Dead as a Dinosaur (16 page)

“We knew that,” Pam said, and told how.

“Why do you suppose they made such a point of telling us?” Jerry asked. “All altruism?”

Bill Weigand shook his head wearily. He wasn't sure of anything; had too many theories about everything.

“Now this business of the labels—” he said and, so reminded, reached for a telephone. He made two calls: One to the medical examiner's office. Query: How much phenobarbital in Preson's body? One to Mullins at the Institute. Instructions: Find the labels which had fallen off Preson's bones and hold on to them. He gave the Norths' number each time. He sipped coffee and talked, to the Norths and to himself.

Jesse Landcraft must have had more on his mind than the knowledge that the Preson family planned to contest the will. That was information dangerous to nobody. What he had known was dangerous; he had been intercepted because it was dangerous, and killed because of that. There the pattern was classic. But the point was, “Why go to Agee?” Because Agee was the murderer? That, also, fitted the common pattern. That was simple.

“The trouble is,” Pam said, “the rest isn't. Did you ever try to wrap up a toy?”

Then they both looked at her.

“Oh,” Pam said. “Anything with things sticking out. Points and things. A—oh, a contraption. That's what we're trying to do. But we don't even know the shape. So how can we wrap it up in Dr. Agee?” She paused. “Anyway,” she said, “I keep thinking of Dr. Steck, really. You say he was there. And—doesn't he—”

“I just talked to Steck,” Bill said. “Yes, Pam, apparently he does profit. He gets to be curator. He gets to head an expedition which he appears to consider very important. With Preson alive he wouldn't have—” And then Bill Weigand interrupted himself.

“With Preson alive
and
competent,” Jerry North said. “Not just with him alive.”

“That's it!” Pam North said. She thought. “That could be it,” she said. She looked at her husband, at Bill Weigand. “Why,” she said, “we've converged. I can't remember that we ever did before, anyway so soon.”

But Bill Weigand shook his head. It only started out all right, he said. It didn't finish all right. Suppose they started out with the theory that Albert James Steck, D.Sc., was the villain of the piece—that he, to a degree hard to believe in, wanted to become curator of Fossil Mammals of the Broadly Institute of Paleontology and to lead an expedition for the Institute. Suppose he felt, perhaps rightly, that Dr. Preson was in his way. Suppose then he tried to drive Preson mad by bizarre persecutions. Suppose—

“Wait,” Jerry said. “Put it this way. Suppose he tried to make it appear that Preson was out of his head. That Preson had turned into a crackpot and was putting these advertisements in newspapers because he got some crazy amusement out of it. That would have served Steck's purpose. Anyway, I imagine the Institute would have eased Preson out if the directors thought that.”

“Then,” Pam said, “why go on and kill him? No—wait. Because Preson found out? Threatened to tell everybody what Steck was trying to do, and so discredit Steck? So that, in the end, Dr. Steck had to go further than he'd planned?”

But Bill Weigand was shaking his head through all of this. They had, he said, forgotten one simple thing: Preson
had
put the advertisements in himself. They knew that. But then, again, he paused and seemed uncertain.

“Actually,” Bill said, “we only know, on the clerk's identification, that he put in the last advertisement. I suppose it's possible that someone else put in the others. It's far-fetched, of course.” He shook his head over his empty coffee cup.

“The identification—?” Pam began, but Bill shook his head before she had finished. They would, now, check up on it again, of course. But the girl had seemed certain. He had been there when she made the identification. Almost always you could tell. The girl had been certain. She was intelligent, and the oddity of the advertisement had, of course, focused her attention. She had, also, described Dr. Preson before being shown his photograph. And, she had, unprompted, remembered his trifocal glasses, called them “funny-looking.”

“Suppose somehow he put the last one in to trap Dr. Steck on the others?” Pam said. They waited. “Somehow,” she said, with diminished confidence.

“Tell us how, Pam,” Jerry suggested. She couldn't. Then the telephone rang.

It was the report from the medical examiner's office. Dr. Orpheus Preson's body had contained upward of three grams of phenobarbital. It was a dosage he might have survived. He had not survived it. Bill Weigand put in another call, this time for the police laboratory. He held on for the answer. According to a quantitative analysis, the milk remaining in the quart bottle in Dr. Preson's refrigerator had contained 1.12 grams of phenobarbital. The milk remaining had been twenty-two fluid ounces. A little less than a third of it had, therefore, been poured out and—although now this was merely presumption—been drunk by Dr. Preson. Assuming uniformity of the solution, Dr. Preson would have drunk about half a gram of phenobarbital.

It looked, Bill told Pam North, as if she were right. It also looked as if, by taking too much for granted, he had himself slipped badly. It had all been there for anyone with paper and pencil, and a rudimentary ability to add and divide. Bill Weigand swore softly to himself. The telephone rang. Bill Weigand listened to Sergeant Mullins at the Institute. Bill replaced the telephone and swore again, not so softly.

Dr. Steck had thrown the useless labels into a wastepaper basket, which had been emptied into a bag and, with other combustibles, into an incinerator.

Bill Weigand thought for a moment and reached again for the telephone. He got Mullins again.

“Get those bones and hold on to them,” he told Mullins.

10

S
ATURDAY
, 5:45
P
.
M
.
TO
7:50
P
.
M
.

Just before she left the room, she picked up the copy of the
New York Post
. As she left, she carried the newspaper with her, rolled in her hand. There was no logical reason for this action; all that mattered in the
Post
was indelibly in her mind. She did not need to read again the tense, rather excited, account of Jesse Landcraft's murder. It was only that the newspaper, as a physical object, as something she could hold in her hand, was an aspect of reality. Holding it would be enough, but if she needed to reassure herself that this was not a nightmare, dreamed by herself only, she could again read the quick sentences and be sure that it was a nightmare shared.

Leaving her room on the third floor of the tall house in Riverdale, Emily Preson took nothing else except her purse. She had about a hundred dollars in her purse and she wished it were more. Perhaps, from the savings bank, she could get more tomorrow; perhaps, if she went to the bank very early, just after it opened, it would be safe. She would have to wait and see. But now, here in the house, she could not wait.

Aunt Laura was in the house. Emily had heard her moving in her bedroom a little after Emily herself had first come home—before Emily realized she could not remain in the house. Then, standing by a window, looking out on the dimly lighted street, Emily had heard her aunt going slowly down from the second floor to the first and then, because sound carried so far in the old house, walking back along the corridor toward the kitchen. Emily should have gone then, she thought now. But then she had not yet quite decided.

Now she might encounter her aunt, who almost certainly—Emily had not heard her, but it was almost certain—would have finished whatever she had to do in the kitchen (saying something to the cook about dinner, probably) and gone back to the living room. It was a chance which had to be taken. If she waited any longer, the risk of being seen would be at least doubled, perhaps trebled. It was almost time for her father to come home and Wayne might come at any time. Her chance would not get any better.

She held the newspaper and the strap of her purse in her left hand and went out of her room as quietly as she could. She remembered to close the door quietly behind her. She went down the first flight of stairs cautiously, holding with her free hand to the rail. At the second floor landing she stood, for a moment, listening. She could hear sounds from the kitchen—a pan being got out from among other pans in the cabinet. She could not hear anything else. But, looking down, she could see light flowing out from the open living room door to make a wall of light across the downstairs corridor. She would have to break through that wall to reach the outer door.

She went on down the stairs, now more carefully than ever, and along the corridor to the edge of the light. She stopped, then, just in the area of semi-darkness, and could look diagonally into the living room. As she waited, her aunt stepped into Emily's line of vision. Aunt Laura had a cloth in her hand. As Emily watched, Aunt Laura picked up a china dog and wiped it very carefully, turning it in her hand, holding it up to the light to be sure that she got all the dust from it. She put the china dog down, finally, and reached out for another dog. She picked up a glass dog, this time.

Each Saturday, and again each Tuesday, Aunt Laura cleaned the glass and china dogs, carefully, one by one. The woman who came each day to clean the house was not permitted to touch the dogs; none of the cleaning women who had, through years, come daily to the old house had been allowed to touch the slowly growing collection of glass and china dogs. There were seventy-one of the dogs, now; once Emily had counted them. But, although she was scrupulous, Aunt Laura was also quick. In a little over an hour she could dust all of the dogs.

If she had started only after she had returned from the kitchen, Aunt Laura would be engaged with the dogs for another forty-five minutes. Emily could not wait that long; she would have to chance her aunt's turning as she passed, seeing her in the light from the open door. Emily waited until the glass dog was finished and put down and her aunt, her back partly to the door, was reaching for a china pug. It was as good a time as any; Emily went, visible but quiet, unprotected but very quick, through the light. She reached the outer door and pulled it toward her, knowing it would creak a little, as it always did.

“Homer?” her aunt said from the living room. “Is that you, Homer?”

Emily did not hesitate; she pulled the door to behind her and stood on the porch, a harsh wind snatching at her. She waited for a second then, but the door did not open behind her. Perhaps her aunt was still waiting for her father to speak; perhaps Laura Preson had decided that only the wind had made the sound she had heard. Emily went on, and now, since silence was no longer of importance, she went more rapidly. She did not quite run. She went toward the bus stop, although her father would come from there, along this unfrequented street. That, too, was a risk which had to be taken, if she were to get away, if she were to keep them from finding her.

She was a slender girl in a dark cloth coat, the coat held close to her body with her free hand. She seemed to be blown along the dimly lighted street by the west wind. She strained her eyes so that she would be first to detect, and to identify, anyone coming toward her, but the street ahead was empty. It was not until she was within a block of the bus stop—the last stop, the place where the bus turned around and went back—that she saw someone coming toward her. But, instantly, she realized that the man coming was not her father, and so she went on, although now walking more slowly so as not to attract attention by her haste. She passed the man, who was no one she had ever seen before, who did not appear to notice her, and then she was in the lighted block, with the drug store on the corner and the A & P next to it and, beyond, a bus just pulling up to the stop. She could see several people inside the bus, getting to their feet to leave it. One of them was her father.

She stopped, hesitated for a moment. Then she turned into the dark street which ran beside the drug store and, in the darkness beyond the window, stepped close to the wall. She waited there, looking toward the lighted sidewalk down which her father would walk on his way home. After what seemed a long time, but was not more than a minute, she saw him pass. She waited for what seemed, again, a long time and walked to the corner. She looked down the way she had come, and saw her father, walking quickly, pass under a street lamp. She hurried toward the bus. It was standing with the door open, and the lights on, but the driver was not in his seat. He would, she realized, be getting coffee in the room which was at once a minor office of the bus line and a kind of canteen for the drivers. She saw that there were no coins in the box, and dropped her own in. She went back into the bus, and found a seat. She willed the driver to come back and drive the bus away; she wanted to scream for him to hurry. She sat on the side of the bus farthest from the sidewalk, because many people in the neighborhood might know her by sight—although she herself knew almost no one, she had discovered that many people saw and remembered; the difference was part of that difference between herself and other people which she could not ever fully understand, and always fought and could never alter.

She was still conscious that she was as visible in the lighted bus, standing here on a familiar corner, as she would have been on a lighted stage. He must come! she thought. It must be time for him to come out of the place they go and drive away! A woman walked toward the bus and Emily, instinctively, turned, so that her face was away from the entrance to the bus, and looked out of the window. The woman got into the bus, making a small sound of effort, and Emily could feel herself being looked at. She did not look at the woman. She heard coins dropping into the box, and turned her head further to the left, so that only the back of her head was visible to anyone walking down the aisle. But the woman took a seat well forward in the bus. After a moment, Emily ventured a glance at her. She was sure she had never seen the woman before. Nevertheless, she turned her head away again, and looked out into the empty street.