continued, “I like your father. I heard him talk at the Medical
Convention Dinner last winter and I like him, tremendously.”
Cub bowed quickly. Then, to cover his embarrassment, asked:
“What were you doing there?”
She twisted her head in the pillows and replied, demurely:
“Oh, I was sitting among the medical wives and daughters.”
Cub laughed again, and the timbre of it made her blush. She said
quickly:
“Truth is, if you remember, Doctor, that dinner took place the day after
New Years. I was in the Press box pinch-hitting for ... believe it or
not ... the star reporter!”
“Queer I didn’t see you.” The tone carried admiration.
“You couldn’t very well. I was behind a curtain trying to keep up with
your father’s mental ball-bearings.”
“They roll,” Cub said admiringly, then he asked, slowly:
“What’s your name ... really...?”
Her mouth twitched slightly:
“According to medical records, Doctor, Sophie Merriweather. But
according to the church register, Sally Ferguson. To the reporters on
_The Call_, ‘Ferg’ ... to my father I ... was ... ‘Salscie’ ... I like
that best of all....”
Her body began to stiffen and Cub straightened the cover over her legs.
His voice was casual:
“She _sounds_ like a cigarette smoker. What’s the brand ... Miss
Salscie?”
She looked at him slowly. Then she smiled.
And Cub said, “Camels, Chesterfields, Old Golds...?”
She nodded and he repeated:
“Old Golds?”
She nodded again, and he said:
“Try to get you a pack at Otto’s. Bring them over later.”
Her voice returned:
“Who’s Otto?”
He walked to the door before he spoke and then he said:
“A bartender who gave me my first belt, first suspenders, first razor
... and my first drink! May be late tonight before I get over there.
After eleven, probably. My house staff meets in ten minutes. Then supper
and after that ... rounds. Be a good child, Salscie....”
Her eyes and mouth broke into a natural smile, which followed him out of
the door.
When his footsteps echoed out of hearing, Sally Ferguson remembered that
she hadn’t asked him any of the things she had intended to find out.
When Dr. Ethridge Sterling, Junior, again appeared in the main corridor
he had changed to white hospital coat. The sun had left the trees in the
back garden of the great hospital and the nurses were switching past in
lines of five or six on their way to supper in the new Nurses’ Home.
Had he put it to his staff in the proper way? It was troublesome having
women in a meeting. No matter how hideous they were. They always
listened to what you said and divined what you didn’t say, and whatever
else came of this thing he had to stick by his staff. If for one half
second they suspected....
And in a time like this why in the hell.... If love was as easy to
diagnose as disease ... if he could be perfectly sure! He had been
married to medicine for thirty-eight years and they had got along pretty
well.... Why not leave well enough alone! He glanced up at the corridor
clock and swung ’round and returned to Medicine Clinic again. This was
no time to walk along reflecting upon what a smile could mean. Better
tell Miss Kerr how things stood. If your head nurse got down on you....
He lit a cigarette and considered. The proper thing was to go to his own
office and send for Miss Kerr. But if he handled her with a touch of
gallantry, she was always easier.
As the corridor light threw his shadow across the doorsill, Miss Kerr
laid down her pen and carefully smiled. Before she did either of these
things one was always aware that she knew whom her eyes would appraise.
“Dr. Ethridge!”
She always called him that. When he was “a darling little boy,” she had
come from Massachusetts General to “help make the Elijah Wilson.”
Cub folded his frame into a chair and adjusted it into angles of
dignity.
“Miss Kerr, at the General Staff Meeting this afternoon I reported the
two unexplained deaths on B Ward.”
“Why, Dr. Ethridge! You ... you ... wasn’t it a little odd ... to ...
er....”
“I don’t believe so. Dr. MacArthur and I....”
“But you,” she interrupted him and Cub felt instinctively that the fire
had reached the ridgepole, “you put the nursing service in a _very
compromising_ position. A matter which reflects so unfavorably upon the
_whole_ medical unit should, I most emphatically feel, have been
discussed with the head of every department before being presented to
the General.” A sanctimonious note entered her heaves of indignation.
“It was.”
He scratched his nose with such care that unless Miss Kerr had been
painfully aware he was contemplating her large flat feet she would have
noticed it. He knew that the nurses since time immemorial had called her
“Foots,” and she knew he knew it.
“Discussed. Yes. Grilled, perhaps better suits what the nursing staff
has been subjected to. But before we were disgraced I do think....”
“You speak as though you alone were bearing the whole thing.”
“Really ... er ... er,” her pompadour and bosom ascended, “Dr. Merritt
always....” then her china blue eyes protruded and she snapped:
“_You_ speak as though you suspect my service, Doctor. In all the years
Dr. Merritt’s staff....”
“We suspect nobody, Miss Kerr. We do _expect_ the nursing service to
coöperate and do as it is ordered to by the medical. This is not a time
for disagreements. Wherever the blame, until that blame is placed we are
all culpable.
“Dr. MacArthur asked me before the meeting if there were any special
nurses on B Ward. Are there?”
“None.”
“In what classes are the five student nurses?”
“Two in the class graduating in January, two in the next year’s class
and one entered training last fall. Really, Dr. Ethridge, hasn’t my
service been probed far enough? For you, Dr. MacArthur, the
superintendent of nurses, and the head of the training school, to
suspect my staff....”
Cub cut her short.
“We suspect nobody ... and everybody, Miss Kerr.”
But woman roused without consent of will is always woman who will not
keep still.
“But to humiliate me before Dr. Paton ... he’s always been against me
... and dear Dr. Hoffbein and even in front of Dr. Peters ... without
allowing me to utter one single word in my defense....”
“My dear Miss Kerr, will you never realize that you haven’t been, as you
call it, ‘humiliated’? As your line of duty in a crisis, your service
... like ours ... is suspected of a failure ... somewhere.”
He rose and turned.
She towered from her chair with the determination of a mule.
“The idea! After all of these years! I can answer now ... and later,
Doctor, for _my_ staff ... and _myself_.”
The last word came in two ascending notes of inquiry.
“I trust you are correct, Miss Kerr. Good evening.”
The water-off-a-duck’s-back nonchalance with which he quitted her office
left Miss Roenna Kerr, Class of ’90 M. G. and head nurse in Medicine
Clinic Elijah Wilson Hospital since 1900, with a sensation of standing
with her feet in a puddle.
As the elevator girl respectfully bore him to the top floor where his
early rounds began, Dr. Ethridge Sterling, Junior, slouched with his
tongue in the corner of his mouth. He was thinking:
“Could break her damn neck! Sex-repressed old maid.”
Miss Patricia Withers had been night superintendent of nurses so many
years that she had developed an hourly routine.
From two to four-thirty, after all of the clinics had checked-in their
midnight patient rounds, she read mystery stories.
After thirteen false clues and flukes, she had just reached the place
where the real murderer was to be revealed when her telephone bell
intervened.
With an intensity, every motion of which was profane, she snatched up
the receiver:
“Well,” upon a rising note.
The voice at the other end quaked:
“General Superintendent’s office?”
Miss Withers checked her: “Yes. What do you want?”
“This is Medicine Clinic, Ward B, Miss Evelina Kerr, Student Nurse,
speaking. The telephone of the night supervisor Medicine Clinic does not
answer, so I am reporting to your office the death of Alice Tuck,
patient in Bed 11.”
“What?” Miss Withers’ breath pushed each letter through the receiver.
“Reporting the death....” the student nurse’s voice began to quaver it
out again.
“I heard you before, child! Are you sure? No pulse? No respiration? Draw
the curtains and leave everything exactly ... exactly, you understand
until your superiors come....”
There seemed to be no response and Miss Withers feared the nurse had
fainted.
“Can you hear me?” the authority in her voice would have revived the
dead woman, if she had been nearer.
“Yes’m,” the girl breathed.
“Then do as I order.”
The night operator of the hospital was interrupted in her regular
reverie as to whether she could get into the movies, by Miss Withers:
“Get Dr. Mattus. Get the morgue. Get Dr. Ethridge Sterling, Junior. Get
Dr. Sarah James ... and get Miss Kerr.”
The telephone girl decided that was enough for the present and rang off.
“Hell-let-loose,” she muttered and began ringing Mattus’ ’phone.
Miss Withers sat drumming her desk. Again. That’s the third one!
Superstitions! Like three on a match!
Dr. Sidney Mattus turned over in his white iron bed in his “Germicidal
Cell,” and reached for the ringing telephone.
“Huzzies!”
He spat the word with sleepy vehemence born of unconscious fatigue. The
contact between his ear and the receiver took several motions.
“Nayaa.” The inflection bore no interest, it was simply a sign that
contact had been established.
“Dr. Mattus?” Miss Withers’ voice was like a splash of cold water.
“What is it?” he was bluntly and resentfully awakening.
“Miss Withers, speaking. The woman in Medicine, Ward B, Bed 11, is
dead.”
“Humh? Dead? Couldn’t be!”
“Alice Tuck, Bed 11, Ward B....”
Mattus now wide awake thundered, “Who says so?”
“The floor night student nurse has just reported to me. That’s the
bed....”
Mattus, too, had realized that it was. He was busily pulling on his
pants. The receiver lay upon the pillow and he was calling into the
mouthpiece.
“Get Cub Sterling. Notify Dr. MacArthur. Keep the day staff off the
floor until notified. Call the morgue. Call.... My God, Miss Withers,
call everybody but the police! No you don’t. Don’t call anybody but
Sterling until I verify the nurse’s statement.”
He ran from the room, the telephone receiver still upon the bed and the
lights burning. He started around the octagonal hall toward the
stairway. Three flights below ... in the center of the lobby ... he
could see the statue of Elijah Wilson.
As he reached the second floor he finished buttoning his pants and
started toward the door of Dr. Sarah James, then remembered:
“Spending the night with her mother in Cincinnati. She would be!”
With an indignant grunt he had passed the statue and was letting out his
stride down the long corridor.
As neither Dr. Cub Sterling nor Dr. Henry MacArthur answered
immediately, the operator rang Miss Roenna Kerr.
Miss Kerr and Miss Withers were classmates at Mass. General and it
seemed only fair to tip her....
The bedroom of Miss Roenna Kerr was bare as an operating room. It was
also a front line trench, but the enemy in this case was age. Upon one
chair reposed a specially built corset to hide the collapsing stomach.
Under the bed stood, like a pair of dachshunds, two large white shoes
with built-in bunion-rests. Under her chin nestled a wrinkle strap and
her hair was in “papers.” Kid papers, too. She snored with heavy
precision.
For the first time since the fire in Ward M she was awakened by the
insistent clamor of her telephone. She arose, put on her wool wrapper,
loosened the chin strap, and walked over to the ’phone.
“Eeenie, the patient in Bed 11, Ward B, Medicine Clinic, is dead!”
As quickly as the voice had come it had gone and for the first time in
all the years she had been a nurse Miss Kerr stood inefficiently looking
into a silent telephone!
Then, in her highnecked nightgown, she assumed her military bearing and
muttered:
“I don’t care whose son he is!”
As assistant to Dr. Merritt, Cub Sterling had occupied a series of rooms
on the second floor of the Administration Building. Graduated to “golden
oak,” the internes called it. The furniture had belonged to Elijah
Wilson.
Sterling still used the rooms.
When his telephone began ringing, he lay caticornered in his golden oak
double bed with a pillow nestled into his neck. He had reached that
second sleep where even an insistent telephone cannot cut the purple
mist.
But the night operator of the Elijah Wilson had awakened Cub before. She
began ringing in short hysterical jerks like the throbs of a bad heart.
Cub awoke.
The pillow—when he became aware it was a pillow—flew through a door and
landed in the bath tub.
He took his fury out upon the ’phone.
“’Lo”
The result was the same as if he had said “Boo!”
Miss Withers actually lost her speech.
Cub repeated the process and then in exasperation rung off.
In the interim Dr. Mattus had cut in upon Miss Withers’ line.
“Miss Withers? Dr. Mattus. She’s dead!”
“Dead?”
“Stone! Get Dr. Sterling ... wherever he is ... get him ... quick!”
Cub had decided, now he was awake, to smoke a cigarette. The pillow was
no go ... but that lovely little laugh when he handed her the
cigarettes....
The ’phone interrupted him.
He repeated his “’Lo!”
“Dr. Sterling, Miss Withers,” the words were tumbling. “Pupil nurse
Medicine reported patient in Bed 11, Ward B, dead four minutes ago. Dr.
Mattus has confirmed the....”
The cigarette followed the pillow ... but was aimed at a different
receptacle.
“Dead! You’re wrong. I saw her at rounds. About seven. Dead!” His
incredulity almost Stopped his speech. “Gimme Mattus!”
“Dr. Mattus is on Ward B....”
“All right. All right. Tell him to wait till I get over there before ...
and Miss Withers, call Dr. MacArthur right away. It’s....”
He had started to say murder ... but he hung up instead....
The night operator snapped to the exchange:
“Now keep on ringing and let me know when you get Riverside 7892, Dr.
Henry MacArthur.”
“Say, what’s the trouble. Can’t you wait....”
“Listen, Pal,” the night operator responded. “You know as much as I do.
A woman ‘went out’ and the whole place is raisin’ hell....”
“Aw girlie, quit y’kiddin’. What did they expect her to do? That’s a
hospital, ain’t it?”
In what the architects refer to as “The Master’s chamber” of a white
colonial house replete with early American antiques—mostly genuine
pieces inherited from his wife’s mother—Dr. Henry MacArthur snored
peacefully. His wife was in Paris and he had spent from ten to midnight
propped up in bed, smoking cigarettes and sipping whiskey highballs. The
enjoyment of sprees is based upon comparison.
He lay with one arm against his head, the other thrown out, from habit,
toward his wife’s side. He snored with vehemence; he had had a grand
time....
Upon a bedside table lay a volume of Osler’s essays and several medical
journals. They were dusty. Only the telephone appeared to have been used
within the last week.
The telephone was as necessary to Dr. MacArthur’s existence as his
eye-glasses. To be so excellent a director of so tremendous a hospital
demanded that at any moment of any hour he must be immediately available
and ready with a wise, sane, judicial decision upon any subject under
the sun. Therefore wherever he went, whenever he went, whyever he went
could be known by any head nurse who cared to inquire. That was why he
had enjoyed his spree.
It had been the servants’ night off.
It had been utterly private.
He was topping it off with uninterrupted snores.
But the night telephone operator at the hospital worked upon the
principle that all men past thirty snore. Therefore she took several
surreptitious puffs of a cigarette, cut in upon the exchange and settled
herself to the task of drowning out a snore ... long, continuous,
vibrating, insistent, monotonous....
She was successful.
The monotony of the bell dripped through to Dr. MacArthur’s
consciousness. He turned over and put the pillow over his head.
The operator took several more puffs and began again ... this time in
the angry insistence of a crying baby.
MacArthur succumbed and reached feebly for the receiver. It was no use.
She rang like a wrong number. But it was no use.
He was fully awake but kept his eyes shut, in an endeavor to keep them
from aching, which they did anyhow ... terribly.
He fumbled the receiver off the hook.
His “yes,” was like a cow’s “moo.”
The voice which responded hit his brain with an impact. He opened his
eyes and listened:
“This is Cub Sterling. The patient in Bed 11, Ward B, is dead. Found by
the night nurse fifteen minutes ago.”
“Dead?”
“Yes, sir. Mattus and I have both examined her. There are no signs of
... of anything. It..... What shall we do, Dr. MacArthur?”
“Remove the body to the autopsy room. Order immediate autopsy. Keep
entire staff intact. Notify your father. Keep everything and everybody
composed and wait for me.”
The clearness in his head seemed to recede and he crawled out of bed
with a horrible weariness.
He had fought death, deceit, politics, criticism, financial panics,
women ... but this was his first experience with ... murder!
»III«
Autopsy Findings
Bear Sterling was tilted back in the desk chair. The half-egg-shell
ceiling light blazed in his face. He wore the surgeons’ apron in which
he had performed the autopsy. His lower jaw lay relaxed against the
cushions of his chins. His eyes were peacefully closed. He was asleep.
When the Elijah Wilson had been founded he had been the youngest
surgeon, and had learned to sleep between crises. He did it
automatically, naturally and silently.
Cub Sterling had twined himself around an uncomfortable office chair and
was smoking cigarettes. His left shoulder was hysterically high.
He watched his father’s innocent repose with a visible irritation. He
had struck no matches for over an hour. The smoking was incessant and
the old butt served to light the new cigarettes.
Dr. Sidney Mattus sat stiffly in a straight chair. His head rested upon
one corner of the back and his feet tucked into one of the chair rungs.
He watched all of the men and held his eyes past them, apparently upon
the coming dawn which could just be discerned through the high window.
Dr. Henry MacArthur sat across the double desk from Bear Sterling. He
had shielded his brow from the glaring light and was soothing it like a
man in constant pain. Occasionally he lifted his free hand and twisted
his left ear thoughtfully.
No man had spoken for many minutes.
The air of the room was heavy with smoke, tension, the odor of
formaldehyde and the chilliness of dawn.
It housed all the suppressed horror of a death chamber, and its
occupants had the appearance of men awaiting execution.
Dr. MacArthur’s shoulders were hunched as though prepared for a blow;
even in Bear Sterling’s slumber there was a sense of watchful waiting.
Cub was thinking. Shall I keep my mouth shut and watch that night
student nurse...? She is a niece of Miss Kerr ... remember that ... old
fellow!
Dr. MacArthur raised his head as though to answer and said:
“What did your father say about the heart?”
Cub’s eyes met his and he responded:
“In normal condition, considering the history, sir.”
“Strange. Was that your understanding, Mattus?”
“Yes, Dr. MacArthur.”
Silence lay over the air again. MacArthur put his head back into his
hands and began checking it all over: Cub, Mattus, Bear, the student
nurse, the orderly, the Head Nurse in Medicine Clinic ... the ... was
there anybody else? Was it possible....
He stopped his mind and decided not to think until he had some facts.
There would be no sense in clouding his faculties with hysterical
superstitions. A clear head was what must be maintained.
The morning light was beginning to fill the room; it began to suffuse
the faces of the four men.
MacArthur straightened and turned to Cub Sterling and Mattus, and
smiled.
“I’m sorry boys if I’ve been taciturn ... but the Elijah Wilson is my
only child ... and as a parent I guess I’m hopeless.”
“Good God, sir, we understand.”
Cub Sterling was upon his feet and towering over MacArthur. Mattus’
manner dropped from him and he became almost a schoolboy in his shyness.
“Of course we do,” he affirmed.
Bear Sterling stirred in his sleep and awoke. His steel-gray eyes were
softened by the coming dawn. All three men turned to him. His eyes
became pin points.
“Any news?”
“Not yet.”
“Wish Heddis hadn’t gone to that damn convention.”
“I’ve telegraphed for him. Could that sleeping potion have been
administered hypodermically?” MacArthur’s voice was thin and old.
“Improbable. The order was for capsule,” Cub Sterling snapped.
“Then that puncture was from....” Mattus’ voice slid into the opening
each man’s brain had already made.
“Durn these pharmacologists!” Bear announced and closed his eyes.
MacArthur took his watch from his pocket and said:
“Boys, since all tests are being done upon those organs, it may be hours
yet. Go get some sleep and prepare for today. You’ll have a twenty-four
hour job ahead of you to sit on the suppressed hysteria in Medicine
Clinic ... and you have _got_ to sit on it!”
Mattus and Cub Sterling rose. Patients, another day, ... Tuesday! ...
rounds, diagnoses ... they had forgotten it all! And within three hours
it must be faced again.
They turned toward the door and it was opened in their faces by the
second assistant chemist.
He was a small damp man whose limp black hair sweated into his muddy
forehead. He said:
“Dr. MacArthur, Dr. Heddis and Dr. Maids are at the convention in
Cincinnati, so I did the tests upon the organs you sent over....”
His voice was matter-of-fact. Its uninterested monotony awakened Bear
Sterling.
He rivetted his eyes into the fellow and growled:
“Who in the hell are you?”
“A gentleman,” Dr. MacArthur said, “who is reporting upon some organs I
sent over to the chemical laboratory, Dr. Sterling. Dr. Heddis’ second
assistant.”
The chemist wiped his perspiring lip and continued in the voice of a
bell-hop.
“None of the organs show traces of any foreign substance except the
ingredients of a sleeping potion, which I believe was administered in
powdered form, capsule probably. I have not proceeded with any obscure
tests. Dr. Heddis will be back this afternoon. I regret I can make no
further report until after a consultation with Dr. Heddis.”
Bear Sterling’s regular breathing was the only noise.
“Dr. Heddis is flying back. He should be here within two hours. Sorry to
have called you at such an hour. Please keep on searching and consult
Dr. Heddis immediately he returns. In the meantime, will you be so kind
as to have a typed report of your findings in my hands by nine this
morning? So kind of you!” Dr. MacArthur stated.
He ushered the chemist through the door and shut it after him. He turned
to face the three men. He stood so erect that his wife would have known
he had lost a battle and a tremendous one.
“Bear Sterling, did that body show a hypodermic puncture?”
“It did.”
“Then that syringe contained something ... I can’t seem to make my brain
... understand.”
At nine-fifteen, Dr. Henry MacArthur sat in his own office chair and
peered intently at the innocuous findings of the second assistant
chemist and the addenda which Dr. Heddis had written an hour before.
His long brow was pleated with straight thin wrinkles.
He was reading Dr. Heddis’ supplement with fascinated horror. It
indicated, what he had feared, that the patient in Bed 11, Ward B,
Medicine Clinic had not died of a sleeping potion. That somewhere in the
Elijah Wilson....
His door into the corridor of the Administration Building was open.
Except during meetings it was always open.
His secretary appeared in it and said, “Here is your mail, Dr.
MacArthur.”
The tone of her voice braced him.
He smiled as she advanced and laid the letters upon the desk.
“I won’t dictate this morning, Miss Sadler. There is an important staff
meeting. Please call off my appointment with the Woman’s Board, and that
luncheon engagement with the man from the Duke Foundation ... and ...
take all telephone messages unless they come from the staff, or Dr.
Heddis.”
He was interrupted by the tall shadow of Cub Sterling.
The secretary turned and passed out.
Cub took the proffered chair and said, “Can they all come, sir?”