The Case of the Seven Sneezes

by Anthony Boucher

  Finding the needle in the haystack would be nothing compared to guessing the minister Campetti would pick to legalize his proposed venture into the hay, and incidentally to silence the chief prosecuting witness. Routine was useless here; you had to play your hunch.

  And Jackson’s hunch looked good to him. He’d checked up on the waitress. She was a decent girl, despite the mess she’d got herself tangled up in, and, what was specifically important, a devout Catholic. He was positive that she’d insist on a priest. She might consent to an elopement, but never to what she would consider a sinful marriage.

  The young priest at the chaste and pleasing little church of Saint Joan of Arc hardly objected at all to being dragged out of bed; but he did protest vigorously against the suggestion that he would perform what he pityingly referred to as “a Las Vegas marriage.”

  “In the case of a mixed marriage, there’d have to be a dispensation. And if both parties are Catholics—”

  “Campetti was probably born one.”

  “Then in that case the marriage would have to be solemnized in the woman’s parish, and after the publication of banns. You don’t understand the laws of the Church, Lieutenant.”

  “I’ll lay odds Campetti doesn’t either. He’s never given us any reason to believe he understands laws.”

  “At any rate he hasn’t been here. No one has.”

  “I came by plane,” Jackson reflected. “That’d cancel out the head start he had … Maybe he hasn’t got here yet. Do you mind if I wait?”

  “Certainly not, Lieutenant. I’ll fix you up in the study. A glass of wine, perhaps?”

  “Afterwards,” said Lieutenant Jackson grimly.

  “Let me stand guard again,” Tom Quincy said. “Give me the Smoker’s Companion. I’ve got to make up for my—my—”

  “Your bad luck,” said Fergus. The others had gone up to bed now. The two young men sat in the library again, and Fergus fiddled restlessly with his charts.

  “You’re kind, sir. Too damned kind. I wasn’t unlucky. I was inefficient and stupid and a pretty contemptible failure. Let me prove to myself that I am worth something.”

  “To yourself?”

  “All right. To Janet, then. Let me justify myself in her eyes.”

  “I think you’re pretty well justified as is. You didn’t see her when she learned you’d been, hurt.” Fergus rose and went to the window. “No, don’t torture yourself so. Go up and go to bed or visit with Janet or do what you damned please. I’ll keep an eye open. And it won’t be many hours before we have light again.” He stared out the window at the embers of the great bonfire.

  Tom followed his gaze. “The beacon didn’t bring much result, did it?”

  “It may yet. Some bright mind in Santa Eulalia may be doing a slow take. And tomorrow …” He returned to the table and thumped his clenched fist on the chart. “These goddamned facts! The whole thing’s there, somehow. It has to be. Someplace in those hentracks of mine is the key to all this reign of terror—which is as pretty a piling up of metaphor as I’ve achieved in some time. I’ve got the solution there before me, yet I, a dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak, like John-a-dreams … Who’s there?”

  “Mr. O’Breen?” a woman’s voice asked from outside.

  “Open the door, Tom. Oh, Mrs. Brainard.”

  Catherine Brainard had changed from the pink to a baby-blue negligee, equally frilly and silly but bloodless. She had made herself up carefully and well; the result was like an excellent job of tinting on a deathmask. Her pale drawn face was set in an expression of fixed resolution.

  “You want to talk to me?” she asked tonelessly. “Stella said I was the only one you didn’t have on your chart.”

  Fergus smiled sincerely. “Thanks. I hadn’t expected such unsolicited cooperation. Will you sit down here?”

  She held the negligee about her with the automatic coyness of a Greuze painting, and looked questioningly at Tom.

  “I get it, Aunt Catherine. No stooges wanted. See you later, Fergus.” He left quietly, seemingly still weighted down by his burden of responsibility and failure.

  Mrs. Brainard seated herself wearily. She seemed spent after her sudden physical outburst in the livingroom, but some inner compulsion kept her going. “Now, Mr. O’Breen?”

  She sat patiently through the questioning, giving only quiet Yes’s and No’s. Yes, she had been dressing when Corcoran was attacked. Yes, she thought her husband had been with her most of that time. No, she couldn’t be positive. No, of course they weren’t in Hollywood Wednesday night. No, she couldn’t remember anything about Martha’s death. No, she didn’t know a thing about an unread letter. Yes, she’d always believed in the prowler theory herself. Who else would do such a thing?

  But these routine questions were manifestly not what she had come downstairs for. There was growing impatience in her brief answers. At last she leaned forward across the table. “Mr. O’Breen.” Her little eyes glinted bright. “Aren’t you going to ask me about tonight?”

  “Of course, Mrs. Brainard. I was coming to that. What were you doing between—”

  She swept his words aside with a quick petulant gesture. “What I was doing doesn’t count. You want to know what I saw.”

  “And what did you see?”

  “I saw the murderer.”

  She reached a well-manicured flabby hand across the table and seized Fergus’ arm. “I saw him, I tell you. I saw him get out of bed and slip out of the room. I heard a thump in the hall. That must have been Tom. Then I didn’t hear a thing. Not anything. But then,” her breath was coming fast now, “I saw him come back and lock the door and get into bed. He didn’t think I saw him, but I did. I saw him after he killed Lucas, and I didn’t know it.”

  Fergus regarded her narrowly. “You mean your … ?”

  “Of course I mean Horace. Then I heard you at the door. I knew then something was wrong. I couldn’t breathe. My chest was solid. It wouldn’t move when I tried to breathe. And I knew it had happened to Lucas. I felt it. I went to his room. Horace tried to stop me, but I went to him.”

  “Of course you did,” said Fergus gently. “He meant so much to you, didn’t he?”

  “More than you’ll …” She broke off and jerked her hand away. “So now you know,” she spat out. “What will you do to him?”

  “To your husband?”

  “They don’t hang people any more in California, do they?” Her eyes gleamed viciously. “They use gas now. He’ll have to sit in that little room and people watch him through the glass and he tries to sleep so it’ll be easier but he can’t sleep and the gas comes in and crawls around him like snakes and he tries to breathe but his chest is solid too. He can’t breathe and then at last he has to breathe and he breathes in snakes of gas and they coil into him and … !”

  Abruptly she let her head sink onto the table. Her back shook beneath the frilled negligee, but no sound came. Fergus rose and paced helplessly. At last he laid a gentle hand on her shaking shoulder. “Mrs. Brainard. You’d better go to bed now. Get your rest. I’ll attend to everything.”

  She looked up. A pathetic trusting appeal lit up her makeup-streaked face. “You won’t let him … ?”

  “Nobody’s going to get away with anything. Now you go to sleep.”

  “But I can’t sleep. I’m all twisted and miserable and … and old,” she confessed. “I never admitted that before even to myself, but I’m old and Lucas is dead and I can’t sleep.”

  He put an arm around her and helped her out of the chair. “Come on. We’ll see Dr. Arnold. He’ll help you sleep. And don’t talk to him about what you saw. You mustn’t talk to anyone until we’re in a position to take definite action.”

  Fergus realized, with some surprise, as he tapped on the door of what had been pointed out to him as his room, that he hadn’t even been inside it yet. Something had been happening every instant since he’d hit the island. With his bag gone, dressing had been out of the question; and sleep seemed equally so.


  “Idiot,” Dr. Arnold muttered when Fergus explained the summons. “No, Mr. O’Breen, not you. I mean myself. I left my bag in my own room. I pray earnestly that no one … Wait here with Catherine.”

  He returned in a moment, his aquiline face seriously perturbed. “Here, Catherine.” He held out a white tablet and a glass of water. “Take this now, and if you still can’t sleep,” he handed her a small box, “take one of these in an hour. Shall we see you to your room?”

  She hesitated, shuddering. “I can’t go there. Not where Horace is. I’d—” She stopped short at a warning glance from Fergus.

  “Then if you’d care to sleep here, Catherine, and let me move back to my old room?”

  “But that Mexican’s on your bed.”

  “The armchair is more than satisfactory. And I begin to feel that I should not have left my patient alone. Come, Mr. O’Breen. Let us leave our hostess to her rest.”

  “What’s the matter?” Fergus demanded as they came out into the hall. “You look as if you’d heard a banshee. And you so impassive.”

  “This struck close,“ said Arnold quietly. “I feel that I have betrayed what little good there is in me by reveling in a comfortable bed while my patient … But see for yourself.”

  He opened the door of his room. The bedlamp shone down on Jesús Ramirez and on the metal handle protruding from the left side of his chest.

  “… But I don’t need to give you all the lowdotun on the Stanhope case,” Lieutenant A. Jackson read; “you’ll remember the beer-fest last week and the argument we had on Ferguson. The point is: I’m with these people on an island and there’s been another cat. If you don’t hear from me Saturday morning, for God’s sake send somebody or come yourself to take over.”

  “The damned fool!” said Jackson aloud.

  The young priest seemed not to mind the vocabulary. “What’s the trouble?”

  “Friend of mine’s got himself into a hellish mess, and I should be getting him out. But here I am in Las Vegas and …”

  There was a loud banging on the outside door of the rectory. Jackson followed the priest, his hand on his automatic, keeping invisible in the shadows of the

  “We want to get married, Father,” a husky voice announced. “And quick, see?”

  Jackson felt his grip involuntarily tightening. There was no mistaking that harsh loud whisper. The hunch had worked.

  “Won’t you come inside?” the priest was saying. “We can discuss things better in there.”

  There was a shadow of doubt in the whisper now. “Kind of eager, ain’t you, Father?”

  Then a girl urging, “Go on, Caesar,” and the whisper again, “Saw a light when we drove up. Kind of late hours, isn’t it, Father?”

  “My son,” the priest began, and then it all happened at once. Campetti’s hand had darted lithely into the hall and found the light-switch. He swore one short word when he saw Jackson and reached instantly for his gun.

  The two explosions made one, deafeningly loud in the little hallway. Jackson saw the gun bounce from Campetti’s wounded hand, and at the same time felt a throbbing arc of pain spread from his own left shoulder. He dived forward, caught Campetti about the knees, and brought him down with a thundering crack against the cement of the doorstep. Campetti did not move.

  Jackson felt a warm stream flowing from his shoulder and his strength pouring out with it. He waved the priest away and said, “Call the local police. And a doctor.”

  The girl was crouching over Caesar Campetti and whimpering softly.

  Jackson groped his way back to the study. Funny, he didn’t remember anybody turning off that hall light. As he sank into a chair, he called out to the priest, “You can bring that wine now.” Then all the lights went out.

  ii

  Fergus stared at the Mexican. “Another one dead,” he said bitterly. “Hell, I’m not a detective. I’m a carrier.”

  “Would it console you, Mr. O’Breen, to learn that he is not dead?”

  “Not dead? But look, that thing, whatever it is, that toad-sticker is jabbed straight through his heart.”

  “It is jabbed,” said Dr. Arnold precisely, “through the left frontal wall of his chest, in what is normally the cardiac region.”

  “Normally?”

  “Ramirez has the amazing good fortune to be a dextrocardiac, or dexiocardiac, to use a perhaps better term. I had observed as much when I examined him before, but thought it not worth mentioning. I am now deeply grateful that I kept silence. For though the wound is a serious one, Ramirez’ heart still beats firmly on the right side of his chest.”

  Fergus was making rapid mental calculations. “You last checked up on your patients after the others had gathered in the livingroom. Nobody left that room during my inquisition. Then Ramirez was stabbed some time between Horace’s indignant exit from the livingroom and the time I came upstairs—in other words within the past fifteen minutes. Everybody was on the loose then and unobserved—getting ready for bed, going to the bathroom …”

  “Mr. O’Breen,” Arnold broke into his speculations, “you are about to undertake a new profession. Have you ever been a male nurse?”

  For the next quarter hour Fergus fetched hot water, held towels, lit candles for impromptu sterilization, and was all in all far too busy to think of more than the wonderful dexterity of Hugh Arnold’s long thin fingers. The patient moaned and tossed but never awoke. Occasionally Fergus had to hold his arms as they made instinctive unconscious gestures of defense.

  “He doesn’t feel much,” Arnold explained. “That was a stiff local. He was probably still somewhat under the narcotic I gave him when this happened. He doubtless lost consciousness again from the shock and from loss of blood.”

  Now at last the hasty operation was over and the wound sterilized and bandaged. “I’m worried about that lung,” the doctor admitted. “I need an X-ray and some decent equipment. But this will see him through till we can get him to a hospital tomorrow, if your plans work. If he has to wait longer, I make no guarantees.” He rinsed his hands of the last stains of blood. “In a way, O’Breen, this is almost a relief. To feel that I am doing something, making my training and my skill count for something … Damned sight more satisfactory than lolling in your chromium-trimmed office prescribing bread-pills.”

  Fergus looked at the weapon. It was a common, or garden, meat-skewer, about four inches long. The point was not too sharp; but with strength behind it and enough skill to miss the ribs, it could easily have disposed of any individual whose heart was literally in the right place. “I thought I was so smart,” he said, “rounding up all the cutting edges on the place. I thought our man had an idee fixe. I no more expected him to use a point instead of a blade than I’d have expected him to use poison. Maybe murder’s like drinking. I despise gin, but I’ve been known to plaster myself liberally with it when there wasn’t any whisky. And if you’ve got the itch and there are no blades, a point has to do.”

  Dr. Arnold gestured at his bag. “There are blades.”

  “He wouldn’t expect that. I wouldn’t myself. Do you ordinarily go around so professionally well equipped on house parties?”

  “Only,” said Arnold dryly, “when cats have been lulled.”

  “Valentino,” Fergus reflected, “had his uses … Or look: this makes more sense. This isn’t in the killing line at all. I mean, it doesn’t belong with the maniac throat-slitting of Valentino and Corcoran and Quincy. This is rational and utilitarian like the sluggings. Remember when I was asking Ramirez who slugged him and he fainted before he could answer? Somebody let a little relieved gasp of breath escape then. Somebody was afraid Ramirez did know, and somebody, coldly and quite sanely, tried to make sure that he would never tell.”

  “And earlier?” Arnold suggested. “That scream from Ramirez after dinner?”

  “I don’t know.” Fergus thought back and remembered the curious scrap of conversation in the upper hall between Quincy and Herndon. “Only one of two men could have mad
e an attempt on him then, and now one of those two … No, that time I think your appeasement theory was right. That was probably a nightmare. But it might have planted an idea in our friend’s mind. Get rid of the bastard before he …” Fergus broke off and smoked in silence for a full minute.

  “Well?” Arnold asked at last.

  Fergus’ eyes were alive with a green enthusiasm. “I’ve got an idea. It’s hazy still, but the form’s coming through. And if I can … Dr. Arnold, I’m asking a favor of you and I want you to obey me without any questions.”

  “If it will help you to put an end to this—this …”

  “Massacre?” Fergus suggested. “I think it will.”

  “Then what must I do?”

  “Stay here in this room and if humanly possible stay awake until I come back, which will be some time after dawn. That’s about six, if I remember right. Admit no one, speak to no one, and above all let no one have any notion that Ramirez is still alive.”

  “Catherine—” Arnold began.

  “Yes. She knows you came back here, and from that she could deduce, if she … But we’ll have to take the chance. Tell no one else, and stay here.”

  “And where are you going?”

  “Me? I’m going to sit up with a sick goat.”

  Janet sat on the edge of Tom’s bed, in a tentative sort of posture as though she might at any moment take flight. “Unconventional setting to be discussing … marriage, isn’t it?” she asked.

  “But I’ve got to know, darling. We’ve been thrown so close together here tonight; it makes up for the whole five years of not seeing you.”

  “Does it? I’ve changed a lot in those five years, Tom. The changes don’t show so much tonight.”

  “I’ll chance the changes.”

  “You’re a brave man, Tom Quincy.”

  “I’m not brave. I just happen to love you.”

  “Can’t you let me wait till I’m clear again? Can’t you leave the decision up to Miss Brainard?”

  “The hell with Miss Brainard. I want to marry Janet.”

  “But you’ll be living with Miss Brainard. She’s sensible, she is. She doesn’t approve of love at first-sight-after-five-years. She thinks people should know each other and—”