by Helen McCloy
She watched him uneasily as he moved down the room through the archway.
Maurice came back to the window seat where she was sitting and spoke in an almost inaudible voice. “Don’t do anything foolish about Vera, Philippa. The police will be prying into all our lives for some time to come. The less they know about you and me or you and Amos the better.”
Philippa looked down at her gloved hands. “You won’t consider paying Vera?”
“To keep her quiet? She’d be insatiable. I can’t afford it and neither can you. We’ve got to gamble that she’ll hold her tongue when she finds we don’t scare easily.”
“Will you write her? Or shall I?”
“Nothing in writing. I’ll call her on the phone.”
They were silent as they heard Basil’s voice speaking into the telephone. “Right away. Good-bye.”
He came back into the living room with a brisker step and brighter eyes. “That was the Bureau of Missing Persons. You were wrong, Lepton. They’ve already discovered the identity of the man you knew as Amos Cottle.”
Philippa’s hand went to her throat as if she felt a choking sensation there. For a moment, Lepton looked as if Basil were threatening him with a loaded revolver.
Basil could guess why Philippa was dismayed. She had known Amos so intimately she could not anticipate learning about the other side of his life and the other women he had known, with complete equanimity. But why was Lepton, who had scarcely known Amos at all, so deeply disturbed?
CHAPTER TWELVE
Lerner Memorial was one of the newer hospitals. By the time it was founded, the price of real estate in the heart of Manhattan was prohibitive to a hospital maintained by voluntary contributions, so the founders had gone northwest to the very edge of the city limits. The white stone buildings were constructed on a heroic scale with the simple, massive solidity of ancient Egyptian architecture, which for some inexplicable reason was called modern in the thirties. Standing high, it was a perfect counterpoint for the flat face of the New Jersey Palisades across the river. Whenever a slight mist blurred its corners and dimmed the glitter of its many windows, it could easily have been mistaken for a mirror image of the rugged cliff face, transferred by some trick of refraction to the New York shore.
A heavy soundproof door led into the west wing where the administrative offices were housed. The director’s private office was a large room facing the river, flooded with light from windows like pillars of glass running from floor to ceiling. It was monastically chaste in its sparing use of furniture. A great flat desk, three plain uncomfortable chairs, a row of filing cabinets, telephones and an interoffice communicator. No rug, no pictures, no books, not even a typewriter. It seemed a thousand years removed from the fancier Wall Street offices with their gentleman’s library look—their open fireplaces, TV sets and concealed bars. Here there was nothing unnecessary and nothing comfortable.
After all, thought Basil, the research hospital, like the university, has something of the same relation to the general public that monasteries had in the Middle Ages. Here was an austere tradition sustained by an absolute faith in ideals that happened to be secular. This was the domain of people who thought and lived on another plane from that of their contemporaries, who cheerfully accepted relative poverty, cushioned by minimum security, as the price that must be paid for more leisure to cultivate the inner life than was possible to anyone involved in the fierce competitions of the market place. Set apart from the human harvest, like seed corn, they were able to germinate ideas that would have perished if there had been no such communities withdrawn from the mainstream of modern life. As always, the eternal could only be preserved by those who rejected the contemporary with all its flashing, distracting and deceiving delusions.
George Hansen, the director, was small, fair and effeminate. Put a woman’s wig on his sleek, sandy head and you would accept him immediately as a woman schoolteacher or librarian in her late forties. The plain, neatly knotted dark tie, the immaculate linen with a hint of starch, the hands that looked as if they had just been washed—all indicated a man orderly, punctilious, a little rigid, a little petty, but sure to fulfill any administrative job with flawless precision and meticulous attention to detail. He would have made a good abbot, but he would not have survived for one day among the robber barons.
“Dr. Willing? I understand that you are interested in the history of Alan Sewell.”
“The Missing Persons Bureau believe that he is the man I am looking for,” said Basil, cautiously. “What can you tell me about him?”
There was a folder on the spotless blotter—the only thing besides a pen on the bare desk. Hansen opened the folder and glanced at the papers inside. “Alan Sewell was born in Adamant, Vermont, in 1918.”
“Vermont!” Basil was astonished. “Are you sure?”
“I have all the documents here. Why shouldn’t he be from Vermont?”
“I had a strong suspicion that he was a Westerner.”
“So far as I know, he was never in the west. He was a graduate of Harvard Medical School and he interned in this hospital in 1948. He showed considerable promise as a surgeon. He was married during his interneship to a childhood sweetheart, Girzel MacDonald. She had come on here from Vermont about two years earlier, and she and another girl ran a small beauty parlor in this neighborhood.”
“The other girl’s name?”
“Alice Hawkins.”
“Is she still in the neighborhood?”
“No, she has a big place on Fifth Avenue now under the trade name of Alicia Armitage.
“Girzel MacDonald had some savings of her own which made the marriage possible financially while Alan was still an interne. They lived in a small apartment near the hospital and they seemed happy. Then Alan finished his interneship and became a staff doctor, which eased the financial situation. Unfortunately Mrs. Sewell died suddenly of acute appendicitis. The operation had been delayed too long.”
“Why?”
“My dear Dr. Willing, you can hardly expect me to answer that question. I did not know the Sewells intimately. But we all know that appendicitis is not always easy to diagnose. We’ve had several cases here where every test was negative and then a purely exploratory operation has revealed infection close to the danger point. Presumably it was one of those cases. Of course it was a most tragic thing to happen to so young a man and it had an unfortunate effect on Sewell’s personality. Until then he had been quite gregarious and well liked, but he became so morose and withdrawn that a number of his colleagues complained he was difficult to work with. No one suggested that he neglected his duties in any way, but his manners, or lack of manners, created a bad impression.
“The situation remained stationary for several months. We all hoped he would snap out of it eventually, but then—I began to hear reports that Dr. Sewell was drinking heavily. I questioned him about this. He assured me that he did not drink on duty, only when he was alone at home. I pointed out the dangers of solitary drinking, especially for a doctor, and tried to say a few words of fatherly advice. I admit I was beginning to be troubled about the whole thing. In a job like mine you have to keep the future constantly in mind, and I could foresee the possibility that in a few more months Dr. Sewell would have to be asked to resign, if he didn’t pull himself together. I did not relish the prospect, naturally, and then…Well, fate intervened and I was spared that unpleasant necessity.”
“What happened?”
Hansen leaned back in his chair and looked out the window. Basil had an odd impression that Hansen was relieved, as if he felt he had got over the most difficult part of his story without being asked the one question that he feared. Certainly he was now choosing his words with less care and his whole manner was more relaxed.
“It was a rainy evening in winter very much like this.”
“The date?”
“October 14, 1950. Sewell was in the coffee shop downstairs having a sandwich before leaving to go home. One of the nurses was with him,
a Miss Linton. She was a sweet little thing and completely devoted to Sewell. This is her story. No one else in the coffee shop was paying any attention to Sewell at the time. She said afterward that he seemed more than usually depressed. She suggested that they go to a movie. Rather to her surprise, he agreed. He paid for his sandwich and hers and they walked to the front entrance together. He stopped on the way to buy a pack of cigarettes in the lobby and they discussed the movie they were about to see. Hamlet, I think, with Laurence Olivier. The rain was coming down violently as they came out of the entrance under the porte-cochere. He said, ‘You wait here. I’ll get a taxi. I won’t be a minute.’ He pulled down his hat brim, turned up his coat collar and plunged into the rain. She waited for five minutes, for ten, for twenty. No one here ever saw him again.
“After Miss Linton had waited about twenty minutes she put up her umbrella and walked over to the taxi stand nearby. There were two taxis waiting and both drivers were regulars at that stand, familiar with all the hospital personnel. They told her they had been there thirty minutes and they had not seen Dr. Sewell walk down the driveway to the street. She phoned his apartment. No answer. He had vanished into thin air for no apparent reason.
“After twenty-four hours we reported the case to the Missing Persons Bureau. They were never able to trace him. He had no close relatives surviving in Vermont and neither did his wife, so there was not quite the same pressure on the police to find him that there is when anxious relatives are involved.”
“What was the state of his finances when he disappeared?”
“About eight hundred in a checking account. No debts. All but the most recent bills paid. No insurance. No car. Just a few personal effects.”
“He made no attempt to withdraw the eight hundred?”
“No, he was finally presumed dead and it went to a distant cousin in Oregon.”
“What do you think happened?”
Hansen drew a deep breath. “Dr. Sewell had been brooding over his wife’s death. He knew we disapproved his drinking. He may have realized already that he would not be able to control it. I thought of suicide and a body that was never discovered. Washed out to sea, perhaps. Less probable, but perfectly possible, was fugue, amnesia—a sudden blotting out of all personal memory, an unconscious attempt to flee from the past and begin a new life.”
“But why at that particular moment?” demanded Basil. “Suicide might be the culmination of weeks of brooding, but wouldn’t it take some shock to precipitate fugue so suddenly?”
“That’s more your line than mine, though I believe I have heard of cases where fugue set in suddenly for no immediate cause but simply as a final result of accumulated stress. After all, fugue is a psychological suicide.”
“Would the death of his wife, for which he was in no way responsible, set up such extreme tension?” persisted Basil.
Hansen shrugged. “Each individual mind has its own breaking point…. Dr. Willing, I am really curious to know what did become of Sewell. What is your half of the story? You know it’s as if we were trying to match two halves of a broken coin. Do the points of my jagged edge fit the bites in your edge where something has been ripped away?”
“Would you be surprised if I told you that Alan Sewell was found on a Westchester road the next morning in a state of complete personal amnesia with a wound in his head?”
“Westchester? What was he doing there?”
“At that time there was a celebrated clinic for alcoholics there at a place called Stratfield.”
“You mean Dr. Clinton’s place?”
“Yes. As a doctor, Sewell could have heard about it. He could have been on his way there hoping to arrange for a cure.”
“Walking? At night?”
“He could have been walking from the station. On a rainy night the taxis might all be out on the road when he arrived.”
“And the head wound?”
“There’s some evidence he was struck by a car.”
“Did that account for the amnesia?”
“I thought so until today. But how explain his abrupt desertion of Miss Linton unless the amnesia started a moment or so after he left her? Of course we only have Miss Linton’s own word for the nature of their parting. If she said or did something to anger him, something she thought it wise to leave out of her story, then I should not conclude the amnesia was caused by the head wound.”
“What happened to Sewell afterward?”
“His alcoholism was cured at the clinic. He never recovered his memory. He became the celebrated novelist, Amos Cottle, who was poisoned last Sunday.”
Hansen had himself under almost perfect control, but he could not repress a slight start of amazement. “You are on the wrong track, Dr. Willing.”
“Why?”
“Writing novels just doesn’t fit an inarticulate personality like Sewell’s. I’m not a psychiatrist. I could be wrong, but…”
“It’s easily tested.” Basil took the photograph of Amos Cottle out of his pocket and laid it on the desk.
Hansen gasped. “I apologize, Dr. Willing. You understand human nature better than I do. For that is Alan Sewell. No question about it.” He laid a finger over the beard. “Yes. I’d know Sewell’s brow and eyes and nose anywhere.”
“You never saw him on TV?”
“I detest TV.”
“What about the others who knew him here?”
“Doctors ‘are pretty busy people—as you know. If this was a daytime program…”
“It was a Thursday afternoon program.”
“Then that explains why none of us saw it.”
“What about the nurses? And the girl who ran the beauty parlor with Girzel Sewell?”
“Working women don’t watch TV in the daytime. Only housewives and children.”
“I’d like to talk to that one nurse who was the last person to see him as Alan Sewell. Miss Linton, did you say?”
Hansen dropped his eyelids. “Unfortunately Miss Linton is no longer with us. She went overseas with the Army when the Korean War broke out, and she’s still in Japan.”
The interview ended politely, but Basil left the room with an uncomfortable feeling that he had learned less than he had hoped to. This was only the skeleton of Alan Sewell’s story. How was it to be clothed in flesh and blood?
Back in his own office he telephoned his friend Lambert of the Medical Examiner’s office.
“You had a research project at Lerner Memorial several years ago, didn’t you?’’
“Yes.”
“Was there an interne named Alan Sewell there at the time?”
“No. I left before he came. I’ve heard about him though. Didn’t he disappear about six years ago?”
“Yes. Did you know Hansen, the director?”
“Everybody there knows Prissy!”
“Would he tell the truth about something that might be perfectly legal, but that might also reflect a little on the efficiency of his hospital?”
“Of course not. Would you?”
Basil laughed. Lambert’s skepticism was always refreshingly frank.
The atmosphere of Alicia Armitage, Inc. was as different from the atmosphere of Lerner Memorial as it was possible to be. Nothing monastic here. This was a luxury trade built on superstition, a witch cult of the robber barons’ wives. Here you plunged with joyous abandon into the main stream of modern culture and all its most cherished myths and foibles. Here was faith, too, but a pagan faith without austerity or dedication.
Here you believed that a mysterious God named Science, whose icon was an image of a handsome young man in a white coat, would make you young and beautiful and desirable no matter what your age or appearance or character, if you gratified him by putting blanched and perfumed mutton fat on your face, dyes of various colors on your hair, lips, eyelids and nails, brought your weight down and spent large sums of money on your clothes.
Here in scented, softly lighted chambers of turquoise and silver with velvet underfoot, Marie Laurencin on
the walls and Muzak in the air, there were diet and vitamin bars, cubicles for hairdressing, manicuring, massage and exercise, Turkish baths and a shop that sold clothes and cosmetics. They could mold and tint your hair into any shape or color you wanted, erase your face and replace it with a porcelain mask, carve your body in the proportions of the life-size plastic dolls in dress-shop windows and leave you finally with almost as much individuality.
The ministering acolytes were all clad in white, but the high priestess proclaimed her own distinction by her ceremonial vestments of black crepe and her insignia of three strands of pearls. Her hair was a lovely, unnatural copper, her face white as pipe clay—latest reaction from the suntan cult that had become too common to be fashionable. Her long nails and full lips were exactly the color of fresh blood. Because the rest of the building was turquoise and silver, her sanctum was orchid and gold with touches of black. She was a showcase for her own wares. Little scars at either temple explained the smooth rigidity of her face, but one thing about her had remained alive—the tawny, hazel eyes that looked out of lashes black and sticky with mascara—eyes that were alert and intelligent and responsive.
She offered cigarettes in a malachite box and talked freely.
“Sure I remember Alan. Poor kid! He was all cut up over Girzel’s death. Let’s see. I met Girzel at the beauty parlor school here in New York. She told me she was engaged to a young interne at Lerner Memorial. He wasn’t making anything, of course, but she was going to save her money so they could get married a little sooner. We became friends and opened that little hairdressing place uptown on a shoestring. We had just enough money for rent. I borrowed money for equipment and we both worked like hell.
“I got to know Alan pretty well. I had a boy friend then and we all went on double dates together. What was Alan like? Easygoing. He hated scenes. He always tried to agree with everything that other people said. Good at his job and ambitious. More so than Girzel. She wanted to go back to New Hampshire or Vermont or wherever it was and settle down in a big house and have a lot of children. No ambition at all. But she was kind and sweet and loving—much too good for Alan. What she saw in him, I never could understand. She kept her job after they were married and things went on that way for about two years.