Murder Comes First (26 page)

He listened to a small, nimble man of, he guessed, about sixty-three. The man, who was restless in a cluttered room, had much gray hair on his head and more of it, in a border of tufts, on his chin. Detective Anstey shook his head appropriately, made a small, suitable, clucking sound with tongue and teeth and wondered whether Dr. Orpheus Preson did not now and then pull out small sections of his chin whiskers to further some purpose of his own. Detective Anstey found himself speculating as to what such a purpose might be, and returned his vagrant mind, under arrest, to the subject at hand. He said, “The trouble is, doctor—” and was interrupted, as he had expected to be. He said, “I understand, doctor,” and was given more to understand.

It was a rather dusty room Anstey sat in and around which Dr. Orpheus Preson prowled as he talked. It was large enough, and had two good-sized windows on the street; it even had a fireplace, into which, it appeared, Dr. Orpheus Preson was in the habit of throwing almost any object for which he had, momentarily, no further use. There was much crumpled paper in the fireplace, which was to be expected. But there was also a starched collar and what appeared to be, from some feet distant, half a loaf of bread. “The trouble is, doctor—” Detective Anstey said again. “Yes, doctor, I appreciate that,” he said. “Ummm,” he said.

Dr. Preson was about five feet six and probably weighed not over a hundred and fifteen pounds. That part of his face visible above the tufts—“swatches” he took out of the beard; that was the word Detective Anstey had been trying to remember—so much of his face as was visible was ruddy with evidently healthy blood, at the moment in a state of agitation. Dr. Preson wore a gray sweater of notable cleanness and white duck trousers and tennis shoes. He picked up a bone and waved it at Detective Anstey for emphasis.

The bones did, certainly, add a note to the whole affair. They were on a long table toward the end of the room most distant from the windows, but there was a shaded light hanging over them. The bones seemed—but Detective Anstey was again at some distance from the display—to be of most conceivable shapes and of a variety of sizes. The one Dr. Preson now waved, with probably unintentional belligerency, was a sizeable bone. Detective Anstey thought it must once have been a leg of something. It appeared to be a very old bone, which was to be expected.

Dr. Preson became aware that Detective Anstey was regarding the waving bone and regarded it himself. “Hoplophoneus,” Dr. Preson said. “Pleistocene.” Detective Anstey said, “Oh.” Dr. Preson put the bone back on the table. “Well?” Dr. Preson said.

“A crackpot, of course,” Detective Anstey said. “New York's full of them, you know.” He paused, and selected what he hoped would prove a suitable word. “Troublesome,” he said.

“I,” said Dr. Preson, “put it in your hands. What do you propose?”

That was the trouble. Detective Anstey had nothing to propose. There was nothing to propose. It was just one of those things. But tact was indicated.

“Of course,” Detective Anstey said, “we'll do what we can.”

“In short,” Dr. Preson said, “you are without a suggestion. It would appear to me, Detective Anstey, that—”

“Doctor,” Anstey said, and smiled, “doctor, I know how it appears to you. Believe me, I do. We all do. There are millions of people in New York and God knows how many crackpots.”

“The purpose of the police,” Dr. Preson began. Anstey shook his head. He still smiled; he made it clear that he wished things were otherwise.

“I know, doctor,” he said. “We'll do what we can. But—I don't promise much. You see, whoever's doing this is using your name. He—or she—is paying cash across the counter. If we had a hundred men to spare we might—” he shrugged. “We might not, too,” he said. “And we haven't a hundred men.”

“The point is,” Dr. Preson said, “that you regard it as trivial. I assure you—”

“Dr. Preson,” Anstey said. “Listen a moment. Half the time I work nights. That's the way we're set up. I live out in Queens. I've been married a couple of years. Well, about six months ago, when I was on the night shift, the telephone at the house rang about—oh, a little after midnight. It kept on ringing until my wife got out of bed and answered it. She said, ‘Hello?' and whoever had called hung up. You see, she's not much more than a kid and the first thing she thought was that something had happened to me. You see how she'd feel? Just a kid; not married very long. She called in and I was out on a job, of course. It was about three before I got in, and got her message and called back. She didn't go to sleep. And the next night—about one, that night—the same thing happened again. It kept on happening for about a month, whenever I was on night duty. Like I said, a crackpot. Maybe somebody whose toes I'd stepped on. It was just one of those things. Like this thing of yours. I didn't think it was so damned trivial, doctor. Neither did my wife.”

“For about a month, you say?” Dr. Preson told Anstey. “Then, I take it, you stopped it?”

“Sure,” Anstey said. “I had the telephone number changed. The new one isn't listed. Sure I stopped it.”

“And whoever was playing this trick?” Dr. Preson said. “You mean he still—”

“Sure,” Anstey said. “A crackpot. You never catch up with them.” He paused. He stood up. “However,” he said, “we'll try, as I said. There won't be much we can do, but we'll do what we can. It could be we'll get a break. You might try to make some arrangement with the papers themselves—arrange for identification in the future. Of course, there'd be a good many to cover, in town and in the area.”

He did not intend to sound encouraging. He did not sound encouraging.

“I,” said Dr. Preson, “am a taxpayer. As it happens, a very considerable taxpayer.” He had sat in a chair; now he jumped out of it and clutched his beard. None of it came out; there was, apparently, another explanation of its condition. “I will not be subjected to this—this
persecution!
I expect that the police will—”

Anstey stood up, too. He was smiling still; his voice was gentle.

“I know how you feel, doctor,” he said. He sought to look into Dr. Preson's eyes, hoping to convey sympathy and reassurance. He found this difficult, since he was distracted by Dr. Preson's glasses. They had, looked at closely, very curious lenses. They were, basically, bifocals. But above the semi-circular lower lens, there was a narrow band of what appeared to be another lens and above that, still another. Anstey blinked, partly in surprise and partly in sympathy. Although he had intended to continue, soothingly, to amplify his knowledge of the way Dr. Preson was feeling, the glasses distracted him from speech.

“Trifocals,” Dr. Preson said. “If that's what's the matter, Mr. Anstey. Surely you've seen trifocals before?”

“No,” Anstey said. “Well.”

“When it is necessary to have three foci,” Dr. Preson said. “With certain eyes, under special conditions. Your only suggestion, I gather, is that I have a change made in my telephone number?”

“I would,” Detective Anstey said. “Meanwhile, we'll do what we can.”

“I had hoped to find—” Dr. Preson began, and stopped and shook his head. The movement disparaged the police force of the city of New York. Detective Anstey once more promised that everything possible would be done—short, however, of a hundred men in full cry—and went down in the elevator of the elderly, not immaculate, apartment hotel in West Twenty-second Street. He made brief enquiries of the bright-eyed, white-teethed, brown-skinned young operator, who said sure he knew about it, that everybody in the place knew about it, and that they were doing what they could. They were trying to see that visitors to Dr. Preson's apartment were announced in advance.

“But what's to keep them from just walking up the stairs?” he asked Anstey. “See what I mean?”

Anstey saw what he meant. Anstey went toward Twenty-third Street to consider the next squeal on his list. It appeared that, in Twenty-third Street, there was an outbreak of dog poisoning. Another crackpot, of course; this time one to be regarded with special animus by Detective Anstey, who owned, and was extremely fond of, a toy poodle. Still, it was just one more of those things. Anstey wondered if his transfer ever was going to come through. When he got back to the precinct, he would see if Lieutenant Weigand had heard anything about it. On Homicide they gave you something to work on—something that really mattered a damn.

Mr. Gerald North of North Books, Inc., stopped in the middle of page two hundred and sixty-seven and looked out his office window to rest his eyes and to consider the cause of a feeling of uneasiness. Something, he realized, didn't jibe. He sighed, thought further, and went back to page seventy-four. He read through to page eighty and found it. He made a note: “Eyes, color of, 80–267. Blue on eighty.” He made check marks on the manuscript and began on page two hundred and sixty-eight. He read one sentence three times, failed even on the third to discover a verb or any substitute therefore, and made another note: “268 L 22.” He made another check on the manuscript. Frankel was casual about verbs.

It was Tuesday afternoon and there was a cold rain and Mr. North, feeling the need of a cocktail, of an apartment's warmth and of other warmths, looked reproachfully at the sheaf of manuscript pages still unread. Frankel liked them long. Mr. North sighed. So, however, did the public. Mr. North began on page two hundred and sixty-nine. The trouble is, Mr. Gerald North thought, I'm reading it all for the third time; that's the trouble. That's why it tastes of sawdust. Breasts on page two hundred and sixty-nine strained at thin fabric. Sawdust. The girl's clothes were too small for her; that was what it came to.

Mr. North put down the manuscript, took off his reading glasses and rubbed his eyes. He was doing nobody any good—not Frankel, nor the seventeenth century (with which Frankel was, as the blurb for his last book had remarked, “saturated”), nor Gerald North nor, when it came to that, “Inc.” Sufficient unto the morrow would have to be the seventeenth century thereof, although that would make the morrow a tangle. Lunch at one with Miss Eaton; an appointment at two-thirty with Gallagher's agent about the new contract—neither of those could be postponed. The sensible thing to do would be to take Frankel's seventeenth century home with him, and see how it tasted after dinner. Mr. North sighed again. He had thought he and Pam might go to a movie. He—

The telephone on his desk rang. Gerald North said, “Yes?” to it, in no tone of encouragement, and listened. Each word he heard postponed further the warmth of an apartment, of three greeting cats at a door—most of all of a lady named Pamela.

“Has he,” Mr. North asked the telephone, “got a manuscript with him?”

The telephone paused for a look; it reported no evidence of a manuscript. It reported that he was walking around and seemed to be talking to himself.

“Ask Dr. Preson to come in, then,” Mr. North said. From the seventeenth century he would go now to the Pleistocene, conceivably to the Pliocene. This was retrogression on a major scale. Furthermore, Dr. Orpheus Preson would be, by and large, incomprehensible, since he mentioned the intricacies of fossil mammals to his publisher with a touching confidence that publishers understand all things. It was fortunate that Dr. Preson had no such illusions about the reading public, which he guided tenderly through prehistory. It was remarkable, Mr. North thought, how many people were nowadays fleeing to the past—the twenties, the seventeenth century, even the Pleistocene. Or, perhaps, it wasn't remarkable.

Dr. Preson came into the office like a released watch spring. He did not have a manuscript with him, which meant that he had come to report delay in the second of the three volumes of
The Days Before Man
. Gerald North hoped that this would not mean Dr. Preson had decided he must go to the Middle East and try to dig up something. In another year or two, non-extinct mammals might find it less painful to live in the present.

“Good afternoon, doctor,” Gerald North said, standing.

Dr. Orpheus Preson darted at Mr. North, his whiskers vibrating. He shook hands sharply. He said, “Somebody is trying to drive me mad.” Then he sat down vigorously on the edge of a chair and looked at Mr. North.

“Insane,” Dr. Preson said. He momentarily considered. “Crazy,” he said.

“Oh,” Jerry North said. “That is—”

“Dogs to board,” Dr. Preson said. “A butler. French lessons. A pony to rent. Somebody to lay brick. A
bushelman!
” He glared at Gerald North. “Three of
them
,” he said. “
Three!
”

Gerald North sat down in his own chair. He grasped the arms of his chair and held on.

“For a week,” Dr. Preson said. “A week ago yesterday. First it was a tree surgeon. A
tree
surgeon!” He paused for a response. Mr. North gasped slightly. “I have no trees,” Dr. Preson said. “Everybody knows that. Then it was the first bushelman. Do you know—”

“Tailoring,” Mr. North said, grasping at something fleetingly tangible. “It's one of the crafts in the garment trade, I think.”

“Precisely,” Dr. Preson said. “It appeared I desired to employ a bushelman. That was last Tuesday. But there were tree surgeons left over from Monday. You see?”

“I'm afraid—” Gerald North said. His fingers strayed toward a call-button on his desk.

“Wednesday afternoon,” Dr. Preson said, “the pony and the dog to board. It seemed I had the dog but that I wanted the pony. There were still bushelmen from Tuesday, of course, and one tree surgeon. Fortunately, he telephoned.”

“I am afraid,” Gerald North said slowly, in a voice a little raised, “I am afraid, doctor, that I have no idea at all what you are talking about.” Dr. Preson started to speak. “No idea at all,” Mr. North repeated, spacing the words. “Are you feeling—that is, are you all right?”