Dead as a Dinosaur by Frances Lockridge Read Free Book Online Page B

satisfied, since it was obviously the task of the police to check up on things. She went back to washing stockings, and Anstey and Bill Weigand went back to the Buick. On the way, Anstey reported that he would be damned. He said that, still, he didn’t get it.
    â€œHe was putting these damn things in himself,” Anstey said. “Wearing his ‘funny-looking’ glasses. He was the crackpot all along. What do you know?”
    Bill Weigand didn’t, except what was obvious. Nobody was trying to drive Dr. Orpheus Preson insane. Nobody needed to. Dr. Preson had made it on his own.
    â€œThe labels were off the bones,” Anstey said. “Where’d that get him?”
    Bill didn’t know. He said he didn’t know.
    â€œAnd the stuff in the milk?”
    Again, there was no ready answer. But the actions of the insane need no reason, are susceptible to no answer. Presumably, Preson had planned to drink the milk himself, himself succumb to the barbiturate, presumably be discovered in drugged sleep, and thus add new, and more dramatic, lines to the picture he was himself painting of a man persecuted.
    â€œA crackpot,” Anstey said. “God, what a crackpot. He ought to be locked up.”
    â€œPerhaps,” Bill said. “I suppose he might get dangerous, although so far he seems merely to be giving himself a headache.”
    â€œHis sister,” Anstey pointed out.
    Hadn’t been seriously harmed, or put in much danger, Bill pointed out. However—He shrugged. It wasn’t his problem. It was Anstey’s problem, and the problem of the precinct and, more than of either, of Preson’s relatives. Bill Weigand drove home, leaving Anstey with his share of the problem.
    Bill told his wife, who had greenish eyes, and moved almost as lithely as a cat, and was named Dorian, about the odd case of Dr. Orpheus Preson, mammalogist and crackpot, over a cocktail.
    But he did not need to tell her all of it. She had lunched with Pamela North, and had heard a good deal already, although, of course, nothing of the sleeping sister or the animated midgets. Dorian was able to tell Bill that Dr. Preson was finishing, or ought to be finishing, the second volume of his book about ancient animals; to tell him that Jerry North was apparently counting on it.
    â€œOf course,” Dorian said, “Ezra Pound got a poetry prize even though they did have to lock him up. So I suppose Dr. Preson could still write about mammals?”
    But she did not sound convinced, and Bill was not. Pound was, after all, a poet to begin with, Bill pointed out. Dr. Preson wrote in prose.
    â€œI think,” Dorian said, “you’d better tell Jerry what’s happened, don’t you?”
    Bill Weigand agreed, and reached for the telephone. The result of that was cocktails in the Algonquin lounge and dinner afterward, Norths and Weigands again together.

4
    W EDNESDAY , 5:15 P . M . TO 11:20 P . M .
    Detective Vern Anstey, having flicked a hand at the departing acting captain of Homicide West, found a telephone and reported to the precinct. He was told he had better get on with it, and took a subway downtown again. He went to the apartment hotel in West Twenty-second Street and discovered that his luck had run out. Dr. Preson was not there. Anstey nevertheless went to the mammalogist’s apartment, looked around it—noticing that the bones still were disordered—and found a typewriter under a black, oilcloth cover. Detective Anstey used the typewriter, copying on it Dr. Preson’s application for the service of five midgets. He didn’t suppose—
    He examined the results. It was a matter for experts, but after scrutiny, Anstey found that he did suppose Preson had procured a want-ad blank, taken it home, typed his advertisement on it and then carried it back to Times Square. This involved procedure made no more sense than any of the rest of it. Anstey consoled himself with the thought