t is strange,” said the police detective, “that you heard nothing.”
Professor Rowe shook his head sadly.
“Our home is solidly built. I would have thought I would hear—but I was very absorbed in my work.”
“You were with a patient?”
“No. I am not only an analyst, or even primarily one. You see, the science of the mind is also a science of the soul. One cannot study the mind while denying the soul.”
“So you’re a preacher?”
“No, no. I don’t preach. I study and write. I am, if you will, a philosopher.”
“Hmmm.”
Professor Rowe was pale and drawn. His usual enthusiasm when he talked about science, the mind, and the soul was lackluster.
“At least,” Professor Rowe said, “I have the certainty, denied to so many, that my wife now thrives on another plane. She was an enlightened woman.”
Whatever he said, Charles Rowe certainly sounded like a preacher, and the stolid policeman couldn’t see any preacher throwing a woman around like that. It certainly couldn’t have been the girl, that slight thing who had been in bed with an illness so recently. She didn’t look like she could throw a doll around a room.
“Your work,” the Professor was saying, “interests me greatly. You look into the past to see what was written there. It is a matter, I gather, of taking the remnants of the past as they are written on the present and correctly interpreting them. As in Sir Conan Doyle’s work.”
“Sure,” said the policeman uncertainly. “That’s about it.”
“If we could gather the key to that interpretation into a formula, could it be applied to the interpretation of dreams, remnants of the life of the soul?”
The policeman stared at him.
“Never mind,” said Professor Rowe, “just a rhetorical question, just a musing speculation.”
“All right,” said the policeman. “You can go.”
The policeman was wondering whether Charles Rowe could have murdered his wife just to prove some incomprehensible theory when two men came in holding a woman between them.
“Who is this?”
“We picked this treasure up in a bar, out by where Carlson lives. He was on his game, since when he heard her talking what seemed like nonsense, he connected it up with this murder here.”
“I don’t think I can stand to hear any more nonsense.”
“Then you’d better not hear her tell it. What it looks like to us, plain and simple, is she was taking up a hobby of blackmail.”
“Blackmail, eh?”
“She went ’round to the house with some story about Mr. Rowe being married to her out somewhere or other and came away with a pocketful of cash.”
“What call would she have to kill the wife then? Unless the story was true.”
“Not likely, or else what’s she doing hanging out around here in a bar spending off the cash she got?”
“Maybe that Professor killed his wife, anyway, to keep her from leaving him.”
“No, we think it’s this girl. See, Carlson put it together with some other story—maybe you should tell it, Carlson.”
“Right. It was like this, a man came to the station one day with a complaint. This woman had come to him, telling him that she was his daughter and offering to tell his wife all about it. Her story was that the man had gone on a business trip and taken up with a lady, and that lady was the girl’s mother. He gives her some money, and she goes away, and that’s that, but then he starts thinking the better of things. It was true enough that he’d been off on a trip about the time she says, and that he slipped, as they say, from his marriage vows a bit. But he didn’t see how anyone could have tracked him down after all these years, as he hadn’t given the woman his name nor any information about himself. So he begins to suspect that he’s been taken. Well, he thinks that’s the end of it, and he’s just been swindled out of some cash, when he comes home one day and finds that this woman is there with his wife, and the two are at blows. In fact, this little hellcat is beating on the poor wife and shouting how she let herself be sadly fooled by this man. The wife, you see, didn’t believe the girl, who had it in mind to break up the marriage on top of taking the man’s money. So there’s the pattern, as she’s gotten money from this second poor man, and then his wife came to violence.”
“Well, what do you have to say to that, miss? What’s her name by the way?”
“Winifred, plus whatever last name suits her at the time.”
“What do you have to say for yourself, Winnie?”
“None of it’s lies, if that’s what you think.”
“So you’re this one man’s daughter and this other man’s wife?”
“No,” she said. “I mean they both did those crimes to their wives, just as I said.”
“And you found out about it and decided to get some money out of it for yourself.”
“They deserved anything they got, for what they did to those women. I hear them in my head, every day, begging me to put a stop to these evil men. You’re just like them, mister. An upstanding citizen, upholding the law here. Isn’t there a woman you left with a baby inside her to fend for herself, when you were just a kid? What do you think became of her?”
The policeman stared at the woman.
“Crazy,” said Carlson, “completely off her rocker, or trying to make out like she’s crazy so that she’s not hanged. Although, judging from her talk at that bar before she was caught, I vote for true, blue nuts.”
“Well, lock her up. Whether she’s nuts or not isn’t for us to decide.”
They put the girl in a jail cell, and she never saw a free day in her life again, although she was not hanged. She was not even tried. Instead, she got a hold of a man’s shaving razor somehow that never was explained and killed herself. They speculated that she had it on her the whole time, and Carlson was reprimanded for not searching her thoroughly. Her being a woman, though, and him having shown great presence of mind in connecting her with both crimes (blackmail and murder), his reprimand was only a formality.
A young guard found her in the cell the next morning, and there was blood all over the walls and all over the floor. It seeped out of the cell doors, at least part of the girl escaping, not able to be held by metal bars. The boy who found her was sick to his stomach at the sight. He had to quit his job, because he couldn’t stand looking at a jail cell from that moment forward, and he went on to become a carpenter of great local reputation (as his father had been before him, and always wanted him to be), whose cabinets and chairs were in great demand.
This was one thing I saw in my mirror.
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