District attorney Vernon and sheriff Feeney, with a horde of reporters and photographers close behind them, arrived from the county seat. They went through a lot of detecting motions that got them nowhere except on the front pages of all the San Francisco and Los Angeles papers–the place they liked best.
I had Gabrielle Collinson moved into another room in the hotel, and posted Mickey Linehan next door, with the connecting door unlocked. Gabrielle talked now, to Vernon, Feeney, Rolly, and me. What she said didn’t help us much. She had been asleep, she said; had been awakened by a terrible noise and a terrible jarring of her bed; and then I had come in. That was all she knew.
Late in the afternoon McCracken, a San Francisco police department bomb-expert, arrived. After examining all the fragments of this and that which he could sweep up, he gave us a preliminary verdict that the bomb had been a small one, of aluminum, charged with a low-grade nitroglycerine, and exploded by a crude friction device.
“Amateur or professional job?” I asked.
McCracken spit out loose shreds of tobacco–he was one of the men who chew their cigarettes–and said:
“I’d say it was made by a guy that knew his stuff, but had to work with what he could get his hands on. I’ll tell you more when I’ve worked this junk over in the lab.”
“No timer on it?” I asked.
“No signs of one.”
Doctor George returned from the county seat with the news that what was left of Fitzstephan still breathed. The doctor was tickled pink. I had to yell at him to make him hear my questions about Fink and Gabrielle. Then he told me Fink’s life wasn’t in danger, and the girl’s cold was enough better that she might get out of bed if she wished. I asked about her nerves, but he was in too much of a hurry to get back to Fitzstephan to pay much attention to anything else.
“Hm-m-m, yes, certainly,” he muttered, edging past me towards his car. “Quiet, rest, freedom from anxiety,” and he was gone.
I ate dinner with Vernon and Feeney in the hotel café that evening. They didn’t think I had told them all I knew about the bombing, and kept me on the witness stand throughout the meal, though neither of them accused me pointblank of holding out.
After dinner I went up to my new room. Mickey was sprawled on the bed reading a newspaper.
“Go feed yourself,” I said. “How’s our baby?”
“She’s up. How do you figure her–only fifty cards to her deck?”
“Why?” I asked. “What’s she been doing?”
“Nothing. I was just thinking.”
“That’s from having an empty stomach. Better go eat.”
“Aye, aye, Mr. Continental,” he said and went out.
The next room was quiet. I listened at the door and then tapped it. Mrs. Herman’s voice said: “Come in.”
She was sitting beside the bed making gaudy butterflies on a piece of yellowish cloth stretched on hoops. Gabrielle Collinson sat in a rocking chair on the other side of the room, frowning at hands clasped in her lap–clasped hard enough to whiten the knuckles and spread the finger-ends. She had on the tweed clothes in which she had been kidnapped. They were still rumpled, but had been brushed clean of mud. She didn’t look up when I came in. The nurse did, pushing her freckles together in an uneasy smile.
“Good evening,” I said, trying to make a cheerful entrance. “Looks like we’re running out of invalids.”
That brought no response from the girl, too much from the nurse.
“Yes, indeed,” Mrs. Herman exclaimed with exaggerated enthusiasm. “We can’t call Mrs. Collinson an invalid now–now that she’s up and about–and I’m almost sorry that she is–he-he-he—because I certainly never did have such a nice patient in every way; but that’s what we girls used to say at the hospital when we were in training: the nicer the patient was, the shorter the time we’d have him, while you take a disagreeable one and she’d live–I mean, be there–forever and a day, it seems like. I remember once when–”
I made a face at her and wagged my head at the door. She let the rest of her words die inside her open mouth. Her face turned red, then white. She dropped her embroidery and got up, saying idiotically: “Yes, yes, that’s the way it always is. Well, I’ve got to go see about those–you know–what do you call them. Pardon me for a few minutes, please.” She went out quickly, sidewise, as if afraid I’d sneak up behind her and kick her.