are consciously defying the forces of law and order. I was keeping material evidence from the police, but I didn't care. At least I possessed one thing which I could use in my effort to save Iris from the probings of that grim-sounding State alienist.

  But how I could use it, or what I could do with it, I had not the remotest idea.

  22

  WHEN I REACHED Wing Two, I started searching for Geddes. I was horribly eager to find him. Now that I had determined, in movie parlance, to sweep into action, he was my only possible confederate. He had knowledge, possibly valuable knowledge. If I could get it before Lenz and the police, there was just a chance…

  But in the common rooms where the others were still roaming more or less at random, the Englishman was nowhere to be seen. I decided to try his room, though his attack should have been over by now and I knew that he hated staying in bed longer than was necessary.

  I hurried through the still deserted corridors. The evening had closed in on us and no one had thought to turn on the passage lights. As I moved through the half-darkness, I felt a strange sensation of alarm—an alarm which grew steadily as I left the others farther and farther behind. One day, I told myself, I would write a horror play about a man alone in an empty sanitarium, looking for something or someone that he could not find. Alone, with no companion but a Voice.

  Which reminded me suddenly that our own particular Voice had never lied. It had warned Geddes. It had coupled his name with those of Laribee and Fogarty. And if anyone had wanted to harm him, what a perfect opportunity he would have now, when the sanitarium was in chaos, when everyone could get everywhere and the staff was occupied, when Geddes was alone there, sleeping in his room.

  I ran down the last few yards of the corridor, threw open the Englishman's door, and switched on the lights. I was dazzled, but only for a second. Soon I could see all too clearly.

  Geddes was still lying on the bed, but not in sleep as before. While I paused motionless on the threshold, I heard once again those ominous words he had repeated to me in the squash court.

  "Fogarty was the first. You, Laribee and Duluth will be the next.'"

  Even in my dazed state, I could tell that Geddes was bound almost exactly as Fogarty had been. There was no strait-jacket, but he lay on his stomach, his hands crushed somehow beneath him. And around his neck, tied viciously tight, was a twisted surgical bandage, a bandage which was also attached to his legs. He was pinioned in that same brutal, ghastly way. His mouth, like Fogarty's, had been gagged with a handkerchief.

  For the fraction of a second I stood there, feeling that all power of motion had permanently left me. Then, I thought I caught a slight movement, a twitching in the muscles of the neck which was being drawn gradually backward by the feet, just as Fogarty's had been. His eyes were staring, desperate. But, thank God, they were not the eyes of a dead man.

  That brought me back to my senses. Springing forward, I fumbled like a fool with the bandages. Their toughness was amazing. My agitated attempts to untie them must have almost choked Geddes, but at last I got him free.

  He was in a complete daze, unable to speak, scarcely able to move. I stretched him, somehow, on his back and started to chafe the ugly red marks around his throat and wrists. For a long time I sat there, moving my hands over his body. I don't know if I did any good, but I was too bewildered myself to think of trying to find someone else to help me. It was very quiet—quiet with that deep, preternatural silence of a place deserted by all animated life.

  Gradually, I could feel him relaxing beneath my fingers. At last, he drew himself painfully into a sitting position and flexed the muscles of his shoulders. Life had come back into his eyes, and his gaze moved slowly to the pile of bandages on the floor.

  But when he tried to speak, the words didn't come. I brought him a glass of water, and that seemed to help. He drank it eagerly and croaked with a wry smile:

  "I thought bandages were supposed to be instruments of mercy. They seem to make pretty effective instruments of torture, too."

  I was thinking the same thing myself. I had always supposed bandages to be fragile, ladylike things, but, twisted in that way, they had the strength of steel cable.

  As I stared at them, coiled on the floor, I remembered Mrs. Fogarty's words on the night of the dance. I could see her handing Miss Powell's treasure-trove to Dr. Stevens. "This accounts for everything but a stop watch and two bandages."

  Well, we could account for the bandages, now. Vaguely I wondered whether they had been destined for this sinister purpose from the beginning, just as the stop watch and the knife had been for theirs. The criminal at large in the sanitarium seemed certainly to have extracted the uttermost out of Miss Powell.

  With an effort, Geddes rose to his feet and staggered to the mirror. With one hand he started to pass a brush across his hair; with the other he tried to shake some of the creases from his suit. I questioned him eagerly.

  Of course he could remember nothing. The last thing of which he had been conscious was the film. Baboons or something, he said. After that everything was a blank except for an unpleasant nightmare about a python strangling him to death. He had wakened up from it to find himself bound and helpless, as helpless as he had been in the grip of that dream python. "I must have come to just a few minutes before you arrived, Duluth," he said shakily. "You saved my life."

  We grinned at each other and looked a bit embarrassed. But I realized that he was only too right. I found myself marveling at the ruthless efficiency of that amazing personality in our midst. It had been only by the purest luck that I had discovered Geddes when I did. If the session in Lenz' office had kept me a few minutes longer, that slow, agonizing torture might have been successful for a second time. And once again the murderer might have established for himself a water-tight alibi, right here under the very nose of the police. In fact, I reflected with sudden disgust, had it not been for the Englishman's cataplexy which kept his muscles unusually rigid, he might easily have been already dead when I came to him.

  "I'd better get Miss Brush or someone to doctor those bruises," I said.

  "No. I'm all right." Geddes sat down on the bed and glanced at the weals on his wrists. "I want to get things a bit straight in my mind first. I can see now why that damn voice warned me, why they were so anxious to do me in, but why on earth didn't they strangle me outright instead of playing that crazy trick?"

  "Fogarty was killed that way," I said bluntly.

  "He was!" The Englishman stared at me in horrified astonishment.

  "Yes. And for God's sake tell me if you know anything that would help to explain!"

  Geddes' eyes had taken on a steely hardness. "They must have tried to murder me," he said slowly, "because they thought I knew who killed Fogarty."

  I felt a moment of wild hope. "But do you?"

  "No. That's the damnable part of it." He smiled slightly. "I've gone through all this for nothing. On Saturday night, just after the dance, I happened to want Fogarty— wanted to ask him if he could switch my hour with young Trent's. I went down to the physio-therapy room on the off-chance he'd be there."

  I nodded.

  "When I reached it, I heard voices. One of them was Fogarty's so I pushed the door open and glanced in. I couldn't see anyone. They must have been in an alcove. But I called Fogarty's name and the talking stopped right away." He shrugged. "Then I noticed some clothes lying on the floor. We all knew Fogarty’s reputation with the ladies. I thought something like that must be going on and tactfully withdrew. Didn't give the matter another thought, although I see now why Moreno tried to question me about it."

  "But didn't you recognize the other voice?"

  "Afraid not. One doesn't think about things like that at the time. I have the vaguest notion it was a woman's voice, but perhaps that's just because I associated the whole business in my mind with a woman.'*

  "Yo
u must have got there just before the murder,** I said. "It's easy enough to see what they had against you. They knew your voice and thought you'd seen or heard something."

  The Englishman grunted. "I can understand that, all right, but I can't imagine why they were satisfied with warning me at first. I'd have thought that once they'd made up their mind to it, they'd have disposed of me right away."

  "Not necessarily. You weren't much of a danger to them so long as you were just a coddled patient who hadn't been told of Fogarty’s death. As you admit yourself, you'd forgotten the incident completely. It was only after I spilt the beans that you started being a real menace. I'm afraid that, as usual, I was more or less responsible for this. Someone must have overheard us outside the movie."

  For a moment neither of us spoke. Then Geddes remarked slowly: "There's another thing that puzzles me. How on earth was it possible for me to be trussed up here all that time without one of the staff finding me?"

  It was only then that I remembered his attack had come on a short while after the movie began. He still knew nothing about the fire-alarm, Laribee's murder and the consequent crazy confusion. Swiftly I started, and told him from the beginning all I knew of what had been happening in the sanitarium. It was astonishingly comforting to be able to shoot my mouth off. I even told him about Iris and my own rash determination to do something for her before that alienist came at ten o'clock.

  At first he seemed a bit dazed, but gradually he managed to piece things together.

  "So they murdered Laribee and then hurried up here to do me in," he exclaimed grimly. "Double murder in an afternoon's pretty ambitious. You were threatened too, Duluth. You've had a bit of luck."

  "Don't congratulate me yet," I said, grinning. "I may not last out the night. But, listen, I've made up my mind to raise hell until I've found out who's back of this. I was hoping you might do a bit of helping."

  Geddes sat very still a moment. Then a hand moved to the red bruises on his throat.

  "I'd decided to leave," he said slowly. "I'd had just about enough of this sanitarium. But if there's anything I can do, why—"

  "That's decent of you."

  "Decent!" he echoed. "Don't you suppose I'm as eager as you to get my hands on that swine? Apart from anything else, he tied me up when I was unconscious. That's one little trick I don't feel any too good-tempered about."

  He was as visibly indignant as I had ever seen him. Something about the set of his jaw comforted me.

  "Two against the world," I remarked. "It's very touching but what are we going to do?"

  "Well, what have we got to work on?"

  "Precious little. There's that hunch of mine about the son-in-law. Maybe he's masquerading here somehow."

  "Perhaps he is. And the daughter, too. It's a damn fool notion. But she's an actress, you say, and Laribee was pretty mad. She might have done something to herself so that he wouldn't recognize her."

  "Sounds fairly farfetched," I said. "But I guess we're out after something pretty crazy anyway."

  "Of course, there's the staff," said Geddes musingly. "In a way, that's a more hopeful field. You say they all have a financial interest in the sanitarium and old Laribee's death brings in a half million. It's absurd to suspect Lenz himself, but some of the others—"

  "Yes," I broke in eagerly. "And as we're being disrespectful, how about Miss Brush? If that will were valid—"

  "I'd forgotten the will. You say you've still got it and no one knows you have. Surely, we can do something with that."

  I felt we were getting somewhere, teetering on the brink of a workable idea. It was Geddes who straightened it out first.

  "Listen," he said, "we can assume fairly certainly that the whole business originally centered around Laribee. Whoever killed him must have been after his money. Well, they'll be wanting that will, won't they?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "Listen, practically everyone on the staff of this place benefited by Laribee's former will. If one of them murdered Laribee, he'd be desperately eager to find the new will and destroy it just in case it could be proved valid. If, on the other hand, we're looking for someone who benefited by the new will, they'd be just as anxious to get hold of it and use it to claim the money. That's pretty straight reasoning, isn't it?"

  "Gosh, yes," I answered enthusiastically. "So we do have a trump card, after all. But how on earth can we play it?"

  Geddes passed a reflective finger across his mustache. "If only we could plant it somewhere—plant it in some place that only the murderer would know. It's rather like Daring Dick, the Ace Detective, but—"

  "Got it in one!" I cut in. "We know that somehow or other our criminal at large must have worked on Miss Powell to steal things for him from the surgery. When I heard her talking about her projected attack on the knives, she said, ‘I can hide them in the musical place.’ Obviously that's the spot where he gets her to conceal her stolen goods."

  "Yes. And he'd take damn good care that no one else knew where it was. But what next?"

  "This thing's going to be as simple as breathing," I exclaimed. "We plant the will in the musical place, let the murderer know it's there and just wait for him to take it.'*

  "Unfortunately," said Geddes with a smile, "as we don't know who the murderer is we can hardly let him know what we've done."

  "Then we'll have to tell everybody," I persisted. "And tell them in such a way that it'll be so much nonsense to everyone but the person we want; a sort of adaptation of my celebrated psycho-analytical experiment."

  "And how do we do that?"

  For a moment my fountain of inspiration seemed to become clogged, but soon it spouted up once more.

  "Got it again," I cried excitedly. "We can take another cue from our versatile adversary. I'm certain he worked through Fenwick, faked up that phony spirit message to suit his own purposes. Why shouldn't we invent a spirit message, too? With any luck we could persuade Fenwick into believing we'd received an official announcement from the astral plane, that Laribee has made a new will and put it in the musical place. We could easily convince him it was his particular duty to impart the news to everyone individually. The guilty person's bound to go to the musical place on the off-chance. The others'll just accept it as Fenwick's usual hooey."

  "That's pretty ingenious," remarked Geddes after a pause, "but it'd only work with the patients. If the man we're after's on the staff, he'd smell a rat right away. We'll have to think out something less fishy for them. Listen, you're more or less in their confidence, aren't you? Why don't you tell them some story? You could pretend you saw Miss Powell pinching something from Laribee's pocket just before the movies and heard her whisper something about the musical place. It's rather thin, but they're used to swallowing anything in this institution."

  "Positively brilliant!" I rose and started to pace up and down that small, silent room. "If ever a cock-eyed scheme deserved to work, this does! I’ll hide the will in the musical place. Fenwick and I can circulate the messages and then—" I glanced at him eagerly. "Can you imitate one of your attacks?"

  "I could hardly make a poker of myself, but I could pretend to go to sleep."

  "Swell. Everyone's used to your going asleep at odd moments. We can plant you right there by the musical place and then you drop off into a dose. Why, they'd take that will from under your nose and not give you a second thought!"

  "'The perfect plan," murmured Geddes wryly, "to catch the almost perfect murderer. But ..." He broke off and I saw a smile move across his lips. "Damn us for idiots, Duluth! We've forgotten the only important thing. We haven't the slightest idea where this absurd musical place is."

  I felt like a pricked balloon. "Probably near the radio," I said weakly.

  "Or the piano or the gramophone at the far end of the room," muttered Geddes. "Im afraid this is where we start all over again, unless we could shanghai Miss Powell. She'd be able to tell us."

  "I doubt it," I said dejectedly. "I don't know much about psychology, b
ut I'm pretty certain that she has no more idea where the musical place is than we have. All that side of her nature's subconscious or something. When she's normal, she instinctively drives it out of her mind."

  Geddes jumped up from the bed. "Why not crib another of our friend's tricks and work on Miss Powell's subconscious mind, Duluth? Have you got any jewelry?"

  I indicated a ring on my finger.

  "You say she steals things while she talks to people,** continued the Englishman quietly. "And she hides them in definite places. With any luck—"

  "—we could get her to take the ring and put it in the musical place," I broke in quickly. "Fine and dandy!"

  I think that if I alone had figured out that scheme, built up as it was on an elaborate groundwork of conjecture and other people's psychoses, it would have seemed credibly, hopelessly fantastic. But I had lived so lot among crazy people that nothing seemed particularly crazy any more. Besides, there was a matter-of-fact about Geddes. Any plan with his okay must have a certain amount of logic.

  "I think we'd better perform our miracle tonight, Duluth," he was saying calmly. "We'll get to the central lounge about eight o'clock, that gives us two hours before the alienist comes. You can start work right away on Powell and I'll get Fenwick to circulate the spirit message. Then we plant the will and I go to sleep. You'll just have to give your story to the staff and we’ll be ready."

  "But even if someone does take the will," I said sudden doubt, "do you suppose that's enough to convince the police?"

  "It's enough to get them thinking," muttered Geddes. "And that's all we can hope for at the moment."

  He stared once more at his bruised wrists and fingered them gently.

  "Think I ought to report this, by the way?"

  Finally we agreed to say nothing about the attack on Geddes for the time being. It would probably result in his being questioned by the police just when our plan was to go into action.