The Long Skeleton

by Frances

  “Nevertheless,” Bill Weigand said. “But go on, doctor. A special sort of man?”

  Dr. Wahmsley regarded the silver coffee pot for some seconds.

  “In understanding,” he said, finally, and spoke with deliberation, as if seeking words. “In a sense, of course, trying to understand the way the mind works was his trade. I don’t mean only that. More than anyone else I’ve ever known he went beyond the mere technics of understanding. It was as if he—” Dr. Wahmsley shared his hesitancy with the silver coffee pot “—went into the minds of others, shared what was in other minds. With the utmost sympathy, the most complete—generosity. Perhaps that is the word I want. Generosity. Not only in the obvious sense.”

  He shook his head at the silver coffee pot and seemed, Bill thought, to shake it in reproof as if the coffee pot had failed him. Then he said that it was difficult to put into words precisely what he meant. He added that words were elusive things and asked if Captain Weigand had not found it so.

  “Yes,” Bill said. “They turn up meaning more, or less, than we intend. But—an unusually generous man.”

  “And—understanding,” Wahmsley said. “Sympathetic. Use all the usual words. Barnacled with associations, worn smooth with usage. There—you see what we come to? Roughened by accretions, at the same time, worn smooth.”

  He was, Bill thought, again in conversation with the coffee pot.

  “In the most simple word,” he said, to the pot. “A good man. Which means much less than it should. But—not the kind of man who is killed by another man or a woman. I would have sworn that. I have always felt that getting oneself murdered must result from a flaw somewhere—a flaw in character. Almost as much as murdering.”

  He looked at the coffee pot again. He told the silver pot that he talked like a professor. He told Bill Weigand that he was sorry to be wasting so much of his time. He told Bill that Bill wanted facts and—

  Professor Elwell had been on the Dyckman faculty for something like forty years, starting as an instructor while still working for his master’s, his doctorate. He had gone up the slow, but reasonably sure, steps—assistant professor, associate, full professor, head of department. (The last step, of course, by no means inevitable.) He would have reached the retirement age in a few months. “Technically,” Dr. Wahmsley pointed out. “No real difference, if he chose not to have any. Oh—no further administrative duties, of course. But everything else much as before.”

  “I take it,” Bill said, “that he had money of his own. Beyond his salary.”

  “My God yes,” Wahmsley said, in honest astonishment. “You pointed out yourself he owned two houses. He was a college professor, man.”

  “About his generosity,” Bill said. “You said ‘not only in the obvious sense.’ I suppose you meant not only with money? But—included that.”

  “Well,” Wahmsley said, “we’ve a term around here—So-and-so’s probably on an ‘Elwell scholarship.’ We had to guess, for the most part. Jamey wouldn’t mention anything like that, and most of the kids were—well, I suppose, asked not to. But—likely kids who came along without money and looked like having to drop out rather often discovered they didn’t need to. Because of Jamey.”

  He was asked if he wanted to name names. He said he didn’t, at least unless the captain could assure him that names would help. He said, also, that most names he might give would be guessed at.

  “A man named Hunter?” Bill asked him. “A girl named Faith Oldham?”

  “Hunter?” Wahmsley repeated. “We have fifteen thousand students here—in the college, in the schools, in the whole setup. I’d guess a hundred Hunters, wouldn’t you? As for the Oldham child. That’s quite a different matter. She’s Frank Oldham’s daughter.” He seemed to feel that he had said all that needed saying. Bill lifted his shoulders.

  “Sic transit,” Wahmsley said. “A philosopher of some note, we felt. A pride of Dyckman. And, a great friend of Jamey’s. His closest, oldest, I imagine. A man of great wisdom, Frank was. But—improvident as they come. So when he died ten years ago or so—and left a widow and a young daughter—and nothing else to speak of—” He ended with a gesture.

  Bill Weigand said he saw.

  “In Elwell’s—what he seems to have called his laboratory,” Bill said. “We came across a rather odd phonograph record. I don’t know whether you can help on—”

  “‘Forward’?” Wahmsley said. “‘You are falling slowly forward’ and the rest of it?”

  “Right.”

  “Just a sway test record,” Wahmsley said, as if so much (at least) should have been obvious. “Gauges susceptibility to hypnosis. Or’s supposed to. Not my field.”

  “Elwell’s?”

  “Oh,” Wahmsley said. “Very much his field. Very much indeed. A field of increasing importance, you know. Now that the medical profession isn’t so afraid of it. Jamey’s last publication made quite a stir, I understand. Boys over at the press are a bit green about it.”

  To that Bill Weigand could only shake a bewildered head.

  “Dyckman University Press,” Wahmsley said, spelling it out. “Jealousy, green with. Jamey gave it to a trade publisher, to get wider circulation. Some of the public’s still a bit stuffy about the whole subject, you know. Or, say uninformed.”

  “Doctor,” Bill Weigand said. “Do you happen to know who published this last book of Professor Elwell’s?”

  He waited the answer with somewhat bated mind. It happened that Dr. Wahmsley did know.

  Bill Weigand was not really much surprised. Mullins had a good policeman’s feel for the shape of things, including those to come.

  3

  It had been what Pamela North sometimes thinks of as a “why-not?” evening, which she regards as often the best kind of evening. It had begun, as such evenings frequently do, with cocktails. That idea had been Dorian Weigand’s, who reported, on the telephone to Pam, that she felt like seeing people, and that Bill, the evening before had asked her whatever had become of the Norths.

  “In ten days?” Pam said to that. “Not that it wasn’t a very nice thing for him to say. Why not here, though?”

  Which was the first of the “why-nots?” and an impermanent one since, as Dorian pointed out, it was her idea. And it would be good for Bill, who had had precisely the sort of day he found most arduous—a day hanging about General Sessions, waiting to be called as a witness. The Norths would cheer him.

  “You’d think,” Pam said, when later she learned that Bill would not be present to be cheered, “you’d think Inspector O’Malley knew we were coming.”

  The idea was, admittedly, a bit slippery. Dorian and Jerry looked at each other. Jerry North shrugged, elaborately. “You make me tired,” Pam said. “Both of you. You know how O’Malley feels about us, although I can’t think why, because mostly we help. So, if he knew we were coming, it would be just like him to do a thing like this.”

  “Listen,” Jerry North said, and ran his fingers through his hair. “Listen, Pam. You mean, I mean you don’t mean, that the inspector arranged to have somebody murdered so that Bill would have to work and couldn’t come home for cocktails because we were going to be here?”

  “You certainly make things sound complicated,” Pam told him, with wide-eyed innocence.

  It was around six, then. It was around seven-thirty when Pam said, “Why not come out to dinner with us? Since Bill isn’t here, and we have to because Martha likes Wednesday better than Thursday.” Dorian and Jerry waited. “To be off on,” Pam said.

  It was a little before nine when they finished dinner.

  “As long as we’re up and about,” Jerry said, “why not go look at that movie at the Art? The actress with the—”

  “I know,” Pam said. “The one with both of them rather—extravagantly. ‘The,’ indeed.”

  Jerry said that his interest, actually, lay elsewhere and realized, from the pleased expression on the faces of both Pam and Dorian, that he had not greatly improved matters. He said, “Any
way—” which was as useful a remark as he could think of, and they went to the movie. From it, they walked, cross town, to the apartment house in which the Weigands lived.

  “Why not,” Dorian said, “come up for a nightcap? Maybe Bill’s home by now.”

  They went up for a nightcap. It was a “why-not?” evening.

  The telephone was ringing in the apartment—which has a view of more than a slice of the East River; for several reasons, all quite legal, the Weigands do not live on a policeman’s salary—when Dorian opened the door. She was across the room to it, moving as if en route from base-line to net position. She said into it, “Darling!” and then, ‘’At a movie, with the Norths; don’t sound like a cop, darling” and then, “Yes, they did as it happens.” And then listened.

  “I’m sure they will,” Dorian said, and turned toward Pam and Jerry and twisted the receiver away from her lips, “Won’t you?” she said.

  “Of course,” Pam North said, with no hesitation. “We’d love to.”

  “I’m not so—” Dorian said, and then, into the telephone now, “Yes, Bill?” and again listened. She said, “All right. Ten minutes,” and put the receiver back.

  “So nice he wants us to—” Pam began and stopped, seeing Dorian’s face.

  “Of course he does,” Dorian said. “Only—well, this time there’s something more to it. It seems the man who was killed was somebody you publish, Jerry. A Professor Elwell, and—”

  “No!” Pam said. “Not Jamey!”

  But there was no use saying it was not Jamey, no use saying it couldn’t be, that it didn’t make sense, as Pam did to Bill, when he arrived as promised. It could be because it was; making sense out of it was, Bill Weigand hoped, where the Norths might help.

  “Sometimes,” Pam said, a little later, “it seems as if there’s no future in being a North author. There was that dinosaur man and—”

  They knew. Several authors published by North Books, Inc., have led troubled lives, abruptly terminated. A poet once, and a novelist, and of course the dinosaur man. Pam has moments, but they pass quickly, of thinking that it might have been better if they had not found their first body in a bathtub or, having found it, left it unmentioned.

  It was not, Jerry told Bill, on being asked, odd that North Books, instead of a publisher of scientific works, should have brought out Elwell’s Hypnotism in the Modern World. For one thing, the book had been written for the lay reader. For another, Jerry, hearing about the book through a friend of his at Dyckman—“a scout, if you must know”—had gone after it.

  “Why?” Bill asked.

  “Because,” Jerry told him, “we like to sell books.”

  Bill waited that one out.

  “In the last year or so,” Jerry said, “there’s been—well, a resurgence of interest in hypnotism. And, in the acceptance of hypnotism. It’s been a long time coming, especially in the United States.”*

  “Because, Jamey always said, of vaudeville,” Pam said. “The mumbo jumbo. And doctors, even the ones who knew about it, didn’t use it much—or maybe admit using it—because people think of men in capes and glittering eyes.” She paused. “And stiff people between chairs,” she added. “Jamey says—” She stopped, abruptly. “Jerry!” she said. “He was—such a lamb. How anybody—”

  “I know,” Jerry said, and then, to Bill, “That’s about it. Recently, because of the work of men like Elwell and a lot of others—the notion that there’s some kind of black magic about it, or that it isn’t true at all, has begun to break down. With medical men, where it’s important. With laymen. It took a long time to make most people accept that the earth isn’t flat.”

  Bill said that Jerry seemed, more or less overnight so far as he could see, to have become unexpectedly familiar with hypnosis. Jerry grinned at that, said he was a quick study, that he read the books he published.

  “Also,” he said, “Jamey had a way of—of making things exciting.” He paused, spoke more slowly. “He was quite a guy, Bill,” Jerry said. “I feel pretty much the same way Pam does.”

  They had known Jameson Elwell only for three or four months, but had, increasingly, seen more of him than the author-publisher relationship fully explained. That sometimes happened. Sometimes it was all business, now and then even rather scratchy business. (“These damn subsidiaries,” Jerry said, somewhat obscurely, and in passing.) Sometimes, an author was as good as his book, or even, on occasion, better. “We hit it off,” Jerry said. “He and I first and then Pam heard about the cats. At first, at lunch, very casually. She had been—”

  “I got to talking about Martini,” Pam said. “And poor Sherry. And poor Gin. And any son—” She looked at Jerry, who had said nothing. “All right,” she said, “any man who doesn’t cover an abandoned well. And then about cats in general.” She paused, considered. “I do,” she said, “talk a good deal about cats, I guess. And Jamey told us about—”

  He had told them about the cats into whose elusive, surprising minds he and several others were peering at Dyckman University. He had taken Pam to see the cats—

  “Doing all sorts of things,” Pam said. “In and out of boxes and stepping on things to make things happen and—”

  She had been worried, at first, having come to like Jameson Elwell and being afraid that, if he was doing the wrong things to cats, she wouldn’t any more. But the cats had all seemed very happy, to be enjoying themselves. “Cats like to do things,” Pam said. “Especially when they’re young.”

  She stopped and said again that she did talk a good deal about cats. “Actually,” she said, “Jamey used dogs, too, and monkeys. And elephants at one time, I think. But, elephants do take up space, of course.”

  This was commemorated by a moment of silence.

  “I doubt,” Jerry said, “if elephants come into it, particularly. I don’t know what we can tell you, Bill. The book’s going well. We’ve been to his house—a couple of times for dinner. He showed us his laboratory—he did some hypnosis experiments there—started that when Dyckman was still leery enough to prefer to have them done off campus. It’s changed its mind now. You found the laboratory room?”

  Bill had. He told them about the record.

  “A quick way,” Jerry said, “to find out whether a person can be hypnotized—will go into somnambulistic trance. Only about one in five will, according to Elwell. Listening to the record, good subjects will begin to sway back and forth and—” He stopped, on looking at Bill Weigand’s face. “Don’t,” Jerry said, “tell me you swayed, Bill. Nothing against it—apparently the more intelligent, the more sensitive, a person is the better chance—”

  “Thanks,” Bill said. “But, no.” He hesitated a moment. “I haven’t told him,” Bill said. “And don’t you. But—Mullins swayed just fine. And—didn’t know he was doing it.”

  He looked enquiringly at Jerry, who said he wasn’t the authority, just a man who had published an authority. But it seemed probable. At least, people in hypnosis didn’t remember, when they came out of it, were brought out of it, that they had been in. Or, needn’t, unless the operator wanted them to. Jerry said that there were wrinkles within wrinkles, and that he would send Bill a copy of Elwell’s book.

  “Long book?” Bill asked, with evident doubt. “All right—no need to look like a Cheshire cat.”

  Jerry, still looking rather like one (except that he did not leave his grin hanging in mid-air), said that Professor Elwell’s book was, perhaps, rather long. “People seem to like long books nowadays,” Jerry said. “Apparently long books give them a sense of—” He paused. “Completion, maybe.”

  “Accomplishment,” Pam said. “They get through and say, ‘My. Look what I did.’ Particularly novels, of course. The kinds with heroines.”

  “Carl Hunter?” Bill said, bringing them back. The Norths looked at him, at each other; they shook heads.

  “Should we?” Pam asked.

  “A graduate student,” Bill said. “Working with Elwell on the animal psychology experi
ments.” They shook their heads again.

  “He was there this afternoon,” Bill told them. “Left before the professor was killed. He says.”

  They waited.

  “I have no idea,” Bill said. “It’s obviously possible. You remember a little silver clock the professor had on the desk in his office?”

  “You do jump around,” Pam said. “Clock? Don’t tell me it stopped when the—when Jamey died?”

  “Not then,” Bill said, and told them when, and how, the clock too had died.

  “What a funny thing for somebody to do,” Pam said. “Because the clock—was slow? But, you say it wasn’t. Was Mullins there? Say it was screwy?”

  “Yes,” Bill said. “He did use the expression—later and in general terms. He was a little puzzled that you two weren’t—that is.”

  “I know,” Pam said. “Poor Mullins. His worst hopes. A clock phobia? I mean—some people go in for clocks, which is supposed to mean something. Do some people go—out for clocks?” She looked at her husband. “Jerry’s thinking,” she said.

  The three of them—Dorian quiet, live-eyed, curled in a chair—looked at Gerald North expectantly.

  “In hypnotism,” he said, “there’s a—wrinkle. Seems that, during a trance, the operator can tell the subject that, after he comes out of it—at a certain time afterward—he will do a certain thing. Won’t be able to help doing it. Have an irresistible impulse. Usually, of course, to do something that doesn’t make any sense. Afterward, they usually rationalize. Make up reasons for doing the nonsensical thing.” He paused. “I wish you’d read the book yourself,” he said to Bill. “If you think hypnotism has anything to do with—with Jamey’s death.”

  “I doubt if it—” Bill began.

  “It seems,” Dorian said, “like a devious way to get a clock broken. If you mean that this Mr. Hunter was acting under posthypnotic suggestion.”