I got up again and walked, kept on walking. After a while I drank a little water from the tap, kept it down, drank more. Half an hour or more of that and! was ready to talk to somebody.
The closet door was locked and the chair was too heavy for me. I stripped the bed, slid the mattress to one side. There was a mesh spring underneath, fastened at the top and bottom by heavy coil springs about nine inches long. It took me half an hour and much misery to work one of these loose.
I rested a little and drank a little more cold water and went over to the hinge side of the door.
I yelled «Fire!» at the top of my voice, several times.
I waited, but not long. Steps ran along the hallway outside. The key jabbed into the door, the lock clicked. The hard-eyed little man in the short white coat dodged in furiously, his eyes on the bed.
I laid the coil spring on the angle of his jaw, then on the back of his head as he went down. I got him by the throat. He struggled a good deal. I used a knee on his face. It hurt my knee.
He didn’t say how his face felt. I got a blackjack out of his right hip pocket and reversed the key in the door and locked it from the inside. There were other keys on the ring. One of them unlocked my closet. I looked in at my clothes.
I put them on slowly, with fumbling fingers. I yawned a great deal. The man on the floor didn’t move.
I locked him in and left him.
FIVE
From a wide silent hallway, with a parquetry floor and a narrow carpet down its middle, flat white oak banisters swept down in long curves to the entrance hall. There were closed doors, big, heavy, old-fashioned. No sounds behind them. I went down the carpet runner, walking on the balls of my feet.
There were stained glass inner doors to a vestibule from which the front door opened. A telephone rang as I got that far. A man’s voice answered it, from behind a half-open door through which light came out into the dim hall.
I went back, sneaked a glance around the edge of the open door, saw a man at a desk, talking into the phone. I waited until he hung up. Then I went in.
He had a pale, bony, high-crowned head, across which a thin wave of brown hair curled and was plastered to his skull. He had a long, pale, joyless face. His eyes jumped at me. His hand jumped towards a button on his desk.
I grinned, growled at him: «Don’t. I’m a desperate man, warden.» I showed him the blackjack.
His smile was as stiff as a frozen fish. His long pale hands made gestures like sick butterflies over the top of his desk. One of them began to drift towards a side drawer of the desk.
He worked his tongue loose — You’ve been a very sick man, sir. A very sick man. I wouldn’t advise —»
I flicked the blackjack at his wandering hand. It drew into itself like a slug on a hot stone. I said: «Not sick, warden, just doped within an inch of my reason. Out is what I want, and some clean whisky. Give.»
He made vague motions with his fingers. «I’m Dr. Sundstrand,» he said. «This is a private hospital — not a jail.»
«Whisky,» I croaked. «I get all the rest. Private funny house. A lovely racket. Whisky.»
«In the medicine cabinet,» he said with a drifting, spent breath.
«Put your hands behind your head.»
«I’m afraid you’ll regret this.» He put his hands behind his head.
I got to the far side of the desk, opened the drawer his hand had wanted to reach, took an automatic out of it. I put the blackjack away, went back round the desk to the medicine cabinet on the wall. There was a pint bottle of bond bourbon in it, three glasses. I took two of them.
I poured two drinks. «You first, warden.»
«I — I don’t drink. I’m a total abstainer,» he muttered, his hands still behind his head.
I took the blackjack out again. He put a hand down quickly, gulped from one of the glasses. I watched him. It didn’t seem to hurt him. I smelled my dose, then put it down my throat. It worked, and I had another, then slipped the bottle into my coat pocket.
«Okay,» I said. «Who put me in here? Shake it up. I’m in a hurry.»
«The — the police, of course.»
«What police?»
He hunched his shoulders down in the chair. He looked sick. «A man named Galbraith signed as complaining witness. Strictly legal, I assure you. He is an officer.» -
I said: «Since when can a cop sign as complaining witness on a psycho case?»
He didn’t say anything.
«Who gave me the dope in the first place?»
«I wouldn’t know that. I presume it has been going on a long time.»
I felt my chin. «All of two days,» I said. «They ought to have gunned me. Less kickback in the long run. So long, warden.»
«If you go out of here,» he said thinly, «you will be arrested at once.»
«Not just for going out,» I said softly.
As I went out he still had his hands behind his head.
There was a chain and a bolt on the front door, beside the lock. But nobody tried to stop me from opening it. I crossed a big old-fashioned porch, went down a wide path fringed with flowers. A mockingbird sang in a dark tree. There was a white picket fence on the street. It was a corner house, on Twentyninth and Descanso.
I walked four blocks east to a bus line and waited for a bus. There was no alarm, no cruising car looking for me. The bus came and I rode downtown, went to a Turkish Bath establishment, had a steam bath, a needle shower, a rub-down, a shave, and the rest of the whisky.
I could eat then. I ate and went to a strange hotel, registered under a fake name. It was half past eleven. The local paper, which I read over more whisky and water, informed me that one Dr. Richard Sharp, who had been found dead in a vacant furnished house on Carolina Street, was still causing the police much headache. They had no clue to the murderer as yet.
The date on the paper informed me that over forty-eight hours had been abstracted from my life without my knowledge or consent.
I went to bed and to sleep, had nightmares and woke up out of them covered with cold sweat. That was the last of the withdrawal symptoms. In the morning I was a well man.
SIX
Chief of police Fulwider was a hammered down, fattish heavyweight, with restless eyes and that shade of red hair that is almost pink. It was cut very short and his pink scalp glistened among the pink hairs. He wore a fawn-colored flannel suit with patch pockets and lapped seams, cut as every tailor can’t cut flannel.
He shook hands with me and turned his chair sideways and crossed his legs. That showed me French lisle socks at three or four dollars a pair, and hand-made English walnut brogues at fifteen to eighteen, depression prices.
I figured that probably his wife had money.
«Ah, Carmady,» he said, chasing my card over the glass top of his desk, «with two a’s, eh? Down here on a job?»
«A little trouble,» I said. «You can straighten it out, if you will.»
He stuck his chest out, waved a pink hand and lowered his voice a couple of notches.
«Trouble,» he said, «is something our little town don’t have a lot of. Our little city is small, but very, very clean. I look out of my west window and I see the Pacific Ocean. Nothing cleaner than that. On the north Arguello Boulevard and the foothills. On the east the finest little business section you would want to see and beyond it a paradise of well-kept homes and gardens. On the south — if I had a south window, which I don’t have — I would see the finest little yacht harbor in the world, for a small yacht harbor.»