by Frances
“Take it easy, mister,” one of the policemen said. “Everything’s going to be all right.”
At that, Dr. Preson laughed more loudly than he had spoken; he laughed shrilly, almost hysterically.
“I tell you, Charlie,” the first midget said. “This square is nuts. That’s what it is. Nuts.”
Detective Vern Anstey finished typing his report, looked it over, sighed deeply, and sent it along. He’d have a sandwich—although whether as a late lunch or an early dinner it would be hard to say—and get on with his part of it. He started out of the West Twentieth Street station house and encountered Acting Captain William Weigand, also on his way out. Anstey said, “Hi’ya, lieutenant” and then, “sorry, keep forgetting you’re a captain now.”
Bill Weigand told Anstey it didn’t matter. Bill said, “By the way, about that transfer. I’m doing what I can, but the inspector—” Bill ended that with a shrug. Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O’Malley was known to one and all.
“Thanks,” Anstey said. “Thought for a while this afternoon I’d worked you up a case. Overdose.” He paused outside the door. “Screwy one,” he said. “One of those things but—well, it’s not your worry.”
“Right,” Bill said. “However, if it’s screwy enough.” he hesitated. “Anybody named North mixed up in it?” he asked, as casually as the topic permitted.
Detective Vern Anstey said he hadn’t heard of anyone named North. People were named Preson. An old guy some crackpot was badgering; his sister, who had, apparently, run accidentally into something meant for brother. But now—
“Well,” Anstey said, walking along toward the diner down the street, “it comes out attempted murder, I suppose. Which is a bit more than we bargained for.”
“Preson?” Bill Weigand said. “Not Preston?”
“That’s right,” Anstey said, and stopped and asked, “Why?”
“A scientist?” Weigand asked him. “Let’s see—mammalogist? Write a book about prehistoric animals, d’you know?”
“That’s the guy,” Anstey said. “Why?”
“Well,” Bill Weigand said. “Well. Oh—a friend of mine published the book.” Bill paused. “Friend of mine named North,” Bill Weigand said. “I think I’ll have a cup of coffee with you, Anstey.”
Anstey talked while the counterman made hamburgers, interrupted himself to eat them with enthusiasm, and talked again. He began at the beginning, with tree surgeons and bushelmen. “So, it was just one of those things,” he said, and Bill Weigand nodded. “Sometimes,” Anstey said, “you get to feeling that half the city’s nuts.” “Right,” Bill Weigand said.
But then came this last thing—these last two things. There was no reason to think that they were not part of the pattern, the work of the same crackpot. But when you came to phenobarbital, and a good deal of phenobarbital, it was no longer merely an irritating thing.
“The whole bottle was full of it,” Anstey said, and then explained what bottle he was talking about. “Or,” he said, “the bottle this dame is talking about. Preson’s sister.”
Miss Laura Preson probably was, by now, out of the hospital to which she had been taken. She had come out of it quickly. She had not, the doctors said, got much of the stuff—only a little more, apparently, than many people took every night at bedtime. Perhaps no more at all; since Miss Preson was not an habitual taker of barbiturates, a little might have gone far enough.
“So that was all right,” Anstey said. “Of course, there were the midgets, but we got rid of them. Fast.” He took a drink of coffee. “It would be a hell of a thing to be a midget,” he said.
“Right,” Bill said. “You talked to Miss Preson?”
Anstey had, as soon as the doctors permitted. Her story was a simple one. She had been downtown and, forgetting that Wednesday was her brother’s day at the Institute, gone around to his hotel, thinking they might have lunch together. She had asked for him at the desk and, when Orpheus Preson—“Orpheus, for God’s sake,” Anstey said—proved to be out, had identified herself and been let into his apartment. The clerk had used his judgment, and Anstey was not inclined to question it. “For one thing,” he said, “there’s quite a bit of resemblance. For another—well, nobody would pick Miss Preson as somebody up to monkey business. Anyway, she’s fifty or so.”
Anstey, Bill Weigand guessed, was around thirty. Fifty still seemed a long ways off; by achieving fifty, one passed beyond the realm of monkey business. Of course, there were fifties and fifties, and Anstey had talked with Dr. Preson’s sister.
“Right,” Bill Weigand said.
Miss Preson had gone to the apartment at about twelve-thirty, perhaps a little earlier. She had waited for fifteen or twenty minutes, and begun to feel hungry.
“Had breakfast early, she said,” Anstey told Bill Weigand. “They live up in Riverdale.”
The connection was not instantly apparent. Then it was. Riverdale, although it is part of the Bronx, has rural aspects. In the country, people got up, and hence had breakfast, earlier than in the city. That was Anstey’s connection; Anstey was very urban.
“Right,” Bill said.
Miss Preson had gone to her brother’s kitchenette and to her brother’s icebox. She had found a bottle of milk there, poured herself a glass and, fifteen minutes or so later, had become very sleepy and gone to sleep. She had awakened, very surprised, in St. Vincent’s Hospital.
“The bottle was still there,” Anstey said. “We took it along, naturally. Full of phenobarbital. If anybody drank all of it, he wouldn’t wake up.”
“Quart bottle?” Bill asked.
It had been. Anstey seemed puzzled for a moment. Then he nodded.
“Hadn’t thought of that,” he said. “You wouldn’t figure anybody’s drinking a quart of milk at one time.”
“Right,” Bill said.
“That fits, of course,” Anstey said. “It’s still the same screwy business. Whoever put the stuff in the milk didn’t plan to do Preson in. Just to knock him out for a while.”
Bill merely nodded.
“For one thing,” Anstey said, “it wasn’t the old boy’s milk. So he says, anyway. He does drink milk—drinks warm milk every night. Finished off what was in the only bottle he had early this morning sometime, after he got through working on the bones. I told you about those damned bones?”
“Yes,” Bill said.
“So,” Anstey said, and finished his coffee, and pushed the empty cup toward the counterman, “so—somebody brought him a nice fresh bottle of milk, filled with nice fresh phenobarbital. But not, probably, planning to kill him. Too much milk and, of course, there are better things than phenobarbital. That is—worse things.”
It was, Bill Weigand pointed out, apparently very easy to get in and out of Preson’s rooms at the hotel—to get in and out unnoticed.
“One elevator,” Anstey said. “The desk’s off at the other side of the lobby, and kind of around a corner. The stairs are handy.” He drank from the new cup of coffee. “It’s a pretty run-down place,” he said. “Clerk, girl at a switchboard—she’s clear out of sight of everything. One elevator operator, on in the daytime. The thing’s automatic and there’s nobody on it at night. They don’t make much effort to keep people from going upstairs if they want to. But what hotel does, if you come to that? Anyway, I don’t suppose many of the people who live there have a lot worth stealing.”
Bill Weigand nodded again. He asked whether Dr. Preson didn’t lock his door.
“Sure,” Anstey said. “And half the keys that fit closet doors would unlock it. They do put Yales on if asked, but Preson didn’t ask. I suppose he figured nobody would want a lot of old bones.”
“Right,” Bill said. “About the midgets?”
The arrival of the midgets, although rather dramatically inopportune, was merely another part of the pattern. There had been an advertisement that morning in the New York Times. It had carried Dr. Preson’s name and address. It had—
“Here, read it,” Anste
y said, and produced a clipping from his billfold. “Under ‘Help Wanted, Male.’” He handed it to Bill Weigand. It read:
“MIDGETS. Five midgets needed connection product exploitation. Temporary; unusual remuneration. Apply O. Preson, Greeley Apartment Hotel. West Twenty-second Street.”
The first two midgets had applied while Dr. Preson had been attempting to awaken his sister. Six more had applied later. All eight, incidentally, had been incensed; one had threatened action for damages.
“Rather academic phrasing,” Bill said, and handed the clipping back to Anstey. “Why not just ‘high pay,’ if that’s what was meant?”
“Well,” Anstey said, “he’s a professor or—but no, he didn’t put it in, did he? Could have been another professor. You think—”
“I don’t know,” Bill Weigand said. “You’ll have to try to trace it down now, of course.”
That Anstey knew. Had he not, as a good policeman, known it already, the captain in charge of the precinct detective detail would have informed him. The captain had anyway, if needlessly. As soon as Anstey finished his coffee—which he then did—he was going up to the Times to see what he could find out. He’d start with the main desk in Times Square, but he was not sanguine. The chances were a hundred to one that the advertisement had been telephoned in or, if not that, mailed in.
“Even crackpots have that much sense,” Anstey said, and slid off the stool.
Acting Captain William Weigand of Homicide West walked with Detective Vern Anstey to the door. Anstey said, “Well, thanks for listening, lieu—captain.”
Bill Weigand said, “O.K., Vern” and started to leave the other policeman, and then hesitated. He turned back.
“I’m going uptown anyway,” he said. “I’ll drop you off.”
It was swell of him, and he was told so. He had been going north anyway, Bill repeated, and then realized why he had used that word to indicate direction—and, at the same time, why he had offered to drop Anstey. It was a funny thing about the Norths, Bill thought, walking with Anstey toward his parked Buick. They did get into the damnedest things. (As Sergeant Mullins said, the screwiest things.) It would be like them to be involved with a mammalogist and old bones—and midgets and bushelmen, if you came to that.
So, in the end, Bill Weigand did not actually drop Anstey. He went with him to the main want-ad desk of the New York Times, and listened while Anstey identified himself and produced the clipping; waited while the source was checked from filled-out blanks of the night before; was as astonished as Anstey when the blank was turned up, the appeal for midgets typed on it. It had been handed across the counter; the receiving clerk had initialed it. The receiving clerk could be identified, and was. Her name was Alice—Alice Farbmann. She was not on duty; her address, on the upper West Side, was available. Anstey took the blank and the address. Bill Weigand took Anstey, north again, in the Buick.
Their luck held. Alice Farbmann was at home; she was also an alert young woman; she also remembered the advertisement.
“Of course,” she said. “I asked him, were they for kites?”
Bill Weigand blinked. Anstey, however, remembered. The summer before, some press agent had made an attempt to fly midgets from kites in Central Park, an attempt the police had rendered abortive. The press agent (whose purposes remained obscure throughout) had had no permit to fly midgets from kites in Central Park. He had tried Prospect Park in Brooklyn, where it was found that the flying of midgets would create a disturbance.
“He said, ‘Of course not,’” Miss Farbmann told Anstey, while Bill Weigand listened. “He said, ‘This is entirely legitimate, young woman.’”
“He?” Anstey repeated. “Do you happen to remember what he looked like?”
“Sure,” Miss Farbmann said. “A little man. Red faced. Sort of jumpy. He wore glasses. Funny-looking glasses. He had a muffler up around his chin but I could see most of his face.”
“Oh,” Anstey said. He produced a photograph of Dr. Preson. “This man?” he asked.
She looked; then she nodded. “That’s him,” she said. “He had this muffler over his chin, but that’s him, all right.” She nodded. “Preson,” she said. “That was his name. It’s on the blank. It had to be. That’s Mr. Preson.”
“Yes,” Anstey said, “I guess it is, all right. Well—thanks, Miss Farbmann. Probably nothing’ll come of it.”
“Look,” Miss Farbmann said, “did something happen to the midgets?”
Anstey reassured her. Nothing had happened to the midgets.
“Just checking up on something,” he told Miss Farbmann, and she was satisfied, since it was obviously the task of the police to check up on things. She went back to washing stockings, and Anstey and Bill Weigand went back to the Buick. On the way, Anstey reported that he would be damned. He said that, still, he didn’t get it.
“He was putting these damn things in himself,” Anstey said. “Wearing his ‘funny-looking’ glasses. He was the crackpot all along. What do you know?”
Bill Weigand didn’t, except what was obvious. Nobody was trying to drive Dr. Orpheus Preson insane. Nobody needed to. Dr. Preson had made it on his own.
“The labels were off the bones,” Anstey said. “Where’d that get him?”
Bill didn’t know. He said he didn’t know.
“And the stuff in the milk?”
Again, there was no ready answer. But the actions of the insane need no reason, are susceptible to no answer. Presumably, Preson had planned to drink the milk himself, himself succumb to the barbiturate, presumably be discovered in drugged sleep, and thus add new, and more dramatic, lines to the picture he was himself painting of a man persecuted.
“A crackpot,” Anstey said. “God, what a crackpot. He ought to be locked up.”
“Perhaps,” Bill said. “I suppose he might get dangerous, although so far he seems merely to be giving himself a headache.”
“His sister,” Anstey pointed out.
Hadn’t been seriously harmed, or put in much danger, Bill pointed out. However—He shrugged. It wasn’t his problem. It was Anstey’s problem, and the problem of the precinct and, more than of either, of Preson’s relatives. Bill Weigand drove home, leaving Anstey with his share of the problem.
Bill told his wife, who had greenish eyes, and moved almost as lithely as a cat, and was named Dorian, about the odd case of Dr. Orpheus Preson, mammalogist and crackpot, over a cocktail.
But he did not need to tell her all of it. She had lunched with Pamela North, and had heard a good deal already, although, of course, nothing of the sleeping sister or the animated midgets. Dorian was able to tell Bill that Dr. Preson was finishing, or ought to be finishing, the second volume of his book about ancient animals; to tell him that Jerry North was apparently counting on it.
“Of course,” Dorian said, “Ezra Pound got a poetry prize even though they did have to lock him up. So I suppose Dr. Preson could still write about mammals?”
But she did not sound convinced, and Bill was not. Pound was, after all, a poet to begin with, Bill pointed out. Dr. Preson wrote in prose.
“I think,” Dorian said, “you’d better tell Jerry what’s happened, don’t you?”
Bill Weigand agreed, and reached for the telephone. The result of that was cocktails in the Algonquin lounge and dinner afterward, Norths and Weigands again together.
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Copyright © 1961 Frances and Richard Lockridge
Cover design by Andy Ross
ISBN: 978-1-5040-3135-6
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