“The person — Who was it?”
“He didn’t wait for us to thank him.” Merlini turned his back, dismissing the subject, and glanced interestedly about at the books which overflowed the room.
“Oh.” Gail sent a sharp look at his back. “I see. Yes, it’s coffee. It’ll be right out.” He disappeared into the kitchen.
The living-room was a pleasant, cheerful place with an open fireplace, deep, comfortable armchairs, and a sufficient number of ash trays scattered about. Two bookcases were filled to capacity and beyond. There were books on the tables, in the chairs, and stacked in crooked towers in the corners. The larger share of them were technical works on psychology and related subjects, though here and there I glimpsed others that indicated a wide and catholic taste. One lower bookcase shelf held a whole row of brightly jacketed detective stories.
Merlini removed a stack of psychology journals from one of the chairs and sat down. As he lighted a cigarette, his eyes, above the match flame, slid sideways and looked down at something on a small end table beside his chair. Dropping his match into an ash tray, he glanced up thoughtfully at the kitchen door, his slightly tilted smile showing across his mouth.
The Doctor entered carrying a tray that held coffee, cups, cream, and sugar. As he placed them on the center table, I came forward from the bookshelves and circled Merlini’s chair, a surreptitious eye cast downward. Two letters lay there bearing similar inscriptions, both addressed to Mr. Gordon Williams, c/o G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2 West 45th Street, New York City. In each case the name and address had been crossed out and a new one written in ink alongside: Dr. William Gail, 56 East 65th Street, New York City.
I took my coffee black. Merlini lay in his chair, his long legs protruding an unheard-of distance. Dr. Gail poured silently and with a slightly grim air.
Merlini took his cup and held it cradled in his hands, warming them. “There’s one point that must be settled at once. You, Doctor, said tonight that Miss Skelton would never have gone up to that house alive and under her own power. You sounded pretty positive. Are we to understand that there could have been no exceptions at all?”
Gail struck a match with his thumbnail, applied it to his cigarette, and then pitched it into the fireplace. “Know much about agoraphobia?”
Merlini shook his head. “Never heard of it until tonight.”
“All right. We’ll start from scratch. The word means ‘fear of assembly.’ A more exact term, in Linda’s instance, would be topophobia, fear of place. It’s an anxiety hysteria that springs from some childhood experience which gave her a terrific, disruptive emotional shock, and has played merry hell with her neural patterns almost ever since. For the patient, the fear is a mysterious thing with no apparent reason. The causative experience, long forgotten, remains buried in the subconscious mind while its emotional effect, seizures of uncontrollable terror, bursts from time to time into the consciousness.”
Dr. Gail leaned back in his chair and fished a book from the shelves behind him. “Leonard, its most articulate victim, described it in The Locomotive God far better than I can.” He thumbed quickly through the pages, found a passage, and read, “ ‘At times this emotional effect remains merely a diffused state of terror, in intensity running the whole scale from vague anxiety to intensest feeling of impending death; and the agonized mind stands balked of any explanation whatever.… my phobic seizures at their worst approach any limits of terror that the human mind is capable of in the actual presence of death in its most horrible forms.’ ” Gail looked up. “That gives you a rough idea.”
“Yes, quite,” Merlini said seriously. “What would have happened had Miss Skelton been taken forcibly beyond her given limit?”
“A number of things. The outward symptoms might be one or more of the following: palpitation of the heart, shivering, vomiting, exaggerated flushing of the face, dry mouth, cold and clammy sweating, accelerated intestinal and urinary action, hysterical fainting, unconsciousness, and even catalepsy. In Linda’s case I should fully expect a collapse from nervous exhaustion, quite possibly resulting in complete insanity or simple death from pure fright.”
“That,” I interposed with a sudden technical interest, “sounds like a novel murder method for a detective story. Murderer, forcing agoraphobe out of bounds, frightens her to death. Then moves body back again. Medical examiner diagnoses heart failure, It’s neat and simple, and the cops would have a pretty time trying to prove murder.”
Gail smiled, “Yes. That’s all right — for fiction, There’s an even better agoraphobe plot though. Use the phobia as a motive. The murderer has it. Within his prescribed area he has a job. Someone who dislikes him tries to get him fired. See the situation? His livelihood depends on the position; if he loses it he can’t hop on a train like anyone else and go look for one somewhere else. He’s irrevocably sunk. He kills his enemy as a simple matter of self-preservation. And if you can devise a long-distance murder, so that the victim meets death out beyond the boundary which the murderer cannot cross — you’ve given him a neat alibi.”
“And the other agoraphobe variation,” Merlini said slowly, “is the one we’ve got. Any ideas about that, Doctor?”
The latter carefully ground out his cigarette in an ash tray. Then, seeing my cup empty, he indicated the coffee pot and said, “Help yourself, Harte.” He lighted another cigarette before he replied in a careful voice, “Yes, I have.”
Merlini said nothing, waiting. The Doctor went on.
“I can’t tell you who poisoned Linda, but — well, if I were you I wouldn’t eliminate everyone who knew she was an agoraphobe, just because her body was in the wrong place. Not right off the bat, anyhow.”
“You suspect that’s what the murderer wants us to do?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve been thinking about that. The murderer kills her, fakes the appearance of suicide, and then puts the body in the wrong place. The position of the body not only explodes the false suicide, but at the same time indicates that the murderer was someone who knew no better than to fake a suicide in the wrong place. The obvious explanation, and, being simpler, the one the police would prefer. The agoraphobia is then neither means nor motive, but alibi. That the general idea?”
“Yes. It explains the appearance of suicide.”
Merlini frowned at him. “Doctor, I hope you didn’t kill her. Because if you did I can see it’s going to be difficult.”
Gail said coolly, “As a matter of fact, I didn’t, but I shouldn’t be surprised if it turns out to be difficult just the same.”
“You suspect someone?”
The Doctor hesitated. “Perhaps. But it’s only that. I couldn’t suggest a name at this point.”
“But you might — later?”
“I might.” Gail didn’t seem too positive. He scowled at the floor; then, studying Merlini’s face, asked, “Do you believe there are any justifiable instances of murder?”
Merlini shook his head. “That’s a leading question. I beg to be excused on the grounds that I might incriminate myself. I take it you do?”
“Your reason for not answering—”the Doctor smiled—“is as good as any.”
“You shouldn’t have mentioned it. Let’s get back to Miss Skelton, shall we? Had you any hope of effecting a cure?”
“No. Frankly, I did not. No harm in trying though. You see, she was beginning to develop phobophobia, a fear of the fear itself. I was trying to prevent that, but phobias in the acute form of Linda’s are far out on the frontiers of abnormal psychology. There’s such a lot we don’t know yet. About all we can do is to try to drag the initial causative experience up out of the subconscious depths and put it where the patient can see and understand it. Linda’s acute condition dates from the opening night of her first Broadway appearance as an actress. She collapsed completely. Her most powerful emotional urge has been the desire to be a great actress. Instead of being an exhibitionist, she’s an agoraphobe, and her complete frustration merely makes matters worse. The acting scare was not the original one; only that which unleashed the phobia. Somewhere far back in her childhood — she may have been only two or three years old — some emotional fright occurred that burned itself deep into her brain.”