Double, Double

Thursday, April 27

The household brightened quickly, snatching a half-portion as the whole. At the same time there was a common watchfulness which centered on Dr. Dodd, responsive to the slightest twitch of his jowls. But the doctor seemed really better. He was nimbly in and out on calls at all hours of the day and night; he went back to his clinic duties; he visited the hospital frequently. He even made little jokes about “Mrs. Kenneth Winship” and young Dr. Kildares in love. Rima worked and trilled and made them laugh, recounting Ken’s exasperated attempts to teach her to drive his car in the odd hours they were able to snatch together. Mrs. Fowler broke out in a rash of cookies and pies. Essie Pingarn unpacked her bag. Even Harry Toyfell looked less glum as he worked over his flats and transplanted seedlings; on Wednesday Ellery heard him rustily whistle a tune.

If Ken remained skeptical, he was at considerable pains to conceal it.

Still, there was something artificial in the doctor’s gaiety and their grateful responses. They were like people on a stage going through carefully rehearsed emotions.

Ellery lounged about the house. There was nothing to be done except to go over the same shifty ground retesting his footing. But he could find solidity nowhere. There was the past, and there was the jingle, and between them the mysterious quicksand. Dakin knew nothing. Nothing had happened, nothing had changed. A rich man was dead, a poor man was dead, a beggar-man was gone if not dead, a thief was indubitably dead; and there was the doctor, playing the scherzo of his tragic symphony. Who was composing what in purgatory?

As he dropped off to sleep Wednesday night, Ellery was thinking that he might as well give up and go home.

But that was Wednesday night.

On Thursday Dr. Dodd’s composition came to its end with a crash, double forte.

Ellery was at breakfast with Winship when Rima came hurrying down, yawning guiltily. “I am sorry, Kenny. Good morning, Ellery! Oversleeping, I mean—”

Ken kissed her. “You and Doc. I’d have waited for breakfast, but I’m due at the hospital. Dr. Flacker has a tracheotomy scheduled and he’s a little touchy about it—”

“Did you say,” said Ellery, “‘you and Doc’?”

“What?”

“Dr. Dodd? Oversleeping?”

“Yes. He hasn’t been down yet.”

“He has been. I looked into his room on my way down and he’d been up and gone.”

“But Mrs. Fowler said—” And Ken stopped.

There was a little interlude.

“Don’t be silly,” said Rima gaily. “It was probably a night call, an emergency or something. He has an extension by his bed and now I remember I thought I heard a phone ringing during the night. Will you two,” cried Rima crossly, “stop looking that way?”

“Are you sure, Rima, you heard his phone ring during the night?”

“Of course I’m not sure. I may have dreamed it. Or he got up early and went out for a walk before breakfast. He’s done that twice since I’ve been living here. I don’t know why everyone has to be so... There he is now! Ringing the front door bell. Forgot his key. Essie? Is that Dr. Dodd?”

“It’s a policeman,” came Essie’s nasal voice. “Wouldn’t you be Mis’ Gotch’s boy Dodie? That was in the navy? Sakes, how you’ve shot up.”

They were in the hall, not conscious of having run. Mrs. Fowler’s head was caught in the swinging door to the kitchen. Harry Toyfell, with egg on his chin, pushed it wider.

“Mr. Queen? Dr. Winship?” He was a young officer, tall and serious; the new crop. Ellery did not know him. “Chief Dakin’s sent me to get you.”

Ken said, “Something’s happened to Doc.”

“Yes, sir,” said Mrs. Gotch’s boy Dodie respectfully. “We found his jalopy over on Route 478 in a culvert. Just past the railroad tracks. He’d crashed through the concrete wall on the curve of the overpass there. Car’s a junk heap.”

“But Dr. Dodd,” said Ken. “Dr. Dodd!”

The young officer said with an awkward tact, “I guess, Doc, he’s pretty dead.”

Dr. Dodd was very dead. At the impact with the concrete wall he had been hurled headfirst through his windshield into the culvert and the car had followed, landing on top of him. They had been an hour extricating the body. One of the policemen, as new on the force as Mrs. Gotch’s Dodie, had had to be sent home.

Coroner Grupp was there, and Prosecutor Chalanski, and Malvina Prentiss and Francis O’Bannon and a photographer from the Record. And for a short time the chubby startled face of Attorney Otis Holderfield appeared, but after talking to Dakin and Chalanski he disappeared. There were two ambulances, one from Wrightsville General and the other from the County Hospital beyond Slocum. Cars were lined up on both sides of the overpass; the edge of the culvert was jammed with people. In a nearby field a farmer was screaming at some boys who were racing through his radish and lettuce plants. The sun was warm and everything was clear and beautiful.

“No, Doc,” Dakin was saying to Ken at the bottom of the culvert, “I’m not goin’ to let you see him. Now, I’m not.”

“I’m a doctor!” shouted Ken. “Get out of my way!”

“No, sir, I don’t think it would be a good idea,” said Dakin. Rima took Ken by the arm and led him off to a rock, where they sat down, Rima holding his hand.

Dakin nodded to Ellery.

So Ellery saw Dr. Dodd; or rather he saw enough of Dr. Dodd to tell that it was Dr. Dodd, but such a Dr. Dodd as even he was barely able to stomach. But he steeled himself and asked them to turn the body over. He looked down at what had been the back of Dr. Dodd’s head and turned away to stumble over to where the coroner and the prosecutor were talking to Malvina Prentiss. Francis O’Bannon stood at her elbow holding his notebook at the ready.

“The back of his head, Dr. Grupp—” began Ellery, swallowing.

“I know all about the back of his head,” said Grupp in a querulous voice. “How would the back of your head look if you were tossed through a windshield, bounced twenty-five feet off sharp rocks, and then had a car fall on top of you?”

“Mr. Queen, are you on Miss Prentiss’s payroll?” asked Prosecutor Chalanski with a slight smile. “She’s interested in the back of his head, too.”

“Why aren’t you, Chalanski?” demanded Malvina Prentiss. The sun on her silver harlequin glasses as she tossed her head made Chalanski shift to the other foot. “Seems to me you people are in an awful hurry to write this off as a common highway accident.”

“Now what do you mean by that?” asked the prosecutor without the smile.

“Coroner, didn’t you say it looks to you as if he’s been dead since about five?”

“A snap opinion. Completely unofficial.”

“What was Dodd doing on the road at 5 A.M.?”

“He was a doctor,” said a dry voice, “and he never refused a sick call in his life.” It was Chief Dakin. “And he had his medical bag with him, Miss Prentiss.”

“Well, who called him? Have you located this hypothetical patient? That oughtn’t to be too hard, even for a Wrightsville policeman.”

Dakin’s colorless eyes flickered. But he said mildly, “You might give us a chance, Miss Prentiss. This only just happened.”

“And even if you do locate somebody, suppose Dodd was followed? Suppose he was cut off near the overpass and stopped? Suppose he was cracked on the head? Suppose his car was sent tearing at that wall up there with an unconscious man at the wheel?”

“Then I’d say somebody committed the perfect murder,” replied Chalanski, smiling again. “Miss Prentiss, you have to have some fact to start supposing things with. If somebody stopped his car, there’s no sign of it on the road up there. If somebody cracked Dodd on the head — which is possible and wouldn’t be detectable now, Coroner Grupp has admitted — we haven’t found the weapon it was done with, or it’s part of that pile of bloody junk there and won’t ever be identified. If Dodd’s car was sent crashing at high speed against the retaining wall we can’t tell it, because the tire marks visible up there are just such marks as the car would have made if Dodd ran off the road in an ordinary accident. In other words, Miss Prentiss, the facts we have to this point indicate an accident, like thousands of similar accidents messing up our roads every year. When we turn up something that points in the opposite direction you’ve got my word, Miss Prentiss, you’ll be the first to be notified.”

“Oh, come on, Chalanski,” said Coroner Grupp; and the prosecutor followed him abruptly. Chief Dakin followed both.

The lack of a fact, thought Ellery. Again. How true. Bringing up, again, two possibilities. Either-or. Accident or murder. Natural or contrived. Obverse or reverse.

Rich man dead, poor man dead, beggar-man dead, thief dead, and now doctor dead.

“What?” said Ellery. “I beg your pardon, Miss Prentiss, I’m afraid I wasn’t listening.”

“I said,” said the publisher, eying him frigidly, “what are you waiting for, Mr. Queen, a sign from heaven? They’re waiting for Charlie Duncan’s dead-wagon to cart off the pieces, but you’re not an undertaker. Or are you?”

“I’m afraid—”

Francis O’Bannon said placatively, “It’s all these deaths, Mr. Queen. MacCaby, Hart, Anderson, Jacquard, now Dodd. We’re bothered, too—”

“Though in a different way, Spec, a different way,” said his employer briskly. “The point is the great sleuth has been in our fair township for how long is it now? — and the longer you stay, Mr. Queen, the more people die. When do you make more history with some big deductions? When do you start sleuthing?”

Suppose I said to her right now, thought Ellery, with the wreckage of Dodd and his car not cold: Would you like to know, Miss Prentiss, who’s going to be next? Because I can tell you, Miss Prentiss. And you’d laugh, and I’d have to laugh with you. Because we’d know and we wouldn’t know. We’d see and we’d be blind. We’d act and we’d be running around in a circle.

“Tell me,” she was saying — “since you don’t seem to want to answer those fundamental questions — tell me, Mr. Queen. Do you think it was an accident?”

“I don’t know,” said Ellery.

The woman smiled. It was a radioactive smile, and Ellery thought: O you would-be Rosalind Russells of this world. He watched her as she turned to O’Bannon, everything about her flashing. “Use the murder tag with question marks, Spec. Connect Dodd with the others by association. MacCaby, Hart, Anderson, Jacquard, Dodd. What’s behind it? Who’s out to depopulate Wrightsville? Why? And who’s next? That’s our lead, Spec: Who’s Next? Pratt!” she shouted at her photographer. “Did you shoot Queen? Well, why not? — come down here! ‘Famous Sleuth at Scene of Crime Question Mark?’” Malvina Prentiss smiled atomically at Ellery. “We’ll drag you into this yet, Ellery.”

Francis O’Bannon, his redhead’s face earnest and preoccupied, wrote and wrote.