by Don Wilcox
Whoever the witness had been, he would no doubt show up with Mr. Bondpopper’s will in due time.
But Mae Wing said no. I sat with her in the solarium at the hospital and we went over the newspaper together.
“He wrote that statement to give him time to make a will,” said Mae. “When I last saw him he was trying to find a way for us to get out of that awful room full of little creatures. Does that sound as if he was planning to commit suicide?”
“When do you think he wrote it?”
“After he disappeared,” said Mae.
“He didn’t dare date it back very far, because the fresh typing and signature would give him away. He’s still alive, and he doesn’t want to see his property mismanaged. He’s probably busy making out a will right this minute.”
Then Mae stopped to regard the second very glaring clue. This witness who had signed the statement with him who was he?
“D.A. Edton. What do the papers say about him?”
“He’s a maverick.” I said. “They can’t seem to name his brand. Do you know him?”
“Never heard of him,” said Mae. “I think he’s a phoney.”
“Don’t think too hard,” I said. “You know what the doctors say, you need rest.”
Mae Wing gave me a look that flashed fire. “So you’re getting that idea, too. Let me tell you something, Steve. If you got put into this hospital for trying to tell the truth the way I did, you’d get out in twenty-four hours.”
“I was planning to get you out,” I said.
“You’ve been talking about it long enough,” said Mae.
She had me. The fact was, I’d kept putting off the plan because I had a hunch that folks get themselves in trouble when they steal patients out of a hospital. That was part of the reason.
Then, too, I sort of liked coming each day to visit her. I’d discovered she liked flowers and candy and magazines even though her education had been neglected along the lines of cowboy music. As long as she was here I had a continuous date, so to speak. I could come here and hold her hand. The doctor didn’t object, and neither did Mae.
When I left that day, it seemed to me that she was in a pretty desperate mood. As I thought it over I realized that she might try to break out by herself. But I didn’t realize how well satisfied her doctor was with her progress.
That night I had dinner with Joe and Betty Morris. They were so gay that I turned my worries out to pasture for the evening.
“Haven’t you heard the latest?” Betty asked. “Joe is teaching me to sing cowboy songs.”
“She can do ‘Home on the Range’ already,” said Joe, proudly.
“I practice all day, going up and down the elevator,” said Betty.
“As soon as she gets good, Steve, she’s going to quit her night job at Taggart’s. Joe rolled his eyes at her. “Ain’t you, honey?”
“If Taggart will let me.”
“He’d better let you, the big overeducated ape,” said Joe, showing his teeth and hunching his shoulders to give us an imitation of Taggart. “You’ve given him a new fortune in turbans and neckties. What more could he want?”
We fell to talking about the turbans and the sensational success they were having all over the country. Taggart had struck a bonanza on this idea of magnifying talents.
You see, the darned thing actually worked.
One way or another they got results. No one was exactly sure how or why. Maybe it was some electrical brain stimulation, as the advertisements would have you believe. Or maybe it was just your own psychology. You’d put on one of these fancy neckties and say to yourself, “Now I’ll paint a better picture than I painted yesterday.” And you’d do it—all credit to the necktie or the turban.
In some of the variety columns in the paper you invariably run across items about talents and abilities that got magnified to amazing degrees.
Here was this chap in Oregon that was gifted at collecting newspaper clippings. He started wearing a turban at work. Now after he’d finished with a newspaper, nothing was left but the margins.
Then there was a lady gambler in Jersey City who started wearing a turban and broke eleven gambling joints in a row.
And there was a yarn Joe had picked up somewhere—I can’t vouch for the truth of this one—that a guy named Sleepy Limbo in Tennessee had made a specialty of dreaming weird and scary dreams, and afterward telling them, to give his friends an awful chill. Sleepy, it seemed, made a night-cap out of a turban his wife had discarded. For the next three mornings he told the most hideous and horrifying dreams anyone ever heard. But on the fourth morning he didn’t tell anything because he didn’t wake up. The coroner concluded that he had scared himself to death.
Another gink prided himself on being able to take a lot of different kinds of patent medicines. After he started wearing a talent-magnifying scarf he got too ambitious and swallowed a combination of ingredients that added up to nitroglycerine. When last seen he was riding a porch pillar over a haystack.
But most of the published items were milder in tone and generally a credit to Taggart’s Turban. Artists, editorial writers, campaign managers, sportsmen, business executives—all of these, and bridge players, too—had good things to say about this remarkable talent magnifier.
Betty Morris had a friend who knew a good-looking New York lady who went out to this summer resort town and picked up the bridge prizes right and left. It made everybody jealous. So, come tournament time, they made it up to give her the dumbest partner in the club. But when the New York lady arrived for the event she was wearing a Taggart turban. So they simply handed her the prize and called the party off.
“And to think,” said Joe, patting Betty’s hand proudly, “you designed that turban yourself.”
“Not exactly,” said Betty. “All I did was to follow instructions. Confidentially, it was a matter of catching these turban creatures at just the right stage.”
“Catching them for what purpose?” said Joe.
“To mix them in with the dyes and press them into the design. You mustn’t tell anyone. Taggart would kill me if he knew I told you, because it’s a secret process—”
A waiter approached our table.
“Pardon me, sir, are you Cowboy Steve? . . . There’s a telephone call for you, sir.”
It was Mae’s doctor on the phone. Something was in the air.
“So you are at the restaurant,” he said. “All right, I was just afraid this might be another of Miss Wing’s delusions.”
“Oh! . . .” I said, not knowing what he meant.
“I had agreed to let her out on good behavior,” said the doctor, “provided she wouldn’t try to resume her nightclub singing right away. So she told me her plans before she left this afternoon. Now I was just checking up.”
“I see. Then everything’s O.K.?” I asked.
“If she’s there with you everything is all right,” said the doctor.
“Everything is all right,” I said, and hastily hung up.
I returned to the table. Betty and
Joe wanted to know why I was so pale. “Did Mae run away?”
I groped for an answer.
From what the doctor had said, I judged that Mae had fled like a deer the instant they gave her her release. There was no telling where she would go.
“Speak up, cowboy,” said Betty. “Has she had a relapse?”
“I’m afraid that—” My trepidation suddenly burst like bubbles. “Hell, everything’s swell. Don’t you folks worry about Mae Wing.”
My quick change of mood was caused by the sight of Mae herself. For at that moment she appeared in front of the restaurant window. She caught my eye, gave me a little signal of silence by touching a finger of silence to her lips, then glanced at her wrist-watch.
All of which plainly meant that she was waiting to see me alone.
Ten minutes later Betty and Joe were on their way. I found Mae waiting for me a few doors away. Her eyes were full of an intense excitement that was beautiful t
o see.
CHAPTER XIII
Hope for Mr. Bondpopper
“I’m on a sure trail, Steve,” said Mae. “I could hardly wait to see you. You’re the only one who would understand.”
“Let’s go back into the restaurant,” I said, “just in case your doctor doubts whether you kept this date.”
It was nearly midnight and she was sure the doctor hadn’t approved of her plan to be out at this hour. But she meant to be honest with him. No nightclubs or all-night parties.
“All I want to do is deliver a letter,” she said. “Here, Steve, can’t we both sit on this side so we can watch the street? Can you see the entrance to the Oriental Jewelry Shop?”
I could, by edging a little closer to her, and I didn’t mind.
“Do you remember that spot from some previous night?” she asked.
“Er—yes, sort of. Betty Morris and I dodged in there the night Heptad and Taggart closed in on us.” I must have reddened a little as I went on. “We tried not to show our faces, and I put my arm around Betty to hide her. They were talking about putting something over with the commissioner.”
“I heard that conversation,” said Mae. “They’re making it their racket to bring about these cave-ins. When Monty’s building fell and all those people got killed, Taggart and his men were the murderers. For some strange reason, by some unknown method they’ve started out to make that whole street unsafe.”
“I might swallow that if I knew how and why they’re doing it,” I said.
“I’ve got a good hunch on the how. It’s those turban creatures—the thousands and thousands of them that I saw.”
“Take it easy,” I said. “You’re out on probation. You’re saying some peculiar things. In the first place, you’re the only person who has seen any such number of these little people. Even Betty Morris, who works there, has never seen more than three or four dozen at once. In the second place—”
“Go ahead,” said Mae. “You can argue down everything I say, but I still know I’m right.”
“In the second place, a turban creature is much too small to get mixed up in the business of undermining buildings.”
“Did you ever hear of termites?” asked Mae. “They’re even smaller.”
“In the third place, if Taggart is responsible, why should his own steps and sidewalk get broken down? Doesn’t he know any better than to destroy his own property?”
“He did that to avoid suspicion,” said Mae. “It cost him almost nothing. That was a smart move to put himself in the clear.”
“He’s smart, I don’t doubt,” I said. “Betty thinks he’s too damned smart—”
“He was smart again when he called Monty and some other property owners into conference to demand that the city get to the bottom of this thing. Just another blind for his own guilt.”
“Hm-m-m. You might be right at that. Is that why Heptad turned tail and ran the other night when I took a notion to poke him? Another blind?”
“That was the night Monty’s building fell,” said Mae. “At such a time Taggart was smart enough to keep all his men as quiet as mummies. You’ll be on their list for action soon after their present troubles blow over.”
“In the fourth place,” I said, “How did you know about that doorway conversation in the first place?”
“I was there,” said Mae Wing. “Again, please?”
“I was there.” She smiled at me in a mischievous and tantalizing manner. “You think I’m joking? I’m not. I was just inside that panel to the left of the door. It’s an entrance to Taggart laboratories . . . Well, why don’t you say something?”
I gulped and stammered my surprise. I had to believe her when she looked at me like that.
“We’re going over there,” she went on, “as soon as the midnight traffic thins out a little. Do you think you can break the door down, the same as movie cowboys do?”
I counselled in favor of calling on a night watchman. Or, if it was urgent, a cop or two. Door-busting wasn’t one of my special talents.
“Just so we can deliver this letter to Mr. D.A. Edton,” said Mae with quiet determination.
She kept watching the street. Pedestrians passed the Oriental Art Shop and sauntered along in front of the display windows, but no one ever even noticed the name panels that flanked the door.
“D.A. Edton,” I said absently. “I’ve heard of him before.”
“He was the witness to Mr. Bondpopper’s signed statement,” said Mae, “and he is a phoney, I’m quite positive.”
“Then why are you sending a letter to him?”
“In hopes Mr. Bondpopper will get it and know that we understand what D.A. Edton means,” she said.
“What does it mean?”
“Spell it backwards.”
“N-O-T-D-E-A-D.”
“That’s right,” said Mae. “Not dead. What could be plainer?”
We crossed the street to the Oriental Art Shop. I knocked against the panel. As a door it was as stubborn as a stone wall—until the cops came over to help us. Now I would have been satisfied just to slip the letter through the narrow crack at the foot of the panel.
But these cops seemed ready to listen to our ideas, so Mae gave them a pretty thorough account of what we were up to.
I was surprised at how very obliging and useful these officers of the law turned out to be. If this was a secret doorway, you’d have thought they might be puzzled over it.
But, as luck would have it, they struck the very combination of hidden buttons to open the thing. It opened immediately.
“Walk right in,” one of them said, “and we’ll follow you.”
CHAPTER XIV
Down the Dark Incline
We walked in and they followed.
Right away we were in a big room, all right—about the biggest walled-in jungle full of glass tanks and pipes I ever saw. In one glance you could tell there was as much going on here as in a corral at rodeo time.
“Looks like you two youngsters have discovered something,” said one of the cops. “Now just what was it you wanted down here? A visit with Mr. Bondpopper? Shall we help you look for him?”
Mae didn’t make any answer. She only gave the three policemen her most suspicious look. I was too slow-witted to get it, being overwhelmed by all the wonders.
At once everything that Mae had formerly told me, that I had taken to be her bad dreams, came back to me.
Those metal troughs overhead must be the rivers full of purple water that all the little turban people would race through. I climbed up onto an elevation to get a look.
I glimpsed the sparkle and splash of purple water. I had a dizzying impression of thousands of tiny human beings dashing along in it knee-deep at breakneck speed. But that was as much as the cops thought I ought to see. They ordered me down and they seemed pretty sour.
“Come on, you,” one of them said. “You’re holdin’ up the party.”
Seemed to me I’d heard that voice before. Mae gave me a quick little frown which meant that all wasn’t well.
“So your friend Bondopper went down this way to look for an exit?” said a cop. “You sure he wasn’t lookin’ for a swimmin’ pool?’
They were leading us into a narrow tunnel-like entrance to a walled-in section in the center of the big laboratory. For all you could tell it might be a swimming pool. But the lights were off. I didn’t like the idea of descending this greasy incline in the dark.
“Any cop on night duty oughta carry a flashlight,” I said.
One of these uniformed dopes came back at me with a surly snarl. “Who said anything about cops? We’re just having ourselves a little masquerade party.”
Another one said, “Pug Heptad had to miss the party on account of a black eye, but we promised him we’d make up for it.”
“Good joke, but I don’t get it,” I said. “If you fellows ain’t cops, this would be a low-down trick. It would make me feel like passing out some more black eyes—like this!”
I s
wung my fist like a baseball bat, and the nearest cop folded up against the wall. You could tell that wall was awful solid the way it stopped him.
We were at it, then, like a pack of mad dogs. The phoney cop was out for about twenty seconds—time enough for me to throw about fifty blows, many of which went wild. It was so dark I could hardly see. Mae Wing stifled a scream. The danger was that she was getting mixed up with these haymakers.
The dog pile broke for a moment. One of the cops flashed on a light, then covered me with a gun.
In that instant I was not sure which end of the curved tunnel was which. But there was no chance to make a dash. This plug-ugly meant business. Mae’s eyes were full of terror, but her sharp wits were working. She gave a quick nod, and I knew which way our exit lay.
We would have made it if that cop on the greasy floor hadn’t been faking.
I thought he was out cold, which left us the job of running two cops and a gun.
Before anyone could speak, I got one of those bozos by the wrist and throat and swung him around like a shield. The gunman tried to sidestep. I gave him a run for his money, crowding him with my temporary prisoner.
“Get out, Mae! I’ll follow you!”
I would have sworn the path was clear in that split second, but the knocked-out cop sprang a joker. He threw out an arm and tripped Mae. Springing up, he got her by the shoulders and hauled her down the wrong side of the tunnel. Mae fell and slid. She tried to catch herself. The pitch of the floor was steeper than I thought. Mae was screaming, trying desperately to stop herself. I dashed after her.
The last I saw of the three fake cops, they were standing there in the light, watching us. Then the curve of a wall closed them off from our view. This devilish slippery slide had us.
Down, down, down. We passed under a dim blue light, and for an instant had hope of stopping our descent. We rolled toward the wall, but it, too, was coated with wax. Darkness again!
If you can imagine sliding down a coal-chute into a swimming pool of purple water, you have it. All that Mae had told me about Mr. Bondpopper’s disappearance came back vividly now. We fell in with a splash that re-echoed within this enclosure. Faint blue lines outlined the rectangular walls and illuminated the glowing purple liquid. The pool was alive with tiny creatures.