Diagnosis

by Rufus King

  There were, he knew, no servants beyond an outside handy man and a stolid Slavic woman who browsed through a general cleaning once a week and appeared in black alpaca and an unbecoming white cap at such rare evenings when the Everetts entertained.

  Their roots struck back into the territorial period of Ohio. An Everett had notched his measure of Indians near the rapids of the Maumee during the battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794, when the Indians had lain in ambush behind tree trunks felled by storm. The sisters’ grandfather had been a member of the Democratic Congressional delegation which had been hatched from dissatisfaction with the President’s emancipation program in 1862. The sisters’ father (“dear Papa”) had manufactured, in addition to a comfortable fortune, shoes. He had died, leaving Laura and Janice jointly the estate, with Laura as trustee for Janice’s share of it until Janice became twenty-five. And it had shrunk through two depressions to a husk in which Janice practiced liquid scales and Laura, with appropriate and expensive delicacies, enjoyed the semi-invalid trappings of her anemia.

  Starr suspected strongly that Mary had done the bulk of the work since her arrival in spring, feeding on simple things (the tidbits being segregated carefully for poor Laura) and, more fulsomely, on her obvious love for young Roger Bennett. For whenever, rarely, Starr saw them together it was an obvious thing. He thought it pretty hopeless, too, unless they were willing to wait until Bennett’s job in a filling station could economically reach even the cottage stage.

  The hour was thirteen of twelve when Starr, Dune, Mary and Janice Everett gathered on the porch, while Janice Everett took a key from her bag and unlocked the front door. They went inside, into a large hallway dimly lighted by a ceiling cluster, and Janice Everett swept them along in her wake into a living room and said, “Scotch, Doctor? I know you do, Ludlow. Mary, my dear, you may light the fire.”

  It was chill and dampish in the room, with a musty smell that sifted from its faded elegance. Mary struck matches at the hearth, and Janice Everett dropped a black velvet wrap from her shoulders and blazed in crimson chiffon that had held their eye at the Marshalls’ throughout a buffet supper at seven o’clock and the long musical evening. She handed the wrap to Dune, flashed her exit smile and left the room. Starr helped Mary at the hearth while Dune started harrying Debussy at the grand piano, and six minutes later they heard the scream.

  It rang with startling precision and volume through the house, rooting them: Dune in a discord at the piano, Mary and Starr at the fire, and then Janice Everett was coming in from the hallway and saying, “Doctor—quickly, please, Doctor—Laura has killed herself.”

  Starr took the silver tray from her hands, with its three filled glasses of scotch and soda and ice, and put it on a table. She still held the doorway, a bulk of crimson chiffon and wide terrified eyes. She said, as he hurried past her, “Gas—gas!”

  * * * *

  The bedroom was on the ground floor. Laura Everett had not cared, with her anemia, to bother with stairs so she had converted a small parlor to her use and had transformed an adjoining coatroom into a bathroom.

  Starr turned off the gas. Its source was obvious from the rubber tubing which led from beneath the towel covering Laura Everett’s face to a baseboard outlet planned to supply fuel for a portable hot-water radiator beside the bed. He unbolted windows, opened them, then assured himself that Miss Everett was dead and had been dead, he judged superficially, for about three hours.

  (Lividity well developed—suggillations, the settling through gravity of stagnant blood, were plain—the flesh cold, its lividities a dullish blue—a dullish blue—)

  Starr went over to the hall door where Dune stood wiping dampness from an ashen face.

  “There’s nothing I can do,” Starr said. “She’s been dead for several hours. Phone District Attorney Heffernan, please. He’ll know whom to call up and bring out here.”

  “Police?”

  “Police, the coroner, Heffernan will see to it.”

  “But surely with a plain suicide, Doctor?”

  “A suicide is governed by the regulations of any unnatural death. After you telephone stay in the living room with the Everetts.”

  “Of course, Doctor—yes, of course.”

  Starr closed the door. He returned to the bed. The room was remarkably clear of gas. His examination became more detailed and complete. He confirmed with greater accuracy, through body temperature, his guess that Miss Everett had been dead for about three hours: since, roughly, nine o’clock.

  He looked for the inevitable suicide note.

  There was none that he could see. Its absence puzzled him. He knew that a person under stress of strong emotion inevitably reacted to established patterns. Rarely had his experience shown him an exception, and definitely (he thought) there should be none now. Nothing in life was so cataclysmic as the moment of death, effacing all resources of initiative, compelling the mind in its bewilderment to snatch at and cling to accepted gestures which were known, again and again, to have been done. Whether one died (Starr knew this to be true) or whether one killed.

  A book lay open on the bed table. A pencil was beside it, and black lead underlined heavily certain words on the open pages of the book. The book was Septimus Strange’s Moon Madness in Tahiti. The underlined words, when read consecutively, made sense. They read: “—forgive—but—life is a—torment—tired—better—this—”

  So (Starr’s virile, pleasant face grew grim): the inevitable suicide note.

  * * * *

  Starr went through the ground floor of the house, thoroughly testing each window and each door that led outside. Each was securely bolted or locked. He searched, more perfunctorily, the cellar, the upper story and the attic, moving quickly through the dank dark house which was large enough for a home and children and for children’s children and which had become a decaying mockery for three and was now a tomb.

  He returned to the living room, where the fire was a futile gesture on its hearth. The looks that greeted him were easy to assort, simple for his intimate knowledge of men and women, a knowledge which ran the emotional gamut of the human nerves and brain and heart and sometimes, in its ugliness or beauty, of the soul.

  Dune’s swimming eyes were tightened into something smug, some discount of an immediate future of which he already had a foretaste. Janice Everett’s had acquired, Starr thought, a certain depth: a curious quality of perception as if she were increasingly aware of things to which she had been blind. Mary’s alone were bruised by shock and grief and with that astounding incredulity of the vital young toward sudden death.

  “You telephoned, Mr. Dune?” Starr said.

  “Yes.” Dune examined a large gold watch attached to a heavy-linked gold chain which thwarted his mid section over white piqué. “Ten after midnight. Any time now.”

  Janice Everett’s voice was obviously controlled.

  “Doctor—”

  “Miss Everett?”

  “Laura—surely she wasn’t ill enough for that?”

  “No, in no sense ill enough.”

  “Then why?” Suddenly she was shrill. “Why?”

  “Janice, my sweet, my dear!”

  Dune caught and stroked a hand which, becoming aware of the stroking after two or three of them, she jerked away. Blood drained from her cheeks, bringing out the old lines, and she said, before she collapsed, “Laura made her life exactly what it was, so I suppose she felt she had the right. The right to take it, Doctor.”

  Starr got a glass from the highballs which were still untouched upon the tray. He insisted that she drink some, watched color’s slow return; then she wanted to be alone, to relieve by some solitary solace the feeling of suffocation that was stifling her (she said), so if they would forgive her going upstairs to her room for a little while, with her suffocation and her grief—no, not Mary or Dune, just alone.

  Her departure was Wagnerian.
It left a void for them to rattle in. There were things Starr wanted to know. He said to Mary, “About tonight, was the maid here?”

  “No, Doctor, Anna’s day is Friday.”

  “Miss Everett was alone?”

  “Yes, after Cousin Janice left and I left.”

  “When was that, Mary?”

  “Cousin Janice left just before seven for the Marshalls’; then after Cousin Laura had finished her supper I took care of the dishes and filled the thermos jug with ice cubes, and Roger called for me with the Rallstons at eight.”

  “Had Miss Everett gone to bed?”

  “She had supper in bed, Doctor. It was one of her bad days. I did want to stay home with her, but Cousin Janice said it was nonsense and insisted that I go to the party, but it wasn’t nonsense; it wasn’t all right.”

  Dune said sharply, “Why not? You can’t foresee things like this. Perhaps I seem callous, but I’ve a philosophy about life. What’s done is done.”

  “About the doors and windows, Mary?”

  “Yes, Doctor?”

  “Were they locked when you left?”

  “Oh yes. I saw to that.”

  “You have a key?”

  “I used Cousin Laura’s.”

  “Who else has a key?”

  “Only Cousin Janice.”

  “What’s this all about?” Dune asked.

  “The only gauge for a suicide, Mr. Dune, are the circumstances surrounding a case. They will be required in my report.”

  “Gauge? It seems perfectly plain. Two keys, one with Mary at the Rallstons’, and Janice had the other one with us at the Marshalls’, and Laura was locked up alone in the house. Isn’t it?”

  “Tell me about the party, Mary.”

  “We were on the river, Doctor, in Jerry Rallston’s launch. Esther and Norman Towne met us at the boathouse and came with us. Esther and Jerry, well, I think they like each other the way Roger and I do. They’re awfully good friends, I mean.”

  “Of course. Incidentally, I don’t think I’ve seen much of you and Roger around, or does the awfully good friendship consist in telepathy? Or isn’t it any of my business anyhow?”

  Mary smiled back at him faintly.

  “You know how things are, and then Cousin Laura—it was so silly, really.”

  “What was?”

  “Well, just because Roger works in a filling station. His family’s an awful good one, and all the crowd understands and admires him for it.”

  “But Miss Laura Everett didn’t?”

  “No. It isn’t that she ever said anything directly, but it did seem hard ever to be able to keep a date with Roger. Things just came up.”

  “Did she try to keep your home tonight?”

  “I think she wanted to, but I think Cousin Janice talked to her. I think Cousin Janice likes Roger a lot better than Cousin Laura did, or else she just doesn’t mind his working in a filling station so much.”

  “I suppose you’re right. Look here, you spoke of doing the dishes before you left and also of filling a thermos jug with ice cubes. Were they for your Cousin Laura?”

  “No, they were for you. Cousin Janice said she was going to ask you to stop in on the way home, you and Mr. Dune, and she wanted the tray ready. She wanted you to see—Cousin Laura—”

  She turned her face away in tears. Dune cleared his throat awkwardly, said: There, there! and a pull bell jangled in the hallway.

  “That will be District Attorney Heffernan,” Starr said.

  * * * *

  It was twenty after midnight.

  Starr stood beside the bed with Heffernan in the cold, quiet room while Aleck Jones, Heffernan’s stenographer, jotted down a preliminary report. Obviously (Heffernan insisted) a plain, straightforward case of suicide: an ill, a despondent woman securely locked from intruders in an empty house, no marks of violence, no signs of struggle in the bed or in the room, the suicide message in the book; why under the sun (Heffernan asked) had Starr sent for him? Why not just some assistant from the coroner’s office to rubber-stamp an obvious case?

  “It’s obvious enough,” Starr said. “But it’s murder.”

  “Look here, Colin. Be reasonable. Take your time elements.”

  “I have.”

  “All right. Laura Everett was alive when Mary left her around eight o’clock. Or have you got some nutty idea that that nice kid killed her?”

  “No, the facts wouldn’t fit. She couldn’t have.”

  “All right again. You and Dune and Mary and Janice Everett all come in together about midnight and find—this is your own say-so, mind you—you find that Laura Everett has been dead for three hours or since nine o’clock. So if Mary didn’t do it before she left the house what’s your only other answer? Some tramp who drifted in through locked doors and windows killed her without leaving any sign of a struggle, without robbery or any trace of a sane motive, and then drifted out again? Forgive the sarcasm if it seems pretty heavy, but honestly!”

  “No tramp. I know who killed her.”

  “Shall we go around again? Mary? If that child’s a murderess I’m one. Look at her. Look at me.”

  Starr did not smile. He said, “You might kill tonight.”

  “Rot.”

  “Y’might. Jones, here, might.”

  “Nonsense, Colin. We’re three normal people.”

  “Normal? Yes, in the sense that you’re romantic. We all are. We’re that way as a nation. We accept all of the nicer clichés about life. In spite of rational fact we prefer womanhood on a pedestal, tender, soft, fine; you know that. Just look at your acquittals, look at the jury-trial balance between evidence and a pretty face. No, don’t misunderstand me—I’ll admit the infinite capacity of women for the finest standards we know, but I refuse to blind myself to the truth, that women can be inhumanly vicious, incredibly cruel. Like men. Given a common set of circumstances, no two individuals will react the same. Angels can become devils in the flash of an eye and the reverse. I know that, Tom.”

  Heffernan’s jaw grew obstinate.

  “That kid has more than a pretty face. She’s got a good face. I’d go to bat on it. And in my job I know faces.”

  “There is no face to murder. It’s unpredictable. It’s a force as capricious as lightning.” Starr gestured impatiently. “Take a hundred people at random. You can fairly pick out your liars, your thieves, your defectives and your cheats; yes, I’ll grant you that. Any psychiatrist could do so with the simplicity of adding two to two and getting four. But to pick your murderers from that group? You can’t. The psychiatrist can’t. Nor can you pick any of the myriad potent or inconsequential motives which impel them to the kill.”

  “Listen, Colin. I know you’re different from the rest of us, not just seeing things as a doctor which we miss, but in other ways too. You’ve put the bite on some tricky messes in this town, but facts don’t lie. And right now they spell suicide in ABCs.”

  “Let me prove you’re wrong. Get Jones to take down accurate notes on the condition of this body. Observe the things I’m going to point out to you, and be prepared to swear to them in court.”

  “What things?”

  “Come closer—you, too, Jones. First, the lividity.”

  “What’s lividity?”

  “This”

  * * * *

  Brief solitude had had its quieting effect.

  Janice Everett had a cold compress across her eyes. She lay vivid in crimson chiffon on a chaise-longue of faded lemon French corduroy and did not stir when Starr closed the room’s hall door.

  “Is it you, Doctor?”

  “Yes, Miss Everett.”

  The room was spacious, with doors opening into a bedroom and a bathroom. Its earlier smartness had a mended look, and dust filmed flat surfaces of veneers. Starr drew a chair closer to the chaise-longue and sat
down on threadbare brocade. He said nothing, and the silence grew, and the little noises of the house and the night became important out of all proportion to their sound.

  Then: “Well, Doctor?”

  “I’ve yet to express my sympathy, Miss Everett.”

  “Thank you. Docs one suffer—from asphyxia?”

  “Briefly.”

  “Briefly, Doctor?”

  He studied her white, quiet hands.

  “Exact observation on the point has naturally been rare, Miss Everett.”

  “Naturally.”

  “However, there were some experiments conducted a good many years ago in England. They serve as a yardstick. This doesn’t disturb you, Miss Everett?”

  “Why? I mean if release from living meant happiness to Laura have we the right to judge? Even to grieve? What were the experiments, Doctor?”

  “They were made by a committee of the English Medico-Chirurgical Society. From the nine tests on animals they found that the average duration of breathing, after any air source had been cut off, was four minutes and five seconds.”

  “But gas, Doctor. Surely gas would be quicker?”

  “Gas, Miss Everett?”

  A white hand tensed in a minute contraction. Still she did not remove the cold compress from her eyes.

  “Surely? Gas?”

  “There is a property about gas poisoning which I found absent from your sister. There should have been a fresh color to her face, a lifelike tint to her lips. I found, instead, lividities that were dull and blue.”

  “I simply don’t understand, Doctor.”

  “Your sister died from suffocation.”

  “Forgive me if I seem obtuse, if I miss the importance of what you’re driving at. Was it the towel across her face and not the gas that killed her?”

  “Your sister was already dead, Miss Everett, before the gas was turned on.” Her hands clenched briefly, then were quiet again.

  “I am not a stupid woman, Doctor. I sec where your thoughts are leading. I refuse to accept them even against fact.”

  “You are thinking of Mary, Miss Everett?”