Murder by Reflection

by H. F. Heard

  “Maybe I’d have better not come,” his mind gradually concluded. A little crestfallen, he went back to his car. She had told him there was nothing that she needed. “’Cept one thing,” he remarked to himself, “and p’r’aps she suspects I know.”

  When an extrovert fails in an attempt to rouse a “moping” person, he generally looks for someone with whom he may talk off his pent and balked wish to do good. Doc, finding himself unwanted by the patient, from whom he felt he had a call, considered that as he was out on that side of town he had just time to look in on the Hermit. “I ought to ask him about young Heron. I’ve never talked the matter over with him since asking him to help.”

  When he arrived, his good spirits were back at their usual high pressure. He would just report that everything at Plantation House was, after all, all right. He found Kermit at work and tapped him on the shoulder.

  “’Member my concern over Plantation House and its inmates?” Kermit turned around, looked at him, and waited for him to go on. “Well, everything’s blown over without our doing anything.”

  “What’s happened?”

  “Well, probably the best thing in the circumstances. Mrs. Heron has died.”

  “What of?”

  “Oh, I don’t quite know. I’m interested in people being alive. I hold that what you die of doesn’t matter—it’s just chance—the thing that matters is that you’re done, your vitality is gone. She was due to go. I saw that. I knew she was over. What was the last thing to go wrong with her, what does it matter? I saw the first thing, the crack in the dike which lets the water through. She just didn’t want enough to go on living.”

  “But you didn’t hear what her doctor thought was wrong?”

  “Hertz and I get on well enough—I’ve often pointed out to him things that were beginning before the patients knew, or indeed, I believe, before he saw it himself—so that’s my end of the business. He’s there to sign certificates and that sort of stuff when the person himself has decided to clear out.”

  “Dr. Hertz didn’t mention to you an actual complaint?”

  “Oh, I think he said her blood was poor—but that’s the favorite ending now for all doctors when the patients go quietly and just because they are used up.”

  “Her blood went wrong?” Kermit waited for a little while. “Dr. Hertz didn’t by any chance say it was leukemia?”

  “I don’t recall. Yes, p’r’aps he did. But we don’t have consultations, you know, just chats. And as I’ve said, I’m not interested in the technical jargon that tries to explain to me why people die.”

  “Well, I wish when you next have one of your chats you’d do me a favor and ask Dr. Hertz one question.”

  Doc couldn’t disown an intimacy which was less close in reality than in his conversation it appeared. “Well, what is it?”

  “Listen,” said Kermit.

  As they talked Doc’s mood was switched, switched from the reverie in which he saw himself as master of the civic ceremonies, smoothing over everything with an easy tact and asking people not to make mountains out of molehills, to the picture in which he played almost an F.B.I. role. He went off very serious—but not less happy.

  He felt the matter needed something more than a casual sidewalk talk. When he got back from his round he actually rang up Dr. Hertz and asked if he might come round to his place. Dr. Hertz had also finished his round. It had been a rather harder one than Doc’s, and he had hardly the mailman’s delight in human contacts just for their own sakes. He saw people as patients—people with difficult bodies which quite often made them have difficult minds and characters. He wanted to help them, but he saw enough of them and of the problem of helping them that he was often relieved when the day was over. He was, then, not overpleased when the telephone rang, and his low mood was not lifted when he heard Doc’s voice at the other end. His mood actually sank further when he heard the tone in which Doc was speaking.

  “All right,” he said. He felt, as he put down the instrument, that he had certainly not sounded all right, if all-rightness includes cordiality, but defended himself with a muttered, “If only the good old fellow wouldn’t take himself so seriously and if only he would look after the mail, which I’m sure he does well, and leave metabolism to me!”

  And Doc’s appearance and carriage when he came did not help, but strongly confirmed Dr. Hertz’s diagnosis over the phone.

  “It’s rather a serious and subtle point,” said Doc, pulling himself up with a slow, abdominal heave. “I’ve been talking over the question with my friend Kermit—”

  “That crank up the canyon,” thought Dr. Hertz, and his tiredness began to crystallize into sharp needles of something very like irritability.

  “—And we feel that there’s something on which some more light is needed.” Then, seeing that Dr. Hertz was showing that stony attention which means that your hearer is for some reason aloof, Doc, to open him up, added parenthetically, “Not that we think you’ve overlooked anything.”

  The “Thank you” with which this tribute was acknowledged showed Doc that he was losing, not making, ground. He judged it best to plunge right forward. Dr. Hertz listened, tried to remind himself of the maxim that everyone a doctor sees, even his own reflection in a mirror, is really a patient, and so sat out the instruction he was given. Certainly, for a moment, when it was over he was inclined to say a short “Thank you” and, perhaps, add, “I have to say I see nothing in your theory.” But his general kindly courtesy and the sense that if he left these, two old cronies to think up theories certainly the one in front of him would disseminate them, the town would be talking and he, Dr. Hertz—in honesty, this consideration came last—would be gossiped about as a not-too-careful physician, made him feel it would be wise to give reason for the lack of faith that he felt in the yarn he had just heard spun.

  “I can tell you in confidence that I can throw some light on the subject you raise. It is unprofessional to discuss one’s patients with anyone else”—he paused and watched Doc bridle a little—“but, as you have the good name of the town so much at heart, I will settle your doubts. As it happens, some time ago young Heron came to me one day. He was suffering from a condition which caused him distress. I am glad to say I was able to find out what it was and, further, to cure it. He was running a high blood pressure—very unusual in a young man living a quiet life. I found it was due to the fact that he had been using in his researches a wave-length in one of the smaller wave bands. I happened to know that this was the cause of his condition. He stopped that work and the trouble cleared up at once. It did not recur. Nor, of course, was it present in the other case. You may be sure I would have been on the lookout for that. The case was perfectly normal, perfectly.”

  “But—” went on Doc. “But—”

  Dr. Hertz felt that he could not go on. “I can say no more,” he remarked, rising, “on that subject. And now that I’ve gone to the edge of professional discretion in one direction, I’ll go to the edge in the other: Don’t interfere in medicine. The ministers may feel that all messengers are colleagues but a scientific profession must be professional.”

  It was a stiff termination. But Doc took his medicine really better than the younger man gave it. He knew that he had overstepped the borderline between private confidences and public reflections. He had failed, from his excessive zeal for his city’s welfare. He was hurt a little, but he was determined to apologize.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, rising too. “I shouldn’t have interfered, or at least asked about it. I’ll stick to my mail.”

  But he didn’t, quite. Dr. Hertz was mollified, a little ashamed of his own impatience which he knew sprang largely from fatigue, and they parted quite good friends. But Doc, though he knew that he could never hope again to tap that source, felt that the interview had not been in vain. He had something to bring back to Kermit and, with his usual buoyancy, he began to think that, after all, the matter might have been cleared up or proved to have nothing in it.

&nb
sp; The next day, therefore, he reported back to Kermit. He hid, it was true, the fact that he and Dr. Hertz had not been perhaps altogether at ease with each other, but what did a mere personal question like that matter?

  “I had a very interesting time with Hertz,” he reported, “and I must say he has convinced me, with information of a confidential sort which he put before me, that there is nothing in your suppositions.”

  “Well, first let me repeat what I’ve told you. I saw that young man as you asked me to; I saw Mrs. Heron also; I saw his work; and I repeat that I want to know more.”

  “What more can you know?”

  “I want to see the inside of that house again.”

  Doc hesitated. Had he not better let Kermit have his doubts settled—if he had any way of settling them? After all, he, Doc, had for a while thought there might be something in them.

  “What do you exactly want to see?”

  “I want to take a photograph or two of the interior.” Doc was still hesitating when Kermit added, “Don’t think I’ll be infringing a copyright. Both mother and son asked me to take some pictures of the place; I have them here.”

  “Oh, all right,” said Doc, relieved. “Then it’ll be O.K., I guess.”

  “Well, can you arrange for me to see the house? I’d rather do this piece of work before young Heron returns.”

  Doc again felt himself as the dispenser of leave. “There’s no difficulty in that. My doubt was whether I ought to allow it. I’m satisfied that I should. As to the keys, I have them. Meet me tomorrow at the house and I’ll show you over.”

  Doc couldn’t resist a certain feeling of superiority that it was he who had never been invited to the house who could now show over his friend who had been there as a guest more than once. And with the feeling of superiority there came, naturally, the sense that the situation was really all right, for was it not in his own hands?

  They met the next day at the house. Doc felt a slight twinge of disappointment that it was Kermit who knew his way about. To the sensible suggestion that he might take a photo of the great hall came the reply, “Taken before. I want to take the big upstairs north room which I didn’t have a chance at, last time. That was the place where he worked. Then he gave up. He told me last time I was there he wasn’t getting anywhere with his research, and, I understand, he acted on that and ceased to use that room as a laboratory. Still I want to see it. I believe a clue might lie there.”

  They had reached the room’s door. Doc opened it. Kermit was loaded with his apparatus.

  “Um, she had it done up finely, didn’t she!” Doc was standing looking at the great bed with its ivory satin curtains and white plumes. Kermit had given an exclamation when he saw the room, which he had last seen as Arnoldo’s laboratory, transformed into a queenly bedchamber. But he checked himself and remarked, “A fine design at the bed-head, too,” looking at the mural of white birds on their blue-and-silver ground. He bent closer, “Very ingenious, you see.”

  The wall had been scarred and pocked by some old fixtures and the drawings had been made so as to disguise these marks and holes.

  “The peacock’s tail follows the fanned-out pattern of some semicircular fixture and, you see, the eyes of these water-birds bending down, each pair is drawn exactly where there is the print of a brace of nails or screws.”

  “True enough,” said Doc; “and just like these very rich folk. They’ll pull down and rebuild three-quarters of the house and then, over a square yard of wall they won’t have the damaged plaster taken off and replaced, but will touch it up so and try to disguise that it’s all scratched and punctured.”

  “Well, perhaps they were in a hurry,” Kermit suggested.

  Doc agreed, “That’s another feature of the rich. When they want something done, it must be done instanter.”

  Leaving plutocratic psychology to the observer of human nature, Kermit turned to rigging up his camera. It was more elaborate than that which he had used when photographing in the hall at the visit when he had been invited to make some studies of the place. Nor, when he had finished mounting it, did he seem inclined to make an exposure and have done with it.

  “And why do you want first to take the bed-head?” asked Doc. The camera was close up by the bed, pointing at the bed-head. “It’s not a bad little mural, but why not take it in with a picture of the whole room?”

  Kermit’s reply was to go to the windows and draw shut the massive, heavily lined curtains. After pulling one, he said, “Good,” switched on the light and pulled the rest. The light was needed. Evidently Mrs. Heron had slept so poorly that the windows had been made lightproof.

  “Now,” he remarked to Doc, “I want to take a long exposure. It’s rather an experimental form of photography.”

  “Are you trying to photograph the ghost?” Doc felt a little eerie with the large empty house around him and standing in the actual darkened death-chamber. He felt a joke was called for.

  But Kermit only answered absently, “I’m not looking for ghosts. Perhaps, though, I’m looking for prints.”

  “Prints! You’ll never find them that way.”

  Doc was, he felt, far more knowledgeable about crime than Kermit could be. Surely attempts at forgery, purloining, theft of mails, such things were in his province, not in a retired portrait-photographer’s! But what, anyway, had actually been said about crime! That suspicion was as groundless as ghosts. He was sorry that he had humored the old Hermit. Doctors were the men to decide if everything was O.K., and he and Dr. Hertz had agreed that nothing but “natural causes” had been present here.

  “How long will that be cooking?” he asked, nodding at the camera brooding on the wall.

  “Take me around the house,” replied Kermit. “It should be done by the time we have strolled around.”

  He followed Doc to the door and as they passed out switched off the lights, leaving the white chamber in darkness. Then by the light that came from the door he stepped back into the room. A click came from the camera and he rejoined Doc at the door, closed it, and accompanied him on the tour. They had finished their round in a quarter of an hour.

  “It somehow looks bigger than it is,” Doc remarked, “with all these mirrors always making each corridor look as though it went on as much again. And this grand staircase seems to wind on and repeat itself like a snake.”

  “I think, though,” said Kermit, “these opposing mirrors in this hall give the best effect: where you actually are, seems only a step in an interminable staircase.”

  He stood looking into the gradually greening dusk down which they could see pair upon pair of themselves growing less and less recognizable until they could only be sure that a couple of human beings were down there in that tunnel and well of drowning light.

  “It’s like looking back at one’s ancestors and down to one’s descendants,” he reflected aloud.

  “Come,” said Doc. “You’ll be hypnotizing yourself, like that. Anyhow, if you like looking down an imaginary passage, I’ve got to keep here in the present. The midday mail’ll be in soon. We must hurry!”

  “I expect by now the camera has formed its own views,” said Kermit, and led the way up the stairs to the closed chamber. As soon as the curtains were drawn back he dismantled his camera.

  “Aren’t you going to take any more of the rooms?” queried Doc.

  “We’ll wait to see how these come out. If they don’t develop, well, it won’t be worth while.”

  Chapter XV

  They developed, however. Two days after, Doc had a call from the Hermit.

  “Do you want to take more?”

  “No; these have come out sufficiently well that I don’t think there’ll be need for any more. Come up and see what there is to show.”

  “I’ll be along this evening.”

  Doc couldn’t think what it was that he would see when he arrived. His curiosity was roused. Why had the Hermit wanted to photograph that rather fancy mural? Of course he had some odd suspicion. But Doc n
ow felt sure that though he might have found something to interest an odd researcher there’d be nothing of value for a practical mind. But Kermit was a good man at photoing. There’d be some little oddity waiting for him. Doc liked any little interest provided that it didn’t last too long. The car had chugged up to the road’s limit. Doc swung out, clambered up the ladder-like pathway, and found the Hermit working in his laboratory.

  “Ah, come and see the photo I wanted to show you.” He reached over and picked out of a rack a photographic plate. “I didn’t make a print; the negative shows clearly enough.”

  Doc stood at his friend’s shoulder looking at the plate which he was holding to the light. He scanned it all over until he was quite sure.

  “Why, it’s simply clouded. Light must have gotten in.”

  “Light did get at it. But the plate isn’t clouded. Look closely. It’s striated.”

  “I’m in the dark.”

  “So was the camera, but it picked up enough.”

  “Oh, drop it; what is here?”

  “Well, those streaks are lines made by radiations. They are made by some substance radiating, some radioactive material.”

  “Your camera was pointed all the while at that mural at the bed-head. That bit of interior decoration design couldn’t be radiant—never saw a less fiery composition.” Doc chuckled uneasily, even defensively; he felt some oncoming unpleasantness. Exhumation of buried suspicions is always unpleasant for one who has a fine and healthy power of repression.

  “Nevertheless,” went on Kermit, “that cool-looking painting was shooting out that amount of radiation. Now, with this before us, here are the other facts which throw further”—he chose the word deliberately—“dark light on the problem which you think closed but which I feel certain the evidence now collected in this room must reopen.

  “Let me run over the steps we have gone together so far: First, why did I ask you whether I might take photos of the house? For two reasons: You asked me to see that young man. I visited his laboratory. When I first went there he was experimenting with some quite powerful, new, small X-ray tubes. At that very time I was myself interested in a piece of work of which you once saw traces. Do you recall the dicyanine screens?”