‘Oh, Crouch!’ called the doctor. ‘Mr Crouch!’
‘That “mister” ought to get him.’
But there was no answer. ‘Guess he’s out. That’s right—put him on the sofa. Push that other switch by the door. Good.’
Dr Archer inspected the supine figure as he reached into his bag. ‘Not so good,’ he commented. Beneath his black satin robe the patient wore ordinary clothing—trousers, vest, shirt, collar and tie. Deftly the physician bared the chest; with one hand he palpated the heart area while with the other he adjusted the ear-pieces of his stethoscope. He bent over, placed the bell of his instrument on the motionless dark chest, and listened a long time. He removed the instrument, disconnected first one, then the other, rubber tube at their junction with the bell, blew vigorously through them in turn, replaced them, and repeated the operation of listening. At last he stood erect.
‘Not a twitch,’ he said.
‘Long gone, huh?’
‘Not so long. Still warm. But gone.’
The short young man looked at his scowling freckled companion.
‘What’d I tell you?’ he whispered. ‘Was I right or wasn’t I?’
The tall one did not answer but watched the doctor. The doctor put aside his stethoscope and inspected the patient’s head more closely, the parted lips and half-open eyes. He extended a hand and with his extremely long fingers gently palpated the scalp. ‘Hello,’ he said. He turned the far side of the head toward him and looked first at that side, then at his fingers.
‘Wh-what?’
‘Blood in his hair,’ announced the physician. He procured a gauze dressing from his bag, wiped his moist fingers, thoroughly sponged and reinspected the wound. Abruptly he turned to the two men, whom until now he had treated quite impersonally. Still imperturbably, but incisively, in the manner of lancing an abscess, he asked, ‘Who are you two gentlemen?’
‘Why—uh—this here’s Jinx Jenkins, doc. He’s my buddy, see? Him and me—’
‘And you—if I don’t presume?’
‘Me? I’m Bubber Brown—’
‘Well, how did this happen, Mr Brown?’
‘’Deed I don’ know, doc. What you mean—is somebody killed him?’
‘You don’t know?’ Dr Archer regarded the pair curiously a moment, then turned back to examine further. From an instrument case he took a probe and proceeded to explore the wound in the dead man’s scalp. ‘Well—what do you know about it, then?’ he asked, still probing. ‘Who found him?’
‘Jinx,’ answered the one who called himself Bubber. ‘We jes’ come here to get this Frimbo’s advice ’bout a little business project we thought up. Jinx went in to see him. I waited in the waitin’ room. Presently Jinx come bustin’ out pop-eyed and beckoned to me. I went back with him—and there was Frimbo, jes’ like you found him. We didn’t even know he was over the river.’
‘Did he fall against anything and strike his head?’
‘No, suh, doc.’ Jinx became articulate. ‘He didn’t do nothin’ the whole time I was in there. Nothin’ but talk. He tol’ me who I was and what I wanted befo’ I could open my mouth. Well, I said that I knowed that much already and that I come to find out sump’m I didn’t know. Then he went on talkin’, tellin’ me plenty. He knowed his stuff all right. But all of a sudden he stopped talkin’ and mumbled sump’m ’bout not bein’ able to see. Seem like he got scared, and he say, “Frimbo, why don’t you see?” Then he didn’t say no more. He sound’ so funny I got scared myself and jumped up and grabbed that light and turned it on him—and there he was.’
‘M-m.’
Dr Archer, pursuing his examination, now indulged in what appeared to be a characteristic habit: he began to talk as he worked, to talk rather absently and wordily on a matter which at first seemed inapropos.
‘I,’ said he, ‘am an exceedingly curious fellow.’ Deftly, delicately, with half-closed eyes, he was manipulating his probe. ‘Questions are forever popping into my head. For example, which of you two gentlemen, if either, stands responsible for the expenses of medical attention in this unfortunate instance?’
‘Mean who go’n’ pay you?’
‘That,’ smiled the doctor, ‘makes it rather a bald question.’
Bubber grinned understandingly.
‘Well here’s one with hair on it, doc,’ he said. ‘Who got the medical attention?’
‘M-m,’ murmured the doctor. ‘I was afraid of that. Not,’ he added, ‘that I am moved by mercenary motives. Oh, not at all. But if I am not to be paid in the usual way, in coin of the realm, then of course I must derive my compensation in some other form of satisfaction. Which, after all, is the end of all our getting and spending, is it not?’
‘Oh, sho’,’ agreed Bubber.
‘Now this case’—the doctor dropped the gauze dressing into his bag—‘even robbed of its material promise, still bids well to feed my native curiosity—if not my cellular protoplasm. You follow me, of course?’
‘With my tongue hangin’ out,’ said Bubber.
But that part of his mind which was directing this discourse did not give rise to the puzzled expression on the physician’s lean, light-skinned countenance as he absently moistened another dressing with alcohol, wiped off his fingers and his probe, and stood up again.
‘We’d better notify the police,’ he said. ‘You men’—he looked at them again—‘you men call up the precinct.’
They promptly started for the door.
‘No—you don’t have to go out. The cops, you see’—he was almost confidential—‘the cops will want to question all of us. Mr Crouch has a phone back there. Use that.’
They exchanged glances but obeyed.
‘I’ll be thinking over my findings.’
Through the next room they scuffled and into the back of the long first-floor suite. There they abruptly came to a halt and again looked at each other, but now for an entirely different reason. Along one side of this room, hidden from view until their entrance, stretched a long narrow table draped with a white sheet that covered an unmistakably human form. There was not much light. The two young men stood quite still.
‘Seem like it’s—occupied,’ murmured Bubber.
‘Another one,’ mumbled Jinx.
‘Where’s the phone?’
‘Don’t ask me. I got both eyes full.’
‘There ’tis—on that desk. Go on—use it.’
‘Use it yo’ own black self,’ suggested Jinx. ‘I’m goin’ back.’
‘No you ain’t. Come on. We use it together.’
‘All right. But if that whosis says “Howdy” tell it I said “Goo’by.”’
‘And where the hell you think I’ll be if it says “Howdy”?’
‘What a place to have a telephone!’
‘Step on it, slow motion.’
‘Hello!—Hello!’ Bubber rattled the hook. ‘Hey operator! Operator!’
‘My Gawd,’ said Jinx, ‘is the phone dead too?’
‘Operator—gimme the station—quick … Pennsylvania? No ma’am—New York—Harlem—listen, lady, not railroad. Police. Please, ma’am … Hello—hey—send a flock o’ cops around here—Frimbo’s—the fortune teller’s—yea—Thirteen West 130th—yea—somebody done put that thing on him! … Yea—O.K.’
Hurriedly they returned to the front room where Dr Archer was pacing back and forth, his hands thrust into his pockets, his brow pleated into troubled furrows.
‘They say hold everything, doc. Be right over.’
‘Good.’ The doctor went on pacing.
Jinx and Bubber surveyed the recumbent form. Said Bubber, ‘If he could keep folks from dyin’, how come he didn’t keep hisself from it?’
‘Reckon he didn’t have time to put no spell on hisself,’ Jinx surmised.
‘No,’ returned Bubber grimly. ‘But somebody else had time to put one on him. I knowed sump’m was comin’. I told you. First time I seen death on the moon since I been grown. And they’s two mo’ yet.’
&nbs
p; ‘How you reckon it happened?’
‘You askin’ me?’ Bubber said. ‘You was closer to him than I was.’
‘It was plumb dark all around. Somebody could’a’ snook up behind him and crowned him while he was talkin’ to me. But I didn’t hear a sound. Say—I better catch air. This thing’s puttin’ me on the well-known spot, ain’t it?’
‘All right, dumbo. Run away and prove you done it. Wouldn’t that be a bright move?’
Dr Archer said, ‘The wisest thing for you men to do is stay here and help solve this puzzle. You’d be called in anyway—you found the body, you see. Running away looks as if you were—well—running away.’
‘What’d I tell you?’ said Bubber.
‘All right,’ growled Jinx. ‘But I can’t see how they could blame anybody for runnin’ away from this place. Graveyard’s a playground side o’ this.’
CHAPTER II
OF the ten Negro members of Harlem’s police force to be promoted from the rank of patrolman to that of detective, Perry Dart was one of the first. As if the city administration had wished to leave no doubt in the public mind as to its intention in the matter, they had chosen, in him, a man who could not have been under any circumstances mistaken for aught but a Negro; or perhaps, as Dart’s intimates insisted, they had chosen him because his generously pigmented skin rendered him invisible in the dark, a conceivably great advantage to a detective who did most of his work at night. In any case, the somber hue of his integument in no wise reflected the complexion of his brain, which was bright, alert, and practical within such territory as it embraced. He was a Manhattanite by birth, had come up through the public schools, distinguished himself in athletics at the high school he attended, and, having himself grown up with the black colony, knew Harlem from lowest dive to loftiest temple. He was rather small of stature, with unusually thin, fine features, which falsely accentuated the slightness of his slender but wiry body.
It was Perry Dart’s turn for a case when Bubber Brown’s call came in to the station, and to it Dart, with four uniformed men, was assigned.
Five minutes later he was in the entrance of Thirteen West 130th Street, greeting Dr Archer, whom he knew. His men, one black, two brown, and one yellow, loomed in the hallway about him large and ominous, but there was no doubt as to who was in command.
‘Hello, Dart,’ the physician responded to his greeting. ‘I’m glad you’re on this one. It’ll take a little active cerebration.’
‘Come on down, doc,’ the little detective grinned with a flash of white teeth. ‘You’re talking to a cop now, not a college professor. What’ve you got?’
‘A man that’ll tell no tales.’ The physician motioned to the undertaker’s front room. ‘He’s in there.’
Dart turned to his men. ‘Day, you cover the front of the place. Green, take the roof and cover the back yard. Johnson, search the house and get everybody you find into one room. Leave a light everywhere you go if possible—I’ll want to check up. Brady, you stay with me.’ Then he turned back and followed the doctor into the undertaker’s parlour. They stepped over to the sofa, which was in a shallow alcove formed by the front bay windows of the room.
‘How’d he get it, doc?’ he asked.
‘To tell you the truth, I haven’t the slightest idea.’
‘Somebody crowned him,’ Bubber helpfully volunteered.
‘Has anybody ast you anything?’ Jinx inquired gruffly.
Dart bent over the victim.
The physician said:
‘There is a scalp wound all right. See it?’
‘Yea—now that you mentioned it.’
‘But that didn’t kill him.’
‘No? How do you know it didn’t, doc?’
‘That wound is too slight. It’s not in a spot that would upset any vital centre. And there isn’t any fracture under it.’
‘Couldn’t a man be killed by a blow on the head that didn’t fracture his skull?’
‘Well—yes. If it fell just so that its force was concentrated on certain parts of the brain. I’ve never heard of such a case, but it’s conceivable. But this blow didn’t land in the right place for that. A blow at this point would cause death only by producing intracranial haemorrhage—’
‘Couldn’t you manage to say it in English, doc?’
‘Sure. He’d have to bleed inside his head.’
‘That’s more like it.’
‘The resulting accumulation of blood would raise the intra—the pressure inside his head to such a point that vital centres would be paralysed. The power would be shut down. His heart and lungs would quit cold. See? Just like turning off a light.’
‘O.K. if you say so. But how do you know he didn’t bleed inside his head?’
‘Well, there aren’t but two things that would cause him to.’
‘I’m learning, doc. Go on.’
‘Brittle arteries with no give in them—no elasticity. If he had them, he wouldn’t even have to be hit—just excitement might shoot up the blood pressure and pop an artery. See what I mean?’
‘That’s apoplexy, isn’t it?’
‘Right. And the other thing would be a blow heavy enough to fracture the skull and so rupture the blood vessels beneath. Now this man is about your age or mine—somewhere in his middle thirties. His arteries are soft—feel his wrists. For a blow to kill this man outright, it would have had to fracture his skull.’
‘Hot damn!’ whispered Bubber admiringly. ‘Listen to the doc do his stuff!’
‘And his skull isn’t fractured?’ said Dart.
‘Not if probing means anything.’
‘Don’t tell me you’ve X-rayed him too?’ grinned the detective.
‘Any fracture that would kill this man outright wouldn’t have to be X-rayed.’
‘Then you’re sure the blow didn’t kill him?’
‘Not by itself, it didn’t.’
‘Do you mean that maybe he was killed first and hit afterwards?’
‘Why would anybody do that?’ Dr Archer asked.
‘To make it seem like violence when it was really something else.’
‘I see. But no. If this man had been dead when the blow was struck, he wouldn’t have bled at all. Circulation would already have stopped.’
‘That’s right.’
‘But of one thing I’m sure: that wound is evidence of too slight a blow to kill.’
‘Specially,’ interpolated Bubber, ‘a hard-headed cullud man—’
‘There you go ag’in,’ growled his lanky companion.
‘He’s right,’ the doctor said. ‘It takes a pretty hefty impact to bash in a skull. With a padded weapon,’ he went on, ‘a fatal blow would have had to be crushing to make even so slight a scalp wound as this. That’s out. And a hard, unpadded weapon that would break the scalp just slightly like this, with only a little bleeding and without even cracking the skull, could at most have delivered only a stunning blow, not a fatal one. Do you see what I mean?’
‘Sure. You mean this man was just stunned by the blow and actually died from something else.’
‘That’s the way it looks to me.’
‘Well—anyhow he’s dead and the circumstances indicate at least a possibility of death by violence. That justifies notifying us, all right. And it makes it a case for the medical examiner. But we really don’t know that he’s been killed, do we?’
‘No. Not yet.’
‘All the more a case for the medical examiner, then. Is there a phone here, doc? Good. Brady, go back there and call the precinct. Tell ’em to get the medical examiner here double time and to send me four more men—doesn’t matter who. Now tell me, doc. What time did this man go out of the picture?’
The physician smiled.
‘Call Meridian 7-1212.’
‘O.K., doc. But approximately?’
‘Well, he was certainly alive an hour ago. Perhaps even half an hour ago. Hardly less.’
‘How long have you been here?’
‘About fifteen
minutes.’
‘Then he must have been killed—if he was killed—say anywhere from five to thirty-five minutes before you got here?’
‘Yes.’
Bubber, the insuppressible, commented to Jinx, ‘Damn! That’s trimming it down to a gnat’s heel, ain’t it?’ But Jinx only responded, ‘Fool, will you hush?’
‘Who discovered him—do you know?’
‘These two men.’
‘Both of you?’ Dart asked the pair.
‘No, suh,’ Bubber answered. ‘Jinx here discovered the man. I discovered the doctor.’
Dart started to question them further, but just then Johnson, the officer who had been directed to search the house, reappeared.
‘Been all over,’ he reported. ‘Only two people in the place. Women—both scared green.’
‘All right,’ the detective said. ‘Take these two men up to the same room. I’ll be up presently.’
Officer Brady returned. ‘Medical examiner’s comin’ right up.’
The detective said, ‘Was he on this sofa when you got here, doc?’
‘No. He was upstairs in his—his consultation room, I guess you’d call it. Queer place. Dark as sin. Sitting slumped down in a chair. The light was impossible. You see, I thought I’d been called to a patient, not a corpse. So I had him brought where I knew I could examine him. Of course, if I had thought of murder—’
‘Never mind. There’s no law against your moving him or examining him, even if you had suspected murder—as long as you weren’t trying to hide anything. People think there’s some such law, but there isn’t.’
‘The medical examiner’ll probably be sore, though.’
‘Let him. We’ve got more than the medical examiner to worry about.’
‘Yes. You’ve got a few questions to ask.’
‘And answer. How, when, where, why, and who? Oh, I’m great at questions. But the answers—’
‘Well, we’ve the “when” narrowed down to a half-hour period.’ Dr Archer glanced at his watch. ‘That would be between ten-thirty and eleven. And “where” shouldn’t be hard to verify—right here in his own chair, if those two fellows are telling it straight. “Why” and “who”—those’ll be your little red wagon. “How” right now is mine. I can’t imagine—’
The Conjure-Man Dies Page 2