After that they x-rayed my neck and an oculist put drops in my eyes. He took my broken glasses to have the lenses re-ground, and left me alone with a policeman. Policemen had begun to bore me, and I wriggled my toes between the sweet, clean sheets, turned over and went to sleep. Those whom the gods wish to go to sleep, they first make sleepy.
I was awakened for lunch, which began with a bowl of chicken broth and ended with cornstarch pudding. “You must keep your strength up,” the nurse said, and I didn’t laugh because my laughing apparatus had congealed. Also, because they’d probably put me in jail if they found out that I wasn’t an invalid.
While I was still inflicting cornstarch on my palate, an orderly brought me my mended glasses. I polished them on a corner of the sheet and put them on and looked around. They let me see things more clearly but the new lenses didn’t filter out the policeman. He was still there sitting inside the door, moving his jaws scissorwise like a camel. “Have you got a cigarette?” I asked.
“Not me, professor.” He exhibited a wad of tobacco between his teeth. Then he moved to the window to spit.
I noticed that the window was the same as those in McKinley Halclass="underline" the heavy steel-sashed lower pane swung outward from the top, supported by steel arms at the sides. I remembered that the hospital was a university building, built at the same time as McKinley, by the same contractor. I also noticed that my room was on the ground floor of the hospital, and that the window was only a few feet above the lawn of an inner courtyard.
I said to the policeman, “Would you get me a pack of cigarettes? The booth is just down the corridor, I think.”
“Sorry,” he said. “My orders are to stay here.”
“You don’t think I’m going to run away in a nightshirt that barely covers my navel, do you?”
“A guy ran away from this hospital once without anything on at all,” the policeman said. “He was coocoo.”
“Listen, I haven’t had a smoke for twenty-four hours. I’ll give you two dollars for twenty cigarettes.”
“Where’s the money?”
“At the station. What’s your name? I won’t forget you.”
“Stevenson,” he said. “Robert Louis Stevenson.”
“You’re looking better, R.L.S.,” I said. “Will you do it?”
“Well, I hate to see a guy suffer. What brand?”
“They’re milder,” I said. “My throat needs kindness.”
He spat out of the window again and sauntered out of the room.
The window had given me an idea. I got out of bed and opened the lower section wide, so that the pane was horizontal, with two-foot spaces below it and above it. Across the courtyard in another wing of the hospital, a window-cleaner was cleaning the upper pane of another window like mine. He had opened the lower pane wide and was sitting on it as he worked. When I saw the window-cleaner, my idea became a momentary obsession.
I climbed onto the sill and sat on the pane like the window-cleaner, with my feet on the sill. I raised my feet and swiveled on the cold, smooth glass, keeping my weight on the inner end of the pane. When my feet were pointing outwards, I leaned back and slid forward until my legs were hanging over the outer edge and my shoulders rested on the steel sash at the inner edge.
I felt like somebody’s sweetie laid out on a table in St. James Infirmary, and I wondered what an unconscious man would do if he came to in that position.
There was a bellow from the room behind me, “Hey!” and I sat up startled. The window partly closed under my weight and I tobogganed into air. But it was a drop of only four or five feet and I landed on all fours in the grass without hurting myself.
Haggerty stuck his nose and a gun out of the window and said, “Stay where you are.”
I said, “Throw me a sheet then. My knees are naked to the blast. As well as my–”
“I said you were nuts,” Haggerty growled but he threw me a sheet and I disguised myself as Julius Caesar. He clambered over the sill, dropped to the ground, and seized my togaed arm.
Feeling unpleasant and at the same time unaccountably gay, I said, “Et tu, Haggerty? Then die, Caesar.”
“Jesus,” Haggerty said to himself, looking at me with the awe policemen reserve for rich men and lunatics. “He really is nuts.”
He spoke to me in dulcet accents, as to a little child, “C’mon, professor, let’s you and me just go inside, eh? What are you doing out here anyway, eh?”
“Reconstructing the crime,” I said.
“C’mon, professor, that’s all right, forget it. Don’t bother your head any more with that awful tragedy. You’ve had an awful night.”
He twisted his face into what he thought was a smile of kindly solicitude, and led me gently but firmly towards a side door, babbling lines from Grade B movies:
“Everything’s going to be all right, professor. You just have a nice, long rest and everything’s going to be jake. President Galloway’s here to see you and we’re going to drop our charges against you.”
“You mean I can get out?”
“You don’t have to run away, professor. Nobody’s going to hurt you. You just stay in bed and have a nice, long rest.”
“Like hell I will. Bring me my clothes.”
Haggerty led me into my room and urged me towards the bed with friendly grimaces. The policeman with the camel jaws was standing by the bed, looking sullen and betrayed. He said:
“I just went down the hall for a drink of water, and when I came back this bastard is out the window.”
“Where’s Galloway?” I said. “If you won’t bring me my clothes, bring me Galloway.”
“You just get in bed now,” Haggerty said, “and I’ll bring you anybody you want. Then you can have a nice sleep and forget all about this awful calamity.”
I sat down on the edge of the bed as a concession and said, “You damn fool, I think I know how Judd was murdered.”
Haggerty looked at me and it began to dawn on him that I wasn’t crazy after all. I could see the sun rising in his eyes. Midnight sun. He said:
“None of that talk now, professor. You can’t talk like that to an officer of the law. I could be pretty nasty about you trying to escape again.”
“I wasn’t trying to escape. I was going to tell you how Judd was killed. Now I’m not going to give it to you.”
“He wanted to confess, Sarge,” said the ship of the desert. “Want me to take it down?”
“Bring me my clothes,” I said. “And take me to Galloway.”
“Listen, professor.” Haggerty’s personality shifted again but it was still deficient. “If you know something, it’s your duty to tell us. Come on, professor, let’s have it.”
I thought of the handcuffs and the thought left me feeling unpleasant and not at all gay. “I wouldn’t trust you with an old menu. I want to talk to a detective who isn’t moribund above the coccyx. Bring me my clothes.”
Then I remembered that the clothes I had been wearing would make a good tail for a kite.
A nurse opened the door and said to Haggerty, “Does the patient seem able to receive visitors? President Galloway is waiting in the office to see him.”
“It depends upon the visitors,” I said. “These gentlemen, for example, irk me. Please take them away and bring the President.”
Haggerty turned red and said, “You’ll have to talk at the inquest to-morrow morning.” He went out and the other policeman followed him, shaking his head over my treachery.
After covering my legs with a sheet so as not to arouse her, I called in the nurse:
“Will you do something for me, nurse?”
“It depends on what it is,” she said, as if I looked capable of anything. I remembered my eyes.
“Will you call up the janitor of the Plaza Apartments and tell him to bring me some clothes?”