Diagnosis

by Rufus King

There were three Chanins: Arthur and his wife Edna and Arthur’s younger brother Robert. Starr’s card file on each was clinically unexceptional. Arthur Chanin’s digestive system was chronically out of tone from over-rich foods and a sedentary habit of living. His sole occupation in life consisted of being a gentleman and a scholar, and the pursuit enthralled him.

  Edna Chanin had come to him in March and had delicately instructed him in the facts of life to a point where he had finally grasped the idea that she expected to have a baby. This he had confirmed, and the child was scheduled to take over the Chanin torch sometime in December.

  Robert Chanin was an alcoholic, his entire system shot, and with an unpredictable but presumably brief span left him to live.

  Beyond the clinical, however, there were (on Starr’s card files) certain brief annotations. On Arthur Chanin’s: Smiles without humor; not miserly, but has a dementia toward pennies.

  On Robert Chanin’s: Needs a Holy Grail. Starr did not know exactly why he had jotted the phrase down, but it did comprise in a sort of concentrated-pill form his feelings about the youngster, his feeling that if Robert Chanin had lived in the era of Crusades he would not have been the wastrel that he was today.

  On Edna Chanin’s: Why take swimming lessons when she knows how to swim? That had been the previous summer (long before she had tactfully led him through the mazes of her currently scheduled blessed event) and it had puzzled him until he had seen the new swimming instructor at the River Club: something blond out of Norway with a Hollywood build, and Edna Chanin had started with the breast stroke, then graduated, with astonishing rapidity, into an Australian crawl.

  Starr turned into the Chanin driveway, heard the sing of crushed gravel for fifty yards, admired, as he always did, an impressive row of coster blue spruces on his right, then drew up before the handsome limestone facade of the house itself. The June air was redolent with moist greens, and twilight gave way to stars and the first deep dark of night as he mounted shallow steps and pressed a bell.

  He said, “Hello, Maxwell,” to the manservant who opened the door.

  “Good evening, Doctor.”

  “How are the twinges?”

  “Much better since the pills.”

  “Let me know when you need more.”

  “Thank you.”

  Maxwell took Starr’s hat and gloves and coat. He carried them into a small room that opened out of the ponderous elegance of the large entrance hall, and Edna Chanin was starting down the dark mahogany stairs just as Starr reached the base of them. Light from the hall’s great luster chandelier heightened the pallor of her face, with its dark direct eyes and madonna cap of sleek dark hair, and it occurred to Starr that she was more impressively beautiful than he had ever before thought, and that age (he knew her to be in her thirties) had not touched her at all.

  Her hand was cool and her grip firmly assured. She said, “Before you go up, Doctor?”

  Her smile, conservatively tinged with worry, made her utterly charming. A scent of the perfume which had knocked them dead at the club’s May Day dance stirred as she passed him, and he followed her into the dim privacy of a small room.

  They sat on gilt and tapestry, and she said, “It’s beyond a slight attack of indigestion this time, Doctor.” She studied briefly the intelligence and virility which saved Starr’s features from being handsome. “Do you mind my discussing it?”

  He accepted the inevitable and said, “Of course not.”

  “It’s Robert, really.”

  Starr, from his maturer viewpoint of the early forties, liked young Robert, who was twenty-two. He believed that he understood the youngster and felt worried and sorry for the desperate physical and moral wreckage that Robert was making of his life. Their professional contacts had been futile, for Robert would pleasantly agree to a course of treatment and then willfully refuse to follow it through. In fact, Starr had declined any longer to accept him as a patient and had advised a sanitarium, advice which had ended in nowhere. He continued, however, to golf with him occasionally, usually when Robert was recovering from a debauch.

  Stories about Robert’s gambling losses were common gossip at the country club, mainly from wonder as to where he got the money with which to pay his debts. His allowance from Arthur, who was sixteen years older, was notoriously meager. Arthur, at the sudden death of their parents in a motor accident in the French Alps, had inherited the entire Chanin estate, whereas Robert (he had early in life been the perfect problem child) had been cut off with a dollar and a thumping codicil of outraged censure.

  “Another scrape?” Starr asked.

  “A culmination of successive ones rather.”

  “Just how, Mrs. Chanin?”

  The delicate lifting of her shoulders was a work of art.

  “You see, this time there’s a girl.”

  “But hasn’t there frequently been?”

  “Yes, but not like this. Robert married her last night.”

  “Did you know her?”

  “No, no one knows her.”

  It was more than a simple statement of fact; it was an epitaph.

  “Have you seen her, Mrs. Chanin?”

  “Yes. Robert brought her here this morning. I liked her, Doctor. I hope that won’t strike you as extraordinary.”

  “Why should it, Mrs. Chanin?”

  “Well, there was a flavor; nothing definite was said about it, but one sensed the district.”

  “Oh, surely not!”

  “Robert was very drunk, Doctor. The girl’s name is Beatrice. She’s sixteen. She’s thin from something. I thought it hunger. It made her eyes seem very large, so that you ignored the rest of her. Robert introduced her—well, defiantly. To me and to Arthur. It wasn’t pleasant.”

  “No, I can understand that.”

  “I wondered at his temerity in bringing her so abruptly, without any warning, to the house. But then you know the tragic fog that Robert lives in. Is it too much to suggest that he loves her? I mean to a point that blinded any shred of common sense? I prefer that to the other.”

  “Which other, Mrs. Chanin?”

  “The more obvious interpretation, Doctor. Plain extortion, frankly. A drunken attempt to force Arthur to protect the Chanin name by an offer to annul the mésalliance in exchange for a lump sum. They stayed for lunch.”

  “What?”

  Her smile was deprecatingly understanding and forgiving too.

  “Do you know Arthur well?”

  “Actually, I don’t.”

  “So many people have what you might call their family side.”

  “Yes, I see what you mean.”

  “The fact that he asked them to stay for lunch was a case in point. That was when Arthur told them, you see. Possibly it’s why I decided to like her, the way she bore up under Arthur’s smiling insistence that Robert have second servings in honor of it being the Prodigal’s last meal. They stood it until the salad course when Arthur—well, it would have been kinder to throw them out physically than the way in which Arthur did. That was when the district note was touched. And there you are. I thought you had better know in case you were puzzled by any nervous disorders beyond plain indigestion. Will you see me before you go?”

  “Of course, Mrs. Chanin.”

  The house held a definite brooding quality as he mounted the stairs. He rapped lightly on the door of Arthur Chanin’s bedroom. There was no answer. He went inside the vast, still room with its large front windows that overlooked the river. It retained the “modern taste” of the early 1880s when ebony veneers, straight lines and holly inlays had thrown the Mid-Victorian overboard.

  A single lamp burned on a table beside the massive canopy bed, turning Arthur Chanin’s face into a gray dish against white pillows. It was a weakly patrician face, sensual in a petulant way, topped by black hair cut with a Byronic touch. Starr thought him sleepi
ng, but his eyes opened and he said, “I’m sick. I’ve just been very sick, in there, in the bathroom. Got cramps.”

  Starr glanced toward the open bathroom door. The lights in the bathroom were out, but his eye was caught for an instant by a lambent glow of pale moonlight that illumined some patch of moisture at the base of the wide marble washstand.

  “Doctor—”

  “Yes?”

  (No further response—temperature—surely an obvious case of acute gastroenteritis, augmented by nervous reaction to the luncheon scene—then, swiftly, a flash of delirium—the blank, bland eyes of sudden coma—cardiac collapse—)

  Starr did not know that Mrs. Chanin was beside him until he heard her voice. “Doctor?”

  “Mrs. Chanin!”

  “Arthur? Oh, dear God—Arthur—”

  “Yes. He’s dead.”

  “Oh, darling—darling—darling—”

  The violence of her grief upset him. It was genuine enough. He did believe that. But there was something in its curious intensity that was frightening too.

  * * * *

  A clock struck half-past ten.

  Dr. Starr put the fountain pen down on his desk. He looked up at his secretary as she stood, in severe white, in the office doorway.

  “Yes, Miss Wadsworth?”

  “Mr. Robert Chanin is here.”

  “Show him in, please.”

  “Yes, Doctor.”

  Starr shoved the blank death certificate further to one side. He stood up. He held out his hand as Robert Chanin came through the doorway.

  “Sorry, Bob.”

  “Thanks, Colin.”

  “Drink?”

  “Please.”

  Starr poured scotch.

  “Sit down.”

  “Thanks.”

  Starr appraised shaky fingers, the rangy looseness of the youngster’s body, the dull chalk of haunted shock under the homely, pleasant face’s tan.

  “There was nothing I could do, nothing anyone could do. Those things happen.”

  “Sure, Colin.”

  “Who told you?”

  “Edna.”

  “She knew where you were?”

  “Yes. Beatrice and I checked in at the Muskingum House this afternoon. Edna telephoned. She said I’d better run over and see you before going out to the house. She said there’d be things you’d want to know for the death certificate.”

  “That’s right. More scotch?”

  “No, thanks, Colin. Got too much now.”

  Starr jotted down notes.

  “When was your brother born?”

  “In 1901, July eleventh.”

  “Your father’s full name?”

  “Jackson Arthur Chanin.”

  “Also born in Laurel Falls?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your mother’s maiden name?”

  “Ellen May Beston.”

  “Where born?”

  “Here too.”

  The office door opened.

  “Yes, Miss Wadsworth?”

  “Mr. Greentree is on the wire, Doctor. He’s telephoning directly from Mr. Chanin’s home, not the funeral parlors.”

  “Thank you.”

  Starr lifted the phone from its cradle. He noted the increasing nervousness of Robert’s fingers as the youngster took a match from his pocket and snapped it alight with a thumbnail, rather a large match, like the old-timers. “Greentree?”

  “Oh, hello, Doc. I’m out at the Chanin place. Mrs. Chanin says a cremation, and, boy, is she splashing! You know that Number 74 casket? Solid silver handles and the imported violet crepe? Like the Whitmans fell for last November?”

  “Yes…”

  “Well, is it okay to go ahead, or do I wait until you fill out the certificate? Guess that’s a laugh!”

  Starr looked beyond the desk, beyond Robert Chanin, past the long old-timer match still burning in his fingers, out through a window at the silhouette of Lombardy poplars done in laced ebony against the black night sky—against the black night sky—a shock ran lightly along his nerves and grew with swift, illuminating impacts into a chill monstrosity that widened his eyes.

  “Doc?” Greentree’s voice over the telephone was querulous. “Are you still there, Doc?”

  “Yes…”

  “I asked was it all right to go ahead.”

  “What?”

  “The death certificate, Doc. Have I got your say-so to go ahead?”

  “Wait.”

  “Wait?”

  “I’ll be out there shortly.”

  “But what the hell, Doc? Going formal on me?”

  “I said wait.”

  Starr put the phone back on its cradle. Chill prickles still iced his nerves. He took a cigarette. He said, “Got a match, Bob?”

  “Sure.”

  Starr accepted the match. He fiddled with it. He did not light it. He said, “Look here, do you mind if I get pretty personal?”

  “Go right ahead.”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “Get what?”

  “Money.”

  “You’ve been hearing things?”

  “Plenty of things.”

  “I see.”

  “Don’t get tough, mutt. I like you.”

  “I’ve always thought you did.”

  “Well?”

  “Edna gave it to me. Sorry to disappoint the old cocktail bags at the club Sorry it wasn’t armed holdups.”

  “Was it her own money?”

  “Edna’s got no money. She’d get it from Arthur, heaven knows how. It can’t do her any harm now, no matter who knows it.”

  “She’s been pretty decent to you?”

  “Decent? She’s an angel. I guess nobody’ll ever know what she’s been to me since she married Arthur. She understands me. Nothing, no matter what happened, Colin, she’d come right up to bat with money or sympathy. Honest, no matter what I did she’d just say it was all right and how she understood.”

  “Did it ever strike you that perhaps the sympathy could be—well, encouragement?”

  Sweat broke on Robert’s strained young face.

  “Why, you dirty-minded louse, I—” He started to cry. “Honest to God, Colin, if I ever thought anything like that—”

  Starr waited until Robert had finished crying. He stood up.

  “Wait outside for me, please, Bob.”

  “All right, Colin.”

  The office door closed. Starr lifted the telephone. He made two calls. The first one took ten minutes. The second one longer.

  He put the unlighted match in his pocket.

  * * * *

  Mrs. Chanin had changed into black.

  The small drawing room seemed dimmer than before, the putti vaguer, a more misty pink; the scent of Mrs. Chanin’s lethal perfume alone remained strong. “But surely Robert gave you the details, Doctor?”

  “There are further ones I need for the diagnosis, Mrs. Chanin. What time was luncheon?”

  “At one o’clock. No—do you want this quite exact?”

  “Quite, please.”

  “Robert and his wife came shortly before, and Arthur started smiling and being courtly in the manner which he thought so amusing and insisted that they stay for lunch. Robert went upstairs to his room to pack some things and left the girl with us.”

  “How long was Robert gone?”

  “About half an hour, I think. I know we delayed luncheon until Maxwell told us that Robert was already in the dining room mixing a scotch and soda.”

  “Was there any food on the table before you sat down?”

  “The salad, Doctor—Arthur’s one touch of provincialism. He liked it to be there at luncheon.”

  “Any garlic in it?”

  “
Yes, a trace. Maxwell rubs the bowl.”

  “What sort of a salad, Mrs. Chanin?”

  “Nothing alarming, Doctor. I’m afraid you will have to attribute the enteritis to the nervous tension rather than the food.”

  “I would still like to know the contents of the salad.”

  He carefully noted her eyes as they shifted slightly to the doorway behind him.

  “Greens, some lettuce and romaine, some radishes, stuffed olives—Arthur’s own recipe, as a matter of fact. His thought on salads was to sublimate them.”

  “You did hate him, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.” Blood flushed her cheeks slowly, then slowly drained, and they were white again. “Are you being deliberately impertinent?”

  “Your husband was murdered, Mrs. Chanin.”

  She said after a long while, while her eyes continued to flick obliquely toward the door behind him, “When did you know?”

  “You thought so too?”

  “I was afraid.” She started to tremble. “I am afraid.” She leaned toward him, and her fingers were icy on his hand. “Poison, Doctor?”

  He took the match which Robert had given him from his pocket.

  “Have you ever noticed any matches of this type in the house?”

  “It’s rather large, isn’t it? Weren’t they more common in the gaslight era?”

  “They were common before the law prevented their manufacture.”

  “Fire? Spontaneous combustion?”

  “No, their heads contain the toxic form of phosphorus. The law now insists that a harmless, a nontoxic form be used instead.”

  “But, surely—just a match, Doctor?”

  Starr studied her quietly while trying to hold back the increased pressure of his blood, while conscious of the light beading of sweat that was starting on his face.

  “As little as one and one half grains has fatally poisoned an adult, Mrs. Chanin. You can check that, if it interests you, in the book on legal medicine and toxicology in your husband’s library. There are cases on record where children have sucked the ends of lucifer matches and where the ends of just two of them have been known to kill a child. Were you aware of any matches such as this one in the house?”

  The room, the night itself could not have been more still. No sign of her inward struggle touched the placid beauty of her face.