“Neat job that,” the driver said, noticing Mason’s interest in the plane.
The lawyer didn’t even hear him.
The plane taxied up to a point almost directly opposite the place where Mason was seated in the parked automobile. A gate opened. A long gray-colored automobile with a red spotlight slid through the gates.
“An ambulance,” Della Street said.
Mason, without taking his eyes from the ambulance, motioned her to silence.
The ambulance turned, backed up to the plane. The driver jumped out and opened the doors in the back. The body of the ambulance concealed what was taking place, and Mason frowned his annoyance.
“Get ready to go,” he said to the driver, “and you’re going to have to go fast. Never mind the speed laws. I’ll stand good for fines.”
The driver said dubiously, “You want that ambulance followed?”
“Yes.”
“He’ll use a siren and spotlight and go right through all the signals.”
“Follow right along behind,” Mason said.
“I’ll get pinched.”
“Not if you’re close enough. Cops will think it’s a member of the family rushing to the bedside of a dying relative.”
“What’ll the driver of the ambulance think?”
“I don’t give a damn what he thinks, just so we find out where he goes. Okay, here we go.”
The doors of the ambulance slammed shut. The driver ran around, jumped in behind the steering wheel, and the gates swung open once more as the big machine gathered momentum.
The driver of Mason’s car started out in low gear, turned to say over his shoulder, “It might not be just a fine. Up here they...”
“Get over,” Mason told him. “I’ll take the wheel.”
“I can’t let you do that. I...”
“Look,” Mason said. “If I threatened you with a monkey wrench, and made you get over, you’d do it, wouldn’t you?”
“I don’t know. I...”
“And then,” Mason said, “if anything happened, you could say that you had been in fear of your life, that you thought I’d gone crazy, and that I took the automobile away from you by force... Get over.”
The man stopped the car, slid over in the seat, said dubiously, “I don’t like this. You ain’t even got a monkey wrench.”
Mason swung his long legs over the back of the front seat, jackknifed his slim figure, slipped in behind the steering wheel, and snapped the car into second gear, easing back the clutch as he pressed the foot throttle. The car slid smoothly forward. Mason swung it into a sharp turn, snapped the gear shift into high, and fell in behind the ambulance.
The blood-red rays of the spotlight from the car ahead made a sinister pencil of light. A siren screamed. Mason, moving the wheel of the rented car with deft skill, kept the machine within a few feet of the rear of the ambulance, following through the traffic in the pathway cleared by the spotlight and siren.
The man who had been driving the car gripped the back of the front seat with his left hand, held to the edge of the door with his right. “Good Lord,” he moaned. “I didn’t know it would be like this!” His face was strained with nervous tension. Several times he instinctively pressed down with his feet against the floorboards as though trying to put on the brakes. Once when collision seemed imminent, he reached for the ignition switch. Mason, batting his hand away, stepped on the throttle and avoided the oncoming car.
“Don’t be a fool,” Mason said without taking his eyes from the road. “No chance to stop on that one. Using the throttle was our only chance. If you hesitate, you’re licked.”
Della Street, in the back of the car, hanging on to the robe rail, her heels braced against the foot rest, watched the kaleidoscope of traffic which flashed past the windows of the speeding automobile. Her lips were half parted; her eyes sparkling. The driver of the car, looking back to her for moral support to back up his demand for less speed, abruptly changed his mind and concentrated simply on hanging on.
The ambulance cut its way through traffic, to slow down in front of the red brick structure of a rambling hospital.
Mason left the ambulance as it turned into the emergency entrance. He swung his car around to the front of the hospital, parked it, and said to the driver, “Here’s the monkey wrench I was holding over your head.”
He handed him three ten-dollar bills.
The driver put the money in his pocket wordlessly.
“Okay?” Mason asked.
The driver tried to speak. His voice came as a throaty squeak. He coughed, cleared his throat, took a deep breath, and said, “Okay, but I wouldn’t go through it again for a thousand.”
Mason slid out of the car. “Come on, Della.”
She followed him into the hospital. Mason said to the girl at the information desk, “I know something about this ambulance case that’s just coming in the door now. I’m supposed to tell the doctor something about the patient.”
“Yes?”
“Uh huh.”
“What did you want to tell him?”
“Something he wants to know,” Mason said.
She flushed. “I didn’t mean it that way. Was it information about the patient?”
“Of course.”
“He won’t be able to see you right now. It may be an operative case. They telephoned the doctor from Los Angeles and again from the airport. He’d been waiting for the call.”
“What’s that doctor’s name?” Mason asked. “I wasn’t certain I caught it.”
“Dr. Sawdey.”
“His initials?”
“L. O.”
“I’ll be waiting here in the lobby. No. Perhaps I’d better go get in touch with the nurse. I think the information I have is something he wanted before he operated. Where will I find the patient?”
She said, “Just a moment,” plugged in a telephone, consulted a memo, said, “What room will Carr Luceman be in? It’s an ambulance case that just came in. Emergency operation. Dr. Sawdey. Oh, yes.”
She pulled out the line, said, “The patient will be in room three-o-four. Dr. Sawdey is preparing to operate. Go to the third floor, tell the nurse in charge who you are, and ask her to get in touch with Dr. Sawdey’s nurse.”
Mason nodded, said to Della Street, “Come on,” and walked across the lobby, down the corridor to the elevator.
“Third,” he said to the attendant.
Once on the third floor, Mason motioned to Della Street, led her down to the end of the corridor where there was a solarium. Now the room was darkened, and the wicker furniture, spaced with the rectangular efficiency of a hospital rather than the careless informality of a private home, seemed in its stiff silence to be occupied by white-clad ghosts.
Mason looked at the door of 304 as they walked past, said, “We’ll sit here for a while and watch.”
A nurse garbed in a spotless, stiffly starched uniform walked by on rubber heels, rustling her way efficiently down the linoleum-covered corridor. She vanished in the door of 304. A few moments later, a man in the middle fifties, clothed in a dark business suit, pushed open the door and walked in. Shortly after that, the man left the room again.
Mason waited until this man had left the room. A few moments later the nurse bustled out, then Mason touched Della Street on the arm. “Okay,” he said, “let’s go.”
They walked down the corridor, the faint smell of disinfectants in their nostrils. Mason paused before the door of 304, on which a sign said, “Dr. Sawdey,” and below that a printed placard reading, “No Visitors.”
Mason silently pushed open the door.
The man in the room lay in the hospital bed. The sheet-covered blankets were arranged with hospital efficiency over the thin figure. A dim night light made the shadows a backdrop against which the white, tired face on the pillow was sharply accented.
The man who lay motionless in the bed, his eyes closed, was Elston A. Karr.