Kitabı oku: «The Conjure-Man Dies: A Harlem Mystery»
Copyright
Collins Crime Club
an imprint of
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
This eBook edition 2017
First published by Covici-Friede, New York 1932
‘John Archer’s Nose’ first published in The Metropolitan by Meeks Publishing Co. 1935 Introduction first published by Arno Press Inc. 1971
Cover design by Mike Topping © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020 Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780008216450
Ebook Edition © January 2017 ISBN: 9780008216467
Version: 2020-09-28
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
Chapter XXIII
Chapter XXIV
John Archer’s Nose
Also by this Author
About the Author
About the Publisher
INTRODUCTION
THE CONJURE-MAN DIES is, first and foremost, highly readable, wholly entertaining.
This should go without saying, since the book is a mystery novel of merit, and the sole function of any mystery story is to entertain. Of all types of fiction, it is probably the least pretentious, which is all in its favour at a time when the novel is so often used by authors as sugar coating for indigestible messes of philosophy or polemics calculated to make the reading of fiction a duty rather than a pleasure. Or for self-indulgent exercises in Beautiful Writing by poets manqués which make it neither a duty nor a pleasure.
This is not to deny that the formal mystery story does have its limitations, nor that too many of its practitioners, adopting these limitations as a rule book, tend to turn out a sort of mechanically contrived product, one cheapjack job after another rolling off the production line, each similar to the other beneath its coat of paint.
But it is a fact that a writer of authentic talent can and will create within the genre a novel which, while staying in bounds, offers a good example of that talent. Rudolph Fisher was such a writer, and the one mystery novel he wrote, The Conjure-Man Dies, originally published in 1932, offers striking evidence of it, especially when viewed in the light of its times. Its success on publication was great enough to carry it into production as a play by the Federal Theater Project in 1936. Its rediscovery, and appearance in this edition, are no more than proper tributes to both its readability and its merits as a record of its period.
Fisher himself was an extraordinary man. Born on 9 May 1897 in Washington, D.C., he graduated from Brown University with honours and went on to become a distinguished doctor of medicine, specializing in Roentgenology. At the height of his medical career, he turned to writing as an avocation and was soon being published by such magazines as Atlantic Monthly, Crisis, McClures, American Mercury and Story. A novel, The Walls of Jericho, published in 1928, received high critical praise, and when one adds the success of The Conjure-Man Dies to the list of Fisher’s literary achievements, it is plain that he was at least as talented in writing as he was in the practice of medicine. He died, however, on 26 December 1934, tragically young, and with a brilliantly promising career in letters unfulfilled.
His authorship of The Conjure-Man Dies gave Fisher a lonely distinction. Since the 1860s, when Metta Victor in America and Wilkie Collins in England produced the first formal mystery novels, there had been no Black writer who utilized this technique as a means of literary expression until Fisher came along. After his death there was again a hiatus until the 1960s, when Chester Himes appeared on the scene with his detective stories of Harlem. The time now ripe for it, Himes, an enormously talented writer himself, came to achieve a prestige and financial success from his mystery stories which Fisher could never have conceived.
What adds a special dimension to Fisher’s novel from the present reader’s point of view is the date of its publication, 1932. The African-American experience that year was still basically unchanged from the era of the Reconstruction. The vaunted Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s had not gone below the surface; excellent as some of the literature emerging from it was, there was a strong smell of the dilettante about the movement, largely emanating from the whites who were part of it. And the Great Depression had stopped even the meagre economic life-blood that was left in Black communities from flowing. If life everywhere was hard, life in Harlem came down to a desperate day-by-day struggle for mere survival in a world where the most minimal public works and inadequate welfare payments were only glimmerings on the Rooseveltian horizon, and where the word ‘militant’ was the exclusive property of white-dominated radical organizations.
Under these life-and-death conditions, the ‘Negro’ role, as prescribed by the white world of the 1930s, remained consistent. It was a familiar role, presented to the public by, among other things, the mystery stories of Octavus Roy Cohen in The Saturday Evening Post where the antics of the comically uppity Florian Slappey and his dull-witted, head-scratching cohorts illustrated it so vividly, and by mystery movies where the trusty but terrified and goggle-eyed Black servant could perform it larger than life on the screen.
On the other hand, Black Americans could take what comfort they might from white intellectual and dilettante who, heading in the opposite direction from the arrant racist, sentimentalized Black lives, romanticized their bitter struggle into something delightfully exciting, and, in effect, patted them on the head as one would a pet spaniel. It was ironic and inevitable that neither the racist nor the sentimentalist knew how nicely they were cooperating in the destruction of a people’s identity and individuality by barring the way to the honest exploration and discovery of them. This, of course, is the function of the stereotype, and it matters very little whether the stereotype is that of vicious hound or pet poodle.
The mystery novel of that day, where it dealt with Black people at all, played both angles. They were either servitors or hardboiled crap shooters, take it or leave it. Hardly surprising when one considers that, first, the mystery novel is popular fiction, and popular fiction always tends to cater to popular prejudices, and, second, that the genre itself had, by and large, used as its subjects the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant middle and upper classes, always acknowledging their superiority to the non-WASP world without question.
The classical mysteries written under these conditions were essentially puzzles where the reader was invited to unearth the murderer before the author did so. Their structures were as rigid as those of a Japanese no play, their characters one-dimensional, their styles generally florid, representative of the snob’s idea of Good Writing. A rereading of S. S. Van Dine, most successful mystery writer of that time, will be enlightening to anyone questioning what might seem excessively harsh judgments in the foregoing.
Luckily, in 1930, there crept into this WASP paradise of genteel murder a serpent named Dashiell Hammett. With a background as Pinkerton investigator and pulp writer, with a superb talent for fiction and a highly-developed social conscience, he plucked the apple right out of the tree that year with his his publication of The Maltese Falcon. Suddenly, murder in the mystery novel showed some of the forms it had already demonstrated in such outstanding pulp magazines as Black Mask and Flynn’s. Suddenly it was booted right out of the vicar’s garden and into the gutter, a much more likely setting for it. There was a hard-edged realism to Hammett’s characters and events, a comprehension of the meanness and viciousness of the urban world they inhabited. And his prose, clipped, economical, earthy, broke completely with the sort of overblown style favoured by S. S. Van Dine and his confreres.
It is highly probable that Rudolph Fisher, intrigued by the idea of presenting Harlem, from top to bottom, in a mystery novel that could reach a larger audience than a straight novel, devoted himself to some serious study of what made the books of both Hammett and S. S. Van Dine tick, since both their approaches are clearly evident in The Conjure-Man Dies. Fisher’s extremely complex plotting and his occasionally too-pedantic writing of descriptive and expository passages is in the classical mode. But the characters, their broad range of background, and the handling of dialogue are wholly of Hammett’s realistic school.
Overall, it is clear that Fisher’s own sympathies and interests lie with Hammett, much as he deferred to traditional techniques. Stylistically, if one judges by the descriptive and expository writing in his novel, The Walls of Jericho, it is possible that he was not so much deferring to what he thought the mystery reader demanded as reflecting a background of pre-World War I reading. Every writer is strongly influenced by the reading he most enjoyed in his teens. It is the exceptional writer who, like Fisher, can dispense with its influence even in part.
In either case, there is no question that it is Fisher’s adherence to the new realism which, as in Hammett’s works, invests The Conjure-Man Dies with the qualities of a social document recording a time and a place without seeming to. One is drawn through the book by its story, but emerges at last with much more than that story in mind.
In the end, of course, it is the book itself that must speak for its author. And what one can best do in introducing a book so happily rediscovered after decades of obscurity is only to mark its place in history, and then step aside.
STANLEY ELLIN
New York
This book was first published in New York in 1932 and reflects the society of that time, including racist language that would be considered offensive if used today. It is presented here in full for the sake of historical accuracy.
CHAPTER I
ENCOUNTERING the bright-lighted gaiety of Harlem’s Seventh Avenue, the frigid midwinter night seemed to relent a little. She had given Battery Park a chill stare and she would undoubtedly freeze the Bronx. But here in this mid-realm of rhythm and laughter she seemed to grow warmer and friendlier, observing, perhaps, that those who dwelt here were mysteriously dark like herself.
Of this favour the Avenue promptly took advantage. Sidewalks barren throughout the cold white day now sprouted life like fields in spring. Along swung boys in camels’ hair beside girls in bunny and muskrat; broad, flat heels clacked, high narrow ones clicked, reluctantly leaving the disgorging theatres or eagerly seeking the voracious dance halls. There was loud jest and louder laughter and the frequent uplifting of merry voices in the moment’s most popular song:
‘I’ll be glad when you’re dead, you rascal you,
I’ll be glad when you’re dead, you rascal you.
What is it that you’ve got
Makes my wife think you so hot?
Oh you dog—I’ll be glad when you’re gone!’
But all of black Harlem was not thus gay and bright. Any number of dark, chill, silent side streets declined the relenting night’s favour. 130th Street, for example, east of Lenox Avenue, was at this moment cold, still, and narrowly forbidding; one glanced down this block and was glad one’s destination lay elsewhere. Its concentrated gloom was only intensified by an occasional spangle of electric light, splashed ineffectually against the blackness, or by the unearthly pallor of the sky, into which a wall of dwellings rose to hide the moon.
Among the houses in this looming row, one reared a little taller and gaunter than its fellows, so that the others appeared to shrink from it and huddle together in the shadow on either side. The basement of this house was quite black; its first floor, high above the sidewalk and approached by a long greystone stoop, was only dimly lighted; its second floor was lighted more dimly still, while the third, which was the top, was vacantly dark again like the basement. About the place hovered an oppressive silence, as if those who entered here were warned beforehand not to speak above a whisper. There was, like a footnote, in one of the two first-floor windows to the left of the entrance a black-on-white sign reading:
SAMUEL CROUCH, UNDERTAKER.
On the narrow panel to the right of the doorway the silver letters of another sign obscurely glittered on an onyx background:
N. FRIMBO, PSYCHIST.
Between the two signs receded the high, narrow vestibule, terminating in a pair of tall glass-panelled doors. Glass curtains, tightly stretched in vertical folds, dimmed the already too-subdued illumination beyond.
It was about an hour before midnight that one of the doors rattled and flew open, revealing the bareheaded, short, round figure of a young man who manifestly was profoundly agitated and in a great hurry. Without closing the door behind him, he rushed down the stairs, sped straight across the street, and in a moment was frantically pushing the bell of the dwelling directly opposite. A tall, slender, light-skinned man of obviously habitual composure answered the excited summons.
‘Is—is you him?’ stammered the agitated one, pointing to a sign labelled ‘John Archer, M.D.’
‘Yes—I’m Dr Archer.’
‘Well, arch on over here, will you, doc?’ urged the caller. ‘Sump’m done happened to Frimbo.’
‘Frimbo? The fortune teller?’
‘Step on it, will you, doc?’
Shortly, the physician, bag in hand, was hurrying up the greystone stoop behind his guide. They passed through the still open door into a hallway and mounted a flight of thickly carpeted stairs.
At the head of the staircase a tall, lank, angular figure awaited them. To this person the short, round, black, and by now quite breathless guide panted, ‘I got one, boy! This here’s the doc from ’cross the street. Come on, doc. Right in here.’
Dr Archer, in passing, had an impression of a young man as long and lean as himself, of a similarly light complexion except for a profusion of dark brown freckles, and of a curiously scowling countenance that glowered from either ill humour or apprehension. The doctor rounded the banister head and strode behind his pilot toward the front of the house along the upper hallway, midway of which, still following the excited short one, he turned and swung into a room that opened into the hall at that point. The tall fellow brought up the rear.
Within the room the physician stopped, looking about in surprise. The chamber was almost entirely in darkness. The walls appeared to be hung from ceiling to floor with black velvet drapes. Even the ceiling was covered, the heavy folds of cloth converging from the four corners to gather at a central point above, from which dropped a chain suspending the single strange source of light, a device which hung low over a chair behind a large desk-like table, yet left these things and indeed most of the room unlighted. This was because, instead of shedding its radiance downward and outward as would an ordinary shaded droplight, this mechanism focused a horizontal beam upon a second chair on the opposite side of the table. Clearly the person who used the chair beneath the odd spotlight could remain in relative darkness while the occupant of the other chair was brightly illuminated.
‘There he is—jes’ like Jinx found him.’
And now in the dark chair beneath the odd lamp the doctor made out a huddled, shadowy form. Quickly he stepped forward.
‘Is this the only light?’
‘Only one I’ve seen.’
Dr Archer procured a flashlight from his bag and swept its faint beam over the walls and ceiling. Finding no sign of another lighting fixture, he directed the instrument in his hand toward the figure in the chair and saw a bare black head inclined limply sidewise, a flaccid countenance with open mouth and fixed eyes staring from under drooping lids.
‘Can’t do much in here. Anybody up front?’
‘Yes, suh. Two ladies.’
‘Have to get him outside. Let’s see. I know. Downstairs. Down in Crouch’s. There’s a sofa. You men take hold and get him down there. This way.’
There was some hesitancy. ‘Mean us, doc?’
‘Of course. Hurry. He doesn’t look so hot now.’
‘I ain’t none too warm, myself,’ murmured the short one. But he and his friend obeyed, carrying out their task with a dispatch born of distaste. Down the stairs they followed Dr Archer, and into the undertaker’s dimly lighted front room.
‘Oh, Crouch!’ called the doctor. ‘Mr Crouch!’
‘That “mister” ought to get him.’
But there was no answer. ‘Guess he’s out. That’s right—put him on the sofa. Push that other switch by the door. Good.’
Dr Archer inspected the supine figure as he reached into his bag. ‘Not so good,’ he commented. Beneath his black satin robe the patient wore ordinary clothing—trousers, vest, shirt, collar and tie. Deftly the physician bared the chest; with one hand he palpated the heart area while with the other he adjusted the ear-pieces of his stethoscope. He bent over, placed the bell of his instrument on the motionless dark chest, and listened a long time. He removed the instrument, disconnected first one, then the other, rubber tube at their junction with the bell, blew vigorously through them in turn, replaced them, and repeated the operation of listening. At last he stood erect.
‘Not a twitch,’ he said.
‘Long gone, huh?’
‘Not so long. Still warm. But gone.’
The short young man looked at his scowling freckled companion.
‘What’d I tell you?’ he whispered. ‘Was I right or wasn’t I?’
The tall one did not answer but watched the doctor. The doctor put aside his stethoscope and inspected the patient’s head more closely, the parted lips and half-open eyes. He extended a hand and with his extremely long fingers gently palpated the scalp. ‘Hello,’ he said. He turned the far side of the head toward him and looked first at that side, then at his fingers.
‘Wh-what?’
‘Blood in his hair,’ announced the physician. He procured a gauze dressing from his bag, wiped his moist fingers, thoroughly sponged and reinspected the wound. Abruptly he turned to the two men, whom until now he had treated quite impersonally. Still imperturbably, but incisively, in the manner of lancing an abscess, he asked, ‘Who are you two gentlemen?’
‘Why—uh—this here’s Jinx Jenkins, doc. He’s my buddy, see? Him and me—’
‘And you—if I don’t presume?’
‘Me? I’m Bubber Brown—’
‘Well, how did this happen, Mr Brown?’
‘’Deed I don’ know, doc. What you mean—is somebody killed him?’
‘You don’t know?’ Dr Archer regarded the pair curiously a moment, then turned back to examine further. From an instrument case he took a probe and proceeded to explore the wound in the dead man’s scalp. ‘Well—what do you know about it, then?’ he asked, still probing. ‘Who found him?’
‘Jinx,’ answered the one who called himself Bubber. ‘We jes’ come here to get this Frimbo’s advice ’bout a little business project we thought up. Jinx went in to see him. I waited in the waitin’ room. Presently Jinx come bustin’ out pop-eyed and beckoned to me. I went back with him—and there was Frimbo, jes’ like you found him. We didn’t even know he was over the river.’
‘Did he fall against anything and strike his head?’
‘No, suh, doc.’ Jinx became articulate. ‘He didn’t do nothin’ the whole time I was in there. Nothin’ but talk. He tol’ me who I was and what I wanted befo’ I could open my mouth. Well, I said that I knowed that much already and that I come to find out sump’m I didn’t know. Then he went on talkin’, tellin’ me plenty. He knowed his stuff all right. But all of a sudden he stopped talkin’ and mumbled sump’m ’bout not bein’ able to see. Seem like he got scared, and he say, “Frimbo, why don’t you see?” Then he didn’t say no more. He sound’ so funny I got scared myself and jumped up and grabbed that light and turned it on him—and there he was.’
‘M-m.’
Dr Archer, pursuing his examination, now indulged in what appeared to be a characteristic habit: he began to talk as he worked, to talk rather absently and wordily on a matter which at first seemed inapropos.
‘I,’ said he, ‘am an exceedingly curious fellow.’ Deftly, delicately, with half-closed eyes, he was manipulating his probe. ‘Questions are forever popping into my head. For example, which of you two gentlemen, if either, stands responsible for the expenses of medical attention in this unfortunate instance?’
‘Mean who go’n’ pay you?’
‘That,’ smiled the doctor, ‘makes it rather a bald question.’
Bubber grinned understandingly.
‘Well here’s one with hair on it, doc,’ he said. ‘Who got the medical attention?’
‘M-m,’ murmured the doctor. ‘I was afraid of that. Not,’ he added, ‘that I am moved by mercenary motives. Oh, not at all. But if I am not to be paid in the usual way, in coin of the realm, then of course I must derive my compensation in some other form of satisfaction. Which, after all, is the end of all our getting and spending, is it not?’
‘Oh, sho’,’ agreed Bubber.
‘Now this case’—the doctor dropped the gauze dressing into his bag—‘even robbed of its material promise, still bids well to feed my native curiosity—if not my cellular protoplasm. You follow me, of course?’
‘With my tongue hangin’ out,’ said Bubber.
But that part of his mind which was directing this discourse did not give rise to the puzzled expression on the physician’s lean, light-skinned countenance as he absently moistened another dressing with alcohol, wiped off his fingers and his probe, and stood up again.
‘We’d better notify the police,’ he said. ‘You men’—he looked at them again—‘you men call up the precinct.’
They promptly started for the door.
‘No—you don’t have to go out. The cops, you see’—he was almost confidential—‘the cops will want to question all of us. Mr Crouch has a phone back there. Use that.’
They exchanged glances but obeyed.
‘I’ll be thinking over my findings.’
Through the next room they scuffled and into the back of the long first-floor suite. There they abruptly came to a halt and again looked at each other, but now for an entirely different reason. Along one side of this room, hidden from view until their entrance, stretched a long narrow table draped with a white sheet that covered an unmistakably human form. There was not much light. The two young men stood quite still.
‘Seem like it’s—occupied,’ murmured Bubber.
‘Another one,’ mumbled Jinx.
‘Where’s the phone?’
‘Don’t ask me. I got both eyes full.’
‘There ’tis—on that desk. Go on—use it.’
‘Use it yo’ own black self,’ suggested Jinx. ‘I’m goin’ back.’
‘No you ain’t. Come on. We use it together.’
‘All right. But if that whosis says “Howdy” tell it I said “Goo’by.”’
‘And where the hell you think I’ll be if it says “Howdy”?’
‘What a place to have a telephone!’
‘Step on it, slow motion.’
‘Hello!—Hello!’ Bubber rattled the hook. ‘Hey operator! Operator!’
‘My Gawd,’ said Jinx, ‘is the phone dead too?’
‘Operator—gimme the station—quick … Pennsylvania? No ma’am—New York—Harlem—listen, lady, not railroad. Police. Please, ma’am … Hello—hey—send a flock o’ cops around here—Frimbo’s—the fortune teller’s—yea—Thirteen West 130th—yea—somebody done put that thing on him! … Yea—O.K.’
Hurriedly they returned to the front room where Dr Archer was pacing back and forth, his hands thrust into his pockets, his brow pleated into troubled furrows.
‘They say hold everything, doc. Be right over.’
‘Good.’ The doctor went on pacing.
Jinx and Bubber surveyed the recumbent form. Said Bubber, ‘If he could keep folks from dyin’, how come he didn’t keep hisself from it?’
‘Reckon he didn’t have time to put no spell on hisself,’ Jinx surmised.
‘No,’ returned Bubber grimly. ‘But somebody else had time to put one on him. I knowed sump’m was comin’. I told you. First time I seen death on the moon since I been grown. And they’s two mo’ yet.’
‘How you reckon it happened?’
‘You askin’ me?’ Bubber said. ‘You was closer to him than I was.’
‘It was plumb dark all around. Somebody could’a’ snook up behind him and crowned him while he was talkin’ to me. But I didn’t hear a sound. Say—I better catch air. This thing’s puttin’ me on the well-known spot, ain’t it?’
‘All right, dumbo. Run away and prove you done it. Wouldn’t that be a bright move?’
Dr Archer said, ‘The wisest thing for you men to do is stay here and help solve this puzzle. You’d be called in anyway—you found the body, you see. Running away looks as if you were—well—running away.’
‘What’d I tell you?’ said Bubber.
‘All right,’ growled Jinx. ‘But I can’t see how they could blame anybody for runnin’ away from this place. Graveyard’s a playground side o’ this.’
CHAPTER II
OF the ten Negro members of Harlem’s police force to be promoted from the rank of patrolman to that of detective, Perry Dart was one of the first. As if the city administration had wished to leave no doubt in the public mind as to its intention in the matter, they had chosen, in him, a man who could not have been under any circumstances mistaken for aught but a Negro; or perhaps, as Dart’s intimates insisted, they had chosen him because his generously pigmented skin rendered him invisible in the dark, a conceivably great advantage to a detective who did most of his work at night. In any case, the somber hue of his integument in no wise reflected the complexion of his brain, which was bright, alert, and practical within such territory as it embraced. He was a Manhattanite by birth, had come up through the public schools, distinguished himself in athletics at the high school he attended, and, having himself grown up with the black colony, knew Harlem from lowest dive to loftiest temple. He was rather small of stature, with unusually thin, fine features, which falsely accentuated the slightness of his slender but wiry body.
It was Perry Dart’s turn for a case when Bubber Brown’s call came in to the station, and to it Dart, with four uniformed men, was assigned.
Five minutes later he was in the entrance of Thirteen West 130th Street, greeting Dr Archer, whom he knew. His men, one black, two brown, and one yellow, loomed in the hallway about him large and ominous, but there was no doubt as to who was in command.
‘Hello, Dart,’ the physician responded to his greeting. ‘I’m glad you’re on this one. It’ll take a little active cerebration.’
‘Come on down, doc,’ the little detective grinned with a flash of white teeth. ‘You’re talking to a cop now, not a college professor. What’ve you got?’
‘A man that’ll tell no tales.’ The physician motioned to the undertaker’s front room. ‘He’s in there.’
Dart turned to his men. ‘Day, you cover the front of the place. Green, take the roof and cover the back yard. Johnson, search the house and get everybody you find into one room. Leave a light everywhere you go if possible—I’ll want to check up. Brady, you stay with me.’ Then he turned back and followed the doctor into the undertaker’s parlour. They stepped over to the sofa, which was in a shallow alcove formed by the front bay windows of the room.
‘How’d he get it, doc?’ he asked.
‘To tell you the truth, I haven’t the slightest idea.’
‘Somebody crowned him,’ Bubber helpfully volunteered.
‘Has anybody ast you anything?’ Jinx inquired gruffly.
Dart bent over the victim.
The physician said:
‘There is a scalp wound all right. See it?’
‘Yea—now that you mentioned it.’
‘But that didn’t kill him.’
‘No? How do you know it didn’t, doc?’
‘That wound is too slight. It’s not in a spot that would upset any vital centre. And there isn’t any fracture under it.’
‘Couldn’t a man be killed by a blow on the head that didn’t fracture his skull?’
‘Well—yes. If it fell just so that its force was concentrated on certain parts of the brain. I’ve never heard of such a case, but it’s conceivable. But this blow didn’t land in the right place for that. A blow at this point would cause death only by producing intracranial haemorrhage—’
‘Couldn’t you manage to say it in English, doc?’
‘Sure. He’d have to bleed inside his head.’
‘That’s more like it.’
‘The resulting accumulation of blood would raise the intra—the pressure inside his head to such a point that vital centres would be paralysed. The power would be shut down. His heart and lungs would quit cold. See? Just like turning off a light.’
‘O.K. if you say so. But how do you know he didn’t bleed inside his head?’
‘Well, there aren’t but two things that would cause him to.’
‘I’m learning, doc. Go on.’
‘Brittle arteries with no give in them—no elasticity. If he had them, he wouldn’t even have to be hit—just excitement might shoot up the blood pressure and pop an artery. See what I mean?’
‘That’s apoplexy, isn’t it?’
‘Right. And the other thing would be a blow heavy enough to fracture the skull and so rupture the blood vessels beneath. Now this man is about your age or mine—somewhere in his middle thirties. His arteries are soft—feel his wrists. For a blow to kill this man outright, it would have had to fracture his skull.’
‘Hot damn!’ whispered Bubber admiringly. ‘Listen to the doc do his stuff!’
‘And his skull isn’t fractured?’ said Dart.
‘Not if probing means anything.’
‘Don’t tell me you’ve X-rayed him too?’ grinned the detective.
‘Any fracture that would kill this man outright wouldn’t have to be X-rayed.’
‘Then you’re sure the blow didn’t kill him?’
‘Not by itself, it didn’t.’
‘Do you mean that maybe he was killed first and hit afterwards?’
‘Why would anybody do that?’ Dr Archer asked.
‘To make it seem like violence when it was really something else.’
‘I see. But no. If this man had been dead when the blow was struck, he wouldn’t have bled at all. Circulation would already have stopped.’
‘That’s right.’
‘But of one thing I’m sure: that wound is evidence of too slight a blow to kill.’
‘Specially,’ interpolated Bubber, ‘a hard-headed cullud man—’
‘There you go ag’in,’ growled his lanky companion.
‘He’s right,’ the doctor said. ‘It takes a pretty hefty impact to bash in a skull. With a padded weapon,’ he went on, ‘a fatal blow would have had to be crushing to make even so slight a scalp wound as this. That’s out. And a hard, unpadded weapon that would break the scalp just slightly like this, with only a little bleeding and without even cracking the skull, could at most have delivered only a stunning blow, not a fatal one. Do you see what I mean?’
‘Sure. You mean this man was just stunned by the blow and actually died from something else.’
‘That’s the way it looks to me.’
‘Well—anyhow he’s dead and the circumstances indicate at least a possibility of death by violence. That justifies notifying us, all right. And it makes it a case for the medical examiner. But we really don’t know that he’s been killed, do we?’
‘No. Not yet.’
‘All the more a case for the medical examiner, then. Is there a phone here, doc? Good. Brady, go back there and call the precinct. Tell ’em to get the medical examiner here double time and to send me four more men—doesn’t matter who. Now tell me, doc. What time did this man go out of the picture?’
The physician smiled.
‘Call Meridian 7-1212.’
‘O.K., doc. But approximately?’
‘Well, he was certainly alive an hour ago. Perhaps even half an hour ago. Hardly less.’
‘How long have you been here?’
‘About fifteen minutes.’
‘Then he must have been killed—if he was killed—say anywhere from five to thirty-five minutes before you got here?’
‘Yes.’
Bubber, the insuppressible, commented to Jinx, ‘Damn! That’s trimming it down to a gnat’s heel, ain’t it?’ But Jinx only responded, ‘Fool, will you hush?’
‘Who discovered him—do you know?’
‘These two men.’
‘Both of you?’ Dart asked the pair.
‘No, suh,’ Bubber answered. ‘Jinx here discovered the man. I discovered the doctor.’
Dart started to question them further, but just then Johnson, the officer who had been directed to search the house, reappeared.
‘Been all over,’ he reported. ‘Only two people in the place. Women—both scared green.’
‘All right,’ the detective said. ‘Take these two men up to the same room. I’ll be up presently.’
Officer Brady returned. ‘Medical examiner’s comin’ right up.’
The detective said, ‘Was he on this sofa when you got here, doc?’
‘No. He was upstairs in his—his consultation room, I guess you’d call it. Queer place. Dark as sin. Sitting slumped down in a chair. The light was impossible. You see, I thought I’d been called to a patient, not a corpse. So I had him brought where I knew I could examine him. Of course, if I had thought of murder—’
‘Never mind. There’s no law against your moving him or examining him, even if you had suspected murder—as long as you weren’t trying to hide anything. People think there’s some such law, but there isn’t.’
‘The medical examiner’ll probably be sore, though.’
‘Let him. We’ve got more than the medical examiner to worry about.’
‘Yes. You’ve got a few questions to ask.’
‘And answer. How, when, where, why, and who? Oh, I’m great at questions. But the answers—’
‘Well, we’ve the “when” narrowed down to a half-hour period.’ Dr Archer glanced at his watch. ‘That would be between ten-thirty and eleven. And “where” shouldn’t be hard to verify—right here in his own chair, if those two fellows are telling it straight. “Why” and “who”—those’ll be your little red wagon. “How” right now is mine. I can’t imagine—’
Again he turned to the supine figure, staring. Suddenly his lean countenance grew blanker than usual. Still staring, he took the detective by the arm. ‘Dart,’ he said reflectively, ‘we smart people are often amazingly—dumb.’
‘You’re telling me?’
‘We waste precious moments in useless speculation. We indulge ourselves in the extravagance of reason when a frugal bit of observation would suffice.’
‘Does prescription liquor affect you like that, doc?’
‘Look at that face.’
‘Well—if you insist—’
‘Just the general appearance of that face—the eyes—the open mouth. What does it look like?’
‘Looks like he’s gasping for breath.’
‘Exactly. Dart, this man might—might, you understand—have been choked.’
‘Ch—’
‘Stunned by a blow over the ear—’
‘To prevent a struggle!’
‘—and choked to death. As simple as that.’
‘Choked! But just how?’
Eagerly, Dr Archer once more bent over the lifeless countenance. ‘There are two ways,’ he dissertated in his roundabout fashion, ‘of interrupting respiration.’ He was peering into the mouth. ‘What we shall call, for simplicity, the external and the internal. In this case the external would be rather indeterminate, since we could hardly make out the usual bluish discolourations on a neck of this complexion.’ He procured two tongue depressors and, one in each hand, examined as far back into the throat as he could. He stopped talking as some discovery further elevated his already high interest. He discarded one depressor, reached for his flashlight with the hand thus freed, and, still holding the first depressor in place, directed his light into the mouth as if he were examining tonsils. With a little grunt of discovery, he now discarded the flashlight also, took a pair of long steel thumb-forceps from a flap in the side of his bag, and inserted the instrument into the victim’s mouth alongside the guiding tongue-depressor. Dart and the uniformed officer watched silently as the doctor apparently tried to remove something from the throat of the corpse. Once, twice, the prongs snapped together, and he withdrew the instrument empty. But the next time the forceps caught hold of the physician’s discovery and drew it forth.
It was a large, blue-bordered, white handkerchief.
CHAPTER III
‘DOC,’ said Dart, ‘you don’t mind hanging around with us a while?’
‘Try and shake me loose,’ grinned Dr Archer. ‘This promises to be worth seeing.’
‘If you’d said no,’ Dart grinned back, ‘I’d have held you anyhow as a suspect. I’m going to need some of your brains. I’m not one of these bright ones that can do all the answers in my head. I’m just a poor boy trying to make a living, and this kind of a riddle hasn’t been popped often enough in my life to be easy yet. I’ve seen some funny ones, but this is funnier. One thing I can see—that this guy wasn’t put out by any beginner.’
‘The man that did this,’ agreed the physician, ‘thought about it first. I’ve seen autopsies that could have missed that handkerchief. It was pushed back almost out of sight.’
‘That makes you a smart boy.’
‘I admit it. Wonder whose handkerchief?’
‘Stick it in your bag and hang on to it. And let’s get going.’
‘Whither?’
‘To get acquainted with this layout first. Whoever’s here will keep a while. The bird that pulled the job is probably in Egypt by now.’
‘That wouldn’t be my guess.’
‘You think he’d hang around?’
‘He wouldn’t do the expected thing—not if he was bright enough to think up a gag like this.’
‘Gag is good. Let’s start with the roof. Brady, you come with me and the doc—and be ready for surprises. Where’s Day?’
The doctor closed and picked up his bag. They passed into the hallway. Officer Day was on guard in the front vestibule according to his orders.
‘There are four more men and the medical examiner coming,’ the detective told him. ‘The four will be right over. Put one on the rear of the house and send the others upstairs. Come on, doc.’
The three men ascended two flights of stairs to the top floor. The slim Dart led, the tall doctor followed, the stalwart Brady brought up the rear. Along the uppermost hallway they made their way to the front of the third story of the house, moving with purposeful resoluteness, yet with a sharp-eyed caution that anticipated almost any eventuality. The physician and the detective carried their flashlights, the policeman his revolver.
At the front end of the hallway they found a closed door. It was unlocked. Dart flung it open, to find the ceiling light on, probably left by Officer Johnson in obedience to instructions.
This room was a large bedchamber, reaching, except for the width of the hallway, across the breadth of the house. It was luxuriously appointed. The bed was a massive four-poster of mahogany, intricately carved and set off by a counterpane of gold satin. It occupied the mid-portion of a large black-and-yellow Chinese rug which covered almost the entire floor. Two upholstered chairs, done also in gold satin, flanked the bed, and a settee of similar design guarded its foot. An elaborate smoking stand sat beside the head of the bed. A mahogany chest and bureau, each as substantial as the four-poster, completed the furniture.
‘No question as to whose room this is,’ said Dart.
‘A man’s,’ diagnosed Archer. ‘A man of means and definite ideas, good or bad—but definite. Too bare to be a woman’s room—look—the walls are stark naked. There aren’t any frills’—he sniffed—‘and there isn’t any perfume.’
‘I guess you’ve been in enough women’s rooms to know.’
‘Men’s too. But this is odd. Notice anything conspicuous by its absence?’
‘I’ll bite.’
‘Photographs of women.’
The detective’s eyes swept the room in verification.
‘Woman hater?’
‘Maybe,’ said the doctor, ‘but—’
‘Wait a minute,’ said the detective. There was a clothes closet to the left of the entrance. He turned, opened its door, and played his flashlight upon its contents. An array of masculine attire extended in orderly suspension—several suits of various patterns hanging from individual racks. On the back of the open door hung a suit of black pyjamas. On the floor a half-dozen pairs of shoes were set in an orderly row. There was no suggestion of any feminine contact or influence; there was simply the atmosphere of an exceptionally well ordered, decided masculinity.
‘What do you think?’ asked Dr Archer.
‘Woman hater,’ repeated Dart conclusively.
‘Or a Lothario of the deepest dye.’
The detective looked at the doctor. ‘I get the deep dye—he was blacker’n me. But the Lothario—’
‘Isn’t it barely possible that this so very complete—er—repudiation of woman is too complete to be accidental? May it not be deliberate—a wary suppression of evidence—the recourse of a lover of great experience and wisdom, who lets not his right hand know whom his left embraceth?’
‘Not good—just careful?’
‘He couldn’t be married—actively. His wife’s influence would be—smelt. And if he isn’t married, this over-absence of the feminine—well—it means something.’
‘I still think it could mean woman-hating. This other guess-work of yours sounds all bass-ackwards to me.’
‘Heaven forfend, good friend, that you should lose faith in my judgment. Woman-hater you call him and woman-hater he is. Carry on.’
A narrow little room the width of the hallway occupied that extent of the front not taken up by the master bedroom. In this they found a single bed, a small table, and a chair, but nothing of apparent significance.
Along the hallway they now retraced their steps, trying each of three successive doors that led off from this passage. The first was an empty store-room, the second a white tiled bathroom, and the third a bare closet. These yielded no suggestion of the sort of character or circumstances with which they might be dealing. Nor did the smaller of the two rooms terminating the hallway at its back end, for this was merely a narrow kitchen, with a tiny range, a table, icebox, and cabinet. In these they found no inspiration.
But the larger of the two rear rooms was arresting enough. This was a study, fitted out in a fashion that would have warmed the heart and stirred the ambition of any student. There were two large brown-leather club chairs, each with its end table and reading lamp; a similarly upholstered divan in front of a fireplace that occupied the far wall, and over toward the windows at the rear, a flat-topped desk, upon which sat a bronze desk-lamp, and behind which sat a large swivel armchair. Those parts of the walls not taken up by the fireplace and windows were solid masses of books, being fitted from the floor to the level of a tall man’s head with crowded shelves.
Dr Archer was at once absorbed. ‘This man was no ordinary fakir,’ he observed. ‘Look.’ He pointed out several framed documents on the upper parts of the walls. ‘Here—’ He approached the largest and peered long upon it. Dart came near, looked at it once, and grinned:
‘Does it make sense, doc?’
‘Bachelor’s degree from Harvard. N’Gana Frimbo. N’Gana—’
‘Not West Indian?’
‘No. This sounds definitely African to me. Lots of them have that N’. The “Frimbo” suggests it, too—mumbo—jumbo—sambo—’
‘Limbo—’
‘Wonder why he chose an American college? Most of the chiefs’ sons’ll go to Oxford or bust. I know—this fellow is probably from Liberia or thereabouts. American influence—see?’
‘How’d he get into a racket like fortune telling?’
‘Ask me another. Probably a better racket than medicine in this community. A really clever chap could do wonders.’
The doctor was glancing along the rows of books. He noted such titles as Tankard’s Determinism and Fatalism, a Critical Contrast, Bostwick’s The Concept of Inevitability, Preem’s Cause and Effect, Dessault’s The Science of History, and Fairclough’s The Philosophical Basis of Destiny. He took this last from its place, opened to a flyleaf, and read in script, ‘N’Gana Frimbo’ and a date. Riffling the pages, he saw in the same script pencilled marginal notes at frequent intervals. At the end of the chapter entitled ‘Unit Stimulus and Reaction,’ the pencilled notation read: ‘Fairclough too has missed the great secret.’
‘This is queer.’
‘What?’
‘A native African, a Harvard graduate, a student of philosophy—and a sorcerer. There’s something wrong with that picture.’
‘Does it throw any light on who killed him?’
‘Anything that throws light on the man’s character might help.’
‘Well, let’s get going. I want to go through the rest of the house and get down to the real job. You worry about his character. I’ll worry about the character of the suspects.’
‘Right-o. Your move, professor.’
CHAPTER IV
MEANWHILE Jinx and Bubber, in Frimbo’s waiting-room on the second floor, were indulging in one of their characteristic arguments. This one had started with Bubber’s chivalrous endeavours to ease the disturbing situation for the two women, both of whom were bewildered and distraught and one of whom was young and pretty. Bubber had not only announced and described in detail just what he had seen, but, heedless of the fact that the younger woman had almost fainted, had proceeded to explain how he had known, long before it occurred, that he had been about to ‘see death.’ To dispel any remaining vestiges of tranquillity, he had added that the death of Frimbo was but one of three. Two more were at hand.
‘Soon as Jinx here called me,’ he said, ‘I knowed somebody’s time had come. I busted on in that room yonder with him—y’all seen me go—and sho’ ’nough, there was the man, limp as a rag and stiff as a board. Y’ see, the moon don’t lie. ’Cose most signs ain’t no ’count. As for me, you won’t find nobody black as me that’s less suprastitious.’
‘Jes’ say we won’t find nobody black as you and stop. That’ll be the truth,’ growled Jinx.
‘But a moonsign is different. Moonsign is the one sign you can take for sho’. Moonsign—’
‘Moonshine is what you took for sho’ tonight,’ Jinx said.
‘Red moon mean bloodshed, new moon over your right shoulder mean good luck, new moon over your left shoulder mean bad luck, and so on. Well, they’s one moonsign my grandmammy taught me befo’ I was knee high and that’s the worst sign of ’em all. And that’s the sign I seen tonight. I was walkin’ down the Avenue feelin’ fine and breathin’ the air—’
‘What do you breathe when you don’t feel so good?’
‘—smokin’ the gals over, watchin’ the cars roll by—feelin’ good, you know what I mean. And then all of a sudden I stopped. I store.’
‘You whiched?’
‘Store. I stopped and I store.’
‘What language you talkin’?’
‘I store at the sky. And as I stood there starin’, sump’m didn’t seem right. Then I seen what it was. Y’ see, they was a full moon in the sky—’
‘Funny place for a full moon, wasn’t it?’
‘—and as I store at it, they come up a cloud—wasn’t but one cloud in the whole sky—and that cloud come up and crossed over the face o’ the moon and blotted it out—jes’ like that.’
‘You sho’ ’twasn’t yo’ shadow?’
‘Well there was the black cloud in front o’ the moon and the white moonlight all around it and behind it. All of a sudden I seen what was wrong. That cloud had done took the shape of a human skull!’
‘Sweet Jesus!’ The older woman’s whisper betokened the proper awe. She was an elongated, incredibly thin creature, ill-favoured in countenance and apparel; her loose, limp, angular figure was grotesquely disposed over a stiff-backed arm-chair, and dark, nondescript clothing draped her too long limbs. Her squarish, fashionless hat was a little awry, her scrawny visage, already disquieted, was now inordinately startled, the eyes almost comically wide above the high cheek bones, the mouth closed tight over her teeth whose forward slant made the lips protrude as if they were puckering to whistle.
The younger woman, however, seemed not to hear. Those dark eyes surely could sparkle brightly, those small lips smile, that clear honey skin glow with animation; but just now the eyes stared unseeingly, the lips were a short, hard, straight line, the skin of her round pretty face almost colourless. She was obviously dazed by the suddenness of this unexpected tragedy. Unlike the other woman, however, she had not lost her poise, though it was costing her something to retain it. The trim, black, high-heeled shoes, the light sheer stockings, the black seal coat which fell open to reveal a white-bordered pimiento dress, even the small close-fitting black hat, all were quite as they should be. Only her isolating detachment betrayed the effect upon her of the presence of death and the law.
‘A human skull!’ repeated Bubber. ‘Yes, ma’am. Blottin’ out the moon. You know what that is?’
‘What?’ said the older woman.
‘That’s death on the moon. It’s a moonsign and it’s never been known to fail.’
‘And it means death?’
‘Worse ’n that, ma’am. It means three deaths. Whoever see death on the moon’—he paused, drew breath, and went on in an impressive lower tone—‘gonna see death three times!’
‘My soul and body!’ said the lady.
But Jinx saw fit to summon logic. ‘Mean you go’n’ see two more folks dead?’
‘Gonna stare ’em in the face.’
‘Then somebody ought to poke yo’ eyes out in self-defence.’
Having with characteristic singleness of purpose discharged his duty as a gentleman and done all within his power to set the ladies’ minds at rest, Bubber could now turn his attention to the due and proper quashing of his unappreciative commentator.
‘Whyn’t you try it?’ he suggested.
‘Try what?’
‘Pokin’ my eyes out.’
‘Huh. If I thought that was the onliest way to keep from dyin’, you could get yo’self a tin cup and a cane tonight.’
‘Try it then.’
‘’Tain’t necessary. That moonshine you had’ll take care o’ everything. Jes’ give it another hour to work and you’ll be blind as a Baltimo’ alley.’
‘Trouble with you,’ said Bubber, ‘is, you’ ignorant. You’ dumb. The inside o’ yo’ head is all black.’
‘Like the outside o’ yourn.’
‘Is you by any chance alludin’ to me?’
‘I ain’t alludin’ to that policeman over yonder.’
‘Lucky for you he is over yonder, else you wouldn’t be alludin’ at all.’
‘Now you gettin’ bad, ain’t you? Jus’ ’cause you know you got the advantage over me.’
‘What advantage?’
‘How could I hit you when I can’t even see you?’
‘Well if I was ugly as you is, I wouldn’t want nobody to see me.’
‘Don’t worry, son. Nobody’ll ever know how ugly you is. Yo’ ugliness is shrouded in mystery.’
‘Well yo’ dumbness ain’t. It’s right there for all the world to see. You ought to be back in Africa with the other dumb boogies.’
‘African boogies ain’t dumb,’ explained Jinx. ‘They’ jes’ dark. You ain’t been away from there long, is you?’
‘My folks,’ returned Bubber crushingly, ‘left Africa ten generations ago.’
‘Yo’ folks? Shuh. Ten generations ago, you-all wasn’t folks. You-all hadn’t qualified as apes.’
Thus as always, their exchange of compliments flowed toward the level of family history, among other Harlemites a dangerous explosive which a single word might strike into instantaneous violence. It was only because the hostility of these two was actually an elaborate masquerade, whereunder they concealed the most genuine affection for each other, that they could come so close to blows that were never offered.
Yet to the observer this mock antagonism would have appeared alarmingly real. Bubber’s squat figure sidled belligerently up to the long and lanky Jinx; solid as a fire-plug he stood, set to grapple; and he said with unusual distinctness:
‘Yea? Well—yo’ granddaddy was a hair on a baboon’s tail. What does that make you?’
The policeman’s grin of amusement faded. The older woman stifled a cry of apprehension.
The younger woman still sat motionless and staring, wholly unaware of what was going on.
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