2.
The Blind Farmer and the Strip Dancer
MY PROFESSIONAL engagements as an obliging corpse have always been legitimate. I really make a most convincing corpse—I wish you could see me. Certainly none of my clients can complain that they have not had their money’s worth. You see, my heart is on the right side of my body, and it beats very slowly—barely forty to the minute. In fact, it does not really beat at all.
It just flutters. By drinking the liquid that my uncle discovered in a remote South American village, I am able to fall at will into a sleep that has every appearance of death itself; even my lips turn blue. The liquid kills the sensory nerves and removes all traces of abdominal reflexes. It makes me unconscious, and I am, to all intents and purposes, dead.
Physically abnormal as I was, the discovery that with a little medical assistance I could make an excellent living by simulating death, really opened to me the only vocation for which I could hope. James F. Bronson had found a profession.
My chief trouble was in keeping out of the hands of crooked clients. I might have been a rich man a dozen times over, had it not been for my own code of ethics.
After I picked up young Dr. Roesche and instituted him as a partner in my operations, things went beautifully. He had brains and was straight as a string. Once he was satisfied that I would enter into nothing illegal, I could count absolutely upon him. Poor Roesche! As a medical man, he was always tempted by the scientific aspects of my case; but he was always headed off by the necessity of three meals per diem.
“It’s nothing rare to have the heart on the right side as you have, Bronson.” he would say. “Your attendant peculiarities, however, are different. With a heart that flutters instead of beating regularly, and a slow heart at that, and with your barrel chest that even cheats a stethoscope, you’re worth prolonged observation—”
“What’s the bank balance?” I would ask, and that settled it.
It was Roesche who really put my original profession on a business basis. He would precede me to a chosen city and conduct the discreet advertising we employed. The replies flocked in, and he would separate the sheep from the goats. It has always amazed me to find how many people jump at the idea of employing a corpse. Even the most reputable clients would usually have some shady work in prospect. Others would expect to get my services for a small sum; but we played no pikers game. My services came high, and deservedly so.
We got all sorts of insight into human nature. One man, in Seattle, wanted to use me in a queer way. His son was a reckless driver, and hopelessly reckless. The father wanted to hire me and fake an accident in which the son would think he had killed me; he had all the details drawn up, too. When I pointed out that this was no cure for reckless driving, that it was horribly cruel and might result in a deranged mind for the boy, the father broke down and begged me to do it anyway; he wanted to kill or cure. Perhaps he was right, at that, for a few months later the boy and two other people died in a smash-up.
When the astonishing affair of the strip dancer came to us, Roesche and I had arrived together in a big eastern city, which was run wide open.
On this occasion I took over the answers to the advertisement myself. One of the first that I opened hit me right between the eyes; I could feel a certain desperate quality in the words that appealed to me. It lies before me as I write:
“Dear Sir:
I would like an interview. You may be able to help me, and no one else can. The lives and happiness of several people may depend on it. Your advertisement has given me courage to make this appeal. Please see me.
Viola Dane.”
She appended her address.
I gave her an appointment, and when she showed up, Roesche was parked in the bathroom of our hotel suite. I never interviewed anyone without precautions, as I had a horror of being entangled in anything that might prove downright illegal.
Miss Dane was small but exquisitely proportioned, radiant with the most superb youth and beauty; you would have thought she did not have a trouble in the world. She was very expensively gowned. Her jewels were magnificent enough to be vulgar. I was not surprised when she informed me that she was a dancer in a night club here, a famous one.
“I can pay for your services,” she said almost impatiently. She was suffering from some intense agitation. “But can you really pretend to die, so it would look real? Would a doctor be fooled?”
“Many doctors have been,” I said, smiling. “That is, under ordinary circumstances. I won’t submit to hospital or fluoroscope tests, of course. Suppose you tell me how you expect me to help you?”
Experience had given me quite a professional air. Also, I had let my beard grow, the better to conceal my natural pallor and to preserve it. This lent me an appearance of age and dignity.
“Well,” she responded, “there was a man—a man named Ascher—”
Right there, she bogged down. She was pale and nervous, unable to go on, her slim jeweled fingers twisting and untwisting.
She seemed gripped and checked by a certain horror of saying any more, yet driven to it by a still more powerful necessity.
“What do you charge?” she asked, as though trying to gain time. I helped her, by explaining that my fee depended entirely on the work in view, and by stressing the fact that nothing illegal would be considered.
And still her face was white and set, her eyes were desperate. Nothing I could say would penetrate her agitation or put her at ease.
“I—I’m going to be married before long,” she blurted out. “But that has nothing to do with the matter, really.”
SHE paused again. I gave no hint that I knew she was lying. If a woman’s going to be married, everything in her life revolves around that focal point. Suddenly she got off on another tack.
“Viola Dane is my professional name,” she said. “My real name is Viola Hartzell. I used to live on a farm near Lebanon; that’s fifty miles from here. My folks are there now. My father’s nearly blind; cataracts. I haven’t seen him or my mother for—for two years.”
This came with a rush. Her composure was returning, she was getting her emotions under control, and now she settled down to what she must say. And she showed a delicacy about saying it, a hesitant choice of words, a slight flush as she spoke, which proved that, whatever her business, she was no hardened sinner.
And this was perhaps curious, for she was a strip dancer in that night club, the type of girl most persons would think callous and long past any delicacy. Which goes to prove that generalities are wrong, and that none of us really know much about our neighbors.
“There—there was a man named Ascher,” she said again. “Felix Ascher. He was a commission buyer, and he was in Lebanon at harvest time buying up crops. We raise a lot of fruit around there. This was two years ago, or a little more. It’s awfully hard for me to say, Mr. Bronson, but I must make you understand. I really knew nothing at that time, and I suppose it was my own fault. You see, my father was a terribly stern man—”
I began to feel ashamed of the fact that Roesche was listening, as she proceeded.
Well, it was the old story, or I thought it was. This man Ascher skipped out, and in her back-country town a girl who had a baby and no marriage license was up against plain hell. And this poor kid had been up against something far worse. Her old man was one of these hell-bent puritans who would wreck the whole world rather than compromise with Satan, and who ruled his own roost despotically. And her father had aimed to treat her like Sally Jennings. She went on to tell me about Sally.
“She was an awfully nice little girl, Mr. Bronson, sweet and shy and pretty. In high school she got to going with Willy Smith, who worked in the men’s furnishings store after school hours. Well, it came out that she was going to have a baby, and she did. She was more surprised than anyone else; I guess she never did know just how it had happened. She was only fifteen, you see. That was five years back. Her folks took the baby away from her a
nd she never did know where it went.
“She’s still there in Lebanon. She does the housework at home, and sometimes she comes downtown and everybody looks after her and talks, but nobody will associate with her or even speak to her. She looks like she spent half her time crying, and I suppose she does. Willy still works in the store, but he never liked her after that happened. Anyhow, his folks wouldn’t let him marry that kind of girl, though Sally’s father tried to make him do it. So that’s what I had to look forward to all my life. Do you get the picture?”
I got it. She was flushed and earnest now, the words rolling out of her without any hesitation. She made me see this poor little tyke of a Sally, condemned to a living hell all the rest of her life in that backwater town.
“What happened?” I asked quickly. “With you, I mean.”
She laughed. Not a hard laugh at all, but one of really happy triumph.
“Oh, I let them think I was broken-spirited and hopeless. And before the baby was born, while I could still get around pretty well—I just skipped out one night and headed for the city. It was pretty tough going, but I won through. The baby’s with me now, and you bet he stays with me, too!”
“Good for you!” I exclaimed. “Where’s Ascher?”
“Oh, him! Nobody knows.” She accepted a cigaret and was grateful. “He just disappeared. He went out west and could never be traced. Believe me, I tried! Well, Mr. Bronson, that’s why I’m here. I want you to be Felix Ascher.”
“You—what?” I blurted out. Just then the telephone rang. It was Dr. Roesche, from the adjoining room, with the door closed now.
“Listen, Jim,” he said. “I was reading about this girl in the paper last night. She’s playing around with that fellow Wilson—you know, the one who inherited all the paint and varnish millions, and who made such a God-awful fool of himself on Broadway last year. He lives in this burg. The paper said wedding-bells might ring shortly.”
“All right,” I replied, speaking for her benefit. “Suppose you come upstairs. I want you to meet a lady who’s here. Five minutes? Right.”
I rang off and turned to Viola.
“That’s my partner, Dr. Roesche. He must work with me in whatever I undertake, so he’ll have to hear what you say. I can sketch in the story for him later. Now, what’s this about wanting me to be Ascher?”
SHE pressed out her cigaret.
“The idea came to me when I read your ad.” she replied. “First, I want to make you understand the reasons. My mother and I have always been very close, but she’ll never go back on her principles. My father’s not well, he won’t live long; but they’d never let me come near them as things are now. This whole affair has just about broken my father’s heart. He’s stern and hard, but we always did love each other very dearly, and I’m the only one of their children left. There’s the big element—affection. The only way they’ll receive me or see me, is as Ascher’s wife, so I’m going to be just that. If you could see them and know them, you’d realize that their position isn’t as unreal as it seems.”
Just then Roesche came and knocked. I brought him in, introduced him, and in a few words sketched the situation as though he knew nothing of it.
“But where’ll I come in, Miss Dane?” I asked in some perplexity. “All those people will know that I’m not Ascher.”
“No. We’ll deal with my mother, my father, and my Uncle Ezra who lives with them; just those three. They never had dealings with Ascher, I doubt if they ever more than saw him in passing. And with your beard, that makes everything quite certain. I can get a marriage certificate forged easily enough. You go there with me pretend to be Ascher and the father of little Felix, and my husband. Do you see now?”
I did not, and said so. It looked fantastic and senseless to me.
“I don’t go around pretending to be another man, Miss Dane, except as part of my own work. My business is simulating dead men.”
“That’s exactly the point,” she broke in eagerly. “I’m coming to that, Mr. Bronson. I know that my folks would like nothing better than to give the baby a home. If I could leave him with them, he’d have a good home, a fine upbringing. They’d love him dearly and he’d inherit all my father’s money. I thought we might go there for a short visit, just two or three days. Then you could die. You might be quite ill when we got there. It wouldn’t involve anything wrong at all. It would simply make everything right between me and my parents.”
“And,” said Roesche, “you’d be rid of the kid and free to marry someone else.”
That shot went home. She looked at us, her cheeks burning, her eyes ablaze. Before she could burst out with hot words, I cut in quietly.
“You mentioned marriage, Miss Dane. Let’s have no evasions, please. I hate to pry, and yet I must satisfy myself. Does the man you’re going to marry know all this story?”
“He knows all of it; every bit,” she said.
I believed her, and somehow I felt a little flash of admiration for her. Why? Hard to say. She wakened it, that’s all. I could well credit that her impulses might be mixed, that she might have more than one end in view. People are not simple; they are complex. They seldom move along straight lines to some sure and single objective.
“Then,” I replied, “he must be a very fine and understanding man.”
“He’s not.” A trace of a bitter smile touched her lips. “He just doesn’t give a hang. I didn’t say I was making a love match, did I?”
This was her one show of hardness, and I was sorry I had wakened it in her. At least, it proved to me that she was no liar.
“Give me a chance to talk this over with Dr. Roesche,” I said. “I’ll telephone you after luncheon; I can’t jump at decisions, in my business. But I warn you that such a plan will be expensive. I take big chances and get paid accordingly.”
She pulled three rings from her fingers and dropped them on the table.
“You can get five thousand for these anywhere, or I can. Is that enough?”
It was. I told her to keep the rings until she had my answer, and with this she left us. When she was gone, I lit a cigaret and looked at Roesche.
“What d’you make of it?”
“Simple enough. She’s got the paint and varnish account hooked,” he said cynically. “Wilson won’t marry her and take over the kid. So she parks the kid in a soft spot and is free. Then she lands him for keeps and alimony later. But what of it? Nothing illegal that I can see, and her money’s good. Why not?”
Somehow I could not quite agree with him. What stuck in my mind was the story she had told me so earnestly, the picture of that pitiful little Sally Jennings, and this girl’s own initiative in evading a similar hell. A girl who had fought like that for her illegitimate child was not parking him in order to cut loose. Not much.
“Maybe not.” Roesche shrugged at my argument. “But she’s doing it. She’s tempted to do it in order to marry Wilson. Then she’d be set for life, see? You notice what she said, that he didn’t give a hang about her story. He wouldn’t. He’s a wild one himself.”
After lunch I telephoned Viola and then went to her apartment. The baby was there, with a nurse, and he was a cute kid right enough. When I was alone with Viola, I went at her without evasion.
“I want to understand this thing fully, Miss Dane; and somehow I don’t get it. Isn’t there more to the whole thing than you’ve told me?”
“Yes, there is, but I don’t know how to make you see it,” she said slowly. “Your friend, Dr. Roesche, puts a cold blanket on me. I don’t like him.”
“He’s the only man I’ll trust to bring me back to life and handle all details. Of course, I’m not interested in the morality or ethics of your purposes—”
“It isn’t morality. It’s everything here, inside of me,” she broke out, with both hands at her breast. Her eyes were shining with a strange new light. “It’s the baby. What chance has he got in the world, with me? If they think he has a name, everything will be right for h
im at home, he’ll be welcomed and loved, he’ll have a chance for a fine straight life there—”
Almost incoherent, she broke off. Suddenly she smiled and leaned forward, looking me in the eyes.
“See here, Mr. Bronson! I just can’t explain; I can’t find the words. But I feel sure you’ll understand if you only go there. I’m quitting my position Sunday night. We could drive up there on Monday. If you’d spend an hour on the farm, you’d realize everything that’s so hard for me to tell you. I can’t fight your thoughts, your ideas of me, except by giving you other ideas. Will you do it? Then, if you don’t want to go through with the rest of it, I’ll quit.”
And she meant quit, too. Upon the word, the lights went out of her eyes and her shoulders drooped for an instant. This decided me.
“We leave on Monday,” I said. “What’s the name of the town—Lebanon? I’ll have Roesche go on by train and wait for word from me.”
She brightened, and flashed me a smile. “Thank you! Come around for me at two, on Monday afternoon. We can be up there in an hour and a half. Will you drive my car? Good. And I’ll have the five thousand dollars ready for you then, too.”
SHE was as good as her word. When I took her bags out to the car on Monday afternoon, she handed me an envelope with the money in it. And I noticed that she was not wearing her rings.
I drove, and she held the baby; the nurse was left behind. Roesche had gone on to await word from me at the Lebanon Hotel, and he was rather sour about it all, still insisting the game had a catch in it somewhere. He did not cotton to Viola Dean any more than she did to him. I rather thought he might be right, too; but it was this very uncertainty, this element of risk, which made my odd profession so fascinating to me.
We drove up into the fruit country, and she greeted every hamlet, every landmark, with delighted recognition, as though she had been away twenty years instead of two.
She was sparkling, eager, filled with excited suspense. As we drove, a disturbing thought occurred to me, and I voiced it.
Adventures of a Professional Corpse Page 3
