The Shadowers

XX

"Paul," somebody said breathlessly. "Paul, wake up. Please wake up!"

I opened my eyes. Olivia was kneeling beside me.

"Kroch?" I whispered.

"He's dead. Paul, I'm sorry."

Well, she should be sorry, shooting down people other people had promised themselves the pleasure of killing

I pulled my thoughts together and realized she'd been apologizing for a different reason. She didn't know we'd been working on the wrong man. She thought she'd spoiled everything by putting Kroch where he'd never talk.

I remembered belatedly that I was an agent of sorts, not an avenging angel wielding the sword of retribution. There was a man I was supposed to find, a wicked old man with white hair. I wasn't any closer to finding him than I'd ever been. Or was I? I looked up at Olivia.

"What the hell are you doing here, anyway?" I asked.

"Well, you don't act very grateful!" she protested. When I didn't speak, she went on: "I couldn't let you get killed. It was suicidal, going after an armed, trained man with nothing but a hypodermic. It was crazy! I made Jack Braithwaite bring me here." She gave a strained little laugh. "I pointed your gun at him and made him drive me, just like in the movies. To hell with Emil Taussig! I don't give a damn if they never find him!"

"Don't swear, Doc," I said. After a little, 1 asked, "What's the damage?"

"You have a.22 bullet in your leg. It will have to come out later. I just stopped the bleeding temporarily."

I said, "Hell, we just dug a slug out of there last year. I seem to stop everything with that one damn leg. And my head."

"You may have a slight concussion." She held out her hand and showed me a flattened bullet. "That's what hit you. I didn't know they would splash and bounce like that. I thought Pd killed you!"

"Where's Jack Braithwaite?" I asked. I still didn't feel energetic enough to sit up and look around.

"Here, sir."

He came into my field of vision, and he wasn't alone. He was supporting the little blonde nurse on one arm. She was still in her uniform and her silly, formal hairdo; but she didn't look quite as fresh and glowing as she had in the Flamingo Lounge. She'd seen violence and death since then.

I said, "You seem to have misinterpreted my instructions, Mr. Braithwaite. That's not the lady I instructed you to keep safe, if necessary at the cost of your life."

He licked his lips. "Sir, she had a gun-"

"So? Where did she shoot you? You don't seem to be bleeding very copiously. And what the hell are you doing here?" I asked Dottie Darden.

She looked indignant. "Why ask me? You sound as if I had a choice! When somebody has a little time, I'd appreciate being told what this is all about!" Anger made her strong enough to stand alone. She freed herself from Braithwaite's supporting arm. "Stop pawing me you.

you phony Romeo! Using my apartment and pretending. Keep your hands to yourself!"

Olivia said to me, "I couldn't very well leave her by the telephone, Paul. I didn't think you'd want police interference. I made her come along."

I said, "I can't recall asking for any interference before twelve thirty-three." Her expression changed. I said wearily, "Ah, hell. Pass that, Doc." She was still looking at me resentfully. I wasn't acting like a man whose life had been saved at the last desperate minute, I guess. Well, maybe I wouldn't have made it to Kroch after all. Nobody'd ever know now, and it wasn't worth arguing about. "And don't worry about friend Kroch, he wasn't our man," I said. "Where's your tame Ben Casey, Doc? Where's the Apollo of the medical profession? I have a question to ask him as soon as he's recovered from his terrible ordeal, or maybe a little sooner."

"Harold?" She was still frowning, but in a different way. "What do you want to ask Harold?"

"I want to ask him," I said, "why he isn't dead." She was silent, and I went on. "I told you how it would be. I said Kroch would kill them both, and he should have. He killed Toni Vail."

"I know. I… I'm sorry, Paul."

I said, "What I want to know is, just what did Dr. Harold Mooney say that kept him alive. He must have talked very fast and he must have had some real good points to make. He must have been able to claim some friends in high places, for Kroch not to kill him, and I'm not talking about the Pensacola Chamber of Commerce or the American Medical Association. I want to know what he said. I want to know how a crumb like Mooney talked himself out of a bullet when Toni…" I checked myself. That was, after all, beside the point.

"Paul, please take it easy," Olivia said. "It isn't good for you to talk so much, or get so excited."

I laughed at that. I looked up at her and said, "We had it figured that Mooney was Kroch's accomplice at one point, remember? Well, we were wrong but we were only half wrong, as I see it now. He wasn't working for Kroch, but he was somebody's accomplice all right. And when it came to a showdown, with Kroch's gun pointing at his head, he used that somebody's name to save himself. He told Kroch something interesting enough so that instead of shooting him Kroch filed him for future reference, meaning to cash in on the information after taking care of me."

"Couldn't he-" Olivia hesitated. "Couldn't Harold just have offered money?"

"Is that what he says? Don't be naive, Doc. You don't buy off people like Kroch, not with the kind of money Harold could offer. But sometimes you can arouse their curiosity by showing them a big game they might want to take a hand in, on one side or the other. It's the only deal Mooney could possibly have made, and he would have had to spill everything he knew, very plausibly, to make it stick. And if he could spill it to Kroch, he can spill it to me."

"No," Olivia said.

I couldn't read her expression. I looked quickly up at the other two standing over me, and they were regarding me oddly. They looked uneasy, maybe even guilty.

"What do you mean, no?" I asked sharply. "Where is he? You didn't let him get away?"

I tried to rise. Olivia held me down. She started to speak and changed her mind. There was a funny look about her eyes, as if she were close to crying. It was the blonde nurse who spoke at last.

"Dr. Mooney isn't… I mean, he's dead."

I stared up at her, and at Olivia, who turned away, biting her lip. I looked back to Dottie.

"The hell he's dead, Miss Darden! How come? He was thrashing around vigorously enough when I got here!"

She shook her head. "He was unconscious when we came in. Jack and I went right to him while Dr. Mariassy took care of you. Jack helped me cut him loose and get the gag off. He didn't respond. His pulse was very weak. I called Dr. Mariassy and we tried artificial respiration but it didn't help. We couldn't bring him around."

There was a little silence. I looked at Olivia. "I don't like asking, Doc, but it wasn't another of your ricochets?"

She shook her head. "No. There was no wound, Paul. He simply died. It may have been a heart condition, aggravated by fear and partial strangulation. The gag was very tight."

"Heart condition?" I said slowly. I heard myself laugh. It wasn't a very nice laugh. "Doc, you're kidding. Do you expect me to believe that the one man I needed to talk to died of heart failure? You're an optimist if you do." I looked at the other two. "Or somebody is!"

It was suddenly very quiet in the concrete room. They were all watching me. Olivia started to protest as I pushed myself up, but she thought better of it. She helped me rise. I had a sore leg, but it carried my weight after a fashion. I looked around. The place was getting pretty crowded, I decided. A couple more bodies, dead or alive, and we'd have to start turning away applicants.

Olivia said quietly, "I think you'd better say exactly what you mean, Paul. What are you hinting at?"

I studied her face for a moment. I looked at the other two. Olivia looked as if she was considering being angry. Braithwaite looked bewildered. Dottie looked scared. I didn't really blame her. It was quite a situation for an innocent young girl to find herself in, knee-deep in dead bodies-if she was an innocent young girl. At the moment I would have put no trust in a white-robed angel from heaven complete with security clearance for Final Secret.

I limped over to the corner where Mooney lay. It wasn't really difficult. Getting down on my knees was the hard part. It had to be somewhere. I found it in the neck, at the edge of the hair.

"No wound, eh?" I said to Olivia, pointing to the tiny spot of blood.

She knelt beside me quickly, heedless of her nylons. Tending to the wounded had already given them enough of a beating on the concrete, I noticed, and another run wasn't going to make a great deal of difference. It was easier to look at her ruined stockings than to watch her pale face and wonder what was going on behind it.

She said, "Why… why, it looks like a hypodermic puncture!"

"Not really!" I murmured. "Doc, you astonish me!"

She looked at me. "Paul, what-"

"I gave you a message to give to young Braithwaite. In that message I said I might use the needle and a certain injection. Did you pass the word to Jack when you got in the apartment?"

"Yes," she said. "Yes, of course."

"Never mind that. The fact is that everybody here- everybody alive-knew there was a hypodermic available. Obviously somebody who's acquainted with the kind of kit we carry took advantage of that knowledge to silence Mooney in the confusion after all the shooting."

Olivia watched my face and didn't speak. Nobody spoke. It was getting very tight in there, very close. I could feel something or somebody getting ready to break or make a break. Mooney had been killed to keep him from betraying one of three people. The person who'd done the job was waiting for me to put the finger on him

– or her. I checked Mooney's clothes quickly. What I was looking for wasn't there. Toni was next. It wasn't nice, but I had to do it. She didn't have it either.

I struggled to my feet and limped over to Kroch where he lay face down in a pool of blood. He'd been thoroughly shot up and he'd done a messy job of dying. I felt in his coat pocket and my little drug case was still there. However, when I opened it, the hypo was missing as I'd expected. Having run the risk of picking the dead man's pocket for it, the murderer wouldn't be likely to run the risk of being caught returning it.

Something else was missing, too: half an ampoule, if that's the correct term, of the stuff we use when we don't want them to wake up. As I'd figured, under cover of the confusion, while the others were tending to the wounded and dying, the murderer had cleared my needle of the sleepy-stuff I'd been planning to use on Kroch and loaded up with a lethal dose of something permanent. Well, our techniques and equipment are fairly well known to the opposition, just as theirs are to us.

They were all watching me closely. I made a production of inspecting the case and Kroch's body. He didn't have it, either. That established the elements of the problem clearly: four concrete walls and a concrete floor, three people, one hypodermic syringe. I reached out and grabbed Kroch's fallen pistol out of the pool of blood. I aimed it at Braithwaite.

"You said you had a gun, Navy. I want it."

"But-"

"You have five seconds. At five, you're dead."

That was pure bluff, of course. I wasn't killing anybody. I'd lost one potential informant to death; I wasn't about to give away another.

Braithwaite swallowed. "Yes, sir." He reached gingerly into his pocket and brought out a revolver resembling the one I'd lent Olivia. I don't know what makes Washington so partial to the sawed-off little monsters, but they pass them around like chewing-gum samples.

"Lay it down and back away from it," I said. "You, Doc, on your feet. Get over there with him."

Olivia hesitated. Her eyes were wide and questioning, maybe hurt, but she didn't speak. After a moment, she rose and stood beside the boy. I looked at her bleakly. She could be very sweet and we'd had some fun, but I didn't know. I didn't know and I wasn't taking any chances.

"You've got a knife somewhere," I said. "I know because I gave it to you. It's no good for throwing, the balance is all wrong, so don't try. The gun I gave you, you shot empty. As for you, Miss Darden, stand right there with them. I don't know what you've got, weapon-wise, so don't scratch yourself anywhere, not even if it itches real bad."

I managed to get back to my feet. I switched hands on the pistol, wiped my right hand on my pants, and switched back. I didn't really know whether Kroch's sticky little popgun would fire or not-it might even be empty-but neither did they. I gestured. They backed up. I moved forward and managed to get Braithwaite's weapon off the floor without falling on my face. A quick check told me it was fully loaded. I dropped the Spanish.22 into my coat pocket. I was in business as long as I could remain vertical.

Olivia said, "Paul, you're not doing your leg a bit of good. And you're acting like a madman. That blow on the head-"

"Let's postpone the diagnosis, ma'am," I said. "The treatment, too. I'm doing fine. I don't need medical attention. All I need is a hypodermic syringe. Just one little hypo, folks, and we can all go home."

"I don't understand," said Dottie Darden plaintively. "I don't understand-"

"You will," I said. "We might as well start with you. Take your clothes off."

It went over big. Olivia gasped and looked at me incredulously. Braithwaite stared at me with shocked indignation. The little blonde nurse thought I was pretty terrible, too.

"What?" she demanded.

"You heard me," I said. "And don't tell me I should pass you up because you're just an innocent bystander. You may be innocent, in one way if not another, but you're certainly no bystander. You worked for Dr. Mooney, you may or may not have slept with him-"

"I most certainly did not! Anybody who says so is a dirty liar! And if you think I'm going to undress in front of all these people-"

Olivia gave a sharp little laugh. "Don't be a hypocrite, dear. You know you'll just love undressing in front of us; you just wish we were all men!"

I said, "That'll be enough out of you, Doc." I looked back to the blonde girl. "Come on, Dottie. Don't make me get rough."

"Sir," Braithwaite said. "Sir, I don't think-"

"That's fine," I said nastily. "Let's keep it that way. Dottie?"

She hesitated; then she gave a defiant little youthful toss of the head that reminded me painfully of Antoinette Vail alive-another kid who'd got mixed up in things bigger than she was. Dottie threw an accusing glance at Braithwaite, apparently blaming him for this humiliation rather than me. She unbuttoned her uniform rapidly down the front, slipped out of it like a coat, and passed it over. A pink nylon slip came off over her head and followed the uniform into my hand. There was nothing significant in either garment. What remained wasn't worth taking off, except perhaps the sturdy white nurse's shoes.

She started to unfasten her brassiere, more deliberately now, even provocatively. She was beginning to enjoy herself, I saw, in a wicked, perverse, abandoned way; she was getting a charge out of standing there almost naked with everybody watching her or trying not to watch. The brassiere wasn't very substantial, and it obviously contained nothing but Dottie. I cleared my throat.

"That won't be necessary," I said. "Just take off your shoes and shake them out upside down… That's fine. I apologize, Miss Darden. When we get out of here, you can slap my face. Mr. Braithwaite, you're next."

He was quite red, and he was having a hard time keeping his eyes off the well-developed little girl beside him. Very calm and self-possessed, even smiling a little, she started putting her clothes back on as casually as if she were in her own apartment. You'd have thought no man was within miles of her as she dressed; certainly no young man with whom she'd been keeping company, to use the old-fashioned expression, earlier in the evening.

"Mr. Braithwaite," I repeated.

He started, "What, sir?"

"You, sir," I said.

Dottie giggled. "It's your turn, Jackie. Take them off, Lover-boy. Give us girls a thrill."

He glared at her, and at me. "Sir you can't think I… You can't suspect me.

I said, "Sonny, you're temporary help. You haven't been trained. To the best of my knowledge, you haven't even been properly cleared yet. They just picked you off the street to help out in a minor way. Why did you want to leave a soft Navy berth to work for us, anyway? Sure, I suspect you. Somebody in this room slipped a hypo into Dr. Mooney. Why not you?"

I made a gesture with the gun. He undressed very quickly. He was a good-looking young fellow, lean and sunburned. Dottie stared at him boldly and whistled admiringly to torment him. I wondered if he still thought her a nice kid. Well, her morals weren't my concern, and on the whole I found her attitude more convincing than if she'd put on a show of blushing embarrassment. After all, she was a trained nurse, and Queen Victoria was dead.

There was no hypodermic in Braithwaite's clothes. I threw them back to him and drew a long breath. We'd had a million laughs, and we'd seen a couple of fine young bodies, and we'd stalled long enough. I turned.

"Well, Doc," I said. "That puts it up to you."

Olivia faced me stiffly. She'd lost most of her unaccustomed lipstick during the course of the evening. She looked plain and rather dowdy, like the woman I'd met on the carrier a few days ago. She was back where she'd started. It was almost as if nothing had ever happened between us-almost but not quite.

There was the memory of that in her eyes. There was also the fact that, like me, she was somewhat older than the other two. I was asking her to discard her adult dignity, along with her clothes, in front of a couple of relative youngsters, one of whom she had reason to hate.

"I haven't got it, Paul," she said stiffly. "You're being absurd. Why should I kill Harold?"

Dottie laughed. "I can think of a reason!"

"Shut up," I said, and to Olivia: "Maybe Mooney wasn't killed to silence him. Maybe you just saw a chance for revenge and took it. You're a doctor, you know how to handle a needle, and maybe you can even tell the stuff that's deadly from the stuff that isn't, by smell or taste or something. Maybe the killing has nothing to do with what I'm after, but I've got to know who did it."

"Well, I didn't!" she breathed. "You've got to believe me-".

I said, "And maybe all this personal stuff between you and Mooney is sheer camouflage and there are things I don't know about. You hinted at something like that once, something very mysterious. Anyway, the hell with motives, for the time being. You told me definitely that Kroch was dead, Doc. That means you must have given him some kind of an examination. You were also called over to look at Mooney, says Miss Darden. From Kroch to Mooney, the way the needle went. Where is it?"

"I tell you," she said, "I haven't got it."

"I'm sorry. You're going to have to prove it just like the others did."

She said quietly, "I am not going to undress for you, Paul. You will have to… to strip me by force."

"I can do that, too," I said. "But why make it so tough if you've got nothing to hide? You're a doctor. Before that you were a medical student. What's so secret about the human body? I want that hypo, Doc. Or I want to know you haven't got it. Will it help if I say please?"

She shook her head minutely. She faced me, very straight, waiting. There was an odd kind of panic in her eyes, however; and I remembered that although I'd been allowed to make love to her, I'd never been allowed to see her naked: she'd kept a slip on or asked for a moment to change into a sexy nightie. Maybe she did have a thing about it, doctor or no. Maybe that was all it was. Or maybe she had something else to hide. There was only one way to find out.

I took a limping step forward. Olivia awaited me unmoving, but when I reached out to grasp the neck of her dress with both hands-one holding the gun-she drew a sharp breath and caught my wrists.

"No!" she gasped. "Paul, no! Please. I haven't got it. I swear. You can't-" she hesitated, and looked me in the eye, and said deliberately: "You can't do this to me, Paul!"

I returned the look. Hell, anybody can look. I said harshly, "You have to make this just as tough as you can, don't you?"

"Yes," she said fiercely, "yes, and when you've shamed me without finding what you're looking for, I hope you remember the rest of your life that I told you, swore to you, that it wasn't there!"

"I'll remember," I said. I shook her off and reached for her dress collar again. I saw defeat come into her face.

"Wait!" she gasped. "Wait, I'll do it." She hesitated. "Just let me… Just one thing first, Paul. A favor."

"Granted," I said. "With reservations. What is it?" She put out a hand. I stepped back quickly. "Hold it! What do you want?"

"Just the comb," she said.

"Comb?"

"The comb in your breast pocket. Just a cheap little pocket comb. You can examine it carefully before you give it to me. I wouldn't want you to take any chances!" Her voice was bitter.

I regarded her for a moment, wondering what was in her mind. Then I shrugged, took the comb from my pocket, and gave it to her.

"Now what?"

"Now," Olivia said, and turned abruptly to look at Dottie Darden, "now I want permission to comb her hair."

There was a dead silence. Dottie raised her hands protectively toward the elaborate golden beehive-a little wispy now-that crowned her head, that any stupid policewoman would have made her take down as part of a thorough search. It wasn't the brightest evening of my life.

Olivia took a step forward with the comb, and Dottie broke for the door. I did have sense enough to stick my foot out and trip her. My wounded leg gave way, and I came down heavily beside her. I saw what she was doing, and grabbed for her to keep her from getting her hand to her mouth. It took a bit of brutal wrestling to get the death pill away from her.

Then I struggled to my feet and looked at the deadly little capsule in my hand and at the shapely little girl in hospital white, disheveled and dusty now, with her fancy hairdo disintegrating into sagging tufts and loops above a face that suddenly looked much older and not nearly as pretty as it had before.

Above one ear, like an exotic jewel, a bit of metal and glass gleamed among the tumbled blonde strands. She reached up, felt for it, found it, snatched it out, and hurled it at me. Her aim was poor. I heard it shatter against the concrete wall behind me.

"I'll never tell you anything!" she panted. "You can't make me talk!"

They always say that.