The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck (32 page)

“We approve and accept the coroner’s recommendation that a bill of indictment be drawn up and presented to a grand jury of Alton County, accusing Manfred Alling of Altonville, Maine, of causing the death of the said Gideon Wyck by piercing the skin of the neck and severing the spinal cord with a sharp instrument. In support of this recommendation we present the accompanying analysis made by Coroner Kent of the testimony of the said Manfred Alling.”

I had taken it for granted that Dr. Alling would extricate himself by some clever maneuver. There was a kind of relief in the discovery that he had not been able to do so; but I had yet to find out whether there would still be a charge against me as accessory.

After a bit of fumbling, the foreman read the coroner’s analysis of Dr. Alling’s testimony—a document which seemed to show by impeccable logic that no positive evidence had been adduced to prove that the kymograph and Dr. Alling’s watch had been in synchronism in fact. The kymograph record—a cylinder of smoked paper—had allegedly been signed just before it was started, by Dr. Wyck himself, with a notation agreeing with that in the dead man’s letter. The coroner argued, however, that this signature was a forgery. I have since seen it, and it certainly does not agree with Wyck’s signature appended to the letter that very night; but it should be remembered that signing one’s name on an upright cylinder, with a metal implement rather than a pen, and on a surface which would be smudged by a touch of any part of the signer’s hand, would logically produce a distorted signature anyway.

Be that as it may, the coroner’s charge to the jury argued that Alling had impulsively inflicted the neck wound to make sure that Wyck would really be out of the way, and then had hurried to the Connells’ for the specific purpose of establishing an alibi. The letter left by Wyck, admittedly genuine, had suggested to Dr. Alling that all he need do was to induce some kind of violent reaction in Connell, perhaps with the aid of a drug, and then forge a new kymograph record in such a manner that it would seem to have fluctuated violently at the same time as the seizure of supposed madness in Connell.

As I heard this opinion, several objections arose in my mind. If Alling had wanted a witness, why had he deliberately sent Biddy away? Had he taken the chance that I might be upstairs, or might come in just in time? He might have sent Biddy away in order to administer the alleged drug that had caused the reaction. But a doctor would not have to make excuses for giving a patient medicine. Moreover, there was nothing temporary about Mike’s ultimate madness.

The foreman was fumbling with another paper. It proved to be a deposition signed by ten doctors on the hospital staff, all unanimously agreeing that “there is no basis whatever, either in the history of medicine or in that of psychological hypotheses, for supposing that the death of one person might produce a maniacal seizure in another, in a remote place, under any circumstances, general or special.”

The jury’s findings then concluded with the recommendation that I, David Saunders, be held as a material witness, or as an accomplice before or after the fact, or both, at the grand jury’s discretion, or the specific assumption that I had deliberately aided Manfred Alling in the establishment of his alibi. Thus things remained about where they had been for me, midway between extreme danger and freedom.

The announcement, made before all witnesses in the main lecture hall, was greeted by a painful silence, into which the voice of the county prosecutor broke harshly.

“This report has been read to all of you,” he said, “for the purpose of discovering whether in the opinion of any witnesses it fails to concur with his own knowledge of the facts from which the findings are adduced.”

I started, as I heard from the back of the room the voice of Daisy Towers, saying, “I, for one, have reason to believe that the findings are grossly in error. I have vital evidence that has been entirely ignored.”

“Why did you not give it?” the prosecutor asked.

“I was questioned only about certain telephone calls, sir, concerned with a part of the hearing that had no connection with what I refer to. Would you like to have my evidence now?”

The prosecutor looked pointedly at Coroner Kent, who said, “I consider the findings adequate for an indictment. I suggest that any further evidence be taken in a private hearing, or before the grand jury itself.”

“I beg your pardon,” Daisy said, “but my evidence is visual in part. I insist that I be given the protection afforded by numerous witnesses.”

With an inquiring look toward Kent, and then at the foreman, who nodded, the prosecutor mad his decision:

“With all deference to your prerogative, Dr. Kent, I recommend that the hearing be reopened. If you object, I can hold an additional hearing on my own authority, commencing at once.”

“That is quite unnecessary,” Dr. Kent said coldly. “The hearing is reopened. Miss Towers, you may give your testimony before all these witnesses, if you so desire.”

“I must give it in another part of the building, and in a rather cramped setting,” she explained. “I would rather choose six or eight whom I think I can trust to be intelligent and to have accurate memories.”

The prosecutor nodded. She pointed quickly to several of the witnesses. As an apparent afterthought, she said, “I think it would be well to have the accused also present, in case any questions need to be answered on the spot.”

The group filed up the stairs behind her, and stopped opposite the door of Dr. Wyck’s office. Dramatically she threw it open. A scream escaped from the throat of Marjorie Wyck, standing next to me, as we saw, slouched down limply on the desk, the figure of a man who seemed to be her father. I realized that it must be a dummy. The fact that the head was cushioned on one arm, with the face averted, made it, however, an excellent illusion.

Before anyone had a chance to recover from the first shock of astonishment, Daisy jumped into the room, picked up a scalpel from the desk, and walked toward us, holding it arm’s length. “All right, Prendergast,” she said, in a tone of complete assurance, “show us how you did it.”

I glanced quickly at Dick, who wore an expression of what might have been honest amazement.

“Don’t bluff,” she said, rapping her words out smartly now, “I know why you got your uncle drunk in such a hurry, down at Shoulder Lake, and left him gassing with the manager while you slipped out on the terrace of room 109. I know that you ran over to the garage and got your uncle’s car. It was a duplicate of Dr. Kent’s which made it unlikely that anyone would recognize you in it, back here in Altonville. And it was a clever yarn you gave the garage man, with a ten-dollar tip. You told him to keep your secret, because you had a rather intimate kind of date with a nurse, going off duty at midnight. That was clever. A good guy wouldn’t tell on you, in a case like that—or so you thought, didn’t you. That was about quarter to one in the morning. You made the run to Altonville in forty minutes. Fast going, Prendergast. Now, what was it that you really wanted? Do you mind telling us?”

The color had left Dick’s face, during this rapid monologue. For several tense seconds Daisy waited, and then continued, “You’d rather not say? Well, I rather think it was because your uncle had promised you that there would be a legitimate investigation and you wanted to get those blue books into your hands. A transcript wouldn’t satisfy the legislators. They’d want the original documents. So you were going to blackmail them out of Wyck, by offering to hold up the investigation. You were headed for his house. But, coming up from the south, you could see the light in his office window. So you stopped in here, and found Wyck just like that, didn’t you?”

She turned and pointed to the dummy.

“And the scalpel was here, where he kept it as a letter opener. And something went pop in your head, Prendergast, and the next thing you knew, you’d cut his spinal cord. You’d murdered Gideon Wyck.”

The word “murdered” seemed to shock Dick out of his uncertainty.

“I didn’t,” he cried. “It’s a lie! He’d taken poison. The letter said so. He was dead already.”

“The letter you read
after
you’d knifed him? The letter that told you what a fool you’d been?” Daisy asked, almost too cruelly, I thought, until I remembered that Prendergast had so far been willing to let someone else pay for his crime.

He had gone hysterical, standing in the center of the accusing circle of witnesses. “He did leave a letter on his desk,” he screamed. “Where is it? Who’s got it? It proves I’m innocent. He was dead already.”

But the kymograph record and the original post-mortem examination both showed that Gideon Wyck had died of a knife wound, inflicted before sufficient poison had been absorbed to cause death.

Later, when I asked Daisy why she had never told me about her special job of sleuthing for Dr. Alling, down at Shoulder Lake, she kissed me and said, “Because you’re much too diligent. You’d probably have trailed Prendergast around, or searched his rooms the way you searched Alling’s house, and you’d have ended up scaring him to Europe again.”

Remembering the way I had bungled the trip to New York, I could hardly blame her; so I asked, “What made you still suspect Dick, after we knew his alibi, and had his fingerprints?”

“It was a sheer hunch of Alling’s,” she said, “from the way Prendergast had behaved the next morning, when he drove his uncle back for another short conference. Alling lost faith in his own hunch, after he’d checked up the alibi last fall. But he told me about it reminiscently, and I had another try, and succeeded in vamping the garage man.”

I don’t believe that an Alton County grand jury will find any indictment against Dr. Alling, if they are as chary as usual with true bills on which to waste the state’s funds in a probably useless prosecution. Kent, it has turned out, had an ironclad alibi all the while. He had been called down to Augusta immediately after the faculty meeting to attend an important post-mortem on a body so badly decomposed that no further delay was permissible.

Ted Gideon has been sent to join Mike at the asylum; and, as for poor Dick Prendergast, he will plead temporary insanity. His improved record during this school year and his obvious belief that the impulsive act had not been the true cause of Wyck’s death ought to aid in procuring for him a lenient verdict.

I have now to decide whether I should send this ending to my narrative, to join the main part—and it seems best to do so. I was a fool ever to mail the first part at all. But its contents by now are known to some readers. Any effort to stop it probably would bring only added publicity. For better of for worse, the first part of the story is out, and it is best for the exact nature of the conclusion also to be known. If it passes for fiction, I shall be pleased indeed.

David Saunders