The Supernatural Murders
Page 21
Murder cases have a way of enlisting persons with Bunyanesque or Happy-Family-like names, the role-appropriateness of which would never be allowed of the names of characters in crime novels. One thinks of Mr Sherlock, the serendipitous Nemesis in the first Brighton Trunk Case; of Mr Death, the holder of the vital clue in the Müller case; of Chief Superintendent Proven Sharpe, the solver of several English West Country cases; of –
The three association-names are sufficent as provers of the point; a long list would only be handy for a game of Trivial Pursuit for keen readers of murder stories. But such a list would be deficient without the name of the elderly doctor who refused to give it to the reporter for the Times. He was a Cook (Roland of that ilk) – and of the too many extra-investigative cooks in the Elwell case, he meddled most influentially.
Considering his refrain, it is understandable why he preferred to remain anonymous. Supposing that he was not an egomaniac, even any of those would have shown a certain shyness if they had had the temerity to say what he said, which was this:
1. Harrap, London, 1987; St Martin’s Press, New York, 1988.
Charles Norris [the Chief Medical Examiner of New York City] ought to be sacked for having failed to do the most important thing that should have been done at the autopsy, viz the photographing of Elwell’s eyeballs – for it was a well-known fact that dead retinas retained photographic images of the last thing they jointly saw. Dr Norris needn’t have taken a photograph of the photographs if Elwell had been shot from behind; but as Elwell had been shot by someone in his full view, a pair of pictures of the murderer had been available for anyone with a camera suited to taking snaps of dead eyeballs to photograph, having remembered to load the camera with ultrasensitive film that, when developed by an ultrasensitive developer, would reveal what the retinas had retained. There might still be time to remedy Dr Norris’s sin of omission. The body should be exhumed – at dead of night would be best, since there was no telling whether or not eyeballs grown accustomed to the darkness within a coffin had their images wiped out by unexpected light.
All but one of the reporters who did stints in West Seventieth Street wished that the oracular Dr Cook would go away – or, better still, bequeath his eyeballs to researchers at Bellevue Hospital, and instantly drop dead. The reporter who had no such wish worked for the Times. Presumably he was not the crowd-counting one. Whichever of them he was, he seems to have visited his newspaper’s morgue, looked in the drawer marked E for Eyeballs, and there found a cutting that suggested that someone in the Sûreté, unrelated to Jules Verne, had, if the translator had got it right, commented on the possibility of what Dr Cook was broadcasting as ophthalmic fact to visitors to West Seventieth Street, however many of them there were. Consequently, the Times published an article, ‘How Paris Would Treat the Elwell Case’, that contained implicit criticism of Dr Norris for having neglected to photograph, stare into, or even lift the lids of Elwell’s all-revealing eyes.
The day after the article appeared, John Dooling [an assistant district attorney who had jumped on the Elwell publicity bandwagon] was placed in an awkward position by yet another of the Times reporters, who, catching him in the presence of detectives, asked him to comment on the article. Not wishing to speak ill of the produce of a journalist – particularly not of anything by a journalist employed by the Times – Dooling temporised, muttering uncomplimentarily about the French police but raising his voice to say that the account of their methods had interested him ‘very much’. So grown in confidence as to be willing to admit that he didn’t know everything, he said that he knew nothing about the retina-retention notion.
A detective butted in: ‘That is a pure invention of fiction – an absurdity of short-story writers.’
Shocked by such heresy against the press, Dooling sought to distance himself from it. ‘Well, I am going to find out about the theory,’ he announced. ‘I will speak to expert photographers and medical men on that subject.’ Turning to Captain Carey [the leader of one of the investigative groups], he asked if Elwell’s eyes had been photographed –
‘and the Captain only smiled.’
Dr Norris, when quizzed by reporters, put Carey’s smile into angry words, saying that even if the notion held water, which it didn’t, it was irrelevant to the Elwell case: Elwell had not died for some time after being shot, and, while lingering, may have opened his eyes, and must have had them opened – by the ambulance surgeon or by a hospital nurse or intern, or by all of them; and perhaps others. So if there had been any ‘last image’ on his retinas, it would not have been of his murderer but of one or more ministering angels.
In the original publishings of the above, there is a footnote. Here it is, made an addendum:
The eyes are – or, at any rate, used to be – favoured secondary targets of gunmen employed by Mafiosi to ‘wipe out’ people deemed to be offensive; but that may have had a pour encourager les autres inspiration as opposed to a superstitious self-protective one.
Acknowledgements and Sources
Other than those given in the text: ‘A Slaying on Saint Valentine’s Day’, ‘The Widow of Hardscrabble’, ‘The Well and the Dream’ and ‘An Astrological Postscript’ are published by permission of the respective authors. ‘Calling Madame Isherwood …’ was first published in Vanity Fair (USA), June 1928. ‘A Surfeit of Spirits’, which first appeared, slightly shorter, in Master Detective, is published by permission of the compiler. ‘Amityville Revisited’ is published by permission of the author. ‘The Ghost of Sergeant Davies’, from Twelve Scots Trials (Green, Edinburgh, 1913), is published by permission of Mrs Marjorie Roughead. ‘Devils in the Flesh’, from The Sex War and Others (Owen, London, 1973), is published by permission of Mrs Margaret Heppenstall. ‘The Hand of God or Somebody’, parts of which first appeared in The Black Museum (by Jonathan Goodman and Bill Waddell [Curator]; Harrap, London, 1987), is published by permission of the author. ‘The Gutteridge Murder’ is from Volume II of Crime and Its Detection (Gresham, London, 1931).