Murder Comes First (29 page)

“A damned nuisance,” Jerry North said.

The description was, Dr. Preson agreed, precise. The de-labeling of the bones was merely another nuisance added to the nuisances already imposed. Nothing did permanent harm—as theft of the bones, or their destruction, would have done permanent harm; as the actual introduction of a pony into Dr. Preson's apartment would surely have done harm. Dr. Preson was merely being stuck with pins.

“What it comes to,” Dr. Preson said, “is that somebody doesn't want me to finish this book. That's the least of it, of course. Somebody's trying to drive me insane.”

He was relatively calm by then. He was at the table, picking up small fossil bones, looking at them, making words with his lips unconsciously, setting the bones aside—making a preliminary separation of sheep and goats. He stopped suddenly.

“You know,” he said, “suppose Steck is writing a book? Wants to get in ahead of me? He hasn't been able to any other way.”

Jerry North gave the point consideration, then shook his head. Unless Steck was authentically a crackpot, it was not a case of literary jealousy or of desire for literary precedence. The Preson book already had impetus; had already preëmpted its segment of the field. With the publication of the second volume announced, no publisher in his right mind would bring out a similar book against competition so well established. In fiction, perhaps; in this sort of general book, Gerald North greatly doubted.

“Anyway,” Pam said, “if Dr. Steck were doing this, it would take as much of his time as it does of yours. More. He'd be cutting off his own nose.”

Dr. Preson looked at Pam for a moment. He shook his head slightly.

“Exactly,” Jerry said. Dr. Preson, after looking briefly at Jerry North, said, “Oh, of course.” Then he said, “All right, you two tell
me
, then.”

That was more difficult; at that stage, it was impossible.

It was Jerry who suggested that the police be called in again; Dr. Preson who saw no use in it; who seemed, suddenly, to grow fatalistic, perhaps thinking that it would all make no difference in another million years. The change was vaguely surprising; the refusal of police aid was unexpectedly definite. It was as if, being denied Steck, Dr. Preson wanted nobody; wanted only to get on with the reorientation of ancient bones.

“We'll all think about it,” he told the Norths, and the implication was that they might as well think separately.

It was not until the Norths were in a cab bound again for home that Jerry said, “Look, those bones might have had fingerprints on them,” and leaned forward as if to speak to the cab driver.

“I wondered about that,” Pam North said.

“And now,” Jerry told her, “Preson's handling them himself—ruining any prints.”

“You know,” Pam North said, “I wonder if he really is?”

Jerry leaned back again in the taxi seat. He looked at his wife.

“Why would he take the labels off?” Jerry asked.

“That's the hardest part,” Pam said. “I haven't the least idea.”

3

W
EDNESDAY
, 9:45
A.M.
TO
6:45
P.M.

Twice weekly, on Wednesday and again on Friday, Dr. Orpheus Preson spent mornings at his office at the Broadly Institute of Paleontology, there briskly performing those tasks which fall to the lot of a curator of Fossil Mammals. He conferred, he read letters and sometimes dictated answers, now and then he associated himself in the evaluation of newly discovered antiquities. On this Wednesday of tribulation, he went to the Institute as usual, except that he went by cab. He was tired; he had been up until three o'clock sorting out old bones.

His office at the Institute, which is housed in a large building on upper Fifth Avenue, not far from the Museum of the City of New York, was a long room with two windows and a desk at one end and a table down the middle. The table was covered with fossil bones, but these were neatly ordered and properly labeled. Unconsciously, Dr. Preson sighed when he saw the familiar table, and the sigh was partly one of relief and partly one of weariness—the neat array of these bones reminded him unhappily of the confusion of those others. He straightened a small skull, stroking it absently and as absently wondering how, a million-odd years ago, the creature this had been would have responded to the caress. With something like a bark, or something like a purr? The former, probably, although one could not, of course, be certain. There are no fossil sounds to guide the paleozoologist; no sure way of guessing what yips and grunts, what screams of anger and caterwauling of love, may once have torn the prehistoric silence. One could assume, of course, that the ancient cats made cat sounds, and that the first true dog barked, after a fashion. There was no doubt at all in Dr. Preson's mind that the early monkeys had chattered. “We are noisy little beasts,” Dr. Preson told himself, being out of sympathy with primates.

He went, then, briskly enough about his tasks and became engrossed in them. His whiskers waggled indignantly as he skimmed through a recent publication on Muroidea, not so much because he disagreed with the author's remarks as because the idea of mice was momentarily antipathetical. Already he felt as if he were being nibbled by them. He dictated several letters and attended a brief, preliminary conference on a proposed expedition, which he had tentatively agreed to finance, in part, if Auerbrecht handled it. Not otherwise, and he said so. Certainly not Steck. It was tentatively agreed that it should be Auerbrecht; there was an expression of regret that Dr. Preson was not in a position to take it over himself.

Preson did not discuss his personal difficulties with any of those he met at the Institute, and only one of his confreres noticed any particular change in him.

“Preson's jumpy today,” this confrere—Brown of Fossil Invertebrates—remarked to Cornwall, associate in Quaternary Mammals. “Always jumpy,” Cornwall said in reply. “Always wondered whether a beard is itchy.”

“Good man, however,” Brown said.

“Quite,” said Cornwall, and went off to look at some Quaternary bones.

Dr. Preson had cleaned his desk by eleven-thirty. He had a quick lunch in the basement cafeteria and took a cab home again. He reached the door of his apartment at nine minutes after one, found ten seconds later that the door was unlocked, and went in at once. His sister Laura was sitting in a chair facing the door. Her head leaned back against the chair and her mouth was slightly open. Laura Preson was obviously asleep. She was breathing rather stertorously. Standing looking at her, Dr. Preson announced, aloud, that he'd be damned.

Laura Preson was thin and wiry, like her brother; she was about fifteen years younger than he, and there was not a little family resemblance. It was true, of course, that Laura had no beard; her glasses, which remained on her nose while she slept, had each a single lens; she was dressed in a dark suit and Orpheus wore tweeds. Also, of course, Orpheus was awake, which was a further difference. This difference he at once sought to erase.

“Laura!” he said. “Wake up, Laura!”

Laura Preson did not wake up; she showed no indication of intending to wake up. It was several minutes before her brother got around to shaking her; it was some seconds later that he discovered even this had no apparent effect.

“
Now
what on earth?” Dr. Preson then enquired. “Wake
up
, Laura!” He shook her more resolutely. “Wake
up!
” he ordered. Laura Preson's nose glasses fell off into her lap. She did not wake up.

Ordinarily, Laura rather annoyed Dr. Preson. She collected glass dogs, for one thing, which was ridiculous. The dogs were not even anatomically sound. There was no sense whatever in collecting glass dogs. There was nothing one could do with glass dogs, except dust them; there was nothing to be learned from glass dogs. And Laura had the absurd effrontery to contend, when challenged, that anybody who collected old bones was in a poor position to talk. “Dead
animals
,” Laura was inclined to say, somehow making the matter seem unpleasant.

But at the moment Laura was saying nothing whatever, and she was, after all, a sister. Dr. Preson was by no means a slave to family affection; still and all, it was disturbing to find Laura so unshakeably asleep in a chair which did not, after all, belong to her. It was, as a matter of fact, the only really comfortable chair in the room. That, Dr. Preson thought, was like Laura, and shook her again. Her head bobbed.

It was then that Dr. Preson realized, perhaps belatedly, that this was not a natural sleep—that something was the matter with Laura Preson; that, after annoying him with strangers for a week, the malignant influence which was impinging on his life had now got around to annoying him with relatives.

“Somebody's given her something,” Dr. Preson thought, and felt concern—and acted. He telephoned for an ambulance. He got down on his knees in front of the chair and said, over and over, more and more loudly, “Wake
up
, Laura! Wake
up!
” He was thus engaged when someone knocked on his door. Thanking God that the ambulance people had come so promptly, Dr. Preson hurried to the door. He opened it and was startled to see, at first, no one there at all.

“You the man who wants midgets?” a voice enquired, and then Dr. Preson looked down. He looked down on a midget—a very small midget. And then he looked along the corridor, and coming toward the door was another midget.

“So,” the second midget said, “you got here first. I might've known.”

“Hold your horse, Charlie,” the first midget said. “Says here he wants five, don't it? So there's only one of you, Charlie.” The first midget laughed. “Maybe only half a one,” he said, and laughed again.

“
Aah-uh!
” Dr. Orpheus Preson said, and tore at his hair.

Both midgets looked up at him.

“What's the matter with this square?” Charlie enquired.

“You got me, Charlie,” the first midget said. “You sure got me.”

Then the elevator door opened with more than its usual violence; then men in white came out, along with men in blue. The ambulance was there, and the police with it.

“In here,” Dr. Preson said, loudly, gesturing above the midgets. “Somebody's—”

“Take it easy, mister,” one of the policemen said. “Everything's going to be all right.”

At that, Dr. Preson laughed more loudly than he had spoken; he laughed shrilly, almost hysterically.

“I tell you, Charlie,” the first midget said. “This square is nuts. That's what it is. Nuts.”

Detective Vern Anstey finished typing his report, looked it over, sighed deeply, and sent it along. He'd have a sandwich—although whether as a late lunch or an early dinner it would be hard to say—and get on with his part of it. He started out of the West Twentieth Street station house and encountered Acting Captain William Weigand, also on his way out. Anstey said, “Hi'ya, lieutenant” and then, “sorry, keep forgetting you're a captain now.”

Bill Weigand told Anstey it didn't matter. Bill said, “By the way, about that transfer. I'm doing what I can, but the inspector—” Bill ended that with a shrug. Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O'Malley was known to one and all.

“Thanks,” Anstey said. “Thought for a while this afternoon I'd worked you up a case. Overdose.” He paused outside the door. “Screwy one,” he said. “One of those things but—well, it's not your worry.”

“Right,” Bill said. “However, if it's screwy enough.” he hesitated. “Anybody named North mixed up in it?” he asked, as casually as the topic permitted.

Detective Vern Anstey said he hadn't heard of anyone named North. People were named Preson. An old guy some crackpot was badgering; his sister, who had, apparently, run accidentally into something meant for brother. But now—

“Well,” Anstey said, walking along toward the diner down the street, “it comes out attempted murder, I suppose. Which is a bit more than we bargained for.”

“Preson?” Bill Weigand said. “Not Preston?”

“That's right,” Anstey said, and stopped and asked, “Why?”

“A scientist?” Weigand asked him. “Let's see—mammalogist? Write a book about prehistoric animals, d'you know?”

“That's the guy,” Anstey said. “Why?”

“Well,” Bill Weigand said. “Well. Oh—a friend of mine published the book.” Bill paused. “Friend of mine named North,” Bill Weigand said. “I think I'll have a cup of coffee with you, Anstey.”

Anstey talked while the counterman made hamburgers, interrupted himself to eat them with enthusiasm, and talked again. He began at the beginning, with tree surgeons and bushelmen. “So, it was just one of those things,” he said, and Bill Weigand nodded. “Sometimes,” Anstey said, “you get to feeling that half the city's nuts.” “Right,” Bill Weigand said.

But then came this last thing—these last two things. There was no reason to think that they were not part of the pattern, the work of the same crackpot. But when you came to phenobarbital, and a good deal of phenobarbital, it was no longer merely an irritating thing.

“The whole bottle was full of it,” Anstey said, and then explained what bottle he was talking about. “Or,” he said, “the bottle this dame is talking about. Preson's sister.”

Miss Laura Preson probably was, by now, out of the hospital to which she had been taken. She had come out of it quickly. She had not, the doctors said, got much of the stuff—only a little more, apparently, than many people took every night at bedtime. Perhaps no more at all; since Miss Preson was not an habitual taker of barbiturates, a little might have gone far enough.

“So that was all right,” Anstey said. “Of course, there were the midgets, but we got rid of them. Fast.” He took a drink of coffee. “It would be a hell of a thing to be a midget,” he said.