A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

“That,” he explains, “was a dot of dried blood. He’d torn his lip there in smoking the cigarette. Too dry. Often happens.”

“O.K.,” I say disappointedly, “let’s get on with it. What are you putting down in your report as the direct cause?”

“Paralysis of the nerve centers.” He takes a turn or two around the room. “But there was no rhyme or reason for it. It wasn’t a stroke, it wasn’t apoplexy, it wasn’t the bubonic plague—”

Through the window just then, I see the kid look up at the upper part of the house, as though a pebble or something fell near him and attracted his attention. But I’m too interested in what we’re talking about to give him much thought right then. He sort of smiles in a goofy way.

I turn back to the examiner. “Then you can’t tell me anything? You’re a big help!”

“I can’t give you any more facts than those. And since it’s my business to give you facts and not theories, I’ll shut up.”

“The pig’s aunt you will!” I blaze. “You’ll give me whatever you’ve got whether you can back it up or not.”

“Well, this is off the record then. I’d be laughed at from here to

Frisco and back. But the only close parallel to the symptoms of that corpse, the only similarity to the condition of the blood stream and to the bodily rigidity and distortion I’ve ever found, was in bodies I used to see every once in awhile along the sides of the roads, years ago, when I was a young medical student out in India, Java, and the Malay States.”

“Write a book about it!” I think impatiently. “And what stopped ’em?” I hurry him up. It’s like pulling teeth to get anything out of this guy.

“The bite of a cobra,” he says in a low voice.

The front door inches open and the kid slides back in the house and tracks up the stairs sort of noiseless and self-effacing like he didn’t want to attract attention. He’s been up all night, and I figure he’s going to bed and don’t even turn my head and look around at him. Besides, I’ve finally got something out of this guy, and it chimes in with what’s been in the back of my mind ever since she first showed up here, and I’m too excited right then to think of anything else.

“Then what’s holding you up?” I holler out excitedly. “Put it down in your report, that’s all I need! If you ain’t sure of the species, just say ‘poisonous snakebite.’ What are you waiting for? You want me to catch the thing and stuff it for you before you’ll go ahead? I’ll produce it for you all right!”

I remember those “chickens” of hers in that crate with the wire netting — upstairs in her room at this very minute. Chickens, me eye! And a couple of hours after I should have thought of it, I realize that chickens don’t drink milk, they peck com.

“And when I do produce it, the findings aren’t going to be ‘accidental death.’ The charge is going to be murder in the first degree — with a cobra for a weapon.”

Whereupon, he goes and throws cold water all over me. “You can produce dozens of ’em,” he tells me, shaking his head. “You can empty the whole zoo into this house, and I still can’t put anything like that into my report.”

I nearly have pups all over the carpet. “Why? For Pete’s sake, why?”

“Because, for anyone to die of snake bite, there has to be a bite — first of all. The fangs of any snake would leave a puncture, a livid mark, a zone of discoloration. What do you suppose my assistant and I were doing all night, sitting playing rummy? I tell you we went over every inch of body surface with the highest-powered microscopes available. There wasn’t a blemish. Absolutely no place anywhere into which the venom could have been injected.”

I throw all the possibilities that occur to me at him one after the other. I’m not a trained doc, remember. Anyway, he squelches them as fast as they come.

“When you examined the blood stream, or what was left of it, weren’t there heavier traces of this stuff in some parts than others? Couldn’t you track it down from there?”

“It’s very volatile. It diffuses itself all over the system, like lightning, once it’s in. Does away with itself as a specific. It’s not a blood poison, it’s a nerve poison. You can tell it’s there by the effects rather than by the cause.”

“How about a hypodermic needle?”

“That would have left a swelling — and a puncture too; even if smaller than the snake’s fangs, even if invisible to the naked eye.”

“How about internally?”

“It doesn’t kill internally. We analyzed the contents of his stomach. Nothing foreign there, nothing harmful.”

I move the position of one of the chairs in the room rather suddenly — with my foot. “What a temper,” he says reproachfully.

“Maybe I’ve stuck too close to the village green,” I let him know. “Maybe I should have had L. A. in on this.”

“Suit yourself. But, if you go over our heads like that, you better have a direct accusation ready — and be able to back it up. I can’t support you if it comes to a showdown. This report’ll have to stay the way it is — ‘paralysis of the nerve centers, of unknown origin’ — take it or leave it.”