David Alexander - Masters of Noir - Volume 2

He was pretty drunk. He winked at me. “I’m a doctor,” he said. “I know. I know the signs.” Then he kind of bit his lips with his wine-stained teeth and said, “There’s a friend of mine with the city relief agency. He always tips me off when investigators are coming around. They’d cut me off the relief rolls if they knew I had Marge up there with me. You’re not allowed to keep another person in the place they rent for you. Up to now I’ve always got her out in time when the investigator was paying me a call. Parked her in a gin mill and hid what rags she’s got and got rid of all the empties. But now she’s going blind and almost paralyzed, I can’t get her down the steps. And I’ve been tipped off the investigator is coming around tomorrow. I can’t lose that relief.” He drew himself up straight, said, “I’m too much of a gentleman to brace men on the street for my flop and booze money.”

The blockbusters he’d bought had really busted inside me now and made me kind of cocky. Besides, it made me sore, him throwing off like that on guys who brace marks on the street. After all, he was just another wino himself. I should have strung him along, of course, since he was buying and I was needing. But I said, “Look here, Doc, you trying to tell me you’re going to bump this old doll today so you can collect her insurance money and this investigator won’t find her in your pad?”

“That’s fantastic,” he replied. “I couldn’t harm a hair of her poor old head. Why, I’m the one who’s kept her alive as long as this. But I’m a doctor and I know she’s dying, and since she’s dying I might as well see the undertaker gets her out before the relief investigator arrives.”

He looked me full in the face. “That’s only common sense,” he said. “And I’ll give her a nice funeral on the insurance money, too.”

I was still talking against my own best interests, my best interests being for him to keep hanging around and buying me blockbusters. But I was getting tight and I said, “If you think she’s dying why aren’t you up there with her?”

He said, very serious, “You’ve got a point. A telling point. Fact is, I don’t want to be alone with her when she dies, Jack. I’m a drunk. I might get the horrors. You could do me a favor, Jack.”

Uh-uh, I thought, here it comes. I’m old enough to know guys don’t buy you three blockbusters in a row without expecting something. Usually with guys like me who are big and young and kind of rough, it’s the fags slumming on Skid Row who make the propositions. Sometimes they only want you to come up to their fancy Park Avenue apartments and beat the holy hell out of them. That’s a funny kind of kick, you ask me. But this guy wasn’t gay and he wasn’t any slummer. He was a wino who belonged right where he was — on the Bowery.

He was saying, “I’d appreciate it a lot if you’d come up with me, Jack. We can pick up some bottles of wine on the way. Enough to last all day. I’d like you to be there when she dies, just so I could have a little company. A man needs a friend at a time like that.”

It’s funny the things an alky will do to get the stuff. I knew damned well he was framing me somehow and I thought he might be planning murder, but all I was thinking about was those bottles of wine he was going to buy.

I said, “Well, maybe if I could have another blockbuster first. It’s quite a walk.”

“Sure,” said the doc. “Put two ryes in my friend’s sherry this time, bartender.”

The Bowery is used to sights, but the procession we made on our way to Hester Street was one that attracted attention. The blind old dog could hardly walk at all and he moved along in his zombie fashion putting one stiff leg out in front of the other, his nose scraping the sidewalk like a bloodhound on the scent. The hangover and four blockbusters, including a double, had made my own legs wobbly. And the doc was glaze-eyed drunk and stared straight ahead like he was hypnotized. We stopped at a liquor store and bought half a gallon jug of wine plus an extra fifth, just in case the old lady didn’t die right away and we might need it. There were several flights of steps to climb in doc’s tenement, but we didn’t mind ‘em too much because we stopped on each landing and had ourselves a snort. I carried the jugs and the doc carried the blind and crippled old dog upstairs.

The doc’s flat was a railroad, three tiny rooms in a row. The first one was the kitchen with an oil stove and a sink and an old fashioned ice box and a table and some chairs in it. The second was the doc’s bedroom. The door to the third was closed. The place was pretty bare and was furnished with stuff from junk shops, but the doc had kept it neat and clean. I guess it was his hospital training. Most drunks like doc are pretty messy.

The doc told me to sit down in the kitchen. He left the jug and the dog with me. Then he tiptoed to the old lady’s room, the closed one, and opened the door. He came back in a minute or two. He put a finger to his mouth and said, “She’s asleep now.” But he didn’t close her door.

We sat in the kitchen drinking wine and talking about this and that and once or twice I nodded off and put my arms on the kitchen table and slept maybe an hour or more. Every time I woke up the doc was there. He was one of those winos that seems to drink himself sober. Each time he’d tell me the old doll was still sleeping. The old dog would be sleeping, too, snoring loud.

Once I woke up and saw there was hardly a drink left in the half-gallon jug and that we’d have to start on the fifth if the old lady didn’t die pretty soon. I figured the vino wasn’t lasting as long as the doc had thought it would till I looked out the window and saw it was dark. We’d got to the flat before noon. Now it was night already. A drunk sure loses track of time, sleeping and waking up like I’d been doing.

The doc looked worried. He said, “It’s getting late and the investigator comes tomorrow. I’ve got to get old Marge out of here.”

I was rumdumb and stary-eyed and the nasty part of sitting there and drinking and waiting for a sick old woman to die didn’t mean a thing to me. I was only worried if the wine would last. I said, “You mean she’s already dead and the undertaker hasn’t come to get her?”

He shook his head. “No,” he said. “She hasn’t died. Not yet, she hasn’t.”

Then he went over and shook the old blind dog named Pasteur and woke him up. He said sharply, “Come on, Pasteur. We’re going to show old Marge the new trick that you’ve learned.”

Like I say, I was rumdumb and stary-eyed and my brain was numb from the blockbusters and the Pete and I just sat there grinning like a halfwit, not realizing what the hell he was up to.

“Play dead, Pasteur! Play dead!” he said.

The poor old dog got down on his side and after a few painful tries he rolled over on his back and lay there with his stiff legs stuck up in the air and the milky cataracts over his eyes glowing in the ceiling light. The doc had told me all about the old doll identifying herself with the dog, but I was so drunk, I’d forgotten.

The doc had an old-fashioned battery radio in the kitchen in one of those dome-shaped stained-wood cabinets. He turned a dial. For a minute nothing happened. Then there was the most God-awful blast of shrieking sound I ever heard in all my life. I jumped half-way to the ceiling. He grinned at me, turned off the radio, said, “You’re nervous, Jack. You need a drink. The radio always does that when you first turn it on. I wanted to show you how well-trained the dog is. He hasn’t even twitched. You can’t even see him breathing. An atom bomb could go off and he wouldn’t move until I snap my fingers.”

The old dog hadn’t moved. He still looked about as dead as any dead thing I ever saw. But the sudden blast of noise had awakened the old woman. She was calling to him in a croaking voice. The doc said, “Come out here, Marge, and take a look at poor old Pasteur.”