To Keep or Kill

Three

Charles Horne sat upright in the three-quarters bed with his knees virtually propping up his chin, surrounded by scattered blankets and a deep, penetrating silence. He reread for the fourth time the hour-old telegram in his fingers.

Mother Hubbard had brought it in on tiptoe, placing it on his pillow without awakening him, she thought. As soon as she had closed the bedroom door behind her he sat up and ripped open the yellow envelope.

There followed the sound of the ripping a single, expressive word.

Crisply, abruptly, the telegram yanked Charles Horne from the passive role of eyewitness to the crime and put him to running with the hounds. He glanced at the clock and saw it was long past his usual breakfast hour. Union Workman’s Mutual had had time to be notified of the death, but the beneficiary must be in one hell of a hurry. Of course, they could have been notified by the police while the latter were asking questions, or it may have been on the night wire services and already published in Chicago.

Sergeant Wiedenbeck would love this.

Union Workman’s Mutual had become most concerned over the untimely demise of policyholder number G-388,017, more familiarly known as Mr. Walter Alfred Channy III.

Mr. Walter Alfred Channy, the Third, was the sleek and overfed gentleman who so strongly reminded one of a worm. The same sleek and overfed gentleman who had so recently been removed from Boone by the machinations of a practical joker. Union Workman’s Mutual directed Charles Horne to proceed with the investigation of said death and to co-operate with the police in every way.

Which was another way of saying he was to pump them for every scrap of information worth knowing. The death was definitely not an accidental one. It was bare and premeditated murder, but proof of the same must needs be forthcoming, if Union Workman’s Mutual hoped to avoid paying the face value of the policy doubled in greenbacks, as contained in the accidental death benefit clause.

A photostatic copy of the policy application along with other pertinent information was enroute to him via special delivery mail, for his confidential use. A code word embodied in the telegram stated the face amount of the policy was forty-five thousand dollars.

Ninety thousand dollars in cold cash to some lucky individual who happened to be the beneficiary, unless he or the police could present concrete proof of murder. Premeditated murder. And it had to be concrete. The courts were funny that way; they figured insurance companies had money to burn.

There were the so-called “Pearl Harbor cases” in insurance history. The Japanese attack that December day was an act of war and therefore (presumably) put into effect the war clauses in policy contracts held by some individuals who were killed on Sunday morning. But several courts ruled otherwise. Because Congress had not declared war until the following day, the courts held these deaths were murder, and not acts of war. The claims were paid.

Horne read the telegram again.

He noted that one of Everett’s assistants had sent the wire; the old man himself was probably in a state. That was the kind of a supervisor Everetts was; Union Workman Mutual’s penny and dime watchdog who had his nose in everything having the smell of money. Everetts personally checked each new policy-before it took effect, and double-checked each claim before it was paid. The man worked on a flat salary but every employee under him stood ready to swear he received a commission on all monies not paid out.

Horne recalled the futile efforts he had made to pad his expense accounts, and hoped Everetts was developing ulcers over this case. It wouldn’t be hard to prevent the payment of double the face value, but Union Workman’s Mutual was stuck for forty-five thousand as sure as Channy’s death.

Horne’s thoughts switched back to Dr. Saari. She had made him sleep, but the sleep did not wash away the memory of last night’s interview with the police sergeant.

Dr. Saari had difficulty in locating the man.

She had first dialed the police station and asked for him, only to be told he wasn’t in. After she had identified herself, the desk man explained that Wiedenbeck was at the scene of the explosion. She hung up.

“He’s here,” she explained to Charles. “Down on the street.”

“I’ll get him.” The detective stood up.

The doctor shook her chestnut locks, and pushed him down again.

“I’ll get him. Be back in a few minutes. Sit down and rest.”

“What?”

“Oh, sit down!”

Charles Horne sat down. He watched the doctor go out. Waiting until he judged she had had sufficient time to descend the stairs he stood up, crossed the hall to his own office, located a bottle of medicinal spirits and lightened its weight. Then he returned to her office and stretched himself out on the examining table, contemplating her ceiling.

Dr. Saari stood before the broken windows of the drugstore, estimating the damage to this one establishment alone. The nearest window was in complete shatters. Blood flecked the jagged edges still in place around the window casing and was spattered over the displays within the window.

An easy, familiar voice spoke up beside her.

“A man went through that window, doctor.”

She nodded. “I guessed as much. How are you, sergeant?”

The sergeant was a runt as far as size was concerned. She turned to face him, her eyes on a level with his own. But from past experience and talk-about-town she knew he was no runt in brain power. He had risen from patrolman to detective-sergeant in a little over three years’ time.

“I’m getting gray, doctor, getting gray. Things like this don’t help any. There was another guy. He didn’t get it so bad. He was coming out of the drugstore. He got blown back through the door,”

“Badly hurt?”

“Who, the guy kicked through the door? No, he’ll live. The other man won’t, though. The one that went through the window. He’ll be dead by the time the wagon gets him to the hospital, or my name ain’t Wiedenbeck. Thanks for coming down, though, doctor.”

She smiled at him. “There is still another casualty, sergeant. He called me downtown. He wants to see you.”

“Another one! Who?”

“Chuck — Charles Horne.”

“The hell! Where was he? We checked everybody up and down the street.”

“He was in his office. He’s waiting in mine, now. Nothing serious. He wants to see you.”

“To see me? Why?”

She shook her head in mild bewilderment. “I’m not too sure. Something about a wig and a worm.”

He stopped in mid-stride, whirled to face her.

“You’re not... No, you ain’t. What about a wig and a worm?”

“I’m not sure. You’ll have to ask him. He’s groggy to the point where he is thinking out loud. He claims he saw the entire episode. He says he saw the person responsible for this, and a wig and a worm fits in, somehow.”

The sergeant already had her by the arm and was covering ground in long strides. She was forced into a half-run to keep pace with him. Onlookers stared at them, curiously. As he walked, he questioned her.

“You sure he ain’t out of his head?”

“Oh, he’s that all right. But he’s sensible. I mean he can make sense if he wants to. He’s all in and I’m taking him home to bed. Probably have to give him an injection.”

The sergeant dragged her up the stairs and into her office. Horne peered around at them as they burst through the door.

“Good evening, officer. Some joke, wasn’t it?”

Dr. Saari stopped in mid-step and stared at him. In spite of herself she shot a glance at the locked medicine cabinet which contained some bottles of whiskey. Charles followed her glance and grinned impudently at her.

“Never touched your precious golden liquid, Elizabeth, but thanks for telling me where you keep it.”

She sat down across the room from him but said nothing. Instead, she opened the black bag and began to fill a needle with a colorless fluid.

Sergeant Wiedenbeck walked around the examining table and looked at the casualty. He put his balled fists on his hips, elbows askew, and tried his best to express bitter disappointment.

“Too bad they missed. Better luck next time.”

Horne didn’t hear what he said but could follow the lip movements with sufficient ease to get the idea.

He snapped back, “Oh, go to hell.”

Dr. Saari cut in from across the office.

“He can’t hear a thing you say, sergeant. The blast affected his ears. He’ll recover in a day or two, I believe.”

“He can’t hear? Then how did he know what I said?”

She smiled. “Your face told him as much, sergeant.”

The resulting interview was something of a three-way conversation with Wiedenbeck putting the questions to Dr. Saari, who penciled them on paper in a fast long-hand. Horne answered his questions in what he thought was his normal voice. It wasn’t. The sergeant twice made motions with his hands, imploring the patient to not make so much noise.

Dr. Saari explained it. Now that he could no longer hear his own voice, could only “feel” it in his throat, the suddenly-deafened man was unconsciously stepping up the vocal power to compensate for the unnatural loss. A lot of permanently deaf people do it constantly.

The sergeant had come up with his inevitable notebook and pencil, and had asked a fool question. He instantly saw his error; Horne had him there. He had to eliminate the fool questions police love to ask for fool questions look damned foolish when written on paper.

On the other hand he hardly expected some of the answers the private detective began giving him; the astonished expression on his face showed that plainly enough. He began to regard Horne — openly — as something of a fool.

The pencil moved slowly and spasmodically across the pages of the notebook, jotting down a fragment of a fact or sentence, a rough outline of the oral whole. Horne knew Wiedenbeck, knew him well. He had known him from the time the man had come in from Battle Creek to join the force as a rookie. Wiedenbeck’s physical appearance wasn’t such as to cause any maiden to leave home but everyone who knew him had a healthy respect for his intelligence.

Wiedenbeck was keenly interested in the story.

What police officer, intelligent or otherwise, could fail to be interested, Horne asked himself without humor. Here was Charles Horne talking, confidential investigator, protector of the common man (for a fee), the prize sucker of the twentieth century.

His license hanging on the wall said he was a detective. The identification papers he carried in his wallet also mentioned it. His friends and acquaintances assumed he was just that. But he knew a police sergeant who was beginning to suspect otherwise.

Policemen sat at his feet... so to speak... and listened in awe as he poured out his astonishing story. What had this super-mortal, this alert, keenly vigilant protector of the common man (for a fee), done? Nothing much. He had only perched on his thin-boned posterior and somewhat musingly watched a beautiful redhead blow a man to hell with a stick of dynamite.

All without so much as a gently waging finger lifted to reprove her, mind you. To be sure, his face had been pushed around some in the blowing to hell process, but pshaw, that was a mere bagatelle.

The police sergeant’s eyes were unduly expressive, studying the supine man, counteracting the blankness of his face. They were so expressive the eyewitness struck out in self-defense.

“Well, dammit, how was I to know it was dynamite? I thought she had a screech bomb.”

The sergeant answered, and the doctor wrote, “Not dynamite. Probably TNT.”

“Yeah? Where can a girl get TNT these days?”

“Where can any Tom, Dick or Harry get it? We don’t know. We intend to find out.”

“That stuff was damned powerful. Even for TNT.”

A worried frown creased the sergeant’s forehead and he changed the subject.

“I don’t see why you didn’t stop the woman.”

“I told you, sergeant, I thought it was a joke. And besides, so did the other guy.”

“What other guy?”

“The guy that was standing on the stairs. Downstairs, below my office window.”

The sergeant searched his face. “I just come up those stairs,” he said. “I didn’t see any guy.”

“He was there, all right. He was peeking around the corner of the stairway, watching the girl.”

Wiedenbeck glanced at the doctor. Horne didn’t follow his glance and missed whatever took place.

“Describe this girl,” the police sergeant ordered, “as fully as possible.”

That wasn’t too difficult. In her high, clacking heels she stood about five-foot-nine. The build was wonderful and she weighed perhaps a hundred and thirty to forty pounds. There was no excess fat, only well-rounded curves. She had been wearing a thin, white blouse that shown like nylon. The skirt was a shade which Horne judged to be nile green. The hose were probably nylon as well. Black, open-toed shoes. And spiked heels.

And that, he explained with a spread of his hands, was the best he could do. After all it had been rather dark.

Dr. Saari made a remark to the sergeant which she neglected to write down and pass to the witness. The sergeant grinned but it was more of a leer.

After that had come the shot in the arm. The doctor drove him home and he had put himself to bed.

With the late morning sun shining in his eyes, Horne jammed the telegram in his pajama pocket and hopped out of bed. The bedpost saved him from hitting the floor. He clung there weakly until the dizzy spell had passed.

While he was dressing he heard Mother Hubbard in the kitchen below him. Heard Mother Hubbard!

“Hey!” he said aloud. “Well whaddya know? I can hear again!”

Going downtown on the streetcar he read the morning newspaper over the shoulder of the passenger seated in front of him. The worm’s glorious departure was a front page sensation. Boone had seen nothing like it in all history.

The paper even mentioned the only other dynamiting within memory of Boone’s oldest inhabitant, a bit of business about a tool shed being blown up during a labor dispute long before the first world war. It had ultimately been proven the owners of the shed had themselves dynamited the building to discredit the striking workmen. The incident had nothing at all to do with the current explosion, but then that was Boone and Boone’s newspaper. Too, the relatives of the oldest living inhabitant bought extra copies to see grandpapa’s name in print.

Charles Horne climbed the stairs to find his office door standing open. The building janitor and a man from the paint and glass store were putting new windows into place. Most of the rubble had been haphazardly swept into a pile near the door. Horne stooped down to pick up a piece of anonymous metal lying in the pile and pocketed it as a souvenir.

The janitor looked around at him and said good morning. Horne returned the greeting and picked up the mail lying on his desk. There were two letters and a post card. The post card offered him a thousand-dollar life insurance policy for only one dollar per month, and no medical examination. He crumpled it and dropped it on the pile of rubbish.

Across the hall someone left the doctor’s office. He strode across the hall with the letters in his hand and walked into the waiting room. Some of the waiting patients looked up at him curiously. Behind the closed door of the doctor’s inner sanctum her voice could be heard in a low and indistinct mumble. Horne picked the most comfortable chair not already occupied and sat down to read his mail.

The first letter was a confidential note from a concern which hand-painted neckties to order — confidential because the customer could send a photograph and receive in return a nude painted on the tie, the nude bearing the face of the girl in the photograph. He rolled the letter into a ball and sent it spinning across the floor. A youngster looked at it incuriously and kicked it through the door into the hallway.

The second letter commanded his attention.

It bore a Boone postmark, dated early the same morning, and contained only a single sheet of typing paper. In the center of the sheet was typed a telephone number. His own telephone number, in his office across the hall. There was nothing else.

Dr. Saari came out for him about forty minutes later. She found him sitting there, staring blankly at the letter. Without words she tapped him lightly on the shoulder and led the way into her inner office. He pushed the door shut behind him.

She asked, “How are you this morning, darling?”

“I’m... what did you say?”

She laughed lightly. “Forget it. I wanted to see if you were hearing well. You are.”

“Where do you get this darling business?”

“I advised you to forget it. It was a test.”

“Is that so?” He eyed her curiously, watching her movements.

“That is so. Come over here and sit down.” She indicated the leather examining table he had come to know so well. She laid out clean bandages.

He held the letter limply in one hand while she changed the bandages. A typewriter on the desk across the office caught his eye.

“Your typewriter?”

“I rent it. And I can type. Wait until you get my bill.”

“What size of type?”

“Size...?”

“Yeah, pica or elite?”

“Elite. Mind my asking why the curiosity?”

He held up before her the letter with his telephone number typed in pica.

“Thought maybe you might be pulling a gag.”

She read the number, turned the paper over, and finally examined the postmark on the envelope.

“You have a suspicious mind, Chuck. Why should I do a thing like that?”

“Why should anybody do it? Somebody did it to me.”

“But why...?”

“How do I know? It isn’t a joke. I’ve a hunch about that, now. But what the hell does it mean?”

She shrugged and put a tiny light into his ear.

“Any dizziness this morning? Nausea?”

Her voice warned him. “Umm. Should there be?”

She stepped in front of him and grinned impishly down into his upturned face.

“There sometimes is, and in your case, was. That’s what happens to bad boys who gulp whiskey when the doctor isn’t looking.”

“Bosh! I’ve never had a hang-over in my life.”

“Except for this morning. Don’t forget the injection I gave you last night.”

He swung out for her but she danced out of reach.

“You’re doing fine, Chuck.” Her merry face sobered. “Of course, there is a possibility of a recurrence, but don’t let it frighten you. It won’t last. Frankly, I didn’t expect you to be using those ears at all for another day, perhaps two. They took a terrific beating.”

“For that matter, so did Wilsey Street. Did you notice how fast Wiedenbeck changed the subject last night when I began harping on TNT? I’ll bet you a steak dinner at the Blue Mill it wasn’t TNT. It’s something stronger, so damned strong it has the sergeant worried.”

“Oh,” she said, “...the sergeant; that reminds me. He dropped in here looking for you. He said he was so upset last night he forgot to go through the motions. He told me to tell you not to leave town without his permission. You are the only eyewitness. The only one known, that is.”

“How about those two guys at the drugstore?”

“I was called to the hospital this morning. One man died before he arrived there last night. The other one was released this morning, after I made an examination.”

“How was he?”

“Fair. I can’t go into details, Chuck.”

“I didn’t mean that. I know your ethics.”

“And I didn’t mean that in the way it sounded. My professional ethics have nothing to do with it. The sergeant has forbidden me to discuss the man’s condition.”

The detective glanced at her sharply. “The hell!”

“Yes, the hell. Don’t ask me any more, Chuck.”

He shook his head grimly. “I won’t. You’ve told me quite a lot.”

“I’ve told you nothing.”

“In words, no.”

Someone pounded on the door.

“Just a moment.” Dr. Saari started for the door.

A voice came through it. “Special delivery for Horne. They said he was here.”

“He is.” She opened the panel and let the postman in.

“Hear ya’ got banged up last night, Chuck?” The newcomer peered at the bandages. He held out a fat letter, a pencil and a pad. “It’s in the papers.”

“Yeah? That makes me famous.” He signed for the letter. The doctor was watching him.

“From the insurance company,” he explained after the postman had left. “The poor sap in the automobile last night was a policyholder. I have to take a look-see. The company doesn’t want to pay out double the face value.”

He ripped the letter open and scanned the papers. The line he wanted was near the center of the application blank.

“Guess what—?”

“What?”

“He left his money to a dog and cat hospital!”

“That’s... rather unbelievable.”

“Here it is, right here. Forty-five thousand bucks to the Boone Animal Hotel, 116 Mulberry Street.”

She offered information. “I’ve made professional calls there. An old lady by the name of Bridges owns the hospital, Deebie Bridges, I believe.”

“She runs the hospital?”

“Oh, no. A veterinarian handles that end of it. I understand she owns the establishment.”

“According to this application the policy was taken out... uh, in May, three years ago. Deebie Bridges will be a nice gal for a male gold digger to latch onto. Ninety thousand bucks, maybe.”

“Will she get the money?”

“Probably. The company will pay in the name of the hospital, but if she owns the joint, then she writes the checks.” He slipped the letter into an inner coat pocket. “Thanks, doctor, but I’ve got to get busy. Chicago will start hounding me by telephone this afternoon.”

“What are you going to do, Chuck?”

“See what there is to see about the animal hotel and Deebie Bridges; also the vet. Say...”

“Say what?”

“I just mentioned that Chicago will be hounding me by telephone.” He held up the anonymous letter containing his phone number typed on the sheet of paper. “It suddenly occurred to me: someone phoned me last night while I was sitting in the office, someone who hung up when they found it was the wrong number. Or so they pretended!”