Institute

by James M. Cain

  “Yiss, Mr. Garrett. You.”

  He opened his mouth to say something, but didn’t. He just sat there with his face hanging off his cheekbones while Hortense stared, Inga stared—and I, no doubt, stared. Then very briskly Hortense chirped: “So! Shall we get on with it?”

  “Pliz, Mrs. Garrett, yiss.”

  Hortense stepped past the sofa, the one on our side of the table, sat down on it, opened her bag, and took out what looked like a blank check. Turning to Inga, she said: “Now, we’ve been to New York. We’ve talked to Sven, and he’s willing to marry you, provided I kick in, which I’m willing to do from my own private fortune that my uncle bequeathed me, not from anything out of my marriage. I will pay you a quarter million in cash, $125,000 tonight and the rest when my stocks are sold by brokers in Chester. But there’s one small catch, Inga: the check I write you tonight will be payable to Inga Nordstrom, not Inga Bergson.”

  There was an interruption at this point which really busted things up for a minute or two. Mr. Garrett sprang to his feet, acting downright hysterical, in a way that matched perfectly what Teddy had told me—about what Inga meant to him, the “thrall” she held him under.

  “You’re not going to do it, are you, Inga?” he said, moving toward her, past the table and then trying to grab her. But she backed away with quick, defensive steps, holding her arm out all the while, like a football player when he stiff-arms a tackler. This went on for a minute or so, with him asking if it was true, what she meant to do, to which she gave him no answer, and if she believed what I had said—to which she kept saying: “Yiss, Mr. Garrett, yiss. I believe. I believe Dr. Palmer. You lie. You lie to me, yiss.”

  “Knock it off,” I said to him, “and sit down.”

  He went back to his chair and Inga to a chair I had pushed up for her, where she stood pursing her lips and swallowing. Hortense, who had watched the chase without saying anything, now turned to me and asked: “May I borrow your pen, Lloyd?”

  “Oh, pliz, Mrs. Garrett, take my.”

  Inga was unzipping her bag and reaching inside it. But what she came up with wasn’t a pen. It was a gun, a snubnosed, shiny thing, the kind known as a “Saturday night special.” She raised it, first dropping her bag on the chair, and aiming at Mr. Garrett.

  “Now, sir, die—pliz,” and she popped him one last knick.

  The gun spoke with the deafening roar of a shot fired indoors. There was a streak of yellow light and a sudden billow of smoke. He stood for one last moment, then vloomped down on the cocktail table and rolled onto the floor.

  Hortense ran around, dropped down on her knees beside him, and began talking to him in low, vibrant tones. “Richard, Richard; no, no, no—don’t go; don’t let yourself. No, it’s me. Look at me. Oh, darling, darling, darling—”

  There was more of this, what I would have wanted her to say and yet hated to hear, hated to overhear because of the intimacy of it. So as not to intrude, not to see such a personal moment, I turned away and glimpsed Inga as she stood there with the gun at her side, seemingly in a daze. Hortense went on and on. Then the change in her voice told me that it was all over, that Mr. Garrett was dead. Then her voice came, hard, bitter, and rasping: “You rotten little—”

  But the way she broke off alerted me, and I wheeled around to see Inga aiming once more, this time straight at Hortense. Her back was to me, and I reacted automatically, as quickly as God would let me. I aimed a karate chop at that short little neck. It cracked as she collapsed at my feet, but the gun cracked first—and there was the love of my life, her eyes glazing over yet seeking me and at last finding me.

  I reached her in two jumps and caught her before she fell. I had read somewhere that a person suddenly wounded should be stretched out flat and not prodded or twisted or lifted except by trained medical people. I pushed the table over to make room for her on the floor and then eased her down. I grabbed a pillow from a sofa and pushed it under her head, all the while speaking to her. She would answer, not by saying anything but by moving her head just a little as if she were trying to nod. I couldn’t see where she was shot, so there was nothing else I could do.

  “Darling,” I said, “I have to call—call for an ambulance so we can get you to a hospital. I’ll be right back.”

  She moved her head once more, and I sprang for the phone. By then, of course, Miss Nettie had left for the night and I hardly knew the night watchman. He was so dopey when I told him to get the police, so slow to snap out of his sleep, that I slammed the receiver down and called the police myself on the outside phone. I found the number on the emergency list the phone company prints in the front of the book.

  “For God’s sake,” I said, “step on it, will you? There’s a woman here who’s been shot, and she can be saved if you—”

  “Take it easy, pal,” said the voice at the other end. “We’ll be there. We’re on our way right now.”

  I opened the hall door and then went back to Hortense. I kept talking to her, but her hand found mine, telling me to be quiet. So, for an eternity, we communed, hand in hand.

  24

  ALL OF A SUDDEN the elevator door clanged open, there was a knock at the door, and the state police were there, three or four of them headed by a sergeant. There was also an ambulance crew in green smocks, two orderlies and a doctor who looked like a high school boy. He pushed through the officers, knelt by Inga, and immediately fanned his hand to indicate that she was dead. He told the orderlies to lay her out. Then he stepped over to Mr. Garrett, fanned his hand the same way, and motioned to the orderlies again. He knelt by Hortense, felt her pulse, lifted an eyelid with his thumb, and said to the orderlies: “Never mind them. Help me get her down to the ambulance—now.” He gave the table a kick and they lifted it over the sofa to the space between it and the bookcases, which made room on the floor beside her. Then the doctor took a blanket from a pile the orderlies had brought and put it down beside her, folding it carefully. He pushed one edge of it under her and rolled her on her side. Then he rolled her back, pulled the blanket through, and motioned for the orderlies. They put down the stretcher and lifted her onto it with the blanket.

  “O.K.,” he said, and they moved her quickly to the elevator. “Hold it,” he called and then said to the sergeant: “I have to rush her over if she’s going to have a chance. Get your names and the information on the others, and I’ll meet you at the hospital in the morgue and sign the certificates for you. They’ll both be autopsy jobs, but that report, of course, will be separate.”

  “O.K., doc, take her away.”

  Through the door I could see her as they took her onto the elevator, her face pale as the light shone down. She was beautiful. When she was gone, I turned to the officers who had taken up where the orderlies had left off, laying the bodies out for another ambulance crew and covering them with blankets. The sergeant, who said his name was Herbert, sat down on a sofa and motioned to me. The whole place seemed very odd to me now; everything was askew.

  “Just a minute while I straighten up,” I said. I picked up the table and put it back in place and then pulled the sofa straight.

  “O.K.,” the sergeant said, “let’s go.”

  “Go where?”

  “Suppose you tell me what happened here.”

  “Well, there’s not much to tell, really. Miss Bergson—the woman over there, Miss Inga Bergson—shot Mr. Garrett, the man lying beside her, and then shot Mrs. Garrett.”

  “Do you know their addresses?”

  “I think I do.”

  “O.K., but first, who shot her?”

  “Who?”

  “Miss—Berson. Is that what you said her name is?”

  “No one shot her.”

  “Then how come she’s dead?”

  “Search me. I didn’t know she was dead until that doctor said she was. I must have broken her neck.”

  “You must have—”

  I explained what I had done. It took him a moment to readjust. Until then, he had assumed that Inga
had also been shot.

  “I came down on her neck with my hand,” I said, “with kind of a karate chop. But the gun went off first. And when I saw that Mrs. Garrett was hit, I didn’t pay much attention to whether Miss Bergson was hurt—and I completely forgot the gun.”

  He motioned toward the dispatch case he had put on the opposite sofa, saying: “I have it. It was on the floor beside her. So let’s go back to the names.”

  “Wait a minute.”

  It left me sick to my stomach to realize that I had killed someone. When I told the sergeant, he said: “Take your time. We’ve got all night.”

  “No! Maybe you have, sergeant, but I don’t.” I snapped out of it then, telling him to make it quick, because I had to get to Cheverly to the hospital to find out how Hortense was.

  “Calm down,” he said; “cool it. One thing at a time. You’re the only one who knows what happened, and I have to make a report. So—first things first. Names, please, addresses, and occupations, if you know them. First, this dead guy here—”

  I gave him the Garretts’ names and the Wilmington apartment as their address, for him and for her, with the Watergate also for her. He said: “Wait a minute. You can’t live in two places at the same time.”

  “You can if you’re rich enough.”

  For the first time, he reacted to what he’d just written down. “Hey!” he exclaimed. “Those names were in the paper. They gave a party. The two of them gave it together, and the President came. Are these the same Garretts?”

  “They gave a party, yes; and the President came.”

  He looked at me and then at his notebook. “When did these people arrive tonight?” he said.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t keep track.”

  “Wait.”

  He went to the phone and called the night watchman and questioned him. When he came back, he said: “Mr. Garrett got here at 11:52, but no women came, the night watchman says.”

  “They must have used the rear entrance.”

  “What rear entrance is that?”

  I told him about the door from the parking lot, which was one floor down from the lobby, and about the freight elevator.

  “Does that door stand open?” he said.

  “No, I think they keep it locked.”

  “And these women had a key?”

  “Mrs. Garrett probably did, yes.”

  “What for? So she could get in your place?”

  “That’s right. She borrowed it sometimes, to use the phone or whatever, and I gave her a key.”

  “O.K., get on with what happened, Mr. Palmer.”

  “I thought I had already told you.”

  “Well, I don’t—I don’t think so at all. Listen, if you clunked a woman and broke her neck to keep her from killing somebody, it’s all right with me and it’s all right with the law. I’d have no reason to hold you—provided you come clean. Now, you can have counsel if you want, and plead the Fifth, if you want—but only on the grounds that what you say might incriminate you. Would it?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Then you’ll have to talk. So get started.”

  “Give me a minute to get it together.”

  “Take your time.”

  I began ticking it off, beginning with my first meeting with the Garretts. He sat looking at me, and then I realized that I was talking into a recorder which he had placed between us. I kept on and on, working down to Mr. Garrett’s arrival and what he had come about, his fear that Inga might push Hortense off a balcony. Then I brought the two women in, explaining that they had come without knowing Mr. Garrett would be there. Then I told him about the argument we’d had, trying to keep it brief but, at the same time, clear. I got to the shooting and my jumping at Inga, and finally that seemed to be it. He seemed satisfied.

  “O.K., Mr. Palmer,” he said very respectfully, picking up the recorder. “I’ll ask you to come with me now while I get this down on paper. We’ll have to go to the police office in the County Building where I have a typewriter.”

  “I have a typewriter here.”

  “You do? Then, if I can borrow it... ?”

  “Be my guest. I’ll get it.”

  I didn’t use it much, and it was in the spare bedroom. I got it for him and he set it up on the table, then started his recorder. So I wouldn’t hear my voice croaking at him, I wandered back to the bedroom I had shared with Hortense and lay on the bed in the dark. Then I heard someone come in and went out to find more police and orderlies there to take the bodies away. They made it quick, and then I was there with the sergeant who was still pecking away at the type-writer, accompanied by my voice. I went back to the bedroom. After awhile he called me. He seemed to be through and was studying what he had written.

  “What do you do with it now?”

  “Turn it in, of course.”

  “Will newspaper reporters have access to it?”

  “Well, that’s the whole idea. Under the law, they have the right. When copies are made of it, one will hang on a hook in the clerk’s room there in the County Building. Anyone can look, including even them.”

  “You don’t seem to like them much.”

  “Does anyone?”

  He asked me to check it over “for facts,” so I had to read it. It was all there in police lingo, from my first call on the Garretts to the doctor’s pronouncement of death, with the “intimate relations” between Garrett and Inga precisely spelled out. But one thing I managed to hold back. If he suspected it, he didn’t show it, and that was the “intimate relations between Mrs. Garrett and me.” That wasn’t in the report, thank God, and when I had read it, I said to him: “Fine. It looks O.K. to me.”

  He got up to go, telling me to stand by, “in case,” meaning don’t leave town till the case is wound up. Then he left. I sat for a minute and then went downstairs, got in the car, and drove to Cheverly where the Prince Georges General Hospital is.

  The girl at the window spoke to me by name. “Do I know you,” I said to her.

  “Not really, I suppose, Dr. Palmer. I was in your poetry class a couple of years ago, just for three days, till I switched my course. But I remember you well. What can we do for you?”

  I said that I had come about “Mrs. Garrett, Mrs. Richard Garrett, to inquire how she is and see her if that’s permitted at this hour.”

  “Well, I’m afraid it wouldn’t be—” running her finger over a memo of some kind. “Oh, here she is—yes, she’s in Intensive Care. Her condition, unfortunately, is critical.”

  “Thank you. When can I see her?”

  “At two this afternoon—for ten minutes, if, if the doctor will let you see her at all.”

  25

  I DROVE HOME AND put in a twelve-o’clock wake-up with Western Union. Then I went to bed and when the call came, got up. In between, I guess, I slept, at least some kind of way. When I’d dressed, I went down to the lobby, picked up the paper, and read it, at least the high spots. It was all over page one and a couple of pages inside, with pictures of me, Hortense, and Mr. Garrett. But none of Inga, I suppose because they didn’t have any. When you’re a servant you don’t even have a picture of yourself in the files if you kill someone. And there was no mention of my relationship with Hortense beyond my being the director of the Institute, my resignation not having been announced yet. My being—or supposedly being—director of the Institute was the only explanation offered for the visitors I had at one in the morning. “Refusal on Mr. Garrett’s part to accept divorce and marry Miss Bergson” was the explanation for the shooting, according to the papers.

  It took about twenty minutes to skim through. All during that time, Miss Nettie said nothing, although we were pretty good friends. But when I got up to go to the hospital, she said: “Quite a time you had last night.”

  “You can say that again,” I grumbled.

  “I want to hear all about it.”

  “I’ll tell you, but not now, if you don’t mind. I’m not in the mood for talk.”

&n
bsp; “Oh that I can well understand.”

  At a quarter to two that afternoon, I was back at the hospital, talking to another nurse and getting the same report. “She’s in Intensive Care. Her condition is critical. You can visit for ten minutes if the physician in charge permits it.” So, following directions, I took an elevator, went down a long corridor, and found myself at a door with a dozen people in front of it. They were waiting while a nurse stood there with a card in her hand. When I stopped, she asked who I wanted to see, glanced at her card, and said: “You may stay ten minutes. Stand over there, please.” And she motioned for me to go back to the end of the line, and there I went. But a woman had looked up when I mentioned Hortense’s name, and now she came up to me.

  “You must be Dr. Palmer,” she said. “Horty’s spoken of you, and your picture was in the papers.”

  I kept wondering who she was, then a bit grandly, she said: “I’m Mrs. Mendenhall, Horty’s mother.”

  So I knew who she was at last, and I also knew the reason for the pink complexion after what Teddy had told me. But I played up to her, assuring her: “Oh, yes, of course; Hortense has mentioned you often. How is she?”

  “Critical, is all they’ll tell you, which sounds bad, and I guess is. The paper’s not much help. She was still in surgery when they went to press.”

  “We’ll keep our fingers crossed.”

  “It’s all we can do.”

  We stood there for another dead ten minutes on a day that had seemed all dead. I had not had any breakfast, which may have been one reason I felt so dull. And, of course, I was numb from loss of sleep and the reaction to what had happened—or lack of reaction, actually, as part of my trouble seemed to be that I couldn’t quite get caught up on where I was. But not knowing where I was was partly the reason for that. I couldn’t possibly know until I knew something about Hortense’s condition. So I stood there, first on one foot and then on the other.