RENDEZVOUS IN BLACK (5 page)

"At least I don't have to hold your hand, Inspector, and inhale a lot of sachet," he told him. "I wish I'd been a detective. You get out among healthy people more."

"Healthy criminals," Cameron remarked drily. "And you end up poor."

"But think of all the excitement you've had."

Following which amenities, they got down to business, Cameron already with a considerable liking for the doctor and a fairly strong impression of his honesty.

"You treated Mrs. Garrison, doctor?"

"I've been their family physician for years. He's a former classmate of mine. I was called in on--" he looked it up--"May the thirty-first, in the small hours of the night. I didn't like what I saw, but I couldn't diagnose right away. I made a second visit later that same day. I rushed her immediately to the hospital." His voice dropped. "I didn't waste any more time, but it didn't do any good. By evening she was dead."

"What was the cause of her death?"

The doctor's face clouded. He glanced away for a moment, as if averse to speaking. "Tetanus," he said quietly. Cameron noticed he put his cigar aside for a moment, as if it didn't taste so good right then. "I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy."

"You say you didn't recognize it right away, the first time you were called?"

"A physician is seldom that fortunate. It wouldn't have mattered much if I had. I suspected it on the second visit, and I didn't wait to make sure, I took her out of there fast. The tests at the hospital confirmed it." He took a deep breath. "It was already too late for vaccine to be effective. The deadline had already expired. There's a time limit on the injections, you know. If you go past that, no power in heaven or on earth can save you."

Cameron was beginning to feel chilly down his back.

"How did she happen to get it?"

"She grazed her leg on a nail as she was going in the doorway. The main thing was she had it, not how she got it."

Cameron nodded understandingly. "That's the chief difference between us, I suppose. The detective works backwards, the physician works forwards."

"But this wasn't a crime, so your comparison isn't valid."

Cameron just dropped his eyes for a moment as if to say, "Are you sure?"

"Can you tell me something about the disease, doctor? In the simplest language, please. I'm not a medical expert. Frankly, I don't think I have ever heard of it before."

"Yes you have. It's what you fellows call lockjaw. It's transmitted through a break in the skin. Even a scratch or pinprick will do the trick--always providing the virus is present. Which fortunately isn't usually the case, or most of us would be dead. Even a torn hangnail, for instance. Or if the wound was already there previous to going near the source of infection."

"Any other way? Contact with a person?"

"No. It's not contagious in that sense. It can't be transmitted from person to person."

It can, thought Cameron as he got up to go, but I don't mean it in the way you do.

Garrison came down the stairs in bathrobe, pajama trousers showing under it.

"Sorry to get you up, Mr. Garrison," Cameron said from the foot of the stairs. "I know it's three in the morning, but I've been chasing around all night and didn't have a chance to get out here any earlier."

"It doesn't matter," Garrison said dully. "I don't know what it is to sleep any more, anyway."

"I want to ask you some questions," Cameron said, "about that nail that was the cause of your wife's death."

Garrison looked surprised, as though wondering what there was to ask about such a thing. "It was just a nail," he said.

"Can you show it to me?"

"It's gone. I yanked it out and threw it away."

"Can you show me where it was?"

"Yes, I can do that." He led him out to the front door. "Right down there," and pointed. "Can you see that little pit there in the woodwork? That's where it was, sticking out of the frame. We came home late that night, and as I opened the door for her and she went in, the darn thing grazed her leg as she went by. We couldn't understand what it was doing all the way down there. It served no purpose. There's no split in the wood to be held tight. It seemed to have been driven in at random."

"Random?" Cameron said dryly, querying with his eyebrows. "Any idea how long it had been in there?"

"It might have been there for years. If it was, we'd never noticed it before."

"Had it ever grazed her leg until that night, or yours?"

"No, never. Neither one of us."

"Then it was never in there until that night. If it scratched her leg that night, it would have scratched her leg before, if it had been in there before that night. That takes care of that." But he sounded sombre about it, not pleased.

They both straightened up, being unable to hold the acutely bent positions of their backs any longer.

"Had anyone heard any sounds of tapping or hammering?"

"There wasn't anyone here to have heard. We'd been away for the weekend. This was a Sunday night and we'd been away since the Friday before. The house had been closed for those two days. The servants only came back after we did, the following morning, Monday."

Cameron tried the door. Brought it around to full closure, swung it inward to full opening once more.

"The nail stayed on the outside, even with the door tightly locked. The door swings in, so the nail didn't block it. Now let's see. You as the man would take out your key and unlock it. Then you'd step aside to let her go in first. But she'd be a little crowded. Your hand would still be on the knob, pushing the door open for her. Your whole body'd be on this side of her. So she'd have to veer over to that side where the nail was. That's how it would reach her. Otherwise, if she'd gone in dead center, she would have avoided it. Going in a door is a habit," he explained. "You never think of it, but you never vary it either." And to himself he added, "I wonder who else thought of that, besides myself?"

"You drew it right out," he said, "and threw it away?"

"Should you keep a thing like that?" Garrison countered. "I drew it right out then and there, so it wouldn't happen again. She got sore, so I got sore in sympathy. Morgan wasn't here, so I brought a pair of pliers out here and did it myself. And you want to know something funny about it?"

Cameron said with deadly earnestness, "I want to know something funny about it, yes."

"It was driven in the wrong way around. The head was the part imbedded in the wood, the point was the part sticking out."

"Then it wasn't hammered in. A nail can't be hammered in in that position. It would simply bend over and fold up. The entering wedge has to be sharp, not flat."

"But it was all the way in, deep. It was a long devil, almost as long as my hand."

"A hole could have been bored with an awl first, and then the nail simply slipped in backward, filling it. If it was as long as you say, the very depth it took would have held it fast. Did it come out easy?"

"One good wrench."

"Notice anything about it?" Cameron asked him. "Was it bright, was it rusty?"

"I didn't hang onto it long enough to really take a good look at it. I was sore, as I've said. And with one and the same gesture, I drew it out of the wood and swung the pliers up over my shoulder and let it fly off into the dark. But it did pass before my eyes for a moment, on its way up, and it seems to me there was a dirty little strip of gray rag caught around it, or tied around it under its head. Just a wisp. Such as you often find clinging to stray nails. But I can't say for sure, it traveled past my eyes too fast."

"Stray nails," repeated Cameron, in that same dry way he'd used before.

Garrison waited for him to say something more, but he didn't.

"Is all this any good to you?" he asked finally.

"Not now any more. The nail is gone beyond recall," answered Cameron cryptically. "Your wife is dead."

"I don't get what you were driving at," Garrison told him blankly.

"That's the answer right there. You've just given it yourself," Cameron assured him dourly. "As much of a one as there'll ever be."

Cameron's chief handed him a thin sheaf of clippedtogether papers. "I'm assigning you to this," he said tersely.

Cameron looked them over. Then his mouth became an open oval. "But this is another matter," he said. "This isn't the Jeanette Garrison--"

"Drop the case," his chief interrupted. "Or rather, since there never was a case in the first place, drop the informal investigation you've been engaged upon. Oh, yes, I know all about that. I don't like these personal sidelines. You're on homicide, and you stick to homicide. I can give you enough to keep you busy."

"But sir, this woman--"

His chief pasted his hands flat down upon the desk, in such a way that his elbows went up on each side of him. As if he were about to hoist himself to his feet, though he wasn't.

"The woman died of lockjaw. Her personal physician attests to that. The specialists he called in, who have nation-wide reputations, attest to it. The death certificate of our own medical examiner attests to it. As if that weren't enough, you obtained an exhumation order and I allowed you to carry it out. The findings of the autopsy only corroborated what was already known before. If there is any mystery there, and I grant you that there is, it's a biological mystery, for the department of health to worry about, and not ourselves. Even there, you only covered ground that they had already been over. I think, by this time, it's entirely incapable of solution. You could spend the rest of your natural life, Cameron, and never find out how that germ got into her bloodstream. And your business isn't germs, it's two-legged killers. If you wanted to go after germs, why didn't you enter a medical school?"

Cameron tried to say something. This time he didn't even get a "but" out. His chief seemed to read his mind. He swung his arm impatiently.

"Oh, don't give me any more about that note! Every time we have a homicide on our hands, about eighty-five people write in claiming that they did it, you ought to know that yourself. The people that really do these things are the ones that don't write in and claim the credit. I told you she died of lockjaw. What more is there? Now report to--"

"Yes sir. But she could have been murdered by lockjaw. There can be two kinds of lockjaw, the accidentally-contracted and the purposely-contracted. Lockjaw could have been the weapon, just as a gun or a knife or an axe is the weapon."

His chief's voice became very subdued. He pronounced each word very slowly, very distinctly. There were red flags out all over them.

"I--told--you, drop--the--investigation. That's an order."

There was only one answer Cameron could make to that. And stay on the force. "Yes sir," he said quietly.

Garrison came heavily down the stairs, all the spring gone from him. He sat down at the breakfast table. Morgan brought in a half grapefruit bedded in ice, set it down before him. He placed the morning's mail to one side of him.

After awhile Garrison turned to it, began listlessly going through it piece by piece.

It was the third one he came to. It said, "Now how do you like it, Mr. Garrison?"

It had no signature.

For a moment, a moment only, he roused slightly from his lethargy. He turned his head and looked toward the door, and beyond it, where the telephone was. He even seemed to be on the point of leaving his chair, getting up and going out there.

Then a look of wearied wisdom crept into his eyes. He stayed where he was. He pursed his lips. He shook his head slightly, to himself. As if to say, "I let myself be fooled once, by one of these. I won't let myself be fooled a second time."

He crumpled it, threw it under the table, away from sight. He went back to his grapefruit.

THE TELEPHONE CALL came at a fiendishly inopportune moment.

They were both together in the room there.

Florence was dressed before him; the hostess usually is dressed sooner than the host. She should have been downstairs seeing to the last-minute arrangements. She would have been, in all probability, by then. Something about a bracelet had kept her in the room. The catch balked, it took her several moments to get it to work right.

They had an extension there in their mutual bedroom. His blood froze, afterwards, to think how narrowly the call had escaped being intercepted by her. She was even standing closer to the instrument than he was at the moment, within arm's reach. If it hadn't been for that bracelet-catch, occupying both her hands. . . .

"Hugh," she said, indicating it with a nod of her head. "I hope it's no one calling up with a last-minute refusal, after my arrangements have all been made."

He was preoccupied with his bow tie. "Let them get it from downstairs," he said.

It rang again. "You'll only make one of them come all the way up here, when they're needed down there every moment of the time tonight." If she had released the bracelet, it would have slipped from her arm to the floor; she hadn't been able to succeed in joining it yet.

It had stopped.