Two-Thirds of a Ghost

by Helen McCloy

  “Then, one evening, Irving and I were up at their apartment having one of those beef stew suppers when Girzel was taken ill. Violent pain in the abdomen, no other symptoms. Alan’s hospital was the nearest, so we rushed her over there. Another staff man examined her and came up with a diagnosis—acute appendicitis, operate at once.

  “It was after midnight then—a quiet time even for a hospital. None of the doctors on duty was particularly good at surgery. Alan knew that. And he knew that he was supposed to be tops even among the older men.”

  Basil looked at her with dawning horror. “You don’t mean to say he operated on his wife himself?”

  “How did you guess? I know doctors have a thing about operating on members of their own family. After that night I think it’s just as well they do. It was a sort of emergency and Alan was supposed to be the best surgeon there, but I could see the other doctors didn’t like it much. Alan had one glaring fault. He was vain of his surgery. I believe he honestly thought they couldn’t get another surgeon as good as he was without spending quite a lot more money, to say nothing of delaying the operation dangerously.

  “Afterward I talked to one of the nurses who’d been in the operating room. She said it was ghastly. She never saw anything like it before or since. It all started off smoothly, teamwork, sterilize this, hand me that—the business, you know. I’ve seen it in the movies often enough. But the moment Alan took that knife and made the first incision, he—well, he went to pieces. He did everything wrong. The nurse said she and the others didn’t quite realize it the first few minutes. It was just too monstrous to realize. And when they did—it was too late. She died an hour after they wheeled her back to her room.”

  “And I never thought of asking Hansen who had operated!” Basil reproached himself. “That was the question Hansen feared all the time he was talking to me. But how could I, a doctor myself, have dreamed…”

  “I know. It’s one of those rare things that do happen sometimes. Things that hospitals just have to hush up. What would happen to public confidence if they didn’t? Surgeons mustn’t be fallible. They must be gods. Ninety-nine percent of the time nothing goes wrong. But this was the hundredth time. The hell of it was that Alan loved Girzel. I suppose that was why it happened. He was in a state of shock when he started to operate. His nerve crumbled. He lost his head and cut her up so she could never be put together again.”

  Basil wondered. Alan must have wondered, too. That must have been his own peculiar, lonely hell. He would know some medical psychology. Enough to know that even under stress you do nothing that some part of your mind does not want to do. Had there been some ambivalence in his feeling for Girzel? Some disillusion buried deep in the subconscious that came to the surface when he made that first incision that had seemed to this woman and all the other witnesses purely an accident?

  Freud’s theory of unconscious purpose in every slip of the hand was only a theory. There was a formidable mass of evidence to support it, but some day a later psychologist might prove that it was not the whole truth about the working of brain and nervous system. That very uncertainty would make Alan’s doubt of himself all the more torturing. He could never know the truth. Did I kill her because deep in the undermind I always wanted to kill her? The childhood sweetheart pursuing her first love to New York. His horizons changing, hers remaining provincial. An interne’s poverty and the strain on both of her keeping her job after their marriage. No children. Had it been one of those adolescent “understandings” with a girl who was sweetly determined and wholly faithful, an understanding that was really a misunderstanding because he wanted to break it and couldn’t without despising himself? One of those troths that is more binding than marriage itself because it is a debt of honor. One that had condemned Alan Sewell to a dreary, uncongenial marriage because he “hated scenes. He always tried to agree with everything that other people said….”

  So he became a murderer. An unpunishable murderer who would never know himself whether he had really killed or not. A strong man would hardly have survived the shock of such a self-revelation. Alan didn’t sound like a strong man. Vain of his surgery and fatally weak in keeping the letter of his promise to Girzel after the spirit had died, afraid to hurt her or let her hurt him with her reproaches. In every glimpse of him he was a man who followed the line of least resistance.

  “What happened afterward?”

  “He never operated again. They kept him on as staff physician but I think they were just waiting until the talk had died down a little and then they’d have got rid of him quietly. He started to drink. He even drank on duty sometimes, but Prissy never knew that. The nurses covered up for Alan. They knew he was headed for skid row and then—he just disappeared. I always thought he killed himself. I’m sure that’s what the hospital people thought. They must have been glad the body was never found.”

  “It’s all logical. It all fits,” said Basil. “First he tried to escape through the artificial amnesia of alcohol. Then, the night the young nurse wanted him to go to the movies with her…”

  “Linton? Oh yes, I remember her. Nasty, scheming little thing. She made a play for Alan after his wife’s death. I don’t think he liked her much. He wouldn’t have liked any woman then. It was too soon. Especially a woman who had been in the operating room when it happened, as Linton had. But she was too stupid and greedy to realize that. She was always pestering him to go to the movies with her. So he wouldn’t spend the evening drinking, she said. Her real object was matrimony, of course.”

  “You say she was pestering him,” mused Basil. “And she was particularly distasteful to him because she had been one of the nurses in the operating room when it happened. She was a constant reminder of something he wanted desperately to forget. Let’s see if we can reconstruct his last evening at the hospital.

  “He didn’t want to go to the movies with her that night, but he was weak and suggestible and he had agreed to go without thinking because it was the line of least resistance. Once outside in the fresh air, away from her, he dreaded the very thought of an evening with her. We have only her version of the story. She may have said something to him that was the last straw.”

  “She probably did. Something like: ‘You’ve got to stop drinking. They’re going to fire you if you don’t.’”

  “He didn’t go near the taxi stand,” went on Basil. “He must have found a taxi cruising and it suddenly came to him that he didn’t have to go back to her. He didn’t have to let her force this unpleasant evening on him. In a way this was the line of least resistance again. Instead of going back and excusing himself to her on grounds of a headache or something, he just went off and left her without a word, thus sparing himself an unpleasant scene. It’s all quite in character. He didn’t mind hurting her as long as he wasn’t there to see her being hurt. People without imagination are often like that.”

  “But why didn’t he just go home?”

  “He knew Linton would phone his apartment. She did, too. He probably went to a bar and got fairly drunk. That was one thing he couldn’t do as long as she was with him—not without a scene.”

  “Why didn’t he go home afterward?”

  “I think he sat in the bar and remembered all she had said to him and realized what his future would be like if he kept on as he was. And then—I think he made one last effort to escape from the horror that enclosed him. He took a taxi to Grand Central and bought a ticket to Stratfield, New York.”

  “Why Stratfield?”

  “There was a famous clinic for alcoholics there in those days. Dr. Clinton’s. Alan could know about it because he was a doctor in a city hospital where there are always some alcoholic cases. He went that night, late as it was, because he wanted help then without waiting another moment. He was afraid to wait. Afraid his resolution might wilt. And he was far too drunk to worry about gaining admission in the middle of the night.

  “He walked from the station in the driving rain in the dark. A car hit him and sped on. That blow
on the head gave him what he had been seeking ever since he killed his wife—Nirvana. How thankfully his conscious mind must have let those unbearable memories sink into the subconscious, never to be recovered.

  “The clinic was the nearest hospital. They took him there, where his alcoholism was recognized immediately as well as his concussion and amnesia. He stayed there as a charity patient and—eventually he became someone else.”

  “Who?”

  “Amos Cottle, the novelist, who was murdered last Sunday.”

  “Alan became Amos Cottle? Well! You never can tell, can you? Was he murdered as Sewell or Cottle?”

  “That’s what we’d all like to know now. Did Girzel have any devoted brothers?”

  “You mean someone who recognized Cottle as Sewell might have killed him because he had killed Girzel and gone unpunished?”

  “It’s one possibility.”

  “Her parents were dead. She had a married sister in Deerfield, Massachusetts. No brothers. Somehow I can’t see a married sister…Not one in Deerfield.”

  “Another childhood sweetheart besides Sewell?”

  “I wouldn’t know about that, but…Sounds a bit Corsican, doesn’t it? Killing a man years later because he made a mistake when he was a surgeon operating on your childhood sweetheart and killed her inadvertently?”

  “Perhaps he didn’t think it was inadvertent. Or perhaps he had always felt a jealous hatred for the more successful suitor.”

  “But after so many years … It still sounds too Corsican to me.”

  “Premeditated murders are always hard for the normal person to understand,” Basil reminded her. “None of us is incapable of unpremeditated murder, but the other thing is—well, across the borderline. We recognize this when we make the penalty so much heavier. We’re expressing revulsion for something we cannot understand or forgive.”

  Vera was alone in her sitting room at the Waldorf watching TV, when the telephone rang. She was so depressed and lonely that she was almost glad when the operator said that Dr. Willing was in the lobby and wished to see her. She shut off the TV set, refreshed her lipstick and left the door into the corridor open.

  He looked more tired and serious than she had ever seen him when he came in. She urged various drinks upon him, but he shook his head. “I can only stay a moment. I really have only one question to ask you. Did you ever know anyone named Alan Sewell?”

  She looked at him blankly. “Someone in Hollywood?”

  “No, in New York.”

  “Should I know him?”

  “Perhaps not. Does the name Girzel MacDonald mean anything?”

  “No.”

  “Did you ever see these before?” He put the snake-skin purse, the gold thimble and wedding ring, and the lock of hair on the table. Recognition came into her eyes.

  “Amos kept those things in his desk. He told me they had belonged to a sister who was dead.”

  “I have reason to believe they belonged to his wife.”

  Vera’s eyes flared like flame in a draft. “Do you mean…Is she going to get the royalties now?”

  “She can’t hurt you. She died long before you met Amos.”

  “Then—who was Amos?”

  “A young doctor named Alan Sewell.”

  He told her the whole story.

  “It makes sense,” she admitted. “Amos knew all the Latin names for bones. And he used to laugh at patent medicines. He could have been a doctor. But what has all this to do with his death?”

  “I’m not sure yet. It may be a blind alley. He may have been murdered because he was Amos Cottle for reasons that had nothing to do with his identity as Alan Sewell.”

  “The Sewell business really doesn’t change anything for me, does it?” said Vera complacently. “I was his wife legally and I’m his legal heir now. Nobody can take that away from me.”

  She was happy and relieved.

  Ever since his death she had been dreading the revelations that might follow the discovery of Amos’s true identity. Now everything was going to be all right. Nothing in the past affected her status.

  When Basil left she called the desk to see if there were any letters or telephone messages for her. There had been none this morning. Not even a call from Sam about the audition. She must have flopped. He never called to tell her bad news, only good news. Then his voice would be bubbling with exuberance and he would shout, “Oh, boy, baby, we’re in business!” But when one of his schemes went sour, he never mentioned it again.

  When she wrote the four letters yesterday the last thing she had expected was this stunning, unanimous silence. It was unnerving somehow. What were they thinking? What were they doing? Nothing? That was inconceivable. Philippa, Lepton, Tony and Gus—surely at least one of them would be frightened enough to make some move in her; direction and what move could any of them make without answering her letter?

  Perhaps the answers would come tomorrow. Meanwhile there was an evening to be killed. Call one of the theatrical crowd? She was out of touch after three years in Hollywood. The boys should have called her when they saw her arrival at the airport in the papers, but they weren’t quick to call someone whose option had been dropped in Hollywood. She turned on the TV again. A shadowy, gray face mouthed at her silently. Then as she twiddled another dial, the sound came on.

  “…and this evening at eight o’clock we shall take you to the Bookbinders’ Award dinner, where an award of ten thousand dollars will be given to the Most American Author of the Decade….”

  She switched off the set. The announcement made her feel more forlorn than ever. The award Amos was to have had, and she didn’t even have an invitation to the dinner.

  The silence of the empty suite became unbearable. She tried calling Sam’s office number, and got an answering service. Sam had gone home to New Rochelle and his wife and two little sons. There he led a life quite different from his celebrity-spangled existence in Manhattan, playing tennis, going to PTA meetings and suppers at the Unitarian Church, and in summer sailing his boat on the Sound. To Sam, who had been born in a city slum, it was a romantically delightful existence. Vera who had been born in a similar suburb of Cleveland couldn’t understand this. To her Sam’s home life represented everything she had been trying to get away from all her life. She never even telephoned him when he was at home.

  She must kill the evening somehow. Dinner at a restaurant and then a movie.

  A taxi took her to a French restaurant on Third Avenue that she chose because someone had told her it was the most expensive in New York. As the menu was in French and handwritten, she told the waiter to select her dinner. It took a long time and when it came she had no idea what she was eating. There was a large bottle of wine with it that made her a little sleepy. Perhaps she shouldn’t have had those cocktails first. She asked for black coffee and refused brandy. The bill was so enormous that she was convinced the food had been good.

  Outside under the marquee she realized suddenly that this was not the best place in the world to find a taxi on a rainy night. She was so used to having a car or a man to find a taxi for her that she never wore boots ox raincoat. Tonight her sandals were cut low, her hat a confection of tulle, and her furs the glossy kind that would be ruined by a real soaking. Gusts of wind driving the rain slantwise had swept the street of pedestrians for the moment. The doorman went off with his big umbrella but returned after a while without a taxi. Madame would have to wait a little longer.

  Suddenly Madame no longer cared about her sandals or her hat or her furs. Down the street glimmered a neon sign, Bengal Lancers. An old, old film. It would be on Third Avenue. But anything was better than boredom.

  She drew her furs around her chin and bent her head before the rain. She had gone a block when she heard footfalls behind her as rapid as her own. She didn’t look back. Only by keeping her head down could she keep the rain out of her face. The insides of her sandals were soaking now, her stockings clammy against her legs. Forget the movie. Walk to the hotel. Have a hot
bath and turn on the TV and watch the Bookbinders’ Dinner. Gus and Tony were sure to be there. Maybe they would be shown on the screen and she might be able to tell from their faces what they were feeling. Or maybe there would be a telephone message for her now. She turned west and entered a long crosstown street, ill-lit and deserted and slummy in this block between Third and Lexington.

  All the lighted windows were closed and shaded except one on the third floor of an old brownstone house across the street. It was wide open and bright-like a single eye vigilant in the night.

  The footfalls turned with her and now they were closer. For the first time she felt the icy ‘touch of a physical fear. There were all sorts of stories about muggers in New York—gangs of half-grown boys from the slums who snatched your purse if you were well dressed and alone, late at night, boys who sometimes hurt you with homemade weapons—broken glass, razor blades…

  It couldn’t be happening to her. Of course not. There was only one set of footsteps behind her.

  She felt better as she entered the circle of light from the one street lamp in the middle of the block. Lexington, always bright and crowded and cheerfully vulgar, beckoned her on. She ventured one glance back over her shoulder. The sudden flood of relief was sweet as fresh air after a stuffy, rancid night club.

  Her smile was really cordial. “Oh, it’s you!”

  She was quite unprepared for the arm that clamped around her neck like a vise and the hand flat against her mouth.

  The invalid woman at the open window across the street turned away from it. She had seen the smile, the sudden turn of the head and now she thought she was seeing two lovers embracing. She didn’t want to spy on them.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  When Basil Willing married and moved to Connecticut, he kept his bachelor apartment in the old brownstone house on lower Park Avenue. It was a convenience on a night like this when he planned to attend the Bookbinders’ Dinner with his English publisher, Alexander McLean. They had met casually years ago when McLean’s Ltd. issued the English edition of Basil’s first book. They had become friends when they shared common war experiences in Intelligence during the invasion of Germany.