The Weak-Eyed Bat

Alfonse sagged. Jakes thought for a minute that it was only the starch in her uniform that was holding her up. But no. Members of very old families may droop but they never lose consciousness.

“How ghastly,” she whispered.

She was standing up straight again but something had gone wrong with her face. It kept changing, floating almost, from one expression to another, as if it couldn’t make up its mind. Jakes felt as if he had walked in on a naked woman who was searching desperately for her clothes. He looked out of the window.

“You knew her, didn’t you?” he asked.

“Yes, I did. Everyone did.”

“Did she come to this house often?”

“Not often since I’ve been here.”

“Where did you live before you came to Miss Bonner’s?”

To Jakes’s ears her laugh sounded quite gay. “Oh, I’ve lived here, there, and everywhere. Wherever my profession calls me. I answered Miss Bonner’s advertisement in a Toronto paper a little over two months ago. I’ve become quite fond of Muskoka. The air is so fresh, so bracing, so invig—”

“Yes,” said Jakes. “To get back to last night, what time did you leave this house?”

“Around seven-thirty, I suppose.”

“You had an appointment?”

“Well, not exactly. No, I wouldn’t say I had an appointment.”

Jakes snorted impatiently. “If I find out you had a motive for murdering the girl, you’ll have to give the man’s name to protect yourself.”

“I had no motive,” Miss Alfonse said easily. “And a great many others had.”

She paused significantly and Jakes said: “All right. Who?”

“Miss Bonner.”

“But Miss Bonner is a cripple.”

Miss Alfonse smiled. “Quite.”

“You mean she isn’t a cripple?”

“I’m only a nurse. I can’t diagnose. You’ll have to ask a doctor.”

“Can she walk at all?”

“When I help her to bed she leans on me very heavily.” She looked at him sharply and lowered her eyes. “May I go now?”

“All right, but I want to see you again. Perhaps you’ll be more frank with me next time.”

A sniff, a swish, and a rustle, and Miss Alfonse was gone. The interview had not been pleasant but it had relieved her mind a good deal: the policeman was a fool.

In the library Jakes sank into a chair and took out his notebook. He sat biting the end of his pencil because he didn’t quite know what to write in his book. Finally he wrote, “All men are liars,” and decorated the inscription with curlicues. It was Constable Jakes’s most profound contribution to the case.

“Ah, there it is!” The voice came from outside the library window, and simultaneously a yellow turban rose from behind a bush.

“Just missed it!” Prye said, smacking his hands together. “Why, hello, Constable Jakes! This is a surprise.”

“Not to me it isn’t,” Jakes said, frowning. “How long have you been behind that bush?”

Prye came closer to the window. “Behind what bush? Oh, that bush. Not very long. I was just trying to capture a rare specimen of butterfly, an aesophagus major. It eluded me.”

“There is no butterfly called the aesophagus major,” Jake said in a flash of inspiration.

Prye looked shocked. “There you go being positive — the one thing policemen and doctors can’t afford to be. I heard of a doctor once who prescribed medicine for a man with some atropine in it. The man took the required amount, but the next day he came back to the doctor and told him the medicine had made him very ill. ‘Oh, pooh,’ the doctor said. ‘I’m positive there’s not enough atropine in that to hurt you. I’ll take twice as much as that just to show you.’ Well, the doctor did and the doctor died. He had bought the drug at a different supply house, you see, and it was much stronger than what he had been using.”

“Well?” Jakes said.

Prye sighed. “All right, there is no butterfly called the aesophagus major. I want to talk to you about Miss Alfonse, but not through a window. Shall I come in or will you come out?”

“I’ll come out,” Jakes said. “I have to see Professor Frost now, I suppose.”

He came out of the house and joined Prye and they began to walk slowly down the lane.

“Alfonse’s gag about not revealing the name of the man who was with her is tottering with palsy,” Prye said. “I hope you didn’t put your faith in it.”

“Naturally I didn’t,” Jakes said uncomfortably. “But I can’t understand why everyone has to lie when everyone can’t be guilty.”

“Everyone isn’t guilty of the murder,” Prye said, grinning, “but we're all guilty of something, if of nothing more than driving through a red light in Hoboken ten years ago. Fear of the law and policemen is universal. Probably it’s a throwback to childhood when we were told that the policeman would get us if we didn’t wash behind our ears. The new generation of mothers is wiser. They say, ‘Don’t ask anyone but a policeman, Junior!’ thus lining Junior up on the side of law and order.”

“Are you kidding?” Jakes demanded.

“No. I’m just explaining that fear is the most potent reason for lying. Sometimes, however, the fear of policemen has a very real basis. In Alfonse’s case it has.”

He paused, and Jakes said: “Well, what did she do? Kill off a patient?”

“Precisely,” Prye said.