To Keep or Kill

Fourteen

The detective lay stiffly quiet in the hospital bed, wondering how long it would take the stranger’s creeping, bandaged hand to reach the heavy water pitcher. Across the darkened room Horne could see that the fingers of that hand rested on the edge of the white-topped table beside the man’s bed.

The man’s strength had been surprising, the aim not so good. Horne nursed an aching bruise on his ribs instead of his head, where some twenty minutes ago a water tumbler had come flying across the hospital room to jar him into wakefulness.

He had one advantage over the stranger; his bed was in the corner nearest the door and thus in comparative darkness. The faint light coming through the glazed transom above the door reflected in the glaring, unwinking eyes of the man in the opposite bed. Horne had been watching those eyes and he couldn’t remember them winking once in the last twenty minutes.

He clutched the water glass in tight fingers and listened to the sounds of the hospital at night. There weren’t many. Somewhere near at hand a refrigerator was humming and on the floor below a woman was moaning with periodic regularity. He could hear no low conversations, no movement or the tiny rustling of papers which were the telltale sounds of a night nurse on duty somewhere nearby. He could hear nothing at all that gave any evidence of life in the corridor outside the nearly-closed door.

The stranger’s palm rested, quivering in excitement and ebbing strength, on the edge of the white table.

Above the man’s head, draped over the metal frame of the bed and dropping down under the pillow hung a long rubber cord that ended in a push button. Horne followed it with his eyes. It was the only call signal in the two-bed room, given by right of prior occupation to the white-swathed figure in the other bed.

“Betty’s dead,” Horne whispered piercingly across the room. “The redhead’s dead, deader than hell. Bumble killed her. They’re both dead.”

The fingers of that resting palm stirred into quick motion and began their slow, tortured crawl across the top of the table. In the deadened silence that followed his words Horne heard the tinny sounds of the fingernails striking the table’s metal surface. The maniacal eyes, not quite completely hidden under the bandages cloaking the face, only glared on. There was no answering flicker of emotion, no indication that the stranger had heard. Only the movement of his hand.

Horne held tightly to the water tumbler against his chest and watched the progress of that hand.

“They’ve got Deebie Bridges in jail,” he taunted. “Hilda’s there, too. They picked up Hilda yesterday.”

He waited a few moments, not really expecting the other to answer him.

“Hilda made a mistake. She thought she was doing a favor. She came into town and tried to buy me a shirt. They got her.”

He didn’t see the lips move; he couldn’t, covered as they were. But he heard the word hurled at him.

“Sure,” he whispered with humorous indifference, pleased that he had drawn a reply. “That’s me all over. My father was, too. So now Betty’s dead, and Bumble’s dead, and that fat slob Channy’s dead. And they’ve got Deebie Bridges and Hilda in jail. That leaves only you, doesn’t it? Just you, all alone, and no one to do your dirty work for you.”

He stopped as the hand reached the side of the pitcher. In his own silence he heard the fingernails tap the glass.

“The cops are sweating Deebie and Hilda by now. The cops are going to get the answers. All the answers. Have you ever heard of a cop we have here called Wiedenbeck? He’ll get the answers. And then he’ll get you!”

The bandaged hand reached up and grasped the handle of the pitcher. It began to slide across the table, moving faster now for the stranger had only to hold tightly to the pitcher and let his arm fall back to the bed.

“They found the wire Betty used to tap the City Hall telephone line,” Horne taunted, egging the man on, hoping to defeat his purpose by making him throw the pitcher before he had really gathered his strength. “Betty smeared black shoe polish on it, tried to make it seem old and dirty like the other wires. Betty made a lot of mistakes. She talked too much when she thought she had me bottled up. She told me who you were, although she never realized it. Too bad she’s dead; she’d get a kick out of seeing us here together.”

The pitcher and the hand that held it rested on the bed beside the heavily breathing convalescent.

“Your curiosity was the end of you,” Horne drove on, unconsciously raising his voice above the hoarse whisper he had been using. “You had to stick around to see the explosion, didn’t you? But you weren’t as dumb as I was — you knew it wasn’t a screech bomb. You stuck around to see what kind of a job she would do and she blasted hell out of you! Wiedenbeck told me in the ambulance a while ago that she used nitrochloride; you didn’t know that, or you wouldn’t have been standing down on my front steps watching.

“Money hungry, that’s what was eating you. But it’s all over now. Betty’s dead; Betty was a helluva swell girl, but she’s dead. Do you know how she died? Bumble electrocuted her, down in the tunnel under the street. He sliced a knife right through a high tension wire. Electrocuted. That’s what will happen to you. They electrocute them in Illinois. You should have stayed in California. Gas doesn’t hurt so much.”

Why didn’t he make an effort to raise the pitcher?

Abruptly, Horne saw why. He wasn’t going to throw the pitcher from across the room; his aim was faulty and he knew it. The man swung his legs to the floor.

The detective tensed his body and worked an arm free of the sheets. He watched the other put his feet to the floor, shifting his weight to his legs and testing them. The man clutched the side of his bed, holding himself upright until the nausea left him. Then he put out a tentative foot, loosening his hold on the bed, paused a moment to see if he could stand upright. It seemed to satisfy him. He took a step, and another, and then a third. The pitcher in his hand began to swing to and fro like a pendulum.

Horne kicked back the sheets and waited. Neither of them uttered a word; their glances locked and held. The hidden refrigerator somewhere nearby shut itself off and ran down into silence. From the corner of his eye, Horne watched the swinging pitcher.

He guessed the other’s plan of action.

The girl’s father lacked the strength to raise the pitcher above his head, lacked the strength to bring it crashing down on Horne’s face in a lethal blow. Instead he was swinging it back and forth, gathering momentum, and at the right moment when he stood beside the detective’s bed he would allow the momentum to swing the heavy pitcher up and around in a complete arc, smashing it down on Horne.

The man was but a few feet distant. The pitcher swung far back and started up the arc like a railroader’s high, wide highball. Horne swung around on his bed, pivoting on his backsides and lashed out with both feet in the other’s unprotected stomach.

Abruptly the arcing pitcher faltered, dropped in a glancing blow to strike the side of the bed. It slipped from the twitching fingers and crashed to the floor, the sound of the shattering ringing like a small bomb in the night stillness. The upsetting of a chair in the corridor echoed the crash.

The swathed figure bent half double over Horne’s bed, his hands clutching his stomach. Horne hit him in the unseen face.

A uniformed policeman burst through the door, saw Horne sitting up, doing nothing, and an empty bed beyond him.

“Hey! What the hell’s going on here?”

A night nurse shouldered past the policeman and switched on the lights.

“Meet my boss,” Horne said, jerking a thumb downward. “He had a pretty daughter who gave him away.”

The patrolman picked the man up off the floor and stretched him out on his own bed. The nurse had her hand on the pulse of the faintly twitching wrist, counting and waiting.

“Are you crazy?” the patrolman demanded. “That guy is Robinson, a private dick.”

“You’re crazy,” Horne contradicted him flatly. “That guy happens to be E. E. Everetts, my boss. Or should I say my ex-boss. You’d better call Wiedenbeck.”

Charles Horne, wedged tightly in the seat between Sergeant Wiedenbeck and Elizabeth Saari, fumbled in his coat pocket for a package of cigarettes, extracted and lit two, passing one of them to the woman driving.

Elizabeth said, “Thanks, Chuck.”

“If you,” he turned to the sergeant, “want one, light it yourself. You might not like my breath. Have you got the papers?”

“Oh, for crying out loud! Will you shut up about those papers? Yes, I’ve got the papers. This is four times I’ve told you yes, I’ve got the papers. And we’ll pick up the rest of them in Capitol City. Now stop asking.” He lit a cigarette for himself and looked out the window at the wheat fields skimming the highway.

Horne delved into his pocket again and brought out a shiny, flat key. The key Betty had given him to the bank vault.

“It’s mine, all mine,” he said wonderingly. “She gave it to me.”

“Among other things,” Wiedenbeck reminded him softly. “Among many other wonderful things.”

Horne ignored the irony in his words. “I wonder if the new supervisor will let me pad the expense account?” he asked musingly. “Everetts never let me get away with it. Can you imagine that! The tight old sonofa—” he broke off, glanced at the doctor, and tried to finish lamely, “Well, he wouldn’t, and all the time he was milking ’em dry.”

“Narrow minds operate in that way,” Dr. Saari answered. “They’ve been doing it since the world was young and will continue doing it until the last man has left the earth. The big frog in the little puddle can do no wrong; he makes his own rules of conduct for himself but expects his inferiors to remain in their proper places.”

“But they usually get caught,” Wiedenbeck pointed out. “Not all of them — some of the little ones and some of the big ones hole up somewhere across the world and die natural deaths. But mostly we catch up with them, somehow, somewhere. They forget the rest of the world isn’t living by their rules of right and wrong, and they stumble.”

Dr. Saari steered the car around a broad curve and the outskirts of Capitol City loomed in the near distance.

“The redhead gave her old man away,” Horne put in. “Accidentally betrayed him several times. She once told me, after giving me a letter I had mailed to Everetts, that he ‘didn’t need it now,’ or words to that effect. Which meant that he already knew what was in it, or that she would tell him what had happened and my letter would be redundant. When I saw the newspaper piece about ‘Robinson’ being found in the hotel, and Betty told me her father was unaccountably missing, and I recalled how I had been unable to reach Everetts by phone in Chicago, I began working by guesswork. Channy made regular trips to Chicago for money — got it from Everetts. Everetts had only to okay beneficiary checks from his company and keep them — or mail them to Betty, or Deebie Bridges, or whatever. Betty gave away that scheme, too.”

“I thought you were talking through your hat,” the sergeant admitted, “until I checked with the insurance company and found that Everetts had been transferred from Sacramento to Chicago within a year after the Bridges woman opened that hospital here.” He frowned at the buildings springing up around them. “The judge issued orders for the exhumation of Ackerley’s body, this morning. About that poison business.”

“I sometimes think,” Horne said wearily, “that I’ll give up all this prying into crime and find me a good, stodgy job somewhere else. A job where the nearest I can come to murder is to read about it in the papers. And then I’ll have time to finish my book.”

Elizabeth Saari grinned lightly. The police sergeant said, “What book? Risky poetry?”

“Of course not!” Horne countered. “Em writing a book on Lost Atlantis. Em going to be an authority on the subject.”

“At the moment,” Wiedenbeck said, “let’s hope you haven’t lost that key. I want to know what’s in that safety deposit box.”

In something less than forty-five minutes the sergeant found out. The Capitol City police had the court order awaiting them, and in company with a fidgeting bank official, plus members of the local police, Horne inserted the flat key in the box, twisted it, and pulled out the long, thin drawer.

When he had it in his hands he grinned at Wiedenbeck and asked, “Were you wondering if it would blow up, too?”

“Hell, no, it never entered my head!”

“It entered mine. But I didn’t think it likely. Look.”

In spite of himself Wiedenbeck jumped. The drawer contained three small red cylinders, harmless looking packages about the size of a roll of quarters and a few inches long. There was also a white envelope, addressed simply, “Darling.”

Being a woman, Dr. Saari saw that first and shot Horne a questioning glance. He shrugged his shoulders and grinned.

“What,” asked the perplexed bank official, “are those red packages?”

Wiedenbeck picked them up carefully. “Nitrochloride,” he answered quietly. “Enough to push a good-sized hole right up through the roof.” The bank official turned and ran.

“What the devil’s the matter with him?” Horne demanded. “The stuff is safe until it’s heated up.”

“Are you,” Wiedenbeck cut in, the words escaping between his teeth, “going to open that envelope or am I going to choke you?”

“Okay, okay.” Horne held it up to the light, glanced at the sergeant oddly, and ripped open one end. Another key fell out into his upturned palm. “Satisfied now?”

“Damn it to hell!” the exasperated sergeant roared, “what’s that one for?”

“This one,” Horne said, weighing it in his palm, “unlocks the one door in the girl’s house I couldn’t get into. It unlocks the room where I thought the bombs were kept.”

“Chuck,” Elizabeth Saari cut in quickly, noting the gathering storm on the sergeant’s face, “we may as well find out the quickest way. Let’s go.”

“Chuck,” she said again, thoughtfully, as she turned the car off the highway into the lane leading to the house, “does there exist the slightest possibility that this key will set off an explosion?”

“There is always a possibility,” he returned, looking out the car window for the dog. “There is always the possibility of anything and everything. But I don’t think so, this time. When she gave me that key she—” he broke off, turned his face to her, turned it away again and went on “—well, let’s say I was her mad pash of the moment. At the time she fancied herself in love with me. I don’t think the key will trip an explosion. Do you see a dog around anywhere?”

“No. I was looking for him, too.”

“You were?”

“Certainly.” She turned to the sergeant. “Recognize the place, sergeant?”

He had his chin in his hand. “Don’t remind me of it,” he growled.

“Say, what goes on here?” Horne demanded.

“I’ll tell you sometime.” She stopped the car. “Get out, and get this over with.”

The three of them walked into the house.

“Where did you sleep?” Elizabeth Saari asked without expression.

“I was expecting that,” Horne chuckled.

“Where?” she repeated.

“In there,” he said, waving his hand at the living room. The fingers of his other hand fished in a pocket for the key. “The dog and I slept in there. I slept on the floor.”

She walked to the open bedroom door and looked in. Behind her back Wiedenbeck caught Horne’s glance and raised an expressive eyebrow in mute questioning. Horne winked at him. Wiedenbeck jerked his thumb at the lock in exasperation.

Horne inserted the key in the lock, twisted it, felt it give, and pushed. The regular lock below the doorknob still held. Impatiently, Sergeant Wiedenbeck jerked a ring of keys from his pocket, fitted a skeleton key into the second lock and turned it. Horne turned the knob and shoved the door inward.

Behind him, Dr. Saari burst out laughing.

“What,” Wiedenbeck wanted to know, “means that?” He pointed into the room. The room was bare of furniture and drapery. There was only a faded green rug and piled on the rug in a huge mass of metal were thousands upon thousands of silver dollars. It looked as if it had been dumped there by a wheelbarrow.

Round-eyed, Horne explained. “She didn’t trust the government. Betty didn’t trust anyone, much. Paper dollars can become valueless. Silver dollars always have value.” He paused to consider something. “Look, it’s mine, all mine. I wonder how many are there?”

Wiedenbeck advanced into the room and waded into the pile of money. He kicked, flung his legs about, enjoying the sight of the dollars flying about the room.

Elizabeth tapped the detective on the shoulder. He turned from the doorway with a question in his eyes.

“Just what,” she inquired softly, “did that woman mean to you?”

“To me? Nothing. Why, nothing at all!”

She let her eyes rest on the money and then on his face. The unspoken suggestion was eloquent.

“Honest, Elizabeth. She was just a batty doll who thought she owned me.”

“You mentioned,” she went on relentlessly, “a party at which you got drunk and passed out.”

“Oh, that. She doped the beer. She made another mistake. She doped it with an aphrodisiac.”

The girl’s eyes grew wide in startled wonder.

“You get the idea, doctor? That stuff mixed with beer put me to sleep. Honest.”

“Hey, look,” Wiedenbeck broke in on them, emerging from the room. “Look what I found. A dollar minted the same year I was born. Do you mind if I keep it, Horne?”