The Search for My Great-Uncle’s Head

by Jonathan Latimer

  The old lady halted halfway through a scream. Intelligence swept back into her eyes. She tried to reply, but nothing except a convulsive sob came from her wrinkled throat. She turned her head toward the open door of my great-uncle’s library, then collapsed in the young woman’s arms. I endeavored clumsily to aid in supporting Mrs Spotswood.

  “No,” said the young woman. “See what frightened her.” She shoved me with her left hand. “Don’t be such a coward.”

  “I’m not a coward,” I retorted. “I was merely trying to help you.” I left the two women and entered the library.

  I knew something pretty awful must have happened to terrify Mrs Spotswood so, and I suppose I was subconsciously prepared to find my great-uncle dead. But I was in no way ready for the truly horrible sight which checked me in my tracks, caused my heart to fly into my throat and made me feel for the first time in my life that I was going to faint.

  Across the walnut desk, over the litter of papers and legal documents, sprawled my great-uncle’s body. Blood from a mangled stump where his neck had been had pooled blackly under the desk lamp, and a few drops had oozed over the edge to the soft green Chinese rug. My eyes searched frantically for his head, but it was not in sight. I bent down and examined the floor. It was not there. I turned back to the body, fervently hoping I had been the victim of a hallucination, but my vision was confronted by the gaping wound just above the high stiff collar. Where the head should have been was my great-uncle’s right hand, the arm making an awkward circle back to the body. The forefinger on this hand was outstretched, while the three remaining fingers were half opened, as though something had been removed from the hand’s grasp. The left arm was stretched backward, parallel to the body.

  Someone came up behind me. “Moses!” he exclaimed. “Where’s his head?”

  I saw it was the larger of the two young men who had trained shotguns on me earlier in the night. “I haven’t got it,” I replied inanely.

  The young man bent over and peered under the desk. He was about twenty-six years old, and he was blond and very muscular. “Gone,” he muttered. His vivid scarlet pajamas contrasted with my somber black ones. He glanced at the corpse again.

  There were sounds of people in the hall. Hurried footsteps and excited voices echoed through the house. There was also a sound of metal doors being opened and closed and the vibration of an electric motor. The noise was like that of an elevator. People were running toward our door.

  “You’d better stand outside and warn everybody,” I said to the young man. “The women shouldn’t be allowed to come in here.”

  “That’s right,” agreed the young man, starting for the corridor.

  I went to the desk and picked up the extension telephone. While I was waiting for the operator to answer Bronson came into the room. He had pulled on trousers and a shirt, but he still wore bedroom slippers. He halted, just as I had done, when he caught sight of the body, and sheer horror convulsed his thin features.

  “Mister Peter!” he gasped, and I felt surprise that he should so suddenly accept my identity. “Mister Peter! What happened?”

  “It looks like murder, Bronson.”

  “Murder!” He passed the back of his hand across his eyes. “But who …?”

  “Possibly our madman.”

  “No! No!” His voice rose to the breaking point; it was vibrant with horrified negation. For an instant he stared at me, then closed his eyes. “Perhaps you are right,” he said.

  Just then the operator answered. “This is the Coffin estate,” I said. “There’s been a murder here. I would like to be connected with the sheriff’s office.”

  A second later a man said, “Hello.”

  I repeated what I had told the operator.

  “This is the sheriff’s office,” said the man. “Who’s dead?”

  “Tobias Coffin.”

  “My God!” exclaimed the man. “Who did it?”

  “We think the madman who’s loose in the neighborhood. Mr Coffin’s head has been cut off.”

  “No!” said the man. “No!”

  “Yes,” I said.

  There was a moment of silence. There was silence in the hall, too, and I looked up and saw a background of faces in the door. Bronson and a new young man were holding the people back. The young man with the scarlet pajamas had disappeared.

  “Look,” said the man at the sheriff’s office. “I’m gong to put in a radio call for the sheriff. He’s already out hunting for the madman. He should be over to your place in ten minutes or so, depending where he is. Don’t touch anything, and if the madman comes around don’t hesitate to shoot him.”

  I said I wouldn’t, and he hung up.

  I turned to the crowd at the door and was shocked to see two older women peering over the shoulders of the men. They didn’t seem especially affected by the sight of my great-uncle’s headless body. “I think everybody had better wait downstairs,” I said. “The authorities will be here in ten minutes.”

  I spoke in the admonitory tone I was accustomed to use on refractory students at Coles, and to my surprise they immediately obeyed me.

  “Now, Bronson,” I said, encouraged by my success as a leader, “I think you and the two young men should search the house. It is possible the madman is still lurking about somewhere.”

  The young man at the door had grown too fast for his weight. He had sandy hair and an alert face, but his build I can only describe as weedy. “Come on,” he said with alacrity. “Come on, Bronson. Let’s get out of here.” I judged his age to be nineteen.

  “I’ll wait,” I said to Bronson, who was hesitating by the door, “until the police come.”

  For an instant Bronson looked as though he were going to suggest something to me, but finally he said, “Very well, Mister Peter.”

  It was not pleasant to be left alone in the room. My first move was to peer into my great-uncle’s bedroom to make sure no one was lurking there. I was surprised to see that the door leading from the bedroom into the hall was open a crack, and I went over to examine it. There was a lock on the door, one of those snap locks which are turned with a round brass knob, and this was on the safety catch so that the tongue was held back. I closed the door, saw that the regular catch below the knob held, and, stopping only to look into my great-uncle’s closet and bathroom, hurried back to the other room.

  Over the wood fireplace on the left side of the library, hung head high, was a mirror. In this I caught sight of myself and noticed that I was still carrying my hairbrush in my right hand. Somewhat foolishly I put it on the mantel and looked around for a better weapon. I still felt decidedly apprehensive about the maniac. The only object which looked serviceable, outside of an unabridged edition of Webster’s Dictionary, was a heavy metal vase on the mantel. It was a thin vase, made for a single flower, and I found it could easily be grasped in my hand. Moreover the base was weighted, and I decided it made an excellent, if unorthodox weapon. I decided to hold on to it.

  Then it occurred to me that if the maniac had broken into the house his feet would have been muddy. I examined the rugs for traces of mud or moisture, but I could find nothing. I was down on my knees, peering nearsightedly at the Chinese rug, when I heard the sound of a footstep. Looking up, I saw a black-haired, middle-aged man regarding me through a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles. He had on slippers and a gray flannel dressing robe, and he was smiling.

  I stood up cautiously, grasping the vase in my right hand.

  “Sleuth?” asked the man. His eyes were on my great-uncle’s body.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “Perhaps a cousin of yours,” said the man. “I’m George Coffin.”

  A remarkable thing about my cousin—if, indeed, he was my cousin—was the lack of expression in his face. There was absolutely no change in it at all when he looked from the corpse to me. It did not even change when he spoke.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “Perhaps a cousin.” He moved nearer the desk, bent
impassively over the pool of blood. “Burton Coffin is my son.” There was a faint shade of contempt in his voice.

  “The young man in the scarlet pajamas?”

  “The young man in the scarlet pajamas.” He moved around in back of my great-uncle’s body and looked down at the rug under the chair. It was wrinkled, as though the chair had been moved without having been lifted. “No struggle?”

  “No,” I said. “The madman must have struck quickly.”

  There was a noise of footsteps in the hall. The young man in the scarlet pajamas stuck his head in the door. He was carrying a shotgun. “Hello, Dad,” he said. “No sign of the guy in the attic or on this floor.” He looked derisively at the vase in my hand, then winked at his father. “I guess you’ll be safe up here with the professor to guard you,” he added. “I’m going downstairs with the others.”

  His father’s face remained frozen. “Some kid,” he said to me. “Played fullback on the Princeton team.” He ignored his son.

  I moved over to my cousin, in back of the desk. “What’s that curious odor?” I asked.

  He sniffed. “Funny! It’s like chloroform.” He glanced over the top of the desk. “Maybe some kind of cough medicine.”

  The odor came from the right side of the desk, about a foot to the right of my great-uncle’s bent arm. I smelled the surface of the desk, said, “It was right here, whatever it was.”

  He peered at me without changing his expression. “What do you make of it, Watson?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “I was simply curious.”

  We both examined the room with our eyes. Nothing seemed out of place. On two sides of the room were the warm-colored backs of the volumes my great-uncle had loved so well—the sets of Dickens, Thackeray, Conrad, Galsworthy, Hardy and other great English authors as well as the tomes of his favorite adventure writers—Stevenson, Conan Doyle, H. Rider Haggard and John Buchan. Not a book was out of place. The oriental scatter rugs, which would have been rumpled by any sort of a struggle because of the slipperiness of the waxed floor, were undisturbed, and, except for the splotches of blood on the pale surface of the Chinese rug, there was nothing of note. I opened the heavy curtains covering the windows and made sure the catches were fastened. It was still raining. I returned to the desk.

  George Coffin was looking down at the corpse. “I wonder what he does with them?” he mused.

  “Does with what?”

  “The heads he cuts off. Do you suppose he reduces them to the size of a potato, like South Sea savages?”

  His words brought into my mind a picture of the madman, his pale round face intent, bending over a kettle in which reposed Uncle Tobias’ head. I shuddered and said, “I should think a detruncated head would be very unpleasant to carry about.”

  George Coffin sat down in one of the leather chairs by the fireplace. “Not if you held it by the hair,” he said. His voice was perfectly serious, and for the first time there was a note of animation in his manner. “If you had a woman’s head, for instance, you could swing it around easily. But a bald-headed man would require a different technique. I don’t know exactly——”

  A woman was screaming downstairs.

  I clutched the vase and started for the hall. George Coffin yelled after me, “I’ll stick here.”

  By the time I had located the kitchen as the source of the sceraming the noise had ceased. Practically everyone in the household was already there, staring at an open window.

  “What in the world’s the matter?” I asked Bronson.

  He pointed to the floor beneath the window. There on the green and gray squares of the linoleum was a cluster of footprints, leading into the dining room. The prints were of bare feet!

  The weedy young man, whom I supposed to be another of my cousins, said, “They go round and round, but they don’t come out here.”

  The pretty blonde, whom I had noticed before, giggled. The plumper of the two middle-aged women who had been peering into my great-uncle’s room, the one who had observed my Coffin nose, said, “He’s still in the house. He must be. I know we’ll all be killed.” Her voice was shrill.

  “Now, Maw,” said the weedy young man, “keep your shirt on.”

  Instead of resenting this vulgarity from her offspring the plump woman subsided. I turned to Bronson.

  “Have you completed your search?”

  “No sir. We were interrupted when Miss Harvey discovered this open window.”

  Miss Harvey was the slender blonde. She was very young—about twenty, I thought—and her face was pert. She had on blue pajamas and a blue dressing gown cut in a military fashion at the shoulders.

  “I toddled out to get a cold glass of water,” she said brightly, “and when I snapped on the light there was the open window. I guess I screamed a little.”

  “You guess you screamed,” said the weedy young man scornfully. “You pretty near lifted the roof off the house.”

  “So what?” queried the blonde, looking at him fiercely.

  “So nothing,” said the young man.

  This appeared to end their conversation, and I spoke to Bronson again. “I think you’d better have everybody go into the living room,” I said, “and stand guard over them. We can search the house as soon as the sheriff comes, and in the meantime it will be better not be separated.”

  “Very well, sir,” said Bronson.

  I looked about for the dark-haired girl and the young man with the scarlet pajamas, Burton Coffin, but they were not with the others. I walked behind the group to the living room, where a bright fire was burning in the huge stone fireplace, and continued on up the stairs. In the hall, just as I was passing my own door, I saw coming slowly toward me the missing pair. They were in earnest conversation, and I slipped into my room. I did not wish to have the dark-haired girl, whose name was Miss Leslie, think that it was immodesty, rather than necessity, which made me appear in public attired only in pajamas, so I donned my own dressing gown and put on my comfortable slippers. Also I placed the vase on the table beside my bed. I knew that it was almost as absurd a weapon as my hairbrush, and I cared to risk no more jibes from young Coffin.

  When I walked out into the hall again I found they were still approaching. They abruptly ceased talking, and Burton Coffin’s teeth gleamed in the half light.

  “Well, Professor,” he said, “I see you’re venturing out without a weapon.” His tone was mocking. “What would you do if the madman suddenly jumped out at you?”

  I glanced at the shotgun under his arm. “I wouldn’t be able to shoot him with one of those if I had one,” I confessed. “I’d probably run if somebody did jump out at me.”

  “Or faint,” said the young woman. She regarded me with evident contempt. “Come on, Burton,” she said, taking his arm. “Let’s go downstairs.”

  They marched past me and turned out of sight at the head of the staircase. I continued down the hall toward my great-uncle’s rooms, musing on the unfairness of women. Because I hadn’t known what to do to comfort Mrs Spotswood I was taken for an utter poltroon by the girl. Not that I cared what she thought; it was simply the injustice of the matter. How many men would have known what to do with a screaming, hysterical woman? Not many, I thought. And just because I didn’t, did that mean I was a coward? Damme, no! Indeed I felt an increasing resentment for the contumely heaped upon me by Miss Leslie. It was an unreasonable feeling, considering that the opinion of the girl was a matter of no concern to me; but it was, nevertheless, quite strong.

  Thus immersed in thought, I turned into my great-uncle’s room. I was surprised to see George Coffin and the sharp-faced man going through my great-uncle’s papers. The man had a disgruntled expression on his face.

  “What are you doing?” I demanded peremptorily. “I thought nothing was to be touched until the authorities arrived.”

  George Coffin’s dark face, behind the shell glasses, betrayed neither surprise nor chagrin. “Thaddeus, this is Peter Coffin,” he said. “Dr Thaddeus Harvey is married
to my sister.”

  “How do you do?” said the sharp-faced man. He came over and shook my hand, and I noticed a smear of blood on his thumb and index finger. “Off the table,” he said, noticing my eye on the blood. “We were looking for the new will.” His hand grasped mine firmly.

  “The new will?”

  “Yes. Didn’t you know he”—he indicated the corpse with a long thumb—“had made a new will?” He didn’t bother to lower his voice in the presence of the dead.

  “I didn’t know he had made any will,” I said.

  He shook his head. “Well, we just thought we’d see what it said.” He turned back to the desk.

  I said, “I think it would be advisable to wait for the police.”

  George Coffin added, “It is considered good manners to wait for the police, Thaddeus. They will not thank you for a breach of etiquette.”

  “Oh, very well.” Thaddeus Harvey moved away from the desk and sat in a chair on the further side of the fire place. He crossed his knees. “Damn funny the maniac should have picked Uncle Tobias, of all the people in the house.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  He looked meaningly at me. “He’s the only person in this house whose death would be of advantage to anyone.”

  “Of advantage?” I echoed. “How do you mean?”

  “The will.” Thaddeus Harvey was leaning forward, his small eyes staring directly into mine. “The new will.”

  I suppose my expression was blank, because George Coffin, one arm resting on the mantel, said, “He is endeavoring to intimate you will benefit by your great-uncle’s demise.”

  “I?”

  Thaddeus Harvey’s body was absolutely motionless. “Then you really don’t know anything about the new will? Your great-uncle didn’t tell you?”

  “He told me only that he was disappointed in my choice of a career,” I said. “He seemed to think it was not rugged enough for a Coffin.”

  Dr Harvey appeared to ponder my answer and find it satisfactory. “The new will is supposed to have named you part beneficiary in the estate,” he explained. “Your great-uncle told George and me that much yesterday afternoon.”