Kit and I had lunch and then she walked with me to the bus. I told her I might or might not be able to phone her. I couldn't be sure till I knew the set-up at the sanitarium. And not to worry if she didn't hear from me for a week.
"Eddie, why didn't you tell me the truth?" she said.
"Huh? What didn't I tell you?"
"That Paul Verne is a homicidal maniac. That what you're going to do is dangerous, really dangerous. After breakfast this morning, I went to a newspaper office and I read their file of clippings on him. I wouldn't have tried to stop you, Eddie. But--but I want you to be honest with me."
From her face, I could tell she was being brave.
"Okay, honey," I said. "I just didn't want you to worry."
The bus pulled up.
"I won't, Eddie," she said.
I kissed her good-by and got on. She turned away, crying quietly, and I felt like a heel.
I was still feeling punk when I rang the bell that brought Garvey to the gate.
"You again?" he said, and opened it.
I grinned at him. "Well, I found it out," I said.
"Found what out?"
"I'm crazy."
"Huh?"
"That's it. I told you this morning that if I was, I hadn't found it out yet. I found it out."
He digested that as we went up the walk.
"Oh, well, what I told you goes, then," he finally said. "If you want anything just let me know."
We had reached the door, and he turned to leave.
I said, "Sssst," and when he turned back, I leaned over and whispered:
"Can you get me a machine-gun?"
He backed off.
Dr. Stanley turned me over to an attendant who took me to Room Twenty and told me it was to be mine. The attendant said if I wanted he would show me around the place, so I left my suit-case on the bed and went with him.
My room was at the end of the corridor and was the highest number on the second floor. My guide--fortunately he was over six feet tall, so I didn't have to study him as a possible suspect--told me that these twenty rooms, with five others on the first floor, were all the rooms assigned to patients, and that attendants and other employees had quarters on the third floor. He said that, counting me, there were now twelve male patients and seven female. The remaining rooms were empty.
He took me first to the main recreation room on the first floor. There was a bridge game going on in one corner. My friend Harvey Toler was one of the players.
The others were a nondescript little woman with gray hair and mousy eyes, a gaunt, dissipated-looking man of about forty, and an anemic youth. They were introduced to me as Miss Zaner, Frank Betterman and Billy Kendall.
Betterman and Kendall went down on my list as possibles. As we walked on, I elicited from my guide the fact that Betterman was an alcoholic--a dipsomaniac--and Kendall the anemic, was suffering from recurrent amnesia. Periodically, he would forget who he was and where he was and what he was doing there.
We saw another recreation room in the basement, with ping-pong tables and a shuffleboard set-up as well as one billiard table with warped cues and a few rips in the cloth. We encountered several other patients in our walk around the outside grounds, and I was introduced to each.
Five men, out of eight I met, could have been Paul Verne.
White in Blackness
My guide excused himself on the ground of other duties, and I went to my room to unpack. There was a lock on the door of my room, I noticed, but the only keyhole was on the outside. From the inside, one just didn't lock the door.
I stood looking out the window for a moment at a man who, standing in the middle of the driveway, was turning in slow steady circles for no reason that I could discover.
Then I turned back into the room and reached for the handle of my suitcase to move it down to the end of the bed.
The pull nearly jerked my arm out of its socket. It felt as though someone had taken my clothes out of that suitcase and filled it up with paving blocks.
I stared at the suitcase. It was mine, all right.
So I opened it. My clothes were still in it, but packed much more tightly than I'd packed them, to make room for the object that had been added.
It was a tommy gun.
I lifted it out and looked at the drum. It was loaded to capacity, and the bullets were real.
I put it down on the bed alongside the suitcase and stood staring at it unbelievingly.
So Garvey did little errands for patients, huh?
But he had backed off when I'd asked him for a machine-gun.
It just didn't make sense. Granting that he had taken me seriously, granting that he was screwy enough to be willing, where in thunder could he have got a tommy gun?
And why, thinking me crazy, would he have given me one? He was supposed to be sane.
The more I thought about it, the crazier it got.
Finally it occurred to me to look through the rest of my stuff to be sure it was all there.
It all seemed to be. Five shirts, one suit besides the one I was wearing, handkerchiefs, socks. I hadn't counted the smaller items of laundry, but there seemed to be about as many of them as I'd put into the suitcase.
I had just thrown them in, though, and now they were tightly packed to make room for the machine-gun. To give my hands something to do, and my brain a rest, I moved them over to the empty drawers of the bureau. Shirts in the big drawer, handker-chiefs and socks in the upper smaller.
And then I remembered something. None of the rolled-up pairs of socks had been heavier than it should be.
I found the pair of thick, woolen socks into which I had rolled the brass knuckles. I didn't have to unroll it. I could tell merely by feeling. The knucks were gone.
I unrolled the socks to be sure.
And then the humor of the thing hit me square, and I sat down on the edge of the bed and began laughing as though I belonged there, laughing like a blasted loony.
Whoever had given me that loaded tommy gun had gone to the trouble of stealing my set of brass knuckles!
"Lovely," I thought, "perfectly lovely."
Stanley Sanitarium, Paul Verne or no Paul Verne, was going to be an interesting place.
After a while sanity came back to me, and with it the realization that I had to do something about that tommy gun. What?
Take it to Dr. Stanley and tell him the truth about it? If he believed me, okay.
But suppose he didn't--and I wouldn't blame him a bit. Suppose he thought, or even suspected, that I had brought it in myself? Out on my ear I would go, before I got another look at the sanitarium. Or I would have Hobson's choice of paying my fare and signing on as a bona-fide loony and committing myself.
On second thought, I doubted he would give me that alternative. He took "mild psychoses" only. Would he figure a man who pulled a stunt like that with a loaded tommy gun was suffering from a mild psychosis? Hardly. He would turn me over to the police for investigation.
And anyway how could I do an about-face from being a man in need of a job to a man able to pay the plenty high tariff a place like this would charge?
Nope, Dr. Stanley might believe me, or he might not. If I took that chance, I was seriously jeopardizing my "in" here before I even began to accomplish my purpose.
But what then?
Well, there was a tiny penknife on my watch chain. Using it as a screwdriver, I took the breech of the tommy gun apart and took out the firing-pin and the tiny block of metal that held it. I took the bullets out of the drum, too.
Then, leaving the tommy gun, with its teeth pulled, behind me, I went down the corridor a few doors and knocked on a door at random. Number Twelve. As I hoped, there wasn't any answer, and when I tried the door, it opened.