A Puzzle for fools (6 page)

And then another thought struck me; a thought slightly more sinister in its implications. Laribee's sanity, or rather his insanity, meant a great deal of money to the institution. Was it possible that…?

I would have given anything for a quart of rye to help me figure it out. But as there wasn't a Chinaman's chance of that, I went in search of fresh air. That opulent lounge with its expensive dresses, its expensive psychiatrists, its dancing puppets, was beginning to get me down.

I had hoped to find my friend Fogarty in the lobby, but only Warren was there. I asked him for a cigarette and we started to chat. Despite his efficient head-locks, our night attendant was a mournful, rather ineffectual man. He always had a grievance, and this time, as usual, it was his brother-in-law. With uncharacteristic frankness, he hinted at Fogarty's marital short-comings and bemoaned his sister's fate for having married a "four-flusher" like that. In a remarkably short space of time, he managed to explain how even a kid like Billy Trent had shown Fogarty up as a bum wrestler; how his brother-in-law wasn't a champ in America, but only in England and anyone could beat an Englishman at wrestling, anyway.

"He's scared to take a tumble with me," he said darkly. "He knows darn well he'd get eaten up. One day it'll happen and you'll see."

This opened up another set of lugubrious thoughts. In the past, it appeared, Warren had himself hoped to become a professional wrestler. He and his sister had had a bit of money but they had both been lured into the stock market and had lost it all.

"Yeah," he said with strange viciousness, "if I had that cash, I might have been a champ by now. And here I am, having to look after a guy like Laribee, the kind of bird who lost my dough for me."

I had often wondered vaguely what happened to would-be wrestlers like Warren, superannuated champions like Fogarty and superannuated speculators like Laribee. As I left the night attendant for the dubious delights of the lounge, I felt that I knew the answer. In some role or other, they all inevitably end up in a place like Doctor Lenz' sanitarium.

When I re-entered the hall the dancing had stopped, and everyone was clustered around the far end of the room. At first I couldn't make out the center of attraction. Then I saw it was Doctor Lenz himself.

With his beard gleaming black against his white shirt front, he looked like God in his younger and more tolerant days. As I joined the group I could feel his personality just as though I had come into his magnetic field. He moved around, giving a moment's attention, an omniscient word to everyone. He was an extraordinary man. I wondered whether he was conscious of those electrical discharges that emanated from him.

I had the vague intention of reporting the stop watch incident to him but I forgot it when I caught sight of Iris. She was sitting alone again in a corner. I hurried over to her eagerly and asked rather fatuously whether she had enjoyed the evening.

"Yes," she answered mechanically, as though I were a dull host, who had to be thanked, "I've enjoyed myself very much."

There seemed no point in carrying the conversation further. I just sat and looked at her, at the exotic, flower face, and the shoulders thrusting like white petals from the sheath of her iris dress.

Suddenly I felt an overwhelming desire to see her walk across a stage. There was something in that girl— something you see only once in a lifetime. A subtle curve of the neck, an indefinable beauty of gesture, the thing that every theatrical man from Broadway to Bagdad is looking for. My old enthusiasm started to tingle in my veins. I had to get out of that place, to take this girl with me, to train her. With the proper build-up she could go anywhere. Already my mind was five years ahead of itself. It was the healthiest feeling I'd had in years.

Ideas were still tumbling over each other in my brain as I glanced back at the others. They were all there, patients and staff, gathered around Doctor Lenz and the bridge tables.

As I watched, a man detached himself from the group. I didn't pay much attention at first. Then I realized it was David Fenwick, our spiritualist. In the black-and-white of his evening clothes he looked even more ethereal than usual. And there was something purposeful about the way he was making for the center of the empty dance floor.

No one else seemed to notice him, but my eyes were fixed on him as he turned suddenly and faced the others. He lifted a hand as though for silence, and even at that distance I could see the gleam in his large eyes. When he spoke, his voice was curiously penetrating.

"At last they have got through," he announced in a toneless chant. "At last I have been able to take their message. It is a warning for us all, but it is directed particularly toward Daniel Laribee."

Everyone spun around. They were staring at him in a sort of fascinated stillness. I was gazing at him, too, but out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of Miss Brush moving hurriedly forward.

She was within a few feet of him when he spoke again. I suppose there must have been something about him that made her pause. For she stood there absolutely motionless as he said:

"This is the warning which the spirits sent me.
Beware of Isabel Brush. Beware of Isabel Brush. She is a danger to us all, and especially to Daniel Laribee. She is a danger. There will be murder —"

The silence was tense. For a second, the two of them stood there like figures on a stage, Fenwick in a sort of trance, Miss Brush very pale and rigid.

Then a voice suddenly cried out:

"David ... David!"

To my amazement it was Dr. Stevens who had spoken and who now sprang forward. His round face had lengthened to an anxious oval. He put his arm almost caressingly around Fenwick's shoulder and whispered something in his ear.

As he drew him away, the spell broke and the room was in an uproar. Miss Brush disappeared somewhere in the milling, agitated crowd. Moreno, Lenz, Mrs. Fogarty, Warren—I had fleeting glimpses of them all as they hurried about trying to restore the polite veneer which Fenwick's startling announcement had so completely shattered.

For the first time I realized how synthetic, how superficial was this built-up pretense of normal men and women brought together for an evening's social entertainment.

That scene of half-panicky confusion was horrible and infinitely sad. As a symbol of it, I remembered Franz Stroubel, that small, distinguished man with the beautiful hands, standing in a corner, gazing serenely over the jostling crowds in front of him and moving his arms rhythmically, conducting with an unseen baton, weaving a pattern into the chaos.

People were streaming past me, but I didn't see them as I turned toward Iris. She had not moved from my side, but her hands were covering her lovely face.

"Murder!" I heard her whisper. "Murder! It's—it's terrible."

At first, when I realized she was crying, I felt helpless and miserable. But suddenly, I was glad. She was frightened, worried, but, at least, she was showing some emotion.

I suppose my nerves must have been rather shaken up, too. Before I knew what I was doing, I had taken her hand and was whispering urgently:

"It's all right, Iris. Don't cry. Everything's going to be all right"

BUT EVERYTHING was not all right as far as those charge of us were concerned. We men were taken back to Wing Two, and some of us were pretty jumpy. Fenwick was nowhere to be seen. Miss Brush made no appearance. Laribee, pale and distraught, was put to bed by Mr Fogarty.

The rest of us were herded into the smoking room, spent the few minutes before bedtime with Billy Trent who seemed to have forgotten the soda fountain in anxiety over Miss Brush.

"It doesn't mean anything, does it, Pete? We don'1 really have to beware of Miss Brush."

"No, Billy," I said. "It's just a lot of hooey."

"And all that about murder?"

"Bunk."

I seemed to be successful in reassuring the kid. But myself was not so easily reassured. I set very little store spiritualistic warnings, but it did seem more than a strange coincidence, that within twenty-four hours, three different persons should have heard that ominous prophecy, There will be murder."

After I had gone to bed, those four words repeated themselves in my mind: first in my own voice, as I had heard them last night; then in Geddes’ voice, just before his attack that morning. And finally I seemed to them again, intoned mechanically by the dazed Fenwick the crowded lounge.

And if there were murder, I asked myself, who would be the victim? Each of the day's incidents, whether trivial, amusing, or sinister, seemed to point to only one person, to the man lying in the room next to mine—to Daniel Laribee.

I wondered whether Lenz was still attributing all these curious incidents to an unfavorable influence. Or whether he was beginning to believe that it all went deeper, all had some basic, alarming significance. After all, Laribee seemed to have plenty of enemies, even here in the institution. If any sane person wanted to murder him, they could hardly choose a safer setting for the crime than a mental hospital.

My reflections were taking a distinctly morbid turn. I decided to go to sleep, and did.

Next morning I woke up with the sunlight, having no idea what the time was. We didn't have clocks in the rooms.

I felt a bit hang-overish but that was nothing new. For an unconscionable time I lay in bed, waiting for Fogarty to take me down to the physio-therapy room. He didn't come. At last I gave way to impatience and, slipping on my bathrobe, strolled down the corridor to look for him.

The passage clock said twenty minutes of eight. Fogarty was ten minutes overdue. I expected to encounter his wife somewhere, but her little alcove was empty and she wasn't around the corridors. In fact, no one was in sight The place had a strange, deserted atmosphere.

I knew the physio-therapy room was always locked and Fogarty had the key. There was no chance of getting in without him. But I kept on my way. The ex-champ might already be down there, I thought.

When I reached it, the door was shut. I was about to take my mild irritation back to bed with me when I saw the key in the lock. It surprised me, for I wasn't used to inefficiency on the part of Doctor Lenz' staff. Feeling curious, I turned the handle and went in.

The physio-therapy room was a kind of miniature Turkish bath without the Turkish baths. There were all types of. electrical gadgets along one wall; showers on another; and small alcoves on the third, where we took rubdowns and other uncomfortably beneficial treatments.

A casual glance showed that Fogarty wasn't with the electrical equipment. I called his name and strolled to the showers. He wasn't there. And then, outside one of the alcoves I saw, lying on the floor, the suit which he had been wearing the night before. For a moment I thought Jo must have been out on a bender and was giving himself a rubdown to help sober up.

I was smiling when I pushed back the curtain. Then, suddenly, I realized what writers mean when they talk about a smile "freezing" on your face. I had started some fool phrase, reproving Fogarty for his unpunctuality, but the words stuck in my throat.

Lying on the marble slab in that tiny room was a thing more ghastly than the furthest horrors of delirium tremens.

"There will be murder." The phrase was familiar enough, but I had not expected anything quite like this.

I could hear a sound re-echoing against the hard stone floors and walls—a muffled, persistent sound. It was my own teeth chattering as they had done those first days without alcohol, here in the sanitarium.

I couldn't think coherently for a moment, but when reason returned, I knew this was no hallucination. It was still there, that thing on the marble slab, that thing which had been Jo Fogarty.

There was no blood, no mutilation. It was the position of the body that was so shocking. The man was lying on his chest in his trunks and socks. And the upper part of his body was bound in a strange garment, the significance of which I didn't immediately recognize. Only gradually did it identify itself in my mind with pictures I had seen of strait-jackets.

The stout canvas was strapped tightly across his great naked torso, pinioning his arms to his sides. Around his neck had been tied an improvised rope, made from plaited strips of towel. This rope was also attached to his ankles, drawing his head and legs back so that he looked like a swallow diver, caught and trussed in mid-air. I noticed vaguely that his feet were secured by his own tie and belt; and his own handkerchief was bound around his mouth to hold in place a gag of torn towel.

The whole tableau was like some mad modern sculpture, symbolizing the apotheosis of agony. And it was the very strength of the man that made it so horrible; the strength of that powerful frame, those swelling muscles straining against the bonds, straining, it seemed, even in death.

For he was dead. Instinct would have told me that immediately even if I had not seen the towel cord, tight around the bull neck, the unnatural set of the head, jerked backward by the weight of the sagging heels. I do not even want to think of the expression on that contorted face, the desperation in those dead eyes.

Suddenly the realization dawned on me that I was alone with death—alone in a small room of vaultlike marble. I was seized by a violent claustrophobia—a fear that I should go mad if I stayed another minute in that cramped, low-ceilinged alcove.

I remembered the key in the lock outside. Swiftly I hurried out of the room and, with trembling fingers, locked the door. I slipped the key into my pocket, looked up and down the corridor, and then started forward.

My thought processes were hopelessly confused. But one phrase repeated itself time and time again in my mind.

"Doctor Lenz ... must go to Doctor Lenz ..."

I didn't hear Moreno as I turned a corner in the passage. He seemed suddenly to have appeared from nowhere, standing in my path and looking at me with that dark, smoldering stare of his.

"You're up early, Mr. Duluth."

Inside my bathrobe pocket my fingers gripped the key. "I've got to see Doctor Lenz," I said with sudden decisiveness.