Flash and Filigree (20 page)

Miss Steven. Sorry to have troubled you. I was certain I had seen our Miss Smart going to Nurses’ Rest Room to change, but I was mistaken—most of our girls look so much alike in their whites (allow me to say, please, present reader excepted!) that they tend to lose their identities and one is prone to confuse them. I have Miss Smart’s home-number, however, and will contact her there. Thanks again for your trouble, Miss Steven. I have to run. Good night.

F. L. EICHNER

He went directly to the car, got in and drove out through the night. As the car swerved into Wilshire and headed for the mountains, the Doctor flicked open the glove-compartment, deposited the partially filled bottle of whiskey, and snapped it to.

Fred Eichner drove through the thickening dark without anxiety or apprehension. The automobile was a Kaiser-Darrin, waspish by comparison to the cars he was accustomed to, but it suited his heady mood. He reached the desolate mountain roads and began to climb, leaving the lights of the city far below. He drove steadily for half an hour, the only sound in the night the constant whir of the motor and the slow moan of rubber tires gnawing the shoulders around the ever left-sweeping curves. The Doctor drove as by second nature, giving separate scrutiny to the characteristics of the road, especially inasmuch as they corresponded with warning markers that preceded them. Finally, at a sign reading: “DANGER—Sharp Curve 200 feet ahead,” he slowed the car. Shortly beyond the marker, the headlights picked up the ominous white criss-cross of guardrail and red reflector lights. He stopped the car and got out to reconnoiter the site. It was a hairpin curve with a thousand foot drop about four feet beyond the rail.

The Doctor surveyed the area carefully, climbing the rail to examine the ground in front of the drop. It was a sheer haze of depth that, in the light of the rising moon, seemed milky soft, as though all the vast space and rock were under clear, warm water. In that moonlight, too, the Doctor’s face seemed to have changed, indefinably, and when he returned to the car, he was visibly quivering with excitement. He got in, and without turning on the ignition, allowed the car to roll back about a hundred feet. He started up the engine, raced it terrifically several times, peering at the white rails dead ahead, then began the ascent, climbing fast, and faster, straight for the rails until at exactly the right instant he flattened the brake and put the car into a screaming twist as it smashed through the rail and came to a stop, veering sideways, two feet from the brink of the drop.

The Doctor sat still behind the wheel for a moment before getting out to look over his work. It was a first-rate job. He had crashed, almost sideways through the rail, leaving on the pavement behind a seventeen-foot black-burnt smear of anguish. All that was necessary now was to release the brake and over the vehicle would go. He cut the motor and put the car in gear, with the emergency brake on. After he had gotten out and hoisted Treevly into the front seat behind the wheel, he closed the doors and leaned inside; he turned on the switch, put the gear in third, and released the emergency.

The car started slowly forward and over it went, in a sort of lazy loop. At first it seemed buoyant, floating like a mothball dropped from a tall building, then it skipped off the first ledge, careening lightly out into space, where it seemed to sail again, inviolate in the soft sea of moonlight, until it hit the ground. When it hit, it more or less exploded, but like a smokeless bomb, and without much sound at that distance.

Finally, after puttering about the ground near the ledge, arranging its disturbance to his purpose, he gave a brief inspection to the burnt tracks on the highway behind, and then started walking down the road. It took him almost three hours to get to a bus line, from whence he went directly home, had dinner, read for an hour, and slept then like a tired lover.

A
S FOR
B
ABS
M
INTNER,
however, Ralph did not call her all during the day, and that night she cried herself to sleep.

Next day, by a remarkable effort of will, she stifled her impulse to be at the Dispensary at two o’clock sharp when he arrived. Instead, she waited one full hour before casually presenting herself there, as on business, for aspirin and pheno-barb.

And the boy seemed somewhat embarrassed when she did appear, but it was evident, too, that he was slightly disturbed at her not having come earlier.

“Hello, stranger,” he said, blasé, frowning a bit.

“Hello,” she said, feigning a friendly calm.

“Well,” he said, “
you’ve
sure changed!”

“Why, how do you mean?” asked Babs, managing surprise.

“Well, if you don’t know,” he said, looking hurt, but shrugging it off.

Babs fought to maintain a sane countenance, handing the boy her list of things.

“I wanted to phone you yesterday,” he went on, lightly now, almost wistfully, as he took the items off shelves around him.

“Well, we were pretty busy,” said Babs airily, regarding her nails.

“—but I had to go out of town,” Ralph continued. “I called last night and they said you had gone to bed.”

“Oh?” said Babs, actually biting her tongue. “They didn’t tell me.”

“They didn’t?” said Ralph, looking puzzled, as he came closer to the girl. “Well, no, I guess I didn’t tell them to.”

“You could have left a message,” said Babs, surrendering up to him with full wet eyes.

“Well,” said Ralph, not exactly ready to deaden his own pain, “I thought I’d be seeing you
sooner than this.
”

“
Did
you?” she demanded, snatched up her things from the counter and marched away.

But alone, in Nurses’ Rest Room, she could only think of
him
; and it was frightening for her as though with every image the new-born thing inside her grew gradually out like some kind of weird plant toward a huge and undeniable fusion . . . with him . . . until suddenly the girl felt that if she did not act at once, and of her own volition, she could not long be responsible for herself. Even so, she did manage to wait fifteen minutes before entering the main corridor and going back to the Dispensary, where she sauntered past Ralph, her eyes down as in nonchalantly perusing the list in her hand.

“Babs,” he called in tender despair.

“Oh!” She gave a slight start, looking up, even as rather surprised to find him there.

“Please, Babs,” he begged, motioning her to come over. “Why are you being like this?” He was clearly disturbed, but more sure of himself now that she was actually there.

“Oh, we’ve been so busy, you’ve no idea!” said she, touching her hair as she approached, frowning down at her list.

“Oh? What’s up?” the boy asked, attempting to go along with it, arching his brows.

“Oh, it’s Fred again—Dr. Eichner,” lied Babs easily.

“Yeah? What’s the matter with him?” asked Ralph, trying to make the fanatic jealousy in his face pass for amused interest.

“Well,” Babs began, glancing around the corridor, “there’s been some trouble. I—I can’t talk about it now.” And she gave him a quick, dark look to sharpen the mystery of it.

Ralph seemed on the verge of a strong reply, but suddenly the corridor sounded with a patter as the ward-boy, Albert, came up on the run, making small animal noises the while. Babs put out her hand caressingly, just as one might to intercept the flight of a dear little puppy dog, completely ignoring Ralph now in making much of the dwarfed near-mute who, with childish ferocity, began at once to pummel her stomach and tug at the skirt of her habit, sometimes exposing the sweet secret ruffles beneath.

“
Don’t
let him do that!” begged Ralph furiously, leaning across his counter toward them.

“Shh,” Babs said, “he’s trying to tell me something.”

Albert looked up at Ralph in brief contempt, and then buried his face in the girl’s skirt.

“Oh, the darling, the darling,” she murmured, closed-eyed, stroking his great head.

Ralph watched, in speechless wrath, as Albert tugged and beckoned Babs away, as to a tryst, and she feigning helplessness, allowed him to do so.

“It may be something about Fred,” she explained to Ralph.

“I’ll be by for you at eight-thirty,” said Ralph with a firmness that shook his voice, “I’ve got two tickets for a concert at the school.” And he withdrew them from his shirt pocket as proof of it.

“All right, dear, I’ll see,” Babs called back lightly, as if too deeply engaged now to give it much thought.

“Eight-thirty,” Ralph commanded, glaring a really hateful vengeance at the back of the giant head of the dwarf, resting as it did against the hip of his own beloved.

A
T PRECISELY 10:30 A.M.
Dr. Eichner had been notified by phone that the stolen money was recovered, or more exactly, that it had been definitely established through the remnants of certain bills of currency found at the scene of an automobile wreck that the stolen money had been destroyed in the amount reported, and that a claim-slip for that sum was being processed and sent forward by the authorities. And, in due order, the Doctor would get full reimbursement from the Treasury Department.

No further comment was offered on the case at the time, the truth being that the authorities were desperately trying to prove a theory that the wholly unidentifiable body found in the wreck was that of the notoriously long-sought “Black Dahlia.”

And now, in the middle of the afternoon, after the Doctor had been further informed that, as a formality, he would be asked to identify the scalpel, a plain clothes detective came around to the Clinic with it.

This detective looked more like a manufacturer’s public-relations man than anyone’s notion of a real detective. With a certain naïveté, he spoke in patient, explicative tones, avoiding those details that he thought the Doctor might find unsavory. He was evidently rather embarrassed at having to say that the
woman
was not actually a woman, but a man so disguised.

“He was a maniac,” said the detective apologetically. “You’re lucky, I guess, that he wasn’t more violent at the time. But you did exactly the right thing, simply giving him the money. You see, the amount was probably more than he expected and diverted his real intention—to put him in a good frame of
mind,
so to speak.”

“He had a record of violence, did he?” asked Fred Eichner in interest.

“Well, not
exactly.
We talked to his psychiatrist—”

“I see. He was under treatment?”

“Well, he
had
gone to this psychiatrist . . . and
he
wasn’t surprised; I mean, he said he had known for a long time that the man was unstable, which is certainly an understatement even so. Though naturally, the psychiatrist might tend to minimize it—afraid he would incriminate himself for not having advised the man to be locked up in the first place. But, of course, we had no such things in mind. We were only interested in the facts of the particular case. Actually, the department puts very little stock in what a psychiatrist may say anyhow—especially after the fact, so to speak. We have our own psychiatrists, of course. For the department, however, it is simply a case of theft-and-recovery.”

“You say she—rather
he
stole a car after he left here?”

“Yes. He came here—on some mad obsession—then was diverted from this obsession when he saw the scalpel. He wished to use it, but could not find the emotional strength or the reason—if I may use the word for a madman—to do so. He hoped you would provoke his anger by refusing him money, and thereby give him an excuse to do so. When you did not, but gave him six hundred dollars instead, his plan changed abruptly. He left, stole a car—a few blocks from here—and was on his way out of the state using a back mountain road. He was drinking, and driving very fast—50 miles an hour—on a hairpin curve, and went over the side, a thousand feet. Completely demolished everything, including him.”

“Drinking, was he?”

“Yes, a piece of a whiskey bottle was found. He
might
not have been drinking before he came here. Not that you could have told, anyway. Whiskey doesn’t affect a maniac the same as an ordinary person, though, of course, in some cases it may be worse.”

“I
see.
”

“Well, I guess that’s all there is to it. You should be hearing from the Treasury Department by the end of the week. I’ll leave the scalpel here, it belongs to you. It seems to be all right—about the only thing that survived the wreck, I’d say. Pardon me for saying so, but you ought to keep those things out of sight. I mean, you don’t want to give anyone more ideas.” He stared at the scalpel for a long moment.

“Yes,” said the Doctor, “you’re probably right there. Well, good-bye and thanks again.”

“You’re welcome. Good-bye.”

Dr. Eichner took four o’clock tea and a sandwich. He had just settled, half-reclining on the leather sofa, with a brandied black coffee, for a comfortable half-hour of perusing his medical journals when the inter-office phone rang. It was Miss Smart to say that the published information on the Alfa Romeo trial sheets was in error, and that a supplemental erratum slip was being issued by the company, with apology.

“Very good,” said Fred Eichner, “very good.”

“They say,” Miss Smart continued, “that they would like to send a man around with the new model, anyway. They’re sure you would be pleased with it. They’re on the line now, Doctor.”

“No, that won’t be necessary. I know this model quite well, you see. I was merely interested in getting at the truth of the published specifications. Ask their representative for the correct figure, please.”

“Yes, Doctor, one moment.”

While waiting, Dr. Eichner fetched out his automotive papers and quickly located the sheet in question.

“Yes, Doctor, the correct displacement is: one, sixty-five, point, two-four. The other specifications are unchanged.”

“One, sixty-five, point, two-four. I’ll just note that. Yes. Well, even so, that is a considerable gain over their last model, you see. But that hardly, ha!—hardly attains it to the—to the
Bugatti
class! You may tell him
that.
No. No, I won’t require a demonstration of this model. You may say, however, that through the published reports, I am appreciatively aware of their progress and will, of course, be in touch with them as soon as—well, as soon as they
come-up-with-something,
so to speak.”