The Collection (96 page)

Betterman and Kendall went down on my list as possibles. As
we walked on, I elicited from my guide the fact that Betterman was an
alcoholic--a dipsomaniac--and Kendall the anemic, was suffering from recurrent
amnesia. Periodically, he would forget who he was and where he was and what he
was doing there.

We saw another recreation room in the basement, with ping-
pong
tables and a shuffleboard set-up as well as one billiard table with warped cues
and a few rips in the cloth. We encountered several other patients in our walk
around the outside grounds, and I was introduced to each.

Five
men, out of eight I met, could have been Paul Verne.

White in Blackness

My
guide excused himself on the ground of other duties, and I went to my room to
unpack. There was a lock on the door of my room, I noticed, but the only
keyhole was on the outside. From the inside, one just didn't lock the door.

I
stood looking out the window for a moment at a man who, standing in the middle
of the driveway, was turning in slow steady circles for no reason that I could
discover.

Then
I turned back into the room and reached for the handle of my suitcase to move
it down to the end of the bed.

The
pull nearly jerked my arm out of its socket. It felt as though someone had
taken my clothes out of that suitcase and filled it up with paving blocks.

I
stared at the suitcase. It was mine, all right.

So I
opened it. My clothes were still in it, but packed much more tightly than I'd
packed them, to make room for the object that had been added.

It
was a tommy gun.

I
lifted it out and looked at the drum. It was loaded to capacity, and the
bullets were real.

I
put it down on the bed alongside the suitcase and stood staring at it unbelievingly.

So
Garvey did little errands for patients, huh?

But
he had backed off when I'd asked him for a machine-gun.

It
just didn't make sense. Granting that he had taken me seriously, granting that
he was screwy enough to be willing, where in thunder could he have got a tommy
gun?

And
why, thinking me crazy, would he have given me one? He was supposed to be sane.

The
more I thought about it, the crazier it got.

Finally
it occurred to me to look through the rest of my stuff to be sure it was all
there.

It
all seemed to be. Five shirts, one suit besides the one I was wearing,
handkerchiefs, socks. I hadn't counted the smaller items of laundry, but there
seemed to be about as many of them as I'd put into the suitcase.

I
had just thrown them in, though, and now they were tightly packed to make room
for the machine-gun. To give my hands something to do, and my brain a rest, I
moved them over to the empty drawers of the bureau. Shirts in the big drawer,
handkerchiefs and socks in the upper smaller.

And
then I remembered something. None of the rolled-up pairs of socks had been
heavier than it should be.

I
found the pair of thick, woolen socks into which I had rolled the brass
knuckles. I didn't have to unroll it. I could tell merely by feeling. The
knucks were gone.

I
unrolled the socks to be sure.

And
then the humor of the thing hit me square, and I sat down on the edge of the
bed and began laughing as though I belonged there, laughing like a blasted
loony.

Whoever
had given me that loaded tommy gun had gone to the trouble of stealing my set
of brass knuckles!

"Lovely,"
I thought, "perfectly lovely."

Stanley
Sanitarium, Paul Verne or no Paul Verne, was going to be an interesting place.

After
a while sanity came back to me, and with it the realization that I had to do
something about that tommy gun. What?

Take
it to Dr. Stanley and tell him the truth about it? If he believed me, okay.

But
suppose he didn't--and I wouldn't blame him a bit. Sup
pose
he thought, or even suspected, that I had brought it in myself? Out on my ear I
would go, before I got another look at the sanitarium. Or I would have Hobson's
choice of paying my fare and signing on as a bona-fide loony and committing
myself.

On second thought, I doubted he would give me that alternative.
He took "mild psychoses" only. Would he figure a man who pulled a
stunt like that with a loaded tommy gun was suffering from a mild psychosis?
Hardly. He would turn me over to the police for investigation.

And anyway how could I do an about-face from being a man in
need of a job to a man able to pay the plenty high tariff a place like this
would charge?

Nope, Dr. Stanley might believe me, or he might not. If I
took that chance, I was seriously jeopardizing my "in" here before I
even began to accomplish my purpose.

But what then?

Well, there was a tiny penknife on my watch chain. Using it
as a screwdriver, I took the breech of the tommy gun apart and took out the
firing-pin and the tiny block of metal that held it. I took the bullets out of
the drum, too.

Then, leaving the tommy gun, with its teeth pulled, behind
me, I went down the corridor a few doors and knocked on a door at random.
Number Twelve. As I hoped, there wasn't any answer, and when I tried the door,
it opened.

I went back for the tommy gun and put it in a drawer of the
bureau in Room Twelve. The room was occupied, because there were shirts in the
drawer. I didn't take time to try to find out whose room it was. Undoubtedly
the whole place would know, when the occupant of that room found what was in
his bureau.

Then I went downstairs, avoiding the recreation room, and
went outside. I wandered about the grounds until I found a secluded spot behind
a small storage shed, and there I buried the bullets. The firing-pin block I
threw over the wall, as far as I could throw it. Somebody might find it some
day, but they wouldn't know what it was.

I got back to the building just in time for dinner. A bell
was ringing.

Dinner was unexciting, although the food was good. It was
served in a dining room with half a dozen tables for four, at which the guests
seemed to group themselves at will. I found myself with two table companions.
Frank Betterman, the dipsomaniac, sat across from me, and at my left sat a man
whose only obvious claim for presence there was that he wore a folded newspaper
hat, the kind children make.

Betterman ate without talking or taking his eyes off his
plate. The man with the paper hat talked only of the weather at first but with the
meat course he warmed up on human destiny and some complex theory of his that
seemed similar to astrology except that the affairs of men were run, not by the
stars and planets, but by volcanic activity within the seething core of earth.

I followed him, more or less, as far as dessert, and then
was hopelessly lost.

On the way out, Betterman came up alongside me.

"Did you bring in any liquor, Anderson?" he said
quietly. "I've got to have a drink or . . . Well, I've just got to."

"No," I admitted, "I didn't. Have you tried
Garvey?"

"Garvey!" There was the ultimate of scorn in his
voice. "That man's on the wrong side of the fence here. He's mad."

"In what way?"

Betterman shrugged. "Cadges you to run errands for
you, and then doesn't. Laughs about it behind your back, to the other
patients."

"Oh," I said.

Then
anyone here might know the joking request for a machine-gun I had made to
Garvey. Not that it helped me any to know that.

I played ping-pong in the basement with Betterman for a
while, which gave me a chance to study him. Aside from being nervous and
jittery, he seemed normal enough.

Lights out at eleven was the rule, but by ten-thirty I was
ready to go to my room and sort out my confused impressions. Already all but a
few of the patients had disappeared from the recreation room and those few were
ones who interested me least.

I walked up the stairs and along the dimly lighted
corridor. The door of Room Eleven, just across the hall from the room into
which I had put the tommy gun, was open. There was a light on somewhere in the
room, out of my range of vision.

I started past the open doorway, glanced in--and stopped
abruptly.

On the blank white wall opposite the open door was a
shadow, the shadow of a man hanging by his neck from a rope. Obviously dead,
for there was not the slightest movement.

I stepped through the doorway and turned to the corner in
which the man must be hanging.

"Hullo," said Harvey Toler.

He wasn't hanging by his neck. He was sitting comfortably
in a well-padded chair, reading a book.

"Your name's Anderson, isn't it?" he said.
"Come in and sit down."

I looked back at the wall, and the shadow of the hanging
man was still there. It looked like a real shadow, not painted. I looked back
toward the opposite corner and this time I saw the gimmick. Nothing more
complicated than a bit of work with a black crayon on the white, translucent
shade of the reading lamp. The six-inch figure there cast a six-foot shadow
yonder.

"Clever," I said.

Toler smiled and looked pleased.

"Sit down," he repeated. "Care for a drink,
perhaps?"

Without waiting for my answer, he put down his book and
opened a door in the front of the little stand upon which the lamp stood. He
took out two glasses and a quart bottle of whiskey, already opened and with
only about a fifth of its contents left.

"You'll find the whiskey Garvey brings in is pretty
smooth stuff," he said. "He robs you for it, but it's good."

I took the glass he handed me.

"Here's to crime," I said, and we drank.

It
was
smooth; didn't bite a bit. The only thing wrong
was that it wasn't whiskey at all. It was cold tea.

"Another?" Toler asked.

I declined enthusiastically. For just a moment I felt a
deep brotherly sympathy with Frank Betterman. It was part of my job, maybe, to stay
and pump Harvey Toler so I could report on him. But after that business with
the tea, the devil with it.

Excusing myself on the ground of being sleepy, I went on
down the corridor to my own room.

I looked into the drawers and the closet but my stuff still
seemed to be as I had left it, and nothing new had been added. I chucked under
the bed the several items of silverware which I'd stolen from the dinner table,
to carry out my role of kleptomaniac, and then undressed. I was just reaching
for my pajamas when the lights went out.

I lay in bed in utter, perfect darkness, trying to think.
But the only thought that came was the thought that if I stayed here long
enough, I'd go crazy myself.

After a while I could see a thin crescent of moon and there
was enough light in my room that I could make out the dark outline of the
dresser and the doors.

Why, I wondered, in the name of sanity or insanity, had
someone put that loaded tommy gun in my room? No sane person would have put it
there. And how would an insane person have got it?

Was Frank Betterman right in thinking the gateman, Garvey,
was on the wrong side of the fence in regard to insanity? If so, was Dr.
Stanley crazy to hire a crazy attendant? Frank Betterman had seemed sane except
for his craving for liquor, and while a dipsomaniac may get DT's, he doesn't
usually suffer from fixed delusions.

I wondered what would happen if Toler offered Betterman a
drink of that zero-proof whiskey of his. If I knew anything about dipsomania,
there would be a bloody murder on the spot.

"Nuts to it," I told myself. "I haven't been
here long enough to get any answers. I'd better go to sleep."

I had just shut my eyes when I heard the sound of the door
opening.

I didn't move, but my eyes jerked open and strained into
the darkness.

Yes, the door was open all right and someone--or something--in
white was standing there in the doorway looking at me. I couldn't make out any
details, for if there was a light in the hallway, it had been turned off.

Just something white. An attendant's white uniform? Or the
white pajamas of a patient?

Still without moving, I braced myself for quick action. As
soon as he stepped inside the room, I would jump him. Luckily, my only cover
was a thin sheet that wouldn't hamper me much.

Then suddenly the figure wasn't there any more. Blackness
instead of gray-white, and the sound of the door closing. The hallway light
flashed back on. I could see the crack of it under the edge of the door.

That meant I could see who my visitor had been. Quietly I
got out of bed, tiptoed to the door, and turned the knob.

The knob turned silently enough, but the door wouldn't
open. It was locked.

Mystery Patients

Calmly I went back to bed.

And lay there, getting less and less calm by the moment. It
was silly for me to want to make any move tonight. I needed more time to study
the people with whom I had come in contact.