“I’m glad to hear you say so, sir.”
“Then let us go in.”
“Must I go back in there, too?”
“You must. Forget the fact that you’re a superstitious Irishman, Cassidy, and remember that you’re a cop. Cops, as you’ve been told more times than one, should be noble, firm, and perpetually cool, calm, and collected.”
“Sure now, you’re kidding.”
“Tut, tut.”
“Well, and I’ll try, Lieutenant—but cripes!”
“But nothing,” advised Lieutenant Valcour as he opened the door to Endicott’s room.
The effect was shockingly garish. All shades had been removed from their lamps, and the various details of the furnishing stood out in the painful white light brightly clear.
Andrews was alone. He stood near the bed upon which Endicott had been placed, looking in rather shocked bewilderment at the body. Lieutenant Valcour joined him. A blanket had been drawn up to Endicott’s chin, and the face which remained exposed looked very waxlike—very still—very much like a dead man’s indeed.
“This is the damnedest thing, Valcour.”
“What is, Chief?”
“They say there’s a chance that this man isn’t dead. Worth is going to operate.”
“Operate? But Dr. Worth himself admitted that the heart had stopped beating after testing with a stethoscope. What sort of an operation?”
“Worth’s going to inject adrenaline into the cardiac muscles.”
“I wonder just how much value there is in that stuff.”
“Well, unless Endicott’s been poisoned, the medical examiner and Worth both seem to think there’s a chance. They feel there’s no harm in trying, anyway. It sounds silly to me, but they reminded me of that recent case in Queens—you probably read about it—where a man had been pronounced dead for six hours and was revived. Of course, they said he wasn’t really dead, just as they now think that Endicott may not be really dead. No one can bring back the dead.”
Lieutenant Valcour threw a bland look to Cassidy, who was standing in as convenient a position to the hall door as he could possibly get.
“They say,” Andrews went on, “that adrenaline’s been used off and on for years. Worth says they try it quite often when a baby is born ‘dead.’ Sometimes it starts the heart pumping and the baby lives.”
Lieutenant Valcour shrugged. “It will make things pretty simple for us if it works with Endicott,” he said. “He can make a statement and prefer charges himself. Where is everybody?”
“The medical examiner and Worth are downstairs telephoning and making arrangements for the operation. My men have finished and have gone back to headquarters. There wasn’t any sign of forcing an entry, so it looks like an inside job, if there was any job. I tell you, Valcour, if it wasn’t for your suggestion that robbery was a motive, or for that note that might have been a threat, I’d drop the whole thing. It’s a different matter if the adrenaline doesn’t work and an autopsy proves poison or something. Find out much from Mrs. Endicott?”
“Enough to be interested in learning more. Want the details?”
“Later, if I have to get to work on the case. You want to keep on handling it?”
“Yes.”
“Go ahead. Call for any outside stuff you want us to check up on for you. I’ll send you a report on the brushes and comb as soon as they finish with them downtown.”
“You going, Chief?”
“No use in my sticking around, Valcour. We haven’t a case yet, really, that calls for any Central Office work. Hell, according to those two six-syllable specialists downstairs, we haven’t even got a corpse. Robbery there may have been, and it’s your precinct—so go to it. I’ll find out from the medical examiner when he gets back how the operation turned out, and if there’s going to be an autopsy. If poisoning is proved and you haven’t pinned it on anyone by then, I’ll get on the job again. I suppose you’ll see that the people in the house are given the once-over?”
“Certainly, Chief.”
“I’ll run along then. Good luck, Valcour.”
“Thank you, Chief.”
Andrews left the room and closed the door.
“I bet he’s got a date,” said Cassidy.
“He’d stay here if he had twenty dates, if he thought it was necessary,” said Lieutenant Valcour.
“Well, I wish I had a date.”
“You’ll have a whole vacation if you don’t brace up. I’m going to take a look in that cupboard, now that Endicott’s no longer in it.”
Even a cupboard seemed preferable to Cassidy to being in the room. “Can’t I help you, sir?” he said with almost fervent politeness.
“No, Cassidy, you can’t. You can stay just where you are.”
“Oh, very well, sir.”
Lieutenant Valcour picked up a straight-backed chair and took it into the cupboard with him. He held a sincere respect for the Central Office men, but at the same time felt that their work was too methodically routine to permit their darting along interesting tangents or wasting their time in strolls along bypaths that might lead to fertile fields. There was no criticism in his mind at all. He admired the system that had been established, and the expert functioning of its units and departments. He knew very well that its average of successes was greater than its average of failures. But it was deficient in that elusive, time-taking, and sometimes expensive thing known as the “personal equation.” It remained, at its best, a machine.
A certain amount of carelessness, too, ran in the general plan. In many cases some things were slurred over, some missed entirely. This again was not surprising when one considered that the personnel was recruited largely from the more intelligent men in the ranks. Intelligent, yes, but hardly specialists, nor could one in all fairness expect them to be.
When working on a case they functioned along two distinctly separate but parallel lines. One department of specialists handled the technical and chemical investigation of material things and clues found on the scene of the crime—just as the brushes and comb were shortly to be examined by the proper men down at Central Office. A second department dealt with the human aspect—examining witnesses, looking up all friends or connections of the victim; a
