The Deadly Percheron

by John Franklin Bardin

  “Did you ever find Blunt?” I asked.

  “He sent us a postcard last summer. I went up to see him at his place in Connecticut. It was then that I found out that the man we arrested was not Jacob Blunt. I thought we had something then and I went to work on him. He told me the same crazy story that I had heard before from you and the impostor: about being hired by this Eustace (who said his real name was Felix Mather) to deliver a horse to Raye. But he said that he decided not to go through with it and left the horse tied to the post. He went to a nearby bar and got soused – when he woke up the next morning he was in a hotel room in Atlantic City married to some blonde he had met when he was drunk. We checked his story and found it was true. By that time the newspapers were off the trail, and I saw to it that the story did not leak out. I still have a hunch that he has something to do with it, but I don’t know what. Then again, if he was telling me the truth – and we could not disprove his story – someone might have been plotting against him. That’s why I did not want the newspapers to get onto the story of what happened to him. I can get him anytime I want him, even though he lives out-of-state now. We have had the sheriff of his town watching him for months.”

  I was puzzled. “If you knew that the man in the cell was not Jacob, why didn’t you question Nan Bulkely further just now when she insisted that he was?”

  “I didn’t want her to suspect that I did not accept her story. It is possible that she is guilty of the crime, but it is more likely that she is shielding someone. She’s being followed right now and I hope she will lead us to something. I have a hunch that between you and her I’ll get at whoever is behind all this.”

  Anderson parked his car on the Avenue across the street from the cafeteria. He made no move to get out; instead be lighted the cigar he had been chewing all this time, and went on talking. He had obviously wanted to talk this all out to someone for along time. “You see, if I wanted to charge Bulkely with perjury and helping a prisoner to escape, I could have done it long ago. But what good would it have done to j ail her ? It would not have solved the case, and we would have shut down our one possible lead to the killer-for I think Nan is in it up to her neck. We might have sweated it out of her, and then again we might not have. All in all, now that you’ve shown up – and Nan reenters the case voluntarily with a cooked-up story that doesn’t fool anybody – I’m beginning to feel I’ve played it right. One of these days this thing is going to bust wide open!”

  He took a long drag on his cigar and knocked some ashes onto the seat. “We tried to find you, too, you know. Your wife was frantic. She gave us your picture and came down to Headquarters everyday for weeks. Then, in November of last year, we found that body and she identified it as yours. I can’t blame her for making a mistake. After a body’s been in the river for a while even its own mother couldn’t recognize it! Your wife finally left town – went to Chicago to her parents.”

  Then I knew where Sara was! I felt better. If she was in Chicago, she was safe and I could reach her anytime. But, I realized, I did not want to reach her. As long as I knew where she was that was all that mattered. I had not yet made up my mind what to do about Sara. There was the scar…the way Nan had reacted to it was still fresh in my mind. No, Sara could wait. There were other matters to be attended to first.

  Anderson was chewing his cigar contemplatively. “So now we got two murders,” he said, “but this time I’m going to hold onto you. You’re not going to get lost again. I’m going to have some good man on your tail night and day.”

  I looked at him in surprise. This I had not expected.

  “I’m taking no chances,” he explained. He opened the car door and stretched his legs. “Come on. Let’s find out what the manager of the cafeteria knows about you.”

  I followed him across the street to the All-Brite. I was still thinking about Sara, and about my scar.

  When I walked into the All-Brite it seemed impossible that as short a time ago as the night before I had worked there. Everything about it was strange and unfamiliar – I was seeing it with George Matthews’ eyes and not John Brown’s – the long steam tables at the rear, the lurid orange walls, the jumpy fluorescent lighting. Although the details of the nights that I had spent there came flooding back to me, and I could recall the feeling that went with the place – a sort of desperate loneliness, a complete and hopeless loss of personality, a fear of being jobless – I found it devilishly hard to confront Fuller, the manager, to pump his flabby hand and look down at his scrubbed-pink face and realize that he had ever represented “authority” to me!

  He sat down with us at one of the tables. He seemed surprised to see me. In fact, his first words were: “What are you doing here at this time of day? You’re not on until six o’clock.”

  I did not answer him. I waited for Anderson to ask the first question. He was considering Fuller, thoughtfully, chewing a little on his cigar. Then he asked, “Does this man work for you under the name of John Brown?”

  Fuller glanced at me apprehensively. He had no way of knowing who Anderson was – the Lieutenant was in plainclothes – but he seemed to sense that something unusual was happening. He answered with exaggerated caution.

  “He has been,” he said. “A good worker, too. I was worried about taking him on – thought the customers might object to – to his face. Thought they might get complaints and I would hear about it. But he’s worked out pretty well… so far. The breakage was less this month…”

  “How did you come to hire him?” Anderson picked a flake of tobacco from his lips and flicked it onto the floor. Fuller’s eyes looked down at it in disapproval. I knew he did not like to have his floor dirtied. But he did not say anything.

  “The hospital recommended him. We get a lot of our help that way now. It’s the times. The war is hard on the cafeteria business.”

  “What hospital? And when did he start to work for you?”

  Anderson was annoyed with the way he had to pull information from the seedy little manager.

  “City Hospital. The social service lady there. She sends them to me with a card. It’s about the best way to get help these days.”

  “When did he start work for you?” Anderson was being very curt. I knew how he felt.

  “I couldn’t say that. I have to look up my records.”

  I broke in here. “I can tell you,” I said. “It was on the 12th of July.” I would never forget that date. That was the day I had first looked into a mirror and discovered a bitter, demented clown.

  Fuller nodded his head briskly. “That’s right. I remember now. It was during that hot spell in the second week of July. I had had another man until the week before, but he got in a fight with one of the grifters around here and he got sixty days…”

  “Don’t you know anymore about him than that?” asked Anderson. I could see he was frustrated.

  “Why?” asked Fuller. “Has he gone and got himself in trouble?” He frowned his disapproval at the thought of “trouble.”

  Anderson leaned back in his chair and flipped the lapel of his coat to show his badge. “I’m from the Homicide Division. Are you sure you don’t know anything more about this guy ?” I was surprised at how tough he could be when he wanted to.

  Fuller stared at us both for an instant, then jumped awkwardly to his feet knocking his chair over in the process. It fell on the tile floor making a noisy clatter. A few people at other tables looked at us with curiosity.

  “I knew I shouldn’t have hired him!” Fuller was saying. “I knew the customers would complain. I knew they’d hear about it. I kept telling myself that I should never have took him on!”

  His voice rose higher and higher until it was a strangled squeak. His pale pink face had flushed a flowerpot red. Now he stopped in mid-protest and stared at me. He raised his arm slowly and pointed at me. “You mean he’s a murderer? You mean he’s killed somebody?”

  I wanted to laugh. It was not at all funny, but I wanted to laugh. The bug-eyed little man was so ridicu
lous. And I had once feared him. Now the whole thing was completely absurd.

  Anderson was angry. “I didn’t say that!” he shouted. “I just asked you if you knew anything more about him that you weren’t telling me. If I wanted to tell you anything else I would tell you. Now answer yes or no – do you know anything else about the identity of this man?” He glared hard at Fuller.

  The manager swallowed once or twice and then backed away. He actually cringed. He moistened his lips with his tongue, opened his mouth, croaked a few times, before he said, “I’d never seen him before that day when he came here with the card from the hospital. I never heard of him before that.”

  Anderson picked up his hat. “That’s all I needed to know,” he said. He motioned to me that it was time to go. I followed him to the swinging doors. Fuller was right behind me, and I turned around to face him. He looked at me, ran his tongue around his lips, still scared. I could not understand why, unless he thought his own security was threatened in some vague way.

  He wanted to ask me a question. I waited patiently for him to form the words. Finally they came, “You are coming to work tonight?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t work here anymore. I’ll be in Saturday to get my pay.”

  He backed away, putting out his hands helplessly. “But what am I going to do?” he asked. “I need a man tonight. Where am I going to get one?”

  And at one time I had been afraid of that man – I could remember the feeling.

  Anderson was waiting for me on the sidewalk. We walked to his car together. “Where do we go now?” I asked him.

  “We go to see Miss Willows, the head social worker at City Hospital,” he said. “I want to find out what those people know about you.”

  “Do we have to do that?” I dreaded going back to the hospital, back to the blank part of my past. I felt I was close to remembering, and I did not want to remember. Without willing it, the image of Nan’s face appeared in my mind’s eye again, close to me, bending over me. It seemed to bob and beckon, urging me to delve deeper. But I did not want to delve – I did not want to remember. I was afraid and, strangely, I was listening. Listening…but for what?

  The Lieutenant nursed the car into the traffic. He began to drive east across Brooklyn towards the river. “We have to follow up all the leads we have,” he said. “The hospital is one of those leads. You remember being there but, as you well know, you may be forgetting something important. Perhaps, they know what happened to you, or, perhaps, after you talk to Miss Willows you will remember it yourself.”

  He talked on, reasonably. I admitted to myself that he was right and that my fear was irrational. I let him take me back to the hospital.

  Miss Willows was the same middle-aged fat woman with a broad face and a placid disposition that I had known before. Her hair was still caught up in a bun at the back of her neck. Looking at her I remembered with peculiar force my desperate lies of a few months before, the cleverly halting story I had told with bated breath, the moment when I had manufactured out of a tissue of fabrication the personality of John Brown that was to fit me better than I knew then.

  Miss Willows did not seem surprised to see either Anderson or me. She looked in a filing cabinet and found a manila folder with the name “John Brown” clearly marked on it. She waddled back to her desk – one of her legs was shorter than the other – and opened the folder and began to examine the cards with their closely written records. Her lips moved silently as she read them.

  “Oh, yes, Mr Brown,” she said, after she had refreshed her memory at the file. “He was one of our more interesting cases. A complete recovery despite a rather bad prognosis. And an excellent adjustment and rehabilitation, if I do say so myself.”

  “Just tell me what you know about this man,” said Anderson.

  She glanced up, a little put out by the Lieutenant’s crisp tone. Then she pursed her lips primly.

  “He came here on the first of May of this year, 1944. One of your men picked him up on the Bowery, wandering. He seemed to have no memory of his past life. He had had a bad concussion and a deep laceration on his head. The policeman thought he had been in a fight. He was not intoxicated.”

  “This was just a few months ago?”

  “In May. We put him in bed and treated him for concussion and shock. When he regained consciousness he had an obsession. He believed himself to be a psychiatrist – a Dr George Matthews. He was most convincing about it. He supplied us with all kinds of details about a fictitious past life. Of course, none of them were true.”

  “You checked on them, of course?”

  “We found them all to be quite fictitious. There was a Dr George Matthews, but he had been dead sometime.”

  “You say that the prognosis was unfavorable at first?”

  Miss Willows smiled quickly. “Did I say that? Well, at first, yes. He had a persecution syndrome. He believed himself to be this Dr Matthews and he considered it unethical of us to keep him here.”

  “He remembered later?”

  “Oh, yes, it all came back! Occupational therapy, you know. A little rest in a quiet place, an opportunity to use one’s hands. Oh, yes, it all came back, didn’t it, Mr Brown?” Now she had turned her smile on me, a chaste, antiseptic grimace.

  “Yes,” I said. “It all came back.”

  “Mr Brown was born in Eric, Pennsylvania,” she was reading aloud from the folder. “He came from a large family. He joined the Army and served in the first World War. He was wounded and came back home. He had a hard time. He worked as a farm laborer, here, and on the West Coast. His wife died. He was on relief during the Depression. He became an alcoholic.”

  She stopped reading and pursed her lips again. “A typical case, I’m afraid. Is he in trouble again?” She spoke right over me – as if I weren’t there or, worse, as if it did not matter how I felt.

  Anderson shook his head. “We just wanted to check with you. This is all the information you have?”

  Miss Willows smiled again. She felt Anderson’s displeasure, but she did not know why he was displeased. She wanted to make amends. I could see she was not a bad sort.

  “You might try one of the doctors, though I doubt if they know as much as I. This is the complete case history, you see. Very complete, in fact. Mr Brown was an unusually interesting case.”

  Anderson thanked her and stood up to go. “Oh, that’s what we’re here for,” she said cheerfully. “Anytime I can help…”

  As soon as we were outside the door, he stopped and looked at me. “Did any of those things ever happen to you?” he asked.

  “No,” I said, “none of them.”

  “Then how did they get on her record?”

  “I remember that much, I assure you. I made that all up. I told it to the doctors and to her. It was the only way I could get out, you see!”

  Anderson scratched his head. “No, I don’t see,” he said.

  “They wouldn’t believe that I was Dr George Matthews. They checked with you, and they were told I was dead. They checked with my office, and they discovered that my office was no longer in existence. They tried to find Sara and they failed. They then decided that I had paranoid tendencies.”

  “But I still don’t see why you had to make all that up?”

  “Because that was the only kind of history they expected me to have. They looked on me as a bum, a vagrant. I cadged that story from a hundred similar cases I have encountered in my career. I constructed it carefully so that in its every detail it would coincide with their preconceived notion of what my life history must be like, and by this means planned to persuade them that I had indeed recovered my memory. If I had persisted in telling the truth, they would have continued to believe that I was suffering from an aberration. All that I might have said would only have heaped coals upon the fire of their conviction. Every circumstance dissuaded the possibility, to their minds, that I might have been a psychiatrist. I was forced to create a complex lie and offer it to them as the reality. There was n
o other way out.”

  “Didn’t you ever doubt your own identity? By God, I know I would have been mixed up!”

  “Sometimes I was alittle confused about it,” I admitted. “But where do we go from here?”

  He laid his hand on my shoulder. His eyes studied me in kindly fashion. I realized that this man was my friend, that he was on my side – at least, for the time being. It was a pleasant sensation. “I’m taking you home,” he said. “I’ll have a man on duty all night in front of your place. When you go out, speak to him so he can keep track of you. I don’t want to take any chances.”

  I was glad to get home. In fact, the car could not take me back to Coney Island fast enough. Things were going on in my head. I wanted to lie down and be with whatever it was that was struggling to the surface of my memory. I was afraid, but I knew that sooner or later I would have to face it. Things had gone too far–someone had pushed me too far. Now was the time to remember – and then to act.

  When I reached my room, I drew the shade and stretched out on the lumpy bed. This was all that was necessary. Nothing clicked; there was no sudden revelation. It was just that a part of me that had been sleeping had awakened. I remembered it all, completely, in each detail. Or, so it seemed at first.

  Later I walked to the window and lifted a corner of the shade. A man was leaning against a doorway across the street. He was watching three small girls play hopscotch. I smiled to myself. That was Anderson’s man. I might need him before the night was up. But right now I needed sleep. I lay down again and closed my eyes. There was no hurry now, no compulsion, I had plenty of time.

  I knew who my enemies were now, even if I did not know why they were my enemies.