The Red Right Hand

by Joel Townsley Rogers

  But it had been. That answered something for him.

  He seemed satisfied about it for the moment, as he rang off, putting his black book back up on the shelf.

  “It was St. Erme, the young fellow that I thought it was,” he mumbled to me, a little grimly. “I usually remember faces. There seems to have been some girl who drove him from New York. I’d rather like to know where that girl is now.”

  It wasn’t necessary for him to tell me. That phone transmitter was quite audible, and I had ears. A good deal better ears than the average, if it was important to have him know.

  (That is one thing more that a man’s voice does tell about him, that I didn’t consider, when thinking of Corkscrew and his voice. A man who talks loudly may be a man who does not hear so well; and the reverse for a soft-voiced man. I have always had good hearing, and I’m glad I’ve got it. Corkscrew, it would seem likely, from the quiet voice he had, had the hearing of a mouse.)

  Anyway, I had heard what Dexter had told MacComerou.

  All right, so it had been St. Erme. All right, so the car was Dexter’s. All right, so St. Erme’s girl had been driving it. But I couldn’t see what old Adam was so tense about. What had leaped into his mind.

  We would like to know where St. Erme’s girl was now, he said. I couldn’t see for what.

  I just couldn’t see any connection.

  “A great invention, Professor,” I remarked to him. “The telephone,” I explained, as he stared uncomprehendingly at me—baffled by something about me still, I could feel it. “I wish you had asked that garage man of yours if he would be willing to come up here for about twenty-five dollars and expenses, in case I can’t get my car started.”

  “Ask Dexter to come all the way up here to get your car started for you?” he said. “A hundred miles? Whatever put such a crazy idea into your head? It’s about as crazy as I ever heard of.”

  He had picked up a washbasin in the sink, after hanging up the phone. He seemed annoyed at my remark, which I had intended merely as a more or less jocose reminder that what I was interested in was getting my car started. I wouldn’t have expected a garage man to come up from New York, just for me. But MacComerou had to take it seriously.

  “Naturally not,” he said. “He would have thought I was crazy myself if I had suggested it. You don’t know Dexter, Doctor. He hates the country. He likes to boast that he’s never been north of the Bronx. New York has a lot of men like that. You couldn’t get him up here for twenty-five hundred dollars.”

  “I guess I’ll have to do without him, then,” I said. “I doubt if I’ve got twenty-five hundred dollars. In cash on me, anyway.”

  I had taken seat on a kitchen chair while he ran water into a washbasin in the sink. He started toward me. I shifted a little on the hard seat. I had my billfold in my hip pocket with maybe forty or fifty dollars in it, of course. And there was that waddy envelope that the Buchanan housekeeper had pressed on me, on my hip, that I could feel. If there were fifty bills, and they were twenties, they would be a thousand dollars. If they were fifties—Well, that would have been a big fee, of course, in the circumstances, considering I had done nothing....

  MacComerou stared at me. Then he must have seen some humor in the idea of it. In my dirty sweaty shirt and slacks, with my sweaty dirty face, looking probably to him more or less like a tramp, that I might have twenty-five hundred dollars on me. His face broke into a broad compressed grin, with crinkles about his eyes.

  “I should hope not, Doctor,” he said. “I shouldn’t suppose you had. Is that all you’re thinking about—your infernal stalled car? Don’t worry, you’ll doubtless get it going. A Draco ’34, you say? And you’ve figured out that the vacuum feed line is clogged up. Well, that sounds plausible to me, not knowing anything about it. You probably don’t need a garage mechanic, anyway.”

  He washed the garden dirt from his big brown hands with a bar of kitchen soap, dumped out the water from the basin, and filled it up again. He bent his head down and sloshed water over his face with both cupped hands, and over the top of his big pale bald head and his big brown bat ears and the back of his neck, suggling and swushing in it with his mushy toothless jaws.

  If I have ever seen a picture of a six-foot hundred-and-eighty-pound bald-headed old man immersing himself in a washbasin and splashing around in it, he was it. It would have been good enough for a cartoon by Partch. He emerged, hauling a hand towel from the rack by the sink, wiping his face and hands and rubbing the rim of close-clipped white hair about his bald head, and using the damp towel then to wipe off his bony ribs and his pale gray-furzed chest.

  It seemed to make him feel a lot better.

  I went to the sink and got myself a drink of water while he slipped some clothes on in the adjacent bedroom. He wasn’t much of a housekeeper, old Adam, as one wouldn’t expect, an old bachelor or widower, living alone this way out in the country with his garden and his thoughts.

  Bachelor—I remembered that Hom. Psych. was dedicated to “My Sister Eva, from Whom I have Learned All that I Know about Women, or Should Care To.” Having his dry little joke. But a man who would write that about his sister, even in fun, isn’t the kind who ever marries. He’s been born a bachelor, and will die one.

  The sink looked like it, I mean. It was piled with rusty silverware and stacks of dirty cups and dishes, the remains of as many different meals, probably all of them sprouting all kinds of green and black molds. Beneath a microscope there would probably have been more different species of beautiful flowers—not to speak of bushes, shrubs, palms, and eucalyptus trees—growing on those plates than he could grow out in his garden in a hundred years, working from dawn till dark. And all of them growing by themselves, without all that cultivation. I’ll take a microscope for mine. As I had told him, I’m not a gardener.

  There were some dried or rotted vegetables on the back of the drainboard, too—a handful of withered carrots, a few potatoes that were full of sprouts, an old quarter of a cabbagehead that had half turned to slime, and a strawberry box that didn’t have anything in it except stems and a mess of black mush that had once been good red berries, which nobody would eat now.

  Since the therapeutic values of Penicillium notum have been discovered, all medical men have a profound respect for molds, even an affection. Still, that sort of slovenliness gave me not such a good opinion of old MacComerou as a person, apart from his brain. I’m not a particularly neat and fussy man, myself; and the way I leave my clothes thrown around on the floor is the bane of Mrs. Millens’ existence. But I’m a surgeon, and I stick for cleanliness in things about me.

  For the moment, I wondered if old Adam mightn’t be a sporadic dipsomaniac—one of those men who go off on periodic sprees, letting everything go to pot around them—and mightn’t be just recovering from a jag now. There are some brilliant men who do it; and not always with such destructive consequences as might be imagined, either. One of the best instructors I ever had in college had used to go off on a drunk four times a year as regularly as the seasons—would shut himself up in his room, not seeing anybody, not answering the phone except to yell into it, not eating a bite of food, not shaving or even washing his face, not even bothering to undress and go to bed, just lying sprawled in a big armchair and living whatever glorious dreams he had, all filthy and ragged and red-eyed and singing to himself, for a week or ten days at a time. And we freshmen all felt sorry for him when it was over and he had got cleaned up, because he was really a nice fellow. Maybe he was all the better for doing it, for all I know. He died young. But he might have been a murderer without it. The water was good and cold, anyway. It was spring water piped from the water tank behind the barn, I guessed.

  MacComerou came back then out of his bedroom, and he had put on a clean blue shirt, a pair of old gray flannel pants and a pair of tennis shoes. He must have guessed what I had been thinking.

  “I should have apologized for the appearance of things, Doctor,” he said, with a wrinkled grin. “John Fl
ail is supposed to clean up, but if I don’t keep after him he tends to let things slide. I’ve been working, and hadn’t noticed. You found yourself a clean glass to drink out of, anyway, I hope.”

  “I rinsed one out,” I said. “It’s good cold water.”

  “Yes,” he said. “The well’s two hundred feet deep. It goes down to a rock ledge that runs under the woods in back. It’s all good cold water. Perhaps,” he added, with a thought, looking at me inquiringly, “you’d like something stronger, Doctor? I don’t drink myself, so it didn’t occur to me. But there’s a small amount of medicinal rye in the cabinet, I think, which might be enough for a potion.”

  I told him no, thanks; that I didn’t take it either— that it might be all right in moderation for the average man, and even perhaps be a necessary release for him occasionally, but that a surgeon just couldn’t touch it.

  And I knew that it was true, too, what he had said about himself, that he didn’t drink at all. My flitting idea that he might be a secret dipsomaniac had been senseless, when I thought it over. Even an occasional jag leaves some physical marks on a man. At the least, it speeds up the general aging process, making him look older than his years. And old MacComerou’s flesh was firm and his muscles were in good tone, I would judge; and he moved limberly and strongly, like a man still in his prime. Except for his teeth, or rather his lack of them, he might have passed for no more than forty-five in the crepuscular light, and might look not so much older than that even in broad day. Though he must have been at least sixty-five, when one considered that his book had been a classic for thirty years.

  There was some kind of dictating machine on a wheeled stand beside the stove, with some batteries and wires. He was dictating a sequel to Hom. Psych., he told me when I asked him, and having a stenographer down in New York do it for him. He wheeled the machine out into the woodshed back of the kitchen before we started.

  We went out through the kitchen door. His station wagon had a flat tire, he said, and the spare was worn out. John Flail had been supposed to patch the tube today, and had left the car standing out in front of the barn for that purpose, but apparently he hadn’t got around to it. But, anyway it wasn’t far to walk, he understood, to where I had left my car.

  No, I told him. Right at the Swamp Road junction. I took a banana from a box of groceries on the back porch, and peeled and ate it as we set out. I hadn’t eaten anything since a cup of coffee and a doughnut at the airfield this morning before taking the plane to Burlington. And being hungry, perhaps, was a part of my splitting headache.

  Old Adam still couldn’t quite believe that I hadn’t seen anything. He didn’t doubt my word, I knew that. He didn’t think I was a conscious liar. Still, he just couldn’t believe it. Maybe I had seen something that I had forgotten, and would remember later. But I must have seen something, he was sure of it, whether or not I knew it.

  He had brought a flashlight along, and as we went along the road he kept playing it down on the stony surface.

  “What’s the name of that tire with a series of S’s forming the tread, do you remember?” he mumbled mushily. “Sigourney, isn’t it? Sigourney Special Service Silent Silver tires, or something like that.”

  “That’s the name, I think,” I said. “Something like that. They used to advertise them a lot, all over, with a picture of a pretty girl at the wheel of a big gray sport phaeton with red cushions. But you can’t get them any more.”

  “There are cars that are still equipped with them, nevertheless,” he said, a little impatiently. “Dexter’s car must have them. You can see the tracks along the road “here. Still, recent. Within the last hour, I would say.”

  We stopped and squatted, and I looked.

  “Where?” I said.

  He pointed, touching the road with a blunt brown finger.

  “The characteristic S,” he said a little impatiently. “Here and here. The car went along here. Can’t you see it, Doctor? What’s the matter with your eyes?”

  “I’ve got ten-D accommodation,” I said. “Emmetropic vision.”

  “That probably explains it,” he said, getting up “You’d see them without much trouble if you wore glasses. Never mind.”

  We went on, while he still played the flashlight down. Maybe he didn’t believe me, and thought that I really did need glasses—that I was just being vain about my eyes, with one of those small vanities some men have. He must have known what 10-D accommodation meant, and emmetropic vision. He knew more ophthalmology than an oculist. More anatomy than an anatomist, even though he wasn’t a medical doctor. I really have the eyes of a fly. Scheduled for flight surgeon in the Navy air arm, two stripes and a half, next month, after battling for three years to get my release from St. John’s and S. and P.—they need surgeons, too—if he wanted to know it. I’ve got eyes.

  I figured that he must have hypnotized himself into seeing those tracks. He knew the car had gone by, and so there must be tracks, and so he saw them. But I just couldn’t see them. The road was so hard and dry. No dust to take an imprint. Brown hard clay earth, and flint, and granite. Dry.

  But the gray murder car had gone along here all right, tracks or not. He was right about that. We came to the eyeless house with the fallen roof that stood off in the weeds, or to just this side of it, where I had heard the croaking in the ditch, after I had picked up that damned hat and thrown it away and had started to walk on.

  There was no croaking in the ditch now, but there was blood upon the road beside it. Drops and little pools. It glistened in the moving of MacComerou’s flashlight, as he stopped beside me, with his bald head bent, his shoulders bent over, staring at it. It was there, all right, and I must have walked right through it without noticing it, as I came past, for there was the circular print of a crepe-soled shoe in the blood, and it was mine.

  We went down off the road into the high weeds of the ditch, where the trail of blood led, and found Flail. He was lying there, supine among the roots of the weeds on the damp earth at the bottom of the ditch, with his black Indian eyes in his dark Indian face staring up at us, and his lank black Indian hair forming a kind of pillow beneath his head. He was still wearing his sweat-stained blue workshirt and khaki pants, and his soft-soled mocpacs in which he had been walking along at his shuffling shambling flat-footed stride, as I had seen him in my vision at sunset down the Swamp Road, with his coat that he had been carrying over his shoulder clutched in his right hand now, and twisted around it and his arm.

  ‘“Don’t touch him, Doctor!” MacComerou cautioned me, with his jaw working.

  I hadn’t any mind to. I wasn’t the official medical examiner. Or coroner, as it is in Connecticut. Only to lay a hand on his heart, to make sure that he was dead.

  “Who is he? Flail?” I said.

  MacComerou nodded inarticulately. “You didn’t know him, did you? No, of course not. You heard me speak of him. Yes, John Flail, he left my place only about ten minutes before that car went by. That devil must have struck him deliberately.”

  That was what it looked like. He had been hit and smashed, as hard as a heavy car can smash a man. Half the bones in his body must have been broken at the impact. I could see tire marks on his shirt, those “SSSS” mark of Sigourncy Silent Specials, which I had been unable to see on the road.

  It had been a wonder he had lived for thirty seconds, crushed like that. But he had lived to drag himself down into the weeds of the ditch, with his coat still clutched in his hand. He had probably died about half an hour ago, about the time I had passed this way. It had been, more than likely, his last groan or death rattle that I had heard—that inhuman croaking in the ditch. A sound that I had thought of as definitely not human. Because it had been human only in part.

  A hit-and-run. It looked bad, the way those tires had gone over him. Still, it was manslaughter, and not murder, without proof of premeditation, without knowing just how it had been done. And that was proof and knowledge, I thought, which it would be hard to get, since Flail had app
arently been walking here alone. Whether he had known who had killed him or not, there was no way to say.

  It wasn’t definitely murder, anyway. It wasn’t murder yet. It wasn’t murder stalking in the night, black, bloody, with a knife. It wasn’t the damp sawdust heaps. It wasn’t terror.

  Not then. Not yet. It was a hit-and-run, and nasty, but that was all, as I could see it. Death had just gone by.

  “The police will have to be notified,” said MacComerou, with compressed lips. “They’ll have to have a complete description of Dexter’s car, too, and of that red-eyed man who was driving it with St. Erme. They will want a statement from you as to how we found him here, Doctor. You can tell them that you never saw him before, of course.”

  “I thought that I saw him walking away down the Swamp Road at sunset,” I pointed out. “I should mention that.”

  MacComerou, squatting on the other side of the body of John Flail, looked at me for a moment.

  “If I were you,” he said, “I think I would not mention having seen any phantasms, Doctor.”

  He arose, stepping back, and began to play his flashlight up and down the ditch.

  “After all, it isn’t pertinent,” he commented, with a calm effort. “Phantasms and mental illusions aren’t of any benefit to the police, I don’t think. Even our own personal deductions or assumptions aren’t particularly wanted by them, since those are liable to be colored by our own mental slants. You found John Flail’s body here with me. Neither of us touched it. That’s what they want to know. We can assume for ourselves that he was struck by a car coming up behind him, while he was shambling along with his coat over his shoulder, as in your vision of him prior to his death. We can assume that, after being struck, he crawled down from the road into the ditch where we found him. But the police can make their own examinations and deductions. They are trained for it.