The Deadly Percheron Read online

  “What has happened to you?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Or, rather, I’ve forgotten.” I told him about meeting the man who had called himself Jacob Blunt, walking with him and Nan to the subway, falling – or being pushed? – losing consciousness.

  “But, good God, George!” he said, “when you saw the man wasn’t your patient why did you take him with you? Why didn’t you come and tell me?”

  I did not know how to answer him. How could I explain the impulse that had misled me without reproaching him for his strangely hostile attitude toward me? I had felt then that if I could talk to the impostor in the privacy of my office, I would have been able to get him to confess his crime or implicate the real murderer. But I had to admit that I had overstepped my authority, and had subsequently paid dearly for it.

  “I should have told you,” I admitted. “But, remember, I had seen the real Jacob only once, and I could not be certain that I remembered his appearance correctly.”

  Anderson shook his head. “But where have you been all this time?” he asked.

  I told him about awaking in the hospital and, briefly, about my escape from the mental ward. I told him about my job in the cafeteria at Coney Island and about Sonia. I explained the apathy that had enervated me during the past month or more and how it was related to the clownlike disfigurement that had distorted my personality. At this, he clutched at a pencil and began to roll it along the blotter on his desk. “I can well believe that,” he said, “As you probably know, some criminologists hold that many criminal personalities can be traced to disfigurements. Scars make crimes.”

  I went on to say that I had had an accident the previous night and that when I had recovered consciousness I had experienced again a momentary loss of memory. I told him of my suspicions that Felix-Eustace had been following me and related my attempts to get him to tell me more about Jacob.

  When I had finished, Anderson looked up quickly. “You think that someone tried to kill you – once, in the subway and, twice, last night. Did you get the license of the car that struck you?”

  I shook my head. “I am not certain that another attempt was made last night. In fact, I think not. The street was dark and I ran into the car while trying to flag it down.”

  “You were frightened?”

  “As I said, I heard someone following me. It turned out to be Felix, and his intentions were friendly. But I did not know this at the time.”

  “Why do you think they tried to kill you in the first place?”

  I paused and thought before I answered. “I think I must have stumbled upon something, learned something, that was dangerous to whoever killed Raye,” I said. “What this could be, I don’t know – unless it was the fact that I knew the man you were holding was not Jacob Blunt.”

  Anderson leaned back in his chair, a tight smile on his face. “You’re being vague, you know. You say ‘I may have been pushed…perhaps, I knew something dangerous to somebody.’ None of that gets us anyplace.”

  “I know I’m being vague. I can’t help it. I don’t remember anything else.”

  The door opened behind me and another policeman came into the room. He gave Anderson a photograph that I recognized immediately as one of my own. It was one I had given to Sara!

  “Where did you get that?” I asked as soon as the other policeman had left the room. “That belongs to my wife.” Anderson nodded his head. “Mrs Matthews let me make a copy of this. She said it was the only existing photo of you.”

  He held it up for me to see. I tried to look at it, but my mind played a trick on me. In its place I saw again the mocking travesty of a face that I had first seen reflected in the soda fountain mirror. I saw the twisted lips – one side of my mouth in a permanent laugh, the other in a fixed, downward sneer – and the livid slash that rode my nose like a saber slash. And I felt a trickle of perspiration run down my back.

  Anderson was studying the photograph. “You’ll pardon me,” he said, “but this has been such a queer case all along that I did not want to take a chance on my memory – even knowing you as well as I do – when identifying you. But I see now that you are the same man as this.” He tapped the photograph, then threw it on the table. I picked it up and looked at it. This time I saw it as it was: a portrait of a self I had almost forgotten, a smiling, distinguished-looking man who knew who he was and where he was and could help other people by sharing his strength.

  I tried to light a cigarette, but my hand trembled too much. Anderson had to help me. I felt weak and womanish. The sense of relief, of knowing that someone at last recognized me indisputably as me, flooded my body with warmth and made a lump rise in my throat. Now I wanted to ask Anderson where Sara was, but I hesitated. I was afraid to crowd my luck. When I had mastered my emotions and looked up to see if Anderson had noticed the effect his words had had on me, I saw that he was standing with his hands clasped behind him looking at a map of the Bronx. I still did not speak. I was terrified to ask about Sara. What if she weren’t all right?

  Finally, Anderson said, “That leaves us with another problem and a very cold trail.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  He sat down and began to scratch his cheek ruminatively. “On the 18th of November, 1943, a man’s body was pulled out of the North River. The head had been smashed in. The body was about your build, dressed in your clothes and had your identification in its pockets. When your wife saw that body, she said it was yours.”

  “That’s why when Harvey Peters called you from the hospital you said I was dead,” I said.

  Anderson nodded his head. “I remember getting a call from a Dr Peters,” he said. He smiled apologetically. “If I had known then what you’ve told me just now, I could have saved you a lot of trouble, I suppose.”

  I could see that he was blaming himself for not realizing that the body that had been found in the river wasn’t mine. “What could you do if Sara identified the body?” I said to reassure him. And then, “I guess this means that whoever killed Franees Raye also killed this man and dressed him in my clothes?”

  “It looks that way. Now we have two unsolved murders instead of one.”

  “But why didn’t he kill me?” I asked. “What did happen to me? How did I get this?” I fingered my scar.

  “That’s what we’re going to have to try to find out,” said Anderson. He bit the end off a cigar and stood up. “And it isn’t going to be easy.”

  EIGHT

  Memory of Pain

  I had reached for my hat, thinking that the interview was over. I knew that Anderson would want to see me again, and before I left I wanted to ask him to try and get in touch with Sara for me. But I did not expect what happened next.

  “It’s strange that you should come to see me just now,” he said, his hand on the door. “The Raye case has been shelved for months and there has been no new evidence – until this morning.”

  He looked at me questioningly.

  “Come with me to my office,” he said. “I want you to meet someone.” He opened the door and waited for me. Then he led me down the corridor to his office.

  Nan Bulkely was sitting there. She turned to look at us as we came in the door. When she saw me her eyes widened and her lips trembled. I could see her hand clutch her pocketbook. For a long moment we stared at each other, then she jerked her head away.

  “Do you recognize this man, Miss Bulkely?” Anderson asked.

  “Yes. He is Dr George Matthews.” Her voice was scarcely louder than a whisper.

  Anderson went behind his desk and picked up a pad of paper on which he had scribbled some notes. “This is the man to whom you referred when you gave me this deposition a few minutes ago?”

  “Yes.” Again I could hardly hear her. I remained standing. What was all this about?

  Anderson cleared his throat and began to read from the pad of paper he held in his hand. “Miss Nan Bulkely, of her own free will, made the following statement in the office of Lieutenant William Anderso
n, Homicide Division, Police Department of the City of New York on the morning of August 30, 1944. ‘On Wednesday night of last week I visited Coney Island with a friend, stopped in a cafeteria for something to eat and recognized one of the employees as Dr George Matthews. This man did not see me at the time or recognize me. I knew that the police considered him dead, and that he had been involved in the murder of Frances Raye which was still unsolved. I had not seen him in nearly a year. When I first had known him he was a psychiatrist who had been treating a friend of mine, Jacob Blunt. I met him in connection with the death of Frances Raye in which Jacob was at that time implicated. You (the police) released Jacob into his custody for further questioning. I went with Dr Matthews and Jacob; after we left the police station Dr Matthews had a fainting fit in the subway and nearly fell into a train. Jacob and I took him to my apartment. Dr Matthews felt better after a short while and left, making an appointment to see Jacob in his office the next day. I thought his action was peculiar then, and I do now, since he would be held responsible for any crime Jacob might commit in the interim. But I said nothing. Jacob stayed with me for a short time and then he also left my apartment. I had not seen either Jacob or Dr Matthews again until last week when I saw Dr Matthews in the cafeteria. I barely recognized him at that time because of the terrible disfigurement he has suffered since I last saw him. His face is badly scarred, but he is obviously the same man for which the police have been searching.’” Anderson stopped reading and regarded me. “Do you remember any of this?” he asked.

  “I do not remember visiting Miss Bulkely’s apartment after my accident in the subway,” I said. “As I told you the last thing I recall is the sensation of falling – or being pushed.”

  “Did you see her last week at the cafeteria?”

  “I did not,” I said emphatically. I looked at Nan. She was sitting rigidly in her chair, her hands clenching the arms. Her face was pale and her eyes were wide and staring. She was badly frightened. But why? Then I remembered the way I looked, the effect the sight of my own face had had on me the first time I saw it–and I understood her fright. I looked away so she would not have to look at my face.

  “Do you think I killed Franees Raye, Andy?” I asked. “Is that what this is all about?”

  Anderson sat down and began to roll a pencil between his fingers. He rolled it back and forth, back and forth. It was a while before he spoke, and during this time I kept my face turned away from Nan. “I don’t think it’s impossible, but I doubt it…at this point. I see no motive for it. But then none of us has ever uncovered a reason for her killing. You are certainly a suspect.”

  I said nothing.

  “Tell me again what you have been doing since you left the hospital,” he said.

  “I’ve been working nights at the All-Brite Cafeteria and living in the neighborhood,” I said. “I have friends that can vouch for that.”

  “But you do not remember going to Miss Bulkely’s apartment or anything that happened between the time you fell in the subway and the day you woke up in the hospital–is that right?”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “What is your impression of Dr Matthews, Miss Bulkely?” Anderson asked Nan.

  She stood up, hesitantly. She had a fur over her shoulder that fell to the floor. I started to stoop to pick it up for her – then remembered how she had reacted to my face. I turned my eyes away and let her pick it up herself. When I looked back she was regarding me. Suddenly I realized that I did not like to have her look at me either. Those staring eyes, that red hair, that beautiful, blank face – they mocked me. A memory of that same face seemed to bob along the surface of my mind like a brightly – painted toy balloon floating on the surface of a pond.

  She had not answered Anderson’s question. I decided to forestall her. “Jacob did not come with us that day when I took a man into my custody, Miss Bulkely,” I said. “That man was not Jacob Blunt. I do not know who he was, but he was not Jacob Blunt.” And then I turned to Anderson. “It seems to me that he would be your most likely suspect, not I.”

  “He must be mistaken,” Nan said with surprising calm. (I had expected my statement to flurry her.) “The man was Jacob Blunt. I knew him very well. I could not be wrong.”

  Anderson kept playing with his pencil. I wished he would stop, the incessant movement of his fingers was making me nervous.

  Nan adjusted her fur about her shoulders. “I think Dr Matthews is ill,” she said to Anderson. “He admits that he has forgotten a good deal. Isn’t it possible that he has forgotten more than he realizes, and even that he is mistaken in some things that he remembers?” Anderson came around the desk and guided her to the door. I heard him say “…investigate his statement thoroughly, check it in every detail. We’ll make certain there’s no mistake. I have your address.” Then they were out in the corridor and he had shut the door on me. I was alone in the room.

  And a frightening thing was happening to me. I was remembering…something. Something that had to do with a girl’s face close to mine, her eyes watching me, something that was horrible to remember…that had to do with pain…my own pain or someone else’s? I did not know.

  I might be wrong. I might be remembering, even now, despite the assertions I had made, going to her apartment that day in October. Perhaps, I had gone there, perhaps, I had done other things I could not remember…both before and after that day.

  I shut my eyes, but found I could not shut out the image of that beautiful face, those wide-open, staring eyes. It would not down. And there was something else…something terrible that was coming that I could not prevent, that was coming again and again. And something else again, the sound of a violin… a sweet sound, yet horrible.

  I heard the door click. I jumped to my feet, terrified. But it was only Anderson. He was smiling in his tight-lipped way.

  “I telephoned the cafeteria,” he was saying. “He says that you work there so you’re probably all right. I want you to come along with me though and have the manager identify you as John Brown. Then we’ll know that at least that part of your story is true.”

  Anderson was still friendly–I thought that a good sign. I felt my muscles losing their tenseness. I tried to smile, but I could not. When I spoke, I stammered. “You think I don’t know what I’m saying, don’t you, Andy?”

  Anderson shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t think in black-and-white terms,” he said. “Working with you taught me that – if nothing else. When you had a practice did you think of your patients as either sane or insane? You know that you didn’t. They were all kinds and varieties of people and their mental aberrations differed in degree as well as in kind. You had to make up your mind about each one, independently. With a cop it’s the same.

  “All I have to do is to look at your face to see that something has happened to you – that you’ve been through a lot. But I know that your having an ugly scar doesn’t mean that you murdered Frances Raye, or even that you are mistaken in your memory of what happened that day in the subway. But you do admit that you cannot remember anything after you fell in the subway. And Miss Bulkely says that you recovered consciousness quickly and then went to her apartment. This makes me want to check the other aspects of your story.”

  “And it makes you curious to find out what happened during my blank months,” I said.

  Anderson smiled. He stuck the pencil he had been worrying into his breast pocket, pulled out a cigar and began to pick at it. “That’s right,” he said. “And that’s another reason why I want to go along with you while you retrace that part of your life that you remember. I have hopes that somewhere in the process you will begin to recall what you have forgotten. I’ve seen it happen before.”

  I followed him out the door and down in the elevator to the street. My thoughts were in great confusion. What was I remembering about Nan Bulkely? I could still see her face in front of mine, her burnished hair, her eyes close to mine, glittering.

  I shuddered.

  I watche
d the Lieutenant as we drove across Canal Street to the bridge and over the bridge to Brooklyn. A small, spare man with closely cropped gray hair, I had thought he looked more like a worried businessman than a detective when I first met him years ago – and I still thought so. It was difficult for me to imagine him using an automatic; my mind preferred to picture him bent over a cash register or studying a checkerboard.

  He talked as he drove, giving me a short history of the Frances Raye case. “We have never been able to follow through on a single line of reasoning from the very beginning,” he said. “That’s one of the reasons I’m taking such a personal interest in you now. You might think that I would assign this sort of routine to one of my men, send a good man out to check up on you and then read his report. Well, the reason is this: the damned business is beginning to get my goat! I don’t want to make any mistakes now!”

  “It’s kind of you,” I said. “I appreciate your interest.”

  “Look at it from the Division’s point of view,” he went on. “Over a year ago a prominent woman was found murdered in her apartment. A drunk was caught ringing her doorbell at the same time the body was found. It looked open and shut. The newspapers created their customary hullaballoo, but we thought that all we had to do was to sit tight, ask the usual questions and make a thorough checkup and the whole thing would be sewed up and ready for the D.A. in a few days.

  “What happens? I ask you, what happens? You came down, visited the prisoner, I let you have him in your custody – and then both of you disappear! We pick up a little guy who says the prisoner hired him to feed you a line, and then we have to let him go. He knows nothing, or he won’t talk. We still don’t find you or Blunt. We question every person we can find whoever spent five minutes with Frances Raye. No results. There is no motive, no clues, no suspects. In four solid weeks of relentless investigation we were never able to follow a solitary clue to its logical conclusions. We know less when we finished than when we started! Is it surprising that, when after all these months you show up again, I should not let you out of my sight?”