Тэлмидж Пауэлл - The Third Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™ - 25 Classic Mysteries

Then the burning sensation began to spread throughout his insides as he heard her intention, this big deal she’d dreamed up in the hospital.

“This boy whose heart beats at this moment within my own breast...” she was saying. “This Spades Dutcher... I had a hospital orderly make inquiries on his days off, Eddie.”

“But I didn’t know you were...” Eddie burst out.

She cut him off with a pat on his hand. “Yes, you would have tackled the chore, had I asked. I know that. But you’d have stuck out like a little green man from Mars in that poor, ghetto neighborhood. No one would have told you anything.”

“And what did this accepted individual, this hospital orderly, learn on his days off?” Eddie asked stiffly.

“Much that I’ll remember always,” Aunt Crabby gazed thoughtfully at the sunny window for a moment. Then her eyes gradually re-focused on Eddie.

“Never mind all the little details,” she sighed. “You need only the highlights for your chore.”

“Chore, Aunt Violetta?”

“Yes, dear. That’s what I’m getting to. The boy, Spades Dutcher, had so little. Broken home. Lack of education. All that. Yet he left me so much. He also left a poor old mother who lives all alone.”

Eddie stared at Aunt Crabby blankly. She caught the look and smiled wryly.

“Yes, Eddie,” she nodded. “The old Violetta Crabtree Harper, wrapped in her own troubled self, wouldn’t have cared two pins about Mrs. Dutcher. She was just a signature on the legal papers necessary for the transplant, obtainable at the cheapest price possible. But now she is a person, Eddie. And I want to do something for her. Something lasting, for the memory of her son.”

Aunt Crabby pointed toward her dressing table. “You’ll find her address written on the pad there, Eddie. Go to this poor woman. Tell her that my bankers will arrange for her to draw on a small but adequate account monthly, for so long as she lives. The bank will advise her the details later. But hurry now, with the good news! She need never be cold or hungry again.”

Eddie groped with a feeling of blindness to the dressing table. He ripped the top sheet from the waiting pad. He was tempted to turn and stuff the address down Aunt Crabby’s throat. She’d do a kindness for a stranger — but for him... nothing. She’d had a change of heart, all right. She was a worse creep than ever!

Eddie expected to find a pitiful, malnourished, rickety scarecrow of the slums. Instead, meeting Mrs. George Dutcher was something of a shock. She lived in a two-room walkup in a scabby, century-old brick building. Eddie parked the Continental at the trash littered curbing, and it was the immediate center of a gang of ragged, fearsome looking kids. Eddie didn’t dare open the door until a beat cop came up.

Eddie thumbed the button that opened the electrically-operated window, thrust his head out of the car, and explained to the cop that he had important business upstairs.

“Better make it snappy,” the cop said. “I can’t keep an eye on the heap all day, and if I didn’t you wouldn’t have even a sparkplug left when you come out.

Eddie nerved himself, dashed across the sidewalk, and scurried up the dark, stinking stairway. His stomach was a bubbling cauldron of hydrochloric acid by the time he reached the fourth floor, sought out a rusty number hanging by one tack, and knocked on the door.

A big woman in a greasy wrapper opened the door. She had a bulbous, liverish colored face and the frizzled ragtags of hair that perhaps in a dim and forgotten past had been a rather luxuriant dark blonde.

“Yeah?” she snarled. “If you’re a bill collector, beat it. I’m broke.”

“No, M’am.” Eddie gulped. He fought the urge to hold his nose. The woman’s breath was coming on like a lion with a three-day muscatel hangover. “I mean, are you Mrs. George Dutcher?”

“So what if I am?”

“My name is Edward Crabtree.” He glanced up and down the gloomy hallway where wooden lathes showed here and there like gaunt ribs exposed by fallen plaster. “Could we talk — briefly — inside?”

“What about?”

“Doesn’t my name — Crabtree — mean anything to you?”

“Can’t say that it does.”

“How about Harper? Mrs. Violetta Crabtree Harper?”

Came the dawning of knowledge to the wine-soaked gray eyes in their folds of greasy fat. “Sure — Harper... The woman who got my son’s heart — for a lousy hundred bucks.”

“It’s about the stipend that I want to talk to you, Mrs. Dutcher.”

“The what?”

“Money.”

“Well, why’n’cha say so! Come in.” She jerked the door wide.

A feeling of faintness smote Eddie when he entered a dark hole furnished with a sway-backed bed carelessly covered with dirty linens, a broken-down washstand, and a sofa with gray stuffing spilling from rents in its filth-greased arms. He glimpsed the adjoining kitchen, where swarming flies battled with a colony of marching cockroaches over a table littered with tin cans, dirty dishes and wine bottles.

“I told Spades he was going to get in trouble fooling with them gangs.” Mrs. Dutcher shoved several tattered confession magazines aside to make room for Eddie to sit down. Crossing the room to turn off the battered, snow-blurred TV set, she added, “Like a good mother should, I warned him. Did my duty, I did. Think it helped, changed anything? Not a bit, it didn’t. He was down there in the next block — it’s all colored — busting windows with the best of them the night the riot happened. Some excitement around here for awhile, I tell you! Six big buildings going up in smoke. People running around like crazy. Say, don’t you want to sit down, Mr. Crabtree?”

“Well, I... what I have to say won’t take long.”

“If it’s about money, let’s get on with it. It’s high time I was getting a break. Never had one. Like Spades, my poor boy. Running across the street, he was, when some joker tossed that hunk of busted cement from the roof of the building. Spades and the brickbat... they both picked the same spot on the street at the same second. Knocked a hole right in his skull.” Her head moved slowly from side to side. The watery content of her eyes overflowed a trifle. Her huge, pulpy chin snapped up. “And where the hell was the pigs, the lousy cops? They’re always there to kick you in the teeth, but how come they couldn’t stop somebody from busting my poor Spades in the head!”

The lumpy sofa sagged a few inches further as her ample bottom dropped onto it. She sat there for a moment, raising a thick-fingered hand to knuckle moisture from her eyes. “Anyhow, guess you ain’t here to talk about all that. You know the rest. Spades was taken to the hospital, and he was dying sure enough, and this doctor tells me he’s got a waiting list a yard long of patients who need and want new hearts real bad.” She squinted up at Eddie. “And this lady what sent you is the one got Spades’s.”

“That’s why the bank will be in touch, Mrs. Dutcher. You won’t move into the Hilton by any stretch of the imagination, but neither will you have to worry about beans or a roof.”

“It’s hard to believe... hard to believe.” She shook her head. Gradually, she became very still, staring at a crack in the floor.

The moments passed. Eddie cleared his throat in twitchy discomfort.

“I don’t want you telling George about this,” she muttered, not looking up.

“What?”

“George, my husband.”

His eyes popped behind the heavy glasses. “A husband? I thought you were a widow.”

“Might as well be.” She wiped her nose with the back of a forefinger. “If you’re worried about them legal papers I signed for the doctor, don’t. I told the doctor about George. I guess he just didn’t bother to tell you. George can’t sign no papers, no-how, him being out in the state run loony bin.”