Death of a Tall Man

by Frances Lockridge

  Q. You noticed the time exactly?

  A. I was in—I wanted to do an errand on my lunch hour. And I had to be back by two. It depended on him whether I had time.

  Q. Right.

  A. He came out at one seven. The door opens out toward me, so I only got a glimpse of him. He got his hat and coat and—

  Q. Please, Miss Spencer. I’d like to get all the details just here.

  A. Details? Well—he just came out into the hall from Room 6, went across the hall to the closet and—well, just took off his hospital coat, got his hat and went out. Through the back door. That’s all I can think of—all the details, I mean.

  Q. Right. How long did this take, would you say?

  A. Not long. Two minutes perhaps.

  Q. That long? Two minutes is really a rather long time, under certain circumstances.

  A. Oh—perhaps a minute, then.

  Q. So you would think that he went out—out of the office entirely, I mean—at about eight minutes after one. Nine minutes at the most. Right?

  A. I’d think so.

  Q. I hope your watch is accurate, Miss Spencer.

  A. Oh, it is. I’m sure it is. I haven’t changed it and—what time is it now?

  Q. Four thirty-three.

  A. Then mine’s right if yours is.

  Q. Right. Then? After the doctor went out?

  A. I decided I would have time to do my errand—easily.

  Q. (By Sergeant Aloysius Mullins) What was your errand, Miss?

  A. I wanted to buy a pair of stockings.

  Q. (By Sergeant Mullins) Oh.

  Q. (By Lieutenant Weigand) And then?

  A. I went to the other closet. The one nearer the bathroom door. You know? I got my own hat and coat—I just put my coat on over my uniform—and went out. I suppose it took me another two minutes. Or one minute.

  Q. Then you left at—say—one ten or one eleven? Didn’t you meet the doctor outside? Waiting for the elevator?

  A. It must have been about then. No, I didn’t. I’d just missed a down elevator; I could tell by the indicator. I had to wait, oh—you’ve unsettled me about times. I’d think two or three minutes. The elevators are crowded just after one, of course.

  Q. While you waited, you didn’t see Dr. Gordon?

  A. No.

  Q. (By Sergeant Mullins) Or anyone else?

  A. Oh—other people, of course.

  Q. (By Sergeant Mullins) I mean—you didn’t see anybody going in what you call the “back door.” Into the office, I mean. Dr. Gordon going back, say? Or anybody else? You were where you could see the door?

  A. The door is right next to the elevators, Sergeant. I’d have noticed if anybody went in. Nobody did.

  Q. (By Sergeant Mullins) Oh.

  Q. (By Lieutenant Weigand) Why, Mullins?

  A. (By Sergeant Mullins) I sort of thought it would be interesting, Loot.

  Q. (By Lieutenant Weigand) And then you went to lunch—and did your errand—and returned, Miss Spencer. Getting back at about two o’clock?

  A. Yes. About then.

  Q. Thank you, Miss Spencer. You’ve been very clear. The rest of it—we’ll let that go for now. Right?

  A. Please, Lieutenant. I can’t—

  The scene is belied by the coherence of Mullins’ notes. There is nothing in the transcript to show how often Grace Spencer’s voice broke; how she hesitated; how her hands moved and twisted as she talked; how, after she said, “I can’t,” her head dropped, on Debbie Brooks’s desk and rested on her folded arms and how her broad, slender shoulders shook.

  Grace Spencer came back from lunch at about two o’clock that afternoon. She let herself in through the back door, hung her coat in the closet she shared with Deborah Brooks, took her time about washing up in the bathroom and then went on through the storeroom into the waiting room. Deborah had her typewriter swung out—and was making an erasure. She was too preoccupied to notice Grace for a moment and Grace stood just inside the waiting room, looking down it with a faint smile on her face. Then Deborah looked up and saw her and smiled in turn. Her smile was rueful.

  “I ought to be better,” Deborah said, and Grace walked down the room toward her. “Only, I don’t seem to get any better.”

  She was all right, Grace told her. Anyway, she would be all right.

  “After all,” Grace said.

  “After all,” Deborah agreed, “I’m new at it. I seem to be new at everything, Grace.”

  She was, the nurse pointed out, only twenty. Few people were not new at things at twenty.

  “Most girls have had training by that time,” Debbie said. “Years of training. And I can’t even type a letter saying all right, come Tuesday at three o’clock and the doctor will work you in, without having to erase three times. Andy’s very patient. And he just has me here because he’s nice.”

  “And,” Grace said, “because he’s known you since you were a—a kitten—and knew your father and mother for years—and, anyway, there’s more to the job than typing. You coo very nicely, Debbie.”

  “Grace!” Debbie Brooks said, with some indignation.

  “On the telephone,” Grace said. “When appropriate. To dear little old ladies who can’t understand why they can’t see as well as they could when they were dear little girls. To men who are so important they can only come when the doctor is at the hospital operating. To—”

  “You make me sound like an—like a drip,” Debbie said. “I mean literally a drip. Dripping.”

  “All right,” Grace said. “You’re a sweet child.”

  “Yes, Mama,” Debbie said. “Yes, Grandmother. All right, Miss Methuselah.”

  “You looked worried when you came back from lunch,” Grace said. “Tell mama. Danny?”

  The younger girl nodded.

  “The same?” Grace wanted to know.

  Debbie nodded again.

  “He insists on our going ahead, whatever Andy says,” Deborah told her. “He won’t wait; he says he’s tired of waiting. He says things are snafu. He says—oh, he says everything, Grace. I’ve told you. And he’s right. And Andy’s right, too, and—it’s a mess.”

  Grace smiled faintly. Things were so easily a mess at twenty. You had so little time at twenty; even when you were only thirty-two you had more time. It was a most ingenious paradox.

  “The doctor thinks six months will do it,” Grace said. “Surely you two can wait six months.”

  “Did you ever—” Debbie began and stopped suddenly.

  “Yes, my sweet, I ever did,” Grace told her. “Longer than that. Much longer.”

  “I don’t know why,” Debbie said. She said it honestly, and with a kind of surprise.

  “Maybe men are afraid of nurses,” Grace said. She was light about it. “Maybe it’s the starch, baby. Anyone want me?”

  “Mrs. Fleming again,” Debbie said. “She says if she could take them off for just a couple of hours. Or even just when she arrived. And will you call her?”

  Nurse Spencer would call Mrs. Fleming. She did, there on the desk telephone. She was gently final with Mrs. Fleming; she was sorry; she had checked with the doctor; the doctor was firm. Not even for a couple of hours. But of course, Mrs. Fleming’s eyes were Mrs. Fleming’s eyes. Then she listened, her own expression one of resignation. Debbie laughed a tiny, low-pitched laugh, watching Grace’s face. “I—” Grace said and had to stop again. She waited. “I wouldn’t,” she said quickly. “The doctor definitely does not approve, Mrs. Fleming. Goodbye.” She put the telephone back in its cradle, looked at Debbie and said, mildly enough, “Damn fool.”

  “That was all?” she said then.

  That was all, Deborah told her.

  “One of the compensations is going blind, poor guy,” Grace said. The man in No. 1. “I don’t have to be a doctor to tell that.”

  “Oh,” Debbie said. “Can’t Andy—?”

  “Not even your Andy,” Grace said. “It would take God.”

  Debbie Brooks closed her own eyes for a
moment and then opened them. Grace Spencer nodded at her.

  “I do that too,” she said. She straightened. “However,” she said, and went from the desk and through the door into the examining-room area. The door to the doctor’s office from the corridor was closed. She went into the first room. The door leading from it to the doctor’s office was also closed. The doctor was back, then, and did not want to be disturbed until office hours began at three. She checked the first examining room, and went on to the next room. Patients left things sometimes; a kind of light debris. She found none until she reached Room 5, which smelled of a pipe. And Room 5—Mr. Henry Flint—had knocked out his pipe on the floor. Grace looked at this debris with resentment. Room 6—Mr. Jose Garcia, with an address in Harlem—had left no debris. Grace went to the storeroom and got fresh cloths to cover the six little tables in the six rooms. She got a dustpan and whiskbroom; she changed the cloths in the rooms and removed Mr. Flint’s debris. She rubbed the wax linoleum lightly with one of the used cloths. She opened the windows slightly to air the rooms and switched off the lights. She disposed of the used cloths in the storeroom hamper, emptied the dustpan and looked at her watch. It was two thirty. She returned to the rooms and picked up the referral cards and carried them to her desk. She entered the names and addresses neatly in a kind of ledger. This took her about five minutes. She went back to the reception room and sat down in the chair at the left of Deborah Brooks’s desk, stretched out her long legs and looked at them and said she had seen a hat that would knock your eye out—would knock your mind out, for that matter—on her way to buy stockings.

  “In that little place on Madison between Fifty-first and Fifty-second? West side of the street?” Debbie said. “If it was, I saw it. The one that went up like this?” She demonstrated.

  “Other side of the street,” Grace told her. “It went down like this.” She demonstrated. “Between Fifty-second and Fifty-third.”

  “Tell me,” Debbie said, and licked an envelope closed.

  “Why don’t you use the sponge?” Grace said.

  “Gets my fingers gummy,” Debbie told her. “Go on. Feathers?”

  At ten minutes of three, an elderly woman dressed in black came in to the waiting room with a younger woman. They went to a sofa against the wall and the younger woman helped the older to sit down. Then the younger woman came to Deborah and Grace—who had got to her feet, unhurriedly, when the two entered. Grace went behind Deborah’s desk into the examining-room corridor and Deborah said, “Good afternoon, Miss Newsome.”

  “We’re the first?” Miss Newsome said. “I hoped we would be.”

  “The very first,” Deborah assured her. “It will only be a minute, I’m sure. The nurse will see if the doctor is ready for your aunt.”

  Grace went to her own desk and sat at it a moment, doing nothing. Then she took a compact from a drawer in the desk cabinet, looked at herself in its mirror and touched her nose with powder. Then, ready, she stood up and walked down the corridor to the door leading to Dr. Gordon’s office. She knocked lightly on the door and, without waiting for an answer, opened it. Dr. Gordon was sitting at his desk across the room, near the windows. As he sat there, he should have faced away from the windows, toward the door in which Grace Spencer stood a moment—stood and instinctively, meaninglessly, raised her right hand toward her lips.

  Because Dr. Andrew Gordon was not facing her. His face lay on the smooth glass of the desk top, the head twisted, so that the right cheek rested on the glass and the eyes could not be seen.

  “Doctor!” Grace said, but already the knowledge that he could not hear her was in her mind. It had come as blackness comes in the narrowing world of one who is about to faint. But Grace Spencer was not about to faint. She crossed the room to the doctor. She had to go around him to reach his left hand, dangling by his side. His body pressed the right arm against the desk.

  Before her fingers touched his wrist she knew. She did not need to feel for the pulse. But her fingers, trained until they seemed to work without direction from her mind, did feel for the pulse on the wrist which, although it was not cold, was too cold for life. The fingers did not fumble. They did not find a pulse.

  Grace did not scream. But when she stood up, her face was colorless and her wide mouth was set in a contorted line. She did not touch Andrew Gordon again; she looked at him with eyes which were wide and blank. Her lips were stiff; so stiff she could hardly move them. But she spoke as she stood, looking down at Andrew Gordon’s body.

  “Andy,” she said. “Oh—darling. Darling.”

  Her voice was low in the emptiness of the room.

  Slowly her eyes focused again. They did not have far to look. In the back of Andrew Gordon’s head, visible even through the hair, there was a deep depression. It was not a horrifying wound; it had not bled; it was probable, she realized, that the skin was not broken. It was merely that the posterior portion of a human skull had been pushed into the brain under it.

  She turned away and started toward the door and seemed to stagger a moment and then caught herself and went on, quite steadily. She went out of the private office and into the doorway leading to the waiting room. Deborah Brooks looked up at her, and then half rose with a little cry. Grace’s head moved to summon her. Deborah came to the nurse and was drawn back, beyond the vision of those in the waiting room, into the corridor. Grace spoke in a low voice; a voice which did not tremble.

  “The doctor’s dead, Deborah,” she said. “He’s been—somebody killed him.”

  The nurse saw the color leaving the girl’s face, saw the lips begin to move before they went slack, and caught the light, slender body as it began to sag. She lowered Deborah to the floor and stood for an instant looking at her. Then she made up her mind and, leaving the girl lying flat, her head pillowed only by the long brown hair, went to Deborah’s desk in the waiting room. She stood behind it and the people in the room—there were five of them now—looked up at her, their differing faces alike in curiosity and expectancy.

  “I’m very sorry,” Grace Spencer said, and her voice was steady, even professional. “Dr. Gordon has been taken suddenly ill. It will be impossible for him to see anyone today. Miss Brooks will—will communicate with you about future appointments.”

  The waiting patients were no fools. They looked at Grace’s white, set face and they did not argue. Grace waited for them to go and then, still rigid—still standing—she pulled the telephone closer and dialed. When she had finished there was a moment’s pause. Then, quite slowly and distinctly, Grace Spencer spoke.

  “I am reporting a murder,” she said.

  The murder of Andy, her mind said. The murder of Andy. Oh darling—darling.

  2

  MONDAY, 1:05 P.M. TO 4:55 P.M.

  Grace Spencer’s report reached the police telegraph bureau at 3:03 P.M. It went out immediately to the East Fifty-first Street station, headquarters of the Seventeenth Precinct. It went also to the office of Lieutenant (Acting Captain) William Weigand, commanding officer of the main office Homicide Squad. But Weigand was not in his office; he was explaining things to Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O’Malley, in command of the Detective Bureau.

  “So there we stand,” Bill Weigand said, not for the first time. “We know he did it. The D.A. says sure he did it. And the D.A. says if we want a false arrest suit, go right ahead and pick him up. The D.A. says juries want evidence.”

  “That,” O’Malley said, “is what you always get from these damn lawyers.” He regarded the younger policeman reproachfully. “Especially nowadays,” he said. “Like I’ve told you.”

  “Well,” said Bill Weigand, “sufficient unto the day.”

  “What?” said Inspector O’Malley.

  “Nothing,” Bill told him. “A quotation. Misapplied. However, Inspector, that’s the way things are. You’ll find it all in D.D. 14.”

  Inspector O’Malley was morose. He said he had. He said it was a hell of a note.

  “It looks to me, Bill, like you
slipped,” he said. “I don’t say you slipped. I say it looks to me like you slipped.”

  “Possibly,” Bill said. “I’m sorry, sir.”

  “What’s sorry?” Inspector O’Malley wanted to know. Bill merely nodded, agreeing by implication it wasn’t much.

  “If you have any suggestions, Inspector,” he said, politely.

  O’Malley shook his head firmly. He said Bill knew he didn’t interfere with responsible officers, which was untrue; he said that he couldn’t do everything, could he? He said, “You young cops!” with a falling inflection and an air of great weariness. Bill Weigand, who was used to this, merely waited, with politeness.

  “All right,” O’Malley said. “O.K., Lieutenant. Put it on the back of the stove. Maybe it will boil.”

  “Right,” Bill said. “I can’t think of anything else. It isn’t as if—”

  A buzzer sounded on Inspector O’Malley’s desk. O’Malley looked resentfully at a box with a grid on the front of it. He reached out, hesitated, pushed firmly down on a lever on the box. The box gave a harsh wail and O’Malley jumped.

  “Damn’ gadget,” O’Malley said, with compressed fury. He pushed the lever up again. He yelled at the box.

  “Well!” he yelled.

  The box cleared its throat, a little nervously. Bill Weigand recognized the throat.

  “Sergeant Mullins, sir,” the box said. “Report of homicide in the Medical Chambers, East Fifty-third Street. Looks important, sir.”

  “Why?” said O’Malley, without compromise in his voice.

  “It’s a doctor, sir,” Mullins said, and cleared his throat again.

  “What’s important about a doctor?” O’Malley said.

  “Yes, sir,” Mullins said. “I see what you mean, sir.”

  “The hell you do,” O’Malley said.

  “Yes, sir,” Mullins said. “I thought the papers, Inspector. Medical Chambers and everything.” Mullins, in the box, cleared his throat again. “I thought the Loot—I mean, I thought you’d want to know, Inspector.”