“Yes, yes, monsieur? What next?” de Grandin rasped as Mr. Peteros ceased speaking. “Pour le chapeau d’un cochon vert, what else is it you see, I ask to know?”
“Eh?” Mr. Peteros looked at him with the blank stare of a wakened sleeper. “What’s that?”
“Mordieu, what else was it you saw?”
“I don’t remember. I can never recall what I’ve seen in the trance.”
The little Frenchman looked as if he were about to spring on him, then raised his narrow shoulders in a shrug of resignation. “Tenez, it is of no real importance. I damn think you have told us quite enough.”
“JE SUIS AFFAMÉ, I am hungry, like a wolf, me,” he told me as we reached the house. “Let us see what Madame Nora has concealed in the ice box.”
We rummaged in the frigidaire and brought out some cold roast lamb, some lettuce and a jar of mayonnaise. Also several bottles of beer.
“Now,” he asked, seating himself on the kitchen table with a sandwich in one hand and beer mug in the other, “what is it that we have? It seems that in the matter of eliminating Monsieur Frye the middle Roggenbuck brother was, as usual, the master mind. He planned the so clever assassination, his henchmen-brothers executed it,
“I am persuaded that they died self-hanged, and that they richly deserved hanging. Of Monsieur Théobald’s suicide there is no doubt. The prints upon the bowling ball exactly match the lines of his feet. That he stood on it, then kicked it away when he had draped the noose around his neck, there is no question. Concerning Monsieur Frédéric I cannot say with certainty, but I incline to think that Dr. Parnell is for once right, and the good Costello once unfortunately wrong.
“Why did they do it? Who can say? Perhaps it was their guilty conscience, though I do not think so, for fripons such as they have little conscience. Perhaps it was the vengeful spirit of their victim seeking justice—forcing them to do that which the law could not. It could be so. At any rate, they are eliminated. Our problem now is Monsieur Rodney.”
“There’s nothing we can do about him,” I rejoined. “There’s no way we can bring the crime home to him. No court and jury in New Jersey would listen to such testimony as Peteros gave us tonight, and even if they did we can’t Prove Rodney planned the murder.”
“I agree with you, mon vieux, but we may do what the law cannot. His conscience—granting that he has one—is not clean. His brothers’ statements that they had a feeling of being watched troubled him. He is persuaded that his murdered brother-in-law has the power to bewitch him—to ‘hex’ him, as he puts it. When, to test his sensibility to suggestion, I pretended to see someone standing behind him last night, did not you see how frightened he was? I think that there we shall find the chink in his armor, and I shall work industriously to enlarge it. Yes, certainly. Of course.”
IT WAS SHORTLY BEFORE noon next day when he entered Mr. Roggenbuck’s office. The place swarmed with activity. A battery of typewriters, operated by singularly photogenic young women, filled in spaces in processed form letters and addressed envelopes; a boy and girl were busy at a multi-graphing machine, several curvaceous females stuffed the filled-in forms into envelopes.
“Yes, sirs?” challenged the young woman at the switchboard, who also evidently acted as receptionist. Advised of our errand she whispered something into an inter-office communicator, and in a moment looked up with a smile. “Straight ahead, please,” she directed. “The Bishop’s office is at the end of the corridor.”
“Parbleu,” de Grandin chuckled as we walked down the hall, “when he first came to see us he was a simple pastor. Today he is a bishop. We must hurry to take care of him, my friend, or he will assuredly become pope.
“Monseigneur,” he announced as we entered Roggenbuck’s dimly-lighted, softly carpeted sanctum, “I have the proof that both your brothers died by their own hands, and—mon Dieu, who is that!” he stepped back, both hands raised as if to ward away some horror.
“Who—where?” the other turned half round in his swivel chair.
“The one who stands behind you with his face all smeared in blood and points at you accusingly—”
“No!” Roggenbuck exclaimed. “It can’t be—he can’t say—”
“Friend Trowbridge, do not you see him?” de Grandin turned to me. “Do not you see him standing there?”
I knit my brows and tried to sound as convincing as possible. “Yes, there’s someone there. He seems to have met with an accident. Shall we call an ambulance—”
“No! No!” Roggenbuck broke in hoarsely. “You’re lying, both of you!” He pressed a button on his desk, and in a moment there came the click of high heels on the floor outside.
“Did you ring, Bishop?” asked a young woman as she entered. “I—oh! who is it—what’s happened?” She stared across her employer’s shoulder, apparently wide-eyed with horror, then put her hands up to her face and dropped back a step, shuddering. “Oh, o-oh!” she moaned. “The blood—the blood!”
Sweat was streaming down Roggenbuck’s face, his full-lipped mouth began to work convulsively, and at its corners little flecks of foam showed. His eyes were bright and dilated as if under the influence of a drug. “Do you see it, too, Elsie?” he choked.
She made no answer, but nodded, her face still cupped in her hands, her shoulders shaking with repressed sobs.
“Oh, my God!” the frightened man rose from his desk and stumbled toward the rear door. “He’s come for me, too. He came for Fred and Theo, now it’s my turn—leave me alone, Amos Frye, I didn’t—I didn’t—” The door banged to behind him, and de Grandin patted the girl’s shoulder.
“Bravo, Mademoiselle,” he applauded. “The great Bernhardt at her greatest could not have done better. Here is what I promised you.” From his wallet he drew several bills and pressed them into her hand.
The girl giggled. “I wouldn’t ’a’ done it if he hadn’t been such a heel,” she confessed. “But he was always makin’ passes at us girls, an’ threatenin’ to fire us if we squawked. The pious old hypocrite!”
The Frenchman grinned delightedly. “You have given me a new word for my vocabulary, ma chère. It are entirely as you say. He was an eel of the first water, him.”
From the driveway beside the office we heard the rasp of gears and the roaring of a motor being started. In a moment, from the corner came the shrill, hysterical scream of a police whistle, the crash of metal smashing into metal and the ring of breaking glass.
We rushed into the street and raced toward the corner, with the shriek of the policeman’s whistle and a chorus of hoarse cries still sounding.
Telescoped until it was foreshortened by at least a third its length, Roggenbuck’s convertible stood at the intersection of the street and boulevard, while towering above it, like a bulldog straddling a luckless cat, was a ten-ton truck.
“Hullo, Dr. de Grandin,” greeted the policeman. “Good mornin’, Dr. Trowbridge. Gimme a hand with him, will you? He was comin’ hell-bent-for-election down the street, payin’ no more attention to the red light than if it wasn’t there, when zingo! he barged into this here now truck, like he’d knock it outa his way. Yeah, the cemeteries is full o’ birds that drive like that. He didn’t have no more chance than a rabbit.”
“One sees,” returned de Grandin as, assisting the policeman, we lifted what was left of Roggenbuck from his car. Death must have been instantaneous. Certainly, it had been messy. His whole face was bashed in as if it had been struck by a battering-ram. His skull, from frontal bone to occiput, had been smashed like an egg and almost denuded of scalp. “Mort,” pronounced de Grandin. “Mort comme un mouton—he is dead like a herring, this one.” He nodded to the policeman. “This is for the coroner, mon brave. Do not disturb the internes at the hospital. They hate to have their poker playing interrupted by such fruitless calls.”
The Body-Snatchers
STREET LIGHTS WERE COMING on and the afterglow was faint in the west under the first cold stars as I let myself in at the front door. I
’d had a hard day at the hospital, two T and A’s in the morning and a cholitonotomy in the afternoon, and at my age surgery is almost as hard on the physician as the patient. “Thank heaven, no calls this evening,” I murmured as I shrugged out of my overcoat and started toward the study where I knew Nora McGinnis would have a preprandial cocktail iced and waiting for me.
My heart sank like a plummet as the voices came to me from the consulting room. “I realize this is more a case for a lawyer than a physician, but I’ve known Dr. Trowbridge since I was thirty seconds old, and I have to talk it over with somebody. Just going to an attorney seems so sort of—well, common, if you understand, Dr. de Grandin. There’s never been a divorce in our family, but—”
”Hullo, there young ’un!” I greeted with wholly meretricious cordiality as I paused at the door. “What’s all this talk about divorce—”
“Oh, Dr. Trowbridge, I’m so glad you’ve come!” Nancy Northrop fairly leaped from her chair and threw her arms about me. “I—I’ve been so miserable, Doctor!” The held-back tears broke through her eyelids and in a moment she was sobbing like a little girl whose doll is broken.
“There, there,” I soothed, patting her shoulder. “A dry Martini won’t cure the trouble, but it’ll help. Come into the study, both of you.”
Nancy Northrop was a small, pretty woman with bright hair, a straight little nose and wide-set amber eyes “put in with a smutty finger,” as the Irish say. For a long moment she was calm, immovable as the embalmed bride of a Pharoah, staring broodingly into the tawny depths of her cocktail. “I just don’t seem to have the proper words to tell it,” she murmured finally. “You’ve known Norman and me all our lives, Doctor; you know we went together even in grammar school days, and when we married it was no more a surprise to anyone—including us—than setting down the sum beneath a column of figures would have been.”
“That’s so,” I agreed. “You were childhood sweethearts, I remember. A lot of people thought it just one of those boy-and-girl affairs, but—”
“I said it was no more surprising than the sum arrived at when you add a line of figures,” she broke in. “Well, someone made a mistake in addition, Doctor. Norman’s left me.”
“Eh? What d’ye mean, child?”
“Just what I said. He’s—as the old song had it—‘gone with a handsomer girl.’”
“Tenez, Madame,” de Grandin interrupted, “suppose we start at the beginning and work forward. How was it that Monsieur your husband left you, and when?”
“Last Monday, sir. There was a party at the Lakerim Country Club that evening, and Norman and I went. We had the first few dances together, then Norman went somewhere—he was on the committee, you know—and the next I saw of him he was dancing with a strange girl.”
“A stranger?” I prompted as she fell into a thoughtful silence, turning the stem of her glass between her fingers, biting her lower lip to hold it steady.
“Yes, sir, a stranger. No one seemed to know who she was—just how she came to be at the party, or who brought her is a mystery—but there she was in his arms, and”—she offered us a pitiful, small smile—“I must admit she was attractive and danced extraordinarily well.”
“Can you perhaps describe her, Madame?” de Grandin asked as the silence lengthened again.
“Can I? Was there ever a woman who couldn’t describe her successful rival down to the last hair of her plucked eyebrows and final hook and eye of her gown? She was tall, as tall as a tall man, and built exquisitely—no, not exquisitely, grandly built is more nearly correct. She was more of a Minerva than a Venus. Her hair was dark, either black or very dark brown, and her eyes an intense blue, like the sea off Ogunquit or Hamilton. She must have just come back from Cuba or Bermuda, for her neck and arms and shoulders all seemed carved of smoky amber, and she wore an evening gown of red brocade, sleeveless, of course, and belted at the waist with a gold cord, Grecian fashion. Her sandals were gold, too, and the lovely sun-tan on her feet made them look gilded, except for the red-lacquered nails. Oh”—once more she gave a rueful little smile—“I couldn’t any more compete with her than Hera or Pallas could with Aphrodite! I’d never felt a pang of jealousy before, but when I saw my husband dancing with that gorgeous hussy I was positively green-eyed.
“They were playing ‘Tales From the Vienna Woods,’ and she and Norm were waltzing to it like a pair of ballroom professionals when a man came from the conservatory and cut in. As she danced away with her new partner I could see her signalling Norman, positively teasing him with her eyes.
“The strange couple circled round the floor once then danced into the conservatory, and I felt everything inside me coming loose as I saw Norman follow them.
“I hadn’t any business doing it, I know, it was a cheap, unworthy way to act, but I went in after them. Just as I reached the entrance to the greenhouse I heard voices raised in angry argument, then a crash, and Norman and the strange girl brushed past me. ‘Brushed’ is the verb, too. I might have been just one of the potted plants for all the notice they took of me. As they passed she linked her fingers round his arm and laughed. I heard her say, ‘How handsome you are—’”
Nancy paused in her recital, and a puzzled frown formed on her face, as if she were endeavoring to see something just beyond her vision.
“Yes?” I prompted.
“That’s what’s worrying me, Doctor. What she called him. It wasn’t Norm or Norman nor even Mr. Northrop. It was some other name, some strange name I had never heard.”
Her preoccupation with the trifle annoyed me. “What happened next?” I asked a little acidly.
“I went into the conservatory, and as I staggered between the plants I knew just how an injured animal that crawls away to die must feel. I was so blinded by my tears that I didn’t see the other man until I stumbled over him. He was lying on his back, both arms flung out as if he had been crucified against the floor, and blood was running from a cut in his head where he’d struck it against a jardinière as he fell.
“The first thing I thought was, ‘He’s dead. Norman’s killed him!’ but when I bent down I could hear him breathing hoarsely, and knew that he was only unconscious. I don’t know how long I waited beside him. You see, I wanted to make sure that Norman had a chance to get away before I gave the alarm, but finally I ran back to the ballroom and told Ed Pennybacker what I’d found. Of course, I didn’t tell him anything about the struggle I’d heard, or even about seeing Norman and the strange woman in the greenhouse. Dr. Ferris was at the dance, and went to give the man first aid, but in a moment he came back looking serious and muttering something about concussion. They called an ambulance and took him to Mercy Hospital.”
“And where was Norman all this time?” I asked as she lapsed into brooding silence once more.
“I don’t know, Doctor. I haven’t seen him since.”
“Wh—what?”
“That’s correct, sir. He didn’t come to take me home. Our car was gone from the parking lot, and I had to ride back with Joe and Louise Tralor. He didn’t come home that night. He hasn’t been home since, nor has he been to the office. O-oh!”
Her cry was a small sad sound that heightened and grew thinner, finally ravelled out to nothingness like a pulled woolen thread. “He’s gone, Doctor; left me; deserted me!”
There are times when nothing we can say seems adequate. This was one of them, and so I had to content myself with patting her shoulder and murmuring, “There, there!”
She turned on me, eyes blazing with a sudden heat that fairly burned the tears away as she put her forefinger to her dimpled chin, made me a bobbing little curtsy and, like a little girl reciting, repeated:
There, little girl; don’t cry!
They have broken your heart, I know—
Her voice cracked like a shattering glass, and her laughter was a ghastly thing to hear as she ran from the study and out the front door.
“THERE’S A MISTHER NORTHROP to see yez, gentlemen,” Nora McGinnis t
old us as de Grandin and I sat over brandy, coffee and cigars in the drawing room after dinner that evening. “He says as how it’s most important.”
“Tiens,” de Grandin murmured. “Is it that the errant husband comes to tell us his side of the story, one wonders?”
“Humph, it had better be a good tale he’s cooked up,” I answered. “The unconscionable young pup, treating Nancy that way—”
“Misther Northrop,” Nora interrupted from the doorway.
He was a very ugly little man, some sixty-five years old, I judged, for his face was criss-crossed by a network of deep wrinkles and his small mustache was quite white. His eyes were small, black and deep-set, and what we could see of his hair was also white, though for the most part it was covered by a Sayer’s occipital bandage. His clothes were well cut and of good material, very neatly pressed, but obviously not new. “Good evening, Dr. Trowbridge,” he greeted as he paused at the door.
“Mr. Northrop?” I asked inquiringly. “I don’t think that I’ve had the pleasure—”
The laugh that interrupted me was mirthless as the bark of a teased dog. “Oh, yes, we’ve met before, Doctor,” he corrected. “It was thirty-two years ago, on the seventeenth of January, to be exact, in Mercy Hospital. I’m Norman Northrop.”
I could feel a wash of angry blood in my cheeks. “If this is a joke—” I began, but once more his eerie, bitter laugh broke in.
“If it’s a joke it’s on me, Doctor. I don’t understand it any more than you do, but I’m Norman Northrop.”
“Grand Dieu des porcs!” I heard de Grandin murmur almost soundlessly, then aloud, “Come in, Monsieur; come in and tell us how it comes that you are strange to Dr. Trowbridge, and, I damn suspect, to yourself also.”
“Thank you, Doctor,” the caller bowed acknowledgement of de Grandin’s invitation and came into the drawing room. I noticed that he limped a little, as if he had suffered a slight stroke some time before, for his right foot dragged and turned in as he stepped.
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