In The House Of Secret Enemies

been off-limits to me. I wanted to do some more digging before I started telling tales.

I went to the Liberal Arts building and looked around for Fred Haley. I wanted some more information on the other, nonscholarly side of Dr. Kee. It would have to wait; Haley was away for the weekend.

The walk wasn't entirely wasted, as I managed to latch onto Jim Larkin, a former student of mine who was now a graduate fellow in experimental psychology. He accepted my offer of a cup of coffee and we went downstairs to the Student Union. I gradually steered the conversation around to Dr. Vincent Smathers.

'Strange man,' Jim said. Coming from him, it was hard to tell whether this was a complaint or a compliment. Probably it was neither. Jim was a young man with an almost fanatic devotion to the notion of live and let live. 'All the graduate fellows were assured before he came here that we'd have access to him, that he wouldn't be just a high-priced name for the university to print in its alumni newsletter. However. .'

'I take it that it didn't work out that way?'

'Smathers showed up at exactly one of our graduate seminars, and that was it.'

'Interesting. What do you suppose he does with his time?'

'I haven't the slightest idea,' Jim said. A braless co-ed, who shouldn't have been, had entered the cafeteria and was bobbing along the tables. I made a stab at getting Jim's attention back.

'What happens to a man when he undergoes sensory deprivation?'

Jim turned back to me. 'That's Dr. Smathers' field.'

'I know.'

'Well, simply put, he goes out of his mind. To be more precise, his mind goes out of him. You take away all a man's sensory landmarks and he becomes like a baby, with no past, present, or future, at least while he's undergoing the deprivation. He becomes very suggestible.'

'You mean he's brainwashed?'

Jim made a face. 'That's an old-fashioned term.'

'Uh-huh. Is it like brainwashing?'

'I suppose so.'

'How do you go about this sensory deprivation?'

'The first thing you need is a controlled medium in which to support the man's body.'

'Like water?'

'Yeah, water's good. What are you getting at, Dr. Frederickson?'

'Just curious,' I said with a straight face. 'What do you think of Smathers' Chinese helpers?'

Jim shrugged noncommittally. 'I'll tell you this,' he said after some thought, 'I think there's some strange business going on in that department.'

'What kind of strange business?'

'You heard about that guy who was shot on campus? The old Bowery bum?'

I said I had.

'I saw him in Marten Hall one day. He was walking with one of Dr. Smathers' assistants, one of those Chinese guys.'

Garth, as usual, was chin-deep in paperwork. My brother, all six-feet-plus of him, was sitting behind a desk which might have fit me, merrily clacking away at a typewriter, vintage nineteenth century. His face was grim; his face was always grim when he was doing paperwork. He didn't bother looking up.

'Look what the ants dragged in. What's happening, Mongo?'

'I just wanted to drop in and say hello to my brother.'

'You're here to pump information,' Garth said evenly. He hit the wrong key and swore.

'There was an old man killed on the university campus a few weeks back. Shot.'

Garth frowned. 'I don't recall it.'

'You probably had fifty murders the same day. In any case, I'd like a look at the file.'

'Why?'

'C'mon, Garth. I'm on a fishing expedition.'

Garth leaned back in his chair and stared at me. His eyes were hard. 'You're beginning to take our relationship for granted, Mongo. This is a police station, a public agency, and you're a private citizen. You can't just walk in here and ask to look at a confidential file.' He paused. Something moved behind his eyes. 'You got a lead on this thing?'

'I'm groping around in the dark, Garth. Maybe yes, maybe no. I don't want to talk about it, not yet. And I happen to know that that precious file is buried somewhere. The New York Police Department doesn't have time to investigate the death of some Bowery bum. Sure, you did an autopsy because it's required by law in a murder case, but it's never going to be investigated because you just don't have the manpower. It's not going to hurt to let me look at the file.'

Garth's eyes flashed and the bald spot on top of his head reddened. 'You've got a lot of lip today, brother.'

'It's the truth, and you know it. Besides, you owe me a couple. Let me see the file, Garth.'

Garth hesitated a moment, then got up and disappeared into another room. He returned a few moments later with the file. I thanked him, but Garth said nothing. He went back to his typing and I went over to a corner with the file.

The dead man's name was Bayard T. Manning, and his only known address had been a flophouse on the Bowery. Everything was covered in three short paragraphs. The most interesting part was the results of the autopsy, covered in the last paragraph. Manning had been a dedicated alcoholic; cirrhosis of the liver had set in years before, and his brain had been just about pickled. The curious thing was that he'd been off the juice for at least a month, according to the pathologist's report. Not a drop. Bone dry. The texture of his skin indicated that he'd spent a great deal of time in water just before his death. He'd been holding a transistor tube in his hand when he was killed.

Also, his eardrums had been punctured.

Some legwork had been done; a cursory investigation of his usual haunts had turned up the fact that he hadn't been seen in a month.

I had a pretty good idea where he'd been.

I put in a restless Sunday reading the New York Times and trying to watch the Jets. My file on the case was building, spinning a web around Vincent Smathers. If the web got any tighter, Smathers was going to be eaten by some very nasty spiders, the kind that hatch in a man's mind when he has to spend the rest of his life in prison.

That bothered me. Why should a Nobel Prize winner jeopardize his whole reputation and future by enmeshing himself in a set of circumstances that could destroy him? It was easy to pin any possible blame on the shadowy Kee, but Kee was Smathers' responsibility, assuming a crime had been committed. In fact, I wanted to make very sure I knew what I was talking about before I brought in the police or turned Smathers' future over to a pedantic, professional fund-raiser like Barnum.

I made it to half-time in the ball game, then went to the phone and called Fred Haley's home on the outside chance that he might have returned early. There was no answer. I had nothing better to do, so I drove out to the suburban town where Haley lived. I'd wait for him.

Haley's car was in the driveway of his house. I parked my car behind his, went up the flagstone walk in front of the house and knocked at the door. I waited thirty seconds, then knocked again. There was still no answer.

Something cold crawled up my back. I went around to the back of the house and knocked on that door. I got the same response. I got out my skeleton keys and let myself in.

Fred Haley hadn't gone anywhere that weekend. His body lay on the floor of his study, very stiff with rigor mortis. I guessed he'd been dead at least two days. The odd angle of his head told me he'd died of a broken neck.

I spent the next two hours answering questions, avoiding speculation on possible connections between Haley's death and his knowledge of Chiang Kee's background. It could very well be that Haley had been killed by a burglar he'd surprised. The ransacked house pointed to it-except that Fred Haley, as far as I knew, was no slouch at defending himself; and he was supposed to have left on a Friday afternoon, which was a strange time for a burglar to be prowling around.