Robert Adams - A Man Called Milo Morai

“As for the rest of the household, I see most of them only at dinner and, sometimes, at breakfast. Those nurses who work the night shift sleep during a good part of the day, and those who work the day shift, as does Maggie, have to be on the floor at seven a.m. and so leave at a godawful hour of the morning. Fanny Duncan hasn’t been around for two weeks now, or nearly that; she’s on private duty at the home of some wealthy people up near Evanston, living there to be near the patient at all times.

“The cook is a widow about sixty, and Irish, like Maggie herself. I’ve been polishing my Irish Gaelic on her, learning new words … and that brings us back to my list there, Sam. She, the cook, Rosaleen O’Farrell, says that I speak an Irish dialect that she’s not heard since she was a child, in Ireland, and then only from her rather aged grandmother.”

“I had thought that to settle that matter we had, Milo,” said Osterreich with very mild reproof in his voice. “Now, what of the other persons with whom you reside?”

Milo shrugged. “I’ve met Sally O’Shea but once, and that very briefly; she’s living at the hospital, in nurse’s training. The few conversations I’ve had with Maggie’s youngest, Kathleen, have been mostly her monologue on a hash of something concerning the subjects she’s studying at the University of Chicago. The elder of the two maids is a friendly sort, Canadienne; we chat in French. The other maid hasn’t been with Maggie too long, a colored girl from somewhere down South; I don’t talk much with her because I have great difficulty in understanding her—they must speak a very odd dialect of English where she comes from.”

Milo’s job was better than no job at all, but the income he derived from it fluctuated from two or three dollars a week to, occasionally, as much as twenty or thirty dollars a week, so that all too often he found it necessary to dip into his dwindling hoard of cash from the sale of his gold coins. This would have been bad enough, but he discovered through countings that someone else apparently was dipping in, as well; there never was a large amount missing, no more than ten dollars at a time, but after the third or fourth such occurrence, he invested in a small steel lockbox with a key, a length of log chain, a padlock and a neckchain on which to carry the keys.

He had bought a well-made box with a good lock of heavy construction, and he was glad he had when he found deep scratches on the face of the lock and marks along the edges of the box resulting clearly from vain attempts to pry open the lid. A few days later, he returned to his room from the library to find the box pulled out from under the iron bedstead to which it was chained and with a few millimeters of nailfile tip broken off in the lock. The removal of this required no little effort and the necessity of borrowing a pair of tweezers from one of his co-boarders, Nurse Irun0 Thorsdottar. But a week later, he had to borrow them again to extract a short piece of stiff wire from the lock. On that occasion, he confided in Irunn about the problem of the thefts and attempted thefts, and between them they devised a plan to apprehend the thief in the act.

The tall, broad-shouldered and -hipped woman shook her blond head, her pale-blue eyes above her wide-spreading cheekbones mirroring disgust and anger. “Nothing lower, Mr. Moray, than a sneakthief. I’m not rich, precious few folks are these days, but if a body here was in real need, I’d loan them what I could and I judge you would too, so it can’t be no excuse for them to steal or try to steal from one of us. We’ll catch the snake, though, count on it.”

Milo and Irunn had, however, to bring one additional person in on their plot, and Rosaleen O’Farrell, upon being apprised of the cause for the scheme, was more than willing. So, on the day Milo left the house at this usual time, bound in the direction of the library, battered secondhand briefcase in hand; and Irunn long since having departed to begin her shift at the hospital, the second floor lay deserted as soon as the maids had finished sweeping and dusting it and moved on to the third floor, whereon two night-shift nurses lay sleeping.

Cautiously, Milo returned by way of the service entrance and Rosaleen let him up the back stairs, relocking the door behind him, then returning to her work. Safely out of sight behind the closed door of Irunn’s room—it being directly across the hall from his own—Milo opened the wooden slats of the Venetian window blind just enough to allow light for reading and settled himself in a chair with a library book to wait and read and listen. Nothing happened on that day, nor on the following two days, and he was beginning to think he was needlessly wasting time better spent elsewhere, but on the Friday, about midafternoon, he heard footsteps, two sets of them, and a whispered mutter of voices from the hall outside Irunn’s door. One of the voices sounded vaguely familiar; the other, deeper one did not.

Laying the book down soundlessly and gingerly easing out of the now-familiar chair, he tiptoed over to take a stance hard against the wall behind the door to Irunn’s spotless, scrupulously tidy room. He was glad that he had positioned himself just where he had when the door was slowly opened enough for some unseen person to survey the room from the hallway, then ease it shut again before passing on to open and view the other rooms on the second floor.

Only by straining his hearing was he aware of when his own room’s door was opened, then almost soundlessly shut. There was another dim, unintelligible muttering of two voices, then a brief rattling as his strongbox was dragged out from under his bed on its chain. He gave the thieves a good ten minutes, during which time there were a couple of almost-loud clanks, half-whispered cursing in a man’s voice, another clank, then the commencement of a scraping-rasping noise which went on and on.

Opening Irunn’s room door and then his own on the hinges that they two had carefully oiled at the beginning of this scheme, Milo entered the room to find Kathleen O’Shea, daughter of Maggie, kneeling beside his bed, watching while a black-haired, sharp-featured young man plied a hacksaw against one link of the logchain; the blade had already bitten a couple of millimeters deep into the metal.

When Kathleen looked up and saw Milo, she shrieked a piercing scream, which caused her companion to start, look up himself and heedlessly gash open a thumb and a forefinger with the blade of the saw. But he seemed to ignore the injury, and, dropping the handle of the saw, he delved his right hand into his pocket, brought out a spring knife and, all in one movement, flicked upon the shiny five inches of blade, rose to his small feet and lunged at Milo’s belly.

Milo never could recall clearly just what happened then or in what order events occurred, but when the blur of motion and activity once more jelled, his assailant sat propped against the neatly made bed, his eyes near-glazed with agony. The young man was gasping loudly, tears dribbling down his bluish cheeks, his right arm cradled in his lap with white shards of shattered bone standing out through flesh and shirt and suit coat, which coat was beginning to soak through with dark blood from that injury as well as from the doubly gashed left hand that supported the injured arm.

Milo’s own shirt was sliced cleanly a bit below his rib cage on the left side of his body, sliced about the length of an inch, and there was blood on his shirt around and below that opening, but he had no time at that moment to examine himself for injuries or wounds, for Kathleen still knelt unmoving in the identical spot she had occupied when first he had entered and apprehended her and her companion in the commission of their crime, and she was still screaming. Peal after peal had been ringing out without cessation, and agitated movement could be heard from the floors above and below, as well as on the stairs.