“True. Otherwise Tibbetts might have been judged guilty by reason of insanity and confined to an institution.”
He described Tibbetts as an otherwise unexceptional young man, good-looking, charming, and feckless. “Of course, Tibbetts was only one of our test subjects. It’s too bad Manly Renard isn’t still around — one of my lab assistants on the program. He and Tibbetts became pals of a sort during the course of the project.”
“Any idea where I can locate him?” I asked.
“Sorry. We lost track of him after he left the university to complete his studies in the States.”
In nosing around the area where Tibbetts had lived at the time, I came upon an old neighbor, a garrulous widow named Rosemary Welland-Jones, who had known the family well and had some interesting things to say even if they didn’t advance my investigation, at least at first.
“Giselle,” she told me, “Andy’s wife, was a sweet little thing. She was from Montreal, where they met. Andy was a good-looking lad and she was madly in love with him, despite his problems.” She used McGill’s word for him: feckless. “You know the type. One job after another. Grass always greener somewhere else. Quite suddenly, they moved to the States. We never heard anything more about them until the murder. Didn’t know they’d moved back here until one day I happened to run into Giselle at the Eaton Center. She told me she and Andy had split up two years after they returned — she didn’t say why — and that she’d remarried. I think she said his name was Donohue and they were living in Scarborough.”
Giselle Donohue proved far more approachable than I’d dared hope. Perhaps the passage of time had disarmed her suspicions, or perhaps she found nothing to arouse her distrust in this diffident, elderly professor who landed on her doorstep with his story of writing a book about the sleepwalker case. She was not unwilling to discuss it. I asked her how they’d happened to move to the States, and why Deaconsfield of all places.
“Andy Lee,” she said, “was given to sudden impulses, always expecting things to be better somewhere else. They never were. One day he came home and said he wanted to try the States. Said he had a distant cousin living in Deaconsfield. He’d never before mentioned any relatives in the States and when we got there he could find no trace of this cousin. For all I know he never existed. At first, though, things went fine. Andy Lee got a job in a service station and seemed happier than he’d been in months. We even made a few friends.”
“The sleepwalking, did that continue?”
“Oh yes, we were both used to that. We lived with it. Then suddenly, overnight, it all ended in that terrible nightmare.”
“You must have been vastly relieved when he was acquitted.”
“It seemed a miracle. Of course we couldn’t stay down there, people were not — friendly. We moved back here, and then when the money came it seemed like another miracle.”
“The money?”
“As if out of the blue,” she said. “I came home from work one day and found Andy Lee wildly excited. He said we were rich — well, rich for us. He showed me a bank book with a deposit of fifty thousand dollars. Said he’d wanted to keep it all a secret — he was the most secretive man on earth — until he was certain it was for real. It seems that an agent acting on behalf of some movie producer in the States had approached Andy — all unbeknownst to me — and offered him fifty thousand dollars for the film rights to his story.”
I could hardly contain my excitement. “Do you remember the agent’s name — or the movie producer’s?”
She shook her head. “No, I don’t. So far as I know nothing ever came of it. But Andy Lee changed after that. The money went to his head. He started gambling and drinking. It went from bad to worse, until finally I couldn’t stand it anymore. I moved out. After the divorce I never heard from Andy Lee again.”
Before leaving I brought up the subject of Andrew Lee’s participation in the sleep disorder program. She said that he hadn’t wanted to talk much about that. “I think he rather resented being a guinea pig, so to speak, even if it made him feel somehow important — special — at the time.”
When I asked if she had a picture of Andrew Lee she brought out a box of old snapshots and showed me one of herself, Andrew Lee, and another young man taken at an amusement park near Toronto. It was hard to believe the smiling, handsome, blond young man in the snapshot could ever have been charged with a brutal murder.
“That’s Manly Renard with us,” she said. “He was a graduate medical student at the university who was involved in the project. He and Andy Lee became quite close.”
I told her that Angus McGill had mentioned the name but, like him, she could give me no information about Renard’s present whereabouts.
“Unless you might try New York City,” she said. “I seem to remember Renard mentioning that he’d chosen medicine as a career because his father was a successful doctor in New York.”
Father? Or stepfather, I wondered. The possibility, even if remote, intrigued me.
Until my second attempt to elicit information from Agnew’s lawyer proved more fruitful and provided the breakthrough I’d been seeking for so long. He admitted that Manly Renard was indeed Dr. Agnew’s stepson and heir. His earlier reticence had been a case more of professional embarrassment than protocol.
“The truth is,” he admitted, “we lost track of Renard immediately after settling his stepfather’s estate. Our efforts to locate him were unsuccessful. So far as we know, he might have taken the money and sailed off to the South Seas. In a word, sir, he vanished.”
A feeling of closing in upon the truth now spurred me on. I had connected the links in the chain that led from Verity Bainbridge to Dr. Agnew, from Dr. Agnew to Manly Renard, and from Manly Renard to Andrew Lee Tibbetts; and as for the murder, lack of proof notwithstanding, I felt that I’d unearthed both motive and means.
For all the good it did me. Unless I could locate Manly Renard and somehow pry the truth out of him — and how I could do this, having no hard evidence with which to threaten him, I had no idea — then all my efforts would have been in vain. As time passed it appeared that my attempts to find the elusive Renard were as doomed to failure as the lawyer’s. It was as if he’d taken the money — all but the fifty thousand dollars I was convinced he’d paid Tibbetts for committing the murder — and lost himself in some distant land.
A year passed. I’d given up hope of ever writing an ending to the Sleepwalker Murder Case, left only with the satisfaction of having proved to myself the truth of my theory of how and why it had been perpetrated, that brutal slaying of my distant benefactress.
But fate, perhaps, has an even stronger abhorrence of loose ends than does the amateur detective, and it was on an autumn evening, as I sat watching a panel discussion on a TV talk show, that I was struck by something uncannily familiar about the face of one of the participants, a well-known New York physician. I rushed to my files and dug out that snapshot of Andrew Lee Tibbetts and Manly Renard. Even allowing for the changes wrought by time, I was convinced that I was right. The face of the man on TV was the face of Manly Renard.
Only the name was wrong.
Three days after our dinner together Lyman Fox rang and invited me to lunch at his club. His manner on this occasion was anything but genial; no pretense of friendship. As soon as we were seated he shoved the Bainbridge dossier across the table to me.
“I’ve never read such rubbish,” he said frigidly, “nor have I ever met anyone as blatantly deceitful as you.”
I smiled in mock surprise. “You didn’t find my theory — interesting?”
“I find it libelous. A tissue of lies and wild conjecture. What a funny little man you are, James. To come creeping out of some hole, seeking me out, currying my friendship. What did you hope to achieve?”