The Narrow Cell. Ronal Kayser
needed a preliminary knowledge of the bull’s anatomy. Or you would find yourself helplessly hanging onto the brute’s tail.
He had to establish a line of inquiry. Or else it would all be hit-and-miss; and worse, because he wouldn’t know when he had registered a hit.
Kenmore leaned farther back in the chair. Henry Bowling at 6:30 o’clock had received a test signal blue at Seaview 3-3609; he might have called police headquarters then; but he had not done so. He had not done so until 7:15 o’clock, when he was engaged in the Commando defense drill, expecting two more incident reports from his sector, and expecting these reports by telephone. And, you would have thought, would have left his phone open for the purpose of receiving them. Instead of which, at 7:15 o’clock, Henry Bowling had undertaken to expose a murderer.
The bull’s anatomy was becoming dimly visible in a cloud of pipe smoke.
“Try that again,” thought Kenmore. Henry Bowling had got the blue signal at home . . . come out here to his post and received the red signal . . . within a minute or so of 7:01 had taken and dispatched a reported UXB incident at 30 Pheasant Lane . . . had lighted the gas heater . . . telephoned John Kenmore at 7:15 o’clock . . . then received and transmitted the 7:17 o’clock Richfield station incident . . . and then he had replaced his pencil in its wire rack, lighted and laid aside his briar pipe, removed his eyeglasses, and almost immediately died.
Kenmore would have to fill in the gaps in this account.
He was irritated by a thought on the periphery of consciousness . . .
You had to take those actions apart, put them together into a new combination.
The thought crashed violently from the periphery to the exact center of his suddenly focused realization:
“He wouldn’t have known the number!”
The lieutenant leaned down, dragged open the lower left-hand drawer, and slapped the directory onto the desk before him.
He opened its pages to San Diego, City of—and the thing lay square before him.
A square envelope, grimed with dust and somewhat yellowed with age, it bore on its surface (wrinkled as if it had been partially balled into a wad and then smoothed out) an uncanceled three-cent stamp.
The address, composed in a flowing feminine hand, was to Mrs. E. H. Burrett, New Gilead, Michigan.
“Good God!” said Kenmore, and turned over the envelope.
Across its torn back flap ran a printed legend: Miss Catherine Hope, 1116 Balboa Street, La Jolla, California.
There was, however, nothing inside.
He got up, jammed the thing in his pocket, and went outside hurriedly.
The guesthouse occupied the rear, north-east corner of the large yard; its entry stoop faced upon the tennis court. This court, running north-and-south, had a high wire fence inside the Toyon Street hedge; the garage provided a backstop at the other, south end.
Thus the court offered a short-cut to the big house. Kenmore stepped out onto it and was halfway across the concrete when he heard the voice.
V
. . . washed my mouth with soap and to this day that word makes me think of Pine Bros, tar soap.—THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF CATHERINE HOPE.
John Kenmore came to a stop; listening.
“Skunk-kitty,” the voice in the darkness said. “Dirty, nasty little skunk-kitty. That’s what you are, you drunken bitch.”
The words made up a meaning of violence and anger and reproach. Only the voice (a man’s) was not that kind of a voice. I-told-you-so, its tone said, and the only passion in the saying was a small lip-smacking note of triumph. That’s what you are, it said with a taste of relish on the tongue.
Kenmore was shocked. The lieutenant was used to the casually indecent vituperation of the lock-up and bullpen; but this struck the ear differently, it was genuinely and studiedly impure.
Unfortunately, he couldn’t see the speaker. The sound came from the rear, around the house corner, so that even by broad daylight he couldn’t have seen anything from where he now stood.
Kenmore, who had been heading toward the front door, veered his direction swiftly.
“Come on,” the voice said, quietly and almost soothingly. “Don’t stumble, don’t break your damned neck. Upsi-daisy, watch the step, you sow.”
Kenmore could subsequently testify to these words. What his testimony could not reproduce was the quality of the voice: its blend of pleasure and contempt, mockery and self-satisfaction. And of something else he could not define at all, but was surely evil.
He had overheard a blasphemy, the lieutenant thought. But he could not imagine the district attorney making anything out of that ancient and Biblical impiety. The incident was not to be that easily pinned down . . . “At 9:03 p.m., while proceeding across the tennis court in the direction of the house, the officer heard a sacrilege committed upon the back step—” no.
All the same, Kenmore knew something more than the skunk-kitty was being mocked.
Another figure, likewise arrested by the sound of the voice, loomed unexpectedly before the swiftly advancing lieutenant.
He heard a startled gasp.
And a flashlight blazed full upon him.
“John Kenmore!” Darwina Roydan’s voice exclaimed.
After that, of course, when Lieutenant Kenmore got around the house corner to the rear, the service porch back step was clear of everything except a trio of milk bottles.
Miss Roydan, not for the first time in her career, had outspokenly upset the beans. And Kenmore, not for the first time in his, proved himself a patient man.
After all, it was hardly her fault. Darwina, emerging by way of the front door, had been on her way to the guesthouse. She had simply not recognized him as he bore down toward her out of the night.
“Darwina,” said he, “will you come along, please. There’s something I want to ask you.”
Darwina Roydan, Sc.D., Ph.D., was Fellow of the American Zoophytical Society and the author of the renowned two-volume monograph on leucetta losange-lensis. Among marine biologists, Kenmore understood, her name was almost exactly synonymous with the leucet-tidae for the same reason that the name Einstein is popularly and practically synonymous with relativity.
“This carbon monoxide?” he asked. “How much is enough? A fatal concentration?”
“You mean in here?” Darwina’s hat (it resembled a Spanish galleon more than anything else) tacked sidewise and back again as she glanced around the guesthouse. “But concentration isn’t the point. It’s a question of saturation. So it doesn’t require any particular concentration. The process is absorption, the inhaled gas combining with the victim’s red blood cells, which it does about 250 times as readily as oxygen will.”
“Yes,” said Kenmore, “but how much—?”
“I’m trying to tell you,” interrupted Darwina, somewhat pedagogically. This was an impression furthered by her physical proportions. Darwina was almost Amazonian; she chanced to be one of the sturdiest distance swimmers on the Pacific Coast. Her eyes flashed with a vitality she was accustomed to harness for conversational purposes.
“I am trying to tell you,” said she, “it isn’t the concentration in the atmosphere, it’s the amount in the bloodstream. Death results from an eighty per cent saturation, but you could get that much eventually from the merest trace of the gas in the air—one part in 5000—if you breathed it long enough.”
“But how long?” said the lieutenant. “What’s certain here is that Bowling was alive as late as 7:20, and dead—at any rate unconscious—when I tried to