Chapter 5
A Toast to Fear
I closed the door behind me, and asked curiously, “How did you know who it was?” Hill's chuckle shook his huge body. He snapped shut the book he had been reading and put it down on the floor beside his morris chair. Then he looked up at me.
“Simple, my dear Wunderly. I heard your voice and that of Eric. One of you goes downstairs, the other comes here. It would hardly be Eric; he dislikes me cordially. Besides, he has been in his room playing that miserable descendant of the huntsman's bow. So I take it that you came to tell him, and then me, about the second murder.”
I stared at him, quite likely with my mouth agape.
Darius Hill's eyes twinkled. “Come, surely you can see how I know that. My ears are excellent, I assure you. I heard that scream---even over the wail of the violincello. It was a man's voice. I'm not sure, but I'd say it was Otto Schley. Was it?”
I nodded.
“And it came from the approximate direction of the garage. There are rattlesnakes in the garage. Or there were.”
“There are,” I said. “Probably fewer of them.” I wished I knew that. “But why did you say it was murder?” I asked him. “Loose rattlesnakes are no respecters of persons.”
“Under the circumstances, Wunderly, do you think it was an accident?”
“Under what circumstances?”
Darius Hill sighed. “You are being deliberately obtuse, my young friend. It is beyond probability that two accidental deaths should occur so closely spaced, among a group of seventeen people living in non-hazardous circumstances.”
“Sixteen people,” I corrected.
“No, seventeen. I see you made a tabulation but that it was made after Elsie's death so you didn't count her. But if you figure it that way, you'll have to deduct one for Otto and call it fifteen. There are now fifteen living, two dead.”
“If you heard that scream, why didn't you go downstairs? Or did you?”
“I did not. There were able bodied men down there to do anything that needed doing. More able-bodied, I might say, than I. I preferred to sit here in quiet thought, knowing that sooner or later someone would come to tell me what happened. As you have done.”
The man puzzled me. Professing an interest in crime, he could sit placidly in his room while murders were being done, lacking the curiosity to investigate at first hand.
He pursed his lips. “You countered my question with another, so I'll ask it again. Do you think Schley's death was accidental?”
I answered honestly. “I don't know what to think. There hasn't been time to think. Things happened so---”
His dry chuckle interrupted me. “Does not that answer your question as to why I stayed in this room? You rushed downstairs and have been rushing about ever since, without time to think. I sat here quietly and thought. There was nothing I could learn downstairs that I cannot learn now, from you. Have a drink and tell all.”
I grinned, and reached for the bottle and glass. The more I saw of Darius Hill, the less I knew whether I liked him or not. I believed that I could like him well enough if I took him in sufficiently small doses.
“Shall I pour one for you?” I asked him.
“You may. An excellent precaution, Wunderly.”
“Precaution?” I asked. “I don't understand.”
“Did I underestimate you? Too bad. I thought you suspected the possibility of my having poisoned the whiskey in your absence. It is quite possible---as far as you know---that I am the murderer. And that you are the next victim.”
He picked up the glass I handed to him and held it to the light. “Caution, in a situation like this, is the essence of survival. Will you trade glasses with me, Wunderly?”
I looked at him closely to see whether or not he was serious. He was.
He said, “You turned to the bureau to pour this. Your back was toward me. It is possible--- You see what I mean?”
Yes, he was dead serious. And, staring at his face, I saw something else that I had not suspected until now. The man was frightened. Desperately frightened.
And, suddenly, I realized what was wrong with Darius Hill.
I brought a clean glass and the whiskey bottle from the bureau and handed it to him. I said, “I'll drink both the ones I poured, if I may. And you may pour yourself a double one to match these two.”
Gravely, Darius Hill filled the glass from the bottle.
“A toast,” I said and clinked my glass to his. “To necrophobia.”
Glass half upraised to his lips, he stared at me. He said, “Now I am afraid of you. You're clever. You're the first one that's guessed.”
I hadn't been clever, really. It was obvious, when one put the facts together. Darius Hill's refusal to go near the scene of a crime, despite his specialization in the study of murder---in theory.
Necrophobia; fear of death, fear of the dead. The very depth of that fear would make murder---on paper---a subject of morbid and abnormal fascination for him.
To some extent, his phobia accounted for his garrulity; he talked incessantly to cover fear. And he made himself deliberately eccentric in other directions so that the underlying cause of his true eccentricity would be concealed from his colleagues.
We drank. Darius Hill, very subdued for the first time since I'd met him, suggested another. But the double one had been enough for me. I declined, and left him.
In the corridor I heard the bolt of his door slide noisily home into its socket.
I headed for my own room but heard footsteps coming up the stairs. It was Charlie coming down the hallway toward me. His face look gaunt and terrible. What would have been pallor in a white man made his face a grayish tan.
He saw me and held out his right hand, palm upward. Something lay in it, something I could not identify at first. Then, as he came closer, I saw that it was the rattle from a rattlesnake's tail.
He smiled mirthlessly. “Bill,” he said, “Lord help the astronomers on a night like this. Somebody's got a rattlesnake that won't give warning before it strikes. Better take your bed apart tonight before you get into it.”
“Come in and talk a while,” I suggested, opening my door.
Charlie Lightfoot shook his head. “Be glad to talk, but let's ko up on the roof. I need fresh air. I feel as though I'd been pulled through a keyhole.”
“Sure,” I said, “but first shall we---”
“Have a drink?” he finished for me. “We shall not. Or rather, I shall not. That's what's wrong with me at the moment, Bill. Sobering up.”
We were climbing the steps to the roof now. Charlie opened I lie door at the top and said, “This breeze feels good. May blow the alky fumes out of my brain. Look at that dome in the moonlight, will you? Looks like a blasted mosque. Well, why not? An observatory is a sort of mosque on the cosmic scale, where the devotees worship Betelgeuse and Antares, burning parsecs for incense and chanting litanies from an ephemeris.”
“Sure you're sober?” I asked him.
“I've got to be sober; that's what's wrong. I was two-thirds pie-eyed when Otto--- Say, thanks for closing that garage door. You kept most of them in. I didn't dare take time to go out, because of Otto.”
I asked, “Was it murder, Charlie? Or could the box have come apart accidentally if Otto moved it?”
“Those boxes were nailed shut, Bill. Someone took the four nails out of the lid of one of them, with a nail-puller. Then the box was stood on end leaning against the door, with the lid on the under side and the weight of the box holding the lid on. Otto must have heard it fall when he went in but must not have guessed what it was.”
“How many of the snakes did you find?”
“You kept seventeen of them in the garage when you slammed the door. I got two more in the grass near the door. That leaves eleven that got away, and I'll have to hunt for them as soon as it's light. That's why I've got to sober up. And, dammit, sobering up from the point I'd reached does things to you that a hangover can't touch.”
I said, “Well, at last there's definite proof of murder, anyway. Do you think the trap was set for Otto Schley, or could it have been for someone else? Is he the only one who would normally have gone to the garage?”
Charlie nodded. “Yes. He always makes a round of the buildings before he turns in. Nobody else would be likely to, at night.”
“You know everybody around here pretty well,” I said. “Tell me something about--- Well, about Lecky.”
“Brilliant astronomer, but rather narrow-minded and intolerant.”
“That's bad for Paul Bailey,” I said. “I mean, now that the cat's out of the bag about his affair with Elsie. You think Lecky will fire him?”
“Oh, no. Lecky will overlook that. He doesn't expect his assistants to be saints. I meant that he's intolerant of people who disagree with him on astronomical matters. Tell him you think there isn't sufficient proof of the period-luminosity law for Cepheid variables---and you'd better duck. And he's touchy as hell about personal remarks. Very little sense of humor.”
“He and Fillmore get along all right?”
“Fairly well. Fillmore's a solar system man, and Lecky doesn't know there's anything closer than a parsec away. They ignore each other's work. Fillmore's always grousing because he doesn't get much time with the scope.”
I strolled over to the parapet and leaned my elbows on it, looking down into the shadow of the building on the ground below. Somewhere down there, eleven rattlesnakes were at large. Eleven? Or was it ten? Had the murderer brought the silent one, the de-rattled one, into the building with him?
And if so, for whom?
“For you, maybe,” said Charlie.
Startled, I turned to look at him.
He was grinning. “Simple, my dear Wunderly---as my friend Darius Hill would say. I could almost hear you taking a mental census of rattlesnakes when you looked down there. And the next thing you'd wonder about was obvious. No, I haven't a detective complex like Darius has. How do you like Darius, by the way?”
“He could be taken in too large doses,” I admitted. “Charlie, what do you know about Eric Andressen?”
“Not much. He's rather a puzzle. Smart all right but I think In: missed his bent. He should have been an artist or a musician instead of a scientist. Just the opposite of Paul Bailey.”
“Is Bailey good?”
“Good? He's a wiz in his field. He can think circles around the other assistants---even your Annabel.”
“What's Bailey's specialty?”
“He's going to be an astrochemist. After university, he worked five years as research man in a commercial chem lab before he got into astronomy. I guess it was Zoe and her father who got him interested in chemistry on the cosmic scale. He knew Zoe at university. They were engaged.”
I whistled. “Then this Elsie business must have hit Zoe pretty hard, didn't it?”
“Not at all. Bailey came here about eight months ago, and his engagement with Zoe lasted only a month after he came. And it was mutual; they just decided they'd made a mistake. And I guess they had at that. Their temperaments weren't suited to one another at all.”
“And they're still on friendly terms?”
“Completely. What animosity there is seems to be between Bailey and Fillmore, instead of between Bailey and Zoe. Fillmore didn't like their decision to break the engagement and he seemed to blame Paul for it, although I'm pretty sure the original decision was Zoe's. They're still cool toward one another---Paul and Fillmore, I mean. But for other reasons.”
“What kind of reasons?” I asked.
“Well---professional ones, in a way. I don't know the whole story but Fillmore was very friendly toward Paul when Paul and Zoe were engaged. He is really the one who persuaded Paul to come here as an assistant. And talked the board of regents, back in Los Angeles, into hiring Paul.
“Then he had a reaction when the engagement was broken. I think he tried to undermine Paul then and to get him fired. At any rate, he threatened to do it.”
“Hmm,” I said. “Sounds as though Fillmore isn't quite the disinterested scientist at heart.”
“There may be something on his side,” said Charlie. “Fillmore himself isn't too popular with Lecky and with the regents. And he thinks, rightly or wrongly, that Paul Bailey is shooting for his, Fillmore's, job. If so, it's quite possible Paul will succeed. He's got an ingratiating personality and he knows how to rub Lecky the right way.”
“Who has the say-so on hiring and firing---the director or the regents?”
“The regents, really. But under ordinary circumstances, they'd take Lecky's advice.”
I glanced at the luminous dial of my wrist watch. “Getting late,” I said. “If you're going to hunt those rattlesnakes at dawn, hadn't you better get some sleep?”
“Don't think I'll sleep tonight. It's too late, now, to turn in. And anyway--- Oh, hell, I just don't want to sleep. I'm too jittery.”