A Puzzle for fools Read Online Free

it. Usually Laribee was perfectly normal. Last night was the only time I had seen him acting up. He was a widower with a couple of million and a good chance of getting well again. And even if he was hovering around the crazy sixties, he was still young and sane enough to know an attractive girl when he saw one. I was interested to hear Miss Brush's reactions to these proposals, but Fogarty had gone off on another tangent.
    "So my sissy brother-in-law threw a headlock on you," he was saying as he kneaded my muscles. "He reckons he's got the leverage even if he don't have the weight. Had the nerve to challenge me for a tumble the other night—me, an ex-champ! But I say, what's the use of chewing up a little guy like that anyway?"
    I had a look at his muscles and felt he could chew up anyone, even the steel-cabled Warren. I knew that no love was lost between the two of them and I imagined that, if it came to blows, he could beat up his brother-in-law with one hand tied behind his back. I told him so and he seemed pleased.
    "It's kind of nice to have a drunk to look after once in a while; someone who isn't out-and-out cuckoo," he said. "They're more human, if you see what I mean." He gave me a final slap and asked, "How's 'at?"
    I said it was fine, and that for the first time since I had been in the place I felt like eating something for breakfast.
    And I did. Despite a slight return of jitteriness, I managed to get some cereal down without kidding myself that the milk was rye. Miss Brush, who presided in the dining room as a kind of hygienic hostess, noticed immediately and showed her approval.
    "Night life seems to agree with your appetite, Mr. Duluth."
    "Yeah," I said. "And I never thanked you for the blanket and the bedroom slippers."
    She smiled disarmingly and moved away.
    Since my talk with Lenz, I found myself feeling an almost convalescent interest in the people around me. Before, patients and staff alike had just been sombre caricatures on a monotone backcloth. I had been too wrapped up in myself to pay any attention to them. But now I began to figure out the relationships between them and do a bit of wondering. After all, from my own experience I knew that Lenz' "subversive influence" lurked somewhere in the building. Maybe it was tangible. Maybe it was right here in the room. Drunk, sober or convalescent, the detective instinct is as fundamental as birth or sex.
    We had small individual tables in the dining room, just two or four at a table to kid us into believing we were on a boat or something and not in the hatch. I ate alone with Martin Geddes, a nice, quiet Englishman who superficially had nothing worse wrong with him than a tendency to talk too much about the Empire, and India, where he had been born.
    He was in for a disease which seemed like sleeping sickness, but which his chart called narcolepsy, complicated with cataplexy. He was liable to fall off into a rigid, profound sleep at any moment.
    That morning he did not appear for breakfast and, consequently, I had more time and opportunity to observe the others.
    From a casual glance it would have been difficult to tell that there was anything wrong with any of us. Laribee was over the way from me. Apart from a slight twitch around his heavy mouth, he might have been any successful Wall Street financier taking breakfast anywhere. But I noticed he was up to his old tricks of pushing away the food and whispering:
    "It's no use. I can't afford it. With Steel down below 30, I’ve got to economize—economize."
    Miss Brush was watching him with an angelic brightness which almost hid the worried cloud in her deep blue eyes, I remembered what Fogarty had told me and wondered just how much of the day nurse's worry was professional.
    Laribee sat at a table with a very beautiful, lustrous young man with perfect tailoring and the mouth of a saint. His name was David Fenwick, and, although usually he was no more peculiar than the average young aesthete, he occasionally