Diagnosis

by Rufus King

  “Phil Taylor?”

  “Yes. Eldridge Taylor and Mabel brought him, and Mabel started being resigned and going in for her usual that’s-right-leave-me-sitting-here-alone line, and Phil got fed up with it and came over to our table. Eldridge was in one of his walking-delegate moods.”

  Starr took a moment to straighten it out. The Taylors were Jock’s neighbors to the north just as the Ludington’s were his neighbors to the south. Mabel Taylor was Eldridge’s wife, and Phil was Eldridge’s younger brother, younger by about twelve years. Starr knew the Taylors only casually. He had never treated them professionally, and their social scheme rarely extended beyond Laurel Falls’ agreeable little group of sophisticates whose sport and relaxations were bounded by Gertrude Stein, gin and tonic and numerous cerebral forms of charades. He understood that Mabel was an adept at the harp, which had always stopped him right there.

  He knew Eldridge Taylor as an enormously stout, platter-faced man with a great reputation for intellectual quips and a bright, detailed mind. He knew that Eldridge, as an architect, was reputed to be slipping and that he had recently lost out on several important local and state jobs.

  He knew Philip Taylor as a leaner edition of his older brother, more along the lines of Jock’s build, but otherwise he didn’t know him at all.

  “What time was all this, Jock?”

  “We got to Spinelli’s about half-past eleven. We’d been to the second show at the Bijou. You ought to go see it, Colin. Lugosi blows up the Gatun locks.”

  “Good. Were the Taylors at Spinelli’s when you got there?”

  “No they came in after.”

  “How long after?”

  “A couple of dances, about half an hour, I guess.”

  “That takes us to midnight. Now about those marijuana cigarettes?”

  “Honest, Colin, I swear I didn’t know I was smoking that rotten stuff. I’d rather cut my hand off than do it, Colin.”

  “What kind were you smoking?”

  “The same as I always do.”

  “Package or cigarette case?”

  “Package.”

  “Full or nearly empty?”

  “Say!”

  “Yes?”

  “That could be it, and she didn’t want to be an old maid.”

  “Who didn’t?”

  “Lightning. And I could swear there were more than just one in the package when I left the table.”

  “I want this quite plain, Jock.”

  “It is. I know there were two or three in the package when we got up to dance.”

  “Did you keep the package on the table?”

  “Yes, all of us did.”

  “Just who was at the table right then?”

  “Like I said, Colin, Elsa and me, Dean and Miss Luffbart—she’s Lightning—and Frank and Polly Atchison and Phil.”

  “Did you all get up to dance?”

  “Yes.”

  “Phil Taylor was an odd man. What did he do?”

  “He said he was going out to the bar for a quick one.”

  “Then you did leave Phil sitting at the table when the rest of you got up to dance?”

  “Yes, to be technical about it.”

  “We’ve got to be technical. Go on.”

  “Well, the band quit playing and we sat down, and Dean ordered another round of rum slings for us men and ginger ale for the beetles.”

  “Was Phil Taylor there at the table when you got back?”

  “No.”

  “Where was he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Get to the cigarette.”

  “Just as I said, Colin, I offered the pack to Miss Luffbart, and she said she didn’t want to be an old maid because there was only one cigarette in it, so I lit it myself and ordered a fresh pack.”

  “That was the marijuana cigarette. There are two more in your coat pocket.”

  “There are?”

  “Yes. Didn’t it taste funny to you?”

  “After six rum slings, Colin? Gosh, you could feed me corn silk.”

  “That’s right. What time was it then?”

  “A little after one, I think.”

  “What’s the last thing you remember?”

  “Dean getting up, I guess, to go over to the Taylor’s table.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know why. Eldridge Taylor beckoned to him, I know, because Polly Atchinson said: Royal summons, Dean, don’t forget the six steps backward before you turn when you leave, and Miss Luffbart told him to straighten his plumes, and about then is when I drew a blank and came to with the gun in my hand and, oh God, Colin, Dean was dead.”

  Starr leaped. He gripped Jock’s wrist. He forced the razor blade from between his fingers. He landed a beauty precisely on Jock’s button, then lifted the limp body onto the bed. He took a hypodermic syringe and shot an injection into Jock’s arm. He opened the hall door and said to Mrs. Fraley, who was sitting close to it, as he knew she would be sitting close to it, “I’ve given Jock a sedative. Stay with him, Mrs. Fraley. And don’t worry.”

  The Taylors had come across lawns: Eldridge and his wife Mabel and his younger brother Phil. The sirens had wakened them, and they had seen the Fraley lights. They had come over to find out what the trouble was and, if they could, to help. Starr saw them through the library doorway, being intellectually tense with Heffernan.

  Starr said to Patrolman Brostrom, who was stolidly doing absolutely nothing in a hall chair, “Ask the district attorney to come here for a minute, please. Tell him the chief wants to see him.”

  “But he don’t, Doctor. The chief’s in the living room with the deceased.”

  “I know he don’t, Brostrom. I do.”

  “Oh, I get it, Doctor. Leave it to me.”

  Starr led Heffernan into the dining room. He kept his voice low.

  “Are you willing to stick out your neck?”

  “What for, Colin?”

  “To get a confession within the next hour.”

  “I’d be willing to become a giraffe. What’s on your mind?”

  “Housebreaking.”

  “What?”

  Starr talked quietly, earnestly for several minutes. A queer sort of look settled slowly on District Attorney Heffernan’s face.

  “But that’s crazy, Colin.”

  “Clinically, I think you’re right.”

  * * * *

  Starr joined the Taylors in the library. He thought absently that a harp was the perfect complement to Mabel Taylor’s Rosetti glaze. She was a willowy woman, swathed in a dark velvet wrap over yards of clinging chiffon, and he suspected a supply of assorted neuroses that could be loosed at the drop of a hat.

  The rum slings of Spinelli’s were stamped in the gray and sweat of young Phil Taylor’s face, giving its normally not unpleasant features a thinly saturnine effect, as if old age had suddenly moved in. Starr noticed that the tips of his fingers were club-shaped and that he was gripping them together in an effort to control their trembling.

  Eldridge Taylor, from sheer bulk alone, dominated the scene. He attuned his voice to the accepted pitch for a house where high tragedy reigned.

  He said, “I have just been talking to Heffernan, Doctor. I told him I might have known that Dean Ludington would come over here.”

  “Why, Mr. Taylor?”

  “Because I know the smell of that stuff.”

  “Marijuana?”

  “Yes. Muggles. One of my assistants in the office used to hit it. I caught him offering one to Phil.”

  “I didn’t take it,” Phil said truculently. “I knew what the damn stuff was.”

  “Naturally, Doctor, I gave the man the boot as soon as I found out, and I mean the boot.” Eldridge’s plate-shaped face slipped into a quiet smile. “Learned the
trick up in the lumber country.”

  “What made you realize Jock was smoking it, Mr. Taylor?”

  “I told you I smelled it.”

  “From your table?”

  “Certainly not. The odor isn’t as definite as that. I smelled it as I passed their table. I called Dean over and told him about it. Pitiful.”

  “Pitiful?”

  “Well, isn’t it? I think that’s the charitable word. A young chap like Jock being a dope fiend and probably spreading the habit around among those kids.”

  “I’m beginning to see.”

  “I thought you would, Doctor. Dean probably didn’t want to break it to Elsa until he’d thought it over. When he got home he couldn’t sleep so he put on his trunks and took a dip in the swimming pool.”

  “Do you remember what time they left Spinelli’s?”

  “About one-thirty. Mabel and I left right afterward, after we’d resurrected Phil from a crap game with the bouncer.”

  “What condition would you say Jock was in, or didn’t you notice?”

  “I notice everything, Doctor. Jock was moving, talking over-exhilarated, naturally, but utterly unconscious of what he was doing. A walking blank. When he got to the parking lot we saw him drive off in his car alone. My reconstruction is this, Doctor: Dean, after his dip, decided to come over and have it out with Jock. Unquestionably he told Jock that the engagement to Elsa must be broken off. So Jock shot him. I repeat, pitiful!”

  “A little too pat, Mr. Taylor.”

  “Pat? Of course it’s pat. Life is pat. I dare say the most that Jock will get will be ten or twenty years. Heffernan agrees with me on the entire setup. Intelligent man, Heffernan; not at all like the ordinary politician. I shall testify for Jock at the trial, of course, as to the extenuating circumstances of his having been out on his feet.”

  “Mr. Heffernan did agree with you, Mr. Taylor.”

  “Did?”

  “Yes.”

  A thick, still tension gripped the three Taylors. Chiffon rippled as Mabel stirred slightly in her chair. She said, “He doesn’t now, Doctor?”

  “No, Mrs. Taylor. The nature of Dean Ludington’s wound indicates that he died within a minute or two and certainly retained no powers of locomotion.”

  “I fail to see the point, Doctor. Is it thought that he moved about the living room? It’s most obscure.”

  “He wasn’t killed in the living room.”

  The tension thickened, became, almost, a tangible thing.

  “Really? Where was he killed, Doctor?”

  “Beside the swimming pool on his own grounds, Mrs. Taylor.”

  Starr studied the bland, plate face of Eldridge Taylor; the gripped, club fingers of Phil; the tepid glint of something like fear that came into Mabel’s violet-shadowed eyes.

  “Conjecture, Doctor?” Eldridge Taylor said.

  “No, a question of moisture and the lack of it.”

  “This is all very strange.”

  “Not really. Dean’s swimming trunks were wet. He was killed beside the swimming pool, which is roughly two or three hundred yards across grounds from the living room of this house where his body was found. His body was either brought here in a car or was carried here across a man’s shoulders. The only car when I got here was Jock’s coupe, which is still parked in the driveway. If Jock had shot Dean at the swimming pool and then brought his body here in the car, for some fantastically inconceivable reason, there would be a wet patch on the cloth seat of Jock’s car. There is none.”

  Mabel Taylor said softly, “So he carried him, then, Doctor?”

  “If he had, Mrs. Taylor, there would be wet places either on Jock’s white dinner jacket or on the tweed coat he was supposed to have been wearing when the shot was fired. There are none, and cloth dries very slowly in the humidity of a night like tonight.”

  “Tweed coat, Doctor?”

  “A further elaboration to fasten the crime on Jock, Mrs. Taylor. As the coat isn’t wet I believe that the killer did not wear it but fired through its pocket both to implicate Jock and to muffle the shot. Somewhere there is a car, Mrs. Taylor, with a damp patch on its seat, or there is a coat that not only has damp spots but, conceivably, blood spots as well.”

  Phil Taylor’s voice was no longer truculent; it was thin and hard. “If Dean was killed beside his swimming pool how about that shot which wakened Mrs. Fraley? Which she heard from downstairs?”

  “The killer fired that with his own gun. He fired it after he had placed Jock’s gun, with which he had first shot Dean at the pool, in Jock’s hand. The scene was an over-elaborate stage setting, yes, but it was devised by an over-elaborate mind. The definite purpose of that sudden shot, which wakened Mrs. Fraley and brought Jock to, was to raise the curtain on his play.”

  The door opened suddenly, almost as if on cue, and Patrolman Brostrom said rapidly, “Mrs. Fraley, Doctor—she’s just taken something—the D. A. thinks it’s iodine—”

  Starr ran from the room. He whispered swiftly to Brostrom, “Nice job, Barrymore—beat it upstairs.” He ran back along the hall and joined Heffernan on the back porch.

  “It wasn’t the car,” Heffernan said. “It’s hanging in the cupboard.”

  They sprinted across grass.

  * * * *

  The cupboard was roomy and racked with a row of suits. Starr stood with Heffernan in its darkness, getting his breath, hearing Heffernan getting his breath. They had not long to wait.

  The door opened quietly onto paler darkness and a top light was snapped on, and a hand fumbled among suits.

  “Is it this coat you’re looking for?” Starr asked.

  Eldridge Taylor’s pale face quivered childishly. Then he screamed.

  The mopping up wasn’t nice. Diseases of the mind affronted Starr always, even though he understood them very well. The slipping of Taylor’s business onto the shoals of ruin, the bright last hope of recouping through the marriage of his younger brother into the Ludington estate, its bitter dashing from his lips through the broken engagement and the ascendency of Jock, the diseased attempt to reverse by murder and a legal execution the scene again—one thing alone Taylor wanted to know: which facet of his inspired and opportune plan had betrayed him—how did Starr know that Ludington had not died where his body was found?

  There was, Starr said, the blood, the excess of blood which stained the carpet where the body had been placed. And Taylor, screaming still, insisted that it was human blood, to which Starr agreed and said it didn’t matter whether it were human blood or animal blood or plain red ink; its false message would have been the same.

  He indicated the slight outline of a bandage beneath the trouser leg that hugged Taylor’s large, plump calf, and Taylor screamed, Yes, it was his blood, which he had shed on the carpet in his fervor to set the stage with an accuracy that would defy suspicion! for, he insisted, where a shot man lay there must be blood.

  In nine cases out of ten, Starr said, that would be true. But this had been the tenth. Apart from the fact that the bullet itself plugged up the wound of exit the bleeding with that type of injury was, with the exception of a drop or two, internal. So there should have been no blood.

  “You’d better let me disinfect that cut on your calf, Mr. Taylor.”

  Taylor stared at him for a long moment, while a graying fear puckered his lips and etched sickening lines in his smooth round face as he viewed, in increasing clarity, that near and veiled horizon beyond which nothing lay.

  “Does,” he said, “it matter? Now?”

  Starr felt small pity in his heart.

  “I’m afraid it doesn’t, Mr. Taylor. Not in the long run.”

  THE CASE OF THE IMPERIOUS INVALID

  The Marshalls’ soiree musicale ended at eleven-thirty with Ross Fothergill’s celebrated and interminable rendition of “Pale hands that gleam…” his o
wn hands fluttering plumply from overshot cuffs, and the old house murmured with good-bys.

  Dr. Colin Starr gave Janice Everett and Ludlow Dune a lift, Miss Everett to the estate next door where she wanted him to take a look at her sister Laura, after which he planned to drop Dune off on the way home.

  Janice Everett sang, her acceptable contralto being one of Laurel Falls’s happier exhibits, and it was inevitably turned on for any visitors of social or artistic note. She had at thirty-five the developed framework of a singer: a classical, dark-coroneted head poised regally over a decided bosom which tapered, with few indentations to speak about, to slender ankles and pretty little feet. Her fame remained local even though minor maestros who had sleeper-jumped into town through the years had flatteringly told her that it might easily become national in scope, while the latest one, in a haze of pates and champagne, had mellowly hinted at an ultimate haven in the Met.

  Ludlow Dune, through those same years, had been her accompanist and coach; a largish forty, with swimming deep brown eyes and thick soft hair that rippled in a problematically natural curl. Whatever it was it did the trick and raised the hell up among the town’s matrons who had turned the middle stretch.

  As he stopped before the tall-columned porch Starr saw a glare of headlights in his rear-view mirror. A car swung alongside and braked, and Mary Everett jumped out and thanked the young Rallstons for a lovely evening and said good-by to young Roger Bennett in that caught, breathless sort, of voice with which, filled with wonder, she had been saying good-bys to Roger Bennett since spring. There were several hellos and more good-byes, and the Rallston kids and young Bennett swirled off in a hiss of crushed gravel.

  It was, right then, a quarter to twelve.

  Starr had thought frequently of Mary Bennett since she had come last spring to make her home with her cousins, the Misses Everett. She was a sweet, quiet youngster with a body that could stand fattening and a heart that needed (to replace her parents’ sudden death) a lot of love. Starr doubted whether she had got it in the quantities required beneath the Everetts’ solemn and massive gray slate roof. He was familiar with the home’s ménage, having treated the elder Everett sister, Laura, for a persistent anemia during the past year.