“Better arrive about five,” he said.
“But—if they are not expecting me?”
“They will be expecting you,” he replied enigmatically.
“The doctor, if he’s a St. Luke’s man——”
“There is no doctor.”
It was six months since I had solved, or helped to solve, the mystery of
the buckled bag for Mr. Patton. I had had other cases for him in the
interval, cases where the police could not get close enough. As I said
when I began this record of my crusade against crime and the criminal, a
trained nurse gets under the very skin of the soul. She finds a mind
surrendered, all the crooked little motives that have fired the guns of
life revealed in their pitifulness.
Gradually I had come to see that Mr. Patton’s point of view was right;
that if the criminal uses every means against society, why not society
against the criminal? At first I had used this as a flag of truce to my
nurse’s ethical training; now I flaunted it, a mental and moral banner.
The criminal against society, and I against the criminal! And, more than
that, against misery, healing pain by augmenting it sometimes, but
working like a surgeon, for good.
I had had six cases in six months. Only in one had I failed to land my
criminal, and that without any suspicion of my white uniform and
rubber-soled shoes. Although I played a double game no patient of mine
had suffered. I was a nurse first and a police agent second. If it was a
question between turpentine compresses—stupes, professionally—and seeing
what letters came in or went out of the house, the compress went on
first, and cracking hot too. I am not boasting. That is my method, the
only way I can work, and it speaks well for it that, as I say, only one
man escaped arrest—an arson case where the factory owner hanged himself
in the bathroom needle shower in the house he had bought with the
insurance money, while I was fixing his breakfast tray. And even he
might have been saved for justice had the cook not burned the toast and
been obliged to make it fresh.
I was no longer staying at a nurses’ home. I had taken a bachelor suite
of three rooms and bath, comfortably downtown. I cooked my own
breakfasts when I was off duty and I dined at a restaurant near.
Luncheon I did not bother much about. Now and then Mr. Patton telephoned
me and we lunched together in remote places where we would not be known.
He would tell me of his cases and sometimes he asked my advice.
I bought my uniforms that day and took them home in a taxicab. The
dresses were blue, and over them for the street the St. Luke’s girls
wear long cloaks, English fashion, of navy blue serge, and a blue bonnet
with a white ruching and white lawn ties. I felt curious in it, but it
was becoming and convenient. Certainly I looked professional.
At three o’clock that afternoon a messenger brought a small box,
registered. It contained a St. Luke’s badge of gold and blue enamel.
At four o’clock my telephone rang. I was packing my suitcase according
to the list I keep pasted in the lid. Under the list, which was of
uniforms, aprons, thermometer, instruments, a nurse’s simple set of
probe, forceps and bandage scissors, was the word “box.” This always
went in first—a wooden box with a lock, the key of which was round my
neck. It contained skeleton keys, a small black revolver of which I was
in deadly fear, a pair of handcuffs, a pocket flashlight, and my badge
from the chief of police. I was examining the revolver nervously when
the telephone rang, and I came within an ace of sending a bullet into
the flat below.
Did you ever notice how much you get out of a telephone voice? We can
dissemble with our faces, but under stress the vocal cords seem to draw
up tight and the voice comes thin and colorless. There’s a little woman
in the flat beneath—the one I nearly bombarded—who sings like a bird at
her piano half the day, scaling vocal heights that make me dizzy. Now
and then she has a visitor, a nice young man, and she disgraces herself,
flats F, fogs E even, finally takes cowardly refuge in a wretched
mezzo-soprano and cries herself to sleep, doubtless, later on.
The man who called me had the thin-drawn voice of extreme strain—a
youngish voice.
“Miss Adams,” he said, “this is Francis Reed speaking. I have called St.
Luke’s and they referred me to you. Are you free to take a case this
afternoon?”