John MacDonald - The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper

“Perfectly.”

It took a long time. It took both sides of a five-inch reel of tape and half of another before we were done. He wrote many pages of notes, his writing swift, neat, and very small.

My chain of motive and logic went thus:

Dr. Stewart Sherman had indeed killed his wife, and in the course of his investigation the special investigator for Courtney County, Dave Broon, had come up with something that, if he reported it or turned it in, would have been enough to give a reasonable assurance of an indictment by the grand jury. A practicing physician would be far more useful to Dave Broon than a man indicted for murder. A man of Broon’s shrewdness would probably lock it all up very carefully, perhaps by trading cooperation and silence for a written confession which could be tucked away.

Next consider Tom Pike’s narrow escape when he was being investigated for unethical practices while working as a stockbroker. The intervention of Miss Hulda Wennersehn was almost too opportune. One might detect here the possibility of Dave Broon stepping in and doing Pike a great favor. It would be profitable to help Pike. Maybe he dug up information on the Wennersehn woman to use as leverage, or maybe he already had something and was waiting for a good chance to use it. This would give Broon a certain hold over Pike as well. Pike was becoming more and more successful, and possibly overextended.

Then we have Helena Pearson Trescott, before her first operation for cancer, telling her daughters the terms of her will and the surprising size of her estate. Maureen would certainly have told Tom the terms. Then we have the surgeon, Dr. Bill Dyckes, telling Tom Pike, but not the daughters, that Helena will not recover from the cancer of the bowel. Suddenly the expected baby is a potential source of loss compared to (under the terms of the will) the optimum solution. The ideal order would be for Helena to die first, then for Maureen to die without issue, and for Tom Pike to marry Bridget.

The family doctor is, by accident or plan, Dr. Sherman. One can assume that through a mutually profitable relationship Pike and Broon have become confidants. Trust could be guaranteed by putting various damaging pieces of information in a safe place, available only upon the death of either conspirator.

So pressure is put on Sherman to induce spontaneous abortion of the child Maureen Pike is carrying. There are drugs that can be given by injection that will dangerously inhibit kidney function. Do it, or face complete exposure and disgrace and perhaps a life term. It works almost too well, making Maureen dangerously ill.

Here there is an area of pure guesswork. Why was it so necessary to wipe out Maureen’s memory of the immediate past? Did she suspect the shot Sherman gave her had killed the child? Or, more probably, when she appeared to be comatose, she could have heard too much of some quiet bedside conversation between Dr. Sherman and her husband. Nothing could make a woman keep her mouth shut about that. If memory could not be wiped out, she would have had to be killed, in spite of the money loss it would mean. Sherman had been doing animal experimentations on memory, on the retention of skills once learned, of retraining time when such skills were forgotten. As the doctor on the case, he could easily give Maureen a massive dose of puromycin. When it wiped memory clean of all events of the previous several days, one can assume Pike would soon realize how useful that effect could be. It could help him lay the groundwork for her death, which would have to come after Helena had died, and it would be a way of keeping Bridget there in the house, with the two of them, where she could fall in love with Tom Pike.

Once she is home from the hospital, Tom Pike, with Biddy’s unwitting cooperation, keeps his wife on puromycin. Her day-by-day memory function is fragmented. Her learning skills are stunted. A side effect is a kind of regression to childhood, to sensual pleasure, to the naughtiness of running away. But this helps keep Biddy near. She cannot leave her sister. So while Helena still lives, he sets the stage for eventual successful suicide. There is no risk in feeding her the sleeping pills and waiting a seemingly risky length of time before taking her in. She will have no memory of it. No harm in putting her in the hot tub, making the hesitation marks on her wrist, then one cut deep enough, and waiting, then breaking down the unlocked door. She will not remember. She will not know that it was he who fashioned the clumsily knotted noose instead of she.

But he was not aware of the way potential suicides stay usually with one method and never more than two. But here we have four.

The reason Dr. Sherman became ever more troublesome seems clear. He would slowly come to realize that there was a very small chance of their ever using the evidence of his wife’s murder against him, because if indicted, he would certainly be expected to tell of the induced abortion performed at the request of Pike, with leverage by Broon, and tell of the drug that he had been supplying Pike to inject into Maureen, the drug that had caused the mental effects that baffled the neurologists and the psychiatrists. Meanwhile he had been induced to invest everything in Pike’s ventures, even to cashing in his insurance policies and investing the proceeds.

Maybe Sherman began to talk about confession. Maybe he began to gouge money out of Pike in return for supplying the puromycin.

How was that murder done? A week before she died, Penny Woertz had a dream that reminded her of something. A trapdoor in Sherman’s forehead, a little orange light like the one that winks on the face of the Dormed control. Count the flashes. Could she have remembered some casual comment that Sherman made about some trouble with the electrosleep device he had supplied for Maureen Pike and taught Biddy to operate?

A careful check might reveal that on the night the doctor died the daughters and Helena might have driven down to the Casey Key house. And it might reveal that Pike was out of town, in Orlando or Jacksonville. There he could have rented a car, gone home, gotten the Dormed and put it in its case and taken it down to Sherman’s office to be tested. It was portable. The case was pale. The machine was heavy. A tall man had been seen leaving Sherman’s office. Tall is relative. Pike was fairly tall. Six feet almost? Height is such a distinctive thing that a pair of shoes with extreme lift is a very efficient disguise. I have a pair of shoes with almost a four-inch lift. It takes my six four up to six eight. With them I wear a jacket a couple of inches longer than my normal forty-six extra long. People remember the size. They remember seeing a giant. They remember little else about him.

Simplest thing in the world to take it in for Sherman to check. “Maureen says it hurts her. Biddy and I have tried it. There are little sharp pains at first. Try it and see.”

In moments the doctor is asleep, with the impulses set at maximum. Take the key out of the pocket. Unlock the drug safe. Roll the sleeve up. Tie the tubing around the arm. Inject the lethal shot of morphine. Untie the rubber tubing. Go and collect all the puromycin out of the backroom supplies. Wait a little while and then take the headpiece off, unplug the machine, repack it in its case, and leave.

Helen Boughmer promises trouble. Tell Broon to find a way to shut her mouth. Broon has no trouble.

Holton and Nurse Woertz begin to make a crusade of the whole matter. Nothing they can find out, probably. Broon discovers and reports to Pike that Holton and the nurse have become intimate. Then whisper the news to Janice because, disloyalty being contagious, she can be a good source of information about Holton’s progress in his independent investigation. Make the casual contact with her. By being sympathetic, play upon her hurt and discontent. Keep it all on a platonic basis, but be as cautious and discreet as though it were a physical affair — because were Biddy to learn of it, some unpleasant new problems would arise.