Dagger of Flesh Read online

  I'd been to Jay's house only a few times, usually meeting him at a downtown bar for a drink, so I asked him about his family. He was a widower whose wife had died in childbirth. Jay's daughter, Ann, would be somewhere around twenty now. She'd never been around when I'd called at Jay's, so all I remembered of her was a scrawny kid about ten or eleven years old who always gave me a pain, and had once kicked me vigorously in the shin just for fun.

  Jay had remarried a little over two years back, and I had met his new wife just once, briefly, about a year ago. I was thinking about that meeting and my mouth suddenly started getting dry. I was remembering now; only a little, but enough.

  I was almost afraid to ask it, but I said, "How's ... how's the wife, Jay?"

  "Gladys? Same as usual. You met her once, didn't you, Shell?" He went on, his voice droning pleasantly, but the sound seemed to swell and fade in my ears and I didn't have any idea what he was saying.

  Gladys. Even before I'd asked him, I knew. I had suddenly remembered why Gladys had seemed familiar to me from the beginning. I had remembered, vividly for that one moment, my first sight of her when she'd opened the door for me at Jay's a year ago. I'd even remembered thinking then that she was one of those wide-eyed brunettes who ripen at about eighteen and then get riper, and riper, and riper—and that Jay was going to have trouble with that one.

  "What's the matter, Shell?"

  "What? Oh, I'm sorry, Jay. I was ... a million miles away." I tried to grin at him. "Say it again."

  "I said it won't be long now." He glanced at his watch. "Almost one."

  He kept staring at his watch while I looked at him, feeling utterly rotten. The business with Gladys had bothered me before, but it was worse now. Gladys wasn't simply a desirable woman married to some unknown male—she was Jay's wife. I thought about that for what seemed a long time.

  Jay looked up suddenly and sighed. "Gone," he said. "Gone. Oh, boy." He grinned happily at me. "I'm sane for another twenty-three hours. Well, Shell, how's it feel to own Weather's?"

  "No different, Jay."

  "I feel better than I've felt for a week. Seems like one hell of a load off my mind. You'll be down at five?"

  "Sure. I'll come down a little early. Anything you want me to do before then?"

  "No. I'm all right, if that's what you mean. And thanks. Don't forget, you've got a check coming." I opened my mouth to argue, but he cut me off. "No arguments, Shell."

  He got up, nodded and said, "See you about five," and walked out almost jauntily. I watched him go and wondered about him. I wondered a little about me, too. I was one fine, upstanding, hell of a bastard.

  I slammed the door hard, sending echoes down the corridor, then went back to my desk, looked up the Jay Weather residence in the phone book, and dialed. A girl's voice answered, a happy, bright voice.

  I told her I wanted to speak to Mrs. Weather.

  "Half a minute." I heard the phone clatter, then silence—and then the voice I remembered.

  "Hello, Gladys," I said. "This is Shell."

  "Why, Shell! You darling. Couldn't you wait?"

  "Yeah, I can wait. Gladys, forget tonight. Forget every night from now on."

  "What?" She was silent for several seconds, then she said quietly, "How did you know where to call me, Shell? What's this all about? Have you been sneaking around spying on me?"

  "No. I'm through, that's all. We're washed up."

  "You listen to me, Shell Scott—"

  I interrupted her. "Listen, Gladys, I'll say it once fast, and then that's the end of it. I know your name, and I know your husband. I like him. It wouldn't ever be the same again. I'm sorry, really, but that's how it is."

  Her voice got higher, sharper. "Why, you sneaking bastard. You virtuous, Victorian, simple, stupid—"

  There was more, quite a bit more, and finally I hung up. I sat and smoked for a while, thinking about Gladys, and about Jay's friendship and trust; then I forced those thoughts out of my mind and concentrated on the business at hand. I had tried to act as if nothing about Jay had been too peculiar, but now I tried to figure out whether or not the guy was really off his nut. Sane people don't go around seeing nonexistent parrots and casually selling businesses. Or do they?

  I walked over to the window and looked down at Spring Street. To my right, on a projecting ledge of the building, a mangy pigeon cocked a beady eye at me and blinked. It was a lousy-looking pigeon. I wondered what I looked like to the pigeon. I wondered what that parrot had looked like to Jay.

  When I found myself wondering what Jay had looked like to the parrot, I went back to my desk and put in a fast phone call to City Hall and Bruce Wilson, police psychiatrist.

  Chapter Three

  BRUCE CAME ON, speaking in the easy, relaxed voice that matched the rest of his personality.

  "This is Shell," I told him.

  "Hello, Shell. How's the subconscious?"

  "How the hell should I know?"

  "That's the right answer, chum. What you want?"

  "I need some help. Answer me this: what would make a guy suddenly start seeing things that aren't there?"

  "What kind of things?"

  "Well, a parrot. Why would a guy start seeing a parrot on his shoulder?"

  "Don't know."

  "Come on, Bruce. What might make something like that happen?"

  I could almost see him squeezing his sharp chin between thumb and forefinger. "Hard to say, Shell. You serious? Or is this a hypothetical case?"

  "Serious. Guy I know. Friend of mine."

  "Not a lush, is he?"

  "Uh-uh. Drinks, but no more than I do, as far as I know."

  "Hard to say without seeing the man. Tell me more about it."

  "Started Monday at noon. And it's been happening every day at noon since then. Goes away at one. This is the fourth day, and he was in my office when it happened. Said the bird was on his shoulder, that he could see it and feel it. Nothing there. Is he nuts?"

  He didn't answer for a moment, then he said, "The way you describe it, the thing sounds like a posthypnotic suggestion."

  "A what?"

  "Posthypnotic suggestion. You know, hypnosis."

  I groaned. The little I knew about hypnotism supported that explanation. I said, "Would it work, Bruce? I mean, would it be that real to him?"

  "Under the right conditions. Wouldn't work with everybody, but a lot of people can get positive visual hallucinations as a result of hypnosis."

  "Don't go away," I said. "I'll be right down."

  I hung up, put the bill of sale making me "owner" of Weather's back in its envelope and locked it in the middle drawer of my desk. Then I took off.

  Bruce Wilson was a tall, bony man with a thick shock of brown hair, and alert brown eyes sparkling over sharp cheekbones. He leaned back in the chair behind his paper-littered desk, looped his left leg over the chair arm and said, speaking as slowly as he always did, "What's a private dick doing with a vanishing parrot?"

  "Just walked in on me, Bruce. There's more that's funny, but the parrot business really puzzles me. Never ran across anything like it before. Spell out that hypnosis angle for me, will you?"

  He reached up and squeezed his chin. "Simple enough. If a good hypnotic subject, one capable of experiencing positive visual hallucinations, is told while under hypnosis that he'll see a parrot after he's awakened—or at a certain time of day—he'll see it. Doesn't have to be a parrot, of course; could be a monkey, dog, woman, platypus—anything at all that the subject has seen before." He paused. "You ever see a guy with delirium tremens?"

  "DT's? Yeah. Wino in Pedro."

  "What happened?"

  "I woke him up in the middle of the night and the guy started raving. He'd had some flying lessons once, and thought he was coming in for a landing. Then he began seeing spiders on his arms. Started batting at the things ..." I finally got what Bruce was driving at.

  "Uh-huh," Bruce said. "But there weren't any spiders, naturally. He saw them, though, just as this
friend of yours sees the parrot."

  "Yeah, but ..."

  Bruce held up a yellow pencil in his right hand. "See this?"

  "Sure I see it."

  "All right, here's what's happening. When light hits the retina it trips a trigger, so to speak, that shoots an impulse along nerve pathways to your brain, and you get a picture in your brain of a pencil—in other words, a nerve pattern up there in your head that lets you see this pencil. The pencil, itself, is merely the means of tripping that trigger and forming the pattern in your brain. If you remove the pencil, yet still tripped that particular trigger—stimulated the same nerve pathways and formed the same nerve patterns in your brain—then you'd still see the pencil.

  "The point is, we don't really see with our eyes; they're just the windows. We actually see with our brains, so trip the right trigger and you see the spider or whatever again. Your wino in Pedro did it unintentionally by the combination of liquor, lack of proper food, vitamins, and rest. But the spiders were real to him. Just as real as the voices were to Saint Joan of Arc, or the Lady was to Saint Bernadette. Or the parrot to your friend. What I'm getting at is that the same thing can be done with hypnosis."

  I squinted at Bruce. "To anybody? Me, for example?"

  "No." He shook his head. "Just about everybody's susceptible to hypnosis in some degree, but visual hallucinations require a deep trance and, usually, only about two out of five average subjects are able to cooperate that completely."

  He smiled slightly. "And I guess it's just as well, because we're stuck with minor forms of hypnotic suggestion every day of our lives: radio commercials, advertising, political propaganda. When you get right down to it, all our prejudices, including the racial ones, are little more than conditioned reflexes. A good hypnotist can make you brush your teeth with soap, or believe a Communist prison camp is Utopia, or love your neighbor."

  "Yeah. This deep-trance business, Bruce. What do you mean, cooperate?"

  "Just that. Except when drugs are used or the subject has been previously conditioned, the success of any hypnosis is primarily up to the subject. Normally he has to cooperate with the hypnotist. Of course I'm talking about the usual clinical technique when both subject and therapist have the same end in mind. There are indirect techniques, and drugs have been used with Shelled success." He leaned back in his chair and propped his feet on the desk. "That about what you wanted?"

  I grinned at him. He was getting there, and as usual he was taking the long way around. When a guy's been making his money from the investigation of crime and criminals for several years, as I have, unless he's completely bald inside his head he's bound to start wondering why some of the characters who steal and kill get that way. I'd started wondering, and that's how I'd got to know Bruce Wilson.

  For three years now, I'd been dropping in occasionally to say hello. Usually I wound up spending the day with him if I wasn't on a case, listening to him jaw or jawing myself. And always he took the long way around. I had an idea he just liked to hear himself talk.

  "Okay," I said. "You think that's the trouble with my friend?"

  "I didn't say that at all. I'd have to talk to him. But from what you said, it sounds as if it might well be that. You mentioned the hallucination occurs every day at the same time, lasts an hour, then disappears. Sounds like it."

  "Suppose this bird is a posthypnotic suggestion. Assume that's it. Why the hell didn't Jay tell me he'd been hypnotized?"

  He shook his head. "I thought you knew better than that. Don't you suppose a power that would cause a man to see a nonexistent animal could also make him forget he was ever hypnotized? As a matter of fact, when the subject's been in a deep trance there's usually no memory of the hypnosis at all. Posthypnotic amnesia it's called, and it's common. In any event, if the subject's in a deep trance, the operator or therapist—hypnotist if you want to use the slightly discredited word—can always remove memory of it. All he has to do is tell the subject he won't remember and that memory is erased from the conscious mind just as easily as words are erased from the tape of a recorder."

  "Wait a minute," I said. "You mean it's possible that could have happened to my friend?"

  "It's possible. And he wouldn't remember anything about it. The suggestions would take effect, and naturally he'd be puzzled if the suggestions were bizarre ones. If they were simple, normal things he'd probably carry out the suggestions without even thinking twice about them. If anybody asked him why he was doing that particular thing he'd probably make up a logical reason, one which he'd believe himself."

  "I'll be damned. It's a little hard to believe." Suddenly a thought hit me. "Good Lord, Bruce. If a guy could be hypnotized, then told to forget all about it ..." I stopped. Bruce was smiling.

  "Exactly," he said. He pulled his feet off the desk, scooted his chair forward and leaned on the desk top. "Once those particular manifestations of hypnosis sink in, that's a thought you're bound to come up with. Strange feeling, isn't it, to know that it's within the bounds of possibility that you, yourself, might have been hypnotized once or several times? Yesterday, last week, last year—today, even. Only you don't remember it. It could have happened to anybody. Anybody on God's green earth. And they wouldn't know a thing about it. It's conceivable that some of the things you've done were posthypnotic suggestions which you carried out even while you were rationalizing them as logical behavior."

  "But that's silly," I said. "Hell, I know I've never been hypnotized. Why, that's ..." I stopped talking. The idea was frightening.

  Bruce kept grinning. "Well, don't get excited about it. It is a possibility, of course, but it's not very probable. Except under certain conditions, the active cooperation of the subject has to be obtained—and there are very few people who'd keep such knowledge from the person who'd been hypnotized. There'd be no point in it, and it might cause serious mental conflict and even derangement. Want some more?"

  I stubbed out my cigarette, thinking of Jay's pinched face. "What do you mean, except under certain conditions?"

  "Oh, indirect techniques of hypnosis. They're all through the literature; recent experiments. And, too, we're developing the use of drugs in hypnosis—narcohypnosis. Lot of that during the war."

  "Drugs?"

  "Sure. Sodium Pentothal, for instance. Or Amytal. The drugs lower the subject's resistance; they're cortical depressants and their use makes the inhibitory centers less active—sort of paves the way to the subconscious mind and makes hypnosis much easier. Usually they're injected into the vein on the back of the hand or here at the crook of the arm." He tapped the inside of his arm at the elbow.

  I shook my head. "Wow. I came in to ask you about a parrot. But, maybe that's the answer, huh? Posthypnotic suggestion?"

  "It's possible. Might be something else, but the description dovetails neatly. It sounds as if this friend of yours might have been given suggestions in a hypnotic trance by someone—somebody showing off, probably—and then the suggestions weren't removed from his mind. Sounds like a serious mistake by a dangerous damned amateur playing around with something he knows nothing about."

  I got up. "That's plenty for one day."

  He grinned up at me. "Just a minute." He got to his feet and walked to a bookcase, took out a couple volumes and brought them back. He handed them to me and said, "These'll bring you a little more up to date, if you're interested. And let me know what happens with your friend. Bring him here if you want to."

  "Good deal, Bruce. I'll drop in tomorrow. If he's game, I'll bring him along with me."

  He nodded and I left. It was three o'clock in the afternoon, and I headed for the office. I had an hour and a half to kill before I went down to see Jay at his store, and I figured I'd spend the time reading the books Bruce had given me. Might be I'd find out something else Jay would be glad to know about.

  Besides, I wanted to know more about this thing that could make a man see a parrot that didn't exist—this thing that might, conceivably, have happened to anyone.

&n
bsp; Chapter Four

  AT FOUR-THIRTY I closed one of the books on hypnosis and shoved my chair back from the desk. My mind was spinning. I'd seldom run across anything so fraught with possibilities for good and opportunity for evil in my life.

  I took my .357 Magnum out of the desk, strapped the spring shoulder holster on and checked the gun's cylinder. I looked at the five lethal cartridges thinking they were simply one other way, more direct and less subtle, of making men do what you wanted.

  I stuffed the gun in its holster and went out.

  Jay Weather was alone when I walked into the big store on Ninth Street. I felt ill at ease when I saw him, but I made myself act as if I felt normal. I walked in past a long row of suits and he nodded at me.

  "Hello, Shell." He glanced at his watch. "Got about ten minutes—if they're on time."

  I grinned at him and said lightly, "The faithful employee. I'm doubling your salary, Jay."

  He smiled a little, but seemed preoccupied. "What'll we say to them?" he asked.

  "I dunno. Just tell the guys there's no business. New owner—me. Probably they'll retire in good order."

  A frown creased his forehead. "Afraid not. I've been—you know—not thinking too clearly, but these fellows are funny. Don't act like they'll take no for an answer."

  "They'll have to. Sounds as if it might be a couple of tough boys trying to muscle in on your business—new gimmick on the old protection racket. Anyway, you probably won't see them again after today."

  "I wish I could believe that. I don't think they'll like this."

  "Who the hell cares if they like it or not?" I added casually. "By the way, I think I know where that big green parrot of yours came from."

  "Huh? What do you mean?"

  "I talked to a psychiatrist a couple of hours ago." He flinched, but I went on, "He thinks it might be a case of posthypnotic suggestion."

  "Of what?"

  "Hypnotism. Suggestions given under hypnosis."

  He smiled and shook his head. "Can't buy that."