“Fellow by the name of Steve Karl. Very unsavory character. I was against granting him a license when he applied for it, but that’s all the good it did me.”
“Is he still in town?”
“Yes. Lives out at the place there. He’s looking for some new capital to reopen, I understand. I hope he doesn’t find it. I’d like to see that rat’s nest burn down with him in it. Why do you ask?”
“I think I’d like to have a talk with Steve Karl,” Gregory said slowly.
His house was a tall colonial, white and graceful and distinguished looking on the wide, tree-lined curve of Elm Street. Gregory dismissed his taxi at the corner and walked up the hill toward his home. Through the mask of the tall shrubbery in front he could see the cheerfully glowing white light that marked the side door into his office.
As he told Anne Bentley, that light was always on and the office door was always open. It was not usual for a doctor of Gregory’s standing to be on service twenty-four hours a day. But he liked it that way. He enjoyed his work. Each person that paused under the white light and opened that door was a problem for him to solve.
His footsteps sounded crisp and firm on the walk as he went around to the side of his house. He hesitated a second in front of the office door with his hand on the knob. And then, remembering that she would probably be afraid waiting there alone for this long time, he spoke her name cheerfully:
“Hello, Anne Bentley.”
There was no answer from inside. Gregory’s voice died in cold little echoes. He frowned in a worried way, pushed the door open. He stopped short, standing in the doorway, staring incredulously.
The neat white office was a shambles. The center table had been tossed over on its side, and the magazines that had been on top of it were scattered from one end of the room to the other. The glass case containing his extra instruments in steel shining rows had been smashed open. A chair lay in one corner, its metal arms and legs twisted grotesquely.
“Anne Bentley,” Gregory called. His voice sounded hollow and empty in the wrecked room.
He stepped forward, and he saw something that had been hidden behind the tipped table. There was a man lying on the floor, face down, in a crumpled heap. The bright, shining steel handle of a surgeon’s scalpel protruded from his back.
Gregory didn’t need to look twice to know that the man was dead. He didn’t need to look twice to know that the surgeon’s scalpel was one of his own, taken from the smashed glass case.
Slowly he knelt down beside the stiffened figure. He lifted it a little, turned it on its back. Its arm flopped on the floor with an ugly thump.
Gregory was looking down into the grayish, lined face of the attorney, Richard Danborn. Danborn’s tired eyes stared back at him, glassy and lifeless. There was a blue welt-like bruise on his forehead, running slant-wise above his left eye. Gregory touched it gently with his fingers.
After a moment Gregory stood up. His face looked older now, bleak and harsh and determined. Taking his keys from his pocket, he went over to the door that led into his private office, unlocked it. He snapped on a light, crossed to the flat, polished desk. He took a stubby barreled police revolver from one of its drawers, slipped it into his coat pocket. He went out of the office, around to the garage where he kept his small black coupé. He climbed in and headed into the night. He drove for a long time, out of town and toward the bay, and when he stopped, he let the coupé nose into the shallow ditch beside the road. He had switched off his headlights several hundred yards before he had reached this point, and he got out of the car now. Its door made a muffled thump closing.
There was fog on the bay, and it was creeping slowly inland, pushing up on the land in rolling, puffing billows that changed shapes fantastically as they moved. Gregory stood beside the car, his coat buttoned close around his throat, watching around him. The darkness was a soft, oily black, and except for the creep of the fog, nothing else moved. There were no lights anywhere.
Gregory walked slowly down the road. It turned around the edge of a hill that sloped down sharply. The fog seemed to be waiting for him like a placid white lake, and he walked down into it, feeling for his footing. He moved ahead very slowly and quietly in the dim grayness.
A creaking sound to his right brought him up short. He stood tensely, watching the white object that stood beside the road, until he saw that it was inanimate. It was a white, square pillar with a metal sign attached to it by wires that creaked rustily when the night wind touched them.
Stepping closer, Gregory could make out the bright, slanted lettering on the sign:
There was a wavering side road that turned off here, the thin gravel on its surface scoured into the mud underneath it in twin grooves from the pressure of auto tires. Gregory followed it through the fog until he saw the black loom of a building ahead of him.
It was long and low and rambling, shed-like, with a disproportionately high cupola over what had once been the entrance. There had been a Neon sign on top of the cupola, bright enough to be seen far out on the bay. It was gone now, probably seized by one of the Harlem Club’s many creditors, and only the support remained, looking like a steel gallows, gauntly sinister in the fog.
There were no lights in the building. Gregory felt his way along a wall, still following the dim car tracks. They turned around a long L-shaped garage extension of the building and then stopped before warped, wooden doors.
Gregory hesitated there for a while, listening and watching, and then he slid his fingers in behind the bulge of a door and pulled gently. The door moved a little, sliding noiselessly on oiled runners. Gregory peered through the opening, but there was nothing to be seen inside except the oily heave of the blackness.
He pulled the door open farther, slipped cautiously in. The mud on his shoe soles slid on the cement flooring. He could smell gasoline and oil and the indefinable pungency of wet leather.
After a moment of blind, pointless groping, he breathed a soft curse to himself and reached inside his tightly buttoned coat. He took a small clip flashlight from his vest pocket. Holding his revolver ready in his right hand, he pressed the clip. The small circle of light cut brilliantly through the darkness, showed the mud-spattered side of a parked roadster.
“Hold it,” said a voice flatly. “Hold the light right where it is, Doc. I’m covering you.”
The flashlight beam wavered for a second and then was steady. Gregory stood rigid.
Shoes scuffed on the cement. Gregory listened to the sound of them, listened to them come cautiously closer, approaching from behind.
“The gun,” the flat voice said. “Drop it, now.”
Gregory dropped the light instead. Instantly, as soon as his thumb released the clip, the white beam shut itself off, and the flashlight tinkled on the floor in the darkness. Gregory stepped sidewise and swung the revolver back-handed in a flat, swishing arc.
There was a sodden thud as the barrel struck flesh. The voice gasped in a choking bubble of sound. Gregory struck again, heard the grate of the gun-butt as it struck on bone, felt the jar in his wrist.
Feet scraped on the cement. Someone fell with a lunging clatter, sprawling full length.
Gregory waited, breathing hard. He knew from the feel of that last blow that whoever it was he had struck was unconscious now, if not dead. He moved a little, feeling cautiously with his feet for the prone form. He touched its warm, inert limpness.
Then, suddenly, without the slightest warning sound, something hit the side of his head with tremendous, crushing force. He fell sidewise in the darkness, and it seemed that he was falling for long moments before he felt himself strike the coldness of the cement floor. He remembered feeling that, and then he felt nothing more.