chapter TWELVE
When he got off at the bus depot in Denver that afternoon it was as if he had not been in the city for years. The brief visit of the night before seemed like a journey taken in a dream. Reaching the hotel where he had originally arranged to stay, planning the trip a long time ago in Washington, he was startled to find the reservation waiting for him, and to realize that this was the day he had expected to arrive in Denver. It did not seem possible that everything that had happened had taken no more time than he would normally have spent driving here.
He had dinner at the hotel, rolled into bed while there was yet daylight at the windows, and slept until nine the following morning. The solid hours of rest seemed to draw a curtain over the events of the past days; shaving, he found that he could hardly recall Ann Nicholson’s face. He could bring back the things she had said and done, and the clothes she had worn, but whenever he tried for the face it was the face of a stranger staring at him with dull nonrecognition. He shivered a little and tried to wipe it out of his mind. Going out for breakfast, the hotel dining room having closed by the time he got down, he stopped at the desk for mail. There was a card from his parents hoping he was having a nice time.
“Oh, and there was a call for you last night, sir,” the clerk said. “We didn’t put it through since you’d specially asked not to be disturbed. A lady—”
Emmett felt his whole body waiting for the name, tense with the sudden crazy expectation of finding that the girl of whom he had been thinking had tried to call him. What would I say to her? he asked himself. What did you say to a girl you had rather liked, who had turned out to be a little cracked?
“Here you are, sir,” the clerk said, finding the slip of paper on which the message had been recorded.
Emmett took it and glanced at it warily. He read: Mr. J. E. Emmett call Mrs. Amos Pruitt, Hogback Lake Lodge, Summit, Colo., confirm cabin reservations 8th to 11th. Tel: Summit 721, ring 4. He did not know whether it was relief or disappointment that made him laugh so abruptly that the clerk looked at him a little strangely. He thanked the man, tucked the note into his wallet, and walked out into the sunshine, rereading his parents’ card. It was rather startling to be again reminded that he was supposed to be in the middle of a carefully planned month’s vacation. He tried in vain to find in himself any eagerness for the fishing at Hogback Lake. He found himself wishing, instead, that it were the end of the month, so that he could be getting to work at his new job in California.
The air-conditioning met him coldly as he turned into the first restaurant along the street. The place had chromium plated steel furniture upholstered in two tones of green leather; the tables were a polished black composition resembling obsidian. He selected a small table by a pillar, and a rather pretty girl in a green uniform, with a green bow in her hair, took his order with an impersonality that matched the shining lifelessness of the restaurant; but he had the impression that she thought he was giving himself airs, to take a table by himself, when he could have perched on one of the round upholstered stools by the counter and made life easy for her. The place was almost empty since it was too late for breakfast and too early for lunch.
Emmett filled his pipe slowly, watching a large man who had come in behind him pause at the cash register for a pack of cigarettes; he was still studying the man idly when the man turned away and looked over the deserted restaurant, as if for a desirable place to sit. Emmett was not quite aware of the exact moment he knew the man was coming over to him. He felt himself put the pipe into his mouth and light it, a part of his mind vaguely hoping that the gesture looked natural and unconcerned, while he watched the stranger approach. He saw a big man with the look of a college athlete—sunburned, with cropped dark hair and the type of regular, handsome, rather heavy features that, during the fall, could be seen bursting out of the rotogravure sections of papers all over the country, framed by a football helmet and occasionally adorned by a nose-guard. The man was wearing dark slacks and a light sports jacket that emphasized the width of his shoulders; his head was bare. He stopped at the table.
“Mr. Emmett?”
Emmett nodded. The big man without asking leave pulled out a chair and sat down facing him. After a pause, he took a leather folder from his pocket and slid it across the table.
Emmett opened it slowly and looked at the credentials inside, which certified the bearer, Edward Manning Kirkpatrick, to be an authorized agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, of the United States Department of Justice. Emmett returned the folder gingerly. He leaned back to let the waitress put his breakfast in front of him.
“Coffee here, please,” the big man said. “Black.”
They sat in silence waiting for the girl to return. Outside the street was bright with sunlight, and people walked past the plate-glass window in a steady procession. Not until the waitress had put a cup down in front of him and retreated to the chromium-finished counter, did Kirkpatrick again look at Emmett directly.
Then he said, “We had a visitor this morning, Mr. Emmett. A detective lieutenant from the homicide bureau of the Chicago police, named Polachek. He was down here about the murder of a man named Stevens.” The big man took from his pocket a small notebook with a spiral wire binding. “You’re acquainted with Miss Ann Nicholson, aren’t you, Mr. Emmett?” he said.
Emmett nodded. He had a feeling of being hypnotized; he was aware, presently, that he had begun to eat, but he could not seem to taste the food.
The big man searched for a page in the notebook and found it. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “you met her, presumably for the first time, in a garage in Jepson, Illinois, last Saturday evening.” He was no longer asking questions. His voice went on confidently, paraphrasing the contents of the little book. “You struck up a friendship with Miss Nicholson and, your own car having broken down, persuaded her to give you a lift west. Around midnight Saturday, Miss Nicholson’s doctor and nurse, who had been following their patient to keep an eye on her, explained to you certain medical facts about her, and asked you to help her to Denver. You agreed. Sunday morning, the fifth, you helped Miss Nicholson escape from a Nebraska sheriff who was about to detain her for questioning in connection with the Stevens killing. Sunday afternoon you registered with Miss Nicholson as man and wife at the Boyne Hotel, about sixty miles east of here. You left her that evening, but returned in the middle of the night in time to save her from the consequences of an overdose of sedative, presumably self-administered.” The federal man looked up. “Have I got all that straight?”
Emmett nodded stiffly. “That’s pretty close. Did the detective…?”
“Yes,” Kirkpatrick said. “Lieutenant Polachek seems to have put in some pretty thorough work in two days. He seemed like a good man.” The big man tasted his coffee and, finding it rather hot, put the cup down quickly. “However, when he got out here, he found himself blocked from further progress, Mr. Emmett. It appears that Miss Nicholson has been taken to a place called Young’s Valley Ranch, a sanatorium, or if you prefer, asylum, back in the mountains. At this place they told Polachek politely to go roll his hoop. Miss Nicholson was quite ‘ill’ and an interview was out of the question. Polachek tried to get some cooperation from the local officials, since he was a thousand miles, more or less, outside his own jurisdiction, but somebody, presumably the girl’s father, brought enough pressure to bear to stop that. Polachek then got a little mad and brought us what he’d managed to pick up, frankly hoping we’d be able to blast something loose for him somewhere. We found his information interesting enough that we persuaded him to take the ten o’clock plane east and leave this end of the investigation to us.”
It reminded Emmett of where he was, to hear Chicago called the East, and it made him feel a little like Rip Van Winkle to learn how much had been going on while he slept. He licked his lips.
“Then… he had enough evidence to arrest her?”
Kirkpatrick glanced up. “He thought so. I understand Mr. Nicholson used some infl
uence when his daughter first disappeared to have the alarm sent out for her canceled, but there has never, Polachek seemed to think, been any real doubt—”
“The nurse,” Emmett said. “I thought the nurse gave her an alibi.”
“Lieutenant Polachek has evidence that Miss Bethke, the nurse, did not leave the cocktail party until at least ten minutes after Miss Nicholson’s car had driven away, which makes it kind of unlikely that she was following her patient as closely as she claimed.”
“She was following her when I saw them.”
“Yes, about an hour after leaving the party Miss Nicholson tried to cash a check for a thousand dollars at a large Evanston department store where she was known. The store called her father, who stalled long enough for the doctor and nurse to pick up the trail, as close as Polachek has it figured. Then he told them to pay up.” Kirkpatrick smiled. “Incidentally, Mr. Emmett, the girl’s behavior led the department store manager to think she was either drunk or under the influence of shock; he says she could hardly talk coherently.”
Emmett said sarcastically, “I suppose there was blood on her clothes, too. It’s a wonder he didn’t call the police.”
Kirkpatrick said smoothly, “It’s interesting that you should bring up that point, Mr. Emmett. Polachek wondered about that; he was rather intrigued by the fact that the minute her father caught up to her, in Boyne, he sent her suit out to be cleaned. As a matter of fact, he paid the man ten dollars to rush the job.”
Emmett said, “There wasn’t any blood on her when I met her.”
“Were you looking for blood, Mr. Emmett? Or for places where blood had been washed away, that might still be detected by a laboratory? How do you explain her father’s—?”
Emmett said, “My God, she hadn’t had that ice-cream suit of hers off for twenty-four hours; she’d slept in it and it was getting to look pretty sad. He wanted to get her out of the hotel without attracting any more attention than he had to. Naturally he wouldn’t want her walking through the lobby looking like a tramp… And maybe I wasn’t looking for bloodstains when I met her, Mr. Kirkpatrick,” he said a little angrily, “but she was pretty enough that I gave her a good once-over, and if she’d been scrubbing spots off that suit, I’ll eat it.”
Kirkpatrick smiled. “Yes. Of course, you’d be considered a prejudiced witness, wouldn’t you? You’ve been taking quite an interest in Miss Nicholson.”
Emmett said hotly, “Don’t look at me like that. It’s nothing to me if she’s a female Bluebeard, except that she seemed like kind of a nice kid. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to see anybody hanged because the manager of a department store said she looked like she’d just been murdering somebody.”
The big man laughed, and looked down to consult his notebook, then looked up again.
“And how do you dispose of her motive, Mr. Emmett?” he asked quietly.
Emmett glanced at him, frowning. Then the damning story the girl herself had told him came back to him. “Oh, you know about that, too?”
“Yes. We know why Stevens came to see her. We have the testimony of Stevens’ wife that he felt rather bitterly about Miss Nicholson’s immunity—she’s been considered rather a heroine, hasn’t she?—and was intending to confront her with his information and then take it to the newspapers. It’s rather suggestive, isn’t it? that he should be murdered before he could carry out the second half of his program. And that shortly thereafter she should turn up, obviously on the verge of hysterics, to cash a large check, and then should flee blindly across the country without even stopping for a change of clothes. Considering her medical history—”
“What else has she done, besides trying to kill herself once before?” Emmett demanded.
Kirkpatrick shrugged. “According to Polachek, the doctor was discreet, but obviously felt he couldn’t take the responsibility… It was the nurse who offered the alibi, probably bribed to do it by Mr. Nicholson. The doctor was non-committal. He gave the impression that he wasn’t exactly surprised by what had happened, Polachek says.”
Emmett said, “Then he’s a hell of a doctor, letting a homicidal patient run around loose.”
“With many of them, you can’t tell they’re homicidal until they kill somebody,” the federal man said. “Does the girl herself give any reason for her behavior? Did she say where she was going?”
“Didn’t Dr. Kaufman—?”
“Yes, but I’d like to hear Miss Nicholson’s version.”
“She said that she was, of course, shocked by Stevens’ accusation,” Emmett said. “And that, to confirm or deny it, she was going to see a man who had been in the same prison where she was kept, who would know the truth.”
“And this man’s name?”
“Kissel,” Emmett said. “Reinhard Kissel. He’s teaching at Fairmount University, according to a clipping Miss Nicholson carried.”
The federal man closed his little book and put it away. “Yes,” he said, “that’s very nice. Unfortunately Dr. Kissel is not at Fairmount; that press release was faked by us. Dr. Kissel happens to be doing some very confidential work for the government down at the special project in New Mexico. Have you ever heard of Numa, Mr. Emmett? You should, you’re a chemist, aren’t you?”
Emmett looked up. After a moment he nodded. He had heard of Numa, although it was not as well known as Los Alamos; and he felt the electric tingle go down his spine that was always set off by the names: Los Alamos, Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Bikini, or the key words: uranium, fission, atomic, nuclear. They always made you, these days, stop and look again, feeling that small warning shock; and then you always went quickly on, because you did not really want to know what was being said about them, because you did not have the answer, either.
“If you read the article,” the big man’s voice went on, taking him deeper into unreality, “you know that Dr. Kissel worked in an unspecified German laboratory for some eighteen months. It happens that our scientists are very interested in the work that was being done in that laboratory toward the end of the war, particularly since it doesn’t now happen to be in the part of Germany under our control. They are having the old man reconstruct the place for them as well as he can remember it; fortunately he has a mind like flypaper. The Germans were very close to beating us out, you know, Mr. Emmett.”
Emmett nodded.
“Unfortunately,” Kirkpatrick went on, “it took Dr. Kissel several years before he could persuade the wooden-headed officials over there to take his story to the right people. They thought he was just another DP looking for a free ride to the land of liberty. Even so, his information is apparently considered important, since we’ve been assigned to protect him.” The big man smiled. “Do you begin to see our interest in Miss Nicholson?”
Emmett said, “Yes, but you don’t really think she—!”
“Well,” the big man said, “last Saturday there were two men in this country that we know about, who knew the truth about Miss Nicholson, and today there’s only one: Dr. Kissel. Maybe all she wants is to ask him a question, but I’ve got to keep the alternative in mind, don’t I?”
Emmett did not say anything.
“And there’s another possibility,” the other’s voice went on. “Here I am with a man on my hands who has to be protected. But the G in G-man doesn’t stand for God, Mr. Emmett. I have to let Dr. Kissel live like a human being, for one thing. It’s not just a matter of locking the old man into a bullet-proof cell every night when he gets back from the lab; he’s got to be kept happy. He likes the movies, he dotes on strawberry sundaes, and he likes to talk to people. If I keep visitors away he’ll start to squawk that he’s being kept a prisoner, and that even the Nazis let him see a human face once in a while. And then his memory will start to go bad on him. I understand Miss Nicholson seems to have a neat knack of forgetting things, but you should hear Dr. Kissel when something happens he doesn’t like! He not only can’t remember anything, he can’t even talk English any more, until whatever it is, is fixed up.” The big
man grimaced wryly and passed a hand over his mouth.
“And then,” he said, “there’s Mr. Nicholson. Mr. Nicholson isn’t God, either, but he can swing a certain amount of weight. He has a nice story to show why his daughter should be allowed to talk to Dr. Kissel, if he wants to use it: do we want to stand in the way of a sick girl’s regaining her sanity, or establishing her innocence? Remember that if Kissel says she didn’t betray her husband and friends to the Nazis, there goes most of her motive for killing Stevens. Even if she can’t remember what happened, the State would have to work damn hard to prove that, not knowing whether she’d betrayed them or not, she up and murdered the first man who came along and suggested she had. After all, Stevens had got it second-hand from her husband. She could hope that Monteux had merely jumped to the wrong conclusion when she was captured and the whole organization arrested the following week, or that the Nazis had got the dope from somebody else and covered their informant by blaming it publicly on her. Hell, maybe Monteux himself did the job, and she knows it and is covering for him. It’s a kind of coincidence that he escaped, isn’t it? Maybe that’s what makes her act so screwy… Anyway, if Kissel should happen to clear her, we’d pretty well have to admit that she was a misunderstood, if slightly neurotic, young lady.”
Emmett said, “Has anybody asked Kissel?”
The big man glanced at him. “Nobody but myself has tried. Interesting, isn’t it, Mr. Emmett? You’d think her doctor, or her parents, would jump to hear what Dr. Kissel had to say the minute they learned he was in this country, but I can tell you for certain that nobody’s approached him. It almost looks, doesn’t it, as though they already knew—?”
The Steel Mirror Page 9