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On the other side of me I heard Vernon's teeth click together sharply.
I said:
"Your wife was afraid Whidden would kill her, and wrote that statement. But he didn't kill her. He's been here since daylight. You found the statement, learned from it that they had been too friendly. Well, what did you do then?"
"That's a lie," he cried. "There ain't a word of truth in it. She was dead there when I found her. I never-"
"You killed her," Vernon barked at him over my head. "You choked her, counting on that statement to throw suspicion on Whidden."
"That's a lie," the marshal cried again, and made the mistake of trying to get his gun out.
Feeney slugged him, dropping him, and had handcuffs on his wrists before he could get up again.
XVIII.The Pineapple
XIX.The Degenerate
XX.The House in the Cove
I said:
"Your wife was afraid Whidden would kill her, and wrote that statement. But he didn't kill her. He's been here since daylight. You found the statement, learned from it that they had been too friendly. Well, what did you do then?"
"That's a lie," he cried. "There ain't a word of truth in it. She was dead there when I found her. I never-"
"You killed her," Vernon barked at him over my head. "You choked her, counting on that statement to throw suspicion on Whidden."
"That's a lie," the marshal cried again, and made the mistake of trying to get his gun out.
Feeney slugged him, dropping him, and had handcuffs on his wrists before he could get up again.
XVIII.The Pineapple
"It doesn't make sense," I said. "It's dizzy. When we grab our man-or woman-we're going to find it's a goof, and Napa will get it instead of the gallows."
"That," Owen Fitzstephan said, "is characteristic of you. You're stumped, bewildered, flabbergasted. Do you admit you've met your master, have run into a criminal too wily for you? Not you. He's outwitted you: therefore he's an idiot or a lunatic. Now really. Of course there's a certain unexpected modesty to that attitude."
"But he's got to be goofy," I insisted. "Look: Mayenne marries-"
"Are you," he asked disgustedly, "going to recite that catalogue again?"
"You've got a flighty mind. That's no good in this business. You don't catch murderers by amusing yourself with interesting thoughts. You've got to sit down to all the facts you can get and turn them over and over till they click."
"If that's your technic, you'll have to put up with it," he said; "but I'm damned if I see why I should suffer. You recited the Mayenne-Leggett-Collinson history step by step last night at least half a dozen times. You've done nothing else since breakfast this morning. I'm getting enough of it. Nobody's mysteries ought to be as tiresome as you're making this one."
"Hell," I said; "I sat up half the night after you went to bed and recited it to myself. You got to turn them over and over, my boy, till they click."
"I like the Nick Carter school better. Aren't you even threatened with any of the conclusions that this turning-them-over-and-over is supposed to lead to?"
"Yeah, I've got one. It's that Vernon and Feeney are wrong in thinking that Cotton was working with Whidden on the kidnapping, and double-crossed him. According to them, Cotton thought up the plan and persuaded Whidden to do the rough stuff while the marshal used his official position to cover him up. Collinson stumbled on the plan and was killed. Then Cotton made his wife write that statement-it's phony, right enough, was dictated to her-killed her, and led us to Whidden. Cotton was the first man ashore when we got to the hiding place-to make sure Whidden was killed resisting arrest before he could talk."
Fitzstephan ran long fingers through his sorrel hair and asked:
"Don't you think jealousy would have given Cotton motive enough?"
"Yeah. But where's Whidden's motive for putting himself in Cotton's hands? Besides, where does that layout fit in with the Temple racket?"
"Are you sure," Fitzstephan asked, "that you're right in thinking there must be a connection?"
"Yeah. Gabrielle's father, step-mother, physician, and husband have been slaughtered in less than a handful of weeks-all the people closest to her. That's enough to tie it all together for me. If you want more links, I can point them out to you. Upton and Ruppert were the apparent instigators of the first trouble, and got killed. Haldorn of the second, and got killed. Whidden of the third, and got killed. Mrs. Leggett killed her husband; Cotton apparently killed his wife; and Haldorn would have killed his if I hadn't blocked him. Gabrielle, as a child, was made to kill her mother; Gabrielle's maid was made to kill Riese, and nearly me. Leggett left behind him a statement explaining-not altogether satisfactorily-everything, and was killed. So did and was Mrs. Cotton. Call any of these pairs coincidences. Call any couple of pairs coincidences. You'll still have enough left to point at somebody who's got a system he likes, and sticks to it."
Fitzstephan squinted thoughtfully at me, agreeing:
"There may be something in that. It does, as you put it, look like the work of one mind."
"And a goofy one."
"Be obstinate about it," he said. "But even your goof must have a motive."
"Why?"
"Damn your sort of mind," he said with good-natured impatience. "If he had no motive connected with Gabrielle, why should his crimes be connected with her?"
"We don't know that all of them are," I pointed out. "We only know of the ones that are."
He grinned and said:
"You'll go any distance to disagree, won't you?"
I said:
"Then again, maybe the goof's crimes are connected with Gabrielle because he is."
Fitzstephan let his gray eyes go sleepy over that, pursing his mouth, looking at the door closed between my room and Gabrielle's.
"All right," he said, looking at me again. "Who's your maniac close to Gabrielle?"
"The closest and goofiest person to Gabrielle is Gabrielle herself."
Fitzstephan got up and crossed the hotel room-I was sitting on the edge of the bed-to shake my hand with solemn enthusiasm.
"You're wonderful," he said. "You amaze me. Ever have night sweats? Put out your tongue and say, 'Ah.'"
"Suppose," I began, but was interrupted by a feeble tapping on the corridor door.
I went to the door and opened it. A thin man of my own age and height in wrinkled black clothes stood in the corridor. He was breathing heavily through a red-veined nose, and his small brown eyes were timid.
"You know me," he said apologetically.
"Yeah. Come in." I introduced him to Fitzstephan: "This is the Tom Fink who was one of Haldorn's helpers in the Temple of the Holy Grail."
Fink looked reproachfully at me, then dragged his crumpled hat from his head and crossed the room to shake Fitzstephan's hand. That done, he returned to me and said, almost whispering:
"I come down to tell you something."
"Yeah?"
He fidgeted, turning his hat around and around in his hands. I winked at Fitzstephan and went out with Fink. In the corridor, I closed the door and stopped, saying: "Let's have it."
Fink rubbed his lips with his tongue and then with the back of one scrawny hand. He said, in his half-whisper:
"I come down to tell you something I thought you ought to know."
"Yeah?"
"It's about this fellow Whidden that was killed."
"Yeah?"
"He was-"
The door to my room split open. Floors, walls, and ceiling wriggled under, around, and over us. There was too much noise to be heard-a roar that was felt bodily. Tom Fink was carried away from me, backward. I had sense enough to throw myself down as I was blown in the opposite direction, and got nothing worse out of it than a bruised shoulder when I hit the wall. A door-frame stopped Fink, wickedly, its edge catching the back of his head. He came forward again, folding over to lie face-down on the floor, still except for blood running from his head.
I got up and made for my room. Fitzstephan was a mangled pile of flesh and clothing in the center of the floor. My bed was burning. There was neither glass nor wire netting left in the window. I saw these things mechanically as I staggered toward Gabrielle's room. The connecting door was open-perhaps blown open.
She was crouching on all fours in bed, facing the foot, her feet on the pillows. Her nightdress was torn at one shoulder. Her green-brown eyes-glittering under brown curls that had tumbled down to hide her forehead-were the eyes of an animal gone trap-crazy. Saliva glistened on her pointed chin. There was nobody else in the room.
"Where's the nurse?" My voice was choked.
The girl said nothing. Her eyes kept their crazy terror focused on me.
"Get under the covers," I ordered. "Want to get pneumonia?"
She didn't move. I walked around to the side of the bed, lifting an end of the covers with one hand, reaching out the other to help her, saying:
"Come on, get inside."
She made a queer noise deep in her chest, dropped her head, and put her sharp teeth into the back of my hand. It hurt. I put her under the covers, returned to my room, and was pushing my burning mattress through the window when people began to arrive.
"Get a doctor," I called to the first of them; "and stay out of here."
I had got rid of the mattress by the time Mickey Linehan pushed through the crowd that was now filling the corridor. Mickey blinked at what was left of Fitzstephan, at me, and asked:
"What the hell?"
His big loose mouth sagged at the ends, looking like a grin turned upside down.
I licked burnt fingers and asked unpleasantly:
"What the hell does it look like?"
"More trouble, sure." The grin turned right side up on his red face. "Sure-you're here."
Ben Rolly came in. "Tch, tch, tch," he said, looking around. "What do you suppose happened?"
"Pineapple," I said.
"Tch, tch, tch."
Doctor George came in and knelt beside the wreck of Fitzstephan. George had been Gabrielle's physician since her return from the cave the previous day. He was a short, chunky, middle-aged man with a lot of black hair everywhere except on his lips, cheeks, chin, and nose-bridge. His hairy hands moved over Fitzstephan.
"What's Fink been doing?" I asked Mickey.
"Hardly any. I got on his tail when they sprung him yesterday noon. He went from the hoosegow to a hotel on Kearny Street and got himself a room. He spent most of the afternoon in the Public Library, reading the newspaper files on the girl's troubles, from beginning to date. He ate after that, and went back to the hotel. He could have back-doored me. If he didn't, he camped in his room all night. It was dark at midnight when I knocked off so I could be on the job again at six a. m. He showed at seven-something, got breakfast, and grabbed a rattler for Poston, changed to the stage for here, and came straight to the hotel, asking for you. That's the crop."
"Damn my soul!" the kneeling doctor exclaimed. "The man's not dead."
I didn't believe him. Fitzstephan's right arm was gone, and most of his right leg. His body was too twisted to see what was left of it, but there was only one side to his face. I said:
"There's another one out in the hall, with his head knocked in."
"Oh, he's all right," the doctor muttered without looking up. "But this one-well, damn my soul!"
He scrambled to his feet and began ordering this and that. He was excited. A couple of men came in from the corridor. The woman who had been nursing Gabrielle Collinson-a Mrs. Herman-joined them, and another man with a blanket. They took Fitzstephan away.
"That fellow out in the hall Fink?" Rolly asked.
"Yeah." I told him what Fink had told me, adding: "He hadn't finished when the blow-up came."
"Suppose the bomb was meant for him, meant to keep him from finishing?"
Mickey said: "Nobody followed him down from the city, except me."
"Maybe," I said. "Better see what they're doing with him, Mick."
Mickey went out.
"This window was closed," I told Rolly. "There was no noise as of something being thrown through the glass just before the explosion; and there's no broken window-glass inside the room. The screen was over it, too, so we can say the pineapple wasn't chucked in through the window."
Rolly nodded vaguely, looking at the door to Gabrielle's room.
"Fink and I were in the corridor talking," I went on. "I ran straight back through here to her room. Nobody could have got out of her room after the explosion without my seeing them-or hearing them. There wasn't finger-snapping time between my losing sight of her corridor-door from the outside, and seeing it again from the inside. The screen over her window is still O.K."
"Mrs. Herman wasn't in there with her?" Rolly asked.
"She was supposed to be, but wasn't. We'll find out about that. There's no use thinking Mrs. Collinson chucked the bomb. She's been in bed since we brought her back from Dull Point yesterday. She couldn't have had the bomb planted there because she had no way of knowing that she was going to occupy the room. Nobody's been in there since except you, Feeney, Vernon, the doctor, the nurse, and me."
"I wasn't going to say she had anything to do with it," the deputy sheriff mumbled. "What does she say?"
"Nothing yet. We'll try her now, though I doubt if it'll get us much."
It didn't. Gabrielle lay in the middle of the bed, the covers gathered close to her chin as if she was prepared to duck down under them at the first alarm, and shook her head No to everything we asked, whether the answer fit or didn't.
The nurse came in, a big-breasted, red-haired woman of forty-something with a face that seemed honest because it was homely, freckled, and blue-eyed. She swore on the Gideon Bible that she had been out of the room for less than five minutes, just going downstairs for some stationery, intending to write a letter to her nephew in Vallejo while her patient was sleeping; and that was the only time she had been out of the room all day. She had met nobody in the corridor, she said.
"You left the door unlocked?" I asked.
"Yes, so I wouldn't be as likely to wake her when I came back."
"Where's the stationery you got?"
"I didn't get it. I heard the explosion and ran back upstairs." Fear came into her face, turning the freckles to ghastly spots. "You don't think-!"
"Better look after Mrs. Collinson," I said gruffly.
"That," Owen Fitzstephan said, "is characteristic of you. You're stumped, bewildered, flabbergasted. Do you admit you've met your master, have run into a criminal too wily for you? Not you. He's outwitted you: therefore he's an idiot or a lunatic. Now really. Of course there's a certain unexpected modesty to that attitude."
"But he's got to be goofy," I insisted. "Look: Mayenne marries-"
"Are you," he asked disgustedly, "going to recite that catalogue again?"
"You've got a flighty mind. That's no good in this business. You don't catch murderers by amusing yourself with interesting thoughts. You've got to sit down to all the facts you can get and turn them over and over till they click."
"If that's your technic, you'll have to put up with it," he said; "but I'm damned if I see why I should suffer. You recited the Mayenne-Leggett-Collinson history step by step last night at least half a dozen times. You've done nothing else since breakfast this morning. I'm getting enough of it. Nobody's mysteries ought to be as tiresome as you're making this one."
"Hell," I said; "I sat up half the night after you went to bed and recited it to myself. You got to turn them over and over, my boy, till they click."
"I like the Nick Carter school better. Aren't you even threatened with any of the conclusions that this turning-them-over-and-over is supposed to lead to?"
"Yeah, I've got one. It's that Vernon and Feeney are wrong in thinking that Cotton was working with Whidden on the kidnapping, and double-crossed him. According to them, Cotton thought up the plan and persuaded Whidden to do the rough stuff while the marshal used his official position to cover him up. Collinson stumbled on the plan and was killed. Then Cotton made his wife write that statement-it's phony, right enough, was dictated to her-killed her, and led us to Whidden. Cotton was the first man ashore when we got to the hiding place-to make sure Whidden was killed resisting arrest before he could talk."
Fitzstephan ran long fingers through his sorrel hair and asked:
"Don't you think jealousy would have given Cotton motive enough?"
"Yeah. But where's Whidden's motive for putting himself in Cotton's hands? Besides, where does that layout fit in with the Temple racket?"
"Are you sure," Fitzstephan asked, "that you're right in thinking there must be a connection?"
"Yeah. Gabrielle's father, step-mother, physician, and husband have been slaughtered in less than a handful of weeks-all the people closest to her. That's enough to tie it all together for me. If you want more links, I can point them out to you. Upton and Ruppert were the apparent instigators of the first trouble, and got killed. Haldorn of the second, and got killed. Whidden of the third, and got killed. Mrs. Leggett killed her husband; Cotton apparently killed his wife; and Haldorn would have killed his if I hadn't blocked him. Gabrielle, as a child, was made to kill her mother; Gabrielle's maid was made to kill Riese, and nearly me. Leggett left behind him a statement explaining-not altogether satisfactorily-everything, and was killed. So did and was Mrs. Cotton. Call any of these pairs coincidences. Call any couple of pairs coincidences. You'll still have enough left to point at somebody who's got a system he likes, and sticks to it."
Fitzstephan squinted thoughtfully at me, agreeing:
"There may be something in that. It does, as you put it, look like the work of one mind."
"And a goofy one."
"Be obstinate about it," he said. "But even your goof must have a motive."
"Why?"
"Damn your sort of mind," he said with good-natured impatience. "If he had no motive connected with Gabrielle, why should his crimes be connected with her?"
"We don't know that all of them are," I pointed out. "We only know of the ones that are."
He grinned and said:
"You'll go any distance to disagree, won't you?"
I said:
"Then again, maybe the goof's crimes are connected with Gabrielle because he is."
Fitzstephan let his gray eyes go sleepy over that, pursing his mouth, looking at the door closed between my room and Gabrielle's.
"All right," he said, looking at me again. "Who's your maniac close to Gabrielle?"
"The closest and goofiest person to Gabrielle is Gabrielle herself."
Fitzstephan got up and crossed the hotel room-I was sitting on the edge of the bed-to shake my hand with solemn enthusiasm.
"You're wonderful," he said. "You amaze me. Ever have night sweats? Put out your tongue and say, 'Ah.'"
"Suppose," I began, but was interrupted by a feeble tapping on the corridor door.
I went to the door and opened it. A thin man of my own age and height in wrinkled black clothes stood in the corridor. He was breathing heavily through a red-veined nose, and his small brown eyes were timid.
"You know me," he said apologetically.
"Yeah. Come in." I introduced him to Fitzstephan: "This is the Tom Fink who was one of Haldorn's helpers in the Temple of the Holy Grail."
Fink looked reproachfully at me, then dragged his crumpled hat from his head and crossed the room to shake Fitzstephan's hand. That done, he returned to me and said, almost whispering:
"I come down to tell you something."
"Yeah?"
He fidgeted, turning his hat around and around in his hands. I winked at Fitzstephan and went out with Fink. In the corridor, I closed the door and stopped, saying: "Let's have it."
Fink rubbed his lips with his tongue and then with the back of one scrawny hand. He said, in his half-whisper:
"I come down to tell you something I thought you ought to know."
"Yeah?"
"It's about this fellow Whidden that was killed."
"Yeah?"
"He was-"
The door to my room split open. Floors, walls, and ceiling wriggled under, around, and over us. There was too much noise to be heard-a roar that was felt bodily. Tom Fink was carried away from me, backward. I had sense enough to throw myself down as I was blown in the opposite direction, and got nothing worse out of it than a bruised shoulder when I hit the wall. A door-frame stopped Fink, wickedly, its edge catching the back of his head. He came forward again, folding over to lie face-down on the floor, still except for blood running from his head.
I got up and made for my room. Fitzstephan was a mangled pile of flesh and clothing in the center of the floor. My bed was burning. There was neither glass nor wire netting left in the window. I saw these things mechanically as I staggered toward Gabrielle's room. The connecting door was open-perhaps blown open.
She was crouching on all fours in bed, facing the foot, her feet on the pillows. Her nightdress was torn at one shoulder. Her green-brown eyes-glittering under brown curls that had tumbled down to hide her forehead-were the eyes of an animal gone trap-crazy. Saliva glistened on her pointed chin. There was nobody else in the room.
"Where's the nurse?" My voice was choked.
The girl said nothing. Her eyes kept their crazy terror focused on me.
"Get under the covers," I ordered. "Want to get pneumonia?"
She didn't move. I walked around to the side of the bed, lifting an end of the covers with one hand, reaching out the other to help her, saying:
"Come on, get inside."
She made a queer noise deep in her chest, dropped her head, and put her sharp teeth into the back of my hand. It hurt. I put her under the covers, returned to my room, and was pushing my burning mattress through the window when people began to arrive.
"Get a doctor," I called to the first of them; "and stay out of here."
I had got rid of the mattress by the time Mickey Linehan pushed through the crowd that was now filling the corridor. Mickey blinked at what was left of Fitzstephan, at me, and asked:
"What the hell?"
His big loose mouth sagged at the ends, looking like a grin turned upside down.
I licked burnt fingers and asked unpleasantly:
"What the hell does it look like?"
"More trouble, sure." The grin turned right side up on his red face. "Sure-you're here."
Ben Rolly came in. "Tch, tch, tch," he said, looking around. "What do you suppose happened?"
"Pineapple," I said.
"Tch, tch, tch."
Doctor George came in and knelt beside the wreck of Fitzstephan. George had been Gabrielle's physician since her return from the cave the previous day. He was a short, chunky, middle-aged man with a lot of black hair everywhere except on his lips, cheeks, chin, and nose-bridge. His hairy hands moved over Fitzstephan.
"What's Fink been doing?" I asked Mickey.
"Hardly any. I got on his tail when they sprung him yesterday noon. He went from the hoosegow to a hotel on Kearny Street and got himself a room. He spent most of the afternoon in the Public Library, reading the newspaper files on the girl's troubles, from beginning to date. He ate after that, and went back to the hotel. He could have back-doored me. If he didn't, he camped in his room all night. It was dark at midnight when I knocked off so I could be on the job again at six a. m. He showed at seven-something, got breakfast, and grabbed a rattler for Poston, changed to the stage for here, and came straight to the hotel, asking for you. That's the crop."
"Damn my soul!" the kneeling doctor exclaimed. "The man's not dead."
I didn't believe him. Fitzstephan's right arm was gone, and most of his right leg. His body was too twisted to see what was left of it, but there was only one side to his face. I said:
"There's another one out in the hall, with his head knocked in."
"Oh, he's all right," the doctor muttered without looking up. "But this one-well, damn my soul!"
He scrambled to his feet and began ordering this and that. He was excited. A couple of men came in from the corridor. The woman who had been nursing Gabrielle Collinson-a Mrs. Herman-joined them, and another man with a blanket. They took Fitzstephan away.
"That fellow out in the hall Fink?" Rolly asked.
"Yeah." I told him what Fink had told me, adding: "He hadn't finished when the blow-up came."
"Suppose the bomb was meant for him, meant to keep him from finishing?"
Mickey said: "Nobody followed him down from the city, except me."
"Maybe," I said. "Better see what they're doing with him, Mick."
Mickey went out.
"This window was closed," I told Rolly. "There was no noise as of something being thrown through the glass just before the explosion; and there's no broken window-glass inside the room. The screen was over it, too, so we can say the pineapple wasn't chucked in through the window."
Rolly nodded vaguely, looking at the door to Gabrielle's room.
"Fink and I were in the corridor talking," I went on. "I ran straight back through here to her room. Nobody could have got out of her room after the explosion without my seeing them-or hearing them. There wasn't finger-snapping time between my losing sight of her corridor-door from the outside, and seeing it again from the inside. The screen over her window is still O.K."
"Mrs. Herman wasn't in there with her?" Rolly asked.
"She was supposed to be, but wasn't. We'll find out about that. There's no use thinking Mrs. Collinson chucked the bomb. She's been in bed since we brought her back from Dull Point yesterday. She couldn't have had the bomb planted there because she had no way of knowing that she was going to occupy the room. Nobody's been in there since except you, Feeney, Vernon, the doctor, the nurse, and me."
"I wasn't going to say she had anything to do with it," the deputy sheriff mumbled. "What does she say?"
"Nothing yet. We'll try her now, though I doubt if it'll get us much."
It didn't. Gabrielle lay in the middle of the bed, the covers gathered close to her chin as if she was prepared to duck down under them at the first alarm, and shook her head No to everything we asked, whether the answer fit or didn't.
The nurse came in, a big-breasted, red-haired woman of forty-something with a face that seemed honest because it was homely, freckled, and blue-eyed. She swore on the Gideon Bible that she had been out of the room for less than five minutes, just going downstairs for some stationery, intending to write a letter to her nephew in Vallejo while her patient was sleeping; and that was the only time she had been out of the room all day. She had met nobody in the corridor, she said.
"You left the door unlocked?" I asked.
"Yes, so I wouldn't be as likely to wake her when I came back."
"Where's the stationery you got?"
"I didn't get it. I heard the explosion and ran back upstairs." Fear came into her face, turning the freckles to ghastly spots. "You don't think-!"
"Better look after Mrs. Collinson," I said gruffly.
XIX.The Degenerate
Rolly and I went back to my room, closing the connecting door. He said:
"Tch, tch, tch. I'd of thought Mrs. Herman was the last person in the world to-"
"You ought to've," I grumbled. "You recommended her. Who is she?"
"She's Tod Herman's wife. He's got the garage. She used to be a trained nurse before she married Tod. I thought she was all right."
"She got a nephew in Vallejo?"
"Uh-huh; that would be the Schultz kid that works at Mare Island. How do you suppose she come to get mixed up in-?"
"Probably didn't, or she would have had the writing paper she went after. Put somebody here to keep people out till we can borrow a San Francisco bomb-expert to look it over."
The deputy called one of the men in from the corridor, and we left him looking important in the room. Mickey Linehan was in the lobby when we got there.
"Fink's got a cracked skull. He's on his way to the county hospital with the other wreck."
"Fitzstephan dead yet?" I asked.
"Nope, and the doc thinks if they get him over where they got the right kind of implements they can keep him from dying. God knows what for-the shape he's in! But that's just the kind of stuff a croaker thinks is a lot of fun."
"Was Aaronia Haldorn sprung with Fink?" I asked.
"Yes. Al Mason's tailing her."
"Call up the Old Man and see if Al's reported anything on her. Tell the Old Man what's happened here, and see if they've found Andrews."
"Andrews?" Rolly asked as Mickey headed for the phone. "What's the matter with him?"
"Nothing that I know of; only we haven't been able to find him to tell him Mrs. Collinson has been rescued. His office hasn't seen him since yesterday morning, and nobody will say they know where he is."
"Tch, tch, tch. Is there any special reason for wanting him?"
"I don't want her on my hands the rest of my life," I said. "He's in charge of her affairs, he's responsible for her, and I want to turn her over to him."
Rolly nodded vaguely.
We went outside and asked all the people we could find all the questions we could think of. None of the answers led anywhere, except to repeated assurance that the bomb hadn't been chucked through the window. We found six people who had been in sight of that side of the hotel immediately before, and at the time of, the explosion; and none of them had seen anything that could be twisted into bearing on the bomb-throwing.
Mickey came away from the phone with the information that Aaronia Haldorn, when released from the city prison, had gone to the home of a family named Jeffries in San Mateo, and had been there ever since; and that Dick Foley, hunting for Andrews, had hopes of locating him in Sausalito.
District attorney Vernon and sheriff Feeney, with a horde of reporters and photographers close behind them, arrived from the county seat. They went through a lot of detecting motions that got them nowhere except on the front pages of all the San Francisco and Los Angeles papers-the place they liked best.
I had Gabrielle Collinson moved into another room in the hotel, and posted Mickey Linehan next door, with the connecting door unlocked. Gabrielle talked now, to Vernon, Feeney, Rolly, and me. What she said didn't help us much. She had been asleep, she said; had been awakened by a terrible noise and a terrible jarring of her bed; and then I had come in. That was all she knew.
Late in the afternoon McCracken, a San Francisco police department bomb-expert, arrived. After examining all the fragments of this and that which he could sweep up, he gave us a preliminary verdict that the bomb had been a small one, of aluminum, charged with a low-grade nitroglycerine, and exploded by a crude friction device.
"Amateur or professional job?" I asked.
McCracken spit out loose shreds of tobacco-he was one of the men who chew their cigarettes-and said:
"I'd say it was made by a guy that knew his stuff, but had to work with what he could get his hands on. I'll tell you more when I've worked this junk over in the lab."
"No timer on it?" I asked.
"No signs of one."
Doctor George returned from the county seat with the news that what was left of Fitzstephan still breathed. The doctor was tickled pink. I had to yell at him to make him hear my questions about Fink and Gabrielle. Then he told me Fink's life wasn't in danger, and the girl's cold was enough better that she might get out of bed if she wished. I asked about her nerves, but he was in too much of a hurry to get back to Fitzstephan to pay much attention to anything else.
"Hm-m-m, yes, certainly," he muttered, edging past me towards his car. "Quiet, rest, freedom from anxiety," and he was gone.
I ate dinner with Vernon and Feeney in the hotel cafй that evening. They didn't think I had told them all I knew about the bombing, and kept me on the witness stand throughout the meal, though neither of them accused me pointblank of holding out.
After dinner I went up to my new room. Mickey was sprawled on the bed reading a newspaper.
"Go feed yourself," I said. "How's our baby?"
"She's up. How do you figure her-only fifty cards to her deck?"
"Why?" I asked. "What's she been doing?"
"Nothing. I was just thinking."
"That's from having an empty stomach. Better go eat."
"Aye, aye, Mr. Continental," he said and went out.
The next room was quiet. I listened at the door and then tapped it. Mrs. Herman's voice said: "Come in."
She was sitting beside the bed making gaudy butterflies on a piece of yellowish cloth stretched on hoops. Gabrielle Collinson sat in a rocking chair on the other side of the room, frowning at hands clasped in her lap-clasped hard enough to whiten the knuckles and spread the finger-ends. She had on the tweed clothes in which she had been kidnapped. They were still rumpled, but had been brushed clean of mud. She didn't look up when I came in. The nurse did, pushing her freckles together in an uneasy smile.
"Good evening," I said, trying to make a cheerful entrance. "Looks like we're running out of invalids."
That brought no response from the girl, too much from the nurse.
"Yes, indeed," Mrs. Herman exclaimed with exaggerated enthusiasm. "We can't call Mrs. Collinson an invalid now-now that she's up and about-and I'm almost sorry that she is-he-he-he-because I certainly never did have such a nice patient in every way; but that's what we girls used to say at the hospital when we were in training: the nicer the patient was, the shorter the time we'd have him, while you take a disagreeable one and she'd live-I mean, be there-forever and a day, it seems like. I remember once when-"
I made a face at her and wagged my head at the door. She let the rest of her words die inside her open mouth. Her face turned red, then white. She dropped her embroidery and got up, saying idiotically: "Yes, yes, that's the way it always is. Well, I've got to go see about those-you know-what do you call them. Pardon me for a few minutes, please." She went out quickly, sidewise, as if afraid I'd sneak up behind her and kick her.
When the door had closed, Cabrielle looked up from her hands and said:
"Owen is dead."
She didn't ask, she said it; but there was no way of treating it except as a question.
"No." I sat down in the nurse's chair and fished out cigarettes. "He's alive."
"Will he live?" Her voice was still husky from her cold.
"The doctors think so," I exaggerated.
"If he lives, will he-?" She left the question unfinished, but her husky voice seemed impersonal enough.
"He'll be pretty badly maimed."
She spoke more to herself than to me:
"That should be even more satisfactory."
I grinned. If I was as good an actor as I thought, there was nothing in the grin but good-humored amusement.
"Laugh," she said gravely. "I wish you could laugh it away. But you can't. It's there. It will always be there." She looked down at her hands and whispered: "Cursed."
Spoken in any other tone, that last word would have been melodramatic, ridiculously stagey. But she said it automatically, without any feeling, as if saying it had become a habit. I could see her lying in bed in the dark, whispering it to herself hour after hour, whispering it to her body when she put on her clothes, to her face reflected in mirrors, day after day.
I squirmed in my chair and growled:
"Stop it. Just because a bad-tempered woman works off her hatred and rage in a ten-twenty-thirty speech about-"
"No, no; my step-mother merely put in words what I have always known. I hadn't known it was in the Dain blood, but I knew it was in mine. How could I help knowing? Hadn't I the physical marks of degeneracy?" She crossed the room to stand in front of me, turning her head sidewise, holding back her curls with both hands. "Look at my ears-without lobes, pointed tops. People don't have ears like that. Animals do." She turned her face to me again, still holding back her hair. "Look at my forehead-its smallness, its shape-animal. My teeth." She bared them-white, small, pointed. "The shape of my face." Her hands left her hair and slid down her cheeks, coming together under her oddly pointed small chin.
"Is that all?" I asked. "Haven't you got cloven hoofs? All right. Say these things are as peculiar as you seem to think they are. What of it? Your step-mother was a Dain, and she was poison, but where were her physical marks of degeneracy? Wasn't she as normal, as wholesome-looking as any woman you're likely to find?"
"But that's no answer." She shook her head impatiently. "She didn't have the physical marks perhaps. I have, and the mental ones too. I-" She sat down on the side of the bed close to me, elbows on knees, tortured white face between hands. "I've not ever been able to think clearly, as other people do, even the simplest thoughts. Everything is always so confused in my mind. No matter what I try to think about, there's a fog that gets between me and it, and other thoughts get between us, so I barely catch a glimpse of the thought I want before I lose it again, and have to hunt through the fog, and at last find it, only to have the same thing happen again and again and again. Can you understand how horrible that can become: going through life like that-year after year-knowing you will always be like that-or worse?"
"I can't," I said. "It sounds normal as hell to me. Nobody thinks clearly, no matter what they pretend. Thinking's a dizzy business, a matter of catching as many of those foggy glimpses as you can and fitting them together the best you can. That's why people hang on so tight to their beliefs and opinions; because, compared to the haphazard way in which they're arrived at, even the goofiest opinion seems wonderfully clear, sane, and self-evident. And if you let it get away from you, then you've got to dive back into that foggy muddle to wangle yourself out another to take its place."
She took her face out of her hands and smiled shyly at me, saying:
"It's funny I didn't like you before." Her face became serious again. "But-"
"But nothing," I said. "You're old enough to know that everybody except very crazy people and very stupid people suspect themselves now and then-or whenever they happen to think about it-of not being exactly sane. Evidence of goofiness is easily found: the more you dig into yourself, the more you turn up. Nobody's mind could stand the sort of examination you've been giving yours. Going around trying to prove yourself cuckoo! It's a wonder you haven't driven yourself nuts."
"Perhaps I have."
"No. Take my word for it, you're sane. Or don't take my word for it. Look. You got a hell of a start in life. You got into bad hands at the very beginning. Your step-mother was plain poison, and did her best to ruin you, and in the end succeeded in convincing you that you were smeared with a very special family curse. In the past couple of months-the time I've known you-all the calamities known to man have been piled up on you, and your belief in your curse has made you hold yourself responsible for every item in the pile. All right. How's it affected you? You've been dazed a lot of the time, hysterical part of the time, and when your husband was killed you tried to kill yourself, but weren't unbalanced enough to face the shock of the bullet tearing through your flesh.
"Well, good God, sister! I'm only a hired man with only a hired man's interest in your troubles, and some of them have had me groggy. Didn't I try to bite a ghost back in that Temple? And I'm supposed to be old and toughened to crime. This morning-after all you'd been through-somebody touches off a package of nitroglycerine almost beside your bed. Here you are this evening, up and dressed, arguing with me about your sanity.
"If you aren't normal, it's because you're tougher, saner, cooler than normal. Stop thinking about your Dain blood and think about the Mayenne blood in you. Where do you suppose you got your toughness. except from him? It's the same toughness that carried him through Devil's Island, Central America, and Mexico, and kept him standing up till the end. You're more like him than like the one Dain I saw. Physically, you take after your father, and if you've got any physical marks of degeneracy-whatever that means-you got them from him."
She seemed to like that. Her eyes were almost happy. But I had talked myself out of words for the moment, and while I was hunting for more behind a cigarette the shine went out of her eyes.
"I'm glad-I'm grateful to you for what you've said, if you've meant it." Hopelessness was in her tone again, and her face was back between her hands. "But, whatever I am, she was right. You can't say she wasn't. You can't deny that my life has been cursed, blackened, and the lives of everyone who's touched me."
"I'm one answer to that," I said. "I've been around you a lot recently, and I've mixed into your affairs enough, and nothing's happened to me that a night's sleep wouldn't fix up."
"But in a different way," she protested slowly, wrinkling her forehead. "There's no personal relationship with you. It's professional with you— your work. That makes a difference."
I laughed and said:
"That won't do. There's Fitzstephan. He knew your family, of course, but he was here through me, on my account, and was actually, then, a step further removed from you than I. Why shouldn't I have gone down first? Maybe the bomb was meant for me? Maybe. But that brings us to a human mind behind it-one that can bungle-and not your infallible curse."
"You are mistaken," she said, staring at her knees. "Owen loved me."
I decided not to appear surprised. I asked:
"Had you-?"
"No, please! Please don't ask me to talk about it. Not now-after what happened this morning." She jerked her shoulders up high and straight, said crisply: "You said something about an infallible curse. I don't know whether you misunderstand me, or are pretending to, to make me seem foolish. But I don't believe in an infallible curse, one coming from the devil or God, like Job's, say." She was earnest now, no longer talking to change the conversation. "But can't there be-aren't there people who are so thoroughly-fundamentally-evil that they poison-bring out the worst in-everybody they touch? And can't that-?"
"There are people who can," I half-agreed, "when they want to."
"No, no! Whether they want to or not. When they desperately don't want to. It is so. It is. I loved Eric because he was clean and fine. You know he was. You knew him well enough, and you know men well enough, to know he was. I loved him that way, wanted him that way. And then, when we were married-"
She shuddered and gave me both of her hands. The palms were dry and hot, the ends of her fingers cold. I had to hold them tight to keep the nails out of my flesh. I asked:
"You were a virgin when you married him?"
"Yes, I was. I am. I-"
"It's nothing to get excited about," I said. "You are, and have the usual silly notions. And you use dope, don't you?"
She nodded. I went on:
"That would cut your own interest in sex to below normal, so that a perfectly natural interest in it on somebody else's part would seem abnormal. Erie was too young, too much in love with you, maybe too inexperienced, to keep from being clumsy. You can't make anything horrible out of that."
"But it wasn't only Eric," she explained. "Every man I've known. Don't think me conceited. I know I'm not beautiful. But I don't want to be evil. I don't. Why do men-? Why have all the men I've-?"
"Are you," I asked, "talking about me?"
"No-you know I'm not. Don't make fun of me, please."
"Then there are exceptions? Any others? Madison Andrews, for instance?"
"If you know him at all well, or have heard much about him, you don't have to ask that."
"No," I agreed. "But you can't blame the curse with him-it's habit. Was he very bad?"
"He was very funny," she said bitterly.
"How long ago was it?"
"Oh, possibly a year and a half. I didn't say anything to my father and step-mother. I was-I was ashamed that men were like that to me, and that-"
"How do you know," I grumbled, "that most men aren't like that to most women? What makes you think your case is so damned unique? If your ears were sharp enough, you could listen now and hear a thousand women in San Francisco making the same complaint, and-God knows-maybe half of them would be thinking themselves sincere."
She took her hands away from me and sat up straight on the bed. Some pink came into her face.
"Now you have made me feel silly," she said.
"Not much sillier than I do. I'm supposed to be a detective. Since this job began, I've been riding around on a merry-go-round, staying the same distance behind your curse, suspecting what it'd look like if I could get face to face with it, but never getting there. I will now. Can you stand another week or two?"
"You mean-?"
"I'm going to show you that your curse is a lot of hooey, but it'll take a few days, maybe a couple of weeks."
She was round-eyed and trembling, wanting to believe me, afraid to. I said:
"That's settled. What are you going to do now?"
"I-I don't know. Do you mean what you've said? That this can be ended? That I'll have no more-? That you can-?"
"Yeah. Could you go back to the house in the cove for a while? It might help things along, and you'll be safe enough there. We could take Mrs. Herman with us, and maybe an op or two."
"I'll go," she said.
I looked at my watch and stood up saying:
"Better go back to bed. We'll move down tomorrow. Good night."
She chewed her lower lip, wanting to say something, not wanting to say it, finally blurting it out:
"I'll have to have morphine down there."
"Sure. What's your day's ration?"
"Five-ten grains."
"That's mild enough," I said, and then, casually: "Do you like using the stuff?"
"I'm afraid it's too late for my liking or not liking it to matter."
"You've been reading the Hearst papers," I said. "If you want to break off, and we've a few days to spare down there, we'll use them weaning you. It's not so tough."
She laughed shakily, with a queer twitching of her mouth.
"Go away," she cried. "Don't give me any more assurances, any more of your promises, please. I can't stand any more tonight. I'm drunk on them now. Please go away."
"All right. Night."
"Good night-and thanks."
I went into my room, closing the door. Mickey was unscrewing the top of a flask. His knees were dusty. He turned his half-wit's grin on me and said:
"What a swell dish you are. What are you trying to do? Win yourself a home?"
"Sh-h-h. Anything new?"
"The master minds have gone back to the county seat. The red-head nurse was getting a load at the keyhole when I came back from feeding. I chased her."
"And took her place?" I asked, nodding at his dusty knees.
You couldn't embarrass Mickey. He said:
"Hell, no. She was at the other door, in the hall."
"Tch, tch, tch. I'd of thought Mrs. Herman was the last person in the world to-"
"You ought to've," I grumbled. "You recommended her. Who is she?"
"She's Tod Herman's wife. He's got the garage. She used to be a trained nurse before she married Tod. I thought she was all right."
"She got a nephew in Vallejo?"
"Uh-huh; that would be the Schultz kid that works at Mare Island. How do you suppose she come to get mixed up in-?"
"Probably didn't, or she would have had the writing paper she went after. Put somebody here to keep people out till we can borrow a San Francisco bomb-expert to look it over."
The deputy called one of the men in from the corridor, and we left him looking important in the room. Mickey Linehan was in the lobby when we got there.
"Fink's got a cracked skull. He's on his way to the county hospital with the other wreck."
"Fitzstephan dead yet?" I asked.
"Nope, and the doc thinks if they get him over where they got the right kind of implements they can keep him from dying. God knows what for-the shape he's in! But that's just the kind of stuff a croaker thinks is a lot of fun."
"Was Aaronia Haldorn sprung with Fink?" I asked.
"Yes. Al Mason's tailing her."
"Call up the Old Man and see if Al's reported anything on her. Tell the Old Man what's happened here, and see if they've found Andrews."
"Andrews?" Rolly asked as Mickey headed for the phone. "What's the matter with him?"
"Nothing that I know of; only we haven't been able to find him to tell him Mrs. Collinson has been rescued. His office hasn't seen him since yesterday morning, and nobody will say they know where he is."
"Tch, tch, tch. Is there any special reason for wanting him?"
"I don't want her on my hands the rest of my life," I said. "He's in charge of her affairs, he's responsible for her, and I want to turn her over to him."
Rolly nodded vaguely.
We went outside and asked all the people we could find all the questions we could think of. None of the answers led anywhere, except to repeated assurance that the bomb hadn't been chucked through the window. We found six people who had been in sight of that side of the hotel immediately before, and at the time of, the explosion; and none of them had seen anything that could be twisted into bearing on the bomb-throwing.
Mickey came away from the phone with the information that Aaronia Haldorn, when released from the city prison, had gone to the home of a family named Jeffries in San Mateo, and had been there ever since; and that Dick Foley, hunting for Andrews, had hopes of locating him in Sausalito.
District attorney Vernon and sheriff Feeney, with a horde of reporters and photographers close behind them, arrived from the county seat. They went through a lot of detecting motions that got them nowhere except on the front pages of all the San Francisco and Los Angeles papers-the place they liked best.
I had Gabrielle Collinson moved into another room in the hotel, and posted Mickey Linehan next door, with the connecting door unlocked. Gabrielle talked now, to Vernon, Feeney, Rolly, and me. What she said didn't help us much. She had been asleep, she said; had been awakened by a terrible noise and a terrible jarring of her bed; and then I had come in. That was all she knew.
Late in the afternoon McCracken, a San Francisco police department bomb-expert, arrived. After examining all the fragments of this and that which he could sweep up, he gave us a preliminary verdict that the bomb had been a small one, of aluminum, charged with a low-grade nitroglycerine, and exploded by a crude friction device.
"Amateur or professional job?" I asked.
McCracken spit out loose shreds of tobacco-he was one of the men who chew their cigarettes-and said:
"I'd say it was made by a guy that knew his stuff, but had to work with what he could get his hands on. I'll tell you more when I've worked this junk over in the lab."
"No timer on it?" I asked.
"No signs of one."
Doctor George returned from the county seat with the news that what was left of Fitzstephan still breathed. The doctor was tickled pink. I had to yell at him to make him hear my questions about Fink and Gabrielle. Then he told me Fink's life wasn't in danger, and the girl's cold was enough better that she might get out of bed if she wished. I asked about her nerves, but he was in too much of a hurry to get back to Fitzstephan to pay much attention to anything else.
"Hm-m-m, yes, certainly," he muttered, edging past me towards his car. "Quiet, rest, freedom from anxiety," and he was gone.
I ate dinner with Vernon and Feeney in the hotel cafй that evening. They didn't think I had told them all I knew about the bombing, and kept me on the witness stand throughout the meal, though neither of them accused me pointblank of holding out.
After dinner I went up to my new room. Mickey was sprawled on the bed reading a newspaper.
"Go feed yourself," I said. "How's our baby?"
"She's up. How do you figure her-only fifty cards to her deck?"
"Why?" I asked. "What's she been doing?"
"Nothing. I was just thinking."
"That's from having an empty stomach. Better go eat."
"Aye, aye, Mr. Continental," he said and went out.
The next room was quiet. I listened at the door and then tapped it. Mrs. Herman's voice said: "Come in."
She was sitting beside the bed making gaudy butterflies on a piece of yellowish cloth stretched on hoops. Gabrielle Collinson sat in a rocking chair on the other side of the room, frowning at hands clasped in her lap-clasped hard enough to whiten the knuckles and spread the finger-ends. She had on the tweed clothes in which she had been kidnapped. They were still rumpled, but had been brushed clean of mud. She didn't look up when I came in. The nurse did, pushing her freckles together in an uneasy smile.
"Good evening," I said, trying to make a cheerful entrance. "Looks like we're running out of invalids."
That brought no response from the girl, too much from the nurse.
"Yes, indeed," Mrs. Herman exclaimed with exaggerated enthusiasm. "We can't call Mrs. Collinson an invalid now-now that she's up and about-and I'm almost sorry that she is-he-he-he-because I certainly never did have such a nice patient in every way; but that's what we girls used to say at the hospital when we were in training: the nicer the patient was, the shorter the time we'd have him, while you take a disagreeable one and she'd live-I mean, be there-forever and a day, it seems like. I remember once when-"
I made a face at her and wagged my head at the door. She let the rest of her words die inside her open mouth. Her face turned red, then white. She dropped her embroidery and got up, saying idiotically: "Yes, yes, that's the way it always is. Well, I've got to go see about those-you know-what do you call them. Pardon me for a few minutes, please." She went out quickly, sidewise, as if afraid I'd sneak up behind her and kick her.
When the door had closed, Cabrielle looked up from her hands and said:
"Owen is dead."
She didn't ask, she said it; but there was no way of treating it except as a question.
"No." I sat down in the nurse's chair and fished out cigarettes. "He's alive."
"Will he live?" Her voice was still husky from her cold.
"The doctors think so," I exaggerated.
"If he lives, will he-?" She left the question unfinished, but her husky voice seemed impersonal enough.
"He'll be pretty badly maimed."
She spoke more to herself than to me:
"That should be even more satisfactory."
I grinned. If I was as good an actor as I thought, there was nothing in the grin but good-humored amusement.
"Laugh," she said gravely. "I wish you could laugh it away. But you can't. It's there. It will always be there." She looked down at her hands and whispered: "Cursed."
Spoken in any other tone, that last word would have been melodramatic, ridiculously stagey. But she said it automatically, without any feeling, as if saying it had become a habit. I could see her lying in bed in the dark, whispering it to herself hour after hour, whispering it to her body when she put on her clothes, to her face reflected in mirrors, day after day.
I squirmed in my chair and growled:
"Stop it. Just because a bad-tempered woman works off her hatred and rage in a ten-twenty-thirty speech about-"
"No, no; my step-mother merely put in words what I have always known. I hadn't known it was in the Dain blood, but I knew it was in mine. How could I help knowing? Hadn't I the physical marks of degeneracy?" She crossed the room to stand in front of me, turning her head sidewise, holding back her curls with both hands. "Look at my ears-without lobes, pointed tops. People don't have ears like that. Animals do." She turned her face to me again, still holding back her hair. "Look at my forehead-its smallness, its shape-animal. My teeth." She bared them-white, small, pointed. "The shape of my face." Her hands left her hair and slid down her cheeks, coming together under her oddly pointed small chin.
"Is that all?" I asked. "Haven't you got cloven hoofs? All right. Say these things are as peculiar as you seem to think they are. What of it? Your step-mother was a Dain, and she was poison, but where were her physical marks of degeneracy? Wasn't she as normal, as wholesome-looking as any woman you're likely to find?"
"But that's no answer." She shook her head impatiently. "She didn't have the physical marks perhaps. I have, and the mental ones too. I-" She sat down on the side of the bed close to me, elbows on knees, tortured white face between hands. "I've not ever been able to think clearly, as other people do, even the simplest thoughts. Everything is always so confused in my mind. No matter what I try to think about, there's a fog that gets between me and it, and other thoughts get between us, so I barely catch a glimpse of the thought I want before I lose it again, and have to hunt through the fog, and at last find it, only to have the same thing happen again and again and again. Can you understand how horrible that can become: going through life like that-year after year-knowing you will always be like that-or worse?"
"I can't," I said. "It sounds normal as hell to me. Nobody thinks clearly, no matter what they pretend. Thinking's a dizzy business, a matter of catching as many of those foggy glimpses as you can and fitting them together the best you can. That's why people hang on so tight to their beliefs and opinions; because, compared to the haphazard way in which they're arrived at, even the goofiest opinion seems wonderfully clear, sane, and self-evident. And if you let it get away from you, then you've got to dive back into that foggy muddle to wangle yourself out another to take its place."
She took her face out of her hands and smiled shyly at me, saying:
"It's funny I didn't like you before." Her face became serious again. "But-"
"But nothing," I said. "You're old enough to know that everybody except very crazy people and very stupid people suspect themselves now and then-or whenever they happen to think about it-of not being exactly sane. Evidence of goofiness is easily found: the more you dig into yourself, the more you turn up. Nobody's mind could stand the sort of examination you've been giving yours. Going around trying to prove yourself cuckoo! It's a wonder you haven't driven yourself nuts."
"Perhaps I have."
"No. Take my word for it, you're sane. Or don't take my word for it. Look. You got a hell of a start in life. You got into bad hands at the very beginning. Your step-mother was plain poison, and did her best to ruin you, and in the end succeeded in convincing you that you were smeared with a very special family curse. In the past couple of months-the time I've known you-all the calamities known to man have been piled up on you, and your belief in your curse has made you hold yourself responsible for every item in the pile. All right. How's it affected you? You've been dazed a lot of the time, hysterical part of the time, and when your husband was killed you tried to kill yourself, but weren't unbalanced enough to face the shock of the bullet tearing through your flesh.
"Well, good God, sister! I'm only a hired man with only a hired man's interest in your troubles, and some of them have had me groggy. Didn't I try to bite a ghost back in that Temple? And I'm supposed to be old and toughened to crime. This morning-after all you'd been through-somebody touches off a package of nitroglycerine almost beside your bed. Here you are this evening, up and dressed, arguing with me about your sanity.
"If you aren't normal, it's because you're tougher, saner, cooler than normal. Stop thinking about your Dain blood and think about the Mayenne blood in you. Where do you suppose you got your toughness. except from him? It's the same toughness that carried him through Devil's Island, Central America, and Mexico, and kept him standing up till the end. You're more like him than like the one Dain I saw. Physically, you take after your father, and if you've got any physical marks of degeneracy-whatever that means-you got them from him."
She seemed to like that. Her eyes were almost happy. But I had talked myself out of words for the moment, and while I was hunting for more behind a cigarette the shine went out of her eyes.
"I'm glad-I'm grateful to you for what you've said, if you've meant it." Hopelessness was in her tone again, and her face was back between her hands. "But, whatever I am, she was right. You can't say she wasn't. You can't deny that my life has been cursed, blackened, and the lives of everyone who's touched me."
"I'm one answer to that," I said. "I've been around you a lot recently, and I've mixed into your affairs enough, and nothing's happened to me that a night's sleep wouldn't fix up."
"But in a different way," she protested slowly, wrinkling her forehead. "There's no personal relationship with you. It's professional with you— your work. That makes a difference."
I laughed and said:
"That won't do. There's Fitzstephan. He knew your family, of course, but he was here through me, on my account, and was actually, then, a step further removed from you than I. Why shouldn't I have gone down first? Maybe the bomb was meant for me? Maybe. But that brings us to a human mind behind it-one that can bungle-and not your infallible curse."
"You are mistaken," she said, staring at her knees. "Owen loved me."
I decided not to appear surprised. I asked:
"Had you-?"
"No, please! Please don't ask me to talk about it. Not now-after what happened this morning." She jerked her shoulders up high and straight, said crisply: "You said something about an infallible curse. I don't know whether you misunderstand me, or are pretending to, to make me seem foolish. But I don't believe in an infallible curse, one coming from the devil or God, like Job's, say." She was earnest now, no longer talking to change the conversation. "But can't there be-aren't there people who are so thoroughly-fundamentally-evil that they poison-bring out the worst in-everybody they touch? And can't that-?"
"There are people who can," I half-agreed, "when they want to."
"No, no! Whether they want to or not. When they desperately don't want to. It is so. It is. I loved Eric because he was clean and fine. You know he was. You knew him well enough, and you know men well enough, to know he was. I loved him that way, wanted him that way. And then, when we were married-"
She shuddered and gave me both of her hands. The palms were dry and hot, the ends of her fingers cold. I had to hold them tight to keep the nails out of my flesh. I asked:
"You were a virgin when you married him?"
"Yes, I was. I am. I-"
"It's nothing to get excited about," I said. "You are, and have the usual silly notions. And you use dope, don't you?"
She nodded. I went on:
"That would cut your own interest in sex to below normal, so that a perfectly natural interest in it on somebody else's part would seem abnormal. Erie was too young, too much in love with you, maybe too inexperienced, to keep from being clumsy. You can't make anything horrible out of that."
"But it wasn't only Eric," she explained. "Every man I've known. Don't think me conceited. I know I'm not beautiful. But I don't want to be evil. I don't. Why do men-? Why have all the men I've-?"
"Are you," I asked, "talking about me?"
"No-you know I'm not. Don't make fun of me, please."
"Then there are exceptions? Any others? Madison Andrews, for instance?"
"If you know him at all well, or have heard much about him, you don't have to ask that."
"No," I agreed. "But you can't blame the curse with him-it's habit. Was he very bad?"
"He was very funny," she said bitterly.
"How long ago was it?"
"Oh, possibly a year and a half. I didn't say anything to my father and step-mother. I was-I was ashamed that men were like that to me, and that-"
"How do you know," I grumbled, "that most men aren't like that to most women? What makes you think your case is so damned unique? If your ears were sharp enough, you could listen now and hear a thousand women in San Francisco making the same complaint, and-God knows-maybe half of them would be thinking themselves sincere."
She took her hands away from me and sat up straight on the bed. Some pink came into her face.
"Now you have made me feel silly," she said.
"Not much sillier than I do. I'm supposed to be a detective. Since this job began, I've been riding around on a merry-go-round, staying the same distance behind your curse, suspecting what it'd look like if I could get face to face with it, but never getting there. I will now. Can you stand another week or two?"
"You mean-?"
"I'm going to show you that your curse is a lot of hooey, but it'll take a few days, maybe a couple of weeks."
She was round-eyed and trembling, wanting to believe me, afraid to. I said:
"That's settled. What are you going to do now?"
"I-I don't know. Do you mean what you've said? That this can be ended? That I'll have no more-? That you can-?"
"Yeah. Could you go back to the house in the cove for a while? It might help things along, and you'll be safe enough there. We could take Mrs. Herman with us, and maybe an op or two."
"I'll go," she said.
I looked at my watch and stood up saying:
"Better go back to bed. We'll move down tomorrow. Good night."
She chewed her lower lip, wanting to say something, not wanting to say it, finally blurting it out:
"I'll have to have morphine down there."
"Sure. What's your day's ration?"
"Five-ten grains."
"That's mild enough," I said, and then, casually: "Do you like using the stuff?"
"I'm afraid it's too late for my liking or not liking it to matter."
"You've been reading the Hearst papers," I said. "If you want to break off, and we've a few days to spare down there, we'll use them weaning you. It's not so tough."
She laughed shakily, with a queer twitching of her mouth.
"Go away," she cried. "Don't give me any more assurances, any more of your promises, please. I can't stand any more tonight. I'm drunk on them now. Please go away."
"All right. Night."
"Good night-and thanks."
I went into my room, closing the door. Mickey was unscrewing the top of a flask. His knees were dusty. He turned his half-wit's grin on me and said:
"What a swell dish you are. What are you trying to do? Win yourself a home?"
"Sh-h-h. Anything new?"
"The master minds have gone back to the county seat. The red-head nurse was getting a load at the keyhole when I came back from feeding. I chased her."
"And took her place?" I asked, nodding at his dusty knees.
You couldn't embarrass Mickey. He said:
"Hell, no. She was at the other door, in the hall."
XX.The House in the Cove
I got Fitzstephan's car from the garage and drove Gabrielle and Mrs. Herman down to the house in the cove late the following morning. The girl was in low spirits. She made a poor job of smiling when spoken to, and had nothing to say on her own account. I thought she might be depressed by the thought of returning to the house she had shared with Collinson, but when we got there she went in with no appearance of reluctance, and being there didn't seem to increase her depression.
After luncheon-Mrs. Herman turned out to be a good cook-Gabrielle decided she wanted to go outdoors, so she and I walked over to the Mexican settlement to see Mary Nunez. The Mexican woman promised to come back to work the next day. She seemed fond of Gabrielle, but not of me.
We returned home by way of the shore, picking a path between scattered rocks. We walked slowly. The girl's forehead was puckered between her eyebrows. Neither of us said anything until we were within a quarter of a mile of the house. Then Gabrielle sat down on the rounded top of a boulder that was warm in the sun.
"Can you remember what you told me last night?" she asked, running her words together in her hurry to get them out. She looked frightened.
"Yeah."
"Tell me again," she begged, moving over to one end of her boulder. "Sit down and tell me again-all of it."
I did. According to me, it was as foolish to try to read character from the shape of ears as from the position of stars, tea-leaves, or spit in the sand; anybody who started hunting for evidence of insanity in himself would certainly find plenty, because all but stupid minds were jumbled affairs; she was, as far as I could see, too much like her father to have much Dain blood in her, or to have been softened much by what she had, even if you wanted to believe that things like that could be handed down; there was nothing to show that her influence on people was any worse than anybody else's, it being doubtful that many people had a very good influence on those of the opposite sex, and, anyway, she was too young, inexperienced, and self-centered to judge how she varied from the normal in this respect; I would show her in a few days that there was for her difficulties a much more tangible, logical, and jailable answer than any curse; and she wouldn't have much trouble breaking away from morphine, since she was a fairly light user of the stuff and had a temperament favorable to a cure.
I spent three-quarters of an hour working these ideas over for her, and didn't make such a lousy job of it. The fear went out of her eyes as I talked. Toward the last she smiled to herself. When I had finished she jumped up, laughing, working her fingers together.
"Thank you. Thank you," she babbled. "Please don't let me ever stop believing you. Make me believe you even if— No. It is true. Make me believe it always. Come on. Let's walk some more."
She almost ran me the rest of the way to the house, chattering all the way. Mickey Linehan was on the porch. I stopped there with him while the girl went in.
"Tch, tch, tch, as Mr. Rolly says." He shook his grinning face at me. "I ought to tell her what happened to that poor girl up in Poisonville that got so she thought she could trust you."
"Bring any news down from the village with you?" I asked.
"Andrews has turned up. He was at the Jeffries' place in San Mateo, where Aaronia Haldorn's staying. She's still there. Andrews was there from Tuesday afternoon till last night. Al was watching the place and saw him go in, but didn't peg him till he came out. The Jeffries are away— San Diego. Dick's tailing Andrews now. Al says the Haldorn broad hasn't been off the place. Rolly tells me Fink's awake, but don't know anything about the bomb. Fitzstephan's still hanging on to life."
"I think I'll run over and talk to Fink this afternoon," I said. "Stick around here. And-oh, yeah-you'll have to act respectful to me when Mrs. Collinson's around. It's important that she keep on thinking I'm hot stuff."
"Bring back some booze," Mickey said. "I can't do it sober."
Fink was propped up in bed when I got to him, looking out under bandages. He insisted that he knew nothing about the bomb, that all he had come down for was to tell me that Harvey Whidden was his step-son, the missing village-blacksmith's son by a former marriage.
"Well, what of it?" I asked.
"I don't know what of it, except that he was, and I thought you'd want to know about it."
"Why should I?"
"The papers said you said there was some kind of connection between what happened here and what happened up there, and that heavy-set detective said you said I knew more about it than I let on. And I don't want any more trouble, so I thought I'd just come down and tell you, so you couldn't say I hadn't told all I knew."
"Yeah? Then tell me what you know about Madison Andrews."
"I don't know anything about him. I don't know him. He's her guardian or something, ain't he? I read that in the newspapers. But I don't know him."
"Aaronia Haldorn does."
"Maybe she does, mister, but I don't. I just worked for the Haldorns. It wasn't anything to me but a job."
"What was it to your wife?"
"The same thing, a job."
"Where is she?"
"I don't know."
"Why'd she run away from the Temple?"
"I told you before, I don't know. Didn't want to get in trouble, I— Who wouldn't of run away if they got a chance?"
The nurse who had been fluttering around became a nuisance by this time, so I left the hospital for the district attorney's office in the court house. Vernon pushed aside a stack of papers with a the-world-can-wait gesture, and said, "Glad to see you; sit down," nodding vigorously, showing me all his teeth.
I sat down and said:
"Been talking to Fink. I couldn't get anything out of him, but he's our meat. The bomb couldn't have got in there except by him."
Vernon frowned for a moment, then shook his chin at me, and snapped:
"What was his motive? And you were there. You say you were looking at him all the time he was in the room. You say you saw nothing."
"What of that?" I asked. "He could outsmart me there. He was a magician's mechanic. He'd know how to make a bomb, and how to put it down without my seeing it. That's his game. We don't know what Fitzstephan saw. They tell me he'll pull through. Let's hang on to Fink till he does."
Vernon clicked his teeth together and said: "Very well, we'll hold him."
I went down the corridor to the sheriff's office. Feeney wasn't in, but his chief deputy-a lanky, pockmarked man named Sweet-said he knew from the way Feeney had spoken of me that he-Feeney-would want me to be given all the help I asked for.
"That's fine," I said. "What I'm interested in now is picking up a couple of bottles of-well, gin, Scotch-whatever happens to be best in this part of the country."
Sweet scratched his Adam's apple and said:
"I wouldn't know about that. Maybe the elevator boy. I guess his gin would be safest. Say, Dick Cotton's crying his head off wanting to see you. Want to talk to him?"
"Yeah, though I don't know what for."
"Well, come back in a couple of minutes."
I went out and rang for the elevator. The boy-he had an age-bent back and a long yellow-gray mustache-was alone in it.
"Sweet said maybe you'd know where I could get a gallon of the white," I said.
"He's crazy," the boy grumbled, and then, when I kept quiet: "You'll be going out this way?"
"Yeah, in a little while."
He closed the door. I went back to Sweet. He took me down an inclosed walk that connected the court house with the prison behind, and left me alone with Cotton in a small boiler-plate cell. Two days in jail hadn't done the marshal of Quesada any good. He was gray-faced and jumpy, and the dimple in his chin kept squirming as he talked. He hadn't anything to tell me except that he was innocent.
All I could think of to say to him was: "Maybe, but you brought it on yourself. What evidence there is is against you. I don't know whether it's enough to convict you or not-depends on your lawyer."
"What did he want?" Sweet asked when I had gone back to him.
"To tell me that he's innocent."
The deputy scratched his Adam's apple again and asked:
"It's supposed to make any difference to you?"
"Yeah, it's been keeping me awake at night. See you later."
I went out to the elevator. The boy pushed a newspaper-wrapped gallon jug at me and said: "Ten bucks." I paid him, stowed the jug in Fitzstephan's car, found the local telephone office, and put in a call for Vic Dallas's drug-store in San Francisco's Mission district.
"I want," I told Vic, "fifty grains of M. and eight of those calomel-ipecac-atropine-strychnine-cascara shots. I'll have somebody from the agency pick up the package tonight or in the morning. Right?"
"If you say so, but if you kill anybody with it don't tell them where you got the stuff."
"Yeah," I said; "they'll die just because I haven't got a lousy pillroller's diploma."
I put in another San Francisco call, for the agency, talking to the Old Man.
"Can you spare me another op?" I asked.
"MacMan is available, or he can relieve Drake. Whichever you prefer."
"MacMan'll do. Have him stop at Dallas's drug-store for a package on the way down. He knows where it is."
The Old Man said he had no new reports on Aaronia Haldorn and Andrews.
I drove back to the house in the cove. We had company. Three strange cars were standing empty in the driveway, and half a dozen newshounds were sitting and standing around Mickey on the porch. They turned their questions on me.
"Mrs. Collinson's here for a rest," I said. "No interviews, no posing for pictures. Let her alone. If anything breaks here I'll see that you get it, those of you who lay off her. The only thing I can tell you now is that Fink's being held for the bombing."
"What did Andrews come down for?" Jack Santos asked.
That wasn't a surprise to me: I had expected him to turn up now that he had come out of seclusion.
"Ask him," I suggested. "He's administering Mrs. Collinson's estate. You can't make a mystery out of his coming down to see her."
"Is it true that they're on bad terms?"
After luncheon-Mrs. Herman turned out to be a good cook-Gabrielle decided she wanted to go outdoors, so she and I walked over to the Mexican settlement to see Mary Nunez. The Mexican woman promised to come back to work the next day. She seemed fond of Gabrielle, but not of me.
We returned home by way of the shore, picking a path between scattered rocks. We walked slowly. The girl's forehead was puckered between her eyebrows. Neither of us said anything until we were within a quarter of a mile of the house. Then Gabrielle sat down on the rounded top of a boulder that was warm in the sun.
"Can you remember what you told me last night?" she asked, running her words together in her hurry to get them out. She looked frightened.
"Yeah."
"Tell me again," she begged, moving over to one end of her boulder. "Sit down and tell me again-all of it."
I did. According to me, it was as foolish to try to read character from the shape of ears as from the position of stars, tea-leaves, or spit in the sand; anybody who started hunting for evidence of insanity in himself would certainly find plenty, because all but stupid minds were jumbled affairs; she was, as far as I could see, too much like her father to have much Dain blood in her, or to have been softened much by what she had, even if you wanted to believe that things like that could be handed down; there was nothing to show that her influence on people was any worse than anybody else's, it being doubtful that many people had a very good influence on those of the opposite sex, and, anyway, she was too young, inexperienced, and self-centered to judge how she varied from the normal in this respect; I would show her in a few days that there was for her difficulties a much more tangible, logical, and jailable answer than any curse; and she wouldn't have much trouble breaking away from morphine, since she was a fairly light user of the stuff and had a temperament favorable to a cure.
I spent three-quarters of an hour working these ideas over for her, and didn't make such a lousy job of it. The fear went out of her eyes as I talked. Toward the last she smiled to herself. When I had finished she jumped up, laughing, working her fingers together.
"Thank you. Thank you," she babbled. "Please don't let me ever stop believing you. Make me believe you even if— No. It is true. Make me believe it always. Come on. Let's walk some more."
She almost ran me the rest of the way to the house, chattering all the way. Mickey Linehan was on the porch. I stopped there with him while the girl went in.
"Tch, tch, tch, as Mr. Rolly says." He shook his grinning face at me. "I ought to tell her what happened to that poor girl up in Poisonville that got so she thought she could trust you."
"Bring any news down from the village with you?" I asked.
"Andrews has turned up. He was at the Jeffries' place in San Mateo, where Aaronia Haldorn's staying. She's still there. Andrews was there from Tuesday afternoon till last night. Al was watching the place and saw him go in, but didn't peg him till he came out. The Jeffries are away— San Diego. Dick's tailing Andrews now. Al says the Haldorn broad hasn't been off the place. Rolly tells me Fink's awake, but don't know anything about the bomb. Fitzstephan's still hanging on to life."
"I think I'll run over and talk to Fink this afternoon," I said. "Stick around here. And-oh, yeah-you'll have to act respectful to me when Mrs. Collinson's around. It's important that she keep on thinking I'm hot stuff."
"Bring back some booze," Mickey said. "I can't do it sober."
Fink was propped up in bed when I got to him, looking out under bandages. He insisted that he knew nothing about the bomb, that all he had come down for was to tell me that Harvey Whidden was his step-son, the missing village-blacksmith's son by a former marriage.
"Well, what of it?" I asked.
"I don't know what of it, except that he was, and I thought you'd want to know about it."
"Why should I?"
"The papers said you said there was some kind of connection between what happened here and what happened up there, and that heavy-set detective said you said I knew more about it than I let on. And I don't want any more trouble, so I thought I'd just come down and tell you, so you couldn't say I hadn't told all I knew."
"Yeah? Then tell me what you know about Madison Andrews."
"I don't know anything about him. I don't know him. He's her guardian or something, ain't he? I read that in the newspapers. But I don't know him."
"Aaronia Haldorn does."
"Maybe she does, mister, but I don't. I just worked for the Haldorns. It wasn't anything to me but a job."
"What was it to your wife?"
"The same thing, a job."
"Where is she?"
"I don't know."
"Why'd she run away from the Temple?"
"I told you before, I don't know. Didn't want to get in trouble, I— Who wouldn't of run away if they got a chance?"
The nurse who had been fluttering around became a nuisance by this time, so I left the hospital for the district attorney's office in the court house. Vernon pushed aside a stack of papers with a the-world-can-wait gesture, and said, "Glad to see you; sit down," nodding vigorously, showing me all his teeth.
I sat down and said:
"Been talking to Fink. I couldn't get anything out of him, but he's our meat. The bomb couldn't have got in there except by him."
Vernon frowned for a moment, then shook his chin at me, and snapped:
"What was his motive? And you were there. You say you were looking at him all the time he was in the room. You say you saw nothing."
"What of that?" I asked. "He could outsmart me there. He was a magician's mechanic. He'd know how to make a bomb, and how to put it down without my seeing it. That's his game. We don't know what Fitzstephan saw. They tell me he'll pull through. Let's hang on to Fink till he does."
Vernon clicked his teeth together and said: "Very well, we'll hold him."
I went down the corridor to the sheriff's office. Feeney wasn't in, but his chief deputy-a lanky, pockmarked man named Sweet-said he knew from the way Feeney had spoken of me that he-Feeney-would want me to be given all the help I asked for.
"That's fine," I said. "What I'm interested in now is picking up a couple of bottles of-well, gin, Scotch-whatever happens to be best in this part of the country."
Sweet scratched his Adam's apple and said:
"I wouldn't know about that. Maybe the elevator boy. I guess his gin would be safest. Say, Dick Cotton's crying his head off wanting to see you. Want to talk to him?"
"Yeah, though I don't know what for."
"Well, come back in a couple of minutes."
I went out and rang for the elevator. The boy-he had an age-bent back and a long yellow-gray mustache-was alone in it.
"Sweet said maybe you'd know where I could get a gallon of the white," I said.
"He's crazy," the boy grumbled, and then, when I kept quiet: "You'll be going out this way?"
"Yeah, in a little while."
He closed the door. I went back to Sweet. He took me down an inclosed walk that connected the court house with the prison behind, and left me alone with Cotton in a small boiler-plate cell. Two days in jail hadn't done the marshal of Quesada any good. He was gray-faced and jumpy, and the dimple in his chin kept squirming as he talked. He hadn't anything to tell me except that he was innocent.
All I could think of to say to him was: "Maybe, but you brought it on yourself. What evidence there is is against you. I don't know whether it's enough to convict you or not-depends on your lawyer."
"What did he want?" Sweet asked when I had gone back to him.
"To tell me that he's innocent."
The deputy scratched his Adam's apple again and asked:
"It's supposed to make any difference to you?"
"Yeah, it's been keeping me awake at night. See you later."
I went out to the elevator. The boy pushed a newspaper-wrapped gallon jug at me and said: "Ten bucks." I paid him, stowed the jug in Fitzstephan's car, found the local telephone office, and put in a call for Vic Dallas's drug-store in San Francisco's Mission district.
"I want," I told Vic, "fifty grains of M. and eight of those calomel-ipecac-atropine-strychnine-cascara shots. I'll have somebody from the agency pick up the package tonight or in the morning. Right?"
"If you say so, but if you kill anybody with it don't tell them where you got the stuff."
"Yeah," I said; "they'll die just because I haven't got a lousy pillroller's diploma."
I put in another San Francisco call, for the agency, talking to the Old Man.
"Can you spare me another op?" I asked.
"MacMan is available, or he can relieve Drake. Whichever you prefer."
"MacMan'll do. Have him stop at Dallas's drug-store for a package on the way down. He knows where it is."
The Old Man said he had no new reports on Aaronia Haldorn and Andrews.
I drove back to the house in the cove. We had company. Three strange cars were standing empty in the driveway, and half a dozen newshounds were sitting and standing around Mickey on the porch. They turned their questions on me.
"Mrs. Collinson's here for a rest," I said. "No interviews, no posing for pictures. Let her alone. If anything breaks here I'll see that you get it, those of you who lay off her. The only thing I can tell you now is that Fink's being held for the bombing."
"What did Andrews come down for?" Jack Santos asked.
That wasn't a surprise to me: I had expected him to turn up now that he had come out of seclusion.
"Ask him," I suggested. "He's administering Mrs. Collinson's estate. You can't make a mystery out of his coming down to see her."
"Is it true that they're on bad terms?"