The Narrow Cell. Ronal Kayser
an autopsy is,” observed the bitter brat.
She was certainly smart enough to know what she was up to; Lieutenant Kenmore didn’t yet know; but he felt completely certain she hadn’t objected to the sawing-and-splitting out of squeamishness. For what Corinne’s composed and unmoved face could not mask was a bland indifference to the effect of this lurid description upon her shocked and distressed mother.
“No,” Mrs. Axiter trembled indignantly, “we could never consent to anything of the kind. Never.”
It was not the first time Lieutenant Kenmore had encountered opposition to an autopsy.
He began reasonably and sympathetically. “But, after all, it’s only surgery. It’s performed by a physician for a necessary and legitimate reason, like any other surgical operation. And it’s quite often to the family’s advantage . . . Henry Bowling carried life insurance, I suppose?”
“I can’t see whatever his insurance has to do with this,” Jessie Axiter protested.
Kenmore replied, it might. “If there’s a double indemnity clause covering accidental death. The underwriters would have to be convinced it was accidental, that actually enough carbon monoxide had been inhaled to cause death.”
“Yes,” said Corinne, “only his wasn’t that kind of insurance.”
Kenmore glanced curiously at the girl.
She said, “Uncle Henry purchased insurance as an investment, not to buy protection he didn’t need. I don’t understand all the complexities of it, but I know it wasn’t the kind of insurance you’re thinking of.”
Jessie Axiter brightened. “Well, then, there’s no need for an autopsy,” she declared in relief. “So we won’t talk about it any more.”
“It’s not a question of insurance, Mrs. Axiter. I mentioned that as a possibility, as an example. I hoped you’d see it was reasonable—”
“No,” said Jessie Axiter, interrupting sharply. She got up from the settee, with little flags of color in her too-powdered cheeks. “I don’t see it, I don’t think it’s in the least necessary or reasonable. It’s absolutely horrible and barbaric! And,” her voice had grown shrill, “there’s no use trying to change my mind, because I shan’t even consider it.”
This was meant to be final.
But what else did it mean? Kenmore could not be sure whether Mrs. Axiter objected to the autopsy, or to what it might disclose. Or whether she had not been goaded into this stand by the sardonic Corinne.
At any rate, it demanded a final answer. He was not going to get anywhere with this investigation without determining the cause of death. The issue had to be faced—and forced.
Kenmore stood, too.
“You needn’t change your mind, of course,” said he. “Mr. Bowling’s body is in the custody of the State of California. It cannot be released until the authorities have investigated and certified their findings.”
Jessie Axiter gave him a rigid stare.
“You mean you think you can just go ahead and take him?” she asked incredulously.
“Technically, yes. But in practice, we don’t ‘take’ the body anywhere. It will remain at the local mortuary.”
“And that’s all we have to say about it?”
“Legally,” Kenmore dryly assured her, “you’ve no property right to the body of the deceased. But actually there won’t be any objection to a member of the family attending—or you may ask your family doctor to be present. I suggest you do so.”
There followed a pause; Mrs. Axiter used it to moisten her grey lips; the flags of color were hauled down, and left her face rice-white.
“Well!” she burst forth. “We’ll fight that! I never heard of such a law. If it is one. The idea a man’s own family can’t, his own sister can’t—just because he died accidentally!”
Behind her came a slightly blurred giggle. “Mother, that’s baloney. You know perfectly well Uncle Henry was murdered, and we’re all tickled pink.”
Jessie Axiter flung around: “Lally!”
Her mother hadn’t exaggerated; Lally Dearborn was certainly a beauty. The portiere drapes of a side doorway provided the suitably somber background for a hel-ment of dazzling, wheat-gold hair, and for a figure sheathed in clinging white. The gown left bare Lally’s arms and her shoulders, suntanned to the complexion of richly creamed coffee.
She’d made an indisputably effective entrance.
Unfortunately, the effect dissolved as Lally advanced into the room.
“She’s not herself,” Mrs. Axiter told Kenmore hurriedly; and she was not, at any rate, very sure of herself. He remembered seeing drunken drivers trying to walk chalklines, before breath and blood tests for intoxication came into police use. Lally walked like that, placing her feet upon the parquetry with painfully preserved steadiness. It wasn’t that she staggered; she only looked as if she would, the next step.
Corinne Axiter, her head tipped to one side appraisingly, studied her sister. “I don’t know, mother,” said she critically. “I should say she’s very much herself. Almost more so than usual.”
And Mrs. Axiter observed: “She’s been taking those headache drops again. They always make her dizzy. I think there’s sulfa or something dreadful in them.”
The curious thing to Kenmore was that Lally’s condition excited these comments; but what she’d said made no visible impression upon her mother and sister.
It was left for him to pick up that . . . “Here,” he directed. “Sit down. What do you mean, he was murdered?”
Lally, as he bent over her, was not quite so beautiful as she had seemed in the doorway. And yet her features were flawless. The tiny termites of dissipation hadn’t actually loosened a lineament; it was only that you could sense what she’d look like next year, and the year after.
“What a pity,” thought the lieutenant, who knew better than most how inexorable the change would be. “Why doesn’t she take the cure?” Or, if Darwina was right, put herself into the hands of a psychiatrist. But he knew she wouldn’t. Kenmore had observed before now, there is no one more recalcitrant than a young woman who is determined to go to hell.
But the thought was by-the-way.
“Well?” he demanded. “Why do you say he was murdered?”
In vino Veritas. But what degree of truth? Lally replied with childlike logic:
“That old heater’s been there for years. It never killed Mrs. Rhine. So you see.”
Kenmore drew back a discomfited step. It was only that?
Corinne was stabbing her cigarette to its death. “But,” the dark sister observed superiorly, “when Mrs. Rhine lived there she had the chimney.”
“Chimney?” said Kenmore.
“There used to be a fireplace. Uncle Henry tore it out. He thought if a bomb dropped anywhere near, the bricks would fall through the roof.”
Kenmore thought, that explained the new paneling.
Corinne continued briskly. “The north lots didn’t come with this house. He bought them two years ago, to have room for a tennis court partly, and partly because the old redwood cottage was an eyesore. It was built, oh, years before this section of town was restricted. And Mrs. Rhine never watered, never pulled a weed, and she hung out her washing practically under our noses, things like that. Of course, Uncle Henry intended to remodel the cottage inside and out and make it really a guesthouse. Only priorities came along and he couldn’t get the materials, and let it go until after the War. That’s how it became his air raid post, because he