“The typing stopped at three. Nobody had come or gone, not even Gandolphus, through the one door of the study. At three fifteen we went in. Harrington was dead, and to me it looked natural.”
Fergus stopped.
“To date,” I said flatly, “this is no payment for good beer.”
He reached for his briefcase. “At that point,” he said, “I thought it was just about the most pointless evening I’d ever spent. Then, while we waited for the men from the Medical Examiner’s office, Bill and I read what Harrington had been typing.”
He handed me a sheaf of photostats. They were labeled Statement found in and beside typewriter of Charles Harrington, deceased.
My name is Charles Harrington. I am Fifty-three years of age, and a native American citizen. My residence is 13 Sheridan Square.
That is, I believe, the correct way to begin a statement? But the way from that point on leads through thornier brambles or, to shift the metaphor, through a maze in which the desideratum is to find, not the locus of egress, but the locus of entrance.
My name may not be unfamiliar to such as are interested in hagiography and iconography. My collection of tenth-century objects of virtu relating to Christian devotional practices has made my apartment, I dare say, an irreligious Mecca to many (inevitably one recalls the Roman Catholic church which one observed in San Francisco, which so unbigotedly advertises itself as “a Mecca of devotion for the faithful since 1906”); and hardly any one concerned with the variant vagaries of the mystic mind can be totally ignorant of the series of monographs which will some day form the definitive “life” of St. Gandolphus the Lesser. I place the term “life” within quotation marks because the purpose of the book is to demonstrate the fact that the canonized gentleman never existed.)
The habits of a scholar should, perhaps, make easier the compilation of such a statement as this; but familiar though I may be with the miraculous in the Tenth Century, the . . . shall we say, unusual in the Twentieth is more disturbing.
Let us put it that the matter began a month ago, on Saturday, October the thirtieth. I was taking my conventional evening stroll, which on this particular evening led me toward Washington Square. The weather was warm, you will recall; and you are doubtless familiar with Washington Square of a warm evening?
The mating proclivities of the human animal can flourish as well in autumn as in spring, if the thermometer be but auspicious; and Washington Square of such an evening is an unsettling spectacle to a man of voluntary celibacy. I had regretted my choice of locale and started to turn homeward when the thing flashed in my face.
It seemed, in fact, aimed directly at my eyes; and I knew a moment of terror, since sight has ever been to me by far the most rewarding of the senses. And although I dodged its direct impact, by swifter muscular response than I should have thought myself capable of (you will condone the informality of that construction), I felt a renewal of terror in the instant of the sudden blinding flash of its explosion.
The couples near me were too engrossed in other pursuits to pay any heed to me as I stood there trembling for what must have been a full minute. Only at the end of that time was I able to open my eyes, reassure myself that my sight was unimpaired, and observe upon the grass the shattered remains of what had so disproportionately terrified me. It was obvious from the fragments that the object had been a child’s toy, modeled not upon the engines of my own childhood or the aeroplanes of my nephews’, but upon an interplanetary spaceship such as is employed by the hero of cartoon adventures named, I believe, Buck Ruxton.
That the child should make no attempt to reclaim his toy after so nearly serious an accident is understandable. It is possibly also understandable that I, after so severe a nervous shock, was forced in the course of the short journey home to stop in three successive drinking establishments and in each to consume a pony of brandy.
I relate all this in order to make clear why I, a normally abstemious if definitely not abstentious man, retired that night with sufficient alcohol within me (I had added a fourth brandy upon my return to the apartment) to ensure an unusually, even abnormally sound sleep. It does not explain why I awoke next morning in most exquisite agony; but no hypothesis yet advanced has explained why, upon occasions, the mildest overindulgence may produce more severe reactions than many a protracted debauch.
Only after the ingestion of such palliatives as aspirin, raw egg, tomato juice and coffee was I sufficiently conscious to become aware of what had happened in my apartment during my sleep.
To put it briefly and colloquially: Someone had drunk himself silly. Silly, indeed, he had been to start with; for indiscriminately he had emptied my cooking sherry and my Sandeman ’07, my finest cognac and the blended rye which my younger nephew fancies. And all direct from the bottles: the dead soldiers stood all a-row, but no glasses had been soiled.
As I assured you at the precinct station, no key save my own opens my door. Because of the value of my objects of virtu, even the superintendent and the cleaning woman are admitted only by appointment. The windows could be considered as entrances only by the most experienced “human fly.”
I need not say, therefore, that I was sorely perplexed by the puzzle thus presented to me, nor that I wondered why a burglar, by whatever means he had procured admittance, should confine his attentions to my potable treasures when the apartment contains so many portable articles of value.
I took no action. My civic
