The Pulp Crime MEGAPACK®: 25 Noir Mysteries, page 15
Her gaze lingered on his face. Her eyes were almost like those of a stranger, deeper, gentler, quieter than the eyes he remembered. “Thank you, dear,” she gave his hand a quick, motherly squeeze.
Dr. Picard bumbled out beside her. He permitted her to take the short walk up by herself, slowly and carefully, one step at a time while the servants strained with each of her movements.
She paused on the veranda to accept their welcome. Cook, gardener, maid, butler, the spare-boned registered nurse who had been assigned by Dr. Picard to live in for awhile.
“Welcome home, mum…
“It’s so good to have you back!…”
When all the murmured greetings were over, the servants sneaked bewildered glances at each other. The eyes of Mrs. Violetta Crabtree Harper had actually filled with tears of tenderness and gratitude!
Aunt Crabby led the way into the spacious foyer with its vaulted ceiling, gold-framed mirror, antique hat-rack and umbrella stand. Eddie was the last to enter, on dragging feet.
The servants scattered to their tasks. Dr. Picard gave Aunt Crabby a few moments to look about brightly and exclaim how good it was to be home. Then he ordered her into the chair-lift that had been installed at the graceful, curving stairway.
“Up we go, my dear,” he said. “You’ve had plenty of excitement for the first day. Don’t rush things. You’ve years and years to enjoy your home now.”
He was a big, slovenly looking man whose appearance belied his genius as a heart surgeon. It took the setting of an operating room the touch of a scalpel in his hand to transform him.
Aunt Crabby, Dr. Picard, and the skeletal nurse (Miss Mayberry was her name) disappeared in the upper reaches toward Aunt Crabby’s bedroom. Eddie slouched into the living room and flopped in a huge wingchair upholstered in dark green silk. The chair seemed to shrink his slender frame. Behind heavy black glasses, his face was sparrow-like, with a thin cap of brown hair plastered on a long, narrow skull.
He stared blindly. His scanty, wiry muscles twitched now and then, visible echoes of his churning thoughts.
Right up until today he’d fought the idea that Aunt Crabby would leave the hospital alive. Sure, heart transplants were no longer news. But it just hadn’t seemed possible to Eddie that Dr. Picard could tear the heart from the still-warm body of the Dutcher youth, jam it into Aunt Crabby’s bosom, and have the whole thing work out. Her tissues would reject the alien flesh; her kidneys would collapse; her lungs would fill with fluids and she’d drown in pneumonic juices. But her tissues, kidneys, and lungs had performed with the ease of a computer.
“She’s a lousy, sneaky cheat!” Eddie whispered, his voice quivering with savagery even as it cracked on a note of intense self-pity.
That was the sum and substance of it. For two long, insufferable years he’d played the role of dutiful nephew. Whipping boy. Slave, no less.
He’d leaped to obey her whims. He’d soothed away her fears of death when nightmares had brought her screaming to wakefulness at three in the morning. He’d borne her vituperations as she’d grown to hate those whose days weren’t numbered.
The seemingly certain and foreseeable goal had sustained Eddie. He’d stuck it out, even if the effort to stay in the compliant nephew character had cost him an ulcer. Each day she’d used up had brought him twenty-four hours closer to the moment when he could buy his dear, departed aunt the biggest funeral wreath in town.
He’d played the game honestly. Like the time when he was a kid with the Monopoly game in the neighborhood, skipping squares on the board.
When the sole surviving relative passes “Go” he collects two million dollars. Wasn’t that the rule?
But they had conspired, that horrible old man with the doctors degrees and Aunt Crabby. And they had reached into the “Chance” pile and sneaked out for Eddie a card that read: Go to jail. Go directly to jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect two million dollars…
A burning-knife sensation gathered force behind Eddie’s navel and shot through viscera to his spine. He gritted his teeth, labored out of the chair, and struggled upstairs to his room. He was in the bathroom, chasing a slug of Amphojel with a shot of Alka Seltzer, when timid knuckles rapped on his bedroom door.
“What is it?” he snarled through the open bathroom doorway.
The maid’s voice drifted from the hallway: “Mr. Crabtree, Mrs. Harper wants to talk to you.”
Eddie slammed the glass into its porcelain holder and glared at himself in the medicine cabinet mirror. Sucker…you’ll probably pop off with a bleeding ulcer long before she ever again thinks of dying.…
Aunt Crabby was reposing on a white chaise lounge near the tall, gossamer-curtained windows when Eddie entered her room. She dropped the book she was reading, smiled at him. “Thank you for coming so quickly, Edward. I excused Miss Mayberry. I wanted us to have a chat, just the two of us.”
From long habit, Eddie’s face was a bland, myopic mask. Only a tremor in the jaw muscle suggested a gritting of teeth.
She studied him as he shuffled forward, his bony shoulders slightly stooped. A glow of compassion softened her brown eyes. “You poor boy, the lines in that dear little pale face are my doing, aren’t they?”
She held up a slender hand as Eddie started to speak.
“No, dear. You don’t have to fib to me.” She drew a breath. “Don’t forget, I’ve had weeks in which to think, about myself, other people, life, the really important things. Did you know there’s no place quite like a hospital to do some heavy thinking?”
She reached out to pat the arm of the nearby boudoir chair. The gesture was quick and lively. One thing for sure, the restoration of life—in the midst of certain death—seemed to have peeled the years from her. It was hard to look at the almost youthful glow of her face and imagine the drawn, vulturous visage that had entered the hospital.
“Please sit down, Eddie. Bear with me for a moment. What I have to say isn’t easy.”
“Aunt Violetta.…”
“No, Eddie. Don’t try to gloss it over. I know what a real shrew I’ve been.” A smile trembled in the dainty oval face. “Vixen. Harridan. Old witch. I made life perfectly dreadful for all those around me. I repaid kindness with ire, compassion with wrath. But I was lost, Eddie. Nothing was real to me except suffering and the darkness of death. I know now that I was lashing out.…”
She drew a breath. “Yes, just lashing out.”
Staring at her, Eddie eased to the edge of the boudoir chair.
“But Dr. Picard…the new heart.…” Her solemn eyes sought his face. “What I’m trying to say is that the old heart, Eddie, and all the vile rancor that stemmed from it are gone. I can’t go back and undo the meanness of the old witch that I became. So we must let her rest in peace, mustn’t we?
Eddie glanced away, hating the vitality of her. “Why not?”
“I knew I could count on your kindness and understanding!” She sat up, a fire of excitement building in her eyes. “I want to start writing on the new page of life with a little act of repayment, Eddie. My new heart has given me faith and hope. Now it behooves me to express charity.”
Eddie held his breath. Was she actually going to do something decent for him?
Then the burning sensation began to spread throughout his insides as he heard her intention, this big deal she’d dreamed up in the hospital.
“This boy whose heart beats at this moment within my own breast…” she was saying. “This Spades Dutcher… I had a hospital orderly make inquiries on his days off, Eddie.”
“But I didn’t know you were…” Eddie burst out.
She cut him off with a pat on his hand. “Yes, you would have tackled the chore, had I asked. I know that. But you’d have stuck out like a little green man from Mars in that poor, ghetto neighborhood. No one would have told you anything.”
“And what did this accepted individual, this hospital orderly, learn on his days off?” Eddie asked stiffly.
“Much that I’ll remember always,” Aunt Crabby gazed thoughtfully at the sunny window for a moment. Then her eyes gradually re-focused on Eddie.
“Never mind all the little details,” she sighed. “You need only the highlights for your chore.”
“Chore, Aunt Violetta?”
“Yes, dear. That’s what I’m getting to. The boy, Spades Dutcher, had so little. Broken home. Lack of education. All that. Yet he left me so much. He also left a poor old mother who lives all alone.”
Eddie stared at Aunt Crabby blankly. She caught the look and smiled wryly.
“Yes, Eddie,” she nodded. “The old Violetta Crabtree Harper, wrapped in her own troubled self, wouldn’t have cared two pins about Mrs. Dutcher. She was just a signature on the legal papers necessary for the transplant, obtainable at the cheapest price possible. But now she is a person, Eddie. And I want to do something for her. Something lasting, for the memory of her son.”
Aunt Crabby pointed toward her dressing table. “You’ll find her address written on the pad there, Eddie. Go to this poor woman. Tell her that my bankers will arrange for her to draw on a small but adequate account monthly, for so long as she lives. The bank will advise her the details later. But hurry now, with the good news! She need never be cold or hungry again.”
Eddie groped with a feeling of blindness to the dressing table. He ripped the top sheet from the waiting pad. He was tempted to turn and stuff the address down Aunt Crabby’s throat. She’d do a kindness for a stranger—but for him…nothing. She’d had a change of heart, all right. She was a worse creep than ever!
* * * *
Eddie expected to find a pitiful, malnourished, rickety scarecrow of the slums. Instead, meeting Mrs. George Dutcher was something of a shock. She lived in a two-room walkup in a scabby, century-old brick building. Eddie parked the Continental at the trash littered curbing, and it was the immediate center of a gang of ragged, fearsome looking kids.
Eddie didn’t dare open the door until a beat cop came up.
Eddie thumbed the button that opened the electrically-operated window, thrust his head out of the car, and explained to the cop that he had important business upstairs.
“Better make it snappy,” the cop said. “I can’t keep an eye on the heap all day, and if I didn’t you wouldn’t have even a sparkplug left when you come out.
Eddie nerved himself, dashed across the sidewalk, and scurried up the dark, stinking stairway. His stomach was a bubbling cauldron of hydrochloric acid by the time he reached the fourth floor, sought out a rusty number hanging by one tack, and knocked on the door.
A big woman in a greasy wrapper opened the door. She had a bulbous, liverish colored face and the frizzled ragtags of hair that perhaps in a dim and forgotten past had been a rather luxuriant dark blonde.
“Yeah?” she snarled. “If you’re a bill collector, beat it. I’m broke.”
“No, M’am.” Eddie gulped. He fought the urge to hold his nose. The woman’s breath was coming on like a lion with a three-day muscatel hangover. “I mean, are you Mrs. George Dutcher?”
“So what if I am?”
“My name is Edward Crabtree.” He glanced up and down the gloomy hallway where wooden lathes showed here and there like gaunt ribs exposed by fallen plaster. “Could we talk—briefly—inside?”
“What about?”
“Doesn’t my name—Crabtree—mean anything to you?”
“Can’t say that it does.”
“How about Harper? Mrs. Violetta Crabtree Harper?”
Came the dawning of knowledge to the wine-soaked gray eyes in their folds of greasy fat. “Sure—Harper… The woman who got my son’s heart—for a lousy hundred bucks.”
“It’s about the stipend that I want to talk to you, Mrs. Dutcher.”
“The what?”
“Money.”
“Well, why’n’cha say so! Come in.” She jerked the door wide.
A feeling of faintness smote Eddie when he entered a dark hole furnished with a sway-backed bed carelessly covered with dirty linens, a broken-down washstand, and a sofa with gray stuffing spilling from rents in its filth-greased arms. He glimpsed the adjoining kitchen, where swarming flies battled with a colony of marching cockroaches over a table littered with tin cans, dirty dishes and wine bottles.
“I told Spades he was going to get in trouble fooling with them gangs.” Mrs. Dutcher shoved several tattered confession magazines aside to make room for Eddie to sit down. Crossing the room to turn off the battered, snow-blurred TV set, she added, “Like a good mother should, I warned him. Did my duty, I did. Think it helped, changed anything? Not a bit, it didn’t. He was down there in the next block—it’s all colored—busting windows with the best of them the night the riot happened. Some excitement around here for awhile, I tell you! Six big buildings going up in smoke. People running around like crazy. Say, don’t you want to sit down, Mr. Crabtree?”
“Well, I…what I have to say won’t take long.”
“If it’s about money, let’s get on with it. It’s high time I was getting a break. Never had one. Like Spades, my poor boy. Running across the street, he was, when some joker tossed that hunk of busted cement from the roof of the building. Spades and the brickbat…they both picked the same spot on the street at the same second. Knocked a hole right in his skull.” Her head moved slowly from side to side. The watery content of her eyes overflowed a trifle. Her huge, pulpy chin snapped up. “And where the hell was the pigs, the lousy cops? They’re always there to kick you in the teeth, but how come they couldn’t stop somebody from busting my poor Spades in the head!”
The lumpy sofa sagged a few inches further as her ample bottom dropped onto it. She sat there for a moment, raising a thick-fingered hand to knuckle moisture from her eyes. “Anyhow, guess you ain’t here to talk about all that. You know the rest. Spades was taken to the hospital, and he was dying sure enough, and this doctor tells me he’s got a waiting list a yard long of patients who need and want new hearts real bad.” She squinted up at Eddie. “And this lady what sent you is the one got Spades’s.”
“That’s why the bank will be in touch, Mrs. Dutcher. You won’t move into the Hilton by any stretch of the imagination, but neither will you have to worry about beans or a roof.”
“It’s hard to believe…hard to believe.” She shook her head. Gradually, she became very still, staring at a crack in the floor.
The moments passed. Eddie cleared his throat in twitchy discomfort.
“I don’t want you telling George about this,” she muttered, not looking up.
“What?”
“George, my husband.”
His eyes popped behind the heavy glasses. “A husband? I thought you were a widow.”
“Might as well be.” She wiped her nose with the back of a forefinger. “If you’re worried about them legal papers I signed for the doctor, don’t. I told the doctor about George. I guess he just didn’t bother to tell you. George can’t sign no papers, no-how, him being out in the state run loony bin.”
“I’m sorry,” Eddie said.
“Sure, I know. But it’s all right. George had his day, he did. Two-hundred and thirteen fights. He fought in every tanktown ring from Maine to Miami. Ring Magazine even mentioned him once. Great days, those, Mr. Crabtree. George paid down on a real fur coat for me one time and I got to wear it nearly the whole winter before the finance company nailed us in Greensboro, North Carolina.”
Her sigh was heavy. “Last fight…George couldn’t stand the bees buzzing in his head no more. Couldn’t hear nothing else. Kept right on fighting after the bell ended the fourth. Liked to have killed the other fighter, and the referee, and the two cops it took to drag him out of the ring.
She looked toward the kitchen, probing the wine bottles. “George is all right most of the time, Mr. Crabtree. They let him walk around the grounds when the keepers are watching, and even have company. But sometimes it don’t take much to tee George off, real bad. So just let him be. He’s real happy where he is, and he might get a crazy idea if he learned I come into a little money.”
Eddie’s silence, his very stillness, drew her attention from the wine bottles. She began to frown as she looked at him. She stood up slowly. “Something wrong, Mr. Crabtree?”
“Wrong?” He looked at her, starry-eyed. His happy laugh burst against the scaly walls. “Mrs. Dutcher, you’re a source of sheer inspiration, no less! I’ve never enjoyed meeting anyone so much in all my life!” As if quite out of his senses, he reached and gave her repulsive hulk a quick hug.
As he turned and dashed for the doorway, she lunged after him. “Hey, about the money.…”
“The bank will be in touch.” He threw the words over his shoulder as he disappeared in the stairwell.
* * * *
A big man with iron gray hair and a creased face as patient looking as a hound’s, the white-coated warder strolled the grounds of the state mental hospital keeping an eye on his charges. It was a lovely afternoon, very quiet and peaceful. Little Miss Quackenbush was quietly reading the same thin volume of poetry over and over as she strolled about the walkways bisecting the green lawns. Mr. Heaterly was quietly leaning against the trunk of a huge oak tree discussing the market situation with an invisible broker; Mr. Heaterly’s short-circuited brain had arranged for that black market day in 1929 to be always in a non-existent tomorrow.
The warder glanced toward the long wings of the brick buildings that were beginning to cast shadows over the lawns. Just about time to herd them in, see that they didn’t try to eat their spoons for dinner, and tuck them in for the night.
