The Todd Dossier

by Robert Bloch

  “You’re going to have to accept it,” I said. “In the first place I’m not indentured. In the second place I can’t practice medicine. Not now, not after what’s happened.” He looked at me for a while. “What exactly has happened?” he said finally. “You know damned well what I think happened,” I said. “I can’t prove it. I can’t lay it out on this table, Step A, Step B. But I can’t just forget it, either.”

  Walter put the scalpel down on top of the letter. “What kind of a man do you think Hollis Todd is?” he asked me. Very flat, no emotion in his voice, as if Todd was somebody one of us had just met, maybe a new resident whose work we were watching. “I think he’s a man who wants to stay alive more than he wants anything else in the world,” I said.

  Continued Extract From the Statement of Eva Veillier

  . . . So what he was telling me was that we were not going to be together anymore. He was telling me that we were not going to sit in the sun in Sardinia, never going to—to do anything together again. That is not what he was saying into the tape recorder but that is what he meant. I knew what he was telling me. I sat there by his bed while he talked into the tape recorder and we had hit some rough weather and the plane was lurching but even then he never took his eyes from mine and I knew what he was saying.

  Q. You weren’t shocked, Mrs. Villier?

  A. I—you understand very little.

  Q. I’m simply asking what your reaction was.

  A. My reaction?

  Q. Your reaction to what Hollis Todd was committing to tape.

  A. I don’t know—I don’t know any words to tell you that. I’ll try to tell you one time what it was like, no more. During that half hour on the plane I was closer to Hollis than ever before. I loved Hollis. I knew Hollis. I knew what he had to do.

  Q. You felt no need to stop him?

  A. I told you. I loved him. People you love, you let them do what they have to do.

  Q. Did Mr. Todd say anything to you before you left the cabin?

  A. He asked me to send Dr. Mantle in to check on him in an hour. That would be at two o’clock. And he told me—he told me that I would be all right.

  Q. What did you say?

  A. I said nothing at all. There was no need.

  Continued Extract From the Statement of Walter Geiger, M.D.

  . . . “Everybody wants to stay alive,” I said to Charlie Everett. But I wasn’t sure what I thought myself. It costs me a great deal to admit that, to admit I wasn’t sure. A surgeon can be dead wrong and still carry off an operation, but the minute he stops being sure, then right or wrong he’s not much of a surgeon anymore. You might say well, we weren’t talking about an operative procedure. But surgeons don’t stop thinking like surgeons when the operating-room lights go off, or they shouldn’t. So this uncertainty was to me a—a frightening condition. There was a moment there in that empty surgery when I put it all up to Charlie as if I were a patient. “We’ll go to the police if you want,” I said, the way a patient says he’ll have the operation. “Is that what you want me to say?” It was a long time before Charlie answered me. “We can’t,” he said finally. “I’m no closer to definite proof than I was the night I came to your house. It’s still a question of what I think, not of what I can prove. And if I think wrong, and we open this thing up—well.” Well, indeed.

  Q. Well, what? What exactly did he mean?

  A. He meant that the consequences would be unspeakable. He was correct. They would be.

  Q. What did you say then, Doctor?

  A. I told him that I wanted him to stay. I told him that I believed it was his duty to stay. I said that I wanted to believe he was wrong about Hollis Todd. But I told him too that I had thought a great deal, ever since we first dreamed of transplanting the human heart, about the rapacious ones, the takers. I wasn’t lying to him, I had thought about it. But I had thought about it only in the abstract. There are always takers, people who take what they want, no matter the cost to others. They take in order to extend their own territory, their own power. Now we had given them the opportunity to take in order to extend life itself. I told Charlie that beyond the most elementary precautions I had no idea what we could do about this. But I also told him that the gift he had in his power to give was not available to the takers alone. I reminded him that there were a couple of children down on the pediatric floor right now, waiting for the day one of us would come and explain how it would feel to go to sleep for a little while and wake up with a new heart. I reminded him of a lot of things we had accomplished together. I am not a sentimental man. But I believe in what we do. I wanted Charlie to believe in it too. And finally he said he would stay, a while.

  Q. That is all that was said?

  A. It was well past noon then and I asked Charlie if he wanted lunch. He said not. Neither did I, for that matter. I guess we were both in the same mood when we left surgery.

  Q. How would you describe that mood?

  A. I would scarcely describe it as elation.

  Continued Extract From the Statement of Charles Everett, M.D.

  Walter gave me back the letter and I took it and tore it into little pieces. “Thanks, Charlie,” he said. For the first time since I had known him, he looked old. We walked down the corridor together, and it was as though we had just lost a patient in there on the table. Only it wasn’t a patient we’d lost, it was a part of ourselves. At least that’s the way I felt.

  Miss Rosen was waiting outside my office as we came by. She had a package for me. “It’s from Mr. Todd,” she said. “A messenger just delivered it.” I guess he arranged to have it sent from the airport just before he took off.

  We went into my office. I didn’t want to open the package. “You might as well,” Walter said. There was just a card inside and taped to it was that old Greek coin Todd always carried, the lucky piece. I turned the card over. A message was written on the back. It’s strange seeing someone’s handwriting for the first time after you’ve known them for a while. I never would have thought Todd would write that way, small, precise, like a girl. “Everett,” the message read. “I didn’t count on you making my luck run out. But I guess I had some extra time I had no right to, and perhaps the coin gave me that. I hope you have as good luck with it as I did, if you don’t press it too hard.” It didn’t get through to me at first. I didn’t understand. I showed the card to Walter. The color drained out of his face. “My God,” he said. “He’s killed himself.”

  Continued Extract From the Statement of Eva Veillier

  . . . At two o’clock exactly I went back to Hollis’ cabin. Crosby and Dr. Mantle were having lunch. I had never intended to send Dr. Mantle. It was my business, Hollis’ and mine, I would do it. And I opened the door. And I cried out. I knew in my heart that he would be dead but still I cried out. And before Crosby and Dr. Mantle got back there I took the tape, as he had told me to do, and put it in my bag. And I stayed there with him. I held onto my bag and I stayed with him all the way to New York.

  Transcript of a Tape Recording of the Voice of Hollis Todd

  This is Hollis Todd speaking. What I am about to say is entirely voluntary on my part. Voluntary but, I believe, necessary under the circumstances. Because the question will be asked, the inevitable question. Why did I do it?

  There are so many possible answers, and most of them are wrong. I suppose the gentlemen of the press will paw through my library, and when they see all those volumes of Nietzsche they will say I was a Nietzschean. The ironic thing is that I always thought Nietzsche was a lot of hogwash. I’ve never celebrated the triumphs of the mind. I’m interested in doers. I’m more interested in Von Braun than I am in Einstein. I’m a doer.

  I am not rationalizing. I am dealing, as I have always done, in cold fact. In my time on this planet I have enhanced life as we know it. I have not made money for the sake of money. I could have built mobile homes and become more wealthy with less effort. But does a trailer fortune dignify one’s existence? Does a ski resort or a frozen custard pie e
mpire? My money has pushed back the frontiers of science and space and medicine. I am not a Christian in the conventional sense. God is just a word, a word that to me signifies the unknown. All my life I have in a sense attacked God, in that I have tried to carve away at the unknown. To narrow the limits of the unknown and broaden the horizon of knowledge, to take from God and give to man. I wanted more time to continue this task, a task that few seem capable of. And time was running out for me. It was as simple as that.

  Think of the resources I have at my command. Think how simple it would have been for me to pick any man suitable to my special needs. But I am not a wastrel. I am nothing if not efficient. What I wanted was to perpetuate my own life in the most efficient way, with the least possible suffering to others. I know it is much to ask, but grant me that, just that one small thing. With all the choices which might conceivably be open to me, I made sure to select a man who was living out his own death. A walking corpse—not even walking, but already confined to a wheelchair—a man already doomed, with just six months left to live.

  Some people call euthanasia murder. I call it euthanasia and nothing more. We abort life now, we kill a foetus, and we don’t call it murder. I am willing to be accused of taking Anton Polanski’s life. But I am not willing to be called a murderer. I have said that I don’t celebrate the thinkers, but it is the thinkers who will argue and codify this—this distinction.

  My error was that because of the nature of my condition I had to leave it to others to carry out my plan. Only a fool thinks all men are equal. I believe all men should have equality of opportunity, but biologically, chemically, metaphysically, some men are superior to others. I don’t mean to imply that if I had had total responsibility for perpetuating my life I would have inevitably succeeded. There might always have been an Everett.

  I am sorry I didn’t get an opportunity to really know him. He’s a strange young man, troubled, rigid. I don’t think he would agree with my code, but I would have enjoyed arguing with him. It’s odd to realize this now. Perhaps I really do appreciate the exercise of the mind more than I thought.

  Everett, I’m sure, would point out what he would call the flaw in my thinking. The inevitable after-effects, the loose ends, the unknotted strands, the clutter. It’s part of my nature, I suppose, that I can only think of the Sandozes now as clutter. I cannot bear clutter. Would I have permitted this clutter? I would like to think not. McCullen was such a fool. It was so unnecessary to kill them. But don’t think, please, that I am trying to abdicate any of the ultimate responsibility. I was willing to live with the death of Anton Polanski. It is the clutter I cannot live with. The clutter, and the possibility that the violence would spiral. You could have been next, Dr. Everett. Walter Geiger. Your families, God knows who else.

  So either way I suppose it had to end as it did. What McCullen perpetrated in panic, out of his own selfish fears, I would have been forced into doing to put an end to the continuing clutter. It is the clutter I cannot live with. It is against the very pattern of my life. Even this strange heart I have beating inside me will not permit me to change this pattern.

  And so I reject this heart. I regret that I am rejecting, with it, all the skill and genius that went into giving it to me. Some will say I reject it because I am afraid for myself if Crosby McCullen should crack, but that is not true. I fear nothing, least of all his cowardice. Others may think, when they discover the state of my financial affairs, that I could not bear the possibility of ruin. It is true that Crosby and certain people under him mismanaged things while I was unable to guide the course of Todd Enterprises these past months. This, I suppose, is one of the reasons Crosby was so desperately anxious that I should live—knowing I could, once my physical energies returned, pull the chestnuts out of the fire. I know this too. I would be capable of salvaging the business. But to what end? So that the incompetents, the McCullens and the Mantles, could go on to further clutter? This too I must reject.

  The thinkers will call it a moral rejection. Morality—it’s a word I distrust. I remember once, years ago, driving on the floor of Death Valley. There was an automobile accident on the road. Strange that I should think of this particular instance, an automobile accident—a real accident, not an arranged one. But I recall it now, and vividly. The driver was killed and his companion, a girl, I think, seriously injured. The nearest hospital was perhaps a hundred miles or so away. They drove the girl to the hospital, through the desert at night, in the back of a station wagon. There was an old country nurse who drove the station wagon and she let her husband out there on that barren, lonely desert all through the night with the body of the driver. I remember asking her why. “You can’t just leave a body on the highway,” she said. “It’s immoral.” It was the one time I didn’t distrust the word. I knew what she meant. The coyotes would come in and eat the flesh, and we owe something to our dead. That’s the kind of morality I can understand. In a way, I think Dr. Everett understands it, too. I hope he does.

  We are, in a way, two sides of the same coin, Everett and myself. The coin has been tossed. Not to see which of us wins and which of us loses, because we are both a part of the coin—opposites, perhaps, but of the same metal. No, the coin has been tossed and the sole result is a decision. A decision which is my privilege to make. A decision to end the game . . .

  Continued Extract From the Statement of Charles Everett, M.D.

  It was a nightmare with the newspapers and the television. I guess that someday it will end, that people will forget. Medicine is just another form of human endeavor, the good and the bad. It’s the good I want to believe in. I think I can.

  Natalie believes it too. She was there that day after it was over. She was there to meet me and we went home together.

  The above statements were taken and supplemental material compiled between December 11th and December 16th this year. After examination of the evidence it is the recommendation of the undersigned to the District Attorney’s Office of Los Angeles, County of Los Angeles, that proceedings be instituted before the Grand Jury calling for the indictment of one Crosby Peter McCullen for violation of Section 182 California Penal Code (conspiracy to commit murder) and two counts of Section 189 California Penal Code (murder in the first degree).

  Respectfully submitted,

  s / Walton J. Overbrook

  WALTON J. OVERBROOK

  ASSISTANT DISTRICT ATTORNEY

  CITY OF LOS ANGELES

  COUNTY OF LOS ANGELES

  CALIFORNIA

  Sworn to and attested on December 18:

  s / Austin H. Shea

  AUSTIN H. SHEA

  COUNTY CLERK

  Table of Contents

  Back Cover

  Note on the Ebook

  Titlepage

  Copyright

  THE TODD DOSSIER