The Weak-Eyed Bat

Yes, Ralph was a queer boy. Living under the thumb of a querulous, wealthy old woman had retarded his emotional and mental development, so that at twenty-three he was as unsophisticated and helpless as a boy of sixteen. And what do unsophisticated boys of sixteen do when they are confronted with the fact that this is not the best of all possible worlds? Do they run for a handkerchief or a bag of stones?

It was two o’clock, so Prye called Ralph an uncharitable name and turned over and went to sleep.

In the room next to his, Inspector White was emitting a series of gargantuan snores, and across the hall Nora was dreaming of bloody axes and floating bodies. Professor Frost was still searching for humor in Thucydides. The policeman on duty was yawning and waiting for sunrise.

Of them all Miss Alfonse was the only one at peace, and that was something.

Chapter Fifteen

Early on Thursday morning Sergeant Workman and Corporal Hollis of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were reconnoitering the shores of Lake Rosseau, searching for traces of a Harvard Bomber and four crewmen from Camp Borden. The plane had not returned to its base after it took off on Tuesday afternoon and it was considered lost in one of the Muskoka lakes.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Policemen did not find the plane but they did find something almost as interesting. It was lying face down in the shallow water by the shore, cold and bloated and blue.

Miss Alfonse spoiled Corporal Hollis’s dinner and his new brown boots. She had been dead for some time and the water had swollen her body so that her black bathing suit had split down the back, revealing several inches of dirty pink satin.

Sergeant Workman bent over the body and examined the pink strip of satin.

“A girdle,” he said to Corporal Hollis, snorting with disapproval. “Silly women wear tight girdles and tight bathing suits to stop their circulation and then they wonder why they drown. Go and get Jakes. This is his corpse.”

Corporal Hollis was glad to get away. Sergeant Workman, on the other hand, was glad of a rest, even in his present company. He sat down on a pile of pine needles and rested his head against a tree. But he couldn’t help thinking of the pink girdle. He wasn’t interested in girdles usually. They were scarcely fascinating to a man with a wife and three grown daughters, all of them forcibly compressed by Lastex.

“I’m getting senile,” Sergeant Workman growled, but he got up and went over to the corpse and turned it on its back. He noticed the wide strip of adhesive tape in the crook of the left arm.

It wasn’t the thing to do but Sergeant Workman did it. He unhooked Miss Alfonse’s pink girdle and found something which surprised him a great deal: in a rubber cosmetic bag next to Miss Alfonse’s skin there were fifty one-hundred-dollar bills. They were soaked with water.

At ten o’clock the residents of Clayton and the surrounding countryside were gathered in the small district courthouse for the inquest on the body of Joan Frost. The coroner’s jury had been chosen and were sitting in their places looking stern and dignified to conceal their nervousness.

Of the witnesses only Professor Frost and Susan had arrived. Susan’s eyes, almost hidden by a black lace handkerchief, were darting about the room. Her father made no pretense of grief. He was staring around him with obvious enjoyment, nodding to people he knew: the postal clerk and the florist and a little man who sold fish. They nodded back at him, but stiffly, as if they might lose caste. This delighted Professor Frost. He thought: “By Zeus, I’m like Thucydides watching the battle from the mountain.”

“It’s time to begin,” the court stenographer advised Dr. Prescott. Prescott wore his official frown. “Hardly anyone is here. Where’s Dr. Prye? Where’s White? Where’s Jakes?”

The room began to buzz with conversation. The audience wanted the curtain to go up. But where were all the actors?

Prescott pounded his gavel and cleared his throat.

“We are here today to decide the manner in which the deceased met her death.”

A policeman approached and said in a whisper: “You’re wanted on the telephone in the office.”

Prescott, flustered and red-faced, left the court.

The buzzing increased as if a swarm of bees were coming closer and closer. At ten-thirty the room was in an uproar. Not only were the actors missing, the coroner was missing!

Behind her black handkerchief Susan’s lips moved: “I think we’d better leave, Father. Something has gone wrong.”

He took her arm and they walked out, Thucydides descending the mountain with a gold-star widow.

Some time later the jury, after a whispered colloquy with the court stenographer, filed out of the room. The more frivolous members of the audience broke into boos and demanded their rain checks, but they tired of this, and soon they, too, walked out.

“Well, I,” said the court stenographer, “shall be damned.”