Honey in His Mouth hcc-60

by Lester Dent

  “Never mind that. Where is the rest of your pack of crooks?” The officer was scowling. “You birds work in gangs. Where’s the rest of your outfit?”

  “Officer, under the circumstances, I guess I got to give you the right answers.”

  “Well, what is the right answer?”

  “To hell with you, you son of a bitch.”

  The officer started back. Anger came over his scrubbed and shaven face. “You are a dumb one, Harsh.”

  “I must be, if you think you can walk on me.”

  “We already located your gang, Harsh. One of them anyway. Over in Edina, east of here. A young woman named Vera Sue Crosby. Miss Vera Sue Crosby. She said it was Miss, and I would say it was Miss. You know it is Miss Vera Sue Crosby, don’t you, Harsh?”

  “Officer, as you say, I’m pretty dumb, I don’t remember.”

  “Maybe you would like us to speak of her as Mrs. Walter Harsh, your wife. That’s how she’s registered in this hotel in Edina. Mrs. Walter Harsh. But she admits her name is Miss Vera Sue Crosby. You see what I got on you, don’t you, Harsh?”

  “What you haven’t got, Officer, is somebody to show you how to do your duty, to kick your fat ass into finding that hit-and-run driver who smacked into me.”

  “Miss Vera Sue Crosby, of Quincy, Illinois. You get it, Harsh. Quincy, Illinois. Edina, Missouri. A state line is in between those two towns, Harsh. You see now what I got? Statutory rape.”

  “How was that last?”

  “Statutory rape. You’ve had it, mister.”

  “I may be dumb, but Mrs. Harsh never raised any kid dumb enough to have that hung on him.”

  “I’m talking about what the law says, Harsh. Here is a fifteen-year-old girl, and you bring her from Illinois into Missouri, which is across a state line, and you shack up with her. That is violating the Mann Act. That is statutory rape. That is up to twenty years in the Jefferson City pen.”

  The sides of Harsh’s face felt like china saucers. The officer had not frightened him appreciably until he brought in the thing about Vera Sue being fifteen years old. Good God, she could be fifteen years old, although she had told him she was twenty-three and he had chosen to believe her. If she was fifteen and she had lied, and if they scared her into getting up in court and admitting some other things, then the cop was right, he’d had it.

  The officer watched him. “What’s the matter, Harsh? Don’t you want to call me another dirty name? You brought a fifteen-year-old girl across the state line for immoral purposes, and that makes you the kind of a rat I like to hear call me names. That’s the way I feel, only it ain’t really half the way I feel.”

  “I’m a sick man, officer. I got an arm broken all to hell. You come back after I get some strength, I’ll tell you about how I feel. I’ll spit in your eye while I do it.”

  “I accept your invitation, Harsh, to come back. I’ll bring a pair of handcuffs, too.”

  “You do that, while I save up spit.”

  “You want to tell me who this stranger is who’s fishing around about you?”

  “There is no such guy, and you know it.”

  The officer opened the door to leave. “Fellow, you are in a real mess. I hope you can see that.” He went out, and Harsh lay for several minutes waiting for him to come back, but he didn’t. There was a rubber sheet under Harsh, and he had perspired such a pool on it that when he turned over there was a wet sucking noise like a pig in a mud puddle.

  FOUR

  “Hey, Doc.”

  “Yes, Harsh.”

  “You gotta fix it so I can use a phone.”

  “You’re in no shape to do any telephoning, Harsh.”

  “Listen, I got to hit the telephone, Doc. It’s urgent.” He was talking around a thermometer the doctor had stuck in his mouth.

  The doctor came over and took out the thermometer, put on his glasses, and threw his head back to see through the bifocals. Then he took Harsh’s pulse.

  “The cop sort of upset you, eh?”

  “Sort of.”

  “He’s a pretty nice guy, really.”

  “Yeah, it was easy to see what a nice guy he is. What about me and the telephone?”

  “Well I tell you what, you rest a few hours, get some sleep. Then we may fix you up with a telephone call.”

  “Doc, it can’t wait.”

  “Well, it can try.”

  Walter Harsh lay on the hospital bed and thought about the photography business. The way it was, anyone who could get together a dollar ninety-eight could be a photographer, for that would buy a cheap box with a piece of windowglass for a lens and a roll of low-cost film. That put anyone in business, the snapshot business, and that was the trouble, since that was all the value the public put on it. The twelve-jumbo-size-prints-for-thirty-five-cents roll film finishing business was another problem, a picture for less than a nickel. That was the price tag John Q. Public liked to put on a picture, and anything above that, they called it robbery. That made it a difficult business.

  Harsh was a good portrait photographer, he was sure of that. He had started out very young with a cheap snap box when he was a kid on the farm, securing his camera for the labels off five sacks of hog supplement and a dollar. He sold muskrat pelts to buy a roll of film, sold more muskrat hides and a mink he was lucky enough to trap and bought some D76 and hypo and contact paper. Later when the army got him, he talked his way into a photo section, where he learned a lot. He used the G.I. Bill of Rights to go to a photographer’s school in Kansas City and another portrait school in New York. By then he was a good portrait man. He was no Bannerman, no Kirsh, but he was an above average portrait man.

  He had thought that would be enough, but it wasn’t. He soon decided there were only two ways up as a photographer, and both ways required a gimmick. The best gimmick, which was out of his reach, was a plushy downtown studio with chrome-edged showcases and plenty of gold-toned sepia samples and a blond office girl and a reputation for high prices and being twenty years in the business. The other way up was to go out and knuckle doors. That had its drawbacks, since just about every town had an ordinance against door knocking and an out-of-towner needed a gimmick to get around this. Harsh knew he was right about one thing, the ordinances were barriers the local sit-on-his-bottom photographer had talked the city fathers into passing to protect his laziness. So Harsh felt no remorse about the gimmick he was using.

  Harsh’s gimmick was tailored for small towns. He would send a woman with a nice-sounding voice into the small town a few days in advance to rent desk space and a telephone and buy some spot announcements over the local radio station. Then the woman would sit down at the telephone in the rented desk space and turn to A in the directory and call every subscriber through to Z. “Good morning, Mrs. Aarons. This is Miss Crosby, with National Studios of Hollywood. Mrs. Aarons, you have heard our program on the radio, no doubt. If you can answer today’s quiz question, you will receive an absolutely wonderful big free prize of three size eight-by-ten portrait photographs of yourself and any other two members of your family. If you heard our sponsored program today, you will receive an extra listener’s prize.”

  The quiz question that won the prize was a real toughie: “Mrs. Aarons, who succeeded Franklin D. Roosevelt as President of the United States? Now take your time and think.” The person being called on the telephone always won the wonderful big free prize, because Harsh had to get into their homes to shoot the negatives and come back and push the prints. It was legitimate. The mark got the three free pictures, and unless he could say no faster than a squirrel chatters, he would find twenty or thirty dollars worth of additional prints crammed down his throat. Harsh would snap a lot of shots of the kids with their toys and he had a way of putting all the prints together in an accordion-pleat folder that the parents went for. When he flipped all those shots of the kid out on the living-room rug, mom’s eyes would pop. The telephone quiz gimmick got them around the anti-door-knocker law, the radio gave a cloak of respectability and sub
stance, and National Studios of Hollywood, that sounded like something too.

  Vera Sue Crosby was Harsh’s advance girl. Vera Sue went into the small towns and rented the desk space and the telephone and did the calling. Vera Sue was a real gem in a boiler room. She had a voice like the Mona Lisa over the telephone, a nun-pure voice that sounded naive and honest. The voice certainly didn’t sound like Vera Sue, as full of sex as a thirty-dollar call house.

  There was sunshine in the room when the doctor came in and thrust the thermometer in Harsh’s mouth, which was less embarrassing than having it stuck in his bottom the way the nurses had been doing. Harsh watched the doctor stand there counting pulse with one eye narrowed at his wristwatch while he waited for the thermometer to stabilize.

  “Well, Harsh, I guess you are up to it. If you still want, you can use the telephone.”

  The doctor brought a telephone with a long cord and plugged it into an outlet in the wall and put the instrument on the bed. Harsh seized it, the hospital operator came on the wire, and he placed a person-to-person call to Mrs. Walter Harsh in Edina, Missouri. When the doctor heard that, he looked surprised. “I didn’t understand you were married, Harsh.”

  Better get the old pill-snapper out of the room, Harsh thought. “Look, Doc, this is kind of personal. Do you mind?”

  “Harsh, if you’re married we should have notified—”

  “Doc, you stick to your pills and your thermometer, and leave the women to me, then we would both know what we were doing.”

  The doctor went out reluctantly. An old guy like him, wanting to eavesdrop, when he should be sitting on a creek bank waiting for a catfish to grab a worm, Harsh reflected.

  “Vera Sue?”

  “Walter!”

  “I wasn’t sure my call would catch you, after all this time.”

  “Walter, honey, pep it up, will you? I mean, whatever you got to say, get it said.”

  “Well, for crying out loud, aren’t you the interested one! Haven’t you wondered where I was? Listen, I had an accident, and I’m in the hospital.”

  “I know where you are. Walter, the bus is about due, and the man said it was always on time.”

  “Where are you catching a bus to?”

  “To see you, what do you think? I already got my ticket, Walter, so don’t talk all day.”

  “Good for you, baby. Jesus, I’m glad you used your head so quick. I didn’t know you had it in you. But listen, here’s what you do first. I need you to stop off in Illinois. The minute you get back to Illinois, the very minute you get in Illinois, dig up your birth certificate. Birth certificate. You got that?”

  “Walter, I can’t.”

  “You can’t?” He lowered his voice. “You don’t mean you really are fifteen years old? Goddamn you if you lied to me—”

  “Don’t you goddamn me, Walter, I am twenty-three and you know it.”

  “All right, as soon as you hit Illinois, you dig up a birth certificate to prove it. Otherwise I’m on the hook. If you don’t dig up a birth certificate, they’re going to soak me with the Mann Act and statutory rape and God only knows what. They claim you’re fifteen years old. I don’t know where they got that fifteen stuff. Did you tell them anything like that?”

  Vera Sue burst into laughter. Her laughter was a wonderful sound like a nightingale chorusing out in the moonlight. “I was only kidding the cop. He was such a square.”

  “You picked a great lie to tell him.”

  “It was just a joke.”

  “It was some joke. He came in here and scared the bejesus out of me with that fifteen story. Is that how you found I was knocked out in the hospital? Did the cop tell you?”

  “Yes. But did you know there’s someone else checking on you too?”

  “Who?”

  “A private cop. From Kansas City, I think. Anyway he’s going around asking all kinds of questions and showing your picture.”

  “There really is such a guy? I thought the cop was stringing me.”

  “Well, you were wrong, Walter. This fellow talked to me quite a while, wanting to know different things about you and showing me this picture he had of you. Listen, Walter, when did you have the scar taken off your face?”

  “Scar taken off my face? I never had a scar on my face.”

  “I saw it.”

  “What are you talking about? Where?”

  “On your left cheek, high up. A fair-sized scar.”

  “That proves they’re looking for somebody else, not me. I never had such a scar, never in my life.”

  “But Walter, it looked just like you, I recognized you right off. The only difference was the scar. And it described you, down to the last detail, even your blood type, O-negative.”

  “Goddamn it, you fell for something, some kind of racket. You know why I’m sure? Because nobody knew I had O-negative blood, not even me, until I lit in this hospital.”

  “Well, this guy knew it. Anyway, I’m coming over there. If you think I am going to pay no attention to five thousand dollars floating around, you’re crazy. I got my bus ticket, and if you shut up, I may catch my bus.”

  “Wait a minute, what’s this about five thousand dollars?”

  “This private peeper from Kansas City told me there was five thousand dollars in it if you turned out to be ‘completely acceptable,’ whatever that means. I asked him, but he either didn’t know or put on the clam. Anyway, I’m coming over to see if I can get a piece of that five thousand for baby.”

  “You must have got real chummy with this fellow from Kansas City.”

  “Oh, we had a couple of short beers. I found out that was enough to make him windy.”

  “Listen, Vera Sue, you go to Illinois and get that birth certificate.”

  “Nothing doing. I’ll be sitting on the edge of your bed in a couple of hours.”

  He thought they would come and take the telephone away as soon as he hung up, but no one came. It seemed like time was turning into forever as he lay there with the stuff they had been shooting into him beginning to wear off so that his arm felt like a balloon full of pain. His head seemed to be trying to split itself. He wished he was out of the hospital. He wondered how it would go if he would roll out of the bed and let himself down on the floor real easy and crawl on the floor into the hall and out of the place. It wouldn’t work, of course, but a man could wish.

  He lay back, breathing heavily, his head feeling as though it was rolling over and over down a hill. A private detective from Kansas City, how did you figure that one? If D. C. Roebuck had had insurance, then the man might be an insurance company investigator engaged in getting the goods on him. The idea worried him. An insurance detective could be worse than the police. A damn insurance company, he thought, didn’t care how much it spent as long as it was trying to get out of paying a claim.

  Sweat had come out on him while he was talking on the telephone to Vera Sue and since, and he was wet with it. He was in bad shape. Being so helpless brought tears of rage to his eyes. Here he was like a mouse with its tail caught in the trap, he reflected, and all the cats walking around smacking lips. One cat, two cats, three cats. The city policeman, the Kansas City sherlock, and now Vera Sue, trying to cut herself in on a reward at his expense...

  He did not remember going to sleep, but he awakened when the doctor came in. He felt very weak and shaky.

  “Doc, you sure stayed away long enough.”

  “I was invited to leave, remember?”

  “Ah, Doc, don’t be an old woman. You know, I don’t feel so hot.”

  “What’s the matter? The arm hurt?”

  “The arm, the head, all over. I feel like one big sore ball, Doc, you want to know the truth.”

  The thermometer went into his mouth again, feeling like an icicle, while the doctor counted his pulse. “You have some temperature. What happened with that telephone call to upset you this way?”

  “Nothing, Doc, that I know of.”

  They brought in a transparent canopy and s
et it up on the bed with him inside, then wheeled in a cylinder that had gauges on it and a tube running under the canopy. They hooked up the thing, and stood watching the gauges while the tube hissed close to his nose. “Doc, what is this thing?”

  “An oxygen tent.”

  “That’s what they put on guys who are dying, ain’t it? Take it away. I’m afraid of the thing.”

  “We probably won’t be that lucky with you.”

  The morning sun was splintering into his eyes. The way the sunlight was hitting the oxygen tent canopy he could see very little in the room. Finally he realized someone was sitting by the bed. A nurse, he thought, sitting there like an albino crow waiting for him to die. “Nurse, I got to piss.”

  There was a giggle. The corner of the oxygen tent was lifted and Vera Sue looked in at him. “Hello, Walter.”

  She kissed him. He kissed her back. Her mouth was warm and moist, tasting of spearmint.

  “Jesus, honey, what I said there a minute ago. I thought you were the nurse.”

  “It was kind of funny, Walter.”

  “She’s an old crow, always sticking her cold thermometer in my ass.”

  “Walter, I been sitting here a long time. They told me not to wake you—they said I could sit in here, but I should let you sleep. I told them a lie. I said I was your wife.”

  “I wondered how you got in.”

  “Walter...I couldn’t go to Illinois. I couldn’t make myself do it. You know something, after I talked to you on the telephone, I missed my bus sitting there trying to make myself go to Illinois like you wanted, but I just couldn’t.”

  “Baby, I knew you wouldn’t, so you can stop kidding around.”

  She kissed him and held him close. Her moist mouth moved all over his. “I’m glad you’re not mad. Walter, I wish I could get in bed with you right now.”

  “That would be something. I bet this oxygen stuff would go flying all over, and somebody would come in to see what was wrecking the joint.”

  “I wouldn’t give a damn if they did.”

  A nurse came in with two glasses of orange juice, one for him and one for Mrs. Harsh, she said. The nurse was a different one, a large plain woman.