John MacDonald - The Good Old Stuff

“What did you do?”

“I met a man. I thought he was nice. He sent me to Juarez, and a Mexican gave me a package to bring back. He wouldn’t give it to me until I signed a receipt. I took the package back to the man, and he gave me five thousand dollars. They picked him up twenty minutes later.

“A month ago another man contacted me. He has the receipt I signed. He wants thirty thousand dollars for it. If I don’t give him the money, he’ll turn it over to the authorities and put them on me. I didn’t sign my right name. But the handwriting is mine, and the cops have my description. I told him he had to wait until you came back, when I could get the money from you.”

“What was in the package?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t try to kid me, Marj.”

“All right. It was heroin.”

“And you knew it in advance, before you went after the package.”

“No, I didn’t.’

“Keep lying, baby, and I won’t even give you the right time.”

“All right — so I knew what it was! But it meant five thousand dollars. That stinking allotment from you didn’t even buy cigarettes.”

“Anybody that gets messed up in a filthy business like that deserves to go to prison, Marj.”

She started to cry again. She covered her face and sobbed incoherently. “Work in prison laundry... starchy foods... come out when I’m an old woman...”

“Where does Hanneman fit?”

“He’s nothing. He’s just on the string. I can brush him any time.” She said it calmly, the tears gone.

“Why do you expect me to give you the money?”

“Because it is all your fault, Sim. If you hadn’t gone running off like a fool, I would have had enough money so I wouldn’t have gotten in a jam. Now you’ve got to get me out of it. You’ve got to!”

I pitied her. It wasn’t her fault she had been born this way. Marj grew up without the very essential knowledge of what is right and what is wrong.

“How much time have you got?”

“A week from today. He won’t give me any more time.”

“What am I supposed to get out of it?”

“I’ll do anything you want me to do. Anything, Sim.”

“There’s nothing you can do for me, Marj. When you cured me, you cured me for good. I really loved you. Seems funny as hell, now.”

“I wish I were back with you, Sim.”

“My friends miss you too.”

“Now you’re being cruel again. Please don’t be cruel, Sim. Give me the money. You have it. I know you have it.”

I sat and thought of all the times she had lied to me, her eyes bland and sweet and her mouth like an angel’s. Turnabout was fair play.

“I guess I’ve been kidding you along, Marj,” I said. “When I was ordered to active duty I liquidated my securities and put the whole works into irrevocable annuities. I couldn’t touch it if I wanted to.”

She looked at me. I saw her face change. First, incredulity. Then horrified belief. Then a fear that ripped through her like a rusty bayonet.

She stood up and reached blindly for the door. I said, “Let me know if they give you enough cigarettes while you’re doing time. I can afford that for old time’s sake.”

Marj went out and shut the door softly behind her. I looked at the door a long time. You think of some way to take revenge, and then you get your chance, and it leaves an evil taste in your mouth. I’d been a patsy for her, and now the situation was reversed. The saddle was strapped to her back now. And I had sharp spurs. Let her tremble. Let her eat dirt. Let her come out of the pokey with all the hopes and juices and muscled sheen dried up forever.

Serves her right, I said. But I knew that I couldn’t do it. I knew I was going to give her the money. Kiss it goodbye. I don’t know why I thought I owed her anything. On the other hand, maybe it was a good deal. In one year I’d make it back, once I got out from under that fifty-percent agreement.

Anyway, I could let her sweat it out until we arrived in New York. That would be time enough. I undressed and turned out the light and shoved the shade up. Starlight was bright, and I lay in the rattle-sway of the train, cradled in the night roar of wind and steel wheels. I like trains. I had told her I wouldn’t talk to her anywhere else.

I fumbled up out of sleep and snarled at the door. I wrapped myself in the sheet and, without turning the light back on, pushed the latch over. She came in with the recognizable perfume floating around her and shoved something toward me. “Take this, Sim.”

When awakening, I’m not at my best. I’m dull. I’ve got a reaction time like somebody in a morgue drawer. So I took it. It was sticky.

She shut the door with herself on the inside. I clamped the sheet with my arm, got the light on, and stared stupidly at what I was holding: a big fat switch knife with a six-inch blade. A blade that looked as though it had spent all day on the farm, butchering pigs.

I opened my hand. The knife fell out. I looked stupidly at the blood on my hand. And then I looked at Marj. She was the color of a skid-row handkerchief. Her eyes were holes in the side of the world, leading nowhere. She wore a blue something-or-other hung over her shoulders. Underneath the blue was black. Black lace and shiny black satin. She had blood on her hand, too. She was breathing fast and hard, putting considerable strain on the black lace.

I looked at the knife and then at her. “Who the hell did you kill?”

Her words were like moths trying to get out of a lampshade. “I didn’t kill anybody. Charles was in my compartment. I went down to the women’s room. When I came back, he was dead. I’ve got to get him out of there!”

“Complain to the conductor.”

“Hell with you, Sim. Now you’re in it too. You help me, or I say you came in and stabbed him. Jealous. Ex-husband. I’ll swear it on the stand, on a million Bibles. I’ll never change my story.”

“Who did it?”

“I don’t know who did it. Or why. I just know he’s there and he’s too heavy to lift.”

“So you came and gave me the knife. How sweet of you, darling!”

“I couldn’t take a chance on your saying no, Sim. Get him back in his place. Then we can put the knife back in him and get the blood off us.”

“Otherwise?”

“They’ll try to hang it on me, Sim. And I’ll tell them I saw you do it.”

It was nice and tight. A comfy fit. It was like a size fifteen collar on a size sixteen neck. A rope collar.

“You’re in the next car, aren’t you? Anybody see you come in here?”

There was triumph in her eyes. “I knew you’d help me. Nobody saw me.”

She scouted the corridor while I pulled on pants and a shirt and shoved my feet into the trick shoes. I wished very much that I hadn’t socked him in view of the whole lounge car. We went to her compartment in the far end of the next car toward the engine.

Charles Hanneman was exceedingly dead. He knelt beside the bed, chest and face flat against it, hands all tangled up in the blankets. The hole, like a wet coin slot, was on the left side of his back, just below the shoulder blade. Blood had run down his white shirt into the waistband of his trousers. Not much blood. I had recently seen some very messy bodies. This one had all its parts and did not bother me. And it didn’t seem to bother Marj.

“I’d hate to think you did this, Marj,” I said.

“I didn’t, if that makes any difference to you.”

“Where’s his place?”

“The second bedroom down the aisle.”

Hanneman’s suit coat was there. I worked his putty arms into the sleeves, rolled him onto his back onto the floor, and buttoned the coat in front.

“How do you want to do this?” she asked.

“I can manage him alone. Take a quick look and see if his bedroom is okay. Then come back and make like a guide.”