Richard Deming - Gallows in My Garden

“Gas. When tissue rots, it forms gas, and the cadaver swells up just like a balloon. Pops it right to the surface. I’ve had them three times their normal size. Have to be careful with them, too. When you use the scalpel, they go down like a punctured tire and squirt fluid all over the place. If you’re not nimble, you’re likely as not to get it right in the eye.”

“About Donald Lawson—” I suggested.

“Oh, yeah. We were talking about him. Plain case of gravity. Hardly an unbroken bone in his body.”

I said, “We’re pretty sure it wasn’t an accident, but there’s still some question if it was suicide or murder. How complete an autopsy did you make?”

“The works. That’s what Homicide asked for, and that’s what they got. Of course I can’t tell you how he came to fall, but nothing but the fall killed him.”

“I wondered if possibly he might have been unconscious when he fell.”

Halleran shrugged. “No way to tell that. He might even have been dead. I mean, if someone bashed his head in with a hammer, then tossed him off of whatever it was he fell from, we’d have no way of sorting the hammer blow out from all the other concussions.”

I said, “I meant was he drunk or doped or anything like that? We’ve had another instance of chloral hydrate being used in this same case.”

The young doctor shook his head. “Not a chance. We tested for everything. Found a slight accumulation of alcohol in the brain, but not enough to make him unconscious. More like he’d had a few beers.”

“That’s all I wanted to know,” I told him. “Thanks for the information.”

“Glad to help,” he said. “But don’t hurry off. Just before you came I got a call that a floater’s coming in. Ought to be here any minute.”

I mumbled that I was certainly sorry to miss it, but I had another appointment.

“Well, take a look at this before you leave, anyway. You’ll get a kick out of it.”

Opening the same drawer from which he had obtained his cigar, he drew out a small, dark-colored object resembling a dried fig. He laid it on my palm.

“What is it?” I inquired.

“A hobo’s ear. Guy was in a knife fight, and this came in two days after he was buried in Potter’s Field. A street sweeper found it.”

He stooped to pick the object from the floor, where it had fallen from my palm.

“Sorry,” I muttered. “Clumsy of me.”

Before he could find more curiosities to interest me, I made my way back to where Fausta and Grace were waiting. The two women were staring fascinatedly at a photograph of a marble slab on which lay a torso without arms, legs, or head. The lanky morgue attendant was staring just as fascinatedly at the legs of his beautiful visitors.

“If you can tear yourselves away from that art, I’ll buy you both a drink,” I said. “I’m having a double myself.”

“I feel a little hungry,” Fausta said. “May I have a sandwich?”

“Not in front of me,” I said violently.

For some obscure reason a city ordinance forbids the establishment of a tavern within two hundred yards of a hospital, which meant a two-block walk before we could get a drink. We barely made it, and while Fausta sipped a rum Coke and Grace a plain Coke, I anchored my breakfast down with a double rye.

Professor Laurence Quisby was teaching a class when we arrived at the state teachers’ college, a group of three buildings in the center of the business district. There was little college atmosphere about the school. There was no campus. The buildings came right to the edge of the sidewalk, just as did the other office buildings in the area.

A clerk in the administration building told us Professor Quisby would be free at noon, and since it was already past eleven-thirty, I told him we would wait. He showed us to a small office which had Professor Quisby’s name inscribed on the door and offered us the comfort of three straight-backed chairs.

The professor turned out to be a round, gray-haired man with a sad face and a Van Dyke beard. He glanced at Fausta and Grace without surprise and without the faintest flicker of admiration in his eyes, which led me to believe he was not long for this world. Dejectedly he lowered himself into the chair behind his desk, turned sad eyes on me, and waited without saying anything.

Not to be outdone, I pushed Warren Day’s note under his nose without speaking, either. He read it, pushed it back, and elevated one eyebrow inquiringly. That licked me, for I didn’t know the signs for the questions I wanted to ask, so I had to use my voice.

“This is Miss Grace Lawson, Professor,” I said, indicating the girl. “She’s the sister of the lad who wrote that note. And this is Miss Fausta Moreni, who has no connection with the case, but just came along for the ride.”

He offered a nearly indiscernible nod to each.

“We’ve come pretty close to a dead end on this thing,” I told him. “So we’re rechecking all the original evidence.” Removing the suicide note from my inner pocket, I pushed it across to him. “I understand you positively identified the handwriting here as the deceased’s by comparing it with other handwriting of his.”

With his eyes fixed on the note, his head went up once and down once in a depressed affirmative.

“I also understand you said the writing indicated emotional strain.”

He gave the same signal. Rapidly I was becoming frustrated, but I made a final try.

“Can you tell me anything else at all about the note?” I asked.

For so long he remained silent, I was beginning to suspect he had no intention of answering when he finally spoke. His voice was surprisingly deep and resonant, and his tone so ponderous, it sounded like a portion of a prepared and memorized lecture.

“The paper was eight and a half inches wide and seven and one-eighth inches long, indicating it was part of a piece of standard typing-paper, either the ten-and-a-half-inch or thirteen-and-a-half-inch length. Probably the former, since two samples on ten-and-a-half-inch paper with the same watermark were included in the material furnished me for comparison. A shred of gummed fabric clung to the upper edge, indicating the sheet had been ripped from a pad of typing-paper, possibly the same pad from which the other two specimens came. The bottom had been cut off with a scissors.”

He lifted sorrowful eyes from the note to my face. “I mention these details because I’ve been thinking about this note ever since I made my report. For some reason the police insisted on an examination in the middle of the night, and while I made a thorough comparison, the odd length of the paper did not strike me as peculiar until afterward. I’ve been meaning to contact the police, but you save me the trouble.”

“How do you mean, odd length?” I asked.

“Seven and one-eighth inches.” Then he asked in the same patient but hopeless tone he probably employed when prompting students during recitation, “What length would half a sheet be?”

He lapsed into silence, sitting with eyes half closed, as though on the verge of going to sleep.

I did some mental arithmetic and asked, “You mean twice seven and one-eighth inches would be fourteen and a quarter, and there is no such standard-length paper?”

His eyes popped open with a flicker of what looked almost like surprise. His expression bespoke the frustrated educator, weighted down by the stupidity of humanity, who finally has succeeded in inciting an intelligent answer from one of his students. He almost smiled when he nodded.

“And ordinarily,” I continued to guess, “if a person wanted less than a full sheet of paper, he would simply fold it and tear it in half, not measure off an odd length and cut it with a scissors?”