Mink Is for a Minx

by editor Leo Margulies

  And that’s how we eventually found out his name.

  Joe Cook, the desk clerk over at the Riverside House, our nicest hotel, came down to the morgue when he was off-duty around five o’clock and filed past the slab with the other citizens to take a look. After that, he came into my office upstairs.

  “Lieutenant,” he said. “I’ve seen that guy you got downstairs. I just had a look at him, and I’d swear I saw him at Riverside House a few days ago.”

  “Staying there, was he?” I asked, feeling that at last I had a lead.

  “No,” Joe said. “He wasn’t staying there. This guy just came into the lobby about ten in the morning.”

  “From where?”

  “How do I know? Maybe he just got off the morning train. It was about that time.”

  “Did he come up to you at the desk?”

  “Nope. But I wasn’t very busy at the time, and I happened to notice him come in.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Just came into the lobby,” Joe repeated. “Went over to the telephone booth and looked in the phone book for a minute or two. He didn’t make a call, though. Then he wandered over and sat down at one of our writing desks in the writing alcove and wrote something.”

  “What happened then?”

  “He left, that’s all!”

  “Didn’t he mail what he’d written or buy a stamp from you?”

  “Nope. He just folded up what he wrote and stuck it in his pocket.”

  I got up. “Come on, Joe,” I said. “Show me which desk he was writing at.”

  Joe showed me. It was one of the three writing desks in a little writing alcove off the Riverside House lobby, but perfectly visible from the desk where Joe had been standing. I looked it over. There was a ballpoint pen fastened to the desk with a metal chain to keep guests from stealing it. There was a leather-edged blotter, perfectly clean, covering up most of the desk top. And there were a few sheets of hotel stationery with several hotel envelopes in a slot at the back of the desk.

  “Did he use this hotel paper to write on?” I asked Joe.

  “Yeah. I saw him reach out and take some and start writing on it with that ballpoint pen there.”

  “Okay,” I said. I reached out myself and took the sheets of stationery that were left in the desk slot and brought them out and looked at them crossways against the lobby light. “How many people have written at this desk since the man in the morgue?” I asked Joe.

  “Nobody I know of,” Joe said. “At least, not while I’ve been on duty. This is the seldomest-used desk of the three, Lieutenant—way over here in the corner like it is.”

  I said, “This top sheet of stationery has some marks on it, Joe. Maybe he pulled out more than one sheet by mistake and wrote on the top one, bearing down so heavy with the pen that his writing showed through and marked the next one. I’ve heard about such things happening. I couldn’t be that lucky, though.”

  But I was.

  I went back to the office and turned the sheet of hotel stationery over to Mark Godwin in our little lab, and sure enough, he messed around with graphite or something of the sort and brought up a clear message on that writing paper. He made a copy of it for me and brought it in. Here’s what it said:

  Dear Doctor:

  For 16 years you’ve owed me a $750 back payment. Now I’m in town to collect it—with interest. I’ll be in touch tonight.

  John Smith

  I read it down to the signature and then I swore out loud and said to Mark, “John Smith! You’re kidding!”

  “No,” Mark said. “That’s what it was signed.”

  “There’s a million John Smiths running around loose in this country, Mark. And a fifth of them are using the name as a phoney, at that. You’re a great big help, you are.”

  “It ain’t my fault the guy’s name is John Smith,” Mark told me in a hurt voice and left me to my own devices.

  My first device was to call Doc Sanderson in, tell him about the note having been found, and show it to him. “You’re a doctor,” I told him, “and this note was written to a doctor. Does it mean anything more to you than it does to me?”

  Sanderson shook his head. “I can’t say it does, Lieutenant,” he said. “What’s it mean to you, incidentally?”

  “Well,” I said, “First of all, it’s signed with a phoney name. That’s obvious. Second, this so-called John Smith is dunning some Riverside doctor for an old debt—a doctor that John Smith used to work for sixteen years ago. And third, it sounds like Smith isn’t going to be satisfied to collect his legitimate debt of seven hundred and fifty skins and let it go at that. He’s also going to put the bite on the good doctor for sixteen years’ interest on the money.”

  “Why do you think this doctor Smith was writing to is here in Riverside?” Doc asked.

  “Because John Smith didn’t mail the note when he wrote it. He stuck it in his pocket and carried it away after consulting the telephone book at the hotel for a local address. Obviously, he was going to deliver the note himself. Drop it in the doctor’s mail slot, maybe—right here in town.”

  “And you suspect that doctor, whoever he is, killed John Smith when he got in touch with him that night?”

  “You bet I do. Plenty of murders have been done for less than seven hundred and fifty dollars, Doc. It makes sense, doesn’t it?”

  “Y-e-s,” Doc admitted. “Especially if you read the note a little differently.”

  “What do you mean, differently? I can read English. And that’s what the words say, Doc.”

  “No, I mean interpret the note differently. Suppose our murdered man downstairs isn’t just dunning this Riverside doctor an old debt and sixteen years’ interest. Suppose the words ‘with interest’ are a threat of blackmail? Because now John Smith has come into possession of something he can use to put pressure on this doctor he used to work for? The whole tone of the note is arrogant, self-assured, even a little threatening, it seems to me. As though John Smith knew the doctor would have to pay that old debt now. What do you think?”

  I said, “You could be right, Doc. And the blackmailer is signing his note John Smith just for kicks. Because he’d know the doctor would recognize his true identity from his reference to the old debt.”

  Doc Sanderson nodded. “Yes,” he said, “I’d say blackmail was a definite possibility. Approach it from that angle.”

  “Approach it hell,” I said. “How? We’ve got to find out who this doctor is before we can approach anything. You see that, don’t you, Doc?”

  He grinned his slow relaxed grin at me. “I can see that, all right,” he said, “and I don’t envy you your job.”

  “It’s a cinch,” I said. “I’ve got it all worked out. Look. The note is written by a guy nobody’s ever seen before in Riverside. He’s a stranger from out of town, right? His note practically says so. And we know that he used to work for, or at least knew, this particular doctor sixteen years ago. That means the doctor wasn’t in Riverside either at that time. He was probably in the same town where the bogus John Smith resided. Do you follow me?”

  “Perfectly.”

  “Okay. So we check out all the doctors in Riverside, to see which ones were not living here sixteen years ago. There aren’t too many doctors in a city this size, especially ones that came here from someplace else.”

  Doc Sanderson didn’t say anything.

  “Now, when we find out which doctors weren’t living here sixteen years ago, we send photographs of our John Smith to the police in the towns where the doctors were living at that time. And the chances are, we’ll come up with a true identification of John Smith in one of those towns.

  “We’ll tie him to the specific doctor who came from that town, and who lives here. You could help me with this, Doc, by getting me the dope on our doctors from the records of the county medical society. You’re a member, aren’t you?”

  Doc said, “Sure.” I stood up. But the Doc stayed seated. “But,” he said, “I don’t belong to the denta
l society, or the veterinary society. And I don’t happen to have a Ph.D. behind my name either.”

  I sat down again. “I didn’t think of that,” I said. “Dentists, vets, and Ph.D.’s are all doctors too, aren’t they?”

  “I just thought of it myself,” Doc said apologetically. “But it’s got to be considered.”

  That increased the difficulty of my checking job about five hundred percent, I estimated. And it reduced my chances of coming up with anything helpful by just as high a percentage.

  I sighed. Doc Sanderson sighed in sympathy.

  “This blackmail thing,” I said finally, just to be saying something. “Are doctors likely blackmail victims? Or rather, what would they be likely to be blackmailed about?”

  “In general, the same indiscretions and sorry sins that laymen get blackmailed about,” Sanderson said. “After all, doctors are human, too.” He grinned at me again. “But to answer you question more specifically, I suppose when it comes to doctors, malpractice is the basis for most lawsuits or blackmail schemes against us.”

  “Malpractice? You mean like giving a patient the wrong medicine?”

  “Sure. Or a hundred other wrong things that doctors can do—more often than not through accident, carelessness, or ignorance. Sometimes deliberately, however. Most doctors carry insurance against malpractice suits nowadays, so we don’t fear blackmail attempts the way we used to.”

  I thought about that for a moment. Then I said, “Doc, you mentioned the word ‘deliberately.’ Deliberate malpractice. If a doctor had that proved against him, he’d be washed up in any respectable community, wouldn’t he?”

  “It wouldn’t help him any, that’s for sure,” Sanderson said. A reminiscent smile curved his lips under the white mustache. “I remember when I was in medical school, we had a case history about a doctor who let his love of money run away with his integrity as a medical man. He practiced down south in a community of fairly uneducated, ignorant people, where he could get away with it. His specialty was performing fake hysterectomies on his lady patients.”

  Being a fairly uneducated, ignorant bachelor myself, I was about to ask Doc what a hysterectomy was, when the funniest look came over his face all at once, and without another word, he got up and went out of my office.

  I didn’t see him again for half an hour. When he came back, I was looking at the telephone book, trying just for the hell of it, to get a rough idea how many M.D.’s, Ph.D’s, D.D.S.’s and so forth there really were in Riverside. Doc had a big envelope under his arm.

  “Randall,” he said to me very softly, his face reflecting some kind of inner shame, “when we check out the doctors who weren’t in Riverside sixteen years ago, we can forget everybody but general practitioners and neurosurgeons.”

  “How come?” I asked him. “What’s happened to eliminate all the dentists and vets?”

  “I’ll show you,” he said, “if you’ll come to the morgue with me.”

  I went, of course. Doc Sanderson led me to the slab where John Smith lay. He pulled on an overhead bulb and drew the white sheet down from the corpse’s shoulders, so that when he turned the body over its back was exposed. He pointed to a white, slightly crinkled scar that ran down the dead man’s spinal column for several inches with suture marks on each side of it.

  “See that?” he asked. I nodded. “That’s from an operation of some sort,” Doc Sanderson said. “Spinal fusion, I’d say.”

  I asked, “What about it?”

  Doc said, “Just look at this.” He took an X-ray negative from the big envelope under his arm and pointed. “That’s what’s under the scar,” he said. “I took this X-ray of his back a few minutes ago. Just thought of it when we were talking about those hysterectomies.”

  I looked with a layman’s puzzled eyes at the vertebrae that the X-ray negative showed. “I don’t see anything,” I said.

  “Exactly!” he replied almost exultantly. “There’s nothing to see. That’s just the point! This man, John Smith or whoever he is, has an operation scar on his back, and under the scar there is absolutely no sign at all that the bones have ever been touched by a surgeon!”

  “Ah,” I said finally. “Now I get it, Doc. Thanks. This should do it for us.”

  And it did.

  First, we checked the general surgeons and neurosurgeons in Riverside, the only ones that might have done a back operation. There were only a handful altogether, as it turned out, and only one who had come to Riverside from another city and been practicing here for less than sixteen years.

  This was Dr. Jonas Ridley, a distinguished, civic-minded man, head of the surgical staff at Riverside Hospital, and a highly respected member of the American College of Surgeons.

  Next, we got John Smith, our man in the morgue, quickly identified from his photograph by two cousins and an aunt, in the southern city from which Dr. Jonas Ridley had moved to Riverside, as—yes—John Smith, their cousin and nephew respectively.

  And finally, to cap it all, the hospital to which Dr. Ridley had been attached there, found in its archives a record of a spinal fusion operation performed sixteen years before by Dr. Jonas Ridley on a patient named John Smith.

  So John Smith, it seemed pretty certain, had recently discovered, through a casual insurance physical examination perhaps, that he had paid Dr. Ridley seven hundred and fifty hard-earned dollars sixteen years ago to perform on him a back operation that hadn’t been necessary at all. And that Dr. Ridley had never, in fact, undertaken—except to make a surface incision.

  When I faced him with all this, Dr. Ridley stoutly maintained that he knew nothing whatever about anybody called John Smith, or about his murder.

  But the jury did not agree with him, for four good reasons. Reason one was that I found a flashlight behind the front seat of Dr. Ridley’s car that had demonstrably been used to bash in Smith’s head, since it still bore a few of his hairs and some spots of his blood on it.

  Reason two was that I found in the back seat of Dr. Ridley’s car a men’s-store label that had been cut from John Smith’s inside jacket pocket.

  Reason three was that Dr. Ridley could not satisfactorily account for his time on the night of the murder.

  And reason four was that old Doc Sanderson testified so persuasively about Dr. Ridley’s deliberate malpractice sixteen years before, as revealed by his X-ray of John Smith’s back.

  So we managed to convict Dr. Ridley, all right.

  But both Doc Sanderson and I were a little ashamed of ourselves for not seeing right away that John Smith’s note had really contained the whole truth of the case in just two simple words: ‘back payment.’

  CORPUS DELICTI

  by Talmage Powell

  REALIZING THE USELESSNESS of further effort, Ralph Bradley, lately M. D., drew away from the girl. Full-length on the rickety table in the shabby room, she had hemorrhaged prodigiously. Now she was quite dead.

  Bradley stood looking at her with eyes that burned in the swarthy strip of flesh between white surgical cap and mask. He felt no guilt or remorse. She had come to him of her own free will. He’d required not even her name, only the two hundred dollars she’d extracted from her purse and passed to him with a trembling hand. She’d known what she was doing, the chance she was taking.

  Who else had known?

  The question lay scalpel-sharp in Bradley’s mind. Timid and guilt-ridden, she most probably had kept her condition secret from her family, if she had any. The man responsible, Bradley assumed, was either married and in circumstances legally beyond her reach, or a punk kid who’d run out on her.

  The man had rejected her, or she wouldn’t have reached the desperation that drove her to an abortion.

  There was a good chance she had come here without telling anyone. However—

  Oh yes, Bradley thought angrily, there is always a however—or a but—or an if—

  Someone was going to miss the thin, over-anxious girl with the mouse-tan hair. Someone would start looking. And it was possible her
movements could be traced.

  Bradley despised the sight of her, of what she now represented. He turned away from her and went behind the dusty Japanese screen in the corner. His mind was busy while he stripped off his rubber gloves and smock.

  Consider the worst, he told himself. Project into a future in which a big, cynical detective knocks on the door. You open the door. “Yes?”

  He shows his credentials. “I want to talk to you. May I come in?”

  You shrug and stand aside for him to enter. “What can I do for you?”

  “I’m looking for a girl.” He calls her by name, a name you have honestly never heard before.

  “I don’t know her,” you say. “I’ve never heard the name before.”

  He describes her. Then: “She came here. We know she was coming here. We have traced her to your office.”

  “Your information is incomplete,” you say. “Such a girl never came here. Why should she?”

  “She was pregnant.”

  “Oh?”

  “She wanted an abortion.”

  You look at him coolly. “I resent the implication.”

  “I don’t care what you resent. I want to know where the girl is.”

  “And I have no idea. Look around. Satisfy yourself.”

  You are neither a help nor a hindrance as he goes through the apartment. Finally, he has completed the circuit, returned to the front door. There is frustration in his eyes.

  “You’re the same Ralph Bradley,” he says, “who was involved in the recent dope traffic scandal.”

  “Yes,” you say, “and my defense bankrupted me, ruined my reputation, and ended my career.”

  “I suspect you have a new career, doctor. Illegal medicine.”

  “Perhaps you suspect,” you say, “because I am convenient, easy to suspect. Because you haven’t the imagination or mental acuity to find out what happened to the girl. Maybe she decided to simply run away.”

  Then you close the door in his face. His suspicions constitute no threat—so long as he doesn’t have proof.

  And therein, Bradley thought as he scrubbed his hands at the screened basin, lies the biggest if that has arisen in my entire life. The proof lies dead on the table. The final scene will not go at all as I have imagined it—unless I get rid of the proof.