He must have made the change in half a minute. Then he went rushing back down to find her and kill her. But she was terrified, and she had hid.
Through the twilight woods, crouching, stalking her, calling her with obscenities, he had crept, with the knife in his hand. Finding her coat that she had abandoned.
While she crept from him, and lay hidden with a beating heart.
She had not recognized his voice, though, using oaths that he had never used before. She had thought it was Corkscrew trying to imitate him. Perhaps, in changing into Corkscrew’s hat and coat, he had done something to change his voice, too. I must think about that.
She did not recognize him, anyway. With her myopia, she had not seen his features beneath the saw-brimmed hat, in the old coat. She had even thought his eyes looked icy pale. It was the tramp, she had thought. She could not think otherwise.
The hour was growing late for his getaway. He must not be seen too much as he raced away along the road, yet he must be seen. He had to do it before dark came completely. He could not find her, so he gave up the hunt. Perhaps she had fainted down there by the lake shore, and had fallen into the water and drowned. Perhaps she had fled so far and deep into the woods that she would never find her way out again. Perhaps she would be bitten by a rattler.
He had to give it up, anyway, to go on with his other plan. If she appeared, with a story that he had tried to kill her, it could be put down as hysteria. He would be dead then, anyway. He would show everyone that he was dead.
And so, that rushing scene of terror. A weird horn howling, a hunched driver with a grimacing face and a jeering laugh, in a checked coat and saw-tooth hat, with a finely dressed man in a Panama sprawled beside him at the wheel. A dead dog, some smashed surrealistic pictures, a jeering laugh and a squawk of his horn as he rushed past old MacComerou’s here, frightening MacComerou, too, like all the rest, and after that a man shambling down the road ahead, John Flail, whom he strikes and kills—knocking off, it would seem, his blue saw-tooth hat—and then on. He will dispose of the tramp’s body when there are no more places to pass, and dispose of that checked coat. He will leave the car on the outskirts of a town someplace within the next fifty miles, to be found after a few days. And after a month or two, his body.
Only he turned off down the Swamp Road by mistake, not knowing the country, it would seem, and got cornered. There had to be a body of murdered St. Erme now. Within a comparatively narrow radius. If there was no body, St. Erme was not really dead.
He found that body somewhere. There was someone that he killed, besides John Flail. There was some reason that he had to cut off that right hand.
What did he do with Corkscrew’s body?
Where did he get that black-eyed brown-faced body in the swamp, with its mutilated face?
Where is he now, himself?
And why in God’s name didn’t I see him passing me while I was there at the Swamp Road? He didn’t go by me, that is all. He struck John Flail, and dropped the hat, to show that Corkscrew had gone by, that it was Corkscrew who had done it, and then he vanished. If he had gone a little farther on, only a little farther on, he would have seen me parked there by the Swamp Road.
What does he look like—Inis St. Erme of Oklahoma? Black hair, black eyes, a brown face, well dressed, about six feet tall. Most men are brown-faced in the summertime, if they are exposed to the sun at all. One out of four men, it may be, is black-haired. He may be, now, either well or poorly dressed. There are a dozen men I have seen tonight who are six feet tall, including Stone and Quelch. Only Rosenblatt and I are definitely shorter.
The black eyes, only, are a particularly distinctive feature. He had extraordinarily black eyes. Even old Paul Riddle noticed them. Black eyes, and a little blind, so that he stumbled over small unexpected obstacles. There is no such thing as black eyes, of course. It is only a phrase for dark brown eyes. Eyes are of various shades of blue and brown, with greenish mixtures of both in between. No man can have black eyes. But he can wear contact lenses of black glass.
His eyes were some other color than black, that is all which that feature tells about him. And with the black glass off, they may be cat’s eyes in the dark....
He didn’t do a very good job with my surgical instruments in mutilating the face of that body which he planted for his own. Nor with the sawing off of the hand. Not a job that any medical man, or that old Adam& MacComerou himself, with his knowledge of anatomy, would have been very proud of. He didn’t do so good a job in my own particular field as I did in a garage man’s field with the old Draco, when I looked at its engine and figured out the way it was put together, and how it should be taken apart. As a doctor, I may be only a fair garage man. But as a garage man, he—
Why did I put down that word?
Why did I start to assume that he might be a garage man?
The phone bell out in the kitchen gave its ghostly jangle again. Dexter, the garage man who owns the murder car, A. M. Dexter of Dexter’s Day and Nite Garage on West Fourteenth Street, is a hundred miles away down in New York. When I first came here, old MacComerou called Dexter up, to ask him about his car; and that proved that.
Yet the shadow of that garage man remains sinister. With his dry metallic voice.
Yes, sinister!
Inis St. Erme—
S. Inis St. Erme, with a first name not defined.
S-I-N-I-S-S-T-E-R-M-E.
SINISTER ME! With only one S too many. Perhaps he was always a poor speller.
A man always kept a part of his own name when using an alias, I should have remembered. Sinister—left. Dexter—right. And I thought that I knew some Latin!
St. Erme—Sinister Me—was—he is—the garage man, A. M. Dexter.
I knew he had a right hand somewhere! I knew it.
What is his real appearance? A bald-headed, middle-aged man—that’s Dexter, that’s St. Erme, that’s the murderer.
Twice as big and twice as homely as he himself was, Gus, the day attendant whom Elinor had seen at his garage in the morning, had said, when she drove the colored boy back there, and asked if Mr. Dexter would like to check her driving—not knowing that her dazzling Inis St. Erme was Dexter, waiting at the hotel for her where he had taken a room to give himself an address for insurance.
A big powerful man, bald-headed. With eyes of some other color than black. Anyone can buy himself a wig. As Quelch said, they make them good enough to fool a barber.
Anyone with bat ears can glue them back, too, with any of various preparations, and make them seem inconspicuous with a wig of dark hair worn long—the ears, which are one of the most characteristic features of a face.
A. M. Dexter. What do the initials stand for—for what first and middle name?
Suppose I went to that phone out in the kitchen now, and rang the crank, asking for toll operator; and asked her for Mordaunt 2-8385. And suppose Mordaunt 2-8385 answered, “Dexter speaking!” And suppose I said, “This is Professor MacComerou, calling from my place up in the Berkshircs.” And suppose it said, “What do you want to know, Professor?”
In its dry metallic voice. While I looked through a black book, with a watch having a large second hand before me.
Or suppose, after it said, “Dexter speaking!” I just said nothing for two seconds, or said, “How are the oats growing in Times Square?” or said “Tra-la-la!” And suppose, all the same, at the end of two seconds it said, “What do you want to know, Professor?”
Yes, Professor, what did you want to know?
And suppose there are other numbers to call up, that have a different sequence of answers, for other circumstances. Dexter is down in New York. He’s always there. He wouldn’t come up to the country for twenty-five hundred dollars.
And suppose there is some device at the phone here, too—some device like a dictating machine, with wires and batteries—and the receiver is left off the hook. And suppose that, whenever the phone rings five long, five short, this machine speaks into the transmitter,
after a few seconds, saying: “This is Professor MacComerou! Don’t bother me, confound it! I don’t want to be bothered! I don’t want to be bothered about anything! I am busy writing!”
I can’t call up. The phone line has been cut.
But suppose that that A. M. Dexter stands for Adam MacComerou Dexter?
It has been here before my eyes all along. I must get it down on paper, and slip it beneath the blotter of the desk where it may be found later, before he comes.
It is here before me, all of it.
The case-study jotting of a murderer which the old man had made a note of, at some previous time, in his spidery, shaky old hand:
The case of A, of good family, well educated, colossally conceited of own mental powers, who at age 45, unsuccessful in all undertakings and greedy for money, plots uncle’s death so as to inherit modest fortune—
What “A” had the old man in mind? He never wrote a case history that he did not know intimately. He always used the right initials. That “A” must have stood for a nephew of his own—for one named Adam after him.
The notes here on the pad on the desk:
Call Barnaby & Barnaby GU 9-6400 after lunch. Inquire about mail.
Have John Flail clear out cesspool & prune privet, after painting house & barn.
Sugar, matches, potatoes, oranges, bacon, strawberries, bread.
Call up after what lunch? How long ago? On May 28 or 29, perhaps, after he had been here only a few days, with the murderous nephew who had driven him up. Call up about changing a will, perhaps.
That old man with the bright blue eyes and the rosy withered cheeks whom Quelch had seen sitting in the station wagon, on that day Professor MacComerou first arrived, to occupy the summer place he had bought! The old, old man who had remained in it, with his shivery old bones wrapped up in greatcoat and shawl in the rainy weather, while his bald bat-eared nephew got out, and went into the post office, introducing himself as, Professor MacComerou, and giving instructions for his mail to be held for call! No wonder! He didn’t want the RFD man to notice an overflowing mailbox, and perhaps to stop in to inquire.
John Flail went on and painted the house and barn. No doubt he cleaned out the cesspool. He never got around to trimming the privet—perhaps the instruction was never given to him, by that bat-eared man who said he was Professor MacComerou, and who perhaps explained the old man with him as a senile old man given to delusions. John Flail was stolid, he was an Indian, he was taciturn. Probably he never came into tire house at all, for fear of Ridder ghosts.
And so the old man sat here at his desk, in this house with his murderous nephew, who had assumed his identity, with no one to help him, with no one on whom he could call. Perhaps he had thought that the murderous plans in his nephew’s mind were something that would never come to fruition. That he could talk him out of. But he must have known his death was on him at the last. He hid the doorstops, and all of that.
That doesn’t help me. Perhaps he is sorry for it. I have the feeling that he has been trying to help me now. But he is beyond life, he is beyond the murderer’s reach now himself, old Adam MacComerou.
There must have been something on his body, when Unistaire found it buried down there in the sawdust heaps, which told Unistaire who he was. Or perhaps poor Unistaire just jumped to the realization, with his surrealistic imagination. It was because of his discovery of the old man’s body that Unistaire was killed, anyway, not because of his nonsensical remark about Professor MacComerou no longer getting milk—which may at first have been ordered for the old man. Or his listing of all those things out of which he would make a surrealistic picture of the murderer, which had happened to include a wig and a pair of glass eyes. Though that must have jolted Adam Dexter....
Even that last note on the memorandum pad should have told me how long ago it must have been since old Adam sat here and made those notes, in his spidery old hand: “bacon, strawberries....” Strawberries in August!
And all that mush out in the kitchen sink!
Coming back here—to resume his role as Professor Adam MacComerou, while he practiced the old man’s handwriting, perhaps, and tried to get the old man’s money out of the lawyers’ hands, at long distance—he had had the problem of supplies, of course. That was why he had ordered all that food in Danbury, enough for a month. He had even used the girl’s own ration coupons.
All those provisions that had been on the back porch, as I entered with him from the garden! And on the way back out, after he had alibied himself as Dexter; going back to my stalled car, I had even grabbed a banana from a box, without wondering where that food had come from, with my splitting headache.
He hadn’t got old MacComerou’s spidery handwriting yet. That was why he had refused to sign for the special registered letter from the lawyers, of course, when Quelch had tendered it. That thing had worried me.
How I must have paralyzed him when I appeared, and said I had come from up the road, and had seen nothing! I hadn’t seen John Flail’s body, which he had left there to show that he had gone on past. He hadn’t known that John Flail had crawled into the ditch.
But it wasn’t John, of course. Adam Dexter came rushing along the road, with Corkscrew dead beside him. He was going to drop the hat beyond his place, to prove Corkscrew had gone by. Then he saw John Flail, or one whom he took to be John Flail, walking along the road ahead of him, probably returning from working around his place, as he had made arrangements with John Flail to do. So he had sent his car hurtling into him. Even better than a hat, John Flail’s dead body would prove that Corkscrew had gone by, and that Corkscrew was murderous.
And John Flail might have said something—sometime, to someone—about the old, old man who had been at the house at first, and who had then disappeared. John Flail was taciturn and incurious. Still, he had a tongue.
But John Flail was down at his shack. I had seen him walking away down Swamp Road an hour before. It was Two-fingered Pete Flail, his brother, whom Dexter struck and killed, and whom we found in the ditch. Perhaps that was the moment when Dexter first realized his mistake. He warned me not to touch the body—he didn’t want me to see those missing fingers.
Into his mind there had leaped at once the plan. Here was a body that could be St. Erme’s except for the hand—and St. Erme’s body, he was realizing, would have to be found. He couldn’t use John’s own, for John was old and leathery and wrinkled, and his face too well known. After I had left him, and he had found the police were on their way already to inquire about Pete Flail, he had got his car out of the barn, and rushed down to John Flail’s.
Had found him eating supper, perhaps, and smashed his head in with a stone. Brought his body back; put it where Pete’s had been; and dressed Pete’s in his own clothes, with those things done to his face which would both alter Pete’s look and enmesh me in it. And removing the hand, of course, with the two fingers. I hope the hand is found.
He had meant to create the illusion that he had gone on up the road, and out at Stony Falls, to have his car found a few days later. He thought he had created the illusion perfectly. After killing Flail and dropping Corkscrew’s hat, he had backed on down the road to his drive, and turned up it. Had driven out the station wagon with the flat tire, driven his Cadillac in, closed the doors, and driven the station wagon up in front of the doors. In a few days he would drive it somewhere to be found, but in the meantime he didn’t want the sun or rain to get on it. He loved that car.
If he had driven just a little farther—just a little farther, after killing Flail—he would have seen that his way was blocked.
Then I came, when he was digging in his garden. I had been stalled on the road an hour, I said. And he realized then that murderous Corkscrew and dead St. Erme and his big gray car, which was nicely reposing in the barn, could not have gone on out to Stony Falls. So they must have turned off down the Swamp Road before they got to me—it was the only way. But I had been right at the Swamp Road, and they couldn’t have gone t
hat way, either.
He couldn’t get the car on out to Stony Falls, and prove I was crazy or a liar. But he could get it down onto the Swamp Road, and hope to make it stick.
Before my eyes, all the time. If I had only seen. The old man’s own huge brown buckram-bound Psychopathology, with its dedication to “My Sister Eva,” that I had remembered. Wasn’t one of the most harrowing cases that he had told of in that book the case of “E. D.,” a woman with a homicidal mania whom he had known intimately? Eva MacComerou Dexter, that might have been. I wish I had time to look it up. And to read all those twelve hundred and eighty-seven pages.
Or there is the bright green Garden Flowers, Their Planting and Cultivation. That thudding of the spade in the garden that I had heard, as I came up the drive! I might have looked up to see whether tulips are planted in August, and just how they are planted.
Or read Who’s Who in America, the current edition. Dexter may have torn the page out. But he couldn’t think of everything.
Here it is:
MacComerou, Adam Dwight, psychologist. Born Olion, Missouri, June 7, 1862. Educated. ...
1862! I had thought that Dexter looked no more than forty-five, though he could be sixty-five if he said so. But he couldn’t have passed with me for eighty-five. Not with those muscles rippling beneath his pale hide.
How could he have had that pale hide, anyway, if he had been working all summer in his garden?
There is this newspaper alone on the desk before my eyes, the newspaper with its big headlines. The evening Danbury papers. Quelch said that the Danbury papers didn’t came in by mail till the morning. Stone and Rosenblatt didn’t bring it. I hadn’t brought it. There had been nothing in Elinor’s hands, not even a purse, when I had met her. Yet here was this paper on the desk, fresh from Danbury. It should have told me at once that St. Erme, as I had heard his name, had been in this house—the man who had been in the little ice-cream and stationery store with her in Danbury, and had tossed down his three cents and picked the paper up, and tossed it into the car in front, as they went out and into the grocery.
The Red Right Hand Page 17