by S. T. Joshi
But the problem remained: How to get him?
Could we just burst into the place and expect to gun him down? Who knew what kind of security or protection he had? In my midnight escapade I hadn’t seen the fellow Vance had called Bullet Head, but it was likely enough that he or some similar stooge was there—maybe others, as well. Sanderson may or may not have figured out that his attempt to use me to dispose of the Vances hadn’t worked: he would surely have noticed that no account of their deaths had appeared in the papers. So he might be doubly on guard for some further attack.
We needed to counteract his guile with superior guile of our own. But how?
Our brainstorming session wasn’t turning up much. Neither Vance nor I could approach Sanderson directly—he knew us too well by now. And there would be no more secret-agent climbing in through second-story windows. The whole problem was infuriatingly tantalizing: we knew where Sanderson was, but couldn’t do anything about it.
That was when Marge Schaeffer said:
“Well, there’s one possibility....”
“What?” at least two of us said, desperate to hear any new suggestion.
“We could send in some guinea pigs into the Removal Company....”
“To do what?” I said. “He has at least one bodyguard, possibly more. How are one or two people going to contend with them?”
“There’s a way, I think, if you’d hear me out.”
“There may be,” I countered, “but it’s too risky. And anyway, who could we possibly entrust with a mission like that?”
“How about us?” Marge said, in a small voice, gesturing to Gene and herself.
“Absolutely not!” I exploded. “Are you crazy? I am not going to have you—either of you”—I flashed a look at Gene—“march into that office and not be able to come out. No!”
“But, Joe, it may be the only way to get him....”
“Then we won’t get him! I am not going to put you in harm’s way. Sanderson may have said he hadn’t killed anybody before, but we have no way of knowing whether he’s telling the truth or not. He’s a madman—and a brilliant madman at that, which makes it worse. I will not have you in his clutches!” I was breathing irregularly, glaring at her.
She looked down at her feet. “It’s sweet of you, Joe, to be so concerned, but there may not be any other way.” She held up her hand to still my impending protest. “And anyway, it won’t be just Gene and me. If you’ll listen to the plan, maybe you’ll think differently about it.”
I listened. I really didn’t think much differently about it, but the others seemed willing to put it into action. I was outvoted.
But as I listened, I began to get very nervous. This was going to be a long shot, and could end in disaster for us all.
* * * *
“All right,” said Gene, hanging up the phone. “It’s him. His man will be here in twenty minutes.”
So far, so good. Sanderson had taken the bait—I hoped. Given his apparently extensive cadre of spies, underlings, and collaborators, I had begun to be uneasy that he might know of Marge and Gene and their relation to Vance and myself; but that was a chance we had to take.
I had chosen the Plaza Hotel, near the southeast corner of Central Park, as the rendezvous for the next “clients” of the Removal Company: its large, semi-circular driveway would make it easier to pursue the car that Sanderson would send to fetch Marge and Gene. Vance had suggested that he and I merely wait near the Removal Company’s office on Third Avenue, but I had rejected that idea: in the unlikely event that our friends were taken somewhere else, we would have no way of tracking them. I was a professional in shadowing people, either on foot or in a car; and thought I could escape detection in hunting our quarry down.
Vance and I were already in our vehicle—a Renault Primastella belonging to Arthur’s uncle—when we saw Marge and Gene come out of the hotel and wait on the sidewalk. In minutes a black Packard ambled in and quietly pulled up to them. A man got out of the car.
Vance grabbed my arm excitedly. “That’s—”
“Yes, I know. That’s Bullet Head.”
Incongruously, he shook hands with both Marge and Gene before ushering them into the back seat of his car. With an inconspicuous gesture he pulled out two black silk handkerchiefs and gave some instructions his charges. He was standing directly in front of the door of the back seat, so it was next to impossible for anyone to see or make sense of his actions. No one—and there were plenty of other people in the vicinity in this sunny late afternoon in April—noticed what he did. But we were prepared for it, and we saw it all.
Bullet Head got into the driver’s seat and pulled out slowly. We followed.
As expected, he took an extraordinarily circuitous route to his destination, at one time going as far east as Sutton Place and another time as far west as Times Square. Without exception his driving was moderate, calm, and entirely collected. He gave no indication that he knew he was being followed.
The Packard finally pulled up at the alley off 36th Street. With impeccable control, Bullet Head pulled the car up virtually to the back door of 548 Third Avenue. It would have been folly to have followed him in, so we parked on the street a little farther down and quickly got out of our vehicle. Vance nearly blundered right into the alley, but I grabbed him at the last minute:
“Stay back, you fool! They haven’t gone in yet!”
By craning my head infinitesimally around the edge of the building at the mouth of the alley, I could see all I needed to see. The alley was so narrow that Bullet Head had had some difficulty getting out of his side of the car. Finally managing it, he walked stiffly around the back of the car, gave a quick look around, then opened the back seat door. Marge and Gene got out clumsily. Bullet Head gestured for them to stand still while he opened the door leading up to the Removal Company with a succession of keys.
All three went in.
After about a minute Vance and I crept into the alley and placed ourselves around the door our friends had entered. If anyone had been in that storeroom directly above, through whose window I had climbed several days ago, they would have spotted us instantly. I looked up, seeing the empty space where the pane I had removed had been. The window was dark.
This was now the hard part. We would have to wait. The plan was for Gene to let Marge actually go with Sanderson into the inner office of the Removal Company, then—with the gun he had taken with him—overpower Bullet Head and let us in. I had no idea how long this whole process would take: Sanderson would have to go through his customary procedure of “counseling” Marge to make sure that her “decision” was irrevocable, there would be the signing of papers, and all that business. It was difficult to estimate how long we should wait: fifteen minutes? twenty? half an hour? And what if Gene should fail in his mission? What if Bullet Head overwhelmed him?
I did not want to contemplate that possibility, both for his sake and for Marge’s.
But we had to have some alternative plan. Frankly, there would be nothing to it except to blast our way in. Vance had brought his cannon of a gun, and that might do. But we had two heavy, deadbolted doors to go through, and such an entrance couldn’t be made quietly. Who knows what appalling fate would await Marge and Gene—and ourselves—if Sanderson heard such a commotion and realized the plot against him?
So we waited.
Vance, inevitably, was impatient. After five minutes he already wanted to do something—anything—but I hissed in his face to keep his mouth shut. I had to confess I wasn’t feeling very patient or confident myself. Gene was a newspaper man; could he be a match for a toughened bodyguard, even one who might be caught off-guard? It was the one weak link in the plan, but there had been no way around it.
After ten minutes my palms were moist with sweat, and my finger was slipping greasily over the trigger of my gun. Vance was almost exploding with frustration, whispering impotently:
“For God’s sake, Joe, we gotta do something! It may be too late already....”
“No,” I said, putting forth an assurance I hardly felt. “Give it more time. You remember how long it took for Katharine to go—”
“It didn’t take this long!” Vance said almost out loud. “Marge... Gene...they could be—”
“Shut the bloody hell up, will you?” I spit out. “Just shut up and wait.”
We waited.
Suddenly a sense of the utter unreality of what we were doing came over me. A great city’s incessant hum of traffic sounded all around us. A few people actually crossed the mouth of the alley, entirely oblivious of what was going on only a few hundred feet away. Children were coming home from school, laughing and roughhousing. A stray cat came into the alley, sniffing for food.
I couldn’t take it any more. “All right,” I said. “We’re going in.”
We were about to turn our guns on the door when it suddenly opened.
Bullet Head faced us, staring at us entirely without expression.
“What the—” Vance burst out.
He was about to turn his gun on the man when, like a ghost or shadow, Gene Merriwether loomed up behind him. Bullet Head grunted, feeling something digging into his back.
“Come on up, you guys!” Gene said quickly. “You gotta move fast—he’s got Marge!”
We flew up the stairs.
I was the first one in the door leading into that white, hexagonal room, but Vance was right behind me. When he entered, he suddenly seemed to choke, then started to quiver all over. He must have been remembering.
I didn’t have time for that. Seeing Gene and Bullet Head lumber up behind us, I turned to Vance and whispered: “Cover him! Tie him up if you can.”
I made my way to the door leading into that paneled room. As I was about to turn the knob, I paused irresolutely. I tried to hear what was going on inside, but no sounds emerged.
Then I flung the door open.
Sanderson had just finished injecting something into Marge; the syringe was still in his hand. She was lying on a hospital bed, supine and utterly motionless. Sanderson looked up in sudden alarm at my entrance. The air of sardonic tranquility he always tried to maintain vanished instantly.
“You—you filthy scum!” he shouted.
Flinging the syringe away, he fled through a door and into that long corridor I remembered from my last visit.
Vance now burst in. At sight of Marge he covered his mouth with his hand. “Oh, my God—”
“It’s all right, Vance! He’s just drugged her. She’ll come around. I’m going after him!”
Without waiting for a response, I rushed into the corridor.
I had my quarry in sight, and this time I wasn’t going to lose him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The long corridor was only dimly lit with weak, flickering bulbs that caused both Sanderson’s shadow and my own to drape the narrow walls eerily as we flew past. The many doors on either side of the hall were closed, but their little windows offered some further feeble illumination, possibly from windows within. I could have sworn that a couple of them were occupied, with male and female bodies laid out like corpses in a morgue. I tried my damnedest not even to guess who they might be.
Sanderson turned abruptly to the left at the very last door; it slammed to, and then there was another hard click whose implication I didn’t grasp until I reached it myself seconds later. It was a deadbolt. Peering through the small window in the door, I saw that it was a set of stairs leading both up and down. Sanderson was already out of sight.
“Damn!” I spit out.
There was no recourse. I pointed my gun directly at the deadbolt and fired. The explosion was immense, far greater than I had expected—it reverberated off the walls of the corridor, sending me reeling backward to crash into the door behind me. I grunted in pain, but nevertheless saw that my shot had done the trick. The door had flipped open.
I had enough remnants of caution not to rush through it; instead, a peered carefully both up and down those concrete stairs, looking either for a trace of Sanderson, if he had continued to flee, or for a gun leveled at me, on the chance that he had decided to make this his stakeout for a final confrontation.
I saw nothing, but thought I could just detect the sound of footsteps—coming from below, and receding increasingly into the distance.
I flew down the stairs. At the second bend I just caught a glimpse of him going through a door. Possibly I could have taken a potshot at him, but I had a certain scruple about shooting a man—any man, even a criminal or fugitive—in the back. My chances of hitting him were in any case not good.
I thought I had reached that door at the foot of the stairs only seconds after he had, but when I opened it—again cautiously—I saw that it led to the alley, and that Sanderson had already entered his black Packard and was setting it in motion. Just as I reached the alley myself, the car took off screechingly, its sides showering sparks as they brushed grindingly against the brick and concrete buildings on either side of the narrow passage.
I fired a couple of shots, aiming for his tires, but apparently missed. Sanderson had gone forward, exiting the alley at 37th Street and turning hard to the right; his car nearly fishtailed as he did so. Cursing again, I ran back the other way toward Vance’s uncle’s car, leaped in, and took off after him.
I didn’t attempt to navigate that alley, but instead pulled up to the corner of 36th and Lexington Avenue. Sanderson’s car was easy to spot, and I saw it heading north on Lexington. I followed.
Things now started to get bizarre.
Sanderson did not floor his gas pedal as I had expected, but proceeded with a certain quiet urgency, weaving around slower-moving vehicles but not doing anything that could be considered reckless. I quickly concluded that he was anxious not to attract the attention of the police, and in the next moment realized that it would be to my advantage not to do so as well. If the law were brought in now, the explanations involved would be fearsomely complicated, and might possibly be irreparably damaging to my client and perhaps to hundreds of others—all those people who had used the “services” of the Removal Company. There was every reason to try to resolve this business quietly and privately.
And so I too proceeded with caution, making sure to keep Sanderson in my sights but not making any sudden or dangerous move that would bring on a siren. A busy street was not the place to bring this matter to a head.
Sanderson was heading north, eternally north. At 110th Street he turned sharply to the left, and very quickly we found ourselves traversing the northern edge of Central Park, with its low brick wall on our left. At Riverside Drive—almost at the western edge of the island—Sanderson turned right, resuming his northward course. I now had an instinct where he was heading: the George Washington Bridge leading to New Jersey, only opened two years before.
We crossed the bridge without incident. Once again the unreality of the whole enterprise began to overwhelm me. What exactly were we doing in this sedate car chase? I could easily have overtaken him, perhaps even cornered him on the street, the bridge, or the highway on which we were now cruising due west; but did I want to do that? What would I have done then? Shoot him in cold blood? Take him back to his Removal Company office? What then? Suddenly the incredible difficulty of resolving this whole matter struck me like a hurricane blast. I really had no idea why I was chasing Sanderson or what I was going to do if and when I caught him.
The mechanical effect of driving the car and shadowing Sanderson also freed up my mind to reflect on other things. Once again I was bothered by both the character of Sanderson himself—with his stilted diction, which sounded so phony—and by the completely bizarre nature of his Removal Company. Oh, the idea of “assisting” people in suicide wasn’t so odd—could even have been considered admirable, in its way. It was the utter cumbrousness of his chosen method of giving people new personalities rather than actually dispatching them.
Sanderson may have been right in saying that this kind of switching of personalities may have
been a bit easier than fabricating an entirely new personality, with all the documentation that might require; but the whole procedure was nevertheless incredibly awkward, time-consuming, and bothersome. What had he said? “It takes months, Mr. Scintilla, months to indoctrinate my ‘victim,’ as you term it, into his or her new personality.” But the question remained: Why would someone go to all that effort?
Surely he could have devised some means of actually killing his victims and then disposing of the bodies. That was what his victims had wanted in the first place, and what their survivors had expected. Those survivors wouldn’t be calling in the police, for in that case they really would be accessories before the fact. And the physical disposal of a body—especially for one of Sanderson’s manifest medical skills—should not have been a great obstacle.
So we were back to the basic query: Why? Why had Dr. Sanderson chosen this way to operate?
I was not confident of ever answering that question.
We had been driving—rapidly, but not noticeably so—along Route 4 for some time, passing through the wealthy communities of Fort Lee and Englewood. Shortly after we crossed Teaneck Road, however, Sanderson suddenly veered off into a narrow country road whose name I didn’t catch. What exactly was he doing now? Was this the moment that he would try to give me the slip? The chances of doing so were extremely remote: there were scarcely any turnoffs here except the driveways of farmhouses.
It was one of those early spring days when the transition from day to night comes with jolting suddenness. Uncannily, both Sanderson and I switched on our headlights at about the same time. There was practically no other traffic on this little-used road, and the beams from my car were fastened on his vehicle like a spotlight.
Once again, without warning Sanderson now turned off the road into a field of coarse, dry grass. The abruptness of the move had jounced his car up and down, and with my headlights I actually saw his head hit his steering wheel hard. That seemed to stun him for several moments, for his car weaved erratically, tearing up the grass and dirt of the unused field.