The Conjure-Man Dies by Rudolph Fisher

Author:Rudolph Fisher [Rudolph Fisher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2016-11-18T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XVIII

BY eleven-thirty the same Sunday morning, Dr Archer had completed his morning calls—both of them. He returned to his office, where he found three gentlemen awaiting him. Two were patients, the third was Detective Perry Dart.

‘Urgent?’ he asked Dart.

‘Nope. Take the others.’

The others were soon disposed of; the first pleaded a bad cold and got his liquor prescription, the second pleaded hard times and borrowed three dollars.

‘Come in here,’ the physician then summoned Dart, and led the way through his treatment room with its adjustable table, porcelain stands, glass-doored steel cabinets shining with bright—and mostly virgin—instruments, into a smaller side room which had done duty as a butler’s pantry in the days before Harlem changed colour.

‘Something like Frimbo’s,’ commented the detective, looking admiringly around.

‘In part, yes. That is, Frimbo has some clinical stuff, but that’s only a fraction of his, while it’s all of mine. He has chemistry apparatus that a physician’s lab would never need except for research, and few practicing physicians have time for that kind of research. More than that, he has some electrical stuff there that only a physicist or mechanic would have, and I’m sure I saw something like a television receptor on one end of the bench—remember that affair like a big lens set in a square box? Those specimens sort of stole the show and we didn’t take time to examine around carefully. But all I’ve got is what’s necessary for routine clinical tests—some glassware, a few standard reagents, a centrifuge, a microscope, and that’s about all.’

‘I guess all labs look alike to me.’

‘Well, there’s enough here to investigate certain properties of our friend’s blood, any day. If the two specimens present no differences that we can determine, we’re stumped—so far as murder goes. But if they do—’

‘Is this something new, doc?’

‘New? No, why?’

‘Well, of course I knew they could tell whether it was human blood. I know of plenty of cases where blood was found on a weapon, and the suspect claimed it was chicken’s blood or sheep’s blood, but the doctors came along and showed it was human. I should think that would be hard enough.’

‘Not so hard. A chap—Gay, I believe—sensitized some lab animals—guinea pigs or rabbits or whatever happened to be around—to various serums. You see, if you do it right, you can inject a little serum into an animal and he’ll develop what they call antibodies for that serum. Antibody’s a substance which the blood manufactures to combat certain things that get into it but haven’t any business there. But the point is that each antibody is specific—hostile to just one certain thing. From the viewpoint of the health of the human family, that’s too bad. Be swell if you could just inject a little of anything and get a general immunity to everything. But from the viewpoint of criminology it’s useful, because if you’re smart enough, you can tell whether your suspect is lying or not about the blood on his weapon. You just dissolve your blood off the weapon, and test it against the sensitized blood from each of your known animals.

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