It was midnight before Dr. Kang went up to bed. Before he retired he locked his door and saw that the window was bolted. He lay in the darkness knowing that there could be little sleep for him.
It was three o’clock in the morning when the night clerk at the hotel desk, a Sudanese who knew better than to get in the way of the Emir’s people, heard someone come across the deserted lobby. He opened one eye and watched a robed Arab approach the desk. Without a word the clerk pushed a passkey over the desk.
“It is understood,” said the Arab, “that you are blind and deaf?”
“And I still sleep,” said the clerk.
The robed figure glided away towards the stairs. The clerk sat there, glad that he would go off duty before the murder of Dr. Kang was discovered. He sat there listening and there was no sound except the tinkling of the fountain in the garden.
Five minutes later the Arab came quietly down the stairs and dropped the passkey on the desk. Just for a moment the clerk glimpsed a smear of blood on the man’s hand and then the Arab was gone. He picked up the key, wiped off any fingerprints with his handkerchief, and then replaced it.
A few minutes later he was sleeping. He slept on until the clock struck six and the first shafts of morning sun through the lounge windows woke him. Then he sat up, yawned, and rubbed his eyes.
At that moment there was a sound from the stairs. He looked up. Dr. Kang was coming down, carrying his suitcase. The clerk’s mouth gaped with surprise as Dr. Kang came to the desk, beaming.
“There is a Cairo plane at six thirty? Am I right?” he asked gently.
The clerk nodded.
Dr. Kang pulled out a wallet, a very fat wallet, from his pocket and put some money on the desk.
“This will take care of the bill. The change you can keep.”
As he turned away, he paused and put his hand in his pocket.
“I was forgetting. Before you came on duty I borrowed this from the day clerk.”
He dropped a screwdriver onto the desk. He went out chuckling and he continued to chuckle to himself long after he was safely on the plane.
Back in the hotel the body of Monsieur Charap — in Room 12 — would soon be discovered in bed with a dagger through the heart. Room 10 which should have held the dead body of Dr. Kang would be neat and empty. When the Arab had come to do his work the numbers of the three rooms along the passage had read, 12, 11, and 10. And half an hour after the Arab had left Dr. Kang had made them read correctly again — 10, 11, and 12. A man did not have to change his room to avoid death. It was easier to take the brass figure 0 from his own 10 and switch it with the brass 2 from Monsieur Charap’s 12. And just as easy to walk along a verandah afterward and go in through a window to relieve the dead Monsieur Charap of the Emir’s money... Without money how could a man ever afford to be generous?
Frederick Nebel
No Kid Stuff
A restrained but vigorous study of a State Trooper who for months had been overcautious. Some of his coworkers thought he had lost his guts. But Kinsland wasn’t yellow...
The bulky trooper was soft on his feet for a man of his size. He was all the way across the bedroom, setting down his square strongbox, when Kinsland stirred on the cot against the opposite wall and kicked off the covers. Kicked hard, for Katherine Eaves was on his mind again.
“Uh?” Boagard said. “Wake you?”
“Uh-uh.” Kin sat up. “Been awake on and off all night. How was yours out there on the Pike?” Kin was twenty-nine — six years a trooper.
“So-so. Okay.” Boagard had put on his pajamas in the locker room. He rolled up the window shade, his broad face calm and remote in the windy sunlight. “A vag. Two drunk drivers. Changed a tire — some woman.” He got into bed, unlocked the strongbox, and took out some pamphlets; and the next minute he was even more remote, absorbed in his reading, settled in solid, indestructible repose.
“Day off,” Kin said, watching the wind skim brown November leaves across the parking lot. “I’m on duty tonight. Downstairs — not on patrol.” He was always a little apprehensive these days about the night tour. But downstairs, on call, was better than the night patrol. It was six months, almost to the date, since his good friend had been killed. Boagard had been sent in from a post two hundred miles east to replace Harry Eaves. Harry-had been young — a rookie, really — and he’d been lots of fun. Boagard was no fun. He was a fifteen-year man, giving out little, asking nothing; dedicated with quiet resolve to anything he set out to do; a competent police officer, strict and businesslike. Kin started to say what a wonderful day it looked out; but weather, fair or foul, never brightened or depressed Boagard.
Kin put on his bathrobe and went down two flights of stairs to the basement locker room. He showered and shaved, watching the clock, and took civilian clothes from his green metal locker. Katherine was on his mind most of the time; but after last night, more than ever. And now — the way her aunt had come out with it about Harry — Kin felt heartsick and lonely and a little desperate. For Katherine.
He skipped breakfast in the barracks dining room. Outside, the rollicking wind stirred his spirits; he swung his arms to ease the tension that always seemed to burn between his shoulder blades. He dropped his arms at sight of Stutz, the new commanding officer of the Drum Ridge barracks. “Morning, sir. Nice morning, after all the rain.”
“Nice country,” Stutz said, taking his prebreakfast walk up and down the parking lot. It was only his third month at Drum; he had been transferred from Post D in a tough industrial area three hundred miles south. “You’re up early for a man on the long post duty tonight.”
“I’ll catch some sleep this afternoon.” Kin slowed down. “Yes, sir?”
Stutz had started to say something. But he pivoted and scowled off on his brisk walk — a small man, one-half inch above the minimum height required; his body thin, supple at fifty. His small thin face seemed made up of a series of hard knobs — cheekbones, nose, the chin hardest and most prominent of all. His uniform was all spit-and-polish this morning, the flat-brimmed gray stetson tilted sharply over one ear. His eyelids blinked a lot, but the blinking in no way affected the glum, dead-level way he could peer at you. “Enjoy yourself, trooper,” he grinned, on the lap back past Kin, and was off again, admiring the windy view of meadows and rolling hills. And the State Police flag cracking.
Kin drove down the hill to the village center, ate breakfast in a lunchroom and by eight thirty was parked in front of a shingled house eight blocks from the center, high on Church Street. In a little while Katherine came out, stood beside the car, and gazed down the street in wistful abstraction. “I wish you wouldn’t, Kin.” But she shrugged, anyhow, and got in beside him, giving him a morning-bright, friendly, altogether unsatisfactory smile. The kind she gave to patients, strange or familiar, as she greeted them in Dr. Wilmott’s waiting room.
Kin said, “I’m sorry I blew my top at your aunt last night.”
“I can’t blame you. She — shouldn’t have said that. But she couldn’t help it — help herself. After all, Harry was her only son.”
“She made me feel like a criminal when she said that if it wasn’t for me he’d still be alive!”
She touched his arm lightly. “Kin, I am sorry — dreadfully sorry.”
He almost started the engine then, but didn’t; his hands were locked on the steering wheel, the knuckles white. “You say so. You say so, Katherine. But you, too — ever since it happened — you’re shying away from me, ducking me; excuses and excuses. And even last night, the first time I’ve seen you in three weeks, you said nothing... nothing... when Aunt Grace let me have it.”