by Louis Bayard
“We’ve found none.”
“Humm. Well, no matter, not every suicide leaves a note. Lord knows I’ve seen more than a few just take a leap off a bridge. Very well, Leroy Fry hies himself straight to the nearest bluff—oh, no, stop a minute, he decides to hang himself. Not—not where anyone can find him easy, but maybe he doesn’t want to be any trouble. . . .”
I stopped, then started again.
“Very well, he finds himself a good strong tree, loops the rope around the branch . . . oh, but he’s too distracted to—to test the rope’s length, so . . .” I extended one leg, then the other. “He finds this little gallows of his won’t even lift him off the ground. All right, he ties the rope all over again . . . no, no, he doesn’t do that. No, Leroy Fry wants to die so badly he just . . . keeps kicking.”
I gave my leg a good shake.
“Till the rope finishes its work.” I frowned at the floor. “Well, yes, it’s certainly a longer business, going about it that way. And if his neck isn’t broken, it takes even longer. . . .”
Hitchcock was rising to the challenge now. “You said yourself he wasn’t in his right mind. Why should we expect him to behave rationally?”
“Oh, well. In my experience, Captain, there’s nothing so rational as a man bent on killing himself. He knows just how he means to do it. I once—I once saw a woman take her life. She had a very fine picture of it in her head. When she finally got round to it, you’d have sworn she was recollecting the thing. Because she’d already seen it happen, over and over.”
And Captain Hitchcock said, “This woman you mention, was she . . . ?”
No. No, he didn’t say that. He said nothing for a short while. Just sketched a path around Leroy Fry’s coffin, scuffing up the wax with his boots.
“Perhaps,” he said, “it was a trial run of sorts that got out of hand.”
“If we’re to credit our witness, Captain, there’s no way it could have got out of hand. Feet on the ground, upper limb within reach: if Leroy Fry had wanted to call the whole thing off, he very easily might’ve.”
Still Hitchcock kept scuffing the floor. “The rope,” he said. “The rope might have given way after he hanged himself. Or perhaps Cadet Huntoon jostled him harder than he knew. There could be any number . . .”
He was fighting hard, it was his nature. I should have admired him for it, but he was starting to make my eyes hurt.
“Look here,” I said.
Whipping off my baize jacket, I rolled up my shirt sleeves and plunged my hand into the alcohol bath. A shock of cold, then a phantom shock of hot. And this, too: the queer feeling that my skin was melting and hardening at the same time. But my hand stayed true, hauled Leroy Fry’s head toward the surface. And with the head came the rest of the body, as hard and straight as the trestle on which it lay. I had to lace my other hand beneath him just to keep him from sinking down again.
“The neck,” I said. “That’s what first struck me. Do you see? Not a clean cinch at all. The rope grabbed at him. Ran up and down the neck, looking for a purchase.”
“As though . . .”
“As though he was fighting. And look, if you would. The fingers.”
I gestured with my chin, and Captain Hitchcock, after a brief pause, rolled up his sleeves and bowed over the body.
“You see?” I said. “On the right hand. Very tips of the fingers.”
“Blisters.”
“Just so. Fresh blisters, by the look of them. I’m thinking he was . . . clutching at the rope, trying to peel the thing off him.”
We stared down at Leroy Fry’s sealed mouth, stared hard, as though by doing so we might unseal it. And by some strange accident, the room did fill with a voice—not mine, not Hitchcock’s—ringing with such force that our hands pulled away, and Leroy Fry sank back with a hiss and a gargle.
“May I ask what is going on here?”
We must have been quite a sight to Dr. Marquis. Bent over the coffin in our shirt sleeves. Daylight grave robbers, by the looks of us.
“Doctor!” I cried. “I’m delighted you could join us. We’re in dire need of a medical authority.”
“Gentlemen,” he sputtered. “This is somewhat irregular.”
“It certainly is. I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind feeling round the back of Mr. Fry’s head?”
He wrestled with the propriety of it, or at least he gave propriety a few more seconds of his time, and then he followed our lead. And by the time he had secured the back of the skull, the wince of effort on his face had been planed into something like peace. A man at home.
“Anything, Doctor?”
“Not yet, I’m . . . Mm. Mm, yes. A contusion of some sort.”
“A lump, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe you could describe it for us.”
“Parietal region, best I can make out . . . perhaps three inches in circumference.”
“How thick, roughly speaking?”
“Rising . . . oh, a quarter inch or so above the skull.”
“Now, what might have made such a lump as that, Doctor?”
“Same thing causes any lump, I expect: something hard comes in contact with the head. Can’t tell you any more without looking at it.”
“Might the bruise have been inflicted after death?”
“Not very likely. A bruise comes from extravasated blood—blood escaping from its vessels. If there’s no blood circulating—no heart, in plain truth—” He had the good sense to stop his laugh in midcourse. “There can be no bruise.”
It was slow, almost bashful work, making ourselves civilized again— rolling our sleeves down and putting our jackets back on.
“So then, gentlemen,” I said, cracking my knuckles. “What exactly do we know?”
Getting no reply, I was forced to answer my own question.
“We have here a young fellow who tells no one he wishes to die. Leaves no note. Dies, it would seem, with his feet still on the ground. On the back of his head we find a—a contusion, as Dr. Marquis will have it. Blisters on his fingers, rope burns up and down his neck. I ask you now, does all of this suggest a man going willingly to his Maker?”
Hitchcock, I remember, was stroking the two bars on his blue coatee, as though to remind himself of his rank.
“What do you believe happened?” he asked.
“Oh, I have a theory, that’s all. Leroy Fry quits his barracks room sometime between the hours of ten o’clock and, say, eleven-thirty. He knows, of course, that in doing so, he runs a—I’m sorry, what risk is he running, Mr. Hitchcock?”
“Leaving the barracks after hours? That’s ten demerits.”
“Ten, is it? Well, then, he does run a risk, doesn’t he? Why? Is he longing to see the Hudson, like the charming Mr. Huntoon? Maybe so. Maybe your cadet corps harbors a secret squad of nature lovers. But in the case of Mr. Fry, I have to believe he has a special errand in mind. Only because someone is waiting for him.”
“And this someone . . . ?” said Dr. Marquis, leaving the question unsaid.
“For now, let’s assume it’s the someone who swatted him in the back of the head. Threw that noose round his neck. Drew it tight.”
I took a step away and smiled at the wall and then back at them and said, “Of course, it’s only a theory, gentlemen.”
“I think you are being a bit coy with us,” said Captain Hitchcock, the heat rising in his voice. “I can’t believe you would proffer a theory if you didn’t place some credence in it.”
“Ah yes,” I answered, “but tomorrow the ocean will sweep over it and . . . whoosh.”
A silence then, broken only by the drip drip on the coffin trestle and the slow scuffing of Hitchcock’s boots . . . and at last Hitchcock’s own voice, sounding tauter with each word.
“In the meantime, Mr. Landor, you have left us with two mysteries where previously we had just one. According to you, we must find both Leroy Fry’s desecrator and Leroy Fry’s killer.”
“Unless,” s
aid Dr. Marquis, tossing timid glances at us both, “it is the same mystery.”
Odd that he should have been the one to suggest it, but suggest it he did, and the silence that followed had a new quality. We were, all of us, I think, venturing up different roads, but feeling the same change in altitude.
“Well, Doctor,” I said, “the only fellow who can tell us is that poor boy right there.”
Leroy Fry was rocking ever so slightly in his bath—his eyes still ajar, his body still rigid. Soon, I knew, the rigor mortis would end, the joints would thaw . . . and maybe then, I thought, this body of his might yield up something.
That was when I noticed—noticed again, I should say—the balled-up fist of his left hand.
“Excuse me,” I said. “If you don’t mind.”
I think those were my words, but I was no more conscious of what I was saying than of what I was doing. I knew only that I had to get to Leroy Fry’s hand.
And because dragging it to the light would have meant hauling up the whole body, I contented myself with working just below the surface. The other two had no idea what I was up to until they heard the crack of Leroy Fry’s thumb being pried from his palm. Even traveling through alcohol, it was a savage sound, like a chicken getting its neck broken.
“Mr. Landor!”
“What on earth?”
The other fingers broke faster. Or maybe I just knew now how much force was needed.
Snap. Snap. Snap. Snap.
The claw lay open, and there in Leroy Fry’s hand was the tiniest of bundles, yellow and sodden and torn. A scrap of paper.
By the time I had lifted it to the light, Hitchcock and Marquis were on either side of me, and we read it together, our three sets of lips silently sounding, in the manner of students watching a line of Latin being chalked across a blackboard.
NG
HEIR A
T BE L
ME S
“Well, it may be nothing,” I said, folding it back into its original shape and dropping it in my shirt pocket. I let out a long whistle and then, gazing into the faces of my companions, I said:
“Shall I put the fingers back the way I found them?”
I wasn’t a complete prisoner during my stay at the Academy. There would be times, over the span of the next several weeks, when my escort would step away for a brief while or let me veer a few yards off course. And for a minute, or two minutes, even, the tether would fall slack, and I would be standing alone in the heart of West Point, and my body would show itself to me again: the fringe of hair on my head, the rasp in my left lung, the twinge in my hip . . . and, coursing through it all, that beat beat beat, the cadence I’d felt in Thayer’s office. I took every symptom as a cause for rejoicing, for it meant there were parts of me that still lay apart from the Academy, and how many of the cadets, how many even of the officers, could say that?
So then let me take you back, Reader, to the moment when Captain Hitchcock and I (having left Dr. Marquis to mend the insults to Leroy Fry’s person) were stopped en route to the superintendent’s quarters by a certain Professor Church. The professor had himself a complaint, meant specially for Hitchcock’s ears. The two men drew themselves apart, and I sidled away a bit until I was standing in the superintendent’s garden. A pleasant little space: rhododendrons, asters, an oak tree spidered with rose vines. I closed my eyes and felt myself sinking into a copper beech. Alone.
Except I was not. From behind me stole a voice, speaking under great compression.
“Pardon.”
And that was when I turned and found him. Half hidden behind a Saint Michael’s pear tree. As unreal to me then as a leprechaun, for hadn’t I already watched (or heard) the cadets of the Academy being marched to breakfast, dinner, supper? Marched to class, parade, barracks? Marched to sleep, marched awake? I had come to think of these boys in the passive voice, and the idea that one of them could split from the ranks and pursue a mission of his own (more urgent than dipping a toe in the Hudson) was as likely to me as a rock sprouting feet.
“Pardon me, sir,” he said. “Are you Augustus Landor?”
“Yes.”
“Cadet Fourth Classman Poe, at your service.”
Start with this: he was too old. At least when set next to the other members of his class. Those boys still had garlands of pimple on their jaws, they had big hands and receding chests, and they startled easy, as if the schoolmaster’s switch were still singing in their ears. This plebe was different: the pimples had scarred over, and the bearing was erect, like that of an officer on convalescence.
“How do you do, Mr. Poe?”
Two strands of lank black hair hung down from the absurd leather cap, making a cameo of his eyes, which were hazel-gray and much too large for his face. His teeth, by contrast, were tiny and exquisite, the sort you might find on the necklace of a cannibal chieftain. Delicate teeth, as fitted his frame, for he was thin as straw, slight—except for that forehead, which even the hat could not contain. A pale and hulking thing, it bulged through its envelope, in the way an anaconda’s meal makes a knot of protest in its neck.
“Sir,” he said. “Unless I mistake, you have been tasked with solving the mystery surrounding Leroy Fry.”
“That’s so.”
The news had not yet been made official, but there seemed no point denying it. And in fact, the young man was under no illusion I would, though he did hesitate, long enough that I felt obliged to ask:
“What might I do for you, Mr. Poe?”
“Mr. Landor, I believe it incumbent upon me and the honor of this institution to divulge some of the conclusions which I have reached.”
“Conclusions. . . .”
“Regarding l’affaire Fry.”
He threw back his head as he said it. I remember thinking that anyone who used a phrase like “l’affaire Fry” should probably throw back his head. Exactly like that.
“I’d be most interested to hear them, Mr. Poe.”
He made as if to speak, then stopped himself and cut his eyes both ways—assuring himself, I suppose, that no one could see—or, more likely, that I would pay him the greatest possible notice. Stepping at last from behind the tree, he stood in full view for the first time . . . and then leaned toward me (a hint of apology in this movement) and whispered in my ear:
“The man you’re looking for is a poet.”
And with that he touched his hat, took a deep bow, and marched away. When I next saw him, he had merged with no apparent effort into the stream of cadets proceeding to mess.
Lost in a cloud, most of our meetings. Only when someone becomes vital do we try to give that first encounter the importance it would later have . . . although, if we are to be honest, that man, that woman, was just a face or a circumstance. In this case, however, I have to believe my first impressions were every bit as full as the later ones. For the simple reason that nothing about him was quite right. Or would ever be.
Narrative of Gus Landor
6
October 28th
The very next day, I broke my vow of abstinence. It began, like all great falls, with the best of intentions. I was on my way home to gather some belongings when what should come my way but the steps leading to Benny Havens’ tavern? I could conclude only that Fate had brought me here. For wasn’t my mouth dry as bone? Wasn’t there a fine stack of hay in back for Horse? Weren’t there civilians inside?
And even when I passed through the doors of Benny’s Red House, I had no idea of taking a drink. One of Mrs. Havens’ buckwheat cakes, maybe. A glass of lemon juice and iced water. But Benny had made his famous flip—the hot iron had just been plunged into its eggs-and-ale bath—and the air crackled with caramel, and a fire shivered in the hearth, and before I knew it, I was sitting at the counter, and the missus was slicing up her roast turkey, and Benny was pouring the flip into a pewter flagon, and I was home again.
Here, on my right: Jasper Magoon, a former assistant editor at the New York Evening Post. Left the city (like me) for
his health and was now, a scant five years later, half deaf and all blind, reduced to begging people to read the latest news into his left ear. Fair at Masonic Hall . . . Weekly Report of Deaths . . . Compound Syrup of Sarsaparilla. . . .
In that corner: Asher Lippard, an Episcopalian rector who nearly fell into the sea off Malta and, in a fit of reform, became one of the founders of the American Society for the Promotion of Temperance . . . before being taken by another fit of reform. He was now as devout a drinker as you could know. Took his drinking as seriously as a priest takes unction.
