Абрахам Меррит - Burn, Witch, Burn!

"We'll have you up in a jiffy." I patted his hand.

He whispered: "Have there been any more deaths?"

I had been wondering whether he had retained any recollection of the affair of the night. I answered:

"No. But you have lost much strength since McCann brought you here. I don't want you to do much

talking today." I added, casually: "No, nothing has happened. Oh, yes-you fell out of bed this morning.

Do you remember?"

He glanced at the guards and then back at me. He said:

"I am weak. Very weak. You must make me strong quickly."

"We'll have you sitting up in two days, Ricori."

"In less than two days I must be up and out. There is a thing I must do. It cannot wait."

I did not want him to become excited. I abandoned any intention of asking what had happened in the car.

I said, incisively:

"That will depend entirely upon you. You must not excite yourself. You must do as I tell you. I am going

to leave you now, to give orders for your nutrition. Also, I want your guards to remain in this room."

He said: "And still you tell me-nothing has happened."

"I don't intend to have anything happen." I leaned over him and whispered: "McCann has guards around

the Mandilip woman. She cannot run away."

He said: "But her servitors are more efficient than mine, Dr. Lowell!"

I looked at him sharply. His eyes were inscrutable. I went back to my office, deep in thought. What did

Ricori know?

At eleven o'clock McCann called me on the telephone. I was so glad to hear from him that I was angry.

"Where on earth have you been-" I began.

"Listen, Doc. I'm at Mollie's-Peters' sister," he interrupted. "Come here quick."

The peremptory demand added to my irritation. "Not now," I answered. "These are my office hours. I

will not be free until two."

"Can't you break away? Something's happened. I don't know what to do!" There was desperation in his

voice.

"What has happened?" I asked.

"I can't tell you over-" His voice steadied, grew gentle; I heard him say, "Be quiet, Mollie. It can't do no

good!" Then to me-"Well, come as soon as you can, Doc. I'll wait. Take the address." Then when he

had given it to me, I heard him again speaking to another-"Quit it, Mollie! I ain't going to leave you."

He hung up, abruptly. I went back to my chair, troubled. He had not asked me about Ricori. That in itself

was disquieting. Mollie? Peters' sister, of course! Was it that she had learned of her brother's death, and

suffered collapse? I recalled that Ricori had said she was soon to be a mother. No, I felt that McCann's

panic had been due to something more than that. I became more and more uneasy. I looked over my

appointments. There were no important ones. Coming to sudden determination, I told my secretary to

call up and postpone them. I ordered my car, and set out for the address McCann had given me.

McCann met me at the door of the apartment. His face was drawn and his eyes haunted. He drew me

within without a word, and led me through the hall. I passed an open door and glimpsed a woman with a

sobbing child in her arms. He took me into a bedroom and pointed to the bed.

There was a man lying on it, covers pulled up to his chin. I went over to him, looked down upon him,

touched him. The man was dead. He had been dead for hours. McCann said:

"Mollie's husband. Look him over like you done the boss."

I had a curiously unpleasant sense of being turned on a potter's wheel by some inexorable hand-from

Peters, to Walters, to Ricori, to the body before me. Would the wheel stop there?

I stripped the dead man. I took from my bag a magnifying glass and probes. I went over the body inch

by inch, beginning at the region of the heart. Nothing there nothing anywhere…I turned the body over…

At once, at the base of the skull, I saw a minute puncture.

I took a fine probe and inserted it. The probe-and again I had that feeling of infinite repetition-slipped

into the puncture. I manipulated it, gently.

Something like a long thin needle had been thrust into that vital spot just where the spinal cord connects

with the brain. By accident, or perhaps because the needle had been twisted savagely to tear the nerve

paths, there had been paralysis of respiration and almost instant death.

I withdrew the probe and turned to McCann.

"This man has been murdered," I said. "Killed by the same kind of weapon with which Ricori was

attacked. But whoever did it made a better job. He'll never come to life again as Ricori did."

"Yeah?" said McCann, quietly. "An' me an' Paul was the only ones with Ricori when it happened. An' the

only ones here with this man, Doc, was his wife an' baby! Now what're you going to do about that? Say

those two put him on the spot-like you thought we done the boss?"

I said: "What do you know about this, McCann? And how did you come to be here so-opportunely?"

He answered, patiently: "I wasn't here when he was killed-if that's what you're getting at. If you want to

know the time, it was two o'clock. Mollie got me on the 'phone about an hour ago an' I come straight

up."

"She had better luck than I had," I said, dryly. "Ricori's people have been trying to get hold of you since

one o'clock last night."

"I know. But I didn't know it till just before Mollie called me. I was on my way to see you. An' if you

want to know what I was doing all night, I'll tell you. I was out on the boss's business, an' yours. For one

thing trying to find out where that hell-cat niece keeps her coupe. I found out-too late."

"But the men who were supposed to be watching-"

"Listen, Doc, won't you talk to Mollie now?" he interrupted me, "I'm afraid for her. It's only what I told

her about you an' that you was coming that's kept her up."

"Take me to her," I said, abruptly.

We went into the room where I had seen the woman and the sobbing child. The woman was not more

than twenty-seven or-eight, I judged, and in ordinary circumstances would have been unusually

attractive. Now her face was drawn and bloodless, in her eyes horror, and a fear on the very borderline

of madness. She stared at me, vacantly; she kept rubbing her lips with the tips of her forefingers, staring

at me with those eyes out of which looked a mind emptied of everything but fear and grief. The child, a

girl of no more than four, kept up her incessant sobbing. McCann shook the woman by the shoulder.

"Snap out of it, Mollie," he said, roughly, but pityingly, too. "Here's the Doc."

The woman became aware of me, abruptly. She looked at me steadily for slow moments, then asked,

less like one questioning than one relinquishing a last thin thread of hope:

"He is dead?"

She read the answer in my face. She cried:

"Oh, Johnnie-Johnnie Boy! Dead!"

She took the child up in her arms. She said to it, almost tranquilly: "Johnnie Boy has gone away, darling.

Daddy has had to go away. Don't cry, darling, we'll soon see him!"

I wished she would break down, weep; but that deep fear which never left her eyes was too strong; it

blocked all normal outlets of sorrow. Not much longer, I realized, could her mind stand up under that

tension.

"McCann," I whispered, "say something, do something to her that will arouse her. Make her violently

angry, or make her cry. I don't care which."

He nodded. He snatched the child from her arms and thrust it behind him. He leaned, his face close to the

woman's. He said, brutally:

"Come clean, Mollie! Why did you kill John?"

For a moment the woman stood, uncomprehending. Then a tremor shook her. The fear vanished from