V

Death in the Dark

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

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

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

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

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

Nuts, I thought.

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

Again, nuts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Police.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Maybe I can find Perry Evans for you."

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

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

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

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