Читать книгу The Greatest Murder Mysteries of Mary Roberts Rinehart - 25 Titles in One Edition - Mary Roberts Rinehart - Страница 76

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Miss Lewis came in a few minutes after Briggs had gone, and, closing the door behind her, looked at Tommy.

"Miss Blake is conscious," she said. "Temperature only ninety-nine, pulse a hundred and forty."

"Good!" Tommy said heartily. It was evident to us all how relieved he was. "But I don't like the pulse." He was brushing his hair back with Tish's brush. "She's had a terrific shock of some sort."

"Yes, sir," said Miss Lewis, still with her back to the door.

Tommy leaned over and kissed Tish's cheek. He was delighted at the mere prospect of seeing the Little Nurse, and showed it. "Now, try to be good until I come back, both of you," he said. "All right, Miss Lewis, we'll have a look at our patient in the dormitory."

Miss Lewis looked flushed and uncomfortable.

"I'm sorry, Doctor," she said. "Miss—Miss Blake doesn't—she has asked for Doctor Will-son instead."

"What!" said Tommy, and turned a dark red.

"She's asked for Doctor Willson," repeated Miss Lewis. "There's no mistake. I've been coaxing her for ten minutes."

"She's still delirious," Tish snapped. "And it is not necessary to coax people to retain my nephew's professional services. Miss Lewis."

"Why, that's all right," Tommy said with affected cheerfulness. "Willson's a fine chap —she couldn't do better."

"Fiddle!" Tish was angry. "Who is Wilson, anyhow?"

"Big fellow, dark eyes—very distinguished looking man," said Tommy humbly. Tommy is handsome, if being straight and slim and young count for anything, but I daresay one could hardly call him distinguished. Tish and I differ about this. "Good gracious. Aunt Tish, the girl ought to have the privilege of selecting her own medical adviser."

"Humph!"

"Suppose you go back to the dormitory. Miss Lewis," Tommy said, "and say to Miss— Miss Blake that she's made a wise choice, and I'll send Willson to her as soon as he comes in. And ask her if she will let me see her for a moment, not professionally."

Miss Lewis looked doubtful, but she went. When she came back, in five minutes, she was evidently irritated, and her cap was more than ever on one ear.

"She's sitting on the side of the bed, half dressed," she grumbled, "and she says she won't see anybody."

"Then she doesn't want—Willson?" asked Tommy, looking relieved.

"No. Says she's all right, and if people don't stop bothering her she is going out somewhere in the country where they have a dog and kittens! That's what she said! Not cat and kittens—"

Sensible girl," said Tommy, happy again. She-hasn't changed her mind about seeing me?"

"No, nor about locking the door. And what's more—" She stopped and glanced at Tommy. "I'd like to speak to you a moment in the hall, Doctor."

"What sort of shilly-shallying is that?" demanded Tish. "Can't you speak to him here?"

"I can not," said Miss Lewis, glaring back at Tish, her thumbs inside her apron belt. "It isn't considered shilly-shallying in this hospital for a nurse to make a report to a doctor, and if you'll read the rules on that door—"

"I'll speak to you in the hall," said Tommy. "Miss Lewis is right. Aunt Tish. If it's in line with what we've been discussing, I'll tell you."

But Tish isn't a woman to take chances. Afterward, she justified her looking through the keyhole on the plea that she was making a scientific theory to fit the case, and if it were not for keyholes many a murderer would have gone unhung to his grave. At the time, however, I was rather horrified.

She had plenty of time to tell me what she saw, as it happened, for Tommy did not come back until late in the afternoon, after the guinea-pig incident.

Tish says that when she'd got them in focus, as you may say. Miss Lewis was pulling something out of her sleeve. It was a knife, Tish says, with a short, thin blade that looked as sharp as a razor.

"One of the knives from the operating-room, Doctor," Miss Lewis said. "I thought I'd better not let the old ladies see it."

I daresay that was when I saw Tish's back stiffen.

"Great Scott!" said Tommy.

"I found it on the floor under her bed," Miss Lewis went on. "She didn't see me pick it up.

Tommy was staring at the blade.

"It's been used," he said. "Look at this!"

"Exactly," said Miss Lewis. "It's from the operating room, Doctor, and they don't put away their knives in that condition."

"What do you mean by that?" Tommy demanded sharply. But Miss Lewis only looked at him.

"I don't mean anything against Ruth Blake, if that's what you are indignant about," she said. "But I'm glad I found that knife. There's enough talk. Doctor."

They moved down the hall then, so that was all Tish heard. But she added, "Knife, bloodstained," to her sheet of paper.

Aggie being half drowsy and altogether sulky, we took a little time to go over the notes Tish had made, and they pointed as many different ways as a porcupine—Johnson, with his raps and his talk about coming back, taken from the mortuary and hung by his neck with a roller towel marked S. P. T.; the coincidence of Johnson's wife murdered a few years before and hung up the same way; Miss Blake wandering around at night with a brass candlestick and a blood-stained knife from the operating room, and Tommy Andrews falling or being pushed through a skylight and coming out of the excitement with a bite instead of a fracture! And then there were smaller things, though strange enough—the twisted pipe-molding and the footprints on the wall up-stairs in the room where Johnson's body was found; the loosened molding in Aggie's room and her story about the foot; the fact that Johnson was left to die in the care of a convalescent typhoid and the ward left alone for fifty-five minutes; Linda Smith and her speech to Miss Blake, not to mention the darkish bundle.

It was Tish who advanced the gigantic ape theory. She'd been reading The Murders in the Rue Morgue, and some of the clues seemed to fit, especially Tommy's shoulder. The loosened molding helped out the theory, and as Tish said, also the stringing up of Johnson's body, which, if you left out the supernatural, had apparently been done by something tremendously strong, but without intelligence.

Well, the more we thought of it the more certain we felt. The footprint part of it, too, we considered corroborative evidence, until we got the encyclopedia and learned that the great apes have the equivalent of four hands, and not a foot at all.

But Tish was undaunted. "Mark my words, Lizzie," she said, "they've lost a chimpanzee or a gorilla from the Zoological Garden—not that they'll acknowledge it. You remember when the lion got loose and ate a colored woman out the Ralston road, and how the papers denied everything until they found the beast dead of indigestion in a cellar? But that is what has happened."

Well, I thought it likely enough myself, and Tish called up Charlie Sands, who is on a newspaper and is another of Tish's nephews.

Lizzie and I," said Tish over the 'phone, have reason to believe that there is a great ape—a-p-e—ape! Monkey, monkey—yes. A large monkey loose, and we want you to trace it."

There was a long pause. Tish said afterward that Charlie claimed to have fainted at the other end of the wire, and to have had to be restored with whisky and soda. However, which is more to the point, he promised to find out for us what he could, and Tish hung up the receiver.

"He'll do it, too, Lizzie," she said, "although he spoke to me gently, as if he thought my reason had entirely gone. But, as he said, it won't hurt to scare up the Zoo people anyhow. They're very casual about their animals."

Now, two things were discovered that afternoon, neither of them to be explained by anything we knew. The first one was that Tommy Andrews and Mr. Harrison, the superintendent, making a careful examination of the roof, found a spattering of dried blood leading from the broken skylight to the ridge pole, where it ceased abruptly. The second one was made by Aggie and myself.

About three o'clock that afternoon Aggie got into her clothes and insisted on coming into Tish's room, which was inconvenient, Tish expecting the message from Charlie Sands at any moment. Aggie was nervous, but her head was clearer. She'd been thinking things over, and she knew now that what had happened the night before had been a message from the roofer.

"Then the least said about it the better!" Tish snapped. "If he hasn't any better sense than to materialize his foot, and you a woman of your years and respectability, he'd better go back where he came from."

For heaven's sake, Tish," Aggie pleaded, looking over her shoulder. "He may be listening to us now!"

"I don't care if he is," said Tish recklessly. "If he'd materialize a will, now, leaving you that house in Groveton! But a foot!"

"I'm not so sure it was a foot," Aggie said restlessly. "I've been thinking, Tish—he was a large man, you know. It may have been a hand."

Now at that moment the telephone bell rang, and Tish signaled to me to take Aggie out at once. I got up and took her by the arm.

"I'll walk up and down the corridor with you, Aggie," I said. "You need exercise."

"I don't care to walk," she objected, trying to sit down. "See who is at the telephone, Tish. I expect my laundress is through washing and wants her money."

"I'd like you to see the hospital," I said desperately as the 'phone rang again. "The—the guinea-pigs, Aggie." Miss Lewis had told me about them.

Now, Aggie loves a guinea-pig. It's a queer taste, but she says they neither bark like dogs nor scratch like cats, and they have a nice way of wiggling their noses.

"Guinea-pigs!" she said in an ecstasy. "Where?"

"In the laboratory," said I, and led her out of the room.

She put on all her wraps and Miss Lewis took us to the laboratory, which is a small brick building set off by itself in the hospital yard, with Aggie cooing in anticipation and wanting to send out and buy a cabbage for them. Doctor Grim, who was the surgical interne, met us as we were crossing the yard, and volunteered to let us in.

"You know," he said, feeling in his pocket for the keys, "they're not attractive as some guinea-pigs and rabbits I have known under happier circumstances. They scratch a good bit—some think it's fleas; some say it's germs."

"Germs?" Aggie asked, puzzled.

"Oh, yes," he said, opening the door and leading the way into a narrow hall. "Some of them have been inoculated with several different kinds of germs. That's why we keep this place so well locked up, for fear the germs may escape. You know,"—he unlocked the second door and threw it open, "you know, suppose you were walking up the street and met a solid phalanx of say sixteen billion typhoid germs, or measles! It would be horrible, wouldn't it?"

He stepped into the room and looked about him.

"Come in," he said. "It's a little close. We had a tear-up among the resident staff, and nobody has been here to-day. Hello!"

He threw open the shutters, and a broad shaft of gray daylight lighted the room. Aggie gave a cry of dismay. The doors of the small cages around the walls were all open, and in the center, a pathetic heap of little brown-and-white and black-and-white bodies, lay the guinea-pigs.

Doctor Grim picked one up and examined it closely.

"I'm damned!" he said, and put it down. "Throats cut, every one of them! And where are the rabbits?"

Aggie sat down and began to blubber, but Miss Lewis scolded her soundly. "There'll be plenty more where they came from," she said sharply. "What does concern us is—how would anybody or anything get in here with both doors and all the windows locked, and not a chimney."

Aggie wiped her eyes and got up.

"You laughed at me last night, Miss Lewis," she said with dignity, "but I wish to remind you that to the fourth dimension there are no locks, no bars, no doors or walls."

"When they invent that," said Miss Lewis, opening the door to let us out, "they'll have to invent something like these X-ray-proof screens, or a woman won't dare to change her clothes."

"And what's more," said Aggie, turning in the doorway, "the hand that slew those innocent little creatures is the one I touched last night!"

"Hand!" cried Miss Lewis. "It was a foot then."

But Aggie was holding her shoulder over her face and hurrying across the yard. At the far side she threw back a contemptuous sneeze.

Tish's commission to Charlie Sands had an unexpected result. She was almost bursting with it when I got back.

"Listen," she said while Aggie got her spray, "doesn't this bear out what IVe been saying right along? The Zoo people say positively that none of their animals has escaped. But they took such an interest in his inquiry that Charlie grew suspicious and bribed a keeper. He sent this up by messenger from the office:

" 'Dear and revered spinster aunt,' " she read—"the young rascal! 'I couldn't tell you this over the 'phone, for it's our exclusive property, and will be published to-morrow morning, with photographs of the late deceased, etc. Hero, the biggest ape in captivity, pining for his keeper, Wesley Barker, who has been away, committed suicide in his cage last night by hanging himself with a roller towel. He was found dead when the assistant keeper unlocked the cage at six o'clock this morning. Nobody knows how he got the roller towel. Charlie.'

" 'P. S.—I've got the roller towel, a fine long one and marked S. P. T. Do you think the letters stand for Suicidal Purpose Towel?' "

Tish looked at me triumphantly over her reading-glasses.

"You see, Lizzie, what a little logical thinking will do. If it hadn't been for me, you and Aggie would have gone to your graves expecting to be able to come back at any time and hang from chandeliers or do any of the ridiculous buffoonery that seems to be expected of returned spirits. We search for a ghost and we find a gorilla."

She meant ape, of course, but the other was alliterative.

"I'm not quite clear about it yet, Tish," I said, with my head in a whirl. "If his cage was locked, and the keepers say he hadn't been free, and if Miss Blake—"

"If! If r said Tish impatiently. "I haven't had time to figure it all out, of course. But mark my words, Lizzie, the mystery is solved. We shall sleep to-night."

But, as a matter of fact, we never even went to bed.