The Weak-Eyed Bat

Susan, after an anguished look at her father, advanced timidly toward the doorway.

“Give me your hand, please,” Prye said.

“You don’t have to, Susan!” Ralph shouted. “You don’t have to listen to him!”

“You may challenge me to a duel later,” Prye said cheerfully. “Your hand, Susan.”

She held out a trembling hand. He took it, bent over it for an instant, and straightened up again. Susan gasped.

“I’ve read somewhere,” Professor Frost said conversationally, “that modern psychiatrists are reforming our mental institutions because they have such excellent prospects of becoming future occupants.”

“You’re misinformed,” Prye said. “The profession with one of the highest incidences of mental disease is teaching. Probably the teaching of classics.”

“I can believe it,” Frost said. “It’s the strain of trying to communicate the subtleties of the lyrical meter of Euripides to students who cannot scan Shakespeare.”

Prye held up his hand. “Granted without argument. Jennie, you’re next.”

“I won’t budge,” Jennie said. “I know my rights as well as the next one. I won’t budge.”

Inspector White rose to glare at her. “I have invested Dr. Prye with the authority to conduct these interviews. You will do as he says.”

Jennie did.

Prye spoke to her mildly. “Jennie, I’d like you to put your one hand tightly over your right ear and close your eyes until I tell you to open them. Tell me when you hear a noise.”

“I won’t,” Jennie said. “What kind of noise?”

“That’s what I want you to tell me.”

She closed her eyes intensely. Prye took out his pocket watch and held it about five feet away from her left ear, then four feet, then three, then two.

“There!” Jennie cried. “I hear a watch.”

The trial was repeated with her right ear with approximately the same result.

“Hocus pocus,” Nora said. “You should have been in vaudeville.”

“I am,” Prye said. “Professor Frost.”

Frost got up, smiling. “I offer myself in the interests of more virile vaudeville. Name your experiment, Dr. Prye.”

“A purely verbal experiment,” Prye said. “Right in your line. You keep a diary. I’ve seen it but I haven’t read it.”

“It wouldn’t interest you,” Frost said blandly.

“Was there anything in your diary which would have led your daughter Joan to believe that you intended to have her committed to an institution?”

“There was. I was.”

“You believed she was insane?”

“Certainly.”

There was a sudden shocked silence in the room, but Frost continued to smile.

“Father!” Susan said angrily.

He looked down at her, genuinely amused. “My dear, I was literally tom between Horace and Socrates: speak no ill of the dead, and the truth shall make us free. One discards Horace on general principles.”

“You are a cad, sir!” Ralph said hotly.

“I am, indeed,” Frost murmured. “Interesting point there. If I am a self-confessed cad, am I to be despised as the cad I am or to be honored as an honest man? Impossible to be both, you see. But in these marvelously complex times I fancy I should be honored as an honest man. One has only to admit a fault, not rectify it.”

Every eye in the room was on him, his theatrically handsome face, the gestures of his fine long hands, the play of the light on his white hair...

There was a little click, and he was no longer there but lost in the darkness that swallowed the room.

A figure leaped past Prye through the doorway. Chairs scraped. Voices began to shout. Someone yelled: “Turn on the light!”

The lights clicked on.

Prye was standing with his arms spread across the doorway. A gun appeared in Inspector White’s hand.

“Don’t shoot,” Prye said in an urgent voice. “Don’t shoot at her, you fool!”

Nora started to shriek, “Jennie! It was Jennie!” and without any fuss the police matron walked over and slapped her smartly across the face.

Inspector White came toward Prye, pointing his revolver, menace glowing on his face. “You let her get away,” he hissed. “You — let — her — get — away!”

“Use your head,” Prye said, grinning not very successfully into the barrel of the revolver. “The person you want is still in this room.”

The revolver wavered and sagged in White’s hand.

Chapter Seventeen

They were all watching each other now with eyes that were puzzled, frightened.

“I should have found you out sooner,” Prye said. “You were careless about fingerprints.”

“Fingerprints!”

The word came from the back of Emily’s throat. She was sitting bolt upright in her chair. “There were no fingerprints on anything.”

“That’s right,” Prye said, looking at her gravely. “But when a person innocently drinks a cup of coffee, for example, his or her fingerprints are left on the cup. And when a person picks up a ring and flings it out of the window, there should be fingerprints on the ring.” He turned his head and faced Mary Little. “That’s right, too, isn’t it, Mary?”

Her eyes were hidden by her thick white lids. She said, “I guess so.”

“You said you had been in bed before you picked up the ring, Mary?”

“Yes.”

“Do you usually wear gloves in bed?”