The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck (25 page)

“If that’s so— Well, what makes you so sure that I couldn’t have done that part of it myself, just before coming home?”

He smiled. “Don’t ask any questions like that of the sheriff, Saunders. I had two good reasons. One—that Wyck was comatose at the time the knife struck him. He couldn’t personally have given you the fight which your torn clothes might indicate that he had. And the other reason was the inspirational conviction that the knife cut Wyck’s spinal cord almost as the precise moment of Mike’s third seizure. At that moment, of course, you and I were together at Mike’s bedside, so you obviously couldn’t have done it. Is that sufficient?”

I nodded, still wishing that he would be as frank about his secret information as I had been about mine.

One cold day after the Christmas recess I saw Daisy walking with Dr. Alling down a little canyon left by the snowplow. They passed without looking up. That evening, when I dropped in for my usual call, I asked her, in mock jealousy, what she had gone walking with another beau for.

“Let’s just say that as long as we’re not sure of a solution, I don’t trust anybody. Alling was positive that Wyck had died at the moment when Mike went really mad. He was on hand to watch it happen, and so were you. That’s why he didn’t suspect you, which is fair enough so far as it goes. But Alling isn’t the kind of mind that would feel certain about such a wildly doubtful point, in a scientific investigation, when the corroborative evidence to start with was less than 50 per cent favorable.”

“Point granted, on the merits of a materials brought up,” I admitted.

“Therefore, when he came to Mike’s bedside, he had a better reason than theory alone for thinking that Wyck was about to die. He was sitting there, waiting for the reaction. Remember, you said you found him waiting with a watch in his hand? And he’d sent Biddy away for a pretty flimsy reason. Dave, he came there knowing perfectly well that Wyck was going to die in a few minutes.”

Her argument was bolstered by the one thing I had never spoken to her about—the dry-cleaning machine Alling might have used to clean Wyck’s garments—the very garments which had been mailed from Boston on a day when Alling himself was in that city.

“All right,” I said, “go ahead.”

“Well, it’s perfectly possible that Alling came to Mike’s bedside to watch for a reaction, after having poisoned Wyck. Alling could have insisted on giving him something for his illness, and loaded it down with veronal. Then he could have left Wyck in a coma, with plenty of time to get to the Connells’ before death would actually occur.”

“What about the fact, then, that the knife thrust, and not the poison, caused death? If he was dead before the knife went in, there wouldn’t have been an extensive hemorrhage around the cut.”

“I know. You told me that before. But, once he had Wyck full of a slow-acting drug, he could have arranged him under some kind of mechanical device that would have inflicted the wound. In fact, he’d want to have something to time it, wouldn’t he? Alling’s clever enough to rig up something to do that part of it.”

I had another sudden shock of memory. At the very time when I had discovered about the dry-cleaning machine, I had also checked the invoice for a new kymograph to record varying blood pressure or any other pulsation. Could Alling have used the old one to check up on the actual moment Wyck’s heart stopped beating? I hardly dared to look at Daisy. She seemed to be building up the strongest case yet. There were a dozen reasons why Alling could have wanted to kill Wyck and get him out of the way, at a time when he had become such a terrific embarrassment to the school. And, if Alling had known how near to death from cancer Wyck really was, he could have salved his conscience by calling it an act of mercy.

Daisy was watching my expression, so I said, “Any more to add?”

“Only that Alling told you specifically that he was informed, before Wyck died, of the six transfusions from Mike to the old doctor. There he had a perfect setup. A person with 250 cc. of Mike’s blood in him had caused a certain reaction. Here was a chance to test the repetition by killing another person who had two or three thousand cc. of the same blood. The reaction ought to have been correspondingly more violent—and it was.”

I had two extra items of information to corroborate Daisy’s theory—items unknown to her. Nevertheless, I decided to keep them to myself until I had had a chance to look in Prexy’s house for the dry-cleaning machine. But I resolved to be far more careful in my own confidences with my employer, and to keep a shrewder lookout for slips on his part.

During the next two weeks or so nothing startling occurred. The sheriff continued (by wiles and subterfuges) to add more and more fingerprints to his local rogues’ gallery. His main attentions centered on Dick Prendergast, who was to him a new suspect. Prendergast, however, knew his rights, and did not propose to be bullied out of them.

At last the wily officer caught Dick doing forty-six miles an hour within the town limits and promptly haled him off to the lock-up; but the culprit produced a copy of the state law which forbade fingerprinting except under a felony charge, paid a ten-dollar fine for his misdemeanor, and departed again with his fingerprints still strictly private.

Our weekly paper, which had simply fizzed with news and conjectures for a couple of months after Wyck’s cadaver was found, had been pursuing its usual uninteresting course. The editor, still fired by the memory of those journalistically triumphant two months, began casting about for manufactured excitement. Finally he made a proposition. If the sheriff would give him an interview, he guaranteed to print something that might solve the mystery as well. The sheriff consented, and two days later received his copy of the paper, in which he found a feature story saying that the murderer had been definitely located by Sheriff Palmer, and that his arrest was being delayed for the purely technical reasons that a photograph and actual fingerprints had not yet been received from another city. The man was under constant surveillance, and would be arrested within twenty-four hours.

Sheriff Palmer read the riot act to the editor, and a retraction was arranged for the next issue. However, six hours after the sheet appeared the telephones of the town buzzed with the news that a student had committed suicide. It was poor Tommy Jarvis, who had been one of the medics called by Wyck as a witness against Prendergast. The /Alton Weekly Clarion/ was lying on the floor beside the bed on which his body was found—a copy of that day’s issue, bearing the trumped-up story that the murdered had been located.

Sheriff Palmer immediately let it be known that the hoax had been published for the deliberate purpose of scaring the murder out of town, thus disclosing his identity. That it had worked better than they intended was perhaps a good thing, because it saved the state the expense of a prosecution.

To me it all seemed preposterous, for two good reasons: first, that Jarvis was one of the very few students who had admired Dr. Wyck; second, that I myself that very day had witnessed an episode that was a far more likely cause of this latest travesty.

I have already mentioned the fact that Jarvis was the most brilliant student in the College of Surgery, and have alluded to his ill health. It was about nine o’clock in the evening when Jarvis killed himself by inhaling hydrogen cyanide, but here is what had happened an hour or two before:

On the afternoon in question we all saw a notice on the bulletin board saying that there would be a post-mortem examination at the hospital. These “posts” were of fundamental importance to the science of medicine, and each one was an event. It gave us a chance to correlate organic changes with clinical findings and to complete the picture of a disease—a necessary requirement for accurate diagnosis and treatment.

My mate for the job was Jarvis; even in his first year, the doctors had advised him to give up his dream of being a great surgeon, cautioning him frankly that the climate of Altonville would be an aggravation of his incipient tuberculosis, and that it was doubtful that he could survive even a year of it.

But Tommy had clung to his dream, principally, I think, for the very reason that he wanted to learn every trick and chance that might later aid him in curing himself. A rigorous system of hygienic living and a sheer obstinate unwillingness to succumb somehow combined to keep Jarvis with us for three and a half years. But each month the red spots in his cheeks grew brighter, and his weight continued to decline. It was only after his suicide that we found a sterilizing cabinet full of mucus bags in his closet. He had done no more coughing in public than the average person would, but he had learned the trick of “raising” phlegm in private.

On the day in question it was our turn. As I read off the clinical history of the case for him to copy, I knew that we were in for a grueling session. The corpse had a boyish look, although it was of a man in his middle thirties. He had died after a short recent illness. Tuberculous nephritis was given as the cause. In his youth he had had pulmonary tuberculosis, which had been arrested. The fatal illness was either an exacerbation of the old lesion or a recent infection made worse by his hypersensitive condition.

Tommy tried to conceal from me the extent to which the details of the case struck home to him, but I could not help noticing how wretched it made him feel. Dr. Kent went about his preparations. We hurried into our gowns and rubber gloves.

The autopsy room is built in amphitheater style. An element of drama was added by the use of one powerful light bulb, hanging directly over the operating table, its rays focused sharply downward over the otherwise gloomy room. All of us, I think, felt a far different sensation toward the body in an autopsy than toward the long-dead stiffs which we carved up in the anatomy course. The color and appearance of life often lingered, in a recently dead body, combining curiously with the faint but sharp odor of the first processes of decay.

Tommy took the initiative; his hand was steady as we opened the abdomen to show the weight and appearance of the organs, while Dr. Kent lectured extemporaneously to the class on whatever pathological changes were revealed. Presently we discovered the scars of the previous chest infection. They involved an extensive area in the lower lobe of the man’s left lung, some parts of which were calcified, one nodule about an inch in diameter resembling bone. There was a new focus in the upper lobe, small, but capable of distributing the tubercle bacilli throughout his system. Tubercles, however, were not visible grossly in other organs except his kidneys. Both of these were involved; the left was little more than a dilated sack full of yellow necrotic tissue. The infection extended even down to his bladder.

I had become so absorbed that I had forgotten Jarvis’s special interest in such a case. Looking up, I saw that his lips were bloodless, tightly compressed, and that his eyes were staring downward in a kind of hopeless fascination. The poor chap was really looking at a picture of his own body’s interior.

Dr. Kent finished with the facts as noted, and began to speak of their general ramifications. “We might have found no active primary focus in the lungs,” he said. “The kidney tubercle may have been slowly progressing for a number of years, and progressing necessarily to this end. For, gentlemen, tuberculosis of the kidneys does not heal.”

Tommy seemed on the verge of collapse. I whispered to him to go outside if his stomach was bothering him, but he got a grip on himself and continued doggedly with his scalpel, cutting and weighing organs and tissues while from the instructor he heard a sort of dress rehearsal of his own fate. When he left the room there was a look of determination in his eyes which I wrongly interpreted as a new conquest of his fears. Instead, it must have betokened an irrevocable decision to meet voluntarily the fate which would otherwise come soon enough, but in a messier fashion.

Owing to the presumption that his death was caused by poisoning, an autopsy was performed on Tommy’s body, and we found within him an almost exact duplication of the conditions which he had had revealed to him in the organs of another man. The poor fellow had learned enough, in his courageous attempt at continuing school, to realize from his own symptoms that the infection in his lungs was spreading to other organs, where there was practically no change of arresting it—and the autopsy at which he had officiated had confirmed his worst fears.

This tragic event occurred in the last week of January. When the sheriff’s preposterous interpretation became known to me, I went at once to Dr. Alling and gave him the explanation I believed to be the true one.

“I’ve already heard of that from Dr. Kent,” he said. “He came in here all cut up about it. Nevertheless, I think we will do well to let the sheriff cherish his belief. For him, you see, it solves the case. From now on he’ll be less trouble to the rest of us.”

“What about Tommy’s family?” I objected. “It’s heard enough on them to have lost a son, without having to hear him accused of being a murderer, on the flimsiest grounds.”

“I’ve written this letter to them. Please type it off with a carbon.”

The letter was an eloquent expression of sympathy, a statement that the murder theory was preposterous. Prexy asked that the Jarvis family publish denials of the sheriff’s allegations, requesting that they give him a free hand in the duty of clearing the boy’s name. I was interested to note that he ended the letter with a definite promise that, if he were himself unable to effect this act of justice by the end of the year, he would turn over all data in his possession to any agency of investigation which they cared to appoint.

We have few traditions at the Maine State College of Surgery. It is too young an institution, but the phrase “to throw a March party” is something which has come naturally out of our work and our climate. The object of the party is a serious review which may last anywhere from two hours to eight, of some important phase of our studies. The fellows take up unit subjects in turn. One of us will tell all he knows about a certain phase of a subject. The others hop on any error he makes, and, when he is through, add any details he may have forgotten. Books are seldom opened during a March party. Whatever drinking is done does not have any degree of inebriation for its object, but merely a clearing of the throat, for oratorical purposes. Good fighting applejack binges are frequent enough, at the school, but a March party is never permitted to degenerate into a binge.