The Corpse in the Crystal

Chapter III

The hospital corridor was white, bright with light, clean with the odor of anesthetic and germicides. The door to Gregory Sloan’s private room was just ahead of us, down the corridor. He was evidently much improved. His door was standing open.

As we neared, we heard his voice, “I appreciate your coming to visit me, Miss Smith. You are a good secretary, but when I tell you to come in my office at one thirty, you shouldn’t come at one thirty-five, just as you shouldn’t have brought the flowers tonight. They’re lovely, but my hay fever, you know.”

A girl stammered something. As We moved into the doorway she bade her boss, Gregory Sloan, good-by and speedy recovery, saying she would take care of the office while he was in the hospital. He assured her that he was going home in an hour or so, breaking off as he saw us.

His pale brows lifted. The chief said, “I’m Abner Murder, Mr. Sloan. This is Luke Jordan, my assistant. We’re—”

“I know. Detectives of the private variety. I’ve heard of you, Mr. Murder. Sit down.”

The chief took the chair at the side of the bed. I stood at the foot of the white iron bed.

Murder started to say something, but quick footsteps sounded in the corridor, turned in the room. She saw the chief and me too late to turn back. It was a blonde goddess named Lind... Her face became as lifeless as the color of cotton batting when she saw Murder and me. She stood just inside the doorway, frozen.

Gregory Sloan missed her reaction. “Gentlemen,” he said, “my wife.”

Murder had risen. He made a mocking, faint bow to the girl. “We’re happy to know you, Mrs. Sloan. I would almost swear that I’ve met yon some place before.”

I watched the pulse pound is her throat. Gregory Sloan laughed. “I doubt that you’ve met Linda, Mr. Murder. She’s a very quiet, homey little woman.”

“Oh, I’m sure of it,” the chief said. “Very quiet, homey.” His eyes were drilling into her. Her own lovely green orbs were stricken, begging him to keep silent about trailing her from Nostra’s shack and finding her in the house of a rich man who had two very real corpses in his den.

“I... I really don’t get around much, Mr. Murder,” she stammered. “Another girl, perhaps? Someone who looked like me?”

Murder let her hang for an agonizing moment. Then he said, “Naturally. Another girl.”

She almost slumped with relief. She fumbled in her bag, found a cigarette and lighted it. She stood over by the window as Murder took the chair by the bed again, and explained to Gregory Sloan that we were interested in the deaths foretold by Nostra and would appreciate a few answers. Sloan told him to fire away. He and the chief talked.

As far as I could see, Murder got exactly nowhere. We learned nothing we hadn’t known before. Gregory Sloan had received the note from Nostra, had been alone, had touched nothing that might poison him. He was unable to explain the impossible, he said. Neither could he advance a theory as to how Frank Snow had drowned with no water present, or how a man might be killed in an accident with a toy plastic automobile.

So for my money the visit was a flat pan, but when we left the hospital, there was a smile on Murder’s chubby face. “I know how the whole thing was done, Luke,” he said in the darkness outside. “I can explain the things that happened ho Frank Snow, Loren Cole and Gregory SIoan. I can also explain the two dead men in Wendel Hobbs’ den. I think I can even lay my finger on the killer!”

“But how—”

“You can’t see It?” he said in mock surprise. “Gracious, Luke, you’ve seen every angle of the case that I’ve seen. Every fact known to me is Tight under your nose.”

“Okay, crow awhile,” I said sarcastically. “But in the meantime, why don’t we nab this killer?”

“Because,” he said slowly, “the most important element is still missing. We’ve got to find a motive.”

“So what do we do?”

“We go to the key to the puzzle — Wendel Hobbs. We wait. We hope that we don’t have to wait too long. That we don’t have to wait until I freeze to death here in the middle of August!”

Night had deepened. Despite the sweat gathered in the small of my back, the ground was cold, especially if you were lying full length on it. Dew had risen, seeping into my coat, and the night wind had grown.

I was hunkered behind one of the shrubs dotting Wendel Hobbs’ spacious, terraced lawn. Murder was on the other side of tho flagstone walk, hunkered behind a shrub that was a twin to this one. We had a full view of the front and either side of the house.

I kept watching the light burning in the corner of the house, the shadow pacing back and forth across the face of the light, a silhouette against the window. Murder had assured me that the pacing shadow was old Wendel Hobbs, that eventually he would stop his pacing, turn out the light and go somewhere. Personally, I guessed the old geezer would go to bed. That’s where I wanted to be.

I knew the chief would bawl me out if I dared strike a light to smoke. So I crouched there in misery, cursing the day I’d hired myself out to the dumpy little man with the dimples and baby-blue eyes.

Then my thoughts broke off. The light had gone out, just as Murder had said it would. A door slammed. A long minute of silence, during which even the wind paused. Then the sound of footsteps coming down the path, the steps of an old man made sprightly by nervous reserve energy.

The shadow passed down the walk. As the chief had assured, it was Hobbs and he was going somewhere. A light topcoat with the collar turned up and a hat brim pulled low almost obscured his face. He didn’t want anyone to know where he was going, not even his chauffeur.

He turned right at the sidewalk. Murder and I gave him a moment, then cut across the lawn and fell in behind him.

It wasn’t an easy job, this task of shadowing. Hobbs was leery, cautious. His head kept jerking around, the movement freezing Murder end me in shadows.

Hobbs walked a block, turned. He approached a small park, stopped, looked around. He stood at the edge of the sidewalk for what seemed to be five dragging minutes. The chief and I inched closer to him until we could have whispered to him from the shelter of twin willow trees just off the sidewalk behind him.

Then up the street twin lights flashed. Automobile headlights. The ear was parked a block away at an intersection. Even I didn’t miss that carefully planned detail. The car could have gone in any of four directions should anything go wrong.

Those headlights snapped on and off again, then on once more and stayed lighted. Old Wendel Hobbs reached beneath his coat, pulled out a long, flat package and tossed it on the edge of the street. The car’s motor was roaring and the headlights raced closer. Hobbs turned quickly and started walking back in the direction he had come.

Murder bawled some kind of order to me. Things happened so fast that, even though I didn’t catch his command, I fell in step behind him as he came hurtling from the shelter of the willow tree. His body was bent, his feet pounding. He was headed directly toward the street.

It was a hop and jump; it was nip and tuck. Murder reached it without breaking stride and scooped up the package Wendel Hobbs had tossed in the street. Those headlights were glaring, right on top of us it seemed. My heart was trying to tear its way out of my throat

I heard Hobbs yell. The roar of the car’s motor as the quick-thinking driver gave it the gun.

He twisted the wheel, slashed across the street toward us. If we had paused to turn and take the short way out of the street, he would have got us. Instead, we just kept right on going like the devil was lashing our heels, into the broad, vacant lot directly across the street.

The looming headlights missed us by inches. I heard Hobbs yell again as the chief and I plunged into undergrowth. Murder clutched that long, flat package in his hand. I hoped it was worth all this.

Tires shrilled behind us as brakes were slammed. Car doors opened and shut. The quiet, widely separates estates of elegant Cedarwood Forest had never seen tire like of this.

Half a dozen rough voices rose in the night. Footsteps charged into the undergrowth behind us. Somebody back there ran into a tangle of brambles and cursed.

Somebody else was too much on edge. He fired three quick shots. The man is the brambles cursed some more. “Cut it you fool! Wait’ll we get our hands on them, then we’ll slit their eyes out!”

The chief and I reached a clearing. He drew up short. We’d be spotted in the dim moonlight in the cleared space. And we couldn’t turn back. Personally I valued my eyes too much.

I stood panting during a second that seemed like an eternity. Then Murder shoved me, grabbed a low branch on a tree, swung himself up. I followed suit, easting up on the limb beside him. We pressed against the trunk of the tree, trying to make ourselves a part of it, and waited.

The half dozen men back there would have been tops in their trade in a dark alley with knives in their hands, but they weren’t woodsmen. They made too much noise as they beat the underbrush, coming steadily toward tho clearing. Then they were silent. I knew they had drawn up, ringing that side of the clearing not a dozen feet from our tree.

They were more cautious now. Seconds ticked away and the chief and I saw dim blobs moving out into the clearing. One shadow passed beneath our tree. I could have spit in his eye if he had looked up.

But he didn’t. They worked their way to the other side of the clearing. Somebody said, “There’s another street over here. They musta got away that way.”

“Nice going, nice going, ain’t the boss gonna like this?” somebody else said bitterly.

A third voice added, “We better scram outta here. They got away. Some of the dudes living around here might have heard Duvarti shooting and called the bulls.”

So Duvarti was in that group of men. That meant Krile probably would be, too.

The dim shadows below turned and came back across the clearing. Moments later the motor of the car started. We listened to the sound die away. Our playmates were gone.

Murder and I dropped out of the trees. “Scooped their prize right from under their noses, eh, Luke? I guess old man Hobbs is back home by this time, quivering in his slippers.”

“And what did we scoop?” I asked.

In answer, Murder shielded his light, flicked it on. He handed me the package. I ripped open the end. It was more money than I’d ever dreamed I would see in one time in my whole life. It was a package of thousand dollar bills. There must have been at least a hundred of them.

We didn’t get to enjoy it. A voice in the darkness behind us said, “One move, gentlemen, and I can promise you that you’ll never move again!”

The light of a flashlight spread over us. We turned slowly. “Drop the package.” Murder dropped it.

I’d heard the voice before. It was the voice of Nostra, the guy who owned the crystal.

He chuckled over the gun in his hand. “Did you really think we would give up so easily, Mr. Murder? I guessed you would be hiding somewhere close around. You really didn’t have time to make a getaway. So I stayed behind with a couple of the boys. Two friends of yours. Rick Duvarti and Burt Krile.”

Duvarti and Krile moved up out of the darkness to stand beside Nostra.

“I thought you were in jail,” the chief said.

“It was easy enough to get out,” Nostra said. “I’d committed no real crime. I paid my bond and will have to appear in police court next Tuesday because I slapped the cop. You know as well as I that they had nothing to hold me on.”

Duvarti gave his short, nasty chuckle, came forward and warily picked up the package of money at Murder’s feet.

“You have some admirable traits, Mr. Murder,” Nostra said. “Few men would have thought of trailing Wendel Hobbs and snatching the package from under oar noses. Few men will be so honored in their manner of dying. We will retire to the street. I’ll signal with my light. The car, which is now parked down the street, will turn, come back, and pick us up. If you want to die suddenly, make a break. If you want a few hours more of life, remember that the crystal never lies.”

“You mean—” I gulped.

“I mean,” Nostra explained coldly, “that I have a friend who owns a slaughter House. You ape aware of the refrigerating systems in slaughter houses, of course? Refrigerators that can hold a ton of pork or beef and freeze it solid. We will strip you, gentlemen, and do our best to keep you from being cozy inside the refrigerator. When you have finally expired, about dawn, we’ll smuggle you to a hotel room. A post mortem will prove definitely that you froze to death in August in a hotel room you apparently spent the night in. Quite cunning, don’t you think?”

He laughed, and I was feeling that refrigerator already.