“Now hold on!” He was out of his chair. Bumble appeared in the doorway, propelled by Hilda. Their faces were set, lips clenched. Bumble pushed past the redheaded girl and advanced towards him. He sat down quickly before the giant Negro could reach him. “Hold on!” he repeated. “Gimme time to answer, will you?”
Betty reached out to touch the Negro’s arm. Bumble stopped, his strangely colored eyes never leaving the sweating face of the detective.
“What about that letter?” she demanded savagely.
His answer tumbled out in a torrent of words. “There wasn’t anything to it. Honest. Just my telephone number typed on a sheet of paper. My own paper and written on my own typewriter. That’s all. It was mailed in Boone; night before last, I think, and picked up and canceled yesterday morning.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You must have a reason for pinning down the time like that?”
He nodded. “Channy was killed about sundown. I think he mailed me that letter on his way to the drugstore. It was picked up from a street box early the next morning.”
“Channy!”
“Yes. He knew you’d tapped my phone. He came to see me that morning to sound me out, as I’ve explained. He was satisfied with me. You see — he was standing outside my door, playing with his key ring when I first arrived at the office. He must have gone inside, looked around, typed the letter and had just let himself out again when I climbed the stairs. If he hadn’t planned to consult me that morning, he had to stay and bluff it through, then. So that evening he mailed it.”
Betty said hesitantly, “He knew it was tapped.”
Heavy silence enveloped the tableau in the bedroom, the three unfriendly faces studying his. Bumble would move first, he speculated. Bumble would leap for him; the two women would stand aside waiting for Bumble to finish him. One blow from the Negro’s fist and he was done for. He’d have to evade that somehow. He’d have to get to the insane redhead, use her as a shield.
But watch Hilda. She was undoubtedly armed. Somewhere in those voluminous folds of clothing would be a kitchen knife at the very least. Grab the girl — back up against the wall — force Bumble and Hilda into the bathroom; lock them in.
And make a run for the car before the imprisoned pair could batter their way to freedom. He tensed, the thoughts exciting his muscles.
They noted that.
Betty broke the tension in the room. She walked in front of the Negro and shoved on his chest. He backed towards the door.
“Are you going to behave, Jack?”
“I haven’t misbehaved,” he pointed out coldly. “You started this ruckus.”
Her eyes dropped. “I did, and I’m sorry. I apologize, Jack. Shall we forget it?”
He shrugged as though to suggest the occurrence were an everyday affair. Betty refused to meet his eyes. She turned to the pair of servants waking in the doorway and dismissed them with a wave of the hand. They returned to the kitchen, Hilda nudging Bumble along.
“Lunch will be ready in a few minutes, Jack.” Her voice sounded strange and strained. She was on the verge of tears. “Please go away. I want to clean up.”
He walked out shutting the bedroom door behind him.
A newspaper she had brought from town caught his eye. He scanned the headlines but there were no new developments there. Nothing had been printed about the men from Chicago or the examination of the crater. The Chief of Police made his usual bluff about an early arrest.
Buried near the bottom of the fifth page, below the daily horoscope, he found news.
The item stated briefly that a man registered at the Warth Hotel as W. Mason Robinson had been found unconscious in his room, apparently the victim of a beating. The man had been in the room for some time. The discovery of a trail of blood up the back stairs had led a bellboy to his door. Police advanced the theory he had met with foul play on the streets but had managed to reach his room before collapsing.
The beating had occurred from twenty-four to thirty-six hours earlier; the man was given an even chance of recovering. Visitors were not permitted at the hospital. That was all.
That was enough, quite enough, Horne reflected.
Robinson had been beaten on the street, all right. The miracle of it was that he had not been beaten to a pulp, that he had possessed the remaining strength and the tremendous will power to return to his hotel room. He must have had a compelling desire to return and hide in his hotel room.
Robinson hadn’t been very well protected, not nearly so well as had Horne in his upstairs office. Robinson had stood in the stairway at the street level and taken a much larger shock of the blast.
“Talk about poetic justice...” Horne murmured. “Any time the redhead wants to apologize for that sock on the head, I’ll tell her where her father is. Any time.”
Eleven
Sergeant Wiedenbeck emerged from the restaurant to blink in the bright sun and pick his teeth with an oversize toothpick. He paused on the sidewalk, glancing idly up and down the street. Someone sitting in a car across the way sounded a horn.
He waited for the traffic lights to change, and ambled across to the parked car.
“Hi’a, doctor,” he greeted Elizabeth Saari.
She pushed open the door nearest him. “Climb in, sergeant. Busy?”
“Nope. Not now. I’m off duty.”
Doctor Saari started the motor and slipped into the stream of traffic.
“Nice afternoon,” she commented pointlessly. “Let’s take a ride.”
“Don’t mind a bit. Not at all.”
The doctor didn’t fool Sergeant Wiedenbeck. Not an iota. Charles Horne had been missing for four days.
Elizabeth Saari drove steadily away from town. Traffic thinned out and she fed gas to the car, sending it speeding towards the city limits. The sergeant said nothing, knowing that her mental state was still wound in the wrong direction.
When at last they were in the open country, driving aimlessly along first one gravel road and then another, he made a few stabs at opening a conversation. He possessed news, what he considered good news, but how Elizabeth might take it was another matter. He decided to save the best for the last, to work up to it gradually.
“The perfessor and his bodyguard went back to Chi,” he said by way of an opening.
She nodded absently, her eyes on the twisting road but not really seeing it. “That lets the government out.”
“I don’t mind telling you,” Wiedenbeck continued, “that I was scared.”
“Weren’t we all? A thing like that — what we thought it might be, at first, was horrible to contemplate. I was too shocked to be frightened, until I knew for sure there were no fatal aftereffects in our patient. The one who was blown through the window, I mean; not the other.”
He nodded and let her ramble on.
“Eventually, I suppose, some perverted science will be able to reduce such a weapon to portable possibilities.” She paused. “By that I mean, someday, whether we like it or not, the thing will become what the hand grenade and such now are — and every hoodlum in the underground will have it.” Elizabeth shuddered. “I don’t think I want to live to see the day.”
“You probably won’t,” he reminded her dryly. “When every gangster in the country can toss an atomized pineapple into a bookie joint or whatever, there will be damned few of us left.”
“But the problem is how to prevent such a thing! Look how near we thought we were to that very thing, some days ago. We can’t just sit around, hoping regulations and laws will protect us. Practically every weapon invented has found its way into a thug’s hand sooner or later. With telling results.”
“I don’t know.” Wiedenbeck hunched down in his seat. “All I know is, this was something else. And I ain’t scared no more.”