The Long Skeleton

by Frances

  Jameson Elwell—more fully, a quick check revealed, Jameson Elwell, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology, Dyckman University. Author of—author of a row of books, three shelf-feet of books. (Suggestibility in Children; Technics of Suggestion. Etcetera and etcetera.)

  More fully still—a rather heavy man of a little under normal height; a white-haired man with clipped white mustache; a blue-eyed man. Before so much blood had drained out of him, probably a ruddy man. A man in his middle sixties. (He would, it turned out, have been sixty-five on December twenty-third, if he had lived so long.) A man shot once, from no considerable distance—probably from across the desk only—with what appeared to have been (and was subsequently proved to have been) a .32 calibre revolver. Once had been quite enough. No revolver was in the room. There was nothing on the desk except the blood-soaked blotter, two pens in a holder, a small silver clock faced so that, had his eyes not been dimmed by death, Professor Elwell might have noted exactly when he died.

  It had been five-thirty, or thereabouts, when Bill Weigand dialed a familiar number and heard a familiar voice and said, “Dorian. I—”

  He did not need to finish. He could see her. She had answered quickly; would have moved quickly across the room—the room with windows looking out over the East River—moved with the grace of a dancer, almost of a cat. She would be standing now, with the tips of fingers just touching the telephone table, with the telephone held to her ear with the other hand. She would be standing with uncalculated grace, as she moved with grace.

  “Oh,” Dorian Weigand said into the telephone. The syllable was flat, deflated. “Not again.”

  But it was again.

  “You would marry a policeman,” Bill Weigand said. “After all due warning.”

  “Wouldn’t I just,” Dorian said. “I suppose you’ve no idea? But have you ever?”

  “No,” Bill said. “People will get themselves killed.”

  “Pam and Jerry are—” Dorian said.

  “I know,” Bill said. “Drink a round for me. And, darling—”

  Bill Weigand felt somewhat better when he replaced the telephone in its cradle—somewhat, but not much. Even a voice, diminished by electric impulses, a little scratched by them, was something. Not sight, not touch—just a little something. Bill Weigand drove his car north from Twentieth Street, up the elevated highway, and off it at Seventy-second and, first, to the precinct station house, where he caught up with things—where he looked at photographs and sketches; where he learned that there were fingerprints (not, so far, on record) on the surface of the desk opposite the dead man; that dust from the room was at the lab; that Professor Elwell had been alone in the house when he died because he had given his houseman, one Delbert Higgins—“Delbert?” Yes, Delbert—the afternoon off. And—that, before he left, Higgins had admitted a man named Carl Hunter who was, Higgins thought, one of the professor’s students and was, whatever else, a man who frequently visited the professor, almost always in his office.

  Mr. Hunter had arrived at about two o’clock. Higgins had let him in, had heard him say that the professor expected him, had watched him go up the stairs. Higgins had then, himself, gone elsewhere. He had gone to a movie. He had returned to the house and found the police there.

  Where Higgins had gone did not, for the moment at least, seem of importance. Mr. Hunter might be; Mr. Hunter had been found (from university records) to live in a one-room apartment off upper Broadway and to be, at present, not in it. He was being waited for.

  Nobody had been found who had heard the firing of the bullet which killed Jameson Elwell. Nobody had, as yet, been found who remembered seeing a man—presumably young, if a student—leaving the Elwell house either before or after three o’clock.

  The house was Elwell’s own. Preliminary enquiries suggested that Elwell had not needed to live on a professor’s salary. By the time Weigand reached the precinct house, it was also known that Professor Elwell was a widower of some years’ standing; that he had a brother living in Westport, Connecticut—notified; on his way in—a niece and two nephews, one of the latter attending Dyckman and the other in the army; the niece married and living in Scranton, Pennsylvania; that he had had a daughter who, six months before, had been killed in an automobile accident on the Merritt Parkway.

  Weigand’s hands were, in short, piled high with facts, for some of which he might sometime have use. There was no urgent need to visit the house in which Professor Elwell had died; to look at the dried blood which had drained out of him. Experts had been there, experts would be there again. There were many papers to go through and—

  “By the way,” Weigand said, “what’s this?”

  This was a door indicated in a sketch plan of the professor’s office.

  “Door to a closet,” the precinct detective captain told him. “Record files on both sides; file cards. God knows what all. Putting a couple of men on it tomorrow unless you—”

  “Thanks,” Weigand said. “You go right ahead, Barney.”

  There was no urgent need to visit the house. What was to be found there had been found, or would be.

  “Come on, Mullins,” Bill Weigand said.

  They went to dinner, first, and did not especially hurry over it. If occasion to hurry arose, which was not likely yet, they would be notified. They were not notified. They drove to the Elwell house. A uniformed policeman stood near the door and, as they approached, approached them—and then saw the badge Weigand held out to him and said, “Evening, sir.”

  “Visitors?” Weigand asked, and the patrolman shook his head.

  “The man who works here came back,” he said. “Little geezer named Higgins. Seems to be taking it hard.”

  Weigand rang and there was a pause—rather a long pause—and the door opened. Higgins was, as promised, a little geezer—a small man with not much gray hair, with sloping shoulders under a blue suit jacket, with a black string tie. His eyes were red.

  “’Iggins, sir,” Delbert—the name no longer seemed so odd—Higgins said. “You’ve found out who killed him? Was it that Mr. Hunter?”

  They didn’t know yet, they said they didn’t know yet.

  “I should have been here,” Delbert Higgins said, and his voice quavered. They were in the hallway by then, at the foot of stairs. “I’ll never forgive myself, sir. Never as long as I live.”

  “Not your fault,” Weigand said.

  “It’s easy to say that, sir,” Higgins said. “All these years and when he needed me—” He shrugged sloping shoulders. “I’ll carry it with me, sir,” he said. “I suppose you want to go up there?”

  They did.

  “If you need me,” Higgins said. “There’s a bell to push. On the desk. He would ring and I’d—” He shook his head; said it just didn’t seem possible, and his voice choked on the words.

  They went up a flight and another flight, and into the large room with windows on the street, with a wide desk in front of the windows. A clock—a little silver clock—ticked on the desk. Not as sensitive as the clock in the song, obviously; not as suggestible. Why, Weigand wondered, had he thought of that word? He had, subconsciously, seen it at that instant—of course. On the back of a book. Suggestibility in Children. Elwell.

  The room did not vary from the sketches of the room, from the photographs of the room. The desk—with a blotter once pale green; not pale green now. A leather chair behind it and blood on the chair, too, as on the floor under it. Another leather chair at one end of the desk, and a typewriter (hooded) on a table against one wall, with a typist’s chair in front of it. And a leather sofa and the door of the closet—

  Weigand looked around the room, not touching anything. Sometimes, rooms seemed to speak, to remember. This room did not, so far as he could tell, have any comment to make—any comment not obvious. A man had been killed here; the blood told that. A man who worked at a desk, read books, wrote books.

  Weigand tried the closet door. It was locked—a snap lock obviously. He had brought with him a chain
of keys which had been among the personal effects of Professor Elwell, and selected one which looked appropriate and then the telephone rang. Mullins picked it up and said, “Mullins,” and listened and said, “Hold it, I’ll ask him.”

  “Picked up this guy Hunter,” Mullins said. “Man who was here this afternoon? Want to know should they bring him here or—”

  “Here,” Weigand said.

  “Bring him along,” Mullins told the precinct.

  The closet would wait. Weigand put the keys back in his pocket and looked for a button “on” the desk. It was set into the frame of the desk and he pushed it. After a little time they heard slow footsteps on the stairs; heard a knock at the door; opened the door to Delbert Higgins, who appeared to have been crying further, and to be a little breathless. Weigand waited, expectant. “You rang, sir?” Delbert Higgins said, satisfying expectation.

  At a little after two he had admitted one Carl Hunter. At how much after two? Hunter was a frequent visitor. How frequent?

  Perhaps five minutes after two, perhaps ten. Mr. Hunter came to see the professor a couple of times a week; usually, but not always, he came after dinner.

  “He’s what they call a graduate student, sir,” Higgins said. “At least, that’s what the professor told me. Working for his doctorate, the professor said. The professor was helping him, sir. People needed help, the professor would—” Higgins’s voice broke; he dabbed his eyes. He said, “I’m sorry, sir. I’m not myself.”

  But probably, Bill Weigand thought, Higgins was himself, with a way of life suddenly cut off, no new way of life in sight. Bill said he understood. And Higgins himself had left—when?

  About fifteen minutes after he had let Mr. Hunter in, and Hunter had climbed up toward the top-floor office. Higgins had heard the graduate student knock at the office door, had heard Professor Elwell say, “Come,” and had gone down to his own quarters in the basement—“Although it really isn’t that, sir. Very light and airy”—and changed his jacket and put on a topcoat and gone out through the service entrance in the rear and down two houses to a passageway to the street. And to a movie. And afterward—

  “Never mind,” Weigand said. “You locked the front door? The service door?”

  “Certainly, sir.”

  “When Mr. Hunter went out—out the front door, presumably—it would have locked behind him? A snap lock, that is?”

  “Oh yes, sir.”

  “You heard the professor ask Mr. Hunter to come in?”

  “Oh yes, sir. ‘Come,’ the professor said. I heard that, sir.”

  “And nothing else?”

  “Nothing—oh—no, no sir. You think I’d—”

  “No,” Weigand said. “Mr. Hunter’s coming around, Higgins. With a man from the precinct. Let them in, will you?”

  Higgins went. Bill Weigand took the keys out again, and again selected one appropriate and tried it in the closet door. The door opened. The closet was very shallow. Just depth enough to hold, on either side of the door, narrow filing cabinets, reaching to the ceiling. The rear wall of the closet was of wood. A closet hardly more than a niche in the wall, Weigand thought, as he closed the door and heard the tongue of the automatic lock snap into the slot of the striking plate. Of course, it would be in the exterior wall of the house. No depth possible unless it jutted into the house next door, which was unlikely. Odd that—

  “Coming now,” Mullins said, from the window and Weigand joined him there, and looked down at the top of a police car, at two men getting out of it. It was then, while they waited, that Weigand looked diagonally westward, and saw a slice of the Hudson in the moonlight.

  And Carl Hunter, graduate student at Dyckman University, seeker after a doctorate in (it was to be assumed) psychology, came in and destroyed a small silver clock which had been, whatever he said, dutifully keeping time.…

  “I could have sworn it was slow,” Hunter said, in a puzzled voice. “Why else would I—” He stopped with that, and it was as if he had walked into a solid wall.

  “When you were here this afternoon,” Weigand said. “You saw the clock was slow then, Mr. Hunter? Was that the way it was?”

  “That’s it,” Hunter said, relief in his tone. “Of course that’s it. And the professor must have set—”

  He stopped again.

  “My God,” he said. “We stand here and talk about—about a damn clock. And—Jamey’s dead. Killed.”

  “Right,” Weigand said. “As I said, it must have happened soon after you left. When did you leave, Mr. Hunter?”

  “I wasn’t here more than half an hour,” Hunter said. “So it must have been—oh, about a quarter of three.”

  “By the clock?”

  “I don’t think—no, I remember. By my watch. I looked at it and I had a—an appointment at three and I said, ‘Thanks, sir,’ and left. And he was all right, then. He was sitting right there”—Hunter pointed at the desk, and looked at it, and quickly looked away again—“and made a kind of salute, the way he did, and said, ‘Don’t keep her waiting, Carl’ and—”

  “Yes?” Bill Weigand said. “Her?”

  “Just a girl I know,” Hunter said.

  “You met her—where was that?”

  “At the Campus Book Store. Not that it’s really on the campus. You see it’s—”

  “Never mind,” Weigand said. “You met her—when, Mr. Hunter?”

  “Well,” Hunter said, and spoke slowly, “she was a little late, captain. It must have been—”

  He did not, this time, hesitate to a stop. Sounds stopped him—the sound of knocking stopped him, the snap of a lock.

  A tall young woman—thin, almost gangling; a young woman with hair so blond as to be almost white—walked into the room and, seeing them, stopped—stopped with a kind of young awkwardness, as a child might stop who has chanced into a room forbidden children. Her face was thin; the blue eyes seemed too large for it. She put a thin hand up to her lips—to lips unexpectedly full, curved, bright.

  But the reason Bill Weigand and Mullins stared at her was not related to her appearance. The reason was that the young woman had walked out of the closet.

  2

  Bill Weigand looked from the young woman to Sergeant Aloysius Mullins, and looked by instinct and with sympathy. Events were baffling enough to Weigand; what, he thought, must they be to Mullins? A look told him.

  It was not so much surprise that flooded over Sergeant. Mullins’s large, always somewhat reddened, face. Surprise was there, of course—surprise, disbelief, even consternation. But under those things, the basis of those things, was a great indignation, a great anger. This, Mullins’s face said, was beyond acceptance. This went too far—this went a helluva lot too far. This—

  “All right, sergeant,” Bill Weigand said, gently, and turned back to the girl, who was looking from one to the other of them, eyes very round—very startled. But when she spoke, it was to Carl Hunter. Her voice was unexpectedly low, vibrant.

  “Carl,” she said. “Carl—what is it? What’s happened?”

  “Screwy,” Sergeant Mullins said, in a faraway voice. “That’s what it is—screwy.”

  But it was clear that he spoke only to himself, a man withdrawn from that which could not be tolerated.

  “Where’s Uncle Jamey?” the girl said.

  “Faith—” Carl Hunter said but, instead of going on, looked at Weigand, left it to him.

  “I’m sorry,” Weigand said. “Professor Elwell is dead. He was—shot.” He looked at the desk and the girl looked and then raised both hands to her thin face and covered her face, and the tips of her slim fingers rubbed against her forehead, as if to lessen sudden pain. They waited. After a few seconds the tall girl lowered her hands. Her eyes seemed more than ever too large for her thin, now very pale, face.

  “Your uncle?” Bill Weigand said.

  For an instant she looked at him as if she had not heard him, almost as if she did not see him. But then she shook her head.

  “Not really,”
she said. “I called him that. Always. Since I was a little girl. Killed? Just—sitting there and somebody shot him?”

  Some things must be repeated before they become real.

  “Yes,” Bill Weigand said.

  “I’m Faith Oldham,” the girl said. “We live downstairs.”

  “Down—” Bill began, and did not finish. Instead he went past the girl to the closet. She had left the door partly open and he opened it more widely. Of course—it should all along have been obvious. Not a closet, really—not primarily a closet. A passage into the house next door. What he had taken to be the back wall of the closet was a door. Yes—a sliding door, open now. He went through into the house next door, into a room which, in size and shape, was a twin of the professor’s office. But not in furnishing—this other room was carpeted, as the office was not; here heavy curtains were drawn across the windows. There was faint illumination in the room from a ceiling light. Weigand went back into the room Elwell had died in.

  “Downstairs in the other house?” Bill said to the girl, who looked at him as if the question surprised her but then said, “Yes. Of course. My mother and I—”

  It was not, once explained, in any special way remarkable. Jameson Elwell had owned two houses, side by side, shoulder to shoulder and wall to wall. He occupied all of one and the top floor of the other, and had had a passage opened through and used the double thickness of the two house walls as storage space. And the curtained room?

  “He called it the laboratory,” Carl Hunter said. “Carried on—experiments. Psychological experiments. Psychological—enquiries.”

  “I see,” Bill said, but was not sure he did see. “With animals?”

  “Animals?” Hunter repeated. The girl merely stood and looked at Hunter. “Oh—you’re thinking of Pavlov? Thorndike? No. That is, not here. That’s done at the university. We’ve got a project now with cats that may—” He stopped and shook his head impatiently. “Which is neither here nor there,” he said. “This—I suppose the word ‘laboratory’ gives the wrong impression to a layman. A room to talk to people in. A—quiet room.” He looked at Weigand sharply. “Nothing mysterious,” he said. “And certainly nothing to do with what’s happened.”