VI

No Nuts

When I went back in, I gave Cross his flashlight.

"Find him already?" he wanted to know. "Where's he hiding?"

"Back of the garage," I said. "He dug a hole and pulled it in after him. He's buried there, or somebody is."

He stared at me.

"That's the one place where the ground's soft and easy to dig," I said, "and you wouldn't have to pull up and replace turf. It's been smoothed over pretty carefully, but you can see where it is. It'll probably be pretty shallow."

He still just stared at me.

"Don't blame your men for not finding it," I said. "They were looking for a live man hiding, and live men don't hide underground."

There was still disbelief in his eyes, but he went to the door and gave some orders, and then he came back.

"You mean he wasn't Paul Verne?" he said.

"I got to make a phone call," I told him. "Long distance. Come on in the office if you want to listen."

There was quite a congregation of patients in the office, talking it over. Dr. Stanley, still looking worried stiff, was trying to calm them. A plainclothesman, looking bored, was leaning in one corner of the room. Except for the pitch of the voices, it sounded like a ladies' tea.

But I picked up the phone anyway, and said, "Long distance," and when the operator came on I said, "Get me the home of Roger Wheeler Verne in San Andria, California. Yeah, I'll hold the line."

It was quite a while to hang on to a telephone, but it kept me out of local conversations.

After a while the operator said, "Here's your party," and a male voice said, "Roger Verne speaking."

This time when I started to talk, all the other voices stopped and everybody listened.

"This is Eddie Anderson, Mr. Verne," I said. "Private detective. I've located your son alive, and I'm about to turn him over to the authorities. I wanted to tell you first so there could be no dispute about the reward."

"Excellent, Mr. Anderson. I assure you there will be no difficulty about that."

"Thanks," I said. "You'll probably have another phone call shortly, as soon as the police have him."

As I put the phone down, Captain Cross growled:

"What kind of chiselers do you think we are?"

I grinned at him. "I don't know. What kind are you? All I know is I've had difficulty with rewards before, so you can't blame me for playing safe."

There was tension in the room, plenty of it, as I turned around.

"Frank Betterman," I said.

He was standing behind Dr. Stanley's chair at the desk, and he looked startled and backed to the wall. I went on around the desk after him.

Dr. Stanley turned in his chair and gave Betterman a startled, frightened look, and then pulled open a drawer of his desk that had been partly open before, and his hand jerked out of the drawer with an automatic in it.

"Attaboy, Doc," I said, as I rounded the end of the desk. "Aim it at him. He's a killer. He might get you."

As Dr. Stanley's automatic swung around to cover Betterman, I was right beside Stanley, and I dived for the automatic. I caught his gun wrist in both my hands and bore it down to the floor as I pulled him out of the chair.

The gun fired once as his knuckles hit the floor, but the bullet buried itself harmlessly in the molding. Then I had the gun twisted out of his hand and had his arm turned behind his back, and it was all over. Even the strength of a homicidal maniac can't break an arm-twist like that.

"Sorry, Frank," I said, to Betterman. "But if I hadn't played it that way, he'd have shot several of us before we got him. I saw his hand keeping near that partly open drawer and I knew there'd be a gun in it. Had to stall till I got near enough to jump him."

Frank Betterman wiped sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand.

"You mean Stanley is this Paul Verne?" he said.

I nodded. "I might have known he wouldn't be without an identity that would stand checking. He probably killed the real Dr. Philemon Stanley in Louisville, took over his identity and came here. He couldn't have impersonated him where he was known, of course, but it was easy enough here."

"You better be right, Anderson," Captain Cross said. "I don't get all of it. Why'd he kill those other two guys? I know a nut doesn't need a reason, but he had a good hideout here and was not suspected."

"And he wanted to keep it," I said. "Those weren't motiveless murders, either of them. He wanted to kill me, because he found out why I was here and he knew I'd catch wise sooner or later once I suspected Paul Verne was here. Probably he heard me talking on the phone, via an extension, last night, and decided to kill me. So earlier in the night he killed Perry Evans and hid the body and--"

"Why?" Cross demanded. "What's killing Perry Evans got to do with killing you?"

I grinned at him loftily.

"So there wouldn't be an unsolved murder. I'd be dead and Evans gone, with a piece of cloth from his suit on the barbed wire. Two and two make four, and if the Verne angle pops up, why Evans was Verne and he killed me and scrammed."

"Umm," said Cross. "But what about Toler"

"Toler burgled my room while I was downstairs tonight. I'll tell you why later. Skip it for the moment. And Verne--Dr. Stanley--was waiting here to kill me when I came back, and in the dark he got Toler by mistake. But he found out he'd got the wrong man and waited for me. It wouldn't have put any crimp in his plans. Perry Evans, missing, would have taken the blame for two murders instead of one. But he missed killing me, even after firing a gun through the door. And I got a crowd in the hall outside so he couldn't come out after me that way, so he went back upstairs to his own room."

"You mean he dropped out the window, ran around the outside and went upstairs?"

"I doubt it," I interrupted. "His room is right over mine. I imagine he came in my window by a rope or something let down from his window. And all he had to do was climb back up and then come down the stairs, fastening his bathrobe."

"You were telling me some screwy yarn about a tommy gun," Cross said. "Where does that fit in?"

"Garvey was under orders to report to Stanley on the patients and any requests they might make. As a gag, I asked Garvey for a machine-gun and, of course, he told Stanley. And that's the one nutty thing that Paul Verne did. His macabre sense of humor made him put one in my room. That was before he knew I was a detective, of course. Maybe the first thing that made him suspect me was the fact that I ducked the gun in another room and didn't report it to him. If I'd been what I was supposed to be, I'd have come to him about it."

Cross and the plainclothesman had relieved me of my captive by now and he was handcuffed and helpless. His sullen silence was enough of a confession for me, and apparently for Cross, too.

But there was a plenty worried look on the captain's face as his subordinates took Verne away.

"This is a new one on me," he said. "I mean, the sanitarium here. What the devil am I going to do about all the patients? Can the attendants take over, or did he have an assistant who can handle things long enough to find other places for these people to go?"

I grinned at him. "You didn't ask me yet, Captain, why Harvey Toler came to my room tonight."

He frowned. "All right, why did he? Not that that can have anything to do with winding up the affairs of a sanitarium."

"It can have everything to do with it," I said. "Toler came there to spy on me, after he heard me pass his door to go downstairs. He wanted to look over my stuff, so he could report to Dr. Stanley, or to the man he thought was Dr. Stanley."

"Huh? Why? Wait a minute! You mean Toler wasn't really crazy, that he was faking exhibitionism like you faked kleptomania, and that Stanley hired him like he hired you, to watch the other patients?"

"Exactly, Cap. Now double that, in spades. . . ."

* * * *

"You're crazy," Kit said.

"No, angel," I explained patiently. "That is the whole point. Much as I deplore two murders --three if you count the original Dr. Stanley--that is what makes this case utterly and screamingly a howl. I am not crazy.

"And neither was anybody else in that nut house, except the man who ran it! I should have known it when we investigated a few patients at random, and not one of them seemed to have had enough money to pay his way, but every one of them was the type of person who would be looking for a job and reading want ads. Want ads like the one I answered, but worded differently"

"You mean there wasn't a single nut in that place?"

"Not a one," I told her. "It seems likely Verne would have had at least one genuine application during the month or so he had been operating there, but if he did have, I have a hunch he'd have turned it down. One or two legitimate ones would have spoiled the record, see? Lord, what a kick he must have got out of running that place, knowing that eighteen or nineteen people there were spying on each other at his orders and each of 'em acting crazy to fool all the others! And the whole shebang run by--"

I couldn't go on with it.

Besides, we'd have to stop laughing long enough to figure out where we were going to spend--with the aid of twenty-five thousand dollars--the rest of our honeymoon.