Girl on the Best Seller List

by Packer, Vin

  “He what?”

  “And itcould have worked — if she’d kept the appointment, and if she’d taken the candy with the small dose. Cantharidin, in a tiny dose, acts as an aphrodisiac.”

  “Wait a minute — why thetwo pieces?”

  “That’s the flaw, Dave. Stanley had no way of knowing, or let’s say no way of comprehending, that cantharidin is a deadly poison. He knew it was an aphrodisiac, and his plan was to give himself just a pinch for a push, and to really slug hers. He had the pieces marked. There was an almond on the piece he intended for himself. What would have happened, probably, would be very nearly the same as what did happen. Gloria Wealdon would have eaten the piece without the almond, and died right before his eyes.”

  “But you said she didn’t keep her appointment.”

  “She didn’t. But she accepted the candy from him, and he was too nervous and flustered to think what to do. So he simply decided that he would return to her house after she got back from lunch, and try again. The worst Stanley could imagine was that she might have eaten the candy before he got there, and by the time he got there, the effect he’d intended might have worn off.”

  “Where the hell did he get the stuff?”

  “He’s a loader for Fulton Pharmaceutical Supply. Apparently in the army he’d heard about this cantharidin. He told me all he knew was that it made women ‘hot.’ Even when he burned his hands, he didn’t figure out that it was poison. He said he thought he might be allergic to it, said his skin was sensitive to a lot of things. He had plenty of things wrong with him when he came back after the war, you know that. I don’t think he’s been right since.”

  “So he just thought it was something else like that?”

  “Yes. He said that was another reason he put so little in his own piece. He said he thought he might be sensitive to it, the way he is to Vitamin C.”

  “Oh, Jesus!” said the chief of police.“This takes the cake!”

  “I know. For a while there this afternoon I actually thought Freddy Fulton’s kid did it.”

  “It could have been anybody,” said the officer, “there were so many people in town who hated her!”

  “But love killed her,” Jay said, “and there weren’t that many in Cayuta who loved her.”

  The police officer sighed. Then he said, “By the way, has anyone located Milo Wealdon yet?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “I’ve got Lieutenant Kelly up at the Wealdons’ place in case Milo comes home, but it’s damn strange he can’t be located, wouldn’t you say?”

  “It is,” said Jay. “I thought he might have done it, too, earlier.”

  Jay picked up his suitcoat and his hat from the chair. “I have to run along now, Dave. I’ll give the Fultons a call, and if everything’s all right there I think I’ll go home.”

  “I don’t see how everything could be all right there.”

  “You’d be surprised,” said Jay. “People are funny. In a crisis, you can suddenly accept an awful lot you’d never be able to accept under normal circumstances. In a way, it’s a lucky thing Fern Fulton found out about her husband’s affair right at this time. On an ordinary day, she might have cracked up.”

  “It’s tough about Min Stewart’s kid. I guess Gloria Wealdon can really chalk one up there.Could have, I mean.”

  “She just triggered it. It was on its way; it would have happened eventually.”

  The police officer said, “Well, I guess we can call it a day now. Some day, huh, Jay!”

  “Some day!” Jay Mannerheim agreed.

  As he turned to leave the detention room, the officer called him.

  “Before you go, Jay, do you mind spelling the name of that poison for me?”

  “C-a-n-t-h-a-r-i-d-i-n,” Jay Mannerheim said. “That’s the technical name. It’s in the report. Most people don’t call it that,” he added. “Most people call it Spanish-fly.”

  Twenty-one

  Goodbye to that town, and good riddance too!

  — THE END OF Population 12,360

  PITTS RALEI drove North on Route 2.

  “I’m afraid you’ve made me very late,” he said. “Do you regret it?” “No, but …” “But what?”

  “I have to stop and try Mrs. Wealdon’s number again.”

  “Now she’sMrs. Wealdon.”

  “Well — ”

  “Well, will I beMiss Dare one day?”

  “Edwina — ”

  “Will I?”

  “You’re making me extremely nervous and I don’t know these roads.”

  “I know them. Oh, how I know them!” “Do you have to bring it up?”

  “Does it make you jealous, Pitts? I hope it does.”

  “What’s that?”

  “What?”

  “That thing around your neck that keeps clinking.”

  “It’s a medal.”

  “Oh, are you religious?”

  “I have my faith…. It’s a medal of St. John Port Latin. I got it for bravery.”

  “I never should have had that last Martini. I never should have had the first one. Beer and Martinis!”

  “Now you’re starting to regret everything. In a minute you’ll tell me to get out and walk.”

  “No, I won’t tell you that. But remember, you’ll have to stay at the hotel while I dine with the Wealdons.”

  “I don’t mind that. I don’t need her help now.”

  “You can rest and sleep. I won’t stay there long.” “Then you’ll come back to me, won’t you?” “Yes.”

  “You’ll have a horrible time anyway. Milo Wealdon is a terrible bore.” “So I’ve heard.”

  “He made me so nervous. He called me Edwin. I felt like a man when he called me Edwin.”

  “Did he know about you and Fulton?”

  “Sometimes I think he guessed. I think so.”

  “We have to stop while I call Gloria. You watch for a place.”

  “Pitts.”

  “What?”

  “Do you think you can sell my book?”

  “I’ve only read a few pages. I don’t know. It sounds good, but I don’t want to build your hopes up until I’m sure.”

  “But you will let me drive to New York with you? You will help me?”

  “Yes,” said Ralei. “Yes.”

  “I’ll listen to any suggestions you make about the book. I’m not afraid to take criticism.” “They all say that.” “But I’m really not!”

  “I remember how hard it was to get Gloria to make a change.” “Oh, her!”

  “Her characters were really quite hard.” “I don’t wonder.”

  “Do you remember the book well?” “Yes.”

  “Do you remember Will?” “He was the sexiest man in it.” “He was my idea.” “That doesn’t surprise me.”

  “No, seriously now. Listen to me, and sit back, for heaven’s sake! I mean it about these roads. They wind.” “All right, Pittsy. I’ll sit back.”

  “I don’t know what it is about you upstate women, but you’re certainly a breed apart.” “Why do you say that?”

  “Never mind. Let’s get back to Will.”

  “Ah, Will, handsome, virile, wonderful Will, with the grass in the cuffs of his pants.”

  “Yes. She fought it, you know. She didn’t want her heroine to be attracted to an odd-jobs man. Her heroine was a very cold character.”

  “And you changed all that.”

  “Yes, I did. The heroine needed softening. She needed some character about whom she felt something more than disgust, or pity, or hatred.”

  “Desire!”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll find plenty of desire in my book.” “It isn’t a bitter book, then?” “No. I’m not bitter about Freddy.” “Good.”

  “There’s a place you can call from, Pitts, there on the right.”

  Pitts swung the Sunbeam Talbot into the gasoline station, coming to an abrupt, noisy stop.

  “I’ll wait for you,” she said, “but hurry.”<
br />
  As he walked toward the phone booth, he had ample proof that he never should have had the last Martini. He was very definitely swaying.

  Ten minutes later, when Pitts Ralei came out of the phone booth, his face was ashen. He got into the car and started the motor.

  “Where’s the nearest bar and restaurant?” he said.

  “What?”

  “I said where’s the nearest bar and restaurant?” “About a mile before we reach Cayuta.” “You’re hungry, aren’t you?”

  “Well, I can eat, if that’s what you mean. But what about Gloria Wealdon?”

  “Something’s come up,” he said. “I’m not sure we want to barge in on Mrs. Wealdon just now.”

  “I don’t understand you.”

  “I know you don’t. Let’s just drop it. Let’s find somewhere we can get a drink.”

  “Whatever you say,” Edwina Dare said uncertainly.

  Over dinner, after a few drinks, Pitts would tell her. It would not matter much to her, probably. In a sense, it was himself he would have to tell and make believe. He let the woman beside him continue her long palaver about writing and her novel. He tried not to be irritated with the fact that a silly woman (she had become that suddenly) in his automobile was making small talk, while he sat there trying to comprehend that Gloria Wealdon was dead.

  He tried to feel real remorse, but you never can right away. He felt just numb. He tried not to hope that this woman sitting beside him, by some miraculous and uncanny twist of fate, might be a crazy kind of godsend replacement for the client who had just died. (How had she died? He could not remember the strange man’s voice on the phone saying how she had died; just that he was a friend of the Wealdons’; just that Gloria was dead.)

  He wondered if Gloria had any more than a few chapters on the new book she had outlined (certainly not enough to matter?), and he was ashamed of himself for thinking of practical things. He knew that he would have another Martini, and then maybe another, and that he would probably read another chapter of this woman’s manuscript. And he knew too that he did hope she was that never-happens-in-a-lifetime miracle, someone to step in out of the blue and fill the gap that existed now.

  Still, sometimes a sudden death made sales rise, if it were unusually dramatic.

  “Don’t you think you ought to slow down?” said Edwina Dare.

  But he hardly heard her say it.

  Gloria Wealdon had earned for him well over thirty-five thousand dollars in less than a year.

  Just remembering it so distracted Ralei that he almost ran into a small, green car parked alongside the highway.

  Twenty-two

  “I like surprises too,” said Miles.

  “Ah, but you’re not the type that surprises happen to,” Gina told him.

  — FROM Population 12,360

  “WHEW!” the young woman in the green Volkswagen said. “I thought that fancy sportscar was going to wreck us. You,” she said, poking her passenger’s nose playfully with her finger, “and me,” poking her own.

  “I wouldn’t let him.”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  “No, I’d protect you, Rober.”

  “Why do you call me that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “My name’s Roberta.”

  “I know it.”

  “What if hehad run into us?”

  “I wouldn’t let him.”

  “Say some more of those names.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “You like them?”

  “I love them.”

  “All right, there’s hardy candytuft.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “Catchfly campion.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “Oconee-bells.”

  “Nice!”

  “Goldthread.”

  “Gold thread.”

  “Striped pipsissewa.”

  “That’s a funny one.”

  “Twinflower.”

  “Umm-hmmm.”

  “Dwarf trillium.”

  “Dwarfs!” she giggled. “Foamflower.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “You don’t want me to say any more, do you?”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, there’s amur adonis, and prickly-thrift, and whitlow grass, and navelseed, and toadflax, and houseleek, and moonwort, and — ”

  “Moonwort! That’sfunny-funny.”

  “Moonwort,” he said. “Moonwort.”

  “It’s dark out.”

  “I know it is.”

  “Did you think this was going to happen to us today?”

  No,” he lied.

  “You didn’t plan it, did you?”

  No,” he lied again. “Swear?”

  “I swear,” he said. “I like it.”

  “What?”

  “Being parked here, way away from nowhere.”

  “I do, too.”

  “Have you ever done it before?”

  “No, Rober,” he said honestly. “I never have.”

  “Do you have a guilty conscience?”

  “No.”

  “ ‘Course,” she said, “why should you? We’re just sitting here talking.”

  “Yes,” he said. He put his arm around her. She hiccuped.

  “Excuse me.”

  “Certainly.”

  “They’ll stop pretty soon.”

  “Yes.”

  “I hate hiccups.”

  “I’m the prince,” he said, “and you’re the little Cinderella. I’ll stop your hiccups with a kiss.”

  He brushed his lips across her forehead.

  “You see?”

  “Yes.”

  “They stopped, didn’t they.”

  “Yes.”

  “We can thank St. Roque.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s the Saint of General Diseases.”

  “You know a lot, don’t you? Nice things.” He smiled.

  He said, “I hope you’re not too hungry?” Roberta Shagland cuddled into him. She said, “I’m afraid that piece of coconut ice we shared has spoiled my appetite.”

  THE END

  Vin Packer

  If you liked Girl on the Best Seller List check out:

  The Young and Violent

  I

  I got the rehabilitation blues

  A bunch of screws

  Down at the po-lice station

  Put me on probation

  Rehabilitation

  Rehabilitation

  Blues …

  — A RED EYES DE JARRO ORIGINAL

  THE KINGS OF THE EARTH live on Park Avenue in New York City. They stand now on the wooden bridge at 99th Street, over the train tracks, looking out at the red switch lights of the New York Central, and looking down at their turf. Their turf belongs to them and they control it. Their turf extends ten blocks along the left side of Park, from 98th street on up into 109th, where it fringes El Barrio, Spanish Harlem. Somewhere within this boundary the Kings of the Earth live, and over it, they rule. In all there are nineteen Kings; but here and now only two, Tea Bag Perrez, and Red Eyes de Jarro, the War Counselors. They smoke, and watch, and wait for Rigoberto Gonzalves — Gober — the King of Kings, their leader.

  In the deep blue light of beginning evening a figure mounts the steps of the bridge, and thinking it is their leader approaching, they tense and turn to see.

  “Naw, naw, it ain’t Gobe,” Tea Bag sighs impatiently. “S’only Detached Dan.”

  “Suppose he knows?” Red Eyes wonders.

  “Either that or he’s smellin’,” Tea Bag answers.

  The pair watch Dan Roan’s approach. Dan is what social-welfare circles call a “detached” worker; a street-gang worker. He is employed by the Youth Board; a slender fellow in his early thirties, well over six feet, with sand-colored, close-cropped hair, a lean, sharp-boned face, and bright green almond-shaped eyes. Dan walks leisurely toward them, a burned-down cigarette clutched between his long, narrow fingers, a faint smile at the e
dges of his wide, strong mouth. He wears a gray flannel suit, a green wool sweater under the jacket, a white shirt and plain yellow tie. “Hi, boys!”

  “Dan.”

  “Hello, Dan.”

  “Nice night.” Dan stands beside them now, looking down at the squalor that is upper Park Avenue. A lumbering vegetable truck squeezes its way in the close street beneath them, snorting and coughing smoky fumes and somewhere across from them in one of the tenement rooms a woman’s husky voice croons, “A room with a view — and you — ” The early May sky is not yet dark, but the red neons in the drugstore on the corner are shining, and the raggedy yellow tomcat from the grubby grocery next to it is locked inside, lying on a bunch of grapefruit in the display window, staring out moodily with his tail switching.

  Dan says, “What’s new?”

  Tea Bag shrugs his shoulders. “They shot a bomb off at Yucca: Flats, I hear. I hear tell they did that.”

  Tea is a short, medium-sized fifteen-year-old with mud-colored hair, a smooth, ruddy complexion, and a slumping posture. He is an alumnus of Coxsackie, a state correctional institution, and under the sleeves of his shiny black leather jacket his arms are punctured with needle marks. Before he went to Coxsack, he enjoyed a brief flirtation with marijuana and earned his nickname when his ma got in the habit of chiding him, “You’re nothing but a bag of tea, sonny boy,” but then he was only playing with the stuff. Now he has a romance with heroin, the white, white snow.

  Dan stubs his cigarette out and tosses it over his shoulder, sticks his hands in his trousers pockets and rocks back and forth on his heels. “Yes, I read about Yucca Flats in the paper,” he says quietly.

  “Big explosion,” Tea remarks.

  “It’s the time of the year for them,” Red Eyes de Jarro says. “It’s in the air.”

  Red Eyes wears a black jacket, too, with the same gold crown stamped on its back, and his name King de Jarro stenciled in white on the front above his heart. He is taller than Tea, but not truly tall, and he is thinner. His brown hair is darker, his large round eyes are darker. Red is far-sighted, so much so that the strain from the years he went without glasses gave his eyes the bleary, bloodshot appearance which inspired his name. Now he has glasses in an imitation leather case shoved in a drawer somewhere at home. In September he will be sixteen, old enough to quit school.