Owing to a regional wave of the Asian flu with its subsequent complications, and that vague bite noir elastically labeled virus, even some of the corridors of the Sacred Heart held beds, and a suppressed air of tension pervaded the hospital. With it existed a certain laxity of the less imperative regulations, while a greater than usual ebb and flow of traffic — nurses, sisters, interns, orderlies, visiting relatives, an occasional doctor — gave the place a slight semblance of Grand Central Station during this normally quiet evening hour.
Candice Hoffmann had been fortunate in having been placed in a private room, one vacated through a fatal case of pneumonia. It was a pleasant, impersonal room, its main furnishings being a hospital bed, a dresser, a locker, and some chairs. There were two doors, one to the corridor, one to a private bathroom. There was about the room an aseptic openness that made concealment impossible.
Two windows, open to the trade wind with its odors of the flowering night, were frames for pale moonlight, while a shaded night lamp washed faint amber across the bed’s white pillow and the white-bandaged head with its contusion-marked face resting motionlessly upon it.
Chuck and Monsignor Lavigny stood in the bathroom, in tense expectancy. The bathroom door was opened a crack, sufficiently for them to have a view that included the bed and the corridor door. The two men were continuing an argument in whispers.
“Father, it is still a crime against the Federal government.”
“Technically, yes. But isn’t it the intention that truly constitutes a crime? More so, even, than the crime itself? Remember that Raul has been running guns and ammunition to the rebels at his own expense, paying for them out of his own pocket. There has never been any question of illicit gain. Granted he is a naturalized citizen, yet his roots go back to Cuba. He feels that his family and many of his friends have suffered intolerable injustices from the present regime.”
“A case of patriotism once-removed.”
“Precisely. And precisely the reason why he would rather suffer death than betray his rebel contacts by revealing the truth about his ‘mysterious’ disappearances. So far there exists no proof of his activities and he will never speak. Just as I, except for your confidential ear, shall never speak.”
A sudden pressure of Chuck’s fingers on Monsignor Lavigny’s arm brought immobility and silence. The corridor door, observed through the crack, was opening.
Elise Hoffmann looked in, satisfying herself that the room, with the exception of the patient, was empty. She had been keeping the door under observation for the past five minutes from an inconspicuous post in the traffic-filled corridor, after having noted the departure from the room of a nurse who presumably had arranged her patient for the night.
She came inside and closed the door. A few hurried footsteps carried her to the bed where in fumbling haste her hands pulled the pillow from under the bandage-swathed head, while her dark, abandoned eyes flickered in apprehensive observation between pale windows and the closed corridor door.
She pressed the pillow firmly down on the bruise-marked face.
There was no movement, no struggle. A sound made Mrs. Hoffmann look toward the bathroom door which, remarkably, now stood open with, more remarkable still, that CBI man Mr. Day framed there with a Leica camera held against one eye. Then he was saying, almost casually, “All right, Miss Brown. I have it. You can get up now.”
The strong arms of Miss Brown (sheriff’s dept., physical ed. grad., adept at judo) gave a practiced shove, knocking Elise Hoffmann backward and into a fortuitously located chair.
Extraordinary, the mind, the nerves of a murderer, with that fierce egomaniac clinging to avoid punishment, to save his neck until the last ditch failed! Those were Monsignor Lavigny’s thoughts as he watched Elise Hoffmann stiffen into an icy rage on the chair while, assisted by Chuck, Miss Brown was unswathed from bandages and cleaned of the grease-paint bruise marks that had camouflaged her face.
“I was rearranging the pillow more comfortably,” Elise Hoffmann said in a clear and frigid tone. “Seeing you quite naturally gave me a shock. Unconsciously I put the pillow down. That photograph you have just taken, Mr. Day, shall be the basis of a suit I shall bring against your office.”
No, there was not even a quiver, much less a break. Elise Hoffmann’s control was superb and it was perfectly obvious that she intended to fight. Collapse had been expected, and certainly not this collected defiance.
Chuck took over.
Dispassionately, courteously, he outlined the case against her, tracing the probable moves, both physical and mental, she had gone through.
Her years of oppression under Hoffmann’s domination, with a fretful hatred inevitably building up. The threat of imminent divorce proceedings, ruining her share under the community property law between husband and wife.
(Elise Hoffmann did not even start to break. She sat as a figure of chiseled stone, waiting for an idiot to finish with his maunderings. And Monsignor Lavigny again had that over-the-horizon look.)
Chuck continued. Opportunity presented itself with the morning of the servant-free house, when the staff would be gone at Sea Island, when Candice would, as was her habit, be breakfasting while watching TV in her bedroom, when Hoffmann would be breakfasting alone in the Florida room.
Opportunity aligned itself with the fortuitous clash overheard among Fuentes and Candice and Hoffmann. Fuentes stepped immediately into the role of being groomed as Suspect Number One for the proposed crime.
Then the actual, and this time the true steps. After passing Monsignor Lavigny with a toot of her horn and a good-morning hand wave, the car was garaged. The jack bar was removed from the trunk compartment.
(Elise Hoffmann’s face remained a remotely interested, fashionable mask. Monsignor Lavigny had begun to mutter quietly in his Richelieu beard.)
Candice was, as expected, in her bedroom. Hoffmann was, as expected, breakfasting alone in the Florida room. Not much of a blow on the head was required to cause death — his rickety heart contributed to the result. He toppled sideways off the chair and crashed down on the floor. The sound of running footsteps — Candice. A hasty flattening against the wall beside the archway and a blow with the jack bar as Candice ran through — a blow to silence her as an eyewitness to the immediate picture of the crime.
(Elise Hoffmann smiled. Monfignor Lavigny’s muttering grew faintly severish.)
Chuck steadfastly went on. Not yet the screams. First, the run outdoors to conceal the jack bar among the jasmines. Then the hurried return to the Florida room with the assuming of a horror-stricken pose. Then the screams.
Chuck’s recapitulation was a dud.
He felt swamped with weariness, a bitter wash of failure. The woman would never break.
In the hush of the room, as Chuck’s voice died out, Elise Hoffmann laughed. A cold, amused, diamond-hard laugh.
“Isn’t there a rather important piece of evidence omitted, Mr. Day? Even the newspaper accounts played it up quite strongly. I refer, of course, to the second glass?”
Yes, Chuck realized, her bastions of defense still held. She would never yield while the contradiction offered by the fingerprints remained unresolved. Disheartedly he noticed that Monsignor Lavigny’s mutterings were approaching the decipherable. They seemed to be a murmured supplication to Saint Jude. Then the prelate’s voice exploded with the effect of a minor bomb.