by Otto Penzler
“You must be coming down with a cold,” I said.
She wobbled when we got out of the hack and she held her throat. I had to half-carry her up the steps of the brownstone house and into our room. As I turned from her to switch on the light, she moaned, “Johnny!” and she was doubled over, clutching at her stomach.
For the next hour I had my hands full with her. She seemed to be having quite an attack of indigestion. I undressed her and put her to bed and piled blankets on her because she couldn’t stop shivering. I found baking soda in the kitchen and fed her a spoonful and made tea for her. The cramps tapered off and so did the burning in her throat.
“Something I ate,” she said as she lay huddled under the blankets. “But what? We didn’t have anything for dinner that could hurt us. How do you feel, honey?”
“Fine.”
“I don’t understand it. That Abby didn’t serve anything to speak of. Nothing but some chopped liver and—” She paused. “Honey, did you have the liver?”
“No. I can’t stand the stuff.”
“Then it was the liver. Something wrong with it. Call up Oscar and see if the others are all right.”
I dialed his number. Oscar answered after the bell had rung for some time. His voice sounded weak.
“How are you over there?” I asked.
“Terrible. All four of us sick as dogs. And you?”
“I’m all right, but Stella has indigestion. We figure it was the chopped liver because that was the one thing she ate that I didn’t.”
“Could be,” Oscar said. “Georgie seems to be in the worst shape; he’s sleeping it off in the spare room. Tiny left a short time ago. Abby’s in bed, and that’s where I’ll be in another minute. What bothers me most is a burning in my throat.”
“Stella complained of the same thing. First I ever heard of indigestion making your throat burn.”
“All I know,” Oscar said, “is that whatever it is I have plenty of company in my misery. Abby is calling me.”
He hung up.
I told Stella what he’d said. “The liver,” she murmured and turned on her side.
That was at around one o’clock. At three-thirty a bell jarred me awake. I slipped out of bed and staggered across the room to the phone.
“I need you at once,” Oscar said over the wire.
“Do you feel worse?”
“About the same. But Georgie has become a problem.”
“Is he that bad?”
“Uh-huh. He went and died on my hands. I need your help, Johnny.”
11
Georgie lay face-down on the bed in the guest room. He was fully dressed except for his shoes.
“Tiny took him in here before he left,” Oscar told me. “After that I didn’t hear a sound out of Georgie. I assumed he was asleep. Probably he went into a coma and slipped off without waking. When I touched him half an hour ago, he was already cold.”
Oscar’s face was the color of old putty. He could hardly stand without clinging to the dresser. Abby hadn’t come out of the other bedroom.
I said, “Died of a bellyache? And so quickly?”
“I agree it must have been the chopped liver, which would make it ptomaine poisoning. But only Georgie ate enough of the liver to kill him. Abby says she remembers he gorged himself on it.” Oscar held his head. “One thing’s sure—he mustn’t be found here. Brant is enough trouble already.”
“This is plainly an accidental death.”
“Even so, the police will use it as an excuse to get as tough as they like with us. We can’t afford that, Johnny, so soon after the Coast City job. Best to get the body out.”
I looked him over. He didn’t seem in much better condition than the man on the bed.
“I can’t do it alone,” I said.
He dug his teeth into his lower lip and then fought to draw in his breath. “I’ll help you.”
But most of it had to fall on me. I fished car keys out of Georgie’s pocket and went looking for his Ford. I found it a block and a half up Riverside Drive and drove it around to the service entrance of the apartment building. At that late hour it was possible to park near where you wanted to.
Oscar was waiting for me on the living room sofa. He roused himself and together we got that inanimate weight that had been pot-bellied Georgie Ross down the three flights of fire stairs and, like a couple of men supporting a drunk, walked it between us out of the building and across the terribly open stretch of sidewalk and shoved it into the Ford. For all we could tell, nobody was around to see us.
That was about as far as Oscar could make it. He was practically out on his feet. I told him to go back upstairs and I got behind the wheel and drove off with Georgie slumped beside me like a man asleep.
On a street of dark warehouses over on the east side, I pulled the car over to the curb and got out and walked away.
Stella was up when I let myself in. She asked me if I’d gone to Oscar’s.
“I was worried about them,” I told her. “Tiny and Georgie left. Oscar and Abby are about in your shape. How’re you?”
“Better, though my stomach is very queazy.”
I lay in bed wondering what the odds were on chopped liver becoming contaminated and if a burning throat could possibly be a symptom of ptomaine poisoning. I watched daylight trickle into the room and listened to the sounds of traffic building up in the street, and I was scared the way one is in a nightmare, without quite knowing of what.
Eventually I slept. It was past noon when I woke and Stella was bustling about in the kitchen. She was pretty much recovered.
Toward evening I went out for a newspaper. When I returned, Brant was coming down the stoop. Being a cop, he wouldn’t have had trouble finding out where I’d moved too.
“Nice arrangement,” he commented. “You shack up with Oscar’s woman and Oscar with Wally Garden’s widow. This way nobody gets left out in the cold.”
“You running a gossip column now?” I growled.
“If I were, I’d print an item like this: How come Johnny Worth’s pals are getting themselves murdered one by one?”
I held onto myself. All I did was raise an eyebrow. “I don’t get it.”
“Haven’t you heard? George Ross was found dead this morning in his car parked near the East River Drive.”
He had already spoken to Stella, but I didn’t have to worry that she’d told him about last night’s party and who’d been there. She wouldn’t tell a cop anything about anything.
I said, “That’s too bad. Heart attack?”
“Arsenic.”
I wasn’t startled. Maybe, after all, it was no surprise to me. Arsenic, it seemed, was a poison that made your throat burn.
I lit a cigarette. Brant watched my hands. They were steady. I blew smoke at him. “Suicide, I suppose.”
“Why suicide?”
“It goes with poison.”
“Why would he want to die?”
“I hardly knew the guy,” I said.
“You’ve been seeing him. You were in a beer joint with him a week ago Wednesday.”
“Was I? Come to think of it, I dropped in for a beer and there were some guys I knew and I joined them.”
Brant took his pipe out of his fat face. “Two days later you and he were both in on that Coast City stickup.”
“Who says?”
A cop who was merely following a hunch didn’t bother me. We sparred with words, and at the end he sauntered off by himself. He hadn’t anything. He couldn’t even be sure that Georgie hadn’t been a suicide.
But I knew, didn’t I? I knew who had murdered him and had tried to murder all of us.
12
Oscar didn’t say hello to me. He opened the door of his apartment and just stood there holding onto the doorknob, and his eyes were sick and dull behind his glasses. Though it was after six o’clock, he was still in his pajamas. His robe was tied sloppily, hanging crooked and twisted on his long, lean body. He needed a shave. He looked, to put it mildly, l
ike hell.
I stepped into the foyer and moved on past him into the living room. He shambled after me.
I said, “I suppose Brant came to see you before he did me.”
“Yes.”
“So you know what killed Georgie.”
He nodded tiredly.
“Abby still in bed?” I asked.
“I made her dress and go to a doctor when I learned it was arsenic. Don’t want him coming here, not with the cops snooping. Whatever he gives her for it, I’ll take too.”
“Better not,” I said. “Likely she’ll mix more arsenic with it.”
Oscar took off his eyeglasses. “Explain that, Johnny.”
“I don’t have to. You know as well as I do why she put arsenic in the chopped liver.”
He stood swinging his glasses and saying nothing. He was not the man I had known up until the time I had left the party last night, and it was not so much because he was ill. It was as if a fire had burned out in him.
“Boy, did she sucker you!” I said. “Me too, I admit. But it was mostly our own fault. We knew she didn’t fall for your line that you hadn’t killed Wally. We kidded ourselves she’d be willing to forgive and forget if we paid her off. We wanted to believe that because we wanted her. Both of us did. Well, you got her. Or the other way around—she got you. She got you to bring her to live here where she could get all of us together and feed us arsenic.”
“No,” he mumbled. He looked up. “She ate the liver too. She’s been sick all night and all day. She’s still in a bad way even though she managed to get out of bed and dressed.”
“Huh! She had to put on an act.”
“No, I can tell. And she wouldn’t poison me. Look what she’d give up—this nice home, plenty of money. Why? For a stupid revenge? No. And she’s fond of me. Loves me, I’m sure. Always affectionate. A wonderful girl. Never knew anybody like her. So beautiful and warm.”
He was babbling. He was sick with something worse than poison, or with a different kind of poison. It was the sickness of sex or love or whatever you cared to call it, and it had clouded that brain that always before had known all the answers.
“Try to think,” I said. “Somebody put arsenic in the chopped liver. Who but Abby would have reason?”
“Somebody else.” That old twisted smile, which was not really a smile at all, appeared on his thin lips. “You, for instance,” he said softly.
“Me?”
“You,” he repeated. “You hate my guts for having gotten Abby. You hate her for being mine instead of yours.”
I said, “Does it make sense that I’d want to kill Georgie and Tiny and Stella also?”
“There was a guy put a time bomb on an airplane and blew a lot of people to hell because he wanted to murder his wife who was on the plane. Last night was your first chance to get at Abby and me—and what did you care what happened to the others?”
“My God, you’re so crazy over her you’d rather believe anything but the truth.”
“The truth?” he said and kept smiling that mirthless smile. “The truth is you’re the only one didn’t eat the liver.” He put on his glasses. “Now get out before I kill you.”
“Are you sure she’ll let you live that long?”
“Get out!”
I left. There was no use arguing with a mind in that state, and with Oscar it could be mighty dangerous besides.
The usual wind was sweeping up Riverside Drive. I stood on the sidewalk and thought of going home to eat and then I thought of Tiny. What had happened to him since he had left Oscar’s apartment last night and had dragged himself to his lonely little room? At the least I ought to look in on him.
I walked over to Broadway and took the subway downtown. I climbed two flights of narrow, smelly stairs in a tenement and pushed in an unlocked door. There was just that one crummy room and the narrow bed against the wall and Tiny lying in it on his back with a knife sticking out of his throat.
13
I must have expected something like this, which was why I’d come. There had been four of us involved in the killing of Wally Garden. Now only two of us were left.
I touched him. He wasn’t long dead; rigor mortis had not yet begun to set in. She had left her apartment on the excuse that she was going to a doctor and had come here instead.
There was no sign of a struggle. Tiny wouldn’t have suspected anything. Lying here sick and alone, he’d been glad to see her—to see anybody who would minister to him, but especially the boss’s lovely lady. She had bent over him to ask how he felt, and he must have been smiling up at that clean fresh young face when she had pushed the knife into his throat, and then she had quickly stepped back to avoid the spurting blood.
That was a switchblade knife, probably Tiny’s own, the knife Oscar had borrowed from him to kill Wally Garden. Which would make it grim justice, if you cared for that kind of justice when you also were slated to be on the receiving end.
I got out of there.
When I was in the street, I saw Brant. He was making the rounds of Georgie’s pals and he was up to Tiny. It was twilight and I managed to step into a doorway before he could spot me. He turned into the tenement I had just left.
—
I went into a ginmill for the drink I needed and had many drinks. But I didn’t get drunk. When I left a couple of hours later, my head was clear and the fear was still jittering in the pit of my stomach.
I’d never been much afraid of anybody, not even of Oscar, but I was afraid of Abby.
It was her life or ours. I had to convince Oscar of that. Likely he would see the light now that Tiny had been murdered too, because who but Abby had motive? If he refused to strangle her, I would, and be glad to do it, squeezing that lilywhite throat until the clear blue eyes bulged and the sweet face contorted.
I got out of a hack on Riverside Drive. The wind was still there. I huddled against it a moment and then went up to the apartment.
Abby answered the door. She wore a sleazy housecoat hugging that slender body of hers. She looked limp and haggard and upset.
“Johnny,” she said, touching my arm, “I’m glad you’re here. The police took Oscar away.”
“That so?” I stepped into the apartment.
She closed the door and tagged after me. “They wouldn’t tell why they took him away. Was it because of Georgie?”
“No. I guess they’re going to ask him how Tiny got a knife in his throat.”
Abby clutched her bosom—the kind of gesture an actress would make, and she was acting. “It couldn’t have been Oscar. He wasn’t out of the house.”
“But you were, weren’t you?” I grinned at her. “You got only one of us with the arsenic, so you’re using other methods, other weapons. Have you anything special planned for my death?”
She backed away from me. “You’re drunk. You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“You blame all four of us for Wally’s death. You’re out to make us pay for it.”
“Listen, Johnny!” She put out a hand to ward me off. “I didn’t care very much for Wally. When I married him, yes, but after a while he bored me. He was such a kid. He didn’t tell me a thing about the holdup. Not a word. All I found out about it was from the police, when they questioned me later. I heard your name and Oscar’s from that detective, Brant. So I tried to make some money on it. That’s all I was after—a little money.”
“You didn’t take the money. Instead you worked it so Oscar would bring you to live with him where you could get at all of us.”
“I like Oscar. Honest.”
“Don’t you mind sleeping with the man who killed your husband?”
She tossed her blonde hair. “I don’t believe he did. He’s so sweet. So kind.”
I hit her. I pushed my fist into her lying face. She’d meant death for Georgie and Tiny, and she would mean death for me unless I stopped her.
She bounced off a chair and fell to the floor and blood trickled from her mouth. I hadn’t come to hit her
but to strangle her. But something besides fear possessed me. Maybe, heaven help me, I was still jealous of Oscar. I swooped down on her and grabbed her by her housecoat and yanked her up to her feet. The housecoat came open. I shook her and her breasts bobbed crazily and I slapped her face until blood poured from her nose as well as her mouth.
Suddenly I let go of her. She sank to the floor, holding her bloody face and moaning. At no time had she screamed. Even while I was beating her, she’d had enough self-possession not to want to bring neighbors in on us. She started to sob.
I’d come to do more to her, to stop her once and for all. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I looked down at her sobbing at my feet, lying there slim and fair-haired, battered and bleeding, feminine and forlorn, and there was nothing but emptiness left in me.
After all, hadn’t we killed her husband? Not only Oscar, but Georgie and Tiny and I as well were in a community of guilt.
I turned and walked out of the apartment. I kept walking to the brownstone house, and there in the room Stella and I shared a couple of plainclothes men were waiting for me.
14
They grabbed me, and Stella rose from a chair and flung herself at me.
“Honey, are you in trouble?”
I said dully, “Not much with the cops,” and went with them.
For the rest of that night they sweated me in the station house. No doubt they had Oscar there too, but we didn’t see each other. They kept us apart.
Sometimes Brant was there, sucking his pipe as he watched the regular cops give me the business. There was no more fooling around. They still had questions about Wally and about Georgie, but mostly they wanted to know about the murder of my pal Tiny.
Once, exhausted by their nagging, I sneered at them like a defiant low-grade mug, “You’ll never get us.”
Brant stepped forward and took his pipe out of his mouth. “Maybe we won’t get you,” he said gently, “but somebody else is doing it. Three of you already.”
