The fredric brown collec.., p.76
The Fredric Brown Collection, page 76
“Positive. I got one like it myself. And the way he carried it, it was just heavy enough to have the ball in it.” He looked at me curiously. “Say, Jerry, I never thought of it before, but a case like that would be a handy thing to carry a bomb in. Did someone try to plant a bomb at the morgue?”
“No.”
“Then if it wasn’t a bowling ball —and you act like you think it wasn’t—what would it have been?”
“I wish I knew,” I told him. “I wish to high heaven I knew.”
I downed the rest of my coffee and stood up.
“Thanks a lot, Hank,” I said. “Listen, you think it over and see if you can remember anything else about that case or the man who carried it. I’ll see you later.”
V
WHAT I needed was some fresh air, so I started walking. I didn’t pay any attention to where I was going; I just walked.
My feet didn’t take me in circles, but my mind did. A bowling ball! Why would a bowling ball, or something shaped like it, be carried into the alley back of the morgue? A bowling ball would fit into that ventilator hole, all right, and a dropped bowling ball would have broken the glass of the case.
But a bowling ball wouldn’t have done—the rest of it.
I vaguely remembered some mention of bowling earlier in the evening and thought back to what it was. Oh yes. Dr. Skibbine and Mr. Paton had been going to bowl a game instead of playing a second game of chess. But neither of them had bowling balls along. Anyway, if Dr. Skibbine had told the truth, they had both been home by midnight.
If not a bowling ball, then what? A ghoul? A spherical ghoul?
The thought was so incongruously horrible that I wanted to stop, right there in the middle of the sidewalk and laugh like a maniac. Maybe I was near hysteria.
I thought of going back to the morgue and telling them about it, and laughing. Watching Quenlin’s face and Wilson’s when I told them that our guest had been a rnan-eating bowling ball. A spherical—
Then I stopped walking, because all of a sudden I knew what the bowling ball had been, and I had the most important part of the answer.
Somewhere a clock was striking half-past three, and I looked around to see where I was. Oak Street, only a few doors from Grant Parkway. That meant I had come fifteen or sixteen blocks from the morgue and that I was only a block and a half from the zoo. At the zoo, I could find out if I was right.
So I started walking again. A block and a half later I was across the street from the zoo right in front of Mr. Paton’s house. Strangely, there was a light in one of the downstairs rooms.
I went up onto the porch and rang the bell. Mr. Paton came to answer it. He was wearing a dressing gown, but I could see shoes and the bottoms of his trouser legs under it.
He didn’t look surprised at all when he opened the door.
“Yes, Jerry?” he said, almost as though he had been expecting me.
“I’m glad you’re still up, Mr. Paton,” I said. “Could you walk across with me and get me past the guard at the gate? I’d like to look at one of the cages and verify—something.”
“You guessed then, Jerry?”
“Yes, Mr. Paton,” I told him. Then I had a sudden thought that scared me a little. “You were seen going into the alley,” I added quickly, “and the man who saw you knows I came here. He saw you carrying—”
He held up his hand and smiled.
“You needn’t worry, Jerry,” he said. “I know it’s over—the minute anybody is smart enough to guess. And—well, I murdered a man all right, but I’m not the type to murder another to try to cover up, because I can see where that would lead. The man I did kill deserved it, and I gambled on—Well never mind all that.”
“Who was he?” I asked.
“His name was Mark Leedom. He was my assistant four years ago. I was foolish at that time—I’d lost money speculating and I stole some zoo funds. They were supposed to be used for the purchase of—Never mind the details. Mark Leedom found out and got proof.
“He made me turn over most of the money to him, and he—retired, and moved out of town. But he’s been coming back periodically to keep shaking me down. He was a rat, Jerry, a worse crook than I ever thought of being. This time I couldn’t pay so I killed him.”
“You were going to make it look like an accident on the Mill Road?” I said. “You killed him here and took him—”
“Yes, I was going to have the car run over his head, so he wouldn’t be identified. I missed by inches, but I couldn’t try again because another car was coming, and I had to keep on driving away.
“Luckily, Doc Skibbine didn’t know him. It was while Doc was in South America that Leedom worked for me. But there are lots of people around who did know him. Some curiosity seeker would have identified him in the week they hold an unidentified body and—well, once they knew who he was and traced things back, they’d have got to me eventually for the old business four years ago if not the fact that I killed him.”
“So that’s why you had to make him unidentifiable,” I said. “I see. He looked familiar to Bill Drager, but Bill couldn’t place him.”
He nodded. “Bill was just a patrolman then. He probably had seen Leedom only a few times, but someone else—Well, Jerry, you go back and tell them about it. Tell them I’ll be here.”
“Gee, Mr. Paton, I’m sorry I got to,” I said. “Isn’t there anything—”
“No. Go and get them. I won’t run away, I promise you. And tell Doc he wouldn’t have beat me that chess game tonight if I hadn’t let him. With what I had to do, I wanted to get out of there early. Good night, Jerry.”
He eased me out onto the porch again before I quite realized why he had never had a chance to tell Dr. Skibbine himself. Yes, he meant for them to find him here when they came, but not alive.
I almost turned to the door again, to break my way in and stop him. Then I realized that everything would be easier for him if he did it his way.
Yes, he was dead by the time they sent men out to bring him in. Even though I had expected it, I guess I had a case of the jitters when they phoned in the news, and I must have showed it, because Bill Drager threw an arm across my shoulders.
“Jerry,” he said, “this has been the devil of a night for you. You need a drink. Come on.”
The drink made me feel better and so did the frank admiration in Drager’s eyes. It was so completely different from what I had seen there back in the alley.
“Jerry,” he told me, “you ought to get on the Force. Figuring out that—of all things—he had used an armadillo.”
“But what else was possible? Look! All those ghoul legends trace back to beasts that are eaters of carrion. Like hyenas. A hyena could have done what was done back there in the morgue. But no one could have handled a hyena—pushed it through that ventilator hole with a rope on it to pull it up again.
“But an armadillo is an eater of corpses, too. It gets frightened when handled and curls up into a ball, like a bowling ball. It doesn’t make any noise, and you could carry it in a bag like the one Hank described. It has an armored shell that would break the glass of the display case if Paton lowered it to within a few feet and let it drop the rest of the way. And of course he looked down with a flashlight to see—”
Bill Drager shuddered a little.
“Learning is a great thing if you like it,” he said. “Studying origins of superstitions, I mean. But me, I want another drink. How about you?”
I
Killer at Large
I PUT down the newspaper.
“It’s about time,” Kit said.
I stood up. “Right, honey. It is.”
Her big brown eyes got bigger and browner.
“What do you mean, Eddie? I just meant you’ve been reading that blasted newspaper for hours and hours.”
I glanced at the clock. “For eleven minutes.”
I sat down again and motioned, and she came over and sat down on my lap. I almost weakened.
“It’s been a nice honeymoon,” I said. “But I am a working man. I thought you knew.”
“You mean you’re taking on another case?”
“Nope,” I told her. “One of the same ones. Paul Verne.”
“Who’s Paul Verne?”
“The gentleman I came to Springfield to find.”
She looked really shocked. “You came here to…Why, Eddie, we came here for our honeymoon! You don’t mean you had an ulterior motive in choosing Springfield.”
“Now, now,” I now-nowed.
“But Eddie—”
“Shhh,” I shhhed.
She cuddled down in my arms. “All right, Eddie. But tell me what you’re going to do. Is it dangerous?”
“Get ‘em young,” I said, “treat ‘em rough, tell ‘em nothing.”
“Eddie, is it dangerous?”
“The world,” I told her, “is a dangerous place. One’s lucky to get out of it alive.”
“Oh darn it, I suppose you are going to do something dangerous. I won’t let you!”
I stood up, and she had to get off my lap or fall on the floor. I walked over to the bureau and picked a necktie off the mirror.
“What are you going to do, Eddie?”
“Answer an ad I just read in the paper.”
“You mean an ad to go to work?”
I nodded, and started to put on the necktie.
In the mirror, I could see Kit studying me.
“The idea of a pint-size like you being a detective,” she said.
“Napoleon wasn’t so big,” I said, over my shoulder.
“Napoleon wasn’t a detective.”
“Well how about Peter Lorre? He’s no bigger than I am.”
“Peter Lorre was shot in the last two pictures I saw him in,” Kit said.
She picked up the newspaper I’d put down and started scanning the want ads, while I was putting on my coat.
“Is this the ad?” she said. ”
“Wanted: Man with some knowledge of psychiatry, for confidential work’?”
“What makes you think that’s it?” I countered.
“I know that’s it, Eddie. All the other ads are routine sensible ones for salesmen or dishwashers or something. But why get dressed up to answer it? It just gives a phone number, and there’s a phone right on the table there.”
“That reminds me,” I said. “Use that phone to call Information, will you, and get the listing on that phone number. You’ll find it’s the Stanley Sanitarium, I think. But I might as well make sure.”
She made the call.
“You’re right, Eddie. Stanley Sanitarium.” She looked at me with respect. “How did you know?”
“Hunch. There’s an article on Page Three telling about a new sanitarium for mental cases being started here. A doc by the name of Philemon Stanley runs it.”
“But why can’t you phone from here about the job?”
“From a hotel? Nix. I’ve got to give myself a local background and a local address. I go rent myself a room, and then use the landlady’s phone. That way, if he’s going to phone me back or write me a letter, I can give him an address that won’t sound phony.”
“What’s phony about the New World Hotel?”
I grinned at her. “Ten bucks a day is what’s phony. People who stay at a hotel like this don’t apply for jobs that probably pay less than their hotel bills would be.”
I kissed her, thoroughly, for it just might be the last time for a while if I had to follow up on the job right away, and left.
Half an hour later, from a rooming house, I called the number given in the want ad.
“Ever had any experience working in an institution for the mentally ill?”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “Two years at Wales Sanitarium in Chicago. They didn’t handle really bad cases, you know, just mild psychoses, phobiacs, chronic alcoholics, that sort of thing.”
“Yes,” said Dr. Stanley, “I’m familiar with the work at Wales Sanitarium. What were your duties there?”
“Attendant, male ward.”
“I believe you would fit in very nicely. Not—uh—as an attendant, however. I have something in mind of a different and—uh —more confidential nature.”
“So I figured from the ad, Doctor,” I said. “But whatever it is, I’ll be glad to try it.”
“Fine, Mr. Anderson. I’d like to talk to you personally, of course, but if our interview is satisfactory to both of us, you can start right away. Would you rather have that interview this evening or tomorrow morning? Either will be quite satisfactory.” I thought it over, and weakened. After all I had been married only two weeks and I would undoubtedly have to live at the sanitarium while I was on the job. I told him tomorrow morning. I went back to the hotel and Kit and I went down for dinner to the New World dining room. Over a couple of cocktails, I told her about the phone call.
“But suppose he should phone the Wales Sanitarium to check up on you?”
“They never do.”
“What kind of confidential work would there be around a booby hatch, Eddie?”
“I don’t know,” I told her. “But as long as it puts me in contact with the patients, I don’t care. Anyway, it isn’t a booby hatch, honey. It’s a sanitarium for the idle rich. People who go slightly screwy wondering how to spend their money. That’s why I used Wales as a reference. It’s the same type of joint.”
“It didn’t say that in the article in the paper.”
“Sure it did. Between the lines.”
“But Eddie, aren’t you going to tell me why you’re doing this?”
I thought out how I’d best tell it without worrying Kit too much. She’d have to get used to things like that, but not all at once. Not—right from our honeymoon—to know I was looking for a homicidal maniac who had killed over a dozen people. Maybe more.
“I’m looking for a man named Paul Verne,” I said. “He’s crazy, but he’s crazy like a fox. He escaped three years ago from an institution in California. It’s been in the papers, but you may not have noticed it, because his family had enough money and influence to keep it from being played up too much.”
Kit’s eyes widened.
“You mean they don’t want him caught?”
“They very much want him caught. They offered a reward of twenty-five thousand bucks to have him caught and returned to the institution from which he escaped.”
“But wouldn’t publicity help?”
“It would, and there has been some publicity. If the name doesn’t click with you, you just haven’t read the right papers at the right time. But they held that down, and they’ve spent thousands circularizing police offices and detective agencies to be on the lookout for him. That’s more effective, and reflects less on the family name. Every copper in the country knows who Paul Verne is, and is trying for that twenty-five grand. And every private detective, too.”
“Twenty-five thousand dollars! Why Eddie, think what we could do with that!”
“Yeah,” I said, “we could use it. But don’t get your hopes up, because I’m just playing a long shot. A tip and a hunch.”
Our dinner came and I made her wait until we’d eaten before I told her any more. When I eat, I like to eat.
“The tip,” I told her, after we had finished dessert, “was Springfield. Never mind exactly how, because it’s complicated, but I got a tip Paul Verne was in Springfield. That’s why I suggested we come here for our honeymoon.”
“Well,” she said, “I suppose we had to go somewhere, and after all—”
“Twenty-five grand isn’t hay,” I finished for her. “As for the hunch—it’s a poor thing, but my own. Where’s the last place you’d look for an escaped loony?”
“I don’t…You mean in a loony-bin?”
“Brilliant. What could possibly be a better hide-out? A private sanitarium, of course, where everything is the best and a patient can enter voluntarily and leave when he likes. I’ve made a study of Paul Verne, and I think it’s just the kind of idea that would appeal to him.”
“Would he have money? Could he afford a hide-out like that?”
“Money is no object. He’s got scads.”
“But why this particular sanitarium?”
I shrugged. “Just a better chance than most. First, I think he’s in Springfield, and he isn’t at any of the others.”
“How do you know that?”
“There are only two others here. One is for the criminally insane. He certainly wouldn’t commit himself there voluntarily—too hard to get out again, and too much investigation involved. The other’s for women only. But Stanley’s place is ideal. Brand new, takes wealthy patients with minor warps, comfortable—everything.”
Kit sighed. “Well, I don’t suppose it’ll take you more than a day to look over the patients and find out.”
“Longer than that,” I said. “I haven’t too much idea what he looks like.”
She stared at me. “Mean you’re working on this and haven’t even gone to the trouble to get a photograph?”
“There aren’t any. Paul Verne did a real job of escaping from the sanitarium out West. He robbed the office of all the papers in his own case—fingerprints, photographs, everything. Took along all their money, too.”
I thought it best not to mention to Kit that he’d burned the place down as well.
“Then he went to his parents’ home. They were away on vacation or something, and he destroyed all the photographs of himself, even those of himself as a kid. He also took along all the money and jewelry loose, enough to last him ten years.”
“But you have a description, haven’t you?”
“I have a description as he was three years ago,” I said. “A guy can change quite a bit in three years, and if you haven’t got a photograph you’re not in much luck. But I know he’s got brown hair, unless he dyed or bleached it. I know he weighed a hundred sixty then. Of course he might have taken on a paunch since then, or got thin from worry. I know he’s got brown eyes—unless he went to the trouble of getting tinted contact lenses to change their apparent color.”
I grinned at her. “But I do know he’s within a couple of inches of five feet nine. He might make himself seem a couple inches under by acquiring a stoop, or a couple inches over by wearing these special shoes with built-up inner heels.”
