We had reached the coroner’s office by then, but I stopped and turned.
“There’s only one unidentified body here,” I told him, “and that was brought in this afternoon. If your brother was seen this evening, it couldn’t be him.”
The tall man said, “Oh,” rather blankly and looked at me a moment. Then he said, “I hope that’s right. But this friend said he saw him a distance, on a crowded street. He could have been mistaken. So as long as I’m here—’’
“I guess you might as well,” I said, “now that you’re here. Then you’ll be sure.”
I led the way through thee office and unlocked the door.
I was glad, as we started down the stairs, that there seemed little likelihood of identification. I hate to be around when one is made. You always seem to share, vicariously, the emotion of the person who recognizes a friend or relative.
At the top of the stairs I pushed the button that put on the overhead lights downstairs in the morgue. The switch for the showcase was down below. I stopped to flick it as I reached the bottom of the stairs, and the tall man went on past me toward the case. Apparently he had been a visitor here before.
I had taken only a step or two after him when I heard him gasp. He stopped suddenly and took a step backward so quickly that I bumped into him and grabbed his arm to steady myself.
He turned around, and his face was a dull pasty gray that one seldom sees on the face of a living person.
“My God!” he said. “Why didn’t you warn me that—”
It didn’t make sense for him to say a thing like that. I’ve been with people before when they have identified relatives, but none of them had ever reacted just that way. Or had it been merely identification? He certainly looked as though he had seen something horrible.
I stepped a little to one side so that I could see past him. When I saw, it was as though a wave of cold started at the base of my spine and ran up along my body. I had never seen anything like it—and you get toughened when you work in a morgue.
The glass top of the display case had been broken in at the upper, the head, end, and the body inside the case was—well, I’ll try to be as objective about it as I can. The best way to be objective is to put it bluntly. The flesh of the face had been eaten away, eaten away as though acid had been poured on it, or as though—
I got hold of myself and stepped up to the edge of the display case and looked down.
It had not been acid. Acid does not leave the marks of teeth.
Nauseated, I closed my eyes for an instant until I got over it. Behind me, I heard sounds as though the tall man, who had been the first to see it, was being sick. I didn’t blame him.
“I don’t—” I said, and stepped back. “Something’s happened here.”
Silly remark, but you can’t think of the right thing to say in a spot like that.
“Come on,” I told him. “I’ll have to get the police.”
The thought of the police steadied me. When the police got here, it would be all right. They would find out what had happened.
Facing Horror
As I reached the bottom of the stairs my mind started to work logically again. I could picture Bill Drager up in the office firing questions at me, asking me, “When did it happen? You can judge by the temperature, can’t you?”
The tall man stumbled up the stairs past me as I paused. Most decidedly I didn’t want to be down there alone, but I yelled to him:
“Wait up there. I’ll be with you in a minute.”
He would have to wait, of course, because I would have to unlock the outer door to let him out.
I turned back and looked at the thermometer in the broken case, trying not to look at anything else. It read sixty-three degrees, and that was only about ten degrees under the temperature of the rest of the room.
The glass had been broken, then, for some time. An hour, I’d say offhand, or maybe a little less. Upstairs, with the heavy door closed, I wouldn’t have heard it break. Anyway, I hadn’t heard it break.
I left the lights on in the morgue, all of them, when I ran up the stairs.
The tall man was standing in the middle of the office, looking around as though he were in a daze. His face still had that grayish tinge, and I was just as glad that I didn’t have to look in a mirror just then, because my own face was likely as bad.
I picked up the telephone and found myself giving Bill Drager’s home telephone number instead of asking for the police. I don’t know why my thoughts ran so strongly to Bill Drager, except that he had been the one who had suspected that something more than met the eye had been behind the hit-run case from the Mill Road.
“Can—will you let me out of here?” the tall man said. “I—I—that wasn’t my—” ‘I’m afraid not,” I told him. “Until the police get here. You—uh—witnessed—”
It sounded screwy, even to me. Certainly he could not have had anything to do with whatever had happened down there. He had preceded me into the morgue only by a second and hadn’t even reached the case when I was beside him. But I knew what the police would say if I let him go before they had a chance to get his story.
Then Drager’s voice was saying a sleepy, “Hullo,” into my ear.
“Bill, I said, “you got to come down here. That corpse downstairs—it’s—I—”
The sleepiness went out of Drager’s voice.
“Calm down, Jerry,” he said. “It can’t be that bad. Now, what happened?”
I finally got it across.
“You phoned the department first, of course?” Drager asked.
“N-no. I thought of you first because—”
“Sit tight,” he said. “I’ll phone them and then come down. I’ll have to dress first, so they’ll get there ahead of me. Don’t go down to the morgue again and don’t touch anything.”
He put the receiver on the hook, and I felt a little better. Somehow the worst seemed to be over, now that it was off my chest. Drager’s offering to phone the police saved me from having to tell it again, over the phone.
The tall man—I remembered now that he had given the name Roger Burke—was leaning against the wall, weakly.
“Did—did I get from what you said on the phone that the body wasn’t that way when—when they brought it in?” he asked.
I nodded. “It must have happened within the last hour,” I said. “I was down there at midnight, and everything was all right then.”
“But what—what happened?”
I opened my mouth and closed it again. Something happened down there, but what? There wasn’t any entrance to the morgue other than the ventilator and the door that opened at the top of the stairs. And nobody—nothing—had gone through that door since my trip of inspection.
I thought back and thought hard. No, I hadn’t left this office for even a minute between midnight and the time the night bell had rung at two o’clock. I had left the office then, of course, to answer the door. But whatever had happened had not happened then. The thermometer downstairs proved that.
Burke was fumbling cigarettes out of his pocket. He held out the package with a shaky hand, and I took one and managed to strike a match and light both cigarettes.
The first drag made me feel nearly human. Apparently he felt better too, because he said:
“I—I’m afraid I didn’t make identification one way or the other. You couldn’t—with—” He shuddered. “Say, my brother had a small anchor tattooed on his left forearm. I forgot it or I could have asked you over the phone. Was there—”
I thought back to the file and shook my head.
“No,” I said definitely. “It would have been on the record, and there wasn’t anything about it. They make a special point of noting down things like that.”
“That’s swell,” Burke said. “I mean—Say, if I’m going to have to wait, I’m going to sit down. I still feel awful.”
Then I remembered that I had better phone Dr. Skibbine too, and give him the story first—hand before the police got
here and called him. I went over to the phone.
The police got there first—Captain Quenlin and Sergeant Wilson and two other men I knew by sight but not by name. Bill Drager was only a few minutes later getting there, and around three o’clock Dr. Skibbine came.
By that time the police had questioned Burke and let him go, although one of them left to go home with him. They told him it was because they wanted to check on whether his brother had shown up yet, so the Missing Persons Bureau could handle it if he hadn’t. But I guessed the real reason was that they wanted to check on his identity and place of residence.
Not that there seemed to be any way Burke could be involved in whatever had happened to the body, but when you don’t know what has happened, you can’t overlook angle. After all, he was a material witness.
Bill Drager had spent most of the time since he had been there downstairs, but he came up now.
“The place is tighter than a drum down there, except for that ventilator,” he said. “And I noticed something about it. One of the vanes in it is a little bent.”
“How about rats?” Captain Quenlin asked.
Drager snorted. “Ever see rats break a sheet of glass?”
“The glass might have been broken some other way.” Quenlin looked at me. “You’re around here nights, Jerry Grant. Ever see any signs of rats or mice?”
I shook my head, and Bill Drager backed me up.
“I went over the whole place down there,” he said. “There isn’t a hole anywhere. Floor s tile set in cement. The walls are tile, in big close-set slabs, without a break. I went over them.” Dr. Skibbine was starting down the steps.
“Come on, Jerry,” he said to me. “Show me where you and this Burke fellow were standing when he let out a yip.”
I didn’t much want to, but I followed him down. I showed him where I had been and where Burke had been and told him that Burke had not gone closer to the case than about five feet at any time. Also, I told him what I had already told the police about my looking at the thermometer in the case. Dr. Skibbine went over and looked at it.
“Seventy-one now,” he said. “I imagine that’s as high as it’s going. You say it was sixty-three when you saw it at two? Yes, I’d say the glass was broken between twelve-thirty and one-thirty.”
Quenlin had followed us down the stairs. “When did you get home tonight, Dr. Skibbine?” he asked.
The coroner looked at him in surprise. “Around midnight. Good Lord, you don’t think I had anything to do with this, do you, Quenlin?”
The captain shook his head. “Routine question. Look, Doc, why would anybody or anything do that?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Skibbine said slowly, “unless it was to prevent identification of the corpse. That’s possible. The body will never be identified now unless the man has a criminal record and his prints are on file. But making that ‘anything’ instead of ‘anybody’ makes it easier, Cap. I’d say ‘anything’ was hungry, plenty hungry.”
I leaned back against the wall at the bottom of the stairs, again fighting nausea that was almost worse than before.
Rats? Besides the fact that there weren’t any rats, it would have taken a lot of them to do what had been done.
“Jerry,” said Bill Drager, “you’re sure you weren’t out of the office up there for even a minute between midnight and two o’clock? Think hard. Didn’t you maybe go to the washroom or something?”
“I’m positive,” I told him.
Drager turned to the captain and pointed up to the ventilator.
“There are only two ways into this morgue, Cap,” he said. “One’s through the door Jerry says he sat in front of, and the other’s up there.”
My eyes followed his pointing finger, and I studied the ventilator and its position. It was a round opening in the wall, twelve or maybe thirteen inches across, and there was a wheel-like arrangement of vanes that revolved in it. It was turning slowly. It was set in the wall just under the high ceiling, maybe sixteen feet above the floor, and it was directly over the display case.
“Where’s that open into?” Quenlin asked.
“Goes right through the wall,” Dr. Skibbine told him. “Opens on the alley, just a foot or two above the ground. There’s another wheel just like that one on the outside. A little electric motor turns them.”
“Could the thing be dismantled from the outside?”
Dr. Skibbine shrugged. “Easiest way to find that out is to go out in the alley and try it. But nobody could get through there, even if you got the thing off. It’s too narrow.”
“A thin man might—’’
“No, even a thin man is wider than twelve inches across the shoulders, and that’s my guess on the width of that hole.” Quenlin shrugged.
“Got a flashlight, Drager?” he asked. “Go on out in the alley and take a look. Although if somebody did get that thing off, I don’t see how the devil they could have—”
Then he looked down at the case and winced. “If everybody’s through looking at this for the moment,” he said, “for crying out loud put a sheet over it. It’s giving me the willies. I’ll dream about ghouls tonight.”
The word hit me like a ton of bricks. Because it was then I remembered that we had talked about ghouls early that very evening. About—how had Mr. Paton put it?—’’ghosts, ghouls, vampires, werewolves,” and about a morgue being a good place for ghouls to hang around; and about—
Some of the others were looking at me, and I knew that Dr. Skibbine, at least, was remembering that conversation. Had he mentioned it to any of the others?
Sergeant Wilson was standing behind the other men and probably didn’t know I could see him from where I stood, for he surreptitiously crossed himself.
“Ghouls, nuts!” he said in a voice a bit louder than necessary. “There ain’t any such thing. Or is there?”
It was a weak but dramatic ending. Nobody answered him. Me, I had had enough of that morgue for the moment. Nobody had put a sheet over the case because there was not one available downstairs.
“I’ll get a sheet,” I said and started up for the office. I stumbled on the bottom step.
“What’s eating—” I heard Quenlin say, and then as though he regretted his choice of words, he started over again. “Something’s wrong with the kid. Maybe you better send him home, Doc.”
He probably didn’t realize I could hear him. But by that time I was most of the way up, so I didn’t hear the coroner’s answer.
Wildest Talent
From the cabinet I got a sheet, and the others were coming up the steps when I got back with it. Quenlin handed it to Wilson.
“You put it on, Sarge,” he said.
Wilson took it, and hesitated. I had seen his gesture downstairs and I knew he was scared stiff to go back down there alone. I was scared, too, but I did my Boy Scout act for the day and said:
“I’ll go down with you, Sergeant. I want to take a look at that ventilator.”
While he put the sheet over the broken case, I stared up at the ventilator and saw the bent vane. As I watched, a hand reached through the slit between that vane and the next and bent it some more.
Then the hand, Bill Drager’s hand, reached through the widened slit and groped for the nut on the center of the shaft on which the ventilator wheel revolved. Yes, the ventilator could be removed and replaced from the outside. The bent vane made it look as though that had been done.
But why? After the ventilator had been taken off, what then? The opening was too small for a man to get through and besides it was twelve feet above the glass display case.
Sergeant Wilson went past me up the stairs, and I followed him up. The conversation died abruptly as I went through the door, and I suspected that I had been the subject of the talk.
Dr. Skibbine was looking at me.
“The cap’s right, Jerry,” he said. “You don’t look so well. We’re going to be around here from now on, so you take the rest of the night off. Get some sleep.”
Sleep
, I thought. What’s that? How could I sleep now? I felt dopy, I’ll admit, from lack of it. But the mere thought of turning out a light and lying down alone in a dark room—huh-uh! I must have been a little lightheaded just then, for a goofy parody was running through my brain:
A ghoul hath murdered sleep,
the innocent sleep,
sleep that knits . . .
“Thanks, Dr. Skibbine,” I said. “I—I guess it will do me good, at that.”
It would get me out of here, somewhere where I could think without a lot of people talking. If I could get the unicorns and rhinoceros out of my mind, maybe I had the key. Maybe, but it didn’t make sense yet.
I put on my hat and went outside and walked around the building into the dark alley.
Bill Drager’s face was a dim patch in the light that came through the circular hole in the wall where the ventilator had been.
He saw me coming and called out sharply, “Who’s that?” and stood up. When he stood, he seemed to vanish, because it put him back in the darkness.
“It’s me—Jerry Grant,” I said. “Find out anything, Bill?”
“Just what you see. The ventilator comes out, from the outside. But it isn’t a big enough hole for a man.” He laughed a little off-key. “A ghoul, I don’t know. How big is a ghoul, Jerry?”
“Can it, Bill,” I said. “Did you do that in the dark? Didn’t you bring a flashlight?”
“No. Look, whoever did it earlier in the night, if somebody did, wouldn’t have dared use a light. They’d be too easy to see from either end of the alley. I wanted to see if it could be done in the dark.”
“Yes,” I said thoughtfully. “But the light from the inside shows.”
“Was it on between midnight and two?”
“Urn—no. I hadn’t thought of that.”
I stared at the hole in the wall. It was just about a foot in diameter. Large enough for a man to stick his head into, but not to crawl through.
Bill Drager was still standing back in the dark, but now that my eyes were used to the alley, I could make out the shadowy outline of his body.
Death Locked In Page 13
