AN APE AND SOME GUINEA-PIGS
Miss Lewis came in a few minutes after Briggs had gone, and, closing
the door behind her, looked at Tommy.
“Miss Blake is conscious,” she said. “Temperature only ninety-nine,
pulse a hundred and forty.”
“Good!” Tommy said heartily. It was evident to us all how relieved he
was. “But I don’t like the pulse.” He was brushing his hair back with
Tish’s brush. “She’s had a terrific shock of some sort.”
“Yes, sir,” said Miss Lewis, still with her back to the door.
Tommy leaned over and kissed Tish’s cheek. He was delighted at the mere
prospect of seeing the Little Nurse, and showed it. “Now, try to be
good until I come back, both of you,” he said. “All right, Miss Lewis,
we’ll have a look at our patient in the dormitory.”
Miss Lewis looked flushed and uncomfortable.
“I’m sorry, Doctor,” she said. “Miss--Miss Blake doesn’t--she has asked
for Doctor Willson instead.”
“What!” said Tommy, and turned a dark red.
“She’s asked for Doctor Willson,” repeated Miss Lewis. “There’s no
mistake. I’ve been coaxing her for ten minutes.”
“She’s still delirious,” Tish snapped. “And it is not necessary to coax
people to retain my nephew’s professional services, Miss Lewis.”
“Why, that’s all right,” Tommy said with affected cheerfulness.
“Willson’s a fine chap--she couldn’t do better.”
“Fiddle!” Tish was angry. “Who is Willson, anyhow?”
“Big fellow, dark eyes--very distinguished looking man,” said Tommy
humbly. Tommy is handsome, if being straight and slim and young count
for anything, but I daresay one could hardly call him distinguished.
Tish and I differ about this. “Good gracious, Aunt Tish, the girl ought
to have the privilege of selecting her own medical adviser.”
“Humph!”
“Suppose you go back to the dormitory, Miss Lewis,” Tommy said, “and
say to Miss--Miss Blake that she’s made a wise choice, and I’ll send
Willson to her as soon as he comes in. And ask her if she will let me
see her for a moment, not professionally.”
Miss Lewis looked doubtful, but she went. When she came back, in five
minutes, she was evidently irritated, and her cap was more than ever on
one ear.
“She’s sitting on the side of the bed, half dressed,” she grumbled,
“and she says she won’t see anybody.”
“Then she doesn’t want--Willson?” asked Tommy, looking relieved.
“No. Says she’s all right, and if people don’t stop bothering her
she is going out somewhere in the country where they have a dog and
kittens! That’s what she said! Not _cat_ and kittens--”
“Sensible girl,” said Tommy, happy again. “She--hasn’t changed her mind
about seeing me?”
“No, nor about locking the door. And what’s more--” She stopped and
glanced at Tommy. “I’d like to speak to you a moment in the hall,
Doctor.”
“What sort of shilly-shallying is that?” demanded Tish. “Can’t you
speak to him here?”
“I can _not_,” said Miss Lewis, glaring back at Tish, her thumbs inside
her apron belt. “It isn’t considered shilly-shallying in this hospital
for a nurse to make a report to a doctor, and if you’ll read the rules
on that door--”
“I’ll speak to you in the hall,” said Tommy. “Miss Lewis is right, Aunt
Tish. If it’s in line with what we’ve been discussing, I’ll tell you.”
But Tish isn’t a woman to take chances. Afterward, she justified
her looking through the keyhole on the plea that she was making a
scientific theory to fit the case, and if it were not for keyholes many
a murderer would have gone unhung to his grave. At the time, however, I
was rather horrified.
She had plenty of time to tell me what she saw, as it happened,
for Tommy did not come back until late in the afternoon, after the
guinea-pig incident.
Tish says that when she’d got them in focus, as you may say, Miss Lewis
was pulling something out of her sleeve. It was a knife, Tish says,
with a short, thin blade that looked as sharp as a razor.
“One of the knives from the operating room, Doctor,” Miss Lewis said.
“I thought I’d better not let the old ladies see it.”
I daresay that was when I saw Tish’s back stiffen.
“Great Scott!” said Tommy.
“I found it on the floor under her bed,” Miss Lewis went on. “She
didn’t see me pick it up.”
Tommy was staring at the blade.
“It’s been used,” he said. “Look at this!”
“Exactly,” said Miss Lewis. “It’s from the operating room, Doctor, and
they don’t put away their knives in that condition.”
“What do you mean by that?” Tommy demanded sharply. But Miss Lewis only
looked at him.
“I don’t mean anything against Ruth Blake, if that’s what you are
indignant about,” she said. “But I’m glad I found that knife. There’s
enough talk, Doctor.”
They moved down the hall then, so that was all Tish heard. But she
added, “Knife, blood-stained,” to her sheet of paper.
Aggie being half drowsy and altogether sulky, we took a little time to
go over the notes Tish had made, and they pointed as many different
ways as a porcupine--Johnson, with his raps and his talk about coming
back, taken from the mortuary and hung by his neck with a roller towel
marked S. P. T.; the coincidence of Johnson’s wife murdered a few years
before and hung up the same way; Miss Blake wandering around at night
with a brass candlestick and a blood-stained knife from the operating
room, and Tommy Andrews falling or being pushed through a skylight and
coming out of the excitement with a _bite_ instead of a fracture! And
then there were smaller things, though strange enough--the twisted
pipe-molding and the footprints on the wall up-stairs in the room where
Johnson’s body was found; the loosened molding in Aggie’s room and her
story about the foot; the fact that Johnson was left to die in the
care of a convalescent typhoid and the ward left alone for fifty-five
minutes; Linda Smith and her speech to Miss Blake, not to mention the
darkish bundle.
It was Tish who advanced the gigantic ape theory. She’d been reading
_The Murders in the Rue Morgue_, and some of the clues seemed to
fit, especially Tommy’s shoulder. The loosened molding helped out the
theory, and as Tish said, also the stringing up of Johnson’s body,
which, if you left out the supernatural, had apparently been done by
something tremendously strong, but without intelligence.
Well, the more we thought of it the more certain we felt. The footprint
part of it, too, we considered corroborative evidence, until we got the
encyclopedia and learned that the great apes have the equivalent of
four hands, and not a foot at all.
But Tish was undaunted. “Mark my words, Lizzie,” she said, “they’ve
lost a chimpanzee or a gorilla from the Zoological Garden--not that
they’ll acknowledge it. You remember when the lion got loose and
ate a colored woman out the Ralston road, and how the papers denied
everything until they found the beast dead of indigestion in a cellar?
But that is what has happened.”
Well, I thought it likely enough myself, and Tish called up Charlie
Sands, who is on a newspaper and is another of Tish’s nephews.
“Lizzie and I,” said Tish over the ’phone, “have reason to believe that
there is a great ape--a-p-e--ape! Monkey, _monkey_--yes. A large monkey
loose, and we want you to trace it.”
There was a long pause. Tish said afterward that Charlie claimed to
have fainted at the other end of the wire, and to have had to be
restored with whisky and soda. However, which is more to the point,
he promised to find out for us what he could, and Tish hung up the
receiver.
“He’ll do it, too, Lizzie,” she said, “although he spoke to me gently,
as if he thought my reason had entirely gone. But, as he said, it won’t
hurt to scare up the Zoo people anyhow. They’re very casual about their
animals.”
Now, two things were discovered that afternoon, neither of them to be
explained by anything we knew. The first one was that Tommy Andrews
and Mr. Harrison, the superintendent, making a careful examination of
the roof, found a spattering of dried blood leading from the broken
skylight to the ridge pole, where it ceased abruptly. The second one
was made by Aggie and myself.
About three o’clock that afternoon Aggie got into her clothes and
insisted on coming into Tish’s room, which was inconvenient, Tish
expecting the message from Charlie Sands at any moment. Aggie was
nervous, but her head was clearer. She’d been thinking things over, and
she knew now that what had happened the night before had been a message
from the roofer.
“Then the least said about it the better!” Tish snapped. “If he hasn’t
any better sense than to materialize his foot, and you a woman of your
years and respectability, he’d better go back where he came from.”
“For heaven’s sake, Tish,” Aggie pleaded, looking over her shoulder.
“He may be listening to us now!”
“I don’t care if he is,” said Tish recklessly. “If he’d materialize a
will, now, leaving you that house in Groveton! But a foot!”
“I’m not so sure it _was_ a foot,” Aggie said restlessly. “I’ve been
thinking, Tish--he was a large man, you know. It may have been a hand.”
Now at that moment the telephone bell rang, and Tish signaled to me to
take Aggie out at once. I got up and took her by the arm.
“I’ll walk up and down the corridor with you, Aggie,” I said. “You need
exercise.”
“I don’t care to walk,” she objected, trying to sit down. “See who is
at the telephone, Tish. I expect my laundress is through washing and
wants her money.”
“I’d like you to see the hospital,” I said desperately as the ’phone
rang again. “The--the guinea-pigs, Aggie.” Miss Lewis had told me about
them.
Now, Aggie loves a guinea-pig. It’s a queer taste, but she says they
neither bark like dogs nor scratch like cats, and they _have_ a nice
way of wiggling their noses.
“Guinea-pigs!” she said in an ecstasy. “Where?”
“In the laboratory,” said I, and led her out of the room.
She put on all her wraps and Miss Lewis took us to the laboratory,
which is a small brick building set off by itself in the hospital yard,
with Aggie cooing in anticipation and wanting to send out and buy a
cabbage for them. Doctor Grimm, who was the surgical interne, met us as
we were crossing the yard, and volunteered to let us in.
“You know,” he said, feeling in his pocket for the keys, “they’re not as
attractive as some guinea-pigs and rabbits I have known under happier
circumstances. They scratch a good bit--some think it’s fleas; some say
it’s germs.”
“Germs?” Aggie asked, puzzled.
“Oh, yes,” he said, opening the door and leading the way into a narrow
hall. “Some of them have been inoculated with several different kinds
of germs. That’s why we keep this place so well locked up, for fear the
germs may escape. You know,”--he unlocked the second door and threw it
open, “you know, suppose you were walking up the street and met a solid
phalanx of say sixteen billion typhoid germs, or measles! It would be
horrible, wouldn’t it?”
He stepped into the room and looked about him.
“Come in,” he said. “It’s a little close. We had a tear-up among the
resident staff, and nobody has been here to-day. Hello!”
He threw open the shutters, and a broad shaft of gray daylight lighted
the room. Aggie gave a cry of dismay. The doors of the small cages
around the walls were all open, and in the center, a pathetic heap of
little brown-and-white and black-and-white bodies, lay the guinea-pigs.
Doctor Grimm picked one up and examined it closely.
“I’m damned!” he said, and put it down. “Throats cut, every one of
them! And where are the rabbits?”
Aggie sat down and began to blubber, but Miss Lewis scolded her
soundly. “There’ll be plenty more where they came from,” she said
sharply. “What _does_ concern us is--how would anybody or anything get
in here with both doors and all the windows locked, and not a chimney.”
Aggie wiped her eyes and got up.
“You laughed at me last night, Miss Lewis,” she said with dignity, “but
I wish to remind you that to the fourth dimension there are no locks,
no bars, no doors or walls.”
“When they invent that,” said Miss Lewis, opening the door to let us
out, “they’ll have to invent something like these X-ray-proof screens,
or a woman won’t dare to change her clothes.”
“And what’s more,” said Aggie, turning in the doorway, “the hand that
slew those innocent little creatures is the one I touched last night!”
“Hand!” cried Miss Lewis. “It was a _foot_ then.”
But Aggie was holding her shoulder over her face and hurrying across
the yard. At the far side she threw back a contemptuous sneeze.
* * * * *
Tish’s commission to Charlie Sands had an unexpected result. She was
almost bursting with it when I got back.
“Listen,” she said while Aggie got her spray, “doesn’t this bear out
what I’ve been saying right along? The Zoo people say positively that
none of their animals has escaped. But they took such an interest in
his inquiry that Charlie grew suspicious and bribed a keeper. He sent
this up by messenger from the office:
“‘Dear and revered spinster aunt,’” she read--“the young rascal!
‘I couldn’t tell you this over the ’phone, for it’s our exclusive
property, and will be published to-morrow morning, with photographs of
the late deceased, etc. Hero, the biggest ape in captivity, pining for
his keeper, Wesley Barker, who has been away, committed suicide in his
cage last night by hanging himself with a roller towel. He was found
dead when the assistant keeper unlocked the cage at six o’clock this
morning. Nobody knows how he got the roller towel. Charlie.’
“‘P. S.--I’ve got the roller towel, a fine long one and marked S. P. T.
Do you think the letters stand for Suicidal Purpose Towel?’”
Tish looked at me triumphantly over her reading-glasses.
“You see, Lizzie, what a little logical thinking will do. If it hadn’t
been for me, you and Aggie would have gone to your graves expecting to
be able to come back at any time and hang from chandeliers or do any
of the ridiculous buffoonery that seems to be expected of returned
spirits. We search for a ghost and we find a gorilla.”
She meant ape, of course, but the other was alliterative.
“I’m not quite clear about it yet, Tish,” I said, with my head in a
whirl. “If his cage was locked, and the keepers say he hadn’t been
free, and if Miss Blake--”
“If! If!” said Tish impatiently. “I haven’t had time to figure it all
out, of course. But mark my words, Lizzie, the mystery is solved. We
shall sleep to-night.”
But, as a matter of fact, we never even went to bed.