It’s the plot shortcoming in Death of a Tall Man that I noticed this time through. Oddly enough, despite my having read the book
several times, I hadn’t actually noticed it before. So if you haven’t read the book and think you
might want to, the entire rest of this is a plot-revealing spoiler.
The murderer has been revealed, and Bill Weigand (Acting
Captain in the Homicide Bureau) is explaining what actually happened to the
cast (including, of course, Pam and Jerry North). For the murderer to have pulled off the
murder, he had to impersonate, first, a patient awaiting (in an examination
room) an eye examination, and, second, the doctor doing the examinations. In this case, there were six patients in
individual waiting rooms, all referred for a specialist examination for worker’s
compensation claims. Each patient has a
card with his name (and other information) on it. Here, from early in the book, is a
description of how the patients were handled:
Between 11:35…and 11:55, five more men
came in,,,They identified themselves…and were assigned to the examining rooms
in the order of their arrival, Weber going into the first room, Oakes to the
second, and so on…[At this point, they
are all in the waiting room]…At noon, Grace Spencer came to the door and
said, “If you gentlemen—“ and they stood up…Grace took their cards, which
Deborah [Brooks] had numbered in
pencil in accordance with the room assigned.
Following the examination, during which the doctor (Andrew
Gordon) has made notes on their conditions, the men leave and their cards are
collected and returned to Deborah (subsequently to be provided to Dr. Gordon
for him to write up his findings.
Now, we jump to the explanation.
“Somehow he got in and got one of the
referral cards in Gordon’s office,” Bill said.
“Oakes’ card, by what turned out, for him to be bad luck. I suppose Oakes had been in before and the
card hadn’t been returned [for which I
think we need to read “filed”].
Probably it was on Miss Spencer’s desk.”
We have a reason why both Grace Spencer and Deborah Brooks
would have remembered Oakes, which we need not rehearse here. It’s a sufficiently striking reason, however,
that Deborah Brooks would have been likely to remember his name (at least I
should think so), but she apparently does not:
“A number,,,More a number than a name. A man in one of the rooms…” And our murder got the card, as Weigand says,
he “[s]kipped in and got one of the morning cards…They were done with and
filed; they wouldn’t be checked for days; with the doctor dead, they would
probably never be checked…”
This gives us our first couple of problems. First, the murderer needs to be familiar
enough with the layout of the office, and the office routines, to have some
idea how the examination process works and where the cards are likely to be. Specifically, where the cards from the morning
group of compensation patients are likely to be. (If they had been filed, this would be very
difficult; at one point, we’re told that they were on Spencer’s desk, at
another that they had been filed.) But
we are told explicitly that neither Spencer nor Brooks knows him well, that he
has not been in the office often (or at all?).
Second, the murderer, after arriving (not first, and not last) has to
sit in the waiting room for 5-10 minutes.
Now, he has done something to his hair and is wearing dark glasses. But if he is familiar enough with the office
to have found a card, then Spencer or Brooks would have would have been likely
to recognize him, disguised or not. So
we have a contradiction. Third, the card
would have a number penciled on it from Oakes’ actual visit to the office that
morning. So either the murderer had with
him a pencil and managed to surreptitiously erase the number (without leaving a
trace of its presence) or Brooks was incredibly obtuse.
(We are told explicitly, however, that "neither of the women
in the office knew him well—“The nurse and Debbie barely knew him by sight;
there was hardly a chance that they would recognize him behind the dark
glasses, and they had not.” This is hard
to reconcile with his apparently detailed knowledge of how the examination
procedure works.)
Then our murderer kills Gordon (in Examination Room 2) and
drags him back to his private office and props him up in the desk chair. He takes Gordon’s glasses (to use now in his
impersonation of the doctor), proceeds to “examine” the remaining four
patients, and then ducks quickly out of the office by its rear door—where Spencer, the nurse, was sitting. Presumably, the
murderer was physically similar enough and dressed similarly enough (e.g., in a
suit of approximately the same color and cut) to get away with this, although
we are not told. He goes away to
establish his alibi (which depends on everyone believing that Gordon actually
performed the examinations—and here’s our next problem—and presumably made
notes on the cards of the patients in writing similar enough to be take for
Gordon's. Cards with no notes would raise
an issue, and handwriting too different would raise a very similar issue. For the murderer’s alibi depends strongly on
Gordon’s having been alive after the murderer, disguise and all, had left.
Incidentally, no one seems to have commented on the fact
that no one saw “Oakes” leave despite a physical distinctiveness that would
have made him very noticeable.
So we have us some problems here, and I don’t pretend to
have any clear ideas about how to get around them. But, then, I did read the book several times
before I noticed…
