I asked what. She gave me a telegram. I masked my anger at her keeping it so long and asked her to wait a moment as I might want to answer it. She waited.
The wire was from Rothman, reading: BODY IN RIVER NOT ELEANOR. ADVISE.
So by way of the night nurse I advised him to keep watch on the South Adams Street apartment and to grab Eleanor before she could walk into trouble.
The nurse left, and there were no further interruptions of my solitude.
Around midnight last night I got the hell out of there.
I hadn’t undressed, but stayed under the covers in the event the nurse should walk in. The hospital corridor was L-shaped and the nurse’s desk was at the corner of the L, not far from my door. My room was on the short end of the L, and the entrances for the public and the doctors were at the long end. I was on the second floor and there would be a fire escape at each end of the L.
I waited until I heard the tiny clicking noise that is the signal patients use to summon the nurse. They push a button under their pillow, a light goes on outside their door, and the little click comes from a device above the desk. The night nurse heard the click, looked along both arms of the L, and saw a light somewhere along the long arm. Her footsteps faded from my hearing.
I grabbed my hat and overcoat from the closet, peered out the door and found the corridor clear, and sped for the nearest windows. They were locked but that slowed me only a second. Outside the fire escape held the unbroken snow of the past few days. In very short order the snow was tracked. My tracks. They would give me away, but what the hell.
I wanted to go out and see that caretaker’s cottage. If I waited until daylight the caretaker would certainly be there, and I might be seen by others. At night, however, it just might be deserted because people would be playing in the bam. And I wouldn’t be seen. I would first have to go downtown to the office and get my gun.
I did, and I had to walk all the way.
To play safe I circled around a bit and stopped a few blocks from the office building, waiting in a doorway. The entire building was dark. There were only a few people on the streets, all hurrying to get somewhere. It was still uncomfortably cold. The only car in sight was a white police car parked in front of Thompson’s restaurant. There was no one in the car.
I eased along the sidewalks towards the office, keeping in the shadows next to the buildings and stopping in every doorway that offered a hiding place to look the scene over once more. There wasn’t a thing to arouse my suspicions. When I finally reached the door to my own stairway even the stragglers had vanished from the streets. Across the street I could see two cops eating and someone else playing the juke box. Just those three and the counter girl.
I stood in my own doorway, hidden in deep shadow, feeling the warmth creeping down the stairs at my back, and watching the street I had left. No one or nothing came after me. Turning, I softly went up the stairs.
All the offices on the second floor were dark and apparently empty. I paused at Elizabeth Saari’s doorway to listen and was rewarded with nothing at all. Moving across the hall in the dark to my own door, I felt for the knob, silently turned it, and shoved the door violently open. I had already ducked back out of the door and was waiting, flattened against the wall beside the door.
Nothing at all happened.
It may have been silly to someone watching, but I entered my office on hands and knees, putting my left hand down easily to prevent the plaster cast from bumping the floor. No one would think of shooting that low if he were inside waiting for me. No one shot at all, high or low.
I got up, walked over to the desk, opened the lower drawer where I kept the gun, struck a match and carefully cupped the flame from reflecting on the windows. The flare of the shielded match showed gun and holster in the drawer where I had left them, showed several stacks of Atlantis manuscript lying on the floor as I had left them, and showed some brownish spots of blood on the typed pages. As I had not left them.
I snapped out the match and reached for the gun. Holding it in my right hand, which was awkward, I put out my left hand and touched the blood spots with a forefinger. They were dry. So I simply squatted there for many minutes, wondering what to do next.
While I waited, the dull and throbbing headache started in again. The exertion probably caused it. I loosened my hat to see if it helped any. It didn’t. But with the headache came sudden awareness that all wasn’t what it should have been. Sudden awareness that something indefinable I had been expecting failed to show. Nothing spectacular, only an insignificant, probably subconscious something that should have happened, but hadn’t.
I glanced around the darkened room.
The office door. If it had had eyes, they would have stared back at me. It had failed to hit the wall with the usual thud. I had given it a hearty inward shove and jumped back out of the opening, just in case there were visitors. There were no visitors, but the door hadn’t banged against the wall.
Again on hands and knees, no easy feat when one hand is partly cased in a plaster cast and the other is curled around the butt of a gun, I crawled over to the door and partly around it. The gently prodding barrel of the gun melted into something soft and yielding, something that gave out a whimper.
On my knees, I put out my left hand and followed the pointing barrel. And found a body. There was another response, more moan than whimper. My searching fingers discovered a heavy coat, and beneath the coat a dress and a woman’s breast. I fingered upwards towards the face, followed the soft undercurve of the chin and at the back of her neck found a tight knot of hair.
Eleanor.
The light of a second match showed her to me. She was lying on her back, her attractive, Oriental face now a pasty white. A slug had ripped away the padded shoulder of the coat she was wearing, biting through her shoulder and spilling a great deal of blood. The torn dress and coat were clogged with dried rivulets.
Eleanor rolled her head and cried out feverishly.
I doused the match, pocketed the gun and put my lips to her ear.
“Eleanor... Eleanor... come out of it.” A couple of gentle slaps in the face brought movement to her body. “Eleanor... do you hear me?”
“Please... don’t!” She tried to roll away.
“Eleanor — snap out of it!”
“Who... is it?”
“This is Chuck, Eleanor. Charles Horne.”
In ten minutes I had her sitting upright, in five more her eyes opened and she tried to see me in the dark.
I said, “I’m Chuck, remember?”
She nodded weakly. Frightened, ill, she clung to me. I slipped a clean handkerchief over the wound and pulled her coat about her shoulders.
“Don’t try to talk, Eleanor. I’ll call a doctor.”
“Oh, no...!” She tried to scream, pitifully.
“Take it easy, kid. I’m getting a good doctor. He’s okay; he can be trusted. Can you sit there alone? Now don’t fall over again. I’ll get a cab.”
I phoned Milkshake Mike and asked him if there was a cab in front of his place. He replied that there was, and that the Sultan was now enjoying a cup of coffee not ten feet from him as he spoke. I gave instructions to get the Sultan to my office in a rush. He informed me the Sultan said he would be delighted, after he finished his cuppacoffee.
We had to wait two or three minutes. It seemed like ten or fifteen.
I helped Eleanor to her feet and we waited just inside the doorway at the foot of the stairs for the cab. The cops and their white car had gone.
The cab pulled up to the curb and the Sultan stuck out his head to stare at us.
“Come here and help me,” I called across the sidewalk. To Eleanor I whispered, “Pretend you’re drunk.” She dropped her head on my shoulder, her hair concealing the tom coat.