Part 14
The deep singing was like a walking cane as she started across the room for the door. She pulled the knob, hesitantly, ascertained the student nurse was out of sight, and gathering all of her strength, ran the few feet to the screen porch door. When her knees gave way she was on the concrete steps, halfway down to Ward A, and Ward A was the ground floor.
A wild mental clearing made her understand that with or without strength, she had to reach that porch off Ward A, get over the railing and drop to the ground, before the nurses began rolling the patients out for their afternoon airing.
Ten minutes later, a young girl, walking with an erectness every motion of which hurt, entered Otto’s restaurant and leaned against the deserted bar.
She fastened her violet eyes into Otto and said:
“I love Cub Sterling as much as you do. I think I can save him ... if you’ll lend me a dollar for two hours....”
The money was in her hand before Otto could open his lips. When he did open them, the girl was already in a taxi-cab, and the cab was coasting down the hill from the hospital.
When Miss Carruthers, in response to a telephone call, brought Evelina Kerr, student nurse, to Dr. MacArthur’s office, Matt Higgins rose from a chair and said:
“Miss Carruthers, Dr. MacArthur just stepped out a minute.... He asked me to wait until he returned and ask you to please let this nurse...?”
His “silver threads” smile brought an immediate acquiescence. The old lady smiled, backed out, and Higgins offered the student nurse a chair.
She sat upon the edge, her narrow feet together and the bony ankles pressing against each other. Higgins offered her a cigarette. Her refusal was jerky.
“Excuse me,” he said walking toward the door. “My mistake. I don’t want to get you thrown out.”
She flinched slightly and her round chin tried for a well-bred hauteur. It missed.
When the door was closed, Higgins looked squarely, slowly, with open summary, at the girl. She thought he was flirting. When his eyes began their spreading lid trick, she felt as though he were pointing the muzzle of a pistol toward her. She tried to fight his silence with words.
“Who are you? Why are you looking at me that way?”
Higgins laid his head against the door. His lids continued widening.
Her words beat the air:
“Stop looking at me! Stop it!”
His words were like an ice cloth against her brain:
“Why don’t you quit lying, girlie?”
The battle was uneven. Perfect physical control against shattered nerves. Her close-set eyes began to ferret. She made a last effort to hide behind her sex.
“I’m not lying. I don’t know what you are talking about! You are crazy!”
Matt’s eyes stayed steadfast. He said very slowly:
“No ... it’s your aunt who is crazy!”
Her beaten nerves threw the battle back to her body. She leaped to her feet.
“She’s not. She’s not! I swear to God she’s not!”
Higgins walked over and clenched his hands into her shoulders.
“Look at me!”
She fought to get loose.
He increased, gradually, his hold.
“Look ... at ... me...!”
Her piglike eyes cringed before his steel ones.
Quickly, unexpectedly, he released his hold and smiled at her. His voice was deep.
“Kiddo, I’m sorry for you. Sit down!”
She fell into a chair and began dry-sobbing. He filled a glass from the thermos jug on the mantel and placed it against her lips. And while she drank, with his free hand he soothed her ugly little forehead as one soothes a terrified child.
Kindness was the one thing the girl had never known. She couldn’t fence against it.
Higgins’ reasoning voice suggested:
“Tell me about it, won’t you?”
He took the glass and set it upon the table. Then he took her sweating hand and held it protectingly in his.
The words cascaded out of her:
“She’s not killing them! I swear to God she’s not! She’s ... she’s ... I can’t tell you ... she’ll have me thrown out.... I can’t! I can’t!”
Higgins put his other hand beneath the hand he was already holding.
“Go on!” he ordered in a monotone.... “She’s...?”
His eyes picked into the shady depths of her close-set ones. He smiled again....
The girl’s terror fell away. She whispered:
“She’s ... taking ... morphia-off-the-ward-I’m-on-in-her-clinic. At night. Between the supervisor’s rounds!”
Neither the pressure of his hands nor his voice changed.
“For herself?”
“Yes!”
“Is she an...?”
The girl’s whisper was almost inaudible....
“I ... I ... think ... so....”
Higgins’ voice became stern.
“Then how do you know she’s not ... the murderer?”
The girl shot back instantly:
“Because she ... didn’t come until I notified her ... the night ... the nurse ... went out!”
“Maybe you didn’t see her.”
Her words came in gasps:
“I ... I ... counted-the-tablets ... when-I-came-on ... duty ... and-when-I-went-off. They ... checked...!”
“Perhaps she didn’t take any to throw you off the track. Had you thought of...?’”
The terror in her eyes and voice made Matt shiver.
“No...!”
The word was a wail.
He changed his tactics immediately.
“That’s not likely, though. When the urge is ‘on’, nothing ... not even murder ... can stop it.”
He had risen while he was talking and opened the door into the corridor. Ten minutes had passed. Dr. MacArthur entered. Higgins said to the girl:
“You have nothing more to worry about. Dr. MacArthur and Miss Carruthers will stand behind you ... till you graduate!”
Then he went out of the Administration Building, down the main corridor of the hospital. The corridor was nearly empty. In the distance five probationers, with new text books under their arms, were coming toward him, but they were the only people in sight. The wards had settled down for the afternoon, the white nurses were off duty, and two student nurses on each floor and the head nurse of each building were on duty. The internes and resident were doing lab or case studies.
After he rounded the corner and started toward Medicine Clinic, he met more people and an air of increased tension. The tension was especially plain in the orderlies and maids. He remembered that he had forgotten to tell Snod about the roses, and considered going up to Ward B after he entered Medicine Clinic, then decided to let it slip. That would be dangerous. Even though he had his group cornered there was no reason to take unnecessary chances.
Good thing he had spent part of last evening checking up on Miss Kerr’s past. Now that he had the dope information....
Lil Parkins was the best woman he had ever worked with. She smelt people like a dog. Kind of sixth sense and she never missed. Her hunches had made his reputation.
The explosive air hung over him like a pall. Through an open door he could see Miss Roenna Kerr, her flat feet primly under her desk, her white pompadour overhanging her lean face....
He walked straight into her office and closed the door behind him. Her pen dropped from her fingers and she turned her long head. Then her face became as devoid of expression as a mule’s. Panicky and blank with fear. But her long years of training came briskly to her aid.
“What can I do for you? Is there something in the Clinic that you failed to see, Mr. Immerheld?”
“I’m not Mr. Immerheld of Cornell Medical Center, Miss Kerr. I am from New York, though, and you can be so good as to tell me,” his gray eyes narrowed and tried to make her china blue ones rise above his necktie, “how you happened to have this?”
He drew from his back pocket the doll in the blue dress and frilled bonnet, that Mattus had found in Miss Kerr’s desk, and turned it over on its stomach.
The raucous, “Pa-pa! Pa-pa! Pa-pa!” kept repeating itself slowly and insistently.
“Turn it over! Turn it over! I’ll tell you,” there was relief in her voice.
“My niece had a P. M. several ... about ... a week ago ... and went to a street fair and won it. She brought it to me....”
Higgins seated himself carefully in a chair beside her desk and said:
“Half an hour ago the doll that your niece won was lying in her top bureau drawer!”
Without intending to do so, her china blue eyes raised to his and he shot past her protective covering into her unprepared ear:
“Is morphia quicker than cocaine?”
From inside, without intention, she answered:
“Yes. Much.”
Then she realized what she had said and opened her lips to make a statement about “depending upon the condition of the patient....”
Higgins did not allow her to utter the words. Once an addict has acknowledged the habit, he knew she was powerless to refrain from talking about it.
“What’s the shot you use?”
“An eighth used to do. It’s a half now....”
Her hands began to flutter wildly. Higgins turned the doll over again. Its nasal whining raised the electric tension.
His voice cut through the whining. He said:
“It was clever of you not to take any tablets the night you did the nurse....”
“I didn’t! Before God, I _didn’t do_....”
“You don’t like Cub Sterling, do you?”
The question shot at her like a bullet. She staggered internally.
“Dr. Hoffbein doesn’t like him, either! Dr. Hoffbein used to put you to sleep after...!”
“After what?” she defied and cowered at the same time.
“After that woman doctor you lived with died.”
“That’s not so. How do you know that?”
“Dr. Hoffbein.”
“He didn’t tell you either. He just called me....”
“Maybe it’s in your case history, then....” He leaned quickly forward. “Why did you hide the doll?”
“To protect my niece.”
He changed his tactics:
“Did you use your own syringe on the nurse?”
The old woman’s facial muscles contracted. Her yellow teeth laid bare against her purpling lips. Her bust relaxed hopelessly and then she began to talk, openly, helplessly:
“I didn’t do the nurse. Really, I didn’t. I didn’t do any of them! ... I ... I ... was ... there ... Monday ... but....”
“Who did ... them ... if you didn’t?”
Her china eyes protruded.
“One ... one of ... the Cub Sterling’s!!!”
“What?”
The words bit through her old teeth:
“There are two of them! ... Two...! ... Two Cub Sterlings...! I _saw_ them that night ... of the first traceable murder Monday night! ... I was coming out of the Medicine Closet with my ... and one of them was bending over the patient in Bed 11, and one of them was shadowed against the window shade bending over the patient in Room Two.
“And the one ... bending over the patient in Bed 11 ...” her words began to burst ... “_saw me_! I know _he saw me_! ...”
Higgins cut in sternly:
“It was your duty to ... investigate....”
Her hands began to pick her bosom wildly.
“I couldn’t.... I couldn’t.... Don’t you see I couldn’t?”
“Why didn’t you tell Dr. Hoffbein...?”
“Because ... because ... he had said if ... I ever went back ... to my ... habit ... on duty....”
Higgins nodded grimly and hunched forward.
“Who around this hospital looks like Cub Sterling?”
“Nobody! I swear nobody! Oh, God, I’ve been over every single face since then ... in my mind ... and on sight.... Nobody!”
“One of those Cub Sterlings was a man who knew you were taking dope, Miss Kerr ... who knew that when you saw him ... you’d keep your mouth shut. Who knew...?”
“Nobody but ... my ... niece! That’s why I took the doll. To keep the Staff from ... grilling her ... I was afraid....”
“You are missing out somewhere. Who checks the dope?”
“The floor nurse, once a month. She gives the sheet to me and I turn the clinic sheets over to the pharmacy....”
“Ah, the pharmacy! They knew, Miss Kerr!”
“No! No! They didn’t know. I ... I ... changed ... the sheet from Ward B ... the day I turned it in ... so as to cover....”
“When did you turn it in?”
“The day of the first traceable murder.”
“Take your telephone, Miss Kerr, and ask the white nurse from Ward B if the pharmacy called her to check her figures.”
“She’s off duty now.”
“Get her in her room!”
The old nurse hesitated and cringed.
Higgins’ voice cut her into action.
“If you want to save your own neck ... take it!”
When Miss Kerr hung the receiver back upon the hook she whispered:
“They did. She ... read them ... her pencil memorandum ... on Monday....”
Higgins rose steadily and said carefully:
“If you go on as though nothing has happened, you may get off ... scott free. As soon as I step from this door, until I return, there will always be somebody watching you. Is the pharmacy next to the Administration Building?”
Her wilted voice responded:
“Yes. It is off the main corridor ... but I can’t go on! I _can’t_!”
He stood against the closed door and snapped:
“Would you rather have a chance to resign ... or spend the rest of your life in the pen?”
“Resign!”
“You are not off duty until seven! Understand?”
The old pompadour shook carelessly.
Higgins opened the door and started through the lobby and up the main corridor toward the pharmacy. His brain was reeling. He was dizzy.
Two Cub Sterlings! God Almighty! Suppose she was lying? Suppose? ... She was too frightened to leave, though.... The best thing to do was sit tight and look over the pharmacy staff.
When Snod Smooty came back on Ward B, he found two student nurses on duty and the women remarkably quiet. They were still subdued by the grandness of Dr. Cub Sterling’s leaving his dying father to come to see about them. They were excited over his furrowed face and his sudden ageing. They didn’t call it that, but they felt it, profoundly. To the funeral-wake-type, death is always as exciting as birth, and the death of a famous doctor....
Snod tiptoed up to lower a window shade near Lil Parkins’ bed. She was sleeping peacefully and contentedly. The same feeling of admiration which the other women had experienced for Cub Sterling had taken the form of protective relaxation in Lil Parkins. He would see that nothing happened to her. He had told her to go to sleep.
An expression of sudden warmth lay over the colorless features of Snod Smooty as he looked at Lil. A grand girl, Lil! And a swell detective! Do anything for a pal. Nursed him through pneumonia last fall, just because he was her friend....
The day orderly beckoned to him and he went back to washing dishes. They worked quietly and with the doors closed. One of the nurses came to say she was going off the floor a minute.
The day orderly was a squashy fellow who talked all the time. Snod had known it soon as he set eyes on him. He finished the saucers and left the man still talking. His garrulousness had put Snod’s nerves on the jump and he was hungry, too.
Three-thirty and the fool wouldn’t leave him long enough to get even a bottle of cream outa the ice box! Maybe a cigarette would help....
Snod eased over toward the door and through it. Halfway up the ward corridor, he caught sight of chubby Bessie Ellis sitting up in her crib and playing with a doll ... exactly like the two Dr. MacArthur had shown them yesterday.
He ran noiselessly to her crib and smiled at her. They were friends immediately. As he passed the medicine closet he saw the single student nurse coming out of the nurses’ lavatory.
When he smiled at Bessie he took hold of the foot-board of the crib to steady himself. She was six, and the pink dress of the doll looked pretty against her brown curls and eyes.
It was the hardest job he had ever tackled. He said slowly, and his face was innocent and friendly:
“Where did you get that new dollie Baby?”
“Dr. Cub jes’ gave her to me....”
Snod reeled from the bed and staggered toward that of Lil Parkins. The other women were still asleep. Some of them were snoring. He leaned over and peered behind the drawn curtain.
Lil’s eyes were wild with fear and her face began to contract.
“Stop it!” Snod’s voice was harsh and heavy. “Tell me! You all right?”
She nodded weakly and her intense features began kaleidoscoping her thoughts:
“God Almighty! It’s Dr. Cub Sterling. I trapped him ... cold.... He thought I was asleep and when he leaned over me ... with the hypodermic....” her profile shadow convulsed against the white pillow, “I ... opened ... my eyes. He had pulled the curtains to ... get me...!
“I said, ‘You!’ and started to scream ... and he drew back and his eyes, Snod. Oh, God ... run mad, together. Crazy! And then he cocked his left shoulder, shrugged, lowered his curly head and bowed himself ... out.
“It’s spells, Snod. He wasn’t that way this morning. His eyes! I couldn’t scream. My heart....”
“Rest it, kiddo, till I get Matt.”
Snod coiled around and his eyes with the sudden sharpness of great stress saw the tall figure with the high shoulder walk out of the linen closet and enter the elevator.
And then swiftly, noiselessly, and panther-like he followed.
The elevator door closed just as he reached it.
Three minutes later Snod Smooty slouched up the main corridor. Nobody was in sight, either way, except in the distance was a man. The man wore a white hospital coat, and Snod eyed him hopelessly; then Snod’s eyes narrowed.
The man’s left shoulder had lifted and from the left patch pocket there was dangling a frilled pink organdie doll bonnet!
Snod gathered his muscles and began to run....
He was almost up with the man when a panicky woman opened a side door and halted his progress.
She fell into his arms, before he could sidestep her, and the agony of her face made him involuntarily support her.
“The Maternity Clinic. Quick! For God’s sake, quick!”
Snod looked both ways. Only the tall figure was visible.
“For God’s sake, hurry!”
He gathered the tortured body of the woman into his long arms and began running with his back to the retreating figure.
Nature had tripped him, and he knew it.
When he had helped the orderly inside the door of the Maternity Clinic, who awaited such emergencies, to get the panic-stricken woman onto a handy stretcher, Snod turned swiftly and started slowly back toward the Administration Building.
MacArthur would know where Matt was. No use trying to locate him through Miss Kerr.
God in Heaven! Young Sterling! And they had been so damn near framing three innocent people! Within that space of a hundred yards, he must readjust his mind.
His ineffectual thin body shambled innocuously along....
Behind him there burst upon the air the perfect trilling of a robin. Snod slid over to a window and looked stupidly at the grass in the back garden.
Matt Higgins drew alongside and asked loudly:
“Beg your pardon, but could you tell me the way...?”
Snod began pointing through the window at the different buildings. His eyes followed his fingers. His voice, once it had formulated an action, was like a scimiter blade. It shimmered:
“Where’s MacArthur?”
Higgins was harassed and hot. He was measuring his forefinger against the left thumb.
“Gone to train to meet dead nurse’s mother. There are two Cub Sterlings, old Kerr says. Just confessed. Claims she’s seen ’em. On my way now....”
Snod’s loose hands continued their flappings.
“Kerr’s innocent. Two? Jes-sus! One Cub Sterling just tried to murder Lil. She frightened him off!”
Higgins face grayed.
“W-h-a-t?”
Snod snapped, “I nearly caught him. Had a doll bonnet hanging from his pocket, walking up this corridor five minutes ago. Pregnant woman....”
A smile almost split Matt’s lips. Words knocked it off:
“I’ll call MacArthur at the station. Have him get the sheriff to send a warrant immediately. No! I’ll get the kids’ man. His brother is Attorney-General. He can act quicker. Then I’ll watch Cub Sterling, until they come. Give me time to think. Something don’t click. I still don’t believe it...! You go to the pharmacy before you go back to Lil ... over there ... and see if the pharmacist is in ... if he is watch him until I come....”
Snod’s hands continued their waving. But his eye was out upon the corridor. He hissed:
“A running man.... Turn around, Matt!”
Matt whirled. Ahead, almost through the door into the Administration Building, and round the statue of Elijah Wilson, careened Cub Sterling.
Higgins’ legs were in motion and his words shot back:
“I’ll follow this one. You watch out for Lil! The other may try again....”
Snod’s face remained blank. His biscuit watch was in his hand. Four doctors were coming up the corridor. His deferential voice followed Higgins:
“You have five minutes to make that train, sir.”
»X« The Cupola
As the taxi woggled downhill, Jumbo’s words pushed past the busy clicking of the meter into Sally’s weary brain. Once inside her consciousness, they rolled around like brightly colored Christmas tree balls, and butted into each other and crashed. Far down beneath the shattering concussions her mind began reverberating:
“Think it over, think it over, think it over.”
Twice she decided to go to Bucks and then she knew it would be hopeless. They couldn’t help if a big story broke. They didn’t make the news. They ... they were like buzzards ... and she must do something to keep them ... from....
Murdering patients.... Oh God! Oh God! ... No! ... They are wrong!
She pushed her curly bright hair back from her sweating forehead, and at _The Call_ building gave the driver the dollar, and slipped unnoticed into a crowded elevator and out again in the main hallway of the sixth floor.
This wouldn’t do. Somebody might come along.
She leaned against the wall for a moment, then decided to walk up to the seventh floor. There was a vacant suite of offices on the corner; perhaps if she went where there was plenty of room her brain would get ... wider....
Half way up the marble stairs began rising and hitting her in the face, and then slipping back so that she couldn’t quite reach them when she stepped. She slumped and rested.
If Cub’s arms were only around her now. How many murders had there been? Four! Jumbo had said four, and the last a nurse. The night he brought the last cigarettes. She hadn’t seen him since the morning after ... the nurse.... Not since Dr. Bear began dying ... but she knew! She knew!
Oh God! God! It wasn’t Cub! It wasn’t! A murderer couldn’t kiss you so that your soul ran up and spread out flat under his lips.... A murderer couldn’t look at you so that you said you were sorry, even when you tried not to be.... A murderer’s hair wouldn’t fold into little waves where it spread under the curve at the back of his neck.
But how could you tell a paper that? How could you make a city editor understand ... when you had no proof ... that a man was innocent and framed?
There must be some way! You had to think clearly to see it, and the place to think was upstairs with the whole world spread out below in orderly rows and streets. Just as the sun spread over the city, and strengthened it, so control made it possible.... Two hours! Less than that now....
She clenched her fists tightly and rose with studied steadiness. Necessity cleared the brain. Working in a newspaper office taught that the best ideas came under pressure. She had gone out on enough murder stories to know the person who worked his brain ... could beat anything ... even newspaper reporters and ... police.
By the time Sally reached the door of the vacant suite, the seams of her stockings were straightened and her reddening eyes carefully and painstakingly dry. There was an air of jauntiness about her small figure.
She had a head and was going to use it!
Her violet eyes had changed to the deep purple and iridescent white of orchids. She closed the door and stood against it. Then her irises focused.
A stooped, intent figure was silhouetted between the rows of windows and the long city vistas below. For a second her artistic sense forebade speech.
Like an apple tree, gnarled and buffeted by too much winter, the thin shoulders, flat chest, beak nose, and long hands ribboned with purple veins, strained after the peering eyes which were hidden by a pair of binoculars. The dirty white hair drawn into a tightly furled knot, on the upper front of the head, helped Sally recognize the next-to-the-oldest-employe of _The Morning Call_. She momentarily forgot Cub Sterling.
“Emma! What are you doing?”