Chapter 12
I don't know if you've ever been under ether. You come out of it a little bit at a time. First a kind of a gray light shines on one part of your mind, just a dim gray light, and then it gets bigger, but slow. All the time it's getting bigger you're trying to gag the stuff out of your lungs. It sounds like an awful groan, like you were in pain or something, but that's not it. You try to gag it out of your lungs, and you make those sounds to try and force it out. But away inside somewhere your head is working all the time. You know where you're at, and even if all kind of cock-eyed ideas do swim through that gray light, the main part of you is there, and you can think, maybe not so good, but a little bit.
It seemed to me I had been thinking, even before I began to come to. I knew there must be somebody with me there, but I didn't know who it was. I could hear them talking, but it wouldn't quite reach me what they were saying. Then I could hear it. It was a woman, telling me to open my mouth for a little ice, that would make me feel better. I opened my mouth. I got the ice. I figured the woman must be a nurse. Still I didn't know who else was there. I thought a long time, then figured it out I would open my eyes just a little bit and close them quick, and see who was in the room. I did that. At first I couldn't see anything. It was a hospital room, and there was a table pushed up near the bed, with a lot of stuff on it. It was broad daylight. Over my chest the covers were piled high, so that meant a lot of bandages. I opened my eyes a little bit further and peeped around. The nurse was sitting beside the table watching me. But over back of her was somebody. I had to wait till she moved to see who it was, but I knew anyway even without seeing.
It was Keyes.
It must have been an hour that I lay there after that, and never opened my eyes at all. I was there in the head by that time. I tried to think. I couldn't. Every time I tried to gag more ether out, there would come this stab of pain in my chest. That was from the bullet. I quit trying to gag out the ether then and the nurse began talking to me. She knew. Pretty soon I had to answer her. Keyes walked over.
"Well, that theatre program saved you."
"Yeah?"
"That double wad of paper wasn't much, but it was enough. You'll bleed a little bit for a while where that bullet grazed your lung, but you're lucky it wasn't your heart. Another eighth of an inch, and it would have been curtains for you."
"They get the bullet?"
"Yeah."
"They get the woman?"
"Yeah."
I didn't say anything. I thought it was curtains for me anyway, but I just lay there. "They got her, and I got plenty to tell you boy. This thing is a honey. But give me a half hour. I got to go out and get some breakfast. Maybe you'll be feeling better then yourself."
He went. He didn't act like I was in any trouble, or he was sore at me, or anything like that. I couldn't figure it out. In a couple of minutes an orderly came in "You got any papers in this hospital?"
"Yes sir, I think I can get you one."
He came back with a paper and found it for me. He knew what I wanted. It wasn't on Page 1. It was in the second section where they print the local news that's not quite hot enough to go on the front page. This was it:
MYSTERY SHROUDS GRIFFITH PARK SHOOTING
Two Held After Walter Huff, Insurance Man, Is Found
Wounded at Wheel of Car on Riverside
Drive After Midnight
Police are investigating the circumstances surrounding the shooting of Walter Huff, an insurance man living in the Los Feliz Hills, who was found unconscious at the wheel of his car in Griffith Park shortly after midnight last night, a bullet wound in his chest. Two persons were held pending a report on Huff's condition today. They are:
Lola Nirdlinger, 19.
Beniamino Sachetti, 26.
Miss Nirdlinger gave her address as the Lycee Arms Apartments, Yucca Street, and Sachetti as the Lilac Court Apartments, La Brea Avenue.
Huff apparently was shot as he was driving along Riverside Drive from the direction of Burbank. Police arriving at the scene shortly afterward found Miss Nirdlinger and Sachetti at the car trying to get him out. A short distance away was a pistol with one chamber discharged. Both denied responsibility for the shooting, but refused to make any further statement.
They brought me orange juice and I lay there trying to figure that out. You think I fell for it do you? That I thought Lola had shot me, or Sachetti maybe, out of jealousy, something like that? I did not. I knew who shot me. I knew who I had a date with, who knew I was going to be there, who wanted me out of the way. Nothing would change me on that. But what were these two doing there? I pounded on it a while, and I couldn't make any sense out of it, except a little piece of it. Of course 'Lola was following Sachetti again that night, or thought she was. That explained what she was doing there. But what was he doing there? None of it made sense. And all the while I kept having this numb feeling that I was sunk, and not only sunk for what I had done, but for what Lola was going to find out. That was the worst.
It was almost noon before Keyes came back. He saw the paper. He pulled up a chair near the bed. "I've been down to the office."
"Yeah?"
"It's been a wild morning. A wild morning on top of a wild night."
"What's going on?"
"Now I'll tell you something you don't know. This Sachetti, Huff, this same Sachetti that plugged you last night, is the same man we've been tailing for what he might know about that other thing. That Nirdlinger case."
"You don't mean it."
"I do mean it. I started to tell you, you remember, but Norton got these ideas about keeping all that stuff confidential from agents, so I didn't. That's it. The same man, Huff. Did I tell you? Did I tell Norton? Did I say there was something funny about that case?"
"What else?"
"Your finance company called up."
"Yeah?"
"They popped out with what we'd have known in the first place, I mean me and Norton, if we had taken you into our confidence completely from the beginning. If you had known about this Sachetti, you could have told us what we just found out today, and it's the key to the whole case."
"He got a loan."
"That's right. He got a loan. But that's not it. That's not the important thing. He was in your office the day you delivered that policy to Nirdlinger."
"I couldn't be certain."
"We are. We checked it all up, with Nettie, with the finance company records, with the records in the policy department. He was in there, and the girl was in there, and that's what we've been waiting for. That gives it to us, the hook-up we never had before."
"What do you mean, hook-up?"
"Listen, we know Nirdlinger never told his family about this policy. We know that from a check we've made with the secretary. He never told anybody. Just the same the family knew about it, didn't they?"
"Well-I don't know."
"They knew. They didn't put him on the spot for nothing. They knew, and now we know how they knew. This ties it up."
"Any court would assume they knew."
"I'm not a court. I'm talking about for my own satisfaction, for my own knowledge that I'm right. Because look, Huff, I might demand an investigation on the basis of what my instinct tells me. But I don't go into a courtroom and go to bat with it without knowing. And now I know. What's more, this ties the girl in."
"The-who?"
"The girl. The daughter. She was there, too. In your office, I mean. Oh yeah, you may think it funny, that a girl would pull something like that on her own father. But it's happened. It's happened plenty of times. For fifty thousand bucks it's going to happen plenty of times again."