The reels spun on in silence. Then Fosse was heard again. “Mr. Berlinger? Are you awake?”
Two soft groans might have been an affirmative reply.
“Do you know who it was, Mr. Berlinger? The man who hit you with his car at the library?”
“Yes.” It was little more than a whisper.
“Who, Mr. Berlinger? Who was it?”
The reels made two revolutions. Then the weak voice whispered through wired jaws:
“Teach...”
A shiver ran up Mr. Strang’s spine as the voice trailed off into nothingness.
Fosse reached over and flipped the switch. “Okay,” he said. “Paul tells me you’re very sharp, Mr. Strang. We got four suspects. A store manager, a man who works in the sanitation department, a truck driver” — he paused for effect — “and a teacher. Now you heard the tape. Who do you think Berlinger was accusing?”
Mr. Strang just shook his head and stared at the table.
“Mr. Strang.” Fosse spoke in a low confidential voice. “Like Paul says, you’re an old man. Now we can work something out. I’m sure no judge is going to give a person like you more than a few months. Why don’t you just tell us how it all happened?”
A few months in prison. And what then? Leave Aldershot — the only home he’d known for most of his life? How could he be expected to command honor and respect from his students after this? He’d be washed up as a teacher wherever he went. It all seemed so unfair. Mr. Strang was innocent.
But then why that accusing word on the tape?
“What now, Paul?” Mr. Strang asked in a cracked voice.
“We’ll let you phone a lawyer. If you hurry, maybe he can arrange bail before the court closes.”
As they left the room Fosse started to grip Mr. Strang’s arm, but Roberts brushed the other detective’s hand away. They went out into the hallway, where a plumber was trying to unplug the drain to one of the building’s ancient drinking fountains.
Mr. Strang looked at the can of caustic soda in the plumber’s hand. The word POISON was printed in big red letters along the side of the can.
Something stirred in the teacher’s mind. Trancelike he walked over and took the can from the plumber’s hand.
“Hey,” muttered Fosse to Roberts. “You don’t think he’d try to swallow—”
But the teacher was making no attempt to open the can. Instead he peered closely at the label.
“Paul,” said Mr. Strang, returning to his place, “could I ask Mr. Fosse just one question?”
Roberts looked at Fosse. They shrugged. “Why not?”
“Tell me, Mr. Fosse, when you visited Cliff — Mr. Berlinger — did he act at all strange?”
“He didn’t act any way. In the first place the doctors had given him something for the pain, so he was groggy. And second, he couldn’t hardly move anything but his eyes. And he wasn’t even looking at me. Just staring through the door of the room.”
“ ‘Through’ the door? It was open then?”
“Sure. There was a big poster outside on the opposite wall. It said, Speed Kills.”
“Is that all that was on it?”
“Yep. Underneath the printing there was this big skull and crossbones. And a hypodermic needle at the bottom.”
Mr. Strang could almost hear the wheels whirring in his brain as he tried to remember something he’d heard in a high-school class nearly 50 years ago. And then the wheels stopped.
Jackpot!
“Geez, look at him, Paul,” whispered Fosse. “This is really beginning to hit him. He’s crying.”
Mr. Strang whipped out a red bandanna handkerchief and blew his nose loudly. Waves of relief washed over him, and he longed to set his trembling body into a chair. No, this was not a time for weakness.
Slowly he drew his glasses from the jacket pocket and peered through them at the detectives as he might have regarded a class of students. “Here’s what I want you to do,” he said imperiously.
“What you want?” Fosse’s face was starched with surprise. “Hey, you’re in custody, mister!”
“Shut up and listen, Walt. You might learn something.” There was a grin plastered across Roberts’ face. If Mr. Strang was acting like a teacher again, the truth was coming.
“Mr. Fosse.” The teacher stood poised on a pinnacle of icy dignity. “If you want the person who really ran down Cliff Berlinger, I’ll tell you what to do. Listen closely because I’m not about to repeat myself.”
For a moment Fosse was back in St. William’s Parochial School, preparing to have his knuckles rapped by Sister Anne’s ruler. He listened without interruption.
When the teacher had finished, Fosse shook his head. “I dunno, Mr. Strang,” he said. “It sounds like a mighty long shot to me.”
“What have you got to lose by taking a look?” asked Roberts. “And just to make it interesting, I’ll bet you a steak dinner that Mr. Strang’s right, that you find it.”
In less than 45 minutes Fosse returned to the precinct house with a new prisoner in tow. “It’s like you had second sight, Mr. Strang,” Fosse said in awed tones. “It was all there. The car and everything. He’d put in a new headlight, but I found the old one in the trash. It’s down at the lab right now, and if the piece of glass we found on the library driveway fits the rest, we’ve got our man. It’s spooky how you knew all about it.”
“Hello, Mr. Wilson,” said the teacher. “I can’t tell you how good it is to see you here.”
The librarian mumbled something into his black beard and stared at the floor.
“Go on, Mr. Strang,” said Fosse. “Lay out the case against him.”
“You haven’t got a thing on me,” growled Wilson. “Both Roberts and Fosse saw my car at the library that night, and there wasn’t a dent or a broken headlight on it.”
“Of course there wasn’t,” replied the teacher. “Because the car they saw was not the car you were in when you hit Cliff Berlinger.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Come now, Mr. Wilson. The time for dissembling is past. Your car — the one you were in when Mr. Fosse saw you — has a leaky canvas top. Therefore you must have borrowed your sister’s sedan so you wouldn’t leave the library to find your own car half full of water. But after the borrowed car hit Cliff Berlinger — and before you phoned the police — you drove the damaged automobile back to your sister’s house and stashed it in the garage. The trip couldn’t have taken more than ten minutes.
“You then drove back to the library in your own car, stopping off at a drug store long enough to phone the police and still return before anyone else got to the library. That’s why your call was made at nine thirty even though the library closed at nine. And the police never examined your garage for the car they were looking for because at no time were you under suspicion. On the contrary, you were the public-spirited citizen who had reported the crime.”
Paul Roberts’ grin threatened to touch his earlobes. It was good to see the old Mr. Strang back, instead of the pitiful creature the teacher had become during the time he was under arrest.
“I deny the whole thing,” Wilson snapped.
“Mr. Wilson,” chided the teacher. “How do you explain that broken headlight from your sister’s car?”
“Anybody can break a headlight.”
“You’ll be singing a different tune if the lab matches the bits of glass I found with the headlight from your rubbish can,” said Fosse. “And even if they don’t, Berlinger’s getting better every day. He’ll make a positive identification of you, all right.”
Fosse turned to the teacher. “Just one thing I don’t get. How did you know it was Wilson, Mr. Strang?”
“Cliff Berlinger told me.”
“But all he said was ‘teach’.”
Mr. Strang leaned down and picked up a book from the floor. “While you were at Wilson’s sister’s house, Paul and I got this from the library,” he said.