Part 17 (1/2)
17.
IT WAS FIVE when I got back to 109. I unlocked the door and leaned over and reached around it. No wad of paper anywhere near where it should be. I opened the door the rest of the way. The balled-up piece of stationery was five feet from the door, where it had rolled when somebody had opened the door. when I got back to 109. I unlocked the door and leaned over and reached around it. No wad of paper anywhere near where it should be. I opened the door the rest of the way. The balled-up piece of stationery was five feet from the door, where it had rolled when somebody had opened the door.
It seemed a fair guess that if it had been a maid or a housekeeper, I would have found it in the wastebasket. I checked the phones first. I took the base plate off the one by the bed and found that my visitor was going first cla.s.s. He'd put a Continental 0011 in there, more commonly known as a two-headed bug. It would pick up anything in the room and also over the phone and transmit it on an FM frequency. Effective maximum range probably three hundred feet. Battery good for five days or so, when fresh. It goes for around five hundred dollars. So he could be within range, listening on an FM receiver, or he could have a voice-activated tape recorder doing his listening for him. Or he could have a pickup and relay receiver-transmitter plugged into an AC outlet within range, and be reading me from a much greater distance. One thing was quite certain. The sounds of my taking the screws out of the base plate with the little screwdriver blade on the pocket knife would either have alerted him at once or would when he played the tape back.
So I said, ”Come to the room and we'll have a little talk. Otherwise you're out five hundred bucks worth of playtoy.” I took it out and thumbed the little microswitch to off. I then made a fairly thorough check of the underside of all the furniture and any other place I thought a backup mike and transmitter might be effectively concealed. The professional approach is to plant two. Then the pigeon finds one and struts around congratulating himself, but he's still on the air. If the same person, Broon, had checked me over the first tune, then I had two more reasons to believe he wasn't much more than moderately competent.
I was finding a good place for the gun when Stanger phoned me. He said he hadn't been able to get a line on Broon as yet. He said the continuing investigation on the murder of Penny Woertz hadn't turned up a thing as yet. He had checked on Helen Boughmer and found they had her under heavy sedation.
I told him I had no progress to report. I didn't actually. All I had was a lot more unanswered questions than before. I stretched out on the bed to ask them all over again.
a.s.sume that Tom Pike had arranged that he and Janice Holton have their first a.s.signation, in the full meaning of the word, in the apartment where Hulda Wennersehn lived. Janice couldn't get in touch with him to tell she couldn't make it. So he had gone to the parking lot where they had arranged to meet and had finally realized she wasn't going to be there. a.s.sume he went to the apartment alone and that he went to Penny's place in the late afternoon and she let him in and he shoved the shears into her throat. He tracked some blood into the Wennersehn apartment. He cleaned it up, cleaned up his shoes and maybe pants legs, and burned the rags.
But he had expected Janice to be there. He had changed his plan. What could the original plan have been? Janice certainly would have an understandable motive for killing her husband's girl friend. Having her nearby at the time of the murder could establish opportunity.
So if he planned to frame Janice Holton for the murder of Penny, and if Janice couldn't show up to be the patsy, why would he go ahead and kill Penny anyway? Lorrette Walker had found out from the cleaning woman that somebody had stretched out on Hulda Wennersehn's bed.
So he had some thinking to do. He could cancel out and try to set it up another time. The death of the nurse would, of course, bust up the little duet of Penny and Rick, the two who had the unshakable belief Sherman hadn't killed himself. Did Penny have some random piece of information that she had not yet pieced into the picture and that made haste imperative?
Or it could have been some kind of sick excitement that grew and grew inside the brain of the man stretched out on the bed, until at last he got up and walked to Penny's place and did it because he had been thinking of it too long not to do it, even though the original plan was no longer possible.
Of course, it was possible that he might have at last decided to just go talk to the nurse and see if she did have the missing bit of information that he suspected she might have. Then, while he was with her, she might have made the intuitive leap, and suddenly he had no choice but to kill her, suddenly and mercilessly.
But my speculations kept returning to what the original plan could have been. What good would it do to knock Janice Holton out or drug her and set her up for the murder when under interrogation she would explain why she was at the Wennersehn apartment and who she was with? I tried to figure out how he could have planned to leap that hurdle. Kill them both and set it up as murder and suicide? That would have been a complex and tricky and terribly dangerous procedure.
Suddenly I realized that he could have framed her very safely, very beautifully, if she were unable to remember how she came to be there, in fact could not remember the a.s.signation with Pike or even being in the Wennersehn woman's apartment or in Penny's apartment.
I found myself pacing around the room with no memory of getting off the bed. Suppose Pike had some way of making certain Maureen didn't remember a thing. No memory of suicide attempts. Couldn't Janice have no memory of committing a murder? Suppose she found herself in Penny's apartment with the dead girl, with no memory of how she got there?
Penny had been going to tell me something Dr. Sherman said about memory and digital skills. Digital? Skill with numbers or with fingers? Manual skills, maybe.
Maybe that Dormed thing fouled up memory. Electro-sleep. Portable unit, Biddy had told me.
I needed some fast expert opinions. I had no problem remembering the name of the neurologist in Miami. When your spine has been damaged by an angry man belting you with a chunk of two by four and your legs go numb, and somebody fixes what you were certain was a broken back and wasn't, you don't forget the name.
Dr. Steve Roberts. I got through to him in fifteen minutes. ”Excuse me, Trav,” he said. ”This lady I live with has just handed me a frosty delicious gla.s.s. There. I have tested the drink and kissed the lady. What's on your mind? Back trouble?”
”No. Some information. Do you know anything about an electrosleep machine called a Donned?”
”Yes, indeed. Nice little gadget. Very effective.”
”If somebody used one a great deal, could ft destroy their memory?”
”What? No. Absolutely not. Not enough current to destroy anything. If you keep hitting people with big charges, you don't destroy any particular process. You just turn them into a vegetable in all respects. Each series of shock treatments destroys brain cells. So do alcoholic spasms, if you have enough of them over a long enough period of time.”
”How about convulsions? Like a woman might have if she had a kidney failure and lost a baby.”
”Eclampsia, you mean? No, I doubt it. That sends the blood pressure up like a skyrocket, and before any brain damage could occur, you'd probably have a broken blood vessel in the brain. Where are you, anyway?”
”Fort Courtney.”
”Practicing medicine without a license?”
”Practicing, maybe. But not medicine. Steve, can you think of any way you could make a person lose their memory?”
”All of it? Total amnesia?” of it? Total amnesia?”
”No. Just of recent things.”
”How long do you want this effect to last?”
”Permanently.”
”Sometimes a good solid concussion will do it. Traumatic amnesia. Lots of people who recover after an accident lose a couple of hours or days out of their life and it seems to be gone forever. But there's no guarantee.”
”Is there any chemical or medical way to do it?”
”Well... I wouldn't say that there's anything you could call a recognized procedure. I mean, there isn't much call for it, as I imagine you can understand.”
”Is there a way?”
”Will you hold a minute. I think I can lay a hand on what 1 want.”
I waited for at least two full minutes before he came back on the line. ”Trav? I have to give you the layman's short course in how the brain works. You have about ten billion neurons in your head. These are tiny cells that transmit tiny electric charges. Each little neuron contains, among other things, about twenty million molecules of ribonucleic acid, called RNA for short. This RNA manufactures protein molecules-don't ask me how. Anyway, these protein molecules are related to the function we call memory. With me so far?”
”I think so.”
”In certain experiments it has been shown that if you force laboratory animals to learn new skills, more RNA is produced in the brain, and thus more protein molecules are produced. Also, if you inject rats with magnesium pem-oline, which doubles, at least, the RNA production, you have rats that learn a lot faster and remember longer. So they've tried reverse proof by injecting rats and mice with a chemical that interferes with the process by which the RNA produces the protein molecule. Teach a mouse to find its way through a maze, then inject it, and it forgets everything it just learned.”
”What do they inject?”
”A substance called puromycin. At one university they've been treating goldfish with it, and they have some very stupid goldfish out there. Don't learn a thing and can't remember a thing.”
”What would happen if you injected a person with puromycin?”
”I don't think anybody ever has. If it works the way it does on the lab animals, you'd wipe out the memory of what had recently happened, maybe forever. Personally, I'd rather be given magnesium pemoline. In fact, I don't know how I'm getting along without it. As to puromycin, I have no idea what the side effects would be.”
”Could anybody buy it?”
”Any doctor could, or any authorized lab or research inst.i.tute. What in the world world have you gotten into?” have you gotten into?”
”I don't know yet.”
”Will you tell me someday?”
”If it wouldn't bore you. Say, what about memory and digital skills?”