The Corpse Next Door

by John Farris

  “That’s right.”

  The doctor shrugged. “He gets drunk. He has headaches. He seeks quick, convenient outlets for his sexual energy. Is all this so strange or terrible? He’s under a strain. He’s launching a political campaign, the outcome of which is vitally important to his career. He lost his wife a year ago. He’s the high-strung type. Works furiously for long hours without rest. These things contribute to the behavior of which we speak.”

  “I could figure that out for myself, doctor. You haven’t said a word.”

  He covered his annoyance with a grin. “Then suppose you tell me what’s on your mind, Randall.”

  “I think maybe his headaches are psychosomatic.”

  He shrugged again. “I’ve examined him. So have specialists in St. Louis. You’re right about that. We found no organic cause. I suggested psychiatric treatment.” Dr. Einhorn chuckled sourly. “He threatened to find another doctor. So I told him I had a drug that might give him relief. The capsules he takes are sugar. They do him as much good as anything will. That, of course, is confidential.”

  “How did Nathan get along with his wife?”

  He pouted slightly, as if it were none of my business, but he answered readily. “He worshiped her. Nathan’s an intense young man. He became far too wrapped up in Kelly Anne, so that she dominated his life instead of being just a desirable part of it. I warned him about this. Kelly Anne had a rheumatic heart condition. She was my patient. If she had taken good care of herself she might have lived ten or fifteen years longer. She didn’t take good care of herself. She drank too much. She never slept. The consequence was inevitable. Her heart gave out. Nathan was inconsolable. He had tried to get her to slow down, but felt a distinct sense of guilt because he’d failed. I think he’ll straighten out before long.”

  He was silent momentarily. A faint remorseful smile appeared for an instant.

  Then he said, “I told you Nathan adored Kelly Anne. Perhaps you know she did not adore him.”

  “I’ve heard.”

  “She was going to divorce Nathan.”

  “Oh? When?”

  “She made up her mind a couple of weeks before she died. They had already been to her lawyer’s once. Maybe Nathan’s abject love was at the bottom of it. Maybe she was just ready to move on. Maybe it was Karis being a competitor for Nathan’s affection.”

  “What kind of settlement did Kelly Anne want?”

  He smiled thinly. His eyes remained constantly sad, as if a part of his mind forever dwelled on his own difficulties. Maybe that was the reason he talked so freely of Nathan.

  “I suppose if I don’t tell you, you’ll find out elsewhere.” He glanced at his watch. “I don’t know how much she wanted. But I was told it was more than the family could easily afford.”

  “I thought a sustained exertion on the heart was necessary to cause failure in rheumatic cases,” I said. “From what I’ve heard, Kelly Anne just dropped.”

  He gave me a smile of approval. “That’s true. But Kelly Anne had been drinking with foolish abandon all afternoon. Perhaps she ran up the stairs after something, ran down. This sudden exertion, combined with the effects of the alcohol, finished her. It was a large party, and nobody was keeping track of anybody else. I was there. I got to her right after it happened.”

  “What did the autopsy show?”

  He shook his head. “There was no autopsy. No reason for one. I signed the death certificate.” He took a pair of rimless glasses from his shirt pocket and put them on. “I’ll have to get to my patients now. I hope I’ve been able to tell you something about Nathan.”

  “You’ve given me some help,” I admitted.

  He looked over his glasses at me. “I hope you understand,” he said softly. “I’m worried about Nathan. I want to help him. He won’t let me.”

  His eyes were glumly intent on his introspected thoughts. I left him.

  AT THREE THAT AFTERNOON I MET PHIL NAAR IN A HIGH-way cafe on the west side of town. He sat in an isolated booth toward the rear of the place, staring at the table. A cup of coffee in front of him looked cold and untouched. His raw white hair was slickly combed and parted in the middle. It had been a long time since I had seen him with his hair combed.

  “Hello, Bill,” he said without looking up.

  “I didn’t know if you’d come,” I said uncertainly.

  He looked at me then, as I sat across the table from him. “Gulliver was in his office all morning with two FBI men. They seemed satisfied that Smithell was Richard Olson. I don’t know what Gulliver told them, what he said about the money. Or if he mentioned it.”

  A waitress came and I ordered something to get her out of the way. Phil continued to stare at the table.

  “You know what, Bill?” he said in a quiet, plodding voice. “I woke up yesterday morning and discovered I didn’t like myself.”

  “Everybody goes through that.”

  He looked at me, his eyes hurt and faintly bitter. “No. This was different. I looked at myself in the mirror. I really saw me. I told myself, ‘You stink,’ and didn’t feel any pity or remorse. I agreed one hundred per cent with myself that I was no damn good. I’ve wasted my whole life trying to kid myself that I was being useful as a cop. I would have been a failure at anything else and I would have been a failure as a cop, too, anywhere but in this town. Maybe you’re a failure, Bill. You failed Jimmy Herne. But you had guts enough to fail honestly. I would never have dared say a word to Gulliver.”

  In a way his self-abasement gave him a sort of lonely strength. I couldn’t touch him with pity or anger or sympathy. I let him alone.

  He spoke more rapidly, as if completing vague resolutions. “I’m through. I’m going to resign. I don’t want this town any more. I don’t want the pension checks. I’m going to live with Jerry. He’s the only good thing that’s a part of me.”

  “When are you leaving?”

  “Next week, some time. Do you think I’m right, Bill?”

  “You’re running away from a ghost.”

  He had anticipated this. “No. Jimmy Herne’s not the cause of it. He was just a focal point. When he died I began to think.”

  He nodded. With one hand he pulled nervously at the metal link band of his wrist watch. “I’ve made up my mind. What are you going to do, Bill? Go back?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t even thought about it much. I’m beginning to wonder if I care any more. I’ve had other things to think about.”

  There was a zealous gleam in his eye. In the midst of his self-destruction he had sensed the salvation for others. “Why not go back to school, Bill? You’re older now, better adjusted. Go back and study law. With your experience as a cop you’d have a head start.”

  “I’m considering it. Sometimes I think I’ve had a gutful. But I can’t run away.”

  “If you go back to Gulliver you’re still a quitter. You can’t do anything now.”

  I said with a flaring of anger, “Don’t try to push me into your mold.”

  “Sorry,” he mumbled. He studied his watch. “Well, I’m due at HQ. I’ll be gone in a week . . . I hope I see you before I go, Bill.”

  “I hope so,” I said. We watched each other awkwardly, complete strangers despite years of association.

  “What did you want to see me about, Bill? Is there anything I can do to help you—” he began.

  “Maybe there will be.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I’m working on something now. But I’m not sure what.”

  “Well,” Phil said. “I’d like to help, sure. Sure I’ll help. If I can.”

  8

  I HAD no trouble. I went to Roxy’s motor court and parked in front of the restaurant. I went inside. There were some people around, in the restaurant. I went up the stairs, to Roxy’s office. I unlocked the door, shut it behind me. I took the small brown bottle, sealed with masking tape, from the desk drawer. I put it in my pocket and went downstairs. A few people may have noticed me, but they paid no particular
attention.

  It was after five o’clock when I reached Highway Patrol headquarters and the office girls were streaming down the broad steps to the street. I walked into the lobby, nodded to a couple of troopers I knew, turned left down a long hallway past Troop F headquarters and the communications center until I came to a door marked Admittance for Official Business Only and, in the lower right hand corner of the opaque glass, Lt. Darryl McHane.

  I went inside. Fading sunlight fell through slanted venetian blinds and striped the floor, tinted the glass doors of the bookcases with sunset colors. My footsteps sounded discreetly on the composition tile. No one seemed to be around. I went through a doorway into the lab.

  Lieutenant McHane stood inside with his hands clasped behind his back, scrutinizing a couple of smears on slides beneath petri dishes. There was a towel with many brown stains on the bakelite sink top nearby. McHane wore a full-length apron over his uniform of light blue shirt and dark blue trousers.

  “How’s the apothecary business?” I said.

  He turned without haste and peered at me over rimless glasses. “If it isn’t the small-town dick,” he murmured. “Long time no see, hayseed.”

  “You know how it is in my line of work,” I said. “Never any time to visit my pals.” McHane is a stockily built, meek-looking man with a big nose, morose eyes and thinning hair. He has college degrees in chemistry and philosophy, boasts a vast intricate knowledge of law. This is usually apparent only at trials when he is called upon to testify on behalf of laboratory evidence. He loves to confound smart defense lawyers who fall for his meek act and try to invalidate his lab findings. It’s a pleasure to watch him work, although most of the lawyers in the state are on to him by now.

  We shook hands solemnly. “Since when are you running your own blood tests?” I asked him.

  “Cleve is over at St. Kit’s with his bride of nine months and an imminent baby,” he said. “I’ve just been preparing some reagent.”

  “Have time to do me a favor?”

  He wiped his palms on the apron. “Well, you know how bloodstain analysis is. Slow as molasses. Slower. Takes three or four days, if all you’ve got is dried on a towel like that.” He looked unobtrusively at his watch. “What you want done?”

  I took the bottle I had stolen from Roxy’s office out of my pocket. “I need to know what’s in this.”

  He stretched out his hand. “Let’s see.” He took the bottle and held it up to the dwindling light of the windows, turned it around several times with his fingers.

  “Any idea what it is?”

  “Just a hunch. I wouldn’t want to influence your decision any.”

  “Any idea how old it is?”

  “About a year.”

  “Unh-hunh.” He took a single-edged razor blade from a cardboard box on the sink and carefully incised the masking tape, unscrewed the lid of the small bottle. He sniffed the contents carefully, several times, inhaling clean air between each appraisal of the liquid. Then he held out the bottle to me.

  “What you smell?”

  I sniffed a couple of times, frowned. “Whiskey, I think. Pretty faint.”

  “Can see you’re not a drinking man,” he said. “Scotch. Good Scotch once, before somebody denatured it with soda pop.” He indulged in another long reflective sniff. “Anything else?”

  “That’s all I could smell. Of course, I don’t have your nose.”

  “True.” He stroked the nose fondly with one finger. “There is something else, though. Vague. I can hardly place it.”

  “Toxic, maybe?”

  “To say the least.”

  “How long would it take you to isolate it?”

  “Not long, if it’s what I think.”

  He touched a switch near the door and cold bars of neon flared. I leaned against the refrigerator and watched him. “What’s in the ice box, McHane?”

  “A pickled stomach, a cocker spaniel’s liver and a couple of Coca-Colas,” he said. “Help yourself to a Coke. While you’re drinking it go into the other room and type out a statement for me. You know what I want on it. Date, time, what you brought in, why. Sign your name.”

  I did that. I did not mention that I was suspended. By the time I had pecked out with one finger the information he wanted and added my signature he came out of the lab with the bottle.

  “I only needed a little of it,” he said. “I resealed the bottle.”

  “What did you find?”

  “Scotch and soda pop. Some kind of mixer, I guess. Also a quantity of cyanide. Not a whole lot. Just enough to make this concoction lethal.”

  I sighed. “How long would it take the person who drank some of it to die?”

  He rubbed his nose, pointed to a chair across the room. “After four or five good swallows with some witty conversation interspersed he would about have enough time to walk over to that chair and sit down before it hit him. It would hit him like a tree falling on his head.”

  “That fast.”

  “It ain’t slow, pal. Not slow at all. Not cyanide. It’s a handy sort of toxicant, too, if you’re intent on doing somebody in. Found in silver polish, for example.” The glasses slipped a little on his nose and he looked at me over them. “I suppose this will put me in court before long.”

  “I couldn’t say, McHane.”

  I took the bottle, exchanging it for the information he had requested. He initialed the sheet and folded it, put it away. “Time to stay and talk?”

  “I wish I could. I’ll buy you a dinner some time next week.”

  “Fair enough. So long, copper.” He turned and trudged back into his laboratory.

  Outside the round orange sun was shrouded in haze. Dusk settled swiftly as I took myself and my car home. My feet made lonely sounds on the gravel driveway as I walked toward the apartment house. I used my key to disengage the lock on the door of the basement entrance, and pushed the door inward. The night light inside was out. The door had locked shut behind me before I remembered having seen the janitor put in a new bulb two days ago.

  The arm closed around my neck abruptly, crushing the breath from my throat. I was bent backward slightly, so that I couldn’t struggle and still keep my feet on the floor. My flailing hands found nothing in the blackness. My coat was slapped aside and I felt the .45 slipped from its holster. Blood thudded in my temples, and there were bright red explosions behind my eyes. I lost interest in trying to fight. I just wanted to breathe. I put both hands to the arm across my throat and tugged.

  I felt his breath on the back of my neck, smelled the stale fruity odor of chewing gum. The arm went away from my throat then and I was shoved suddenly. I stumbled against a wall and fell down, held my bruised throat. I whispered a curse. The light came on, and I looked up, at my gun and the man who pointed it at me.

  DONNY ARLENE TOOK HIS HAND AWAY FROM THE LIGHT BULB he had tightened in the ceiling socket and grinned.

  “Hello, good friend of mine,” he said softly.

  “What do you want?”

  “I came to tell you Roxy wants to see you.”

  “Why the muscle?”

  “Roxy said you might not want to see him. He said this was the best way. I wouldn’t hold this gun on you, but Roxy said the badge in your pocket don’t mean any more than a bottle top now. You can stand up.”

  I stood up. My throat was still hurting. Donny waved the gun at the door. “Your car,” he said, with a jaunty confident grin. We went outside, and he got into the front seat with me. He had put the .45 in his coat pocket and was holding his stiletto, the blade out. He sat facing me on the seat with the knife hand balanced on his knee, the point of the blade close to my side. He told me to drive slow.

  “If I stick you with this,” Donny said, “it would make you bleed a lot. Some people get hysterical when they see themselves bleed. I’ve seen it happen.” His lips smacked rhythmically as he chewed gum. He hummed softly. We were going to a picnic, and Donny was bringing the meat.

  Roxy didn’t smile at me aft
er Donny had conducted me into his office.

  “You took something from me, Bill,” he said grievously. Somebody had put one over on him, and he was suffering humiliation. “You came into my office and took something from me.”

  “Took what, Roxy?”

  “You know what you took. You took the bottle. I want it back.”

  “Maybe Dr. Einhorn took it, Roxy.”

  He shook his head impatiently. “No. I talked to him. He knows better. He says he didn’t take it. I believe him. I don’t believe you. I know you’ve got it. Donny, shut up that humming and search him if you haven’t done it already.”

  “No need to bother, Roxy. The bottle’s in my coat pocket.”

  “Get it out.”

  I took the bottle from my pocket carefully, mindful of Donny and his knife. I tossed the thing to Roxy and he caught it nervously with both hands.

  “What was the idea, Bill? What did you want with the bottle? What made you think you could just take it?”

  I didn’t answer. To my right Donny folded his knife and put it away. He had one eye on the painting of love among the daisies and the other on me.

  “I’m going to call Gulliver,” Roxy said. “You just lost any chance you ever had of getting back in good with him. He’ll run you right out of town for this.” His hand descended to the receiver of the telephone.

  “You don’t want to call him,” I said. “Get your goddam hand off that telephone.”

  His head jerked up and he stared at me numbly.

  “If you do call him, Roxy,” I said, “I’ll have something to say too. I know about the bottle. Where it came from and what’s in it, why it’s important. I know all that. Gulliver will listen to me. Even a man like Gulliver has to draw the line somewhere, Roxy. You’re way over the line he would have to draw.”

  Roxy studied me, his face shadowed in the light cast by a standing lamp near the desk. It was the only light in the office. He had control of himself again. He didn’t seem worried.

  “Why don’t you go down to the bar and have a drink, Donny?” Roxy suggested. “Come back in about fifteen minutes.”