Blandell was in his own home, but he might as well have been locked up somewhere. He was not allowed to leave; friends had kindly seen to that. He was under constant supervision, “for his own good.” He was a bewildered, shattered prisoner.
“What made me do it?” he said, after he had told his distinguished nephew of the corner episode. “I don’t know. I didn’t even know what I had done, till they told me later. My mind seemed to go blank while I was taking leave of Jenner, and it stayed blank till I was here at home with police swarming around and a doctor and psychiatrist in attendance. I suppose the word for it is — insanity.”
“Stop it!” snapped Sessel. “There never has been insanity in our family. Why should you suddenly lose your mental balance?”
“I suppose it has to start in a family sometime,” sighed Blandell. “It’ll be a couple of years before the bank lives down what I did,” he added. “Naturally, I’ve resigned as president.”
Sessel was striding up and down the Blandell living room, fingering his well-kept dark Vandyke beard.
“You say this happened to you while you were taking leave of your friend Jenner at Garfield Gear?”
“Yes,” said Blandell wearily. “But that doesn’t mean anything. It just happened that I was there. If a mental lapse was due, it could have come on me any place.”
Sessel answered noncommittally, and went out to the company in question.
The Garfield Gear Company was a large plant on the edge of town. There was a high barbed-wire fence around it, with an electrified strand on the top. There were men nearby to act as guards. This was because the company, in addition to making gears and axles, made a lot of gun and torpedo parts for the government. War materials are guarded.
Ned Jenner, president and majority stockholder of the company, knew Sessel slightly, so the nephew of the bank president was immediately ushered in to see him.
Jenner was a big fellow, not quite fifty, with a strong jaw, a frank handclasp and a straight glance. In his office, when Sessel entered, was an employee: a slim, slightly bald young man with sensitive lips and a high-arched thin nose.
“Mr. Sessel, Mr. Stanley Grace, my secretary,” Jenner said, rather absently. “I won’t need you for a little while, Grace.”
The secretary nodded silently, folded his notebook, and left the office. Jenner’s frank gaze came to Sessel.
“You’re here about your uncle, I suppose?”
Sessel nodded. He was looking at a leather divan, set along one wall of the office. On the divan was curled a little fox terrier, not asleep, looking Sessel over with bright, alert eyes, but making no move or sound.
“That’s Prince,” said Jenner. “He’s my pal, aren’t you, Prince?” The dog’s tail wagged. “Where I go, Prince goes. He’s in the office when I am, and he usually looks over the plant beside me.”
Jenner turned back to Sessel. “I don’t know that there’s a thing to tell about your uncle,” he said. “It was shocking to hear the news. Shocking! But I’m sure it’s temporary. John has been eminently sane all his life. I know that. Went to school with him. He couldn’t have gone off his head now, at middle age.”
“I don’t think so either.” Sessel was staring at the fox terrier. “The attack came on, he thinks, while he was here at the plant with you.”
Jenner nodded. “I heard that also. And I can see, now, that probably it did. Because the minute I heard it, I remembered that John’s eyes had gone curiously dull as he was shaking hands and leaving. As if he were very tired. All I thought, at the time, was that the old boy must be working too hard. But looking back on it—”
“There was nothing that happened here that could have disturbed him?” said Sessel, staring at the dog.
“Nothing!” said Jenner. “He came out to discuss a short-term loan, we settled the matter and had a chat; then he left. That was all.”
A little whine came from the fox terrier, and he moved uneasily on the divan.
“Did Uncle John do anything queer before he left the plant?” Sessel asked.
Jenner shook his head. “He went out of the office quietly. He left the building like a normal person, nodded to the man at the gate and got in his car. He was driving himself. No one around here had the faintest idea that he wasn’t all right.”
Suddenly the fox terrier howled. There was a curious note of pain in it, though nothing was anywhere near the dog to disquiet it. He howled, and scratched at his ears with his paws.
“What’s the matter with your dog?” said Sessel.
“I don’t know,” said Jenner, anxiously. “He has done that several times lately. Pawed at his ears, as if they hurt. Maybe it’s ear canker. I’ll have to take him to a veterinarian.”
“Yes, that’s a woman who eats vegetables,” Sessel said.
“I beg your pardon?” said Jenner.
“I’ll have to run along,” Sessel said. “Thanks for the ear canker.”
He moved out of the office. He passed through the anteroom where Grace, Jenner’s secretary, had his desk, and into the big general office. As he went he chanted in a low tone, “Thanks for the canker. Thanks for the canker.”
CHAPTER III
Murder in the Corridor!
In the world of letters and biology, Sessel’s was a shining name. But as a tap dancer he wasn’t known. That was natural because he had never even tried to tap dance before.
He tried it now in the center of the general office with gaping clerks and scared stenographers watching.
With his chin high, sticking his Vandyke out at a crazy angle, he whistled “Sweet Adeline” and tried to clog the time with his feet. He fell down, bumping his head against a desk leg.
He didn’t seem to feel it at all. He got up, laughing shrilly like a whinnying horse and tried again.
“Sweet”—tap, tap, tap, stumble—“Adeline”—tap, tap, heavy fall.
Sessel lay where he had fallen that time, for he had turned his ankle. But lying there, he was screaming with laughter as though at the funniest joke in the world. And between laughs he was chanting the song and jerking his feet in rhythm.
Jenner came running toward him. The clerks in the office stared with growing horror in their eyes.
“Good heavens!” said Jenner. “He has gone mad! Like his uncle!”
They carried him to the gate. Blandell’s town car and chauffeur were there. They put Sessel in, still shaking with laughter and trying to dance. Jenner went to the Blandell home with him.
There were more cops around the Blandell place now. There were three more psychiatrists there. And Sessel, who had come to help Blandell in his mental lapse if he could, was now being treated as a patient, too. And in his eyes was the fear that had been in the banker’s for the past hours.
He wasn’t trying to tap dance or sing or laugh, now. He was cold sane; he felt as a man does who is cold sober after a heavy drunk.
“I can’t understand it,” he moaned, for the dozenth time. “I simply can’t. I never had a blank spot in my mind like that before.”
Blandell bit his lips. He had heard what Sessel had done. It was about the maddest thing that his dignified, distinguished nephew could have attempted.
Sessel himself had had to be told, too. He had no recollection whatever of it.
“Your mind just went blank when you were leaving Jenner?” Blandell said.
Sessel nodded.
“I have a faint recollection of saying something to him that didn’t quite make sense, and of hearing his pet dog howl as if something had hurt him. And that’s all.”
Blandell stared. “That’s exactly the way it happened with me! I was leaving Jenner. Things faded out. And — I heard Prince howl as if something were hurting him.”