Free Dead as a Dinosaur by Frances Lockridge Page A

wouldn’t,” Pam pointed out. “After one bottle full of barbital, anybody would think twice.”
    â€œRight,” Bill said. “Are you looking for rationality, Pam?”
    Pam North hesitated for a moment. Then she said, “I guess not. I guess I’m licked. And he’s such a nice little man, in spite of the whiskers and everything. Let’s go home, Jerry.”
    Bill Weigand dropped them; drove on to the apartment hotel in West Twenty-second Street; went upstairs to have his look around. Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O’Malley was in one of his thorough moods.
    Bill Weigand was thorough himself; a conviction that thoroughness would lead nowhere did not lessen his application. In half an hour he had what he needed, which was, at least in outline, what he expected.
    Dr. Preson had been found, in a coma, at a few minutes before eleven. A nephew, Wayne Preson, had found him. The nephew had called Laura and Homer Preson, sister and brother of the mammalogist, and then for an ambulance. There had then been an empty glass in front of Dr. Preson, who had been sitting at the table in the rear of the room relabeling bones. The glass had contained milk. It was apparent that, as he wrote on gummed labels, licked the labels and applied them to the bones, Dr. Preson had sipped from the glass.
    â€œTook the taste out of his mouth, probably,” a uniformed precinct man suggested, and Bill said, “Right,” and then, more or less absently, “should have used a sponge.”
    â€œMakes ’em too wet,” the precinct man said, and continued to report. He had arrived in a prowl car before the ambulance from St. Vincent’s; when he arrived, Wayne Preson had got the little curator of mammals to a couch. He was restless, then, stirring uneasily in his sleep.
    From what Wayne said, it was easy to get the picture. Dr. Preson, sitting in front of his pile of bones, had written and licked and sipped and stuck labels onto bones. Slowly the phenobarbital in the milk had had its effect. The handwriting on the labels, at first firmly clear, had deteriorated; toward the end it was hard to decipher what Dr. Preson had intended. “Particularly with words like that,” the precinct man said. In the end, Dr. Preson’s head had come to rest on the table, with the bones of extinct mammals. Apparently as he lost consciousness, he had been reaching for another label from a box of them near his hand. How long he had rested so was anybody’s guess.
    The ambulance had come and Dr. Preson had been taken to St. Vincent’s Hospital, his nephew in attendance. Laura and Homer Preson had also gone directly to the hospital. Precinct detectives had continued the formalities.
    â€œFound a bottle of milk, less one glass, in the refrigerator,” Bill Weigand said. “Dr. Preson’s fingerprints on it, probably. No—he’d have wiped them off, wouldn’t he? Phenobarbital in the milk.”
    â€œAbout that, captain,” the precinct man said. “Good guess.”
    â€œRepetition,” Bill told him. “It happened earlier. Didn’t anybody tell you?”
    â€œWho’d tell me?” the uniformed man said. “Don’t you know we just think with our feet?” He interrupted himself. “Sorry, captain,” he said. “Didn’t mean anything.”
    Bill told him enough. He said, “Oh, one of those things.”
    â€œDid they find out when Dr. Preson got here?” Bill asked.
    They had. The information had been left with the man from the prowl car. Dr. Preson had got back to the hotel a little before five o’clock in the afternoon. He had not left again. When Wayne had arrived, representing the family, he had first telephoned Dr. Preson from the desk, and had gone up when there was no answer.
    â€œAny food sent up to him?” Bill asked.
    There had not been.
    â€œCarrying anything when he came in?”
    There