by Horace McCoy
Nemo knew he had to move fast.
A little after four o’clock in the morning Paul Sublette awakened and rolled over in bed and listened. He thought he heard noises. He got up and went into the living room and looked down into the street. There was nothing there. Thinking he had been dreaming, he went back into the bedroom. Then he heard the noises again. They were coming from the back. He went to the rear of the apartment and looked down into the alley.
Three men were down below, standing just across the alley from the rear entrance of Acme. Paul was very afraid they were John Conroy’s men.
He went back into the bedroom. Pia was still sleeping. Paul slipped his trousers on over his pajamas and his coat over the jacket. He wore the coat because it had an auxiliary police badge pinned inside. He opened the small door of the night stand and took a revolver off the top of the little radio inside. He put it in his pocket, keeping his hand on it, and went down the back way into the alley. At that moment he was not afraid. He did not know who these men were and he did not know what they were up to, but whatever they were up to they were up to very close to his wife, whom he loved with a deep passion.
In the alley one of the men had heard the door open upstairs and had seen Paul coming stealthily down the back stairs. He ducked behind a packing crate and as Paul crept by, his pistol extended, like a child playing cops and robbers, the man behind the packing crate stood up. It was Roy Ackerman. He slapped Paul behind the ear with a blackjack and caught him before he hit the ground.
The other two men came over. One was Eamon Harrigan.
Harrigan said, “Sublette?”
Ackerman said, “Nobody else.”
“Well, you know what to do with him,” Harrigan said.
The third man said, “Let’s get out of here.”
Ackerman dragged Paul Sublette to the back door of Acme and dumped him.
The third man picked up a detonator and said, “Beat it. This is RDX. It’s like an atom bomb. Everything around here’ll go up.”
“What about you?” Ackerman asked.
The man grinned at him in the darkness. “You ain’t really worried about me, are you?” he asked.
“Not a bit. Not a damn bit,” Ackerman said, walking rapidly away with Harrigan.
The man unrolled the wire, walking down the alley with the detonator, in the opposite direction from Harrigan and Ackerman. He turned the corner and walked some more.
Then he stopped and backed against a building.
He pushed down on the detonator.
There was a roar like the crack of doom and a sheet of flame shot into the air.
“My God!” Kessel said to himself. He was standing at the window of the listening post, looking out.
Van Pelt came over. He was wearing only shorts. He had been sleeping on a cot and the blast had almost knocked him out of bed. “What happened?” he said. Then he saw. “That’s right about where Acme is.”
“It’s right where Acme was,” Kessel said. “I’ll call Conroy.”
He went to the telephone and started to dial a number and then he stopped. There was no dial tone. “This phone’s dead,” he said. “I have to find another one.”
The explosion had blown a crater in a block of small office buildings and stores, of which Acme was the core. But there was very little actual fire and only three engine companies were required to handle it.
Three men from the company at the rear were at the nozzle, called the metropolitan shut-off type, working some one hundred and fifty feet away, with their water slithering through at a pressure of fifty pounds per square inch. They hit the back wall of Acme with the stream of water and they literally washed into view a human being. Paul Sublette.
He pulled himself out of the debris, fighting the stream of water, and trying to stand up.
“Pia, Pia, Pia!” he screamed and collapsed.
When the battalion chief heard about it he hurried to District Attorney Fogel and John Conroy, who were standing at the front of the building. “The boys just uncovered a body,” he said.
“Where?” John asked.
“In the back.”
John and Fogel ran around the corner to the rear. Down the street they saw an ambulance just pulling away, red light on, its siren just beginning to growl.
“My car’s around here,” Fogel said.
John ran after him.
Fogel drove with the siren open, the red lights, front and back, glowing. Ten blocks away they overtook the ambulance.
“Pull alongside,” John said.
“For what?”
“I’m going in.”
Fogel pulled alongside the ambulance, then eased a little in front. John crawled into the back seat and lowered the window and signaled to the ambulance driver that he was coming in. The ambulance driver tried to shake him off, but John signaled that he was coming anyway.
He opened the door and eased out, hanging onto the inside of the front door, and swung over to the ambulance. He opened the ambulance door and wedged through into the front seat.
“What the hell, copper, you nuts or something?” the driver yelled.
Paul Sublette was on the stretcher, soaking wet. His eyes were closed and he was motionless. An intern was leaning over him, holding a stethoscope on his chest. The intern did not see John and the stethoscope prevented him from hearing.
There was no way John could crawl into the back because the window behind the seat was too small. But he leaned through as far as he could and yanked at the short sleeve of the intern’s jacket.
The intern took the stethoscope out of his ears.
“Is he dead?” John asked.
“Not yet,” the intern said. “Which one of the Rover boys are you?”
“I’m Dick, the serious one,” John said.
Fogel and John stood in the corridor outside the operating room when the doctor camp out. He saw the tension in the faces of the two men. “He’s still in a shock state,” he said.
“Has he come to?” John asked.
“No. But otherwise he seems to be all right. Severe bruises on his legs, a very severe contusion on the back of his head where a brick or a piece of debris struck him.”
“Will he be all right?” John asked.
“I think so. We’ll just have to wait and see what the X-rays show.”
“When will we know?”
“Couple of hours. Maybe less. Would you like to wait in my office?”
“Thank you, Doctor,” John said.
At intervals the doctor came in to give, almost step by step, the technique that was being employed to resuscitate the patient. Oxygen was being administered ... he was in a shock state ... his pulse was 80-84...his behavior indicated concussion ... he was in hysteria ... his pulse soared to 110 ... he kept screaming for somebody named Pia ... heat was being used ... he was administered a stimulant.
Finally, at 6:25 in the morning, the doctor came in and said the patient was rational and was being transferred to a ward.
John and Fogel followed him out.
Two interns and a nurse and a doctor were wheeling Paul Sublette through the double doors of the operating room on a stretcher. He was fully conscious and his eyes were clear. John and Fogel walked beside the stretcher toward the elevator as the doctor went into his office.
The elevator doors suddenly opened and three men started to get out. Nemo Crespi, Roy Ackerman and Eamon Harrigan. They saw Fogel and John and stepped back into the elevator. “Down!” Nemo snapped. “Down!”
Paul Sublette saw them but he said nothing.
John and Fogel followed the stretcher into a room. When Sublette was in bed and the interns and nurses had left, John said, “Okay, Sublette. Let’s have it. What happened?”
“I don’t know what happened, I don’t know,” Paul said, looking up at them.
“You were downstairs. You were at the back,” Fogel said. “What were you doing there?”
“I was just leaving. I always go out the back way,” Paul
said. He was coherent, but his voice was husky and his words came at an uneven rhythm.
“You were just leaving the office—at 4 a.m.?” John Conroy said. “Who was there with you?”
“Nobody.”
“The place blew up, Sublette. There was an explosion. The stuff had to be planted there. Who planted it?”
“I don’t know.”
“This wasn’t a bagful of dynamite that somebody walked away and left. This was big. This took preparation. They killed your wife, Paul—”
“You killed her!” Paul shouted suddenly. “You blew her up!”
“No, Paul,” John said soberly.
“You killed her!” Paul said again.
“You know I didn’t have anything to do with this,” John said. “But you know who did it, and you’re afraid they’ll kill you—like they killed your wife.”
“Doctor!” Paul shouted.
“Okay. We won’t question you further,” John said. “Not now.”
He nodded to Fogel and they went out.
It was almost an hour later before the doctor would let Nemo Crespi, Roy Ackerman and Eamon Harrigan in to see Paul. They pretended to be very solicitous, but their mission was not, of course, humanitarian. They were not sure how much Paul knew, how long he had watched what had been going on in the alley before he finally came downstairs or whether or not he had recognized any of the figures. They had tried to kill him once, and failed, and they would not hesitate to try again if they felt he had the slightest suspicion of who those figures in the alley had been. There was a chance, they knew, that he had not seen them at all, but they were playing it from the bottom up.
“They killed Pia,” Paul kept saying. “They killed her.” It was all they could get him to say.
“Didn’t you see anybody when you looked out the window?” Nemo asked. “Come on, Paul, talk to me. It’s Nemo.”
“Three guys. But it was too dark.”
“What size were they? What’d they look like?” Ackerman asked.
“Just guys. Shadows. It was dark.”
“Who were they, Paul? Do you know?”
“John Conroy.”
“What do you mean, John Conroy?”
“Him or his men. Who else would kill Pia?”
“Yeah. It had to be John Conroy,” Nemo said. “If you can remember what they looked like we’ll have him for murder. He killed Pia, Paul—”
Paul Sublette began to cry. “It was so dark. Everything happened so fast.” He shook his head and moaned, “Pia, Pia ...”
Nemo winked at Ackerman.
They felt better, a lot better.
Helen Waycross sat down to breakfast. There was a soft-boiled egg in an egg cup, two slices of Melba toast and a pot of tea. But she did not see them. She was looking at the headlines of the morning paper, which was propped up in the center of the table in a silver paper-holder.
3 KNOWN DEAD IN GREAT BLAST: WEST SIDE BUILDINGS WRECKED
Acme Securities, a Crespi concern, believed to be center of explosion
Crespi’s sister and night-watchmen among those who are dead
Dumfounded, Helen Waycross picked up the newspaper and read the story.
The maid came into the breakfast room. She thought it odd that Judge Waycross did not look up. The judge always did, she was always very cheerful and very pleasant, as they discussed what she would wear that day.
“You only have about forty-five minutes, Judge,” Frenelle said.
“What? Forty-five minutes for what?”
“Why, Judge, you have to go to court. Your court’s in session.”
“Yes. Yes, of course,” she said. She put the paper down and stood up.
“You didn’t eat your breakfast, Judge—”
“I’m not hungry.”
Judge Waycross started back to her bedroom, saying, “Never mind helping me dress this morning, Frenelle. I can manage.”
“Shall I have the car brought around?” Frenelle asked.
“No. I’ll take a cab.”
When Judge Waycross’s bailiff called her residence, the butler answered the phone. The bailiff wanted to know where the judge was. It was five minutes to ten and Judge Waycross was not in her chambers. The butler told him that Judge Waycross had left half an hour before.
At 10:15 the bailiff, now thoroughly aroused, called District Attorney Fogel and told him about the circumstances.
Fogel said he’d look into it. He called Judge Waycross’s apartment and, with John Conroy listening in on the extension, got what details there were from Frenelle. The maid said she thought that the story in the paper about the explosion had greatly upset the judge. Frenelle said that she had called Miss Amanda, who was on the way over to the judge’s residence.
Fogel hung up. “We’d better go, too,” he said.
“You go,” John said. “I remember something my father said to me the first day I was on this job. He said that I was a reformer, a do-gooder—”
“Don’t take this personally,” Fogel said.
“How else can I take it?” John said, starting out.
“Wait a minute. Where’re you going?” Fogel asked.
“Never mind that. I’m not going with you.”
Minutely, Frenelle related to Amanda Waycross her own observations of the judge’s curious behavior. “It started last night right after Mr. Conroy left,” she said.
“John Conroy?”
“Yes.”
“When was he here? What time?”
“Late. About twelve o’clock.”
Amanda frowned: “What did he want?” she asked.
Frenelle didn’t know. Mr. Conroy had shut the door of the study after the judge had come in from her bedroom. Frenelle said that after Mr. Conroy left, the judge had seemed disturbed. She had dressed and gone out. When she had come home, sometime later, she had awakened Frenelle to ask where the nembutal was.
“She never used sleeping tablets—once a year,” Frenelle said.
The buzzer rang. The butler answered the door. It was a man in a blue uniform with a shield on his left chest which said: The City National Bank. He had four envelopes.
“What are they?” Amanda asked.
The bank messenger said he didn’t know. He had been told to deliver them.
They were addressed to the four servants. Amanda handed Frenelle the one marked with her name. “Open it,” she said.
The envelope contained twenty new $50 bills. The others contained the same amount.
Amanda called the bank. The manager said that he had sent the envelopes by request of the judge. She had drawn out the money. She had drawn out of her account $100,000 in cash.
When Amanda walked into the suite at the Hotel Manchester, the middle file of the drawer was open and John had pulled a chair over to it and was stuffing papers into a briefcase. Amanda was very worried. She said that her mother was missing.
“I know,” John said.
Amanda suddenly realized what John was doing. “What’re you doing?” she asked.
“What does it look like? I’m quitting. I’m resigning. The whole investigation’s a colossal failure—my father’s dead, my mother’s heart is broken, my own career messed up, your mother missing.” He stood up. “I don’t want to lose you. I can face losing everything and everyone—but you. Let’s get married right now. Cicero can take over—”
“A proposal of marriage at last!” she cried bitterly. She faced him resolutely. “I want to know what my mother has to do with this—you saw her last night. What did you want?”
“Authority to tap Acme’s telephone.”
“The place that blew up?”
“Yes. She told me to go ahead.”
Amanda was aghast. “She had no authority.”
“She took it.”
“I see,” Amanda said grimly. “Why wasn’t I told of this?”
“I was going to when I saw you. Things have been breaking fast.”
“You didn’t want me to know. You deliberately
kept it from me—”
“Will you listen a minute?” he said. “I haven’t seen you—”
“You could have called. There’s such a thing as a telephone. But no. You wanted to sneak behind my back. You just won’t let anything stand in your way, will you? Pressure, pressure, pressure on everything and everybody. Your family, my family—”
He grabbed her. “Listen!” he said hotly. “I’m running out just to keep from having to draw your mother into this. That Acme explosion was no accident. Somebody was tipped off!”
She looked at him, loathing in her face. “And I thought you were something pretty special,” she said slowly.
She slapped him across the face and went out.
Almost halfway between Montreal and Quebec, in the province of Quebec, the St. Lawrence River bulges to form Lake St. Peter. Forty miles due east of Lake St. Peter, in Nicolet County, is the village of St. Felix de Valois. This is the region of dairy products, of rolling foothills, a land of no particular distinction, dotted with villages of no particular distinction. Save one—St. Felix de Valois.
In Valois there was a foundling home—and working in that foundling home was Helen Waycross. When she had left the city she had gone there—by airplane to Montreal, by a smaller plane to Three Rivers, by boat across Lake St. Peter, by Canadian National Railroad to Yamaska and by car to Valois.
Years before she had spent her honeymoon there, quite by accident. She and Bob Waycross, in his private amphibian plane, were en route to Yarmouth, in Nova Scotia, where they had planned to honeymoon and fish off Wedgeport in the celebrated “rip” where the 600-pound tuna pause in their great migration to feed off the herring schools.
But their plane had developed engine trouble and they had been forced to land in a field in the small village that was St. Felix de Valois. After their first hour there, they had decided to honeymoon in Valois.
