The Death Gods (A Shell Scott Mystery) (26 page)

Dane paused. “Are you
already familiar with any of this, Shell? I can skip some of the
details, if you’re not interested in all the background or ‘color’
stuff I’ve collected.”

“
No, I’m interested. Don’t
skip. I’d heard about the famous Wintersong spinal
whatyoucallit—which, by the way he and I discussed briefly today.
I’ll fill you in on that later. I also remember some of the monkey
thing, of course, like everybody else, but I’d forgotten the guy’s
name, the doctor. Sherwood, was it? Duncan Sherwood?”

“
Yes. Even before beginning
my research for this book, I thought Dr. Sherwood’s suicide was
tragic, a waste, and a considerable loss to medical science no
matter what he’d done. But the important thing, as far as this
particular chapter about IFAI is concerned, was the profound effect
Sherwood’s death, particularly by his own hand, obviously had on
Dr. Wintersong. The two of them were very close, you
know.”

I shook my head. “Until
you mentioned it, I wasn’t even aware they’d worked in the same
hospital. And I’ve only vague memories of Sherwood’s part in that
monkey thing, bits and pieces. It must have been sixteen or
eighteen years ago when I was just a big kid starting high school
and in those days I was more interested in rah-rah football, and
finding someone with your approximate, ah, appearance to take to
the prom.”

“
Well, all of that
seventeen years ago was when I was...” She turned her head to one
side, fluttering her eyelashes. “... hardly more than a pubescent
child.”

I figured she’d spent
maybe a month and a half in puberty before leaping speedily on
through sizzling adolescence, but I kept such musings to myself.
And listened, as Dane refreshed my memory.

“
I didn’t remember very
much about it myself, Shell. But this last week I read all the
material in my files, because I knew I’d be seeing Dr. Wintersong
today. What Dr. Sherwood had done, you’ll recall, was keep a
capuchin monkey’s severed head alive for sixteen days. After many
failures, of course....”

Of course. As she spoke,
it came back to me, the newspaper reports, magazine cover stories,
praise and condemnation on the TV news. Gradually, details had
emerged. Dr. Duncan Sherwood, after years of research and hundreds
of failed experiments, had surgically severed a monkey’s head from
its body and kept the head alive for sixteen days. Some applauded
Sherwood’s “elegant” research. Among these who did not applaud,
some booed and railed and condemned, calling Sherwood everything
from a butcher to the bastard reincarnation of Adolf
Hitler.

Dane continued. “Anyway,
the Chief of Surgery at Grantland Memorial, Dr. Sherwood—he was in
his fifties then—and his brilliant young surgical star, Wintersong,
were very close, almost like father and son. So when Sherwood died,
or rather when the father-figure ended his own life—one bullet,
from a forty-five caliber gun into his right temple and on up
through his brain—it was extremely traumatic for Dr. Wintersong.
Especially since it was Wintersong, and an on-duty nurse with him,
who together, found the body. And blood, brains, pieces of skull
all over, on Sherwood’s desk, a wall, even part of the ceiling.”
She grimaced. “According to copies of police reports and photos I
have in my files.”

“
Sounds more like my
files,” I said. “So Wintersong himself found his friend’s body? And
all the yuck?”

“
Yes, him and a surgical
nurse who was with him.”

“
Do you remember her
name?”

“
I did earlier this week,
when I re-read the...” Dane half closed her eyes, a faint frown
line appearing between her brows. “Her name was...Fallon. Margaret
Fallon. The two of them were together in a hospital corridor, not
far from Dr. Sherwood’s office, and both of them actually heard the
shot. Naturally they rushed to that office and found the body.
Although he must have been terribly upset, Dr. Wintersong
immediately sent nurse Fallon to find and inform the hospital
administrator, while he phoned the police. He also had sufficient
presence of mind to keep everyone else out of the office until the
police arrived and sealed the room—other doctors and nurses had
also heard the gunshot, of course, and several of them gathered in
the hallway. If Dr. Wintersong hadn’t taken charge, so to speak,
there might have been any number of people bursting in and
disturbing the scene, I think was the phrase.”

I must have raised an
eyebrow at that last comment because she added, “I’m trying to
recall the details accurately for you, reconstructing this as best
I can from my reading of the official reports and Dr. Wintersong’s
statement to the police.”

“
And doing a good job of
it, Dane,” I said. “I’d forgotten most of the grisly details, at
least the ones I was aware of in those days, until you jogged my
memory. I didn’t even remember Wintersong was so closely associated
with Sherwood, but that must have stuck somewhere in my head.
Because I connected Wintersong somehow, without knowing why, with
monkeys.”

I paused briefly,
thinking. “But those weren’t his experimental animals, they were
Sherwood’s. Was there anything fishy about his suicide? Anything in
Sherwood’s office disturbed or missing? Did he leave a suicide
note?”

Her brows pulled down
slightly over the big green eyes, but all Dane said was, “No, there
wasn’t a note. But the previous day’s edition of the Tribune was on
his desk—the issue revealing that Dr. Sherwood had done those
previously unknown, and successful, experiments on two other
monkeys. If you remember.”

“
Yeah, I do now. One of
them survived for three weeks or so, and the other one put on life
support at the same time—other head, at least—was still alive when
Sherwood killed himself, right?”

“
Almost right. The lab in
Grantland Memorial where he’d done that...those experiments wasn’t
checked until an hour or so after his body was taken to the morgue,
and it was discovered then that the one remaining monkey was also
dead, the life-support system turned off, or whatever Dr. Sherwood
would have done to—to end it.”

“
Probably just pull a plug.
No electricity, no life, same as us people. Or light
bulbs.”

Down came those brows
again. After a second or two of what seemed like thick silence,
Dane said, “Anyway, on his desk was that issue of the Tribune, with
the front-page revelations about those two most-recent monkey-head
experiments, and next to it another section, opened to the
editorial page, where there was a box of very critical comments
from the editor. It’s assumed that after reading the front-page
story and those negative comments, maybe for the tenth time, Dr.
Sherwood went to his lab and, well, pulled the plug on his final
experiment, then returned to his office and did it. There was blood
and stuff on those pages of the newspaper.”

Dane paused, then added,
“But there wasn’t anything fishy about it, not as far as I know.
And there wasn’t anything stolen, or missing....” She stopped.
There was still a little crease between hew brows.
“Except...”

“
Except? You mean something
was swiped?”

“
No, I don’t mean that.”
Dane leaned slightly forward, as though about to say something
sharp to me, but apparently thought better of it. “It’s just that
Dr. Sherwood was noted for his habit of keeping very detailed notes
about everything he did in each of his experiments. He kept all of
those notes—handwritten in small, but neat and very legible script,
I’ve seen some of the pages—in individual leather-bound loose-leaf
notebooks. He must have had nearly a hundred of them, one for each
research project, all identical except for the title, or project
name, he burned into the spine of each notebook, so they could be
easily read when they were all lined up in a little bookcase he
had.”

“
Burned? You mean with one
of those things like a little branding iron?”

“
Yes. Probably something
like those instruments people use to make designs in leather. The
title were all short, only one word, or maybe two. A couple I
remember were ‘Euphoria’ and ‘Rejuve’—probably short for
‘Rejuvenation,’ I’d guess. Some others were just names, like ‘Pepe’
or ‘Willie’ or ‘Tommy,’ and so on.”

“
Pepe—or Willie or Tommy?
That’s curious.”

“
Why curious? They didn’t
have to mean anything special except to Dr. Sherwood. Anyway, what
I was getting to, his notes for what’s been called his last
‘monkey-head’ experiment—the one he pulled the plug on—weren’t
complete. They ended abruptly six weeks before his death, which was
unusual. There were about forty filled pages, then the notes just
stopped.”

“
This monkey notebook was
loose-leaf, like all the others?”

“
Yes, identical. Except, of
course for the name, or word, ‘Jock’ on the spine, to identify it.
My guess is that Dr. Sherwood was getting so depressed by some of
the really nasty criticism that he just didn’t feel like writing
down every—”

“
Wait a minute. What the
hell did you say?”

“
I assume he was depressed,
actually suffering from profound clinical depression, and simply
didn’t feel like—”

“
No, the subject word, the
name burned into the notebook’s spine.”

“
Jock? I told you the books
all had different identifying words that didn’t have to mean
anything except to Dr. Sherwood. Certainly I don’t know what they
stood for.”

“
I’m not sure I do, either.
But...”

I stopped, a sudden rush
of cold, almost like a tangible chill wind blowing over snow,
prickling the back of my neck.

CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN

There was a brief moment
when Dane, the booth, the softly lighted interior of the Gourmet
Room melted away, even the sounds of conversation and laughter,
clinking of silverware on white china, faded into stillness. And in
that strange quietness I was seeing again, vividly, the appealing
brown face of Jock-Jock, thick lips parted and curving into what
looked like a smile. In an odd jerky fraction of a second before
the Gourmet Room, Dane, all the rest came back from wherever they’d
gone, I saw the brown head starting to snap forward, the lips
spreading, and somewhere within my mind I actually heard the ugly
sodden sound of that mechanized hammer striking the back of
Jock-Jock’s skull.

“
Are you all right? Shell?
What’s the matter?”

I licked my lips,
surprised that they were so suddenly dry. “Nothing. I just thought
of something.” What I’d been reaching for didn’t make any sense at
all, those remembered sights and imagined sounds couldn’t have any
connection to something that had happened seventeen years ago.
“Well, where were we?” I went on. “Yeah, I wanted to mention, when
I was picturing those moments just before Sherwood shot himself, it
lined up like—sound of gunshot, Wintersong and nurse Fallon are the
first persons to reach the office, Wintersong sends the nurse for
help and then keeps everybody else out until the cops take over,
right?”

“
That’s right. Is something
bothering you?”

“
Only that the police
wouldn’t have arrived for at least five or ten minutes, maybe
longer—assuming Wintersong called the law immediately. So for at
least that long he was alone in Sherwood’s office. With the corpse,
the notebooks, whatever was in there.”

“
So? Would it have been
better to let the entire staff rush in? He’s a doctor, you know, he
understands what the police wish done in cases of unusual deaths. I
thought Dr. Wintersong showed admirable decisiveness and good
sense. Apparently you, uh, don’t agree?”

“
I’m not quite sure, Dane.
Maybe he just rubs me the wrong way. But I get the distinct
impression you’ve got more than a little admiration for the good
doctor.”

“
I do admire him, Shell, or
at least the work he’s doing. He’s not only been able to build a
brilliant second life in medical research—after being forced to
give up an outstanding career in neurosurgery, as you know—but
there can’t be anything more important that finding a cure for
IFAI, can there?”

“
Well...”

I wasn’t quite sure how to
answer that question. But my response turned out to be unnecessary
because I noticed Dane turning her head as our waiter approached
the booth, coming back with our coffee. It looked like more than
six-bucks-a-cup caffeine, however, because the guy was pushing
before him a four-wheeled cart on which were a couple of silver
bowls, a pair of tall but quite thin white cups, and two shiny
pieces of mysterious machinery.

While we waited, and
conversation lagged, our waiter brewed the brew alongside our
booth, making such a production of it that I started thinking this
stuff might be worth twelve bucks after all. He ground three or
four varieties of little beans into a fine powder, using one piece
of machinery, then dumped the result into a separate gleaming
metallic contraption and poured steaming water in on top of it. The
entire process consumed five or six minutes and produced two dinky
cups of ominous-looking brown liquid. And my ominous-looking
check.

But soon I had to admit
that it—the coffee—was worth waiting for: smooth on the tongue, not
bitter but almost as strong as just chewing the beans.