Death of a Pusher

by Deming, Richard

  For several minutes she stared at me without answering. Then she lowered her face to her hands and began to cry. Leading her over to a chair, I let her sit and cry herself out. Eventually, when she started to sniff, I handed her a handkerchief.

  Wiping her eyes, she said in a small voice, “I don’t want to get Norman in trouble. He’s been wonderful. He just gives me enough to quiet my nerves, cutting it down all the time. He’s going to cure me.”

  “Sure,” I said. “The mental hospitals are full of voluntary cures.”

  It was true. There are cases of voluntary cure of drug addiction, I suppose, but the only former addicts I knew had kicked it by being locked up long enough to dry out completely. And often even they got right back on the dream wagon the minute they were pushed back into society.

  “He is curing me,” she said with a touch of spirit. “I’ve already cut down a quarter of a grain a day in this short time.”

  A quarter of a grain, and she thought she was making progress.

  While she was crying, I had been thinking. And I was beginning to suspect what might have happened that night. Picking up the bedside phone, I dialed headquarters, asked for Communications, and issued some instructions to be relayed to the radio car cruising closest to 427 Clarkson Boulevard.

  When I hung up, I said to Beverly, “Come on. I’m going to drive you home.”

  “I have my own car,” she said.

  “It’ll keep. I’ll have it brought to your apartment later.”

  A squad car was parked in front of the building when we arrived. There was a storm drain right in front of the building, and its manhole cover was off. A uniformed policeman stood over the hole, directing a flashlight downward.

  As we climbed from the car, the patrolman looked up. “You Sergeant Rudd?” he inquired.

  “Uh-huh. Any luck?”

  “I think my partner just found it. He’s coming up.”

  A man’s head emerged from the hole, and a second policeman climbed out. He was shirtless, barefoot, and his trousers were rolled above his knees. He had a small, nickel-plated revolver in his hand.

  While the man who had been down in the storm sewer went over to the squad car to dry his hands and feet on a handkerchief and get back into uniform, I examined the gun. It was a five-shot, hammerless Smith and Wesson thirty-two, probably at least fifty years old.

  “This must have been in the family for some time,” I said to Beverly. “No wonder it wasn’t registered.”

  “It belonged to my father,” she said dully.

  I said, “Give me your car keys.”

  Obediently she probed in her purse and brought them out. Handing them to the policeman, I described her car, told him where it was, and asked him to drive it to the lot behind the apartment building and leave the keys in the glove compartment.

  Then I took Beverly inside. Norman was in bed. When I flicked on his bedroom light, he sat up and stared at us. Seeing Beverly’s expression, he gradually paled.

  I said, “We just found the gun in the storm sewer out front, Doctor. You were almost lucky. If that woman across the street had kept looking out her window a few more seconds, she would have seen you ditch it.”

  “You told?” he asked Beverly.

  She shook her head miserably. “He guessed. He found out I was an addict.”

  Norman Arden got up and started to dress, pulling his clothes on over his pajamas.

  “Want to tell me about it?” I asked.

  “Why not?” he said in a colorless voice. “I still don’t regret it. I’d kill him again. You would have too, if you had watched your sister on her knees begging for a hypo.”

  “You walked in on them?”

  “Sure. I knew what was the matter with Bev. I’d been watching her all evening. She had the hall door open, waiting for that creep to come home, jumping out of her skin—I thought she’d shake apart. When he finally stuck his key in his door, she shot across the hall so fast, she was just a blurred streak. At first I only meant to turn the man over to the police. I deliberately waited fifteen minutes, hoping to walk in and catch him in the act of giving her a shot. Then I meant to hold him at gunpoint and call the police. But it didn’t work out that way, because he didn’t have any heroin to give her.”

  “Then why’d you shoot him?” I asked.

  Momentarily he closed his eyes. “They were in the kitchen and he was making her coffee, trying to quiet her down. She was down on her knees begging for a shot and he was saying he didn’t have any because he was in trouble with the police and had gotten rid of it. Just as I reached the kitchen door, my sister made her last plea. She said if he would give her just one fix, she would not only pay him double, but he could have her.”

  He opened his eyes again and said calmly, “So I shot him.”

  No one said anything for a time. Finally I said heavily, “Suck to that defense, Doc. If any jury gives you more than manslaughter, I’ll serve part of your time. Ready to go?”

  “I’m ready,” he said quietly.

  It was nearly two A.M. by the time I had booked Dr. Norman Arden and had checked Beverly into the narcotics ward at City Hospital. When I headed for home, I was in no mood for sleep. I kept thinking of the wreckage that men such as Benny Polacek left in their wake. How many vital young women similar to Beverly Arden had he hooked into abject slavery to a drug? Even in death he had wrought havoc, ruining the career of a young doctor whose only real crime was devotion to his sister.

  They ought to give him a medal, I thought. But I knew they wouldn’t. As the young doctor himself had said, you can’t condone the murder of even lice such as Benny Polacek without risking anarchy.

  I felt the need of diversion to take my mind from its depressing thoughts. Heading north, I was nearly to the Palace when I remembered that this was April’s night off.

  Two A.M. was a devil of a time to go calling on a young lady, but I continued on to her rooming house anyway. The front door was locked, but I knew which room on the second floor was hers, and there was a light on inside. An instant after I tossed a pebble against the screen, the curtains parted, and she peered down at me.

  She smiled delightedly when she saw who it was, then forced her expression into stern lines. “You just wait right there,” she called down in a low voice.

  Less than a minute later she let herself out the front door. “I’ve been sitting at home all evening because you said you might drop by,” she said. “I ought to be mad at you.”

  “I’m here,” I said reasonably. “I just got off work.”

  “Oh,” she said. “In that case I won’t be mad.”

  I helped her into the car, went around it and slid under the wheel.

  “What time do you have to check in tomorrow morning?” she asked.

  “I’m supposed to be in at ten, but I have some time coming. I’m going to phone in and take the day off.”

  “Umm,” she said. “In that case we can have a long breakfast.”

  If you liked Death of a Pusher check out:

  Body for Sale

  1

  WHEN I ARRIVED BACK IN RAINE CITY, I DIDN’T GO STRAIGHT to the office. I stopped by Tony Vincinti’s Bar and Grill first. When you know you’re going to be fired anyway, what’s the point in being careful not to breathe liquor in the boss’s face?

  At two in the afternoon the place was deserted except for fat Tony. He flashed me his white-toothed Sicilian grin and ran a rag over the already spotless section of the bar in front of me.

  “You’ve been gone a while, amico,” he said.

  “Just three weeks,” I said. I pulled my order book from my pocket and started to flip pages. “Seven fifty, five, three fifty and two. I netted four orders for good old Schyler Tools, Tony. Eighteen-hundred-dollars’ worth of business.”

  Tony’s grin widened. “That sounds good, Tom.”

  “It sounds lousy,” I told him. “The commission is ten per cent. It works out to sixty dollars a week.”

  The t
avern proprietor’s grin disappeared. “Well, you get expenses too, don’t you?” he said philosophically.

  “Yeah. Which cuts Schyler’s profit on my last three weeks’ work to nothing. Make me a double Gibson.”

  Tony looked worried. “You reported in yet, amico?”

  “What the hell do you care?”

  His dark face flushed. “I thought we was compari.”

  His flush made me a little ashamed of myself. “We are,” I said. “No, I haven’t reported in yet. Make me a double Gibson.”

  “You come in here once before with that look on your face,” Tony said. “In uniform that time. Remember what happened?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I had six double Gibsons and got knocked off the force for being drunk on duty. It wasn’t your fault.”

  “I served them, didn’t I? I always felt bad about that.”

  “Rest easy,” I said. “I make my own jams. I’m a slob.”

  “You’re my compare,” he protested. “You can’t talk that way about a friend of mine.”

  I gave him a patient grin. “You going to build me a double Gibson, or do I have to go to some clean bar?”

  He pretended he was offended. Slapping ice into a mixing glass, he poured quite a bit of gin before adding a mere dash of vermouth.

  “This time it doesn’t matter,” I told him. “Drunk or sober, I get canned the minute I turn in this order book.”

  He stirred the mixture. “Why? You been working, ain’t you? You even been on the wagon since you started with Schyler.”

  “I’ve been working my head off, Tony. That’s what makes it a boot in the pants. I never blamed anybody for my own mistakes, did I?”

  Pouring the drink into a five-ounce stemmed glass, he dropped in a pearl onion and set it before me. I gave him a five-dollar bill. He rang up a dollar twenty and set the change on the bar.

  “I never heard you cry about anything,” he said.

  I took a sip of the drink. “Up to now I never had anything to cry about. I never held it against the lieutenant who caught me drunk on duty. Hell, he was just doing his job. It wasn’t his fault I let a dame throw me for a loop. And I never blamed anybody but myself for the other two jobs I lost.”

  Tony said, “That private-eye job wasn’t so much anyway, was it?”

  “That’s beside the point. Know why I got canned?”

  He shook his head.

  “I got caught trying to shake down a client.”

  Tony looked embarrassed.

  “Know why I lost my hack-driving job?”

  He shook his head again.

  “An inspector caught me gimmicking my meter. I told you I was a slob.” I drained my glass and shoved it toward him. “Same way.”

  Tony said, “Don’t a lot of them do that? You was just unlucky to get caught.”

  “I was an angle-shooter,” I said. “Up to six months ago I’d been an angle-shooter all my life. I woke up when I suddenly realized all it ever got me was trouble. So in six months on the road for Schyler Tools I haven’t even padded my expense account. And I’ve worked night and day. Only I can’t seem to sell tools.” I pointed to my empty glass. “I said the same way.”

  A little reluctantly he started to mix another drink. “That ought to count for something, Tom. Why don’t you check in and talk to the boss instead of going off half-cocked?”

  I let out a bitter chuckle. “I plan to talk to the boss. I’m primed to tell him good.”

  “You will be primed if you keep downing this priming fluid,” Tony muttered. He set the second drink before me and rang up another dollar twenty. “Ain’t it kind of childish to tell off the boss when you get canned?”

  “Not this boss,” I said. “You know who the president of Schyler Tools is?”

  Tony shook his head.

  “George Mathews. He’s president because he married old Lyman Schyler’s daughter just after the old man died. She inherited controlling interest. Without her vote Mathews couldn’t get a job as a stock boy. He spends about three hours a day at the office. The rest of the time he’s golfing, boating and discreetly chasing females. Discreetly, because his wife would kick him out on his can if she ever caught him. That’s the kind of incompetent that’s going to fire me.”

  Tony frowned. “That’s not just sour grapes? How’s the place keep going with a guy like that in charge?”

  “He’s only nominally in charge. The real brains of the company is the force of assistants Lyman Schyler built up before he died. It goes on functioning just as automatically under a figurehead boss as it did under the old man. This isn’t just sour grapes. My opinion of George Mathews is the same one held throughout the plant.”

  “He’s nobody you can reason with then, huh?”

  “He wouldn’t know what I was talking about. He’ll just can me and then rush off to play golf. At least I’m going to have the pleasure of telling him he doesn’t know his head from a cobblestone.”

  I finished my second drink and Tony mixed a third without my ordering it. “On me this time,” he said.

  I had one more after that. I was pretty well primed by the time I reached the office. Not drunk, just courageous enough to spit in a tiger’s eye.

  The little blond who served as George Mathews’ receptionist gave me a nice smile and trilled, “Good afternoon, Mr. Cavanaugh.”

  The smile turned to a look of alarm when, without even answering, I pushed through the swinging gate and headed for Mathews’ private office.

  “You can’t go in there!” she squealed, rushing after me. “Mr. Mathews is in conference.”

  I stepped inside and shut the door just before she got to it. She must have been afraid to violate her boss’s privacy further because she didn’t try to follow me. A quick glance about the office showed me that no one was there. This made me feel a little foolish until I remembered the small siesta room connecting to the office. The door to it was closed.

  Quietly I crossed over to it. It was unlocked too. I pushed the door open and went in.

  This room was a mere cubbyhole, no more than ten by seven feet square. There was a bar across one end with four stools before it and the door to Mathews’ private washroom alongside. The only other furnishings were two leather-upholstered chairs and a leather-covered sofa, plus a couple of ash stands.

  A couple of people, stark naked, were horizontal on the sofa.

  My unannounced entrance brought on a flurry of activity. With a flash of white legs a shapely brunette bounced up from the sofa, swept a dress and a couple of pieces of lingerie from one of the chairs and darted into the washroom so rapidly I didn’t even glimpse her face.

  But I didn’t have to. I recognized the small pink birthmark on the left cheek of her round little bottom. George Mathews wasn’t the only man at Schyler Tools who was intimately acquainted with file clerk Gertie Drake. But he probably did have the distinction of being the first to get intimately acquainted on company time.

  Mathews’ look of consternation changed to a threatening frown when he saw who had interrupted his conference. But he delayed saying anything until he had grabbed his own clothing from the other chair and jerked it on as fast as he could. He didn’t sacrifice thoroughness to speed, though. He knotted his tie in the mirror behind the bar and even carefully adjusted his tie clip.

  Then he asked in a cold voice, “What do you mean bursting in here unannounced?”

  I had intended blistering his ears with my personal opinion of him, but the situation changed my mind. Giving him a chummy smile, I took one of the chairs and lit a cigarette. Mathews glared at me.

  “I don’t seem to be much good on the road,” I said. “I think I’d like district sales manager better.”

  Striding toward me, he looked down at me with clenched fists. I wasn’t very impressed. At thirty-two George Mathews was lean and hard and well muscled, but at thirty I was leaner and harder and better muscled. And I outweighed his one seventy-five by twenty pounds.

  “Of all the unm
itigated—” Mathews started to say.

  “Would you rather have me discuss the promotion with Mrs. Mathews?” I interrupted.

  He opened his mouth and closed it again. After staring at me wordlessly for a few moments, he managed in a slightly high voice, “Are you trying to blackmail me?”

  I gave him a pleasant nod.

  He stared a while more, unclenched his fists and rubbed the back of his neck. His gaze strayed to the closed washroom door.

  “I’ll make as good a district sales manager as you do a company president,” I said reasonably.

  Looking back at me, he sniffed. “You’ve been drinking.”

  “A little,” I admitted. “We all have our minor indulgences.”

  “You’re drunk.”

  “You’re an adulterer,” I countered amiably.

  His fists clenched again, then unclenched. Instead of staying angry, he decided to make me a fellow conspirator.

  Summoning a rueful smile, he said, “What the hell, Tom. We don’t have to insult each other. You’d get a little sore if I barged in on you at a time like this. And don’t tell me you’ve never had a time like this.”

  “I won’t. But I’m single.”

  He dismissed this hair-splitting with an airy wave. “According to Kinsey, fifty per cent of all married men cheat a little.”

  “How many of them have wives who could pitch them out in the street without a nickel?”

  He flushed. “You want to be nasty about this?”

  “No,” I said. “I just want to be district sales manager.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said testily. “There’s no opening.”

  “Ed Harmony retires in two weeks.”

  “You know very well Harry Graves is scheduled for that spot. Moving you over his head would create an office scandal.”

  I knew I was in by the way he was arguing instead of just telling me to go to hell.

  “Then create one,” I said. “I don’t feel like going on the road any more, so I’ll take a two-week leave until the job opens. With pay, of course.”