Always Leave ’Em Dying

by Richard S. Prather

  I kicked the door shut and said, "Stand still, Wolfe. You're not going to get hurt. Just don't let out a peep."

  He turned and backed slowly away from me until he bumped into the desk. A small wooden triangle, a few papers, the phone, and a carafe of water were on the desktop; the wooden triangle bore the name "Dr. Frank Wolfe." He looked scared silly, his face white.

  "Just ease over and sit down," I said. "Stay away from the phone and don't even think about yelling."

  He sat gently in the swivel chair behind his desk. I hooked my foot under a straight-backed wooden chair, slid it in front of him, and straddled it. Keeping the gun pointed at his nose, I said, "Let's get one thing straight: I'm not even slightly goofy, I'm as sane as you are, but there's something crazy going on in this fit factory and you're going to tell me all you know about it."

  He kept moving his head slightly to the left and then right again, eyes riveted on the gun. He wasn't much good to me, scared as he was, but I kept the gun on his nose anyway. "Just get used to it," I said. "Now, give a listen." I told him exactly what had happened to me when I arrived at Greenhaven, explained how I'd wound up in the strait jacket. "So that's it," I finished. "All of a sudden those bums jumped me; somebody else clobbered me from behind. Your turn."

  He jumped slightly. "What?"

  As I'd talked he'd calmed down, and color had come back into his face. But the better he looked, the worse I felt. I was in lousy shape, my head throbbed, there was a small fire in my stomach, and I was shaky, nauseous. I said, "Your turn; what do you know about it?"

  He shook his head rapidly back and forth. "Nothing, nothing. There was an enormous commotion, Mr. Scott, yelling and all. I ran down to Dr. Nichols's office—several people were there ahead of me—and, well, there seemed to be bodies all over the floor. That's all I know."

  He explained that the guards—who were now in Greenhaven's hospital—had said I'd run amuck, and that they'd had to manhandle me. I asked him, "Who was there ahead of you?" He named several doctors and nurses I'd never heard of, and I said, "How about Dr. Nichols?"

  "She arrived when I did. Everything was confused . . ."

  "You're telling me."

  He laughed and appeared relaxed for the first time. "You— Couldn't you put the gun away?"

  "No."

  His pleasant expression faded slightly and he licked his lips. "I'm quite convinced of your sanity, Mr. Scott—now. Actually, you didn't make the best initial impression on either Dr. Nichols or me. She said that when she first saw you, you were, ah, chasing a ball."

  That got a small chuckle out of me. Dr. Wolfe extended one hand slowly toward me. "Please note, Mr. Scott." His hand was trembling. "You gave me quite a shock a minute ago and I'd like a drink of water for an exceedingly dry throat. I wouldn't want you to get excited." His eyes were on the gun. Naturally; his eyes hadn't been any place else so far.

  "Go ahead."

  He picked up the carafe and a glass from the tray, poured water to the accompaniment of clink, clink, clink from his shaking hand, gulped the drink, and sighed. I was about to ask him to clink another for me when the door behind me opened. I jerked the gun back against my chest, swung my head around, nerves jangling all through my body. A white-uniformed woman stood in the doorway. She was tall and heavy-framed. I'd never seen her before. She didn't seem at all surprised to see me. She just looked tired and sleepy.

  "I'm leaving now, Doctor," she said. "Unless you need me."

  "Nothing more," he said. "Good night."

  She kept staring past me, and I thought there was an expression of surprise on her face for a moment. Then she turned and started to leave. I swung my head back toward Dr. Wolfe as the door closed, thinking he might be pulling a gun out of a desk drawer, or even jumping toward me. He was just pouring himself another glass of water. Maybe I'd imagined that she'd looked surprised. But my heart was pounding again, my throat so dry it ached.

  I said, "What about that nurse? If she starts screaming—"

  "I don't think there's any worry there. She could hardly have seen you before. And, too, I can vouch for you now while I couldn't have earlier." His brows lowered as he added. "You look quite pale. Mr. Scott. Are you all right?"

  "Yeah, I'm OK. Just a little beat."

  He pushed the water carafe toward me. "Would you like a drink? You look ill."

  I poured a drink into another glass with my left hand; the water eased the dryness in my throat a little, cooled the small fire still in my stomach. Then I took a breath and went on: "In a minute you're going to use that phone and call the people I tell you to. I want to talk with both those stupid guards and find out who popped my skull, for one thing."

  He shook his head and held forth a while about how strange this all was, until I cut him off. "Right now, though, I want to know about Nurse Dixon. Where is she, who does she work for?"

  "She comes on at midnight, Mr. Scott. She works for Dr. Yancey. You met him."

  "Uh-huh. There are a few other things I want to hear you talk about, too. While I was in that strait jacket, somebody tried to stick a knife in me. And not long ago a body was lugged away from here and buried. Besides that, what do you know about Dixon's doing abortions here in Greenhaven?"

  He seemed shocked, unbelieving, and started protesting, but his words sounded funny to me. It wasn't so much what he said, but the fact that the words themselves seemed soft, muffled. I shook my head to clear it, wake up a little more, but still I could hardly hear him. "Knock it off," I said. "Get the mush out of your mouth." The words sounded stupid; I couldn't remember what I'd asked him. He stopped speaking.

  I said, "Listen. I told you somebody tried to kill me. Somebody here. Start with that."

  He was looking at my face. His mouth moved but I heard only parts of his speech. ". . . narrow it down . . . records . . . never any difficulty . . . no violent patients . . . freedom here . . ."

  He paused, looking steadily at me, then began speaking again. I couldn't understand what he was saying. The idea seemed silly, but I felt as if I'd been drugged again. Couldn't have drugged me, I thought. I was looking at him all the time. Then I remembered taking my eyes off him when that nurse had come in, tried to think back to that moment. It was an effort to hold my head erect. Wolfe's voice seemed to swell and fade. Light bounced from the lenses of his glasses.

  Neither of us had spoken for what seemed a long time. I said, my tongue thick, "Shut up. Felicity. Felicity Gifford. That's why I came here. Tell me . . ." I couldn't hang onto my thoughts, couldn't put them in order.

  "You do look ill," he said. "Have some water, Mr. Scott." He pushed the carafe toward me. "Perhaps you should lie down."

  His face was sober; he stared fixedly at me. I looked at the carafe, at the water glass in front of him. It was full; he hadn't drunk any of his second glass, the one he'd poured after that nurse had come in. I reached for the carafe, poured my glass full again, my fingers numb. Tiny white grains swirled in the bottom of the glass, grains from whatever I had drunk before. The water seemed milky.

  I straightened in the chair. Weakness licked at my muscles as I looked over the room—and saw something I hadn't noticed before. In the corner stood a wooden clothes tree. Dangling limply from it was a dark raincoat; drops of water glistened on its surface. On the floor beneath it sat a pair of rubbers, their soles muddy. I looked at my own shoes, at the dirt and mud on them from that lonely hill where something, someone, had been buried. Then I looked at Dr. Wolfe. He stared silently back at me.

  "You sonofabitch," I said. I thumbed back the hammer of my .38 and he pulled his lips tight against his teeth and babbled something. "Put your hands flat on the desk," I told him.

  He flopped them on the desk; they lay there shaking as if they weren't a part of him. There was a ring on the little finger of his left hand, its big diamond glittering, sparkling as his hands fluttered.

  Finally, I understood his words. "Don't, don't, don't," he was saying over and over.

  "Shu
t your face. Who was it—"

  The door clicked open behind me, banged against the wall. Wolfe jerked his eyes from my face. I swung my head around, the movement slow and uncoordinated. It was a woman again, walking toward the desk, a different woman, but also in a white uniform. She said, "Frank, did you—"

  Her voice faltered, stopped as she saw me. She was short, thin, thin-faced, and a big black mole grew on her cheek. It was Nurse Dixon. She was so close to me that I could see stiff hairs jutting from the mole, see the fixed, rigid expression into which her sharp features had congealed.

  Suddenly she whirled on her heel and left, pulling the door shut behind her. I yelled at her, tried to stand up—and fell. My legs wouldn't support me and my sight was blurring.

  I was sprawled on my back, still clutching the gun but with my arm against the floor at my side, my finger curled around the .38's trigger. Wolfe was beyond the desk and I couldn't see him. I didn't even know if I could stand, and as I started to try getting up I changed my mind, and lay quietly with my eyes almost closed. In a moment, looking from under my lids, I saw Wolfe stand, his face seeming to swell like a balloon and get small again. He looked at me, then went across the room to a cabinet against the wall, opened it, took something out, and fumbled with it. Then he walked toward me.

  His figure shifted and blurred, and then he was over me, bending down, and I saw a hypodermic syringe in his hand, saw a drop of fluid that formed and dropped from the needle's slanted hollow tip.

  I tried to bring the gun up toward him but wasn't even sure my arm was moving. But I saw his expression change, heard him shout. I forced myself to squeeze the muscles of my right hand together, felt my index finger tug at the revolver's trigger, and heard the boom of the gun.

  His body jerked. His mouth was wide and I heard the high sound he made. The syringe dropped from his hand and I tried to get off my back, the gun held before me, pointing toward him. I rolled onto my left elbow, darkness gathering, but I could see him as he fell, his head noiselessly striking the carpeted floor. With the last of my strength I crawled closer to him, forced my right arm forward until the muzzle of my gun rested against his skull.

  Then I couldn't see him. I was looking into a thickening darkness; but I heard a soft report as I squeezed the trigger, felt the slow, gentle recoil of the gun in my hand. Then darkness grew, turned to blackness.

  Chapter Nine

  Suddenly the light was blinding. It slammed into my eyes painfully, and I squeezed them shut, opened them slowly, then started to shade them with my right hand. My left hand moved, tugged by the other one. I stared at metal handcuffs on my wrists, then looked around the room.

  I was still in Wolfe's office, seated in a leather-covered chair—but now I saw two uniformed policemen, who must have come out from nearby Raleigh. One of them, a fat, flabby-faced sergeant with a big red-veined nose, squatted on the floor near me; I could smell whisky on his breath. The other, a patrolman, leaned against the wall near the door, a short cigar clamped between his teeth.

  "He'll be all right for a while, Sergeant Meadows."

  It was a woman speaking on my left, and I glanced around to see, still in her white uniform, the lovely Lyn. She turned from the sergeant squatting before me and stared at my face. I looked over my shoulder, but Dr. Wolfe's body had already been taken out. Stains on the carpet, though, showed where he had been.

  "Yeah," the sergeant said, his voice twanging nasally, "he's gone. Only he didn't walk out." He glanced questioningly up at Lyn and asked, "This goofball know what I'm talking about?"

  "I imagine he does." A note of annoyance was in her voice.

  "Wait a minute," I said to her. "Of course I know . . . Oh, Lord." I had just realized she'd hardly be thinking of me as a highly stable personality. Her first glimpse of me had been when I was playing catch with that eight ball, then with the fake Dr. Nichols, and next in a strait jacket. And a little while ago she must have spotted the escaped nut lying alongside Wolfe's body. I said, "You may find this a bit difficult to grasp at first, but I'm not crazy."

  The sergeant spoke to me as if I were a small, retarded child. The whisky on his breath sickened me. He sickened me.

  "You want to tell us what happened?" he asked.

  "I'd like to. There's quite a bit to explain."

  He smirked and glanced over his shoulder at the patrolman, who shrugged and shifted the cigar to the other side of his wide mouth. Sergeant Meadows turned to me and asked softly, "You know who you are?"

  "Oh, for God's sake. Of course I know who I am. I'm Shell Scott—and I'm quite sane, Sergeant. So you can forget the baby talk."

  "Sure," he said soothingly. "Sure. Suppose you tell me the whole thing, Scott."

  I started with my arrival at Greenhaven, but after the second sentence I knew he was only half listening. So I spoke directly to Lyn, hoping I could at least convince her. She kept on looking sweet, lovely, attentive, and unconvinced. A few times she did frown, and press white teeth into her lower lip, but that was all.

  After a couple of minutes the patrolman leaning against the wall said around his cigar, "This one's really gone, ain't he? If this ain't the craziest story I ever heard, then I'm balmy muhself." He laughed, and Meadows laughed. Lyn didn't. I didn't.

  The two slobs traded a few sentences that they must have thought funny, judging by their hilarity; then Meadows looked at me, still highly amused.

  "That's exactly how it happened, huh? Self-defense? You were fighting off an attack from a needle?" He chuckled.

  I said as levelly as I could, "That's exactly it. As well as I can remember. Some of it's a little hazy because I . . ." The two cops were exchanging knowing glances. I said to Lyn, "Miss, they aren't listening, but you are. Don't I sound lucid, normal?" I stopped. "Incidentally, how come I'm OK now?" I glanced at my watch; it wasn't even one o'clock and it was still night outside.

  She frowned slightly and said, "I gave you an intravenal injection, Mr. Scott. A stimulant. We couldn't awaken you, and the officers wanted to talk to you. The sergeant insisted. When it wears off, you'll feel worse than if I hadn't given it to you."

  "You mean I can feel worse? Before I get out of here I'll be some kind of addict."

  Meadows took Lyn outside and after a bit I heard him say, "Skeezo what? Frantic?" They talked another minute, Meadows asking stupid questions, then came back.

  I said to Lyn, "Listen, there's proof that Wolfe was going to squirt something into me. His hypodermic syringe was on the floor where he fell. You must have seen that when you found me."

  She shook her head. "There wasn't any syringe on the floor."

  "There must have been." She didn't say anything. I looked around and saw the water carafe on Wolfe's desk.

  "That water bottle," I said. "I told you he drugged me. Check it. You'll find some kind of drug in the water. That will prove it."

  Lyn asked softly, "What would that prove, Mr. Scott?"

  And then I realized it wouldn't prove anything at all, just that Wolfe had sensibly attempted to subdue a maniac who was running around loose. Lyn stood near the chair, looking at me. She wasn't much taller standing up than I was sitting down, maybe five-two, and those dark eyes were a warm velvety brown; the long thick hair wasn't a fiery red, but more a soft darkness with a hint of redness in it.

  Meadows and the patrolman had understandably spent almost as much time looking at her as at me, but now Meadows got up off his haunches and said, "Let's go, Scott."

  That "Let's go" startled me. I knew what it meant if they took me to jail, to a cell in Raleigh. Even now, right here where it had happened, nobody believed I hadn't murdered Wolfe, either in babbling insanity or after cold premeditation. The bald statement that I'd killed him in self-defense would sound ludicrous to anyone else. It almost sounded that way to me, now.

  I looked at Lyn again. "I tell you, Wolfe dropped that syringe in here. Just a few seconds before . . . I shot him, he got it out of some kind of cabinet." I looked along the wall, sa
w it. "That one, I guess. He took the syringe out, then filled it with something, I think."

  She glanced at the officers, then at me. She went to the cabinet, took some keys from her pocket, and selected one. She opened the cabinet and picked up a small black case, opened it.

  Three syringes were inside it, and there were no empty spaces. "I'm sorry," she said softly. "Don't you think you might have imagined it?"

  I licked my lips and they were dry. Pain started throbbing in my head. "No," I said. "No, I didn't imagine it. Damn it, I know it happened. Are you all lying? What the hell is this?" I swallowed. "Somebody must have come in before you did, picked the thing up and put it into the case, put the case back. Dixon. Does she work for Wolfe?"

  "Yes."

  "Talk to her. She must have done it. She was in with him."

  I stopped and it was quiet. The two cops looked amused. Sergeant Meadows scratched his thigh. "Guess this does it, Al," he said to the patrolman.

  I said, "It's true. It had to happen that way."

  Meadows said, "Come on, let's get out of here." Al walked toward me. A pulse started beating heavily in my temples.

  "I know it's hard to swallow all at once," I said rapidly, "but that's the way it happened. Look, I talked with Mr. Hunt just before I ran into Wolfe in the hall. He can tell you what we talked about, and that I was normal."

  She asked me what room he'd been in and I told her. She went out, and came back in a minute. "There isn't anybody there," she said. "The bed is rumpled, but that's all."

  "This Hunt," Meadows said slowly, for the first time seeming to show some interest. "Who is he? What's he look like? How'll we recognize him if we see him?"

  "Randolph Hunt. Find him and talk to him. For all I know, he's still here somewhere. And you couldn't miss him. He'll be wearing a yellow shirt with roosters on it, and a white coat, and a black Homburg. And . . . Oh, nuts. The hell with it."

  It was not only that Meadows and Al were about to fall down and roll around on the floor holding their sides, but that I was starting to wonder if this could really have happened. Could I have had a Technicolor dream? I realized now that Meadows had just been fishing for a laugh, and he'd got it. He was having a real belly laugh now, his breath spraying me.