Once on the third floor, Mason motioned to Della Street, led her down to the end of the corridor where there was a solarium. Now the room was darkened, and the wicker furniture, spaced with the rectangular efficiency of a hospital rather than the careless informality of a private home, seemed in its stiff silence to be occupied by white-clad ghosts.
Mason looked at the door of 304 as they walked past, said, “We’ll sit here for a while and watch.”
A nurse garbed in a spotless, stiffly starched uniform walked by on rubber heels, rustling her way efficiently down the linoleum-covered corridor. She vanished in the door of 304. A few moments later, a man in the middle fifties, clothed in a dark business suit, pushed open the door and walked in. Shortly after that, the man left the room again.
Mason waited until this man had left the room. A few moments later the nurse bustled out, then Mason touched Della Street on the arm. “Okay,” he said, “let’s go.”
They walked down the corridor, the faint smell of disinfectants in their nostrils. Mason paused before the door of 304, on which a sign said, “Dr. Sawdey,” and below that a printed placard reading, “No Visitors.”
Mason silently pushed open the door.
The man in the room lay in the hospital bed. The sheet-covered blankets were arranged with hospital efficiency over the thin figure. A dim night light made the shadows a backdrop against which the white, tired face on the pillow was sharply accented.
The man who lay motionless in the bed, his eyes closed, was Elston A. Karr.
In the hospital surroundings, with wax-like lids closed over the burning power of his hypnotic eyes, he seemed wasted, tired, as robbed of power as a burnt-out electric globe.
Mason stood in the doorway long enough to note that the bedclothes were rising and falling with the even respiration of a man who is sleeping under the quieting influence of a powerful narcotic. Then he closed the door, took Della Street’s arm, and tiptoed down the corridor.