The Collection (97 page)

But just the same, I couldn't sleep, and the longer I lay
there, the less sleepy I got. My mind went in circles.

Finally I gave up, and got up. I got the little pencil
flashlight from the pocket of my suit coat, and started to work on the lock. I
got it open within ten minutes.

The hallway was empty, and all the doors along it were
closed.

My bare feet made no sound in the hallway and on the stairs.
The recreation room was dark, but there was a dim light in the corridor that
led to the office.

The door of the office was locked, too, and that cost me
another ten minutes or so. But time didn't matter. It couldn't be later than
about one o'clock and I had the whole night ahead of me.

I took a look around the office, shading my tiny flashlight
so its beam would not show outside. I don't know just what I was looking for. I
opened a closet door and jumped back when a skeleton confronted me. But it was
a conventional wired medical skeleton and entirely harmless. An odd thing, it
occurred to me, for a psychiatrist to have, but possibly it was a relic of his
medical student days, with which he hated to part.

There was a safe, a big one. It looked to be well beyond my
lock-picking abilities. And it probably wouldn't contain anything of sufficient
interest to justify the attempt.

The desk would probably have what I wanted. And I found it
in the first drawer I opened.

A
small card file of names and addresses. It was divided into two sections, one
for patients and the other for employees. Into
a
notebook I quickly copied the names and addresses of all the male patients and
male employees.

Oh, yes, it was remotely possible that Verne might be masquerading
as a woman. But the more likely prospects came first.

I found myself with a list of eleven male patients and four
male employees. Then I began marking off those who couldn't possibly fit the
description of Verne. First the attendant who was over six feet tall, and
another who was barrel-chested and had arms like a gorilla. A man can change
his weight by taking on fat, but he couldn't take on that sort of a muscular
development.

Three of the patients were definitely too tall-- including
the man with the paper hat and the inverted astrological theories. One was too
short--only about five-feet five.

Seven patients left, two employees. I didn't mark off any
more names, but I ticked off with check marks four which seemed the most
unlikely of the nine. All four had physical characteristics so different from
Verne's as to put them at the bottom of my list, if not to eliminate them
entirely.

That left only five names as my best bets. They were not
the only possibilities, but they were the ones who rated attention ahead of the
others.

I picked up the telephone and, speaking so softly I
couldn't have been heard outside the office, I gave the number of the New World
Hotel and then gave my own room number.

Kit's sleepy voice answered.

"Take a pencil, honey," I said, "and copy
down these names and addresses. Ready?"

When she was, I gave her the names and addresses of Garvey,
Frank Betterman, Harvey Toler, Bill Kendall and Perry Evans. The latter was a
paranoiac whom I'd seen in the recreation room and at dinner, but with whom I
had not yet talked.

"Got 'em, Kit? Attagirl. Now here's one more name,
only you get it for a different reason. Joe Unger. He has an office on the
third floor of the Sprague Building here in town. Joe's a private detective and
we've worked together. I mean, when he has any work in Chicago he throws it my
way and when anything I'm working on, when I'm home, has a Springfield angle,
Joe handles it for me.

"Now bright and early tomorrow morning--I think he
gets to his office at eight--you look up Joe Unger and give him those names.
Don't tell him where I am or what I'm working on, but have him get all the dope
he can on each of those names."

Kit sounded wide awake now.

"How about the out-of-town ones?" she asked.
"One's in Chicago and one in Indianapolis?"

"Joe can handle them by phone, somehow. Main thing I
want to know is whether they're on the up and up. One address might turn out to
be a phony, and then I can concentrate my attention on that name. And any
general information Unger can pick up will help. Tell him to get all he can in
one full day's work."

"How shall I tell him to report to you, Eddie?"

"You can get the dope from him tomorrow evening. I'll
phone you tomorrow night about this time. Oh, yes, one other thing I want him to
check. What kind of a reputation Dr. Stanley has. Whether he rates as being
ethical and honest."

"All right, Eddie. But why?"

"The bare possibility that Paul Verne might be here--
if he's here at all--with Stanley's knowledge. Verne would have plenty of
money, and he might bribe his way in and make it worth anyone's while."

"All right, I'll have him check on that. What's
happened since you got there?"

"Here? Not a thing. Life is dull and dreary."

"Eddie, are you lying to me?"

"I
wouldn't think of it, honey. 'By now. I'll call you tomorrow night."

I got back up to my room without being seen.

After I fixed the lock back the way it had been, I wedged
the blade of my penknife between the door and the jamb, near the top. I sleep lightly,
and if the door opened again during the night the fall of the knife onto the
floor would wake me.

But the knife was still in place when I awakened in the
morning.

Just after lunch I was summoned to Dr. Stanley's office.

"Close the door, Anderson," he said, "and
then sit down."

I took the chair across the desk from him.

I spoke quietly. "You want a report on what I've
seen?"

"You needn't lower your voice. This room is quite
soundproof--naturally, as I interview my patients here. No, I didn't have a
report in mind. You haven't been here long enough. It will take you several
days to get to know the patients well enough to--uh--recognize changes in their
mental attitudes.

"What I had in mind was to ask you to concentrate for
the moment on Billy Kendall. Try to win his confidence and get him to talk to
you freely. I am quite disturbed about him."

"That's the fellow with recurrent amnesia, isn't
it?" I said.

Dr. Stanley nodded. "At least up to now, that is all
that's been wrong with him. But--" He hesitated, twirling the gold-rimmed
glasses faster on their silk ribbon, and then apparently made up his mind to
tell me the rest of it. "But this morning the maid who cleaned his room
found something strange under the bed. An--uh--extremely lethal weapon. A submachine-gun,
to be frank."

I looked suitably surprised. "Loaded?" I asked.

"Fortunately, no. But the mystery is no less deep for
that. Two mysteries, in fact. First, why he would want one. He has shown, thus
far, no symptoms of--uh--that nature. Second, where and how he could have
obtained it. The second question is the more puzzling, but the first is, in a
way, more important. I mean, it involves the question of whether or not he is
still a fit inmate for this particular institution. In short, whether it may be
necessary to suggest his transfer to a place where they are prepared to cope
with that sort of insanity. You see what I mean?"

"Perfectly, Doctor," I said. "I'll look him
up at once." I stood up. "What room is Kendall in?"

It wasn't until I was out in the hall that I realized he
had said Room Six. I had put that tommy gun in Room Twelve. Had the occupant of
Room Twelve found it and passed the buck? Or what?

Billy Kendall could wait. I went to Room Twelve and knocked
on the door. Frank Betterman opened it and I pretended I had known it was his
room and suggested a game of ping-pong.

So we played ping-pong and I couldn't think of any way of
asking him if he had found a tommy gun under his bed without admitting I had
put it there. Which hardly seemed diplomatic.

I managed to sit at the same table with Billy Kendall at
supper. But he wouldn't talk at all, except to answer my questions with
monosyllables.

I swiped another pocketful of silverware.

A bridge game constituted the excitement of the evening and
I began to think I had been telling Kit the truth in saying events were dull
and dismal.

After turning in, I waited until well after midnight before
my second foray into the office to phone Kit. She didn't sound sleepy this
time. She had been waiting for the call.

"Get anything exciting?"

"Yes, Eddie. That Indianapolis address was a phony.
There isn't any such street there."

The Indianapolis address had been that of Harvey Toler. I
whistled softly. Was Harvey Toler the man I wanted?

"Thanks a million, angel," I said. "Now I
can go ahead."

"Wait,
Eddie. There was something funny about one or two of the others. Frank
Betterman--his address was okay, a cheap 
rooming
house, but he'd lived there. Used to be a reporter on the Springfield
Argus.
He got fired for drinking too much."

"But that makes sense," I said. "He's a
dipso--"

Then I saw what she meant. Where would a fired newspaper
reporter get the kind of dough to stay at a fancy sanitarium? Particularly a
lush, who would hardly have saved his money while he was working.

"And Kendall, William Kendall," Kit said.
"He used to work for a bank and left there under a cloud. There was a
shortage, and he was suspected of embezzlement. But they couldn't prove
anything and he was never arrested."

"Um," I said. "Maybe that's where he got the
dough to stay here. And since he's got amnesia, maybe he forgot where it came
from. What about my friend Garvey?"

"That one was okay. He's got a sister, married and with
six kids, living at that address. The other patient, Perry Evans, we couldn't
get much on."

"That was the Chicago address, wasn't it?"

"Yes, and it's a hotel. A little one, Joe Unger said.
All we could find out was that Perry Evans had stayed there for three months up
to a month ago. They didn't know anything about his business, or wouldn't
tell."

Nuts, I thought. That didn't eliminate Evans, by any means.
For all anyone knew, Paul Verne could have stayed three months in a Chicago
hotel under that name. But the heck with it, Harvey Toler had given a
nonexistent out-of-town address.

"Okay, honey," I said. "I'll keep him in
mind as second choice. What'd you find out about Doc Stanley?"

"He came here only a little over a month ago, rented
the property out there. It had been built ten years ago as a small, select
girls' school.

"And failed three years ago," I said, "and
has been vacant since. Yes, toots, that was all in the newspapers. Also that
Stanley came here from Louisville, Kentucky. What I want to know is about his
reputation."

"Good, as far as we can find out. Joe Unger called a
Louisville detective agency and they made inquiries there. He practiced as a
psychiatrist for ten years there, then got sick and gave up his practice a year
ago. His reputation was good, but presumably he didn't want to start at the
bottom again to build up a new practice when he recovered, and got the idea of
starting a sanitarium instead."

"I suppose somebody told him he could get this place
here for a song," I said. "So he came to Springfield. Okay, honey.
Anything else?"

"No, Eddie. How soon will you be through there?"

"Not over a few days, I hope. I'll concentrate on my
friend Toler with one eye and Perry Evans with the other, and I ought to know
pretty soon. 'By now."

Death in the Dark

After I hung up the phone, I sat there in the dark
thinking. For some reason, I can think better sitting in an office, even in the
dark, than in bed.

The
only trouble was that the more I thought, the less I knew. Harvey Toler, the exhibitionist,
had given a false address when signing on here. That might mean he was Paul
Verne--if Paul Verne was really here at all. But it might mean nothing at all.
There are plenty of reasons why people give false addresses. I had given one
myself, and I wasn't Paul Verne. Maybe he was ashamed of being here and didn't
want his friends to find out where he was. Maybe giving himself a false
identity--if his name as well as the address was phony--was a facet of his
exhibitionism. And wasn't Perry Evans' case even more suspicious, on second
thought? Paul Verne wasn't a dope. Would he give an address which a single
phone call would prove to be false? Wouldn't he
be
more likely to have established an identity somewhere?

Say, he had been hiding out at a little Chicago hotel.
Coming here, he would use the identity he had used there, so if someone--like
me--got curious, he could be checked back that far and no farther.