“Ohé, caballero,” the girl cried tremulously, “have pity on poor Constancia and save her from the centipedes. They are all about, scores of them, hundreds, thousands! Help, oh, help me, I implore you!” She held her little hands beseechingly to him, and her voice rose to a thin and rasping scream as she repeated the dread word, “escolopendra—escolopendra!”
“Whist, mavourneen, if’ ’tis centipedes as scares ye, ye can set yerself aisy. Sure, it’s Jerry Costello as won’t let one of ’em come near ye.”
Reaching up, he gathered her into his arms as if she were a child. “Come on, sors,” he suggested, “let’s git goin’. This pore gur-rl’s real enough, ’spite of all th’ gallopin’ corpses that ye’ve seen around here.”
De Grandin in the lead, we hastened down the hall, and were almost at the stairs when he halted us with upraised hand. “A silence;” he commanded, “écoutez!”
Very faintly it came to us, more a whimper than a moan; low, frightened, weak. “Morbleu,” de Grandin exclaimed as he turned the handle, kicked the door, and disappeared into the bedroom like a diving duck.
I followed, and Costello, with the girl still in his arms, came after me. In a wicker chair beside the chamber’s window sat a young man, the mad girl’s brother, judging by their strong resemblance to each other, gently rocking to and fro and moaning softly to himself. He was dressed in dinner clothes, but they were woefully disheveled.
His collar had been torn half from his shirt; his tie, unknotted, hung limply round his neck; the bosom of his shirt had been wrenched from its studs and bellied out from his chest like the sail of a full-rigged ship standing before the wind.
“Howly Moses!” Costello tilted his straw hat down on his nose, then pushed it back upon his head. “Another of ’em?”
“Gregorio, hermano mio!” the girl Costello carried cried. “Gregorio—las escolo pendras—”
But the young man paid no heed. He bent forward in his chair, eyes riveted upon his shoe-tips, and hummed a sort of tuneless song to himself, pausing now and then to utter a low moan, then smile foolishly like a man fuddled with liquor.
“Hey, Clancy,” Costello hurried to the stairhead and called down, “come up here on th’ run; we got a couple o’ nuts!”
The burly uniformed patrolman came up the stairs three at a time, joined us in the bedroom and drew the drooling youth up from his chair. “Up ye come, young felly me lad,” he ordered. “Come on out o’ this, an’ mind ye don’t make anny fuss.”
The boy was docile enough. Tottering and staggering as though three-quarters drunk, but otherwise quite tractable, he went with Clancy down the stairs and made no effort at resistance as they thrust him into the police car.
Costello placed the girl in the back seat beside her brother and turned uncertainly to de Grandin. “Well, sor, now we got ’em, what’re we goin’ to do wid ’em, I dunno?” he asked.
“Do with them?” the little Frenchman echoed acidly. “How should I know that? What does one usually do with lunatics? Take them riding in the park, take them to dinner and the theatre, buy them lollipops and ice cream—if all else fails, you might convey them to the City Hospital. Me, I go to research that never-quite-sufficiently-to-be-anathematized house. I tell you that I saw three corpses there, as dead as mutton and as real as taxes. I shall not rest till I have found them. Can they play hide-and-seek with me? Shall three cadavers make the monkey out of me? I tell you no!”
“O.K., sor, I’ll go wid ye,” agreed Costello, but to me he whispered, “Stay wid ’im, Doctor Trowbridge, sor. I’m feared th’ heat has touched ’im in th’ head.”
With the little Frenchman in the lead we marched into the hall again and, following the line of our first search, paused before the screen that masked the entrance to the service-pantry.
“See, look, observe,” he ordered as he found the light switch and snapped the current on. “I tell you that a woman’s body lay right here, and—a-ah?” He dropped upon his knees and pointed to a globular black button on the polished hardwood floor.
“U’m?” Costello grunted noncommittally, bending forward to inspect the globule. “What is it, sor, a bit o’ jet?”
“Jet?” de Grandin echoed in disgust. “Grand Dieu des porcs, where are your eyes? Touch it!”
The sergeant put a tentative forefinger on the gleaming orb, then drew back suddenly, his heat-flushed face a thought paler. Where his finger had pressed it the button had gone flat, lost its rotundity and become a tiny pool of viscous liquid. What he had mistaken for a solid substance was a great drop of partly congealed blood.
“Bedad!” he wiped his finger on his trousers, then scrubbed it with his handkerchief. “What wuz it, sor? It looks like—”
“Précisément. It is,” the Frenchman told him in a level, toneless voice. “That is exactly what it is, my friend. The heart’s blood from the poor dead woman whom neither I nor good Friend Trowbridge saw here before we called you.”
“Well, I’ll be—” Costello began, and:
“One can almost find it in his heart to hope you will,” cut in de Grandin. “You have made me the insult, you have intimated that I did not know a corpse when I beheld one, that I had hallucinations in the head—ah bah, at times you do annoy me past endurance!”
Grinning half maliciously, half derisively, he straightened from his knees and nodded toward the stairs.
“Let us go up and see what else it was Friend Trowbridge and I imagined when we first came to this house of the three corpses,” he ordered.
We climbed the winding stairs, every sense alert for token of the unseen murderers or their victims, and walked down to the room where we had found the mad girl raving of the centipedes.
“Now,” de Grandin cast a quick, stock-taking glance around the chamber, “one wonders why she babbled of ‘las escolopendras.’ Even the insane do not harp upon one string without some provocation. It might have been that—stand back, my friends; beware!”
We stared at him in open-mouthed amazement, wondering if the room’s influence had affected him, but he paid us no more heed than if we had been bits of lifeless furniture. Slowly, stepping softly on his toes, silent-footed as a cat that stalks a mouse, he was creeping toward the chintz-draped bedstead in the center of the room. And as he advanced noiselessly I heard a faint, queer, clattering sound, as though some mechanical toy, almost run down, were scratching on the bare, bright polished floor beyond the shadow of the bed.
Chin thrust forward, lips drawn back in a half snarl, mustache aquiver, the little Frenchman advanced some three feet or so, then quickly slipped the rapier blade from his sword-stick and stood poised, one foot forward, one drawn back, knees slightly bent, his bright blade slanting down in the beam of the electric light.
“Sa-ha!” He stabbed swiftly at the shadows and whipped his blade back. As he held the steel aloft for our inspection we saw a thing that writhed and twisted on its point, an unclean thing—six inches or so long; a many-jointed, horn-armored bit of obscenity which doubled convulsively into a sharp horseshoe-curve, then bent itself into a U, and waved a score or more of crooked, claw-armed legs in pain and fury as it writhed.
“Observe her very carefully,” he ordered. “Medusa on a hundred legs, ‘la escolopendra.’ I have seen her kind in Africa and Asia and South America, but never of this size. One does not wonder that the poor young mademoiselle was frightened into idiocy by the knowledge that this lurked among the shadows of the room. It is a lucky thing I heard her clawing on the floor a moment since and recognized her footsteps; had she gotten up a trouser-leg and sunk her venomed mandibles in one of us—tiens, that one would soon have found himself immersed in flowers, but unable to enjoy their scent. Yes, certainly.”
“Ye said a mouthful there, sor,” Costello agreed. “I’ve seen ’em in th’ Fillypines—’twas there I learnt th’ Spanish lingo so’s I understood th’ pore gur-rl’s ravin’s—an’ no one needs to tell me about ’em. Shtep careful, sors; perhaps there’s more of �
�em about. They hate th’ light like Satan hates th’ Mass, an’ our pants would make a fine place for their hidin’. It’s glad I am ye seen th’ poison little divil first, Doctor de Grandin, sor.”
“CALLING ALL CARS; ATTENTION all cars,” a voice was droning through the police car’s radio as we left the house. “Be on the lookout for a funeral car—a limousine hearse—license number F373-471. Reported stolen from in front of 723 Westmorland Street. License number F373-471. That is all.”
“Ah-ha,” de Grandin exclaimed. “Ah-ha-ha?”
“What is it, sor?” Costello asked.
“The joke has been on me, but now I think that we shall turn the laugh on them. One sees it all. But of course!”
“What—” I began, but he motioned me to silence.
“The hearse which almost ran me down, whence did it come, Friend Trowbridge?”
“Down this street; it almost clipped you as we started to cross at—”
“Précisément, exactement; quite so. You have very right, my friend. And the address whence the stolen car was pilfered, where is it, mon sergent?”
“Right round th’ corner, sor. ’Bout halfway between this street an’ Myrtle Avenoo—”
“Perfectly. It fits together like a picture-puzzle. Consider, if you please: Three bodies lie here, a hearse is stolen just around the comer; the bodies disappear, so does the hearse. Find one and you shall find the others, I damn think.”
“THANK YOU KINDLY, GENTLEMEN; all contributions to our stock of assorted nuts are gratefully received.” Doctor Donovan, in charge of H-3, the psychopathic ward at City Hospital, grinned amiably at us. “You say you found ’em babbling in a house in Tuscarora Avenue? Pair o’ howlin’ swells, eh? Well, we’ll try to make ’em comfortable, though they can’t have caviar for breakfast, and we’re just fresh out o’ pâté de foie gras. Still—”
“Doctor Donovan”—an interne pushed the superintendent’s office door four inches open and nodded to our host.
“Yes, Ridgway?” asked Donovan.
“It’s about the man and woman just brought in. It looks to me as if they had been drugged.”
“Eh? The devil! What makes you think so?”
“Doctor Amlie took the girl and I examined the man. He seemed half drunk to me, and as I was preparing the test for alcoholism an urgent message came from Doctor Amlie.
“I left my patient with a male nurse and hurried over to the women’s section. Amlie was all hot and bothered. ‘What d’ye think o’ this?’ she asked me as she pointed to a spot of ecchymosis bigger than a silver dollar on her patient’s arm. It was just above the common tendon of the triceps, and surrounded the pit of a big needle wound. Looked to me as if she’d had a hypo awkwardly administered. She couldn’t ’a’ given it to herself.
“Amlie wanted to test for morphine or cocaine, but I talked her out of it. Cocaine’s hardly ever injected except for surgery, and morphine makes ’em lethargic. This girl was almost hysterical, jabbering Spanish or Italian, I don’t know which, and stopping every other moment to giggle. Then she’d seem about to fall asleep, and suddenly wake up and go through the whole turn again.
“I’d just finished reading Smith’s Forensic Medicine in the East, and had a hunch.”
“Uh-huh?” Donovan encouraged.
“Well, sir, I withdrew one-point-fifty-four cc’s of blood from her arm, directly in the ecchymosed area, and gave it the Beam test, using ethyl chloride instead of alcoholic potash—”
“Talk English, son; I’m rusty on my toxicology,” Donovan broke in. “What’d you find?”
“Galenical cannabis indica, sir.”
“U’m? Any objective symptoms?”
“Yes, sir. Her reflexes were practically nil, the heart action was markedly accelerated and the pupils dilated. Just now she seems about to drop off to sleep, but there are periods of hysteria recurring at gradually increasing intervals.”
“Uh-huh. How about your patient?”
“Doctor Amlie came over to the male section with me and we put my man through the same tests. Everything checked, but his symptoms are more marked. I’d say he had a heavier dose, but both of ’em have been doped with cannabis indica injected intravenously.”
“How long d’ye think this condition’ll last?”
“According to the text books not much longer than an ordinary drunk. They should sleep it off in eight to ten hours, at most.”
“Pardon,” de Grandin interrupted, “but is there not some way that we can hold these persons incommanicado? In France it would be easy, but here—”
”Sure, there is,” Costello broke in. “You an’ Doctor Trowbridge say you seen three corpses in that house, an’ ye believe that they wuz murthered. These kids wuz found there, an’ might know sumpin’ ’bout it. We can hold ’em as material witnesses any reasonable time.”
“Very good, take the necessary steps to keep them in restraint, and when they are recovered from their drugged sleep let me see them.”
“SAY, TROWBRIDGE,” DOCTOR DONOVAN’S voice came to me on the telephone next morning, “who wants to break in to see a nut?”
“Who wants to what?” I answered, mystified.
“You heard me right, feller. There was some monkey business down here last night, and one of those kids you and de Grandin and Costello brought here is mixed up in it. Can you and de Grandin come down here?”
Dawkins, the night chief orderly of the psychopathic ward, was waiting for us in the superintendent’s office when we reached the City Hospital, and launched upon his story without preface.
“I was sittin’ just inside the safety door—the grating, you know—and it was just ten minutes after one when the funny business started,” he told us.
“How do you place the time with such exactitude?” de Grandin asked.
Dawkins grinned. “I went on duty at eleven, and wouldn’t be relieved till seven in the morning. About one o’clock I began to get pretty sleepy, so I sent Hosmer to the kitchen for a pot o’ coffee and some sandwiches. It seemed to me he took a little longer than he should, and I’d just looked up at the electric clock on the wall just opposite my chair when I heard a funny-sounding noise.
“It wasn’t quite like anything I’d ever heard before, for while it was a sort of whistling, like a sudden wind, it was also something like the humming of a monster bee, perhaps an airplane.”
De Grandin tweaked his mustache ends. “You say it combined a hum and whistle?”
“That’s just about the way to describe it, sir.”
“Very good, and then?”
“Then I saw the shadow, sir. You know, there’s a ceiling light in the main corridor—the one connecting the ambulance entrance with the emergency ward—just around the corner from the hallway leading to H-3. Anybody standing around the corner of the junction of the two corridors, but between that light and the angle made by our hallway branching off, casts a shadow down our hall. Many a time I’ve spotted nurses and orderlies standing to talk there when they should have been about their duties. Well, when I heard this funny noise I got up, and as I did I saw this shadow. It wasn’t any of the hospital employees. It was someone with a derby hat on, and it looked to me as if he had a club or something in his hand. I didn’t like his looks too much.”
“You were suspicious? Why?”
“Well, we haven’t had anything of the kind happen for some years, but in the old days when the gangs were running liquor, two-three times gunmen broke into the hospital and shot up fellers we had in here. Once they rubbed out an orderly because he tried to stop ’em.
“So I started down to the other end of the ward. Dennis was on duty there, and he’s a pretty good one to have with you in a scrap. O’ course, we aren’t allowed to carry weapons—not even billies—in H-3. Too much chance of some lunatic’s getting hold of ’em and going on a rampage. But I wanted Dennis to take a gander at this guy’s shadow, and if he thought what I did, we could call up the main office and have someone with a gun come
round and grab him from behind while we went out to tackle him in front. So I started down to get Dennis.”
“Yes, and then?”
“Well, sir, just as I got abreast of 34, the room they’d put Doctor Ridgway’s patient in, I heard a sound that seemed to cut through the queer noise I’ve been telling you about, like someone filing a piece of metal.
“The patient was asleep and I thought he might be snoring—some of ’em make mighty funny noises-but when I looked through the peep-hole in the door I saw a feller on the outside, cutting through the window grating.
“You know how our windows are. There’s a strong steel netting on the outside, then the glass, then another grating on the inside. This feller was working on the outside grating with a saw of some sort, and had already cut a hole two inches long.
“D’ye know what I think?”
“Nothing would delight us more than hearing it, my friend.”
“Well, sir, I think that funny noise I heard was made to cover up the noise the saw made as it cut that grating.”
“Your theory does great credit to your perspicacity. Did you see the one who sought to cut the grating?”
“Not very good, sir. He seen me about the same time that I spotted him, and ducked down out o’ sight. Funny thing about him, though. I’d say he was a foreigner. Anyhow, he was mighty dark and had black hair and a large nose.”
Donovan took up the story: “Dawkins turned in the alarm, and we rushed around to see about it. Of course, we found no one in the main corridor, but that’s not strange. There’s no guard at the ambulance entrance, and anyone can come or go that way at will. If we hadn’t found the cut screen we’d have thought he dreamed it.
“Now, what I want to know is this: Who’d want to help those kids escape? As I understand it, they’re being held as witnesses to a murder—”
“Excusez-moi!” de Grandin cut in; then, to Dawkins: “Will you take me to the window this one tried to cut through, if you please?”
They were back in less than three minutes, and a grim look set upon the little Frenchman’s face as he opened his folded handkerchief and spread it out on Donovan’s desk. “Regardez!” he directed.
Black Moon Page 28
