Murder Comes First

by Frances

  “Well—” Gerald North had said, in a tone of extreme doubt. He had nevertheless read the book; he had read it most of one night and part of the next day, and the next night strange monsters had stalked his dreams and the time of man had seemed trivial and wan—a moment during which evolution or nature, or whatever one chose to think of as the animating Force, had grown bored between marvels. “Some Aspects of Paleozoology” had, in short, turned out to be quite a book, and Jerry could not remember another like it. The public, when given the opportunity, appeared to agree.

  Dr. Preson, alone among those concerned, was unsurprised that The Days Before Man appeared on lists of best sellers and remained there. He pointed out that paleozoology was a very interesting study and always had been. He said that the trouble was people usually got it in bits and pieces from popularizers who didn’t, as a matter of fact, know Machairodontinae from Nimravinae, and never would. He excepted certain publications of the American Museum of Natural History, and lamented that they were not more widely read. He was, however, gratified and surprised at the size of the royalty checks. Ancient bones are most readily uncovered by modern dollars.

  “Do you mean,” Pam asked, “that he was running out of his own money?”

  Jerry could only shrug to that. He had only an impression, not certain knowledge, that Dr. Orpheus Preson was well off by—well, call it by nature. Call it by inheritance, since, until The Days Before Man, mammalogy could hardly have paid highly. Now he knew that Dr. Preson had, so far, made a little under fifty thousand dollars in royalties—and that, for income tax purposes, he probably could spread the amount over three years, which would help. He had been told, however, that, over a period of years, Dr. Preson’s financial contributions to research had been very considerable.

  “Apparently,” Pam said, “he hasn’t any family.”

  The connection escaped Jerry North, who waved at it in passing.

  “Few wives really care much about old bones,” Pam said. “Of course, wives are just an example. I don’t suppose cousins and nephews and aunts do either. I mean, I’d just as soon my aunts didn’t go in for Smilodons, and I don’t think I’m mercenary.” She paused. “Or am I?” she enquired, proving an open mind.

  Jerry reassured her.

  “So,” Pam said, “has he?”

  “I don’t—” Jerry began, and remembered. “He’s got a brother, apparently,” he said. “Lives up in Riverdale, I think. Dr. Preson went up there last week when things got too tough. Stayed a couple of days and went back to his own place. I don’t know whether there are any more.”

  “Sometimes,” Pamela North said, “one relative is enough.” She paused and considered. “I’ll admit I can’t see any connection, though,” she added.

  If she meant between relatives and uninvited masseurs, Jerry North couldn’t either. Then he remembered Frankel’s novel, ignored in his briefcase, and sighed. He mentioned the Frankel novel to his wife. He said that, interesting as Dr. Preson was, he would have to get on with it.

  “From mammalogist to mammaries,” said Pam, who had read novels by Mr. Frankel. “I’ll wake you when I go to bed.”

  Jerry blinked momentarily, and inwardly. He decided to skip the point, if there was one. He took briefcase and—after only a momentary pause—a newly filled glass, into his study. Pamela began to read. The cat Martini wriggled around the book and lay over it. People whom cats have honored are not supposed to have other interests. Pamela moved Martini, who voiced an opinion better not translated from the original cat, and crawled back into a position to obstruct. Then the telephone rang.

  Pam did not need to remove Martini, who jumped angrily. Gin, the junior seal point, dashed from a retreat with the impetuosity of any junior who has been expecting a telephone call, Sherry ran part way after her and stopped abruptly to wash her tail. Pam answered the telephone.

  She said, “Yes,” and “well he is, but—” and then listened briefly and said, “Oh!” She put the telephone back in the cradle and for a second or so looked at it in surprise. Then she went to the door of Jerry’s study and opened it. Jerry looked up from the manuscript.

  “It was Dr. Preson,” Pam said. She spoke slowly and carefully, as if repeating something she had memorized. “He said, ‘Tell your husband somebody has taken the labels off my bones.’” Pam paused and shook her head slightly. “That,” Pamela North assured her husband, speaking in a voice somewhat strained, “is what he said.”

  The newest attack on the composure of Dr. Orpheus Preson was not quite so drastic as it had sounded. To the Norths, who went to West Twenty-second Street as much because of disturbing curiosity as concern, Dr. Preson admitted that his construction had perhaps been weak or, at any rate, not entirely precise. The bones involved were not his, in any real sense. They were bones, and other fossil remains, which currently belonged to the Broadly Institute, their original owners having no longer need for them. They were in Dr. Preson’s apartment because he found it easier to work there than in his office at the Institute. But it was true that someone had got into the apartment and taken all the labels off the bones. The intruder had then, evidently with some care—since not even the most brittle was broken—jumbled the bones into a heap. Fragments of Cranioceras, a Tertiary browser with a horn growing out of the back of his head, were mingled, in most unscientific fashion, with particles of a very elderly Viverridae. Since there had been a great many bones on a long table, and most of the bone fragments had been small—although the piece of Smilodon was quite substantial, as was appropriate—the situation was discouraging. Dr. Preson’s bone table looked like the inside of a gardener’s garage.

  There was only one word for it, and Pam used it. “My!” said Pam North.

  Dr. Preson was very red of face and his whiskers were more than usually tufted. His profuse gray hair stood indignantly upright on his head and he peered rapidly, almost convulsively, through first one and then another lens of his trifocal glasses. For some little time after the arrival of the Norths, coherence failed him, although words did not. Bushelmen, tree surgeons, masseurs—now maniacs. It was too much. And, indeed, it seemed a good deal to Pam and Jerry North.

  “Can you ever straighten them out again?” Pam asked, when, after a disorderly ten minutes or so, Dr. Preson appeared a little calmer. The result was unexpected.

  “There is no reason to be insulting,” Dr. Preson said. “Or do you think I’m out of my wits entirely?” He then advanced toward Pam North and waved his tufted chin at her.

  “Please, Dr. Preson,” Pam said. “I didn’t mean anything. Of course you can.”

  Dr. Preson moderated at once. He said, “Didn’t mean to shout at you, young woman. Seem to be a little upset.”

  “Of course,” Pam said. “It’s terribly upsetting. So many bones.”

  It was, Dr. Preson made it clear—although with a good many verbal spurts in a variety of directions—merely another annoyance. It was a meaningless annoyance, as was the effort to sell him a pony. The labels were on the bones merely as a convenience; in most cases they served no particular purpose; most of the bones Dr. Preson knew as if they were his own, or even more intimately. He could, obviously, tell Smilodon from Hemicyon at ten paces. It was true that to differentiate between some of the smaller remnants he would have to look twice, as would any paleozoologist. And certainly it was true that, to proceed at all, order would have to be re-established in this chaos, where now Carnivora rubbed bones with ruminants in a manner pleasing to neither. It was true that the bones would have to be relabeled and that, under the circumstances, Dr. Preson was the man who would have to do it. Involved were loss of time, and tedium. Until things were straightened out, work on the second volume of The Days Before Man must stand still.

  “A damned nuisance,” Jerry North said.

  The description was, Dr. Preson agreed, precise. The de-labeling of the bones was merely another nuisance added to the nuisances already imposed. Nothing did permanent harm—as theft of the bones, or their
destruction, would have done permanent harm; as the actual introduction of a pony into Dr. Preson’s apartment would surely have done harm. Dr. Preson was merely being stuck with pins.

  “What it comes to,” Dr. Preson said, “is that somebody doesn’t want me to finish this book. That’s the least of it, of course. Somebody’s trying to drive me insane.”

  He was relatively calm by then. He was at the table, picking up small fossil bones, looking at them, making words with his lips unconsciously, setting the bones aside—making a preliminary separation of sheep and goats. He stopped suddenly.

  “You know,” he said, “suppose Steck is writing a book? Wants to get in ahead of me? He hasn’t been able to any other way.”

  Jerry North gave the point consideration, then shook his head. Unless Steck was authentically a crackpot, it was not a case of literary jealousy or of desire for literary precedence. The Preson book already had impetus; had already preëmpted its segment of the field. With the publication of the second volume announced, no publisher in his right mind would bring out a similar book against competition so well established. In fiction, perhaps; in this sort of general book, Gerald North greatly doubted.

  “Anyway,” Pam said, “if Dr. Steck were doing this, it would take as much of his time as it does of yours. More. He’d be cutting off his own nose.”

  Dr. Preson looked at Pam for a moment. He shook his head slightly.

  “Exactly,” Jerry said. Dr. Preson, after looking briefly at Jerry North, said, “Oh, of course.” Then he said, “All right, you two tell me, then.”

  That was more difficult; at that stage, it was impossible.

  It was Jerry who suggested that the police be called in again; Dr. Preson who saw no use in it; who seemed, suddenly, to grow fatalistic, perhaps thinking that it would all make no difference in another million years. The change was vaguely surprising; the refusal of police aid was unexpectedly definite. It was as if, being denied Steck, Dr. Preson wanted nobody; wanted only to get on with the reorientation of ancient bones.

  “We’ll all think about it,” he told the Norths, and the implication was that they might as well think separately.

  It was not until the Norths were in a cab bound again for home that Jerry said, “Look, those bones might have had fingerprints on them,” and leaned forward as if to speak to the cab driver.

  “I wondered about that,” Pam North said.

  “And now,” Jerry told her, “Preson’s handling them himself—ruining any prints.”

  “You know,” Pam North said, “I wonder if he really is?”

  Jerry leaned back again in the taxi seat. He looked at his wife.

  “Why would he take the labels off?” Jerry asked.

  “That’s the hardest part,” Pam said. “I haven’t the least idea.”

  3

  WEDNESDAY, 9:45 A.M. TO 6:45 P.M.

  Twice weekly, on Wednesday and again on Friday, Dr. Orpheus Preson spent mornings at his office at the Broadly Institute of Paleontology, there briskly performing those tasks which fall to the lot of a curator of Fossil Mammals. He conferred, he read letters and sometimes dictated answers, now and then he associated himself in the evaluation of newly discovered antiquities. On this Wednesday of tribulation, he went to the Institute as usual, except that he went by cab. He was tired; he had been up until three o’clock sorting out old bones.

  His office at the Institute, which is housed in a large building on upper Fifth Avenue, not far from the Museum of the City of New York, was a long room with two windows and a desk at one end and a table down the middle. The table was covered with fossil bones, but these were neatly ordered and properly labeled. Unconsciously, Dr. Preson sighed when he saw the familiar table, and the sigh was partly one of relief and partly one of weariness—the neat array of these bones reminded him unhappily of the confusion of those others. He straightened a small skull, stroking it absently and as absently wondering how, a million-odd years ago, the creature this had been would have responded to the caress. With something like a bark, or something like a purr? The former, probably, although one could not, of course, be certain. There are no fossil sounds to guide the paleozoologist; no sure way of guessing what yips and grunts, what screams of anger and caterwauling of love, may once have torn the prehistoric silence. One could assume, of course, that the ancient cats made cat sounds, and that the first true dog barked, after a fashion. There was no doubt at all in Dr. Preson’s mind that the early monkeys had chattered. “We are noisy little beasts,” Dr. Preson told himself, being out of sympathy with primates.

  He went, then, briskly enough about his tasks and became engrossed in them. His whiskers waggled indignantly as he skimmed through a recent publication on Muroidea, not so much because he disagreed with the author’s remarks as because the idea of mice was momentarily antipathetical. Already he felt as if he were being nibbled by them. He dictated several letters and attended a brief, preliminary conference on a proposed expedition, which he had tentatively agreed to finance, in part, if Auerbrecht handled it. Not otherwise, and he said so. Certainly not Steck. It was tentatively agreed that it should be Auerbrecht; there was an expression of regret that Dr. Preson was not in a position to take it over himself.

  Preson did not discuss his personal difficulties with any of those he met at the Institute, and only one of his confreres noticed any particular change in him.

  “Preson’s jumpy today,” this confrere—Brown of Fossil Invertebrates—remarked to Cornwall, associate in Quaternary Mammals. “Always jumpy,” Cornwall said in reply. “Always wondered whether a beard is itchy.”

  “Good man, however,” Brown said.

  “Quite,” said Cornwall, and went off to look at some Quaternary bones.

  Dr. Preson had cleaned his desk by eleven-thirty. He had a quick lunch in the basement cafeteria and took a cab home again. He reached the door of his apartment at nine minutes after one, found ten seconds later that the door was unlocked, and went in at once. His sister Laura was sitting in a chair facing the door. Her head leaned back against the chair and her mouth was slightly open. Laura Preson was obviously asleep. She was breathing rather stertorously. Standing looking at her, Dr. Preson announced, aloud, that he’d be damned.

  Laura Preson was thin and wiry, like her brother; she was about fifteen years younger than he, and there was not a little family resemblance. It was true, of course, that Laura had no beard; her glasses, which remained on her nose while she slept, had each a single lens; she was dressed in a dark suit and Orpheus wore tweeds. Also, of course, Orpheus was awake, which was a further difference. This difference he at once sought to erase.

  “Laura!” he said. “Wake up, Laura!”

  Laura Preson did not wake up; she showed no indication of intending to wake up. It was several minutes before her brother got around to shaking her; it was some seconds later that he discovered even this had no apparent effect.

  “Now what on earth?” Dr. Preson then enquired. “Wake up, Laura!” He shook her more resolutely. “Wake up!” he ordered. Laura Preson’s nose glasses fell off into her lap. She did not wake up.

  Ordinarily, Laura rather annoyed Dr. Preson. She collected glass dogs, for one thing, which was ridiculous. The dogs were not even anatomically sound. There was no sense whatever in collecting glass dogs. There was nothing one could do with glass dogs, except dust them; there was nothing to be learned from glass dogs. And Laura had the absurd effrontery to contend, when challenged, that anybody who collected old bones was in a poor position to talk. “Dead animals,” Laura was inclined to say, somehow making the matter seem unpleasant.

  But at the moment Laura was saying nothing whatever, and she was, after all, a sister. Dr. Preson was by no means a slave to family affection; still and all, it was disturbing to find Laura so unshakeably asleep in a chair which did not, after all, belong to her. It was, as a matter of fact, the only really comfortable chair in the room. That, Dr. Preson thought, was like Laura, and shook her again. Her head bob
bed.

  It was then that Dr. Preson realized, perhaps belatedly, that this was not a natural sleep—that something was the matter with Laura Preson; that, after annoying him with strangers for a week, the malignant influence which was impinging on his life had now got around to annoying him with relatives.

  “Somebody’s given her something,” Dr. Preson thought, and felt concern—and acted. He telephoned for an ambulance. He got down on his knees in front of the chair and said, over and over, more and more loudly, “Wake up, Laura! Wake up!” He was thus engaged when someone knocked on his door. Thanking God that the ambulance people had come so promptly, Dr. Preson hurried to the door. He opened it and was startled to see, at first, no one there at all.

  “You the man who wants midgets?” a voice enquired, and then Dr. Preson looked down. He looked down on a midget—a very small midget. And then he looked along the corridor, and coming toward the door was another midget.

  “So,” the second midget said, “you got here first. I might’ve known.”

  “Hold your horse, Charlie,” the first midget said. “Says here he wants five, don’t it? So there’s only one of you, Charlie.” The first midget laughed. “Maybe only half a one,” he said, and laughed again.

  “Aah-uh!” Dr. Orpheus Preson said, and tore at his hair.

  Both midgets looked up at him.

  “What’s the matter with this square?” Charlie enquired.

  “You got me, Charlie,” the first midget said. “You sure got me.”

  Then the elevator door opened with more than its usual violence; then men in white came out, along with men in blue. The ambulance was there, and the police with it.

  “In here,” Dr. Preson said, loudly, gesturing above the midgets. “Somebody’s—”