James Cain - The Cocktail Waitress

“Maybe he gave it by accident.”

“That would be some accident, Mrs. White, like meaning to throw a drowning man a rope and throwing him a brick instead.”

“Then my husband got it some other way. Maybe some other pill he took? One the other doctor prescribed?”

“We thought of that possibility, but no-first of all, Dr. Cord denies prescribing it, for exactly the same reason Dr. Jameson gave, and second of all, there was residue of this chemical on the inside of the intravenous bottle and of the tube that connected it to your husband’s arm. It got in there somehow, and it wasn’t his doctor who put it there.”

I sat down, though he remained standing. “I don’t know what you want me to say. I have no idea what was in those bottles. I didn’t like them, I wish Earl had never used them, but he did and that’s all I know.”

“Maybe. Maybe so. But you have to admit it would have been convenient, if you had wanted your husband dead-”

“I didn’t! Ask anyone. I saved his life, more than once, when he had attacks that might have killed him.”

“-if, I say, if you wanted him dead, it would have been convenient to place this chemical in his medicine-”

“How? Will you tell me that? It was a sealed sterile bottle, a sealed tube.”

“With a syringe, Mrs. White, like the row of syringes that were sitting behind his chair. You dissolve this chemical in a little water, draw it up with a syringe, put a tiny hole in the rubber seal of the bottle and presto, you’ve laced his medicine with what for a man in his condition was pure poison. Then you let him exert himself with another woman while you’re conveniently away-”

“My husband chose to exert himself, as you put it, it wasn’t a matter of me letting him. And as for the other-did you find the chemical in one of the syringes?”

“No,” he conceded, “we did not. But of course we don’t know how many syringes there should have been. The syringe in question might simply have been disposed of after being used in this way.”

I fought to control my temper, to keep from shouting at him. “And how would a person get her hands on this chemical? How would she even know what it would do? A person like me, I mean. I’m no more a chemist than you are.”

“No, of course not. Why would you be. But-” He waved an arm at the bookshelf, with its tall narrow volumes. The one lent to Earl by Dr. Jameson was still there, the one he’d been reaching for the day of the attack. “-your husband seems to have been a reader, and a man who suffers from a terrible condition might be expected to devote some of his reading to articles about what treatments might make it better or worse. You might have found the information in one of these journals.”

“You haven’t answered the first question. This alpha-fatha-ludo-I can’t even say it, much less know where to get it.”

“Well, it might get easier if you asked for it under its common name, its trade name, if you will.”

“What’s that?”

“Thalidomide.”

He must have seen the blood rush from my face. “What is it, Mrs. White? Do you know that drug?”

“… I’ve heard of it.”

“Heard of it, I see. Have you ever been prescribed it?”

“No.”

“Ever known anyone else who was?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

“You’re not sure?”

“How would I know?”

“If we asked your co-workers at that restaurant, do you think we’d find that one of them has a prescription?”

“I have no idea!”

“We’ll just have to ask, then.”

I exploded: “Ask all you want. You won’t find anything. Even if one of them has a prescription, she never shared it with me.” My brain, of course, was racing all the while, thinking of Hilda and the favor she’d done me, of this terrible coincidence and how it might put me in the electric chair. For of course I hadn’t crushed any of her pills and injected them into Earl’s intravenous solution-but if they found her somehow, in Texas, and she told them she’d given them to me-or if they found the remaining pills, which I’d kept in a cabinet upstairs-

I realized after a moment that Private Church was saying something and apparently had been for some time, had repeated himself with no answer from me. “Do you hear me, Mrs. White?”

“I’m sorry. I was just distracted a moment, thinking of all you’ve said.”

“As you might be. Let me ask it again, then, now that I have your attention. I said, was your first husband on any medication?”

I stood up then. I did more than that, I stepped forward until my face was no more than an inch from his, though he was taller, and I had to tilt my head to look directly into his eyes. He took a step back and his hand found its way to his hip, where he wore his gun. “My first husband medicated himself with one thing only, and it came in something bigger than a pill bottle. He took it orally. You’ll find it on the shelf of any liquor store or bar, and it comes without a prescription. Side effects include dizziness, inability to perform sexually, and a tendency to beat the tar out of those you love. You can see my son’s x-rays if you think I’m making it up.”

“We did see them, Mrs. White-a dislocated shoulder, if I remember correctly. Ample reason for you to leave your husband and to take your son with you. Or to go to the police and have him arrested for battery. But that’s not what happened, is it?”

“You know what happened.”

“I know he died. And I can’t help wondering if perhaps he had some help. Maybe some medication that would have made him sleepy behind the wheel? Something crushed up and added to that beer you said he kept yelling for you to bring him …?”

“Get out of my house.”

“Your house,” he said. “That didn’t take long, did it?”

I stormed past him to the front door, threw it open and waited with one hand on the knob and the other on my hip. My heart was hammering and I didn’t trust myself to speak.

He came forward, set his hat on his head, pulled his uniform jacket tighter around himself against the cold. His voice was quiet, calm and emotionless when he spoke. “You and I both know you killed your first husband, Mrs. White. We dug him up too late to find any traces, but that doesn’t mean you didn’t do it. You served him a drink that killed him, and now you’ve done it again, and this time I’m going to prove it, and you’re going to burn for it.”

“Get out, you son of a bitch, get out!”

I heard Araminta behind me, rushing toward the door, and from the direction of the dining room I saw Myra coming as well.

Private Church tipped his hat. “Ma’am,” he said.

I asked Myra to draw me a bath, as hot as she could stand it when she put her hand in, and I lay back in it, crying, until the water cooled.

Then I found myself dressed and standing at the front door, with no memory of having gotten myself there. I was in a fog and needed badly to clear my head. I didn’t even take the car this time, just headed off on foot, following the path Earl had taken each night and arriving at the Garden around the same time he always had. Jake saw me first, as the hatcheck booth was standing empty when I entered, and he stepped out from behind the bar to put his arms around me, a sure sign of how bad I must have looked. I tipped my head onto his shoulder and wept. Liz came out of the kitchen then, carrying a plate. “Oh, Joanie,” she said. “Let me serve this and then you and I can go back to the locker room for a good talk.” She hurried off to a corner table, the small one at the far end of the room. But when I saw who was sitting there, I knew there would be no talk in the locker room for me, not now.