Honey in His Mouth hcc-60

by Lester Dent

  “He still speaks no Spanish.” Doctor Englaster moved the flame from a jeweled lighter in front of his cigarette. “It is a liability.”

  “Did you know, Doctor, I was once a language professor?” Mr. Hassam got to his feet. “Suppose I test his linguistic aptitude. Who knows? If it is favorable, I may be able to cram enough Spanish into him to get him by.”

  Harsh’s initial good opinion of Mr. Hassam improved further when the fat man wheeled in a cart on which was an assortment of liquor bottles, ice, seltzer. Mr. Hassam, a man who noticed things, had remembered that Vera Sue Crosby had been drinking Benedictine and he had included a squat bottle of this, but Harsh said he preferred bourbon, straight. Mr. Hassam poured a pair. They clinked glasses.

  “Harsh, I am going to ask you some questions, and have you make some sounds. If you wish to think I have a hole in the head, just go right ahead and think it.”

  “All right by me, Hassam. Thanks for bringing in something to drink.”

  “What I am actually going to do is test your aptitude for learning the Spanish language, Harsh. Do you know what vowels are?”

  “Vowels? You mean A, E, I, O, U? I got that crap in school.”

  “Good. You are familiar with what consonants are?”

  “I guess.”

  “Give me some examples.”

  “I guess I ain’t that familiar with consonants, Mr. Hassam.”

  “Did you graduate from college, Harsh?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “From high school?”

  “Not exactly that, either.”

  “The eighth grade?”

  “I got four months into the eighth grade. Me and the teacher didn’t seem to jibe.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Now, you will repeat after me: La cabeza es para pensar. Will you repeat that? Get the sounds as nearly the same as mine as you can.”

  “Law caboose is a pair pants, sir.”

  “Come come, Harsh, no joking. This is important. It is in the nature of an important test. I can tell you that you have passed nearly all other requirements. This is the one remaining test, and believe me, Harsh, it is an essential one. Now say after me: La boca es para hablar.”

  “La boca es para hablar.”

  “Oh, excellent. Much better. Much. Again, please. Watch the stress on the same syllables as I placed it. Again.”

  Harsh made the sounds requested time after time, matching Mr. Hassam’s patience with a tolerant curiosity. They had another round of bourbon together. Mr. Hassam then gave a lengthy speech about Harsh being handicapped by unfamiliarity with the psychological make-up of the national character of the Spanish-speaking people in South America, stating this was an unfortunate handicap because the real character of a language stemmed from the user’s environment and habits, and unless one knew the character and environment, preferably knew it firsthand and from experience, then a man would encounter difficulty with the finer nuances of handling the speech of the land, and in particular of the individual who was supposed to be speaking, although as a whole it was not an insurmountable thing if a man applied himself judiciously. Following this out of a clear sky, Mr. Hassam asked Harsh to repeat all the words he had been pronouncing earlier. Harsh came back, getting all of them out, not muffing the pronunciation very seriously.

  “Good, oh good for you! Far better than I expected.” Mr. Hassam did not conceal his delight.

  “Did I pass, Professor?”

  “Oh, excellent.”

  “Well, as the fellow says, you didn’t catch me at my best today. To tell the truth my head is kind of fuzzy from the shots I been getting for the pain in my arm.” He did not mention the sleeplessness from watching the wall safe.

  Mr. Hassam conveyed his favorable impression to the others in emphatic terms. “I vote for this man. I tell you, I have had my doubts about the sanity of this project from time to time. But not now. This man can pull it off. We will never find a better candidate.”

  Miss Muirz nodded. “I am sure.”

  Doctor Englaster hesitated. “There is the matter of the broken arm the fellow has.”

  “It will mend.”

  “Suppose it does not?”

  Mr. Hassam shrugged. “Then El Presidente will just have to break his arm when he flees into exile. A broken arm will be believable, I imagine. He will be fortunate if he does not collect a hide full of bullets.”

  “I hope not.” Brother’s eyes were suddenly nasty. “I want to shoot the bastard myself.”

  Miss Muirz looked away suddenly. Her eyes focused rigidly on nothing in particular.

  Doctor Englaster eyed Brother. “You are sure of the blood type?”

  “Positive. The same as El Presidente, O-negative. I checked it twice.”

  Doctor Englaster waved his long cigarette holder. “You know, I think the bounder might do.”

  Harsh had never been fingerprinted by the police. His encounters with the punitive side of the law either had not been on charges sufficiently serious to warrant printing or had been in smaller communities where the police did not go in for promiscuous printing. He had been fingerprinted when taken into the army, however. He assumed his prints were on file with the Pentagon or the FBI or wherever they kept them. He thought of all this quickly when Mr. Hassam asked him to put his fingerprints on a card. By the time he decided not to object, Mr. Hassam had the card and ink pad ready, and he took hold of Harsh’s hand.

  “Hey, Mr. Hassam, let’s see the card. That’s kind of a funny-looking fingerprint card, ain’t it?”

  Mr. Hassam smiled faintly. He gave Harsh the card. Harsh had never seen a similar card, having had no occasion to truck with banks handling large deposits, but the printed matter told him it was a bank identification card for filling out by a depositor.

  “Mr. Hassam, I put my fingerprints on this thing, what am I getting into?”

  “I would not mislead you, Harsh. As soon as your fingerprints are on this card, some money is going to be deposited in the bank using the card for future identification.”

  “Yeah? How much money?”

  “A useful sum, Harsh.”

  “Will my name be on the card?”

  “No. Just your fingerprints.”

  “Then the money won’t be for me?”

  “No.”

  “How much money, Mr. Hassam?”

  “Harsh, I do not think I am supposed to tell you that.”

  “Goddamn it, you want my fingerprints on that card, don’t you?” Harsh turned wheedling. “Look, you and I are hitting it off pretty good, Mr. Hassam, so why don’t you go all the way?”

  “One million three hundred and ninety-four thousand dollars.”

  Harsh lay back on the bed. He felt he was going to be sick.

  “May I take your fingerprints, Harsh?”

  “Jesus Christ,” Harsh had difficulty breathing. “Go ahead.” He let Mr. Hassam take his limp fingers and roll them on the ink pad, then on the card.

  “Thank you, Harsh.”

  “Mix me another slug, will you?” Harsh’s voice was ragged. “You people are going to ruin my health, did you know that?” He closed his eyes, did not open them when Mr. Hassam placed a glass half full of bourbon in his fingers.

  Mr. Hassam carried the card into the solarium. He waved it under the noses of his confederates.

  Doctor Englaster frowned. “Didn’t Harsh object to giving you his fingerprints?”

  “I gave him a verbal anesthetic.” Mr. Hassam smiled.

  Harsh was sitting up in bed, another drink in his hand, looking at the wall safe when Doctor Englaster came into his room.

  This is the stuck-up son of a bitch, Harsh thought.

  “What do you want, head-picker?”

  “I have a piece of information for you, Harsh.”

  “I wish you had sent Miss Muirz in to tell it to me.”

  “Miss Muirz is busy.”

  “I bet she could be kept busy, all right.” Harsh was somewhat drunk. “How about you taking Mi
ss Muirz a little message from me saying that if she wants to get real busy, she should come in here and see me.”

  Doctor Englaster’s cheeks were beginning to flatten out. “Miss Muirz will visit you at her own convenience, I imagine.”

  “Is that so? Well, is that a sample of the goddamn hospitality around here? Is that what it is?”

  “If you wish anything in the way of food or drink, I imagine you can get it by ringing.”

  “Just ring, huh, Doc? Okay, I’ll ring or rub the lamp, or something. I would rub you, only I can see you’re not Aladdin’s lamp.”

  “You do that.”

  “Doc, you snoot-up bastard, what’s with this Muirz?”

  “I do not believe I understand.”

  “Oh, you understand me. Between us boys, what’s with that babe? To start with, who does she climb into the hay with around here?”

  “Mr. Harsh!”

  “Can it, Doc. You can Mr. Harsh! me all you want, you won’t convince me you haven’t eyed that piece yourself. And if she’s off limits, I bet you know who it is that’s keeping her that way.” He took another swallow of his drink. “You know what I think? I think he may not be packing enough for her, whoever he is.”

  “May I suggest you are drinking and talking overly much, Harsh?” Doctor Englaster controlled his anger. “You need to be in good physical condition for your operation tomorrow.”

  “I know it ain’t you that’s disappointing her, Doc. It ain’t you because I don’t think you pack enough to even start the disappointment.” Harsh paused and blinked his eyes carefully. “What was that last?”

  “Tomorrow morning I am going to put that scar on your face.”

  “You are? On me?” Harsh rolled his eyes. “Old Scarface Wally Harsh, I’m to be knowed as, huh?” Suddenly Harsh sat up yelling. “You ain’t goin’ to cut on my face, you son of a bitch. Not until I get that money back in my hands!” He endeavored to throw his glass of whiskey at Doctor Englaster but it slipped out of his fingers and fell on the bed where he could not find it in the covers.

  ELEVEN

  Harsh lay quietly on the bed. For almost an hour he hardly moved. Then the liquor stimulated his kidneys and he got up and went to the bathroom. He was still tipsy enough to be sure that he had to be very precise about each thing he did, and he made the decision that he was precisely scared, that was what he was. His face even looked scared in the bathroom mirror. That sweat on his upper lip was not from the heat.

  He addressed himself in the mirror. “What did you put your damn fingerprints on that card for?” His voice sounded scratchy and dry. “Man, you didn’t think, that’s what you didn’t do.” He cleared his throat of phlegm and spat it in the sink. “One million three hundred ninety-four thousand dollars.” He looked at himself. His mouth was hanging open. “Dumb bastard. Somebody’s kidding you, you dumb bastard.”

  He laid his fingers against his left cheek and pulled the skin down then pushed it up. He decided the face suited him the way it was, without a scar. He did not want any scar on his face. Someone must be kidding him about the scar too. That was what they had been doing, joshing him, and he was joshing back when he gave permission to do it. Hey, had he told anybody they could carve a scar on him? Great God, he was out of his head if he had told anyone they could scar him.

  His right arm gave him a stab of pain when he lowered it. That Brother had just about torn his arm off with that judo stuff, and had looked as if he wanted to laugh like hell while he was doing it. The man liked inflicting pain. When they got ready to cut a scar on his face, Brother would enjoy throwing him down and sitting on him while they did it.

  If Harsh didn’t want to know how that felt, he had better get out of this dump.

  He ran into the bedroom and glared at the wall safe. The dirty, dirty, dirty bastard, putting all his money in the safe and then locking it with two keys and giving him one key to tantalize him.

  He glanced at the window and saw it was night outside. The bright Florida moonlight was shining in the window. Night, he thought, was the time to slip away from here because nobody would see him. But how far would I get with no money? What the hell would it take to open that safe anyway? Would a pickaxe do it? A pickaxe was quite a tool if you put the oof in it when you swung it, and an estate this size would have a tool house somewhere and in the tool assortment might be a pickaxe. But he only had one arm. And the noise. He thought of the noise a pickaxe would make. It was a bum idea, the pickaxe. He would have to come up with a better one than that. The thing to do was lie down and bat his brains until something came out. Maybe he could get up his nerve to rob somebody in the house and skip with whatever he got. He couldn’t leave without a cent, that was for sure.

  He turned toward the bed. His eye caught the bottle of Benedictine on the liquor cart, and he brought up short. He began to nod drunkenly to himself. “She got five hundred from Brother, she’s bound to have some left.” His voice had a vicious note. He picked up the bottle of Benedictine and shuffled to the door. He opened the door and hung his head out in the hall, then set out for the door of Vera Sue Crosby’s bedroom.

  Vera Sue wore a sheer green silk nightgown which fit tightly to her hips and breasts and loosely elsewhere. She had not been able to sleep either. She was sitting in a low armchair, her feet stuffed in her oldest pair of gold-embroidered mules.

  “Oh, hello, Walter.”

  “I been thinking about you so hard I can’t sleep, Vera Sue. Can I come in?”

  “Well now I don’t know, Walter. You have been acting like you were real mad with me.”

  “I know. I been feeling sorry about that. I been laying in my room for hours trying to think of how to make up with you, but I couldn’t think of any way. So I just decided to come over. How about having a drink of water with me, at least?”

  Sharing a drink of water was a long-standing joke with them. “Well, I guess you can come in, Walter.”

  He entered and closed the door. The bedroom was elaborate to the point of being ridiculous, the furniture Louis XIV silk brocades, the woodwork carved and painted and gold-leafed. He knew Vera Sue would love it.

  “You know, I like seeing you in a place like this, Vera Sue. Being in a room like this, baby, a real fine room like this, is what you should have. All the time I been laying there trying to think of a way to make up for how I acted, I wished I could give you something like this, a room that was nice enough for you, and here you were in the room all the time. Ain’t that a coincidence?”

  “You have been drinking, Walter.”

  “Yeah, I guess I was trying to whiskey-drown the son of a bitch that is me. But you know something, I was too big a son of a bitch for drowning in anybody’s whiskey.”

  “I’m sort of glad you come, Walter. I been mad at you, but I been lonesome as hell.”

  “I’m glad I came.”

  “I’m glad you remembered I like Benedictine.”

  “I’m glad I remembered.”

  “I had some left, but it was all right for you to bring yours. I been getting up every little bit and having a nip.”

  “To look at you, Vera Sue, I wouldn’t know you had been drinking any.”

  “A whole bottle tonight, Walter. I drank a whole bottle, one of them big bottles like that one, Walter. The whole bottle.”

  “You sure carry it well.”

  “Do I? You have been drinking too, haven’t you? Did you say you had? You carry it well too, Walter.”

  “We both carry everything pretty well, don’t we?”

  He poured some Benedictine in two water glasses and Vera Sue drank hers rapidly. The little bitch goes after the stuff like it was Tom Collins, he thought. When you drank Benedictine the way you were supposed to, he knew a glass was supposed to last half an hour or so. He was glad she had been hitting the stuff before he got there, though. He wouldn’t need as long to get her real tight.

  “Walter, can you tell me why we’re here? Nobody talks to me. Act like I was measles, that’s wh
at they do. And you know something, I’m beginning to feel like I was in jail in the damn place.”

  “I guess I been poor company.”

  “Walter, I’m getting scared.”

  “Well, Jesus take us, baby, I didn’t dream you were worried. I thought you knew what was going on. I thought Brother told you. The son of a bitch, I told him to tell you that we were partners in the thing. I told Brother, look, I said, there’s a good straight kid, that Vera Sue, and what I get, she gets half of. Either count her in for half or count me out, that’s what I said.”

  “Count me in what, Walter?”

  “Why, it’s simple as hell. I invented a new kind of film emulsion. Big money deal. Brother is the bankroll. He’s going to manufacture the film for me.”

  Vera Sue moved from the chair to the bed. She sat on the edge of the bed and rubbed her face with her hands, frowning. “I didn’t know you were an inventor, Walter.”

  “Yeah, I ain’t a very hot one, but I’m an inventor. Took me one hell of a time to work it out. I been fooling with it since I was a kid, or anyway for years.” He wanted to stop lying and start laughing. He could hardly keep a straight face. She was taking it all in—he was a photographer and therefore he knew enough to invent a film emulsion, something that real scientists probably worked on for years, and mostly failed at besides. “Vera Sue, this film emulsion I invented, it is a kind of ultraviolet emulsion, which is a little more high-powered than the infrared. What it does, you take a picture of a person with it, it shows the type of blood they got. That was what all the stink about that O-negative blood was about. Tell you the truth, I didn’t know the film was that good when I invented it, and maybe I wouldn’t have known, only this Brother got the detective from Kansas City investigating me and that tipped me off I had something. I guess he would have stole my invention if I hadn’t got wise, but I did get wise, and I put it up to him cold gosling, and here we are.”

  “Walter.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Is all that the truth?”

  “Jesus Christ, you think I could think up a lie like that?”