The Dain Curse Page 16

  “Are you sure,” Fitzstephan asked, “that you’re right in thinking there must be a connection?”

  “Yeah. Gabrielle’s father, step-mother, physician, and husband have been slaughtered in less than a handful of weeks—all the people closest to her. That’s enough to tie it all together for me. If you want more links, I can point them out to you. Upton and Ruppert were the apparent instigators of the first trouble, and got killed. Haldorn of the second, and got killed. Whidden of the third, and got killed. Mrs. Leggett killed her husband; Cotton apparently killed his wife; and Haldorn would have killed his if I hadn’t blocked him. Gabrielle, as a child, was made to kill her mother; Gabrielle’s maid was made to kill Riese, and nearly me. Leggett left behind him a statement explaining—not altogether satisfactorily—everything, and was killed. So did and was Mrs. Cotton. Call any of these pairs coincidences. Call any couple of pairs coincidences. You’ll still have enough left to point at somebody who’s got a system he likes, and sticks to it.”

  Fitzstephan squinted thoughtfully at me, agreeing:

  “There may be something in that. It does, as you put it, look like the work of one mind.”

  “And a goofy one.”

  “Be obstinate about it,” he said. “But even your goof must have a motive.”

  “Why?”

  “Damn your sort of mind,” he said with good-natured impatience. “If he had no motive connected with Gabrielle, why should his crimes be connected with her?”

  “We don’t know that all of them are,” I pointed out. “We only know of the ones that are.”

  He grinned and said:

  “You’ll go any distance to disagree, won’t you?”

  I said:

  “Then again, maybe the goofs crimes are connected with Gabrielle because he is.”

  Fitzstephan let his gray eyes go sleepy over that, pursing his mouth, looking at the door closed between my room and Gabrielle’s.

  “All right,” he said, looking at me again. “Who’s your maniac close to Gabrielle?”

  “The closest and goofiest person to Gabrielle is Gabrielle herself.”

  Fitzstephan got up and crossed the hotel room—I was sitting on the edge of the bed—to shake my hand with solemn enthusiasm.

  “You’re wonderful,” he said. “You amaze me. Ever have night sweats? Put out your tongue and say, ‘Ah.’ ”

  “Suppose,” I began, but was interrupted by a feeble tapping on the corridor door.

  I went to the door and opened it. A thin man of my own age and height in wrinkled black clothes stood in the corridor. He was breathing heavily through a red-veined nose, and his small brown eyes were timid.

  “You know me,” he said apologetically.

  “Yeah. Come in.” I introduced him to Fitzstephan: “This is the Tom Fink who was one of Haldorn’s helpers in the Temple of the Holy Grail.”

  Fink looked reproachfully at me, then dragged his crumpled hat from his head and crossed the room to shake Fitzstephan’s hand. That done, he returned to me and said, almost whispering:

  “I come down to tell you something.”

  “Yeah?”

  He fidgeted, turning his hat around and around in his hands. I winked at Fitzstephan and went out with Fink. In the corridor, I closed the door and stopped, saying: “Let’s have it.”

  Fink rubbed his lips with his tongue and then with the back of one scrawny hand. He said, in his half-whisper:

  “I come down to tell you something I thought you ought to know.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s about this fellow Whidden that was killed.”

  “Yeah?”

  “He was—”

  The door to my room split open. Floors, walls, and ceiling wriggled under, around, and over us. There was too much noise to be heard—a roar that was felt bodily. Tom Fink was carried away from me, backward. I had sense enough to throw myself down as I was blown in the opposite direction, and got nothing worse out of it than a bruised shoulder when I hit the wall. A door-frame stopped Fink, wickedly, its edge catching the back of his head. He came forward again, folding over to lie face-down on the floor, still except for blood running from his head.

  I got up and made for my room. Fitzstephan was a mangled pile of flesh and clothing in the center of the floor. My bed was burning. There was neither glass nor wire netting left in the window. I saw these things mechanically as I staggered toward Gabrielle’s room. The connecting door was open—perhaps blown open.

  She was crouching on all fours in bed, facing the foot, her feet on the pillows. Her nightdress was torn at one shoulder. Her green-brown eyes—glittering under brown curls that had tumbled down to hide her forehead—were the eyes of an animal gone trap-crazy. Saliva glistened on her pointed chin. There was nobody else in the room.

  “Where’s the nurse?” My voice was choked.

  The girl said nothing. Her eyes kept their crazy terror focused on me.

  “Get under the covers,” I ordered. “Want to get pneumonia?”

  She didn’t move. I walked around to the side of the bed, lifting an end of the covers with one hand, reaching out the other to help her, saying:

  “Come on, get inside.”

  She made a queer noise deep in her chest, dropped her head, and put her sharp teeth into the back of my hand. It hurt. I put her under the covers, returned to my room, and was pushing my burning mattress through the window when people began to arrive.

  “Get a doctor,” I called to the first of them; “and stay out of here.”

  I had got rid of the mattress by the time Mickey Linehan pushed through the crowd that was now filling the corridor. Mickey blinked at what was left of Fitzstephan, at me, and asked:

  “What the hell?”

  His big loose mouth sagged at the ends, looking like a grin turned upside down.

  I licked burnt fingers and asked unpleasantly:

  “What the hell does it look like?”

  “More trouble, sure.” The grin turned right side up on his red face. “Sure—you’re here.”

  Ben Rolly came in. “Tch, tch, tch,” he said, looking around. “What do you suppose happened?”

  “Pineapple,” I said.

  “Tch, tch, tch.”

  Doctor George came in and knelt beside the wreck of Fitzstephan. George had been Gabrielle’s physician since her return from the cave the previous day. He was a short, chunky, middle-aged man with a lot of black hair everywhere except on his lips, cheeks, chin, and nose-bridge. His hairy hands moved over Fitzstephan.

  “What’s Fink been doing?” I asked Mickey.

  “Hardly any. I got on his tail when they sprung him yesterday noon. He went from the hoosegow to a hotel on Kearny Street and got himself a room. He spent most of the afternoon in the Public Library, reading the newspaper files on the girl’s troubles, from beginning to date. He ate after that, and went back to the hotel. He could have back-doored me. If he didn’t, he camped in his room all night. It was dark at midnight when I knocked off so I could be on the job at six A.M. He showed at seven something, got breakfast, and grabbed a rattler for Poston, changed to the stage for here, and came straight to the hotel, asking for you. That’s the crop.”

  “Damn my soul!” the kneeling doctor exclaimed. “The man’s not dead.”

  I didn’t believe him. Fitzstephan’s right arm was gone, and most of his right leg. His body was too twisted to see what was left of it, but there was only one side to his face. I said:

  “There’s another one out in the hall, with his head knocked in.”

  “Oh, he’s all right,” the doctor muttered without looking up. “But this one—well, damn my soul!”

  He scrambled to his feet and began ordering this and that. He was excited. A couple of men came in from the corridor. The woman who had been nursing Gabrielle Collinson—a Mrs. Herman—joined them, and another man with a blanket. They took Fitzstephan away.

  “That fellow out in the hall Fink?” Rolly asked.

  “Yeah.�
�� I told him what Fink had told me, adding: “He hadn’t finished when the blow-up came.”

  “Suppose the bomb was meant for him, meant to keep him from finishing?”

  Mickey said: “Nobody followed him down from the city, except me.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Better see what they’re doing with him, Mick.”

  Mickey went out.

  “This window was closed,” I told Rolly. “There was no noise as of something being thrown through the glass just before the explosion: and there’s no broken windowglass inside the room. The screen was over it, too, so we can say the pineapple wasn’t chucked in through the window.”

  Rolly nodded vaguely, looking at the door to Gabrielle’s room.

  “Fink and I were in the corridor talking,” I went on. “I ran straight back through here to her room. Nobody could have got out of her room after the explosion without my seeing them—or hearing them. There wasn’t finger-snapping time between my losing sight of her corridor-door from the outside, and seeing it again from the inside. The screen over her window is still OK.”

  “Mrs. Herman wasn’t in there with her?” Rolly asked.

  “She was supposed to be, but wasn’t. We’ll find out about that. There’s no use thinking Mrs. Collinson chucked the bomb. She’s been in bed since we brought her back from Dull Point yesterday. She couldn’t have had the bomb planted there because she had no way of knowing that she was going to occupy the room. Nobody’s been in there since except you, Feeney, Vernon, the doctor, the nurse, and me.”

  “I wasn’t going to say she had anything to do with it,” the deputy sheriff mumbled. “What does she say?”

  “Nothing yet. We’ll try her now, though I doubt if it’ll get us much.”

  It didn’t. Gabrielle lay in the middle of the bed, the covers gathered close to her chin as if she was prepared to duck down under them at the first alarm, and shook her head No to everything we asked, whether the answer fit or didn’t.

  The nurse came in, a big-breasted, red-haired woman of forty-something with a face that seemed honest because it was homely, freckled, and blue-eyed. She swore on the Gideon Bible that she had been out of the room for less than five minutes, just going downstairs for some stationery, intending to write a letter to her nephew in Vallejo while her patient was sleeping; and that was the only time she had been out of the room all day. She had met nobody in the corridor, she said.

  “You left the door unlocked?” I asked.

  “Yes, so I wouldn’t be as likely to wake her when I came back.”

  “Where’s the stationery you got?”

  “I didn’t get it. I heard the explosion and ran back upstairs.” Fear came into her face, turning the freckles to ghastly spots. “You don’t think—!”

  “Better look after Mrs. Collinson,” I said gruffly.

  19

  THE DEGENERATE

  Rolly and I went back to my room, closing the connecting door. He said:

  “Tch, tch, tch. I’d of thought Mrs. Herman was the last person in the world to—”

  “You ought to’ve,” I grumbled. “You recommended her. Who is she?”

  “She’s Tod Herman’s wife. He’s got the garage. She used to be a trained nurse before she married Tod. I thought she was all right.”

  “She got a nephew in Vallejo?”

  “Uh-huh; that would be the Schultz kid that works at Mare Island. How do you suppose she come to get mixed up in—?”

  “Probably didn’t, or she would have had the writing paper she went after. Put somebody here to keep people out till we can borrow a San Francisco bomb-expert to look it over.”

  The deputy called one of the men in from the corridor, and we left him looking important in the room. Mickey Linehan was in the lobby when we got there.

  “Fink’s got a cracked skull. He’s on his way to the county hospital with the other wreck.”

  “Fitzstephan dead yet?” I asked.

  “Nope, and the doc thinks if they get him over where they got the right kind of implements they can keep him from dying. God knows what for—the shape he’s in! But that’s just the kind of stuff a croaker thinks is a lot of fun.”

  “Was Aaronia Haldorn sprung with Fink?” I asked.

  “Yes. Al Mason’s tailing her.”

  “Call up the Old Man and see if Al’s reported anything on her. Tell the Old Man what’s happened here, and see if they’ve found Andrews.”

  “Andrews?” Rolly asked as Mickey headed for the phone. “What’s the matter with him?”

  “Nothing that I know of; only we haven’t been able to find him to tell him Mrs. Collinson has been rescued. His office hasn’t seen him since yesterday morning, and nobody will say they know where he is.”

  “Tch, tch, tch. Is there any special reason for wanting him?”

  “I don’t want her on my hands the rest of my life,” I said. “He’s in charge of her affairs, he’s responsible for her, and I want to turn her over to him.”

  Rolly nodded vaguely.

  We went outside and asked all the people we could find all the questions we could think of. None of the answers led anywhere, except to repeated assurance that the bomb hadn’t been chucked through the window. We found six people who had been in sight of that side of the hotel immediately before, and at the time of, the explosion; and none of them had seen anything that could be twisted into bearing on the bomb-throwing.

  Mickey came away from the phone with the information that Aaronia Haldorn, when released from the city prison, had gone to the home of a family named Jeffries in San Mateo, and had been there ever since; and that Dick Foley, hunting for Andrews, had hopes of locating him in Sausalito.

  District attorney Vernon and Sheriff Feeney, with a horde of reporters and photographers close behind them, arrived from the county seat. They went through a lot of detecting motions that got them nowhere except on the front pages of all the San Francisco and Los Angeles papers—the place they liked best.

  I had Gabrielle Collinson moved into another room in the hotel, and posted Mickey Linehan next door, with the connecting door unlocked. Gabrielle talked now, to Vernon, Feeney, Rolly, and me. What she said didn’t help us much. She had been asleep, she said; had been awakened by a terrible noise and a terrible jarring of her bed; and then I had come in. That was all she knew:

  Late in the afternoon McCracken, a San Francisco police department bomb-expert, arrived. After examining all the fragments of this and that which he could sweep up, he gave us a preliminary verdict that the bomb had been a small one, of aluminum, charged with a low-grade nitroglycerine, and exploded by a crude friction device.

  “Amateur or professional job?” I asked.

  McCracken spit out loose shreds of tobacco—he was one of the men who chew their cigarettes—and said:

  “I’d say it was made by a guy that knew his stuff, but had to work with what he could get his hands on. I’ll tell you more when I’ve worked this junk over in the lab.”

  “No timer on it?” I asked.

  “No signs of one.”

  Doctor George returned from the county seat with the news that what was left of Fitzstephan still breathed. The doctor was tickled pink. I had to yell at him to make him hear my questions about Fink and Gabrielle. Then he told me Fink’s life wasn’t in danger, and the girl’s cold was enough better that she might get out of bed if she wished. I asked about her nerves, but he was in too much of a hurry to get back to Fitzstephan to pay much attention to anything else.

  “Hm-m-m, yes, certainly,” he muttered, edging past me towards his car. “Quiet, rest, freedom from anxiety,” and he was gone.

  I ate dinner with Vernon and Feeney in the hotel café that evening. They didn’t think I had told them all I knew about the bombing, and kept me on the witness stand throughout the meal, though neither of them accused me pointblank of holding out.

  After dinner I went up to my new room. Mickey was sprawled on the bed reading a newspaper.

  “Go feed yo
urself,” I said. “How’s our baby?”

  “She’s up. How do you figure her—only fifty cards to her deck?”

  “Why?” I asked. “What’s she been doing?”

  “Nothing. I was just thinking.”

  “That’s from having an empty stomach. Better go eat.”

  “Aye, aye, Mr. Continental,” he said and went out.

  The next room was quiet. I listened at the door and then tapped it. Mrs. Herman’s voice said: “Come in.”

  She was sitting beside the bed making gaudy butterflies on a piece of yellowish cloth stretched on hoops. Gabrielle Collinson sat in a rocking chair on the other side of the room, frowning at hands clasped in her lap—clasped hard enough to whiten the knuckles and spread the fingerends. She had on the tweed clothes in which she had been kidnapped. They were still rumpled, but had been brushed clean of mud. She didn’t look up when I came in. The nurse did, pushing her freckles together in an uneasy smile.

  “Good evening,” I said, trying to make a cheerful entrance. “Looks like we’re running out of invalids.”

  That brought no response from the girl, too much from the nurse.

  “Yes, indeed,” Mrs. Herman exclaimed with exaggerated enthusiasm. “We can’t call Mrs. Collinson an invalid now—now that she’s up and about—and I’m almost sorry that she is—he-he-he—because I certainly never did have such a nice patient in every way; but that’s what we girls used to say at the hospital when we were in training: the nicer the patient was, the shorter the time we’d have him, while you take a disagreeable one and she’d live—I mean, be there—forever and a day, it seemed like. I remember once when—”

  I made a face at her and wagged my head at the door. She let the rest of her words die inside her open mouth. Her face turned red, then white. She dropped her embroidery and got up, saying idiotically: “Yes, yes, that’s the way it always is. Well, I’ve got to go see about those—you know—what do you call them. Pardon me for a few minutes, please.” She went out quickly, sidewise, as if afraid I’d sneak up behind her and kick her.

  When the door had closed, Gabrielle looked up from her hands and said: