Matthew Higgins laid down The Morning Call and smiled vaguely. It had been a long time since he was in the Middle West, and you got out of the way of remembering it. He finished his coffee, motioned for his check, paid it, leaned over the bar and said:

“That’s the best coffee roll I ever had outside of Paul’s.”

Otto beamed and cocked his head slowly.

“Fank you! Fen I fus cum to dis country, I vork in Paul’s. Two vyears.”

Matt put his weight in his shoulders and his voice was admiring.

“Why did you come West?”

Otto began wringing his towel helplessly.

“Vell, my vivfe vus humsic, so I tried to make into a Jerman settl’ment ... an’....”

He stood silent a moment. All of his verve wilted.

Higgins interposed, “Any news around town?”

Otto peered over his glasses pleasantly.

“Ve reever made four inchers, las’ night. Eif 232 she continuers....” He threw out his hands. His face flashed sober and he drew his hands over his abdomen and said carefully:

“Docturr Bearr Sterlink is ... dyin ... k.”

Matt squared his shoulders and sat straight on the stool. He stretched his torso upward.

“Great man I guess ... that Bear Sterling! Saved the lives of lots of people...!”

Otto reached over the counter and began carefully balancing the dishes and his words.

“Yess. Lots. Lots of people. But even great men half der veak spots....”

Matt Higgins poised a spoon upon the saucer of the cup Otto was lifting.

“What do you mean ... ‘weak spots’...?”

“Vell...,” Otto’s conscience and his philosophy collided. He peered over his glasses again.

“Du ... did you kno’, Docturr Bearr Sterlink?”

Matt Higgins shook his head definitely.

“By reputation, only. What’s his weak spot?”

Otto closed his lips completely and turned his back. When the dishes were safely deposited, he said:

“Sum men are veak vid de knife, sum aroun’ de heart, sum like me, aroun’ de stumack...! Sum ven ve are young.... Sum ven ve are studients.... Sum ven ve are in bed....” He whirled 233 quickly and threw out his hands. His head nodded the periods to his sentences.

“Ve all haf dem!”

An interne burst through the door and begged:

“Otto, gimme some coffee quick! Quick, Otto! Black!”

Matt Higgins noted the boy’s blanched face and shaking hands.

Otto soothed:

“Fut vus hit, Docturr?”

The interne gulped the coffee and shook his head pleadingly.

Otto leaned across the counter and ordered:

“Fut ... frightened you, Docturr?”

The boy put down the cup.

“Hell!” he strode toward the door, “I ain’t frightened. It was a nigger baby with a severed head. It just got my guts ... that’s all...!”

When he was gone Otto turned to Matt Higgins, shrugged and smiled.

“Hiss iss ... fear!” he said.

Then leaning upon the counter he asked:

“Vy did you cum Vest?”

Matt looked him straight in the eyes and replied:

“I’m a New York gangster, on vacation, come to see my kid brother interning at the hospital.”

Otto perked his head.

“Maybe ... I know him.”
234

Matt Higgins shook his head.

“No. You couldn’t know him. He’s high-hat as hell. Only lets me see him half a day every six months.... He’s my ... weak spot!”

He slid from the stool and stepped aside. Four medical students jostled through the door.

Otto mopped his counter, slowly, thoughtfully, painstakingly.

Matt Higgins tipped his gray hat over his narrowed eyes, and went through the door.

That man knew something ... but there was no use trying to get him to....

He turned down Beeker Street and made his way over to Wilson Boulevard, one end of which was fa?aded by the Elijah Wilson group; the other was bounded by the River. He looked back over his shoulder to see if he could get a glimpse of anything denoting the river. Only a curling line of smoke from a ferry-boat.

The air was clear, still and comforting and the people all walked like New Yorkers. But the women didn’t amount to much. No good legs. No poise. No New York verve.

He looked at his watch as he entered the tall iron gate and approached the main entrance. It was eight forty-five.

At the main entrance he took off his gray overcoat and stood back to let two nurses pass. They weren’t much.
235

He passed the statue of Elijah Wilson, went on into the main corridor and turned to the left. He walked with the air of a man who knows where he is going and is not to be stopped by trifles. Long experience had taught him that demeanor could get one almost anywhere. Especially in a hospital.

Nurses and doctors passed, returning from breakfast. The faces of the lovelorn and the love-lettered were revealed by every passing window. Intermingled with all of these were a group of abnormally sad faces, and then he remembered that today was the day of that nurse’s funeral. She’d been a pretty little thing, too. Her fragile little corpse had skipped rope in all of his dreams last night! He quickened his pace and his hairy hands were clenched in his pockets.

Halfway down the main corridor he stopped ostensibly to look from a window at the back garden of the hospital. He took in the approaching people in both directions at a glance. They were all of them distant enough to risk it.

He walked several feet further, began walking close to the wall, and faded into a door. The door opened into what had been the old laboratory building, and with the renovating of the hospital had been left vacant. The corridor was lighted by a series of tall windows at the far end. The brilliant morning sun sifted through them vaguely. The 236 grime and dust of the panes and of the intervening corridor made its trickle thin and eerie.

Matthew Higgins closed the door softly and stood silently against it for a second, listening. Then he accustomed his eyes to the light and looked at the floor. In the center were the tracks he and Dr. MacArthur and Snod had made last night. On the far side were the tracks which he and Snod had agreed Snod should make this morning.

He shifted his hat upon the back of his head and began walking up the corridor next to Snod’s morning tracks. Halfway up, he stopped and listened. Then he threw his overcoat over his shoulder and approached, cautiously, the door of the laboratory they had decided upon. On tiptoe. Silently. His weight was thrown forward with the expert training of a toe-dancer. Slowly, melting into it as he did so, he pushed open the door of the laboratory.

It was darker than the corridor. The outside window blinds had been closed for several years. He stood silently several seconds and then decided to chance a match. He took off his hat and struck it carefully in the shadow the hat provided. Then when it was well-lighted he lifted it and surveyed the room.

The dusty lab sinks, the rotting rubber hose, the two stools with their cane bottoms gone, and upon a bamboo couch in the corner Snod Smooty, 237 his face totally devoid of expression, sleeping with the abandon of an infant.

As the match burned low in his fingers Matthew Higgins leaned over and watched Snod Smooty sleep. This was the first time in ten years he had known Snod to sleep with someone watching him.

The night must have been a swell affair! The smell of smoke reached Smooty’s consciousness; he turned over suddenly and opened his eyes completely. His face was still blank with an effort to see in the darkness, and his voice came huskily:

“Matt?”

The answer was in keeping with the dimness. The match had burned out and Matt Higgins was killing it on the floor with his toe.

“Yeah. Wake up! Any news?”

Snod Smooty raised his slim body to a sitting posture and slung his thin feet to the grimy floor. He ran his left hand through his colorless hair and wiped out his eyes with the right palm.

“Cigarette?”

Matt Higgins took The Morning Call from his overcoat pocket and placed it over the hole in one of the stools. Over that he folded his overcoat and raised himself onto the stool.

“Better not. Watchmen or something. How was the night?”

Smooty put the unlit cigarette sullenly in his hip pocket and said sweetly:
238

“Hell all the time ... and then some.... ’Bout ten a drunk naval officer-beau of the dead nurse brought her a bouquet of red roses, darling. Thought she was doing duty on the ward. Didn’t know about her death. Shook the guts outa that student nurse when she told him and then began playing hide-and-seek under the patients’ beds with me.”

“The devil!”

“Yeah, himself! I got him outa the hospital, socked him, and tucked him into a parked car to sleep it off. Went over him first, though. William Brady, U. S. N. Loot. J. G.

“Then I went back to the ward. And he had left the roses on the bed of one old blattering fool and she took it that she’s next to go and can she scream! So loud the others couldn’t make a squeak. Well, the Jew doctor got there and a mess of nurses and hen medics and give them all a bromide and then they needed bed-pans again ... and then ... they had to have a drink of water. And then another bed-pan around. Like salt and pepper, you know. Now I see why the Waldorf makes money. Pay toilets for ladies.”

“And Lil?” Matt’s voice was demanding.

“Lil’s lost her nerve, Matt. Swears if you don’t get her outa there by this afternoon, she’s going to walk out. Says the examination she had to get in that damn bed was just like being frisked naked. 239 During pan-rounds we had some conversation.

“She’s took it into her head that that student nurse, the niece of the head nurse, is doing the murders. She’s took it that the girl is like that moll she caught in the circus last spring (she says you know which one) working for a hypnotist and selling dope. Damn if Lil ain’t decided that the head nurse of the clinic, Miss Kerr, who got her stout old tail up there before it was all over, ain’t making her niece work for somebody ... ain’t both of them working for some control ... who is having them murder patients.”

“Lord God! That ties up, too.... Go on ... finish your story.”

“It’s Lil’s idea, Matt, that they are doing it because they hate young Sterling and are trying to ruin him, and get him out ... and nothing I could say ... between bed-pans and glasses of water ... could change her mind a nits worth. When Lil is out of reach ... you know what I mean ... she’s hard to reason with.

“And she’s got the creeps bad as the rest of them, now, and told me if I let that little bitch come within fifteen feet of her the rest of the night she’d....

“So after we’d gotten all them females quieted 240 inside and out, I had to spend till seven this A. M. doing things that would keep me where I could see the nurse. Sweeping corridors and asking questions and messing up the guts of the electric refrigerator and, you know ... having the hell of a good time....”

He threw out his hands futilely.

“Women who can walk and talk is bad enough, but when they ain’t got nothing to do, except lay out in bed ... thirty strong ... I ain’t been this tired since I worked in a prison camp in Germany in ’16.

“That student nurse and her aunt suspect me, too. And I had to put up some alibi about having been a hospital orderly in London and when I was always in the place I was told not to be, that was the way ... you know.... Lil says if I ain’t back on the ward by three this afternoon, time the aunt usually makes floor rounds, pretending to be learning the ways from the day orderly, she will be outa there ... and ... you know....”

“Good work, Snod.” Higgins complimented, and then ordered, “Good idea. Be back on by three. Sleep here this morning. After last night, the murderer will either strike quick, or lay off for some time. I’ll wire for another man this morning; but he may not get here until tomorrow.... We’ll have to do double time all around....”

Snod’s voice was flat and caustic.

“Yeah.”

Higgins ignored it and said:

“After you went on, MacArthur and I had another 241 talk, and he took me to see the nurse’s body. Lovely thing. Seems this coniine can be prepared synthetically but the toxicologist laughs off the idea that it was. Too hard to do. And I brought out that however prepared the first thing to do was to stop the ‘shots’. MacArthur agrees, but he won’t commit anybody. You were right. I told him it’s a crazy nurse or doctor and he had apoplexy. He’s straight. I like him. I’m to see the heads of all departments today and see what I can find out, unobserved. And I’ll meet you here again at two-forty, before you go back on the ward.

“If Lil’s right, they are working for the psychiatrist, and if she’s not, then it’s the man MacArthur is shielding. See anybody last night took your eye?”

“No. They were all too shocked. The murderer wasn’t there.” Smooty, who had a habit of talking “in character” was too interested to “think” as an orderly. “The person in authority was the Jew and he’s white. Jew doctors are! Those Kerr women, head nurse and student, took it too calmly.”

“Want any breakfast?” Higgins asked from the door.

“No. Just a bed-pan, please!”

Snod’s voice fluted after him.

With the overcoat, Snod Smooty made himself a pillow, and was asleep before Mr. Higgins had retraced his steps halfway up the corridor.
242

When Higgins reached the place where the basement steps came up into the corridor of the vacant building, he struck another match, again under the protection of his hat and looked for the tracks he and Dr. MacArthur had made last night. Then he descended the steps and stood in the dark basement corridor. He stood erect, with his shoulders thrown back, listening. When the silence assured his mind and hurt his eardrums he began walking up the basement corridor, toward the entrance into the main service corridor, which ran directly under the main hospital corridor. He and Dr. MacArthur had decided the best way to get out of the lab building would be through the service corridor, the door of which had a spring lock, and then up the service elevator to the main floor of the Administration Building.

The basement corridor was black as night, but totally dead. The worn-out odor of old chemicals mingled with that of damp plaster. The smell began to permeate his nostrils and made each creak of the sagging floor hit his brain like a pistol shot. The soft blackness closed in like a sweating fog.

He began to feel as a swimmer feels against strong tides. The door at the end of the corridor was diminishing as the door in Alice in Wonderland, or had it been Alice who diminished? He had just convinced himself that the last sound and the newest smell were caused by a leaking water tap 243 and an escaping gas jet, when something struck his foot, ran up his pants’ leg to his waist, and down the other side.

Rats!

He jumped with the agility of a fencing expert into an open door and threw up his arm automatically. He stood with his muscles flexed, listening and beginning to feel the beads of perspiration starting under his arms and trickling down his thighs.

And then he laughed at himself and tried to lower his arm. It wouldn’t come. He tugged and he could feel his coat sleeve beginning to give. The tap continued its regular drip, drip, and his nerves became strung and he reached his free hand in his pocket and drew out a match and lit it upon the seat of his pants, regardless.

Then he saw the trouble instantly. His arm was caught by a long iron hook suspended from the ceiling. He looked around and saw the room was full of such hooks.

“Wuuh!”

The ejaculation came naturally. He was in the room where they had once hung the cadavers. His coat was caught upon a cadaver hook! And with the realization his reflexes began working automatically. He leaped and freed his arm and struck his head upon the ceiling.

Then he leaned against the wall and shivered. 244 The feel of the burning match against his flesh brought him to, like a pain.

“Fool!” he muttered reprovingly and his perspiring body was seared dry by a consuming shame. “Lighting matches in a basement with escaping gas and getting hysterical over rats. Get out of here!”

He regained the corridor and proceeded quickly in the direction of the door. When his hand was upon the handle he stopped for a moment to consider and get himself together.

Was Snod safe in this building? Had those feelings he had just been through been entirely hysterical or were they partly occasioned by the presence of the murderer, somewhere, in that basement?

He checked over it all step by step and decided that they were pure ... might as well admit it ... pure hysteria. An innate fear of dead people, which he knew perfectly well he had had ever since that boy in Mexico took so long to die when he shot him fifteen years ago. And he had glassed his eyes on him when he finally did go.

Nobody but Snod was in this building. A murderer left tracks just like any other man and he had examined all of the tracks.

You had to take a chance....

He snapped the spring lock and ste............