Murder Out of Turn

by Frances Lockridge

  Thelma Smith, walking quickly away from the station, continued along Main Street until she came to the First National store. She went in.

  Mrs. James Harlan Abel came out of the notion store next to the garage on the opposite side of Main Street and crossed to her car. She looked at her watch and shook her head, looked toward the station and got into the car. She sat first in the seat next the driver’s; then she moved across under the wheel. Then she lighted a cigarette and leaned back.

  Hardie Saunders parked his new LaSalle carefully and got out of it unhurriedly. He looked at his watch, which assured him that it was 8:49. It was not quite dark, he noticed—not quite the dark of full night. But the dusk was heavy. Saunders lighted a cigarette, tossed the match aside, and sauntered off.

  A State trooper, unobtrusive in civilian clothes, watched the arrival of the 8:38, which had come in at 8:43. He saw Dorian Hunt turn up the hill and James Harlan Abel cross the street. He watched the arrival of the Wilson car and raised his eyebrows over Thelma Smith’s sudden departure from it while Kennedy was in the station. He observed Kennedy when he returned and, after Kennedy crossed to the saloon, strolled after him. Some time earlier, he had noted the arrival in Brewster of Mrs. Abel and seen her park diagonally in Main Street.

  The trooper entered the barroom, saw Kennedy at the far end with a glass in front of him, and paid no attention to him.

  “Guess I’ll have a beer, Jim,” the trooper told the bartender. “How’s tricks?”

  It still lacked a few minutes of nine o’clock when the trooper finished his beer. He tossed a coin across the bar, and looked down it toward Kennedy. Kennedy wasn’t there. The trooper looked puzzled for a moment, and the bartender, watching him, intercepted his gaze. The bartender nodded his head toward a door at the rear of the barroom, and enlightenment appeared on the trooper’s features. He told Jim he’d be seeing him, and to be good, and walked without hurry toward the door. On the steps outside he stood reflectively for a moment, lighting a cigarette. Then he made up his mind, in pantomime, and turned to the right. He walked up the hill, in the direction Dorian Hunt had taken.

  John Blair, his head heavily bandaged, slept restlessly. At 8:45, a nurse opened the door of his room and crossed softly to the hospital bed. She looked down at Blair for a moment and then nodded. She crossed to the window and opened it a few inches from the bottom and stood for a moment looking down into the grounds below. The hospital stood in a little park, and in building it the contractor had been careful not to injure, more than was necessary, the trees which grew around it. Hence, although the hospital was brightly new, its surroundings were comfortably aged. The tree nearest the window could tell of fifty years.

  It was dark under the trees, but then it was almost dark everywhere. Cool air came in through the partly opened window. The nurse, rustling faintly in stiff white, turned from the window to the bed again, and looked down at the sleeping man. He seemed to be quieter, now; the doctors said he would almost certainly recover. The nurse nodded at him approvingly, and then looked at the watch on her wrist. She nodded approvingly at the watch and went out of the room, closing the door behind her. She walked on rubber heels down the long hall toward the diet kitchen.

  John Blair had strange dreams. He was sitting in the sun, which fell on him warmingly. Then a shadow formed and lay across his body, shutting off the sun. He could not understand what made the shadow, which lay so heavily on him. It was a strange shadow. It had pressure, weight. It crept over him and grew heavier. It was not a shadow, but a dark substance, impalpable but oppressive. It moved over his face and it was hard to breathe through the heavily pressing shadow.

  “I’m dreaming,” John Blair thought. “I’ve got to wake up! I’ve got to wake up!”

  He tried to push sleep aside, to tear it away. Sleep was pressing too heavily on him—on his body, on his head. Didn’t sleep know that his head was hurt? Didn’t—?

  John Blair’s hands came up from his sides, fighting against the pressure on his head.

  The nurse finished her cup of coffee in the diet kitchen, and doused in the dregs the coal of an unauthorized cigarette. Well, it was time to get back to the patient.

  Lieutenant Weigand glanced at his watch as, with a willing but bemused Mullins behind him, he went out of the Norths’ door toward his car. The buzz of urgency was back in Weigand’s mind, but now there was no vagueness in it. Weigand knew where he was going—at 8:44 o’clock by his watch—and he was going fast. Mullins was still pulling the car door closed behind him, the Norths were watching, with surprise on their faces, from the doorway, when the wheels of Weigand’s car spun a moment on damp grass as the clutch went in. The car jumped backward and turned to face the gap in the wall. Almost before it stopped, the wheels spun again and it leaped for the road. A car coming up the road from the right checked suddenly, and skidded on the crowned macadam as the Buick’s siren snarled.

  The Buick was doing fifty on the narrow road as it passed Ireland’s store and swerved on the road toward Brewster, nine miles away. Two minutes later, with a mile and three-quarters of twisting, high-crowned road behind it, the Buick went into Route 22 without slackening, and then the speedometer needle swung around to seventy within a quarter-mile.

  “Things happening, Loot?” Mullins inquired, mildly.

  “Maybe,” Weigand said. “Blair, I’m afraid.”

  Mullins gripped the side of the door as they went at sixty-five around a wide curve to the right.

  “These babies move right along, don’t they, Loot?” he said, pleased. And, with a smile of content on his face, he felt under his coat and loosened a police automatic in a shoulder holster. Feeling the grip in his hands, Mullins nodded in approval. Weigand caught the expression, and a smile cut momentarily across his face.

  “Happy, Mullins?” he asked.

  “It’s all right with me, Loot,” Mullins said. “We’ll fix ’em.”

  The Buick went around a curve to the left at seventy.

  The Norths looked at each other, and Mr. North shook his head.

  “I guess I don’t get it,” he said. “What came over Bill, do you think?”

  Mrs. North shook her head, puzzled.

  “He saw something,” she said. “That’s the way he acts when he sees something. Only, what?”

  Mr. North shook his head.

  “Think!” Mrs. North said. “You think, and I’ll think. Something about Blair.”

  “All right,” Mr. North said. “You think. What about Blair?”

  It was something, Mrs. North said, that they had all missed the first time; something they remembered but did not understand.

  “We told him,” she said. “And now we don’t know. Quick—what did Blair do Saturday?”

  “Well,” Mr. North said, “he and Saunders got up and had breakfast and then Saunders went to Brewster and Blair came over to play tennis. Wasn’t that it? I don’t see anything in that, do you?”

  Mrs. North looked at that, and shook her head.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t think I do. Was it something about breakfast?”

  Mr. North shook his head. He said he didn’t see it.

  “Or tennis?” Mrs. North said. “Or later—wait a minute.” Her forehead wrinkled. “Wait a minute,” she repeated. “Something’s coming! Maybe it was—oh!”

  “Oh! What?” Mr. North said. “If you are—”

  “Come on, Jerry!” Mrs. North said. “Oh, we were stupid! Come on!”

  She was running toward their car.

  “Listen,” Mr. North called. “What the—”

  “Come on, if you’re coming!” Mrs. North called, yanking open the car door. “Don’t just stand there!”

  Mr. North found himself crossing the yard. He was crossing it at a trot, which hurt both his head and his arm, and he was trying to get sense out of Mrs. North as he trotted.

  “Come on!” Mrs. North said. “It will all be over if we dawdle.”

  “What will be over?” Mr. Nor
th said, in breathless confusion, and braced himself with his sound arm against the dashboard as the car lurched backward, with protest from the gears.

  “Everything!” Mrs. North said. “The murderer. Everything!”

  The car jumped through the gap in the wall, and Mr. North shivered convulsively. He loosened his hold to run the only available hand desperately through his hair, and then grabbed for the dashboard again as the car swerved at Ireland’s.

  “Oh,” said Mrs. North, “I don’t see how we could have been so foolish! And he’s afraid about Blair, of course. His being conscious again and everything, and the murderer remembering and all. And Blair knowing!”

  Mr. North’s words were devout. His tone was otherwise.

  “If you would only—” he said, turning in his seat so that he could get a grip on the inner handle of the door.

  “It was empty!” Mrs. North said. “Only it wasn’t! And we missed it.”

  Mr. North shook his head and started to reply. Then he decided that he would not, under these rather appalling circumstances, distract Pam North from the business which rested, so hazardously, in her hands. If they ever stopped; if ever this demoniac progress through the approaching night was ended, and if they were still alive, he would speak to her sternly. But now—

  And then something in her last words echoed in Mr. North’s mind and his grip on the doorhandle relaxed and he stared unseeingly ahead. So that was it! He sighed, and shook his head.

  “I must be stupider than anybody else,” he told himself, resentfully. “Than anybody else in the world.”

  He looked at Mrs. North’s intent profile. It was lucky, he thought, that he had married so well. He reached down and turned on the lights, which Mrs. North had, in some incomprehensible fashion, been getting along without. He would finally tell her how well her mind worked, he thought. If they lived, of course.

  18

  MONDAY

  8:51 P.M. TO 9:22 P.M.

  Nurse Frazier stood up, half-heartedly flicked the front of her uniform to dislodge crumbs, and glanced at her watch with instinct for time which comes to those who live by schedule. She walked from the diet kitchen toward Room 41, which was occupied by John Blair, and she was in no particular hurry, nor did any sense of urgency trouble her mind. She moved abstractedly, tasting the flavor of coffee and cigarette which clung to her mouth. Midway of the corridor a door opened and Nurse Carlin came out. Nurse Frazier and Nurse Carlin stopped.

  “Always,” said Nurse Carlin, with resigned bitterness, “he’s having a sinking spell. But always. And ringing his head off.”

  Nurse Frazier nodded understandingly.

  “And isn’t,” she said. “Patients!” Her tone was hopeless about patients. “The things they want!” she amplified. “Thank heaven, Forty-one’s still out.”

  “Well,” said Nurse Carlin, as a parting acknowledgment. She went on down the hall. Nurse Frazier shook her head, over patients apparently, and went on to Room 41. She hesitated a moment outside the room and heard a small sound, as of someone stirring. It sounded as if Forty-one might be waking up, in which case she must notify the resident, who was, she had heard, obligated immediately to notify the police. Nurse Frazier opened the door. She stood rigid a moment before she began to scream.

  In that moment the dark figure which was standing at the head of Forty-one’s bed, bending down and doing something with its hands, turned a face which was a blur only less dark. The hands did not move for that instant, the body was stilled in the moment of action, set in the muscular pattern of energy, but without energy. Then the scream of Nurse Frazier shattered the moment. The scream, high, with sheer astonishment and terror mingled, floated back down the corridor. It caught Nurse Carlin as she neared the diet kitchen door and stopped her as if it were a noose hurled suddenly, and tightened, over her moving body. She whirled, with a hand up in a subconscious gesture of repulsion.

  The scream echoed down the corridor and down the stairs. At its first sound a nurse at the information desk, seated, a record book before her, moved convulsively. Her pen scratched against the paper, caught and splattered ink in a shiver of arrested motion. Dr. Adams heard it in his office behind the information enclosure, and started to his feet, and as it came again threw the door open and came out running. Bending over a patient on the lower floor, a nurse and an interne, talking in whispers beside a bed, heard it more faintly and threw up their heads and listened and stared at each other. Then it came again and the interne broke for the door.

  And in Room 41, the dark figure which had been bending over John Blair turned as the scream began and was at the window in one long movement. The figure was going through the window to the fire-escape outside as the scream still sounded down the corridor, and by the time Nurse Frazier had dashed light into the room with a frantic flick of a hand, there was no figure in sight, but there was a hurried, scrambling sound on the fire-escape. Nurse Frazier ran to the bed.

  Her scream still seemed hanging in the air—she could hear it still in her ears—as she snatched at the pillow which covered Blair’s head, and against which one of his lifted hands was spread motionless, palm up. Her quick fingers searched for a pulse as there was the slap of running feet in the corridor. Nurse Carlin stood in the doorway, a hand at her breast.

  “What—?!” she said. “What is it?”

  “The doctor!” Nurse Frazier told her, the voice tense and high-pitched, and the fingers still seeking the pulse, the eyes intent on the suffused, motionless face. “They tried to smother him!”

  Dr. Adams was there, then, brushing the nurse aside, calling for adrenaline, working swiftly, and both nurses moved deftly, with professional sureness, at his direction. It was not until the racing interne burst into the room that there was time for anyone to lean from the window at which Nurse Frazier pointed. By then there was nothing moving in the shadows of the park, under the heavy foliage of the trees. But so fragile had been this moment that the interne, leaning from the window, could hear the scuffle of feet in the gravel at the side of the hospital, as someone ran, hard, around the building toward the semicircular drive in front, where cars could be, if they were backed a few feet onto the turf, parked in darkness.

  Then the interne reached for the telephone on the bed table and, as Adams and the nurses worked, blowing on the spark of life which might still remain in the body of John Blair, shouted into the transmitter.

  The girl at the information desk shouted for a porter who should be somewhere near and, at almost the same moment, spun the dial of an outside telephone to the police number. Her cry for the porter passed beyond the doors and reached the slim young woman in green, with a yellow ornament on a green hat, just as she stepped down from the last step onto the arching drive in front.

  She stood with a foot on the drive and the other motionless on the step behind her, and turned her head. Then, at another sound, her head moved back again and she was staring at the corner of the hospital. Gravel crunched under running feet and Dorian Hunt raised both hands, with the fists clenched, toward her breasts. She was standing so, as if frozen, when the runner came around the corner of the hospital and at the sight of her checked for a moment and threw up one hand as if to hide a face. But the gesture was only an involuntary one, without meaning, because a gasp from the girl at the steps had told its story.

  “No!” Dorian said. “Oh—no!”

  And then, from the menace in the runner’s movements, Dorian Hunt started to run. She ran across the semicircle toward the road which wound down the hill from the hospital. But there was a rush from her right and, as she dodged, an ankle turned under her. She seemed to be falling a long time and then, almost before her outstretched, protecting hands touched the ground, she was snatched up again. She struggled against a strength that was greater than hers—a strength that, irresistibly, bore her backward and to the side. She tried to cry out, but a hand clamped heavily on her mouth, bruising her lips.

  William Weigand, driving as Mullins had never
seen him drive before, took eight minutes to do the nine miles, part of it on a winding, crowned road, that separated the camp from the traffic light set where Brewster’s Main Street stemmed off to the right from Route 22. It was 8:52 when, reaching that intersection, he wasted half a minute behind cars which had stopped dutifully on red, and were confused when the siren sounded behind them. A woman in the car at the head of the line trembled violently, looked anxiously at the red light, put her car convulsively in gear and stalled her motor. She was still stalled when the Buick, twisting out of line with siren speaking in anger, whirled around her.

  From Route 22, Brewster’s Main Street goes, with a moderate twist or two and usually with cars parked where they will do the most harm, up a grade. When it straightens out in the business center it is wider, but there cars are parked diagonally—a position which increases curb capacity, to merchantly satisfaction, but makes progress slow. Not even a siren can move such cars, or widen the narrow lane they leave open in the center.

  Weigand could have avoided the loss of more than a minute here, to his subsequent peace of mind, if he had known Brewster better. If he had known Brewster better, he would have turned up a diagonal street which climbed the hill to his right a couple of hundred yards up Main Street from the traffic light. This would have taken him up the hill, and to a street above which paralleled Main Street and from which the winding road which dead-ended at the hospital led, after another few hundred yards, off to the right. But the diagonal street was not an inviting one unless one knew its habits, and did not very earnestly promise to lead anywhere. So Weigand ignored it.

  And even after he gained the business center, and was stymied for seconds behind a grocery supply-truck, he might have reached the hospital more quickly if he had taken the first turning to the right, and gone up a hill which was about as nearly perpendicular as a street can be without shedding its pavement. That would have led him straight to the parallel street on the higher level, and left only a short jog to the left before reaching Hospital Road. But Weigand, driving by instinct and completely sure only that the hospital was on the hilltop, passed that turning and took the second. This led up a less precipitate grade, ended in the same parallel highway, and required a jog to the right for Hospital Road.