Murder in the Madhouse

by Jonathan Latimer

  Miss Van Kamp put her mouth close to Crane’s ear. “Mr. Pittsfield has a clue,” she said.

  “What is it?”

  “I’ll tell you later,” said Pittsfield. He looked about him. “We are facing an implacable enemy.” The two old ladies were impressed. “It may be I shall have to summon my marines from Washington.”

  “Marines from Washington?” said Crane. He caught a look from Miss Van Kamp. “I don’t think you’ll have to do that.”

  “I trust not.” Pittsfield moved away.

  “You haven’t told anyone else about me?” asked Crane.

  “Nobody but Nellie here,” said Miss Van Kamp. “She won’t tell a soul. She and Mr. Pittsfield have been trying to help me.”

  “You mustn’t tell anyone else.”

  Both women nodded solemnly.

  “Who is Miss Queen?” Crane asked.

  “She was a noted English comedy star,” said Miss Van Kamp. “She had a series of nervous breakdowns and was forced to give up her career.”

  By the door, Crane caught sight of a tanned, aristocratic young lady in a blue evening dress. “Who’s that?” he asked. The lady crossed over to where Richardson stood alone.

  “Mrs. Patterson Heyworth,” said Miss Van Kamp. She and Nellie walked from him.

  Richardson regarded Mrs. Heyworth possessively. He leaned over and said something to her. She smiled and looked around the room and caught sight of Crane. Her eyes were passing over him casually, as over a stranger, when suddenly their expression changed. The new expression was of recognition, of intimacy, of joy; such as a woman might use to greet a lover. It was a look outside the bounds of sanity, a transcendental look. Crane stared at her. Suddenly she put a warning finger to her lips. She turned to Richardson.

  Crane sat down in a chair. “What the hell,” he said. “What the hell.”

  A musical chime rang. He sat up in his chair.

  “Dinner,” said someone.

  “Sure,” Crane said. He got up and started to walk.

  “Not that way,” said someone. “That’s the garden.”

  Dr. Livermore took Crane’s arm. “I’ll show you,” he said. He looked curiously at him. “You seem to have been preoccupied.”

  Crane said, “That’s right.”

  They went into the dining room.

  Chapter V

  BY THE TIME the coffee was served, Crane had them pretty well placed. He was seated between Miss Queen and a small man who hadn’t said a word all evening. He had been introduced as Horace Penny, a manufacturer of ladies’ underthings and he had acknowledged both facts with a faintly ribald droop of the right eye. Mr. Penny was really amazing. During the dinner he had indicated his desire for celery with a motion of his little finger; he had intimated the fish that was not all it should be with a slight twist of his lips; he had delicately urged Crane to try some of the chutney with a movement of his left eyebrow. He got along quite nicely without speaking. Across from Crane was a blowsy blond lady with a large bosom and sparkling teeth. She talked continually at the top of her voice. Her name was Mrs. Brady. She was interested in the finer things of life: gambling, race horses, prize fighting.

  The table was chastely sophisticated with fine silver and linen, and Dr. Livermore sat at the head like the czar of all the Russias. He ate ponderously, chewing his food carefully but not cautiously. Every now and then he would sweep his napkin across his beard.

  Crane tried his coffee and then put some camembert on a cracker. “What does everybody do in the evening?” he asked. He inserted a piece of the cracker in his mouth and eyed Miss Queen.

  “This is movie night,” she replied, looking a little pointedly at the small piece of cracker left in his hand.

  “Movies?” He put the piece of cracker in his mouth. “Do they really have movies here?”

  “You’ll see,” said Miss Queen.

  Mrs. Brady caught Crane’s eye with her overbright blue ones. She shouted across the table, “Do you like horses?”

  “What kind of horses?” asked Crane.

  “Race horses,” said Mrs. Brady. “The kind my husband used to own.”

  “I didn’t know your husband.”

  “Oh, Mr. Crane!” Mrs. Brady was convulsed with some emotion. Crane didn’t know whether it was amusement or rage. “I mean all race horses.”

  “I think they are wonderful.”

  “Oh, you do,” cried Mrs. Brady. “So do I.”

  That seemed to end it. William Crane returned to his cheese. At the end of the table opposite Dr. Livermore, Blackwood was talking to Pittsfield.

  “There is no beauty in a legal document,” he was saying. “It is like a maiden lady who has been raised under Victorian standards, stiff, stilted, repressed.”

  “I suppose you are right,” said Pittsfield; “but you can’t deny that lawyers are able to write fine prose.”

  “But I can,” said Blackwood. “And I do. No lawyer ever wrote anything of real artistic value. His training precludes that possibility, just as does that of the journalist.”

  “Lawyers framed the Constitution of the United States.”

  “Fine prose that is.”

  Pittsfield was pale. “I am supposed to have written some good prose myself. Take the Gettysburg address. Critics call that a gem.”

  “Now, gentlemen,” said Dr. Livermore. “I think posterity had the final say as to the quality of prose.”

  “I’ll have you deported—” Pittsfield glared at Blackwood—“just as soon as I get back to Washington.”

  Blackwood’s puffy face broke into a smile. He winked at the rest of the table. Pittsfield sank back in his chair. His face became blank. Dr. Livermore returned to his food.

  “Poor fellow,” said Miss Queen. “That Blackwood can always infuriate him.” Her face lengthened in sympathy.

  “Why does Blackwood try?” asked Crane.

  “They hate each other. I think it is because of their different natures. One is so simple and honest, and the other is so complex.”

  One of the two colored maids poured fresh coffee into Miss Queen’s cup. Crane looked toward Mrs. Heyworth. She was talking to Richardson. The light slid brownly from her boyishly cut hair and shadowed her dark curling eyelashes. Conscious of his look, she turned and stared into Crane’s eyes. Her glance was warm and intimate. He hurriedly returned to his cheese. He reached for a knife, knocked over a water glass, pushed the knife on the floor, and dropped a cracker on his lap.

  Miss Queen said, “It will be easier just to push the table over.”

  “Huh?” said Crane. He removed the cracker from his trousers.

  “All we need is a drink to top off this meal,” declared Blackwood. His small eyes shone maliciously. “You haven’t any port wine, have you, Dr. Livermore?”

  “Alcohol?” Dr. Livermore’s beard quivered as though there were animals running through it. “Poison on top of a fine meal? Mr. Blackwood, how can you ask?”

  “It’s the only way to end a dinner. As for its being a poison, many drink it and live.”

  While Blackwood was speaking, Crane looked at Mrs. Heyworth out of the corner of his eye. He was relieved to find she was talking to Richardson.

  “I cannot express too strongly my disapproval of alcohol,” said Dr. Livermore to the table. “It is one of the chief causes of human trouble. It lowers the morale, the resistance of the body to disease, and destroys the nervous system.”

  Crane had a startled impression that the doctor was talking to him. He took a hasty drink of coffee on the theory it would kill the smell of applejack on his breath.

  “You take rats,” said Dr. Livermore. “If you feed rats alcohol, their offspring are weak and far below the intellectual standard of normal rats. And if you feed the offspring of an alcoholic rat alcohol, it will be stunted for life.”

  “You take the rats,” said Blackwood; “I’ll take the alcohol.”

  Dr. Livermore continued: “As for cancer, experiments have shown that rats with cancer
die much more quickly when they are fed alcohol than when they are not.”

  “So much the better for the drunkard rats,” said Blackwood. He looked around the table for approval.

  “Science has exploded the myth of alcohol.” Dr. Livermore was not to be stopped by any futile attempt at humor. “In the instance of snake bites, it has long been assumed that whisky would materially help in the cure. It has been proven that the alcohol aids the venom.”

  ‘Interesting, if true,” said Blackwood. “But how do you account for the fact that whisky is taken along on every expedition into wild country?”

  “Merely misguided zeal on their part. Now, you take rats that have been exposed to very hot or very cold——”

  Miss Van Kamp rose stiffly from her chair. “I don’t care for rats.” Her voice was thin. “Particularly at dinner.” Nellie stood up, and the two turned and walked from the table. Dr. Livermore muttered something that was lost in his beard and pushed back his chair. There was a general burst of conversation. Pittsfield brushed by Crane as they walked into the living room. He whispered, “I’ll tell you about the box after the movies.” Crane nodded.

  Dr. Livermore glanced at the brass clock over the mantel. It was eight o’clock. “Well, well,” he said cheerfully. “Time for the evening’s show.”

  He led the way out into the hall into a large room at the end. This room had a screen at one end with lines of chairs reaching to the rear wall. Projecting a few feet from the wall was a stand, and on this was a strange, bulky instrument of steel and shiny chromium. A large nurse sat composedly on a tall chair beside the machine. She was about thirty. She had very large breasts, and she gave the appearance of being held in an S-shape by a series of tight rubber abdominal bands. She was very stiff and proud.

  Everybody came into the room and took seats, in most cases so that at least one chair separated each from the other. Only Richardson and Mrs. Heyworth and Miss Van Kamp and Nellie sat together. William Crane took a seat near the door in the back row. Dr. Livermore stood behind him.

  “I want you all to remember to relax,” said Dr. Livermore. “It is important to relax. You are going to have complete repose; deep, complete repose; deep, deep repose for one hour.”

  The lights were turned off. It was black and so still that Crane could hear the breathing of Dr. Livermore behind him and the faint rustle of the nurses’ starched clothes from the platform. He became aware of a soft radiance emanating from the screen. It was delicate and weird and at first barely perceptible. Soft greens and blues floated across the screen in combinations of pastels; then came darker colors, sea blues, purples, mauves, heavy greens, and even a suspicion of red, so that there were yellow and faint gold. The colors formed patterns on the screen; clouds and dark hills and lakes and strange ghostly shapes that moved slowly from right to left.

  The effect was soothing, and it was some time before Crane realized that music was being played by a phonograph in subtle harmony with the colorama. The music was confusing. It seemed to have a smell attached to it. In fact, there were smells attached to it. William Crane recognized some of them. There was new-mown hay, rose, old lavender, a curious acid smell, a sort of manure smell, licorice, pine, mint, cinnamon, and some others that touched his memory but which he could not identify. These odors, too, were very subtle and he let his mind and body relax in the luxury of utter nothingness. He felt suspended in the state which is reached only just before falling asleep or just after waking. He would have fallen asleep if he had not caught a rustle behind him on the carpet. He turned his head slowly toward the lesser shadow of the door and saw a faint movement as a dark shadow slipped across the opening. A second later another shadow, smaller and quicker, followed.

  Crane waited a moment and then tiptoed out into the hall. He looked up to the living room, but there was nobody in sight. The living room was empty too. The brass clock read eight-fifteen, which meant at least a half hour more of the movies, and he decided to look around upstairs. He went first to his room and secured a flashlight from a compartment in his pigskin suitcase. Cautiously he crept out into the hall again. The first door was unlocked, and he stepped inside. The room was like his except that the two windows were together at the end opposite the door. It was a man’s room. There were a pair of white trousers across the bed, and underneath, an orderly row of men’s shoes. They were small and he decided they must belong to Mr. Penny. He was not interested in Mr. Penny, so he tried the next room. This was also obviously inhabited by a man. He passed on to the next.

  It was a surprising room. Instead of a bed, there was a studio couch gay with colored pillows. The curtains on the windows were of red and brown batik; the rugs were red and black. Two red and black moderne chairs and a chromium writing desk of curved pipe were under the windows. He opened the closet door and disclosed with his flashlight an array of dresses. The floor of the closet was covered with shoes. In a corner stood a tennis racquet. He closed the closet and went back to the writing table. He found a photograph of Mrs. Heyworth, a tall man, and a baby. He thought the man looked slightly familiar. His light flashed onto an object by the head of the couch. At first Crane thought it was a tea wagon. He flashed the beam squarely on it and discovered it was a baby carriage, painted gray, with rubber tires and a silvered handle. He bent over it and looked into the interior. His light was reflected by a pair of staring blue eyes and rosy cheeks of colored enamel. He saw it was a large doll, neatly tucked in under blue bedclothes of wool. Beside the doll was a bottle half filled with milk. It was uncomfortable being stared at by those unmoving blue eyes, and he decided to leave the room. He snapped off his light and turned the knob of the door, pulling it slowly toward him. As he edged out into the dark hall he heard a rustle of cloth. Someone hurried by him and turned down the stairs.

  After several minutes he stepped out into the hall and continued his search. He tried three more rooms. Two belonged to men, and the other obviously was lived in by a woman younger than Miss Van Kamp, if black lace lingerie was any indication. A fourth room proved to be vacant. The fifth was the object of his search. The bed was covered with an elegant patchwork quilt with a date, 1812, sewn on the middle of it in some heavy white material.

  William Crane wondered if it was Miss Van Kamp’s class numeral at Vassar. He pulled a heavy mahogany rocking chair against the door to prevent being surprised and laid his flashlight on the bureau so that the rays were directed away from the windows at the end of the room. In the reflected light he examined both shades carefully, and the catches on the windows, but he could detect nothing unusual. On the edge of the sill of the right-hand window, he was surprised to find a series of fresh holes about the size made by a thumb tack. There were nearly one hundred of them. He examined these closely and then turned to the rest of the room. It was hard trying to pick up something on a theft that had happened nearly three weeks before, but he hoped he might find something.

  The closet, partially filled with dark dresses, black petticoats, dressing gowns, and two dark coats, yielded nothing of particular interest. Neither did the bathroom, which was hung with robes-de-nuit and an enormous series of neatly coiled rubber tubes, the purpose of which Crane did not like to surmise.

  A writing table furnished nothing noteworthy except a savings deposit book with a balance of $26,384.31. He studied this enviously for some time. A pincushion on the top of the dresser he gave only a glance, but he carefully emptied out a box filled with small pieces of jewelry, rings, cameos, a shilling piece, a silver medallion inscribed, “Sunday-school Attendance—First Prize,” three pennies, and a large thumb tack. The top left-hand drawer in the bureau was filled with handkerchiefs, silk and embroidered. The right-hand drawer contained a neat pile of silk and woolen stockings. There were also some pieces of black lace. In the first big drawer were careful piles of fine silk petticoats and wool underwear, a gray silk dress of webbed texture, a few pairs of gray silk stockings, and a fine paisley shawl. There was a strong smell of lavender in the dra
wer, and William Crane thought of the movies downstairs. He pulled open the next drawer and found nightgowns and more wool underwear jumbled together in a haphazard mess. He flashed his light over the tumbled contents and carefully felt through them with his left hand. He encountered only matted clothes. He softly closed the drawer, opened the bottom one, and saw that it was in order, and promptly closed it. He returned to his inspection of the mussed drawer. Finally he shut it for the second time and flashed his light around the bottom part of the bureau. Underneath, on the side away from the door, the heavy Wilton rug was partially turned over in a firm crease. He pondered over this for some time. Then with a sigh he stood up and flashed his light around the entire room. Everything else was in perfect order. He walked over to the green waste basket and looked in it. It was empty. He moved toward the door, but in passing the bed he bent down and turned his light under it.

  The clear, white rays shone on an agonized face, staring out into the room with redly protruding eyes. The skin was a liver-blue and from a distorted mouth hung a swollen tongue like a misplaced velvet necktie. Around the corpse’s neck there was an angry crimson welt.

  After a time William Crane managed to breathe. He saw the body was that of Pittsfield. He reached under the bed to the dead man’s vest and found the heavy gold watch was in place. The wallet he found in the hip pocket of the trousers was empty, but two rings were on the fingers of the man’s right hand. There was a diamond stick pin in his tie. A pocket in the wallet contained nothing but a book of postage stamps and a photograph of a painting of Abraham Lincoln. He put it back in the hip pocket, smoothed out the rug where he had knelt, and quickly let himself out of the room.

  He hurried down the dark hall to his room, feeling a sudden uplift of relief as he closed the door behind him. He found a glass in the bathroom, filled it halfway with moonshine, and drained it in a single gulp. He felt better immediately. He put the flashlight back in the grip, washed out the glass, and stuck the bottle behind the dresser. He reflected that whatever Pittsfield had to tell him would go untold. He thought it was a hell of a way to die, strangled and stuffed under an old lady’s bed.