The Weak-Eyed Bat

Chapter Twelve

Mary Little was already downstairs by the time Prye arrived. Her dress was ripped where she had torn it out of Jennie’s hands, her hair was flying over her shoulders, and she wore no shoes or stockings. Jennie was clutching one of her hands, periodically emitting a low moan.

Prye stood in the doorway watching them, not speaking. Under his gaze the tableau became fixed, self-conscious, and with a little shudder Mary stopped struggling and met his eyes. She looked embarrassed and half-ashamed, but she said defiantly:

“You can’t stop me, you can’t!”

Prye smiled. “Stop you making a fool of yourself? Well, I can try. Jennie, perhaps we’d better help Mrs. Little back to her room.”

“I’m not going back to my room,” Mary said. “I’m going out to find my husband. If you interfere with me, I’ll... I’ll—” She clung to the banister, breathing hard. Prye picked her up easily and carried her upstairs. He put her on the bed and she started to cry and beat her hands feebly on the pillow.

“Stop that,” Prye said. He called down to Jennie and told her to bring up his instrument bag. She brought it up, laid it on a chair, and backed out of the room. Prye went on talking in a steady, monotonous voice as he prepared a hypodermic needle with one eighth grain of morphine.

“I told you this morning that the police were doing their best to find your husband. I spend half my time soothing hysterical women like you. Sometimes they’re merely pretending, and in that case a smart slap on the face is the best cure.”

“Oh!” Mary gasped.

“Others have momentarily lost their powers of reasoning and I give them a hypodermic. That’s you. I have here a one eighth grain of morphine sulphate. It may put you to sleep and it may not, but it will ease your mind for a while.”

“I don’t want to sleep,” she protested weakly. “I’m scared. I—”

He rubbed her arm with an alcohol swab, still talking in a voice that had become a drone. She did not even wince as the needle entered her arm.

“You’re a good hypnotic subject. You’re practically asleep already. That’s because you’re suggestible. If I suggested that you were a cow you’d probably moo. It’s nearly three o’clock and the only thing to do at three o’clock in the middle of summer is to go to sleep. I wish to hell I were asleep. Mary?”

He touched her shoulder and she did not move. Her breathing was more even. He felt her pulse and found it fast and weak. Then he went out and closed the door.

“Is she all right?” Jennie asked fearfully when he came downstairs.

“My patients are always all right,” Prye said with dignity, “but if she has a relapse at seven o’clock let me know.”

Jennie was gazing at him, awed. “How did you do it?”

Prye smiled modestly. “Sheer force of personality though the opium poppy did its bit, too.” He went out whistling, and while Jennie was sitting down to have a nice long cry he was pounding on Miss Alfonse’s door.

Miss Alfonse was certainly in her room. There were rustlings and creakings from inside. But she made no move to open the door. From his pocket Prye took a small triangular piece of metal, a recent gift from a friend of his whose intermittent address was San Quentin, and within a minute the door was unlocked.

Prye rapped once again. “Miss Alfonse, shall I come in or would you prefer to come out?”

“You can come in,” she answered in a flat voice.

She was sitting on the edge of her bed, wearing her uniform. Her face was pale and completely without expression.

“Wise guy, eh?” she said.

“I have my talents,” Prye said. “One of them is saving young ladies from certain death. If you’re a lady you qualify. Even if you’re not a lady, somebody probably loves you and I don’t want you to be murdered. At a quarter after six last night you phoned Tom Little. What for?”

“I wanted to play honeymoon bridge and I needed a partner.”

“That’s your attitude, is it?”

“Until I can think of a better one, and I’m not thinking myself into a brain strain for your benefit.”

“I wouldn’t even ask you to,” Prye said. “Miss Jones, though, didn’t mention honeymoon bridge to me, but there was something about a pier. Miss Jones is the switchboard operator at Clayton. She’s got a dozen roses and I’ve got a record of your conversation with Little.”

Miss Alfonse’s face did not change but her fingers plucked at the chenille flowers on her bedspread.

“Mr. Little and I had business together,” she said at last.

“It must have been peculiar business because Tom Little hasn’t been seen since. Here’s another interesting point: at nine o’clock you had your appointment with Little, and an hour later you were throwing a fit in Miss Bonner’s room.”

“The hell I was.”

“That’s her story.”

“She’s an old goat,” Miss Alfonse said tightly.

“Now here’s my idea. On Tuesday you told Constable Jakes that you had an alibi for the time of Joan’s murder. Yesterday you and I had a little chat. At first you were pretty skittish but by the time you left you were feeling good again. I think I know why.”

“All right. Why?”

“Because you didn’t have an alibi but you had suddenly thought of a fine way to get one. It had to be a man because you had already told Jakes you were out with a man that night. It had to be someone who would be glad to provide an alibi for himself, and it couldn’t be Ralph because you have other ideas about Ralph. Tom Little filled the bill nicely. He was one of the chief suspects, he had an elastic code of ethics, and he would be sap enough to fall in with any scheme presented by a lady in the right way. It’s lucky for you that he disappeared, because Little already had an alibi and it wouldn’t have looked well if he had two of them. When you’re counting alibis and not apples, one plus one equals none.”

Miss Alfonse sat rigid, a film of ice forming over her eyes.

“Now just suppose that you met Tom Little as you had planned and told him your intellectual blitz. He would naturally wonder why you were so anxious to have an alibi and it might have occurred to him that your anxiety had its source in a guilty conscience. So Tom says, ‘Nuts to you, Miss Alfonse. I know now who murdered Joan. Wait right there until I go and get a policeman.’ But you don’t like that idea at all. You have given yourself away, you are desperate. You reach down and pick up a rock and several people are given the opportunity to quote ‘De mortuis nil nisi bonum.’ As simple as that.”

Miss Alfonse got up and went over to the window. Without turning her head she said: “You mean he’s dead?”

“We think so,” Prye said.

“What did I do with the body?”

Prye went over to the window and stood beside her and they both looked out at the lake. It was dimpling in the sun like a fat baby.

“Nasty place to end up, isn’t it?” Prye said. “Joan knows about that. I guess Tom knows, too. Funny about Tom. You’d expect him to have more sense than to go traipsing about in the woods with someone he scarcely knew. People take foolish risks sometimes. When someone has committed one murder the second is easier. The third? The third is the simplest of all. The murderer is in good training.”

Miss Alfonse turned on him savagely. “What in hell are you talking about?”

Prye did not raise his voice. “You. You’re the third.”

For a minute the silence was so thick that Prye’s skin began to crawl with invisible insects. Then he heard Emily shouting “Wang!” and he began to smile.

“How much are you getting?” he asked.

“For what?”

“Keeping your mouth shut.”

“I don’t know anything. I didn’t keep that date with Tom Little. I’m scared of thunderstorms. I wouldn’t go out in one unless I had to.”

“You had to,” Prye said.

She shook her head.

“You’re being very naive, Miss Alfonse, to trust a murderer.”

“I won’t,” she said in a firm voice. “I know what I’m doing. What’s more, I know what you’re doing. You’re bluffing, and you’re a mile wide of the mark.”

“If you say so,” Prye agreed politely.

“I’m not worried about not having an alibi. A lot of other people haven’t. And I’m not worried about getting a bash on my head for the simple reason that I don’t intend to turn my back to anyone. Not even to you, Dr. Prye.”

She had backed to the door, and now she opened it and waited for him to go out. He heard the lock slipping into place behind him.

It was nearly four o’clock when he arrived at his cottage. Nora and Inspector White were waiting for him in the sitting room, and he greeted them gloomily and flung himself into a chair.

“What’s the matter?” Nora asked.

“The heat,” Prye said. “And murders. And storms and liars. If this were an epidemic of typhoid, we’d inoculate. But it looks like an epidemic of murder.”

Inspector White coughed gently. “In my own way I have inoculated.”

“Have you men posted at each end of the lane and throughout the woods? Have you a string of spotlights put up? Have you told everyone to stay inside and lock their doors? It may sound drastic but I for one would rather be drastic than dead.”

“I have sent for more men,” Inspector White said. “But there are only a limited number available and the commissioner—”

“To hell with the commissioner,” Prye said. “If there aren’t enough men, why doesn’t he hire some deputies?”

“Could I help?” Nora said in a small voice. “I can fire a gun.”

“The trick is to hit something,” Prye said. He turned to Inspector White. “You have a fine reputation, Inspector. You understand criminals and how they work. You know all about fingerprints and poroscopy and moulages and ballistics and the other tools of crime detection. But I don’t think these murders are in your field at all. I think they’re in mine. I think we are dealing with a mind that believes it is divinely inspired to dispense justice, with a person who considers himself an instrument of God.”

He shrugged his shoulders. “I’m guessing, I’m having hunches, my subconscious is getting up steam. Call it what you like. But I assure you that I would rather deal with the lowest gangster on the continent than with one of these instruments of God. Nothing can stop them, you see. They’re not afraid of the laws in this world or in the next. They are simply and irrevocably and terrifyingly right.

“There are dozens of these people in the violent wards of institutions. They perform strange and wonderful rituals at the dictates of this inner voice that they call God. You’ve never been in a violent ward. They don’t encourage visitors because it isn’t safe. You wouldn’t like to go through one. I saw a nurse putting up a Christmas tree one day last December and the next day the tree was gone except for the main trunk. There wasn’t a piece of tinsel or an ornament or a shred of evergreen left. We operated on the man who ate it but he died anyway. At home I have a collection of fifty-seven articles taken from a woman’s stomach, including a spectacles frame and eleven nails. She died, too.

“Even in sane people, or those who pass for sane, we sometimes find this terrible compulsion, this overwhelming obedience to a voice within themselves. Sometimes the commands are trivial — ‘Always lick a stamp from left to right.’ Sometimes they’re important — ‘Kill Joan Frost.’ In one case it’s superstition or a compulsion neurosis. In the other, it’s murder, murder at the bidding of God and for the good of all, murder for the sake of justice. A man obsessed by the idea of justice for his race is murdering half of Europe. And close beside us a man or woman has taken justice into his own hands and doles it out with a bag of stones and an ax.”

He sat down suddenly and smiled.

“Impassioned oratory is not my strong suit.”

Nora was staring at him, half-hypnotized.

“Is it true?” she whispered.

“Is what true?”

“About the Christmas tree?”

“Certainly it’s true.”

She got up quickly and left the room. Inspector White’s voice was rather uncertain. “I hope you’re wrong. I’ve never had anything to do with a maniac.”

“Not exactly a maniac,” Prye smiled. “Our murderer is living, outwardly at least, a normal life. He has an obsession which he is still sane enough to keep to himself. He may be obeying the laws of God, you see, but he is well aware of the laws of man. An obsession is, after all, merely an idea which has gotten out of control, just as a phobia is a fear that has gotten out of control. We all have phobias to some extent. My own is acrophobia. I’m terrified of heights. I also have a phobia of having a phobia which I suppose would be called phobia-phobia if anyone were silly enough to name it. Don’t mind me, Inspector, I always talk too much when I’m tired, which brings us to that controversial question: What is tiredness? Shall we go into it?”

“Not now,” the inspector said. “Besides, what good would it do to know what tiredness is? When I’m tired I rest, and then I am no longer tired.”

“Simply and beautifully said. What this country needs is more simple and beautiful sayings said by more simple and beautiful people.”

Inspector White rose briskly. “You’d better rest, Prye. I’m expecting some men at four-thirty. By the way, you were right about the canoe. It belonged to Joan Frost. But the dinghy with the outboard motor is also missing, so dream about that, will you?”

He went out, and in ten minutes Prye was asleep stretched out on the leather couch. Nora found him there later, and feeling tenderly maternal she covered him with a blanket although the thermometer was near the 90° mark.

At half-past eight on Wednesday evening Jennie Harris was in the sitting room of the Littles’ cottage working on the afghan that was to become famous in a certain area of Muskoka. She crocheted absently, one eye on the clock and one ear cocked for any sounds upstairs. But when a sound finally came it was not from upstairs but from the front door. Later Jennie described the knock as “soft and mysterious.” She heard no footsteps, and her hearing, she said, was very good considering that she was over sixty.

She put down her afghan and went to the door. She was not frightened. If, as Hattie Brown had told her, there were fifty policemen guarding the community, what was there to be afraid of? Nothing, absolutely nothing. But her feet faltered, and she called out, “Who’s there?” before she unbolted the door.

No one answered because there was no one there.

She stood peering out into the darkness for a full minute listening, too frightened to go further and too curious to go back. Gradually her eyes became adjusted to the darkness and she saw at her feet a long white envelope. She stooped and picked it up, conscious of eyes upon her.

A tree rustled beside the veranda and she let out a cry and leaped back into the house. She locked and bolted the door and leaned against it, trembling.

“Holy Moses,” Jennie said reverently.

“Is there another man in your life?” Prye asked Nora.

She was down on her knees in front of the fireplace. In the grate she had collected a pile of paper, wood shavings, and dry timber in the hope that the application of a lighted match would produce a roaring fire. Vast clouds of smoke issuing from the grate hinted at fire but no fire was visible.

“Because if there is another man in your life,” Prye shouted above the crackle, “I wish you would sit down quietly and write him a letter.”

She struck another match and replied absently: “Don’t like writing letters. I like building big homey fires. Have you any marshmallows?”

Prye went over, grasped her hands, and pulled her to her feet.

“We have no marshmallows,” he said as gently as possible. “But we have two murders, and I want to think about them. Think, see?”

“You thought last night,” Nora said practically, “and nothing came of it.”

Prye held her two shoulders in his hands. “Look, if you’re a good girl I’ll marry you.”

“Gentlemen’s agreement, or will you put it in writing?”

“Writing.”

“Do I get kissed?”

She got kissed. Then she sat down and folded her hands primly.

“That was nice,” she said. “All right. Who did the murdering?”

“I don’t know,” Prye said. “I theorized this afternoon but I think I was partly right. Joan was killed because she was hated. It may have been a personal hatred on the part of those who came into daily contact with her like Susan and her father, or an impersonal hatred on the part of someone who hated her for what she was, who thought she wasn’t fit to live.”

“It wasn’t Susan,” Nora said scornfully.

“No? Professor Frost said something peculiar the other day. He told me Susan had a spark of fire some place within her but he’d never seen it. I have — when she was talking about Joan. Susan was out on Monday night. Susan is a nice girl but she is twenty-six and plain and dowdy, and has never been kissed and has never had a pretty dress or been to a dance. And she is in love with Ralph.”

“I knew that a month ago,” Nora said.

“In my profession we regard such paragons as Susan with a cold eye. They have no normal outlets for their feelings. Compared with Joan, Susan is so unattractive that she has come to believe that unattractiveness is a virtue in itself. It is deplorable the value that most women and many men place on physical charm so that the lack of it warps their lives or, more rarely, turns them into geniuses in the artistic fields. If Susan had the nicest legs in Ontario she wouldn’t be Susan, she might even be Joan.

“So we have two sisters, and one of them is beautiful and bad and the other is plain and good. The beautiful but bad is engaged to the man that the plain but good loves and so everybody does not live happily ever after. No — one of them dies. With Joan dead, Ralph is ripe to fall into the nearest arms. Well, there’s Susan’s motive and it’s a strong one. Her opportunity is better than anyone’s. She simply had to wait for Joan to go out, follow her, and kill her. She may have had the bag of stones already prepared, or she may have known that Joan was going to meet someone in the grove of birches, arrived ahead of time, and prepared it then.”

“It was a funny weapon to use for murder,” Nora said. “It shows such economy of thought and effort — to kill and to weight the body down with the same thing. It suggests a neat logical mind, a cold-blooded, detached kind of mind. Like Professor Frost’s. But it’s impossible to think of Professor Frost as a murderer. He’s so mild and harmless.”

“If I remember correctly, seventy percent of the murders in the United States are committed by people who have never been arrested before and who were probably considered mild and harmless. I rather like Frost in the role of murderer. He’s so sure of himself it would only amuse him to see us trying to fasten the crime on him. I don’t mind amusing people but I hate to do it by my blundering ineptitude.”

“He wouldn’t care enough to murder anyone,” Nora said.

“Not ordinarily. But what happened on Monday morning might have swayed him. Frost thinks well of himself and his ability to control situations and people. He wouldn’t have liked Joan stealing his diary and slapping him across the face. But I don’t have to find a motive for Frost. He admitted he had one.”

“He wouldn’t have done that if he were really the murderer,” Nora objected.

Prye smiled dryly. “If Frost is guilty he’ll give us all aid short of war. To admit his motive and his lack of an alibi would merely titillate his sense of humor. If he’s the murderer he won’t be caught.”

“Aren’t you being modest, darling?”

“Never,” Prye said glumly. “I simply recognize a first class opponent when I see one. He has the whip hand to begin with — his part is merely that of passive resistance. Mine is to collect positive proof. He’s cool. He has the ability to make me feel like an ass. He has a charming talent for picking pockets — yes, my pocket! He knows we have nothing definite against him.”

The telephone began to ring, two long and one short.

“Is that your ring?” Nora asked.

“Yes. I’ll get it. Probably Jennie saying Mrs. Little has jumped out of a window.”

He went out to the kitchen, picked up the phone, and said: “Dr. Prye speaking.”

“He’s dead!” Jennie whispered over the phone. “We got a letter. Says to tell Mrs. Little he’s dead. Says to tell her his body—”

“I’ll be right over. Be quiet and don’t make a fuss and don’t say anything to Mrs. Little.”