“Alice Tuck, Bed 11, Ward B....”
Mattus now wide awake thundered, “Who says so?”
“The floor night student nurse has just reported to me. That’s the bed....”
Mattus, too, had realized that it was. He was busily pulling on his pants. The receiver lay upon the pillow and he was calling into the mouthpiece.
“Get Cub Sterling. Notify Dr. MacArthur. Keep the day staff off the floor until notified. Call the morgue. Call.... My God, Miss Withers, call everybody but the police! No you don’t. Don’t call anybody but Sterling until I verify the nurse’s statement.”
He ran from the room, the telephone receiver still upon the bed and the lights burning. He started around the octagonal hall toward the stairway. Three flights below ... in the center of the lobby ... he could see the statue of Elijah Wilson.
As he reached the second floor he finished buttoning his pants and started toward the door of Dr. Sarah James, then remembered:
“Spending the night with her mother in Cincinnati. She would be!”
With an indignant grunt he had passed the statue and was letting out his stride down the long corridor.
As neither Dr. Cub Sterling nor Dr. Henry MacArthur answered immediately, the operator rang Miss Roenna Kerr.