The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck (15 page)

“There’s a lot of fine inventors pushin’ up daisies, Doc, from tryin’ to fly with their own brand of wings.”

As we descended the stairs, he added, “Gee, it’s been a funny summer, with no Mike to go fishin’ with.”

As I told him of the last hopeless report, he shook his head, but became cheery again as he bent to read the pressure gauge on the chlorine tank. “See that now, Doc Saunders? Right on the dot where it was last spring. Ask Doc Kent. She was at 70, and he says, let her down to 50 flat. They all told me that she’d leak if I left her hooked up. ‘Not with them white lead joints, she won’t,’ I says. And she didn’t, did she now?”

“If you want to prove she’s at 50 I’ll swear to it,” I said, after examining the gauge. “I don’t know where it was when you finished filling the vault, though.”

“Sure I want to prove it. Doc Kent bet me a box o’ Pittsburgh stogies it’d leak five pounds. You gotta help me collect, Doc. That old fool Wyck shot off his mouth about gas leakin’, too, and spoilin’ things upstairs. ‘Chlorine don’t walk upstairs,’ I says. ‘You oughta be enough of a chemist to know that.’ Now, Doc, you turn that there valve in the exhaust pipe.”

I followed directions. It was a two-inch lead pipe running from the sealed vault to a metal tank. This in turn had an outlet running outdoors. Chlorine from the vault would bubble up through water in the bottom of the tank, and then through several copper screens, electrically heated, above which were layers of finely powdered animal charcoal and antimony. Most of the wet chlorine formed CuCl_{2 with the copper mesh. Any surplus was adsorbed on the antimony and charcoal. Charlie had not worked out the details, but it was he who had suggested using something like the gas masks he had worn in the war.}

When the exhaust valve was open, he snapped a switch. A small centrifugal blower between tank and vault whined to full speed and began drawing out the gas. We could hear it bubbling in the tank. Presently the pump changed its note.

“Getting’ a vacuum in there,” Charlie said. “Now we can make a niche or two with no danger of any gas getting’ into the buildin’.”

Air whistled through the cracks of the door as he pried at a piece of packing; and when he pulled it free there was a loud sucking noise. “See, Doc,” he said exultantly, “That vault was /hermetically/ sealed. That packin’ round the door don’t leak a mite.”

“Well, your machinery seems to work, inventor,” I said. “I guess I’ll be on my way.”

“What’s your hurry?” he inquired. “There may be a whiff or two left in there. I don’t figger on passing out with nobody around.”

I waited ten minutes or so, while Charlie stripped from around the vault door its “packing.” He opened the padlock and worked hard at the bolts, which had been partly embedded in the tarry stuff. After some tugging, the heavy door swung out.

“Snap that switch, will you, Doc?” he directed. “Yeah, the one highest up.”

I turned it, but there was no effect.

“Shoot!” Charlie exclaimed. “Bulb musta gone flooey durin’ the summer.”

“Maybe it’s just loose,” I said. He groped for it, gave it a twist, and said, “Now try.”

I snapped the switch again and the vault was lighted.

“That’s funny,” I heard Charlie say.

“What’s funny?” I asked, poking my head in and coughing over a whiff of unexhausted chlorine, which did not quite succeed in suppressing the regular vault smell of musty corpses, lying under snow-white shrouds on their tiers of shelves.

“That there,” he said. “There wasn’t no stiff on the damned go-cart when I sealed this place up.”

My stomach took a leap, and then settled down into the bottom of my abdomen. I resolved in a flash that Charlie, not I, would take off the cloth. I stepped nearer to have a good view of his face when he did it.

“Funny the way you can forget a thing like that,” he muttered. “I coulda sworn I’d put every one o’ them stiffs in bed. Well, let’s see how they stood up.”

He pulled the cloth from over the feet of the corpse that was lying on the wheeled stretcher in the middle of the room. I expected to see something loathsome, but this body was obviously embalmed, like all the others. I began to doubt the conclusion to which my mind had leaped.

“Fine and dandy,” said Charlie. “Now, if this was three years ago, before we figgered out this chlorine stunt, you’d ’a’ scraped the mold off’n them feet half an inch thick—an inch, mebbe. Let’s see if his hair’s sheddin’.”

He pulled away the head end of the shroud, stretched out a hand to pull at the hair, and then withdrew it slowly.

“Holy Gawd, Doc!” he whispered. “It ain’t— Yeah, it is him. Ain’t it?”

If Charlie had actually been aware of what he would find when he lifted that bleached shroud, then he was the finest actor I have ever seen. With eyes popping and fallen jaw, he stood staring at the cadaver of Gideon Wyck.

The tallow-colored corpse showed faint red and purple blotches from extravasted blood and embalming fluid. The face, although somewhat relaxed with time, still was twisted with hideous signs of a convulsive death. I jumped and with difficulty restrained a yell of alarm as one of his arms, which had apparently been disturbed from a precarious equilibrium when the diener pulled at the shroud, suddenly slipped over the edge of the stretcher and dangled rigidly, pointing downward. Far less embalming fluid had been used that is usual. This was indicated by the extreme emaciation of the wrinkled skin, as it hung over the bones like wet cloth. Ordinarily the most wrinkled of bodies is distended to plump smoothness by the embalming fluid. But Gideon Wyck was certainly no pleasanter a man dead than alive.

Charlie was first to regain some sort of composure. “Listen here, young feller,” he said, “you go and phone the sheriff. I’m gonna stand in that vault door, and not move for nobody till the sheriff gets here.”

Grabbing the phone I said, “Daisy, get me the sheriff quick and you’d better listen in on this one.” I explained to the sheriff what had happened. “Have ye called Dr. Kent?” he asked. “Well, you do, and save me the trouble.”

Dr. Kent was the state pathologist and a professor at the medical school, but he also held the office of county coroner.[
1
] Daisy at last located him at a store in town. As I finished giving him my message a car stopped noisily outside, and a Yankee voice bawled, “Where in hell is this here crime?”

I told Sheriff Palmer Dr. Kent would be over shortly, and led him down to the vault. The diener was standing in the doorway.

“How much have ye yanked him around?” the sheriff snapped, thrusting his head forward shrewdly.

“He ain’t been touched,” said Charlie, “only to lift the cloth, each end. And that arm fell loose after I pulled the cloth from under it.”

“Who say him first?” the sheriff inquired.

“Dunno. Me and Doc Saunders here was both in there. I pulled the shroud off.”

“Then you’re under arrest,” said the sheriff promptly. “And I’m like to want you, too,” he added, turning to me.

He did some prowling and sniffing, but nothing else happened until the coroner came, accompanied by a public stenographer. I was thrown into an inner panic by the glance I got from Dr. Kent. He made a quick general inspection, and then asked the diener and me, each with the other absent, to describe what had happened, while the stenographer took down our depositions.

“Very well,” he said. “Sheriff Palmer, will you arraign Mr. Michaud and Mr. Saunders before the magistrate, and then return here? As soon as another doctor arrives from the hospital we will proceed with the autopsy.”

1. The office of the coroner does not exist in the State of Main. The governor appoints medical examiners, having similar duties.
   

Charlie and I were arraigned before Judge Cole as material witnesses and paroled in custody of the sheriff. He prowled through the preparation room, asking us questions about the embalming process, and hunting fingerprints. I observed with some relief that criminology, in Maine, remained doggedly in the romantic stage. We told the sheriff that rubber gloves usually were worn throughout the embalming process, but he continued to putter with a little pot of dry white lead, a device for dusting it evenly, and a magnifying glass.

Presently he said, “Hey, what are you yaps hangin’ around here for? Beat it. But if I catch you over the township line, you’ll have a hell of a job getting’ out o’ jail for the next twenty years.”

I stopped for a quick bite at the dog cart, and then hurried across the street to dress for an evening with Daisy.

In front of the Connells’, the town clerk served me with a summons to appear for the coroner’s investigation, at 9:30 A.M. on the second day following. I resolved then and there to answer all questions in the simplest possible fashion, and to volunteer nothing.

Daisy met me on the lawn, and we began to stroll around the back way toward the hospital, past the cemetery. Quite automatically we joined hands, smiled at each other, and looked ahead again.

While I was describing carefully the afternoon’s astonishing occurrences, we passed the hospital and wandered on into the Bottom Road. When I had finished she was silent, all the way to the first little bridge. Then she said, “You don’t know how Alling reacted?”

“I haven’t seen him since it happened.”

“You were there over two hours,” she mused aloud, “and he didn’t come down to investigate the finding of the body of his own colleague—and he’s the head of the school. We’ve got to figure out some innocent-sounding things for you to ask him in the morning, Davy.”

“What for?” I inquired.

“To see whether he did the job himself, or used the diener as a cat’s-paw.”

I gave a nervous laugh. “Did the job himself? Why, the way he’s been trying to protect the school from an investigation—do you suppose he’d pull a bizarre stunt like that? It’ll be in headlines all over the country tomorrow morning. As for doing the job himself, can you imagine that crippled half-pint heaving a stiff around the embalming room?”

“I don’t blame you for being loyal to the guy.”

“It’s not that,” I insisted. “You know I was suspicious of him for months, over his not asking me where I’d been when I came in all messed up, that night.”

“Why should he ask you where
you’d
 been, if
he
 did it himself? More than three hours passed between when you last saw Wyck and the time you came in and found Alling sitting up with Mike. What was he doing there at that hour, anyway?”

“It’s perfectly obvious: Biddy called him up, because he was the last doctor Mike had had.”

“Very good, Watson,” she mocked. “Unfortunately, Biddy did nothing of the sort. The record for that night shows only one call from the Connells’ line, when Alling called for help after Mike had gone coo-coo. Did you ever ask Biddy?”

“No,” I confessed.

“Well, do. The night girl might just possibly have left it off the slip, but it isn’t likely. I’d suggest that you ask Alling, just casually, how he happened to be there, too, tomorrow morning, and I’ll hang on to the line to make sure that the first one you ask doesn’t call up the other, so they can get together on an answer.”

“You’re not meaning that you think Biddy is mixed up in this, Daisy?” I asked, half angry with myself, because I had secretly through over the possibility more than once.

“Some laundress is,” she answered. “And what laundress could have more cause to be than Biddy? Those clothes of his weren’t laundered in any commercial establishment or they’d have laundry marks.”

“And I suppose she dry-cleaned the suit,” I asked, sarcastically.

“Score one for you. But then, I’m not saying she did it all alone. Obviously, she wouldn’t have known how to embalm the body. The diener must have done that. Alling might have killed Wyck either before or after Mike went mad, and surely would have had time to direct the embalming job between then and daylight, if it wasn’t done before.”

“How do you even know it was done that night at all?” I asked, still doubtful.

“Because the last call I put through this evening was the coroner calling the county prosecutor, and he mentioned that the vault was sealed on the day of Wyck’s disappearance.”

A sudden fear gripped me. I clearly remembered having helped Charlie heave two last stiffs into the vault, and could recall his very words—“Last arrivals for this year.” Had one of them been Wyck’s body? Was I actually an accessory of the crime? Then a thought came to make the fear absurd. I had just finished, and had been washing my hands, when Wyck himself had come to give me the book of plates depicting various kinds of monsters. It was several hours after we had put the last stiffs away that Wyck ha started up the hillside, when last I saw him alive. The coroner must have meant the day when Wyck’s disappearance became known.

“Well,” I remarked, “I’ll have to keep on thinking it’s sill to accuse Alling while Ted Gideon and Muriel Finch are missing. They’re stronger suspects, from all we know. And I have my own private notions about my fine fellow student Mr. Prendergast. We still have to learn what became of those two blue books that were the basis of his getting fired. And incidentally, mightn’t it be a good idea to save our theorizing till we find out what the coroner has to report? We don’t even know yet how he was killed.”