Max Collins - No Cure for Death

“Mr. Norman.”

“Yes, uh… Mallory, is it?”

“That’s right. Mr. Norman, a young woman named Janet Taber died the other day. Did you know that?”

His eyes became cloudy again, then immediately hardened. “Yes,” he said, “yes, of course, I mentioned that, didn’t I?”

“No, you didn’t… I…”

“Mallory. Mallory. You’re the one Stefan called about. He said I shouldn’t…” And he leaned over to the nightstand and pressed a white button.

I didn’t bother moving. Five seconds later the door opened behind me and I didn’t have to turn around to know there was a big black man back there waiting for me.

Harold Washington said, “I’ll make you a proposition.”

I was sitting on a couch next to Rita in her brother’s one-room living quarters on the lower floor of the Norman house. Rita didn’t seem angry with me, though she wasn’t pleased, either; apparently she felt my little whitey lie classified me more like kid-in-the-cookie-jar than Judas. I’d expected my confrontation with brother Harold to be rather on the short side; he’d show up and it would all be over but the shouting. Well, it wasn’t over and there wasn’t any shouting. He had quietly escorted me out of Simon Norman’s presence, down the stairs and into his room, where Rita was waiting. And now Harold Washington was politely asking me if he could make a proposition.

I shrugged. “Propose away.”

He said, “I have to go back up and give Mr. Norman his medication. If you’ll wait here while I do that, I’ll come back and answer some questions. Providing, of course, that you’re first willing to answer a few of mine.”

I managed to nod. Where was the cyclops-like, bus station brute of Tuesday past? Punjab, is that you, Punjab?

“Would you like me to bring you a cup of coffee when I return?”

I managed a second nod. What’d I do, knock human kindness into his head with that Pepsi bottle the other day?

“How do you like it?”

“Uh, black.”

“Rita?” he asked.

“Nothing, thanks,” she said. She seemed embarrassed, as if her brother’s kindness and instant unspoken forgiveness was far worse than a scolding.

“Okay,” he said, and he ambled out like a big tame bear.

I looked around the room, which was the reverse of the rest of the all-but-unfurnished house. The floor was carpeted in rich, wall-to-wall brown, and there was a large deep gold reclining chair next to the couch Rita and I were sitting on, with a coffee table between. From where I sat, the door was on my left and the wall surrounding it was the only one with its cream color nakedly showing. The wall behind me was paneled, and the wall across from me was a network of wooden shelves that housed not only a considerable library, but a component stereo, its various speakers, photographs of Rita and (I assumed) other Washington family members, a small but well-shaped ebony statue of a jungle cat and a hunk of driftwood; two-thirds down the wall the shelves gave way to closed cabinets, with a space in the center making room for a big color television. A single bed ran along the brown-draped back wall, next to an arched doorless closet in the corner.

“Your brother keeps a neat house,” I said.

“Are you trying to make up?” Rita asked.

“No.”

A few moments of silence limped by.

She said, “Why aren’t you?”

“Why aren’t I what? Trying to make up? Because you aren’t mad at me.”

“I’m not?”

“Hell, no. You know it wouldn’t do any good.”

“That I’ll admit.”

“And you know my motives are altruistic.”

“You never stop bullshitting, do you?”

“I never noticed I was.”

“You’re right.”

“I’m right about what?”

“My brother does keep a neat house.”

“He sure does.”

Washington came in, shutting the door with his foot as he balanced two cups of coffee in his hands. He came over to me and handed me a cup, set the other down on the table by the couch, then went over and pulled a chair off the wall and dragged it over by me and sat down. He was still wearing the houndstooth suit, and not even the absence of a tie made him seem any less formal. His bald head and lack of eyebrows seemed somehow less frightening than they had two days ago, and made him seem almost peaceful, monklike. The only tangible difference in his appearance from the other time we’d met was the eyepatch, which was large enough to hide the lengthy scar as well as the empty socket. But this difference was a major one: the raving madman seemed now a quiet and sane gentleman. Yes, gentle, damn it, which was, after all, what everybody’d been telling me about him.

“Mr. Norman asked me,” he said, “to convey an apology to you for his abrupt show of bad manners. He said he enjoyed speaking with you, and hopes you aren’t offended.”

“Hardly. I was intruding.”

“That,” he said, sipping his coffee like a lady at a tea, “would seem as good a place as any to begin.”

I wasn’t fooled by any of this: I knew full well any moment he’d start pulling the arms and legs off me.

Rita said, “He was supposed to wait in the car, Harold, I was going to tell you…”

“That’s beside the point,” he told her. “And I’m not at all interested in how he got you talked into smuggling him in here. I’m sure it took some nice footwork, but whatever it took, done is done, you brought him here and here he is.” He turned back to me. “Now, do you mind telling me why you’re sticking your nose in around here?”

I said I didn’t mind at all. I told him how two days ago I’d seen him giving Janet Taber a very rough time in a bus station. I told him how that same night I saw her dead inside a car at the bottom of Colorado Hill. That she was supposed to be drunk-driving, only she didn’t drink, and she was supposed to have died in the crash, but her neck was broken like maybe a couple big hands did it. That that was when I started sticking in my nose, and I found out she used to work for a guy named Richard Norman. Who also died in a car crash out at Colorado Hill. Son of that guy upstairs in the bed. Who a certain Harold Washington worked for.

“Have you noticed yet,” I said, “that there’re a few connections between these people and incidents?”

“I see the connections,” Washington said. “I just don’t see yours.”

“My connection is I liked Janet Taber.”

“Knew her well, did you?”

“No. Somebody denied me that chance.”

“And coming around here bothering Simon Norman is supposed to lead you to the somebody who did that.”

“Maybe. The thought has crossed my mind that I’m talking to that very somebody right now.”

Rita shifted nervously next to me.

“Mr. Mallory…” Washington began.

“Call me Mal. Do you prefer Harold or Harry? I hear some of your pals call you Eyewash.”

“You’ve got balls, I’ll give you that much. Brains, that I’m not so sure about. Do you really think I broke Janet Taber’s neck?”

“You tell me.”

“I didn’t. Now ask me if I think it was a bad thing, her getting killed. Because I’ll tell you it was a good thing.”

“People getting killed is rarely a good thing.”

He had something prepared for me, I could see it in his eye, something gone over in his mind he was now going to get to let loose.

He said, “This woman, this woman you knew for minutes, this woman whose posthumous honor you’re out to protect, was a back-stabbing, self-serving, blackmailing bitch, and you better know that, know it well, before you waste any more time on her.”

Rita said, “Hey, come on, brother, this dead chick was all of that? You’re laying it on a little heavy, aren’t you?”