The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck (9 page)

“Don’t know, Dave. They’ve got her upstairs pumped full of morphia. She was throwing hysterics when they brought her in.”

I asked when that was. Daisy looked at a card, and said, “Two-twenty A.M., about fifteen minutes after you and Dr. Alling arrived, feet first.”

“Where was she when the fight started?” I asked.

“Out for a walk. She hadn’t been out of the house in ten days, Dr. Alling said. He was bawling you out for that, sweetheart. He told her to walk around for half an hour or so, even if it was after midnight.”

“How did Dr. Alling himself happen to be there just then, Daisy?”

“He attended Mike yesterday morning, as you know, so he was the logical one for her to call, wasn’t he?”

“How did you know he was there yesterday morning?” I asked. “He wasn’t summoned by phone, that time.”

“It’s my business to know where doctors are, my boy, no matter how they’re summoned. I phoned him at Wyck’s that a symmelus had been born, and he said he’d be right over. But when it took him twenty-five minutes to get from Wyck’s to here, with a live monster to see, I knew he’d been dragged somewhere in between.”

“He’s right about one thing,” I confessed. “He thinks you’re a smart girl, the way you keep track of doctors.”

“I have been till this morning. You don’t happen to know where Dr. Gideon Wyck is, do you?”

Perhaps I only imagined that she was watching me narrowly, in spite of her casual tone. I’m afraid I hesitated before admitting, “No, I don’t. Why?”

“His daughter’s been making very innocent-sounding calls around town to give anybody a chance to explain why her papa didn’t come home at all last night.”

“Oh, he’s an old night-owl anyway,” I remarked quickly.

“Yes, but it’s nearly eleven in the morning now.”

Dr. Wyck’s words, spoken to Muriel on the bridge, flashed back into my mind: “It makes no difference, so far as I’m concerned, after tonight.” Had he felt certain that some well-merited revenge, which he had called down upon his own head, was due? Had he deliberately disappeared, because of that, from the scene of some secret crime? Had he— I was plagued by the insane notion that the soul of Gideon Wyck, having exhausted its proper body, had seized upon the healthy one of poor Mike Connell.

Muriel’s safe return made it seem altogether unlikely that the old doctor had been kept from returning by a mere accident to the car. I wanted to ponder more upon these matters, however, before saying anything to Muriel; and I knew that it was good sense to do my pondering elsewhere than under the shrewd eyes of Daisy Towers.

When I got home I found a note from Dr. Alling pinned to the door. It merely advised that I spend the day resting. But all day long fellows kept dropping in for a first-hand description of the fight. Toward evening they all spoke of Dr. Wyck’s disappearance.

Mickey Rehan summed up the prevailing sentiment when he smiled broadly and said, “Hope he died with considerable pain.”

Between visits, I made a careful record of all the events of the preceding day or two that seemed to ebar upon the mysteries of Mike’s symptoms and of Wyck’s disappearance. I knew that Muriel and the boy Ted were implicated in some fashion, and that the old farmer, Tompkins, had had unusually good reasons for hating an already well hated man. Prendergast’s petition, which had proved such a boomerang, also made it possible to think that Dick might have something to do with the doctor’s disappearance, of only as a prankish kind of revenge.

Dick’s landlady stopped in to inquire about Biddy and said that he had not come home at all the night before. Later she called again, to inform me that Prendergast had turned up with his uncle, early in the afternoon, to pack all his belongings, pay his rent for the balance of the year, and leave town.

I told her that Daisy ha phoned, just before going off duty for the day, to say that Biddy was all right and might be home next morning. Mike, she said, had ceased his raving and had lapsed into a deep sleep.

The last of my visitors was Jarvis, one of the few thorough-going admirers of the hard-boiled old doctor. He was without question the best student in the medical school, a fearfully conscientious bird; and his own frail health had given him a morbid complex, half defiant and half apologetic, when in the presence of normal people. He got a kind of joy out of taking the blame for anything that went wrong in group work, and then demonstrating by subsequent efficiency that it could not have been he who was at fault. I suppose it was exhibitionism; but it had become so much a habit that he had actually come to talk with me about the possibility that his, Jarvis’s, own conduct in the matter of Prendergast’s cribbing and the petition at faculty meeting might have been the cause of Wyck’s vanishing.

When he at last departed, I got out my shorthand diary again and read over the account for the last two days. Only one thing was plain. I had to decide at once whether I should confess my knowledge of Gideon Wyck’s whereabouts, after he left the faculty meeting. Perhaps he had belatedly realized the full extent to which his presence was complicating things for Prexy, had repented his insistence upon attending the faculty meeting, and had decided that a prompt job of vanishing would be to everyone’s advantage, including his own. If he had committed suicide, the world might be happier if whatever deviltry he had been up to remained undiscovered.

Finally (for it never occurred to me that kidnapping was the answer to the mystery) there was the very reasonable likelihood that he had been murdered. If so, Muriel Finch seemed the likeliest suspect. The boy Ted might have had as good an excuse, or better, for hating him; but I knew from Muriel’s own statements that she had both feared and loathed him, for a cause too awful to mention. Mere sexual attentions, in the case of that easygoing young woman, were insufficient to account for the extreme nature of her reaction. Perhaps he had made her an agent to some loathsome kind of perversion; perhaps he was a modern manifestation of the Marquis de Sade, whose works I had seen on his own bookshelves. If that were true, it seemed to me that I had no right whatever to pass judgment upon any means that Muriel might have taken to free herself.

If anyone in authority had questioned me, I would have told what I knew at once. But if the reader censures me for not having reported to the police, I ask him to remember that as yet we had not definite knowledge that anything was seriously amiss. It was two days later before the authorities were officially informed of the doctor’s disappearance, and longer than that before we got any definite clue to hint at what had happened to him.

I was influenced more than anything else by the difficulty of explaining my sudden entrance, torn and bleeding, long after midnight, at Mike’s bedside. Dr. Alling had been astonished by my appearance. If Gideon Wyck had been murdered that very night, on the lonely hillside up which I had followed him, how could I clear myself of suspicion? Only by involving Muriel and the boy Ted. And what would my single voice be worth, in testimony, against both of theirs? It might so happen that they were possessed of perfect alibis, and I knew that I had no convincing alibi at all, during those hours on the hillside. I began to hope that Gideon Wyck was still alive. Muriel’s expression of happiness, when I saw her in the hospital, had not seemed like that of a murderess. I decided to wait, and not make a fool of myself.

For all I knew, Dr. Alling might have set people to watch my reactions and to report upon my movements. Just to play safe, I hid my diaries in my mattress, and for several days did nothing whatever outside the usual routine of work. I did no want to betray myself by too much of a change of manner, so I continued to stop for a few words with Daisy every day; but I was careful about what I said to her.

At last the awaited event happened, a week after the mysterious night. On the morning of the 11th of April, 1932, Marjorie Wyck received by parcel post a bundle containing every item of clothing worn by her father when he was last seen. Nothing which he might have been supposed to have had on his person seemed on first examination to be missing. The linen had been immaculately laundered, the socks washed, the shoes polished. The woolen garments, moreover, smelt so strongly of cleaning fluid that they presumably had been dry-cleaned just before mailing. This left us with two likely assumptions: either Gideon Wyck had been disposed of by a cleverly insolent murderer or else the sending of his clothes was a symbol that for good reasons of his own he was discarding his former identity and disappearing deliberately from among his old acquaintances.

One curious sidelight on Gideon Wyck’s disappearance was the tacit willingness of everyone concerned to do nothing whatever about it. His absence was looked upon as good riddance. But the delivery of the bundle of clothing of course brought the authorities into action. Hos Creel, the postman, described the beginning of the investigation to a group of us on the school steps.

“Made out like I didn’t think it nothin’ special,” he explained. “ ‘Hull darned new outfit, here,’ I says, ‘from the heft of it.’ ‘Hope so,’ she says, just like that, ‘but who’d be a-sendin’ me one?’ Took it brave too. Lots o’ starch in that girl. Right away she says, ‘Don’t ye tetch ’em, Hos. Don’t lay even a finger on ’em.’ The sheriff comes and says, ‘Ye did right, not to tetch ’em. Fingerprints.’ And he wraps the whole bundle, paper and all, in another paper. ‘Hos,’ he says to me, ‘you got an important part in this case.’ Wal, I told him back to help find where the parcel was mailed from. And then the postmaster comes snoopin’ in, o’ course, and takes the case out o’ my hands, he not having’ had a smitch to do with it. Wal, that’s how it goes, boys. The higher-ups allus takes the credit.”

Next day the
Alton Weekly Clarion
 came out with its first scarehead in years, the finding that whoever had packed the bundle had left not a trace of a fingerprint on anything except the inside back cover of the doctor’s watch, which bore on its burnished gold surface a perfect impression of a man’s thumb. It was so carefully done that it must have been put there either in derision or as a move to put the searchers on the wrong track.

Now that the case had become an open and generally discussed mystery, however, it seemed the right time to risk a talk with Muriel. She was still on the night shift, and I did not want to hang around, suspiciously, waiting to catch her by chance. It would be more natural to try phoning at various hours. I purposefully confined the calls to hours after seven o’clock, when Daisy went off duty.

After a few days, I paused to pass the time of day with Daisy. She asked, “How’s the love affair coming along?” I inquired what she meant, and she said, “Don’t be that way. I mean the sudden infatuation for Nurse Finch.”

“I haven’t even caught a glimpse of her in days,” I had the wit to answer promptly.

“That may be, but you’ve certainly worked the telephone hard in her direction.”

“Where did you get that idea?” I asked, remembering the care with which I had confined my calls to hours after seven o’clock.

“Thought you were fooling me, did you?” she countered. “If any of my rivals captures the champion woman-hater, it won’t be by way of my switchboard.”

“Not much evidence so far that she’s trying to,” I answered, with a mock sigh. “Good chance for you to chisel in, Daisy.”

“Not till you elevate your tastes a bit,” she replied.

“No kidding,” I said, “how did you get the idea that I had been ‘working the telephone’?”

She shoved a little black desk machine toward me. A long roll of paper in it wound through a kind of little window, and a push of a button shifted it one space.

“New system,” she said. “They’ve got us keeping track of all calls, even the locals, on this.”

“Since when?” I Asked, full of a sudden alarm at the thought that this might be part of a detective system set up to aid in solving the mystery of Dr. Wyck’s disappearance; but she reassured me by saying, “Since the first of the month.” It was on the night between the 3rd and 4th that he had disappeared.

“So that’s how you spend your time,” I said, “scouting for scandal through the back end of the tape.”

“Uh-huh. Lots of fun. Very convenient, too. All the private houses have four-digit numbers, and all the medical school phones have three, and all the hospital ones two.”

“What’s Connells’?” I asked quickly.

“One-one-one-eight. You didn’t honestly think I’d fail to keep that number next to my heart, did you, David?”

I decided to be a lot more careful about my phoning in the future. For some time Muriel continued successful in what could not have been anything other than a deliberate attempt to avoid meeting me.

Meahwhile, I had been spared through all the first week the necessity of confronting Dr. Alling. A visiting surgeon had asked Prexy to come to Boston for some kind of harangue, which he did. I heard a few caustic remarks about this, because the doctor in question was Vladimir, the Hungarian skin-grafting specialist; and the more orthodox members of our staff thought it beneath Prexy’s proper dignity to truckle with a person who made his living by rejuvenating old rakes at ten to fifty thousand dollars a throw, with monkey glands.

Some of our doctors would have been still more shocked had they known that the monkey gland business was precisely what Prexy was interested in, for a chapter in the
Short Sketch.

He returned on the 10th, and phoned me in the evening that he would want to resume our usual work the following afternoon. But it was in the morning mail of the 11th that Dr. Wyck’s clothes were delivered, and this fact sent Prexy back to Boston again with Dr. Kent, the coroner, on the theory that Dr. Wyck might have been an amnesia victim, who had been jerked up by the Boston police.

The theory prove false, and they were back again on the 13th. That afternoon, Dr. Alling phoned to say that he wanted to see me at five o’clock. I was possessed at once by an irrational feeling of panic.

Dr. Alling was seated at his desk. “Weird business about Wyck, isn’t it?” he remarked, eyeing me quizzically.

I prepared for the worst, nodded, and asked whether he had discovered anything of importance in Boston.