Dr. Phibes

by William Goldstein

  To other Londoners, Chelsea was a bazaar. People came there to see and be seen. The well-to-do called it slumming when they ventured out to visit the fashionable coffee houses of the moment. Later, they would come alone, for different, more private reasons. Social service workers and university people also spent many evening and weekend hours there, ostensibly for research. Matrons came by the afternoon busload, lured by Bengalese woodwork, Korean tin kitchen-ware, dried kippers from Iceland and Greek ginger. Evenings they queued up at bus stops, feet aching, their net sacks packed with booty, anxious to make their neighbors jealous with talk of shopping exploits. Their husbands could be found on the same Chelsea streets during lunch hours; they would drift from bookshop to bookshop in fervid search for risque maidens and dervish dancers, catapult artists and lady acrobats or other sumptuary themes. These booklets, more popular than any best-seller, were bound in unobtrusive covers to prevent detection by blue-noses on the Vice Squad.

  For the visitor, Chelsea tried—and succeeded for the most part—to cater to all tastes. For the people that lived there, it became an easily worn shield against the rough handling of the outer world. Its plain restaurants, of which there were many, offered thick beef and fish soups for twopence and one would get a boiled hambone covered by a thick layer of potatoes and cabbage for twice that. At the coffee shops, one could find any kind of conversation—from military preparedness lectures to first-person accounts of life on the Wyoming trail. On special occasions, a passable pilaff could be enjoyed along with a bottle of resinous sweet wine at one of the numberless East Indian restaurants.

  Wesley Longstreet had just returned from one of these establishments and was now leaning on the railing of the stairs leading to his second-floor rooms; he was exhausted. It wasn’t from physical exertion that Longstreet was now gasping but rather because he’d overeaten. He allowed himself one good meal per week, on Wednesdays, and tonight he’d chosen the East Indian place. The pilaff with skewered lamb had been quite enough but he’d gone overboard on the sesame cookies. He really couldn’t help it, for his own attempts at the saucepan had turned him into a drudge and ruined his palate to boot. He hadn’t had any warm food since last Friday when the scrambled eggs and kidneys overran on the stove, and ignited and blackened the closet wallpaper.

  Now Longstreet grabbed the rail and pulled himself up the remaining steps; he groped down the murky landing to his door, only to fumble at the doorlock. He’d forgotten his key or at least he couldn’t find it in the myriad pockets slit into his waistcoat, sweater, vest, or trousers.

  He grew desperate. The wine had done its work well and the new discomfort was reaching an intensity sufficient to have him hopping about the hall.

  Mercifully, the ancient door, its brown-green varnish chipped and iron-hard with age, wheezed open.

  “Why, it’s Dr. Longstreet.”

  He rushed past dear Mrs. Frawley, his landlady of these past seven years, and raced to the tiled sanctuary next to his bedroom, pausing just long enough to edge the door closed in the name of modesty. But had he been able to hear over the watery din, he would have been mortified at Mrs. Frawley’s unwanted audience.

  He washed his hands with a bottle of green soap borrowed from his office, scrubbing his nails and wrists in the practiced manner of surgeons. For Wesley Longstreet, despite his idiosyncracies, was a practitioner of that medical art. Indeed, Wesley Longstreet was a member of the Royal College of Surgeons and enjoyed the honor of those few colleagues who knew of his work as well as the respect of his students.

  Had Wesley Longstreet so desired, he also could have had a considerable fortune and all the embellishments that go with it. But Dr. Longstreet was from an early age in the medical profession. Dedicated to the principle that quality medical care should be obtainable by rich and poor alike, and noting that for every physician that practiced in the city’s working class districts one-hundred others had established themselves in the West End and other fashionable areas, he made the simple personal choice of living by his convictions. Had Wesley stemmed from a conventional family, he would have created a stir, to say the least. But his father had been a labor organizer, travelling extensively about and eventually dying in the Midlands. His mother maintained the household, raised three children, and helped keep bed and board together by working as a vocal coach.

  Causes were not lightly treated in the Longstreet family. Wesley’s decision to pursue medicine was met with determination, his decision to serve the poor, with acclaim.

  But temperaments of that depth are not usually simple things. Wesley Longstreet had an exotic streak in him as well, camouflaged but not otherwise corrupted by his missionary spirit. If he couldn’t quite live with the poor, he’d live near them. When he’d settled in Chelsea seven years earlier, it was more out of this well-concealed exoticism than out of convenience, although his tiny office in Cheapside was a few minutes away by tram.

  Wesley never paused to acknowledge that he himself was far removed from affluence. In fact, the word “comfort” could not even be applied to his financial condition. For Wesley Longstreet, burdened still by debts incurred in setting up his practice and peppered daily by pleas from his patients for pocket money, lived a hand-to-mouth existence. Whatever spare money he could accumulate he sent to his mother for her keep; otherwise his habits closely approximated the Spartan ethic.

  But although one could not tell it with the naked eye, Wesley was not lacking in his pursuit of pleasure. Further, he was certainly not the kind of man to deny himself once he’d found it. That he’d found it and that he was going to enjoy it was the second reason he’d rushed back to his apartment after dinner.

  Wedged between the Pharmaceuticals and bandages in his physician’s bag was a reel of film. And newly packed on the reel was twenty minutes’ worth of Natasha doing what the bookseller had described as her “sizzling terpsichorean interpretation.” Wesley had even been privileged to glimpse a preview (he was an old customer) of Natasha in the privacy of the bookseller’s cloakroom. One look at her bare rump convinced him that the film was worth every penny of the pound the man was asking. Glasses still steamed, he threw the crumpled note onto the counter and ran out. He was still running by the time he’d gone the six blocks to his apartment. Now his hands were shaking in anticipation as he dried his face with a towel.

  “I’m leaving, Dr. Longstreet. See you in the morning!” Mrs. Frawley’s voice crackled in that sing-song way of hers.

  Wesley grunted; his eyes were full of soap.

  “How’s that, you say?” she wailed through the door.

  Would the witch never leave? He glowered in the mirror, his face still red and raw from the green soap.

  “Dr. Longstreet! Are you all right?” her voice slipped closer. Now she was tapping on the door. He’d have to get rid of her personally. With extreme effort, he fixed a smile on his features, dabbed back his stringy hair and advanced toward the door. Then he opened it and prepared to address the woman who was his charlady, fairy godmother and tormentor at times.

  He caught himself short. She was wearing a daisied hat, a coat that almost looked new, and bigod, a plunged neckline that, in the face of the massed wrinkled front it offered up, was absolutely indecent.

  “Where the hell are you going?!”

  “Why, Dr. Longstreet!” She’d never heard such an utterance from her dear charge’s mouth.

  He blushed and tried again, much more in character this time: “What I mean is, Mrs. Frawley, please have a good evening wherever it is you’re going.” He tried to move past her.

  “I have a rendezvous with a social acquaintance. We’re going dining, Doctor.” This said, very sweetly, she turned and, mustering a bit of spring to her ancient kneecaps, plowed toward the door.

  When she was finally gone, he tiptoed into his parlor where he’d slyly thought to set up his viewing apparatus the evening before. It was for his medical research, he’d explained to Mrs. Frawley when she looked quizzically at the small ha
nd-driven projector and silvered screen. Now it stood silent, wintry, and disgustingly mechanical.

  He pulled the cover off the projector and set about threading the film. Despite the fact that he’d been collecting these lascivious treats for several years, he’d never learned to properly operate the requisite equipment. It either ran too fast or too slow, it became overheated or the screen, usually at some inappropriate moment, would fly up to his great horror. Worst of all, he could never thread the film properly and spent several desperate minutes winding, removing, rewinding and inserting the celluloid.

  But this night things went smoother than at other evenings. The film went in on the first try, much to his amazement. His body heat rising, he pulled a brandy bottle and large snifter from a desk drawer, adjusted his easy chair at what he thought to be proper viewing range and, flicking the overhead lamp off, readied himself for a first taste of the pleasure.

  As was his habit, he viewed each new acquisition four to six times, depending on its quality.

  With each viewing, he consumed an equal measure of brandy to sharpen his senses and prolong the effect. He poured his first glass now and started to reel the film.

  What he saw on screen kept the promise of the bookseller’s cloakroom. Natasha, long of limb and full of grace in every soft curve, leapt out from behind a colonnade and began a throbbing, sensuous series of dance steps the like of which he’d never seen before. With each variation in pitch from an unseen orchestra (which Wesley imagined to consist of drums and reeds), she discarded a veil. Now he could see her navel, properly jewelled, now a rosebud or two above, equally dazzling, now even her arms turned like snakes about the colonnade, her hips sweeping back and forth like an angel’s broom. Would she ever take the remaining veils off?

  “Dr. Longstreet!”

  “Good Lord, she’s back,” Wesley thought in panic. He stopped the machine, but not before the wretched charlady had descended upon him in full flower.

  “Why, Dr. Longstreet, why are you sitting here in the dark?” She looked at him with piercing fish eyes from beyond the screen.

  He fought for control. “Just some research, Mrs. Frawley. Did you forget something?”

  That seemed to satisfy her.

  “I just came to get my gloves,” She turned and walked out.

  It scarcely bothered him that she might have caught him. As soon as he heard the door close, he started reeling again, this time more feverishly than before in a hurry to get to the “good” parts.

  Natasha was emerging again from behind the colonnade. And there they were—two ripe full breasts that stood free and clear from her magnificent torso. But she was not yet still! Now she arched and flexed her hips in a rotating compression that set the firm buds above into a rotating motion. This vision of compact flesh reacting to muscle control was more than Longstreet could bear. He sipped deeply of his brandy, letting the frame hold on its magnificent vision.

  Then he set to reeling again, more slowly this time, taking in every aspect, every motion of the tremendously organized Natasha. He drank again, and then again, toasting the revelation before him.

  Longstreet’s senses were clogged now with gelid desire. It is doubtful that he could have heard the door of his bedroom open, more than doubtful that he could have done anything to prevent a gray-cowled figure from sneaking up close to him and, then, in a dazzling instant rendering him unconscious with a compression blow to the base of his ear.

  In a single reaction Wesley Longstreet slid backward in his chair and on the way out of life. To complete the action, the figure slipped a gloved hand about the brandy snifter, removing it from Wesley’s languid grasp to place it carefully on the floor.

  Then, fixing Natasha in a pose of innocent abandon, he repaired to the bedroom. When he returned, he carried a physician’s bag similar to Longstreet’s and a large black oilskin satchel.

  This he laid open at Longstreet’s side and removed several vacuum bottles, laying them neatly in a row about the doctor’s feet. A small motorized pump came next, which he set up on a side table wheeled next to the easy chair. Working quickly now, he pulled a roll of rubber tubing from the oilskin and, attaching one end to the pump, affixed a long needle to the other end. Then he expertly located a heavy vein in Longstreet’s arm and inserted the needle into it. He led a third length of tubing into one of the vacuum bottles, bent swiftly to his physician’s bag and removed a pressure cuff.

  With chilling precision, he placed the cuff on Longstreet’s arm above the needle, inflating the cuff with a final stroke which sent the blood coursing from the hapless doctor’s body.

  His work finished, he stood back to watch the pump take over. Soon one bottle was full. He readied a second, placing the first quart of blood on Longstreet’s mantelpiece. As he returned to his station, a small brass amulet dropped to the carpet, snapping off from a chain about his neck. It was the Hebrew symbol for “blood.”

  While the third bottle was filling, Wesley Longstreet awakened. But he was too weak to do more than look in helpless shock at the man who was murdering him. A few more movements of the pump and Longstreet lapsed into unconsciousness again.

  The man removed the bottle, replacing it with a fresh bottle and, moving with the grace of a battlefield surgeon, put the filled container on the mantelpiece next to the others. He repeated the process four more times, then finished, removed his equipment and left as silently as he had come.

  Later that evening, a call reached Inspector Trout at Dr. Vesalius’ house. He took the news of the fourth victim quietly, almost as if he’d expected it.

  Chapter 6

  “THAT arrogant sonofabitch! I’ve heard of professional reserve before but this is outright gall. The cheek of that man: four of his colleagues, men he’s worked closely with over the years, are murdered and he thinks he might be able to help us.” Schenley shook the phone and slammed it into the receiver.

  “Tom, the good doctor will hear you.” Trout looked at his partner with an amused grin. “That’s no way to talk to a member of the concerned citizenry. Now tell me what he actually said.”

  Schenley still frowned. “He hung up on me, said he didn’t like his breakfast disturbed but that he’d give it some thought and get back to me in a few days. He could’ve at least faked a bit of concern . . .”

  “Well, now, sergeant, you have to consider the ‘professional’ mind. A cool manner, devious in thought, an insistence on priorities and attention to details. These are society’s Brahmins who defend the right to privacy at all costs. Concerned the doctor most probably is; he just didn’t want you to know it.”

  “I still say he’s a cold, stiff bastard. Give me a bloody amateur any day.” The telephone rang again. “If it’s who I think it is, I’m going to let him have it,” Schenley said; he listened for a moment, then glared at Trout. “The charlady just came in.”

  “Let’s go!”

  Trout drove all the way to Chelsea without saying a word. Schenley could tell the case was beginning to get to Trout from the way he negotiated the traffic. The Inspector seldom drove when he was working, preferring to take in the scenery, mapping out his next step in the battle while the countryside zipped by. The only time he actually drove was when he was restless or when he knew exactly what he was going to do.

  “Why should they do it to him? The doctor never meant anyone harm. He was such a good man. Oooh, ooh help me!” Mrs. Frawley sobbed into her hankey. She still wore the daisied hat, slightly drooped, and her valiant coat of last evening. The shock of her charge’s death had thrown her into such disarray that her gray hair, uncombed since she arose, now lay damp and matted about her face, providing her with a skewed and slightly waterlogged halo.

  Trout patted her on the arm and then continued: “Did Dr. Longstreet have many visitors, Mrs. Frawley, anybody that came here frequently?”

  She shook her head, moaning balefully into her knotted fists.

  “What about family, did he visit them often?”

 
“He sent his mother a bit of money whenever he could.” This recollection of filial piety sent the woman into new fits of sobbing.

  Trout looked about the room for some distraction, then glanced at Schenley, who acknowledged his plight. The inspector patted Mrs. Frawley on the shoulder and pursued his questions with great forbearance.

  “Could he have had any enemies?”

  She looked up from her handkerchief, her red-rimmed eyes flashing anger now. “Yr befoulin’ the memory of the most generous man this town’ll see for a good many years. He lived for his patients, cared for them day and night, went out after ‘em in all kinds of weather; they gave him gratitude and little else. Poor’s they were and to him.”

  She nodded at the ashen corpse of her benefactor who, still in the seat of his last night’s pleasure, dominated the room with glazed stare and eternal smile.

  They were his whole life.” She hesitated at this new sense of remorse. “May the ones that done this to Dr. Longstreet burn in hell for their sins.” Her courage collapsed with her shoulders and she wracked with heavy sobs, groaning and wailing with such violence that Trout led her into the other room.

  When he returned, he paced quickly about the room, then addressed the victim directly with a trained clinical eye. He checked the fingertips, neck, eyes, teeth with practiced precision, looking for powder burns, discolorations, edema, and finding nothing. Then incisively he rolled up the left shirtsleeve and straightened the arm out at the elbow, remarking in a quiet, even tone: “That’s how he did it.”

  Schenley looked up from the draperies where he’d been probing. “Umm, oh yes, he’s really quite dry, sir. Wouldn’t you think he could have stopped it? I mean, one just doesn’t submit to this sort of act.”