Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Vol. 108, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 661 & 662, September/October 1996

The Sleepwalker by Donald Olson

© 1996 by Donald Olson

In this age of the personal computer few authors remain who still work on a typewriter. When EQMM asked Donald Olson for a computer disk and an extra “hard copy” of his latest story, we discovered that the author works on the machine he’s been using for decades and keeps only a carbon copy of the work. It seems fitting that Mr. Olson should do so, for his stories have an old-world charm.

Lyman Fox is dead. As I read his lengthy obituary in the Times, replete with fulsome testimonials to his worthiness, I recalled with a mix of emotions our last visit together.

“You’re looking well, James,” he’d said, and might have added, as the less tactful often do, “for your age.”

I’d been an occasional patient of Lyman’s for about two years, having sought him out for some trifling ailment. I’d cultivated his friendship and shared the infrequent drink or dinner whenever I was in town and he could spare the time from his busy practice and active social life.

I’d invited Lyman to dinner at a little Italian restaurant not far from his office, and once seated I said, “There’s something I’d like to show you, but first, if it won’t bore you too much, I’d like to tell you a little story from my past.”

Lyman Fox had a confident, incisive way of speaking that went with his mature good looks and faultless grooming. “Bore me? No chance, old boy. I know hardly anything about you. Most of my patients can’t wait to tell me their life stories, often at grueling length.”

“I’ll spare you that,” I promised. It was true, Lyman knew little about me aside from my being a retired college professor who spent most of my time at my cottage upstate. I hadn’t wanted to say anything about the subject that had occupied my mind for so long until I felt certain I wasn’t riding a lame hobbyhorse; it now seemed pointless to delay any longer.

I proceeded to tell him about my family, who had been very poor indeed, with little time or inclination for anything beyond the struggle to make ends meet, especially at the tail end of the Depression, the period of which I was speaking; circumstances being as they were, I’d had no hope whatsoever of realizing my ambition to go to college. At that time scholarships were not so readily available as they are now.

“One summer day,” I said, “soon after my high school graduation, a big black car — Packard, as I recall — pulled up in front of our little house on the wrong side of the railroad tracks. The chauffeur opened the door for a tiny gray-haired lady who marched up onto the porch where I was helping my mother shell peas for our supper. I can still remember the lilac pattern of the woman’s dress and her wide-brimmed white straw hat. She introduced herself and told us why she was calling.

“ ‘As you may know,’ she said, ‘I’m on the school board. James’s teachers have told me all about him. Now I’m a very wealthy woman thanks to my late husband’s enterprise, and I like to invest in promising young people. I understand you have no plans for college, James?’

“I was much too shy to say so; my mother was not. ‘We know how much James wants to go to college. We know how bright he is. But there’s no way on heaven’s earth we could afford to send him.’

“The woman nodded. ‘Well, that is why I’m here. I’m prepared to underwrite, wholly without obligation, four years’ tuition for James at the state university. I hope you’ll grant me this privilege.’

“We were stunned. I remember my mother’s astonishment and the struggle between her pride and her ardent desire for my advancement. My would-be benefactress quickly overrode Mother’s uncertainty. The verbal contract was agreed upon. ‘All I ask in return,’ said this fairy-godmother from across the tracks, ‘is that you apply yourself, James, and do your best to fulfill my faith in you.’ ”

In all modesty, I think I can say I kept my end of the bargain and can look back on a fairly distinguished career.

“I’ve never forgotten that woman,” I told Lyman Fox, “or the immense debt I owe to her. She was a truly remarkable person. If she hadn’t stepped out of that Packard on that long-ago June day, I might have spent my life in the juice-bottling plant, like my father.”

“Very inspiring,” agreed Lyman, sipping his Chianti. “Pity there aren’t more like her today.”

“Well, it’s different now. The most mediocre student usually has access to higher education.” I’d deliberately withheld the woman’s name, nor did I reveal it now as I told Lyman the end of the story — so far as it concerned my long-dead good angel.

“You can imagine how distressed I was when she died, some twenty years ago. You see, she was murdered.”

“Good God.”

“Yes. One might have expected her to be the least likely victim of murder, despite her wealth.”

Lyman clearly found this an intriguing twist to my story. He asked me how it had happened and I told him a young man had broken into her house in the middle of the night and stabbed her to death.

Lyman’s wine remained untasted now and his face grew solemn. “How ghastly. Robbery, was it?”

“No. Nothing was taken. There was no apparent motive.”

“Was the killer ever apprehended?”

“Oh yes. The very next morning.”

“Extraordinary.”

“More than that. Bizarre. If it happened today, the TV people would have a field day with it. This all happened in a little town on the Canadian border. There was a trial. The murderer, although clearly guilty, was acquitted.”

“Lack of evidence?” Lyman asked. “Legal technicality?”

“You might say that. The young man’s defense was that he committed the murder while sleepwalking.”

At this point Lyman’s rapt expression acquired a sudden guarded alertness, his dark eyes probing into me as if his field were psychiatry and he were trying to gauge the degree of my madness. “Surely not a viable defense,” he said flatly.

“On the contrary. The young man’s story was that he’d been afflicted with somnambulism all his life. Scores of witnesses and a string of eminent physiologists testified to this fact. As did his wife, of course. It was she who’d called the police. She’d awakened to find her husband asleep on the bed, fully dressed and covered in bloodstains. She knew that something frightful must have happened. As it transpired, the young man, who remembered nothing of the event, had risen in his sleep, dressed himself in shirt and jeans, took a butcher knife from a kitchen drawer and walked barefoot three miles to the old lady’s estate on the edge of town, crawled through an open window, and murdered her in her bed. No one heard a thing.”

Lyman finished his wine and sat gazing into the empty glass. “Hard to believe a jury would swallow such a story.”

“We all know how malleable juries can be in the hands of a good defense lawyer. Furthermore, the young man’s record was spotless and he himself made a sympathetic impression on the stand. Of course, there were many in that town who felt he’d got away with murder, as in effect he had. Soon after the trial, he and his wife moved back across the border to Canada.”

“Incredible,” said Lyman, and then added, with what seemed a false air of professional detachment, “Whatever prompted you to tell me all this?”

“Because I have a favor to ask you. But first read this.” I took from my wallet an item clipped from a five-year-old copy of the Toronto Star and handed it across the table. The item was headed: DEFENDANT IN SLEEPWALKER MURDER FOUND DEAD. Andrew Lee Tibbetts, it disclosed, had been found dead of a drug overdose in a Yorkville rooming house. A brief summary of the case which had aroused such interest back in the seventies followed.

For the first time I referred to the murdered woman by name. “Perhaps because of her lasting influence on my life, I was profoundly disturbed by the way she’d died. Verity Bainbridge had touched many lives by her generosity, young lives such as mine. She hadn’t deserved such a cruel death.”

Pocketing the clipping, I tried to explain how obsessively the case had haunted my mind. I’d read all that was printed about it, of course, and after my retirement, with so much time on my hands, I delved into it more deeply, thinking I might write a book about it.

“You see, Lyman,” I explained, “I was never able to accept the conclusions drawn by the court. Oh, I never doubted the fact of Tibbetts being a chronic sleepwalker — I’ve done my homework on that mysterious disorder. Still, it kept nagging me, why was Verity Bainbridge the victim? What shadowy instinct drew the killer to her house? There was no link between them. She was a stranger to Tibbetts. He’d only recently moved to Deaconsfield. He didn’t rob her. Seemingly he didn’t profit from her death. It was a case without motive, without reason, a senseless tragedy. And yet I could not accept it as such. I still can’t.”

“Perhaps,” said Lyman with a faint yawn — by now he’d finished the bottle of wine, “you would rest easier if you did.”

“I’m sure you’re right.” I looked at the clock. “Good lord, is it that late? I do apologize, Lyman, for boring you at such length with my idiotic idee fixe. And it’s well past my bedtime, if not yours.”

“My dear chap, you haven’t bored me in the least. It’s an appalling story. I’m not sure I shall sleep tonight thinking about it.”

As we were saying our goodnights, I reached into my overcoat pocket for what I’d come to think of as my Bainbridge dossier. “Will you do me a favor, Lyman? Will you take all these notes of mine and let me know how they strike you? I’ve concocted a kind of theory about the case and perhaps you’ll let me know if you think it’s totally cockeyed. You have the scientific objectivity I lack.”

He slipped the folder into his pocket. “Of course I shall. I’m extremely interested.”

“I’ll call you next week,” I said.

Despite the wine and the lateness of the hour I wasn’t at all sleepy, and long after I’d arrived home I sat brooding in my chair, wondering if, having delayed so long before breaking my silence, my decision to speak out might have been unwise.

In my amateurish investigation into the Sleepwalker Case I’d employed the method used by the literary detective A. J. A. Symons in tracing the obscure and bizarre history of that late-Victorian eccentric, Frederick Rolfe, which he ultimately published in his fascinating study, The Quest for Corvo. That is to say, I wrote a great many letters and made numerous phone inquiries and interviewed several people who had been associated with Verity Bainbridge and with her killer, Andrew Lee Tibbetts.

Travel at my age and with my natural disinclination to stir from home was not the pleasure it had been in my younger days, but it could not be avoided.

My first journey had been back home to Deaconsfield, a trip I’d not made for several years, where I sought out Verity Bainbridge’s lawyer, a genial and forthcoming old gentleman now also living in retirement. I made no bones about my reasons for delving into the case, and I found Arthur Pembroke equally candid in answering my questions.

“You ask about her will,” he said, “and to answer that I must explain that Mrs. Bainbridge was confined to a wheelchair after suffering a grievous accident in her early eighties. Then, about five years before her death, she had the good fortune to be treated by an osteopathic surgeon in New York, a brilliant specialist who after a lengthy course of treatment and surgery restored the use of her legs.”

He went on to say that Dr. Agnew and his patient became close friends. “She gave generously to the work of his clinic, and in her will left it a sizable bequest, as well as a personal bequest to Agnew, whom she regarded as a miracle worker, of nearly a quarter million. The residue of her estate was distributed among a raft of charities.”

“So Agnew was the main beneficiary.”

“Among the individual legatees, yes. Regrettably, the doctor did not live long enough to enjoy his fortune. He contracted pancreatic cancer and was not expected to live more than a year at most. In fact, he survived Mrs. Bainbridge by only eleven months.”

“Had he died before Mrs. Bainbridge,” I asked, “where would the money have gone?”

“The clinic would have got it all.”

“And when he died soon after inheriting where did the money go then?”

“We didn’t represent Agnew, of course, but I seem to recall his being survived by a stepson in Canada.”

My eyes flew open at this disclosure. Andrew Lee Tibbetts was from Canada. Could he have been Agnew’s stepson? But I quickly dismissed the notion as entirely untenable. Surely in their investigation of the case the police would have explored this possible link and motive.

Feeling it to be a waste of time but with no other immediate inquiries in hand, I decided to follow this line a bit further, if only to tie up a loose end. I finally managed to track down Agnew’s New York lawyer; here my efforts were effectively balked. The lawyer, citing client confidentiality, refused to impart any information whatsoever.

It was time, I decided, to explore the other end of the path, and with this in mind I flew to Toronto and directed my inquiries to the university where, a transcript of Tibbetts’s trial had informed me, the chronic sleepwalker had been a test subject in a program of sleep dysfunction research, the findings of which were later to prove so decisive in establishing the fact of Tibbetts’s affliction.

That particular research project had been discontinued long ago, but I was able to interview, on the pretext of my writing a book on the case, the former director of the program, a physiologist named Angus McGill. He astounded me by revealing that in his opinion, despite there having been no overt behavioral pattern to support it, Tibbetts was a borderline psychotic.

“Somnambulism,” he explained, “has been linked to epilepsy, parkinsonism, imminent psychosis, and dissociation of personality, among other abnormalities.”

“Yet sleepwalking itself is not considered a form of mental illness, true?”

“True. Otherwise Tibbetts might have been judged guilty by reason of insanity and confined to an institution.”

He described Tibbetts as an otherwise unexceptional young man, good-looking, charming, and feckless. “Of course, Tibbetts was only one of our test subjects. It’s too bad Manly Renard isn’t still around — one of my lab assistants on the program. He and Tibbetts became pals of a sort during the course of the project.”

“Any idea where I can locate him?” I asked.

“Sorry. We lost track of him after he left the university to complete his studies in the States.”

In nosing around the area where Tibbetts had lived at the time, I came upon an old neighbor, a garrulous widow named Rosemary Welland-Jones, who had known the family well and had some interesting things to say even if they didn’t advance my investigation, at least at first.

“Giselle,” she told me, “Andy’s wife, was a sweet little thing. She was from Montreal, where they met. Andy was a good-looking lad and she was madly in love with him, despite his problems.” She used McGill’s word for him: feckless. “You know the type. One job after another. Grass always greener somewhere else. Quite suddenly, they moved to the States. We never heard anything more about them until the murder. Didn’t know they’d moved back here until one day I happened to run into Giselle at the Eaton Center. She told me she and Andy had split up two years after they returned — she didn’t say why — and that she’d remarried. I think she said his name was Donohue and they were living in Scarborough.”

Giselle Donohue proved far more approachable than I’d dared hope. Perhaps the passage of time had disarmed her suspicions, or perhaps she found nothing to arouse her distrust in this diffident, elderly professor who landed on her doorstep with his story of writing a book about the sleepwalker case. She was not unwilling to discuss it. I asked her how they’d happened to move to the States, and why Deaconsfield of all places.

“Andy Lee,” she said, “was given to sudden impulses, always expecting things to be better somewhere else. They never were. One day he came home and said he wanted to try the States. Said he had a distant cousin living in Deaconsfield. He’d never before mentioned any relatives in the States and when we got there he could find no trace of this cousin. For all I know he never existed. At first, though, things went fine. Andy Lee got a job in a service station and seemed happier than he’d been in months. We even made a few friends.”

“The sleepwalking, did that continue?”

“Oh yes, we were both used to that. We lived with it. Then suddenly, overnight, it all ended in that terrible nightmare.”

“You must have been vastly relieved when he was acquitted.”

“It seemed a miracle. Of course we couldn’t stay down there, people were not — friendly. We moved back here, and then when the money came it seemed like another miracle.”

“The money?”

“As if out of the blue,” she said. “I came home from work one day and found Andy Lee wildly excited. He said we were rich — well, rich for us. He showed me a bank book with a deposit of fifty thousand dollars. Said he’d wanted to keep it all a secret — he was the most secretive man on earth — until he was certain it was for real. It seems that an agent acting on behalf of some movie producer in the States had approached Andy — all unbeknownst to me — and offered him fifty thousand dollars for the film rights to his story.”

I could hardly contain my excitement. “Do you remember the agent’s name — or the movie producer’s?”

She shook her head. “No, I don’t. So far as I know nothing ever came of it. But Andy Lee changed after that. The money went to his head. He started gambling and drinking. It went from bad to worse, until finally I couldn’t stand it anymore. I moved out. After the divorce I never heard from Andy Lee again.”

Before leaving I brought up the subject of Andrew Lee’s participation in the sleep disorder program. She said that he hadn’t wanted to talk much about that. “I think he rather resented being a guinea pig, so to speak, even if it made him feel somehow important — special — at the time.”

When I asked if she had a picture of Andrew Lee she brought out a box of old snapshots and showed me one of herself, Andrew Lee, and another young man taken at an amusement park near Toronto. It was hard to believe the smiling, handsome, blond young man in the snapshot could ever have been charged with a brutal murder.

“That’s Manly Renard with us,” she said. “He was a graduate medical student at the university who was involved in the project. He and Andy Lee became quite close.”

I told her that Angus McGill had mentioned the name but, like him, she could give me no information about Renard’s present whereabouts.

“Unless you might try New York City,” she said. “I seem to remember Renard mentioning that he’d chosen medicine as a career because his father was a successful doctor in New York.”

Father? Or stepfather, I wondered. The possibility, even if remote, intrigued me.

Until my second attempt to elicit information from Agnew’s lawyer proved more fruitful and provided the breakthrough I’d been seeking for so long. He admitted that Manly Renard was indeed Dr. Agnew’s stepson and heir. His earlier reticence had been a case more of professional embarrassment than protocol.

“The truth is,” he admitted, “we lost track of Renard immediately after settling his stepfather’s estate. Our efforts to locate him were unsuccessful. So far as we know, he might have taken the money and sailed off to the South Seas. In a word, sir, he vanished.”

A feeling of closing in upon the truth now spurred me on. I had connected the links in the chain that led from Verity Bainbridge to Dr. Agnew, from Dr. Agnew to Manly Renard, and from Manly Renard to Andrew Lee Tibbetts; and as for the murder, lack of proof notwithstanding, I felt that I’d unearthed both motive and means.

For all the good it did me. Unless I could locate Manly Renard and somehow pry the truth out of him — and how I could do this, having no hard evidence with which to threaten him, I had no idea — then all my efforts would have been in vain. As time passed it appeared that my attempts to find the elusive Renard were as doomed to failure as the lawyer’s. It was as if he’d taken the money — all but the fifty thousand dollars I was convinced he’d paid Tibbetts for committing the murder — and lost himself in some distant land.

A year passed. I’d given up hope of ever writing an ending to the Sleepwalker Murder Case, left only with the satisfaction of having proved to myself the truth of my theory of how and why it had been perpetrated, that brutal slaying of my distant benefactress.

But fate, perhaps, has an even stronger abhorrence of loose ends than does the amateur detective, and it was on an autumn evening, as I sat watching a panel discussion on a TV talk show, that I was struck by something uncannily familiar about the face of one of the participants, a well-known New York physician. I rushed to my files and dug out that snapshot of Andrew Lee Tibbetts and Manly Renard. Even allowing for the changes wrought by time, I was convinced that I was right. The face of the man on TV was the face of Manly Renard.

Only the name was wrong.

Three days after our dinner together Lyman Fox rang and invited me to lunch at his club. His manner on this occasion was anything but genial; no pretense of friendship. As soon as we were seated he shoved the Bainbridge dossier across the table to me.

“I’ve never read such rubbish,” he said frigidly, “nor have I ever met anyone as blatantly deceitful as you.”

I smiled in mock surprise. “You didn’t find my theory — interesting?”

“I find it libelous. A tissue of lies and wild conjecture. What a funny little man you are, James. To come creeping out of some hole, seeking me out, currying my friendship. What did you hope to achieve?”

“The truth.”

He jabbed a finger toward the dossier. “You call that the truth?”

“It all fits. You knew your stepfather was dying, would in all likelihood die before Verity Bainbridge, causing you to lose out on all that money. You were greedy and ambitious and as fate would have it you lucked onto someone as greedy as yourself. Working in that sleep disorder laboratory at the university you somehow won Tibbetts’s confidence — he was easily suggestible and always good for a gamble, and probably a closet psychopath as well. You convinced him that he could murder a stranger and get away with it, would stand a better than even chance of being acquitted once a jury was persuaded he hadn’t known what he was doing when he committed the crime. You promised him fifty thousand dollars if he took the risk.” I tapped the dossier. “It’s all here, the whole chain of events.”

He regarded me with supercilious contempt. “And not a shred of proof. If there had been, the police would have discovered it.”

“Possibly — if they’d dug as deeply as I did. And been as lucky. It was pure luck I saw you on that TV show. Another thing that convinced me of your guilt was that you evidently found it advisable to sever yourself from your past, even to changing your name, an amusing but not especially clever change. Lyman, an anagram of Manly; Fox, the English equivalent of the French Renard.”

His expression remained aloof and disdainful. “And you, James, are neither amusing nor clever. A theory, as you must have taught in your own classrooms, is no good without proof.”

“We’ll see if the authorities share your opinion. I’m confident the case will be reopened. You’ll be ruined, you must know that.”

I picked up the dossier and rose. “Thanks for the invitation, Lyman, but I suddenly have no appetite.” With that I walked out of the room.

Now that it was over, I didn’t really care what happened to Lyman Fox. Enough that I knew my quest had been successful, that I’d done what I could to even the score for Verity Bainbridge. Nor can I say I felt any strong sense of satisfaction when I learned of Fox’s death. It was the final proof I needed. A man of Lyman’s professional standing and social prominence was not the sort who could face ruin and disgrace.

Nonetheless, as time passes, I suppose it’s not unnatural for a shade of doubt occasionally to trouble me. I have the firmest conviction that I proved my case, but as in many more celebrated cases, the evidence, one must admit, was circumstantial. I’m back home at the cottage now, snug and secure, yet for some reason I’ve been having trouble sleeping. The insomnia keeps getting worse. Maybe I should see a doctor.