Lyman finished his wine and sat gazing into the empty glass. “Hard to believe a jury would swallow such a story.”
“We all know how malleable juries can be in the hands of a good defense lawyer. Furthermore, the young man’s record was spotless and he himself made a sympathetic impression on the stand. Of course, there were many in that town who felt he’d got away with murder, as in effect he had. Soon after the trial, he and his wife moved back across the border to Canada.”
“Incredible,” said Lyman, and then added, with what seemed a false air of professional detachment, “Whatever prompted you to tell me all this?”
“Because I have a favor to ask you. But first read this.” I took from my wallet an item clipped from a five-year-old copy of the Toronto Star and handed it across the table. The item was headed: DEFENDANT IN SLEEPWALKER MURDER FOUND DEAD. Andrew Lee Tibbetts, it disclosed, had been found dead of a drug overdose in a Yorkville rooming house. A brief summary of the case which had aroused such interest back in the seventies followed.
For the first time I referred to the murdered woman by name. “Perhaps because of her lasting influence on my life, I was profoundly disturbed by the way she’d died. Verity Bainbridge had touched many lives by her generosity, young lives such as mine. She hadn’t deserved such a cruel death.”
Pocketing the clipping, I tried to explain how obsessively the case had haunted my mind. I’d read all that was printed about it, of course, and after my retirement, with so much time on my hands, I delved into it more deeply, thinking I might write a book about it.
“You see, Lyman,” I explained, “I was never able to accept the conclusions drawn by the court. Oh, I never doubted the fact of Tibbetts being a chronic sleepwalker — I’ve done my homework on that mysterious disorder. Still, it kept nagging me, why was Verity Bainbridge the victim? What shadowy instinct drew the killer to her house? There was no link between them. She was a stranger to Tibbetts. He’d only recently moved to Deaconsfield. He didn’t rob her. Seemingly he didn’t profit from her death. It was a case without motive, without reason, a senseless tragedy. And yet I could not accept it as such. I still can’t.”
“Perhaps,” said Lyman with a faint yawn — by now he’d finished the bottle of wine, “you would rest easier if you did.”
“I’m sure you’re right.” I looked at the clock. “Good lord, is it that late? I do apologize, Lyman, for boring you at such length with my idiotic idee fixe. And it’s well past my bedtime, if not yours.”
“My dear chap, you haven’t bored me in the least. It’s an appalling story. I’m not sure I shall sleep tonight thinking about it.”
As we were saying our goodnights, I reached into my overcoat pocket for what I’d come to think of as my Bainbridge dossier. “Will you do me a favor, Lyman? Will you take all these notes of mine and let me know how they strike you? I’ve concocted a kind of theory about the case and perhaps you’ll let me know if you think it’s totally cockeyed. You have the scientific objectivity I lack.”
He slipped the folder into his pocket. “Of course I shall. I’m extremely interested.”
“I’ll call you next week,” I said.
Despite the wine and the lateness of the hour I wasn’t at all sleepy, and long after I’d arrived home I sat brooding in my chair, wondering if, having delayed so long before breaking my silence, my decision to speak out might have been unwise.
In my amateurish investigation into the Sleepwalker Case I’d employed the method used by the literary detective A. J. A. Symons in tracing the obscure and bizarre history of that late-Victorian eccentric, Frederick Rolfe, which he ultimately published in his fascinating study, The Quest for Corvo. That is to say, I wrote a great many letters and made numerous phone inquiries and interviewed several people who had been associated with Verity Bainbridge and with her killer, Andrew Lee Tibbetts.
Travel at my age and with my natural disinclination to stir from home was not the pleasure it had been in my younger days, but it could not be avoided.
My first journey had been back home to Deaconsfield, a trip I’d not made for several years, where I sought out Verity Bainbridge’s lawyer, a genial and forthcoming old gentleman now also living in retirement. I made no bones about my reasons for delving into the case, and I found Arthur Pembroke equally candid in answering my questions.
“You ask about her will,” he said, “and to answer that I must explain that Mrs. Bainbridge was confined to a wheelchair after suffering a grievous accident in her early eighties. Then, about five years before her death, she had the good fortune to be treated by an osteopathic surgeon in New York, a brilliant specialist who after a lengthy course of treatment and surgery restored the use of her legs.”
He went on to say that Dr. Agnew and his patient became close friends. “She gave generously to the work of his clinic, and in her will left it a sizable bequest, as well as a personal bequest to Agnew, whom she regarded as a miracle worker, of nearly a quarter million. The residue of her estate was distributed among a raft of charities.”
“So Agnew was the main beneficiary.”
“Among the individual legatees, yes. Regrettably, the doctor did not live long enough to enjoy his fortune. He contracted pancreatic cancer and was not expected to live more than a year at most. In fact, he survived Mrs. Bainbridge by only eleven months.”
“Had he died before Mrs. Bainbridge,” I asked, “where would the money have gone?”
“The clinic would have got it all.”
“And when he died soon after inheriting where did the money go then?”
“We didn’t represent Agnew, of course, but I seem to recall his being survived by a stepson in Canada.”
My eyes flew open at this disclosure. Andrew Lee Tibbetts was from Canada. Could he have been Agnew’s stepson? But I quickly dismissed the notion as entirely untenable. Surely in their investigation of the case the police would have explored this possible link and motive.
Feeling it to be a waste of time but with no other immediate inquiries in hand, I decided to follow this line a bit further, if only to tie up a loose end. I finally managed to track down Agnew’s New York lawyer; here my efforts were effectively balked. The lawyer, citing client confidentiality, refused to impart any information whatsoever.
It was time, I decided, to explore the other end of the path, and with this in mind I flew to Toronto and directed my inquiries to the university where, a transcript of Tibbetts’s trial had informed me, the chronic sleepwalker had been a test subject in a program of sleep dysfunction research, the findings of which were later to prove so decisive in establishing the fact of Tibbetts’s affliction.
That particular research project had been discontinued long ago, but I was able to interview, on the pretext of my writing a book on the case, the former director of the program, a physiologist named Angus McGill. He astounded me by revealing that in his opinion, despite there having been no overt behavioral pattern to support it, Tibbetts was a borderline psychotic.
“Somnambulism,” he explained, “has been linked to epilepsy, parkinsonism, imminent psychosis, and dissociation of personality, among other abnormalities.”
“Yet sleepwalking itself is not considered a form of mental illness, true?”