“What do you make of it?”
He questioned both of them in one sentence.
Miss Parkins answered, “He’s square. But he is shielding someone.”
Mr. Smooty inserted his sentence at the end of hers. “Honest as the King. But worried sick. There is somebody he considers innocent, that the others have dots on. All I got to say is somebody around here is crazy as hell.”
Mr. Higgins, who had never been sick a day in his life and never slept in a hospital even so much as one night, had a healthy man’s antagonism for the medical profession.
“Toughest job we’ve ever had. He’s square all right, but how the hell can you catch a murderer in a hospital? You are right, Snod. Somebody around here is crazy as a tick. And lots of people are lying. One thing you got to remember is you are up against professional liars. All nurses and doctors are professional liars. Didn’t one tell me my mother was ‘doing nicely’ when she had been dead an hour? So watch everybody in the same way you watch a spy.
“He’s also covering somebody that everybody else believes guilty. I think I know whom he is covering. But that’ll wait. He suspects that head nurse and her niece. That’s plain as day. And he didn’t tell the truth about why he thinks she is doing it. There’s somebody behind them, in his mind.”
He stopped for a moment to draw breath and Miss Parkins flipped her cigarette and said:
“Matt, I’d like a gun, if you don’t mind?”
“You scared, Lil?”