The Institute

24

All of a sudden the elevator door clanged open, there was a knock at the door, and the state police were there, three or four of them headed by a sergeant. There was also an ambulance crew in green smocks, two orderlies and a doctor who looked like a high school boy. He pushed through the officers, knelt by Inga, and immediately fanned his hand to indicate that she was dead. He told the orderlies to lay her out. Then he stepped over to Mr. Garrett, fanned his hand the same way, and motioned to the orderlies again. He knelt by Hortense, felt her pulse, lifted an eyelid with his thumb, and said to the orderlies: “Never mind them. Help me get her down to the ambulance — now.” He gave the table a kick and they lifted it over the sofa to the space between it and the bookcases, which made room on the floor beside her. Then the doctor took a blanket from a pile the orderlies had brought and put it down beside her, folding it carefully. He pushed one edge of it under her and rolled her on her side. Then he rolled her back, pulled the blanket through, and motioned for the orderlies. They put down the stretcher and lifted her onto it with the blanket.

“O.K.,” he said, and they moved her quickly to the elevator. “Hold it,” he called and then said to the sergeant: “I have to rush her over if she’s going to have a chance. Get your names and the information on the others, and I’ll meet you at the hospital in the morgue and sign the certificates for you. They’ll both be autopsy jobs, but that report, of course, will be separate.”

“O.K., doc, take her away.”

Through the door I could see her as they took her onto the elevator, her face pale as the light shone down. She was beautiful. When she was gone, I turned to the officers who had taken up where the orderlies had left off, laying the bodies out for another ambulance crew and covering them with blankets. The sergeant, who said his name was Herbert, sat down on a sofa and motioned to me. The whole place seemed very odd to me now; everything was askew.

“Just a minute while I straighten up,” I said. I picked up the table and put it back in place and then pulled the sofa straight.

“O.K.,” the sergeant said, “let’s go.”

“Go where?”

“Suppose you tell me what happened here.”

“Well, there’s not much to tell, really. Miss Bergson — the woman over there, Miss Inga Bergson — shot Mr. Garrett, the man lying beside her, and then shot Mrs. Garrett.”

“Do you know their addresses?”

“I think I do.”

“O.K., but first, who shot her?”

“Who?”

“Miss — Berson. Is that what you said her name is?”

“No one shot her.”

“Then how come she’s dead?”

“Search me. I didn’t know she was dead until that doctor said she was. I must have broken her neck.”

“You must have—”

I explained what I had done. It took him a moment to readjust. Until then, he had assumed that Inga had also been shot.

“I came down on her neck with my hand,” I said, “with kind of a karate chop. But the gun went off first. And when I saw that Mrs. Garrett was hit, I didn’t pay much attention to whether Miss Bergson was hurt — and I completely forgot the gun.”

He motioned toward the dispatch case he had put on the opposite sofa, saying: “I have it. It was on the floor beside her. So let’s go back to the names.”

“Wait a minute.”

It left me sick to my stomach to realize that I had killed someone. When I told the sergeant, he said: “Take your time. We’ve got all night.”

“No! Maybe you have, sergeant, but I don’t.” I snapped out of it then, telling him to make it quick, because I had to get to Cheverly to the hospital to find out how Hortense was.

“Calm down,” he said; “cool it. One thing at a time. You’re the only one who knows what happened, and I have to make a report. So — first things first. Names, please, addresses, and occupations, if you know them. First, this dead guy here—”

I gave him the Garretts’ names and the Wilmington apartment as their address, for him and for her, with the Watergate also for her. He said: “Wait a minute. You can’t live in two places at the same time.”

“You can if you’re rich enough.”

For the first time, he reacted to what he’d just written down. “Hey!” he exclaimed. “Those names were in the paper. They gave a party. The two of them gave it together, and the President came. Are these the same Garretts?”

“They gave a party, yes; and the President came.”

He looked at me and then at his notebook. “When did these people arrive tonight?” he said.

“I don’t know. I didn’t keep track.”

“Wait.”

He went to the phone and called the night watchman and questioned him. When he came back, he said: “Mr. Garrett got here at 11:52, but no women came, the night watchman says.”

“They must have used the rear entrance.”

“What rear entrance is that?”

I told him about the door from the parking lot, which was one floor down from the lobby, and about the freight elevator.

“Does that door stand open?” he said.

“No, I think they keep it locked.”

“And these women had a key?”

“Mrs. Garrett probably did, yes.”

“What for? So she could get in your place?”

“That’s right. She borrowed it sometimes, to use the phone or whatever, and I gave her a key.”

“O.K., get on with what happened, Mr. Palmer.”

“I thought I had already told you.”

“Well, I don’t — I don’t think so at all. Listen, if you clunked a woman and broke her neck to keep her from killing somebody, it’s all right with me and it’s all right with the law. I’d have no reason to hold you — provided you come clean. Now, you can have counsel if you want, and plead the Fifth, if you want — but only on the grounds that what you say might incriminate you. Would it?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Then you’ll have to talk. So get started.”

“Give me a minute to get it together.”

“Take your time.”

I began ticking it off, beginning with my first meeting with the Garretts. He sat looking at me, and then I realized that I was talking into a recorder which he had placed between us. I kept on and on, working down to Mr. Garrett’s arrival and what he had come about, his fear that Inga might push Hortense off a balcony. Then I brought the two women in, explaining that they had come without knowing Mr. Garrett would be there. Then I told him about the argument we’d had, trying to keep it brief but, at the same time, clear. I got to the shooting and my jumping at Inga, and finally that seemed to be it. He seemed satisfied.

“O.K., Mr. Palmer,” he said very respectfully, picking up the recorder. “I’ll ask you to come with me now while I get this down on paper. We’ll have to go to the police office in the County Building where I have a typewriter.”

“I have a typewriter here.”

“You do? Then, if I can borrow it...?”

“Be my guest. I’ll get it.”

I didn’t use it much, and it was in the spare bedroom. I got it for him and he set it up on the table, then started his recorder. So I wouldn’t hear my voice croaking at him, I wandered back to the bedroom I had shared with Hortense and lay on the bed in the dark. Then I heard someone come in and went out to find more police and orderlies there to take the bodies away. They made it quick, and then I was there with the sergeant who was still pecking away at the type-writer, accompanied by my voice. I went back to the bedroom. After awhile he called me. He seemed to be through and was studying what he had written.

“What do you do with it now?”

“Turn it in, of course.”

“Will newspaper reporters have access to it?”

“Well, that’s the whole idea. Under the law, they have the right. When copies are made of it, one will hang on a hook in the clerk’s room there in the County Building. Anyone can look, including even them.”

“You don’t seem to like them much.”

“Does anyone?”

He asked me to check it over “for facts,” so I had to read it. It was all there in police lingo, from my first call on the Garretts to the doctor’s pronouncement of death, with the “intimate relations” between Garrett and Inga precisely spelled out. But one thing I managed to hold back. If he suspected it, he didn’t show it, and that was the “intimate relations between Mrs. Garrett and me.” That wasn’t in the report, thank God, and when I had read it, I said to him: “Fine. It looks O.K. to me.”

He got up to go, telling me to stand by, “in case,” meaning don’t leave town till the case is wound up. Then he left. I sat for a minute and then went downstairs, got in the car, and drove to Cheverly where the Prince Georges General Hospital is.

The girl at the window spoke to me by name. “Do I know you,” I said to her.

“Not really, I suppose, Dr. Palmer. I was in your poetry class a couple of years ago, just for three days, till I switched my course. But I remember you well. What can we do for you?”

I said that I had come about “Mrs. Garrett, Mrs. Richard Garrett, to inquire how she is and see her if that’s permitted at this hour.”

“Well, I’m afraid it wouldn’t be—” running her finger over a memo of some kind. “Oh, here she is — yes, she’s in Intensive Care. Her condition, unfortunately, is critical.”

“Thank you. When can I see her?”

“At two this afternoon — for ten minutes, if, if the doctor will let you see her at all.”