"Very quick for a very young man."
"How old are the fellows running the big go-go funds? How old are the executives in some of the great big conglomerates? He's quick and tough and bold, and you don't know what his next move is going to be until it's all sewed up."
"Last item. How well do you know Hardahee?"
"More professionally than socially. Wint is very solid. Happens to be under the weather right now. Scheduled this morning at ten on an estate case where I represent one of the parties at interest and Stan Krantz appeared and asked for a postponement because Wint is ill and nobody else over there is up on the case. It's pretty complex. Jesus! All this work to do and I just can't seem to make my mind work. McGee, what are you after? What's this all about?"
"I guess it's about a dead nurse."
"That mean that much to you?"
"She was very alive and it was a dingy way to die."
"So you're sentimental? You're carried away because she was so sore at me she took you on? All she was, McGee, was--"
"Don't say it."
"You mean that, don't you?"
"Say it then, if you're sure you want to find out."
He looked at me and rubbed the back of his hand across his lips. "I think I'll take your word for it."
"You're mean in a curious way, Holton. Small mean. Like some kind of a dirty little kid."
"Go to hell," he said with no emphasis at all. He swiveled his chair. He was looking out at his little oriental garden patio as I walked out. The rain had stopped.
17
IT WAS FIVE when I got back to 109. I unlocked the door and leaned over and reached around it. No wad of paper anywhere near where it should be. I opened the door the rest of the way. The balled-up piece of stationery was five feet from the door, where it had rolled when somebody had opened the door.
It seemed a fair guess that if it had been a maid or a housekeeper, I would have found it in the wastebasket. I checked the phones first. I took the base plate off the one by the bed and found that my visitor was going first class. He'd put a Continental 0011 in there, more commonly known as a two-headed bug. It would pick up anything in the room and also over the phone and transmit it on an FM frequency. Effective maximum range probably three hundred feet. Battery good for five days or so, when fresh. It goes for around five hundred dollars. So he could be within range, listening on an FM receiver, or he could have a voice-activated tape recorder doing his listening for him. Or he could have a pickup and relay receiver-transmitter plugged into an AC outlet within range, and be reading me from a much greater distance. One thing was quite certain. The sounds of my taking the screws out of the base plate with the little screwdriver blade on the pocket knife would either have alerted him at once or would when he played the tape back.
So I said, "Come to the room and we'll have a little talk. Otherwise you're out five hundred bucks worth of playtoy." I took it out and thumbed the little microswitch to off. I then made a fairly thorough check of the underside of all the furniture and any other place I thought a backup mike and transmitter might be effectively concealed. The professional approach is to plant two. Then the pigeon finds one and struts around congratulating himself, but he's still on the air. If the same person, Broon, had checked me over the first tune, then I had two more reasons to believe he wasn't much more than moderately competent.
I was finding a good place for the gun when Stanger phoned me. He said he hadn't been able to get a line on Broon as yet. He said the continuing investigation on the murder of Penny Woertz hadn't turned up a thing as yet. He had checked on Helen Boughmer and found they had her under heavy sedation.
I told him I had no progress to report. I didn't actually. All I had was a lot more unanswered questions than before. I stretched out on the bed to ask them all over again.
Assume that Tom Pike had arranged that he and Janice Holton have their first assignation, in the full meaning of the word, in the apartment where Hulda Wennersehn lived. Janice couldn't get in touch with him to tell him she couldn't make it. So he had gone to the parking lot where they had arranged to meet and had finally realized she wasn't going to be there. Assume he went to the apartment alone and that he went to Penny's place in the late afternoon and she let him in and he shoved the shears into her throat. He tracked some blood into the Wennersehn apartment. He cleaned it up, cleaned up his shoes and maybe pants legs, and burned the rags.
But he had expected Janice to be there. He had changed his plan. What could the original plan have been? Janice certainly would have an understandable motive for killing her husband's girl friend. Having her nearby at the time of the murder could establish opportunity.
So if he planned to frame Janice Holton for the murder of Penny, and if Janice couldn't show up to be the patsy, why would he go ahead and kill Penny anyway? Lorrette Walker had found out from the cleaning woman that somebody had stretched out on Hulda Wennersehn's bed.
So he had some thinking to do. He could cancel out and try to set it up another time. The death of the nurse would, of course, bust up the little duet of Penny and Rick, the two who had the unshakable belief Sherman hadn't killed himself. Did Penny have some random piece of information that she had not yet pieced into the picture and that made haste imperative?
Or it could have been some kind of sick excitement that grew and grew inside the brain of the man stretched out on the bed, until at last he got up and walked to Penny's place and did it because he had been thinking of it too long not to do it, even though the original plan was no longer possible.
Of course, it was possible that he might have at last decided to just go talk to the nurse and see if she did have the missing bit of information that he suspected she might have. Then, while he was with her, she might have made the intuitive leap, and suddenly he had no choice but to kill her, suddenly and mercilessly.
But my speculations kept returning to what the original plan could have been. What good would it do to knock Janice Holton out or drug her and set her up for the murder when under interrogation she would explain why she was at the Wennersehn apartment and who she was with? I tried to figure out how he could have planned to leap that hurdle. Kill them both and set it up as murder and suicide? That would have been a complex and tricky and terribly dangerous procedure.
Suddenly I realized that he could have framed her very safely, very beautifully, if she were unable to remember how she came to be there, in fact could not remember the assignation with Pike or even being in the Wennersehn woman's apartment or in Penny's apartment.
I found myself pacing around the room with no memory of getting off the bed. Suppose Pike had some way of making certain Maureen didn't remember a thing. No memory of suicide attempts. Couldn't Janice have no memory of committing a murder? Suppose she found herself in Penny's apartment with the dead girl, with no memory of how she got there?
Penny had been going to tell me something Dr. Sherman said about memory and digital skills. Digital? Skill with numbers or with fingers? Manual skills, maybe.
Maybe that Dormed thing fouled up memory. Electro-sleep. Portable unit, Biddy had told me.
I needed some fast expert opinions. I had no problem remembering the name of the neurologist in Miami. When your spine has been damaged by an angry man belting you with a chunk of two by four and your legs go numb, and somebody fixes what you were certain was a broken back and wasn't, you don't forget the name.
Dr. Steve Roberts. I got through to him in fifteen minutes. "Excuse me, Trav," he said. "This lady I live with has just handed me a frosty delicious glass. There. I have tested the drink and kissed the lady. What's on your mind? Back trouble?"
"No. Some information. Do you know anything about an electrosleep machine called a Donned?"
"Yes, indeed. Nice little gadget. Very effective."
"If somebody used one a great deal, could ft destroy their memory?"
"What? No. Absolutely not. Not enough current to destroy anything. If you keep hitting people with big charg
es, you don't destroy any particular process. You just turn them into a vegetable in all respects. Each series of shock treatments destroys brain cells. So do alcoholic spasms, if you have enough of them over a long enough period of time."
"How about convulsions? Like a woman might have if she had a kidney failure and lost a baby."
"Eclampsia, you mean? No, I doubt it. That sends the blood pressure up like a skyrocket, and before any brain damage could occur, you'd probably have a broken blood vessel in the brain. Where are you, anyway?"
"Fort Courtney."
"Practicing medicine without a license?"
"Practicing, maybe. But not medicine. Steve, can you think of any way you could make a person lose their memory?"
"All of it? Total amnesia?"
"No. Just of recent things."
"How long do you want this effect to last?"
"Permanently."
"Sometimes a good solid concussion will do it. Traumatic amnesia. Lots of people who recover after an accident lose a couple of hours or days out of their life and it seems to be gone forever. But there's no guarantee."
"Is there any chemical or medical way to do it?"
"Well... I wouldn't say that there's anything you could call a recognized procedure. I mean, there isn't much call for it, as I imagine you can understand."
"Is there a way?"
"Will you hold a minute. I think I can lay a hand on what 1 want."
I waited for at least two full minutes before he came back on the line. "Trav? I have to give you the layman's short course in how the brain works. You have about ten billion neurons in your head. These are tiny cells that transmit tiny electric charges. Each little neuron contains, among other things, about twenty million molecules of ribonucleic acid, called RNA for short. This RNA manufactures protein molecules-don't ask me how. Anyway, these protein molecules are related to the function we call memory. With me so far?"
"I think so."
"In certain experiments it has been shown that if you force laboratory animals to learn new skills, more RNA is produced in the brain, and thus more protein molecules are produced. Also, if you inject rats with magnesium pem-oline, which doubles, at least, the RNA production, you have rats that learn a lot faster and remember longer. So they've tried reverse proof by injecting rats and mice with a chemical that interferes with the process by which the RNA produces the protein molecule. Teach a mouse to find its way through a maze, then inject it, and it forgets everything it just learned."
"What do they inject?"
"A substance called puromycin. At one university they've been treating goldfish with it, and they have some very stupid goldfish out there. Don't learn a thing and can't remember a thing."
"What would happen if you injected a person with puromycin?"
"I don't think anybody ever has. If it works the way it does on the lab animals, you'd wipe out the memory of what had recently happened, maybe forever. Personally, I'd rather be given magnesium pemoline. In fact, I don't know how I'm getting along without it. As to puromycin, I have no idea what the side effects would be."
"Could anybody buy it?"
"Any doctor could, or any authorized lab or research institute. What in the world have you gotten into?"
"I don't know yet."
"Will you tell me someday?"
"If it wouldn't bore you. Say, what about memory and digital skills?"
"What about it?"
"Well, make a comment."
"There seems to be a kind of additional memory function in the brain stem and in the actual motor nerves and muscles. We've discovered that a man can have a genuine amnesia, regardless of cause, and suppose he has been a jeweler all his life and you hand him a jeweler's loup. More often then not, without knowing why he does so, he will lift it to his eye, put it in place and hold it there, like a monocle. Give a seamstress a thimble, and she'll put it on the right finger. We had a surgeon here once with such bad aphasia he couldn't seem to make any connection to reality at all. But when we put a piece of surgical thread in his hand, he began to tie beautiful little surgical knots, one-handed, without even knowing what he was doing. Shall I go on?"
"No. That should do it."
"Don't turn your back on anybody holding a two by four."
"Never again." I thanked him and hung up.
An hour later I stood screened by the shrubbery on the grounds of a lake-shore house, empty and for sale, and saw the station wagon come out of the Pike driveway and turn toward me on the way to town. The two daughters of Helena, blond, dressed for the party, smiling, Biddy at the wheel and Maureen beside her.
I could reasonably assume that Tom Pike was already in the city, making certain of the arrangements, seeing that his guests would be taken care of. I moved through the screen of plantings, along the road shoulder, angled back along the property line to a point where I could look at the big house. Both cars were gone. Mosquitoes sang their little hunger note into my ears, and a bluejay flew to a pine limb directly over me and called me foul names and accused me of unspeakable practices.
I crossed the drive and the yard to the rear door and knocked loudly and waited. After the second try, with no answer, I tried to slip the lock, but there was too much overlap in the door framing, so I went along the back of the house and used a short sturdy pry bar on the latch of the first set of sliding glass doors. I had stopped en route at a shopping plaza and bought it, thinking of the sturdy construction of the steel cabinet I had seen in Maureen's bathroom. The metal latch tore easily and I slid the glass door and sliding screen open, glad that they had not yet adopted that most simple and effective device now being used more and more to secure sliding glass doors, one-inch round hardwood cut to proper length and laid in the track where the door slides.
I slid the foot-long pry bar back inside my slacks, the hook end over my belt, and went swiftly upstairs to Maureen's room. There was a party scent of perfume and bath soap in the still air, overlaying the constant undertone of medications. I knelt on the yarn rug in the bathroom and examined the lock on the metal cabinet. It was solid-looking, with such a complex shape of orifice for the key I could assume that trying to pick it would take too much time and patience. I bent the steel lip with the chisel-shaped end of the bar far enough so that I could work the curved nail-puller end into it. I held the cabinet with one hand and pulled slowly on the bar until suddenly the lock gave way and a flying bit of metal clinked against the tile wall.
There were all the usual bathroom nostrums and medications in the cabinet, things that could be harmful to children-iodine, aspirin, rubbing alcohol. There were syringes and injection needles laid out on a pad of surgical cotton. There was a box of disposable sterilized hypodermics. There was a little row of prescription medicines, pills in bottles and boxes, and there were only three small bottles of medication for injection, with a screw cap covering the rubber diaphragm through which the colorless solution was to be drawn into the hypo. Each had a prescription number, the same number. Two were full, one half empty. It seemed to be a very meager supply compared with enough needles for a nurse's station. The drugstore was Hamilton Apothecary, Grove Hills Shopping Center.
I knelt, pondering, automatically listening for any sound in the house. Biddy had said she had learned to give Maureen shots. So the prescription sedative could have been drawn off in whole or in part, and puromycin injected into the bottle. I took one of the two full bottles and the partially empty one. The twist caps on the full ones were still sealed. I realized that the placement of the three bottles bothered me. They were set out midway on the metal shelf, neither back against the rear, nor out at the edge. The other items on the other shelves were set back, taller items at the rear. So something could have been taken out, something that had stood behind the smaller bottles.
I got up and prowled and found a small flashlight on the nightstand in Biddy's room. I knelt again and shone the beam of light at a very flat angle against the metal shelf. There was a very, very faint coatin
g of dust on the shelf, and I discovered that in the area behind where the three small bottles had stood there were four circular areas about the size of fifty-cent pieces where there was no dust. So four bottles or containers had rested there and had been removed very recently.
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