Stand Up and Die

by Frances Lockridge

  Liz continued to look at the door. Her lips seemed dry, and she moistened them with the tip of her tongue. But almost at once they were dry again, and again her tongue moistened them. Her imagination was too active, Heimrich thought. It filled her mind with pictures of sharp knives and an ancient body, of a white light beating down on both.

  “You shouldn’t have come, Miss Monroe,” Heimrich said. “It wasn’t necessary.”

  She turned to him quickly.

  “I’m all right,” she said. “I’m perfectly all right. What made you think—”

  “Now Miss Monroe,” Heimrich said. “Don’t try to picture—anything.”

  She looked at him and her eyes widened a little.

  “Can’t I even have my thoughts?” she said, and spoke quietly, but as if she were a little puzzled. “Must you know everything, Captain Heimrich?”

  He smiled faintly, and shook his head. She looked at him a moment longer, as if she were seeing him for the first time, or in some new light. Then she looked back at the door. It was not the door she thought it was, which did not matter.

  The four of them sat, then, for minutes and said nothing. Gates put his big hand back over one of Liz Monroe’s hands, and she did not show consciousness that it was there, but did not move her hand. Kirkwood tried a cigarette, and gave it up. And finally, the door opened. It was not the door at which Liz Monroe had been looking, but she turned quickly to face it.

  Dr. Crowell came through first, walking in professional dignity, his face almost impassive. But it was not quite impassive when he looked at Heimrich, who stood as he entered. Heimrich knew the answer then, and knew that again there was hell to pay. But this did not show in his own face.

  Dr. Kramer, the county pathologist, came behind Dr. Crowell. Dr. Kramer still wore white; there were lines of weariness on his face. He shook his head quickly for Heimrich, and that was that. Then he hesitated.

  “Go ahead, Doctor,” Heimrich said.

  “Well,” Kramer said, “you understand there are tests I haven’t made yet, Captain? Toxicological tests? Things that take time? That you’ve given me no time?”

  “Now Doctor,” Heimrich said. “I understand that. Go on.”

  “There is nothing to indicate that Mrs. Saunders did not die of natural causes,” Dr. Kramer said. “The cada—the body is that of a very old woman. There is extensive damage to the cardivascular system, as one would expect in view of her age and history of hypertension. Arteriosclerosis, of course.” He paused. “To put it as simply as possible, Captain,” he said, “Mrs. Saunders died of old age and high blood pressure.” He paused again. “Of course, as I said, there are certain tests, but—” He shrugged.

  “They won’t show anything?” Heimrich said.

  “Really,” Kramer said, “I can’t—”

  “Now Doctor,” Heimrich said. “Now Doctor.”

  “I shall be very surprised if they show anything,” Dr. Kramer said. “To put it bluntly, I’ll be astonished.”

  It was enough—good enough or bad enough. He knew Kramer; everybody in the East knew Kramer.

  “I must say, also,” Dr. Kramer said, “that Dr. Crowell’s diagnosis is entirely confirmed by my examination. His course of treatment with hexamethonium, as he outlined it to me, was in my opinion exemplary.” He looked around at them; stopped with Liz. “You are the granddaughter?” he asked, and when she nodded, said, “I feel that in fairness to Dr. Crowell, I should say that,” he said. “Although, of course, I realize it is hardly necessary.”

  Liz nodded. She looked at Heimrich, then.

  “You don’t really know everything, do you, Captain?” she said, and her voice, now, was almost gentle.

  Captain Heimrich said, “Hm-m-m,” which he did not regard as adequate. He could not think of anything that would be. He found it difficult, for the moment, to think of anything at all. His mind, instructed that it must believe the unbelievable, seemed momentarily to have disintegrated under the strain.

  “You seem to be surprised,” Dr. Crowell said. “You really suspected something else? In spite of what I told you?”

  “Now Doctor,” Heimrich said. “You must know I did.”

  Dr. Crowell nodded gravely to that. If the vindication of his professional judgment was unexpected, if it was even particularly gratifying, nothing of either showed in his face.

  “Well,” Kirkwood said, “there we are. Not that I expected anything different, Paul.”

  Paul inclined his head again, accepting the now unnecessary reassurance.

  “Then there’s nothing to keep us here, Liz,” Kirkwood said.

  Liz Monroe looked from Dr. Crowell to Captain Heimrich, and looked longest, her expression a little puzzled, at Heimrich. She might have showed relief; it did not seem to Heimrich that she did. It occurred to him that Liz Monroe, too, might be surprised at Dr. Kramer’s report. She stood up, and Timothy Gates stood beside her, and looked down at her.

  “Tell you what,” Timothy Gates said, “we could all use a drink.”

  The girl nodded. She still looked puzzled. She looked at Heimrich again, as if expecting him to say something, to clarify something. He shook his head.

  She turned then toward the outer door, and went toward it, Gates behind her. The others, after a moment, followed. Heimrich watched them go. Dr. Kramer, standing near the door to the autopsy room, watched them.

  “It doesn’t help, I gather,” Dr. Kramer said, when the door closed behind Liz and her lawyer and Timothy. Gates, behind Dr. Paul Crowell, cleared of any imputation.

  “No,” Heimrich said. “It’s quite a surprise, Doctor.” He paused. “Naturally,” he added.

  “Part of a theory?”

  That put it mildly. It was the heart of a theory. It was the mainspring of a watch; it was whatever vital one wanted to call it.

  “I don’t need to ask if you’re sure, Doctor,” Heimrich said. “Whether there isn’t any possibility?”

  “I told you that,” Kramer said. “There are tests still to be run. They’ll show nothing. You heard me stick my neck out, Captain. I don’t do that, you know.”

  “High blood pressure,” Heimrich said. “Old age. Arteriosclerosis. Nothing you wouldn’t have expected.”

  Kramer nodded.

  “The course of treatment you spoke of,” Heimrich said. “You say it was proper?”

  “Entirely,” Kramer said. “I’m sorry, Captain. I can’t help you.”

  Heimrich’s gesture accepted that. He closed his eyes.

  “What was the treatment again,” he asked.

  “Hexamethonium,” Dr. Kramer said. “Hexamethonium bromide.”

  Heimrich shook his head.

  “A chemical,” Dr. Kramer said. “Rather recently developed. Blocks the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems. Releases tension. In certain types of high blood pressure it’s very effective.”

  It apparently hadn’t been this time, Heimrich pointed out.

  “It’s a treatment,” Dr. Kramer said. “Not a miracle. In some forms of hypertension it doesn’t help much. In others it doesn’t help enough.”

  “You’ve used it?”

  “Now Captain,” Dr. Kramer said, “my patients don’t suffer from high blood pressure. Suffer from no pressure at all. You know that. Nevertheless, I do know what I’m talking about. You’re not going to get anywhere, I’m afraid, Captain.”

  Heimrich was afraid of that, too. If Kramer found nothing, there was nothing to find. It was, nevertheless, as if the sum of two and two had suddenly, and irretrievably, become five.

  “This hex—” Heimrich began, and stumbled. He was put on his feet. “Hexamethonium,” he said. “It’s not a dangerous drug?”

  “My dear Captain,” Dr. Kramer said, and his voice now was almost as weary as his face, “all drugs are dangerous. Most medicines are, or may be. Not counting the poisons used therapeutically—which leave traces, incidentally. A person in a million or two might be killed by aspirin. Digitalis can kill people. So can in
sulin. Depends on how much, under what conditions, on the patient. Maybe hexamethonium can, but I’ve never heard it did. The point is—cut the cadaver up and you find out. All right. I did. And I did. Old age and high blood pressure. That’s all I can give you.”

  “Hexamethonium is a new drug?”

  “If you mean experimental, no. It’s in wide use. Has been for several years.” He sighed. He said Heimrich was, God knew, a persistent sort of man.

  “Now Doctor,” Heimrich said. “I have to be, naturally.”

  That was all very well, Kramer agreed. But this time it would do him no good. However—he would not, apparently, be satisfied until he heard more of hexamethonium. So—it was useful in certain types of hypertension, without value in others. It reduced blood pressure and, under optimum conditions, with continued dosage, kept it reduced. The amount of dosage was determined by experiment on the individual. Once established it tended to remain constant, although tolerance was sometimes induced. It could be injected intramuscularly; it was more commonly given orally, in tablet form.

  “All right, Doctor,” Heimrich said. “I do get your point, naturally. Was she getting anything else? Any other medicine? Did you ask?”

  Dr. Kramer sighed, meaning his sigh to be heard.

  “I suppose he gave her aspirin when her head ached,” he said. “Laxatives when she needed them. I suppose he had her on a diet. She died of old age.”

  “A stroke?”

  “Laymen,” Dr. Kramer said. “No. There had been a cerebral accident, minor, some time back. She’d got over that. What happened was, her heart had to work harder and harder. Then it stopped. It had been working a long time and it stopped.” Dr. Kramer sighed again. “I’ve been at it since God knows when this morning,” he said. “I know how you feel, Captain. But I can’t help you.”

  “No,” Heimrich said. “I guess you can’t.”

  “Where does it leave you?”

  “Now Doctor,” Heimrich said. “That’s the point, isn’t it? It doesn’t help, naturally.”

  He had seldom understated more completely, Heimrich thought, driving back through the soft night to East Belford. That Mrs. Penina Saunders had died of natural causes left him nowhere. It left him with his hands filled with coincidences—the presence of Timothy Gates, the peculiarities of the will, the financial difficulties of Dr. Paul Crowell and the emotional intensities of Liz Monroe. It left Captain Heimrich with that coldness one experiences on having made a mistake of colossal size and perhaps irretrievable character. Heimrich took his mistake to bed with him at the Inn. He turned it over and over for half an hour. Then, getting nowhere, he went to sleep.

  The mistake was with him when he awoke Friday morning, but by then it had become merely a problem—a problem to which the solution was not evident, a problem not anticipated. But it was nevertheless no more than a problem.

  “We thought we had the key,” Heimrich told Forniss, sitting in the little office of the police substation. “Turns out we haven’t, Charlie. But there’s a key somewhere, naturally.”

  “Maybe,” Forniss said, “it’s just what it looked like being—some guy who gets a kick out of using a knife. Just as simple as that.”

  “The dress, Charlie?” Heimrich said. “The car in the reservoir?”

  “Well,” Forniss said, “about a guy like that you can’t tell anything, can you? All bets are off.”

  There was that, Heimrich agreed. The normal mind could only speculate about abnormality. Still—

  “You made the point about too many coincidences,” Forniss pointed out. “Well—the old lady’s death turns out to be coincidence. If you won’t have more than one, where does it leave the kid? Gates?”

  Heimrich closed his eyes. After a time he shook his head. He said, then, that perhaps he was wrong. He had proved how wrong he could be, which was chastening.

  “But you’ve met them, Charlie,” he said. “They may look like anybody, and even, pretty much, talk like anybody. But it’s a thing you can spot, Charlie. You can’t take it to court. You can’t prove it. But it’s there. Isn’t it, Charlie?”

  “All right,” Forniss said. “I know what you mean.”

  “A kind of disharmony,” Heimrich said.

  “Whatever you want to call it.”

  “I don’t feel it in Gates, do you, Charlie?”

  Slowly, Forniss shook his head. Heimrich had not opened his eyes, yet he answered, “Neither do I.”

  “We can both be wrong,” Heimrich said. “But let’s leave Gates out then, for the moment. Say it was some other man who, as you say, gets a kick out of using a knife. Where are we then, Charlie?”

  “Nowhere much,” Forniss said. “Until he does it again.”

  “No,” Heimrich said. “There isn’t any pattern left, is there? It may be that way, naturally. But the girl may have been killed for a reason. Not her grandmother’s money, apparently. So what have we got? Her sister didn’t like her, maybe her sister hated her. Liz was jealous of the other girl’s freedom, of her being on top of the world. She thought Virginia was carrying on some sort of a campaign against her—malicious hints, the ‘my-poor-incompetent-little-sister’ business.”

  “Was she?”

  “We’ll have to find out, naturally,” Heimrich said. “Find out how far it went. How much Liz may have been thrown off balance by it, whether Virginia really did have a campaign or Liz just thought she did. How hard hit Liz was if she was in love with Kirkwood and her sister hinted she was having an affair with this chauffeur, and that way threw Kirkwood off.”

  “That was all a couple of years ago,” Forniss said.

  “There could have been a series of things,” Heimrich said. “Perhaps Liz felt caught, tied in an old house with an old woman. Perhaps she blamed her sister. Perhaps there was something recently we don’t know about. We’ll have to try to find out. And there’s Kirkwood himself. Perhaps Virginia did tell him she was through, was going to marry the doctor.”

  “He’s no kid,” Forniss said. “You know how it is usually. It’s the adolescents who can’t take it.”

  “Naturally,” Heimrich said. “But it isn’t always that way, is it? And perhaps there was something there, too, we don’t know about. We’ll have to find out, if we can.”

  “What it comes to, pretty much,” Forniss said, “is that we start over.”

  It was not quite that bad, Heimrich said. They had not actually gone wrong, although they had worked on the wrong theory. They had merely to go further, now; had merely to find the right key.

  “In a haystack,” Forniss said.

  “Now Charlie,” Heimrich said. “It always is, isn’t it?”

  “You thought you had it,” Forniss said.

  Heimrich opened his eyes.

  “Now Charlie,” he said. “Of course. You thought so too, naturally.”

  “Yep,” Forniss said, “it looked easy for a while there.”

  Heimrich sighed, involuntarily, as he might have sighed at the upsetting of a jig-saw puzzle all but completed.

  “Kramer could be—” Forniss began.

  “Now Charlie,” Heimrich said. “We both know Kramer, don’t we?”

  “Some poison we don’t know about,” Forniss suggested, and Heimrich opened his eyes. They rather snapped open. “Sorry,” Forniss said. He considered, “Could he have given her high blood pressure?”

  “Give it up, Charlie,” Heimrich said. “We’ll just have to give it up.” He sighed again. “We’re not having luck,” he said. “Why didn’t Townsend lock up when he left yesterday?”

  “Because he figured I’d want to come back and I didn’t have a key,” Forniss said. “It’s all snafu. It’s—”

  The telephone rang. Forniss, who was nearest it, answered. He listened. He said, “Thanks a lot. Let you know if there is,” and hung up.

  “I ought to have remembered,” he said. “New York Academy of Medicine.”

  “Now Charlie.”

  “Two east a hundred and third,” F
orniss said. “The address she wrote down.”

  Heimrich closed his eyes. Then he said that would have seemed very interesting—yesterday.

  “She lived two places,” he said then, and his tone changed the subject. “Here and New York. Mostly in New York, I’d imagine. I suppose I’d better get into New York and poke around, Charlie. You poke around here. Maybe somebody saw somebody around the substation yesterday. That would help, naturally. But you know what we want.”

  “Yep,” Forniss said.

  Heimrich took the car. He stopped first at the Saunders house. Liz was crouched by the peony bed, pulling weeds. Timothy Gates stood and watched her. They both turned when Heimrich walked across the lawn toward them, and the girl stood up. Her face changed, not for the happier. It was part of Heimrich’s profession to have that effect on people—even on slim young women in slacks, in blue shirts open at pretty throats. When he was still some feet from the two, Heimrich could feel them both tighten. There was almost a vibration in the air around them.

  “Again!” Liz said.

  It wouldn’t be long, Heimrich promised. He was going to New York, to see what he could find there. He planned to begin at the office of the modeling agency for which Virginia Monroe had worked. Unfortunately, although he had had the address, he had mislaid it. (He did not add that it had been among numerous papers mislaid.)

  Liz would have to go to the house to look it up. She went across the lawn, straight and slender in slacks. Heimrich, after watching her for a moment, turned to Gates, who was still watching her. Heimrich waited; Gates watched Liz Monroe until she entered the house. His face was very revealing. When she was out of sight, and he looked at Heimrich, he flushed a little and smiled.

  “She’s—” he began, and stopped. “So Mrs. Saunders died naturally,” he said, instead. “You hadn’t expected that, sir?”