The Book of the Dead (8 page)

“Buckley's said it would be the day after tomorrow.” Gamadge watched the smoke rise from his cigarette. “One rather wonders how great the influence of Pike may have turned out to be—on Crenshaw's testamentary dispositions, you know. One hears of these people coming in for a lot of money, even turning up as the principal beneficiaries in a new will.”

“Crenshaw's will was made; he referred jokingly to middle-western distant cousins who weren't down in it. His only relatives. I think he was the last man in the world to lose his head over an employee.”

“Rather odd that he didn't communicate with these cousins, or have them notified?”

Billig moved slightly in his chair. “His bank may have had instructions. I know nothing of that. He had a man up from the Western Merchants that afternoon—the afternoon he went to the hospital.”

“Then his bank at least knew that he was dying?”

“Presumably.”

Dr. Billig—who was, so far as Gamadge could judge, decidedly not a meek character—had responded to what he could only have thought an inquisition meekly enough. Gamadge rose. “Don't get up, Doctor; and thank you very much for giving me this information. I'll report to Miss Fisher, and she will be gratified. And her duty towards an acquaintance whom she liked very much—and was very sorry for—will have been done.”

Billig sat looking up at his guest. “I don't quite understand,” he said, “how they came to meet. From what Crenshaw said, and from what I assumed, Crenshaw was already weak and ailing at Stonehill; I mean he didn't go out—hardly left the place.”

“Casual thing, I believe,” said Gamadge. “Miss Fisher took walks; she was accustomed to a walk that led through the old Crenshaw property; she said something about Mr. Crenshaw sitting in the orchard there.”

“I see.” Billig got to his feet. He accompanied Gamadge to the door of his flat, but no further; they parted courteously.

When Gamadge had left the building the doctor went hurriedly to his bay-window, pulled the dust-colored curtain aside, and watched his late visitor's progress to the Park Avenue corner. Then he darted into his bedroom—he was light on his feet, it seemed, when haste was required—came back with his felt hat on his head and a wrapped package in his hand, stuffed the package into his coat pocket, and hurried out of the flat.

He got into the car that stood just beyond the front steps, and started it with a jerk. He drove west; in the darkness of the car his face was not the face that Gamadge had seen—it was contorted with urgency, and perhaps with some fiercer emotion. The car turned down Park, passed Gamadge, and left him behind; Gamadge, walking along the other side of the street, head down and hands in his pockets, did not see it at all.

G
AMADGE WAS WALKING
because there were no cabs. He soon arrived at 86th Street, however, and waited a few minutes for the crosstown bus; Idelia, he was sure, would be glad to hear that his trip to the west side had cost him only five cents.

The bus came; he boarded it, and sat thinking about his report to his client while he travelled to Madison, down Madison, to Fifth, and into the blacker transverse of the park. What should he say to Idelia? That Dr. Billig was a man of intellect whose path in life led downward? That in spite of a vast self-control, developed through his professional life, Dr. Billig was very uneasy?

There was something against Dr. Billig: if his uneasiness had been founded on nothing more than a sense of the oddity of Crenshaw's isolation, he would have confessed to it; but he had not confessed to it. He had rather minimized that situation, he had been in a general way complimentary to Pike, his account of Pike was by no means Idelia's. One of them was wrong, and Gamadge did not think that that one was Idelia. He did not think that Dr. Billig had really missed what was, if not sinister, at least remarkable, in the personality of Crenshaw's confidential man.

But all this amounted to no more than a series of impressions: Gamadge's impression of Billig, who might after all have withheld
his
real impressions from a mere outsider—one who had no right to ask questions about Crenshaw at all; Idelia's impression of Pike, her and Gamadge's unsubstantiated theory that the underlined passages in
The Tempest
referred to Pike and to Crenshaw himself. After all, Billig was a reputable physician, if a shabby one; he was still a member of the staff of St. Damian's Hospital; and if Mr. Thompson, the night superintendent, had not seemed enthusiastic about the doctor, perhaps that was because Mr. Thompson didn't like fatness, shabbiness, and lack of professional success.

And Dr. Billig had not shown undue interest in Idelia.

Gamadge decided that he must know more about Dr. Billig, and that tomorrow he would call up his own doctor, the impressive Hamish.

The bus emerged from the park, and trundled its way along the next block. At the corner Gamadge got out. He walked up to Idelia's street, and stood looking down her block; a block inadequately lighted by its one dimmed-out lamp, and ending in the dimmed lights of the farther avenue. The rooming house was two doors from that corner, one of a double row of brownstone houses with high stoops. None showed any light; most of them were empty, or converted as Idelia's had been from private dwellings to lodgings of the cheaper class. A dark and desolate street indeed; a street that might have figured in a bad dream.

There was a dreamlike quality, too, in the stifling sensation caused by the heat; heat such as might be reflected from a metal screen. You couldn't get rid of that by waking up; you couldn't wake out of this nightmare at all. Behind it, causing the deadness and the darkness, was the black cloud of the war.

Gamadge walked along the north side of this dream street, past the wells of area and the lightless vestibules, past the little island of radiance cast by the street lamp, to Idelia's rooming house. No light here, either; or none discernible from the sidewalk. Hadn't she said she would be waiting in the front parlor? It was shuttered; perhaps her light was very dim—orders of the landlady.

He had his foot on the first step when he noticed that the front door was partly open. Chained back as his own had been this evening, for coolness? Rather dreamlike, to call at a New York brownstone house and find the front door open…Rather dreamlike to see a hat with a pink rose on it lying half way down the front steps.

He ran up to the vestibule. Idelia lay face downwards half in and half out of the doorway, her packages scattered about her, her handbag open and empty in a dark corner. She had done a lot of shopping in that drugstore—too much shopping. It had delayed her—she had been beaten down as she unlocked the door. Gamadge bent over her, sickened by shock and remorse.

He touched her hand in its fabric glove; still warm, but there could be no life in anyone whose skull was crushed like that. He straightened, glancing from the handbag to the spilled paper of candy, the bottle—broken in its wrapper—that exuded a powerful odor of citronella, the paper-covered book, the magazine, the toothbrush in its cellophane. Very ironical, these trifles; very ironical that Crenshaw had been the death of his last friend.

Gamadge pulled himself together, pushed the doorbell, and ran down the steps. He walked the few yards to the corner, and then made for the nearest subway station. At Columbus Circle he took a cab, reaching home at 11:29.

He was looking rather white and wild when he let himself into his dark house. Darkness suited him; but the reason why he did not turn the switch beside the front door was that there was another one at the back of the hall, near the coat closet and opposite the elevator. He had his hand on it, when something—some alien sound of motion from the direction of office—caused him to turn. He saw nothing, but his thought was: If he has a gun, goodnight.

His next action was automatic. He grasped and pulled the knob of the elevator door; if the elevator was there, the steel door would open. It was there. He slid into it, the door swung to behind him, and the elevator rose with its usual and dreadful deliberation.

He could hear a shaking and a fumbling below—his visitor had evidently thought that the door was a cupboard door and made of wood. The few moments of delay allowed Gamadge to reach the second floor, plunge from the elevator, and fling himself across the hall and into the library while feet still pounded on the stairs.

He slammed and locked the library door, which was of solid mahogany and had been built to last. The telephone, unfortunately, was in the hall; so he stood in the middle of the room, out of range, and shouted at the top of his voice at nothing: “Police? Radio car. Burglars,” and added his name and address.

Meanwhile his eye was on the door; but there was no explosion, the lock did not burst out of it. Relieved, he went to the oldfashioned speaking tube near the mantelpiece, and pulled the handle of its bell. Presently a whistling noise reached him.

“Theodore?” Gamadge spoke low.

“Sir?” Theodore was speaking from the front basement.

“Lock yourself in, and telephone the precinct. Talk softly. Tell them to send a radio car. Don't make any noise or move out of there till the cops come; then let them in by the area.”

“What is it?”

“Burglar.”

Gamadge spent the next few minutes looking up road maps and timetables. By the time he had found what he wanted there was a loud knocking on the door; he threw it open to admit Theodore and a policeman. Theodore began to talk immediately and complainingly:

“No wonder you get a burglar, Mist' Gamadge; you left your office window open. That window stays locked. I don't go in there at night and lock up, how can I know you'll open it? You got a filter.”

“It wasn't your fault. The filter was simply fanning in hot air. I had a client. You go down and make some mint juleps for me and for the officers,” said Gamadge. “I suppose the other one's searching the house? No use. Our friend heard me pretending to bawl for the police.”

Theodore retired, grumbling. The second policeman arrived, and Gamadge asked them both to come in and sit down. They were rather complimentary when he told them about the escape by elevator, but inclined to admonition. Martin the cat ran in, and one of the officers said it was too bad he wasn't a dog.

“What do you mean, too bad he isn't a dog?” Gamadge was affronted. “Oh—you mean he'd have barked at the burglar? But he'd bark at the milkman, too, wouldn't he?”

With the juleps arrived Detective-Lieutenant Durfee of Homicide. Gamadge said: “This is very nice of you; to what happy chance am I indebted?”

“I was at the station when your SOS came in,” replied Durfee, sitting down and accepting a frosted glass. “It's news when you get in trouble. Catching up with you, are they?”

“What on earth do you mean, Lieutenant? I haven't an enemy in the world.”

“There wasn't any burglar. What you heard was a breeze from that window you left open, blowing papers off your desk.”

“What breeze?” Gamadge was fanning himself with a newspaper.

“Come on now, give us the dope. You can't get us over here on a night like this for nothing.”

“As a taxpayer I'm entitled to protection.”

“The department is entitled to taxpayers keeping their ground-floor windows locked. I'm glad your wife's out of town.”

The radio policemen sat with their tumblers in their right hands and their cigarettes in their left hands, looking from Gamadge to Durfee and back again. They were awed by the familiarity between their superior and this citizen.

Gamadge said: “It's all the fault of the dim-out. Nobody climbs into front windows when there's any light on a street.”

“We have a chance to blame a lot of hold-ups on the dim-out now,” said Durfee. “They had one over on the west side just now; I caught the word at the station. Nice young woman, dentist's assistant, had her brains knocked out on her own rooming-house doorstep. And the murderer was kind enough to ring the bell.”

“Ring the bell?” Gamadge stared.

“So the medical officer could get there in time to say she'd been killed within a half an hour. What we think is that it was some passer-by, who noticed the door was open and didn't want to get mixed up in the case and give evidence. But that's the way you citizens act—no sense of responsibility.”

“I don't know what the passer-by could have told you more than you know now,” objected Gamadge. He thought: That was cutting it fine, cutting it fine, and wondered why he himself wasn't lying dead on the rooming-house steps. He had just missed it; lucky that the killer had been so anxious to complete his job on the east side.

Durfee rose, and the others with him. “I suppose you want us to take fingerprints,” he said.

“Fingerprints?”

“The ones that won't be on your window-frame and doorknobs.”

“Fingerprints bore me.”

“They bore us, too, but we have to go through the routine.”

Gamadge, with many thanks for prompt service, showed the three out of the front door. As they were going down the steps, the youngest officer—exhilarated by his juleps and willing to ingratiate himself with his superior—clumsily remarked that this Gamadge was a jittery specimen, wasn't he?

Durfee stopped to look at him. “Who?”

“This Gamadge. Like you said when you were joking him in there.”

“I was joking him. If that guy called you up,” said Durfee, “it was because he was in there with a killer between him and the front door. If it wasn't for that little elevator of his, he'd be dead.”

Gamadge, meanwhile, was formulating another theory to account for his escape. He had been studying the maps and timetables, and now stood beside the telephone in the hall, looking down at his cat. Martin was looking up at him, mewing silently in the plaintive way cats have: “Pity me, I'm so small.”