But the shape of the head and the way the hair curled at the back of the neck sickened her, horribly. It was only when he reached in a hip pocket and drew out a handkerchief ... Cub carried his in his white coat breast pocket....
Then he reached back toward the table for the hypodermic syringe, and held it up to the light again.... And his left shoulder rose ... and Sally Ferguson’s eyes floated hopelessly, the stiff tensity of her body began to relax ... she staggered forward....
Coming up the hall was the sound of running feet and they sounded like the feet of running men....
The door swung open. The note of relief in Cub Sterling’s voice as he said “Salscie!” stiffened her relaxing muscles and gave her the power to turn.
Matthew Higgins had come out of the Administration Building as the long, lank body of Cub Sterling shot into a taxi at the stand.
Higgins had jumped another cab.
Sally Ferguson turned and swayed toward Sterling as Matthew Higgins stepped inside the door and it was he who caught the incredulity, the anguish, the blind hope of her voice.
“Cub! Are you really Cub?”
As Sterling reached her his voice was stern.
“What is it? You must tell me,” his eyes cut into her clouding ones and Matthew Higgins stepped alongside and said curtly:
“Poison her too?”
Sally Ferguson’s lids began lowering and she gasped, holding up the glasses with her ebbing strength:
“Look, Cub! The cu-po-la!”
The words faded with her closing eyes, and the final horror in them made Cub Sterling lay her head against his chest, place his long arms under her breasts and raise the binoculars, which were still suspended around her neck.
“Lan’ sakes. It’s only a man. Jes, a doctor’s helper. And I seys....” Emma had found her voice at last, but Cub Sterling cut in:
“God Almighty! Look! And tell me what you....”
His words were directed toward Emma.
Matthew Higgins took the glasses from Cub’s hands and Sally’s neck before Cub said, “Tell me....” The expression on his face had convinced Higgins that he saw ... something ... vile.
A silence, like the high hysteria after a buoy-bell, spread over the waiting doctor. His eyes, livid with fear, turned upon the florid, gray figure of Matthew Higgins. And it was Higgins’ voice that brought Sally Ferguson out of her purple palaces. Its steadiness was more hysterical than any word that had been uttered.
“A man with his head turned away from me ... sitting at a small table writing in a book, his left shoulder is ... he is reaching for a hypodermic syringe and holding it up and.... The murderer! ... The murderer! The crazy doctor! The other Cub Sterling!”
The glasses hit the floor with a thud and Matthew Higgins started down the hallway before Cub Sterling and Sally Ferguson turned around. He must reach Snod ... reach Snod. In the same legal offices from which Sally had telephoned he grabbed the receiver and ordered:
“Elijah Wilson Hospital, immediately!”
“Number? Number? Number?”
“Give it to me. I don’t know it.”
Sally reached the doorway and sighed:
“Wilson 2000.”
When the connection was through Higgins rasped:
“Dr. Henry MacArthur.”
The nasal whine of the placid operator came back:
“Dr. MacArthur’s ’phone doesn’t answer.”
“Then give me Ward B, Medicine Clinic.”
“We never connect ‘outside’ with the wards.”
“To hell with you!” Higgins threw the ’phone from him and followed the running figure of Cub Sterling toward the elevator shaft. Sally Ferguson eased in as the door slipped to, and said to the operator:
“Will, non-stop one. For God’s sake, quick!”
Higgins’ head cleared. “Who is he?” Cub nodded vacantly.
As they ran from the building Cub Sterling jumped in beside the driver of a cruising taxi and ordered:
“Elijah Wilson. To hell with traffic lights! Five dollars if you do it in two minutes!”
Matt Higgins pulled Sally Ferguson into the back seat and slammed the door.
They began their wild, uphill snaking in and out.
Matt Higgins said:
“If we are not there in seconds, that devil will be.... Who is it, Sterling?”
Cub took his panic-stricken eyes from the approaching hospital and said:
“I don’t know, Mr. Immer....”
“Higgins. Hired by Dr. MacArthur to ... a New York dick, doc.”
Sally’s “Oh” was spontaneous.
Higgins turned and smiled.
“But it took a lady...!”
The cab drew up at the hospital. Cub Sterling was out and up the steps before the driver applied the brakes. Matt Higgins tossed him the money and he and Sally caught Cub before he was halfway up the main staircase in the Administration Building. They reached the second floor and ran around the octagonal railing, through which Sally caught a glimpse of the statue of Elijah Wilson, far below, and on to the third floor. There Cub turned, wild eyed.
“Damn it!”
“Which way?” Higgins demanded.
“I don’t know.... I’ve never been....”
Higgins began systematically opening doors and looking for an outlet. Little streams of late afternoon sun filtered through the cracks. The hospital was deathly still. All of the people off duty were preparing to go to Rose Standish’s funeral.
Sally’s hands continued wringing themselves, and she begged:
“Cub, isn’t there some way ... another stairs, Cub?”
He swirled without a word and ran down to the second floor again. Higgins and Sally followed, hopefully.
Another stairs ... behind the pharmacy ... where Rose Standish had kissed his interne ... perhaps that went up as well as down....
They reached the door that opened onto the enclosed stairway. Cub pulled the knob savagely. The door flew open. He peered into the darkness. Matthew Higgins thick body brushed him aside. The detective pushed onto the narrow landing and struck a match. Caticornered from the stairway that led down to the pharmacy, a rusty door-knob caught the reflection.
“Locked!” his discovery was like a curse.
Sally stood in the doorway that led to the second floor and moaned. Fatigue. Blinding fatigue was beginning to....
Cub Sterling moved over to Higgins’ side and said “Let’s bust it!”
They propped their feet upon the opposite wall and laid their shoulders against the flimsy panels. The match was out and the veins in their necks began choking them.
Far down below Sally heard the clanking bell of an approaching ambulance; it hid the scrunching of the wood from her ears.
She stepped onto the landing and tried to see. Before her eyes were accustomed to the dark, the heavy breathing of the two men seeped into her like a narcotic. She lay weakly against the wall.
The breathing had ceased for half a second before she opened her eyes. Through the final screech of the bulging door she heard Higgins’ voice.
“Footprints!”
He and Cub were through the hole and halfway up the narrow, winding stairway. She could see Higgins’ match ahead as she scrambled through the jagged panelling.
The steps were high and horrible. She lost all light when Higgins rounded the turn. When she staggered up, again, Higgins had his hand upon a knob and was ordering, in the heavy darkness:
“Stand over there, Sterling!” and then, “It opens out and is....”
He turned the knob, and a rush of yellow sunlight filled the twisting stairs. They pushed on into it. The last three steps extended past the cupola door and into the octagonal room.
Higgins, Cub and Sally stood upon these steps and looked.
Their gray, brown and violet eyes mirrored beside the white medicine case, a raised glass in hand, the counterpart of Cub Sterling ... gone insane.
The late afternoon sun played upon the bushy hair, upon the similar, yet dissimilar faces. It caught each feature, as it catches mountain crags and emphasized it. The same white coat, the same carriage, but not the same eyes.
It was the eyes which froze all three spectators into a paralyzed horror. They were the color of Cub Sterling’s, except that they centered upon his own eyes with a blistering, venomous, consuming hate, and that hate was confirmed in the crooked, violent twist of the almost rigid lips.
The lips opened, the man gave his left shoulder the hysterical twist and drained the glass, but even with his head thrown back, his eyes bored into and scorched the brain of Cub Sterling, and held Matthew Higgins inert with horror.
It was Sally’s, “Peaches! I smell peaches!” that brushed past their fear.
“Cyanide!”
As Cub barked the word, the tall man stiffened gauntly, his eyes still intent upon Sterling’s; then his body, like a palm tree in a hurricane, cracked suddenly forward.
The medicine cabinet was within ten feet of the steps upon which Higgins, Cub and Sally stood, and the man fell so that his head just brushed the railing. His hands automatically spread through the railing and caught Sterling’s knee.
The fall threw his hair forward and Matthew Higgins snapped:
“Who is he?”
Cub’s eyes began disentangling themselves from the glassy vileness of the dead man’s stare. Matthew Higgins reached down and savagely yanked at the stiffening hands around Cub’s knees.
Sterling, his own hands gripping the railing for support, endeavored vainly to make his reeling mind bring his tortured eyes into focus.
Matthew Higgins threw the dead man’s hand heavily back upon the floor; the body rolled half over.
Higgins rasped:
“Doctor who?”
Cub’s brain snapped. His eyes focused.
“God! Baldy! It’s Baldy!”
He lay upon the railing and carefully repeated in a dead monotone:
“Baldy Rath ... bone ... Baldy....”
“Who’s he?”
The sentence did not cut through and Higgins bellowed into Cub’s ear:
“Doctor Rathbone ... who’s he?”
It reached. Cub stood straight and clipped:
“Baldy Rathbone. Not doctor. Chief pharmacist of the Elijah Wilson. But why in God’s name! Baldy Rathbone!”
The incredulity returned. He looked again at the inert body with its eerie features.
Higgins nodded slowly....
The long hair had flopped so that the wide part again led to the shiny spot....
“The book!”
When the sentence finally reached Sally’s lips, it whipped both Sterling and Higgins into action. They ran across the room and the sun took their gray and brown heads and played upon them. Through the cob-webbed windows it shone with prismatic beauty onto the now expressionless face of the dead man.
A terrible desire to get away from that hideous beauty gave Sally the will to mount the remaining steps and run to the table and to Cub.
Through the single open window, the late spring breeze played gently. It brought a hush to the horror-stricken air and a single fly entered, flew directly to the dead man’s face and began walking upon his crooked lips, up his relaxed cheek and around his glassy eyes.
Matthew Higgins held, in his blunt hairy hand, a small stiff-backed notebook, such as the Elijah Wilson used for ward-addresses. The back was checkered and the pages ruled. It was open at a half-written page. The ink was still wet and the small, finely formed script stood out heavily.
Cub read over his shoulder:
“Cupola.... May 19th, 3:55 P. M. I have just failed to administer to the patient in Bed 11, Ward B, Medicine Clinic, a hypodermic of coniine. She opened her eyes suddenly and recognized me as ... Cub Sterling! Nothing could be more fortunate.
“Beforehand I presented to Bessie Ellis my usual token. I was followed by an orderly whom I suspect as a detective. I got away ... but at last ... at last ... my brother may be arrested.... It has worked, perfectly!”
“My God! Lil!” Higgins said savagely as he dropped the book onto the plain deal table.
Nobody paid him any attention.
Cub Sterling said, “‘My brother?’”
And Sally Ferguson picked up the book and began reading aloud from the first page. Her voice was thin and pointed and she read:
“In 1883 there came to Heidelberg as a medical student a young American named Ethridge Sterling. He had studied at the Hotel Dieu and in New York. He lived at the Eagle Inn and attended lectures in surgery under Klotz.
“As a chambermaid at the Eagle Inn, there was a young Bavarian girl, Gretchen Seinrich. She was fair to gaze upon and full of country spirits.”
Cub Sterling had sat down, his head buried in his cupped hands. Matthew Higgins rested against a corner of the table. He was suddenly old. Lil Parkins ... for many years....
They both listened, vacant of expression, and at the same time horrified with interest, to Sally’s voice:
“From the spring of 1883 to the fall of 1884 young Sterling prevailed upon Gretchen Seinrich to live with him and she did so. I like to believe they were in love. I know she always was in love with him.
“In October 1884, Sterling was suddenly called back to New York by the unexpected death of his father. He promised to write. He never did so. He promised to send his address. He did not do so.
“The last night he spent in Heidelberg he spent with her. While she was still asleep he arose and wrote the note containing all of the above promises, and before she woke he had packed and gone....
“And I was conceived....
“She returned to Bavaria and went to work as a seamstress. After my birth, my mother determined to come to America and find my father ... and so she went to work at a more profitable profession ... the oldest.”
The utter and terrible stillness of Cub Sterling was more frightful than any words would have been.
“Go on!” Matthew Higgins was relentless and Sally continued.
“It took three years to earn enough money to come to America and then it took years of blind wandering to reach this hospital and....
“When she reached it, her great love had grown, through endless pain and privation, to a great bitterness. She determined to reveal the Great Dr. Sterling and ruin him, and by mistake when she asked to see him, she was taken, instead, to his father-in-law, Dr. Jemison, and it was through the door of Dr. Jemison’s office that she saw Ethridge Sterling standing with his arm around Dr. Jemison’s daughter.
“She had a heart attack. Dr. Jemison pronounced her dead, and she was carted back through the dispensary door and handed over to a German Society for burial. The president of the society was Otto Weber. He burned her papers and I, then nine, was put into an orphan asylum.
“My father was already famous. He was Otto’s best customer. But what we learn in the first eight years of our lives ... if it is bitter ... we never forget....
“At the asylum we had candy at Christmas and mush for breakfast, and the Elijah Wilson operated upon us, free, when necessary. I remember quite vividly when I was operated upon. Double hernia, and endless pain, and a dispensary consultation. Dr. Sterling was designated to do the operation.
“Upon the day slated, his son was born and my case was turned over to an assistant resident. A man killed in the War....”
“Fegus,” Cub’s voice was low.
“The doctor had never done the operation before. I was his first ... the incisions were too deep.
“I lost my mother before I really knew her and my manhood before it began....
“I lost both of them because my father was Dr. Ethridge Sterling, of the famous hands.
“At sixteen, when the boys in the orphanage discovered my inabilities, I determined to ruin my father ... and began studying pharmacy with an idea of becoming connected, eventually, with his hospital.
“The orphanage farmed me out to a pharmacist. Otto Weber had become a political influence. I went to him and worked upon his sentiment. It was he, and the excellency of my work ... and why not? I am the son of Dr. Sterling ... that persuaded the Attorney-General to recommend me to Dr. Barton and Dr. MacArthur as assistant pharmacist.
“I passed my state boards brilliantly. I entered the pharmacy of the Elijah Wilson, the same year that Cub Sterling entered medical school.
“He spent ten years studying the science of medicine. I spent those ten years perfecting myself in the science of murder. At first I intended murdering the patients of my father, slowly, occasionally, over a period of years. Then I perceived if I waited until Wilkins died, became promoted as Chief Pharmacist and murdered my brother’s patients, I would doubly ruin my father....
“Then the gods smiled...! Through the losing of my top hair, I, unconsciously, grew a nickname. For five years now, I have catered to that nickname. I shaved my center part to accentuate my bald spot. I pomaded my long front hair, which naturally is curly as my brother’s, to slick behind my ears ... to change my forehead line.
“There is not a famous doctor around this hospital who would not testify as to my baldness....
“Around a hospital where so many people are constantly passing at stated intervals to stated places, the eyes of even a good observer become dulled into ‘seeing,’ when a person resembling a familiar doctor passes at an unexpected time, that doctor!
“It is upon that knowledge, a sudden assumption of my brother’s queer angularity, and the combing of my recently washed hair to cover my bald spot, that I have built my resemblance ... not upon the features....
“Some day I shall be caught. When I am caught my father will be caught also.”
“Is that all?” Higgins was still relentless....
Cub Sterling’s head jerked up from his folded arms and he said:
“God! It’s enough!”
Sally Ferguson’s voice out into him:
“There is a diary of the murders, too.”
Both men rose and came to her side. Their movement disturbed the fly and he began circling around the dead man’s head.
Sally’s voice drowned out his buzzing.
“Cupola, Friday, May 13th ... 1:00 A.M. I have just committed my first murder upon the patient in Bed 11, Ward B. I know I have just completed it, because I filled, myself, the prescription to which I added Datura stramonium. The medicine was to be administered at midnight. The dose should, with the heavy bromide I included, have acted in an hour. It is unexpected and therefore not likely to cause an autopsy.
“The patient is one of my father’s and also under the care of my brother.
“And she is now dead.”
“Cupola, Sunday, May 15th ... 1:00 A.M. The murder of the second patient in Bed 11, Ward B, is now completed. I tripled the prescription dose of Digitalis. It was to be administered at 12 M.
“She is a patient of my brother and observed by my father. Though autopsy is performed the condition of the organs will be such as not to suggest chemical analysis. Therefore I am protected.
“So far suspicion is not aroused, but patience is not a virtue in which I have been lacking. It takes time to make a reputation and time ... to ... my candle is almost gone....”
“Cupola, Tuesday, May 17th ... 1:15 A. M. I have just returned from Ward B where by the use of coniine administered with a hypodermic syringe, I have murdered the patient in Bed 11. My first traceable murder. Peters and Paton nearly caught me. If murdering ugly women is so much pleasure; a pretty woman.... Tonight I began an intriguing custom. I left upon the crib of Bessie Ellis a Ma-ma doll.
“Miss Kerr was on the ward at the time. She is stealing morphia again. So ... even should she have recognized me, she will deny all knowledge. Most fortunate!
“The staff meeting yesterday, at which my brother escaped all censure, forces me into action. This autopsy will reveal murder and begin, I hope, the suspicion. My plan is working splendidly! But why not? Fifteen years’ patient study are behind it. I am tired and it is late.... Seeing Peters and Paton was luck....”
“My eyes ... I can’t....” Sally wailed.
Matthew Higgins took the book from her hands; the fading light was eerie. Cub Sterling put his arms around the girl and drew her into his lap. She began to shiver and Higgins read:
“Cupola, Wednesday, May 18th ... 1:30 A.M. The Gods are on my side. I have just murdered Rose Standish. She was a pretty woman, and my father had ordered a sleeping potion ... then he came by and asked me privately to make it bread pills. I did ... plus an African sleeping drug. Ah! the murder drugs are so fascinating and Heddis searched for the obvious potions, only.
“Ah, luck! Ah, irony! Bear Sterling helping his illegitimate son to ruin his legitimate one.
“Rose Standish was asleep by midnight. The student nurse nearly caught me. It was exciting! She will testify against my brother.
“Yesterday I was called before the staff to check drugs after Heddis settled upon coniine. It is all so damnably easy. Of course no house sold the supply. I made it from the hemlock I gathered in the mountains of Pennsylvania when I was east on vacation. I had thought so long about what to use. Something which we did not keep in the pharmacy. I used to think something untraceable ... and then when I met Heddis I saw he would discover....
“Then coniine came to me. Out of a volume of Plato I found in a pullman seat in the Broad Street Station coniine came to me. Coniine, such a word! Coniine!
“The suspicion is growing. My brother and my father are panicky.
“I put another doll upon Bessie’s crib. I passed no one in the corridor. Rose Standish was a pretty woman....”
“Crazy. Dead crazy!”
Higgins’ nerves were jumpy too.
“Anything else?” Cub’s voice had become relentless, now.
“Yes?”
“Cupola, Wednesday, May 18th, Noon. My father has pneumonia and will die without the knowledge of my brother’s ruination unless I act quickly.
“There must be a daylight murder within the next twenty-four hours. If there is no patient in Bed 11, then upon the patient in a corresponding bed upon another floor.
“Before he dies, my brother must be under arrest....
“It will take careful planning to execute a daylight murder ... but years of careful planning prepare one....”
“God! It makes me sick to read it! Lil Parkins, the best woman....”
“A detective you put in the bed...?”
Higgins nodded flatly, and turned the pages. At the back of the book was written, upon the stiff cover:
Murder Chart:
- May 13th, 1:00 A. M.—goitre—E.S. & E.S. Jr.—Datura stramonium
- May 15th, 1:00 A. M.—heart—E.S. & E.S. Jr.—overdose Digitalis
- May 17th, 1:15 A. M.—operative E.S. obs. S. Jr.—Coniine
- May 18th, 1:30 A. M.—nurse—E.S. Jr. obs. E.S.—Coniine
- May 19th, 3:40 P. M.—heart—House & E.S. Jr.—failed to murder but ruined E.S. Jr.
The sunset breeze wound in the window and loosened the bands of Higgins’ heated brain, and the hysterical tears of Sally Ferguson. She buried her head in Cub’s shoulder and sobbed horribly.
Her sobs were long and rending and they forced Matthew Higgins into instant action. He struck a match, tore the pages from the front of the blank book and put them over the match.
The yellow-red flames ran up the crinkling paper as Cub Sterling’s legs began untangling themselves and he threw Sally aside.
“Aw, what’s the use?” Higgins’ gray eyes shot into Cub. “He’s dead and your father’s dying. The body and the murder chart’s all we need.”
The contact with Cub had revived Sally’s fight.
“How can we stop The Call?”
Higgins snapped around.
“Who owns it?”
Cub was half across the room toward Sally. He swerved.
“Barton told me half an hour ago that the Attorney-General had just bought it.... Now I see....” His voice shattered.
Sally ran toward him. Higgins pushed a chair under his bending legs.
The fly rose from the dead man’s face and slipped with the curling smoke out of the open window toward the distant river.
Transcriber’s Notes
- Copyright notice is from the printed edition—this text is public domain in the country of publication.
- Silently corrected palpable typos; left non-standard spellings and dialect unchanged.
- Only in the text versions, delimited italicized text in _underscores_ (the HTML version reproduces the font form of the printed book.)