Darker Than You Think (23 page)

Barbee
wanted to forget that dream. He went shivering back to bed, and tried
to sleep again. He couldn't sleep. Every detail of that long
nightmare lingered to haunt him, horribly vivid and real. He couldn't
rid his mind of the wolf bitch's crimson grin, or the flimsy feel of
Jiminy Cricket's vertebrae snapping in his own powerful jaws, or the
sight of Mondrick's widow stumbling in her frantic pursuit, pitiable
in her blindness and yet terrible with that silver blade.

He
got up again, and limped unthinkingly to pull the blinds against the
cruel light of day. He poured antiseptic on that enigmatic scratch,
and shaved carefully, and took an aspirin to dull that ache in his
jaw.

Dreams
were logical results of normal causes, he kept insisting to himself,
and he didn't need Dr. Glenn to help him unraval this one. The
obvious dislike of Nora Quain and Mrs.
Mondrick
for
April Bell might very plausibly have planted the suggestion in his
own unconscious that the charming redhead was a bitch, and his own
indignant revolt against the suggestion seemed motive enough for the
gray wolf's part. With all the bizarre details of the Mondrick
tragedy for background, and his own nervous fatigue, the nightmare
seemed natural enough.

Yet
he wasn't quite satisfied with such efforts at rational
self-analysis. He decided to call Rowena Mondrick. He wanted to
assure himself that she was really safe in the old house on
University Avenue, and her dog Turk with her.

He
dialed her number with a numb forefinger. For a long time there was
no answer—perhaps, he hoped, everybody was safely asleep. At
last he heard the high-pitched voice of Mrs. Rye, the housekeeper,
asking sharply what he wanted.

"I'd
like to speak to Mrs. Mondrick, if she's up."

"She
ain't here."

"Huh!"
He gulped, trying to swallow his instant panic. "Then give me
Miss Ulford, please." "She ain't, either."

"What—?"
he croaked feebly. "Where—?" "Miss Ulford went
in the ambulance, to see after poor Mrs. Mondrick."

He
nearly dropped the receiver. "How's that?"

"Mrs.
Mondrick—the poor old dear—she must have gone out of her
head last night. The shock of her husband called so sudden, you know.
And she has always had them funny spells, you know, ever since that
varmit clawed out her eyes across the water."

Barbee
swallowed hard.

"What
happened?" he gasped impatiently.

"She
got up in the night, and slipped out of the house with that ugly dog
she insists on keeping. I guess she thought she was hunting
something—that same varmit, might be, as got her eyes. Anyhow,
she carried one of her good sterling table knives, that she had gone
and sharpened like a dagger. Lucky thing the dog started barking.
That woke Miss Ulford, and she got up and followed."

Barbee
listened, mute and shivering.

"The
dog must have run off and left her. Mrs. Mondrick was stumbling after
it through the streets—poor blind thing—as hard as she
could run. The nurse said she had to chase her nearly twenty blocks—I
don't see how she ever got so far."

Mrs.
Rye seemed to find a morbid satisfaction in her own narrative.

"Miss
Ulford was all worn out herself, but she finally brought Mrs.
Mondrick home in a cab. Dear blind thing—she was all skinned
and bleeding from falling in the streets, and quite out of her head.
She wouldn't let go that sharpened knife till we twisted it away, and
she kept screaming something about the things Turk was after.

"Miss
Ulford called the ambulance from Glennhaven, and woke me to pack a
few of Mrs. Mondrick's things. They took her away, not an hour
ago—she struggled with the keepers, poor old dear, till I was
afraid she'd kill herself."

"I—I
think Glenn has treated her before." Barbee tried desperately to
make his voice sound calm. "Why didn't she want to go?"

"She
kept begging us to take her to Mr. Sam Quain's house. She was so
frantic about it, that I finally tried to telephone Mr. Quain for
her—but the operator told me he had left his receiver off the
hook. The men in the ambulance kept telling her they'd take care of
everything, and they took her on to Glennhaven.

"So
she ain't here," Mrs. Rye concluded. "Anything I can do?"

Barbee
stood woodenly, too dazed to reply.

"Hello?"
said Mrs. Rye. "Hello?"

He
couldn't find his voice, and she hung up impatiently. He stumbled to
the bathroom and poured himself half a tumbler of whisky—and
dashed it untasted, on a terrified impulse, into the lavatory. If
whisky had anything to do with such disturbing occurrences as this,
it was high time to quit.

Little
Miss Ulford was a smart nurse, he told himself stubbornly, to take
her patient to Dr. Glenn. That queer tragedy at the airport had
clearly been too much for Mrs. Mondrick, and his own fears for her
sanity must have played a part in shaping that grotesque dream.
Grimly, he resolved not to ponder the too-many coincidences between
fact and dream—that road to madness Mrs. Mondrick herself must
have travelled.

On
abrupt impulse, he called the Trojan Arms.

He
couldn't quite dare ask April Bell if she had got home safe from the
railroad bridge. He knew very well that people didn't get hurt in
other people's dreams. But he wanted to hear her voice, and know
where she was. He could make his excuses for not calling yesterday
and ask her for another date. His voice turned eager as he asked for
Miss Bell.

"Sorry,
sir," the clerk told him. "We can't disturb Miss Bell."

"I'm
a friend," Barbee insisted. "I don't think she'd mind."

The
clerk was firm, and Barbee asked for the manager. Publicity is
important to hotels, and Gilkins was commonly cooperative with the
working press. April Bell, however, appeared to be the uncommon case.

"Sorry,
Mr. Barbee," he murmured politely, "but we really can't
disturb her. Sorry, old man—but Miss Bell always sleeps till
noon, and she has left strict orders not to be bothered for anything
less than fire or bloody murder."

Barbee
tried not to shiver at that last phrase. The tall redhead kept pretty
luxurious hours, it seemed to him— for a cub reporter on an
afternoon paper. Barbee left a message that he had called, and
determined not to brood about his nightmare.

He
dressed hastily, stopped for a cup of coffee at the Dainty Diner on
the corner, and drove on downtown. He wanted people around him. Human
people. He wanted familiar voices and the clatter of typewriters and
the steady thump of teletypes and the jingle of mats in the composing
machines and the deep rumble of the presses. He stopped across the
street from the
Star
at
old Ben Chittum's newsstand, and asked about Rex.

"He's
all torn up." The lean old man seemed moodily depressed. "It
must have hit him pretty hard, the way Dr. Mondrick went. He stopped
to see me yesterday after the funeral, but he didn't have much to
say. Had to get back to the Foundation."

He
paused to straighten a rack of papers, and then peered sharply at
Barbee.

"Why
didn't the papers print more about it?" he wanted to know. "I
know you were out there, and this girl from the
Call.
It
seems important to me—when a man like Dr. Mondrick dies that
way. But there's hardly anything."

"Huh?"
Barbee was vaguely puzzled. "I thought it was a page-one story,
and I turned in six hundred words. I guess I was too upset myself to
notice what they used."

"See."
The old man showed him a copy of yesterday's
Star.
Not
a word of his story had been printed. On an inside page, he found the
bare announcement of Mondrick's funeral at two in the afternoon.

"I
don't get it," he said, and shrugged off his brief perplexity.
He had more disquieting riddles than that to solve. He crossed the
street, glad to get back to the ordered confusion of the newsroom.

On
his desk was a familiar blue-paper memo requesting him to report to
Preston Troy. The
Star
was
not the greatest among Troy's enterprises—which included the
mills and the Trojan Trust and the radio station and the baseball
club. The newspaper was his favorite child, however, and he handled
most of his affairs from his spacious corner office on the floor
above the city room.

Barbee
found the publisher dictating to a svelte titian-haired
secretary—Troy was famous for the sophisticated good looks of
his secretaries. He was a squat, florid man, with a thin fringe of
reddish hair around the pink dome of his head. He looked up at Barbee
with shrewd blue eyes, and rolled his thick cigar across his wide,
aggressive mouth.

"Find
me the Walraven file," he told the girl, and his cold eyes came
to Barbee. "Grady says you're a good legman, Barbee. I want to
give you a chance at some feature stuff—under your own
by-line—to build up Colonel Walraven for the senate."

"Thanks,
Chief," Barbee said without enthusiasm for Colonel Walraven. "I
see Grady didn't run my story yesterday on Mondrick's death."

"I
told him to kill it."

"Will
you tell me why?" Barbee watched Troy's pink-jowled face. "I
thought it was page-one stuff. Strong human interest, with a swell
mystery angle. Old Mondrick died, you see, right in the middle of
telling what they had brought back from Asia in that green box.

"And
it's still a good story, Chief." Barbee curbed his eagerness,
trying to sound sanely calm. "The coroner's verdict was death
from natural causes, but the old man's associates act as if they
don't believe a word of that. They're hiding whatever is inside that
green box, and they're still afraid to talk."

Barbee
gulped and tried to slow his voice.

"I
want to follow up the story, Chief. Give me a photographer, and I'll
file some features that will put Clarendon on the map. I want to find
why Mondrick went to the Ala-shan. And what those men are afraid of.
And what they're hiding in that box."

Troy's
eyes were hard and blank.

"Too
sensational for the
Star."
His
rasping voice was abruptly dictatorial. "Forget it, Barbee. Get
to work on the colonel."

"Too
sensational, Chief?" Barbee echoed. "You always said murder
was the cornerstone of the
Star."

"I
set our editorial policy," Troy snapped. "We're printing
nothing about the Mondrick case. Neither, you will find, is any other
large newspaper."

Barbee
tried to swallow his puzzled unease.