“Whore!” Ron yelled, “Of course!”
“What?” asked Janet, startled.
“Bravissimo, amico, bravissimo,” the professor said. “You make me more reconciled to the unpleasant fact that I cannot live forever.”
“But what—?” Janet asked.
“Shhh!” the professor told her. “My young friend now must have time to consider the implications—to fill in the rest of the story.”
Her first instinct was to protest. Nobody had shushed Dr. Janet Higgins in quite a while. She put a hand on the back of her seat to turn and give the old man a few chosen words on etiquette, but when he gave her a significant look, then a small smile, and patted her big hand with his bigger, bony one, she subsided.
Janet could tell Ron was distracted, she could almost feel the tension of concentration in him. When they were challenged at the hospital entrance, the professor had to remind him to produce their credentials.
Going up in the elevator, Ron’s eyes opened wide, and he whispered, “Oh, my God.”
“You have it now, eh, amico?” the old man asked.
“Oh, my God,” Ron said again. “Why, Maestro? What was behind it?”
“I do not know,” the old man said.
Ron sputtered. ‘Then—then this makes less sense than anything!”
“I hope to know before the day is over,” the professor said. “Let us do what we must do here, eh?”
Janet forbore asking any questions, but she would have given years of her life to know what they were talking about. I must really love him, she thought ruefully, as the elevator stopped. She meekly followed down the hall to the room that housed Jorge Ruiz Vasquez, aka Juan Bizarro, aka the Pope of Dope.
“He’s probably asleep,” the patrolman guarding the door said. He was living proof that a man cannot serve two masters, Ron thought. If he lets us in, the hospital will be on him; if he doesn’t, it’s the department.
Loyalty to the force won. On the assurance that the professor would assume full responsibility for the state of health of the prisoner, the patrolman let the three of them in. No medical personnel happened to see them.
Ron turned on the room’s fluorescent lights. The brightness brought the figure on the bed to squinting wakefulness. Ron was glad. He didn’t want to touch him. Ron looked at the Pope of Dope, and marveled to think how much damage he had been able to do immobilized in a hospital bed.
Vasquez blinked at them. “What the hell do you want? What time is it?”
The professor scratched the back of his hand. “It is time you told us the truth, eh? Your spite has cost enough lives.”
“Go to hell,” Vasquez said. He looked as though he wanted to spit.
“Who beat you up, Bizarro?” Ron asked.
There was silence from the bed.
“Wilbur beat you up, right? That’s why you tried to make us think he was Hog, but he wasn’t, was he?” More silence, broken by a gasp from Janet.
“You’re crazy,” Vasquez said at last. “I’m going to ring for the nurse!”
Ron took the buzzer away from him, leaned over the bed. “Later. Right now we talk.”
“What happens if I don’t?” the pusher sneered. “You break my legs?” He glanced down at where his legs were in traction.
“I don’t even like to smell you, let alone touch you,” Ron said. This was his department. The professor was counting on him to get Vasquez to talk. It was a loose end that had to be tied before they could breech (and God help us all, he thought) the person who really was Hog.
“I’ll tell you what happens if you don’t talk, your Holiness. First all the charges against you will be dropped.”
“That’s a threat?” Vasquez asked.
“I’m not finished. First all the charges are dropped. Today is Sunday. Tomorrow, Frank Pompano is arrested. Tuesday, Leo Hertz is arrested. On Wednesday, I open a bank account for you with twenty-five hundred dollars in it, that sounds about right.” Vasquez was sweating, had panic in his eyes. Ron went on. “On Thursday, we go to Rochester, and arrest Manny Gill—”
“Jesus, you’re out to murder me, man! You—you can’t do that!”
“No? On Friday, I put another six, seven hundred bucks in your account.”
Vasquez was trembling. Ron was threatening to make him look like a class “A” stoolie, talking about the big boys. “They’ll kill me,” he protested.
“Of course,” Ron went on. “I’m putting you right on the bull’s-eye, Bizarro. After the lives you cost I’m only sorry I can’t think of anything worse. On Saturday night that cop outside your door is going to get something in his eye and have to leave the door unguarded while he gets one of the nurses to take it out.”
“Bah!” the professor said in disgust. “Leave him alone, before he soils the bedding. The sophisticate. The graduate of the university. Verme. Codardo.” Now the old man leaned menacingly over the bed. “Now, Jorge Ruiz Vasquez, I will recount what happened the night of January 27-28. If I make any mistakes, you will correct me. Or I shall send my colleague out to start getting the charges against you dropped. Do you understand?”
Vasquez nodded.
“Va bene,” the professor said, straightening up. “One of the things I have learned in my researches is that while not all evil is cowardly, all cowardice is evil. A good individual, an honest man or woman, is heroic in his very honesty—a life like that one”—he gestured toward the bed—”is too often rewarded in today’s world.
“But I digress. The night Leslie Bickell died.” He addressed Vasquez once again. “It has been established that Leslie Bickell stole the money from Atler’s office, obtained the heroin from you, and returned to her apartment.
“We know Terry Wilbur came to that apartment, in haste, and we know that he shouted something while he was there, after which he ran away, and was never heard from again—until yesterday afternoon.”
Vasquez looked surprised.
“Oh, yes,” the professor said. “He has been found. And from him I have learned enough to solve the case—and to discover your part in it.”
Ron looked to see if the old man’s bluff was working. It was the best kind of bluff—the truth.
“Now Herbert Frank, that most valuable of witnesses, told us that Wilbur was angry at Miss Bickell—that he called her a ‘whore.’ I didn’t realize until quite recently that it is very easy to mistake shouted words, especially when heard through walls. Only the strongest syllables are likely to be heard ...”
That’s what stuck in the old man’s mind at Reade’s house, Ron thought. When Reade found his wife after her suicide attempt, he’d yelled for Dr. Higgins but all they’d been able to make of it was “rig.” An increase in volume led to a decrease in precision of articulation.
“... and once one realizes that,” the professor was saying, “it is a simple thing to put a new construction on events.
“Leslie Bickell has broken her hand. She cannot administer her needle to herself in the only vein she has isolated. She is understandably reluctant to go searching for a new one—she may miss, giving herself a subcutaneous injection that wouldn’t suffice for her needs.
“So. She needs that shot. But she needs help as well, to get it. She calls Terry Wilbur, who loves her. I think it probable that Wilbur was not aware of the effect your influence had on her, Mr. Vasquez.
“That would account for the other things Herbert Frank heard Wilbur yell. We can reconstruct the conversation. ‘I have become a narcotics addict, through the influence of your old friend,’ says Miss Bickell. Mr. Wilbur invokes Jesus Christ. Miss Bickell says, ‘You must give me this injection of heroin, I need it, and I am suffering greatly.’ Wilbur yells her name, in anguish and disbelief, but he can’t stand to see her suffer, so he does as she asks.
“He couldn’t know that was part of an extremely potent batch of poison. All he knows is that before he had even finished emptying the needle, Leslie is dead.
“He knows it is your fault, and he yells.
Your name, Mr. Vasquez. He has known you since the day you left Puerto Rico—you yourself told us Wilbur is the last person to call you by your baptismal name, pronounced the Spanish way. Herbert Frank’s misguided passions made ‘whore’ the only word that made sense. But it wasn’t ‘whore’ he was shouting, it was ‘Jorge’; ‘whore-hay.’ The second syllable would easily be lost—it is little more than a breath, as the name is pronounced.
“Wilbur was a killer, and he knew it. Because of you, he killed his own girl. He dumped the heroin in the bathroom sink, leaving the water running to flush it away, then looked for you and found you.”
The eyes of Jorge Ruiz Vasquez blazed. “He was crazy!” he said vehemently. “He should have been locked up years ago. He tore into me like old man Timmons, but there was no one to pull him off. He left me for dead, man, he had to suffer for that.”
“You knew,” Ron said. “You knew that Wilbur had killed her accidentally, but you didn’t tell us, hoping we’d pin the whole Hog thing on him.”
“I hoped they’d find him and gun him down, Gentry. And don’t be surprised someday if it happens to you, either.”
Ron smiled at him. “I’ll be ready, George.”
The professor said, “I will never know why, but Wilbur thought he had killed you, and felt guilty about it—that was why he ran away. One who kills the likes of you should be awarded a medal.” The old man turned to Ron and Janet. “Let us go, eh? Our Sunday morning has been sufficiently profaned.”
Hoping she didn’t appear hopelessly backward (though that’s the way she felt) Janet, very politely, asked the professor to explain how he had arrived at the conclusions he had just outlined.
The professor didn’t look at her when he answered; he appeared to be hypnotized by the elevator lights. “When once I had determined that Terry Wilbur was not and could not be the Hog, it was easy.”
“But that’s what I don’t understand,” Janet protested. “Just because he killed Leslie Bickell accidentally doesn’t mean he couldn’t have been Hog. He could have added her in the note to cover up, or try to. And what about the books? And the way he died?”
The professor’s black eyes blazed as he spoke to Ron. “Siamo tutt’e due idioti. Those children’s books screamed the right answer, and we couldn’t see it.”
“I’m going to scream,” Janet said loudly, just as the elevator doors opened in the lobby. A guard asked her if she was all right, looking suspiciously at the professor and Ron.
“No, no, I’m fine,” she told him. Embarrassment chased her across the lobby and out into the cold, with Ron and the professor just behind.
Ron caught up with her outside the door. “I’ll explain, Funnyface.”
“Please,” she said sincerely.
“Look, in order to be Hog, Wilbur had to have sent those notes, right?”
“Of course,” Janet said.
“Well, from the very beginning, the evidence has been blindingly obvious that Terry Wilbur could not read!”
The professor had caught up with them. “Precisely. We had his school records to study—they were quite bad, yet everyone (especially the lovely Mrs. Zucchio), told us how personable and bright he was.
“Evidently, Terry Wilbur suffered from dyslexia, or some other learning disability. That is more your field than mine, Doctor, but what I understand of it, it is a tragedy of the first magnitude.”
Janet drew a long, soft breath. “Of course. I should have seen—And you’re right, professor, it is tragic. For some reason, the brain simply cannot make sense of the written word. Someone once called it a ‘blind spot in the understanding.’ It’s only come to the attention of the public in the last few years.”
The professor spoke bitterly. “All the more tragic for Terry Wilbur that he was attending school during that ‘enlightened’ time when children were passed from grade to grade, regardless of their accomplishment or lack of accomplishment, in order not to embarrass them, buon’ Iddio, rather than being detained to ascertain why they did not learn and doing something about it. Stupidity, eh?”
“With understanding, and little special help, dyslexics can get along fine,” Janet said. “From what I read in the journals, they’re often very bright children, with good memories, and high IQs.”
“Nelson Rockefeller was dyslexic, I read somewhere,” Ron put in. “And look what he did for himself. Of course, he had the wealth and influence to draw on.”
Benedetti nodded. “Terry Wilbur, though, had no such influence, nor, I am sure, such understanding instructors. He was simply passed along, from grade to grade, knowing he was somehow less than the other children, unable to decode the information locked in the school books. Can you imagine the loneliness he must have suffered? Each year growing farther and farther behind? Being the stupid one; the slow one?
“I am inclined to believe that teacher, Mr. Timmons, did Terry Wilbur a favor by touching off his frustration in high school by calling him stupid, and getting beaten up. Outside the school, working as a gardener, Wilbur could achieve something positive, eh? From a poor student, he had become a good gardener.”
“Then he met Leslie Bickell,” Janet said. She could see it; she could almost feel it. The gardener fell for the heiress; the dropout wanted the graduate student. All the feelings of inadequacy would come back. Wilbur would feel he would have to measure up.
“That, of course, was the sinister ‘project’ Wilbur told Mrs. Zucchio about,” the professor said. “That was the purpose of the children’s books. Wilbur was devoting the winter to one last effort to learn how to read. Inspired by love, he would learn by sheer force of will. But it is not always so easy.”
Again, Janet could feel the pain Wilbur must have felt, poring over books designed for children, silly stories and fairy tales, painstakingly copying the letters and words, underlining a word he might recognize (“No, I do not like them, Sam; I do not like green eggs and ham”), but not being able to make any progress, not being able to keep the letters from moving around, or showing themselves in different shapes. Defeat. Humiliating defeat.
“He defaced the books in frustration,” Janet said. “The same way he lashed out at that teacher. It explains so much.”
They had reached Ron’s car. He unlocked doors, they got in.
“It even explains Charlotte’s Web,” Ron said. “Probably the one thing Wilbur could recognize on sight was his own name. When he was buying the books he was going to use, he probably spotted it, and bought it on a whim. Of course he never got to try it because he never got past the simplest books.”
Ron started the car, pulled into the street. “It explains how he died, too,” Ron said tonelessly. Janet could tell he felt the tragedy of Terry Wilbur, too.
“He couldn’t get that gas heater started because he couldn’t read the instructions,” he said. “He couldn’t find that stupid green button. He kicked those dents in the thing in frustration, tried to force the handle and broke it. He might have had enough firewood, but you’ll recall, four days after he must have arrived at the cabin, the blizzard hit, blanketing the whole Northeast. Not only did it force him to use more firewood, it buried any he might have been able to find in the woods. He broke up the furniture for a while, but eventually, the cold and fatigue got to him.”
They were silent for a while. Janet thought about the tragedy; it was, she realized, totally peripheral to the Hog case. Even if there had been no Hog, Leslie Bickell and Terry Wilbur would still have died. But ...
“But if Terry Wilbur killed Leslie Bickell ...” She spun on Ron and the professor, “Who sent the note? That was an authentic Hog note!”
“It was,” Ron agreed. “Hog wrote that note, of course.”
“But—” Janet was coming to grips with an idea the ramifications of which she couldn’t comprehend. “But if Hog wrote a note ... if he didn’t kill Leslie Bickell ...”
The professor smiled like a cat, and said, “For the third time, Dr. Higgins, bravissima. You have a certain undeveloped ta
lent for this sort of thing. It is a pity I did not meet you when you were younger. Training a female protégé would have been interesting.
“For you have a knack for asking the right question. If Hog didn’t kill Leslie Bickell ...” just whom did he kill, eh?”
TWENTY-TWO
THE PROFESSOR NEVER GOT a chance to answer his own question (not that Janet expected he would), because Ron had a sudden thought.
“You know, Maestro, Buell Tatham may, right this minute, be writing a column that will perpetuate a lot of wrong ideas about Terry Wilbur.”
“We mustn’t allow that,” the professor said. “Is there anything else we must do before we inform of what we have ... deduced?”
“I can’t think of anything,” Ron said.
“On second thought, I can.” The old man took out a cigar. “I believe Inspector Fleisher has been sent home from the hospital. I firmly believe we should offer him the opportunity to be in on this conference.”
Ron grinned. “As opposed to, say, the commissioner?”
“Precisemente.”
“Good morning, Inspector, I hope you are feeling better,” the professor said.
“I’m okay,” Fleisher said irritably. He had recovered sufficiently to resent things. Most of all he resented being taken off the case. But there was plenty of room left to resent being awakened at eight o’clock on a Sunday morning and having to entertain the professor. What had gotten into his wife, anyway?
“You look well,” Benedetti said amiably. “By the end of the day, you will doubtlessly feel much better.”
“Why?” the inspector asked.
“Because of three quarters of an inch of iron. Among other things.” And the professor began to talk. When he finished, Fleisher dashed up the stairs to get dressed like a man who had never been sick a day in his life.
Hog Murders Page 20
