Stephen Barr - Best of the best detective stories - 25th anniversary collection

He hurried in the opposite direction. The wound wasn’t important enough to delay him. Ellen was probably sore at him for not having shown up. Or worried. He had to get to her at once.

But Ellen was dead.

His breath came out in a sobbing gasp. He stopped walking and then resumed almost at once. What had made that absurd thought pop into his head? He had spoken to her on the phone at six o’clock this evening. He had had a date with her at seven-thirty, but he hadn’t reached her apartment because something had happened on the way.

Ellen was dead.

There it was again, a voice inside of him telling him with dreadful certainty.

“No!” he said aloud. “That blow made me sappy; it’s making me imagine things.”

Ellen lay face down in a pool of her own blood.

“Stop it!” he said fiercely. “She’s all right. She’s fine. She had a nasty experience this morning, but nothing happened to her and she spoke to you at six o’clock. It’s you who were bleeding. It’s you who were hurt.”

How badly hurt? He seemed to be having no bad physical effects, yet he was having a mental reaction that was giving him terrible thoughts. He felt the back of his head, the dried blood caked at the nape. There should be a cut higher up. His hand moved up almost to the hatband.

There was no skull. His fingers kept going in.

He staggered. His hand jerked away. I’m dead, he thought. That’s what scared those people. The top of my head is gone. The swarthy man knew I couldn’t be alive.

He recovered, telling himself that he must have lost sensation in his fingertips. A wound always felt worse than it was.

By the light of a streetlamp he could see his reflection in the window of a clothing store. The collar of his light tweed jacket was smeared with blood; a dried splotch of it trailed between his shoulders. But no matter how he turned, he could not get the back of his head into his line of vision.

He stepped into the store vestibule. The door glass was also like a mirror; it was at an angle with the store window so that he could see the back of his head. He removed his hat.

A section of his skull had sunk* into his head, and there was sight of shredded bone where the hair did not cover it. It wasn’t bleeding now and had probably not bled enough to have greatly weakened him. Had the blood clotted? Was the horribly pressed-in bone still a covering for the wound? He could not see well, but he had seen enough.

Yet he felt nothing but shock, and shock shook him for a long minute. Then carefully he placed his hat far back on his head, covering the visible bone. He fumbled a cigarette out of his pocket and used half a book of matches.

The screaming of the woman in the doorway now made sense. She had seen the back of his skull when he had passed under the light, and the horror of it had unnerved her. The counterman had retained only a little more self-control. But where did the swarthy man come in? He hadn’t seen the wound. Crane had always been facing him.

And Ellen was dead, lying in a pool of her own blood.

No! His mind had been affected by the blow. Desperately he tried to think. He had left his house, and then a woman had screamed. Between, in that period, Ellen lay dead. That was all there was, and it had to be a lie.

He found himself walking, and he was fighting the tremendous urge to rush to the nearest doctor, to the nearest hospital, for a chance to survive. But first he had to see Ellen.

He did not remember covering the few remaining blocks. Suddenly he was inside the apartment house, pressing the button for the automatic elevator. He rode up to the third floor, walked up the hall, turned the corner — and there was a uniformed policeman standing in front of Ellen’s door.

His knees started to buckle. The cop leaped forward, grabbed his arm.

“You’re hurt?” the cop asked, peering into his face. “You look sick. Say, who are you?”

Crane fought himself erect. “I’m all right. My name is James Crane, and I—”

“We been looking for you,” the cop broke in excitedly.

The cop pushed the door open. There were half a dozen men in Ellen’s compact one-room apartment. And Ellen was there.

She lay face down on the floor, with her long brown hair spread about her face like a halo. And there was blood in her hair and on the rug — blood which had run out of the hideous hole in her head.

It was like coming back to the scene of a tragedy, where he had been before. Three hours ago, he knew now, he had seen her just like this.

“Crane, eh?” A man with fiery eyes stood in front of him. “I’m Lieutenant Blanchard.”

Crane leaned weakly against the wall. “We were to be married next month,” he muttered.

A little of it was coming back to Crane. He remembered being inside this apartment three hours ago and staring down at Ellen lying dead in her own blood. He had heard a sound behind him and had started to turn, but he had never had a chance to complete that turn. And then blankness.

Crane said: “The murderer also struck me. Look.” He took off his hat and turned his back to the room.

A startled gasp went up from the men. The lieutenant said sharply: “Dr. Rowland!” A chubby-faced man, who was doubtless the coroner, gently took Crane’s arm and led him to the couch. Crane lay down and pressed his face to the cushion.

Fingers probed the back of his skull, but seemed to avoid the wound. Dr. Rowland said incredulously: “You mean to say you’ve been walking around like this?”

“I feel all right,” Crane muttered. “Except once when I threw back my head too quickly to look at a signpost. It made me sick to my stomach for a few minutes. Will I be all right?”

“We’ll have you fixed up in no time.”

Lieutenant Blanchard asked: “Could that wound have been self-inflicted?”

“Nonsense!” Dr. Rowland straightened up. “He was struck from behind.”

There was silence then. Even the murmuring of the other men in the room had ceased. Crane turned his face on the cushion and saw that Blanchard and Dr. Rowland had crossed to the other side of the room and were consulting in whispers. But the room was small and disjointed phrases reached him.

“... nothing I can do here,” Dr. Rowland was saying. “... hospital... even there... should have died instantly... bone pressing...”

His voice got too low. Then Blanchard was speaking and Crane strained to hear.

“... left here under his own power... came back... talks all right and...”

Dr. Rowland shook his head and his voice rose testily, so that Crane got full sentences.

“It’s one of these phenomena medical men can’t quite explain. I’ve come across it before in similar injuries. The person does not even suspect that he is fatally injured. He might feel and act normal for a considerable period, and then suddenly—” Dr. Rowland glanced at Crane and saw how intensely he was listening, and lowered his voice.

Crane buried his head in the cushion. He could finish the doctor’s sentence: and then suddenly drops dead . He had had a cousin who had received a head injury in an auto accident. His cousin had got up and walked home, acting outwardly normal, and a couple of hours later he had collapsed and died.

The swarthy man was right, Crane thought dully . I’m dead. But not yet dead enough for him.

“Lieutenant,” he said aloud, “I know who did it. It was the man who held Ellen up this morning.”

Blanchard returned to the side of the couch. “What do you know about the holdup?”

“Only what Ellen told me over the phone.”

Crane spoke with his eyes closed and the side of his face against the cushion. “Ellen worked for a paper mill, in the office. Among other things, she handled the payroll. It was lunch hour and she was the only one in the office. She was behind in getting the payroll out and planned to have lunch later. She was putting the money into the envelopes when two armed men with handkerchiefs tied over their faces came in. One stayed at the door to watch if anybody came from the plant. The other gathered up the money. As he was about to leave, the knot became untied in his handkerchief and it fell from his face. He shot at Ellen, but missed. She dropped behind a desk. By then there was an uproar outside and the man whose face Ellen had seen couldn’t take the time to go around the desk after her. He and the other man fled.