The Collection (98 page)

And if Perry Evans were genuine, and had enough money to
afford this sanitarium, why had he been staying at a place like that? And where
had a broken-down newspaper hack got the money to stay here?

And Billy Kendall, ex-bank clerk. Had he or had he not been
guilty of embezzlement? And if so, where did he fit into the picture?

Nuts, I thought.

Only Garvey's case had been completely on the up and up.
And Garvey had interested me most of the bunch. It had been Garvey I had asked
for a machine-gun. And got one.

Again, nuts.

I went back upstairs. Maybe some sleep would do me good. I
hadn't slept much last night and it was already two o'clock tonight.

The light was still out in the upstairs hallway. I groped
my way along the wall to my door at the end of the corridor.

I opened it, part way. It hit against some yielding but
solid obstacle. Six inches, perhaps, it opened. Then a few more as I shoved
harder. There it stuck.

I had the pencil flashlight in my hand, although I hadn't
been using it along the hallway. I reached inside the door and turned it on,
aimed downward. I could barely get my head inside the door far enough to see
what lay there.

It was a body, lying on its back. A man, in pajamas, with
blood matted in his black hair. It looked like--

And then something hard and heavy swished through the air and
grazed the top of my head. Just grazed it, luckily, for the blow was meant to
kill.

Pain blinded me, but I didn't have to be able to see to
jerk my head back out of that door. And my hand, still on the knob, pulled the
door shut after me.

Whoever was in there could probably open it from the
inside, as I had, but not for several minutes.

Then, as a shot roared out inside the room and a little
black hole appeared in the panel of the door, I dropped flat. And, as four more
shots came through the door, at different angles, I rolled to a corner of the
hallway and hugged the floor. None of them hit me.

Five shots was all that came through the door. That meant
that the killer hadn't emptied his gun. A revolver holds six shots, and an
automatic may hold more.

Then silence. I listened carefully but the man inside
didn't seem to be working on the lock to let himself out.

I stood up cautiously, and used my handkerchief to wipe off
blood that was running down my forehead and into my eyes.

There wasn't silence any more now; there was bedlam. From
most of the rooms along that corridor came voices yelling questions as to what
was happening, wanting to be let out. Several doors were being hammered by
impatient fists.

I heard footsteps running along the corridor overhead on
the third floor, which meant that attendants were coming. If I waited for them
it would be too late to find out what I most wanted to know--which of the
patients were still in their rooms and which were not.

I
ran along that corridor, jerking doors open. In most cases, the occupant of the
room was right behind the door. If he wasn't I stuck my head inside and played
my flashlight on the bed. I didn't take time to answer questions or make
explanations, and I finished the corridor by the time the tall attendant, in
white uniform, and Garvey, pulling trousers up over a nightshirt, came pounding
down the stairs.

Two rooms had been empty. Harvey Toler's room where, just
the night before I had been given a toast in cold tea. And Room Four, Perry
Evans' room.

Two gone, and both of them were in my room. One was dead
and the other was a homicidal maniac. But why
two
of them? Paul Verne
must have learned, in some way, that I was a detective and had gone to my room
to kill me. But had he taken someone along for company, and then killed him?

And which was which? Both Harvey Toler and Perry Evans had
black hair. Either one could have been lying there just inside the door. And
Joe Unger's investigation outside had not eliminated either one. Toler's
address had been a fake, and Perry Evans' address had been the little hotel in
Chicago, an easy-to-get address that made him almost more suspect than a phony
one.

Betterman had me by one arm and the attendant by the other,
and both were asking questions so fast and getting in each other's way. I
couldn't find an opening to answer them. Frank Betterman's face, I noticed,
looked more haggard than usual.

Then Dr. Stanley, fastening the cord of a bathrobe, was
coming down the stairs, and his first question shut up Betterman and the
attendant and gave me a chance to answer.

He took a quick glance down the hall at the bullet-holes in
the door of my room, as though to verify what I was saying, and then
interrupted me long enough to send the attendant to phone the police.

"You don't know which shot which?" he demanded.
"And you think the other one is Paul Verne?"

His face was white and strained. The name of Paul Verne
meant something to him. Every psychiatrist in the country, as well as every
copper, knew of Paul Verne.

I nodded. "I doubt if he's in there now, though. He
can't hope to get out this way any more, but there's the window. There's soft
ground under it and he could drop. He's probably over the fence by now."

The words were bitter in my mouth as I spoke them, because
I had failed. The police would have to take up the chase from here, and even if
they caught their quarry, I wouldn't get a smell of that twenty-five grand.

If only I'd had a gun, it might have been different. But it
would have been nothing but suicide for me to have gone through that door, or
to have run around outside to try heading him off. I would do a lot for
twenty-five thousand dollars, but suicide wasn't one of them. . . .

Police.

The place was run over with policemen, inside and out.

The body in my room had been that of Harvey Toler. And he
hadn't been playing dead this time. The back of his head had been bashed in by
something that could have been, and probably was, the butt end of a pistol or
automatic.

Perry Evans was gone and there was a little triangle of
checkered cloth stuck on a barb of the barbed wire on top of the wall. Evans
had a checkered suit and it was gone from his room; his other suits hung in a
neat row in his closet.

Squad cars, every one available, were searching the
neighborhood. Railroad and bus terminals were being watched. So were freight
trains and highways. You know the sort of thing.

Apparently the shock of discovering he'd had Paul Verne
among his inmates had slowed down Dr. Stanley's thinking a bit. Although I had
told him the whole story, it still hadn't dawned on him that I had taken the
job there solely for that purpose and that I would not be staying.

"We'll tell that to the police privately, of course,
Anderson," he said. "Or the patients will find out you aren't really
one of them and then your usefulness will be ended."

I
shrugged and let it go at that. I was too annoyed at losing a chance at
twenty-five grand to care whether the boss thought I was staying or not.

I talked to Captain Cross, who was in charge, and to some of
the other detectives, privately, and showed my credentials. And I avoided
talking to the other patients so I wouldn't have to explain to them why I had
not been in my room when the fireworks started.

Most of the patients were downstairs. Few were willing to
return to their rooms. The whole building was lighted up like a Christmas tree.

I wandered outside and walked around the grounds. Looking
for something; I didn't know what.

The whole place, inside and out, had been searched. The
police had recognized the possibility that the bit of cloth on the barbed wire
might have been a ruse and that Perry Evans might have doubled back and hidden
somewhere here. They looked everywhere a man could hide and some places he
couldn't.

I leaned back against a tree and stared at the building,
particularly at my own window. The photographers were up there now. What had
happened in that room, in my room, tonight? Verne must have discovered who I
was and what I was doing there and come to kill me. But how had Harvey Toler got
in the way, and got his best chance to play the rôle of corpse?

Harvey Toler worried me. More dead than when he had been
alive. Why had he used a phony address?

There are plenty of reasons, aside from being a homicidal maniac,
why a man might give a wrong address. Not all of them criminal reasons. But it
was a coincidence, the devil of a coincidence, that in this particular case a
wrong address had been given. And Billy Kendall, the lad who couldn't remember
who he was part of the time. Who had maybe had something to do with money being
gone from a bank, although they couldn't prove it. And maybe he didn't have
anything to do with it. It started to go round and round inside my head and it
didn't make any sense.

Perry Evans was gone, so Perry Evans had been Paul Verne
all right, but where had a broken-down newspaperman like Frank Betterman got
the dough to take his booze cure at a place like this?

It was nuttier than a fruit cake, and the more I thought
about the whole thing the screwier it got.

Screwier and screwier and finally, there in the dark, it
got so bad it began to make sense.

There was
one
way of looking at it that added it up
to something so monstrously crazy that it almost had to be true.

I grinned up at the lighted window of my room and then I
went inside for a moment and borrowed a big flashlight from Captain Cross.

"Sure," he said. "But what do you want it
for?"

"Maybe I can find Perry Evans for you."

"In the grounds here? We looked high and low."

"But maybe not low enough," I said, and before I
had to explain what I meant by that, I made my escape.

There was one really likely place, and if what I wanted
wasn't there, I would have to start a systematic search.

But I went to the likely place, and it was there.

No Nuts

When I went back in, I gave Cross his flashlight.

"Find him already?" he wanted to know.
"Where's he hiding?"

"Back of the garage," I said. "He dug a hole
and pulled it in after him. He's buried there, or somebody is."

He stared at me.

"That's the one place where the ground's soft and easy
to dig," I said, "and you wouldn't have to pull up and replace turf.
It's been smoothed over pretty carefully, but you can see where it is. It'll
probably be pretty shallow."

He
still just stared at me.

"Don't blame your men for not finding it," I
said. "They were looking for a live man hiding, and live men don't hide
underground."

There was still disbelief in his eyes, but he went to the
door and gave some orders, and then he came back.

"You mean he wasn't Paul Verne?" he said.

"I got to make a phone call," I told him.
"Long distance. Come on in the office if you want to listen."

There was quite a congregation of patients in the office,
talking it over. Dr. Stanley, still looking worried stiff, was trying to calm
them. A plainclothesman, looking bored, was leaning in one corner of the room.
Except for the pitch of the voices, it sounded like a ladies' tea.

But I picked up the phone anyway, and said, "Long
distance," and when the operator came on I said, "Get me the home of
Roger Wheeler Verne in San Andria, California. Yeah, I'll hold the line."

It was quite a while to hang on to a telephone, but it kept
me out of local conversations.

After a while the operator said, "Here's your
party," and a male voice said, "Roger Verne speaking."

This time when I started to talk, all the other voices
stopped and everybody listened.

"This is Eddie Anderson, Mr. Verne," I said.
"Private detective. I've located your son alive, and I'm about to turn him
over to the authorities. I wanted to tell you first so there could be no
dispute about the reward."

"Excellent, Mr. Anderson. I assure you there will be
no difficulty about that."

"Thanks," I said. "You'll probably have
another phone call shortly, as soon as the police have him."

As I put the phone down, Captain Cross growled:

"What kind of chiselers do you think we are?"

I grinned at him. "I don't know. What kind are you?
All I know is I've had difficulty with rewards before, so you can't blame me
for playing safe."

There was tension in the room, plenty of it, as I turned
around.

"Frank Betterman," I said.

He was standing behind Dr. Stanley's chair at the desk, and
he looked startled and backed to the wall. I went on around the desk after him.

Dr. Stanley turned in his chair and gave Betterman a
startled, frightened look, and then pulled open a drawer of his desk that had
been partly open before, and his hand jerked out of the drawer with an
automatic in it.