The Lady in the Morgue (29 page)

French turned to Courtland. “I would like to express my admiration for the manner in which you rescued Crane, Mr. Courtland. Not many wealthy young men would display such courage.” He smiled at Crane. “I am sorry you had such an unpleasant experience with us, Mr. Crane. It was purely a matter of business. I wanted to find Miss Vincent, and I believed you had possession of her body. I see now that I was mistaken.” He held out a slender hand. “I'm sure you bear me no personal animus.…”

“The hell I don't,” said Crane. “If I ever catch you out of your own backyard, you greasy Dago, I'll take a good sock at you.” He scowled at the gangster.

Warningly, French shook his head at his driver, who was clawing for a pistol under his coat, and smiled at Crane. “I can well believe you would. You have already made an excellent start—the X-ray pictures show you broke three of my ribs.” He paused at the door. “I shall try to keep out of your way.” His face, suddenly cheerful, was gone.

Johnson said, “Not such a bad guy.”

“Yeah?” said Crane, bitterly. “You ought to have him lock you up in his back room sometime.”

Courtland yawned. “What's next on the program?”

Crane's face was blank. “I'm damned if I know.”

“Then how about letting me break the story that the girl's been found?” asked Johnson.

“Wait till eight o'clock.” Crane sighed heavily. “I have a feeling that the solution is only a few inches out of my brain, but I can't get it. I'd like to be able to explain who she is when the story breaks.”

“Christ! It'll help you find out who she is if you let the papers have the story,” argued Johnson. “Besides, if you hold off until eight the
A.M.S
won't get the story at all.”

“What do you care, as long as you have it exclusive? There's plenty of afternoon papers, anyway.” Crane held the inner receiving-room door open for them, and then turned off the light and followed them up the steel stairs. Williams was seated on one of the waiting benches, his eyes half closed. Crane asked him, “Get anything out of Udoni?”

“Naw. He says he don't know where his wife is, and he's got no idea where she might be.”

“That's funny.” Crane sighed again, added, “Well, O'Malley is tailing him, and if he does go to his wife he'll get her.”

“Why do you want to find her?” asked Johnson.

“I don't know,” said Crane. “I think she's cute. And I'd like to know why she had that hair tint in her room.” He bent over and rubbed a spot off his right sport shoe. “Look! I want to see her very much.” He took out a pencil, wrote on the back of an envelope. “Here's a couple of places where you might find some trace of her.”

He gave the envelope to Williams, who asked, “Ain't you coming along?”

“Hell, no.” Crane made a fanning, negative motion with his hand. “I'm sticking right here. I had plenty of trouble finding that body downstairs, and I'm taking no chances of losing it again.”

Courtland's face was tired. “I don't feel so well. I think I'll go home pretty soon.”

Williams handed the envelope on which Crane had written to Johnson. “Where in hell is that last address?” he asked.

The reporter eyed the envelope, his face puzzled. “Which address?” he asked. Then he said, “Oh yeah, Banks Court. That's a little street just off Astor. On the North Side.”

“Can you find it, Doc?” asked Crane.

“I guess so.”

“You better scram.” Crane looked out the windows facing the court of the County Hospital, saw only reflected flashes of lightning. “It's let up a little outside.”

“O.K.,” said Williams, picking up his hat.

“You mind if I go along?” inquired Johnson. “I might be able to help you find some of those addresses. You'll be back in a couple of hours, won't you?”

“I hope so,” said Williams. “Sure, come along.”

As they started toward the corridor Courtland said to Crane, “I'll stick around for five or ten minutes and then beat it.”

“Sure,” said Crane; “stick around. I need company.” He called after the others, “Make it as snappy as you can.”

The cracked clock over the attendant's head read 4:05. The attendant had apparently worked himself into a state of complete exhaustion. He was sound asleep at his desk, his head pillowed in his arms. Water dripping from the roof of the morgue fell plop-plop-plop into a lake beneath the big windows in the waiting room.

Courtland asked Crane, “What about those gangsters? Have you given up the possibility that the dead girl is Mrs. Paletta?”

“I'm damned if I know.” Crane handed Courtland a Lucky Strike, took one himself and lit them both. “If Paletta isn't interested in Miss Ross it proves he knows where his wife really is.”

“Yes, that would be true if Paletta
really
wasn't interested.”

“You think he might have been lying?” Crane let the smoke roll out of his mouth. “Yes, he could have been.” Startled, he whirled around, faced Courtland. “That would mean he is planning to do something about the body—maybe come down here and take it away.”

Courtland nodded. “French could have lied, too. It seemed to me he was terribly pleased about something down there in the receiving room.”

“My God!” There was horror in Crane's face. “He might be coming back, too.”

“Somebody is likely to come back,” said Courtland. “Whoever stole the body in the first place proved to be a desperate person, and he still has reasons for wishing to get the body out of the morgue again.”

“Christ!” exclaimed Crane. “Maybe I should have kept Williams and O'Malley here.”

Courtland blew out a long stream of smoke. “Look,” he said suddenly; “why don't we hide down in the receiving room? Then when the fellow comes to get the body, I mean if he comes, we could grab him.”

“I don't know,” said Crane. “It's pretty dangerous.”

“The hell!” Courtland dismissed the danger with a flat, pushing motion of his hand.

“All right.” Crane stood up. “I don't mind, if you don't.”

He glanced at the attendant, saw that he was still sleeping. He followed Courtland down the stairs and into the receiving room. The powerful overhead light lit the big room brilliantly, made the long sheets over the seven occupied tables white. Miss Ross's body was in the center of the chamber, and past it, near the second door, opening into the driveway, was a vacant table, sheet folded neatly across one end. The room was without furniture, except for a white, instrument-filled cabinet, and there was no place to hide.

“We'll have to lie on a table,” said Courtland, “and pull the sheets over us.” He indicated the empty table fifteen feet from the driveway door. “You take that one, and I'll lie on the one by this door. In that way we'll be on both sides of the body and have the door guarded, too.”

“It'll be good practice for being dead,” said Crane, starting for the further table. Halfway across the room he noticed a third door. It opened into the windowless room used by the coroner's physicians for autopsies. He switched on the light, saw there was no other door in this room and switched off the light. As he closed the door Courtland asked, “What's in there?”

Crane told him and added: “Nobody can get in here from that way.”

Courtland was spreading the sheet over his table. “I'm right beside the light,” he said, “And I'll turn it out. You get fixed.”

The sheet was heavy and coarse, like the canvas on a sailboat. Crane spread it out and gingerly climbed on the table, moving carefully so it wouldn't slip away from him on its rubber-tired wheels. He pulled the sheet over his body, over his head, and said in a muffled voice: “O.K. Douse the glim.” He wished the county provided the corpses with pillows.

Tarlike darkness followed the click of the switch. From across the room came the swish of cloth being moved. Courtland's voice called, “Sleep tight.” Clammy air flowed slowly through the room.

Crane said, “I wish I was tight.” His voice echoed hollowly.

He thought how lonely it must be to be dead.

Chapter Twenty-Two

THE STORM sounded as though it were moving back over the city. The grumbling of the thunder was louder, more irritable, more often increasing to cymbal-like crashes of noise; it was weird in the window-less room because it was followed by no flashes of lightning. It sounded like stage thunder, like tin being beaten with a hammer and then muffled with cloth.

Crane tried to relax on the metal operating table, but he couldn't loosen his muscles. His stomach felt upset. His skin was covered with goose pimples. This was because of the steady, slow movement of clammy, conditioned air in the room. It couldn't be because he was frightened. There was a curious odor about the air: sweet, musty, sickish; an odor of slow decay. He supposed the odor came from the corpses, from the seven corpses in the room with him. The enameled surface of the operating table was hard on his back; the sheet was rough against his skin. The sheet smelled strongly of disinfectant, and he wondered if it had been washed since it had last been used to cover a body. He hoped so.

A clatter of thunder set his muscles vibrating. His face was damp with sweat; he felt as though the sheet were choking him, choking him.

He waited until the next long roll of thunder, then slipped from the table, toed the cement floor, held his breath in an interval of silence. As the thunder rumbled again he gave the table a tentative push. It moved noiselessly on its rubber-tired wheels. Resting one arm on the table top, he leaned over and pulled off first one shoe and then the other. He put them on the sheet. Next, stockingfooted, he cautiously pushed the empty table toward the wall in movements synchronized with the thunder, pushed it until it touched another table. His searching fingers encountered cold flesh on the new table. Involuntarily he jerked his hand away. He abandoned his table, wheeled the table with the corpse on it to approximately the position on the floor his table had originally held.

Halfway back to his own table an abrupt silence in the sky caused him to pause on tiptoe, his breath imprisoned behind clenched teeth. A reassuring rattle of thunder, like a truck on a wooden bridge, set him moving again. He found his shoes and, after he had folded the sheet on the table, he returned to it with the corpse. He felt under the sheet at one end, and his palm encountered long hair. A woman! He moved to the other end of the table and pulled the sheet off her naked feet. He wondered if she had been young. One of his brown-and-white sport shoes he fitted on her left foot, the other on her right. He adjusted the sheet so that it exposed both shoes, but not the woman's bare ankles, and then he got down on his knees, crawled under her table and stretched out on the floor, his face directed at the point he imagined Miss Ross's table was, some thirty feet away.

Three quarters of an hour later his muscles ached from contact with the cold floor. He changed position several times, but each change brought only new aches. His eyes ached, too, from straining to pierce the chamber's blackness. But particularly his hips and elbows ached, where solid bone had come into contact with solid cement.

Moreover, he was scared.

Several times, now that the storm had moved on southward and the thunder was no louder than the roar of the elevated trains a block and a half away, he thought he had heard a rustle, a movement in the room. Hands clenched until the nails tore the palms, breath held until his lungs throbbed with pain, he had listened. He wondered if it could have been imagination. Neither the driveway door, not more than twenty-five feet away, nor the inside door, close to where Courtland was lying on the table next to Miss Ross, had been opened. He wondered if there could be any other entrance to the room. He wished he had asked the attendant.

There was a long roll of thunder, low at first, but increasing in volume until it ended with the detonation of a powder charge. The flash of lightning which followed was faint. The flash of lightning! Crane caught his breath. A door, some opening to the outside, must be open! He jerked his head around toward the driveway door. Was that a diminishing rectangle of grayer darkness? Had someone entered?

Anyway, the rectangle was gone. He wondered if he had really seen the flash of lightning. He rolled over until his chest pressed the floor. The cement was cold on his palms, on his knees, on his stocking-covered toes. He strained every nerve to keep muscles, breath, heart quiet while he listened. Thunder, like an eruption of giant firecrackers, filled the room with sound, abruptly ceased. There was a brief rustling, the sound of a blow, in the center of the chamber, near the body of Miss Ross, near the table on which Courtland was lying! He felt the hair rise on the back of his neck. His heart pounded. Somebody was moving about. The lightning flash had been real; the driveway door had been opened.

Suddenly a pale curtain-rod of light pierced the velvet blackness of the room, swept across the table above his head, paused for a cracked second at the point where his sport shoes stuck out below the sheet, and disappeared. The chamber was as black as licorice again. If he hadn't been completely alert he wouldn't have seen the light at all.

He lay so quiet he could hear the beating of his heart, the ticking of his wrist watch. Each mutter of thunder, he knew, cloaked a movement of the person in the room. He wished he were closer to the light switch, close enough to jump for it, turn on the lights and cover the intruder with Frankie French's pistol. He debated whether he ought to risk crawling around the room to the switch. He knew that if he made a noise the flashlight would catch him, make him a target for the intruder's gun.

Not more than eighteen inches from his ear, from the floor, came a sound of leather being placed on cement. It was the faintest of sounds. A second later it was repeated, twelve inches away this time. The person was standing beside his table!