Diagnosis

by Rufus King

  “I am drawing the only conclusion that I can from what you say, and in face of every medical technicality I know firmly in my heart that you are wrong. You sent for the police, Doctor. Do they think as you think?”

  “Yes.”

  “But what motive, what reason? There is none.”

  “District Attorney Heffernan would disagree. Surely you know the town’s propensity for gossip, Miss Everett. The Leffton people’s offer has been thoroughly discussed, their efforts to persuade your sister and you to sell this estate to further their subdivision plan for a group of cottages on small lots.”

  “What conceivable motive could that offer to Mary? If she were to have lulled us both, then, true, she is our closest relative and heir, or has Mr. Heffernan touched on the fantasy that that dear child has reserved my murder for some later date?”

  “I’m simply pointing out the obvious, Miss Everett. Surely you’ll agree that your sister was adamant in her refusal to consider the Leffton offer?”

  “Doctor, did you know Laura? Know her really well?”

  “Yes, I think very well.”

  Laura was, in his thoughts, alive again before him: a woman who possessed in its fullest measure the tyrannical strength of the conscious weak. They traded, these iron weaklings, on the ultimate sympathy of those who were bound to them by the ties of any close relationship. They traded on that innate repugnance of a kin to hurt, in little things, a being whom the sheer habit of years had accustomed you to love. In little things, which he knew had a fashion for cohering until they solidified with time into a solid big.

  “She was considerably older than you. Miss Everett?”

  “Yes, eleven years. A handicap which she never released, Doctor. An authority, a mother complex, I suppose.”

  “And you? Forgive me if I harp on this Leffton matter. Without your sister’s—well, domination, would you have sold?”

  “With a chance at last? Does anyone relish chains?”

  Starr felt against his will a certain pity, a pity which sprang from his helpless inability in any problem of human behavior not to see and understand the other side. Heffernan, a judge, a jury might dismiss as tenuous the motive for her crime, so he recognized the imperative necessity for a confession which, buttressed by evidence of the clearest nature, would stand in court.

  He himself found nothing tenuous in the reason for this killing which the average layman would segregate into the tabulation reserved for crimes against nature. The happenstance that Laura was her sister could even have enhanced her purpose rather than have deterred her from the act.

  He saw the profile of her life from childhood: being told as a little girl what and what not to do by another, an authoritative girl eleven years her senior; then the stretch of years when Laura had acted as trustee for her, Janice’s, share of the estate; it took no Freud to label the result of that ingrained habit of dependence, of deferring ever to Laura’s judgment, to her command through those formative years. And it took time, Starr knew, to shake such a domination off, time and a strength of will power which Janice Everett did not possess.

  Until finally all of the little things had cohered under the Leffton company’s offer to hand over a moderate fortune in cash for the estate. It had not meant a moderate fortune to Janice Everett but, as she had just herself said, a release from chains: money in hand with which to set out (undoubtedly with Dune in tow) and enslave the world with her voice. Before it was too late.

  Starr knew that therein lay the actual spark which had flashed the accumulative powder train to murder, knew how nothing on earth could be more maddening than the irresponsibility of a reasonless check made by a person in power, saw that damnable stubbornness of Laura’s with the insensate flare of rage in which Janice Everett must have seen it: for Laura would not sell. Nor could she force Laura to sell. But under that unpredictable and horrendous blast when murder tempts as a sole release against a capriciously unfair impasse she could, and had, forced Laura to quit being alive.

  Starr did not like the job he had to do.

  “Did you lie upon your sister?” he asked quietly. “Press her face down in the pillows?”

  He did not like the thought of Heffernan and of Jones with his notebook and pencil waiting like twin fates behind the bedroom’s slightly opened door. But, more strongly than any of those things, he disliked a murder done by one you trust. He arranged his lancets coldly in his mind while the little noises of the house and of the night were prominent again, while blood receded from Janice’s face and she took the compress from her eyes, and he saw them hard and pitiless as black glass.

  “Did I understand you, Doctor?”

  He said reasonably, “I think you found your sister resting on her side and that you simply turned her face downward, when you lay upon her, and pressed her face into the pillows.”

  He watched the profound reserves of hidden strength she drew upon, plugging the shock of fear before it reached her glass-hard eyes, tightening the slight preliminary quiver of her lips.

  “Before leaving for the Marshalls’? Have you gone mad, Doctor? Must I remind you that Mary can prove that Laura was alive, that even while I was sitting beside you at supper Laura was alive?”

  “Your sister was killed shortly before nine o’clock, Miss Everett. Just before you sang.”

  Her voice was beautifully freighted with derision.

  “By me?”

  “You’re a clever woman, Miss Everett. I think all of the Marshalls’ guests would swear that your crimson dress was constantly vivid in the general scene, with the exception of those few minutes just before you sang.”

  “While I sprayed my throat, Doctor?”

  “While you were, presumably, spraying your throat in the little dressing room opening from the music room.”

  “I see.” (Derision remained, but he found in her eyes, which were turned directly on him, the flat and deadly contemplation of a patient snake.) “I sprayed my throat. I left the dressing room by its garden door. I came home. I smothered Laura. I arranged the suicide scene, the tubing, the towel, the—”

  Her voice dropped abruptly as a stone into the quiet pool of the night.

  “The book, Miss Everett?”

  “Book, Doctor?”

  “With its underlined suicide message?”

  “There was one?”

  “Yes. Yours, Miss Everett. The only property for the scene which you had prepared in advance and which will prove premeditation, your intent to kill.”

  She smiled obscurely at some inner comfort.

  “You are yourself my alibi for your absurdities, Doctor.”

  “I realized that. I did not, I do not feel flattered. You were with me during supper and later while we gathered in the music room. You were scheduled to sing at nine o’clock. It was exactly ten minutes to nine when you asked me the time.”

  The strange smile lingered.

  “And I sang, I think, as the clock struck the hour?”

  “Yes, Miss Everett.”

  “So in ten minutes I did all of those things?”

  “No, what you did was this. At ten minutes of nine you left me and went to the dressing room, bolting its music-room door. You did not spray your throat. You left by the garden door. You ran through the Marshalls’ garden, across your own lawn, unlocked the front door and entered this house. We tested the time required to do so just before I came upstairs. It can be done in two minutes. You went directly to your sister’s bedroom. You smothered her.”

  “Four minutes and five seconds, the average time it takes, didn’t you say?”

  “I did.”

  “Then counting both coming here and returning, Doctor, and killing Laura, I had something under two minutes in which to set the suicide scene, to control my apparently shattered nerves and breathing and start singing ‘Berceuse’?”

  Her laugh
had the artificial clarity of tinkling glass.

  “No, Miss Everett, it wasn’t like that. You dared not risk a single gesture after your sister was dead. Your entrance into the music room had to be on time. You set the stage for suicide after I drove you home, while Mary lit the fire, while Dune was playing Debussy, while you were presumably arranging a tray that had already been arranged. Nobody could have entered your sister’s room after we reached the house but you.”

  “Nobody did, Doctor. I saw her body from the door.” (The break came like a rush of logs that stir, then tumble, when the jam is broken, with a turbulent stream. Her words, Starr thought, were like such logs, pelting and grinding in the savagery of their release.) “I shall drive you from this town. I’ll sue you for every cent you possess. Your vile slander means nothing. You cannot prove a thing.”

  “I think we can. The little things were plain. For example, your scream when you pretended to find your sister dead, when you presumably had paused in her doorway to see whether she were awake, on your way back from the pantry with the drinks. It was a scream pitched to the sudden reaction to violent shock, and still no drop of liquid had been spilled from the filled glasses which were on the tray in your hand.”

  “Do you build your case on that, Doctor?”

  “These, as I say, are the minor things. For another example, the gas. If, as we were supposed to think, your sister had committed suicide by gas the whole house would have been filled with it. She had been dead, you know, for about three hours before we got here.”

  She stirred slightly, and her breathing became more quick.

  “You accuse me on the basis of the strength, or lack of strength, of the smell of gas? Gas seeping from a room that was tightly closed?”

  Starr swung, with a pitying reluctance, his masked battery into line.

  “Your sister herself accuses you, Miss Everett. Not I.”

  “Laura—the dead?”

  “You should have left her body lying on its face.”

  “Is this some abortive trap, Doctor?”

  “No. Things happen when a person dies, Miss Everett. The blood stops circulating, you see, and it settles gradually through the force of gravity until it becomes congested in the body’s lower parts. The time varies that it takes to do so. But it, this settling, is usually completed within two or three hours. Do you begin to understand?”

  She said nothing but stared up at him with bleak, puzzled eyes, while her tongue crept out to give moisture to her drying lips.

  “Surely you see the picture?” Starr went on. “Your sister died with her body face downward and remained in that position for several hours, for long enough for the blood to have settled and to have established lividities that were unquestionably indicative of that position. That’s why I knew you had set the scene, Miss Everett, because when I examined your sister right after you pretended to have discovered her death every indication, every lividity and suggillation for the position in which the body lay was exactly reversed.”

  * * * *

  Starr drove Dune home. He listened to a good many of Dune’s “Oh Gods” before telling him flatly to shut up, because Mary was with them, still trembling and cold and sick with shock, sitting there between them on the glove-soft leather, while a paling moon brushed silver across the bordering trees.

  He said to Mary, after Dune had been dropped to “Oh God” himself into a tortured bed, “I liked her voice.”

  “Roger’s mother?”

  “Yes. You can tell about people from their voices, even over a telephone. She’s all right.”

  “I know just what you mean. I knew that the first time I heard Roger’s—”

  Good, Starr thought, I won’t have to give her a sedative. She’ll do. She’ll sleep.

  THE CASE OF THE BUTTONED COLLAR

  Six people were involved, if you counted the one who was killed. Against them stood the law while, between, there was Dr. Colin Starr.

  On January eleventh at 9 A.M. Mrs. Beckfort did not see the smoke. The windows of her room looked backward toward the hills, the rugged hills of southeastern Ohio at the foot of which the town lay, Laurel Falls, on the bank of the Muskingum River. It was the sole room in the spacious house which she had retained for her own use. The rest, with their elegance polished to the bone, were occupied by paying guests. Elsa had been born in it twenty-two years ago, and Mrs. Beckfort’s husband, Arthur, with his gentle vagaries and inspired lack of the slightest sense, had died in it with diminishing splendor seven years back.

  The smoke was not there by ten.

  Panic seized Mrs. Beckfort at eleven o’clock and she dialed the telephone which rested on a stand within reach of her wheel chair. An impersonally courteous voice said: “Doctor Starr’s secretary speaking.”

  “Miss Wadsworth, this is Mrs. Beckfort. May I speak with the doctor, please?”

  “Certainly, Mrs. Beckfort.”

  Even over the wire Starr’s voice kept its friendly ability to reassure her instantly, as it always had, bulwarking her morale through the lean last years.

  “Good morning.”

  “Oh, good morning, Doctor.”

  “Are the knees bothering you again?”

  “No, you’ll think me terribly silly, but it’s Elsa.”

  “Yes?”

  “You see, there was no smoke.”

  Starr knew what, she meant. It was a ritual, the smoke between Mrs. Beckfort’s daughter Elsa and herself. Simple and direct as all things were which dealt with wilderness (not wilderness, exactly, but a place removed from the accessories of society such as electricity and the telephone), the signal smoke at nine every morning had been a greeting to Mrs. Beckfort from Elsa and an assurance that all was well. The habit had started a year ago when Elsa had married Joel Durban and they’d gone to live in a cabin near a forge which he’d built in the hills. Joel turned out wrought-iron objects at the forge with, Starr always thought, a plethora of muscular strength and little else.

  He said: “But wouldn’t Joel come in if anything were wrong?”

  “That’s it. Joel isn’t out there. He went to Columbus the day before yesterday about some show he’s arranging for his primitives.”

  “Was the smoke there yesterday morning?”

  “Yes, just at nine.”

  “Possibly Elsa is coming to town.”

  “Even so, Doctor, she would have sent the signal. I’m afraid she’s ill. I’m worried that there might have been an accident. The forge is so isolated, Doctor.”

  “I’ll run out there, Mrs. Beckfort. I can leave here in about twenty minutes.”

  Her relief was evident.

  “You’ll let me know?”

  “Yes, I’ll let you know.”

  * * * *

  Elsa’s body lay cupped in snow, in a sheeted pocket fifteen feet beneath the lip of a path which frost had hardened into iron. No blood was on the snow. Her face, in death, glowed splotchily bright the way flesh does with freezing: a cherry red. A stand of black walnut trees brooded under flat and chill gray sky.

  Starr knew the Luffberry boy fairly well, as well as you could get to know anything elementally primal. He had pulled Jeff back from typhoid late last year.

  “How does it happen you were waiting here, Jeff?”

  “There wasn’t any smoke.”

  Jeff’s voice was soft, oddly soft to go with his build and his face and hands which seemed blocked out in dark mahogany.

  “Been here long?”

  “No Doctor. Two or three minutes before you came.”

  “Take my car, will you? Pete’s filling station has the nearest phone. Ask him to get in touch with the sheriff and coroner. You’d better wait and come back with them.”

  “All right, Doctor—”

  “Yes?”

  “The stove in the cabin’s cold.”

 
; “Then she must have fallen last night, Jeff.”

  “It was stone cold last night.”

  “You were here?”

  “I figured Mrs. Durban’d gone into town.”

  Starr started to say something but Jeff was gone, suddenly, with that animal ability of his to vanish, rather than just to move off, among the trees. Starr found toe holds down the steep cliff. The hard surface of the ground told him nothing when he reached it. No footprints broke the flat of surrounding snow patches, and his own were the first to cut the one where Elsa lay.

  Yes, he thought, that was all right. Slipped on the path and landed down here on her back. Knocked unconscious. Then the cold had got her, caught her easily as it did the habitually ill-nourished and, as he knew her to be, the worn-out with fatigue. Lethargy would have overpowered her before she had revived, then coma and, in it, death.

  A metallic firmness of her flesh assured him nothing could be done. A certain difference about her appearance disturbed him: a difference between the way he usually had seen Elsa Durban and as he saw her now, a certain neatness about the jacket, the collar being buttoned primly up about her throat (that was it) and it had always been with a loosely worn woolen scarf that Starr remembered her when out of doors. He undid the high collar. Its upper edge had pressed snugly just below her chin, and like her face (his eyes grew sharp with shock) the smooth, stiffened throat showed cherry-red marks too…

  Sheriff Dixlow had received his appointment largely from his political abilities rather than through any aptitude or experience in the solution of obscure crimes. His voice especially was freighted with a valuable (politically) charm: a curiously sensitive instrument housed in a large and rather gloomy shell. He arrived with Jeff Luffberry and two deputies. He was moderately annoyed at the physical inconvenience of having to descend the cliff. He was definitely annoyed at the bitter cold. He had every intention of getting this business through quick.

  “The coroner could not come, Doctor. He’s in bed with a touch of flu. Your report will cover things. Start getting her up the cliff, men. She slipped on that path, fell, froze to death. That’s right, Doctor?”