The stranger’s palm rested, quivering in excitement and ebbing strength, on the edge of the white table.
Above the man’s head, draped over the metal frame of the bed and dropping down under the pillow hung a long rubber cord that ended in a push button. Horne followed it with his eyes. It was the only call signal in the two-bed room, given by right of prior occupation to the white-swathed figure in the other bed.
“Betty’s dead,” Horne whispered piercingly across the room. “The redhead’s dead, deader than hell. Bumble killed her. They’re both dead.”
The fingers of that resting palm stirred into quick motion and began their slow, tortured crawl across the top of the table. In the deadened silence that followed his words Horne heard the tinny sounds of the fingernails striking the table’s metal surface. The maniacal eyes, not quite completely hidden under the bandages cloaking the face, only glared on. There was no answering flicker of emotion, no indication that the stranger had heard. Only the movement of his hand.
Horne held tightly to the water tumbler against his chest and watched the progress of that hand.
“They’ve got Deebie Bridges in jail,” he taunted. “Hilda’s there, too. They picked up Hilda yesterday.”
He waited a few moments, not really expecting the other to answer him.
“Hilda made a mistake. She thought she was doing a favor. She came into town and tried to buy me a shirt. They got her.”
He didn’t see the lips move; he couldn’t, covered as they were. But he heard the word hurled at him.
“Sure,” he whispered with humorous indifference, pleased that he had drawn a reply. “That’s me all over. My father was, too. So now Betty’s dead, and Bumble’s dead, and that fat slob Channy’s dead. And they’ve got Deebie Bridges and Hilda in jail. That leaves only you, doesn’t it? Just you, all alone, and no one to do your dirty work for you.”
He stopped as the hand reached the side of the pitcher. In his own silence he heard the fingernails tap the glass.
“The cops are sweating Deebie and Hilda by now. The cops are going to get the answers. All the answers. Have you ever heard of a cop we have here called Wiedenbeck? He’ll get the answers. And then he’ll get you!”
The bandaged hand reached up and grasped the handle of the pitcher. It began to slide across the table, moving faster now for the stranger had only to hold tightly to the pitcher and let his arm fall back to the bed.
“They found the wire Betty used to tap the City Hall telephone line,” Horne taunted, egging the man on, hoping to defeat his purpose by making him throw the pitcher before he had really gathered his strength. “Betty smeared black shoe polish on it, tried to make it seem old and dirty like the other wires. Betty made a lot of mistakes. She talked too much when she thought she had me bottled up. She told me who you were, although she never realized it. Too bad she’s dead; she’d get a kick out of seeing us here together.”
The pitcher and the hand that held it rested on the bed beside the heavily breathing convalescent.
“Your curiosity was the end of you,” Horne drove on, unconsciously raising his voice above the hoarse whisper he had been using. “You had to stick around to see the explosion, didn’t you? But you weren’t as dumb as I was — you knew it wasn’t a screech bomb. You stuck around to see what kind of a job she would do and she blasted hell out of you! Wiedenbeck told me in the ambulance a while ago that she used nitrochloride; you didn’t know that, or you wouldn’t have been standing down on my front steps watching.
“Money hungry, that’s what was eating you. But it’s all over now. Betty’s dead; Betty was a helluva swell girl, but she’s dead. Do you know how she died? Bumble electrocuted her, down in the tunnel under the street. He sliced a knife right through a high tension wire. Electrocuted. That’s what will happen to you. They electrocute them in Illinois. You should have stayed in California. Gas doesn’t hurt so much.”
Why didn’t he make an effort to raise the pitcher?
Abruptly, Horne saw why. He wasn’t going to throw the pitcher from across the room; his aim was faulty and he knew it. The man swung his legs to the floor.
The detective tensed his body and worked an arm free of the sheets. He watched the other put his feet to the floor, shifting his weight to his legs and testing them. The man clutched the side of his bed, holding himself upright until the nausea left him. Then he put out a tentative foot, loosening his hold on the bed, paused a moment to see if he could stand upright. It seemed to satisfy him. He took a step, and another, and then a third. The pitcher in his hand began to swing to and fro like a pendulum.
Horne kicked back the sheets and waited. Neither of them uttered a word; their glances locked and held. The hidden refrigerator somewhere nearby shut itself off and ran down into silence. From the corner of his eye, Horne watched the swinging pitcher.
He guessed the other’s plan of action.
The girl’s father lacked the strength to raise the pitcher above his head, lacked the strength to bring it crashing down on Horne’s face in a lethal blow. Instead he was swinging it back and forth, gathering momentum, and at the right moment when he stood beside the detective’s bed he would allow the momentum to swing the heavy pitcher up and around in a complete arc, smashing it down on Horne.
The man was but a few feet distant. The pitcher swung far back and started up the arc like a railroader’s high, wide highball. Horne swung around on his bed, pivoting on his backsides and lashed out with both feet in the other’s unprotected stomach.
Abruptly the arcing pitcher faltered, dropped in a glancing blow to strike the side of the bed. It slipped from the twitching fingers and crashed to the floor, the sound of the shattering ringing like a small bomb in the night stillness. The upsetting of a chair in the corridor echoed the crash.
The swathed figure bent half double over Horne’s bed, his hands clutching his stomach. Horne hit him in the unseen face.
A uniformed policeman burst through the door, saw Horne sitting up, doing nothing, and an empty bed beyond him.
“Hey! What the hell’s going on here?”
A night nurse shouldered past the policeman and switched on the lights.
“Meet my boss,” Horne said, jerking a thumb downward. “He had a pretty daughter who gave him away.”
The patrolman picked the man up off the floor and stretched him out on his own bed. The nurse had her hand on the pulse of the faintly twitching wrist, counting and waiting.
“Are you crazy?” the patrolman demanded. “That guy is Robinson, a private dick.”
“You’re crazy,” Horne contradicted him flatly. “That guy happens to be E. E. Everetts, my boss. Or should I say my ex-boss. You’d better call Wiedenbeck.”
Charles Horne, wedged tightly in the seat between Sergeant Wiedenbeck and Elizabeth Saari, fumbled in his coat pocket for a package of cigarettes, extracted and lit two, passing one of them to the woman driving.
Elizabeth said, “Thanks, Chuck.”
“If you,” he turned to the sergeant, “want one, light it yourself. You might not like my breath. Have you got the papers?”
“Oh, for crying out loud! Will you shut up about those papers? Yes, I’ve got the papers. This is four times I’ve told you yes, I’ve got the papers. And we’ll pick up the rest of them in Capitol City. Now stop asking.” He lit a cigarette for himself and looked out the window at the wheat fields skimming the highway.
Horne delved into his pocket again and brought out a shiny, flat key. The key Betty had given him to the bank vault.