The next thing was whiteness — walls, sheet, table, uniforms.
There was a blurred interlude. Then a starchy intern murmuring, “Three minutes. No more. And don’t excite him.”
Butch chortled, “Excite him, the man says! We got bedtime stories for him.”
Silk nudged the third member of the trio. “Tell him, Carol.”
Carol came to the cotside with shining eyes. “We thought you were ready for the last rites and ceremonies, darling. But you must be made of plastic and piano wire. They say now you’ll be up and doing in two weeks.”
“Two weeks nothing. I’ll be out for bass next weekend.” Tony smiled up at her. “Can you hold off the blue ribbon boys until then?”
She nodded solemnly. “Maggie didn’t pull through. But she made a full confession, and we got it on tape. She said she did it to put her daughter in the clear, but I think at the end she had an attack of remorse for helping Drummond murder her husband.” She stroked his hair gently. “From what she said I don’t think there’s much doubt Drummond cooked the scheme up pretty much by himself, and didn’t have any difficulty getting the others to help him, because it looked like a foolproof way to knock off a lot of money without much danger of a comeback.”
“I’ll give reasonable odds—” Quinn grinned at the gap in Silk’s front teeth — “that a checkup will show Drummond was a defaulter from his bank, probably for a sizable sum. He’d been a respectable citizen for years, or he’d never have been put in such a responsible position. It wouldn’t be rational to believe he just went haywire and bloodthirsty all of a sudden. But if he’d been speculating, say, or playing the horses, he might have dipped into the till until he couldn’t replace what he’d stolen. Then it would have occurred to him that a man in his position, with the authority to okay the payment of cash for checks, could easily get away with a mint of money. All he had to do was locate an individual who had plenty of money in the bank and who couldn’t contest a signature on a big check. Only one answer to that.”
“A big time baddie.” Silk nodded. “And after he’d tried it once, it was too much of a temptation for him to stop. But how’d he know when these hot-shots like Verchamps and Prosser and Attar were coming to our fair city? You must have known how the machinery was greased, but we don’t.”
Tony said, “At some time or other, on some business trip, Drummond must have stopped at the Koppner House in Pittsburgh. There he made the acquaintance of a dishonest house dick who ran a little blackmail racket on the side by ransacking the rooms of guests and getting the lowdown on some of them who didn’t want their presence in the city known. Maybe this bird put the bee on Drummond himself, first. Anyhow, when Drummond found he was in need of a finger-man to point out possible suckers for the sexy come-on game he’d arranged with Mrs. Maggie Wizlow and her daughter who was — well, uh—” He glanced at Carol.
“Go on” — she smiled — “say it. ‘A luscious lay.’ She must have been, to cozen all those hard-boiled Harrys.”
“Yep,” he admitted, “Lulie was all of that. So when Drummond needed suckers for this setup, he turned to the house detective, who must have made a nice piece of change for himself by telephoning the description of cars and prospects to Maggie, who gave them to Lulie, so daughter could go into her ‘accident’ act. Now it’s my turn to be quizmaster. What happened to you, Carol?”
She shivered. “They doped my drink, I guess. One minute I was at the bar, the next I was sitting on the cement floor of a shower bath with a taste in my mouth like the bottom of a bird cage. In the washbowl were a cleaver, a couple of hacksaws and a sponge. I... I don’t want to talk about it. Tony.”
Silk cut in, “You know about me, sir. Except that I had to wait until it was dark before I dared to make any try to get in Cottage Four where I’d seen them take you, carrying you as if you were drunk. But I came as soon as I could make it.”
“You hit it right smack on the nose.” Tony Quinn praised. “A few minutes earlier would have been fatal. Three minutes later, I’d been ready for that cement mixer, myself.”
Butch said, “No, you wouldn’t, Boss. I’d have seen to it you never got in that contraption. Because I was riding it, all the way in from Jack-the-Wrecker’s.”
“You were?” Quinn was astonished.
“Yowzah.” Butch beamed proudly. “I figured the bastards would holler for that spinning buggy when they were fixing to slit somebody’s gizzard. So I got tired waiting there at the house. I went out to that junkyard, shimmied over the fence and climbed up into that damn mixer, rode right to the motel inside it!”
Tony said, “Nice timing, all around. Almost as neat as Drummond’s.”
Carol shuddered. “He had things working to a pretty sharp schedule, didn’t he!”
“Guy really had a red thumb,” Tony said. “Like some people have a green thumb and can make anything grow. He was sort of a red thumb genius at murder.”
Silk said, “In a way it’s too bad we had to stop him. He was putting a lot of nasty characters out of the way, sir.”
Tony sighed. “There’ll still be a few left for us to work on, Silk. Find ’em under any damp rock.”
He put his arm around Carol. “Can’t you lunkheads tell when a man wants to say good night to his girl? Scram!”