Murder Comes First (28 page)

“Preson is prominent enough,” he said. “People have heard his name, particularly since
The Days Before Man
. There've been stories about him. We saw to that, of course. He's made good copy—a scientist, a subject dry as—as fossil bones—and a best seller out of them. A target for a crackpot.”

Pamela North patted her lap and Martini jumped to it. She stroked Martini, who purred faintly. Pamela North said she supposed so, but her tone was without confidence. She sipped the drink.

“You know what the catch is,” she said. “He does too, doesn't he? That's why he—he dragged in this Dr. Stick—Steck. It's going on too long. Wouldn't a crackpot get bored?”

It depended perhaps on the width of the crack, Jerry suggested. But his tone, too, lacked assurance. The alternative was deliberate persecution—meaningless persecution. Why should anyone persecute a curator of fossil mammals?

“Particularly,” Pam agreed, “a nice one. He is nice, isn't he? In a jumpy, prickly way? In spite of the whiskers and those—those very strange glasses. I'd think you'd go crazy deciding what part to look through.” She paused. “You don't think he has?” she asked.

Jerry didn't. He said Dr. Preson's book—the popular book—was entirely sane. He said that Dr. Preson had proved sane enough in contract negotiations. He pointed out that Dr. Preson was being victimized, was not making it up—as evidence the authenticated arrival at the apartment hotel of four masseurs. He paused.

“This Dr. Steck,” Pam said. “Do you know him? The one he's feuding with. The one he calls a ‘splitter.'”

“By correspondence,” Jerry said. “He looked over the manuscript for us—Preson's manuscript. It was beyond us, so we called in Steck and a couple of others, just as a precaution. As specialists in a field we didn't—”

“All right,” Pam said. “Did he like it?”

Jerry did not at first remember.
The Days Before Man
had been, at any rate, not technically disapproved by the consultant scientists, which was all that was wanted. (Lay opinion was unanimously favorable.) He had a vague feeling one of the consultants had indicated certain reservations. Then he remembered.

“It
was
Steck,” he said. “Said the book probably was all right for the kind of people who would read it, since it didn't make any difference what they thought anyway. Said Preson was a ‘lumper' and unsound on something or other. The genera of the Felidae, I think. Oh yes—said there was no point to Canoidea since everybody knew what Arctoidea meant. I remember looking that up.” He stopped.

“All right,” Pam said.

“Couple of names for the dog family, is all,” Jerry told her. “You can call it Ursoidea, too, but authority will be against you.”

Other things would be against her also, Pam pointed out. She asked what kind of a man Dr. Steck had sounded like.

“Was he feuding back?” Pam asked.

It had not appeared from his letter, so far as Jerry could remember. But it was a couple of years ago.

“Anyway,” he said, “I gathered from what Preson said that what you call the feud was pretty special—pretty private. Not anything you'd invite outsiders to. Anyway, would people really feud about—about the classification of extinct mammals?”

“People will feud about anything,” Pam told him. “Don't you know that, Jerry? Particularly about anything they're enough interested in. Dr. Preson cares a great deal about old bones, probably. Probably Dr. Steck does.”

It was a long way from an interest in old bones, however mammalian, to bushelmen, masseurs and Shetland ponies, Jerry pointed out. It was a long way from paleozoology to what Jerry, with some reluctance, brought himself to call crackpotism. He could, in effect, imagine no one less likely to annoy a distinguished mammalogist than another mammalogist.

“The trouble is,” Pam said, “that Dr. Preson doesn't seem to think so.”

There had been that, certainly, during the hours Dr. Preson had spent with the Norths—hours which included a cocktail or two and a dinner stretched by Martha from two to three; which included, also, a subsequent period of conversation in which living dogs, variety Doberman; animals that, a million years ago, approached dogdom; the taxonomic errors of Dr. Albert James Steck and the unanticipated appearance of tree surgeons; the race history of cats and the lack of enterprise of the New York Police Department—in which these and other subjects were rather inextricably mixed. Toward the end, particularly, Dr. Preson had rather harped upon Dr. Steck. But it was not clear whether Dr. Steck had become topical because of things which had happened during the past week or of zoological changes which had, on the best evidence, taken place a few millions of years ago. To be a “genera splitter”—a vice only vaguely comprehensible to the Norths even when explained—was also, Dr. Preson indicated, to be a crackpot. Speaking of crackpots—there was a man who split the existing and prehistoric cats into twenty genera. Speaking of crackpots—there was a man who inserted newspaper advertisements to annoy Dr. Preson. Yet Dr. Preson, possibly because he spoke to laymen of a confrere, did not specifically accuse Dr. Steck.

“You can't deny that Dr. Preson wanders a good deal,” Pam told Jerry, who had not thought to deny it; who did, however, now attribute it to a mental uneasiness natural in one who was being assailed by bushelmen. Usually, Jerry said, Dr. Preson kept pretty much to one subject—prehistoric mammals. Jerry had to admit, however, that he did not know a great deal about Dr. Preson.

He told Pam what he did know. Preson was a paleozoologist widely known in his field, which was a field into which laymen seldom ventured. He was important at the Broadly Institute of Paleontology as a scientist and also as a man who could, and did, finance expeditions, not only, although chiefly, in his own special field. A good many of these expeditions he had led; where interesting bones were found, there hastened Dr. Preson, with pick and spade. He had been doing this for years, and publishing what he discovered and speculating on the meaning of what he had discovered. He had remained unknown to the readers of the
Daily News
, whose interest in mammalogy was more immediate, and also to all but a handful of the readers of the
New York Times
.

And then a literary agent had telephoned Gerald North, of North Books, Inc., and had said he had something pretty special. Possibly, he had said, a little out of Jerry's line, but still—. Perhaps of interest to a special audience. (“But, by God, Jerry, it interests
me
.”) A book which would have to be illustrated and which was, admittedly, a little long. Well—of which one volume, in itself pretty long, was presently at hand. A book now called “Some Aspects of Paleozoology” which, certainly, few readers could be expected to ask for at Macy's book counter. Still and all—

“Well—” Gerald North had said, in a tone of extreme doubt. He had nevertheless read the book; he had read it most of one night and part of the next day, and the next night strange monsters had stalked his dreams and the time of man had seemed trivial and wan—a moment during which evolution or nature, or whatever one chose to think of as the animating Force, had grown bored between marvels. “Some Aspects of Paleozoology” had, in short, turned out to be quite a book, and Jerry could not remember another like it. The public, when given the opportunity, appeared to agree.

Dr. Preson, alone among those concerned, was unsurprised that
The Days Before Man
appeared on lists of best sellers and remained there. He pointed out that paleozoology was a very interesting study and always had been. He said that the trouble was people usually got it in bits and pieces from popularizers who didn't, as a matter of fact, know Machairodontinae from Nimravinae, and never would. He excepted certain publications of the American Museum of Natural History, and lamented that they were not more widely read. He was, however, gratified and surprised at the size of the royalty checks. Ancient bones are most readily uncovered by modern dollars.

“Do you mean,” Pam asked, “that he was running out of his own money?”

Jerry could only shrug to that. He had only an impression, not certain knowledge, that Dr. Orpheus Preson was well off by—well, call it by nature. Call it by inheritance, since, until
The Days Before Man
, mammalogy could hardly have paid highly. Now he knew that Dr. Preson had, so far, made a little under fifty thousand dollars in royalties—and that, for income tax purposes, he probably could spread the amount over three years, which would help. He had been told, however, that, over a period of years, Dr. Preson's financial contributions to research had been very considerable.

“Apparently,” Pam said, “he hasn't any family.”

The connection escaped Jerry North, who waved at it in passing.

“Few wives really care much about old bones,” Pam said. “Of course, wives are just an example. I don't suppose cousins and nephews and aunts do either. I mean, I'd just as soon my aunts didn't go in for Smilodons, and I don't think I'm mercenary.” She paused. “Or am I?” she enquired, proving an open mind.

Jerry reassured her.

“So,” Pam said, “has he?”

“I don't—” Jerry began, and remembered. “He's got a brother, apparently,” he said. “Lives up in Riverdale, I think. Dr. Preson went up there last week when things got too tough. Stayed a couple of days and went back to his own place. I don't know whether there are any more.”

“Sometimes,” Pamela North said, “one relative is enough.” She paused and considered. “I'll admit I can't see any connection, though,” she added.

If she meant between relatives and uninvited masseurs, Jerry North couldn't either. Then he remembered Frankel's novel, ignored in his briefcase, and sighed. He mentioned the Frankel novel to his wife. He said that, interesting as Dr. Preson was, he would have to get on with it.

“From mammalogist to mammaries,” said Pam, who had read novels by Mr. Frankel. “I'll wake you when I go to bed.”

Jerry blinked momentarily, and inwardly. He decided to skip the point, if there was one. He took briefcase and—after only a momentary pause—a newly filled glass, into his study. Pamela began to read. The cat Martini wriggled around the book and lay over it. People whom cats have honored are not supposed to have other interests. Pamela moved Martini, who voiced an opinion better not translated from the original cat, and crawled back into a position to obstruct. Then the telephone rang.

Pam did not need to remove Martini, who jumped angrily. Gin, the junior seal point, dashed from a retreat with the impetuosity of any junior who has been expecting a telephone call, Sherry ran part way after her and stopped abruptly to wash her tail. Pam answered the telephone.

She said, “Yes,” and “well he is, but—” and then listened briefly and said, “Oh!” She put the telephone back in the cradle and for a second or so looked at it in surprise. Then she went to the door of Jerry's study and opened it. Jerry looked up from the manuscript.

“It was Dr. Preson,” Pam said. She spoke slowly and carefully, as if repeating something she had memorized. “He said, ‘Tell your husband somebody has taken the labels off my bones.'” Pam paused and shook her head slightly. “That,” Pamela North assured her husband, speaking in a voice somewhat strained, “is what he said.”

The newest attack on the composure of Dr. Orpheus Preson was not quite so drastic as it had sounded. To the Norths, who went to West Twenty-second Street as much because of disturbing curiosity as concern, Dr. Preson admitted that his construction had perhaps been weak or, at any rate, not entirely precise. The bones involved were not his, in any real sense. They were bones, and other fossil remains, which currently belonged to the Broadly Institute, their original owners having no longer need for them. They were in Dr. Preson's apartment because he found it easier to work there than in his office at the Institute. But it was true that someone had got into the apartment and taken all the labels off the bones. The intruder had then, evidently with some care—since not even the most brittle was broken—jumbled the bones into a heap. Fragments of Cranioceras, a Tertiary browser with a horn growing out of the back of his head, were mingled, in most unscientific fashion, with particles of a very elderly Viverridae. Since there had been a great many bones on a long table, and most of the bone fragments had been small—although the piece of Smilodon was quite substantial, as was appropriate—the situation was discouraging. Dr. Preson's bone table looked like the inside of a gardener's garage.

There was only one word for it, and Pam used it. “My!” said Pam North.

Dr. Preson was very red of face and his whiskers were more than usually tufted. His profuse gray hair stood indignantly upright on his head and he peered rapidly, almost convulsively, through first one and then another lens of his trifocal glasses. For some little time after the arrival of the Norths, coherence failed him, although words did not. Bushelmen, tree surgeons, masseurs—now maniacs. It was too much. And, indeed, it seemed a good deal to Pam and Jerry North.

“Can you ever straighten them out again?” Pam asked, when, after a disorderly ten minutes or so, Dr. Preson appeared a little calmer. The result was unexpected.

“There is no reason to be insulting,” Dr. Preson said. “Or do you think I'm out of my wits entirely?” He then advanced toward Pam North and waved his tufted chin at her.

“Please, Dr. Preson,” Pam said. “I didn't mean anything. Of course you can.”

Dr. Preson moderated at once. He said, “Didn't mean to shout at you, young woman. Seem to be a little upset.”

“Of course,” Pam said. “It's terribly upsetting. So
many
bones.”

It was, Dr. Preson made it clear—although with a good many verbal spurts in a variety of directions—merely another annoyance. It was a meaningless annoyance, as was the effort to sell him a pony. The labels were on the bones merely as a convenience; in most cases they served no particular purpose; most of the bones Dr. Preson knew as if they were his own, or even more intimately. He could, obviously, tell Smilodon from Hemicyon at ten paces. It was true that to differentiate between some of the smaller remnants he would have to look twice, as would any paleozoologist. And certainly it was true that, to proceed at all, order would have to be re-established in this chaos, where now Carnivora rubbed bones with ruminants in a manner pleasing to neither. It was true that the bones would have to be relabeled and that, under the circumstances, Dr. Preson was the man who would have to do it. Involved were loss of time, and tedium. Until things were straightened out, work on the second volume of
The Days Before Man
must stand still.