The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction (81 page)

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 to.

“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.

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, like 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.

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 beside 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.

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.”

After that I stopped sneering. I stopped saying anything. And by morning they let me go.

Before I left, I asked a question. I was told Oscar had been released a couple of hours before.

I made my way home and Stella was waiting and I reached for her.

But there was no rest for my weariness against her cuddly body. She told me Oscar had been here looking for me with a gun.

“When was this?”

“Half an hour ago,” she said. “He looked like a wild man. I’d never seen him like that. He was waving a gun. He said you’d beaten up Abby and he was going to kill you. Honey, did you really beat her up?”

I had taken my jacket off. I put it on.

Stella watched me wide-eyed. “If you’re running away, take me with you.”

“I’m not running,” I said.

“But you can’t stay. He said he’d be back.”

“Did he?” I said hollowly.

I got my gun from where I’d stashed it and checked the magazine and stuck the gun into my jacket pocket.

She ran to me. “What are you going to do? What’s going on? Why don’t you tell me anything?”

I said, “I don’t want to die,” and pushed her away from me.

I went only as far as the top of the stoop and waited there, leaning against the side of the doorway. I could watch both directions of the cheerful sun-washed street, and it wasn’t long before Oscar appeared.

He looked worse than he had yesterday afternoon. His unshaven face was like a skeleton head. There was a scarecrow limpness about his lean body. All that seemed to keep him going was his urge to kill me.

Maybe if I were living with Abby, had her to love and to hold, I wouldn’t give a damn what suspicions I had about her and what facts there were to back them up. I’d deny anything but my need for her body, and I’d be gunning for whoever had marred that lovely face.

I knew there was no use talking to him. I had seen Oscar Trotter in action before, and I knew there was only one thing that would stop him.

I walked down the steps with my right hand in my pocket. Oscar had both hands in his pockets. He didn’t check his stride. He said, “Johnny, I—”