Dead as a Dinosaur (15 page)

Dr. Agee shook his head. He said he wished he could.

The telephone on Dr. Agee's desk rang. Agee answered it, said, “Just a minute, please,” and, “Is one of you Acting Captain Weigand?” Weigand nodded and took the telephone.

“The commissioner wants us to handle it,” Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O'Malley said. “Says we started it. Says we dropped it. Says he'd like to see us pick it up pronto. Says the newspapers—”

“Yes, inspector,” Bill Weigand said.

“So don't drop it again,” Inspector O'Malley said. “Got to rely on you.”

“Yes, inspector,” Bill Weigand said.

“And for God's sake, keep those Norths out of it,” Inspector O'Malley told him.

“Yes, inspector,” Bill said. He hung up.

“The commissioner wants Homicide West—” Bill began, and the man from the other side of Manhattan grinned at him.

“Hell,” he said, “I heard him. One thing about O'Malley, you can hear him. I must say you're welcome to it.” He shook his head. “A stone axe, for God's sake,” he said.

He was told he sounded like Inspector O'Malley. Bill took Mullins with him and went to find Dr. Albert James Steck. He found Steck working at a table full of ancient bones. Steck rumbled at him. He rumbled that he had already told somebody all he knew, which was nothing.

Bill Weigand was sorry. He realized they were repetitious. He wouldn't be long.

He was not long. Dr. Steck had worked late the night before. He had been visited; about seven or a little after, by the director, who was looking for Landcraft. Steck had not seen Landcraft.

“Saw him a while ago,” Steck said. “Damned nasty thing.”

It was, Bill Weigand agreed. Dr. Steck had no idea what Landcraft had wanted to see the director about.

“Something to tell him, Agee said,” Steck said. “That's all I know. I don't know what about. Agee did say something about an expedition we've got coming up, but it couldn't be that. Nothing to do with Landcraft, who hasn't been around in years. You've asked Agee?”

They had. Steck said he would bet they had.

“You stayed around a bit after Dr. Agee left?” Weigand asked him.

“Ten minutes,” Dr. Steck said. “Perhaps a quarter of an hour.”

“You went straight from here? I mean from your office? You didn't go anywhere else in the building?”

“I went across the hall to Preson's old office,” Steck said. “They may want to move me in there. It's always been the curator's. I wanted to see whether they had cleared poor old Preson's personal stuff out of it. They hadn't.”

“You're taking over as curator?” Bill asked him.

Dr. Steck was.

“By the way,” Bill Weigand said, “did you feel Dr. Preson had been acting strangely lately?”

“Not around here,” Dr. Steck said. He was emphatic, in a heavy, rumbling voice. “Whatever anybody says. I told this publisher fellow that.”

Jerry North went to his office briefly and returned to the apartment to pick up Pam for lunch. Pam North was in the kitchen. She had a saucer with a little water in it, and into the water she was crushing aspirin tablets. Three cats sat on the table and looked at her with round blue eyes. Jerry North joined them, his eyes almost as round, if not so blue.

“New recipe?” he enquired, gently. “I'd rather thought we would lunch out.”

Pamela North said hello. She said, “I got to wondering why they weren't and remembered they were.” She had reduced several aspirin tablets to a watery paste. “The trouble is,” she said, “they keep on crinkling up.”

“Well,” Jerry said, “they often do, you know.”

She stopped. She turned.

“The labels,” Pam North said. “I thought it was the stickem. I wondered, why not Dennison's. Then I remembered Bill said they were Dennison's. So I wondered, suppose it wasn't really in the milk.”

She waited. Jerry looked at her, which was pleasant; at the saucer of aspirin paste and then at a box of gummed labels on the table. He said he'd be damned. Pamela, back at her task, nodded abstractedly. She pushed away a cat which, mistakenly believing a special cat delicacy to be in preparation, moved forward to sample. Pam took a label from the box and sloshed it, mucilage side down, in the aspirin broth. She put it aside.

“The trouble is, they crinkle,” she said. “I suppose this isn't the right way to do it.”

Jerry thought of another objection. “The taste,” Jerry North said. “Or doesn't phenobarbital taste?”

“A little bitter,” Pam said. “I looked it up. I wish we
had
some phenobarbital. But the stickem—here, taste.” She gave Jerry a label out of the little box. He licked. What Pam preferred to call the stickem was highly flavored. It was a flavor which would absorb considerable bitterness.

“I can get all of a tablet on five labels,” Pam said. “It says they're five grains each, so that's a grain to a label.”

“Some of it's starch or something,” Jerry said. “Whatever the aspirin people use. Inert material. Phenobarbital's—” He paused.

“White crystalline powder,” Pam told him. “Odorless and stable in the air, it says. I think you can get it in tablets. I suppose mixed with something, the way you say. I wonder if—Jerry, suppose we used a small paint brush? Maybe they wouldn't crinkle up afterward. This way, they get wet all over, and that wastes some of it, too.”

They had no small paint brush. Jerry went out and bought one. He mixed them a round of martinis, for sustenance until lunch, and they tried it with the small paint brush—a brush such as a child might use to paint in water color a picture of a cow. It worked much better with a brush. They painted the mucilage sides of a dozen labels, and drank martinis while the labels dried.

They were still not quite as they had been; still a little crinkled. The stickem showed a granular white deposit. But, dried and stacked together neatly, they did not look much changed. Picked up, one at a time, stickem side down, and written on, the labels showed no change to a person not expecting change, or so Pam and Jerry North decided. When a label was taken up and licked, with the gummed side held down in preparation for the tongue, as was not only natural but almost inevitable, the white deposit on the mucilage was invisible. On the tongue, the acidity of aspirin was lost in the flavor of the stickem.

“Stick some on something,” Pam said. “We haven't got any bones, I'm afraid. On anything. Except a cat, of course.”

It was evident that she had already tried that part, but Jerry North was obedient. He stuck a label on the handle of a knife and another on the linoleum of a kitchen counter and another on the outside of a cocktail glass. The last did not even momentarily adhere, since the glass was damp. The other two seemed to stick; in applying them, one could feel adhesion. There was nothing abnormal, either to sight or sense of touch. But as it dried, the label on the knife handle fell off and that on the linoleum curled up at the edges.

“They'd do better on bones, probably,” Pam said. “Bones are sort of porous. But you see, something happens to the stickem. It gets diluted, I suppose. Part of it washes off.”

Jerry nodded, abstractedly. A grain to a label; say the licking tongue got three-quarters of a grain. Then from a dozen labels they had done, nine grains of aspirin might have been absorbed. Or—nine grains of phenobarbital. They went to a toxicology they had bought soon after they had, a number of years ago, met one Lieutenant William Weigand of Homicide.

It is true of all but a few poisons that toxic doses are variable and lethal ones even more so. Poisoners have been plagued by this fact for generations; carefully laid plans have gone astray because one person will die of a gram of this or that while another—and perhaps the very person most in need of killing—will take the same quantity and feel little the worse. A variety of circumstances enter into this, and a few of them are predictable—tolerance can be established to a variety of noxious substances, for example, and sometimes a hearty meal taken beforehand will reprieve the condemned man. But inherent susceptibility, which cannot be predicted, also enters in. Phenobarbital is, in its effects, variable. Less than a gram has caused death; people have recovered from ten times as much.

It appeared from the course of events that Dr. Orpheus Preson had taken a good deal of phenobarbital. It appeared to Pam and Jerry North, from the experiments they had just concluded, that he might have got a good deal. Jerry got paper and pencil and figured. Say three-quarters of a grain to a label; say—this he had to look up—15.4 plus grains to the gram. Say, then, twenty labels to the gram. (Pam, working simultaneously on the long division, came up first, gratifyingly, with two labels. Jerry, briefly, explained a matter of decimal points.) Say, to make it easy, he had had time to write a word on, lick, attach, sixty labels. It could easily have been enough; it began to look as if it had been enough.

And it began to look, inescapably, like murder. If Dr. Preson had wished to poison himself, fatally or otherwise, he would hardly have spent several hours applying a barbiturate to the mucilage side of labels so that he might subsequently lick it off. As Pam pointed out, there are limits even to insanity. He had had milk to put phenobarbital into and—

“But,” Jerry said, “so would a murderer have had.”

They were at lunch by then, the debris of experimentation left behind. Pam shook her head decisively and then had to say, “Oh, not you,” to a waiter who, approaching, had shied away. The waiter came closer, a little doubtfully, and was instructed.

“No,” Pam said, then. “We've been over that. Dr. Preson brought the milk in himself. He could hardly be expected, anyway, to drink milk which had been standing around in his refrigerator, because he had discovered what happened to that. That was the first time the murderer tried, I suppose.” She paused at this, and looked doubtful. “They say there wasn't enough in the milk, though,” she said. She brightened. “Probably went home and looked it up,” she said. “Anyway, milk was out the second time.”

Nevertheless, Jerry said, there was phenobarbital in the milk the second time.

“Of course,” Pam said, “to make it look like suicide. Put in afterward—I mean, after Dr. Preson had licked the labels.” She stopped again, and this time seemed to look through Jerry. “About the first time,” she began, “I wonder if—” She stopped again. “I don't really know what I wonder,” she said. “It's on the tip of my mind, but it keeps sliding off. It—” She gave up with a shrug and finished her drink in time for
canneloni
. The
canneloni
tasted somewhat of mucilage.

The
New York Post
, which is of tabloid size, can devote the whole of its front page to a headline and this day it did. “Cave-Man Axe Used in Slaying!” the
Post
announced. The Norths, having left the restaurant and walked to Madison Avenue, bought a copy of the
Post
and, as instructed, saw Page 3. They saw that “Dr. Jesse Landcraft, retired scientist, was found brutally murdered today in an exhibit enclosure at Broadly Institute, his head crushed by repeated blows from a stone-age axe which had formed part of the exhibit. The blood-stained axe, said by Institute authorities to be many thousands of years old, had been wrenched from the central figure of the exhibit, the model of a cave man. Dr. Landcraft's body lay at the cave man's feet.”

It was, as Pam said automatically, dreadful. It also, the Norths decided—as O'Malley and Bill Weigand had decided some hours earlier; as the
Post
was to decide in its next edition—was, had to be, a violent sequel to the quieter death of Dr. Orpheus Preson. (“The police link,” the
Post
was to say, when the
Post
thought of it.) The Norths found a telephone booth and called Homicide West. They did not find either Weigand or Mullins there. They left word. They went home by subway, since it was quicker—and in spite of Pam North's conviction that it is unnatural to travel below ground—and tried again to get Bill Weigand at Homicide West. As they hung up the telephone, they got Bill at the front door of their own apartment.

“Landcraft's been killed,” he said. He looked at them. They were nodding. They showed him the
Post
.

“It means somebody killed Preson,” Bill said. “But of course you see that.”

“We think we know how,” Pam said. “We were trying to get you.”

“Right,” Bill said. “They told me. You think what?”

“We've worked out how Dr. Preson was killed,” Pam said. “It wasn't the milk. The milk was a red herring.”

“The—” Bill said. “Oh. You're talking about the barbital?”

“You dissolve it,” Pam said. “Suspend it, maybe. Anyway, in water. Then you—”

She told him of her experiment. Once or twice at the start Bill seemed about to interrupt her. As she went on, he listened more intently. At the end he moved his head slowly, in tentative agreement.

“It's going the long way around,” he said. “But—”

“So are midgets,” Pam North said. “Bushelmen, for that matter. The whole thing's going the long way around. Dr. Preson persecuting himself, if he was. Or somebody trying to drive him crazy. Shetland ponies. Repeated blows with a cave-man axe. Who was going the long way around to where? That's what it comes to.”

Bill Weigand knew it did. His face showed it; he said it. Without too much urging, Bill sat down. He refused a drink, but admitted that coffee was a good idea. “I'm supposed to keep you two out of it,” he said. “O'Malley tells me I am.”

“As usual,” Pam said, and Bill said, “Right.”

“So,” Bill said, “here's the setup.”

He had, he said, just come from the Broadly Institute. The
Post
account was generally right, although Landcraft had been hit only twice, which had been plenty. Landcraft apparently had been intercepted by his murderer while on his way to tell something to Dr. Agee—presumably to tell him that the Presons now planned to contest Dr. Preson's will.