“Let me know if there’s any change,” he said. Then he took Edith’s left arm, stripped back the sleeve and unwound the bandage.
Howard Cove opened his eyes once and looked up at me.
“You still here?” he asked in a voice that was thick, as though it was difficult for him to move his tongue.
I nodded.
He grinned again.
“So am I,” he said.
Doctor Krueg finished dressing the arm, came over to the man on the table, felt the pulse, pulled back an eyelid, looked at me and shook his head.
“You’ve got to get him out of here,” he said.
“Do we dare to move him?” I asked.
“It won’t make any difference to him,” he said. “Even with the best of care it’s only a matter of an hour or two.”
“Well?” I asked.
“That’s the understanding,” he said. “I patch them up, but I don’t sign any death certificates and I don’t make any explanations. You take care of your own bodies.”
“How do I get him out of here?” I asked.
Doctor Krueg looked significantly at the packing case.
“All right,” I said, “let’s not have any misunderstanding about this. You and your nurse both heard the man’s confession, that he pulled the Loring job.”
Doctor Krueg’s black eyes stared at me, glittering and cold.
“I heard nothing,” he said.
“Your nurse heard it,” I said.
“She heard nothing,” he told me. “If ‘Two-pair’ Kinney told you the truth about me, he told you that I merely give first-aid service. In extreme cases I have a couple of beds in an adjoining room. But I sign no death certificates, I ask no questions, and I hear no comments.”
“But, my God, man!” I told him. “There’s an innocent man in jail for this crime. The guard was shot up and may die. It may be a murder rap.”
Doctor Krueg shrugged his shoulders.
“You owe me,” he said, “fifty dollars on dressing the arm case, and two hundred dollars on this case.”.
“Isn’t that steep?” I asked him.
“That,” he said, “is the price of the service, with no questions asked and no reports made. If you’d prefer to pay regular rates and have me notify the authorities that you’re here with a gunshot case, it suits me all right.”
I took out my wallet and counted out the money.
“I could give you more,” I said, “if you could remember what you heard.”
“I didn’t hear anything,” he told me, pocketing the money.
We loaded the man into the packing case and trundled him back down the freight elevator. The janitor was nowhere in sight. Edith held the back door open for me, and I wheeled the packing case out to the loading platform. Then the door closed behind us, and the spring lock clicked into place.
I paused for a moment to take stock of the situation.
“Where are you going to take him?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “My car’s out of the question. There’s blood all over the seat. I’ve got to take it somewhere and ditch it.”
“And Cove?” she asked.
“We’ve got to ditch him.”
“But he confessed,” she said.
I looked at her bitterly.
“Try to make anyone believe it,” I said—“the word of two crooks to support a confession.”
“But he told us where the stuff was.”
I nodded. “That,” I said, “is the only break we’ve got.”
I wheeled the hand-truck out to the curb, leaving the roadster where it was. Edith hailed a cab.
“Continental Hotel,” I told the driver, “and be careful of the box. It’s got some stuff in it that might spill.”
The cab driver helped us load the box on the side of the cab. He held it in place with a strap. Edith and I got in the car.
“It’s only five or six blocks from here,” I told her.
I felt her shudder every time the cab jolted to a stop or lurched in motion, but said nothing. My mind was busy hatching out a scheme that might hold water.
The cab slid in to the curb. I told the driver to wait while I went in and hunted up the head bellboy. I got a room on the third floor, and the bellboy took a hand-truck and brought up the packing case as though it had been filled with gun cotton. The girl and I closed and locked the door behind the bell captain and opened the packing case.
Cove was just about finished. We managed to lift him out and get him on the bed. He was unconscious and his face was slowly turning a putty gray.
“What are you going to do?” she asked me.
“Wait here, will you?” I said.
She nodded.
I slipped out into the hall.
It took me but a matter of seconds to run up the two flights of stairs, and to find 519. I knocked at the door. There was no answer. A passkey put me inside, and I clicked on the light. I didn’t have time to use any caution.
I pulled out the bureau drawer, set it on the bed, looked in back of the place where the drawer had been. There was a cunningly concealed wooden receptacle which had been fashioned by some skilful cabinet-maker. I had to get out two more drawers before I could work out the receptacle. It was lined with cotton. I took off the cover and shook it.
It was empty.
I must have sat there for ten seconds, staring at the empty cotton-lined receptacle. Then I put it back into position and replaced the bureau drawers.
I switched out the lights, slipped out into the corridor and locked the door behind me with my passkey.
I stood in front of the door of Doctor Krueg’s office and emptied my wallet.
A man who stands outside the pale of organized society must carry a roll. There is no place where the truth of the axiom “Money is power,” is more evident than in the underworld.
I had approximately eight thousand dollars in the wallet. A couple of thousand, in hundred dollar bills, I left in the wallet. The balance, in five hundred dollar bills, I made into a roll, snapped with an elastic and put into my hip pocket.
I walked to Doctor Krueg’s office door, pushed my way inside. I could hear the jangle of the bell in the back room.
The nurse came to the door.
She was a pretty thing, with a pair of wide-set eyes, clear and innocent, a face that was youthful and virginal.
She looked at me without expression.
“You?” she said.
I nodded. “I have to see the doctor right away.”
“What about?” she asked.
“I’m afraid that one of the bills I gave him was bad,” I told her.
She stepped to the inner office.
Doctor Krueg came out in a moment. His manner was warily watchful.
“Yes?” he said.
I pulled the wallet from my pocket.
“One of the bills I gave you was bad,” I said. “One of the hundreds.”
The nurse came to the door and stood by him. Doctor Krueg took his wallet from his pocket, took out the two one-hundred dollar bills I had given him, handed them to the nurse. The nurse brought them to me. I looked at them, nodded, put one in my pocket and replaced it with one I had taken from the wallet.
She took them back to Doctor Krueg. He turned the one over and over in his fingers, looked up at me and nodded.
“Very well,” he said.
I turned to the door, and, as I did so, jerked a handkerchief from my hip pocket. I had placed that handkerchief so that the roll of bills came from my pocket and fell to the floor.
I mopped my forehead with the handkerchief, turned and grinned at Doctor Krueg.
“Gosh,” I said, “I was frightened about that. Don’t think that I’m shoving the queer. It was just a bad one that was given to me, and I was holding it to get it redeemed by the chap who gave it to me.”
“It’s quite all right,” he said.
I replaced my handkerchief and stepped out into the corridor. The door closed behind me.