“She isn’t feeling well,” said Harriet, biting her lip.
“Darling, you keep saying that,” said Gladys, looking perplexed. “I feel perfectly marvelous!—Just a little dazed, maybe, as if I’d had something funny to drink…”
“She hasn’t had anything funny to drink,” I said.
“She doesn’t need anything funny to drink,” said Siegman.
Nulty smiled.
“Anyway,” said Harriet, “I can tell you where she was at seven-thirty this morning because she was home with me.”
“Oh? Miss DeWinter lives with you?”
“No, she lives alone, but she came over at about seven.”
“At about seven,” said Nulty, nodding. “That early?”
“The circumstances were very odd, but if you insist—”
“Not at all, Miss Hopper,” said Nulty gallantly. “I know a bunch of early-Sunday-morning visitors when I meet ’em. Odd circumstances only tend to confuse matters. The significant thing is that you’re all accounted for, and very simply. Miss De Winter visited you, and the Lieutenant visited the Doctor. Everyone can vouch for everyone else—not,” he added with a laugh, “that anyone needs it. Good night.”
“What about that message you had for me?” said Siegman.
“Oh, yes,” said Nulty, turning back again. “It’s from your resident friend at Bellevue. I had a talk with him just before I came up here. Matter of fact, I was able to help him out of a tough spot, I think. He’d given Mr. Myshkin special attention, and they seemed to feel he might be involved. But I remembered how intelligent you’d been about the whole thing, and I assured the authorities he had nothing to do with it—least of all on your account. But it’s a first class mystery, all right.”
“Are you talking about Myshkin’s escape?” said Siegman.
“What else?”
“Then why didn’t you say so?”
“You seem to have understood me easily enough.”
“Listen, Mr. Nulty, I know about Myshkin’s escape because my friend phoned and told me,” Siegman said evenly. “I’m sorry to hear it’s made trouble for him, but that’s all I know about it. Don’t go getting any ideas.”
“What kind of ideas?” said Nulty. “And what would I have to base them on? Mr. Myshkin was there one minute and gone the next—vanished into thin air—just like the robbery this morning, to make an idle comparison. Of course, artistic disappearances do have a certain appeal for a detective, but—”
“Frankly, I haven’t the slightest interest in the subject,” said Siegman. “Do you still remember the message?”
“He told me to tell you to drop dead,” said Nulty.
“Thank you. Western Union couldn’t have done better.”
“Well,” said Nulty pleasantly, “a third and last good—”
“Mr. Nulty,” Harriet interrupted, “do you really think it’s possible those robbers are somewhere around here?”
Nulty shrugged. “I wish I knew what to say, Miss Hopper.”
“That’s good enough. Gladys, darling, we’re going.”
“Oh, but I’m staying, darling,” said Gladys.
“Sure, it’s early,” I said. “What’s the rush?”
Harriet studied me through narrowing eyes. “I have a good mind to answer that question,” she said slowly. “Ready, Gladys?”
“Darling, I’m very happy here. You go, I’ll stay.”
“You’re leaving with me, darling,” said Harriet firmly.
What a big, beautiful smile Nulty had…
“We’re all leaving,” I said. The floor was turning to fresh quicksand under my feet, and I had the feeling that if I let a quarrel develop, I’d find myself in the room below with Myshkin—where one was already a crowd. “I had no idea it was so late,” I said as I struck a vigilant pose with an arm raised, ready to switch off the light.
“Anyone want a lift uptown in a squad car?” said Nulty.
“Don’t trouble,” said Siegman. “I’ll call an ambulance.”
They all went down together. When I heard the front door close I turned off the light and felt my way to the dark stairs. As I reached them, a flashlight at the bottom snapped on, and I heard Nulty’s voice: “Watch your step, lieutenant.” My feet were numb but I managed the descent. “You’ll never guess why I stayed behind,” Nulty was saying, and I wondered if he had guessed that I had become a chunk of ice.
But I could still talk. I said, “If the police department can run a message service and a chauffeur service, why not an usher service?”
“Hah!” said Nulty appreciatively. “Quite a compliment and very true—because, you know, I’d almost forgotten we also run a small policing service. As long as I’m here, I ought to look into that downstairs room, don’t you think?”
“W-w-w-why?”
“Just to make sure Mr. Myshkin isn’t in it.”
“How could be he—I mean, how could he be?”
“I can’t say,” said Nulty, “but if he can vanish one place, maybe he can appear in another.”
He shot the beam down the corridor and went ahead. When I followed, I attained a deep understanding of what it was like to walk The Last Mile. Nulty had switched on the light by the time I entered the room, and it took just one glance to find the unmistakable evidence that his quarry was still there—Myshkin’s bundled old shoes, tattered pants and green sweater lying on the floor not far away near a pile of corrugated cardboard cartons. It could only be a matter of moments before Nulty spotted them. There were half a dozen places where Myshkin could have hidden, but none of them was any good, not the way Nulty went at them. He’d picked up a five-foot section of slender pipe and poked the possibilities one after another. When he got to the cartons, he moved Myshkin’s bundle aside with a foot and jabbed the pipe around. I was ready. Psychologically, I mean; I’d even the defense I’d make in court: “Your Honor, this man, this brave soldier of his country’s forces overseas, is not a lawbreaker, but rather, a man who has seen so much violence that it never—” But nothing happened. Nulty eliminated one place after another—all but the forge and its chimney, which for some reason he had apparently discounted—and the search was over.
Nulty sighed. “How nice if he’d been here,” he said, and he shook his head. “That’s the trouble being a student of vanishing acts. You want to have a talk with someone good at it, but those who are good at it stay vanished. Sorry to have kept you, lieutenant,” he said, and led the way out.
I turned off the light and went to the front door with him. I opened it, let him out. The minute he stepped into the street, I said, “Oh, I forgot something!” and quickly closed the door. Then I turned the lock an extra time, leaned against the door, took two or three long breaths and hurried back to the downstairs room. At the time it seemed to me that I had to tell Myshkin where we were going, and how careful he’d have to be.
I didn’t want to have any light, but it would have been impossible to get to the forge in darkness without stumbling all over the place, so on it went. It was a good thing I’d stopped for those quick breaths, because I needed them now. The bundle of clothes had moved. Oh, I was sure, all right. I remembered very well where it had been when I first saw it, and where Nulty had moved it with his big foot. I hadn’t been able to take my eyes off it most of the time Nulty was searching, so I was sure. The bundle had moved—and not just a few inches, say, but about two yards.
“Myshkin!” I whispered. “Myshkin, it’s me—Henry!”
Nothing.
“Myshkin, where are you? Make a sound! It’s all right!”
Still nothing, so that apparently settled it, and Myshkin was back either in the forge or even the chimney. But he wasn’t in the forge, and when I called up the chimney, there was no answer. I kept calling, “Myshkin, it’s Henry—I know you’re here! Believe me, Myshkin, it’s safe to answe
r! Why don’t—”
At this point, Nulty said, “Hah—A skeptic!”
And there was Nulty standing at the door in his socks, his shoes in his hands, beaming at me and chuckling.
“Not that I blame you,” he said, carefully picking his way toward me on tiptoe. “I thought of it myself. But I felt that for a man of Mr. Myshkin’s superior accomplishments, the chimney was an insulting—” and here he gingerly stepped on Myshkin’s bundle to detour around the cartons “—suspicion. Still, I feel responsible for putting the notion into your mind—” and now he placed his shoes on the floor beside me and took out his flashlight “—so maybe I’d better—Anything wrong, lieutenant? You’re green. Here now, let me help you…”
He sat me down on a box beside the forge, so I sat.
Then he stuck his head part way up the chimney, played the light around, and laughed. Of course, where his head was, the laugh had a hollow ring, but when he took it out, the laugh sounded more hollow than before.
“You see?” he said. “Not there at all!” and he put on his shoes, chuckling away. “But just in case you think I’ve been careless about it…
He found the long pipe he had used before and went through that room with terrible thoroughness. He moved everything at least once—and Myshkin’s bundle, twice—chuckling louder and louder, and there was no Myshkin to be found.
The way Nulty stood there looking at me, all I could think of was a song I used to know, called Me and Brother Bill, where the words went:
“Brother Bill said, ‘Boy, whut’s a-matter wid you?’
If he’d a-knowed like I, he’d a-run some too!…”
When finally we were both out in the street, Nulty pressed something into my hand. It was a key. “For the front door. It was under some of this stuff when I got here,” said Nulty. He meant the yellow powder under our feet, just outside the door.
“Then you didn’t have to ring the bell?” I said.
“No,” said Nulty, with a deep sigh, “I could have walked in right off. But you know how it is with a thing like this—you’ve got a key, it’s like an ace in the hole, you don’t play it too soon. If I frightened you, I’m sorry.”
Siegman and the girls were standing at the corner with the cops with the rifles. We started walking toward them.
“Did you really think Myshkin was in the house?” I said.
He nodded solemnly. “A mistake,” he confessed. “You must think I’m a pretty lousy detective.”
I almost said something. It was a very tempting opening; I was on the verge of taking a parting shot at him. But he’d made one slight miscalculation. We were close enough to the corner by then to have come within the range of the double street lights, and I caught that almost imperceptible sly look in his eyes I’d seen there when he first asked Gladys where she’d been at seven-thirty in the morning. So I shut up, and it was a good thing I did, because Nulty had a parting shot of his own.
“Still,” he said, “it’s probably not important. How far can an escaped nut get before he’s caught? Especially when he’s got on a pair of old, torn shoes, a ragged pair of pants stained with yellow powder, and a hooded green sweater?”
* * * *
“I don’t want to have anything more to do with it!” Harriet said. “I don’t want to discuss it or hear it discussed, and both of you get out of my apartment! ” Then she sank down on the couch and made small, feminine sounds of despair. “I just want to lie here and tell myself it never happened… I’m so tired… so very tired…”
“It’s about time,” said Siegman.
“Isn’t it incredible she bore up so long?” said Gladys.
“Remind me to write the Museum of Unnatural History about shrinking your head,” said Siegman. “Come on, Henry, we’ll make some drinks.”
We went to the kitchen and got busy with corkscrews and cracked ice. I said I questioned the wisdom of leaving Gladys with Harriet, but Siegman said it didn’t matter.
“I wouldn’t worry about Harriet,” he said. “She’s a remarkably strong girl, all things considered. She’ll work it out for herself one way or another. But Gladys is really a problem. Something’s the matter with her—I mean something specifically the result of this afternoon and evening—but trying to find out what’s wrong with Gladys is like the needle in the haystack.” He thought it over and added, “If I could indulge myself in a mild fantasy, I’d say Gladys acts as if she’s under a spell…”
“Hypnotized, maybe?” I said, trying not to grin.
“It’s not funny,” said Siegman gloomily. “I hope it’s not serious.”
We sampled the drinks. They weren’t bad, and we sat there sipping away and pondering in liquid silence.
“You know,” said Siegman, “maybe you had something there—maybe we’ve all been exposed to some sort of group hypnotism. All I know is it’s an impossible business to keep on one’s mind for very long. I wonder what a good night’s sleep will do for us.”
“What do you think about Myshkin’s bundle of clothes?” I said.
“You mean why Nulty didn’t say anything about them until you’d both left?”
“No,” I said. “Nulty can be explained as a foxy operator. He saw the clothes and obviously knew all about them from the start—but I’m the only one who knows they moved by themselves.”
“You mean apparently moved by themselves.”
“What do you mean I mean apparently? They did move by themselves.”
“Well, of course, that’s nonsense, so we won’t go into it.”
“Now, listen—”
“What difference does it make?” said Siegman. “We know Myshkin was in that room and we know he got out—”
“How?” I said.
“Haven’t we been through that?” Siegman said wearily.
“Just try tracing his possible exit and you’ll see what I mean,” I said.
He sighed. “All right. First Nulty rang. Then Myshkin went down into the room. He couldn’t have left the house by the front door while Nulty was upstairs with us, because there were a couple of watchful cops right outside in the street. We also know that Myshkin had no intention of leaving the house because he’d have changed clothes—”
“Objection,” I said.
“We’ll come back to it,” said Siegman. “To me it seems reasonable that he’d have put on his shoes, pants and sweater if he was going to try to escape from the place. True enough, he could appreciate the fact that any alarm out for him would detail the clothes he was wearing—but don’t tell me he thought he’d attract less attention moving around New York streets wearing a Bellevue Hospital robe and pajamas?”
“All right,” I said, “but remember my objection at this point.”
“To my dying day,” said Siegman. “So there he was, not anticipating any necessity to escape. Remember, he told us right from the start, almost the first minute after he’d returned, that if the police came looking for him we’d have to talk them out of making a search of the house because there was no place for him to hide. Things seemed to be working out for him. Nulty and the girls and I went downstairs, but Nulty opened the door, let us out and he stayed behind. Then you put out the upstairs light and started down. Right so far?”
“Go on,” I said.
“Then Nulty picked you up with his flashlight. According to what you’ve told me, you spent about a minute in the hall with him, during which he said very plainly that he wanted to have a look in that downstairs room. So at that moment Myshkin knew that Nulty was coming in to look for him. He had maybe twenty or thirty seconds at most to duck. We also know from what followed that the only place he could have ducked then was in the forge or up in the chimney, because you say Nulty went through everything with a long pipe, but he didn’t look either at the forge or the chimney. Furthermore, the forge-chimney theory has a logical ring to it—it’s just
the sort of place that anyone caught in that room with no time to find a spot to hide would run for…”
He reached for another drink, swallowed it and poured another for me.
“Notice what an orderly mind I have?” he said.
“Absolutely,” I said. “You’d have made a wonderful orderly in the army.”
“Care for some ice?” he said. “I’d like to see you being kept on ice.”
“The suggestion leaves me cold,” I said. “Go on, orderly mind.”
“Yes. Well, Myshkin was in the forge chimney while Nulty was searching for him. I think we can safely say that he had no expectation of going undiscovered. Maybe he was ready with the gun—maybe if Nulty had found him at that time, he’d have tried to shoot his way out. All right, I won’t argue it; he might have just given up. However, I don’t for a moment accept the idea that he would have shot himself. Whatever it was, fortunately Nulty was being exceptionally crafty, in his feeble-minded way—”
“You should be so feeble-minded,” I said.
“—and, having already spotted Myshkin’s clothes,” Siegman went on without deigning to argue, “he decided to give you a little more rope. Obviously, he was sure Myshkin was there, but he was trying to find out things—he wasn’t just fooling when he told us that Myshkin’s escape from the hospital baffled them—and he must have been hoping to uncover some clue that would help him understand how Myshkin had managed it. Anyway, he went to the front door with you, let you lock him out because he had the key—”
“You call that feeble-minded?” I said.
“I do,” said Siegman affably. “It has all the superficial glitter of a smart move, but what happened? You locked the door, made a remark about having forgotten something and back you went. Then you turned the light on again and were shocked senseless—why? Because the clothes had moved. It is to laugh,” he said, and uttered an arid noise. “Does this require an explanation?” he asked in disgust. “Myshkin had just about had time to breathe a black prayer of thanks to his guardian demon for deliverance—you’d turned off the light and gone out with Nulty, and there he was, apparently saved from discovery. He sneaked out of the forge-chimney and immediately went for his clothes. That bundle must have been on his mind all the time he was hiding. It seemed to him they must have given him away the instant they were spotted, unless—I say this because he certainly could not have expected Nulty to see the clothes and not say anything—unless you had managed to conceal them somehow when you first came in…”
The Mad Scientist Megapack Page 13