The Lady and Her Doctor (32 page)

“
Amory: I am committing suicide because I poisoned Mother. Sloane
.”

“Sloane's notepaper. Sloane's handwriting—”

“In fact, Sloane's suicide note, darling.”

She glared at him, then closed her eyes again to visualize it. “Then the police got on the wire. He said who he was, where he lived—‘Dr. Krop. My wife has just committed suicide. No, don't bother with that—'”

“Ambulance.”

“He told them she was dead, all right, that he was a physician. She had been dead from one to three hours, he said. I read the note and heard him saying this at the same time, and I started to run upstairs. The door to Sloane's old room—next to my old one—was open so I knew she was there. She was lying on her bed. She looked smaller, shrunken, but that is because one has become unaccustomed now to such huge beds, I think, Day. She had on a black dress. Her hair was up—more or less. Sloane never had her hair cut and never had a permanent wave and never—Eccentric.” Trick. Trick. “Sloane was completely dressed, only her shoes were kicked off. Her clothes and the bed-clothes were very much—disarranged—” Lady Constant pressed her fingers hard against her eyeballs, then steepled her fingers again and held her head propped up straight. “He followed me upstairs when he finished the call to the police. He stood next to me in the doorway looking at Sloane. He started moving away. I asked him where he was going and he said just going to wash his hands. You know—but I didn't understand what that meant at the time. I made myself look at Sloane again.”

“Punishing yourself,” Day said gently.

“I couldn't take the punishment. I couldn't be alone. I began to panic and ran down the hall to the bathroom and yanked at the door—it wasn't locked—and ran in. I startled the bejesus out of him; he threw me out. ‘Out! Out!' When he had recovered somewhat from the shock, he came after me and we went downstairs to wait for the police.

“The police didn't come right away,” Amory said, “or maybe it never seems right away with police and doctors and stuff—It seemed forever; anyhow it was long enough to start eating supper. Then the police came and after they went upstairs and decided Sloane had taken poison, they were pretty startled to find us eating the same food she'd had—not from her plate, of course—her plate was clean. I was the dirty-plater in the family always, not Sloane; she couldn't bear to see anything wasted, even when we were children. It started early with her.”

“Don't get started on that, Amory, love—if you go off into your childhood, you'll get this all wrong. You were saying that the police had been surprised to find you eating the same food that your sister had eaten.”

“When the police were surprised—annoyed—I realized—For a few minutes there I had some sharp stabbing pains in my belly, and expected to drop down dead any moment.”

Day nodded. “Psychosomatic.”

“Whatever you call it, but he—Dr. Krop—explained to them that I had been on the verge of collapse. We had to wait. He had decided that if I didn't have something to do, I'd blow up, so he had made me eat. Therapy! He had eaten, too, you see, the same food I ate. We know now that the cook had the same food as well. She always had her dinner before going off. Dr. Krop was more interested in explaining what Sloane had taken (he was pretty sure, anyhow) and why it had been in his medical bag left around when he knew of her suicidal tendency. This stuff—I forget the name—was the only poison he had around and he had it for Sloane's sake. It is both a poison and an antidote, it seems. Sloane had been doing very little sleeping and he had been giving her sleeping pills. She was just as much afraid, according to him, of dying of an overdose of sleeping pills as she was anxious to die. Both, I mean, but not at the same time. One or the other. He had to keep the stuff around so that she would take as many sleeping pills as she needed—so he could pull her out if she overdosed.”

“They do that,” Day said. “The ones who want to kill themselves have this pendulum thing. Because they want to die they are more afraid that they will. They swing to either extreme. That figures.”

“Ironic,” Amory said. “Ironic is the word, I suppose, that she should take this particular stuff—He had warned her that it was a double-edged sword, of course. I know, it was his duty to warn her. Anyhow, he was pretty sure that was what she took and it was. What she took.”

“Did you see the stuff, Amory?”

“He showed it to the police. I saw it, yes, a white powder—like salt.”

“Now you've told me the whole thing?”

Amory nodded, leaning toward the table edge and Day's face to see whether she had told him something she had missed, then straightened up again.

“You haven't omitted anything and you haven't added anything? Well, what did you see? What did you see that would prove he killed her?” She didn't know. “Amory, was there any time during the evening that he acted peculiarly? Did anything he did stand out of context, I mean?”

“No. I have gone over it and over it, but it seems to me he acted perfectly—correctly. He was exactly what he should have been.”

“The only thing that strikes me, darling, is the eating. I am now leaning over backward to make a case out for you, Amory. Doesn't it look as if he wanted to make certain the police knew she wasn't poisoned at dinner? I mean—his class is strong for decorum—at a time like that, his wife just dead, urging you to eat?”

“I know, but he is a doctor, Day. Surely your psychiatry books tell you that it is natural to feel hunger at times of extreme emotion—maybe one uses up something or other, or it shoots something or other into the bloodstream which makes one hungry. Anyhow, I know I was, hungry and shaking and faint—No dinner, if you remember. Certainly the food had no taste—‘The salt hath lost its savor'—is that from the Bible or Shakespeare? The salt had lost its savor, all right, I remember everything tasting ‘stale, flat and unprofitable,' Day, but I ate. I wolfed, in fact. But, oh, Day—what you said—‘middle-class decorum'—in spades, Day! You see until I realized that I had trespassed on his sacred middle-class prejudices about what is simply not done, what I couldn't quite understand was the way he acted when I barged in on him in the john. I told you that, but, Day, I don't think I've ever seen anything quite as scared and horrified as his face. It struck me. It was absolutely con
vulsed
—much more shocked than he had been the time in my room when I told him I thought he'd murdered Mother. Much more! But probably it was much more shocking to have a lady walk in on you than to accuse you of murder.”

“Lady Kinsey.”

“Literally, of course, I didn't walk in on anything—He was just standing there about to flush the toilet—Mother's house still has one of those chain things. One arm in the air—It seemed so preposterous, that expression on his face at such a time for such a thing, that I became hysterical and screamed at him, ‘Oh, flush it, flush it and let's get out of here.' You know, Day, ‘Flush your prudery down the drain,' ‘I don't want to be alone,' something like that, I meant. He was struck absolutely speechless, one hand in the air like that, and then he started screaming for me to get out, get out. ‘Out, out, damned spot'—Dr. Macbeth, caught in the act of trying to flush down the evidences of foul murder!

“He threw me out and standing outside the door—I could
not
be alone—remembering the expression on his face, how he
hated
me for walking in, I was scared, Day. Day—you—How many times you've said one's expression—wait—one's expression speaks truer than words, only not as loud as. And he looked—he looked
daggers
at me, I tell you. He hated me! There can only be one reason! I tried to apologize later. I couldn't figure out why, if it did that to him to have anyone barge in, he didn't lock doors.”

“No need. Barging in isn't done. It would never have occurred to him that you would.”

“I wondered why he hadn't made it plain—but he thought he had, Day. He had told me he was going to wash his hands, that is a polite euphemism, I suppose. I certainly thought he meant wash his hands.” She was smiling faintly, then she frowned. “Washing his hands of Sloane's blood, that's what he looked like, as if I had caught him in that act.”

“Now, Amory, you shocked the fellow down to his grass roots!”

“Not only him, Day.” She smiled again. “That night when I was telling the policeman what happened, and he asked me—the same thing you asked: ‘Do you remember anything out of the way?' I told him about the john episode, about how—flabbergasted Dr. Fell had been, and you know what, Day? The two young cops turned bright red and the older one began to cough. They were just as
flabbergasted
—they were just as shocked! Apparently they would have thrown me out and given me the same look Dr. Fell did.”

“And that's all? Then you have nothing, Amory. There is nothing.” He stretched out his arms and stood up. When Amory was off the marble table, he took her in his arms. “Bury the hatchet, darling. Let the poor man know you forgive him what he did do—which was not to get her psychiatric help—”

“You want me to suck up to him for the money!” Pulling away from Day's embrace, Amory stubbed her toe. She stood there, frowning, holding her foot in her hand, staring at Day, then she smiled. “Oh, all right! I'll do as you say, Day. I'll bury the hatchet. We will be bosom companions, he and I!” Gingerly she put her foot on the floor again.

“Amory! For Christ's sake, Amory, you're still at it! You don't want to be decent—” She was moving away from him and he could not see her face. “What do you want now? What do you think—?”

She was at the television set. She turned up the volume control and listened, it appeared, to Groucho, then nodded and whirled around.

“He just said what I want, Day! Your Groucho! Did you hear him?” She tried to imitate the famous voice, “—the magic wordie, that's what I want! ‘It's a common word—something you might find around your house—Say the magic wordie and get—' I'm through thinking. Yes, I'll call Dr. Fell now, and I'll see him and listen to him and perhaps, sooner or later, he'll say the magic wordie and then I'll know!” She turned and pressed a kiss on the television screen, then turned it off. “Where's your phone, Day?”

Chapter XI

THURSDAY AFTERNOON

Milton thought of the Haunted House as being finished but it didn't look finished. Even though the house was going to be torn down and the stuff in it, except for what Sloane had offered to the museum near Boston, was going to the Salvation Army, it looked as it always had and what was worse as if it would always stay that way. (As if he couldn't order it torn down.) He had, however, pulled the most comfortable chair in the small sitting room out into the hall near the telephone. At least he could be comfortable while he kept an ear to the phone and an eye on the front door and the other eye and ear on Mrs. Austen as she went about her business. So far nothing had happened. Nothing would happen. Only one week more not counting tonight. (He would go to bed early and then it would really be only one week more. He looked at his watch. Eighty-twenty; he would go up to bed around ten.) When the telephone rang, Mrs. Austen was in the kitchen cleaning up after dinner and he was making the final “arrangements” with Joe Dinton. (
Final
arrangements meant finished.
Finished
.) When the phone rang, Joe Dinton stopped talking and his pencil point stabbed into the dollar sign on the “estimate.”

Milton called toward the kitchen, “I'll get it, Mrs. Austen, don't bother.” He had already explained to Joe why he was camped in the hall like that. He didn't want to go to the bother of hiring strange people to clean up the odds and ends before the place went but that meant a lot of work for the old lady, so, to save her strength, he was picking up the telephone and seeing whoever came to the door. “I'm getting it, Mrs. Austen!” Milton wet his lips before he lifted the receiver. Every time he had to talk to anyone these days he did that. “Hello? Hello? Oh, Lady Constant!” As he listened to her he kept moistening his lips.

After he hung up, in the few moments of respectful silence Joe Dinton obviously believed was due a conversation between the bereaved and the closest blood relative of the deceased, Milton went over in his mind what he had said to Lady Constant: “Now, that's very nice of you, Lady Constant.” (To want to see me.) “I appreciate that. It takes a load off my mind. Frankly, I didn't have the guts to call you. What do I mean by that? My God, I've been scared you might be blaming me for not preventing what happened, so I certainly appreciate your calling, but if you don't mind, I'll take a rain check on that.” (She wanted to come here and see him. Like hell. She and the old lady crying on each other's shoulders. Like hell.) “Well, I'm up to my ears here. I'm working every minute on the Foundation—the plans for the Foundation Sloane wanted. You know about that? I'll ask Sloane's law firm to give it all to you, they're the ones handling it, but where my medical knowledge can help—The Foundation was your sister's dearest wish and believe me it's got me all tied up in knots here. I want to get my part off my mind before I go.” (“Where are you going?” Lady Constant had asked.)

“You didn't know? No, I guess you didn't. I'm sailing on the
Elizabeth
, the next sailing, Friday a week. That was the sailing Sloane got us and from sentimental reasons—because she arranged it all—We were going together. We didn't have any—wedding trip—Well, I'm going alone, because I want to get away, you can understand that, Lady Constant, my wanting to get the—excuse me, out of here. All I want to do is get away and forget, that's all I can do now.” Then he had paused and then quick, as if, if he thought it over he might not say it, “And, excuse me, Lady Constant, but—it's not only I'm tied up in knots here with the Foundation but—you remind me. You remind me. It's natural.” (He had given a kind of laugh.) “All I want from you, if you'll excuse me, is what you just did. I appreciate that. I appreciate your telling me you don't blame me—but besides that—I'll take a rain check.” (He had looked at Joe here and Joe looked and nodded as if it was natural he should feel that way. Anyone would think it was natural.)