The Red Right Hand Read online

  And out of all those details which I have casually noted and idly tucked away during the past few hours, it is possible that I may be able to arrive at some rational and unsupernatural explanation of where the killer is. And of what he is—a man, and neither a hallucination nor a demon. Provided only that I bring all these details forth to the last one, omitting none of them, however trivial they are or seem to be.

  It is the thing which I must do now, to the exclusion of all else. There is a killer loose. There is a malignancy to be located and excided. It is a problem in diagnosis, nothing more.

  I must set the facts down for examination, in the method of a case history preliminary to a surgical diagnosis. It is a tedious process, but it is the only conclusive way. A thousand bright formless intuitions may go rushing through a man’s mind as quick as lightning, if he will let them; and each may seem to flash with blinding brilliance for an instant. Yet they leave no definite shape behind them when they have faded out, and there is only the dark again, a little deeper than it was before. Facts which are set down on paper, however, have substance and they have a shape. They can be measured and compared. They can all be added up.

  That is the method in which I have always found it necessary to do my own thinking anyway. And I must discipline myself to use that method now. If there is time.

  Let the others continue to hunt him through the darkness. Let them find more bodies of his dead. They have done that, too, I seem to have heard them shouting back and forth, far off a little while ago. With the hounds howling. But they haven’t found him yet. And why not?

  There is some item missing from the puzzle, or there is some item too many. I must assemble all the pieces, and work it out. To find the answer to that dead man I saw walking. And of where Corkscrew is now—the ragged man, the little sawed-off man, the grinning dirty man with the matted auburn hair who had a voice so strangely like my own.

  For that is something which I must answer, too. It is an item never to forget.

  Perhaps, if I could only see it, the answer to him lies before my eyes.

  Very well. I am here. I will start here.

  I am sitting at the battered secretary-desk in the living room of the summer home of the late Adam MacComerou, professor emeritus of psychiatry at Harvard. It is situated on the Whippleville-Stony Falls Road, in the northern Connecticut hills, a hundred miles from New York. The hour is half-past three of the morning, of Thursday, August 11.

  There is a quire of yellow work paper and a sheaf of sharpened pencils on the desk blotter pad. The green-shaded gasoline study lamp gives a white steady light for writing.

  In the glass doors of the secretary I can see my reflection when I glance up, and the room behind me to the farthest limits of the light. That man with the round head covered with close-clipped reddish hair, with the red-brown eyes and the brown thickly freckled face, is myself, Harry Riddle, Dr. Henry N. Riddle, Jr. That’s me, myself. The self that I have always known, for twenty-seven years.

  The bookshelves back of the glass doors are filled with a varied assortment of old MacComerou’s ponderous reference books. There is a bright red Who’s Who in America. A bright green Garden Flowers, Their Planting and Cultivation. In between them stands a somber brown buckram-bound copy, six inches thick, of the old man’s own monumental Homicidal Psychopathology, his tremendous textbook analysis of the murderous mind, which has been a classic in every medical school’s advanced psychology course for more than a generation, and has gone through how many editions I don’t know.

  In the desk’s pigeonholes there are sheaves of papers—brief clinical notes and case-history jottings, apparently, I find on pulling one or two of them forth, for some sequel which he may have intended writing to that great tome, set down in a small, spidery, old-fashioned hand.

  The case of A, of good family, well educated, colossally conceited of own mental powers, who at age 45, unsuccessful in all his undertakings and greedy for money, plots uncle’s death so as to inherit modest fortune—

  So one paper reads. But whether A succeeded in his murderous plans or not before he was discovered is not told, nor what retribution he met with. It is a story not completed, for a book that will never be written. Which lies now, with much else about murder, in a dead man’s mind.

  Besides the quire of work paper on the desk, there is a small memo pad which had three or four notations on it, in the same wavering but careful hand:

  Call Barnaby & Barnaby GU 9-6400 after lunch

  Inquire about mail

  Have John Flail clear out cesspool & prune privet, after painting house & barn

  Sugar, matches, potatoes, oranges, bacon, strawberries, bread

  Commonplace notes about the little business of daily living which a man must plan for, living alone in the country. Little things to be done to keep the place up. Provisions to be got. A phone call to his lawyers or publishers, perhaps. No murder there.

  A folded newspaper, for a third item, lies beside the lamp on the desk—a copy of the Danbury Evening Star, dated Wednesday, August 10, yesterday afternoon, with big headlines on it about some great amphibious operation against Japan itself, it seems.

  HONSHU INVADED!

  There are radioed photographs and lesser headlines over the whole portion of page that is visible. Perhaps the fate of the world for generations is being decided in that terrific battle which is told about. Hundreds of thousands of our men, at this very moment, must be locked in a fury of desperate struggle. The story of it is here. Yet such is our concentration on our own immediate affairs, on our own small lives and the terror of our deaths, that no one has opened the newspaper to read it since it came. No one has had time. Nor will anyone read it now, since the news in it, in these last few hours, has grown already stale.

  In addition, I have on the desk Lieutenant Rosenblatt’s fat pulp-paper notebook, which he left behind when he went surging out, with his wrinkled pugdog face, with his stocky little frame in his blue black-belted uniform, reaching for his gun, at Quelch’s scream from near John Flail’s.

  More than an hour ago, and Rosenblatt has not been back since. So I have appropriated his notebook, to examine it for anything which I may have overlooked.

  Those are the only things I see in front of me, as I sit here. I do not see how the killer could be hidden in books on the secretary shelves, or in papers on the desk, or in my reflection in the glass. If there is any trace or pattern of him visible, I do not see it.

  Perhaps old Adam MacComerou saw some pattern, with his big old brain that knew so much of murder. But if he did, he could not help himself. No one near him when he met the killer. He left no word that has been found.

  Yet now, sitting here at the desk where he had his largest thoughts, I feel nearer to him than when I was walking down the road with him in the twilight, looking for that spectral gray car which had vanished, neither of us knowing yet that it was murder, though with something dreadful in the air, hearing the croaking in the weeds beside the road.

  No, the croaking had stopped then. Still I felt him alien and remote from me, though he was beside me, then. But now and here, I have almost a feeling that he is trying to help me. That he would help me if he could.

  At my left there is the doorway going out into the kitchen, where the wood range gives forth a low dull heat and the phone bell jangles and the alarm clock ticks. There is a lamp on the shelf above the sink out there, and I can see the whole room fairly clearly, to the white-washed planks of the woodshed door beyond, with its H hinges and rusty latch.

  Back of my left shoulder, here in the living room, there is the closed door into the bedroom. Behind me, at the farther end of the room, is the door into the small front hallway, with the stairway out in it leading up to the half-story attic. But the front door is padlocked and nailed, and the door into the hallway itself is locked with a key....

  Through the open window at my right hand the mingled odor of yellow roses and damp night grass and rich black garden earth comes
in. Moths are fluttering against the copper window screen, with soft repeated bumpings of their white dusty bodies, their crimson eyes reflecting in the light.

  On the sofa against the wall, beside the desk, St. Erme’s young bride is still sleeping deeply. She fell off that way about one o’clock, Rosenblatt told me when I returned, while he was going over his notes. Worn out by nervous strain, by sheer physical exhaustion and all the black nameless terror, yet able to dream it all away now for a little while, one hopes, with the unequalled recuperative powers of nineteen.

  She has not been told yet that St. Erme’s body has been found. I, or someone else, will have the obligation of telling her when she awakes. But perhaps it will not be necessary for her ever to be told anything more.

  The tautness has slipped away from her. She is completely relaxed. Her slight body, in her periwinkle-blue gown and thin white summer coat with the little rabbit’s fur at the collar, is lying with knees bent sideward, with her face turned away from me and the light. Her breathing is faint and almost cataleptic, without a visible stirring of her breast. Her dark blue eyes, with their enormous pupils, which were so full of terror at first sight of me, are closed now beneath a sweep of lashes. Her left arm has dropped down off the sofa’s edge, with knuckles trailing to the floor. The big emerald engagement ring given her by St. Erme, too large for her finger, lies on the roses of the carpet in the shadows, in danger of slipping off. Yet it might disturb her if I tried to remove it for safekeeping.

  She has turned her head just now on the sofa’s headrest, and her face is toward me. A faint sweat is on her forehead and short upper lip, from the still heat of the night. A strand of dark curl is plastered to her temples. Her lips are a little parted, breathing more deeply now.

  The edge of the lamplight falls on her breast and the lower part of her face. But by propping up the newspaper in a kind of screen, I have succeeded in shielding it from her eyelids partially. So there is a shadow on her look. But none, I hope, in her dreams. Until she wakes.

  The voices of the men out in the night have gone beyond earshot now. The rats and squirrels in the attic have ceased their scuttering. There is no board in all the house that creaks. The fragile beating of the insects at the screen will not disturb her. My pencil moving on the page.

  So I must examine the problem in every detail, setting the facts down.

  First, there is she herself. What do I know about her, since she is here?

  It was just after dark when I first met her, stumbling along the stony road from the lake shore eight miles below, bewildered, terrified, and lost.

  I had been trying to make up time in my old car, after the lost hour while I had been stalled at the Swamp Road entrance, and was expecting to strike the main highway soon, to get back down to New York.

  But it was still a nightmare road, narrow and stony, winding between steep wooded slopes and big rocks which pressed out on the road shoulders on either side, as it had been since I first got on it. No other cars, and not half a dozen inhabited places that I had passed.

  Rounding a sharp rock turn, I saw her white figure, pressed back at the right side of the road, in my headlights. Like an unearthly shape in some Coleridgian poem, gesturing imploringly to me.

  Her eyes were enormous and dark in her pale face. There were scratches and dirt streaks on her cheeks, and dead leaves in her hair. Clusters of green and brown burrs were caught on her coat. Her white pumps were muddy and stone-bruised, and one of them had lost its heel.

  She had nothing in her hands, not even a pocketbook—she had left her purse in the car, along with everything else, when she and St. Erme had got out. It would still be in the car when it would be found down on the Swamp ‘Road, though emptied of the fifty-dollar bill St. Erme had given her at the bank before they started, and even of its small change.

  She was breathing hard from her scrambling and running, trembling, as I stopped beside her.

  “Please!” she gasped. “Can you give me a lift somewhere? He kidnaped my fiancé and stole our car! He was trying to find me! There is no one who seems to live around here at all! I thought no one was ever going to come by!”

  “Get in,” I said, opening the door on her side. “We’ll get you to the police.”

  She recoiled against the rock wall.

  “Get in,” I repeated to her soothingly. “We’ll try to find him. Who was he?”

  “O dear God!” she gasped. “Doc!”

  She must have thought I was going to reach out and grab her, in that moment. Turning with that frantic gasp, she started to run toward the front of the car, down the road ahead.

  “Wait a minute!” I said. “Confound it, what’s thematter with you?”

  There is only one way to deal with hysteria, and that’s to jump on it. Whatever had caused her frantic terror, she had to be stopped before she had hurt herself. I opened the car door, and was out after her in a leap.

  She was too exhausted to run far. She tripped on her pump heel in no more than half a dozen steps, and, with a sob, she fell on hands and knees on the road.

  “Stand up!” I said, getting her under the armpits. “You aren’t hurt, are you?”

  I lifted her to her feet and turned her around to face me, with my hands still on her arms. Her face was blood less in the headlights, and she stood limp and almost cold within my grasp.

  “Snap out of it!” I said. “Nothing has got you. I’m not the bogey man. You’re all right.”

  She stared at me with dilated pupils, as I slowly released her. Her gaze seemed to go over each feature of my face twice.

  “Why, you aren’t!” she said. “Are you?”

  A deep shudder passed through her, and her frozen looked relaxed.

  “Of course not,” she said. “I’m sorry. He was much smaller and older, and his hair was matted, and he needed a shave. And he was dressed so extraordinarily. But I am a little nearsighted. And when you spoke to me, your voice—”

  A little nearsighted. She was probably damned myopic.

  “I am Dr. Riddle,” I said. “Dr. Harry Riddle of New York. You say your car has been stolen and your fiancéÈ kidnaped? Was it a gray Cadillac phaeton with red upholstery, and a license plate XL something?”

  “Yes!” she said. “That was it! You noticed it as it went past you?”

  “Was your fiancé named Inis St. Erme?” I said. “A black-eyed man, rather tall, with black hair and a black mustache, in a gray gabardine suit and a Panama hat?”

  “Yes!” she told me, still a little incoherent. “Do you know Inis? I am Elinor Darrie. We were on our way to Vermont to be married. How did you know who I was? We picked up this hitchhiker outside of Danbury, the most horrible-looking little man you could imagine—”

  “A little tramp with red eyes and long matted auburn hair?” I said. “With sharp pointed teeth and a torn left ear, about five feet three inches high? Dressed in a checked black and white sport coat, a green shirt, and a light blue felt hat with the brim cut away in scallops all around?”

  “That was the man?” she said. “Do you know him? What did he do to Inis? Please tell me! Where is Inis now?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t seen him.”

  “He wasn’t in the car any longer when it passed you? That must mean—”

  “I didn’t see your car,” I told her.

  “You didn’t see it?”

  “No,” I said. “I didn’t see it. I didn’t see your fiancé, I’m sorry. I didn’t see the tramp, either. But he drove up the road, apparently, and he had your fiancé with him. Get in, and I’ll turn around. There’s a phone at a house a few miles back up the road, if no place nearer. The police have already been notified, I think. He killed a man—and ran him down. No, not your fiancé. Just a man walking on the road. Don’t worry. Everything is probably all right. He can’t have got far. Your fiancé will probably be found.”

  I got her into my coupe, and started on down the road with her, looking for a place to turn around
. My assurances, though mere empty banalities, had succeeded somewhat in assuaging her. Being in a car and going somewhere, too. No longer alone on the dark empty road.

  “I hope I shan’t be taking you out of your way,” she said with childish apology. “I suppose maybe I was an awful fool to let myself be so frightened. But he did do something to Inis, and he did drive off with him. Are you sure that you don’t have to go some place in a hurry—that you can spare the time?”

  “That’s all right,” I said. “I was just on my way down from Vermont.”

  “We were going to Vermont ourselves,” she said. ”We were going up there to be married. We couldn’t get married in Danbury today, we found, and so we thought we would drive on up. Then just outside of Danbury we met this tramp—”

  “You’ll find a bottle of alcohol and some cleansing tissues in the glove compartment in front of you,” I told her. “There’s a comb, too, I think. It will make you feel better to freshen up. I’ll turn the mirror around for you. Has that got it? Try not to think of him any more now for the moment. Think of yourself or think of me. It will probably turn out all right. Let’s leave it for the police.”

  I switched on the dome light above. Obediently she wetted a tissue and cleaned her face, then scrubbed her hands, with the gravity of a kitten. She found the comb and combed her dark hair, which is one of the most pleasurable and self-soothing gestures which a woman can make, as well as one of the most agreeable to be in proximity to while it is being made.

  “You are very kind,” she said, with her lower lip still trembling a little. “Did you say your name was Riddle? Why, I work for a man named Riddle. Mr. Paul Riddle of the Riddle Insurance Agency on East Forty-fourth. You are from New York, too, you said? Are you a doctor, really?”

  “That’s right.” I told her. “Dr. Harry Riddle. On the staff of St. John’s Medical and Surgeons’ and Physicians’. I live at 511 West Eleventh Street. I belong to the University Club, the Scalpel, and the Dutch Treat. I am a Republican, and white. My father had a second cousin named Paul Riddle who is an insurance man, I think. I don’t know him, but he’s the same family. If that helps to make it right.”