But worst, perhaps, was the thing that had been done with his skull. The skin of his forehead had been sliced across with a surgical scalpel, or else an extraordinarily sharp knife, and peeled down over his black staring eyes. Other things had been done with that scalpel to his face, too, around his mouth and ears. And there was the circular mark of a trephine on his skull where someone had tried a crude trepanning job on him. Or had begun it, though that someone hadn’t got very far along with it when something must have frightened him.
St. Erme had to be found to make the horror real. And he had been found.
I had to make the preliminary observations. I was there, and I was the only doctor at hand. The old coroner had gone into the army; and the new coroner who had been appointed to replace him was eighty years old, and hadn’t yet been got out of his bed over beyond Stony Falls. Country districts never are well supplied with doctors, anyway. Not enough for the living, much less for the dead. So it was up to me to examine and say what had been done to him. I didn’t like it.
Rosenblatt knew some anatomy and elementary medical science, of course, and MacComerou knew a lot. More than a lot of doctors themselves, maybe. And almost any man knows of his own experience that ordinarily a man has two hands. But St. Erme had only one. His right hand had been cut off at the wrist, which was what had got me down, even more than those other things.
“Someone started to use a surgical trepan on him,” said Rosenblatt to MacComerou, ignoring me. “Some man with a certain amount of medical knowledge, wouldn’t you say, Professor?”
He was already ignoring me. Maybe he had begun to almost from the first. When I had told him that I hadn’t seen that car or Corkscrew. When I had identified the sawtooth blue hat as mine.
“A trephine, not a trepan, Lieutenant,” I said.
“What’s the difference, Professor?” said Rosenblatt, ignoring me.
MacComerou, kneeling across from me with his big brown bat ears standing out on his head, with his pale gaze on me, let me reply.
“A trepan is an old-style instrument that nobody uses any more,” I said. “A trephine makes a circular incision like this. The man who did this knows less about surgery than I do about motor mechanics. It is terribly crudely done. It wasn’t an operation with any sense to it, either. It looks like some crazy man trying to get an idea out of St. Erme’s head with an auger after he was dead.”
“I suppose you have a trephine yourself, Doctor?” Rosenblatt said.
“I’d hate to be without one.”
“What about his right hand, Doctor? What happened to it?”
“I wish I knew. I don’t doubt that it’s around here some place, and that we had a damned sight better find it. That’s what makes me sick.”
“I mean, how was the hand severed?”
“It was cut off with a surgical saw,” I said.
“I suppose you have a saw, too?”
“I have a full set of tools,” I said. “I’m a good mechanic at my trade. Or I did have them, in the luggage compartment of my car.”
“You had them while you were parked right at the entrance to the Swamp Road during the murder hour, and so on?”
“And so on,” I said....
It’s funny how a man sticks things away in his hip pocket. Some men stick a lodge card or a driver’s license, some a penknife, some a flask. A gunman sticks a gun there, a reefer smoker sticks a spring knife. Most men stick a handkerchief or a bunch of keys. I’m apt to stick a billfold on my hip, myself.
I’d never stick a paid-up hotel bill there. But if St. Erme hadn’t stuck his away, waiting at the President for Elinor Darric this morning, with his name on it, and the name of his hotel on it, he might never have been identified. Or if old Adam MacComerou had not been introduced by chance to him previously by Dexter, and if old MacComerou hadn’t happened to have a good memory for faces, and also if St. Erme’s big flappy Panama hat hadn’t fallen off his head by the time that big gray car went rushing past the place here in its mad getaway at twilight, and furthermore if St. Erme’s head hadn’t been rolled back on the car cushions, with his face turned up to all the light that there was in the twilight sky—giving old MacComerou a chance to recognize him—he might never have been found.
For even with the best of circumstances, old MacComerou couldn’t be more than three-quarters sure, in the short time he had had to see St. Erme in passing, a man he had met but once. And he couldn’t be sure of murder; he could hardly even more than guess at it, and that only because of the pale look of St. Erme’s face and the look of that red-eyed little man. And it might have been hours before he or someone else might have thought it advisable, after discussing it back and forth, to notify the police. And so he might never have been found
But he had been found.
I didn’t have that envelope any more on my own hip, I realized while I was squatting there beside him. That waddy envelope which old Buchanan’s housekeeper had given me, and which I had folded and stuck away when I was leaving my stalled car at the road entrance in the dusk to find a wrench
It had probably worked out of my pocket in the car, or maybe while I had been sitting in MacComerou’s living room, having coffee with the girl and Postmaster Quelch and Trooper Stone, before coming down here with Stone. I had had it last, so far as I could remember, when I had been going down the road toward Route 7 with that big yellow mongrel slavering at my wheels, just before I had met her. I might have lost it while examining the ground down there on the road edge overlooking Dead Bridegroom’s Pond, of course.
All right, I might find it again, and I might not. If I found it, I would tuck it away more securely. And if I didn’t find it, it was a payment for nothing that I had earned. I hadn’t even opened the envelope to see how much was in it.
But I knew now, after hearing how much St. Erme had had on him, that it had been fifty fifties in that envelope of mine. As sure as hell.
Postmaster Quelch appeared to join the group around us in the headlights. I didn’t think at the moment about the girl we had left with Quelch back at MacComerou’s house. I didn’t think about what might have happened to her, or where she might be, or with anyone or alone now, when I saw him I was just sick, seeing what had been done to the man she had loved—that man who would never be a man again.
I just thought, Here comes the automatic phonograph again, when I saw Quelch, with his high-kneed strut, his tall celluloid collar and bow tie, his throat muscles already quivering to speak, coming around from back of the car and joining the group around. With Quelch to take the pulpit, I could continue with what manual examination was necessary, beneath Rosenblatt’s and MacComerou’s eyes, without all those questions about and-so-on.
I knew where I had been myself during that hour, and every minute of it; and if they didn’t believe me it was their hard luck. Even if I had found St. Erme’s right hand in my hip pocket, I would still have known.
“Postmaster Ouelch from down at Whippleville,” Quclch introduced himself with sprout-chested geniality to old Adam MacComerous, reaching down a hand. “Professor MacComerou, I believe? I met you when you first moved up on May twenty-seventh, about three-fifteen in the afternoon, when you stopped in at the post office in your station wagon, on your way up to open up your house, to give instructions about your mail.”
“Glad to see you again, Mr. Ouelch,” said MacComerou, reaching around to take the proffered hand, without any particular gladness or pain. “I rather blew my head off the other day when you called me up, I think, and I may owe you an apology for it. Or was it you? I don’t like to hang up so sharply, but I was busy writing, and I don’t like to be summoned to the phone.”
Old Adam had found a lower plate of teeth since I had first come upon him in his garden and walked back up the road with him; and he didn’t mumble mushily any more. He had a rather deep, sympathetic voice, now that he had something to work his tongue against. His appearance may have been improved somewhat, too; though one row of teeth isn’t m
uch better than none so far as looks go, and his jaws were still wrinkled and flat.
But when a man is old he doesn’t care for appearances. That’s one thing about it.
“I know how it is, Professor,” said Ouelch, standing over us, and looking down with interest at St. Erme’s body on the road. “I hate to be interrupted myself when I am thinking. Yes, it was me you mean, I guess. It was nine days ago I called you up, a week ago last Monday, about six-ten in the evening, right after the evening mail truck had come in with the New York mail, that had a special-delivery for you. You had given me instructions to hold your mail for you to call for—that there wouldn’t be anything important, probably, and you didn’t want to bother to have it delivered by the RFD man because maybe you would forget to look in your box for maybe a couple of weeks and it might spill out and get rained on, or somebody might come along and take it. And there hasn’t been much of anything has come for you except scientific magazines and college catalogues, none of them very interesting or I guess important, so I have just been holding it till you got around to getting it.
“But there was this special-delivery letter for you from your lawyers, I guess they are, Barnaby and Barnaby, Counsellors at Law, Ten Wall Street, New York City, and I didn’t know if you might want it delivered out to your place right away. It looked like a check in it, holding it up to the light, though I couldn’t quite make out the amount. I thought you might want to know about it, anyway, which was why I ventured to disturb you. Of course when you told me not to bother you, that was all right, too.”
“I’m much obliged to you,” said old MacComerou. “My quarterly dividend check. I had forgotten that it was about due. I’ll pick it up sometime.”
“I brought it along with me,” said Quelch “I got it here, with my book. I thought I might as well earn the nine-cent delivery fee. It’s a registered special, with return receipt. If you’ll just sign for it.”
He reached the letter, along with a dogeared memorandum book and a stub of a pencil, down across MacComerou’s shoulders. But old Adam was mad by that time, with his bat ears twitching and with his shrewd old blue eyes rolling sidewises in his head.
“Don’t bother me about it now, you jabbering clown!” he said. “I am not going to sign for it now.”
“A clabbering jown, am I?” said Mr. Quelch. “Why, you hald-beaded, hat-beard—”
He could think of the adjectives, but he-couldn’t pronounce them very well, with the indignation that was seething in his ‘brain beneath his three long plastered hairs. “Bald-headed” and “bat-eared” were probably what he had meant to say. They were pretty obvious about old Adam. A man’s ears that stick out stick out. But Quelch couldn’t think of any noun. It’s hardly an insult to call a man a psychologist. Though there are some men—like a chemistry instructor from Harvard that I had at Southern State—who think that if anyone calls them professor, it is a fighting word.
Not that they aren’t full professors; they just don’t like to be called that. But old Adam wasn’t a man like that. He had been annoyed by Ouefch’s garrulity. As he had been annoyed by some of my remarks, maybe. But he had self-control.
“I am a representative of the United States government,” Quelch articulated with dignity. “Appointed by the President as one of his first acts when he came into office because I am a good and loyal Democrat, and now blanketed under permanent civil service like all others, under the new law. Even a Republican President couldn’t remove me. You and nobody else can talk to me like that. A clabbering—a cabbering—a jabbering jown.”
“The quarterly check from Barnaby and Barnaby is for the sum of eight hundred and twenty-nine dollars and some odd cents, I believe, Mr. Quelch,” said old Adam with tight-lipped courtesy. “Unless they have altered my investment portfolio to provide more profitable dividend producers, which no Wall Street trust lawyers ever do. Open the envelope yourself and see how much it is for if you’re interested.”
“Why, that’s nice of you, Professor,” said Mr. Quelch, mollified. “It’d be against the law for me to open your registered mail for you, though, even if you wanted me to, until I’d handed it to you, and you had signed a receipt for it, and handed it back to me. I wasn’t curious about how much your income is, don’t misunderstand me. Every man’s private business is his own. Multiplying that by four, that would be about thirty-three hundred and sixteen dollars every year, with maybe a couple of dollars over for the odd cents, depending on how odd they were. That’s a right nice income. All right, I’ll hold it for you as long as you want, Professor. How is your mother, by the way? Is she still with you?”
Old Adam’s brown bat ears stood out on his head at the question. A wrinkle of skin seemed to creep across his pale bald skull, as if a bug were creeping along underneath his scalp. Over his shoulder he stared up at Quelch with his pale incredulous stare. He looked horrified, nothing else.
Maybe he had loved his mother. He had never loved, I think, another woman.
“In God’s name, how could my mother be with me still?” he said. “She’s been dead for twenty years. You never knew her, certainly. What made you ask that, Quelch?”
“Maybe it was your wife, then,” said Quelch. “Or maybe it wasn’t a lady, but some old man. It was raining pitchforks, and there was rain sloshing down the post office windows and down the windows of your station wagon, and I couldn’t see out and in so well. I didn’t notice particularly. But it was some old party with a nice pink old wrinkled smiling face and bright blue eyes, setting in the front seat beside you that you had got out of, all wrapped up in a big blankety kind of overcoat, with a shawl over their head. Come to think of it, he had a red necktie on, so he must have been a man.”
“Oh,” said old Adam. “That was old Squibbs you must have seen. An old faithful retainer of mine, well along in his eighties. He came up to spend the summer with me, but the somewhat primitive conditions were too much for him, and he left in less than a week.
“I live quite alone, Mr. Quelch,” he added after a moment. “A retired old bachelor, with my garden and my writing and my books, except for what companionship I have had from John Flail while he worked about the place. And he was always a taciturn type of Indian. Now he’s gone. I planned to get married once when I was young. But something always came up to prevent it. I never did.”
“Your ought to keep a cat like me,” said Mr. Quelch. “You can always talk to a cat. That was one thing I noticed about that old party, Mr. Squibbs, that was with you, that made me like him. He had a gray cat on his lap that he was talking to. But cats take milk, of course. I’m sorry that he’s gone....”
A man like Quelch could talk on like that, annoying a man like old MacComerou, with this thing lying here. But I was glad Quelch had the pulpit, while I looked at that trephine job again, to see what the devil had been trying to get out of that dead brain.
It was then she came. The girl who had loved St. Erme. Whom he would never marry now. She came down there on the road where we were looking at it.
Maybe worse even than finding that arm without a hand, that was the worst.
There we were, gathered in the headlights in front of the car, about the body of St. Erme which had been found. Which lay on the corduroy with its bones bludgeoned, with its face stripped and augered by those sadistic things which had been done by a depraved maniac, in its silky gabardine suit that was all muck now, and its white silk shirt that was all brown swamp water. With the love-knot cuff link at the wrist of its left hand which had lain on the seat lightly and protectively back of her where she sat at the wheel all the way up, heading for Connecticut and then Vermont upon their wedding journey; and with the link on its right wrist that had no hand now.
I hadn’t thought of her. He just made me sick. And if anyone thinks it’s funny for a doctor to be that way, he can try being one.
I had just completed my examination. All that could be made without an autopsy, and there would be no need of that. MacComerou had been answering O
uelch over his shoulder, kneeling there across from me. Rosenblatt, with his wrinkled forehead and his cap pushed back on his bush of hair, was just squatting, watching everything my hands touched and everything I did. And those others around us in a ring, standing silently—all except Quelch—watching.
And maybe Ouelch had just made some remark about how the poor fellow didn’t seem quite so good-looking as he had been back at the post office, or perhaps some remark that he looked younger; and maybe old Adam had just replied that death makes all men timeless. I knew all that I would ever know about him now. I was getting up from my knees. And then I heard her.
“Inis!”
Oh, in the name of all suffering mercy, that fool Ouelch had brought her along down here in his car with him!
He had probably left her in it, back along up the road with the twenty or fifty other parked cars; and maybe had patted her wrist or chucked her under the chin and told her to stay there like a good little girl. But he wasn’t the sort of man that women ever listen to, though they may laugh at them or with them. She had got out and come down the road, having heard that something had been found.
“Inis! Where are you Inis? Oh, where is he?”
Oh, in the name of suffering mercy!
She was right back of the car now, and coming around it. In her white coat, with her dark eyes staring, and her hands half feeling out before her, as if she were dazed and blind. Across from me MacComerou crouched with his mouth tight, with his shrewd eyes turned toward where she was coming, terribly pale. Even Rosenblatt looked as if he could be flattened with a breath.
Some of the gawking fools standing around us—they hadn’t any better sense—were making way to let her through.
The Red Right Hand Page 14