“Easy,” he said into the slitted, dancing eyes; “easy now.”
Larry Ormsby’s white teeth flashed under his mustache.
“Righto,” he smiled. “If you’ll turn my wrist loose, I’d like to shake hands with you — a sort of ante-bellum gesture. I like you, Threefall; you’re going to add materially to the pleasures of Izzard.”
In his room on the third floor of the Izzard Hotel, Steve Threefall undressed slowly, hampered by a stiff left arm and much thinking. Matter for thought he had in abundance. Larry Ormsby slapping his father’s face and threatening him with an automatic; Larry Ormsby and the girl in confidential conversation; Kamp dying in a dark street, his last words lost in the noise of the marshal’s arrival; Nova Vallance giving him an empty revolver, and persuading him to let a burglar escape; the watch on the floor and the looting of the blind man’s savings; the caravan Larry Ormsby had led toward the desert; the talk in the Vauxhall, with its exchange of threats.
Was there any connection between each of these things and the others? Or were they simply disconnected happenings? If there was a connection — and the whole of that quality in mankind which strives toward simplification of life’s phenomena, unification, urged him to belief in a connection — just what was it? Still puzzling, he got into bed; and then out again quickly. An uneasiness that had been vague until now suddenly thrust itself into his consciousness. He went to the door, opened and closed it. It was a cheaply carpentered door, but it moved easily and silently on well-oiled hinges.
“I reckon I’m getting to be an old woman,” he growled to himself; “but I’ve had all I want to-night.”
He blocked the door with the dresser, put his stick where he could reach it quickly, got into bed again, and went to sleep.
A pounding on the door awakened Steve at nine o’clock the next morning. The pounder was one of Fernie’s subordinates, and he told Steve that he was expected to be present at the inquest into Kamp’s death within an hour. Steve found that his wounded arm bothered him little; not so much as a bruised area on one shoulder — another souvenir of the fight in the street.
He dressed, ate breakfast in the hotel café, and went up to Ross Amthor’s “undertaking parlor,” where the inquest was to be held.
The coroner was a tall man with high, narrow shoulders and a sallow, puffy face, who sped proceedings along regardless of the finer points of legal technicality. Steve told his story; the marshal told his, and then produced a prisoner — a thick-set Austrian who seemingly neither spoke nor understood English. His throat and lower face were swathed in white bandages.
“Is this the one you knocked down?” the coroner asked.
Steve looked at as much of the Austrian’s face as was visible above the bandages.
“I don’t know. I can’t see enough of him.”
“This is the one I picked out of the gutter,” Grant Fernie volunteered; “whether you knocked him there or not. I don’t suppose you got a good look at him. But this is he all right.”
Steve frowned doubtfully. “I’d know him,” he said, “if he turned his face up and I got a good look at him.”
“Take off some of his bandages so the witness can see him,” the coroner ordered. Fernie unwound the Austrian’s bandages, baring a bruised and swollen jaw.
Steve stared at the man. This fellow may have been one of his assailants, but he most certainly wasn’t the one he had knocked into the street. He hesitated. Could he have confused faces in the fight?
“Do you identify him?” the coroner asked impatiently.
Steve shook his head.
“I don’t remember ever seeing him.”
“Look here, Threefall” — the giant marshal scowled down at Steve — “this is the man I hauled out of the gutter — one of the men you said jumped you and Kamp. Now what’s the game? What’s the idea of forgetting?”
Steve answered slowly, stubbornly:
“I don’t know. All I know is that this isn’t the first one I hit, the one I knocked out. He was an American — had an American face. He was about this fellow’s size, but this isn’t he.”
The coroner exposed broken yellow teeth in a snarl, the marshal glowered at Steve, the jurors regarded him with frank suspicion. The marshal and the coroner withdrew to a far corner of the room, where they whispered together, casting frequent glances at Steve.
“All right,” the coroner told Steve when this conference was over; “that’s all.”
From the inquest Steve walked slowly back to the hotel, his mind puzzled by this newest addition to Izzard’s mysteries. What was the explanation of the certain fact that the man the marshal had produced at the inquest was not the man he had taken from the gutter the previous night? Another thought: the marshal had arrived immediately after the fight with the men who had attacked him and Kamp, had arrived noisily, drowning the dying man’s last words. That opportune arrival and the accompanying noise — were they accidental? Steve didn’t know; and because he didn’t know he strode back to the hotel in frowning meditation.
At the hotel he found that his bag had arrived from Whitetufts. He took it up to his room and changed his clothes. Then he carried his perplexity to the window, where he sat smoking cigarette after cigarette, staring into the alley below, his forehead knotted beneath his tawny hair. Was it possible that so many things should explode around one man in so short a time, in a small city of Izzard’s size, without there being a connection between them — and between them and him? And if he was being involved in a vicious maze of crime and intrigue, what was it all about? What had started it? What was the key to it? The girl?
Confused thoughts fell away from him. He sprang to his feet.
Down the other side of the alley a man was walking — a thick-set man in soiled blue — a man with bandaged throat and chin. What was visible of his face was the face Steve had seen turned skyward in the fight — the face of the man he had knocked out.
Steve sprang to the door, out of the room, down three flights of stairs, past the desk, and out of the hotel’s back door. He gained the alley in time to see a blue trouser-leg disappearing into a doorway in the block below. Thither he went.
The doorway opened into an office building. He searched the corridors, upstairs and down, and did not find the bandaged man. He returned to the ground floor and discovered a sheltered corner near the back door, near the foot of the stairs. The corner was shielded from the stairs and from most of the corridor by a wooden closet in which brooms and mops were kept. The man had entered through the rear of the building; he would probably leave that way; Steve waited.
Fifteen minutes passed, bringing no one within sight of his hiding-place. Then from the front of the building came a woman’s soft laugh, and footsteps moved toward him. He shrank back in his dusky corner. The footsteps passed — a man and a woman laughing and talking together as they walked. They mounted the stairs. Steve peeped out at them, and then drew back suddenly, more in surprise than in fear of detection, for the two who mounted the stairs were completely engrossed in each other.
The man was Elder, the insurance and real-estate agent. Steve did not see his face, but the checkered suit on his round figure was unmistakable — “college-boy suit,” Kamp had called it. Elder’s arm was around the woman’s waist as they went up the stairs, and her cheek leaned against his shoulder as she looked coquettishly into his face. The woman was Dr. MacPhail’s feline wife.
“What next?” Steve asked himself, when they had passed from his sight. “Is the whole town wrong? What next, I wonder?”
The answer came immediately — the pounding of crazy footsteps directly over Steve’s head — footsteps that might have belonged to a drunken man, or to a man fighting a phantom. Above the noise of heels on wooden floor, a scream rose — a scream that blended horror and pain into a sound that was all the more unearthly because it was unmistakably of human origin.