The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck by Alexander Laing Page A

parcel was mailed from. And then the postmaster comes snoopin’ in, o’ course, and takes the case out o’ my hands, he not having’ had a smitch to do with it. Wal, that’s how it goes, boys. The higher-ups allus takes the credit.”
    Next day the Alton Weekly Clarion  came out with its first scarehead in years, the finding that whoever had packed the bundle had left not a trace of a fingerprint on anything except the inside back cover of the doctor’s watch, which bore on its burnished gold surface a perfect impression of a man’s thumb. It was so carefully done that it must have been put there either in derision or as a move to put the searchers on the wrong track.
    Now that the case had become an open and generally discussed mystery, however, it seemed the right time to risk a talk with Muriel. She was still on the night shift, and I did not want to hang around, suspiciously, waiting to catch her by chance. It would be more natural to try phoning at various hours. I purposefully confined the calls to hours after seven o’clock, when Daisy went off duty.
    After a few days, I paused to pass the time of day with Daisy. She asked, “How’s the love affair coming along?” I inquired what she meant, and she said, “Don’t be that way. I mean the sudden infatuation for Nurse Finch.”
    “I haven’t even caught a glimpse of her in days,” I had the wit to answer promptly.
    “That may be, but you’ve certainly worked the telephone hard in her direction.”
    “Where did you get that idea?” I asked, remembering the care with which I had confined my calls to hours after seven o’clock.
    “Thought you were fooling me, did you?” she countered. “If any of my rivals captures the champion woman-hater, it won’t be by way of my switchboard.”
    “Not much evidence so far that she’s trying to,” I answered, with a mock sigh. “Good chance for you to chisel in, Daisy.”
    “Not till you elevate your tastes a bit,” she replied.
    “No kidding,” I said, “how did you get the idea that I had been ‘working the telephone’?”
    She shoved a little black desk machine toward me. A long roll of paper in it wound through a kind of little window, and a push of a button shifted it one space.
    “New system,” she said. “They’ve got us keeping track of all calls, even the locals, on this.”
    “Since when?” I Asked, full of a sudden alarm at the thought that this might be part of a detective system set up to aid in solving the mystery of Dr. Wyck’s disappearance; but she reassured me by saying, “Since the first of the month.” It was on the night between the 3rd and 4th that he had disappeared.
    “So that’s how you spend your time,” I said, “scouting for scandal through the back end of the tape.”
    “Uh-huh. Lots of fun. Very convenient, too. All the private houses have four-digit numbers, and all the medical school phones have three, and all the hospital ones two.”
    “What’s Connells’?” I asked quickly.
    “One-one-one-eight. You didn’t honestly think I’d fail to keep that number next to my heart, did you, David?”
    I decided to be a lot more careful about my phoning in the future. For some time Muriel continued successful in what could not have been anything other than a deliberate attempt to avoid meeting me.
    Meahwhile, I had been spared through all the first week the necessity of confronting Dr. Alling. A visiting surgeon had asked Prexy to come to Boston for some kind of harangue, which he did. I heard a few caustic remarks about this, because the doctor in question was Vladimir, the Hungarian skin-grafting specialist; and the more orthodox members of our staff thought it beneath Prexy’s proper dignity to truckle with a person who made his living by rejuvenating old rakes at ten to fifty thousand dollars a throw, with monkey glands.
    Some of our doctors would have been still more shocked had they known that the monkey gland business was precisely what Prexy was