I was beginning to understand. This was another example of the killer's psychotic love of indirection. How this little nurse with the tired eyes figured in the madman's scheme, I couldn't guess, but I'd play along with the game, whatever it was.
I made myself laugh. In my own ears it sounded hollow and frightened. “You'll have to excuse me, Miss Flagg. You see, I never thought of Fred by his real name; we had nicknames for each other. In the old days.”
“Is that so?” It sounded phony to her, too. “Fred Stanley? It seems a nice, normal name to me.”
“And you're perfectly right, Miss Flagg. Nicknames are silly.” I had a strong hunch that Nurse Flagg had innocently got herself mixed up in something that she didn't even begin to understand.
My grin felt sharp and jagged, like a crack in plate glass. “That's Fred for you. Always doing the unexpected.”
“Really? That's odd, isn't it? I've always thought Fred to be quite punctual and predictable. His calling and asking me to meet you was the only truly unpredictable thing I've ever known him to do.”
I had blundered again, but I didn't know how badly. I said lamely, “Time changes all of us, doesn't it?”
She studied me with growing distrust and I thought I had better get the conversation on the right track. “Did Fred say why he wanted to meet me at your place, instead of here?”
She shook her head. “No. When I talked to him, he sounded rather... disturbed.” There was something in the way she said that—disturbed.
My muscles ached with wanting to grab her and shake her until she told me where Jeanie was. But she probably didn't know. Probably as far as she knew, Fred was a nice, quiet guy who liked to mind his own business. I wondered what she would think if she knew that Fred had already killed three people and, unless something happened fast, the count would soon go up to five.
But all I said was, “There's a taxi stand up on the next corner, Miss...”
She said not to bother; she had her own car in the hospital parking lot. Mildred Flagg owned a late-model Ford sedan and she drove it with the same thoughtful competence with which she must have run her floor at the hospital. I tried to relax on the passenger side of the seat, but my insides were in knots. If I closed my eyes, I saw Jeanie's face frozen in terror, like ice sculpture.
I asked, “How long have you and Fred known each other, Miss Flagg?”
She concentrated on the road ahead. “Not long, really.”
What did she mean,really? Had it been a casual acquaintance which had just recently become intimate? Could it be that she and Fred were in this thing together?
We came to a cross-town thoroughfare and she slipped the Ford expertly into the flow of early traffic. I didn't notice where we were going. I didn't care. If Jeanie wasn't there, it didn't make any difference. And if she was there...
Then I thought of something else. Nurse Flagg had talked to the killer just before she left the hospital. He had told her just where to find me. That must mean that he had known every move I had made, from the time I bribed the laundryman to now. It was a chilling thought. Not even a ghost could have trailed me from the apartment to the hospital. But the killer had.
“Is something wrong, Mr. Coyle?” The nurse was watching me from the corner of her eye.
“I was just thinking...”
“About Fred?”
“Yes, I suppose I was.”
“You and Fred were very close, weren't you, when you were boys? In Texas?”
“Yes.” In Texas? Who did she think she was kidding?
“Did you know his parents?”
“Not very well. You know how it is with kids; they don't pay much attention to adults.”
She drove on, staring fixedly into the windshield. Then, with sudden decision, she turned onto a side street and stopped.
“All right, Mr. Coyle, you don't know Fred at all, do you? Fred Stanley never knew his own parents; he was raised in an orphanage. And he has never lived in Texas.” Those tired eyes were flashing now, with anger.
“Orphanage?” The word stumbled over my tongue.
“A church orphanage, back East somewhere. He told me where, but I've forgotten.”
Something was wrong. The picture that had been so clear had suddenly gone muddy and distorted. The killer was a German. He couldn't have been raised in an American orphanage, back East or anywhere else.
“Mr. Coyle...” Nurse Flagg stared as I held my head in both hands and tried to hold my thoughts together. “Mr. Coyle, what is it!”
“Miss Flagg—how long have you known Fred Stanley? Howwell do you know him?”
“Why should I tell you?” Her chin tilted stubbornly.
My mouth was filled with saw-toothed words, but I swallowed them. I said, “Because a girl's life may depend on it. The girl I want to marry. I think Fred is going to kill her unless I can find a way to stop him.”
Her eyes were pale-blue saucers. “You... you must be insane!”
“That thought has crossed my mind more than once, but I'm afraid I'm sane, Miss Flagg—perfectly sane. And the nightmare I'm living is real. Now, will you please tell me about Fred Stanley?”
She didn't know whether to believe me or start screaming for help. Then I remembered something, and I took the folded sketch from my jacket pocket and showed it to her. She made a little sucking sound as she inhaled.
“That's Fred!”
“Miss Flagg,” I said with false calm, “listen to me. Listen very closely.” And I told her, as quickly and precisely as possible, about the little boozer and the artist's sketch. In a few words, I told her what I could of Germany, and the dead woman and the little girl. And Orlan Koesler and Charlie Roach, and the threatening notes. And finally I showed her the telegram—and that capped it. After the telegram, she believed.
That is, she believed that I wasn't deliberately lying. She was still a long way from believing that Fred Stanley could be a killer.
“Miss Flagg, will you help me?”
“Yes...” nodding slowly. “If I can.” If it didn't bother Fred.
“Will you just drive me to your place and let me talk to him?”
After a moment's hesitation, she nodded again. “All right, Mr. Coyle. I must admit that I don't understand any of this, but I'm sure that Fred can explain...” She started the car.
“A while ago,” I said, “I asked if you had known Fred long and you said 'not really.' What did you mean by that?”
Several seconds must have passed before she said, “I've known Fred quite well for several months— more than a year.”
“But before that you knew him in a more casual way?”
“Yes... casual. In a business way; nothing else.”
“Was it in a hospital that you knew him? Was he a patient of yours?”
She shot me a look, her mouth set in a thin line. “There are things a nurse may not discuss, Mr. Coyle. Anyhow, in a very few minutes Fred will tell you himself anything you need to know.”
“Haven't you listened to a thing I said, Miss Flagg? Can't you get it through your head that you're not just toying with the niceties of professional ethics? You may very well be helping snuff out a human life.”
She looked angry and worried, and strangely self-conscious. “Wait a minute,” I blurted. “Are you in love with him? Is that the reason you're covering up for him?”
She didn't have to answer. The high color in her cheeks told me all I needed to know. It also explained why the killer wasn't known on Horner Street. Mildred Flagg might be a lonesome woman, but she was not the type to take up with a skid-row bum. The killer wasn't known on Horner Street because, except for these past twenty-four hours, he'd probably never been there.
We were on a quiet residential street, a street of modest frame and brick houses and stately elms with brown autumn leaves. Miss Flagg turned the Ford into a graveled driveway and stopped beside a one-story frame house with an old-fashioned porch all the way across the front. This was the place where Mildred Flagg lived. Sh
e had lived here with her parents until they died, and now she lived here alone. There was something about that house, something forlorn, with the feeling of emptiness, although it was cluttered with an unusual amount of dark, old-fashioned furniture and dozens of whatnots and gewgaws of all descriptions. The thing I felt about the place was loneliness. It had seeped into the walls and furnishings. I could smell it.
Nurse Flagg unlocked the front door to the dark mustiness of aged wood and fabrics. “Fred should be here soon. May I make you some coffee, Mr. Coyle?”
I said yes to the coffee and followed her through the house as she went from room to room opening blinds. Then I began to feel it. There was something here besides loneliness. It clung to the still air like the after-scent of funeral flowers. I couldn't name it, but it raised the hackles on my neck and left me sweating.
“Did you hear... something?”
“Hear what?” We had entered a small, neat kitchen and Mildred Flagg was measuring coffee into an electric percolator.
What had I heard? I didn't know. I couldn't even guess. Maybe the pounding of my own heart. “I thought I heard something. Do you mind if I look through your house, Miss Flagg?”
She smiled faintly. “Do you think Fred is hiding here? In a closet, behind a door—under the bed, possibly?”
“Humor me, Miss Flagg.”
She plugged the percolator in and nodded. “Look all you like, Mr. Coyle. But Fred isn't here. When he comes, you'll hear him. He'll come up the driveway, whistling, like always.”
It wasn't Fred I was looking for. I was looking for Jeanie. If Jeanie was still alive. Now, finally, I had to acknowledge a possibility that I had purposely turned blind to until now. It might be that I wasn't looking for Jeanie at all. It might be that there wasn't any Jeanie now—only her body.
Back in that dim front room, I got out my handkerchief and mopped my palms and forehead. Take it easy, Coyle. Jeanie's safe. The killer wouldn't have sent that telegram if he had meant to harm her.
I looked everywhere Jeanie could have been hidden. In the closets, under the beds, behind the bathroom shower curtains. She wasn't here. Still, this house had to have something to do with the killer and his plans. This is where I'd have to stay until he made his next move.
Then, on what used to be called a library table, I saw the glint of lacquered brass on green wool.
“Miss Flagg!”
The shout was startling in that small room, and Nurse Flagg appeared almost immediately. “The belt buckle, there on the table,” I managed hoarsely. “Have you ever seen it before?”
She looked at me, anxiety in her eyes. Then she went to the table and cautiously touched the buckle, as though it might be alive. “No, I've never seen it before. Where did it come from?”
“The last time I saw it, Jeanie Kelly was wearing it.” I remembered the dress only too well—green to match Jeanie's eyes. With touches of lacquered brass on the buckle and buttons. “Jeanie has been here, in this house, in this room,” I heard myself saying in a flat, cold voice. “That, or the killer has been here. One of them left this buckle.”
Mildred Flagg swallowed with difficulty. “But why!”
“If it was Jeanie, she left it to let me know that she had been here. That the killer—your Fred Stanley— had brought her here.”
She blurted again, as though they were the only two words she knew: “But why!”
“Can you think of a better place to commit murder? Who would look for a homicidal maniac in a quiet, respectable neighborhood like this?”
But she wasn't listening. That was something I was beginning to learn about Mildred Flagg—when there was something she didn't want to hear, she simply refused to listen.
“Miss Flagg...”I moved over to face her, looking down into those pale eyes, sad eyes. “Miss Flagg, is his name really Fred?”
She was only faintly surprised by the question. But something happened to her—somewhere in her mind a wall of resistance began to crumble. Then she sighed a long sigh and said, “I can't tell you much, Mr. Coyle. There really isn't much to tell.”
“Will you help me, Miss Flagg?”
She hesitated. “What do you want to know?”
“About the man you call Fred Stanley. Wherever he is, he has Jeanie with him, and he means to kill her. He would like to have me there when he does it. You remember what I told you about the woman and little girl in Germany? This man—the killer—has his own twisted idea about poetic justice. The way he sees it, it would sort of even things up i£ he killed...”
“I understand about that.” At last she was listening. “About Fred... I don't know what his real name is. When I first met him, almost fifteen years ago, he had no name, no face, not even a past, and not much of a future.”
“What do you mean?”
“I was an Army nurse during the war, stationed in England. He had been burned, terribly, and his face was a blackened mask. When they brought him to my hospital ward he was burned beyond recognition; his dog tags had been lost and, as a result of shock, he was suffering from almost total amnesia. He didn't know who he was, and no one could tell him.”
“Is there any possibility that he could be German?”
She shook her head. “When our infantry medics found him, he was wearing an American uniform— what was left of it.”
“What outfit?”
She shrugged. “There was no insignia on his clothing.”
A lot of outfits removed identifying patches when they went on attack. I said, “Given time and care, amnesia usually clears itself up, doesn't it?”
But she was already shaking her head, so I probed in another direction. “A while ago you mentioned that Fred sounded 'disturbed' when you talked to him. That word is beginning to take on new meaning for me. In that English hospital,” I pressed, “in that ward of yours—was it a mental ward?”
“Mr. Coyle, amnesia in no way implies...”
“I'm not talking about amnesia, Miss Flagg. Was Stanley a mental patient?”
She winced. But at last, staring straight through the spot where I stood, she nodded.
“And you still can't tell me where to find him or Miss Kelly?”
“... No.”
“Even if it could save Stanley's life? The cops, if they find him first, won't take his Service and hospital record into account. They won't even know about it. They'll just know one thing—he's a cop killer. They'll drop him on sight.”
Her face began to wrinkle and break up like a papier-mache mask. She turned her head away and said, “Do you think I haven't thought of that?” All her tears, I guessed, had already been shed. Long ago. “I don't know any more, Mr. Coyle. Fred said he'd meet you here. That's all I can tell you.”
Ugly questions circled like vultures in my mind. But it was the killer's game. All I could do was wait. Very slowly, I reached out and took that green and brass buckle in my hand and closed it in my fist and squeezed it until little cramp knots began jumping on my forearm. If Jeanie had left that buckle, it meant that she was probably safe and not far away, and that terror hadn't paralyzed her mind. But if the killer had left it, it could only mean that he felt compelled to drag out his torture, to prolong the taunting to the last possible minute.
Mildred Flagg must have been aware of all that hate that had been building up inside me for longer than I wanted to remember. She tried to speak but made no sound. Abruptly, she wheeled and ran from the room.
I followed her through that musty, uncomfortable house to that bright, neat kitchen. I didn't want to hurt her; and I was sorry that she was so lonely that she had fallen in love with a madman, but I couldn't stand there doing nothing, saying nothing, just waiting on the homicidal whim of a maniac.
Without looking at me, she poured coffee into two small, delicate cups and placed them on a metal breakfast table. She pushed one of the coffee cups toward me, but I didn't sit down. “Don't ask me to help you, Mr. Coyle. I brought you here because Fred asked it, but don't expect me to do any m
ore. I couldn't hurt him... no matter what he's done.”
“Even if he has killed and intends more killing?”
Gravely: “No matter what.”
Mildred Flagg sank to a chair and stared at her coffee without touching it. She had been talking but saying little. One thing she had done, though— she had wrecked my pet theory completely. If the killer wasn't a German seeking vengeance, then who? And why did he hate me so that even death, by itself, was not enough to satisfy him?
Suddenly I came erect, as though a cold breath had touched my face. Once more the hackles began to rise on the back of my neck.
This time, Miss Flagg heard it, too. A solid but almost inaudible thumping, no louder than a heartbeat. She stared at me with those wide, pale eyes and gasped:
“The cellar! When you were searching the house, Mr. Coyle, you forgot about the cellar.”
CHAPTER TEN
I hadn't known there was a cellar. There was no way to get to one from inside the house; I had opened every closet, every door.
“Follow me, Mr. Coyle.” Nurse Flagg's voice had gone cold now, strangely lacking in excitement and curiosity—almost as though she already knew what we would find. I followed her out the back door onto a flat cement porch, the kind that some people insist on calling a patio. At one end of the porch was a storm cellar-type door, covered with sheet iron and painted white, and a few feet back of the door there was a ventilating chimney. Mildred Flagg started lifting on the door. I took it from her and swung it open, and the moist, earthly smell of the grave rose up from the darkness and enveloped us.
We listened. The thumping was louder, coming from below. I thought of all the horror stories I had read as a kid, of people getting buried by mistake when they weren't really dead; buried alive. And how they would always wake up too late, after the grave was filled, and how they would claw and scratch and beat on the coffin... That is what this sound reminded me of.
Nurse Flagg grabbed my arm as I started down the cement steps. “What is it?” .
The Long Vendetta Page 11
