Double, Double

Saturday, April 22

Rima lay on the overstuffed waiting-room couch in the three-quarter darkness. A golden clear youth’s voice was singing something tender and longing in a queer language to the accompaniment of a native stringed instrument and beside her, through the song, she could hear Kenneth Winship breathing in masculine rhythm to the music and feel the still heat of his hand on her ankle, like a minor sun, strengthening but full of fiery danger. She did not know what time it was; she supposed it was close to midnight, and it was Saturday night, but what was time? A way of spacing things that happened, and she was in no statistical mood tonight. The day had been too full of pain and flushed faces, whistling breaths, high temperatures, submissive people at the clinic, the hiss of the sterilizer, the croak of sick children. She was so exhausted that she felt lightheaded. Or perhaps it was that odd antique music.

Or the burning place on her ankle.

The voice stopped and the heat lifted as she felt and heard him get up from the couch. The record was scratching away in the living room across the hall and she saw his big figure cross under the dim night light in the hallway chandelier and get lost in the darkness “beyond. A moment later the scratching stopped and then it began again. The same golden young voice accompanied by the same childish instrument was lifted in a grave and fervid plea of some sort; and Dr. Winship came back across the hall and took his place again.

“What was that, Ken?” Rima murmured.

“An Italian ballade of the fourteenth century. Remember the Decameron? Boccaccio’s young rakes who fled the plague of the city and found so much time on their hands in the country? That was one of the songs they sang to the accompaniment of the viol.”

“And this?”

“‘Gloria in Cielo.’ Same period. It’s rather different, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

Yes, thought Rima. This is all proper things and the other had been, had been... She felt her hand taken and she made a convulsive movement, half sitting up.

And suddenly he was saying the most absurd things. She heard his voice and she knew what the words meant but none of them seemed real; it was like the language of the ballade singer, incomprehensible but clear as the sun on leaping water, full of turbulent things in a dream.

“I loved you the second I saw you, Rima. I knew I couldn’t ever really be satisfied again unless you were in the same room. I’m a clumsy ox and you’re so little and wonderful, but I’ll try, I’ll try awfully hard, Rima, so awfully hard, Rima...”

And she was saying, as the record went round and his voice went round, “I love you, Ken, I love you. I don’t know what love is but whatever it is I’m full to the brim and it’s all for you, darling, it’s been that way since...”

And then only the record went round and round, although things in Rima’s head seemed to be doing it too in the same sweet unbearable rhythm.

It was hours or years later when the light sprang up in the living room across the hall and Rima heard Dr. Dodd’s voice saying, “Funny, this record on. Where’s everybody?” But now time was spacing things again and she found herself on her feet, the backs of her legs bracing her against the couch, and Ken’s big hand steadying her and his voice saying, “It’s all right, dearest. Just Doc and Queen back from Pharisee.” And then the light came on in the waiting room and there were Dr. Dodd and Ellery in the doorway, startled and aware in the same moment; and everything was over.

Later, they sat around in the darkened living room, the three men and Rima, talking about the miracle and making plans for its consecration, and it was a very happy time. Or so it seemed to Rima. She leaned against Ken’s shoulder content to drift and listen, not thinking of her father or the dark colors of her recent trouble, only wishing that Ellery would talk less and Ken more, so that she could keep hearing his voice. But Ellery was all over the place. Now he was telling about the day’s outing and what a cunning old woodsman Dr. Dodd was, and all the time he chattered he avoided looking at Rima, so that gradually she became conscious of his avoidance and some of the joy went out of things.

When suddenly he broke off. Rima thought he was being very erratic and she began to laugh; but when Ken put his hand over her mouth she felt a little thrill of alarm.

“Did you hear that, Ken?” asked Ellery in an undertone.

“A window. At the back of the house somewhere.”

“Funny,” said Dr. Dodd.

They listened again.

This time Rima heard it. A creaky window was being slowly opened. There was a squeak, then silence, then another squeak, then another silence.

“Burglars?” asked Rima facetiously.

But no one smiled. Dr. Dodd got up.

“Doc, where you going?”

“I’ll be right back.” He passed quickly under the night light in the hall and disappeared in the darkness of the waiting room.

“What the devil,” muttered Kenneth Winship.

Dr. Dodd recrossed the hall. Something was glinting in his right hand.

“Oh, no, you don’t. Doc, give me that!”

“Kenneth—”

“For heaven’s sake. You’d probably shoot yourself with it.” The younger man took the revolver. “Now, Doc, there’s nothing to be afraid of.” Dr. Dodd’s teeth were actually rattling. Ken put his hand on the burly man’s arm. “Now, Doc,” he said. The little sounds stopped and Ellery heard Dodd mumble something. “You all stay here—”

“No!” whispered Rima.

“Don’t... leave me,” said Dr. Dodd with some difficulty.

Ken was already in the hall. Rima flew after him.

Dr. Dodd began to shake again.

“It’s all right, Doctor,” said Ellery. He took the man’s arm; it was rigid as wood. “We’ll trail along. There’s no danger. Ken’s had army training.” Of course, Winship was right. The day in the woods had told Ellery only one thing: Sebastian Dodd lived in a monster-infested jungle, the prey of — what? Ellery did not know.

Ken was at a door at the rear of the hall, listening, Rima against the wall. Ken looked back; Ellery nodded toward the hall chandelier and, still gripping Dr. Dodd’s arm, moved over and touched the switch button.

In the darkness, Dr. Dodd’s breath whistled a tune.

The door at the other end of the hall crashed open and there was a streak of light from the room beyond, wheeling in a surprised arc, then a blaze as Ken’s left hand sprang into view against an invisible wall, fixed on a light switch.

And they heard Ken say, “Hold it, you,” quietly.

Ellery ran up the hall, brushed by Rima, stopped.

The room was a study, with an old mission desk and chair and a black leather couch and mission bookcases and two windows beyond, one of which was open to the night. Several of the desk drawers were open and in one of them a large dirty hand was caught while the other gripped a flashlight. Behind loomed the bulk of Nicole Jacquard.

“Jacquard, what do you think you’re doing?” asked Ken.

The man’s tongue came out of hiding, darted in again.

“What,” asked Ellery, “were you looking for?”

But Jacquard only glared.

“Nick.” Dodd’s voice. Shaking. “Did I ever send you a bill for Emilie’s operation? For saving little André’s leg? For delivering your wife of your last three children? Is this the way you pay me back, Nick?”

Jacquard said nothing. The glassy eyes were hunting.

“You won’t get anything out of him,” said Rima. “He knows only two things, drinking and stealing. Not even my father could do anything with him.” All of the past was in her voice.

Jacquard moistened his lips again.

“Queen, take this gun and cover him,” said Ken Winship. “While I get some rope to tie those hams of his—”

That’ll teach you never to take your eyes off a cornered man, Ellery thought as he flung his arms up and backward, bowling Rima over and doubling up Dr. Dodd. And then he was sprawled on both of them, covering them with his body. At the slight turn of Winship’s head Jacquard had sprung with animal agility, his paws flashing for the gun. The two men went down with a crash, Ken hanging on to the weapon. There was no time for Ellery to help; he jumped backward against Rima and the older doctor as Jacquard leaped; they all struck the floor at the same instant. And immediately after there was a shot, and all motion stopped.

For a moment the two men lay entangled.

Then Rima screeched, clawing her way from under Ellery just as he lunged toward the antagonists.

He felt the warm blood on his hand as he pulled.

“Ken!” Rima screamed. Then she cried joyfully, “It wasn’t Ken! It wasn’t Ken!”

Everything on Ken’s face was straining to open wider. Ellery pulled him to his feet. He tried to pull away, staring down at Nick Jacquard. But Ellery said, “No, Ken, no. Let Dr. Dodd do it.”

Dr. Dodd looked up after a while, his face alive with some mysterious yeast. “He’s dead.”

“Dead?” said Ken in an outraged voice.

“In the heart, Kenneth. He’s dead.”

“I killed him.”

“Darling, he was fighting you for the gun,” said Rima rapidly, holding on to him. “We all saw it. It’s not your fault, Ken. We all saw it.”

“I killed a Jerry once. In Italy. Big bruiser. Big as Jacquard. He spun around like a ballet dancer and then his knees buckled and he fell on his face and lay there on his knees with his behind in the air like a praying Arab. Dead?”

“Get him out of here,” muttered Ellery to Dr. Dodd and Rima. “Doctor, give him something. Keep telling him it wasn’t his fault. Go on, now! I’ve got to phone Dakin.”

Chief of police Dakin, who had been decently in bed, was there by 1:45 A.M. and Prosecutor Chalanski, who had been at a party on Skytop Road, did not arrive until 2:15 — which was a valuable lesson, said Chalanski, for the good shall inherit the headaches — “though talking about headaches... what was in those Manhattans?... this doesn’t promise much of one at all, eh, Queen?” — and the prosecutor of Wright County shook hands limply, adding that crime seemed to follow Ellery around like a bill collector and prompting Ellery to mumble that he rather thought — at least he hoped — it was the other way around.

No one, with the interesting exception of Harry Toyfell, seemed to take the death of The Town Thief very seriously, at least in a social sense. Ken was immersed in his own psychological troubles; Rima was immersed in Ken; Essie Pingarn, who flew downstairs in tight rag curlers and a surprisingly elegant quilted bathrobe covered with big red roses, fainted and, on being revived by Dr. Dodd, immersed herself in the roaring waters of her faith; Mrs. Fowler, pale but showing the iron of her Puritan genes, bustled about with pots of coffee, fumbling with the control box of her earpiece and saying that the Lord had His own way of punishing shiftlessness and sin; Dr. Dodd turned very nearly cheerful, joking with Chief Dakin about his gun license, telling stories of other gunshot deaths in his experience, and generally being — not altogether to Ellery’s surprise, for he had seen men falsely bucked up by death before — a tower of strength; and Dakin and Chalanski handled Jacquard as if he were a card in a file. As for Harry Toyfell, he appeared like some medieval monk in a long earthcolored bathrobe and tattered carpet slippers and took his place over the hulk of his old crony, now a total wreck, with a hardbitten stoicism. Toyfell slept in a room above the garage, which was to the rear of the house and had once been a coach house; he had shuffled through the rear garden and the earth crumbs on his carpet slippers were very near his friend’s dead face.

“No, I sleep hard,” he replied to Prosecutor Chalanski. “Didn’t hear a thing till your siren woke me up.”

“Better for Jacquard if you had, maybe,” remarked Dakin.

But Toyfell shook his head. “He’d got in a bad mess one way or ’nother,” he said. “Nick was an angry man,” he said. “All his life he was lost and couldn’t find his way out.”

“Well, he’s found it now,” said Chalanski with a laugh, turning away.

Toyfell remained out of everyone’s way, near the body.

Malvina Prentiss descended out of space with a flash. Ellery got to the window just in time to witness her landing in a rocket-shaped convertible, its iridescent silver paint reflecting the amazed street lights. Dakin’s men had roped off the area before the Dodd house; beyond pressed a crowd; and they were all gaping, police included, at the silver monster. Apparently, like Chalanski, the publisher had been to a party: she was half-dressed in a silver lamé evening gown of Polynesian décolletage and a billowing evening cape of some other silvery material; and as she sailed up the walk pulling Francis O’Bannon along in her airstream, she looked about as indigenous to Wrightsville as a Venusian warlord. O’Bannon, at least, had been to no Saturday night social. He needed a shave, his neat Boston suit was rumpled, the laces of one shoe dragged. If he looked surly and rebellious, it was only in transit. By the time they were in the house he had a pad and pencil out and was trotting after his employer with not a shirttail of independence showing.

Miss Prentiss was there, it seemed, to see justice done.

When the facts were presented to her — Chalanski was gracious and tumblehaired, as befitted a man nuzzling a Congressional candidacy and counting on his boy-of-the-people personality to get over to the electorate by way of the press — Miss Prentiss’s highborn nostrils quivered as if she detected the odor of corruption and she demanded an interview “with the murderer of this poverty-stricken father of twelve orphaned children.” Mayhem, in the small person of one Rima Anderson, was averted by the gentleman from New York. That authority pointed out with a smile that the shooting was accidental and wholly the result of the dead man’s own folly, and that any attempt on the part of the Record to needle public sentiment against Dr. Winship in advance of the inquest would be cynical, unjust, prejudicial, and a damned dirty piece of xanthous journalism, and how are you again, Miss Prentiss? Miss Prentiss laughed and so the disagreeable incident was squashed, threatening to arise again only once, when Harry Toyfell said thoughtfully: “Man who expects truth from a newspaper would look for mercy from a Japanese beetle.”

When Miss Prentiss finally took off in a puff of silver, trailed by her exhaust, Mr. O’Bannon, with his padful of curlicues and pothooks, everyone drew an extra breath.

They were all accountably sober as two men from Duncan’s Funeral Parlors packed Nicole Jacquard off for temporary safekeeping and the pleasure of Coroner Grupp and a jury of Dr. Winship’s peers, Dr. Dodd mumbling something about having to see what could be done for Jacquard’s widow and children. Harry Toyfell shuffled after the undertaker’s men as far as the elm on the front lawn. His long face was set in a deep and monkish wisdom.

Dakin conferred with Chalanski and the prosecutor said that it would not be necessary to put Dr. Winship to the nastiness of cell detention until the inquest; he could be booked for the record and released on his own recognizance until the hearing. So they all went out to the cars.

Ellery’s ascent into Dr. Dodd’s decrepit vehicle was accomplished not without a groan or two, for he was feeling a dragging weariness. Nothing seemed right, nothing came to a point; the fate of Anderson, the significance of the deaths of MacCaby and Hart, were as far from comprehension as ever; perhaps further. The events of the night had only piled nonsense on confusion. And yet he could not escape the puzzle. It pressed on him so heavily that his head ached. I’m bushed, he thought as Dr. Dodd started the car. I’ve got to—

Then he was bushed no longer.

A sort of double exposure, he was thinking at the jump of his blood, because they were really one face duplicated. Two tiny men in undershirts, their pants sagging, with lumberjackets identically hung over their pigeon shoulders, stood side by side on the porch of a small frame house directly across Algonquin Avenue from the Dodd house.

Watching.

The little elderly tailors of the Granjon Block on Washington Street.

The identical Waldo twins.

Which was David and which Jonathan? He had never seen Jonathan. Not that it mattered. Seeing Jonathan was seeing David. There were probably differences if you used X-rays and micrometers, even differences in skills; but this was nature in an antic mood — and even so, why should anyone care?

As Dr. Dodd’s car spluttered away, Ellery kept asking himself why his nervous system should jangle an alarm at learning the surely extraneous fact that the Waldo brothers, who made Otis Holderfield’s clothes, were across-the-street neighbors of Attorney Holderfield’s patron saint, the fortunate Dr. Sebastian Dodd?