I nodded. “You’re a godsend, Gene.” I looked at his snub-nosed, freckled face and damn near broke down. “Lord, in over three days you’re the first person I’ve talked to who hasn’t thought I was nuts.”
Gene snorted. “You’re not crazy. You been framed.”
There was assurance in his voice. But, better than that, there was sudden assurance inside me. Now, away from the atmosphere of the sanitarium, I knew damned well that I was sane.
The how, and for that matter, even the why, of what had happened to me were still obscure. But I’d been in a hell of uncertainty and now I was out of it again, in the light.
I wasn’t crazy, and they weren’t going to take me back there alive. Sure, it would be foolhardy to resist arrest and hide out, but that was my personal brand of craziness and I wasn’t afraid of that. Right now, I wasn’t even afraid of the nightmares; I knew I wasn’t going to have them any more. Somehow, I was going to wreck that train wreck before it wrecked me.
Gene said, “It’s nine-thirty. I’ll be back in half an hour.”
Back in the shadow of the trees, I watched the cab drive off, and I waited.
Half an hour passed. Then another, and another. I waited two hours and then I walked to the corner of the boulevard and saw a cab coming. It wasn’t Gene’s, but I hailed it. I gave an address about six blocks from the laboratory.
This, I thought, as I got out of the cab and paid off the driver, was the route Gene would have taken. I’d gone as close as I dared, in the cab. Maybe Gene would have parked nearby for some reason, and I could walk close enough to see his cab.
And this was the route Peter Carr would take going home, if he’d been working late. These six blocks, and then one block west to the car line.
I looked around the corner and down Hale Street, and there was a man halfway down the block walking toward the car-line street. A man about Peter’s size and build.
Well, there was no hurry in my walking toward the lab, and that might be Peter. I started after him, walking briskly. I’d caught halfway up to him—a quarter of a block away, perhaps—when he reached the corner.
Then I heard the rumble of an approaching streetcar, and realized that he’d board it before I got there. I broke into a run and—yes, it was Pete Carr. I recognized that long, brown topcoat of his and the disreputable felt hat pulled down over his eyes.
I yelled, “Hey, Peter!”
He heard me and turned. Then he whirled back and ran toward the tracks. The streetcar stopped and he boarded it while I was still fifty paces away.
He must have recognized me—my voice, at any rate. Lord, if even Peter Carr thought me a dangerous lunatic, to be run away from, I’d get little help from other people, I knew.
I was out of breath and panting. I’d passed a tavern while I was running toward Peter, and I returned and went into it. I’d rest a minute and have a drink, and then walk toward the laboratory to see if I could spot Gene’s cab.
I ordered a beer, and while the bartender was drawing it, I called Andrews’s number again. No, he hadn’t been or phoned home and they didn’t know where he was.
Drinking the beer, I wondered about Peter. Could he have missed recognizing me? True, he was a timid cuss, in some ways. Seeing a man running toward him, yelling something he didn’t understand, he might have reacted that way. But—
“Nice night,” said the bartender.
“Yeah,” I lied. It was a hell of a night, now. Everything was going wrong. Probably Gene—on sober second thought—had decided it was too dangerous to help me, and had gone back downtown. Not that I blamed him.
The beer was good, and I had another. Damn Peter, I thought.
Well, there wasn’t any hurry, now. It was twelve fifteen by the clock behind the bar. I might as well catch the streetcar into town and turn in. Tomorrow—
I’d kept an eye out the window and no squad cars had gone by outside, so I felt fairly certain Peter hadn’t phoned the police. Anyway, the tavern keeper was getting ready to close up.
I strolled up to the car stop on the corner, and only when I got there did I remember that there wouldn’t be another car along until two. I’d missed the one at twelve—the one Peter had taken, and the only owl cars on the line after midnight were at two and at three-thirty.
I leaned against the building a moment, and then decided I’d rather walk than stand there. True, on the car-line street here, there was a chance of flagging an inbound cab, but I thought I’d rather kill time until two o’clock by taking another look at the laboratory.
Even if they were watching it all night, I could surely get within a block of it without being seen. Maybe—oh, I don’t know why I wanted to go that way, but I did. Maybe it was just a hunch.
I walked back the way I had come, to the corner a block back where I’d gotten out of the cab. Down the six straight blocks that led to the lab, I could see two or three cars parked without lights. But in this outlying district, all-night parking was permissible. It was unlikely that any of them harbored detectives, for none of them was closer than a block to the lab.
Anyway, I could get closer—
The first car, a block up, was an old jalopy I’d seen parked there often before. The next—was it a taxi?
Yes, it was. A cab parked without lights. There was a driver in the front seat, but no one in back. Looked like Gene’s cab, but why would he still be parked here? For that matter, why would he have parked here at all? It was too far away from the lab, and on the same side of the street. He couldn’t even see it from here.
I was closer now, and I could see that the driver was slumped forward across the wheel. Was it Gene, asleep?
It was Gene, all right. I opened the door of the cab, called his name, and put a hand on his shoulder to awaken him. The tips of my fingers touched the flesh of his neck, and the flesh was cold.
* * *
—
Something inside me turned cold, too, at that moment. It wasn’t fear, thank God, it was anger.
Up to now, I’d been worried stiff, and I’d been acting defensively, trying to clear myself of the implied charge against me of insanity. Now it was different.
Gene had been the first person really to be on my side, the first to accept my version of what had happened. And now Gene was dead. Murdered. Even before I turned on the dome light of the taxi to see how he had been killed, it didn’t occur to me to doubt that his death had been by violence.
And it had. The lower part of the back of his head was crushed in. A cowardly blow from behind; it could have been dealt with the butt of a heavy revolver.
Yes, now everything was different!
Now, as though Gene’s being killed weren’t enough, this was proof. Proof that whatever machinations of evil had taken place four nights ago had not been figments of a disordered imagination. Now I could go to the authorities and demand—No, I couldn’t, of course. From their point of view, I was an escaped maniac. I’d been with Gene. Unless the time of his death could be set with unlikely exactitude and should coincide with my ride in the other cab, I had no alibi.
And it wouldn’t coincide, of course. Gene had been killed before then, or he would have been back to pick me up. He’d been killed while I waited for him back there in the shadows.
But by whom—and why?
I flicked off the light switch and sat down in the back seat to think things through as far as I could.
Whoever had killed Gene had been in the cab with him, sitting here where I was sitting now. And the cab had been parked here; with Gene slumped forward over the wheel that way, it couldn’t have been brought in to the curb here after his death.
Let’s see—he left me to drive past the laboratory, to see if there was a light on there. He wouldn’t have picked up a casual fare with me waiting for him back there. There were only two possibilities then. A policeman or detective
might have stopped his cab in front of the laboratory, ordered him to drive a few blocks on and—no, that was unlikely. If the place were being watched, there’d be a pair of detectives. So the other would know—
But Gene knew Peter Carr, by sight. He knew that I wanted to talk to Peter. If Peter had left the laboratory while Gene was driving past, or if Gene had passed him on the street, while Peter was walking to the car line—right here, maybe—Gene would have pulled in to the curb, told Peter I’d sent him, and asked him to get in.
And then—Had Peter Carr murdered Gene?
But why? Impossible as it was to think of Peter Carr as a murderer, it was even more fantastic to name any motive for his killing Gene. He could have refused to get into the cab, if he were afraid of me. Or, if already in the cab, he could have refused to accompany Gene and got out again. The cab hadn’t started.
The more I tried to think it out, the dizzier became the circles in which my thoughts revolved. Somehow, this apparently motiveless murder was madder than anything that had happened yet.
Was I, framed somehow to appear insane, the victim of a madman’s plotting? Gene had nothing to do with whatever was going on; who but a madman would want to kill him?
Well, my first step was obvious. Regardless of risk, regardless of his attitude toward me, I was going to look up Peter Carr. Tonight. Now. When I’d heard his story, even if I had to sit on him to keep him from running away from me while we talked, then maybe things would begin to make sense.
I got out of the cab. There was nothing I could do for Gene now, except get his murderer. Then I remembered that Peter Carr had moved recently and I didn’t have his new address. He was living alone—I recalled him telling me—in a sort of bungalow along the river.
But there was only one way I could get that address tonight, and that was from the records at the lab. But if the lab were watched—
Well, there was one way that they might not have covered. I started walking toward the lab, four blocks away. Slowly, so I could think out what my best chances were of getting in unobserved.
A block and a half away, I cut into an alley, and from there on, I avoided the street on which the lab faced. I cut through yards to the back door of a four-story apartment building half a block away, and went in and up to the fourth floor.
The hallway window there would give me a bird’s-eye view of things, for the few other buildings in the next block were low ones. My laboratory was a one-story concrete garage building I’d had remodeled for my purpose.
Yes, there were two parked cars, one in the alley behind and a little beyond the lab, the other, across the street from the front of it. If there were no watchers other than those I presumed were in the cars there, I could make it unseen to a side window.
I went downstairs again, crossed the side street, and cut across lots and yards and over fences.
The window was locked, of course, but I got it open. I’d purchased a razor and blades when I’d left the hotel, and one of the thin steel blades now stood me in good stead. I pushed it up through the space between the sashes and pushed the catch. I’d often thought of putting better safeguards on those windows, but I’d never had anything really worth stealing in the place.
Inside, I tiptoed over to the file cabinet. It made a noise when I opened it, and I stopped and listened intently. It was quite possible that they had a man planted somewhere inside the building. But there was no sound save the ticking of a clock.
I had to risk a match to find Peter’s address, but if the only watchers were in the two parked cars, they wouldn’t be able to see a faint flicker of light here in the office.
Then I crossed over to the safe and struck another match while I worked the combination. There was about three hundred dollars cash in the safe, kept for making various cash purchases. I didn’t know how much longer I’d be a fugitive nor what unexpected expenses I might have, so I’d take advantage of the opportunity by taking that three hundred with me.
I swung open the safe, and struck another match. The tin box that held money was there, but the safe was strangely empty otherwise. The two bigger compartments, which held the condensed records of all our experiments and tests, were empty. Strange. Had Major Lorne taken them? Peter had the combination of the safe, and he’d have turned those papers over if Lorne had demanded them. But why would Lorne have wanted them? He had the originals of most of them; these were merely our copies. And in general, they were valuable only in a negative way, in that they might save time for other research men.
And Peter? He’d have had no cause for taking them. For a moment I pondered the idea that Peter might have discovered something about which I knew nothing. But that wasn’t likely, for it was I who did all the testing. And if he had discovered something important on the side and wanted to take personal advantage of it, he would never have incorporated it in those records, and, therefore, had no reason to steal them.
I took out the tin box and opened it. The money—the paper money—was gone, too. There were a few dollars’ worth of silver, but whoever had rifled the safe hadn’t bothered with it.
I didn’t bother with it, either. I left the safe ajar and started back for the window. After all, I had Peter’s address, and that was what I’d come for.
At the window, I paused to listen for sounds outside. A locomotive whistled mournfully far away. But that was all, except for the nearby ticking of that clock.
I had a leg over the window sill, before a thought came to me that stopped me from going the rest of the way.
I didn’t have a clock that ticked, here in the laboratory. There was an electric clock out in the shop, and a small chronometer back in the testing room, but—
I pulled my foot back into the room, and headed for the direction from which that ticking seemed to come. I found myself standing in front of my own desk and the ticking sound came from under it. I lighted a match and bent down.
It was a clock, all right, but the clock was fastened to a simple mechanism that would detonate a fuse. And the fuse was embedded in a box of what looked like granulated TNT.
Thirty or forty pounds of it. Enough to make a shambles of the whole laboratory, if not actually to blow it apart.
Quickly, I reached out and pushed the button that would shut off the alarm. Then I tiptoed out into the laboratory and groped through a drawer until I found a stub of candle. By its light, back in the office, I carefully dismantled the detonating mechanism.
I found that my forehead was dripping wet when I finished. I have a good, healthy respect for explosives. That’s why I’d been able to work with them so long and still retain the requisite number of arms, legs and fingers. But I’d never before messed with it in forty-pound quantities.
There was sufficient toluene and nitrates right here in the lab to have made that much TNT. Twice that much, in fact.
Again I went out to the laboratory and from there into the stock room. The toluene was all gone. If it had all been used for making TNT, then there was another forty pounds or so of it kicking around somewhere.
But that worried me less at the moment than the problem of who had trinitrated that toluene. Because there was only one answer, and that was one that didn’t make sense. Only Peter Carr had sufficient access to the laboratory to have made that quantity of TNT. With all our equipment designed for handling minute quantities, it would have taken a lot of time to make eighty pounds of HE. It couldn’t have been done in a stolen hour or two late at night.
But was Peter Carr a homicidal maniac? That fitted the murder of Gene Larkin, and insanity might account for the time bomb I’d just dismantled. But it couldn’t account for whatever frame-up had been pulled on me four nights ago. Peter Carr couldn’t have done that.
At any rate, I had his address. That was what I’d come here for, and my coming had incidentally saved quite a few thousand dollars’ worth of equipment from being scattered a
bout the landscape.
Now to talk to Peter Carr.
I left as I had come, without attracting the attention of the detectives in the two automobiles.
Safely away, three blocks from the lab, I glanced at my watch. It was ten minutes to two o’clock. I could still make that two A.M. owl car. And it would take me within walking distance of Peter Carr’s place.
I was the only passenger on that car, and the ride seemed interminable. My mind was so confused that I actually tried to avoid thinking, until after I had talked to Peter.
It was two-thirty when I walked down Grove Street to the river.
There are cottages, many of them mere one-room shacks, all along the river at this point. Some of them are fixed for year-round occupancy, the others are uninsulated frame buildings habitable only during the clement months of the year.
Peter’s would be the third or fourth south of Grove Street. Yes, there was his name on a mailbox at the edge of the road. A path led down the slope into darkness.
A cool breeze blew in off the river. In it, a smell of coming rain.
I glanced up at the sky, and the rain clouds were still quite distant in the west. Overhead were white, fleecy cumulus clouds, a round area of them made radiantly golden by the moon behind them. Those clouds were moving east, out of the path of the coming storm, and I saw that within a few minutes the moon would be out in the open, and that I’d have much better light for picking my way down that path.
So I leaned against the mailbox, and waited. The breeze was pleasant in my face, and I took off my hat to let it ruffle my hair.
About me was utter silence and peace as I looked up again at the sky to see if the moon were nearing the open stretch of sky.
Then the night exploded.
I was lying on my back in the road. My ears were numbed by a sound so loud that I cannot really say I heard it. The flash had been so bright that it was seconds before I could see.
But I didn’t seem to be injured, otherwise, nor could I have lost consciousness for a measurable interval, for debris from the explosion was still falling.
The Big Book of Reel Murders Page 116
