OU promised,” I reminded Mr. Patton, “to play with cards on the table.”
“My dear young lady,” he replied, “I have no cards! I suspect a game, that's all.”
“Then—do you need me?”
The detective bent forward, his arms on his desk, and looked me over carefully.
“What sort of shape are you in? Tired?”
“No.”
“Nervous?”
“Not enough to hurt.”
“I want you to take another case, following a nurse who has gone to pieces,” he said, selecting his words carefully. “I don't want to tell you a lot—I want you to go in with a fresh mind. It promises to be an extraordinary case.”
“How long was the other nurse there?”
“Four days.”
“She went to pieces in four days!”
“Well, she's pretty much unstrung. The worst is, she hasn't any real reason. A family chooses to live in an unusual manner, because they like it, or perhaps they're afraid of something. The girl was, that's sure. I had never seen her until this morning, a big, healthy-looking young woman; but she came in looking back over her shoulder as if she expected a knife in her back. She said she was a nurse from St. Luke's and that she'd been on a case for four days. She'd left that morning after about three hours' sleep in that entire period, being locked in a room most of the time, and having little but crackers and milk for food. She thought it was a case for the police.”
“Who is ill in the house? Who was her patient?”
“There is no illness, I believe. The French governess had gone, and they wished the children competently cared for until they replaced her. That was the reason given her when she went. Afterward she—well, she was puzzled.”
“How are you going to get me there?”
He gathered acquiescence from my question and smiled approval.
“Good girl!” he said. “Never mind how I'll get you there. You are the most dependable woman I know.”
“The most curious, perhaps?” I retorted. “Four days on the case, three hours' sleep, locked in and yelling 'Police!' Is it out of town?”
“No, in the heart of the city, on Beauregard Square. Can you get some St. Luke's uniforms? They want another St. Luke's nurse.”
I said I could get the uniforms, and he wrote the address on a card.
“Better arrive early in the evening,” he said.
“But—if they are not expecting me?”
“They will be expecting you,” he replied enigmatically.
“The doctor, if he's a St. Luke's man”
“There is no doctor.”
It was six months since I had solved, or helped to solve, the mystery of the buckled bag for Mr. Patton. I had had other cases for him in the interval, cases in which the police could not get close enough. As I said when I began this record of my crusade against crime and the criminal, a trained nurse gets under the very skin of the soul. She finds motives that have fired the funs of life revealed in their pitifulness.
Gradually I had come to see that Mr. Patton's point of view was right: that if the criminal uses every means against society, why not society against the criminal? At first I had used this as a flag of truce to my nurse's ethical training; now I flaunted it, a mental and moral banner. The criminal against society, and I against the criminal! And, more than that, against misery, healing pain by augmenting it sometimes, but working like a surgeon, for good.
I had had six cases in six months. Only in one had I failed to land my criminal, and that without any suspicion of my white uniform and rubber-soled shoes. Although I played a double game, no patient of mine had suffered. I was a nurse first and a police agent second. If it was a question between turpentine compresses—stupes, professionally—and seeing what letters came in or went out of the house, the compress went on first, and cracking hot, too. I am not boasting. That is my method, the only way I can work, and it speaks well for it that, as I say, only one man escaped arrest—an arson case in which the factory owner hanged himself in the bathroom needle shower in the house he had bought with the insurance money, while I was fixing his breakfast tray. And even he might have been saved for justice had the cook not burned the toast and been obliged to make it fresh.
I was no longer staying at a nurses' home. I had taken a bachelor suite of three rooms and bath, comfortably downtown. I cooked my own breakfasts when I was off-duty and I dined at a restaurant nearby. Luncheon I did not bother much about. Now and then Mr. Patton telephoned me and we lunched together in remote places where we would not be known. He would tell me of his cases and sometimes he asked my advice.