Murder by Reflection (19 page)

The handing over was soon finished. They locked the back doors and went again to the front.

“This lock,” said Arnoldo, as they stood by the front door, “will latch of itself when I pull it to as I leave.”

He shook hands with Doc who, pocketing the keys, went off on his round. After packing a small suitcase he gave one more look around the big silent rooms across which the broad, slow swathes of sunlight were passing, seeming slowly to sweep the whole place and to show that there was nothing remaining. Then he snapped shut the tall, narrow leaf of the hall door and walked away without looking back.

Chapter XIV

Doc was pleased with himself. Having half an hour to spare, he dropped in to see his wife.

“Where'll we put these?” he queried, holding up the bunch of keys.

She took them and locked them up in a small bureau. “You're evidently pleased, boy?”

“Well, everything's all right now, isn't it? Dr. Hertz said to me, ‘She'd never have acclimatized,' and I'd add, on my own diagnosis, she'd only have gotten more and more difficult and less and less happy. No; that was a release.”

“And the young man?”

“Oh, when he's stretched himself a bit he'll come back all right, and settle down, and I'm still betting on whom he'll settle with—and even if he doesn't and just clears out, why, the city's left with a fine ‘improvement'—who knows but some day it might be the town museum and art gallery.”

“You run on, boy. How do you know that if he left the town the house it wouldn't prove a white elephant with no money to keep it up? He's no money-maker—a rolling stone that gathers no moss.”

“He may have wished to be but she kept him pinned down—and a rolling pin, you'll allow, does gather dough!”

She laughed at his wisecrack.

“It's true enough,” he went on, pleased with his witticism's reception. “I know it. She left him perhaps all her money, certainly a lot. Well, I must run on. You keep the keys. He'll be back soon.” On his beat through town, Doc, bringing mail to a house, fell in with Dr. Hertz coming out.

“How's our town health?” he asked.

“Oh, good as usual,” answered the professional, “too good for me. If it wasn't for the outsiders I wonder whether I could live! Mrs. Heron was one of our foreign liabilities. We must expect that. Their white cells seem to overcompensate for fear the red ones would be getting too flushed in our sunshine.” The professional joke pleased its maker but it was too technical for Doc.

He gave a conventional chuckle and sidestepped with another question: “Any other alien ailing?”

“Yes, another case of failure to acclimatize—Miss Gayton, at the school. Wish you'd look in and get your wife to go and cheer her up. She's lonely, and that's bad for that sort.”

“What sort?”

“Oh, you should have spotted it. You're the long-range, single-shot diagnostician,” laughed the doctor.

“Well,” retorted Doc, a little nettled, “she's always kept herself out of my range—hardly have set eyes on her.”

“Anyhow, they're not easy to spot,” said Dr. Hertz with what was meant to be conciliation but was received as patronage. “Arrested T.B. cases I don't think anyone could diagnose simply by eye.”

“She's seemed all right? Held down her job at the school, I understand? And surely all this grand out of doors of ours, that's fine for her, isn't it?” Doc felt a personal affront in this young woman's weakly response to the beauty which he felt that in some way he owned or stood sponsor for.

“Yes, all this sun is fine, if they can take it. But the pulmonaries often can't. And if they get down they don't seem to be able to get up. If you can cheer them up, often they'll take hold and get on their feet again. But anyhow I'm sending her up for a thorough over-haul and check-up. She'll be away a week or so. Call in and see her when she's back.”

“Be sure I will.” Doc chugged off. Well, often marriage put a pining girl on her feet more quickly than any other treatment. Doc felt that here he was certainly quite as wise as the professional. Why, hadn't he read the other day in a bit of a magazine as he was carrying it on his rounds that eighty per cent of T.B. cases were psychological. He didn't want to cross swords with one of these young men who never could see anything unless it was safely out of the body and in a test-tube, but that did not make him doubt he knew as much about any disease, about which anyone could say that it was “psychological,” as any degreed practitioner.

His car therefore took him to that border of the city where Miss Gayton lived. He turned up the undeveloped road in which hers was the only house. School was out. He found her resting on her back porch. She did not seem much pleased to see him and his attempts to be gay and cheering evidently grated.

“Maybe I'd have better not come,” his mind gradually concluded. A little crestfallen, he went back to his car. She had told him there was nothing that she needed. “'Cept one thing,” he remarked to himself, “and p'r'aps she suspects I know.”

When an extrovert fails in an attempt to rouse a “moping” person, he generally looks for someone with whom he may talk off his pent and balked wish to do good. Doc, finding himself unwanted by the patient, from whom he felt he had a call, considered that as he was out on that side of town he had just time to look in on the Hermit. “I ought to ask him about young Heron. I've never talked the matter over with him since asking him to help.”

When he arrived, his good spirits were back at their usual high pressure. He would just report that everything at Plantation House was, after all, all right. He found Kermit at work and tapped him on the shoulder.

“'Member my concern over Plantation House and its inmates?” Kermit turned around, looked at him, and waited for him to go on. “Well, everything's blown over without our doing anything.”

“What's happened?”

“Well, probably the best thing in the circumstances. Mrs. Heron has died.”

“What of?”

“Oh, I don't quite know. I'm interested in people being alive. I hold that what you die of doesn't matter—it's just chance—the thing that matters is that you're done, your vitality is gone. She was due to go. I saw that. I knew she was over. What was the last thing to go wrong with her, what does it matter? I saw the first thing, the crack in the dike which lets the water through. She just didn't want enough to go on living.”

“But you didn't hear what her doctor thought was wrong?”

“Hertz and I get on well enough—I've often pointed out to him things that were beginning before the patients knew, or indeed, I believe, before he saw it himself—so that's my end of the business. He's there to sign certificates and that sort of stuff when the person himself has decided to clear out.”

“Dr. Hertz didn't mention to you an actual complaint?”

“Oh, I think he said her blood was poor—but that's the favorite ending now for all doctors when the patients go quietly and just because they are used up.”

“Her blood went wrong?” Kermit waited for a little while. “Dr. Hertz didn't by any chance say it was leukemia?”

“I don't recall. Yes, p'r'aps he did. But we don't have consultations, you know, just chats. And as I've said, I'm not interested in the technical jargon that tries to explain to me why people die.”

“Well, I wish when you next have one of your chats you'd do me a favor and ask Dr. Hertz one question.”

Doc couldn't disown an intimacy which was less close in reality than in his conversation it appeared. “Well, what is it?”

“Listen,” said Kermit.

As they talked Doc's mood was switched, switched from the reverie in which he saw himself as master of the civic ceremonies, smoothing over everything with an easy tact and asking people not to make mountains out of molehills, to the picture in which he played almost an F.B.I. role. He went off very serious—but not less happy.

He felt the matter needed something more than a casual sidewalk talk. When he got back from his round he actually rang up Dr. Hertz and asked if he might come round to his place. Dr. Hertz had also finished his round. It had been a rather harder one than Doc's, and he had hardly the mailman's delight in human contacts just for their own sakes. He saw people as patients—people with difficult bodies which quite often made them have difficult minds and characters. He wanted to help them, but he saw enough of them and of the problem of helping them that he was often relieved when the day was over. He was, then, not overpleased when the telephone rang, and his low mood was not lifted when he heard Doc's voice at the other end. His mood actually sank further when he heard the tone in which Doc was speaking.

“All right,” he said. He felt, as he put down the instrument, that he had certainly not sounded all right, if all-rightness includes cordiality, but defended himself with a muttered, “If only the good old fellow wouldn't take himself so seriously and if only he would look after the mail, which I'm sure he does well, and leave metabolism to me!”

And Doc's appearance and carriage when he came did not help, but strongly confirmed Dr. Hertz's diagnosis over the phone.

“It's rather a serious and subtle point,” said Doc, pulling himself up with a slow, abdominal heave. “I've been talking over the question with my friend Kermit—”

“That crank up the canyon,” thought Dr. Hertz, and his tiredness began to crystallize into sharp needles of something very like irritability.

“—And we feel that there's something on which some more light is needed.” Then, seeing that Dr. Hertz was showing that stony attention which means that your hearer is for some reason aloof, Doc, to open him up, added parenthetically, “Not that we think you've overlooked anything.”

The “Thank you” with which this tribute was acknowledged showed Doc that he was losing, not making, ground. He judged it best to plunge right forward. Dr. Hertz listened, tried to remind himself of the maxim that everyone a doctor sees, even his own reflection in a mirror, is really a patient, and so sat out the instruction he was given. Certainly, for a moment, when it was over he was inclined to say a short “Thank you” and, perhaps, add, “I have to say I see nothing in your theory.” But his general kindly courtesy and the sense that if he left these, two old cronies to think up theories certainly the one in front of him would disseminate them, the town would be talking and he, Dr. Hertz—in honesty, this consideration came last—would be gossiped about as a not-too-careful physician, made him feel it would be wise to give reason for the lack of faith that he felt in the yarn he had just heard spun.

“I can tell you in confidence that I can throw some light on the subject you raise. It is unprofessional to discuss one's patients with anyone else”—he paused and watched Doc bridle a little—“but, as you have the good name of the town so much at heart, I will settle your doubts. As it happens, some time ago young Heron came to me one day. He was suffering from a condition which caused him distress. I am glad to say I was able to find out what it was and, further, to cure it. He was running a high blood pressure—very unusual in a young man living a quiet life. I found it was due to the fact that he had been using in his researches a wave-length in one of the smaller wave bands. I happened to know that this was the cause of his condition. He stopped that work and the trouble cleared up at once. It did not recur. Nor, of course, was it present in the other case. You may be sure I would have been on the lookout for that. The case was perfectly normal, perfectly.”

“But—” went on Doc. “But—”

Dr. Hertz felt that he could not go on. “I can say no more,” he remarked, rising, “on that subject. And now that I've gone to the edge of professional discretion in one direction, I'll go to the edge in the other: Don't interfere in medicine. The ministers may feel that all messengers are colleagues but a scientific profession must be professional.”

It was a stiff termination. But Doc took his medicine really better than the younger man gave it. He knew that he had overstepped the borderline between private confidences and public reflections. He had failed, from his excessive zeal for his city's welfare. He was hurt a little, but he was determined to apologize.

“I'm sorry,” he said, rising too. “I shouldn't have interfered, or at least asked about it. I'll stick to my mail.”

But he didn't, quite. Dr. Hertz was mollified, a little ashamed of his own impatience which he knew sprang largely from fatigue, and they parted quite good friends. But Doc, though he knew that he could never hope again to tap that source, felt that the interview had not been in vain. He had something to bring back to Kermit and, with his usual buoyancy, he began to think that, after all, the matter might have been cleared up or proved to have nothing in it.

The next day, therefore, he reported back to Kermit. He hid, it was true, the fact that he and Dr. Hertz had not been perhaps altogether at ease with each other, but what did a mere personal question like that matter?

“I had a very interesting time with Hertz,” he reported, “and I must say he has convinced me, with information of a confidential sort which he put before me, that there is nothing in your suppositions.”

“Well, first let me repeat what I've told you. I saw that young man as you asked me to; I saw Mrs. Heron also; I saw his work; and I repeat that I want to know more.”

“What more can you know?”

“I want to see the inside of that house again.”

Doc hesitated. Had he not better let Kermit have his doubts settled—if he had any way of settling them? After all, he, Doc, had for a while thought there might be something in them.

“What do you exactly want to see?”

“I want to take a photograph or two of the interior.” Doc was still hesitating when Kermit added, “Don't think I'll be infringing a copyright. Both mother and son asked me to take some pictures of the place; I have them here.”