Chapter 6

Design for Dying

Back in my room, I picked up the manuscript of the book Hill had given me. I was beginning to get a bit sleepy and “The Murderer's Guide” ought to affect that, one way or the other. I didn't care which way. If it made me sleepy, I'd sleep.

It started out slowly, dully. I was surprised, because the random paragraphs I had read previously had been far from dull. In fact, they'd been uneasy reading in a place where murder had just been done.

But, before I became really sleepy, I reached the second chapter. It was entitled “The Thrill of Killing; a Study in Atavism.”

And here Darius really started to ride his hobby and to become eloquent about it. Man, he said, survived his early and precarious days by being a specialist in the art of killing. He killed to live, to cat, to obtain clothing in the form of furs. Killing was a necessary and natural function.

“Man,” Darius wrote, “has a gruesomely long heritage of murder. Nationalities, government, and progress are based upon it. The first inventions that raised man above the lesser beasts who were stronger than he, were means of murder---the club, the spear, the missile. . . .

“Is it any wonder, then, that in most of us survives an atavistic tendency to kill? In many it is rationalized as a desire to indulge in the murder-sports of hunting and fishing.

“But occasionally this atavistic impulse breaks through to the surface in its original, primitive violence. Often the first step is an unintended slaying. The murderer, without really intending to do so, or forced to do so by circumstances beyond his control, has tasted blood. And blood, to a creature with man's heritage, can be more heady than wine. . . .”

And his third chapter was “The Mass Murderer; Artist of Crime.”

A clever man who kills many, Hill wrote, is less likely to be caught and punished than one who commits a single crime. He gave a host of instances---uncaught and unpunished Jack-the-Rippers.

A single crime, he said, is almost always a strongly motivated one, and motivation gives it away. If a killer kills only for deep-lying cause, the motive can almost invariably be traced back to him and proved. On the contrary, a man who kills for the most casual and light of reasons is far less likely to be suspected of his crimes.

“The indigent heir who kills for a fortune, the betrayed husband who slays, the victim who kills his blackmailer---all these act from the most obvious of motives and are therefore doomed from the start, no matter how subtle the actual methods they use. The man who puts nicotine in another man's coffee merely because the latter is a bore, is far more likely to remain free.

“Taking advantage of this, the clever killer will often extend his crime from a single one to a series, one or more of which are, by design, completely without motive. Confronted with such a series, the police are helpless to use their usual effective methods.”

There was more, much more, in this vein. Case after case quoted, most of them solved, if at all, only by a voluntary confession years after the crimes. Case after case of series of crimes which have never been solved to this day.

And suddenly, as I read something came to my mind with a shock.

Undoubtedly the murderer, the man or woman who had killed Elsie Willis and Otto Schley had read this very book. Was using it, in fact, as a blueprint for murder. . . .

There was a soft rap on my door. I said “Come in,” and Charlie Lightfoot stuck his head in the doorway.

He said, “Come on down to the kitchen for coffee, Bill.”

“Huh? At this time of night?”

Charlie grinned. “Night is day in an observatory, Bill. These guys never go to bed till later than this in seeing weather. Even in bad weather they stay up late out of habit. They always have coffee around this time.”

Coffee sounded good, now that Hill's book had made me wakeful again. I said, “Sure, I'll be down in a minute,” and Charlie went on.

I put on slippers instead of replacing my shoes, and put the manuscript away in a drawer of the bureau.

As I neared the bottom of the staircase, I noticed Fergus Fillmore writing at a desk in a niche off the hallway. I wondered for a moment why he didn't find it more convenient to work in his room---then I remembered he didn't have a room here, and was cut off from his own house until Charlie gathered in the rest of the rattlesnakes in the morning.

He looked up at me and nodded a greeting. “Hullo, Wunderly. I see you're turning nocturnal like the rest of us.”

“Having coffee?” I asked him.

“In a few minutes. The police will be here tomorrow or the next day; they'll get through somehow. They'll want our testimony, and I'm making notes while things are fresh in my mind. I'm almost through.”

“Good idea,” I said. “I'll do the same when I get back upstairs.”

I went on into the kitchen.

“It's cafeteria, Wunderly,” Darius Hill told me. “Pour yourself a cup and sit down.”

He, Charlie Lightfoot, Eric Andressen and Rex Parker were seated around the square table in the center of the big kitchen. Charlie slid his chair to make room for me. He said, “I guess Paul Bailey's asleep. I rapped lightly on his door and he didn't answer.”

Andressen said, “He should sleep through all right; we gave him a pretty strong dose. Where's Fergus?”

“Right here,” said Fillmore from the doorway. “Darius, what's this about your twisting the tails of spectroscopic binaries?”

“Haven't made them holler yet” said Darius slowly, “but maybe I've got something. Look, Fergus, on an eclipsing binary the maximum separation of the spectral lines when they are double determines the relative velocity of the stars in their orbits.”

“Obviously.”

“Therefore---” said Darius, and went on with it. At the fourth cosine, I quit listening and reached for a ham sandwich.

As I ate, I looked at the faces of the men around me. Charlie Lightfoot, Eric Andressen, Rex Parker, Fergus Fillmore, Darius Hill. . . . Was one of these men, I wondered, a murderer? Was one of these men even now planning further murders?

It seemed impossible, as I studied their faces. The Indian's haggard and worried, Hill and Fillmore eager on their abstruse discussion with Andressen listening intently and Rex looking bored.

Charlie was the first to leave, then Parker and Andressen together. When I stood up, Darius Hill stood also. He asked:

“Play chess, Wunderly?”

“A little,” I admitted.

“Let's play a game before we turn in.”

When we reached his room, he produced a beautiful set of ivory chessmen. He said apologetically, “Don't judge my game by these men, Wunderly. They were given to me. I'm just a dub.”

He wasn't, by a long shot. But I managed to hold him to a close game that resolved itself finally into a draw when I traded my last piece for his final pawn.

“Good game,” he said. “Another?”

But I excused myself and left.

My slippers made no sound along the carpeted hallway. Possibly if I'd been noisy I'd have never seen that crack of faint light under the edge of Paul Bailey's door. Maybe it would have been turned off, in time.

But I saw it and stood there outside the door wondering whether it meant anything. If Bailey had awakened and turned on a lamp, certainly I'd make a fool of myself turning in an alarm.