The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck

by Alexander Laing

  Finally (for it never occurred to me that kidnapping was the answer to the mystery) there was the very reasonable likelihood that he had been murdered. If so, Muriel Finch seemed the likeliest suspect. The boy Ted might have had as good an excuse, or better, for hating him; but I knew from Muriel’s own statements that she had both feared and loathed him, for a cause too awful to mention. Mere sexual attentions, in the case of that easygoing young woman, were insufficient to account for the extreme nature of her reaction. Perhaps he had made her an agent to some loathsome kind of perversion; perhaps he was a modern manifestation of the Marquis de Sade, whose works I had seen on his own bookshelves. If that were true, it seemed to me that I had no right whatever to pass judgment upon any means that Muriel might have taken to free herself.

  If anyone in authority had questioned me, I would have told what I knew at once. But if the reader censures me for not having reported to the police, I ask him to remember that as yet we had not definite knowledge that anything was seriously amiss. It was two days later before the authorities were officially informed of the doctor’s disappearance, and longer than that before we got any definite clue to hint at what had happened to him.

  I was influenced more than anything else by the difficulty of explaining my sudden entrance, torn and bleeding, long after midnight, at Mike’s bedside. Dr. Alling had been astonished by my appearance. If Gideon Wyck had been murdered that very night, on the lonely hillside up which I had followed him, how could I clear myself of suspicion? Only by involving Muriel and the boy Ted. And what would my single voice be worth, in testimony, against both of theirs? It might so happen that they were possessed of perfect alibis, and I knew that I had no convincing alibi at all, during those hours on the hillside. I began to hope that Gideon Wyck was still alive. Muriel’s expression of happiness, when I saw her in the hospital, had not seemed like that of a murderess. I decided to wait, and not make a fool of myself.

  For all I knew, Dr. Alling might have set people to watch my reactions and to report upon my movements. Just to play safe, I hid my diaries in my mattress, and for several days did nothing whatever outside the usual routine of work. I did no want to betray myself by too much of a change of manner, so I continued to stop for a few words with Daisy every day; but I was careful about what I said to her.

  At last the awaited event happened, a week after the mysterious night. On the morning of the 11th of April, 1932, Marjorie Wyck received by parcel post a bundle containing every item of clothing worn by her father when he was last seen. Nothing which he might have been supposed to have had on his person seemed on first examination to be missing. The linen had been immaculately laundered, the socks washed, the shoes polished. The woolen garments, moreover, smelt so strongly of cleaning fluid that they presumably had been dry-cleaned just before mailing. This left us with two likely assumptions: either Gideon Wyck had been disposed of by a cleverly insolent murderer or else the sending of his clothes was a symbol that for good reasons of his own he was discarding his former identity and disappearing deliberately from among his old acquaintances.

  Ten

  One curious sidelight on Gideon Wyck’s disappearance was the tacit willingness of everyone concerned to do nothing whatever about it. His absence was looked upon as good riddance. But the delivery of the bundle of clothing of course brought the authorities into action. Hos Creel, the postman, described the beginning of the investigation to a group of us on the school steps.

  “Made out like I didn’t think it nothin’ special,” he explained. “ ‘Hull darned new outfit, here,’ I says, ‘from the heft of it.’ ‘Hope so,’ she says, just like that, ‘but who’d be a-sendin’ me one?’ Took it brave too. Lots o’ starch in that girl. Right away she says, ‘Don’t ye tetch ’em, Hos. Don’t lay even a finger on ’em.’ The sheriff comes and says, ‘Ye did right, not to tetch ’em. Fingerprints.’ And he wraps the whole bundle, paper and all, in another paper. ‘Hos,’ he says to me, ‘you got an important part in this case.’ Wal, I told him back to help find where the parcel was mailed from. And then the postmaster comes snoopin’ in, o’ course, and takes the case out o’ my hands, he not having’ had a smitch to do with it. Wal, that’s how it goes, boys. The higher-ups allus takes the credit.”

  Next day the Alton Weekly Clarion came out with its first scarehead in years, the finding that whoever had packed the bundle had left not a trace of a fingerprint on anything except the inside back cover of the doctor’s watch, which bore on its burnished gold surface a perfect impression of a man’s thumb. It was so carefully done that it must have been put there either in derision or as a move to put the searchers on the wrong track.

  Now that the case had become an open and generally discussed mystery, however, it seemed the right time to risk a talk with Muriel. She was still on the night shift, and I did not want to hang around, suspiciously, waiting to catch her by chance. It would be more natural to try phoning at various hours. I purposefully confined the calls to hours after seven o’clock, when Daisy went off duty.

  After a few days, I paused to pass the time of day with Daisy. She asked, “How’s the love affair coming along?” I inquired what she meant, and she said, “Don’t be that way. I mean the sudden infatuation for Nurse Finch.”

  “I haven’t even caught a glimpse of her in days,” I had the wit to answer promptly.

  “That may be, but you’ve certainly worked the telephone hard in her direction.”

  “Where did you get that idea?” I asked, remembering the care with which I had confined my calls to hours after seven o’clock.

  “Thought you were fooling me, did you?” she countered. “If any of my rivals captures the champion woman-hater, it won’t be by way of my switchboard.”

  “Not much evidence so far that she’s trying to,” I answered, with a mock sigh. “Good chance for you to chisel in, Daisy.”

  “Not till you elevate your tastes a bit,” she replied.

  “No kidding,” I said, “how did you get the idea that I had been ‘working the telephone’?”

  She shoved a little black desk machine toward me. A long roll of paper in it wound through a kind of little window, and a push of a button shifted it one space.

  “New system,” she said. “They’ve got us keeping track of all calls, even the locals, on this.”

  “Since when?” I Asked, full of a sudden alarm at the thought that this might be part of a detective system set up to aid in solving the mystery of Dr. Wyck’s disappearance; but she reassured me by saying, “Since the first of the month.” It was on the night between the 3rd and 4th that he had disappeared.

  “So that’s how you spend your time,” I said, “scouting for scandal through the back end of the tape.”

  “Uh-huh. Lots of fun. Very convenient, too. All the private houses have four-digit numbers, and all the medical school phones have three, and all the hospital ones two.”

  “What’s Connells’?” I asked quickly.

  “One-one-one-eight. You didn’t honestly think I’d fail to keep that number next to my heart, did you, David?”

  I decided to be a lot more careful about my phoning in the future. For some time Muriel continued successful in what could not have been anything other than a deliberate attempt to avoid meeting me.

  Meahwhile, I had been spared through all the first week the necessity of confronting Dr. Alling. A visiting surgeon had asked Prexy to come to Boston for some kind of harangue, which he did. I heard a few caustic remarks about this, because the doctor in question was Vladimir, the Hungarian skin-grafting specialist; and the more orthodox members of our staff thought it beneath Prexy’s proper dignity to truckle with a person who made his living by rejuvenating old rakes at ten to fifty thousand dollars a throw, with monkey glands.

  Some of our doctors would have been still more shocked had they known that the monkey gland business was precisely what Prexy was interested in, for a chapter in the Short Sketch.

  He returned on the 10th, and phone
d me in the evening that he would want to resume our usual work the following afternoon. But it was in the morning mail of the 11th that Dr. Wyck’s clothes were delivered, and this fact sent Prexy back to Boston again with Dr. Kent, the coroner, on the theory that Dr. Wyck might have been an amnesia victim, who had been jerked up by the Boston police.

  The theory prove false, and they were back again on the 13th. That afternoon, Dr. Alling phoned to say that he wanted to see me at five o’clock. I was possessed at once by an irrational feeling of panic.

  Dr. Alling was seated at his desk. “Weird business about Wyck, isn’t it?” he remarked, eyeing me quizzically.

  I prepared for the worst, nodded, and asked whether he had discovered anything of importance in Boston.

  “Not much. The parcel of clothing seems to have been left on one of the public desks in the main post office after closing hours on the evening of the ninth. The clerk remarked it because the person who left it, to make sure of the postage, had put about twice as many stamps on it as were needed. There were three speakeasy cards in his wallet, and we went to all of the places with the police. They hadn’t seen him in nearly a year. Or so they said.”

  I stiffened when he continued, “What I wanted to talk to you about is something that happened the night Dr. Wyck disappeared.”

  The blood began to buzz in my ears. “At faculty meeting, that evening, Dr. Wyck had two blue books—examinations by Prendergast and Jarvis. What became of them?”

  My mind cleared enough to permit me to say, “Why, it was my impression that they were passed around to a few of the doctors, then back to you. Yes, and the you read parallel passages for me to take down in the minutes, and handed the books back to Dr. Wyck.”

  “Precisely, and he put them in his pocket. Well, everything else that was in his pockets seems to have been returned in that bundle—everything but those blue books.” He paused impressively. “I’m telling you this, Saunders, because the matter has got to be cleared up for the good name of the college. I’ll need help, and the sheriff’s a blundering fool. Do you want to work with me?”

  “Why, certainly,” I said, thoroughly perplexed by this failure to ask the obvious expected question.

  “Good,” he answered. “Now, you know all that’s been published?” I nodded. “Very well then, after faculty meeting Dr. Wyck went to his office. Dr. Kent saw him. I stayed, talking to Mr. Tolland, Prendergast’s uncle. When I left the building, Wyck’s study window was dark. He must have gone straight home, because his daughter says he came in a little after half past nine. He told her he was going for a walk, and she tried to dissuade him because he seemed ill. He made his usual boast that he had never been ill in his life, although at the meeting I remember thinking that he looked very pale.”

  “I noticed it too,” I agreed.

  “Well, Marjorie couldn’t dissuade him, but it was some while after he went out that she heard the sound of someone descending the steps. At the time, she had no thought of its being anyone other than her father. What’s your idea on that?”

  He spoke the last sentence crisply. I hesitated, more wary of this little man’s cordial manner. He had failed to ask an absolutely obvious question, which I had come expecting to have to answer. Instead, he asked me about footsteps on the Wyck’s porch, heard at a time when I myself had actually been by the barberry hedge, a few yards from the spot. Did he think the footsteps on the porch had been mine? To justify my pause, I said slowly, “Why, I’ve tried to think of another possibility, but I haven’t anything to go on.”

  He merely nodded. “Very well then, those descending footsteps are our last positive knowledge of the whereabouts of Gideon Wyck. That is, I assume anyone would report to us who saw him after that time, don’t you?”

  I got a better grip on myself, and answered, “I can’t see why anyone should withhold information—that is, unless he was afraid it might implicate him in something he really had nothing to do with.”

  “Of course. To continue: I’ve inquired at the bank. On March 26th he made the abnormal withdrawal of five hundred dollars in cash. He pays bills by check, and that sum is unaccountably gone. What are we to conclude from that?”

  “It seems to me, sir, that everything points to his deliberate disappearance. Did he know that he was going to be retired?”

  “He had good reason to suspect it, certainly.”

  “Well, then, he may have known he was going insane, and so drew enough money to go far away somewhere—perhaps to fight it, away from old influences. Who knows?”

  I was almost prepared again to make a clean breast of the facts I knew, since they seemed to corroborate this theory. Then I remembered that a perhaps trivial incident had occurred to make me wonder whether Dr. Alling really trusted me. It was the occasion of discovering that the symélienplate was missing from Geoffroy Atlas. I had wondered at the time whether he suspected me of taking it, and he said nothing about the coincidence that a symmelus had been born that very day.

  Here, again, he was definitely avoiding an even more obvious coincidence in asking nothing by way of explanation of my bloodstained appearance on the crucial night. I decided to keep my secret until convinced of his sincerity.

  Eleven

  A kind of tense calm settled upon Altonville—an aspect of everything going scrupulously right on the surface, the better to hide some brooding catastrophe below. When we lacked even a hint of what had happened to the old doctor, there had been nothing definite to think about; but the mailing of his clothes was an act of mystery, provoking all sorts of conjectural solutions.

  In my case it had the effect of making me wonder whether the doctor might still be near at hand, playing dead in order to gain some new advantage. There no longer seemed any question but that he had been demented toward the last. A madman was an unpredictable element. Whatever deviltry he had been up to, of nights, on the hillside north of town might still be going on.

  There had been a consequent temptation to o more exploring by daylight; but several things stood in the way. I was (and still am) working my way through medical school—a routing which leaves one with little enough time for sleep, let alone exploring. I hoped, moreover, to have a talk with Muriel, who obviously knew the secret of the hill. And, finally, I still suspected Dr. Alling’s motives. He might have his own reasons for assuming that Wyck’s machinations had been conducted somewhere up that lonely road. If so, it was a good place for me to avoid. Prexy had taken over some of Wyck’s work in the school, and also had been called out of town several times to consult with legislative committees and with the county prosecutor. One morning he told me that he did no see any prospects of taking up his historical work for some time to come and asked whether I would care to take a position, at an increased salary, as nurse and “keeper” to Mike.

  The hospital authorities were still uncertain whether it would be necessary to commit him to an asylum. They had voted to let him go home for the time being, under observation. After the long sleep which followed his period of violent mania he had been docile; there had been no repetition of the baffling seizures, all of which had occurred within twenty-four hours. I had been allowed to see him, under guard, and he ha shown no tendency to repeat his rough treatment of me. He was, however, definitely deranged—receptive, but uncommunicative.

  Biddy’s agonized appeal, “Just to give him a chance to get well, Mr. David,” had won me over. It was agreed that one or the other of us must be with him constantly. A special phone was installed in my garret, to summon help if he became violent below, and a couple of lengths of two-by-four were arranged in such a fashion that they could instantly be slipped into place to block the top of the stairwell.

  During Mike’s first few days at home, once or twice he acted as if listening intently to some inaudible voice. That frightened me, I confess. I could not help imagining Gideon Wyck, or his ghost, speaking words audible to Mike alone. The rest of the time, when awake, he either sat staring out the window or read the newspaper. I
noticed that he was not bothered, however, when stories were continued on another page. He read right on to the bottom of the column, and started at the top of the next one, willy-nilly. He made no progress whatever in accustoming himself to the loss of an arm. When he wanted to turn a page of the paper, it always fell to the floor, because of his automatic attempt to hold it in nonexistent fingers.

  On the 18th of April, Dr. Alling asked me to accompany him and Sheriff Palmer as a witness in a complete search through Dr. Wyck’s effects. No one as yet had gone carefully through his papers. I was on my guard; but nothing happened to increase my suspicions. The sheriff spent a lot of time blowing white lead on various articles of furniture, but his painstaking investigation only served to clinch the finding that the thumbprint was indubitably Dr. Wyck’s own.

  When I learned this, the conviction that the doctor had mailed the bundle himself became inescapable. The investigation of Wyck’s papers developed no other clue. Of the missing blue books there was no trace; but I could see nothing remarkable in their disappearance. The essential passages, so far as the testimony against Dick Prendergast was concerned, had been read into the minutes of the faculty meeting by Prexy himself.

  When I returned to the Connell’s, I found Mike staring into the corner of his room with an attentive expression, nodding as if to acknowledge phrases no one else could hear. Immediately I remembered the fingerprint in the watchcase, and its inference that Wyck was still alive. The possibility that he had retained a kind of psychic control over Mike was something I could not get out of my imagination. A horde of possibilities, which the normal mind would never think of, were accessible to me in recent memory, owing to the subject material of the Short Sketch for a History of Concomitant Variations, etc., which was concerned exclusively with abnormalities of body and of mind. Once section, for example, had dealt with an appalling series of case histories involving the authentic production, in normal society, of cannibals, rippers, blood drinkers, and ghouls who dug up newly buried bodes for purposes which you can learn, if you care to, when the Short Sketch is published.