The Collection

by Fredric Brown

  If only I'd had a gun, it might have been different. But it would have been nothing but suicide for me to have gone through that door, or to have run around outside to try heading him off. I would do a lot for twenty-five thousand dollars, but suicide wasn't one of them. . . .

  Police.

  The place was run over with policemen, inside and out.

  The body in my room had been that of Harvey Toler. And he hadn't been playing dead this time. The back of his head had been bashed in by something that could have been, and probably was, the butt end of a pistol or automatic.

  Perry Evans was gone and there was a little triangle of checkered cloth stuck on a barb of the barbed wire on top of the wall. Evans had a checkered suit and it was gone from his room; his other suits hung in a neat row in his closet.

  Squad cars, every one available, were searching the neighborhood. Railroad and bus terminals were being watched. So were freight trains and highways. You know the sort of thing.

  Apparently the shock of discovering he'd had Paul Verne among his inmates had slowed down Dr. Stanley's thinking a bit. Although I had told him the whole story, it still hadn't dawned on him that I had taken the job there solely for that purpose and that I would not be staying.

  "We'll tell that to the police privately, of course, Anderson," he said. "Or the patients will find out you aren't really one of them and then your usefulness will be ended."

  I shrugged and let it go at that. I was too annoyed at losing a chance at twenty-five grand to care whether the boss thought I was staying or not.

  I talked to Captain Cross, who was in charge, and to some of the other detectives, privately, and showed my credentials. And I avoided talking to the other patients so I wouldn't have to explain to them why I had not been in my room when the fireworks started.

  Most of the patients were downstairs. Few were willing to return to their rooms. The whole building was lighted up like a Christmas tree.

  I wandered outside and walked around the grounds. Looking for something; I didn't know what.

  The whole place, inside and out, had been searched. The police had recognized the possibility that the bit of cloth on the barbed wire might have been a ruse and that Perry Evans might have doubled back and hidden somewhere here. They looked everywhere a man could hide and some places he couldn't.

  I leaned back against a tree and stared at the building, particularly at my own window. The photographers were up there now. What had happened in that room, in my room, tonight? Verne must have discovered who I was and what I was doing there and come to kill me. But how had Harvey Toler got in the way, and got his best chance to play the rôle of corpse?

  Harvey Toler worried me. More dead than when he had been alive. Why had he used a phony address?

  There are plenty of reasons, aside from being a homicidal maniac, why a man might give a wrong address. Not all of them criminal reasons. But it was a coincidence, the devil of a coincidence, that in this particular case a wrong address had been given. And Billy Kendall, the lad who couldn't remember who he was part of the time. Who had maybe had something to do with money being gone from a bank, although they couldn't prove it. And maybe he didn't have anything to do with it. It started to go round and round inside my head and it didn't make any sense.

  Perry Evans was gone, so Perry Evans had been Paul Verne all right, but where had a broken-down newspaperman like Frank Betterman got the dough to take his booze cure at a place like this?

  It was nuttier than a fruit cake, and the more I thought about the whole thing the screwier it got.

  Screwier and screwier and finally, there in the dark, it got so bad it began to make sense.

  There was one way of looking at it that added it up to something so monstrously crazy that it almost had to be true.

  I grinned up at the lighted window of my room and then I went inside for a moment and borrowed a big flashlight from Captain Cross.

  "Sure," he said. "But what do you want it for?"

  "Maybe I can find Perry Evans for you."

  "In the grounds here? We looked high and low."

  "But maybe not low enough," I said, and before I had to explain what I meant by that, I made my escape.

  There was one really likely place, and if what I wanted wasn't there, I would have to start a systematic search.

  But I went to the likely place, and it was there.

  VI

  No Nuts

  When I went back in, I gave Cross his flashlight.

  "Find him already?" he wanted to know. "Where's he hiding?"

  "Back of the garage," I said. "He dug a hole and pulled it in after him. He's buried there, or somebody is."

  He stared at me.

  "That's the one place where the ground's soft and easy to dig," I said, "and you wouldn't have to pull up and replace turf. It's been smoothed over pretty carefully, but you can see where it is. It'll probably be pretty shallow."

  He still just stared at me.

  "Don't blame your men for not finding it," I said. "They were looking for a live man hiding, and live men don't hide underground."

  There was still disbelief in his eyes, but he went to the door and gave some orders, and then he came back.

  "You mean he wasn't Paul Verne?" he said.

  "I got to make a phone call," I told him. "Long distance. Come on in the office if you want to listen."

  There was quite a congregation of patients in the office, talking it over. Dr. Stanley, still looking worried stiff, was trying to calm them. A plainclothesman, looking bored, was leaning in one corner of the room. Except for the pitch of the voices, it sounded like a ladies' tea.

  But I picked up the phone anyway, and said, "Long distance," and when the operator came on I said, "Get me the home of Roger Wheeler Verne in San Andria, California. Yeah, I'll hold the line."

  It was quite a while to hang on to a telephone, but it kept me out of local conversations.

  After a while the operator said, "Here's your party," and a male voice said, "Roger Verne speaking."

  This time when I started to talk, all the other voices stopped and everybody listened.

  "This is Eddie Anderson, Mr. Verne," I said. "Private detective. I've located your son alive, and I'm about to turn him over to the authorities. I wanted to tell you first so there could be no dispute about the reward."

  "Excellent, Mr. Anderson. I assure you there will be no difficulty about that."

  "Thanks," I said. "You'll probably have another phone call shortly, as soon as the police have him."

  As I put the phone down, Captain Cross growled:

  "What kind of chiselers do you think we are?"

  I grinned at him. "I don't know. What kind are you? All I know is I've had difficulty with rewards before, so you can't blame me for playing safe."

  There was tension in the room, plenty of it, as I turned around.

  "Frank Betterman," I said.

  He was standing behind Dr. Stanley's chair at the desk, and he looked startled and backed to the wall. I went on around the desk after him.

  Dr. Stanley turned in his chair and gave Betterman a startled, frightened look, and then pulled open a drawer of his desk that had been partly open before, and his hand jerked out of the drawer with an automatic in it.

  "Attaboy, Doc," I said, as I rounded the end of the desk. "Aim it at him. He's a killer. He might get you."

  As Dr. Stanley's automatic swung around to cover Betterman, I was right beside Stanley, and I dived for the automatic. I caught his gun wrist in both my hands and bore it down to the floor as I pulled him out of the chair.

  The gun fired once as his knuckles hit the floor, but the bullet buried itself harmlessly in the molding. Then I had the gun twisted out of his hand and had his arm turned behind his back, and it was all over. Even the strength of a homicidal maniac can't break an arm-twist like that.

  "Sorry, Frank," I said, to Betterman. "But if I hadn't played it that way, he'd have shot several of us before we got him. I
saw his hand keeping near that partly open drawer and I knew there'd be a gun in it. Had to stall till I got near enough to jump him."

  Frank Betterman wiped sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand.

  "You mean Stanley is this Paul Verne?" he said.

  I nodded. "I might have known he wouldn't be without an identity that would stand checking. He probably killed the real Dr. Philemon Stanley in Louisville, took over his identity and came here. He couldn't have impersonated him where he was known, of course, but it was easy enough here."

  "You better be right, Anderson," Captain Cross said. "I don't get all of it. Why'd he kill those other two guys? I know a nut doesn't need a reason, but he had a good hideout here and was not suspected."

  "And he wanted to keep it," I said. "Those weren't motiveless murders, either of them. He wanted to kill me, because he found out why I was here and he knew I'd catch wise sooner or later once I suspected Paul Verne was here. Probably he heard me talking on the phone, via an extension, last night, and decided to kill me. So earlier in the night he killed Perry Evans and hid the body and--"

  "Why?" Cross demanded. "What's killing Perry Evans got to do with killing you?"

  I grinned at him loftily.

  "So there wouldn't be an unsolved murder. I'd be dead and Evans gone, with a piece of cloth from his suit on the barbed wire. Two and two make four, and if the Verne angle pops up, why Evans was Verne and he killed me and scrammed."

  "Umm," said Cross. "But what about Toler"

  "Toler burgled my room while I was downstairs tonight. I'll tell you why later. Skip it for the moment. And Verne--Dr. Stanley--was waiting here to kill me when I came back, and in the dark he got Toler by mistake. But he found out he'd got the wrong man and waited for me. It wouldn't have put any crimp in his plans. Perry Evans, missing, would have taken the blame for two murders instead of one. But he missed killing me, even after firing a gun through the door. And I got a crowd in the hall outside so he couldn't come out after me that way, so he went back upstairs to his own room."

  "You mean he dropped out the window, ran around the outside and went upstairs?"

  "I doubt it," I interrupted. "His room is right over mine. I imagine he came in my window by a rope or something let down from his window. And all he had to do was climb back up and then come down the stairs, fastening his bathrobe."

  "You were telling me some screwy yarn about a tommy gun," Cross said. "Where does that fit in?"

  "Garvey was under orders to report to Stanley on the patients and any requests they might make. As a gag, I asked Garvey for a machine-gun and, of course, he told Stanley. And that's the one nutty thing that Paul Verne did. His macabre sense of humor made him put one in my room. That was before he knew I was a detective, of course. Maybe the first thing that made him suspect me was the fact that I ducked the gun in another room and didn't report it to him. If I'd been what I was supposed to be, I'd have come to him about it."

  Cross and the plainclothesman had relieved me of my captive by now and he was handcuffed and helpless. His sullen silence was enough of a confession for me, and apparently for Cross, too.

  But there was a plenty worried look on the captain's face as his subordinates took Verne away.

  "This is a new one on me," he said. "I mean, the sanitarium here. What the devil am I going to do about all the patients? Can the attendants take over, or did he have an assistant who can handle things long enough to find other places for these people to go?"

  I grinned at him. "You didn't ask me yet, Captain, why Harvey Toler came to my room tonight."

  He frowned. "All right, why did he? Not that that can have anything to do with winding up the affairs of a sanitarium."

  "It can have everything to do with it," I said. "Toler came there to spy on me, after he heard me pass his door to go downstairs. He wanted to look over my stuff, so he could report to Dr. Stanley, or to the man he thought was Dr. Stanley."

  "Huh? Why? Wait a minute! You mean Toler wasn't really crazy, that he was faking exhibitionism like you faked kleptomania, and that Stanley hired him like he hired you, to watch the other patients?"

  "Exactly, Cap. Now double that, in spades. . . ."

  * * * *

  "You're crazy," Kit said.

  "No, angel," I explained patiently. "That is the whole point. Much as I deplore two murders --three if you count the original Dr. Stanley--that is what makes this case utterly and screamingly a howl. I am not crazy.

  "And neither was anybody else in that nut house, except the man who ran it! I should have known it when we investigated a few patients at random, and not one of them seemed to have had enough money to pay his way, but every one of them was the type of person who would be looking for a job and reading want ads. Want ads like the one I answered, but worded differently"

  "You mean there wasn't a single nut in that place?"

  "Not a one," I told her. "It seems likely Verne would have had at least one genuine application during the month or so he had been operating there, but if he did have, I have a hunch he'd have turned it down. One or two legitimate ones would have spoiled the record, see? Lord, what a kick he must have got out of running that place, knowing that eighteen or nineteen people there were spying on each other at his orders and each of 'em acting crazy to fool all the others! And the whole shebang run by--"

  I couldn't go on with it.

  Besides, we'd have to stop laughing long enough to figure out where we were going to spend--with the aid of twenty-five thousand dollars--the rest of our honeymoon.

  THE MOON FOR A NICKEL

  It was almost midnight. The lake front sweltered in the aftermath of a blazing mid-summer day.

  The little man with the straggly gray hair stood dejectedly beside his big black skyward-aimed telescope, upon which hung a hand-lettered sign, "The Moon for a Nickel."

  It was too hot. Business was poor.

  Over the rippling waters of Lake Michigan the moon hung like a golden ball--but no one seemed interested in it. On the other side, beyond the park, the tall buildings rose: black gaunt shapes against a black background. Here and there shone the white rectangle of a lighted window.

  A hand touched his shoulder, and the little man jumped. He had not heard any one approach.

  A man with a black slouch hat pulled down over his forehead stood beside him. The telescope man recognized him as a man he had noticed hanging around almost an hour the previous night, watching the telescope, the buildings, and the people.

  He was holding out a dollar bill. "Take a walk around a tree, dad," he said. "I want to look at the Big Dipper."

  The little man stuck the dollar into his pocket. A buck was a buck--particularly right now. He didn't see many of them. He meandered off and sat down on a bench, just near enough to see that the fellow didn't try to walk off with the 'scope.

  Not that he could do much about it-- the guy looked smooth but tough. Thinking about it, the little man became quite uneasy. It wasn't usual to be handed a dollar and told to take a walk. In fact, it had never happened before. But a buck was a buck, and if only he had forty-nine more of them--

  Out of the corner of his eye he managed to watch the mysterious stranger without appearing to do so. He had a hunch it would not be advisable to act interested.

  The stranger swiveled the telescope around so that it seemed to be pointing up at the nearest building, across the street from the park.

  He kept turning the focusing screw. At last he seemed satisfied with the adjustment and moved the telescope slowly from side to side as though he were peering intently into every window. Then he raised it a trifle and seemed to look into the windows of the floor above. Then the floor below.

  Then he took out his handkerchief to mop his forehead. But before putting it back into his pocket, he waved it once. He turned the telescope around again so that it pointed out over the lake. Then, without a word, he walked away rapidly.

  The little man with the straggly gray hair strolled back to
the telescope. He knew that it was none of his business and that he should keep out of it, but his eyes followed the stranger, who became a dark shadow as he crossed the two blocks of park.

  Then, as he came out under the street lights of the boulevard, he could be seen clearly again. He climbed into the front seat of a big car parked at the curb.

  But the car didn't drive away. It stayed there, waiting.

  The little man realized he was out of his element--that sudden death sat in the front seat of that car, and in its vacant back seat as well.

  And he didn't want to get killed just then, not when his wife was so ill, when she needed an operation and was counting on him, somehow, to find the money. But fifty bucks was as far away as the moon.

  The moon--he should re-aim his 'scope at the moon, so that in case anybody with a nickel came along-- He looked through the telescope and saw a blurred golden disk. He reached up to turn the focusing screw, and then lowered his hand. What was the use?

  He might as well go home. No more tonight. The dollar bill had been a windfall, but just enough to be tantalizing. How, where, when, to find forty-nine more of them to pay for his wife's operation? Her wan face seemed to swim before his eyes, superimposed upon the blurred disk of the moon.

  He turned back and looked up at the building front across the park. There were a few lights here and there. One on the fourth floor, two in adjacent windows on the eighth. He tried to remember the exact slant of the telescope. It would have pointed, he guessed, at the fifth or sixth floor.

  Suddenly, on the sixth floor, he saw a light that glowed and disappeared, showed once more, dimly. A flashlight, he thought. He didn't see it again. Several minutes passed.

  Then out of the entrance of the building, two men walked rapidly to the parked car. One carried a small bag.

  Curiosity overcame caution in the little man beside the telescope. It was partly a dim hope that if he could get the license number of that car, a description of all three of the men, there might be a reward. But mostly it was curiosity.