He hung up, abruptly. I went back to my chair, troubled. He had not asked me about Ricori. That in itself was disquieting. Mollie? Peters' sister, of course! Was it that she had learned of her brother's death, and suffered collapse? I recalled that Ricori had said she was soon to be a mother. No, I felt that McCann's panic had been due to something more than that. I became more and more uneasy. I looked over my appointments. There were no important ones. Coming to sudden determination, I told my secretary to call up and postpone them. I ordered my car, and set out for the address McCann had given me.
McCann met me at the door of the apartment. His face was drawn and his eyes haunted. He drew me within without a word, and led me through the hall. I passed an open door and glimpsed a woman with a sobbing child in her arms. He took me into a bedroom and pointed to the bed.
There was a man lying on it, covers pulled up to his chin. I went over to him, looked down upon him, touched him. The man was dead. He had been dead for hours. McCann said:
"Mollie's husband. Look him over like you done the boss."
I had a curiously unpleasant sense of being turned on a potter's wheel by some inexorable hand—from Peters, to Walters, to Ricori, to the body before me. Would the wheel stop there?
I stripped the dead man. I took from my bag a magnifying glass and probes. I went over the body inch by inch, beginning at the region of the heart. Nothing there nothing anywhere…I turned the body over…
At once, at the base of the skull, I saw a minute puncture.
I took a fine probe and inserted it. The probe—and again I had that feeling of infinite repetition—slipped into the puncture. I manipulated it, gently.
Something like a long thin needle had been thrust into that vital spot just where the spinal cord connects with the brain. By accident, or perhaps because the needle had been twisted savagely to tear the nerve paths, there had been paralysis of respiration and almost instant death.
I withdrew the probe and turned to McCann.
"This man has been murdered," I said. "Killed by the same kind of weapon with which Ricori was attacked. But whoever did it made a better job. He'll never come to life again as Ricori did."
"Yeah?" said McCann, quietly. "An' me an' Paul was the only ones with Ricori when it happened. An' the only ones here with this man, Doc, was his wife an' baby! Now what're you going to do about that? Say those two put him on the spot—like you thought we done the boss?"
I said: "What do you know about this, McCann? And how did you come to be here so—opportunely?"
He answered, patiently: "I wasn't here when he was killed—if that's what you're getting at. If you want to know the time, it was two o'clock. Mollie got me on the 'phone about an hour ago an' I come straight up."
"She had better luck than I had," I said, dryly. "Ricori's people have been trying to get hold of you since one o'clock last night."
"I know. But I didn't know it till just before Mollie called me. I was on my way to see you. An' if you want to know what I was doing all night, I'll tell you. I was out on the boss's business, an' yours. For one thing trying to find out where that hell–cat niece keeps her coupe. I found out—too late."
"But the men who were supposed to be watching—"
"Listen, Doc, won't you talk to Mollie now?" he interrupted me, "I'm afraid for her. It's only what I told her about you an' that you was coming that's kept her up."
"Take me to her," I said, abruptly.
We went into the room where I had seen the woman and the sobbing child. The woman was not more than twenty–seven or –eight, I judged, and in ordinary circumstances would have been unusually attractive. Now her face was drawn and bloodless, in her eyes horror, and a fear on the very borderline of madness. She stared at me, vacantly; she kept rubbing her lips with the tips of her forefingers, staring at me with those eyes out of which looked a mind emptied of everything but fear and grief. The child, a girl of no more than four, kept up her incessant sobbing. McCann shook the woman by the shoulder.
"Snap out of it, Mollie," he said, roughly, but pityingly, too. "Here's the Doc."
The woman became aware of me, abruptly. She looked at me steadily for slow moments, then asked, less like one questioning than one relinquishing a last thin thread of hope:
"He is dead?"
She read the answer in my face. She cried:
"Oh, Johnnie—Johnnie Boy! Dead!"
She took the child up in her arms. She said to it, almost tranquilly: "Johnnie Boy has gone away, darling. Daddy has had to go away. Don't cry, darling, we'll soon see him!"
I wished she would break down, weep; but that deep fear which never left her eyes was too strong; it blocked all normal outlets of sorrow. Not much longer, I realized, could her mind stand up under that tension.
"McCann," I whispered, "say something, do something to her that will arouse her. Make her violently angry, or make her cry. I don't care which."
He nodded. He snatched the child from her arms and thrust it behind him. He leaned, his face close to the woman's. He said, brutally:
"Come clean, Mollie! Why did you kill John?"
For a moment the woman stood, uncomprehending. Then a tremor shook her. The fear vanished from her eyes and fury took its place. She threw herself upon McCann, fists beating at his face. He caught her, pinioned her arms. The child screamed.
The woman's body relaxed, her arms fell to her sides. She crumpled to the floor, her head bent over her knees. And tears came. McCann would have lifted, comforted her. I stopped him.
"Let her cry. It's the best thing for her."
And after a little while she looked up at McCann and said, shakily:
"You didn't mean that, Dan?"
He said: "No, I know you didn't do it, Mollie. But now you've got to talk to the Doc. There's a lot to be done."
She asked, normally enough now: "Do you want to question me, Doctor? Or shall I just go on and tell you what happened?"
McCann said: "Tell him the way you told me. Begin with the doll."
I said: "That's right. You tell me your story. If I've any questions, I'll ask them when you are done."
She began:
"Yesterday afternoon Dan, here, came and took me out for a ride. Usually John does not…did not get home until about six. But yesterday he was worried about me and came home early, around three. He likes…he liked…Dan, and urged me to go. It was a little after six when I returned.
"'A present came for the kid while you were out, Mollie,' he said. 'It's another doll. I'll bet Tom sent it.' Tom is my brother.
"There was a big box on the table, and I lifted the lid. In it was the most life–like doll imaginable. A perfect thing. A little girl– doll. Not a baby–doll, but a doll like a child about ten or twelve years old. Dressed like a schoolgirl, with her books strapped, and over her shoulder—only about a foot high, but perfect. The sweetest face—a face like a little angel. John said: 'It was addressed to you, Mollie, but I thought it was flowers and opened it. Looks as though it could talk, doesn't it? I'll bet it's what they call a portrait–doll. Some kid posed for that, all right.' At that, I was sure Tom had sent it, because he had given little Mollie one doll before, and a friend of mine who's…whose dead…gave her one from the same place, and she told me the woman who made the dolls had gotten her to pose for one. So putting this together, I knew Tom had gone and gotten little Mollie another. But I asked John: 'Wasn't there a note or a card or anything in it?' He said, 'No—oh, yes, there was one funny thing. Where is it? I must have stuck it in my pocket.'
"He hunted around in his pockets and brought out a cord. It had knots in it, and it looked as if it was made of hair. I said, 'Wonder what Tom's idea was in that?' John put it back in his pocket, and I thought nothing more about it.