The Jack Finney Reader

by Jack Finney

  Don't diagnose, Doctor, by explaining away a contradiction! That note is an accusation of murder!

  All right! Dr. Knapp shrugged irritably. If they find poison in that bottle! But you say that they won't.

  The old man shook his head. They won't. Prine isn't crazy. But suicide? Again he shook his head, No. I say this note points squarely away from it; the diagnosis must be re-examined.

  Doctor, he went on gently, at least consider a new diagnosis. For the moment, at least, let's turn away from suicide. Now, if this is not suicide, then a normal dosage is all she extracted from that bottle this morning — and her normal dosage should not produce shock. So tell me: How could someone make certain that her normal injection would induce fatal shock?

  Dr. Knapp stared at him.

  Again Dr. Lerner shook the fluid in the little bottle. When they test this, I am quite sure they won't find poison. But I wonder, he said softly, if they won't find double-strength insulin? He looked at the young man. U-40, the label says, and for Mrs. Prine that is normal strength. But with a hypodermic needle, it would be quite simple to withdraw the insulin originally in this bottle, and replace it with, say, U-100 — more than double-strength insulin, and probably fatal for Mrs. Prine. And then rewrap the bottle. There are two punctures in the bottle cap. I think that's exactly what happened!

  Who's twisting the diagnosis now? The young doctor's voice was dubious. To quote you, what kind of fool plan for murder would that be? It would make certain she'd take double-strength insulin, yes. But she'd be just as certain to take sugar and counteract the shock that would follow! For a moment he paused, then added quietly, As she did.

  Dr. Lerner nodded. Yes, she did. When she felt the symptoms of insulin shock, she was certain to take sugar to counteract it. But suppose it was equally certain that she would immediately get rid of that sugar before it could possibly counteract the insulin? Suppose, in other words, that it was certain she would take an emetic? As she did.

  The young doctor stared at him.

  Doctor, the old man said, we look toward suicide, and we interpret all the signs we find as supporting our diagnosis. He set the little bottle back on the table, and walked toward the doorway and the living room. We see a capsule in the sink, so we say that it is one of her digestion capsules, because I myself prescribed them, and gave the prescription to her husband to fill. He turned to look back over his shoulder. And yet who can say that my prescription was actually filled, or that he even told her I had ordered such a prescription? His hands clasping his lapels, Dr. Lerner stood staring at the rug. That prescription will be downstairs in Prine's files, of course, labeled as having been filled. He looked up at Dr. Knapp. But suppose that actually he made up only one capsule; then concealed it in a sugar cube, which could easily be done. What would happen then?

  The old doctor began to pace back and forth across the room, while Dr. Knapp watched from the kitchen doorway. This morning she takes her insulin injection — her normal quantity, but more than double strength, so presently she will feel the first warning symptoms of shock. Now, naturally, she opens her little matchbox, pops the sugar cubes into her mouth, crunches them up and swallows quickly, as any diabetic would. Doctor, she is certain to feel that capsule as she swallows it — it's a big one. So what must she think about that? Well, her husband hated her; I knew that, and so did she. The capsule concealed in her sugar is poison! It must be! Why else is it there?

  Do you see? The old man stood staring at Dr. Knapp. It's a devilish scheme. There in Mrs. Prine's stomach is the sugar that must be there and stay there to save her from insulin shock. But with it is the poison she is certain will kill her! What is she to do?

  His breathing loud, his eyes bright, Dr. Lerner said, Prine is a pharmacist, and she knows any poison he gives her will be certain to kill. So her only possible hope is that the insulin will not. After all, she doesn't know that it's double strength and more. So her only hope is to take the emetic and get that poison capsule out of her stomach. She will lose the sugar, too, and therefore the insulin shock will continue, and she knows that. But still her only chance is to hope she will survive it.

  Dr. Lerner walked to the kitchen doorway and Dr. Knapp followed. The two men stood staring at the body sprawled over the table top. Perhaps she hopes to get to more sugar after taking the emetic. But an emetic is a weakening thing, she is not a strong woman, and meanwhile the shock is building once again, growing rapidly, pounding at her senses. She manages to reach that chair. There is paper and a pencil on the table. And all she can do in the few seconds of consciousness left to her is to begin the note that tries to tell us how she was murdered. Well, Doctor? Are the arrows of our diagnosis swinging around?

  Dr. Knapp shrugged. Well, you make out a case for it. But it's all based on the sheerest speculation. As you say yourself, it's all in the way you choose to read the signs. Do you say that capsule in the sink is actually poisoned?

  Of course not. Dr. Lerner turned back into the living room. That's exactly what I do not say. When it is tested, it will be found to be filled with distilled water, with my prescription in Prine's files to prove its purpose. But if she thought it was poisoned —

  Sure, sure, the young man burst out angrily. If! If she thought it was poisoned! he said. Doctor, it's all thin air, all speculation, depending entirely on what went on in a dead woman's mind! You say she thought the sugar was poisoned, but her own note contradicts you. She thought the insulin was poisoned.

  Mildly, gently, Dr. Lerner said, If she thought that, why would she take an emetic? He paused, then continued, Insulin is injected under the skin, Doctor. If it is poisoned, an emetic won't get rid of it; she would know that. She took that emetic because she thought there was poison in her stomach!

  Dr. Knapp shook his head. Go read her note, he said.

  You read it, boy, Dr. Lerner said quietly. Because you're quite right — the answer to what happened here this morning lies in a dead woman's mind. Go read what she tells us.

  In the kitchen, Dr. Knapp picked up the note, and studied the wavering message — Poisoninsu — that trailed off, unfinished. For a long moment he stared at it, then he looked up, his eyes startled. My God, he said, you're right. He looked at the paper again. Poison in sugar — that's what she was writing!

  The old man nodded. Yes, he said quietly. She didn't act as though she thought her insulin was poisoned. But she thought the capsule in her sugar was poison. That's how she acted, and that's what her note tells us. She was murdered by a miserable trick! And there is nothing we can do about it.

  His mouth opening, Dr. Knapp looked at him incredulously.

  Well, the old man burst out bitterly, what will you do when he denies the truth! There in that sink lies a harmless capsule, filled with distilled water! There on that table lies a note. Not even finished. Meaningless! Why, the newest, rawest, Assistant District Attorney wouldn't dream for a moment of taking this case into court.

  But, Dr. Lerner, the young man said, that would be a perfect crime!

  Well, damn it, boy, did you think they never happened? the old man said angrily. Were you taught that every diagnosis has its treatment? He sighed. I'll phone the police now.

  Three hours later, finished, at last, with the police, Dr. Knapp sat outside in the car, waiting for Dr. Lerner. Then the old man appeared, got into the car, and Dr. Knapp drove to the corner, then turned into the busy street. For a block they drove in silence; then the young man said wearily, Well, the capsule tested harmless, just as you said. And the insulin was U-100, just as you said. He shrugged. Prine will claim it was a laboratory error, no one will believe him, and so what? Nothing can be proved. He's in the clear.

  Dr. Lerner said quietly, The Chicago police phoned back, just as I left. They found Prine, all right, in Chicago, registered at one of the large hotels. He was dead; they found him up in his room. Dr. Knapp turned to stare at him. His heart, of course, Dr. Lerner said, as I could have predicted. It was a virtual certainty that the
natural tenseness and strain of worrying how things back here were working out would bring on an attack. Not an unusually severe one, though; nitroglycerin should have checked it. And as a matter of fact, he took his tablets — all of them. He had his little pillbox in his hand when they found him. Dr. Lerner paused. But, and now I am quoting the Chicago medical examiner, they might as well have been candy, for all the good they did. Or, to put it another way, they might as well have been the saccharin tablets Mrs. Prine, like all diabetics, took as a sugar substitute. Some saccharin tablets look almost exactly like nitroglycerin tablets; Mrs. Prine remarked about that once, I recall. Now, if they had been substituted for Prine's nitroglycerin tablets — Dr. Lerner shrugged. Well, he'd have known the moment he tasted one that it was saccharin. But all he could do then would be to eat all of them — as he did — in the vain hope that just one of them was what it should have been.

  Dr. Knapp's voice was stunned, Double murder, he said.

  Perhaps. The old doctor smiled wanly. If you like. But personally, I'd call it murder and self-defense. Though it's hard, I'll admit, to say which, exactly, was which. The traffic lights changed, and a horn honked behind them. Let's go, boy, Dr. Lerner said. I'm retired now, and I don't want to waste a second of it.

  Collier's, October 18, 1952, 130(16):28, 30-31, 33

  Behind the News

  No one knew how the false and slanderous item on Police Chief Quayle got into the Clarion. The editor accepted all blame. It was Friday, press day, in the final lull before the old flat-bed press began clanking out the weekly twelve hundred copies, and everything in the one-room frame building seemed normal. Grinning insanely, young Johnny Deutsch, owner and editor, sat before a typewriter at a roll-top desk near his secretary — all three of which had been his father's before him. He sat as he did each week, his long, loose-jointed body hunched over the old machine, his big hands flying over the keys; then he flung himself back in his chair and read aloud what he had just written. Police Chief Slain by Wolf Pack! he cried.

  An immature form of wish fulfillment, his secretary, Miss Gerraghty, murmured acidly — as she did each week.

  Ignoring this, Johnny pounded at his typewriter again, the carriage jouncing. Then he threw himself back once more, a lock of jet-black hair dropping onto his forehead, his lean, roughhewn face happy, his brown eyes dancing. This morning, he read, Police Chief Wendall E. Quayle was set upon and slain by a mysterious pack of wolves that suddenly appeared on Culver Street. Before the eyes of horrified shoppers, the maddened animals tore Quayle to tattered shreds within seconds.

  The Clarion's printer, Nate Rubin, an ink-smudged youth in blue denim apron, stood at his worktable, setting the back-page supermarket ad and, as he did each week, mournfully shaking his head at the prices. Johnny — he glanced up — Quayle's a slob, but harmless. What you got against him?

  Nothing personal. Johnny grinned. But I'm a cop hater, he shouted, as all true Americans instinctively are. A foe from birth of officialdom, bureaucracy and the heel of tyranny! Nate considered this, then nodded in agreement and understanding. Johnny's typewriter clattered again for a time, then stopped. Eyewitnesses, he read, state that the surrounding area was a shambles, while dismembered limbs were found as far south as Yancy Creek. The body was identifiable only from indecent tattoos and the reek of cheap whisky, which characterized our undistinguished late sleuth.

  This, finally, as also happened each week, was too much for Miss Gerraghty, and peering over her glasses like a benevolent grandmother, she said witheringly, A mature mind could never, week after week, compose these childlike fantasies to the uproarious amusement of no one but himself. Mayor Schimmerhorn Assassinated! she quoted contemptuously from a previous effort of Johnny's. City Council Wiped Out by Falling Meteor! An old memory awakened, she frowned, then shook her head disdainfully. Meteors. She sniffed. You're worse than your father.

  What'd he do? Johnny looked up.

  Lots of things, all foolish. Found an old lump of lead in a field, for one thing, and claimed it was a meteor. Threw it in the lead box on the Linotype machine to melt. Then he ran a story saying it was the first time in history a paper had been printed with type cast from a meteor. In a tone suggesting that both stories were equally absurd, she added, Same issue that carried your birth announcement, and nodded at the paperweight on Johnny's desk.

  Johnny glanced at the paperweight, then picked it up, hefting it absently. It was a rectangle of lead type, the letters worn almost smooth; he hadn't read it for years. But now his eyes scanned the blurred lines that had once announced to four hundred uncaring subscribers that he had been born. When he reached the last sentence, It is predicted he will make his mark on the world, Johnny's eyes flicked to the date line, October 28, 1933. All elation and well-being drained out of him then. He was twenty-three years old, the worn type reminded him, and there wasn't the least indication that he would ever make a mark or even a scratch on the world — and for the first time he was impressed with Miss Gerraghty's weekly tirade.

  Recalling his idea, at University Journalism School a few years before, of what life as a newspaperman would be, he smiled bitterly, contrasting that picture with the life he now led. Owner by inheritance of a small-town weekly, its columns filled with stale and newsless news as boring to himself as to his subscribers, he reflected that Miss Gerraghty's contempt was deserved. For he simply went on, week after week, doing nothing to relieve his frustration but compose childish parodies of nonexistent news. He thought of a classmate, now a copy writer for a large advertising agency, earning an enormous salary. Then, with even greater longing, he thought of two other classmates, both of whom were actually married, he reflected bitterly. Glancing at the half-full sheet of copy paper in his typewriter, he felt with sudden force that he was just what Miss Gerraghty said he was, immature and childlike; and he looked down at the worn type in his hand with distaste. The very fact that he had kept it, he suddenly realized, could undoubtedly be explained by Miss Gerraghty in unpleasantly Freudian terms.

  On impulse, a new will toward maturity flaming within him, Johnny stood up, walked to the Linotype machine, lifted the cover of the lead box, and dropped his paperweight into the molten metal. Miss Gerraghty, he said firmly, his voice several tones deeper, what would a mature mind compose?

  She glanced up, surprised. If anything, she said, something at least distantly linked to the remotely possible. Then she turned back to her proof sheets.

  Back at his desk after several minutes of frowning thought, his face set, he believed, in new lines of maturity, Johnny typed Police Chief Loses Pants. Then he went on, typing slowly, to compose a brief fictitious account of an attack on Police Chief Quayle by a large Dalmatian who, Johnny wrote, had torn out the seat of Quayle's pants. But he felt no urge to read this aloud. As he recalled later, Johnny yanked the sheet of paper from his typewriter, tossed it onto his desk, and then left, feeling depressed, for City Hall, informing his staff, who knew better, that he was going to hunt up some last-minute news.

  The item appeared on page one, headline and all, just as Johnny had typed it. How it had gotten in with the remaining unset front-page items, no one knew. But it had, and Nate — with his astounding ability to set words and sentences, editing their spelling and punctuation, yet allowing no glimmer of their meaning to touch his mind — had turned it into type along with the others.

  In any case, it was Johnny's responsibility to check the issue before the final press run, and he had not done so. Deprived by Miss Gerraghty of even the pretense that the Clarion might sometime carry a piece of news worth reading, he had lingered too long talking to the town clerk. This was Miss Miriam Zeebley, a blonde, lithe young woman who resembled Grace Kelly from the shoulders up, though better-looking; Anita Ekberg from waist to shoulders, though less flat-chested; and for the rest of her five feet six inches, as Marilyn Monroe as Miss Monroe undoubtedly wished she looked.

  Seated at her desk, in a thin summer dress — polite, cordial enough, b
ut coolly official — Miss Zeebley obviously didn't actually know or care that Johnny Deutsch was alive, and he didn't blame her. There were times when Johnny, staring into his mirror, could convince himself for as long as two or three seconds that he had a sort of offbeat, Lincolnesque good looks. But now, he felt his face flush as the certainty swept over him that he was actually an awkward, crag-faced lout. Then, grateful for even the crumbs of her attention, but knowing that for her anything less than a young Ronald Colman was absurd, he left.

  Back at his desk, the Clarion already delivered into the official hands of the post office, Johnny reached the lowest ebb of his life. Staring numbly at the page-one libel on Police Chief Quale, knowing that any jury would regard it as tending to embarrass, humiliate and defame, he knew too that he was a failure and a misfit, inept in life, libel and love; and he considered simply walking to the edge of town, jumping a freight, and beginning life anew in the West.

  The front door opened, and a small boy, wearing cowboy boots, the dress jacket of a full colonel in the Space Patrol, and a fluorescent green stocking cap, stepped into the office. He said, Hey, Johnny, you got some old type I can have for my newspaper?

  Ask Nate. Johnny gestured wearily at the shabby sink at which Nate was scrubbing his forearms.

  Okay. The boy suddenly grinned. Gee, it was funny. I sure laughed, he said.

  What was funny?

  Chief Quayle. Gettin' the seat of his pants tore off. Gee, it was funny; I sure laughed.

  Oh. Johnny nodded. You've read the story?

  The boy shook his head. No. I saw it.

  Saw what? Johnny said irritably.

  Saw the dog, the boy explained patiently, bite off his pants. Gee, it was funny. He laughed. I sure laughed.

  Johnny pushed himself upright in his chair. You saw this happen?

  Yeah.

  Where?

  On Culver Street.