Mystery

Tom gazed across the vast emptying lobby. The officer in charge of the first group had begun moving toward a corridor to the right of the new desk. The others went toward the doors and the elevators: there was the same sense of inactivity Tom had felt when he first came in. “What are you doing here?” he whispered.

“My house, tonight,” von Heilitz said in the same ventriloquial fashion.

“Somebody died?”

“Go,” von Heilitz ordered, and Tom stood up as if he had been jabbed with a pin.

He wandered out into the great empty lobby. The elevator into which Detective Natchez had disappeared returned to the lobby, and when Tom reached the desk its doors opened. Detective Natchez and two uniformed policemen emerged on either side of a kind of wheeled sheet-covered cart, which obviously held a corpse. Tom again fell through the hole in the earth’s surface. I did that, he thought. I wrote a letter, and that man died

.

“May I help you?” The woman seated at the desk facing the partition had set down her telephone and was looking up at Tom with a crisp challenge that suggested she would much prefer not to do anything of the kind.

“Ah, I was visiting a friend of mine upstairs,” Tom said, “and I saw all these policemen here, and—”

“No, you were not,” she said.

“What?”

“You were not visiting a patient, not in this hospital,” she said. Her perfectly black, lifeless-looking hair rolled back from her low forehead in a high crest, and half-glasses perched just beneath the bridge of her nose as if commanded to go no further. “I saw you enter the lobby no more than a minute or two ago, young man, and the only patients with whom you have had any contact are those two men seated against the wall. Are you going to leave this hospital by yourself, or will I have to have you escorted out?”

“I wonder if you could tell me what happened here,” he said.

“That wouldn’t be any business of yours now, would it?”

“Two people told me that someone was murdered.”

Her eyes widened, and her chin tilted up another tiny portion of an inch.

“I’d like to see Nancy Vetiver,” Tom said. “She’s a nurse who used to—”

“Nurse Vetiver? Now it’s Nurse Vetiver? And who would you like to see after that, King Louis the Fourteenth? Our people are too busy to be bothered by stray cats like you, most especially when they come babbling about—Officer! Officer! Will you come here, please?”

All the policemen in the lobby looked at them, and after a momentary show of hesitation the officer who had sent Detective Natchez upstairs moved toward the desk. He said nothing, but looked first at Tom, then the receptionist, with a strained, impatient, wholly artificial smile.

“Officer …?” the receptionist began.

“Get on with it,” he said.

Suddenly the entire scene seemed wrong to Tom, essentially out of key. Even the receptionist had been nonplussed by the policeman’s hostility. Some of the men in the lobby seemed angry, and some of them seemed almost triumphant beneath their mask of indifference.

“This young man,” the receptionist began again, “has entered the hospital under false pretenses. He said something about a murder, he’s asking about the nurses, he’s disrupting—”

“I don’t care, lady,” the officer said. He walked away shaking his head.

“Is this how you do your job?” she called to him. Her voice was sharp enough to split wood. Then she saw a more likely source of aid. “Doctor, if you’ll assist me—for a moment?”

Dr. Bonaventure Milton had just emerged from the corridor to the right of the desk, accompanied by a lean, brown, anonymous-looking man in a blue uniform with conspicuous braid. The fat little doctor in his pince-nez and black bow tie looked from the receptionist to him and smiled. “Of course, Miss Dragonette. You have a problem with my young friend here?”

“Friend?” Now she seemed startled. “This young man has been saying things about murder—trying to intrude himself into the hospital—asking for one of the nurses—I want him expelled.”

Dr. Milton made soothing passes with his hands. “I’m sure we can straighten this out, Miss Dragonette. This young fellow is Glendenning Upshaw’s grandson, Tom Pasmore. I saw him just a week or two ago at the Founders Club. Now what was it you wanted, Tom?”

Miss Dragonette had given up on the little doctor and was now trying to galvanize the officer beside him by drilling holes in his head with her eyes.

“I was just outside, and when I saw all the squad cars I wanted to come in—I realized that my grandfather had never called me back about Nancy Vetiver—” He looked at the face of the officer in the splendid uniform, and was disconcerted both by the coldness of the man’s eyes and the sense that he had seen him somewhere before.

“I shouldn’t wonder!” said Miss Dragonette.