“Get a doctor,” I called to the first of them; “and stay out of here.”
I had got rid of the mattress by the time Mickey Linehan pushed through the crowd that was now filling the corridor. Mickey blinked at what was left of Fitzstephan, at me, and asked:
“What the hell?”
His big loose mouth sagged at the ends, looking like a grin turned upside down.
I licked burnt fingers and asked unpleasantly:
“What the hell does it look like?”
“More trouble, sure.” The grin turned right side up on his red face. “Sure–you’re here.”
Ben Rolly came in. “Tch, tch, tch,” he said, looking around. “What do you suppose happened?”
“Pineapple,” I said.
“Tch, tch, tch.”
Doctor George came in and knelt beside the wreck of Fitzstephan. George had been Gabrielle’s physician since her return from the cave the previous day. He was a short, chunky, middle-aged man with a lot of black hair everywhere except on his lips, cheeks, chin, and nose-bridge. His hairy hands moved over Fitzstephan.
“What’s Fink been doing?” I asked Mickey.
“Hardly any. I got on his tail when they sprung him yesterday noon. He went from the hoosegow to a hotel on Kearny Street and got himself a room. He spent most of the afternoon in the Public Library, reading the newspaper files on the girl’s troubles, from beginning to date. He ate after that, and went back to the hotel. He could have back-doored me. If he didn’t, he camped in his room all night. It was dark at midnight when I knocked off so I could be on the job again at six a. m. He showed at seven-something, got breakfast, and grabbed a rattler for Poston, changed to the stage for here, and came straight to the hotel, asking for you. That’s the crop.”
“Damn my soul!” the kneeling doctor exclaimed. “The man’s not dead.”
I didn’t believe him. Fitzstephan’s right arm was gone, and most of his right leg. His body was too twisted to see what was left of it, but there was only one side to his face. I said:
“There’s another one out in the hall, with his head knocked in.”
“Oh, he’s all right,” the doctor muttered without looking up. “But this one–well, damn my soul!”
He scrambled to his feet and began ordering this and that. He was excited. A couple of men came in from the corridor. The woman who had been nursing Gabrielle Collinson–a Mrs. Herman–joined them, and another man with a blanket. They took Fitzstephan away.
“That fellow out in the hall Fink?” Rolly asked.
“Yeah.” I told him what Fink had told me, adding: “He hadn’t finished when the blow-up came.”
“Suppose the bomb was meant for him, meant to keep him from finishing?”
Mickey said: “Nobody followed him down from the city, except me.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Better see what they’re doing with him, Mick.”
Mickey went out.
“This window was closed,” I told Rolly. “There was no noise as of something being thrown through the glass just before the explosion; and there’s no broken window-glass inside the room. The screen was over it, too, so we can say the pineapple wasn’t chucked in through the window.”
Rolly nodded vaguely, looking at the door to Gabrielle’s room.
“Fink and I were in the corridor talking,” I went on. “I ran straight back through here to her room. Nobody could have got out of her room after the explosion without my seeing them–or hearing them. There wasn’t finger-snapping time between my losing sight of her corridor-door from the outside, and seeing it again from the inside. The screen over her window is still O.K.”
“Mrs. Herman wasn’t in there with her?” Rolly asked.
“She was supposed to be, but wasn’t. We’ll find out about that. There’s no use thinking Mrs. Collinson chucked the bomb. She’s been in bed since we brought her back from Dull Point yesterday. She couldn’t have had the bomb planted there because she had no way of knowing that she was going to occupy the room. Nobody’s been in there since except you, Feeney, Vernon, the doctor, the nurse, and me.”
“I wasn’t going to say she had anything to do with it,” the deputy sheriff mumbled. “What does she say?”