Authors: Donald Hamilton
I said, sharply: “Keep them still or I’ll shoot them off.”
She glanced at me calmly, but her fingers stopped moving. Mac spoke in my ear: “Eric?”
“Sorry, sir. A minor matter of discipline.”
“I just had a preliminary report on the Inanook Sanitarium placed on my desk,” he said. “It largely concerns the director you just asked about, Dr. Caine. He was a highly respected New York psychiatrist; however, he was caught
in flagrante delicto
, as the old saying goes, with a female patient. Apparently he wound up as head of this obscure sanitarium after fleeing the scandal that cost him his lucrative practice in the East.”
I said, “Hell, there’s got to be more to it than that. I thought it was practically taken for granted, nowadays, that handsome male psychiatrists, society division, sleep with their female patients as part of the treatment.”
Albert looked as if he wanted to protest this slander against his profession. Elsie continued to stare at the wall. I didn’t like her frozen expression. Instinct told me that, behind it, she was planning her move; it was just a matter of time now. The old-plainsman type beside her seemed to have withdrawn into his shell also. He could have been asleep, but I didn’t think he was.
Mac said, “You’re quite right. Dr. Caine’s problem was that he picked the wrong woman. She happened to be married to one Emilio Brassaro, a syndicate-affiliated gentleman with, among other illicit enterprises, a thriving import business involving Central and South America. You can guess the nature of the imports. Apparently, Mr. Brassaro does not qualify as a complaisant husband. Dr. Caine fled from New York in fear of his life, and Mrs. Brassaro required fairly extensive plastic surgery—apparently she was beaten quite badly, although it was reported as an automobile accident. You will be interested to hear that the person who actually inflicted the ‘accident’ upon Mrs. Grace Brassaro, we have learned, was Mr. Brassaro’s right hand man, a certain Walter Christofferson. You know him—or knew him, depending on his current status—as Herbert Walters.”
I said, “Let me get this straight. Walters, the guy who piloted the plane in which I crashed up in Hecate Strait, was actually a hood in the employ of a New York syndicate bigshot? Is that supposed to make sense—”
That was when the lady doctor went into action. She and Frechette moved simultaneously, heaving the low round table up on edge so that for a moment I couldn’t see which way anybody was going behind it. Then the uniformed man emerged, heading for the lobby door. I fired. Plaster sprayed from the wall in front of Frechette, where I’d aimed. He came to an abrupt halt, his hands rising. The upturned table, after teetering on edge for a moment, crashed clear over, legs in the air. I caught a glimpse of Elsie struggling with the door to the examining room; she’d deliberately used the guard as a decoy to draw my attention the other way.
Before I could change my aim, before Elsie could get the door open, her body jerked strangely. I heard the crash of a firearm that wasn’t mine. Instinctively, not quite comprehending what was happening, I threw myself aside and down. I heard another shot, and another…
Looking up, I saw Kitty standing behind the desk with Frechette’s big revolver clutched in both hands and tears streaming down her face as she hauled back the trigger repeatedly until the firing pin struck a discharged cartridge with a small, snapping noise that was ridiculously feeble after the shattering sounds that had preceded it. The office stopped shaking with the crash of gunfire. I glanced around. Frechette was gone; he’d taken advantage of the violent disturbance to slip away. Dr. Albert was on the floor where he’d thrown himself. He was whimpering fearfully but apparently unhurt.
Elsie lay by the inner door. I rose and went over to her. There was blood on the side of her face; and her dark sweater showed darker stains that glistened wetly. Her eyes opened and found me.
“It
was
broken,” she whispered, and died.
I looked down at the ugly, diseased features and at the swollen wrist that had betrayed her when, forgetting, she’d tried to turn the knob with that hand. I don’t know why I had an impulse to apologize, but I did. It was several seconds before I rose and went to Kitty, still standing there, and took the empty revolver from her hand and reloaded it from the spare-cartridge gadget I’d got from the outside guard. It was an interesting little device that I’d never used before, that I could remember. Then I went over to the dangling telephone, explained what had happened, and hung up. We waited without speaking because there didn’t seem to be much to say.
Presently somebody knocked on the door three times with a heavy object. Two thumps followed. The armed man who entered cautiously—well, the first one in; there were plenty more behind him—was the chunky, darkfaced gent in civilian clothes who was supposed to have some connection with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the silent one who’d attended my plane crash interrogation in Prince Rupert. I remembered that Kitty had told me his name quite recently: Ross. He said for me to hand over my weapons and everything would be just fine.
It seemed like a hell of a big promise for anybody, even a Mountie, to make.
It was still raining as we drove across a wide, modern freeway-type bridge over water and, disregarding numerous exit signs, took the divided highway up the long hill beyond. At the top of the hill, the big road swung left, westward. I had the feeling there were mountains above us, but in the dark and rain I had no real evidence of this.
“Am I supposed to know where I am?” I asked.
“You’ve been here plenty of times, darling,” Kitty said. She was sitting beside me in the rear seat of the car. Our driver was the chunky brown gent who’d led the Inanook Relief Expedition. Kitty went on: “This is North Vancouver, where I live. Farther ahead on this road is West Vancouver. Back there across the water is Vancouver proper. Don’t ever ask what happened to East and South Vancouver. Nobody knows and you’ll just embarrass them by asking. The bridge we just crossed is called the Second Narrows Bridge because it bridges—guess what?—the Second Narrows of Burrard Inlet. There’s also a First Narrows Bridge, also known as the Lions Gate Bridge. Does this sound familiar?”
“Well,” I said, “it doesn’t come as a tremendous surprise—I seem to have heard it before—but I couldn’t have passed a test on the subject.”
Kitty raised her voice slightly. “Take the next exit, please.”
Our driver inclined his head to indicate that he’d heard. The official car—well, I thought it was an official car, although it had no markings—swung off the freeway, ducked beneath it by means of an underpass, and entered a maze of hilly little streets below, with individual houses bearing no resemblance to each other set back on reasonable-sized lots. It was the kind of oldfashioned suburb that existed before bulldozers and developments and identical split-level ranch houses were invented. There were trees and lawns. I made no effort to look for familiar landmarks. It had been a long night. I could work on improving my memory some other time.
We stopped in front of a white, two-story, frame house, still within sight and hearing of the freeway. I got out, since it seemed to be expected of me, and helped Kitty out.
“Thank you, Mr. Ross,” she said politely to the driver. Her voice was perfect, but she seemed to be quite unaware, standing there in the rain, that she was rapidly getting soaked again after having pretty well dried off. “It was very nice of you to give us a lift, Mike,” she said.
I was worried about her. She’d been totally calm and self-possessed about everything. Yes, she had shot Dr. Somerset. No, she didn’t know very much about guns, but Paul had been busy dealing with the guard and she, Kitty, hadn’t thought he wanted to let the woman get away. Yes, she was quite all right, thank you. No, she felt no need for a tranquilizer or sedative, thank you very much.
Now, for God’s sake, she was lecturing me on local geography and graciously thanking our chauffeur for his trouble, like a normal young lady who hadn’t just endured a lengthy imprisonment including a couple of days of ingenious torture, and hadn’t just put three bullets out of six into a human target at six paces. Well, that was about average shooting for a beginner under stress, I seemed to recall, at that range, but the rest of her reactions, weren’t average at all. Either she was an iron-nerved maiden I’d misjudged completely, or she was grimly forcing herself to go through the civilized motions and keeping everything under control with a tremendous effort, probably the latter. Having enough mental problems of my own, I didn’t particularly want to be present when hers surfaced and the strict control let go, but I had a hunch I would be.
“That’s quite all right, Miss Davidson,” the driver said. I had a feeling he might have called her Kitty if I hadn’t been there. I gathered that we’d all got to know each other fairly well, working together earlier. But my loss of memory, and the gory mess out at Inanook, had him treating us both with careful, impartial, policeman formality tonight. “Mr. Madden?” he said.
I closed the rear door of the car and moved up to the open front window. “Yes?”
“We still have a few matters to discuss. It’s late now and you’re tired. Where can I get in touch with you in the morning?”
Kitty took my arm possessively. “He’ll be right here.”
“Then, if I may, I’ll come here. Around eleven?”
“That will be fine,” she said. “I’ll have some coffee for you.”
We watched the car drive away, an ordinary, American-type, blue sedan. I was happy to see it go. I was a little tired of Canadian officialdom. Particularly, I was tired of Mr. Ross. Regardless of our previous association, he’d given me a tough time tonight. Apparently, in Canada, you weren’t supposed to escape from insane asylums in which you were being illegally detained and semi-electrocuted. It got everybody all upset.
I reminded myself that, after all, I wasn’t in jail. I didn’t have handcuffs on. Maybe I was being ungrateful.
I turned to Kitty, who was fumbling in her purse—our smaller personal belongings had been found in the office safe, which Dr. Albert had been persuaded to open. We’d been told that, if our coats and bags were ever located, they’d be delivered to us. On the whole, I had to admit, we’d been treated with reasonable politeness, but there had been a strong aura of disapproval, strong enough that it hadn’t seemed advisable to ask any nosy questions about how Ross and his associates were planning to dispose of, or explain away, the four dead bodies with which Kitty and I had saddled them…
“It’s the attic apartment,” Kitty said, passing me a leather key-case with one key separated from the rest. “Don’t you remember? The stairs are at the side of the house, over there. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t twit you about your memory, should I?”
“Twit away,” I said. “It doesn’t hurt my feelings a bit.”
We followed the wet walk to the side of the house and climbed the outside stairs in the steady rain. If I ever got out of this, I reflected, I’d find myself a nice tropical island with balmy breezes playing under cobalt-blue skies. I unlocked and opened the door and let Kitty pass me. She turned on the light, revealing a small modern kitchen mostly finished in natural wood.
“I think we need a drink, don’t you?” she said. “Everything’s over there to the right of the stove, except you’ll find ice in the fridge. It’s a little chilly, don’t you think? Why don’t I light the fire while you mix the drinks? I do think a fire would be nice, don’t you? It’s such a raw night out.”
Her pleasant hostess manner was in sharp contrast with her rained-on and generally beat-up appearance, and the odd, unsmiling look in her eyes.
“Very nice,” I said.
“It’s Scotch with just one ice cube, darling. No water. And you’re a martini man in case you forget. Oh, dear, I do keep referring to your poor memory, don’t I?”
When I brought the drinks into the living room, which included a small dining nook by the window to the right, she was kneeling to stare into the fire. It was well alight; it must have been already laid. The fireplace, with a deep shaggy rug in front of it, was a brick installation in the end of the low, slant-ceilinged room. There was a door beside it that presumably led to a bedroom and bath beyond.
“Here you are,” I said, reaching over her shoulder to put a glass into her hand.
She took it and sipped from it. She spoke without looking around, in the bright and cheerful voice she’d been using: “Those pressed sawdust logs aren’t so romantic, but they’re much easier to find nowadays, and it’s nice to know that the sawdust from all our lumber-mills is being put to some use, isn’t it? They used to simply dump it, waste it.” She took a deep drink from her glass, and another, and polished off the contents with a final gulp, and handed it back to me. “Kitty wants more,” she said in a phony-childish voice. “Kitty wants to get sozzled. Kitty is a murderess.”
“It’s your liquor,” I said, and went back to the kitchen for refills, draining my own martini glass on the way. Whatever she had in mind, it didn’t seem advisable to let her get too far ahead of me; and now that we were out of that place, the idea of getting sozzled, as she’d called it, had a definite attraction. There were things that had happened that could, I felt, be studied better through a rosy haze of alcohol. When I returned, she hadn’t moved. I placed the glass into her hand as before. “Go a bit easy on that one, doll,” I said. “It’s loaded.”
“I hope you’re not planning to stay sober, darling.” She was still kneeling there staring straight into the fire. “I need company. Sozzled company.”
“I’m right with you,” I said. “What are we celebrating, besides Liberation Day.”
“I told you,” she said. “I’m a murderess.”
“Swell,” I said. “Join the club.”
There was a little pause while she struggled to her feet and turned at last to face me, already displaying some unsteadiness. I remembered that she’d been given no substantial food for quite a while. I remembered also that, a few beers excepted, I’d had no liquor at all within the extent of my limited recent memory. I could feel the unaccustomed alcohol taking effect. It promised to be an interesting, inebriated evening, what was left of it; but after what we’d both been through we had it coming. I couldn’t see a single good reason for staying sober. Kitty took a deliberate, deep swig of her fresh drink, and looked at me gravely.