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.
That much I told the police. The detective in charge dutifully noted my opinions in his notebook and went about his business; Garth showed up later and backed me into a corner. I got him off my back by promising to come in to see him with everything I knew, after I made one more stop. That didn't do much to pacify him, but it gave me time to catch one of the shuttle flights out of Kennedy Airport to Boston.
I knew it was useless trying to talk to any of the officials at Platte. If they talked to me at all, they'd have nothing but glowing reports for Smathers. That was the way the academic game was played; screw up, and you were asked to resign; resign, and nobody has anything but good things to say about you.
I went to the best source of information I could find, the janitor who worked in the Psychology Department.
I landed back at Kennedy at one the next afternoon and got my car out of the parking lot. It was time to report to Garth, and then to Barnum to warn him about the approaching storm. Instead, I put in a call to Garth's office and left a message for him to meet me at my university office in an hour. Then I drove back to the campus and parked in front of Marten Hall.
Mrs. Pfatt was in her usual good form; she looked as though she'd gained weight during her day off. "I told you before that Dr. Smathers does not see visitors."
"He'll see me this time," I said pointedly. "You tell him I just came back from Platte Institute."
Mrs. Pfatt bridled a bit, but she finally called Smathers on the intercom. Her face went through a series of changes as she talked to him. She hung up the phone and stared at me as though I'd just performed a miracle.
"Dr. Smathers will see you, Dr. Frederickson," she said with a new ring of respect in her voice. "He's in his laboratories upstairs. He'd like you to come up."
I went up. The steel door was unlocked. I opened it and went up the soundproofed stairway. Smathers was in the first office. I made a point of checking to make sure that the other offices and labs were empty, then went in to see him.
"You know," he said without looking at me.
"I know that you got pressured to leave Platte because you insisted on performing experiments that had been legally and medically forbidden to you."
"Why are you doing this to me?"
I showed him a photostat of my license. "Besides being a criminology professor, I'm also a private detective. I was hired to investigate you."
"Who hired you?"
"Sorry. I won't tell you that."
The fire in Smathers' eyes went out as quickly as it had flared. "They were fools," he said hollowly. "I'm surrounded by fools.
I'm on the verge of a very important discovery-a profound medical breakthrough-and they will not leave me alone."
"You've discovered a cure for the common cold?"
"Don't mock me, Dr. Frederickson. I can cure drug addiction and alcoholism, along with a number of other things that plague modern man."
"You do all this by puncturing a man's eardrums?"
His eyes dropped. "You know about that, too?"
"I can guess that Bayard T. Manning was the subject for some of your experiments. Willingly or unwillingly, I don't know. I do know he ended up dead."
"Manning was paid," Smathers said. "You see, I have discovered a cure for alcoholism. Alcoholism, like drug addiction, is primarily a psychological problem, despite the physical changes that take place as a result of dependence. The problem is one of the mind. I can literally remake a mind, erase those problems-"