Homicide Sanitarium

Killer at Large

I put down the newspaper.

"It's about time," Kit said.

I stood up. "Right, honey. It is."

Her big brown eyes got bigger and browner.

"What do you mean, Eddie? I just meant you've been reading that blasted newspaper for hours and hours."

I glanced at the clock. "For eleven minutes."

I sat down again and motioned, and she came over and sat down on my lap. I almost weakened.

"It's been a nice honeymoon," I said. "But I am a working man. I thought you knew."

"You mean you're taking on another case?"

"Nope," I told her. "One of the same ones. Paul Verne."

"Who's Paul Verne?"

"The gentleman I came to Springfield to find."

She looked really shocked. "You came here to . . . Why, Eddie, we came here for our honeymoon! You don't mean you had an ulterior motive in choosing Springfield."

"Now, now," I now-nowed.

"But Eddie--"

"Shhh," I shhhed.

She cuddled down in my arms. "All right, Eddie. But tell me what you're going to do. Is it dangerous?"

"Get 'em young," I said, "treat 'em rough, tell 'em nothing."

"Eddie, is it dangerous?"

"The world," I told her, "is a dangerous place. One's lucky to get out of it alive."

"Oh darn it, I suppose you are going to do something danger-ous. I won't let you!"

I stood up, and she had to get off my lap or fall on the floor. I walked over to the bureau and picked a necktie off the mirror.

"What are you going to do, Eddie?"

"Answer an ad I just read in the paper."

"You mean an ad to go to work?"

I nodded, and started to put on the necktie.

In the mirror, I could see Kit studying me.

"The idea of a pint-size like you being a detective," she said.

"Napoleon wasn't so big," I said, over my shoulder.

"Napoleon wasn't a detective."

"Well how about Peter Lorre? He's no bigger than I am."

"Peter Lorre was shot in the last two pictures I saw him in," Kit said.

She picked up the newspaper I'd put down and started scanning the want ads, while I was putting on my coat.

"Is this the ad?" she said. " "Wanted: Man with some knowledge of psychiatry, for confidential work'?"

"What makes you think that's it?" I countered.

"I know that's it, Eddie. All the other ads are routine sensible ones for salesmen or dishwashers or something. But why get dressed up to answer it? It just gives a phone number, and there's a phone right on the table there."

"That reminds me," I said. "Use that phone to call Information, will you, and get the listing on that phone number. You'll find it's the Stanley Sanitarium, I think.

But I might as well make sure."

She made the call.

"You're right, Eddie. Stanley Sanitarium." She looked at me with respect.

"How did you know?"

"Hunch. There's an article on Page Three telling about a new sanitarium for mental cases being started here. A doc by the name of Philemon Stanley runs it."

"But why can't you phone from here about the job?"

"From a hotel? Nix. I've got to give myself a local background and a local address. I go rent myself a room, and then use the landlady's phone. That way, if he's going to phone me back or write me a letter, I can give him an address that won't sound phony."

"What's phony about the New World Hotel?"

I grinned at her. "Ten bucks a day is what's phony. People who stay at a hotel like this don't apply for jobs that probably pay less than their hotel bills would be."

I kissed her, thoroughly, for it just might be the last time for a while if I had to follow up on the job right away, and left.

Half an hour later, from a rooming house, I called the number given in the want ad.

"Ever had any experience working in an institution for the mentally ill?"

"Yes, sir," I said. "Two years at Wales Sanitarium in Chicago. They didn't handle really bad cases, you know, just mild psychoses, phobiacs, chronic alcoholics, that sort of thing."

"Yes," said Dr. Stanley, "I'm familiar with the work at Wales Sanitarium. What were your duties there?"

"Attendant, male ward."

"I believe you would fit in very nicely. Not--uh--as an attendant, however. I have something in mind of a different and--uh --more confidential nature."

"So I figured from the ad, Doctor," I said. "But whatever it is, I'll be glad to try it."

"Fine, Mr. Anderson. I'd like to talk to you personally, of course, but if our interview is satisfactory to both of us, you can start right away. Would you rather have that interview this evening or tomorrow morning? Either will be quite satisfactory." I thought it over, and weakened. After all I had been married only two weeks and I would undoubtedly have to live at the sanitarium while I was on the job.

I told him tomorrow morning. I went back to the hotel and Kit and I went down for dinner to the New World dining room. Over a couple of cocktails, I told her about the phone call.

"But suppose he should phone the Wales Sanitarium to check up on you?"

"They never do."

"What kind of confidential work would there be around a booby hatch, Eddie?"

"I don't know," I told her. "But as long as it puts me in contact with the patients, I don't care. Anyway, it isn't a booby hatch, honey. It's a sanitarium for the idle rich. People who go slightly screwy wondering how to spend their money.

That's why I used Wales as a reference. It's the same type of joint."

"It didn't say that in the article in the paper."

"Sure it did. Between the lines."

"But Eddie, aren't you going to tell me why you're doing this?"

I thought out how I'd best tell it without worrying Kit too much. She'd have to get used to things like that, but not all at once. Not--right from our honeymoon--to know I was looking for a homicidal maniac who had killed over a dozen people.

Maybe more.

"I'm looking for a man named Paul Verne," I said. "He's crazy, but he's crazy like a fox. He escaped three years ago from an institution in California. It's been in the papers, but you may not have noticed it, because his family had enough money and influence to keep it from being played up too much."

Kit's eyes widened.

"You mean they don't want him caught?"

"They very much want him caught. They offered a reward of twenty-five thousand bucks to have him caught and returned to the institution from which he escaped."

"But wouldn't publicity help?"

"It would, and there has been some publicity. If the name doesn't click with you, you just haven't read the right papers at the right time. But they held that down, and they've spent thou-sands circularizing police offices and detective agencies to be on the lookout for him. That's more effective, and reflects less on the family name.

Every copper in the country knows who Paul Verne is, and is trying for that twenty-five grand. And every private detective, too."

"Twenty-five thousand dollars! Why Eddie, think what we could do with that!"

"Yeah," I said, "we could use it. But don't get your hopes up, because I'm just playing a long shot. A tip and a hunch."

Our dinner came and I made her wait until we'd eaten before I told her any more. When I eat, I like to eat.

"The tip," I told her, after we had finished dessert, "was Springfield. Never mind exactly how, because it's complicated, but I got a tip Paul Verne was in Springfield. That's why I suggested we come here for our honeymoon."

"Well," she said, "I suppose we had to go somewhere, and after all--"

"Twenty-five grand isn't hay," I finished for her. "As for the hunch--it's a poor thing, but my own. Where's the last place you'd look for an escaped loony?"

"I don't . . . You mean in a loony-bin?"

"Brilliant. What could possibly be a better hide-out? A private sanitarium, of course, where everything is the best and a patient can enter voluntarily and leave when he likes. I've made a study of Paul Verne, and I think it's just the kind of idea that would appeal to him."

"Would he have money? Could he afford a hide-out like that?"

"Money is no object. He's got scads."

"But why this particular sanitarium?"

I shrugged. "Just a better chance than most. First, I think he's in Springfield, and he isn't at any of the others."

"How do you know that?"

"There are only two others here. One is for the criminally insane. He certainly wouldn't commit himself there voluntarily--too hard to get out again, and too much investigation involved. The other's for women only. But Stanley's place is ideal.

Brand new, takes wealthy patients with minor warps, comfortable--everything."

Kit sighed. "Well, I don't suppose it'll take you more than a day to look over the patients and find out."

"Longer than that," I said. "I haven't too much idea what he looks like."

She stared at me. "Mean you're working on this and haven't even gone to the trouble to get a photograph?"

"There aren't any. Paul Verne did a real job of escaping from the sanitarium out West. He robbed the office of all the papers in his own case--fingerprints, photographs, everything. Took along all their money, too."

I thought it best not to mention to Kit that he'd burned the place down as well.

"Then he went to his parents' home. They were away on vacation or something, and he destroyed all the photographs of him-self, even those of himself as a kid. He also took along all the money and jewelry loose, enough to last him ten years."

"But you have a description, haven't you?"

"I have a description as he was three years ago," I said. "A guy can change quite a bit in three years, and if you haven't got a photograph you're not in much luck. But I know he's got brown hair, unless he dyed or bleached it. I know he weighed a hundred sixty then. Of course he might have taken on a paunch since then, or got thin from worry. I know he's got brown eyes--unless he went to the trouble of getting tinted contact lenses to change their apparent color."

I grinned at her. "But I do know he's within a couple of inches of five feet nine. He might make himself seem a couple inches under by acquiring a stoop, or a couple inches over by wearing these special shoes with built-up inner heels."

Kit grimaced. "So you'll know that any man you see between five feet seven and five eleven might be him. That's a big help. How will you know?"

I told her I didn't know.

"If it were just a matter of spotting him from a photograph or a good description," I said, "he'd have been picked up long ago. I can probably eliminate some of the patients right away. The others I'll have to study, and use my brains on.

It might take longer than a few days."

"Well, then I'm glad you didn't go out this evening."

"This evening," I told her, "I'm going to study. There's a book-store on Grand Avenue that's open evenings. I've got to pick up a few books on psychology and psychiatry and bone up a bit to make good my story to Dr. Stanley that I know something about it. I don't want to get bounced the first day because I don't know pyromania from pyorrhoea.

We got the books, and Kit helped me study them. Fortunately or otherwise, there was a Kraft-Ebbing in the lot and we spent most of the time reading that. But I did manage to read a little in some of the others, enough to pick up a bit of the patter.

A New Job

The Stanley Sanitarium was out at the edge of town, as all respectable sanitaria should be. There was a high brick wall around it, and barbed wire on top of the wall.

That rather surprised me. So did the size and impregnability of the iron-work gate in the wall. I couldn't get in it, and had to ring a bell in one of the gate posts.

A surly looking guy with thick black eyebrows and rumpled hair came to answer it. He glared at me as though I had leprosy. "Eddie Anderson," I said. "I got an appointment with Dr. Stanley."

"Just a minute." He called the sanitarium on a telephone that was in a sentry box by the gate, and then said, "Okay," and unlocked the gate.

He walked with me up to the house, slightly more friendly.

"I reckon you're the new patient," he said. "My name's Garvey. The other patients'll tell you you can trust me, Mr. Anderson. So if there's any little errands you want done or anything you want brought in, why just see me, that's all."

"That's fine," I said, "and if I ever go crazy, I'll remember it."

"Huh?" he said. "You mean you ain't crazy?"

"If I am," I said, "I haven't found it out yet. But don't worry. That doesn't prove anything."

I left him looking doubtful and wondering whether he'd talked too much.

Dr. Philemon Stanley had a white walrus mustache and the kind of glasses that dangle at the end of a black silk ribbon. He twirled them in a tight little circle while he talked. I had to look away from that shiny circle to keep from getting dizzy. I wondered vaguely if he used them on patients for hypnotic effect.

"Uh--Mr. Anderson," he said, "have you had any experience at all in--uh--confidential investigations? That is, in making confidential reports?"

"Can't say I have," I told him. Not quite truthfully, of course. I couldn't say that was my real occupation. "But I'd be glad to try my hand at it."

"Fine, Mr. Anderson. I intend to try out a new theory of mine in the study of mental aberration. A method, not of treatment, but of more accurate diagnosis and study of the patient. It is my belief that a person suffering from a mental ailment is never completely frank or completely at ease in the presence of a doctor, or even of an attendant. There is a tendency, almost invariably, either to exaggerate symptoms or to minimize and conceal them."

"Sounds quite logical," I admitted.

"Whereas," said Dr. Stanley, twirling his glass a bit harder in mild excitement, "they undoubtedly act entirely natural before the other patients. You see what I'm driving at?"

"Not exactly."

"I would like an attendant--someone experienced, as you are, with pathological cases--to pose as a patient, to mix among the other patients, become friendly with them, play cards with them, win their confidence as fellow-sufferer, and to report confidentially on their progress. The job, I fear, would be a bit confining."

He broke off, watching me for my reaction.

It wasn't good, at first. Then I began to see the advantages of it. Certainly I'd be in a better position to find out what I wanted to know, in the status of a fellow patient.

But it wouldn't do to appear eager. I asked about salary and when he named a figure higher than an attendant's wages would be, I let it convince me.

"My clothes," I said. "Will it appear suspicious to anyone who saw me come here if I leave, and then return with them?"

"Not at all. You are, as far as anyone knows, committing your-self to me voluntarily. All my patients, incidentally, are here of their own free will, although they are under restraint to stay within the grounds for the period of their cure. There will be nothing unusual about your having had a preliminary interview."

"Fine," I said. "I'll get my stuff and be back. Right after lunch, say. Oh, by the way, just how insane am I to act, and in what direction?"

"I would suggest a mild psychosis. Something you're more than usually familiar with. Nothing that would force me to keep you under restraint or limit your freedom in circulating about with the other patients. Alcoholism. . . . No, you look too healthy for that."

"How about kleptomania?" I suggested. "I'd have to swipe a few things from time to time, but I'll put them under my bed, and if your fountain pen disappears, you'll know where to look for it."

"Excellent. Any time this afternoon will be satisfactory, if you have affairs of your own to wind up. Uh--you sign nothing, of course, but if any patient asks, tell him you committed yourself here for say, sixty days. At the end of that time, we'll know how satisfactory our arrangement is."

We shook hands and he sat down again at his desk while I went to the door and opened it. I took one step to go into the outer hallway, and then I stopped short as though I'd run into a brick wall.

I stood staring, and then I wrenched my eyes away and looked back at my employer.

I had to clear my throat before I could say:

"Dr. Stanley?"

"Yes, Anderson."

"You have any homicidal patients here?"

"Homicidal? Of course not. That is. . . . Of course not."

"There is a corpse in the middle of the hallway, with the hilt of a dagger sticking out of his chest," I said. "Right over the heart."

"Eh? Oh, I should have warned you. That would be Harvey Toler."

It didn't faze him in the least. He didn't even get up from his desk or reach for the telephone. Was he crazy, or I?

"I don't care if it's J. Edgar Hoover," I said. "The fact remains that there's a knife in his chest."

I heard a sound in the hall and looked through the door. The corpse had got up and was walking away. He was a slender, dark young man with thick shell-rimmed glasses. He put something in his pocket that looked like the hilt of a dagger without any blade.

I looked back at Dr. Stanley.

"Harvey Toler," he repeated. "Uncontrollable exhibitionism. He must have heard I had a caller in my office. A strange case--arrested development in one respect only. A brilliant mind, but he cannot control impulses to shock people. I want particularly careful reports on his conduct among the other patients. I think you'll like him when you get to know him."

"I'm sure I will," I said. "Is that a favorite stunt of his, with the dagger?"

"He's used it before, but he seldom repeats himself. He may . . . Well, I'd rather not tell you too much about him. I'd rather have your impressions without prejudice."

Without prejudice, my grandmother, I thought as I walked to the bus line. If Harvey Toler pulled another one like that one, I'd take advantage of being a fellow-patient to pop him on the nose, exhibitionism or not. And maybe that would be the best cure, at that.

I went to my rooming house, told my landlady I'd landed a job and she could keep the rest of the week's rent I'd paid her.

Then I went to the hotel and woke up Kit. She'd had early breakfast with me and then gone back to sleep.

"Got the job," I told her. "And I'll have to live there. Hope it won't take me more than a few days to decide one way or the other about whether I'm on the right track or not."

"What is the job, Eddie?"

"I'm in charge of the hypochondriac ward, honey. It's confidential. I'd better not tell you about my duties."

"Eddie! Be serious. What is the job?"

I told her and she wouldn't believe me. But by dint of repeating it four or five times, I finally convinced her.

I packed a few things in a suitcase, rather regretfully leaving my automatic out of it. Hardly the sort of thing I'd be carrying, if I was what I pretended to be. But if I really found Paul Verne, it might not be any picnic to handle him. I took a chance on including brass knuckles, rolling them up carefully inside a pair of thick woolen socks.

Kit and I had lunch and then she walked with me to the bus. I told her I might or might not be able to phone her. I couldn't be sure till I knew the set-up at the sanitarium. And not to worry if she didn't hear from me for a week.

"Eddie, why didn't you tell me the truth?" she said.

"Huh? What didn't I tell you?"

"That Paul Verne is a homicidal maniac. That what you're going to do is dangerous, really dangerous. After breakfast this morning, I went to a newspaper office and I read their file of clippings on him. I wouldn't have tried to stop you, Eddie. But--but I want you to be honest with me."

From her face, I could tell she was being brave.

"Okay, honey," I said. "I just didn't want you to worry."

The bus pulled up.

"I won't, Eddie," she said.

I kissed her good-by and got on. She turned away, crying quietly, and I felt like a heel.

I was still feeling punk when I rang the bell that brought Garvey to the gate.

"You again?" he said, and opened it.

I grinned at him. "Well, I found it out," I said.

"Found what out?"

"I'm crazy."

"Huh?"

"That's it. I told you this morning that if I was, I hadn't found it out yet. I found it out."

He digested that as we went up the walk.

"Oh, well, what I told you goes, then," he finally said. "If you want anything just let me know."

We had reached the door, and he turned to leave.

I said, "Sssst," and when he turned back, I leaned over and whispered:

"Can you get me a machine-gun?"

He backed off.

Dr. Stanley turned me over to an attendant who took me to Room Twenty and told me it was to be mine. The attendant said if I wanted he would show me around the place, so I left my suit-case on the bed and went with him.

My room was at the end of the corridor and was the highest number on the second floor. My guide--fortunately he was over six feet tall, so I didn't have to study him as a possible suspect--told me that these twenty rooms, with five others on the first floor, were all the rooms assigned to patients, and that attendants and other employees had quarters on the third floor. He said that, counting me, there were now twelve male patients and seven female. The remaining rooms were empty.

He took me first to the main recreation room on the first floor. There was a bridge game going on in one corner. My friend Harvey Toler was one of the players.

The others were a nondescript little woman with gray hair and mousy eyes, a gaunt, dissipated-looking man of about forty, and an anemic youth. They were introduced to me as Miss Zaner, Frank Betterman and Billy Kendall.

Betterman and Kendall went down on my list as possibles. As we walked on, I elicited from my guide the fact that Betterman was an alcoholic--a dipsomaniac--and Kendall the anemic, was suffering from recurrent amnesia. Periodically, he would forget who he was and where he was and what he was doing there.

We saw another recreation room in the basement, with ping-pong tables and a shuffleboard set-up as well as one billiard table with warped cues and a few rips in the cloth. We encountered several other patients in our walk around the outside grounds, and I was introduced to each.

Five men, out of eight I met, could have been Paul Verne.

White in Blackness

My guide excused himself on the ground of other duties, and I went to my room to unpack. There was a lock on the door of my room, I noticed, but the only keyhole was on the outside. From the inside, one just didn't lock the door.

I stood looking out the window for a moment at a man who, standing in the middle of the driveway, was turning in slow steady circles for no reason that I could discover.

Then I turned back into the room and reached for the handle of my suitcase to move it down to the end of the bed.

The pull nearly jerked my arm out of its socket. It felt as though someone had taken my clothes out of that suitcase and filled it up with paving blocks.

I stared at the suitcase. It was mine, all right.

So I opened it. My clothes were still in it, but packed much more tightly than I'd packed them, to make room for the object that had been added.

It was a tommy gun.

I lifted it out and looked at the drum. It was loaded to capacity, and the bullets were real.

I put it down on the bed alongside the suitcase and stood staring at it unbelievingly.

So Garvey did little errands for patients, huh?

But he had backed off when I'd asked him for a machine-gun.

It just didn't make sense. Granting that he had taken me seriously, granting that he was screwy enough to be willing, where in thunder could he have got a tommy gun?

And why, thinking me crazy, would he have given me one? He was supposed to be sane.

The more I thought about it, the crazier it got.

Finally it occurred to me to look through the rest of my stuff to be sure it was all there.

It all seemed to be. Five shirts, one suit besides the one I was wearing, handkerchiefs, socks. I hadn't counted the smaller items of laundry, but there seemed to be about as many of them as I'd put into the suitcase.

I had just thrown them in, though, and now they were tightly packed to make room for the machine-gun. To give my hands something to do, and my brain a rest, I moved them over to the empty drawers of the bureau. Shirts in the big drawer, handker-chiefs and socks in the upper smaller.

And then I remembered something. None of the rolled-up pairs of socks had been heavier than it should be.

I found the pair of thick, woolen socks into which I had rolled the brass knuckles. I didn't have to unroll it. I could tell merely by feeling. The knucks were gone.

I unrolled the socks to be sure.

And then the humor of the thing hit me square, and I sat down on the edge of the bed and began laughing as though I belonged there, laughing like a blasted loony.

Whoever had given me that loaded tommy gun had gone to the trouble of stealing my set of brass knuckles!

"Lovely," I thought, "perfectly lovely."

Stanley Sanitarium, Paul Verne or no Paul Verne, was going to be an interesting place.

After a while sanity came back to me, and with it the realization that I had to do something about that tommy gun. What?

Take it to Dr. Stanley and tell him the truth about it? If he believed me, okay.

But suppose he didn't--and I wouldn't blame him a bit. Suppose he thought, or even suspected, that I had brought it in myself? Out on my ear I would go, before I got another look at the sanitarium. Or I would have Hobson's choice of paying my fare and signing on as a bona-fide loony and committing myself.

On second thought, I doubted he would give me that alternative. He took "mild psychoses" only. Would he figure a man who pulled a stunt like that with a loaded tommy gun was suffering from a mild psychosis? Hardly. He would turn me over to the police for investigation.

And anyway how could I do an about-face from being a man in need of a job to a man able to pay the plenty high tariff a place like this would charge?

Nope, Dr. Stanley might believe me, or he might not. If I took that chance, I was seriously jeopardizing my "in" here before I even began to accomplish my purpose.

But what then?

Well, there was a tiny penknife on my watch chain. Using it as a screwdriver, I took the breech of the tommy gun apart and took out the firing-pin and the tiny block of metal that held it. I took the bullets out of the drum, too.

Then, leaving the tommy gun, with its teeth pulled, behind me, I went down the corridor a few doors and knocked on a door at random. Number Twelve. As I hoped, there wasn't any answer, and when I tried the door, it opened.

I went back for the tommy gun and put it in a drawer of the bureau in Room Twelve. The room was occupied, because there were shirts in the drawer. I didn't take time to try to find out whose room it was. Undoubtedly the whole place would know, when the occupant of that room found what was in his bureau.

Then I went downstairs, avoiding the recreation room, and went outside. I wandered about the grounds until I found a secluded spot behind a small storage shed, and there I buried the bullets. The firing-pin block I threw over the wall, as far as I could throw it. Somebody might find it some day, but they wouldn't know what it was.

I got back to the building just in time for dinner. A bell was ringing.

Dinner was unexciting, although the food was good. It was served in a dining room with half a dozen tables for four, at which the guests seemed to group themselves at will. I found myself with two table companions. Frank Betterman, the dipsomaniac, sat across from me, and at my left sat a man whose only obvious claim for presence there was that he wore a folded newspaper hat, the kind children make.

Betterman ate without talking or taking his eyes off his plate. The man with the paper hat talked only of the weather at first but with the meat course he warmed up on human destiny and some complex theory of his that seemed similar to astrology except that the affairs of men were run, not by the stars and planets, but by volcanic activity within the seething core of earth.

I followed him, more or less, as far as dessert, and then was hopelessly lost.

On the way out, Betterman came up alongside me.

"Did you bring in any liquor, Anderson?" he said quietly. "I've got to have a drink or . . . Well, I've just got to."

"No," I admitted, "I didn't. Have you tried Garvey?"

"Garvey!" There was the ultimate of scorn in his voice. "That man's on the wrong side of the fence here. He's mad."

"In what way?"

Betterman shrugged. "Cadges you to run errands for you, and then doesn't.

Laughs about it behind your back, to the other patients."

"Oh," I said.

Then anyone here might know the joking request for a machine-gun I had made to Garvey. Not that it helped me any to know that.

I played ping-pong in the basement with Betterman for a while, which gave me a chance to study him. Aside from being nervous and jittery, he seemed normal enough.

Lights out at eleven was the rule, but by ten-thirty I was ready to go to my room and sort out my confused impressions. Already all but a few of the patients had disappeared from the recreation room and those few were ones who interested me least.

I walked up the stairs and along the dimly lighted corridor. The door of Room Eleven, just across the hall from the room into which I had put the tommy gun, was open. There was a light on somewhere in the room, out of my range of vision.

I started past the open doorway, glanced in--and stopped abruptly.

On the blank white wall opposite the open door was a shadow, the shadow of a man hanging by his neck from a rope. Obviously dead, for there was not the slightest movement.

I stepped through the doorway and turned to the corner in which the man must be hanging.

"Hullo," said Harvey Toler.

He wasn't hanging by his neck. He was sitting comfortably in a well-padded chair, reading a book.

"Your name's Anderson, isn't it?" he said. "Come in and sit down."

I looked back at the wall, and the shadow of the hanging man was still there. It looked like a real shadow, not painted. I looked back toward the opposite corner and this time I saw the gimmick. Nothing more complicated than a bit of work with a black crayon on the white, translucent shade of the reading lamp. The six-inch figure there cast a six-foot shadow yonder.

"Clever," I said.

Toler smiled and looked pleased.

"Sit down," he repeated. "Care for a drink, perhaps?"

Without waiting for my answer, he put down his book and opened a door in the front of the little stand upon which the lamp stood. He took out two glasses and a quart bottle of whiskey, already opened and with only about a fifth of its contents left.

"You'll find the whiskey Garvey brings in is pretty smooth stuff," he said. "He robs you for it, but it's good."

I took the glass he handed me.

"Here's to crime," I said, and we drank.

It was smooth; didn't bite a bit. The only thing wrong was that it wasn't whiskey at all. It was cold tea.

"Another?" Toler asked.

I declined enthusiastically. For just a moment I felt a deep brotherly sympathy with Frank Betterman. It was part of my job, maybe, to stay and pump Harvey Toler so I could report on him. But after that business with the tea, the devil with it.

Excusing myself on the ground of being sleepy, I went on down the corridor to my own room.

I looked into the drawers and the closet but my stuff still seemed to be as I had left it, and nothing new had been added. I chucked under the bed the several items of silverware which I'd stolen from the dinner table, to carry out my role of kleptomaniac, and then undressed. I was just reaching for my pajamas when the lights went out.

I lay in bed in utter, perfect darkness, trying to think. But the only thought that came was the thought that if I stayed here long enough, I'd go crazy myself.

After a while I could see a thin crescent of moon and there was enough light in my room that I could make out the dark outline of the dresser and the doors.

Why, I wondered, in the name of sanity or insanity, had someone put that loaded tommy gun in my room? No sane person would have put it there. And how would an insane person have got it?

Was Frank Betterman right in thinking the gateman, Garvey, was on the wrong side of the fence in regard to insanity? If so, was Dr. Stanley crazy to hire a crazy attendant? Frank Betterman had seemed sane except for his craving for liquor, and while a dipsomaniac may get DT's, he doesn't usually suffer from fixed delusions.

I wondered what would happen if Toler offered Betterman a drink of that zero-proof whiskey of his. If I knew anything about dipsomania, there would be a bloody murder on the spot.

"Nuts to it," I told myself. "I haven't been here long enough to get any answers. I'd better go to sleep."

I had just shut my eyes when I heard the sound of the door opening.

I didn't move, but my eyes jerked open and strained into the darkness.

Yes, the door was open all right and someone--or some-thing--in white was standing there in the doorway looking at me. I couldn't make out any details, for if there was a light in the hallway, it had been turned off.

Just something white. An attendant's white uniform? Or the white pajamas of a patient?

Still without moving, I braced myself for quick action. As soon as he stepped inside the room, I would jump him. Luckily, my only cover was a thin sheet that wouldn't hamper me much.

Then suddenly the figure wasn't there any more. Blackness instead of gray-white, and the sound of the door closing. The hallway light flashed back on. I could see the crack of it under the edge of the door.

That meant I could see who my visitor had been. Quietly I got out of bed, tiptoed to the door, and turned the knob.

The knob turned silently enough, but the door wouldn't open. It was locked.

Mystery Patients

Calmly I went back to bed.

And lay there, getting less and less calm by the moment. It was silly for me to want to make any move tonight. I needed more time to study the people with whom I had come in contact.

But just the same, I couldn't sleep, and the longer I lay there, the less sleepy I got. My mind went in circles.

Finally I gave up, and got up. I got the little pencil flashlight from the pocket of my suit coat, and started to work on the lock. I got it open within ten minutes.

The hallway was empty, and all the doors along it were closed.

My bare feet made no sound in the hallway and on the stairs. The recreation room was dark, but there was a dim light in the corridor that led to the office.

The door of the office was locked, too, and that cost me another ten minutes or so. But time didn't matter. It couldn't be later than about one o'clock and I had the whole night ahead of me.

I took a look around the office, shading my tiny flashlight so its beam would not show outside. I don't know just what I was looking for. I opened a closet door and jumped back when a skeleton confronted me. But it was a conventional wired medical skeleton and entirely harmless. An odd thing, it occurred to me, for a psychiatrist to have, but possibly it was a relic of his medical student days, with which he hated to part.

There was a safe, a big one. It looked to be well beyond my lock-picking abilities. And it probably wouldn't contain anything of sufficient interest to justify the attempt.

The desk would probably have what I wanted. And I found it in the first drawer I opened.

A small card file of names and addresses. It was divided into two sections, one for patients and the other for employees. Into a notebook I quickly copied the names and addresses of all the male patients and male employees.

Oh, yes, it was remotely possible that Verne might be masquerading as a woman. But the more likely prospects came first.

I found myself with a list of eleven male patients and four male employees.

Then I began marking off those who couldn't possibly fit the description of Verne.

First the attendant who was over six feet tall, and another who was barrel-chested and had arms like a gorilla. A man can change his weight by taking on fat, but he couldn't take on that sort of a muscular development.

Three of the patients were definitely too tall-- including the man with the paper hat and the inverted astrological theories. One was too short--only about five-feet five.

Seven patients left, two employees. I didn't mark off any more names, but I ticked off with check marks four which seemed the most unlikely of the nine. All four had physical characteristics so different from Verne's as to put them at the bottom of my list, if not to eliminate them entirely.

That left only five names as my best bets. They were not the only possibilities, but they were the ones who rated attention ahead of the others.

I picked up the telephone and, speaking so softly I couldn't have been heard outside the office, I gave the number of the New World Hotel and then gave my own room number.

Kit's sleepy voice answered.

"Take a pencil, honey," I said, "and copy down these names and addresses. Ready?"

When she was, I gave her the names and addresses of Garvey, Frank Betterman, Harvey Toler, Bill Kendall and Perry Evans. The latter was a paranoiac whom I'd seen in the recreation room and at dinner, but with whom I had not yet talked.

"Got 'em, Kit? Attagirl. Now here's one more name, only you get it for a different reason. Joe Unger. He has an office on the third floor of the Sprague Building here in town. Joe's a private detective and we've worked together. I mean, when he has any work in Chicago he throws it my way and when anything I'm working on, when I'm home, has a Springfield angle, Joe handles it for me.

"Now bright and early tomorrow morning--I think he gets to his office at eight--you look up Joe Unger and give him those names. Don't tell him where I am or what I'm working on, but have him get all the dope he can on each of those names."

Kit sounded wide awake now.

"How about the out-of-town ones?" she asked. "One's in Chicago and one in Indianapolis?"

"Joe can handle them by phone, somehow. Main thing I want to know is whether they're on the up and up. One address might turn out to be a phony, and then I can concentrate my attention on that name. And any general information Unger can pick up will help. Tell him to get all he can in one full day's work."

"How shall I tell him to report to you, Eddie?"

"You can get the dope from him tomorrow evening. I'll phone you tomorrow night about this time. Oh, yes, one other thing I want him to check. What kind of a reputation Dr. Stanley has. Whether he rates as being ethical and honest."

"All right, Eddie. But why?"

"The bare possibility that Paul Verne might be here-- if he's here at all--with Stanley's knowledge. Verne would have plenty of money, and he might bribe his way in and make it worth anyone's while."

"All right, I'll have him check on that. What's happened since you got there?"

"Here? Not a thing. Life is dull and dreary."

"Eddie, are you lying to me?"

"I wouldn't think of it, honey. 'By now. I'll call you tomorrow night."

I got back up to my room without being seen.

After I fixed the lock back the way it had been, I wedged the blade of my penknife between the door and the jamb, near the top. I sleep lightly, and if the door opened again during the night the fall of the knife onto the floor would wake me.

But the knife was still in place when I awakened in the morning.

Just after lunch I was summoned to Dr. Stanley's office.

"Close the door, Anderson," he said, "and then sit down."

I took the chair across the desk from him.

I spoke quietly. "You want a report on what I've seen?"

"You needn't lower your voice. This room is quite sound-proof--naturally, as I interview my patients here. No, I didn't have a report in mind. You haven't been here long enough. It will take you several days to get to know the patients well enough to--uh--recognize changes in their mental attitudes.

"What I had in mind was to ask you to concentrate for the moment on Billy Kendall. Try to win his confidence and get him to talk to you freely. I am quite disturbed about him."

"That's the fellow with recurrent amnesia, isn't it?" I said.

Dr. Stanley nodded. "At least up to now, that is all that's been wrong with him. But--" He hesitated, twirling the gold-rimmed glasses faster on their silk ribbon, and then apparently made up his mind to tell me the rest of it. "But this morning the maid who cleaned his room found something strange under the bed.

An--uh--extremely lethal weapon. A submachine-gun, to be frank."

I looked suitably surprised. "Loaded?" I asked.

"Fortunately, no. But the mystery is no less deep for that. Two mysteries, in fact. First, why he would want one. He has shown, thus far, no symptoms of--uh--that nature. Second, where and how he could have obtained it. The second question is the more puzzling, but the first is, in a way, more important. I mean, it involves the question of whether or not he is still a fit inmate for this particular institution. In short, whether it may be necessary to suggest his transfer to a place where they are prepared to cope with that sort of insanity. You see what I mean?"

"Perfectly, Doctor," I said. "I'll look him up at once." I stood up. "What room is Kendall in?"

It wasn't until I was out in the hall that I realized he had said Room Six. I had put that tommy gun in Room Twelve. Had the occupant of Room Twelve found it and passed the buck? Or what?

Billy Kendall could wait. I went to Room Twelve and knocked on the door.

Frank Betterman opened it and I pretended I had known it was his room and suggested a game of ping-pong.

So we played ping-pong and I couldn't think of any way of asking him if he had found a tommy gun under his bed without admitting I had put it there. Which hardly seemed diplomatic.

I managed to sit at the same table with Billy Kendall at supper. But he wouldn't talk at all, except to answer my questions with monosyllables.

I swiped another pocketful of silverware.

A bridge game constituted the excitement of the evening and I began to think I had been telling Kit the truth in saying events were dull and dismal.

After turning in, I waited until well after midnight before my second foray into the office to phone Kit. She didn't sound sleepy this time. She had been waiting for the call.

"Get anything exciting?"

"Yes, Eddie. That Indianapolis address was a phony. There isn't any such street there."

The Indianapolis address had been that of Harvey Toler. I whistled softly.

Was Harvey Toler the man I wanted?

"Thanks a million, angel," I said. "Now I can go ahead."

"Wait, Eddie. There was something funny about one or two of the others.

Frank Betterman--his address was okay, a cheap rooming house, but he'd lived there. Used to be a reporter on the Springfield Argus. He got fired for drinking too much."

"But that makes sense," I said. "He's a dipso--"

Then I saw what she meant. Where would a fired newspaper reporter get the kind of dough to stay at a fancy sanitarium? Particularly a lush, who would hardly have saved his money while he was working.

"And Kendall, William Kendall," Kit said. "He used to work for a bank and left there under a cloud. There was a shortage, and he was suspected of embezzlement. But they couldn't prove anything and he was never arrested."

"Um," I said. "Maybe that's where he got the dough to stay here. And since he's got amnesia, maybe he forgot where it came from. What about my friend Garvey?"

"That one was okay. He's got a sister, married and with six kids, living at that address. The other patient, Perry Evans, we couldn't get much on."

"That was the Chicago address, wasn't it?"

"Yes, and it's a hotel. A little one, Joe Unger said. All we could find out was that Perry Evans had stayed there for three months up to a month ago. They didn't know anything about his business, or wouldn't tell."

Nuts, I thought. That didn't eliminate Evans, by any means. For all anyone knew, Paul Verne could have stayed three months in a Chicago hotel under that name. But the heck with it, Harvey Toler had given a nonexistent out-of-town address.

"Okay, honey," I said. "I'll keep him in mind as second choice. What'd you find out about Doc Stanley?"

"He came here only a little over a month ago, rented the property out there. It had been built ten years ago as a small, select girls' school.

"And failed three years ago," I said, "and has been vacant since. Yes, toots, that was all in the newspapers. Also that Stanley came here from Louisville, Kentucky. What I want to know is about his reputation."

"Good, as far as we can find out. Joe Unger called a Louisville detective agency and they made inquiries there. He practiced as a psychiatrist for ten years there, then got sick and gave up his practice a year ago. His reputation was good, but presumably he didn't want to start at the bottom again to build up a new practice when he recovered, and got the idea of starting a sanitar-ium instead."

"I suppose somebody told him he could get this place here for a song," I said. "So he came to Springfield. Okay, honey. Anything else?"

"No, Eddie. How soon will you be through there?"

"Not over a few days, I hope. I'll concentrate on my friend Toler with one eye and Perry Evans with the other, and I ought to know pretty soon. 'By now."

Death in the Dark

After I hung up the phone, I sat there in the dark thinking. For some reason, I can think better sitting in an office, even in the dark, than in bed.

The only trouble was that the more I thought, the less I knew. Harvey Toler, the exhibitionist, had given a false address when signing on here. That might mean he was Paul Verne--if Paul Verne was really here at all. But it might mean nothing at all.

There are plenty of reasons why people give false addresses. I had given one myself, and I wasn't Paul Verne. Maybe he was ashamed of being here and didn't want his friends to find out where he was. Maybe giving himself a false identity--if his name as well as the address was phony--was a facet of his exhibitionism. And wasn't Perry Evans' case even more suspicious, on second thought? Paul Verne wasn't a dope.

Would he give an address which a single phone call would prove to be false?

Wouldn't he be more likely to have established an identity somewhere?

Say, he had been hiding out at a little Chicago hotel. Coming here, he would use the identity he had used there, so if some-one--like me--got curious, he could be checked back that far and no farther.

And if Perry Evans were genuine, and had enough money to afford this sanitarium, why had he been staying at a place like that? And where had a broken-down newspaper hack got the money to stay here?

And Billy Kendall, ex-bank clerk. Had he or had he not been guilty of embezzlement? And if so, where did he fit into the picture?

Nuts, I thought.

Only Garvey's case had been completely on the up and up. And Garvey had interested me most of the bunch. It had been Garvey I had asked for a machine-gun.

And got one.

Again, nuts.

I went back upstairs. Maybe some sleep would do me good. I hadn't slept much last night and it was already two o'clock tonight.

The light was still out in the upstairs hallway. I groped my way along the wall to my door at the end of the corridor.

I opened it, part way. It hit against some yielding but solid obstacle. Six inches, perhaps, it opened. Then a few more as I shoved harder. There it stuck.

I had the pencil flashlight in my hand, although I hadn't been using it along the hallway. I reached inside the door and turned it on, aimed downward. I could barely get my head inside the door far enough to see what lay there.

It was a body, lying on its back. A man, in pajamas, with blood matted in his black hair. It looked like--

And then something hard and heavy swished through the air and grazed the top of my head. Just grazed it, luckily, for the blow was meant to kill.

Pain blinded me, but I didn't have to be able to see to jerk my head back out of that door. And my hand, still on the knob, pulled the door shut after me.

Whoever was in there could probably open it from the inside, as I had, but not for several minutes.

Then, as a shot roared out inside the room and a little black hole appeared in the panel of the door, I dropped flat. And, as four more shots came through the door, at different angles, I rolled to a corner of the hallway and hugged the floor.

None of them hit me.

Five shots was all that came through the door. That meant that the killer hadn't emptied his gun. A revolver holds six shots, and an automatic may hold more.

Then silence. I listened carefully but the man inside didn't seem to be working on the lock to let himself out.

I stood up cautiously, and used my handkerchief to wipe off blood that was running down my forehead and into my eyes.

There wasn't silence any more now; there was bedlam. From most of the rooms along that corridor came voices yelling questions as to what was happening, wanting to be let out. Several doors were being hammered by impatient fists.

I heard footsteps running along the corridor overhead on the third floor, which meant that attendants were coming. If I waited for them it would be too late to find out what I most wanted to know--which of the patients were still in their rooms and which were not.

I ran along that corridor, jerking doors open. In most cases, the occupant of the room was right behind the door. If he wasn't I stuck my head inside and played my flashlight on the bed. I didn't take time to answer questions or make explanations, and I finished the corridor by the time the tall attendant, in white uniform, and Garvey, pulling trousers up over a nightshirt, came pounding down the stairs.

Two rooms had been empty. Harvey Toler's room where, just the night before I had been given a toast in cold tea. And Room Four, Perry Evans' room.

Two gone, and both of them were in my room. One was dead and the other was a homicidal maniac. But why two of them? Paul Verne must have learned, in some way, that I was a detective and had gone to my room to kill me. But had he taken some-one along for company, and then killed him?

And which was which? Both Harvey Toler and Perry Evans had black hair.

Either one could have been lying there just inside the door. And Joe Unger's investigation outside had not eliminated either one. Toler's address had been a fake, and Perry Evans' address had been the little hotel in Chicago, an easy-to-get address that made him almost more suspect than a phony one.

Betterman had me by one arm and the attendant by the other, and both were asking questions so fast and getting in each other's way. I couldn't find an opening to answer them. Frank Betterman's face, I noticed, looked more haggard than usual.

Then Dr. Stanley, fastening the cord of a bathrobe, was coming down the stairs, and his first question shut up Betterman and the attendant and gave me a chance to answer.

He took a quick glance down the hall at the bullet-holes in the door of my room, as though to verify what I was saying, and then interrupted me long enough to send the attendant to phone the police.

"You don't know which shot which?" he demanded. "And you think the other one is Paul Verne?"

His face was white and strained. The name of Paul Verne meant something to him. Every psychiatrist in the country, as well as every copper, knew of Paul Verne.

I nodded. "I doubt if he's in there now, though. He can't hope to get out this way any more, but there's the window. There's soft ground under it and he could drop. He's probably over the fence by now."

The words were bitter in my mouth as I spoke them, because I had failed. The police would have to take up the chase from here, and even if they caught their quarry, I wouldn't get a smell of that twenty-five grand.

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 check-ered 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 neighbor-hood. 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 some-thing 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.

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 under-ground."

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 different-ly"

"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 thou-sand dollars--the rest of our honeymoon.