by Unknown
She thought of herself as a husky and capable nurse. Which she was. Though vaguely conscious of missing some important and integral part of life, she found that men bored her, almost without exception. A kiss was a remarkably unsanitary gyration.
But, on the bus trip, she had no time to think of vague matters. Her problems were more specific. For three years she had been the surgical assistant to a very fine doctor. She had followed him in so many operations that she could anticipate his every move.
A week before, the doctor she worked for explained that the hospital administration was requesting him to return to the system whereby he took on internes as surgical assistants, thus complicating his own operations, but furthering their education.
He gave her a month off with pay, and she had spent one week at a rented cabin at Lake Morris near Rockwarren. She had thought of offering her services to another surgeon whom she knew, and had left her car at the bus station in Rockwarren, had taken the bus down to the city. She found that the other surgeon had the same problem.
After the three years of acting as surgical assistant, she doubted whether she could force herself to return to a nursing routine.
So Doris Logan was worrying about her future. Unless she could find the means and the opportunity to go to medical school, further progress in the field was denied her. In fact, they wanted her to retrogress. To an individual of her spirit, this was very irksome indeed. She thought of her mind as one of the little white mice she had seen once in a laboratory maze. It ran back and forth, bewildered, its pink nose twitching. The bus was getting well out into the country. The sun had gone below the horizon and the after-work traffic had lessened. Neon was flashing up in front of the juke spots on the highway, and some gas stations were already floodlighted. The driver clicked on the inside lights in the bus.
Her seat companion stirred restlessly and his hat rolled off his head, blundered down into her lap. She picked it up with distaste, glanced at him, half stood and put it on the overhead rack.
She looked at him for a time. Silly man to get so drunk. Yet rather a nice-looking man. Sensitivity in that face. And intelligence. The eyes were set well in the face, and the mouth, though slack in sleep, had a certain firmness and character. She suddenly felt a warmth that surprised her.
Doris, my girl, if you start feeling mushy about drunks in buses, you are really in a sad, bad way.
There were spots of color in the man’s cheek. His breathing was a shade too rapid. Professional interest immediately swallowed personal interest. She watched him narrowly.
If she took his wrist to find the pulse, he might awaken. She moved her head to where she could watch a pulse in his throat. Her watch, of course, had a sweep second hand. She counted.
One hundred and twelve! Not good at all. Ever so lightly, she touched the back of her hand to his dry forehead. It was alarmingly hot.
The slight pressure disturbed him. His right arm moved up and the inside of the forearm pressed against his side just at his waistline.
His hand slowly slid back to the seat. She looked at the place where he had pressed. There seemed to be a slight bulge there. She wondered what it was. She carefully grasped the edge of the rayon cord jacket, lifted it until she could see his gray and white belt. She caught her underlip between her teeth. Even under weak artificial light in a moving bus, she could tell dried blood when she saw it.
It led to a very direct line of reasoning. The man was hurt. There were doctors in the city. He was leaving the city. Thus the wound would be either a knife wound or a bullet wound. She wondered which. She did not doubt for one moment the correctness of her reasoning.
She remembered a ticket stub inside the gray hatband. She stood up and glanced at it. Rockwarren. At Rockwarren she would turn him over to the police. He would probably be wanted.
But ten miles from Rockwarren, he moaned. He opened his eyes and looked at her with the glaze of partial delirium. She saw his teeth shut hard, saw him slowly pull himself together.
He sat up and said weakly, “Could you tell me how far it is to Rockwarren?”
She liked his voice and she liked his eyes. “Another fifteen minutes.” She leaned toward him and said, in that trained voice that doesn’t carry as far as a whisper, “How far do you expect to walk with that wound?”
His hand lifted to his side, then slowly dropped. Surprisingly, he smiled. “You got me, pal,” he said.
“Can you make it about fifty yards?”
“By myself, yes. But not carrying two suitcases.”
He sank into the seat of the small coupe with a heartfelt sigh. She got behind the wheel and drove back to the bus station. He waited and she came out in a moment carrying his bags. In the center of the small village she went into a drugstore.
When she came out she saw that he was either asleep or had fainted. She got behind the wheel, stowed her package in back, considered a moment, and then lowered him so that his head rested in her lap. She threw his hat in back.
Five miles from Rockwarren she turned off the county road onto a dirt track with grass growing high in the middle. It brushed the underside of the car. Her lights made a bright tunnel through the darkness of the woods. The road went down a steep pitch.
She steadied him with her right hand on his shoulder. At the foot of the incline she turned sharply left, her lights brushing across a split-log cabin.
Beyond the cabin was the lakeshore. She left him in the car, went up onto the porch, went into the spare bedroom and turned on the lights. Deftly she made up the bed with her extra sheets.
She could not rouse him when she returned to the car.
With her hands in his armpits, she dragged him out, his heels hitting the ground. She rested when she got him to the steps. She rested again when she got him to the top of the steps. After dragging him across the small living room and into the bedroom, she made one final effort and managed to get him up onto the bed.
She saw that the dragging had opened the wound again, if indeed it had ever been entirely closed. She boiled the probe and scalpel on the kitchen stove, put the sulpha powder, gauze and adhesive on the nightstand.
In five minutes she knew that she would not have to drive back to the village for the doctor as she had planned. The slug had hit at an angle, had followed all the way around his side, not far under the skin, and had lodged within an inch of his backbone. She felt the lump with her fingers.
Deftly she made the short incision, popped the ugly-looking chunk of lead out by pressing delicately with her thumbs on either side of it. She washed both wounds, packed them with the sulpha powder, bandaged them expertly.
His fever was just under a hundred and two. She gave him sulpha tablets which, in his unconscious state, he choked on. She then injected penicillin into him, covered him up, clicked out the bright light and left the room. At the doorway she paused, intending to go back and take his wallet and look for identification.
But she couldn’t do it. She could not bring herself to snoop among his papers.
After she had quietly closed his door, she realized how tired she was. She went out onto the screened porch and looked at the moon pattern across the water. She tried to bring her mind back to the problem of her future. But somehow she could not work up a sufficient amount of interest. She smoked two cigarettes and, when she began to yawn, she went to her bedroom. Then she realized that he might wake up and leave. With a determined stride she went back to his room, collected both suitcases, took them back to her room and shot the bolt.
CHAPTER FOUR
GAYLORD DARROLD
He sat on the kitchen table and could not keep his eyes off the heavily chalked outline on the floor. The outline of Cynthia. There were two men in the kitchen with him. The big, dull-looking one who leaned against the sink was a Lieutenant Krobey. He had a flat tanned face and blue eyes that looked like marbles freshly spray-painted in watery blue.
The other one was a fat and asthmatic man with a cherub face, a shining bald skull an
d a deep, somehow sickening, dimple in his forehead. His name was Sergeant Love. He had been an exceedingly doleful and lugubrious man until one day a hopped-up seventeen-year-old had shot Sergeant Love square in the forehead with a twenty-two pistol. The tiny slug had gone an inch deep into the gray tissue of Sergeant Love’s frontal lobe and had turned him into a jolly and optimistic man who told his wife every day of her life that he was living on borrowed time.
“Give it to me slow again,” Krobey said.
“Our marriage had turned into something pretty dull some time ago. She lived her life. I lived mine. When I was home she cooked for me and kept my clothes in shape. When I was away I didn’t care what she did, just so long as she didn’t spend too much money.”
“You buy her the car?”
“She had some money of her own.”
“You got any idea who she might have quarreled with?”
“No,” Gaylord Darrold said.
The gleaming young man from the district attorney’s office came back into the kitchen. He gave each of the three men an identical nod. Mr. Gaylord Darrold had arrived home at ten-fifteen in the morning, exactly sixteen hours after the discovery of the body of his wife by Mrs. Morgantine.
The burnished young man from the district attorney’s office was named Haggard. De Wolfe Haggard. He had been in and out of the kitchen five times.
Gaylord Darrold was the sort of lean-headed man, the type who, in his twenties, is called “wise,” in his thirties is called “sophisticated,” in his forties is called “dissipated” and in his fifties is called “well preserved.” Darrold was edging from sophistication into dissipation.
He glanced mildly at Haggard, brushed some invisible lint off his sharply creased trousers.
Krobey said heavily, “I just want leads. People kill people and we like to know who.” Krobey seemed intent on making sense.
The phone rang. Gaylord Darrold slid easily from the table, walked into the hall and took the call. He turned and handed the phone to Krobey.
Krobey grunted into the phone a few times and then hung up. He said to Sergeant Love, “That’s the Rockwarren lead. A guy answering the description that old lady give us took the bus about six last night to Rockwarren. But we can’t track him from there. Anybody we can’t track is a good bet.”
“You think he’s got a hole in him?” Love asked.
Krobey shrugged. “No screens on the house. That window over there was open. A slug goes out the window, we never find it if it’s angled up a little. If he has a hole in him, it isn’t important.”
De Wolfe Haggard struck a pose in the middle of the kitchen. He rested his chin on his fist and glared at the floor.
“This is my reconstruction, gentlemen,” he said soberly. “Mrs. Darrold went out the night before last. She struck up an acquaintanceship with this Mr. X. He carried a gun. Lieutenant Krobey has explained to us that since it is rather an old gun, a Browning patent manufactured in Belgium, we will probably never trace it. The young man came here with Mrs. Darrold. She had been dead five hours when she was found. That puts the time at one o’clock.
“For some reason they quarreled. He wrapped the gun in that towel, and fired twice at her. The towel muffled the sound of the shots. He missed her once and the bullet went out that window. She was running from him in terror. The second shot struck her in the back of the head. He wiped the gun on the towel, tossed both the gun and the towel on the floor. Then he calmly walked out. Mrs. Morgantine saw him. It matches with the time of death. All we need to do, gentlemen, is inquire around at those places where it is likely that Mrs. Darrold and Mr. X may have met.”
He looked around the kitchen, said to Gaylord Darrold, “Where did they go?”
“They left some time ago.”
“Oh.” For a moment De Wolfe Haggard looked very young and very vulnerable. He swallowed hard, and in what was obviously a gesture to gain face, marched two paces closer to Darrold, leveled a finger at him and said, “This alibi of yours will stand up, you believe?”
Gaylord Darrold selected a cigarette from a battered leather case. He lit it, flicked the match away. The match bounced off the polished toe of Haggard’s right shoe.
Darrold said flatly, “Don’t raise your voice at me, junior. And don’t pick words like alibi to use on me. Somebody killed my wife. You’ve been boring me off and on all afternoon. Now why don’t you go finger a brief or something and let the cops work on this. They know how.”
The burnished young man coughed, touched his fingertips to a dark blue Windsor knot and fled from the kitchen.
Darrold stared at the chalked outline on the floor. His eyes narrowed and he sucked the smoke far down into his lungs.
The phone rang again. Love came from the front of the house to answer it. He listened for a long time, said, “Okay, Joe,” and hung up.
He walked out into the kitchen and smiled at Darrold. “Okay, so you’re clear, Mister Darrold. We got you located at Barnston, fifty miles east of here, at noon yesterday, and that Mr. Walker, the bookkeeper guy, reported that he put you on the Empire City at just five minutes of twelve, headed east. That train makes its first stop two hours later, at two in the afternoon, a hundred and seventy miles east of here. And I guess nobody jumps off that Empire City, hey?”
“Hardly.”
“Then in Richfield, a hundred and seventy miles away, you called on customers, checked in at the Richfield House after dinner, left your room early this morning, checked out, picked up your car from the Wilson Brothers Garage and drove back here.”
Darrold smiled tightly. “You people really follow it up, don’t you?”
“Brother, we have to. With characters like De Wolfe Haggard running around, we can’t have any holes in our cases.”
“Probably a good thing from my point of view.”
“Sure, figure what happens if we catch the guy and some jury lets him go. You don’t want any suspicion on you. It’s better we check it all the way.”
“Thanks,” Darrold said dryly. He yawned. “Look, Sergeant. All this has been pretty rough. I’m sort of shot. Okay with you people if I take a nap?”
“Go ahead. We’ll know where you are if we want you.”
“If there’s any way I can help …”
Sergeant Love clapped him on the shoulder. “Turn in, fella. You do look sort of shot.”
CHAPTER FIVE
PAUL JANUARY
It was a bit like waking up on the morning of final exams, knowing that there was a horrible day ahead, without being able to remember the reason. At first he thought it was a hangover, but aside from a dull roaring in his ears and a tiny pulse somewhere behind his forehead, he felt fine.
The mattress had obviously been stuffed with old tire irons and petrified bits of cabbage. It rustled and jabbed him when he moved. He wondered why he had taken a bed with such a foul mattress.
The ceiling was of tired-looking plywood.
Suddenly the picture flashed into his mind of a girl on a kitchen floor.
He was wide awake in a fraction of a second. Awake, tense and afraid. The window was unbarred. Clean sheets. He touched his side, felt the comforting firmness of a professional bandage. There was a new area of pain also. He rolled up onto his side, explored the new place, found a second bandage.
An orifice of exit, no doubt. The slug was no longer with him.
He frowned. There was a girl on a bus. Quite a nice girl, in fact. A small car. Headlights.
He stood up with determination, wavered for balance, managed to remain standing. Something clattered. A kitchen sound.
Three steps took him to the bedroom door. He opened it. Same girl. Her back was to him. Red slacks and a halter.
She spun around. “You shouldn’t be up!”
“I feel fine. Just fine.”
She came over to him, took his arm and led him to a deep wicker chair. He sank gratefully into it.
He smiled up at her and said, “In words of one syllable, lady. Please.”
“Certainly. I sat next to you on the bus. I’m a nurse. My name is Doris Logan. I rent this cottage. The noise out there is Lake Morris slapping the dock. I saw you were hurt. I brought you here, extracted one small bullet which you will find over there on the mantel, and gave you some items to knock off the infection which had started. I don’t know why I did it. Who did you kill? How would you like your eggs?”
“My name is Paul January and I didn’t kill anybody and scrambled soft, please.”
She went back to the stove, cut down the flame under the percolator and began making housewife motions over the eggs.
Once she turned and said, “Of course, you’d say that anyway.”
He thought it over. “Yes, I guess I would. Not the killer type, though. I even hate to watch bugs after they get a jolt of DDT.”
In a few moments she pushed the table over to his chair, brought over his plate and cup, sat opposite him.
“I still don’t know why I did it,” she said softly.
He bent busily over the eggs. This was indeed a remarkable young woman. She seemed to have a little transparent sheet over her emotions.
“They’ll be coming after you, you know,” she said. “That is, unless you were a good deal cleverer in getting to the bus than you were after you were on it.”
“They won’t be coming after me,” he said with decision.
“Oh, then you were clever?”
“Not at all. They won’t come after me, because I will go to them, Miss Logan. I don’t know why I ran in the first place. Shock, I guess. The whole thing is still pretty foggy in my mind. I just wanted to get away from there. Anywhere. Just away.”
“Away from where?”
“Suppose I think over the whole thing while I drink the coffee and then tell you later.”
They sat on the screened porch. It was a placid morning, slightly overcast. The lake had a steel-gray sheen. The morning held, for Paul January, a peculiar and haunting unreality. No other camp was visible from the porch. On the far side of the lake silent pines cast deep aqua shadows.
