Terrell listened to his heels clicking sharply toward the elevators, and then he picked up the phone and gave the operator Superintendent Duggan’s home number.
The Superintendent’s wife answered, and told him that Duggan had gone back to the office. She sounded upset. “He just dashed away, right in the middle of that TV program he likes so much. It’s the one where—”
Terrell broke the connection and told the operator he wanted the police board. It took him almost five minutes to get through to Duggan. Finally Duggan’s voice cracked in his ear. “Yes? Who is this?”
“Sam Terrell. Listen, I’ve got an address I want you to take down.”
“Sam, you must live under a rock. Don’t you know the whole goddamn city is upside down? We picked up a hoodlum named Rammersky who tells us he strangled Eden Myles. Caldwell’s clear.”
“The Bancroft nursing home,” Terrell said, raising his voice over Duggan’s. “There’s a girl being held there. Connie Blacker.”
“Wait a minute,” Duggan said. “We already got that tip. The Bancroft nursing home. Hang on.”
“What are you talking about?” Terrell yelled, but Duggan was off the line.
He returned a full minute later, and said, “I just checked with Radio. A couple of cars are on their way to pick her up.”
“Where did you get the tip?”
“Mike Karsh called about ten minutes ago. Told us the girl was being held against her will, that she was an important witness against Ike Cellars.”
“When will you know if she’s all right?”
“When the cars report to Radio. Sam, I’m busy as hell.”
“I’ll call you back,” Terrell said, and put the phone slowly back in place. He sat on the bed and lit a cigarette. Mike Karsh... He shook his head, completely bewildered.
The time passed slowly. He paced the room, counted Frankie’s suits, read the labels on bottles of patent medicines, and then stared at the cover of a magazine that was lying beside the bed. The illustration was of a kitten peeking around a bowl of geraniums. He studied it for a full minute, irrelevantly aware that this particular conjunction of subjects would probably be distasteful to him the rest of his life.
Five minutes passed. He called Duggan again, and was another couple of minutes getting through to him. Then he said, “Have you got the girl?” His voice was high, and he could feel the uneven lurch of his heart.
“Yes. They’ve taken her over to St. Anne de Beaupré’s and made three arrests at the Bancroft home. It’s a phony joint.”
Terrell’s hand tightened on the phone. “What’s the matter with her?”
“Christ, I don’t know,” Duggan said impatiently. “She’s in bad shape. That’s all they told me.”
There were two police cars parked in the gravelled driveway before the accident ward of St. Anne de Beaupré’s hospital. The red emergency light flashed above the wide doorway, and farther down the lane a white ambulance was angled against the receiving ramp.
The patrolmen from the squads were chatting with attendants, while a nurse filled out their forms at the registration desk. As always, the atmosphere was one of casual tension; this was an arena of bright lights and rubber-tiled floors and antiseptic smells, a theatre where the highest tragedies were acted out before nurses, interns and cops — a tough, unimpressionable audience that could watch the drama efficiently and still find time to worry about time-off and coffee-breaks.
Terrell nodded to the patrolmen and said to the nurse, “Connie Blacker. How is she?”
“Admitted,” the nurse said. She looked up at him and smiled quickly. “Hello, Sam. You’re a stranger. She’s under oxygen, I think. She was having some kind of respiratory trouble. What’s the matter? You look pretty rocky yourself.”
“Nothing,” Terrell said. “Where is she?”
“Just down the hall. In Emergency.”
“Thanks,” Terrell said, and turned into the wide white corridor. He knew his way around every hospital in the city; he had sipped coffee in this one, and kidded with nurses while waiting for an accident victim to die, and when it was over he had called the desk with only a momentary and impersonal regret that someone’s life had come to an end.
Now it was all different. A tall, balding doctor came out of the emergency ward, and Terrell caught his arm. “The girl they just brought in,” he said. “How is she?”
“Not too good. You’re a friend of hers?”
“That’s right, I’m a friend of hers.”
The doctor removed his glasses and polished them on his clean white smock. He looked much younger with the glasses off; his eyes were mild and clear and intelligent. “She was injected with considerably too much morphine,” he said. “That was sometime this morning, I gather. Then she spent the day in a tank — the treatment for violents, you know. Wet sheets from head to foot. She’s completely disoriented now. Out of sheer fright, I’d say. And the morphine has affected her respiratory center.”
“Will she be all right?”
