The Collection (92 page)

The tall man stumbled up the stairs past me as I paused.
Most decidedly I didn't want to be down there alone, but I yelled to him:

"Wait up there. I'll be with you in a minute."

He would have to wait, of course, because I would have to
unlock the outer door to let him out.

I turned back and looked at the thermometer in the broken
case, trying not to look at anything else. It read sixty-three degrees, and
that was only about ten degrees under the temperature of the rest of the room.

The glass had been broken, then, for some time. An hour,
I'd say offhand, or maybe a little less. Upstairs, with the heavy door closed,
I wouldn't have heard it break. Anyway, I hadn't heard it break.

I left the lights on in the morgue, all of them, when I ran
up the stairs.

The tall man was standing in the middle of the office,
looking around as though he were in a daze. His face still had that grayish
tinge, and I was just as glad that I didn't have to look in a mirror just then,
because my own face was likely as bad.

I picked up the telephone and found myself giving Bill
Drager's home telephone number instead of asking for the police. I don't know
why my thoughts ran so strongly to Bill Drager, except that he had been the one
who had suspected that something more than met the eye had been behind the
hit-run case from the Mill Road.

"Can--will you let me out of here?" the tall man
said. "I--I--that wasn't my--"

"I'm afraid not," I told him. "Until the
police get here. You--uh--witnessed--"

It sounded screwy, even to me. Certainly he could not have
had anything to do with whatever had happened down there. He had preceded me
into the morgue only by a second and hadn't even reached the case when I was
beside him. But I knew what the police would say if I let him go before they
had a chance to get his story.

Then Drager's voice was saying a sleepy, "Hullo,"
into my ear.

"Bill," I said, "you got to come down here.
That corpse downstairs--it's--I--"

The sleepiness went out of Drager's voice.

"Calm down, Jerry," he said. "It can't be
that bad. Now, what happened?"

I finally got it across.

"You phoned the department first, of course?"
Drager asked.

"N-no. I thought of you first because--"

"Sit tight," he said. "I'll phone them and
then come down. I'll have to dress first, so they'll get there ahead of me.
Don't go down to the morgue again and don't touch anything."

He put the receiver on the hook, and I felt a little
better. Somehow the worst seemed to be over, now that it was off my chest.
Drager's offering to phone the police saved me from having to tell it again,
over the phone.

The tall man--I remembered now that he had given the name
Roger Burke--was leaning against the wall, weakly.

"Did--did I get from what you said on the phone that
the body wasn't that way when--when they brought it in?" he asked.

I nodded. "It must have happened within the last
hour," I said. "I was down there at midnight, and everything was all
right then."

"But what--what happened?"

I opened my mouth and closed it again. Something had happened
down there, but what? There wasn't any entrance to the morgue other than the
ventilator and the door that opened at the top of the stairs. And
nobody--nothing--had gone through that door since my trip of inspection.

I thought back and thought hard. No, I hadn't left this
office for even a minute between midnight and the time the night bell had rung
at two o'clock. I had left the office then, of course, to answer the door. But
whatever had happened had not happened then. The thermometer downstairs proved
that.

Burke was fumbling cigarettes out of his pocket. He held
out the package with a shaky hand, and I took one and managed to strike a match
and light both cigarettes.

The first drag made me feel nearly human. Apparently he
felt better too, because he said:

"I--I'm afraid I didn't make identification one way or
the other. You couldn't--with--" He shuddered. "Say, my brother had a
small anchor tattooed on his left forearm. I forgot it or I could have asked
you over the phone. Was there--"

I thought back to the file and shook my head.

"No," I said definitely. "It would have been
on the record, and there wasn't anything about it. They make a special point of
noting down things like that."

"That's swell," Burke said. "I mean--Say, if
I'm going to have to wait, I'm going to sit down. I still feel awful."

Then I remembered that I had better phone Dr. Skibbine,
too, and give him the story first-hand before the police got here and called
him. I went over to the phone.

The police got there first--Captain Quenlin and Sergeant
Wilson and two other men I knew by sight but not by name. Bill Drager was only
a few minutes later getting there, and around three o'clock Dr. Skibbine came.

By
that time the police had questioned Burke and let him go, although one of them
left to go home with him. They told him it was because they wanted to check on
whether his brother had
shown up yet, so the Missing
Persons Bureau could handle it if he hadn't. But I guessed the real reason was
that they wanted to check on his identity and place of residence.

Not that there seemed to be any way Burke could be involved
in whatever had happened to the body, but when you don't know what has
happened, you can't overlook any angle. After all, he was a material witness.

Bill Drager had spent most of the time since he had been
there downstairs, but he came up now.

"The place is tighter than a drum down there, except
for that ventilator," he said. "And I noticed something about it. One
of the vanes in it is a little bent."

"How about rats?" Captain Quenlin asked. Drager
snorted. "Ever see rats break a sheet of glass?" "The glass
might have been broken some other way." Quenlin looked at me. "You're
around here nights, Jerry Grant. Ever see any signs of rats or mice?"

I shook my head, and Bill Drager backed me up. "I went
over the whole place down there," he said. "There isn't a hole
anywhere. Floor's tile set in cement. The walls are tile, in big close-set
slabs, without a break. I went over them."

Dr. Skibbine was starting down the steps.

"Come on, Jerry," he said to me. "Show me
where you and this Burke fellow were standing when he let out a yip."

I didn't much want to, but I followed him down. I showed
him where I had been and where Burke had been and told him that Burke had not
gone closer to the case than about five feet at any time. Also, I told him what
I had already told the police about my looking at the thermometer in the case.

Dr. Skibbine went over and looked at it.

"Seventy-one now," he said. "I imagine
that's as high as it's going. You say it was sixty-three when you saw it at
two? Yes, I'd say the glass was broken between twelve-thirty and
one-thirty."

Quenlin had followed us down the stairs. "When did you
get home tonight, Dr. Skibbine?" he asked.

The coroner looked at him in surprise. "Around
midnight. Good Lord, you don't think
I
had anything to do with this, do
you, Quenlin?"

The captain shook his head. "Routine question. Look,
Doc, why would anybody or anything do that?"

"I wouldn't know," Skibbine said slowly,
"unless it was to prevent identification of the corpse. That's possible.
The body will never be identified now unless the man has a criminal record and
his prints are on file. But making that 'anything' instead of 'anybody' makes
it easier, Cap. I'd say 'anything' was hungry, plenty hungry."

I leaned back against the wall at the bottom of the stairs,
again fighting nausea that was almost worse than before.

Rats? Besides the fact that there weren't any rats, it
would have taken a lot of them to do what had been done.

"Jerry," said Bill Drager, "you're sure you
weren't out of the office up there for even a minute between midnight and two
o'clock? Think hard. Didn't you maybe go to the washroom or something?"

"I'm positive," I told him.

Drager turned to the captain and pointed up to the
ventilator.

"There are only two ways into this morgue, Cap,"
he said. "One's through the door Jerry says he sat in front of, and the
other's up there."

My eyes followed his pointing finger, and I studied the
ventilator and its position. It was a round opening in the wall, twelve or
maybe thirteen inches across, and there was a wheel-like arrangement of vanes
that revolved in it. It was turning slowly. It was set in the wall just under
the high ceiling, maybe sixteen feet above the floor, and it was directly over
the display case.

"Where's
that open into?" Quenlin asked.

"Goes right through the wall," Dr. Skibbine told
him. "Opens on the alley, just a foot or two above the ground. There's
another wheel just like that one on the outside. A little electric motor turns
them."

"Could the thing be dismantled from the outside?"

Dr. Skibbine shrugged. "Easiest way to find that out
is to go out in the alley and try it. But nobody could get through there, even
if you got the thing off. It's too narrow."

"A thin man might--"

"No, even a thin man is wider than twelve inches across
the shoulders, and that's my guess on the width of that hole."

Quenlin shrugged.

"Got a flashlight, Drager?" he asked. "Go on
out in the alley and take a look. Although if somebody did get that thing off,
I don't see how the devil they could have--"

Then he looked down at the case and winced. "If
everybody's through looking at this for the moment," he said, "for
crying out loud put a sheet over it. It's giving me the willies. I'll dream
about ghouls tonight."

The word hit me like a ton of bricks. Because it was then I
remembered that we had talked about ghouls early that very evening. About--how
had Mr. Paton put it?--"ghosts, ghouls, vampires, werewolves," and
about a morgue being a good place for ghouls to hang around; and about--

Some of the others were looking at me, and I knew that Dr.
Skibbine, at least, was remembering that conversation. Had he mentioned it to
any of the others?

Sergeant Wilson was standing behind the other men and probably
didn't know I could see him from where I stood, for he surreptitiously crossed
himself.

"Ghouls, nuts!" he said in a voice a bit louder
than necessary. "There ain't any such thing. Or is there?"

It was a weak but dramatic ending. Nobody answered him.

Me, I had had enough of that morgue for the moment. Nobody had
put a sheet over the case because there was not one available downstairs.

"I'll get a sheet," I said and started up for the
office. I stumbled on the bottom step.

"What's eating--" I heard Quenlin say, and then
as though he regretted his choice of words, he started over again. "Something's
wrong with the kid. Maybe you better send him home, Doc."

He probably didn't realize I could hear him. But by that
time I was most of the way up, so I didn't hear the coroner's answer.

From the cabinet I got a sheet, and the others were coming
up the steps when I got back with it. Quenlin handed it to Wilson.

"You put it on, Sarge," he said.

Wilson took it, and hesitated. I had seen his gesture
downstairs and I knew he was scared stiff to go back down there alone. I was
scared, too, but I did my Boy Scout act for the day and said:

"I'll go down with you, Sergeant. I want to take a
look at that ventilator."

While he put the sheet over the broken case, I stared up at
the ventilator and saw the bent vane. As I watched, a hand reached through the
slit between that vane and the next and bent it some more.

Then the hand, Bill Drager's hand, reached through the
widened slit and groped for the nut on the center of the shaft on which the
ventilator wheel revolved. Yes, the ventilator could be removed and replaced
from the outside. The bent vane made it look as though that had been done.

But why? After the ventilator had been taken off, what
then? The opening was too small for a man to get through and besides it was
twelve feet above the glass display case.

Sergeant
Wilson went past me up the stairs, and I followed him up. The conversation died
abruptly as I went through the door, and I suspected that I had been the
subject of the talk.

Dr.
Skibbine was looking at me.

"The cap's right, Jerry," he said. "You
don't look so well. We're going to be around here from now on, so you take the
rest of the night off. Get some sleep."

Sleep, I thought. What's that? How could I sleep now? I
felt dopy, I'll admit, from lack of it. But the mere thought of turning out a
light and lying down alone in a dark room--huh-uh! I must have been a little
lightheaded just then, for a
goofy parody was running through my brain: