For the first time, he smiled. “My memory is pretty good, too. But remember, I warned you about breaking and entering.”
I said yes sir. And as he left I asked him to look into the legality of hillbilly music flooding the air. He must have mentioned my complaint to Hazel for presently the radio across the corridor was tuned down. I was glad she had voted for Thompson.
Last evening I asked for Dr. Saari. Hazel reported back that the doctor wasn’t in her office, but that she would keep trying. I wanted to make at least one appeal to be let out the front doors.
She was as good as her word, she did keep trying, but she never got the doctor. She said she could hear Dr. Saari’s office phone ringing but no one answered it. Shortly after supper Hazel went off duty and presumably forgot the whole business.
She hadn’t been gone very long before the night nurse came into the room. I hadn’t seen this one before and wasn’t particularly concerned about ever seeing her again. She asked me if I wanted anything.
I said no, not a thing.
Then she suggested I be a good boy and go to bed early because she didn’t want me galloping around the halls tonight. She put careful emphasis on the tonight. Which told me my jolly little adventure of last night was common property among the staff. I told her I would go to sleep early if that radio across the corridor didn’t keep me awake.
She answered that it wouldn’t, she would see to it, and that she had something for me.
I asked what. She gave me a telegram. I masked my anger at her keeping it so long and asked her to wait a moment as I might want to answer it. She waited.
The wire was from Rothman, reading: BODY IN RIVER NOT ELEANOR. ADVISE.
So by way of the night nurse I advised him to keep watch on the South Adams Street apartment and to grab Eleanor before she could walk into trouble.
The nurse left, and there were no further interruptions of my solitude.
Around midnight last night I got the hell out of there.
I hadn’t undressed, but stayed under the covers in the event the nurse should walk in. The hospital corridor was L-shaped and the nurse’s desk was at the corner of the L, not far from my door. My room was on the short end of the L, and the entrances for the public and the doctors were at the long end. I was on the second floor and there would be a fire escape at each end of the L.
I waited until I heard the tiny clicking noise that is the signal patients use to summon the nurse. They push a button under their pillow, a light goes on outside their door, and the little click comes from a device above the desk. The night nurse heard the click, looked along both arms of the L, and saw a light somewhere along the long arm. Her footsteps faded from my hearing.
I grabbed my hat and overcoat from the closet, peered out the door and found the corridor clear, and sped for the nearest windows. They were locked but that slowed me only a second. Outside the fire escape held the unbroken snow of the past few days. In very short order the snow was tracked. My tracks. They would give me away, but what the hell.
I wanted to go out and see that caretaker’s cottage. If I waited until daylight the caretaker would certainly be there, and I might be seen by others. At night, however, it just might be deserted because people would be playing in the bam. And I wouldn’t be seen. I would first have to go downtown to the office and get my gun.
I did, and I had to walk all the way.
To play safe I circled around a bit and stopped a few blocks from the office building, waiting in a doorway. The entire building was dark. There were only a few people on the streets, all hurrying to get somewhere. It was still uncomfortably cold. The only car in sight was a white police car parked in front of Thompson’s restaurant. There was no one in the car.
I eased along the sidewalks towards the office, keeping in the shadows next to the buildings and stopping in every doorway that offered a hiding place to look the scene over once more. There wasn’t a thing to arouse my suspicions. When I finally reached the door to my own stairway even the stragglers had vanished from the streets. Across the street I could see two cops eating and someone else playing the juke box. Just those three and the counter girl.
I stood in my own doorway, hidden in deep shadow, feeling the warmth creeping down the stairs at my back, and watching the street I had left. No one or nothing came after me. Turning, I softly went up the stairs.
All the offices on the second floor were dark and apparently empty. I paused at Elizabeth Saari’s doorway to listen and was rewarded with nothing at all. Moving across the hall in the dark to my own door, I felt for the knob, silently turned it, and shoved the door violently open. I had already ducked back out of the door and was waiting, flattened against the wall beside the door.
Nothing at all happened.
