Darkness at dawn : early suspense classics Read online

  With that, Steve Standish came in from the back, buttoning his white jacket. The moment he saw me professional etiquette was thrown to the winds. “Well, well, Rodge, so it’s finally come to this, has it? I knew I’d get you sooner or later!” And so on and so on.

  I gave a weak grin and tried to act nonchalant. Finally he said in oh, the most casual manner, “Come on in, Rodge, and let’s have a look at you.”

  I suddenly discovered myself to be far more considerate of others than I had hitherto suspected. “This—er, man was here ahead of me, Steve.” Anything to gain five minutes’ time.

  He glanced at his other patient, carelessly but by no means unkindly or disdainfully. “Yes, but you’ve got to get down to your office—he probably has the day off. You in a hurry?” he asked.

  “Thass all right, I no mine, I got no work,” the man answered affably.

  “No, Steve, I insist,” I said.

  “Okay, if that’s the way you feel about it,” he answered genially. “Be right with you.” And he ushered the other patient inside ahead of him. I saw him wink at the man as he did so, but at the moment I didn’t much care what he thought of my courage. No man is a hero to his dentist.

  And not long afterwards I was to wonder if that little attack of “cold feet” hadn’t been the luckiest thing that ever happened to me.

  Steve closed his office door after him, but the partition between the two rooms had evidently been put in long after ever5rthing else in the place. It was paper-thin and only reached three-quarters of the way up; every sound that came from the other side was perfectly audible to me where I sat, fidgeting and straining my ears for indications of anguish. But first of all there was a little matter of routine to be gone through. “I guess I’ll have to take your name and pedigree myself,” Steve’s voice boomed out jovially. “It’s my assistant’s day off.”

  “Amato Saltone, plizz.”

  “And where do you live, Amato?” Steve had a way with these people. Not patronizing, just forthright and friendly.

  “Two twanny Thirr Avenue. If you plizz, mista.”

  There was a slight pause. I pictured Steve jotting down the information on a card and filing it away. Then he got down to business. “Now what seems to be the trouble?”

  The man had evidently adjusted himself in the chair, meanwhile. Presumably he simply held his mouth open and let Steve find out for himself, because it was again Steve who spoke: “This one?” I visualized him plying his mirror now and maybe playing around with one of those sharp little things that look like crocheting needles. All at once his voice had become impatient, indignant even. “What do you call that thing you’ve got in there? I never saw a filling like it in my life. Looks like the Boulder Dam! Who put it in for you—some bricklayer?”

  “Docata Jones, Feefatty-nine Stree,” the man said.

  “Never heard of him. He send you here to me?” Steve asked sharply. “You’d think he’d have decency enough to clean up his own messes! I suppose there wasn’t enough in it for him. Well, that headstone you’ve got in there is going to come out first of all, and you just pay me whatever you can afford as we go along. I’d be ashamed to let a man walk out of my office with a botched-up job like that in his mouth!” He sounded bitter about it.

  The next thing that came to my ears was the faint whirring of the electric drill, sounding not much louder than if there had been a fly buzzing around the room over my head.

  I heard Steve speak just once more, and what he said was the immemorial question of the dentist, “Hurting you much?” The man groaned in answer, but it was a most peculiar groan. Even at the instant of hearing it it struck me that there was something different about it. It sounded so hollow and faraway, as though it had come from the very depths of his being, and broke off so suddenly at the end.

  He didn’t make another sound after that. But whatever it was it had taken more than a mere twinge of pain to make him groan like that. Or was it just my own overwrought nerves that made me imagine it?

  An instant later I knew I had been right. Steve’s voice told me that something out of the ordinary had happened just then. “Here, hold your head up so I can get at you,” he said. At first jokingly, and then— “Here! Here! What’s the matter with you?” Alarm crept in. “Wake up, will you? Wake up!” Alarm turned into panic. “Rodge!” he called out to me.

  But I was on my feet already and half across the waiting room, my own trivial fears a thing of the past. He threw the door open before I got to it and looked out at me. His face was white. “This fellow— something’s happened to him, he’s turning cold here in the chair and I can’t bring him to!”

  I brushed past him and bent over the figure huddled in the chair. Horrible to relate, his mouth was still wide open in the position Steve had had it just now. I touched his forehead; it was already cooler by far than the palm of my hand and clammy to the touch. I tried to rouse him by shaking him, no good, then felt for his heart. There was no heart any more. Steve was on the other side of him, holding his dental mirror before the open mouth. We both watched it fascinatedly; it stayed clear as crystal.

  “He’s gone,” I muttered. “What do you make of it?”

  “I’m going to try oxygen,” Steve babbled. “It may have been his heart—” He was hauling down a big, clumsy looking cylinder from a shelf with jerky, spasmodic movements that showed how badly shaken he was. “You’d better send in a call for an ambulance.”

  The phone was outside in the waiting room; that didn’t take any time at all. When I came back there was a mask over his face and a tube leading from his mouth to the cylinder. Steve was just standing there helplessly. Every few seconds he’d touch a little wheel-shaped valve on the cylinder, but the indicator showed that it was already as wide open as it could go. “Keep your hand on his heart,” he said to me hoarsely.

  It was no use. By the time the ambulance doctor and a policeman got there (with a deafening crashing of the rigged-up doorbell apparatus) Steve had taken the tube out of his mouth and turned off the flow of oxygen from the cylinder.

  “Gave him nearly the whole tank,” I remember his saying to me.

  The ambulance doctor took one look at him as he came in and then told us what we already knew. “All up, eh?” he said. He then stretched him out on the floor, of all places, with the help of the cop, and began to examine him. I cleared out of the room at this point and sat down to wait outside—fully imagining I was being big-hearted and staying on of my own free will to brace Steve up instead of going somewhere more cheerful. It would all be over in another five or ten minutes, I thought unsuspectingly, and then maybe Steve and I better go and have a drink together some place and both of us take the rest of the day off.

  The patrolman came out to me and asked if I’d been in there when it happened. I told him no, I’d been out here waiting my turn. I was about to add for no particular reason that I was a very good friend of Steve’s and not just a stray patient, when things began to happen rapidly.

  So far everything had been just pure routine on their part. But now

  Death Sits in the Dentist’s Chair I 5

  the ambulance doctor finished his examination and came out, kit in hand, Steve traiUng after him. What he had to say was to the policeman though and not to Steve at all. “It wasn’t his heart,” he said. “Better phone Headquarters and tell the coroner to come up here. He might want to bring a couple of boys with him.”

  “What’s up?” Steve tried to sound casual but he wasn’t very good at it. The cop was already at the phone.

  “Not natural causes at all,” the doctor said grimly. He wouldn’t say an3^hing more than that. The shrug he gave plainly meant, “It’s not my job.” I thought he looked at Steve a little peculiarly as he turned to go. The hideous bell had another spasm of its jangling and the door closed after him.

  II

  The cop became noticeably less friendly after that; he remained standing to one side of the door and had a watchful air about him. Once when
Steve made a move to go back into the other room for something his upper lip lifted after the manner of a mastiff with a bone and he growled warningly, “Take it easy, fellow.” Nice boy he was—as long as you were on his side of the fence.

  They didn’t take long to get there, the coroner and “a couple of the boys.” They looked more like high-powered real estate agents to me, but this was the first time I’d even been in the same room with a detective.

  “What’s about it?” began one of them, lingering with us while the coroner and his pal went on inside and got busy.

  Steve told him the little there was to tell; the man had climbed into his chair, Steve had started to drill, and the man had gone out like a light. No, he’d never treated him before, never even laid eyes on him until five minutes before he’d died.

  That was all there was to this first session, a harmless little chat, you might call it. The cop went back to his beat, a stretcher arrived, and poor Amato Saltone departed, his troubles at an end. Steve’s, though, were just beginning—and possibly mine with them. The second detective came out with the coroner, and the atmosphere which hadn’t been any too cordial, all at once became definitely hostile.

  “Cyanide of potassium,” snapped the coroner. “Just enough to kill—not a grain more, not a grain less. I pumped his stomach, but the traces were all over the roof of his mouth and the lining of his throat anyway. I’ll hold him on the ice in case they want a more thorough going-over later.” And he too departed. That bell was driving me slowly insane.

  The second detective held the inner door open and said, “Come inside, Dr. Standish.” It wasn’t said as politely as it reads in print.

  I’ve already mentioned that every word spoken could be heard through or over the partition. But I was only allowed to hear the opening broadside—and that was ominous enough. Lord knows. “Where do you keep your cyanide, Dr. Standish?”

  The detective who had remained with me, as soon as he realized what the acoustics of the place were, immediately suggested with heavy emphasis: “Let’s just step out in the hall.”

  After we’d been standing out there smoking awhile Steve’s office phone rang. My guardian took it upon himself to answer it, making sure that I came with him, so I had a chance to overhear the wind-up of Steve’s quizzing. The call itself was simply from a patient, and the detective took pains to inform her that Dr. Standish had cancelled all appointments for the rest of that day.

  I didn’t like the way that sounded; nor did I like the turn the questioning had taken.

  “So a man that’s going to commit suicide goes to all the trouble of having a cavity filled in his mouth just before he does it, does he?” Steve’s interlocutor was saying as we came in. “What for—to make himself beautiful for St. Peter?”

  Steve was plenty indignant by now. “You’ve got a nerve trying to tack anything on me! He may have eaten something deadly outside without knowing it and then only got the effects after he was in my chair.”

  “Not cyanide, pal, it works instantly. And it isn’t given away for nothing either. A fellow of that type would have jumped off a subway platform, it’s cheaper. Where would he have the money or drag to buy cyanide? He probably couldn’t even pronounce the name. Now why don’t you make it easy for yourself and admit that you had an accident?”

  Steve’s voice broke. “Because I had nothing to do with it, accidentally or otherwise!”

  “So you’re willing to have us think you did it purposely, eh? Keenan!” he called out.

  We both went in there, Keenan just a step in back of me to guide me.

  “There’s no trace of where he kept it hidden, but it’s all over his drill thick as jam,” Keenan’s teammate reported. He detached the apparatus from the tripod it swung on, carefully wrapped it in tissue paper, and put it in his pocket. He turned to Steve.

  “I’m going to book you,” he said. “Come on, you’re coming down to Headquarters with me.”

  Steve swayed a little, then got a grip on himself. “Am I under arrest?” he faltered.

  “Well,” remarked the detective sarcastically, “this is no invitation to a Park Avenue ball.”

  “What about this fellow?” Keenan indicated me. “Bring him along too?”

  “He might be able to contribute a little something,” was the reply.

  So down to Headquarters we went and I lost sight of Steve as soon as we got there. They kept me waiting around for awhile and then questioned me. But I could tell that I wasn’t being held as an accessory. I suppose my puffed-out cheek was more in my favor than everything else put together. Although why a man suffering from toothache would be less likely to be an accessory to murder than anyone else I fail to see. They didn’t even look to see if it was phony; for all they knew I could have had a wad of cotton stuffed in there.

  I told them everything there was to tell (they asked me, you bet!)— not even omitting to mention the cigarette I had given the man when we were both sitting in the waiting room. It was only after I’d said this that I realized how bad it sounded for me if they cared to look at it in that way. The cyanide could just as easily have been concealed in that cigarette. Luckily they’d already picked up and examined the butt (he hadn’t had time to smoke more than half of it) and found it to be okay. Who says the innocent don’t run as great a risk as the guilty?

  I told them all I could about Steve and, as soon as I was cleared and told I could go home, I embarked on a lengthy plea in his defense, assuring them they were making the biggest mistake of their lives.

  “What motive could he possibly have?” I declaimed. “Check up on him, you’ll find he has a home in Forest Hills, a car, a walloping practice, goes to all the first nights at the theatre! What did that jobless Third Avenue slob have that he needed? Why I heard him with my own ears tell the guy not to be in a hurry about paying up! Where’s your motive? They came from two different worlds!”

  All I got was the remark. Why didn’t I join the squad and get paid for my trouble, and the suggestion. Why didn’t I go home now?

  One of them, Keenan, who turned out to be a rather likable sort after all, took me aside (but toward the door) and explained very patiently as to a ten-year-old child: “There’s only three possibilities in this case, see? Suicide, accidental poisoning, and poisoning on purpose. Now your own friend himself is the one that has blocked up the first two, not us. We were willing to give him every chance, in the beginning. But no, he insists the guy didn’t once lift his hands from under that linen apron to give the stuff to himself—take it out of his pocket and pop it in his mouth, for instance. Standish claims he never even once turned his back on him while he was in the chair, and that the fellow’s hands stayed folded in his lap under the bib the whole time. Says he noticed that because everyone else always grabs the arms of the chair and hangs on. So that’s out.

  “And secondly he swears he has never kept any such stuff around the place as cyanide, in any shape or form, so it couldn’t have gotten on the drill by accident. So that’s out too. What have you got left? Poisoning on purpose—which has a one-word name: murder. That’s all today—and be sure you don’t leave town until after the trial, you’ll be needed on the witness stand.”

  But I turned and followed him back inside and started all over again. Finally when I saw that it was no use, I tried to go bail for Steve, but they told me I couldn’t spring him until after he’d been indicted.

  I spent the rest of the night with a wet handkerchief pasted against my cheek, doing heavy thinking. Every word Steve and the victim had spoken behind the partition passed before me in review. “Where do you hve, Amato? Two-twanny Thirr Avenue, mista.” I’d start in from there.

  I took an interpreter down there with me, a fellow on my own office staff who knew a little of everything from Eskimo to Greek. I wasn’t taking any chances. Amato himself had been no Lowell Thomas, I could imagine what his family’s English would be like!

  There seemed to be dozens of them; they lived in a cold-water flat
on the third floor rear. The head of the clan was Amato’s rather stout wife. I concentrated on her; when a fellow has a toothache he’ll usually tell his wife all about it quicker than his aunts or nieces or nephews.

  “Ask her where this Dr. Jones lived that sent him to Standish.”

  She didn’t know, Amato hadn’t even told her what the man’s name was. Hadn’t they a bill from the man to show me? (I wanted to prove that Amato had been there.) No, no bill, but that didn’t matter because Amato couldn’t read anyway, and even if he had been able to, there was no money to pay it with.

  If he couldn’t read, I persisted, how had he known where to find a dentist?

  She shrugged. Maybe he was going by and saw the dentist at work through a window.

  I went through the entire family, from first to last, and got nowhere. Amato had done plenty of howling and calling on the saints in the depths of the night, and even kept some of the younger children quiet at times by letting them look at his bad tooth, but as for telling them where, when, or by whom it had been treated, it never occurred to him.

  So I was not only no further but I had even lost a good deal of confidence. “Docata Jones” began to look pretty much like a myth. Steve hadn’t known him, either. But the man had said Fifty-ninth Street. With all due respect for the dead, I didn’t think Amato had brains enough to make up even that little out of his head. I’d have to try that angle next, and unaided, since Amato’s family had turned out to be a flop.

  I tackled the phone book first, hoping for a short cut. Plenty of Joneses, D.D.S., but no one on 59th. Nor even one on 57th, 58th, or 60th, in case Amato was stupid enough not even to know which street he’d been on. The good old-fashioned way was all that was left. At that, there have been dentists before now who couldn’t afford a telephone.

  III

  I swallowed a malted milk, tied a double knot in my shoelaces, and started out on foot, westward from the Queensboro Bridge. I went into every lobby, every hallway, every basement; I scanned every sign in every window, every card in every mail box. I consulted every superintendent in every walk-up, every starter in every elevator building, every landlady in every rooming house.