Dead as a Dinosaur (9 page)

“That's all,” the doctor said. “All I can tell you at the moment.”

“No,” Bill said. “I'm not a relative, doctor. I'm a policeman. I take it you're not satisfied?”

“These things vary,” the doctor said again. “There's quite a skin rash, in this case. Characteristic of the stuff, you know. The blood pressure's down, of course. Quite noticeably down, as a matter of fact. Still, he ought to respond to treatment. I'd have been happier if we'd got him sooner but—” He stopped. He shrugged.

“I take it,” Bill Weigand said, “that he hasn't started to respond yet?”

“Well—” the doctor said. “No, he hasn't, captain. Not that that proves anything.”

“He's still in danger?”

“Well—” the physician said again. “As for that, I suppose you could say that. It's just a word, after all. I think we'll bring him around all right. We usually do.” He nodded, seeming to reassure himself. “Takes a while,” he said. “You might tell his people that. Get them to go home. No use their sitting in there all night.”

Bill Weigand told the Presons there was no change, and wouldn't be for hours. He got them to go home, Wayne in a jaunty British sport car; the elder Presons by cab. Weigand watched them go and went home himself.

It was not until a few minutes before ten o'clock the next morning that Dr. Orpheus Preson died of respiratory paralysis.

Weigand was reporting, at that time, to Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O'Malley. An hour earlier, he had checked the hospital and been told there was no change. (There had been, however, no further contention that Dr. Preson was doing as well as could be expected.)

Oral reports to Inspector O'Malley were likely to prove protracted, especially when the inspector was in a mood both thorough and retrospective. That Thursday morning he was. He sought a complete recapitulation of all that was known about Dr. Preson, and what he heard reminded him of things which had happened in the older days, when cops didn't fiddle-faddle. On this, and somewhat allied, subjects he was loquacious with Acting Captain William Weigand and also with Detective (First Grade) Vern Anstey, briefly called in to amplify. The inspector was reminded (obscurely, as it seemed to Weigand) of a crackpot he had himself come across back in 1915—no, maybe it was 1913—who had his furnished room full of snakes. It had been quite a thing; they had been killing snakes for hours. Their harborer had wound up on Blackwell's Island. “No Welfare about it in those days.”

“I suppose this Preson will wind up in Bellevue observation,” O'Malley said. “Keep him there for weeks, trying to find out what makes him tick, won't they? Waste a lot of time and money. Anybody can see he's a crackpot.”

“Right,” Bill said. “I take it you agree, then, that he took this stuff himself? For some—crackpot reason?”

“What've I been telling you?” O'Malley asked. “Don't make me do your thinking for you, Bill.”

“No sir,” Bill Weigand said, with a little more emphasis than he intended. O'Malley looked at him.

“I agree with you, sir,” Bill said.

“Think you would,” O'Malley said. “Nothing in it for Homicide. Anyway, he's not—”

The telephone rang at that moment, O'Malley said, “Yeh,” into it, and handed it to Weigand, who listened, said “Right, thanks,” and hung up.

“Preson died at 9:52,” he said.

O'Malley assumed, briefly, the expression of a man who would have removed his hat, had he happened to be wearing a hat. He said, “Well, we've all got to go” and then banished, with some little effort, the melancholy into which this thought threw him.

“O.K.,” he said. “It's suicide, then. Like I said, he was just a crackpot.”

It occurred to Bill that, to O'Malley, Dr. Preson had, by dying, finally proved that point. The logic was, possibly, less than convincing. But it was also true that, by dying, Dr. Preson had not proved he was not a crackpot. Suicide, while of unsound mind—whether Preson had meant to go that far or not. Bill stood up.

“Well,” he said, “that's that, then?”

“Sure,” the inspector said. “That ties it up.”

Bill agreed. It would run its routine course, through reports, autopsy, the filing of papers without significance. But it was tied up.

The death of Orpheus Preson, Ph.D., D.Sc., was adequately reported in the
New York World-Telegram and Sun
that afternoon; the account appeared on page one, although below the fold, for two editions before a more important story (“State Department Janitor Once Red, McCarthy Charges”) relegated it to page seven. The account was factual—Dr. Preson had been found in a coma due to an overdose of a barbital derivative and efforts to revive him had proved futile. The police were satisfied that Dr. Preson, author of the recent best seller, had himself administered the drug, probably taking an overdose through inadvertence. Homer Preson, head of a printing company bearing his name and well known as a type designer, said that his brother had been nervous and run-down for several months, but not under a doctor's treatment.

The
New York Post
found room for several paragraphs among its columns of opinion, but, since the rewrite man involved had not happened to read
The Days Before Man
—as the
World-Telegram'
s man had—the account was briefer. The
Journal-American
contented itself with two paragraphs well inside, headlined “Mammalogist Dies of Over-Dose.” The item was read with disappointment by many
Journal-American
readers who, misled by a multi-syllabled word, had expected more lively things.

Gerald North read the
World-Telegram
account on his way home from the office and thought, first, “the poor little guy” and, second, “there goes the book.” With these two immediate reactions felt, and noted, he was left with an intangible feeling of dissatisfaction, amounting almost to uneasiness. Damn it all, Jerry North thought, I could have sworn he was sane as anybody.

6

F
RIDAY
, 10:15
A
.
M
.
TO
11:20
A
.
M
.

It had been Pam North who first suggested that they might be too pessimistic about volume two of
The Days Before Man
. Perhaps, she said, the book was really completed and poor Dr. Preson had merely been fussing over it, as writers sometimes did. Perhaps it was almost completed, and somebody could be found to finish it off. “Since you've already got twenty-five hundred dollars in it,” she said, by that time arguing with nobody. “I feel guilty every time I think I called him an extinct mammalogist,” she added. “Once we all went to school and merely sat there and I said, ‘Maybe Old Man Stevenson is dead.' He was the principal and he was. I waked up nights for a week.”

“Um-m,” Jerry said. “You could be right.”

“Oh, I am,” Pam said. “Of course, I was only about ten or eleven.”

“I mean about the book,” Jerry said.

“The book?” Pam said. “Oh—I'm sorry. I was remembering again. None of us liked Mr. Stevenson, which made it worse, of course. For a week I felt that somehow I'd killed him.”

She was, she was told, a bigger girl now. She had not killed anyone, certainly not Dr. Preson.

“The death wish,” Pam said. “But I didn't have it. Jerry, we ought to have done something. Made him want to live.”

It had been then the last drink before dinner Thursday evening—the drink of nostalgia and of aspirations not achieved; at the same time, often, the moment when all knowledge seems just beyond fingertips.

“People ought to want to live,” Pamela North said, and regarded her almost empty glass.

Jerry smiled at her. He said one couldn't make them. He said that, by and large, people did.

“As a matter of fact,” he said, “I'd have thought Preson did. I still don't—”

“I tell you,” Pam said, “that's just it. It looks one way but it isn't. I keep knowing there's something wrong with it.”

But Jerry North shook his head to that. He knew how she felt. But the thought was subjective; in a sense it was a turning away of the mind. He advised her to read again the story in the
World-Telegram and Sun
. There was no doubt that Preson had bought the milk; little doubt he had been alone in the apartment. The milk in the bottle had contained phenobarbital. But it had not contained phenobarbital when Preson bought it from the corner grocery. That he had himself drugged the milk he drank was inescapable.

“Of course,” Jerry added, “it's quite possible he didn't plan it to end as it did, didn't plan to kill himself. It was to have been another move in this—persecution. Only, he got more of the stuff than he could handle. The effects vary.”

“You've looked it up, then,” Pam told him.

Jerry admitted that.

“Then it doesn't seem right to you, either,” Pam said. “Suppose we're all wrong. Suppose there was somebody. Putting midgets in the newspapers, I mean. And phenobarbital—” She stopped. She looked at Jerry over her cocktail glass.

But Jerry shook his head. The real trouble was, he told her, that they had both been wrong about Dr. Preson. He had seemed sane to them; he had written as if he were sane. They did not want to admit they had been wrong. But facts confronted them. And this, he said, brought them back to the question of volume two of
The Days Before Man
.

“Well—” Pam had said, at a quarter of eight on Thursday evening, “well—I suppose you're right. And the police are right. Let's try the Plaza. It's so dark and—and thoughtful. Particularly the bar.”

They had tried the Plaza's dark and thoughtful bar, and afterward the Plaza's less dark Oak Room, and talked of other things. But now, at a little after ten on Friday morning, they were driving in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, above the Hudson River. It was raining, without hurry, as if there were ample time to drown the world and enough water in the northeast to do it. They went down a side street through semi-circular tunnels dug for them by windshield wipers, and then came back up the side street, which was the wrong side street. It was almost eleven when they found an ungainly grayish house on a lot too small for it, and parked and dripped to a narrow porch. They rang a bell and after a time the door opened.

The man who looked at them was tall, but very thin. His shoulders were narrow under a suit jacket too wide for them; his face was narrow and wrinkled deeply, horizontally. His face was almost colorless, and the blue eyes in it were pale. Long, thin hands dangled below jacket sleeves.

“
Good
morning,” the emaciated man said to Pam and Jerry North, in a voice almost intolerably cheerful. “Mr. and—” he paused for a moment and looked down at Pam—“
Mrs
. North?” he said. Pam nodded up at him. “Been expecting you,” the man said, still with great cheer. “Left me to let you in.”

Somewhat bewildered, the Norths went in. Pam looked around instinctively for spider webs, probably with spiders in residence, but the entrance hall was neat. The man preceded them into a living room which opened off the foyer.

Inside the living room, he turned and awaited them. He was even more emaciated here in the living room, lighted against the darkness of the early December morning, than he had been in the damp daylight. He was also somewhat grayer, except for his hair, which was white, and needed cutting. Under the lights, short white stubble appeared on his sunken cheeks.

“Landcraft,” he said, in a voice of vigor and of youth. “Jesse Landcraft. Uncle Jesse.” He was, it was evident, referring to himself. “Friend of the family. Sad thing about poor Orpheus. Very sad. Very good man on canids, especially. Eh?”

He paused.

“I'm sure he was,” Pam North said. “We—”

“Came about the book,” Jesse Landcraft told her. “Homer's on his way. Laura's out, you know.” He paused. “Arrangements,” he said. “Always that, you know. Much to be said for tar pits.”

“What?” Pam said.

“Fell in them,” Landcraft said. “Thought everybody knew about tar pits. Giant sloths. Big cats. All sorts of things. No arrangements then, eh? Good fossils in a few thousand years. No fuss, no bother.”

“Didn't the cats fuss?” Pam asked. “All the cats I know—”

“Oh, everything fusses,” Jesse Landcraft said, and his tone was almost jovial. “Probably fuss ourselves, eh? But there you are.” He looked down at her. “Or will be,” he added, and chuckled. “Don't mind an old man, my dear. Eccentric old man. Lives in a furnished room somewhere. Made you think of that artist chap, eh? Signs himself ‘Chas.' Means Charles. What's his name?”

“Addams,” Pam said. Then she flushed, slightly.

“Everybody does,” Landcraft told her. “Do myself, sometimes. Can't all be pretty women, Mrs. North. Eh?”

“Do you—” Jerry began.

“Garrulous old fool, too,” Jesse Landcraft said, and patted himself on the chest. “Can't do anything until my brother-in-law gets here, you know. I'm just a Chas Addams character to let people in. Have to talk to Homer about the book.” He paused to shake his head. “Well, can't have everything,” he said. “Can sit down, though.”

He sat down himself. He sat down slowly, carefully, grasping an arm of the chair with either hand.

“Sixty,” he said. “Look eighty. Feel like eighty. Poor Orpheus was the other way round.” He nodded. “Would have been, anyway,” he said. “Now look at him, eh? Good mammalogist, too. Not bad on the felids; tops on the canids.”

“Are you one, too?” Pam asked him. Rain lashed the living room windows; the wind found an aperture somewhere and moaned through it. “I mean—”

“Know what you mean,” the young voice said through the ancient mouth. “Used to be. Retired. Got something at a dig. Invertebrate man, myself. Not mammals. Never cared particularly for mammals. Worked with Orpheus, though. My sister met Homer that way. Married him. What you wanted to know, eh?”