Читать книгу The Narrow Cell - Ronal Kayser - Страница 10

“So he fled with all that he had; and he rose up, and passed over the river, and set his face toward the mount Gilead.”—GENESIS 31:21.

Grandfather did likewise, and that is how New Gilead got its name.—THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF CATHERINE HOPE.

“It’s no use, that’s that,” said James Myatt, M.D.

Lieutenant Kenmore made the notation in his pocket memo book: Pronounced dead by physician 8:43 p.m. In this interval two uniformed officers had hastened from the La Jolla sub-station with an inhalator. District warden Sam Elliot and the local civilian defense corps chief, Dr. Lauren Wallace, had come from the control room.

And Darwina Roydan appeared—she being the drill umpire who had handed Wyeland his incident envelope.

Kenmore brightened. For if the ill winds brewed by the Catherine Hope Case had blown good to anyone, his acquaintance with Darwina Roydan was that good . . . But at the moment Miss Roydan merely stood by in the shadows. Kenmore intended to renew the acquaintance, and was otherwise occupied now.

“Cause of death?” said he.

“Why, carbon monoxide—it was that heater in there, of course,” thought Myatt.

“Those unvented heaters play the very devil,” Elliot muttered.

The man who had tried to administer artificial respiration sighed, “Well, you’d better go inside, Jessie,” to Mrs. Axiter. “There’s nothing we can do here.”

Kenmore said: “Just a minute.”

He got from the other a dark, narrowly questioning look.

“We have to file a report on accidental deaths,” the lieutenant observed. “Names of witnesses, who found the body, and so on.”

“I thought you knew. It was the girl, Wyeland’s little girl.”

“And she notified you?”

“She came to the house,” the other said. He produced a wallet, and from it a card that read: Kane & Ffleming, Insurance, with Foster V. Ffleming printed in its lower corner. “She told Mrs. Axiter. I came out with her and we got Mr. Bowling into the fresh air. I’d seen carbon monoxide poisoning before, and I guessed it was that, all right.”

“This was at approximately eight o’clock, I understand? He was entirely unconscious when you found him?”

“Yes, he’d fallen out of his chair. On the floor behind the desk. He might have struck his head in falling, I thought.” Ffleming added, “I don’t think Mrs. Axiter can tell you any more than this.”

Kenmore did not put any questions to Mrs. Axiter. He said, indeed, he thought it would be a kindness on Darwina Roydan’s part to see Jessie Axiter into the house.

Darwina did so, assisted by Ffleming and Dr. Myatt.

And as Wyeland had gone to telephone the mortuary, it left the lieutenant with the district warden and the incident officer.

“Oh, Elliot,” said he, turning to the guesthouse door. “Dr. Wallace.”

The two men followed him inside. Kenmore asked, “You phoned your test signal blue at what time?”

“Why,” said Elliot, “at 6:30.”

“And reached Mr. Bowling here?”

“Why, no. In the house. It’s a different line entirely.”

“And the test signal red—?”

“Just before seven o’clock.”

“And he was here then? I’d like,” said Kenmore, “to fix the time as closely as I can.”

“Well,” Elliot thought, “you can come closer to it than that. Because he phoned in a couple of reports tonight.”

“Yes,” Kenmore agreed, thumbing the pink sheets on the desk, “these. At 7:03 and 7:17.”

“A little later than that. Those are the incicfent times. It’d take a few minutes for the post wardens to put through their reports to him, and for him to call the control room.”

Kenmore said, “So death occurred, say, between 7:20 or thereabouts, and approximately eight o’clock.”

He jotted this into his pocket notebook.

Dr. Lauren Wallace interrupted. “But, inspector—” he paused, “—I mean, lieutenant.”

This slip of the tongue recalled the unpleasant memory.

John Kenmore had been only a detective-inspector when Catherine Hope was slain. Dr. Wallace had been Director of the Marine Research Institute at that time. (He was Director Emeritus now.)

La Jolla took the institution rather for granted, but M.R.I, enjoyed a very substantial reputation in scientific circles, and to the establishment of this reputation Lauren Wallace had contributed notably. The Director Emeritus was not a great scientist nor scholar; and did not pretend to be. Dr. Wallace’s talent inclined to administration, and his genius to money-raising. By means of this genius he had made possible the 1923-’29 Expeditions, whereon was founded the Institute’s unique position in its field. Those were the years of the seven fat kine. And in the starveling years that followed, the good doctor’s administrative talent had at least kept the institution afloat in shoal waters.

The shocking demise of Catherine Hope—whose nude body had been discovered in one of M.R.I.’s aquarium tanks in April, 1937—served to darken the final months of his directorship.

It was not so much the three-day wonder (and that had been bad enough, with the headlines, with the curious wearing footpaths across the grounds, with the morbid threatening to dismember the aquarium in their search for souvenirs). It was the dismal three-week police investigation which did the damage. The revelations had led to the enforced resignations of three professors—not that these marine biologists were probably any better or worse than other mortals; they had been merely more naive in their transgressions.

The scandal cost M.R.I. a number of annual contributors; and it cost Dr. Lauren Wallace his hope of building the edifice which would have been Wallace Hall and the fitting monument to his life labors.

Inspector, said Lauren Wallace, and brought home the jarring fact:

The murder of Catherine Hope remained unsolved to this day.

That affair had run the predictable course of violent crime in a small locality; it had fattened indecently upon the unfortunate professors, and then withered profitlessly away.

Kenmore could hardly blame himself; Captain Harry Whipple had commanded the homicide detail then; but Kenmore had worked on the case, and the recollection of frustration made his grey eyes momentarily bleak.

“Yes?” said he. “What is it?”

Dr. Lauren Wallace shook his white-maned head. “I was going to say, lieutenant, there should be three of those.”

“Three pink sheets?”

“Yes. It’s a new form we were trying tonight. Mrs. Rhine didn’t mimeograph enough copies to waste any, The sector wardens each got exactly three, because we planned three incidents in each sector.”

Kenmore considered that.

“Well, did Bowling actually get three? Is there any certainty he did?”

Dr. Lauren Wallace said, Yes, the copies had been handed around at yesterday’s sector warden meeting; a meeting he had called especially to acquaint the men with the new form.

“And as a matter of fact, Bowling came up to me before the meeting. It was about his messengers, the Chapman twins. They are table tennis addicts, and are playing in a tournament in San Diego tonight. Bowling wanted to know whether he should make other arrangements, and I told him the boys wouldn’t be needed. We talked about the pink sheets, I gave him them to look over, and counted them as I did so.”

Dr. Wallace spoke positively. He was a positive figure of a man; a big ruddy individual with a tall forehead under his shock of white hair; with the forceful manner of the experienced executive and administrator.

Kenmore respected the incident officer’s ability.

“Well,” said he casually, “then Bowling misplaced the other.”

“That would hardly be like Henry Bowling,” Lauren Wallace objected, puzzled. “He was so systematic in everything. Still, none of fos are perfect, are we? I suppose he must have lost it.”

But Dr. Wallace was not through thinking of the third pink sheet. Rather sharply, his glance rested on Kenmore. “You must have hurried here,” said he.

The lieutenant told exactly as much of the truth as he considered Dr. Wallace, or any of them, were entitled to hear.

“It happened I was in La Jolla. I had an appointment with a chap nearby.”

“I see.” Wallace dabbed at his tall forehead with a folded square of handkerchief. “How very hot it is . . . Nobody seems to have remembered to turn off that heater.”

“Yes,” said Kenmore, attending to it. “If you’ll excuse me, I’d better notify the coroner’s office.”

Then, having dismissed the two gentlemen, he lifted the phone to dial operator and give her the headquarters number . . . and summoned the police photographer-and-fingerprint-man from the farewell party on Market Street.

Kenmore, when he had finished talking, stood frowning at the two pink sheets. His frown was cautious in its concentration, for police work makes a literal man. Dr. Wallace had pounced on an interesting detail. If he had noticed the pipe and the eyeglasses and the alarm clock as well, he was as near to a solution as Kenmore himself. But that was not anywhere near enough to satisfy the district attorney. District attorneys want clues—forthright clues whose value as evidence will impress even an unsympathetic jury.

In this sense, Kenmore did not have a case at all and he knew it. He could not prove a crime had been committed; and if he could not prove that, obviously he could not arrest anyone on suspicion of having committed it. He could ask questions, to be sure; but he could not demand answers. The fact that a man has died apparently by accident does not give a police officer the right to probe into the private affairs of his family—and families of relative wealth generally know their Constitutional rights. If Kenmore asked himself why he believed Henry Bowling had been murdered, the answer would be, firstly: because of the telephone call. From the legal point of view, there were three things wrong about the telephone call. It might be excluded from the testimony altogether. It might be objected that Kenmore could not positively identify the voice as Bowling’s. It might be argued, supposing Bowling had made the call, he had nevertheless died by accidental means. Just as, if he had set forth afoot to deliver his information at the substation, he could conceivably have been run down and killed by a motorist having no connection with the case. No law of nature exempts informers from the hazards of traffic, defective heaters, and electric short-circuits. In fact, being preoccupied with the business in hand, Bowling would have been less than ordinarily apt to notice gas fumes in the room.

Secondly, there were the items of a missing pink sheet, a pipe, eyeglasses, and alarm clock. Kenmore considered these were items he assuredly could not act upon, but he could think from them . . . He lighted his own pipe; walked around and sat in Henry Bowling’s chair; and locked his hands behind his head.

“You can’t just rush in and grab the bull by the horns,” he excused this inaction. You couldn’t, because you needed a preliminary knowledge of the bull’s anatomy. Or you would find yourself helplessly hanging onto the brute’s tail.

He had to establish a line of inquiry. Or else it would all be hit-and-miss; and worse, because he wouldn’t know when he had registered a hit.

Kenmore leaned farther back in the chair. Henry Bowling at 6:30 o’clock had received a test signal blue at Seaview 3-3609; he might have called police headquarters then; but he had not done so. He had not done so until 7:15 o’clock, when he was engaged in the Commando defense drill, expecting two more incident reports from his sector, and expecting these reports by telephone. And, you would have thought, would have left his phone open for the purpose of receiving them. Instead of which, at 7:15 o’clock, Henry Bowling had undertaken to expose a murderer.

The bull’s anatomy was becoming dimly visible in a cloud of pipe smoke.

“Try that again,” thought Kenmore. Henry Bowling had got the blue signal at home . . . come out here to his post and received the red signal . . . within a minute or so of 7:01 had taken and dispatched a reported UXB incident at 30 Pheasant Lane . . . had lighted the gas heater . . . telephoned John Kenmore at 7:15 o’clock . . . then received and transmitted the 7:17 o’clock Richfield station incident . . . and then he had replaced his pencil in its wire rack, lighted and laid aside his briar pipe, removed his eyeglasses, and almost immediately died.

Kenmore would have to fill in the gaps in this account.

He was irritated by a thought on the periphery of consciousness . . .

You had to take those actions apart, put them together into a new combination.

The thought crashed violently from the periphery to the exact center of his suddenly focused realization:

“He wouldn’t have known the number!”

The lieutenant leaned down, dragged open the lower left-hand drawer, and slapped the directory onto the desk before him.

He opened its pages to San Diego, City of—and the thing lay square before him.

A square envelope, grimed with dust and somewhat yellowed with age, it bore on its surface (wrinkled as if it had been partially balled into a wad and then smoothed out) an uncanceled three-cent stamp.

The address, composed in a flowing feminine hand, was to Mrs. E. H. Burrett, New Gilead, Michigan.

“Good God!” said Kenmore, and turned over the envelope.

Across its torn back flap ran a printed legend: Miss Catherine Hope, 1116 Balboa Street, La Jolla, California.

There was, however, nothing inside.

He got up, jammed the thing in his pocket, and went outside hurriedly.

The guesthouse occupied the rear, north-east corner of the large yard; its entry stoop faced upon the tennis court. This court, running north-and-south, had a high wire fence inside the Toyon Street hedge; the garage provided a backstop at the other, south end.

Thus the court offered a short-cut to the big house. Kenmore stepped out onto it and was halfway across the concrete when he heard the voice.