The Man Who Couldn't Sleep Part 28

Then, of a sudden, I became aware of the fact that voices were whispering close outside my door. The next moment I heard the crunch of wood subjected to pressure, and before I could move or realize the full meaning of that sound, the door had been forced open and three men were staring in at me.

I looked up at them with a start--with a start, however, which I had the inspired foresight to translate into a hiccough. That hiccough, in turn, reminded me that I had a role to sustain, a role of care-free and irresponsible intoxication.

So, opprobrious as the whole farce seemed to me, I pushed my hat back on my head and blinkingly stared at the three intruders as they sauntered nonchalantly into the room. Yet as I winked up at them, with all the sleepy unconcern at my command, I could plainly enough see that each one of that trio was very much on the alert. It was the youngest of the three who turned to me.

"Kiddo," he said, and he spoke with an oily suavity not at all to my liking, "I kind o' thought I smelt gas leakin' in here."

He had the effrontery to turn and stare about at the four walls of the room. Then he moved easily across the floor to where the champagne picture hung. What he saw, or did not see there, I had no means of determining. For to turn and look after him would be to betray my part.

"That leak ain't in this room," admitted the second of the trio, a swarthy and loose-lipped land pirate with a sweep of carroty bang which covered his left eyebrow. I knew, even before he spoke, that he was the man called Redney, just as I knew the first speaker was the youth they had addressed as Tony. About the third man, who towered above the other two in his giant-like stature, there was a sense of calm and solidity that seemed almost pachydermatous. Yet this same solidity in some way warned me that he might be the most dangerous of them all.

"'Sssh all righ'!" I loosely condoned, with a sleepy lurch of the body.

How much my acting was convincing to them was a matter of vast concern to me. The man named Tony, who had continued to study the wooden part.i.tion against which my microphone had hung, turned back to the table and calmly seated himself beside me. My heart went down like an elevator with a broken cable when I noticed the nervous sweat which had come out on his forehead.

"Say, Sister, this puts the drinks on us," he declared, with an airiness which I felt to be as unreal as my own inebriacy. I saw him motion for the other two to seat themselves.

They did so, a little mystified, each man keeping his eyes fixed on the youth called Tony. The latter laughed, for no reason that I could understand, and over his shoulder bawled out the one word, "s.h.i.+mmey!"

s.h.i.+mmey, I remembered, was my friend the wall-eyed waiter. And this waiter it was who stepped trailingly into the room.

"s.h.i.+mmey," said the voluble youth at my side. "We introoded on this gen'lmun. And we got to square ourselves. So what's it goin' to be?"

"Nothin'!" I protested, with a repugnant wave of the hand.

"You mean we ain't good enough for you to drink with?" demanded the youth called Tony. I could see what he wanted. I could feel what was coming. He was looking for some reason, however tenuous, to start trouble. Without fail he would find it in time. But my one desire was to defer that outcome as long as possible. So I grinned back at him, rather idiotically, I'm afraid.

"All righ'," I weakly agreed, blinking about at my tormentors. "Bring me a bran'y an' soda."

The other three men looked at the waiter. The waiter, in turn, looked at them. Then he studied my face. There was something decidedly unpleasant in his coldly speculative eyes.

"s.h.i.+mmey, d'you understand? This gen'lmun wants a brandy and soda."

The waiter, still studying me, said "Sure!" Then he turned on his heel and walked out of the room.

I knew, in my prophetic bones, that there was some form of trouble brewing in that odoriferous little room. But I was determined to side-step it, to avoid it, to the last extremity. And I was still nodding amiably about when the waiter returned with his tray of gla.s.ses.

"Well, here's how," said the youth, and we all lifted our gla.s.ses.

That brandy and soda, I knew, would not be the best of its kind. I also clearly saw that it would be unwise to decline it. So I swallowed the stuff as a child swallows medicine.

I downed it in a gulp or two, and put the gla.s.s back on the table.

Then I proceeded to wipe my mouth with the back of my hand, after the approved fas.h.i.+on of my environment.

It was fortunate, at that moment, that my hand was well up in front of my face. For as the truth of the whole thing came home to me, as sharp and quick as an electric spark, there must have been a second or two when my role slipped away from me.

I had, it is true, inwardly fortified myself against a draught that would prove highly unpalatable. But the taste which I now detected, the acrid, unmistakable, over-familiar taste, was too much for my startled nerves. I hid my sudden body-movement only by means of a simulated hiccough. The thing I had unmistakably tasted was chloral hydrate. They had given me knock-out drops.

The idea, of a sudden, struck me as being so ludicrous that I laughed.

The mere thought of any such maneuver was too much for me--the foolish hope that a homeopathic little pill of chloral would put me under the table, like any shopgirl lured from a dance-hall! They were trying to drug me. Drug _me_, who had taken double and triple doses night after night as I fought for sleep!

They were trying to drug me, me who on my bad nights had even known the narcotic to be forcibly wrested from my clutch by those who stood appalled at the quant.i.ties that my too-immured system demanded, and knew only too well that in time it meant madness!

But I remembered, as I saw the three men staring at me, that I still had a role to sustain. I knew it would be unwise to let those sweet worthies know just how the land lay. I enjoyed an advantage much too exceptional and much too valuable to be lightly surrendered.

So to all outward signs and appearances I let the drug do its work. I carefully acted out my pretended lapse into somnolent indifference. I lost the power to coordinate; my speech grew inarticulate; my shoulders drooped forward across the table edge. I wilted down like a cut dock-weed, until my face lay flat against the beer-stained wood.

"He's off," murmured the man called Chuck. He rose to his feet as he spoke.

"Then we got to beat it," declared the youth named Tony, already on his feet. I could hear him take a deep breath as he stood there. "And the next long nose who gives me heart disease like this is goin' to get five inches o' cold steel!"

He knelt before me as he spoke, pulled back my feet, and ran a knife edge along the shoe laces. Then he promptly pulled the shoes from my feet. These shoes, apparently, he kept in his hand. "That'll help anchor 'im, I guess," I heard him remark.

"Let's get on the job," suggested the big man, obviously impatient at the delay. "If there's nothin' but five inches o' plank between us and that gold, let's get busy!"

I sat there, with my head on that table top so redolent of the soured beverages of other days, and listened to them as they moved across the room. I listened as they pa.s.sed out and swung the door shut behind them. I waited there for another minute or two, without moving, knowing only too well what a second discovery would entail.

My head was still bent over that unclean table top when I heard the broken-latched door once more pushed slowly open, and steps slowly cross the floor to where I sat.

Some one, I knew, was staring down at me. I felt four distended finger-tips push inquisitively at my head, rolling it a little to one side. Then the figure bending above me s.h.i.+fted its position. A hand felt cautiously about my body. It strayed lower, until it reached my watch pocket.

I could see nothing of my enemy's face, and nothing of his figure. All I got a glimpse of was a patch of extremely soiled linen. But that glimpse was sufficient. It was my friend, the wall-eyed waiter, resolutely deciding to make hay while the sun shone. And that decided me.

With one movement I rose from the chair and wheeled about so as to face him. That quick body-twist spun his own figure half-way around.

My fist caught him on the foreward side of the relaxed jawbone. He struck the worn leather couch as he fell, and then rolled completely over, as inert as a sack of bran.

I looked down at him for a moment or two as he lay face upward on the floor. Then I dropped on one knee beside him, unlaced his well-worn and square-toed shoes, and calmly but quietly adjusted them to my own feet.

Once out in the street I quickened my steps and rounded the first corner. Then I hurried on, turning still another, and still another, making doubly sure I was leaving no chance to be trailed. Then I swung aboard a cross-town car, alighting again at a corner flas.h.i.+ng with the vulgar brilliance of an all-night drug store.

I went straight to the telephone booth of that drug store, and there I promptly called up police headquarters. I felt, as I asked for Lieutenant Belton, a person of some importance. Then I waited while the precious moments flew by.

Lieutenant Belton, I was finally informed, was at his room in the Hotel York, on Seventh Avenue. So I rang up the Hotel York, only to be informed that the lieutenant was not in.

I slammed the receiver down on its hook and ended that foolish colloquy. I first thought of Patrolman McCooey. Then I thought of Doyle, and then of Creegan, my old detective friend. Then with a jaw-grip of determination I caught that receiver up again, ordered a taxicab, paid for my calls, consulted my watch, and paced up and down like a caged hyena, waiting for my cab.

Another precious ten minutes slipped away before I got to Creegan's door in Forty-third Street. Then I punched the bell-b.u.t.ton above the mail-box, and stood there with my finger on it for exactly a minute and a half.

I suddenly remembered that the clicking door latch beside me implied that my entrance was being automatically solicited. I stepped into the dimly lighted hall and made my way determinedly up the narrow carpeted stairs, knowing I would get face to face with Creegan if I had to crawl through a fanlight and pound in his bedroom door.

But it was Creegan himself who confronted me as I swung about the banister turn of that shadowy second landing.

"You wake those kids up," he solemnly informed me, "and I'll kill you!"

"Creegan," I cried, and it seemed foolish that I should have to inveigle and coax him into a crusade which meant infinitely more to him than to me, "I'm going to make you famous!"

"How soon?" he diffidently inquired.