A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

“I don’t know,” said the cop sadly. “I’m just a sidewalk-flattener with the pleasant job of breaking these things to people.”

Eddie hadn’t come to yet, so just standing there looking at him didn’t do much good. It broke my heart, though. One of the doctors gave me a good stiff drink of whiskey and tried to be encouraging.

“He’ll pull through,” he said. “No doubt about it. We’ve made a preliminary examination, and I don’t even think we’ll have to resort to blood transfusion. What saved him more than anything else were the makeshift bandages that were found on him. If it hadn’t been for them he’d have been a goner long before he was picked up.”

This went over my head at the time. I didn’t understand. I thought he meant their own bandages, the hospital’s.

A couple of detectives had already been assigned to the case from the moment the cop who had found him had phoned in his report. Why wouldn’t they be? No car has ever yet been designed so that it can rip the tongue out of a man’s mouth without leaving a scratch on the rest of his face. Or deposit him neatly on the side of the road, with his feet close together and his hat resting on his stomach as if he were dozing. There wasn’t a bruise on him except the mutilations. They were waiting in the other room to talk to me when I came out of the ward, looking like a ghost.

“You his brother?”

“Yes, damn it!” I burst out. “And all I want is to get my hands on whoever did this to him!”

“Funny,” said a dick dryly, “but so do we.”

I didn’t like him much after that. Sarcasm is out of place when a man has just been brought face to face with personal tragedy.

First they told me what they already knew about Eddie, then they had me fill in the rest for them. There wasn’t very much of either. I mean that had any bearing on this.

“He runs the elevator at the Hotel Lyons, works the late shift alone, from midnight to six in the morning,” I explained.

“We checked down there already. He never showed up at all last night; they had to use the night watchman as a substitute on the car. What time did he leave your house to go to work last night?”

“Same time as always. Quarter to twelve.”

“That don’t give him much time, does it?” remarked my pet aversion irrelevantly.

My nerves were raw and I felt like snapping, “That’s no reason why he should be half tom to pieces,” but instead I said, “He only has two express stops to go, the hotel’s on Seventy-second.”

“How do you know he rode?”

“I can give you a lead on that,” I offered. “The station agent down there knows him — by sight, anyway. Kelsey’s his name. Ask him if he saw him come up last night at the usual time or not.” He went out to find a phone. “He don’t know his name,” I called after him warningly, “so just say the young fellow from the Hotel Lyons he let pass through one time when he’d lost all his change through a hole in his pocket.”

“Not bad,” remarked his mate admiringly while we were waiting. “You’ve got a good head, Mason. What do you do?”

“Master electrician. I’ve got my own store on upper Amsterdam.” The other one came back and said, “I had to wake him up at home, but he knew who I meant right away. Yeah, your brother came through the turnstile about five of twelve. Says he flipped his hand up and said, ‘Hello, you bird in a gilded cage.’ ”

“Well,” I said, and my voice broke, “then it’s a cinch he still had — his voice and his — fingers when he got out of the train. And it’s another cinch it didn’t happen to him between the station and the hotel. It’s right on the comer, that hotel is, and it’s one of the busiest comers on Broadway. Looks like the management gave you a bum steer and he did go to work after all.”

“No, that was on the up-and-up. They were even sore about it at first, until we told them he was in the hospital.”

“What were those sandwiches doing in his pocket?” the other one asked. “Looks like he stopped off somewhere first to buy food. They were still on him when he was found, one in each pocket.”

“No, my wife fixed them for him to take with him and eat on the job,” I said. “She did that every night.” I looked the other way so they wouldn’t see my eyes get cloudy. “I saw him shove them in his coat before he left the house. Now they’ll be feeding him through a tube, most likely.”

“Any way you look at it,” said the first one, “it narrows down to about five minutes in time and twenty or thirty yards in distance. He was seen leaving the station. He never got to the hotel. With lights all around as bright as day. Why, he didn’t even have to go all the way across the street — the station’s on an island in the middle!”

“What’s the good of all that?” said the one I didn’t like. “We won’t get anywhere until we find out from him himself. He knows better than anyone else what happened after he came out of the station. He’s the only one can tell us; we’ll just have to sit tight until he’s able to—”