John MacDonald - The Good Old Stuff

“Ask me, because I happen to have one. Something has been nibbling away at the back of my mind. Now I know what it is. If you want to hear it, suppose you tell me that you’ll take it as easy as you can on Mrs. Pell.”

“That isn’t my decision to make, Pell.”

“Then kindly go to hell. Every minute you stall, your friend is getting further away from here.”

That got him. He probably had superiors riding him. He licked his lips and looked almost human.

“I’ll see what I can do,” he said uneasily.

“Okay. Did you ever ask a conductor what time it is? He pulls out a big gold turnip and tells you it is three and a half minutes to eleven. I ask a conductor the time. He looked at a wristwatch and said it was almost eleven. And then I saw him walk right through your cute little cordon out there. Who looks twice at a conductor’s face? I can even tell you where the real conductor is. Knocked out, or dead, and locked in one of the Johns with his own keys.”

“I don’t suppose you’d know what he looked like?” Tomb-face asked, but gently this time.

“I’ve got a vague idea. Five nine or ten. Hundred and sixty pounds. Gray hair, possibly bald on top. Bright red cheeks, high cheekbones, very cold little blue eyes. Big yellow teeth that stick out, making him look like Barney the Beaver. A lot of black hair on the backs of his hands. A gold ring, I think. Deep voice. Some holes in the side of his neck where he’d been lanced once upon a time. The right side of the neck.”

“I didn’t see him on the trip,” Skipper said.

“You’ll probably find a porter that brought his meals to his compartment or bedroom.”

Tomb-face roared out of the car and lit running, bellowing, waving his arms.

“You surprise me, Simon,” Skipper said. “That was a nice job of identification.”

“It doesn’t surprise me as much as it would have a year ago. I’ve just had a lot of training in observation, Skipper.”

They found the conductor with a mild concussion. He had opened a John door and a citizen had yanked him in by the front of his conductor suit and thumped his head against the wall. In there with the conductor was a nice gray expensive suit with the pockets emptied and the label ripped out of it. In a bedroom they found a brown bag, topcoat, felt hat. The hat had been purchased in Los Angeles, the bag in Seattle, and the laundry marks on the shirts were traced to a San Francisco hotel.

Skipper kept me informed. I had to remain in Chicago. I was the guy who could make a positive identification, when and if they picked up our boy. Evidently Barney the Beaver had walked through the station and into a bottomless pit. The man they had been able to grab on the train was small fry, and he was not inclined to be talkative.

Yes, Skipper kept me informed. She let me hold her hand in the movies. The petaled eyes stared at me over the rims of cocktail glasses. Her stride was long beside me as we walked dark streets. She let me kiss her, and, unlike Marj, it wasn’t a tigress reaction. It was more like a kitten when you start to cuddle and then it takes a surprisingly sharp slash at you. We traded life histories, exchanged likes and dislikes, discovered a song that was “our song,” and all the rest of it. You can’t dress it up. It is common, ordinary, everyday falling in love. To the people involved it feels like it had never happened before to anyone in just that way.

Marj’s charms had been startlingly self-evident. But Skipper had a knack of creeping up on you. She would happen, by accident, to turn just so or stand in a certain way, and whoomp ! — there would be a line so breathtakingly lovely, so full of a soft and lingering promise, that it could make a bill collector weep.

Over 3 A.M. coffee in a bean wagon, I told her she better marry me. She was lifting her cup and it stopped in midair, wavered, and floated back down to the saucer. Her lips were the shape of your first game of post office.

“This is so sudden. Give me time to think it over... Okay, I’ve thought it over. Yes, Simon.”

The ham-handed counterman propped his chin on his fists and looked dreamy. “So lovely,” he purred. “Such a beautiful emotion, love.”

Coffee was on the house. Wedding present number one.

For three days I went around patting children on the head. Some of the hard-bitten Chicago tykes spat through a curled lip and said, “Go pat ya own head, ya creep.”

My phone rang beside my hotel bed in the middle of the night. “Simon, darling. I’m down in the lobby.”

“Check in with the house dick and come up.”

I had time to ice-water my face and belt myself into a robe and jam the ugly toeless foot stubs into the trick shoes before she came through the door I had opened for her.

I kissed her. “Aha! You are now in my powah, fair maid,” I said.

She didn’t smile. “Simon, I had to come and tell you this. I had to be the one to tell you. Dear Simon. I’ve been so jealous of her, of what she had of you and what she took away from you. Now I’m so ashamed.”

I stared at her, at tears she ignored. “You talking about Marj?”

“Get yourself a drink, Simon, and sit down.”

I obeyed orders. I slugged myself with a dollop of bourbon. I had the feeling I wasn’t going to like this.

I didn’t like it at all. Mrs. Pell, in the middle of the night, had taken her baggy gray prison dress and had ripped it into strips, woven the strips into a makeshift rope, fashioned a slipknot. Then she had soaked the rope so that the knot would slide tight. There being nothing in the cell she could hang herself to, she had merely put the noose around her neck, tied the free end to a bar of the cell door, then thrown herself backward. Apparently she had tried to change her mind later. She had clawed and torn her throat in the area of the wet knot, but it had buried itself too deeply.

I got up and walked to the windows, looking out, seeing nothing. I was remembering things. The position in which she always slept. Curled up, childish, seemingly innocent. Her passion for lizard shoes. Sound of her laughter. Her warm lips.

Though I had thought myself cured of her, some part of me died while I stood and looked out the windows at the sleeping city.

Incongruously, I remembered two marine sergeants who had hated each other with bloody fervor. Twice they had gone after each other with knives. No name was too foul to call the other. Fate had trapped them in the same outfit and kept them there. And then I had seen one of them by a swing bridge over a jungle river, crying like a child, vocalizing his sobs, staring at the mortar-smashed body of the other.

Skipper came up to me and put her hand on my shoulder. “Do you want me to stay for a while, Simon?”

“No, thanks. I’ll be okay in the morning. Thanks for telling me right away, Skip.”

“I love you, Simon. Remember that.”

“You’re my girl. That woman was a stranger. Someone I happened to know once upon a time.”

I smiled at her, but I guess the smile wasn’t too convincing. Maybe the ache and sense of loss was showing. Her tears had stopped and her smile was measured, precise, careful.

“Good night, Simon.”

I walked her to the door and opened it. Barney the Beaver slid in, kicked the door shut, and slid along the wall. His gun was aimed in exactly the right place to keep me from moving — right where Skipper’s high round hip curved into her slender waist.

“You’re the bright boy,” he said huskily.

“You’re looking a little shopworn,” I said. “Lost weight, haven’t you? Where have you been hiding? In the zoo with the rest of the beavers?”

“Pick the girl up. Go on. Pick her up.”

I did so. One arm under her knees, one arm under her shoulders, my left hand under her armpit where I could feel, against my fingers, the delicate rib cage, the hard ka-thud of her heart. It was a cute idea. She couldn’t do anything and neither could I. Unless I wanted to rush him, using her as a shield.