place. There were tears running down his cheeks and he was holding that iron bar (part of a towel rail) with genuine affection. I wanted to explain that it wasn’t my fault that a passing motorist had decided to hurl a bomb at me, but he wouldn’t listen to reason. Jack Splendide had flipped. And he wanted me dead.
The iron bar came curving up over his shoulder as he swung it with both hands, but then the top got snarled up in a loop of wire. As it came down, it tore the wire out of the wall and for a few seconds electric sparks danced in the air. That distracted him just long enough for me to grab hold of a piece of table and bring it crashing into his stomach. He howled and dropped the bar. I hit him again, this time propelling him forward right to the edge of the floor.
He flailed at the air with his hands. There was a fall of at least forty feet to the cold, hard concrete below and I thought that was just where he was heading. Unable to regain his balance, he yelled and plunged forward, his body lunging out into the night. But at the last moment he managed to grab hold of the very edge of the overpass. And that was how he finished up: a human bridge. His feet were on the floor in what was left of Room 39. His hands were desperately clutching a piece of metal jutting out of the side of the overpass. His body sagged between the two.
I looked behind me. The flames were closing in. I wouldn’t even make it through the shattered doorway now. But I wasn’t too keen on jumping across to the overpass. Jack Splendide was the only answer. A human bridge. I took two big steps. One foot in the small of his back and I was across—safely standing on the edge of the road.
“Kid . . . hey, kid!” I heard him and walked back over to him. He was a big, strong man, but he couldn’t stay like that much longer. “Help me!” he rasped, the sweat dripping off his forehead. The wind jerked at my shirt. The cars roared by, only inches away now. Some of the drivers honked at me, but they couldn’t see Jack Splendide. I crouched down close to him. By now I’d been able to put a few things together.
“Who was it, Splendide?” I asked. “Who threw the grenade?”
“Please!” His hands tightened their hold as his body swayed.
“You must have told them I was here. Who was it?”
There was no way he could stall me. He was getting weaker by the minute and across the gap the flames were creeping up on him. He could probably feel them with the soles of his feet. “It was the Fat Man,” he gasped. “He guessed you might go back to the hotel. He paid me . . . to call if you did.”
“Why?”
“You insulted him, kid. Nobody insults the Fat Man. But I didn’t know he was going to try and kill you. I mean . . . the grenade. Honest, kid. I thought he was just going to take a shot at you—to scare you.”
Yeah, I thought. And you came up to the fifth floor to watch.
“Help me!” he whimpered. “Give me a hand, kid. I can’t hold on much longer.”
“That’s true,” I said, straightening up.
“You can’t leave me here, kid. You can’t!”
“Wanna bet?”
I walked away, leaving him stretched out between the flames and the overpass with a long, long way to fall if he let go. Maybe the police or firemen reached him in the end. To be honest, I don’t really care. Jack Splendide had set me up to be killed. He might not have been expecting a grenade, but he’d known the Fat Man didn’t play games.
It had begun to rain. Pulling the remains of my shirt closer to my shivering skin, I walked down the overpass and forgot about him.
THE PROFESSOR
I was woken by the smell of lavender. Lavender? Yes—perfume. You’ve smelled it before, Nick. Where? I can’t remember, but maybe it was mixed with the raw meat and . . . I swallowed, stretched, opened my eyes.
“Blimey, you’re a sight!” Betty Charlady exclaimed.
I was half stretched out on Herbert’s desk in his office. I’d had to walk home the night before, and by the time I’d gotten in I’d been too tired to go upstairs. I’d looked at the second flight of steps. They led to a bed with a crumpled sheet and a tangled-up quilt. I’ll never make it, I’d thought, and so I’d gone into the office and collapsed there. And now Betty Charlady was standing in front of me, looking at me like I’d dropped in from another planet.
“What happened to you?” she demanded, shaking her head and sending the artificial daisies on her hat into convulsions.
“I had a bad night,” I said. “How did you get in?”
“Through the door.”
“It was open?”
She nodded. “You ought to lock it at night, Master Nicholas. You never know who might visit . . .”
I needed a hot bath, a hot meal, two aspirin, and a warm bed—not necessarily in that order. Instead I went up and washed my face in the sink while Betty made breakfast: boiled eggs, toast, and coffee. I looked at myself in the mirror. Somebody else looked back. His hair was a mess, there were bags under his eyes, and he had a nasty cut on his forehead. I felt sorry for the guy.
Ten minutes later, I was sitting down in the kitchen, eating. Betty had insisted on cutting my toast into triangles, which was pretty embarrassing. I’d been threatened, blown up, attacked—and here I was being treated like a kid again. But I suppose she meant well.
“Where’s Mr. Timothy?” she asked.
“Herbert?” I said. “He’s in jail. Accused of murder.”
“Murder!” she shrieked. “That’s a crime!”
“Well . . . yes.”
“No. I mean accusing Mr. Herbert of doing anything like that.” She sniffed. “Anybody could see he wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
She was right there. Herbert ran away from flies. He was probably the only private detective in the country who was even scared of goldfish.
“So you’re doing all the detective work for him,” she said. I nodded. “Have you found anything out yet?”
Had I found anything out? Well, I’d found out that Beatrice von Falkenberg had strange taste in pets. I’d found out that if you stood too close to an exploding grenade, it made your ears hurt. I’d found out that the Fat Man still wanted to lose weight and that I was the weight he wanted to lose. But when you added up everything I’d found out, it would just about fit on the back of a postage stamp and you wouldn’t even need to write in small letters.
“No, Betty,” I said. “I haven’t found anything out. Not unless you know what a digital detector or a photo lighter is.”
“A wot?” she asked.
The scraps of paper that I had found in the dwarf’s room were still safely in my shirt pocket. The trouble was, my shirt pocket was still in the hotel. It had been blown off the shirt by the blast and for the life of me I couldn’t remember exactly what the words had been.
“I’m going to have a bath,” I said.
“I’ll run it for you,” Betty volunteered.
I shook my head. Any more encouragement and she’d be offering to scrub my back. “No, thanks . . . you go home. I can manage.”
“But what about the cleaning?”
I reached into my pocket and pulled out one of Herbert’s ten-dollar bills. It hurt me to see it go, but there was no denying that Betty had done a good job. When she’d come, the flat had looked like a junkyard. Now it was more like an industrial slum. “Here you are,” I said. “Come back next week, after Christmas.”
“Ooh! Ta!” She took it. “Merry Christmas, Master Nicholas,” she burbled.
“Merry Christmas, Betty,” I said. ———
Sometime later, the doorbell dragged me out of a beautiful sleep. I looked at my watch. It said five to ten. It had said five to ten when I’d gone to bed. Either it had been a short sleep or I needed a new watch. I held it up to my ear and shook it. There was a dull
