A Puzzle for fools (7 page)

"Doctor Lenz is not up yet."

"But I've got to see him."

Moreno's eyes seemed to penetrate mine, trying to read my thoughts. "Will you go back to your room alone, Mr. Duluth? Or do you want me to go with you?"

"I have no intention of going back to my room." I stood there a moment, trying to get a grip on myself. Then I added: "Something very serious has happened."

"Has it?"

"Something that only Doctor Lenz must know about Now will you let me go?"

"Listen, Mr. Duluth—"

Moreno started to humor me in his quiet, relentless fashion. Suddenly there seemed no point in holding back what I knew. Moreno would hear about it soon enough, anyhow.

"Come with me," I said grimly.

He followed me to the physio-therapy room. I unlocked the door, but I could not go near the alcove. As he pulled the curtain back, I saw his jaw drop slightly. But his voice was brisk, dangerously calm as he asked:

"When did you find this?"

I told him.

Slowly, deliberately, he took out a handkerchief and passed it across his forehead.

"Now will you let me go to Doctor Lenz?" I asked.

"We will go together," he said quietly.

I HAD A NASTY ATTACK of jitters after my interview with Doctor Lenz. They sent me to bed, and a pale and very solemn Miss Brush brought me some breakfast. After a cup of black coffee, I felt better and able to think more coherently.

But even so, nothing seemed to make sense. This horrible and utterly unexpected death only added to the confusion of those other strange incidents which the past twenty-four hours had been piling up. Last night I had known there was danger, but that danger had seemed to be connected with Daniel Laribee and Miss Brush. Fogarty had no place in that pattern. There seemed no conceivable reason why anyone should want to kill the attendant whose worst fault had been his boastfulness.

And it seemed incredible, too, that anyone had been able to murder him in that beastly way. It would have needed amazing strength—the strength of a madman, a homicidal maniac.

Maniac! I remembered the look on Lenz' face when he had said: "I feel there is someone in this sanitarium who ought not to be here." Lenz might think it the work of a madman. Yet my own instinct told me it was not. The whole thing was either too deliberately crazy or too horribly sane.

It was a relief when Miss Brush came in and suggested that I should get up.

I strolled into the library, hoping to find Geddes for a soothing game of billiards. He wasn't there. The room was deserted except for Stroubel who sat in a leather chair, staring in front of him with an ineffably sad expression his sensitive face.

The famous conductor looked up when I entered and smiled. I was surprised, for he had never paid any attention to me before. I moved to his side and he said quietly:

'This is a tragic world, Mr. Duluth. We do not realize that others beside ourselves suffer."

I was going to ask what he meant, when he lifted one of those beautifully molded hands of his.

"Last night, lying there in the darkness, I was sad. I rang for Mrs. Fogarty. When she came I saw that she had been crying. I had never thought of that. Never thought that a nurse could have sorrows like mine."

Instantly I found myself interested. It was rather pathetic to think of the grim-faced Mrs. Fogarty crying. Surprising, too.

Last night she couldn't have known what had happened to her husband. Had she, like the rest of us, heard that strange prophetic voice? I hoped Stroubel would tell me more, but at that moment Miss Brush came in and said I was wanted again in Doctor Lenz' office.

She took me there herself. As she walked briskly at my side, I glanced at her curiously. She still preserved her brightness, but I suspected her composure of being as artificial as the pinkness of her cheeks. I asked her if she had been bothered by Fenwick's little scene of the night before. Immediately her lips moved in that fixed smile of hers.

"We expect those things, Mr. Duluth. For a while Doctor Lenz felt I should be transferred to the women's wing. But we decided it was best for me to stay."

We made no reference to Fogarty.

She left me at the door of the director's office. Doctor Lenz himself was sitting behind the desk, his bearded face gloomy. Moreno was there, too; and Dr. Stevens. A couple of plain-clothes men lounged by the wall, and in the seat usually reserved for interviewed patients sat a solid individual whom Lenz introduced to me as Captain Green of the homicide bureau.
      

They seemed to take very little notice of me. Lenz explained briefly that I had discovered the body, and then continued with a discourse which my arrival had interrupted.

"As I was saying, Captain, I must make one point clear before there is any investigation in the sanitarium itself. As a citizen, I have an obligation to the State, an obligation to see that justice is done. But as a psychiatrist I have an even greater obligation, and that is to my patients. Their mental health is in my hands. I am responsible for them and I must absolutely forbid any kind of police cross-examination."

Green grunted.

"Any shock of that sort," Lenz went on, "could cause irreparable damage. Of course, Dr. Moreno and other members of the staff will do all they can in a tactful manner, but I cannot allow anything more direct than that."

Green nodded rather curtly and threw a suspicious glance at me. I suppose he took me for one of the sensitive patients in question.

Lenz seemed to read his thoughts. He assured him with a slight smile that I was a little different from the other inmates and suggested that I might prove useful.

"You can be perfectly frank in front of Mr. Duluth, Captain."

From the conversation which followed between the captain and Lenz, I gathered that Fogarty had been dead for three or four hours when I discovered him. He had last been seen when he left the social hall to go off duty. It appeared that both Mrs. Fogarty and Warren had already been questioned. They had had nothing to report and were able to account for one another's movements during the night.

Throughout this exchange of question and answer Moreno had preserved a cold silence. At length he leaned forward in his chair and said rather acidly:

"Isn't it perfectly possible that the whole thing was an accident? After all, we have no reason to believe that anyone would have wanted to murder Fogarty. I don't see why some practical joke—"

"If it was a practical joke," interrupted Green tartly, "someone around here's got a pretty queer sense of humor. If it was an accident it was a pretty queer accident And if it was deliberate murder, it's one of the cleverest jobs I ever came up against. Dr. Stevens here says it's impossible to tell when the man was put in that strait-jacket. It could have been done any time last night, and whoever did it could have established a hundred alibis."

"It's not only clever," broke in Dr. Stevens quietly. "If it was a crime, it's just about as brutal a one as you could imagine." His normally cherubic face was pale and contoured with lines. "The medical examiner and I believe that Fogarty was probably conscious up to the end. He must have been dying there in slow agony, maybe for six or seven hours. The gag kept him from calling for help and every movement he made to free himself only would have increased the pressure around his throat. It was the tightening of the towel rope, caused by the gradual constriction of his leg muscles, that eventually strangled him." He looked down at his hands. "I can only hope with Dr. Moreno that the death turns out to be the result of some unfortunate accident People have been known to tie themselves up."

"Yeah?" broke in Green impatiently. "And put a strait-jacket on themselves and then run a cord from their necks to their ankles? You'd have to be a super-Houdini to do that. No, sir. We're dealing with murder or else I'm about ready for a cure in this sanitarium."

He turned sharply to me and asked me to run through the events of my discovery in the physio-therapy room. While I spoke, he stared at me suspiciously, as though he expected at any moment to see me gibbering like an ape or climbing up the curtains. When I had finished he said:

"What did the patients think of Fogarty? Did they like him?"

I told him that the ex-champion had been popular with us all and that he was rumored to be especially popular with the ladies. He pressed me for further details and I mentioned his desire to get into show business, and also his pride in his physical strength.

"That's just the point," cried Green exasperatedly. "With a man of his physique, it would have needed at least six or seven ordinary people to get him into that strait-jacket. And yet the medical examiner and Stevens here say there's no sign of violence. The blood's been tested in your own laboratories and there's no trace of anesthetic. I don't see how it was done, unless—"

He broke off and gazed at Lenz. "This whole business seems crazy to me," he continued. "Isn't it possible that you've got someone in this sanitarium who's more dangerous than you think; some out-and-out maniac? They're supposed to have incredible strength, and maybe they'd get a sort of sadistic pleasure out of seeing a man in pain."

I watched Lenz with interest. This theory seemed to fit in so well with his remarks about a "subversive influence." To my surprise, his eyes hardened. Sadism, he explained coldly, was a common manifestation in the most normal individuals. But motiveless murder would imply an advanced condition of dementia which was most unlikely to exist in his sanitarium. He was willing to have any State alienist examine the inmates, but he did not feel it necessary.

"Because," he concluded coldly, "no homicidal maniac could have committed so deliberate a crime. When a maniac kills, it is in a moment of acute emotional disturbance. He would never have the patience to put a man in a strait-jacket and truss him up so elaborately, not even if he had the strength and the opportunity."

Green seemed unconvinced. "Even so, could any of your patients have gone to the physio-therapy room during the night without being seen?"

"I suppose so." Lenz moved a hand up and down his beard. "I do not believe in too much restriction here. With the type of patient I treat, it is essential to create the atmosphere of normality. I try to make the sanitarium seem as much like a hotel or a club as possible, they cause any disturbance, the patients are given considerable license."

"So they could have got hold of one of those strait-jackets," said Green quickly.

"No." It was Moreno who spoke. "We have only two in the institution. Both Dr. Lenz and myself consider them old-fashioned and dangerous. We do not believe in forcible coercion. The strait-jackets we have are kept for extreme emergencies. They are locked in a closet in the physio-therapy room. Only Fogarty and Warren had keys. I doubt if anyone else in the institution knew of their existence."

Suddenly there flashed into my mind the recollection of my talk the night before with the gloomy Warren.

"I suppose there's nothing to this," I suggested. "Fogarty and Warren were talking about taking a tumble with each other. Maybe they used the strait-jacket as a trial of strength and, as Doctor Moreno suggests, there was an accident"

A quick glance passed between Lenz and Moreno.

"Yes," said Stevens urgently, "surely some explanation of that sort would be more satisfactory."

Green grunted noncommittally. He asked me a few more questions and then said:

"There's another possibility. Mr. Duluth here mentioned that Fogarty was popular with the women. Apparently it was impossible for a man to have tied him up against his will, but a woman might have persuaded him to put the strait-jacket on himself. You say he was proud of his strength. It would be easy to get him to show off. And once he was in the jacket, even a woman could manage the rest."

Immediately I thought of Fogarty's little act with Miss Brush the day before; the act which had ended so sensationally with the intrusion of young Billy Trent. I could tell that Moreno remembered it, too, for his dark cheeks flushed slightly. Before I could make up my mind whether or not to mention it, he said abruptly:

"Mr. Duluth is still suffering from the shock of his discovery, and excitement is not good for him. Unless the captain wants to ask him any more questions, I feel he should be excused."

Green shrugged and Dr. Lenz nodded agreement. As Moreno crossed to my side, I couldn't help wondering at his eagerness to get me out of the room. And that wasn't the only thing that puzzled me. Lenz knew as well as I that strange things had been going on in the sanitarium. He himself had first called my attention to them. And yet he seemed to have made no attempt to tell Green.

Moreno conducted me to the door and paused on the threshold.

"Of course," he said curtly, "you will tell none of the other patients about this, Mr. Duluth. And you mustn't think too much about it yourself. You are not a normal man yet, you know."

AS I stepped out into the corridor, I heard Dr. Stevens* voice from the room behind me.

"If you gentlemen can do without me, I'll be getting back to surgery. I'll be there if you need me."

He hurried out of the room and joined me in the passage. As we walked away in silence, I had the distinct impression that he wanted to ask me something. He proved me right by exclaiming with rather forced heartiness:

"Well, Duluth, that's a bad way to begin the day, but the old schedule must go on. How about coming to the surgery with me? We can get your daily check-up done."

I agreed and followed him to the surgery, one of those gleaming, hygienic places with white painted closets and glass-topped tables. There's something about a surgery that always intimidates me. The smell of antiseptic, the gleaming knives in the glass cabinets, the rolls of bandages, remind one with unpleasant force of one's inevitable exit. I sat down in a hard shiny chair and watched Stevens pace restlessly up and down, his hands clasped behind his back. With his plump pink cheeks and china blue eyes he looked like a large cherub giving an impudent imitation of an agitated doctor.