I digested that for an instant. “Exactly what do you want me to steal?”
His eyes were very intent; he put his hand tight and hard on mine as if to compel my understanding. “This is important, Miss Keate. It means everything to her. If they get hold of material evidence against her…”
“All right. Tell me quickly.”
He was still reluctant to share the thing with me. “If I could only do it myself. I’ll be up tomorrow. I must be. I tried to get up just now, while you were out of the room. Beevens helped me. It was no good.”
“Don’t be a fool,” I said hotly. “Do you want to work up a fancy temperature?”
“I’ve got about as much strength as a kitten,” he said angrily. “It’s a hypodermic, Miss Keate. It’s Drue’s hypodermic syringe.”
“Oh…” I said a little weakly.
“You see, Alexia’s got it. She is sure it belongs to Drue. She found it somewhere…”
“Never mind-I know…”
“You know!”
“I put it there. In the fern.”
He started abruptly upright, clasped his free hand quickly over his wounded shoulder and cried, “You, for God’s sake! Why?”
“Never mind that either; I thought I was doing the right thing. Where does Alexia keep it?”
But he lay there staring at me. “She didn’t tell me you had put it there,” he said, and muttered something which sounded more or less profane. Then he said more sensibly, “Do you know what happened? Why did you hide it? Did Drue really give my father the hypodermic?”
“Yes, she did,” I said, sighing and very cross. “But she didn’t kill him with it. I’ll tell you anything I know later. But I think everybody but Maud is downstairs now. If I’m to search Alexia’s room I’d better do it quickly.”
He was still anxious and frowning but agreed with me at once. “Right. You’ll have to hurry. Look in her dressing room, and in the cupboard in her bathroom. Then also, there is a kind of cupboard built into the wall beside her bed. You’ll see. She says she puts jewelry and stuff in there when she doesn’t want to bother to put them in the safe. Look there. Look…” He moved restlessly and impatiently. “If only I could go! I suppose there’s not a chance of your finding it. There’s no telling where she’s put it and it’s so little…”
I was on my feet. “When did Alexia tell you this? How long have you known?”
A subtle change came over his face; his mouth tightened a little, his lean jaw hardened; his eyes went past me and looked very remote and uncommunicative. “Not very long,” he said. “She wouldn’t tell me where she kept it. You’d better go. It’s the second door to the left across the hall. I hate to ask you to do this…”
I didn’t tell him I only wanted the chance. I went at once to Alexia’s room and the trooper was the only person in the long, wide corridor and he was away down near Drue’s room with his back turned toward me and thus didn’t see me.
But I didn’t find the hypodermic. I found Alexia’s room with no trouble and I searched it, and her tiny, luxurious dressing room as quickly as I could; and, while I don’t happen to have the underworld training really requisite for such a task, still I do have a native aptitude for thoroughness. Indeed, the cool way I went through that glittering little dressing room confirmed a kind of impression I’ve had from time to time in a perfectly law-abiding life that I’d chosen the wrong era and sex to be born in and of. I mean, well, I wouldn’t have been a successful courtesan but, after all, there were pirates.
I felt it even more so when, giving up the dressing room and going back into the beige and rose bedroom with its deep rugs and great leopard-skin hassocks and huge sheets of mirrors, I went directly to the little bookshelf and found the cupboard. And found not the syringe but something else and that was a little cluster of checks made out to Frederic Miller.
There were three of them, for five thousand dollars each, signed by Conrad Brent, dated in July, September and October of 1938. They were canceled and endorsed “Frederic Miller” in an ornate and curly handwriting and pinned together with a little steel pin. They were lying flat, under a soft suede case, the kind you use for jewelry when traveling.
The multitudinous nurses reflected in the mirrors (all in white, all inclined toward embonpoint, all with great wads of red hair and white caps which were in every case a little crooked) gave a simultaneous and rather theatrical start.
There was no shadowy pirate forebear standing behind each one of them, but there might well have been for, after only a few seconds meditation, I took the checks, adding them to my already substantial little hoard of clues. I’d have to tell Nugent. But I’d tell Craig first.
I didn’t go then into the intricacies of explaining to Nugent how I’d got hold of the checks. And perhaps five minutes later I had to give up; it seemed more like an hour what with watching the door with one eye, looking for the syringe with the other, and listening with both ears in case someone came-which sounds involved but wasn’t and had no really permanent effect upon my eyesight.
When I heard voices somewhere in the distance I thought I’d better give up. I ducked out of Alexia’s room and into my patient’s room as Alexia emerged at the head of the stairs and was followed by Peter Huber.
Craig was watching for me eagerly but still looked a little startled at my possibly precipitous entrance. “Somebody chasing you?” he said.
I straightened my cap and caught my breath and he got up on his elbow. “Did you find it?”
“No.” I hated the disappointment in his eyes, the tenseness of sharpened anxiety, almost as much as the admission itself.
He lay back against the pillows. “Oh. All right, Miss Keate. Don’t look like that. You did your best. She’s given it to the police, then. She said she would. She hates Drue. It’s because of…” He stopped there, abruptly, his face a kind of mixture of anger and discomfort and, queerly, sadness. There was no embarrassment about it and no fatuous or flattered look. I said crisply, “Because of you, I suppose. She makes it clear enough.”
He wriggled his feet under the covers and scowled at them, but there was still a sad, altogether mature and grave look in his face.
“I hurt Alexia’s pride one time. I didn’t realize I was doing it; I was in love with Drue, you see. I was so in love that”-he paused and then said, simply-“so in love that there wasn’t any other woman in the world. There wasn’t anything but Drue.” He stopped again and then went on, “Alexia just didn’t exist for me. Nothing did really.”
There was another silence; I was wishing Drue could hear him and resolving to tell her. I also realized that this was the time to put in a word or two with a view to clearing the situation between them. That is, while I am neither meddlesome or sentimental, it did seem to me that interference was practically invited at that point.
However, just as I was preparing to come out with something really clinching, he moved suddenly and restively and said in a different tone, “I tried to humor Alexia. She has the whip-hand. And my father loved her-he did, you know. She married him and he loved her.”
“Don’t get excited,” I said, automatically rearranging the covers he had twisted around. “You’ll get a fever…”
“Oh, for God’s sake shut up,” shouted Craig suddenly, explosively, and gave a flounce which sent the eiderdown on the floor.
“Don’t talk to me like that, young man!” I picked up the eiderdown and put it over the foot of the bed.
“I’ve got to think! I’ve got to do something…”
“Well, it doesn’t help to shout.”
He glared at me and I glared back at him. My fingers itched to come into smart contact with his ears, but such a gesture seemed rather to exceed my nursing duties. And then just as we were staring at each other like two enraged cats looking for an opening, he grinned. The anger went out of his eyes and an odd, amused and, which was really remarkable, a rather affectionate look came into them. It really was that, and I couldn’t help seeing it. He said: “I’m sorry, Miss Keate. It’s only that it makes me savage, being helpless like this.”