The Collection

by Fredric Brown

  Dr. Skibbine leaned back in the swivel chair.

  "I don't think being hit was the cause of death, exactly. His forehead struck the road when he fell, and he was probably dead when the wheels ran over him. It could have been, for that matter, that he fell when there wasn't even a car around and the car ran over him later."

  "In broad daylight?"

  "Um--yes, that does sound unlikely. But he could have fallen into the path of the car. He had been drinking plenty. He reeked of liquor."

  "Suppose he was hit by a car," Bill said. "How would you reconstruct it? How he fell, I mean, and stuff like that."

  "Let's see. I'd say he fell first and was down when the car first touched him. Say he started across the road in front of the car. Horn honked and he tried to turn around and fell flat instead, and the motorist couldn't stop in time and ran over him."

  I had not said anything yet, but I put in a protest at that.

  "If the man was as obviously drunk as that," I said, "why would the motorist have kept on going? He couldn't have thought he would be blamed if a drunk staggered in front of his car and fell, even before he was hit."

  Drager shrugged. "That could happen, Jerry," he said. "For one thing, he may not have any witnesses to prove that it happened that way. And some guys get panicky when they hit a pedestrian, even if the pedestrian is to blame. And then again, the driver of the car might have had a drink or two himself and been afraid to stop because of that."

  Dr. Skibbine's swivel chair creaked.

  "Sure," he said, "or he might have been afraid because he had a reckless driving count against him already. But, Bill, the cause of death was the blow he got on the forehead when he hit the road. Not that the tires going over his neck wouldn't have finished him if the fall hadn't."

  "We had a case like that here five years ago. Remember?"

  Dr. Skibbine grunted. "I wasn't here five years ago. Remember?"

  "Yes, I forgot that," said Bill Drager.

  I had forgotten it, too. Dr. Skibbine was a Springdale man, but he had spent several years in South American countries doing research work on tropical diseases. Then he had come back and had been elected coroner. Coroner was an easy job in Springdale and gave a man more time for things like research and chess than a private practice would.

  "Go on down and look at him, if you want," Dr. Skibbine told Bill. "Jerry'll take you down. It will get his mind off ghouls and goblins."

  I took Bill Drager downstairs and flicked on the lights in the display case.

  "I can take off the end and slide him out of there if you want me to," I said.

  "I guess not," Drager said and leaned on the glass top to look closer at the body. The face was all you could see, of course, because a sheet covered the body up to the neck, and this time the sheet had been pulled a little higher than usual, probably to hide the unpleasant damage to the neck.

  The face was bad enough. There was a big, ugly bruise on the forehead, and the lower part of the face was cut up a bit.

  "The car ran over the back of his neck after he fell on his face, apparently," Bill Drager said. "Ground his face into the road a bit and took off skin. But--"

  "But what?" I prompted when he lapsed into silence.

  "I don't know," he said. "I was mostly wondering why he would have tried to cross the road at all out there. Right at that place there's nothing on one side of the road that isn't on the other."

  He straightened up, and I switched off the showcase lights.

  "Maybe you're just imagining things, Bill," I said. "How do you know he tried to cross at all? Doc said he'd been drinking, and maybe he just staggered from the edge of the road out toward the middle without any idea of crossing over."

  "Yeah, there's that, of course. Come to think of it, you're probably right. When I got to wondering, I didn't know about the drinking part. Well, let's go back up."

  We did, and I shut and locked the door at the head of the stairs. It is the only entrance to the morgue, and I don't know why it has to be kept locked, because it opens right into the coroner's office where I sit all night, and the key stays in the lock. Anybody who could get past me could unlock it himself. But it's just one of those rules. Those stairs, incidentally, are absolutely the only way you can get down into the morgue which is walled off from the rest of the basement of the Municipal Building.

  "Satisfied?" Dr. Skibbine asked Bill Drager, as we walked into the office.

  "Guess so," said Drager. "Say, the guy looks vaguely familiar. I can't place him, but I think I've seen him somewhere. Nobody identified him yet?"

  "Nope," said Doc. "But if he's a local resident, somebody will. We'll have a lot of curiosity seekers in here tomorrow. Always get them after a violent death."

  Bill Drager said he was going home and went out. His shift was over. He had just dropped in on his own time.

  I stood around and watched the chess game for a few minutes. Mr. Paton was getting licked this time. He was two pieces down and on the defensive. Only a miracle could save him.

  Then Doc moved a knight and said, "Check," and it was all over but the shouting. Mr. Paton could move out of check all right, but the knight had forked his king and queen, and with the queen gone, as it would be after the next move, the situation was hopeless.

  "You got me, Dwight," he said. "I'll resign. My mind must be fuzzy tonight. Didn't see that knight coming."

  "Shall we start another game? It's early."

  "You'd beat me. Let's bowl a quick game, instead, and get home early."

  After they left, I finished up my work on the card file and then did my trigonometry. It was almost midnight then. I remembered the man who had phoned that he was coming in and decided he had changed his mind. Probably his brother had arrived home safely, after all.

  I went downstairs to be sure the refrigerating unit was okay. Finding that it was, I came back up and locked the door again. Then I went out into the hall and locked the outer door. It's supposed to be kept locked, too, and I really should have locked it earlier.

  After that, I read The Golden Bough, with a note-book in front of me so I could jot down anything I found that would fit into my thesis.

  I must have become deeply engrossed in my reading because when the night bell rang, I jumped inches out of my chair. I looked at the clock and saw it was two in the morning.

  Ordinarily, I don't mind the place where I work at all. Being near dead bodies gives some people the willies, but not me. There isn't any nicer, quieter place for studying and reading than a morgue at night.

  But I had a touch of the creeps then. I do get them once in a while. This time it was the result of being startled by the sudden ringing of that bell when I was so interested in something that I had forgotten where I was and why I was there.

  I put down the book and went out into the long dark hallway. When I had put on the hall light, I felt a little better. I could see somebody standing outside the glass-paned door at the end of the hall. A tall thin man whom I didn't know. He wore glasses and was carrying a gold-headed cane.

  "My name is Burke, Roger Burke," he said when I opened the door. "I phoned early this evening about my brother being missing. Uh--may I--"

  "Of course," I told him. "Come this way. When you didn't come for so long, I thought you had located your brother."

  "I thought I had," he said hesitantly. "A friend said he had seen him this evening, and I quit worrying for a while. But when it got after one o'clock and he wasn't home, I--"

  We had reached the coroner's office by then, but I stopped and turned.

  "There's only one unidentified body here," I told him, "and that was brought in this afternoon. If your brother was seen this evening, it couldn't be him."

  The tall man said, "Oh," rather blankly and looked at me a moment. Then he said, "I hope that's right. But this friend said he saw him at a distance, on a crowded street. He could have been mistaken. So as long as I'm here--"

  "I guess you might as well," I said, "now that you'
re here. Then you'll be sure."

  I led the way through the office and unlocked the door.

  I was glad, as we started down the stairs, that there seemed little likelihood of identification. I hate to be around when one is made. You always seem to share, vicariously, the emotion, of the person who recognizes a friend or relative.

  At the top of the stairs I pushed the button that put on the overhead lights downstairs in the morgue. The switch for the showcase was down below. I stopped to flick it as I reached the bottom of the stairs, and the tall man went on past me toward the case. Apparently he had been a visitor here before.

  I had taken only a step or two after him when I heard him gasp. He stopped suddenly and took a step backward so quickly that I bumped into him and grabbed his arm to steady myself.

  He turned around, and his face was a dull pasty gray that one seldom sees on the face of a living person.

  "My God!" he said. "Why didn't you warn me that--"

  It didn't make sense for him to say a thing like that. I've been with people before when they have identified relatives, but none of them had ever reacted just that way. Or had it been merely identification? He certainly looked as though he had seen something horrible.

  I stepped a little to one side so that I could see past him. When I saw, it was as though a wave of cold started at the base of my spine and ran up along my body. I had never seen anything like it--and you get toughened when you work in a morgue.

  The glass top of the display case had been broken in at the upper, the head, end, and the body inside the case was--well, I'll try to be as objective about it as I can. The best way to be objective is to put it bluntly. The flesh of the face had been eaten away, eaten away as though acid had been poured on it, or as though --

  I got hold of myself and stepped up to the edge of the display case and looked down.

  It had not been acid. Acid does not leave the marks of teeth.

  Nauseated, I closed my eyes for an instant until I got over it. Behind me, I heard sounds as though the tall man, who had been the first to see it, was being sick. I didn't blame him.

  "I don't--" I said, and stepped back. "Something's happened here."

  Silly remark, but you can't think of the right thing to say in a spot like that.

  "Come on," I told him. "I'll have to get the police."

  The thought of the police steadied me. When the police got here, it would be all right. They would find out what had happened.

  III

  As I reached the bottom of the stairs my mind started to work logically again. I could picture Bill Drager up in the office firing questions at me, asking me, "When did it happen? You can judge by the temperature, can't you?"

  The tall man stumbled up the stairs past me as I paused. Most decidedly I didn't want to be down there alone, but I yelled to him:

  "Wait up there. I'll be with you in a minute."

  He would have to wait, of course, because I would have to unlock the outer door to let him out.

  I turned back and looked at the thermometer in the broken case, trying not to look at anything else. It read sixty-three degrees, and that was only about ten degrees under the temperature of the rest of the room.

  The glass had been broken, then, for some time. An hour, I'd say offhand, or maybe a little less. Upstairs, with the heavy door closed, I wouldn't have heard it break. Anyway, I hadn't heard it break.

  I left the lights on in the morgue, all of them, when I ran up the stairs.

  The tall man was standing in the middle of the office, looking around as though he were in a daze. His face still had that grayish tinge, and I was just as glad that I didn't have to look in a mirror just then, because my own face was likely as bad.

  I picked up the telephone and found myself giving Bill Drager's home telephone number instead of asking for the police. I don't know why my thoughts ran so strongly to Bill Drager, except that he had been the one who had suspected that something more than met the eye had been behind the hit-run case from the Mill Road.

  "Can--will you let me out of here?" the tall man said. "I--I--that wasn't my--"

  "I'm afraid not," I told him. "Until the police get here. You--uh--witnessed--"

  It sounded screwy, even to me. Certainly he could not have had anything to do with whatever had happened down there. He had preceded me into the morgue only by a second and hadn't even reached the case when I was beside him. But I knew what the police would say if I let him go before they had a chance to get his story.

  Then Drager's voice was saying a sleepy, "Hullo," into my ear.

  "Bill," I said, "you got to come down here. That corpse downstairs--it's--I--"

  The sleepiness went out of Drager's voice.

  "Calm down, Jerry," he said. "It can't be that bad. Now, what happened?"

  I finally got it across.

  "You phoned the department first, of course?" Drager asked.

  "N-no. I thought of you first because--"

  "Sit tight," he said. "I'll phone them and then come down. I'll have to dress first, so they'll get there ahead of me. Don't go down to the morgue again and don't touch anything."

  He put the receiver on the hook, and I felt a little better. Somehow the worst seemed to be over, now that it was off my chest. Drager's offering to phone the police saved me from having to tell it again, over the phone.

  The tall man--I remembered now that he had given the name Roger Burke--was leaning against the wall, weakly.

  "Did--did I get from what you said on the phone that the body wasn't that way when--when they brought it in?" he asked.

  I nodded. "It must have happened within the last hour," I said. "I was down there at midnight, and everything was all right then."

  "But what--what happened?"

  I opened my mouth and closed it again. Something had happened down there, but what? There wasn't any entrance to the morgue other than the ventilator and the door that opened at the top of the stairs. And nobody--nothing--had gone through that door since my trip of inspection.

  I thought back and thought hard. No, I hadn't left this office for even a minute between midnight and the time the night bell had rung at two o'clock. I had left the office then, of course, to answer the door. But whatever had happened had not happened then. The thermometer downstairs proved that.

  Burke was fumbling cigarettes out of his pocket. He held out the package with a shaky hand, and I took one and managed to strike a match and light both cigarettes.

  The first drag made me feel nearly human. Apparently he felt better too, because he said:

  "I--I'm afraid I didn't make identification one way or the other. You couldn't--with--" He shuddered. "Say, my brother had a small anchor tattooed on his left forearm. I forgot it or I could have asked you over the phone. Was there--"

  I thought back to the file and shook my head.

  "No," I said definitely. "It would have been on the record, and there wasn't anything about it. They make a special point of noting down things like that."

  "That's swell," Burke said. "I mean--Say, if I'm going to have to wait, I'm going to sit down. I still feel awful."

  Then I remembered that I had better phone Dr. Skibbine, too, and give him the story first-hand before the police got here and called him. I went over to the phone.

  The police got there first--Captain Quenlin and Sergeant Wilson and two other men I knew by sight but not by name. Bill Drager was only a few minutes later getting there, and around three o'clock Dr. Skibbine came.

  By that time the police had questioned Burke and let him go, although one of them left to go home with him. They told him it was because they wanted to check on whether his brother had shown up yet, so the Missing Persons Bureau could handle it if he hadn't. But I guessed the real reason was that they wanted to check on his identity and place of residence.

  Not that there seemed to be any way Burke could be involved in whatever had happened to the body, but when you don't know what has happened, you can't overlook an
y angle. After all, he was a material witness.

  Bill Drager had spent most of the time since he had been there downstairs, but he came up now.

  "The place is tighter than a drum down there, except for that ventilator," he said. "And I noticed something about it. One of the vanes in it is a little bent."

  "How about rats?" Captain Quenlin asked. Drager snorted. "Ever see rats break a sheet of glass?" "The glass might have been broken some other way." Quenlin looked at me. "You're around here nights, Jerry Grant. Ever see any signs of rats or mice?"

  I shook my head, and Bill Drager backed me up. "I went over the whole place down there," he said. "There isn't a hole anywhere. Floor's tile set in cement. The walls are tile, in big close-set slabs, without a break. I went over them."

  Dr. Skibbine was starting down the steps.

  "Come on, Jerry," he said to me. "Show me where you and this Burke fellow were standing when he let out a yip."

  I didn't much want to, but I followed him down. I showed him where I had been and where Burke had been and told him that Burke had not gone closer to the case than about five feet at any time. Also, I told him what I had already told the police about my looking at the thermometer in the case.

  Dr. Skibbine went over and looked at it.

  "Seventy-one now," he said. "I imagine that's as high as it's going. You say it was sixty-three when you saw it at two? Yes, I'd say the glass was broken between twelve-thirty and one-thirty."

  Quenlin had followed us down the stairs. "When did you get home tonight, Dr. Skibbine?" he asked.

  The coroner looked at him in surprise. "Around midnight. Good Lord, you don't think I had anything to do with this, do you, Quenlin?"

  The captain shook his head. "Routine question. Look, Doc, why would anybody or anything do that?"

  "I wouldn't know," Skibbine said slowly, "unless it was to prevent identification of the corpse. That's possible. The body will never be identified now unless the man has a criminal record and his prints are on file. But making that 'anything' instead of 'anybody' makes it easier, Cap. I'd say 'anything' was hungry, plenty hungry."