Читать книгу The Conjure-Man Dies: A Harlem Mystery - Stanley Ellin - Страница 8

OF the ten Negro members of Harlem’s police force to be promoted from the rank of patrolman to that of detective, Perry Dart was one of the first. As if the city administration had wished to leave no doubt in the public mind as to its intention in the matter, they had chosen, in him, a man who could not have been under any circumstances mistaken for aught but a Negro; or perhaps, as Dart’s intimates insisted, they had chosen him because his generously pigmented skin rendered him invisible in the dark, a conceivably great advantage to a detective who did most of his work at night. In any case, the somber hue of his integument in no wise reflected the complexion of his brain, which was bright, alert, and practical within such territory as it embraced. He was a Manhattanite by birth, had come up through the public schools, distinguished himself in athletics at the high school he attended, and, having himself grown up with the black colony, knew Harlem from lowest dive to loftiest temple. He was rather small of stature, with unusually thin, fine features, which falsely accentuated the slightness of his slender but wiry body.

It was Perry Dart’s turn for a case when Bubber Brown’s call came in to the station, and to it Dart, with four uniformed men, was assigned.

Five minutes later he was in the entrance of Thirteen West 130th Street, greeting Dr Archer, whom he knew. His men, one black, two brown, and one yellow, loomed in the hallway about him large and ominous, but there was no doubt as to who was in command.

‘Hello, Dart,’ the physician responded to his greeting. ‘I’m glad you’re on this one. It’ll take a little active cerebration.’

‘Come on down, doc,’ the little detective grinned with a flash of white teeth. ‘You’re talking to a cop now, not a college professor. What’ve you got?’

‘A man that’ll tell no tales.’ The physician motioned to the undertaker’s front room. ‘He’s in there.’

Dart turned to his men. ‘Day, you cover the front of the place. Green, take the roof and cover the back yard. Johnson, search the house and get everybody you find into one room. Leave a light everywhere you go if possible—I’ll want to check up. Brady, you stay with me.’ Then he turned back and followed the doctor into the undertaker’s parlour. They stepped over to the sofa, which was in a shallow alcove formed by the front bay windows of the room.

‘How’d he get it, doc?’ he asked.

‘To tell you the truth, I haven’t the slightest idea.’

‘Somebody crowned him,’ Bubber helpfully volunteered.

‘Has anybody ast you anything?’ Jinx inquired gruffly.

Dart bent over the victim.

The physician said:

‘There is a scalp wound all right. See it?’

‘Yea—now that you mentioned it.’

‘But that didn’t kill him.’

‘No? How do you know it didn’t, doc?’

‘That wound is too slight. It’s not in a spot that would upset any vital centre. And there isn’t any fracture under it.’

‘Couldn’t a man be killed by a blow on the head that didn’t fracture his skull?’

‘Well—yes. If it fell just so that its force was concentrated on certain parts of the brain. I’ve never heard of such a case, but it’s conceivable. But this blow didn’t land in the right place for that. A blow at this point would cause death only by producing intracranial haemorrhage—’

‘Couldn’t you manage to say it in English, doc?’

‘Sure. He’d have to bleed inside his head.’

‘That’s more like it.’

‘The resulting accumulation of blood would raise the intra—the pressure inside his head to such a point that vital centres would be paralysed. The power would be shut down. His heart and lungs would quit cold. See? Just like turning off a light.’

‘O.K. if you say so. But how do you know he didn’t bleed inside his head?’

‘Well, there aren’t but two things that would cause him to.’

‘I’m learning, doc. Go on.’

‘Brittle arteries with no give in them—no elasticity. If he had them, he wouldn’t even have to be hit—just excitement might shoot up the blood pressure and pop an artery. See what I mean?’

‘That’s apoplexy, isn’t it?’

‘Right. And the other thing would be a blow heavy enough to fracture the skull and so rupture the blood vessels beneath. Now this man is about your age or mine—somewhere in his middle thirties. His arteries are soft—feel his wrists. For a blow to kill this man outright, it would have had to fracture his skull.’

‘Hot damn!’ whispered Bubber admiringly. ‘Listen to the doc do his stuff!’

‘And his skull isn’t fractured?’ said Dart.

‘Not if probing means anything.’

‘Don’t tell me you’ve X-rayed him too?’ grinned the detective.

‘Any fracture that would kill this man outright wouldn’t have to be X-rayed.’

‘Then you’re sure the blow didn’t kill him?’

‘Not by itself, it didn’t.’

‘Do you mean that maybe he was killed first and hit afterwards?’

‘Why would anybody do that?’ Dr Archer asked.

‘To make it seem like violence when it was really something else.’

‘I see. But no. If this man had been dead when the blow was struck, he wouldn’t have bled at all. Circulation would already have stopped.’

‘That’s right.’

‘But of one thing I’m sure: that wound is evidence of too slight a blow to kill.’

‘Specially,’ interpolated Bubber, ‘a hard-headed cullud man—’

‘There you go ag’in,’ growled his lanky companion.

‘He’s right,’ the doctor said. ‘It takes a pretty hefty impact to bash in a skull. With a padded weapon,’ he went on, ‘a fatal blow would have had to be crushing to make even so slight a scalp wound as this. That’s out. And a hard, unpadded weapon that would break the scalp just slightly like this, with only a little bleeding and without even cracking the skull, could at most have delivered only a stunning blow, not a fatal one. Do you see what I mean?’

‘Sure. You mean this man was just stunned by the blow and actually died from something else.’

‘That’s the way it looks to me.’

‘Well—anyhow he’s dead and the circumstances indicate at least a possibility of death by violence. That justifies notifying us, all right. And it makes it a case for the medical examiner. But we really don’t know that he’s been killed, do we?’

‘No. Not yet.’

‘All the more a case for the medical examiner, then. Is there a phone here, doc? Good. Brady, go back there and call the precinct. Tell ’em to get the medical examiner here double time and to send me four more men—doesn’t matter who. Now tell me, doc. What time did this man go out of the picture?’

The physician smiled.

‘Call Meridian 7-1212.’

‘O.K., doc. But approximately?’

‘Well, he was certainly alive an hour ago. Perhaps even half an hour ago. Hardly less.’

‘How long have you been here?’

‘About fifteen minutes.’

‘Then he must have been killed—if he was killed—say anywhere from five to thirty-five minutes before you got here?’

‘Yes.’

Bubber, the insuppressible, commented to Jinx, ‘Damn! That’s trimming it down to a gnat’s heel, ain’t it?’ But Jinx only responded, ‘Fool, will you hush?’

‘Who discovered him—do you know?’

‘These two men.’

‘Both of you?’ Dart asked the pair.

‘No, suh,’ Bubber answered. ‘Jinx here discovered the man. I discovered the doctor.’

Dart started to question them further, but just then Johnson, the officer who had been directed to search the house, reappeared.

‘Been all over,’ he reported. ‘Only two people in the place. Women—both scared green.’

‘All right,’ the detective said. ‘Take these two men up to the same room. I’ll be up presently.’

Officer Brady returned. ‘Medical examiner’s comin’ right up.’

The detective said, ‘Was he on this sofa when you got here, doc?’

‘No. He was upstairs in his—his consultation room, I guess you’d call it. Queer place. Dark as sin. Sitting slumped down in a chair. The light was impossible. You see, I thought I’d been called to a patient, not a corpse. So I had him brought where I knew I could examine him. Of course, if I had thought of murder—’

‘Never mind. There’s no law against your moving him or examining him, even if you had suspected murder—as long as you weren’t trying to hide anything. People think there’s some such law, but there isn’t.’

‘The medical examiner’ll probably be sore, though.’

‘Let him. We’ve got more than the medical examiner to worry about.’

‘Yes. You’ve got a few questions to ask.’

‘And answer. How, when, where, why, and who? Oh, I’m great at questions. But the answers—’

‘Well, we’ve the “when” narrowed down to a half-hour period.’ Dr Archer glanced at his watch. ‘That would be between ten-thirty and eleven. And “where” shouldn’t be hard to verify—right here in his own chair, if those two fellows are telling it straight. “Why” and “who”—those’ll be your little red wagon. “How” right now is mine. I can’t imagine—’

Again he turned to the supine figure, staring. Suddenly his lean countenance grew blanker than usual. Still staring, he took the detective by the arm. ‘Dart,’ he said reflectively, ‘we smart people are often amazingly—dumb.’

‘You’re telling me?’

‘We waste precious moments in useless speculation. We indulge ourselves in the extravagance of reason when a frugal bit of observation would suffice.’

‘Does prescription liquor affect you like that, doc?’

‘Look at that face.’

‘Well—if you insist—’

‘Just the general appearance of that face—the eyes—the open mouth. What does it look like?’

‘Looks like he’s gasping for breath.’

‘Exactly. Dart, this man might—might, you understand—have been choked.’

‘Ch—’

‘Stunned by a blow over the ear—’

‘To prevent a struggle!’

‘—and choked to death. As simple as that.’

‘Choked! But just how?’

Eagerly, Dr Archer once more bent over the lifeless countenance. ‘There are two ways,’ he dissertated in his roundabout fashion, ‘of interrupting respiration.’ He was peering into the mouth. ‘What we shall call, for simplicity, the external and the internal. In this case the external would be rather indeterminate, since we could hardly make out the usual bluish discolourations on a neck of this complexion.’ He procured two tongue depressors and, one in each hand, examined as far back into the throat as he could. He stopped talking as some discovery further elevated his already high interest. He discarded one depressor, reached for his flashlight with the hand thus freed, and, still holding the first depressor in place, directed his light into the mouth as if he were examining tonsils. With a little grunt of discovery, he now discarded the flashlight also, took a pair of long steel thumb-forceps from a flap in the side of his bag, and inserted the instrument into the victim’s mouth alongside the guiding tongue-depressor. Dart and the uniformed officer watched silently as the doctor apparently tried to remove something from the throat of the corpse. Once, twice, the prongs snapped together, and he withdrew the instrument empty. But the next time the forceps caught hold of the physician’s discovery and drew it forth.

It was a large, blue-bordered, white handkerchief.