The Cocktail Waitress

by James M. Cain

But before I stepped out, he spoke again: “I know I don’t have to say this, but let me say it anyway. Don’t leave Hyattsville, Mrs. White. O.K.?”

  “Where would I go?” I said.

  “Anywhere. But don’t.”

  “Can you tell me what the reason is?”

  “We might need you here, for the inquiry.” That was all he said, but I could see in his eyes there was more he wasn’t saying.

  I went downstairs while Young and Church remained with the body. Araminta came in to the drawing room and I asked her to keep me company. Then Myra was there, and Leora, and we all four just sat there, not speaking. I started to talk, telling them I hadn’t made any plans, so I couldn’t speak of the future, but assured them that “whatever seems indicated,” I would deal decently by them, and help them find other work. They were quite sweet and understanding. Then the bell rang, and Church came down to let them in. Two men were there with a stretcher. They asked for the death certificate, and Church handed it over to them. Then Earl was going out, of the house, of this world, of my life.

  This time it was I, not Ethel, who was calling the undertaker, or funeral director, as they now seem to be known. I called the same one, and a girl was on night duty. She said she’d contact the police the next afternoon to inquire about releasing the body. She thought it would take that long for the autopsy to be completed.

  It was, as I’ve said, Friday night, and no funerals are held Saturday or Sunday, so the service would have to wait until Monday. Plenty went on over the weekend, however. Both newspapers called on Saturday morning, the Post and the Star, on the basis of the death certificate, which it seems they get automatically. They asked me about the circumstances of the death, but they didn’t seem to have heard too much yet, since they accepted my simplest answers and didn’t press for more. They also asked about Earl’s business, the one started by his grandfather and continued by his father—who would carry on now, they wanted to know. I hadn’t the faintest idea, but realized, with butterflies in my stomach, that I might have to make the decision.

  By the time the afternoon editions came out with the story in them, the lawyer had come, Bill Dennison, flying down from New York with the will, the one Earl had drawn just a short time before, which left everything to me, except for some small bequests to the household staff and some to the people in Earl’s office—$2,500 to his secretary, and $1,000 each to the others, about a dozen in all. By the time I’d read all this and had some parts explained to me by Bill, I was getting dizzy. But more people kept coming, most of them strangers to me, but some of them friends, like Jake, Bianca, and at last Liz, who I craved to see most of all—not counting Tom, who did not show. I begged Liz to stay, to spend the night, to see me through what was getting to be an ordeal, but she couldn’t, having to work. While she was there Mr. Garrick rang the bell. He was the undertaker, and of course had to go over such things as the casket, the number of limousines, and the time of the funeral. He seemed to know about the White funeral plot. So, I chose a mahogany casket, the urn, after cremation, to be placed inside it, and on his suggestion, set twelve noon on Monday as the time of the funeral. He suggested his chapel for the services, and the Rev. Archibald Fisher as the minister. “He was Mr. White’s rector, and I think would be indicated.” I accepted all his suggestions, ordered four limousines, “just in case,” and then accepted his suggestion that he send one more car, just for me. “One of my men, of course, will take you over—and be at your disposal in case something comes up.”

  “It’s on the air,” said Araminta, coming in right after he left. “Mr. Wilcox, he act like it was his brother.”

  “You mean, the radio?”

  “Yes’m.”

  As Ethel kept hers on all the time I knew she must have it by now— the death, I mean. I wondered what I would say when she called. I found it was one thing I did not have to worry about. She didn’t call.

  By nightfall Saturday I’d had it, and thought I would go insane if I didn’t get some peace. Suddenly I told Araminta I was going out, not to bother with dinner for me. I picked up a coat, went out, got in the car and drove to the Garden. I got there before the dinner rush started, so I could grab my regular table, and Liz was terribly sweet. She kept company, standing near whenever she could, meaning whenever she had a minute. She wouldn’t hear of my going out in the kitchen, but brought me my dinner right there, with knife, fork, spoon, and napkin. I had steak, and was surprised to find out I was hungry. Then I realized I hadn’t eaten since breakfast.

  Next day was Sunday, and when I answered the bell three people were there, a man and two women. I instinctively knew who they were, and as a matter of fact had been expecting them as soon as the story of Earl’s death had made the papers. I asked them in, offered them tea, which they didn’t take, and water, which the two women did. Then the man said: “Mrs. White, my name is Olson, and these ladies are my sisters, Mrs. Hines and Mrs. Wilson. Our mother was the first Mrs. Earl K. White, and we’ve come to find out if he did what he said he would do, make provision for us in his will, so we come into our proper inheritance, the money our mother left us, which he got from her by a trick, then told us he didn’t mean to help during his lifetime, ‘you’ll have to wait till I die.’ So, we had to wait. And what we’ve come to find out, Mrs. White, is whether he made provision for us, in his will. Have you seen it, Mrs. White?”

  “Yes, so happens, I have.”

  “What does it say about us?”

  “Nothing. It leaves everything to me.”

  He got up and took his hat. “O.K., Mrs. White,” he told me, “you’ve been very pleasant to us, and perhaps don’t know the details of how Mr. White cheated us. We do, however. We’ve been getting the proof together, so you can expect a lawsuit, to be filed against you tomorrow. That will is going to be contested.”

  “That I seriously doubt.”

  “It will be. That’s a promise.”

  “Want to bet?”

  “You being funny or what?”

  I opened my bag which was on the sofa, took out a one dollar bill, pitched it down on the cocktail table, and said: “There’s a buck that says no suit is going to be filed.”

  “This isn’t a joking matter.”

  “Who’s joking?”

  Reaching into his pocket, he put a dollar beside my dollar.

  “O.K.,” I asked him, “how much did my husband owe you?”

  “… Well that I couldn’t say precisely without figuring up.”

  “Then figure.”

  “It would take me some little time.”

  “We have all day.”

  “Hey, wait a minute—”

  “For heaven’s sake, Vincent, she’s asked you how much—so, figure!”

  That was Mrs. Hines—so loud Araminta popped in, asking: “You need me, Miss Joan?”

  “No, Araminta. Thanks just the same.”

  She left, and when I turned back to my visitors they were huddled around the table, using it as a desk to write on a half-sheet of paper Mr. Olson had fished out of his pocket, taking down information from several documents he’d laid out in a neat row. At last he turned to me, saying: “By the bank statements she left, she turned over cash to him, our mother I’m talking about, four different amounts, one of fifty-two thousand dollars, one of thirty, one of seventy-five, and one of one hundred ninety-seven—three hundred and fifty-four in all, that she meant to leave her children, to be divided equally between us.”

  “And when was this?”

  “Our mother died six years ago.”

  “May I have the paper please?”

  I took the paper, turned it over, borrowed the ballpoint, and wrote $354,000. Then I multiplied by .06, and got $21,240. I did that five more times after adding $21,240 to $354,000, so I was figuring compound interest. After six years, it came to $502,155.77 and I asked them to check my arithmetic. Then I got my checkbook, for the joint account Earl had arranged with me, and wrote three checks for $167,385.26 each. It was almost al
l the money in the main account, and I could understand why Earl hadn’t done it sooner—the account probably hadn’t had enough in it until he’d sold that new partnership interest in his company, and afterwards he’d wanted to hold onto the money to cover the expense of raising Tad. Well, I would still have that expense, and others besides—but paying the amounts these three were owed was the right thing to do. They had been on my mind since the day Earl first told me about them, and I wanted to square things up.

  “You’ll just need to sign this to make it all legal,” I said, handing them, along with the three checks, a sheet of paper I’d asked Bill Dennison to prepare the day before. “I accept the amount presented herewith in settlement of all claims, past, current or future, against Joan White, the estate of Earl K. White, or any other,” it began, and went on in similar vein for the rest of the page. At the bottom were three lines for their signatures. One by one, they bent over the table and signed.

  On his way out, Mr. Olson all but kissed me, and both his sisters did. “Mrs. White,” he said, “you’re so decent, I don’t know what to say.” He turned back at the door. “You win your buck, of course.”

  “I said I wasn’t joking,” and smiled at him, the first honest smile I’d had since Earl’s death—and the last I’d have for some time.

  30

  Not an hour later, the bell rang again. I opened, and Sergeant Church was there, by himself this time. His expression wasn’t neutral any longer. “May I come in?”

  “… Of course.”

  He stepped inside and followed me to the drawing room. “Where’s your partner?” I asked as we went.

  “Not working today.”

  “But you are?”

  “It’s an important case.”

  “My husband’s death? Why?” He stopped in the doorway and took a moment just looking at me. It almost made me long for the other sort of look, as this one had no affection in it at all. “It’s important to me,” I said, “but why is it to you? The man was sick, his doctor told him this might happen—”

  “Were you pleased, Mrs. White, when it did?”

  “How can you ask that?”

  “Some women would be. If they were young and their husband old. If they were poor and their husband rich.”

  “How dare you—”

  “We completed the autopsy on your husband’s body,” he went on. He strolled over to the bookshelves and pushed the little rolling stairway back and forth, the one on which Earl had been standing when he’d had his attack. “Do you know what we found?”

  “How would I know what you found?”

  “… Would you like to know?”

  “Clearly you wish to tell me.”

  “Our chemists say they found a substance in his system called, hold on—” He took a card out of his jacket pocket and read from it. “—alpha—fatha—limido—gluta— I give up, Mrs. White. That’s why they’re chemists and I’m only a policeman. But they say they found this chemical in your husband’s body.”

  “So …?”

  “So, we called Dr. Jameson to ask him if he put it there, and he said no, not only didn’t he, but he never would, not with an angina patient like your husband was, because it not only doesn’t help angina, it makes angina worse. It can trigger attacks in some patients and makes the attacks more severe in almost all.”

  “Maybe he gave it by accident.”

  “That would be some accident, Mrs. White, like meaning to throw a drowning man a rope and throwing him a brick instead.”

  “Then my husband got it some other way. Maybe some other pill he took? One the other doctor prescribed?”

  “We thought of that possibility, but no—first of all, Dr. Cord denies prescribing it, for exactly the same reason Dr. Jameson gave, and second of all, there was residue of this chemical on the inside of the intravenous bottle and of the tube that connected it to your husband’s arm. It got in there somehow, and it wasn’t his doctor who put it there.”

  I sat down, though he remained standing. “I don’t know what you want me to say. I have no idea what was in those bottles. I didn’t like them, I wish Earl had never used them, but he did and that’s all I know.”

  “Maybe. Maybe so. But you have to admit it would have been convenient, if you had wanted your husband dead—”

  “I didn’t! Ask anyone. I saved his life, more than once, when he had attacks that might have killed him.”

  “—if, I say, if you wanted him dead, it would have been convenient to place this chemical in his medicine—”

  “How? Will you tell me that? It was a sealed sterile bottle, a sealed tube.”

  “With a syringe, Mrs. White, like the row of syringes that were sitting behind his chair. You dissolve this chemical in a little water, draw it up with a syringe, put a tiny hole in the rubber seal of the bottle and presto, you’ve laced his medicine with what for a man in his condition was pure poison. Then you let him exert himself with another woman while you’re conveniently away—”

  “My husband chose to exert himself, as you put it, it wasn’t a matter of me letting him. And as for the other—did you find the chemical in one of the syringes?”

  “No,” he conceded, “we did not. But of course we don’t know how many syringes there should have been. The syringe in question might simply have been disposed of after being used in this way.”

  I fought to control my temper, to keep from shouting at him. “And how would a person get her hands on this chemical? How would she even know what it would do? A person like me, I mean. I’m no more a chemist than you are.”

  “No, of course not. Why would you be. But—” He waved an arm at the bookshelf, with its tall narrow volumes. The one lent to Earl by Dr. Jameson was still there, the one he’d been reaching for the day of the attack. “—your husband seems to have been a reader, and a man who suffers from a terrible condition might be expected to devote some of his reading to articles about what treatments might make it better or worse. You might have found the information in one of these journals.”

  “You haven’t answered the first question. This alpha-fatha-ludo—I can’t even say it, much less know where to get it.”

  “Well, it might get easier if you asked for it under its common name, its trade name, if you will.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Thalidomide.”

  He must have seen the blood rush from my face. “What is it, Mrs. White? Do you know that drug?”

  “… I’ve heard of it.”

  “Heard of it, I see. Have you ever been prescribed it?”

  “No.”

  “Ever known anyone else who was?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

  “You’re not sure?”

  “How would I know?”

  “If we asked your co-workers at that restaurant, do you think we’d find that one of them has a prescription?”

  “I have no idea!”

  “We’ll just have to ask, then.”

  I exploded: “Ask all you want. You won’t find anything. Even if one of them has a prescription, she never shared it with me.” My brain, of course, was racing all the while, thinking of Hilda and the favor she’d done me, of this terrible coincidence and how it might put me in the electric chair. For of course I hadn’t crushed any of her pills and injected them into Earl’s intravenous solution—but if they found her somehow, in Texas, and she told them she’d given them to me—or if they found the remaining pills, which I’d kept in a cabinet upstairs—

  I realized after a moment that Private Church was saying something and apparently had been for some time, had repeated himself with no answer from me. “Do you hear me, Mrs. White?”

  “I’m sorry. I was just distracted a moment, thinking of all you’ve said.”

  “As you might be. Let me ask it again, then, now that I have your attention. I said, was your first husband on any medication?”

  I stood up then. I did more than that, I stepped forward until my face was no mor
e than an inch from his, though he was taller, and I had to tilt my head to look directly into his eyes. He took a step back and his hand found its way to his hip, where he wore his gun. “My first husband medicated himself with one thing only, and it came in something bigger than a pill bottle. He took it orally. You’ll find it on the shelf of any liquor store or bar, and it comes without a prescription. Side effects include dizziness, inability to perform sexually, and a tendency to beat the tar out of those you love. You can see my son’s x-rays if you think I’m making it up.”

  “We did see them, Mrs. White—a dislocated shoulder, if I remember correctly. Ample reason for you to leave your husband and to take your son with you. Or to go to the police and have him arrested for battery. But that’s not what happened, is it?”

  “You know what happened.”

  “I know he died. And I can’t help wondering if perhaps he had some help. Maybe some medication that would have made him sleepy behind the wheel? Something crushed up and added to that beer you said he kept yelling for you to bring him …?”

  “Get out of my house.”

  “Your house,” he said. “That didn’t take long, did it?”

  I stormed past him to the front door, threw it open and waited with one hand on the knob and the other on my hip. My heart was hammering and I didn’t trust myself to speak.

  He came forward, set his hat on his head, pulled his uniform jacket tighter around himself against the cold. His voice was quiet, calm and emotionless when he spoke. “You and I both know you killed your first husband, Mrs. White. We dug him up too late to find any traces, but that doesn’t mean you didn’t do it. You served him a drink that killed him, and now you’ve done it again, and this time I’m going to prove it, and you’re going to burn for it.”

  “Get out, you son of a bitch, get out!”

  I heard Araminta behind me, rushing toward the door, and from the direction of the dining room I saw Myra coming as well.

  Private Church tipped his hat. “Ma’am,” he said.

  31

  I asked Myra to draw me a bath, as hot as she could stand it when she put her hand in, and I lay back in it, crying, until the water cooled.