David Alexander - Masters of Noir - Volume 2

To my drunken eyes, Marge was a shapeless bundle in an old gray wrapper with a pale face and toothless mouth and clouded eyes and wild white hair. She looked like she must be about a hundred. She hobbled slowly toward the kitchen. She walked as stiff as the old dog.

Finally she saw the dog lying there and she let out a bloodcurdling scream, the most awful sound I ever heard. “He’s dead!” she shrieked. “He’s dead!”

The doc said nothing. He just sat there looking kind of interested, like one of those scientists who do things to white mice.

I couldn’t say anything, either. I was too stupefied.

Marge’s scream changed to a kind of gurgling in her throat. Her face started turning black, right there in front of my eyes, like she was choking to death. Then she crumpled to the floor, real slow, like one of those trick motion pictures you’ve seen.

I’ve lived rough and I’ve seen some things but that was the most horrible thing I ever saw. Between the booze and the shock I couldn’t move. Not for several minutes. I just sat there with my mouth open, kind of gasping.

The doc kneeled down beside the old woman and felt her pulse. Then he went into his room and got a stethoscope and listened to her chest. Finally he got up, cool as you please, and said, “She’s dead. The shock was too much, seeing the dog like that. I’ll have to call a doctor to issue a death certificate. And then the undertaker.”

He noticed the old dog, still stiff there on his back, and grinned. He snapped his fingers, said, “It’s all right now, Pasteur. You did the trick just fine.”

He said to me, “You’re sober enough to know what you just saw. A perfectly natural death. An old woman with a heart ailment. She came out here and keeled over with a stroke, a heart attack.”

The old dog finally scrambled to his feet. And I came to life, too. I swung one at the doc. I was so drunk and weak I couldn’t have hurt a healthy fly, but it was a fluke punch and it landed right on the point of doc’s chin, the button. He went down and his head banged hard. He lay there with his eyes staring up at me and they looked as sightless as the old dog’s eyes.

It’s hard to say why I swung at him. It wasn’t feeling sorry for the old woman made me do it. In a way, her dying was what they call euthanasia, mercy killing. But when I was a kid back in Ohio I had a dog. It was a little fox terrier named Spot. I guess Spot was the only living thing I ever cared much about. I cried my eyes out when he died. I remember that, all right.

What I did next was pure instinct. I stuck the fifth of wine in my pocket. I figured I was going to need it. I’d seen the doc had bills left from his relief check when he paid for the liquor. He’d had them in an old wallet in the inside pocket of his coat. I bent down and got the wallet.

I guess the doc had a weak heart, too. Anyway, when I leaned down to get the wallet my hand was up against his chest. And his heart wasn’t beating. I wonder who’s going to get the old doll’s insurance money. You can buy all the Sneaky Pete on the Bowery with two grand in your jeans.

I picked the old dog up in my arms. He was heavy, but I ran down four flights of steps with him. I brought the old dog here. He’s right alongside me now. The dog and the bottle. I had to give the clerk downstairs $5.75 of the doc’s money for this cubbyhole I’m in. Six bits for the room rent and five bucks bribe for letting me bring the dog up. I guess you could get a big room in the Waldorf-Astoria for that kind of money, but maybe they don’t take dogs and winos.

I don’t know what I’m going to do about the dog. Maybe I can give him to some home for dogs like the SPCA runs. I don’t understand at all why I took the dog in the first place, any more than I understand why I hit the doc. Maybe it was because I remembered my own dog, Spot. Maybe it was because I was afraid the blind and helpless dog would starve to death if I left him up there in the room with two people who couldn’t feed him.

Mostly, though, I think it’s just that I want to try to make it up to the poor old dog for what the doc did to him. People like the doc and the old doll, Marge, and me don’t count. We stumbled over something a long time ago and we took the wrong turn and landed on a street called Skid Row. The doc and the old doll are dead anyway. I’m still young and if it was only the booze with me, maybe I could join Alcoholics Anonymous or something and start all over again. But a city croaker told me some time back that this thing I got in my throat that keeps me from taking big swallows is going to kill me pretty soon, booze or no booze.

But the dog, he’s different. All he ever wanted to do was please the doc and this old doll. He’s old and crippled and blind and he’s got sores on him and he hurts all over, but he kept right on trying to please the doc and the old doll by sitting up on his rump and doing tricks for them.

So I say it’s not right what the doc did to the old dog.

He made the dog a murderer, that’s what he did.

He’s crazy!” she said. “Stark, raving mad! How can they let such a man be a private detective? I never saw anybody act like him in all my life. Why, it’s ridiculous! He simply hasn’t got all his buttons. Do you know what he did, Mr. Jordan?”

“What did he do?”

“He made faces at me and told me to go home.” She expelled a short gasp of utter frustration.

“Please, Mrs. Denney,” I said, “try to relax.”

“Relax?” Her voice went up a full octave. “How can I after talking to such a lunatic?”

What she needed was a shot of brandy to quiet her nerves. I reached behind me into the telephone table and got out the office bottle and poured. “Say when.” But she seemed to have lost her voice, or else she was very thirsty, because I had to quit pouring in order to save my good Napoleon brandy from slopping over the rim of the glass onto the lap of my gray tweed pants.

She drank it like water, with no perceptible effect. Her nostrils were still distended, her bosom continued to heave, and she couldn’t find a comfortable spot in the red leather client’s chair. She had walked unannounced into my office ten minutes before. Her name was Grace Denney and she was married, which seemed a bit unfair, since an architectural design like hers isn’t constructed every day and ought not to be taken out of circulation, though I couldn’t blame any man for wanting an exclusive on it.

She was tall, a lithe, sleek, supple item, slender at the hips, rising like an hourglass to emerge burstingly from the square-cut neckline of a simple dress, wondrously and sumptuously assembled. When you came to her face, reluctantly, you saw luminous brown eyes and cherry-red lips, full and shining. From Cleopatra on down, she had them all stopped. Whatever you might need, wherever you were, she had it, in spades. It made no difference, your age or your physical condition, here was a girl who could put spring in an old man’s legs and fire in a young man’s blood.

Emotional pressure had made her story a little disjointed. I had gathered only that she was from California, that she had written to a private detective named Lester Britt, asking him to find out why an aunt of hers never answered any letters, that she had arrived yesterday, paid a visit on Mr. Britt, and found his behavior most unorthodox, to say the least.

The brandy, I saw, was beginning to work. She settled back in the chair, breathing easier.

“That’s better,” I said. “Now, Mrs. Denney, let’s get the facts untangled. This aunt of yours, tell me about her.”

She moistened her lips. “Aunt Paula. Mrs. Paula Larsen. She’s a widow, about eighty, I’d say, maybe more. She lives at the Vandam Nursing Home on Long Island.”