John MacDonald - The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper

Of course, it was possible that he might have at last decided to just go talk to the nurse and see if she did have the missing bit of information that he suspected she might have. Then, while he was with her, she might have made the intuitive leap, and suddenly he had no choice but to kill her, suddenly and mercilessly.

But my speculations kept returning to what the original plan could have been. What good would it do to knock Janice Holton out or drug her and set her up for the murder when under interrogation she would explain why she was at the Wennersehn apartment and who she was with? I tried to figure out how he could have planned to leap that hurdle. Kill them both and set it up as murder and suicide? That would have been a complex and tricky and terribly dangerous procedure.

Suddenly I realized that he could have framed her very safely, very beautifully, if she were unable to remember how she came to be there, in fact could not remember the assignation with Pike or even being in the Wennersehn woman’s apartment or in Penny’s apartment.

I found myself pacing around the room with no memory of getting off the bed. Suppose Pike had some way of making certain Maureen didn’t remember a thing. No memory of suicide attempts. Couldn’t Janice have no memory of committing a murder? Suppose she found herself in Penny’s apartment with the dead girl, with no memory of how she got there?

Penny had been going to tell me something Dr. Sherman said about memory and digital skills. Digital? Skill with numbers or with fingers? Manual skills, maybe.

Maybe that Dormed thing fouled up memory. Electrosleep. Portable unit, Biddy had told me.

I needed some fast expert opinions. I had no problem remembering the name of the neurologist in Miami. When your spine has been damaged by an angry man belting you with a chunk of two by four and your legs go numb, and somebody fixes what you were certain was a broken back and wasn’t, you don’t forget the name.

Dr. Steve Roberts. I got through to him in fifteen minutes. “Excuse me, Trav,” he said. “This lady I live with has just handed me a frosty delicious glass. There. I have tested the drink and kissed the lady. What’s on your mind? Back trouble?”

“No. Some information. Do you know anything about an electrosleep machine called a Dormed?”

“Yes, indeed. Nice little gadget. Very effective.”

“If somebody used one a great deal, could it destroy their memory?”

“What? No. Absolutely not. Not enough current to destroy anything. If you keep hitting people with big charges, you don’t destroy any particular process. You just turn them into a vegetable in all respects. Each series of shock treatments destroys brain cells. So do alcoholic spasms, if you have enough of them over a long enough period of time.”

“How about convulsions? Like a woman might have if she had a kidney failure and lost a baby.”

“Eclampsia, you mean? No, I doubt it. That sends the blood pressure up like a skyrocket, and before any brain damage could occur, you’d probably have a broken blood vessel in the brain. Where are you, anyway?”

“Fort Courtney.”

“Practicing medicine without a license?”

“Practicing, maybe. But not medicine. Steve, can you think of any way you could make a person lose their memory?”

“ All of it? Total amnesia?”

“No. Just of recent things.”

“How long do you want this effect to last?”

“Permanently.”

“Sometimes a good solid concussion will do it. Traumatic amnesia. Lots of people who recover after an accident lose a couple of hours or days out of their life and it seems to be gone forever. But there’s no guarantee.”

“Is there any chemical or medical way to do it?”

“Well... I wouldn’t say that there’s anything you could call a recognized procedure. I mean, there isn’t much call for it, as I imagine you can understand.”

“Is there a way?”

“Will you hold a minute. I think I can lay a hand on what I want.”

I waited for at least two full minutes before he came back on the line. “Trav? I have to give you the layman’s short course in how the brain works. You have about ten billion neurons in your head. These are tiny cells that transmit tiny electric charges. Each little neuron contains, among other things, about twenty million molecules of ribonucleic acid, called RNA for short. This RNA manufactures protein molecules — don’t ask me how. Anyway, these protein molecules are related to the function we call memory. With me so far?”

“I think so.”

“In certain experiments it has been shown that if you force laboratory animals to learn new skills, more RNA is produced in the brain, and thus more protein molecules are produced. Also, if you inject rats with magnesium pemoline, which doubles, at least, the RNA production, you have rats that learn a lot faster and remember longer. So they’ve tried reverse proof by injecting rats and mice with a chemical that interferes with the process by which the RNA produces the protein molecule. Teach a mouse to find its way through a maze, then inject it, and it forgets everything it just learned.”

“What do they inject?”

“A substance called puromycin. At one university they’ve been treating goldfish with it, and they have some very stupid goldfish out there. Don’t learn a thing and can’t remember a thing.”

“What would happen if you injected a person with puromycin?”

“I don’t think anybody ever has. If it works the way it does on the lab animals, you’d wipe out the memory of what had recently happened, maybe forever. Personally, I’d rather be given magnesium pemoline. In fact, I don’t know how I’m getting along without it. As to puromycin, I have no idea what the side effects would be.”

“Could anybody buy it?”

“Any doctor could, or any authorized lab or research institute. What in the world have you gotten into?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Will you tell me someday?”

“If it wouldn’t bore you. Say, what about memory and digital skills?”

“What about it?”

“Well, make a comment.”

“There seems to be a kind of additional memory function in the brain stem and in the actual motor nerves and muscles. We’ve discovered that a man can have a genuine amnesia, regardless of cause, and suppose he has been a jeweler all his life and you hand him a jeweler’s loupe. More often then not, without knowing why he does so, he will lift it to his eye, put it in place and hold it there, like a monocle. Give a seamstress a thimble, and she’ll put it on the right finger. We had a surgeon here once with such bad aphasia he couldn’t seem to make any connection to reality at all. But when we put a piece of surgical thread in his hand, he began to tie beautiful little surgical knots, one-handed, without even knowing what he was doing. Shall I go on?”

“No. That should do it.”

“Don’t turn your back on anybody holding a two by four.”

“Never again.” I thanked him and hung up.

An hour later I stood screened by the shrubbery on the grounds of a lakeshore house, empty and for sale, and saw the station wagon come out of the Pike driveway and turn toward me on the way to town. The two daughters of Helena, blond, dressed for the party, smiling, Biddy at the wheel and Maureen beside her.

I could reasonably assume that Tom Pike was already in the city, making certain of the arrangements, seeing that his guests would be taken care of. I moved through the screen of plantings, along the road shoulder, angled back along the property line to a point where I could look at the big house. Both cars were gone. Mosquitoes sang their little hunger note into my ears, and a bluejay flew to a pine limb directly over me and called me foul names and accused me of unspeakable practices.