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

“I’m sorry,” Eddie said.

“Sure, I know. But it’s all right. George had his day, he did. Two-hundred and thirteen fights. He fought in every tanktown ring from Maine to Miami. Ring Magazine even mentioned him once. Great days, those, Mr. Crabtree. George paid down on a real fur coat for me one time and I got to wear it nearly the whole winter before the finance company nailed us in Greensboro, North Carolina.”

Her sigh was heavy. “Last fight... George couldn’t stand the bees buzzing in his head no more. Couldn’t hear nothing else. Kept right on fighting after the bell ended the fourth. Liked to have killed the other fighter, and the referee, and the two cops it took to drag him out of the ring.

She looked toward the kitchen, probing the wine bottles. “George is all right most of the time, Mr. Crabtree. They let him walk around the grounds when the keepers are watching, and even have company. But sometimes it don’t take much to tee George off, real bad. So just let him be. He’s real happy where he is, and he might get a crazy idea if he learned I come into a little money.”

Eddie’s silence, his very stillness, drew her attention from the wine bottles. She began to frown as she looked at him. She stood up slowly. “Something wrong, Mr. Crabtree?”

“Wrong?” He looked at her, starry-eyed. His happy laugh burst against the scaly walls. “Mrs. Dutcher, you’re a source of sheer inspiration, no less! I’ve never enjoyed meeting anyone so much in all my life!” As if quite out of his senses, he reached and gave her repulsive hulk a quick hug.

As he turned and dashed for the doorway, she lunged after him. “Hey, about the money...”

“The bank will be in touch.” He threw the words over his shoulder as he disappeared in the stairwell.

A big man with iron gray hair and a creased face as patient looking as a hound’s, the white-coated warder strolled the grounds of the state mental hospital keeping an eye on his charges. It was a lovely afternoon, very quiet and peaceful. Little Miss Quackenbush was quietly reading the same thin volume of poetry over and over as she strolled about the walkways bisecting the green lawns. Mr. Heaterly was quietly leaning against the trunk of a huge oak tree discussing the market situation with an invisible broker; Mr. Heaterly’s short-circuited brain had arranged for that black market day in 1929 to be always in a non-existent tomorrow.

The warder glanced toward the long wings of the brick buildings that were beginning to cast shadows over the lawns. Just about time to herd them in, see that they didn’t try to eat their spoons for dinner, and tuck them in for the night.

The warder yawned, stretched, and then lowered his arms slowly. He mused on the pair of men sitting on the low stone bench near the splashing fountain.

Now don’t it take the cake? The warder’s head moved in a wry shake. All this time everybody had thought George Dutcher was nothing more than a beat-up, punch-drunk ex-pug. Then this skinny young guy wearing the heavy glasses comes swooping up in a snazzy Continental. Says he’s a cousin from a distant branch of the family. Been in Europe a long time. Tried to look up George and was shocked to find him out here. Wants to see the old boy. Maybe arrange for him to enter a private sanitarium. After all, says the young fellow, one doesn’t like to think of one’s family being in a public institution, does one?

George hadn’t remembered his visitor at all. That wasn’t surprising. Sometimes George Dutcher remembered things in detail that had happened twenty years ago. Simple unimportant things that most people couldn’t have recalled at all. Then, in the next second George might forget what had happened five minutes ago.

Anyway, the young guy had been pleasant and easy and patient with George. That was good. The visit should be fine for George.

“...He’s watching us,” Eddie said softly, his face close to George Dutcher’s frightfully lumpy visage. “The big man with the iron gray hair.”

“I’ll break ’im in two!” George graveled.

Eddie quickly laid his hand on the hairy mitt that was curling into a fist. “No, no, George! Don’t even look around. He’ll suspect. He’s the warder, remember, and we don’t want anybody to suspect, do we?”

George’s elephantine shoulders relaxed. His hands, twisted and misshapen from bone and tendon breakage, slowly uncurled. He sat hunched, popping his knuckles in his lap. “Nah! Nobody. Just me and you, pally. And thanks for coming out and giving me the tip.”

“You sure you got it all?” Eddie said. “You won’t forget? Her name? Where she lives? How to get to her house?”

“I won’t fergit nuttin!”

“She’s the one, George.” Eddie glanced over his shoulder. The white-coated warder was strolling toward the old geezer at the oak tree, suspecting nothing. “She had a guy bust Spades’s skull with a brickbat. Then she had your boy’s heart cut out.”

George lifted his left hand and beat the palm against his skull just above the ear.

“George?”

“Yeah, pally? Okay... I’m okay... Don’t worry about me. Nobody flattens Battlin’ George. I’ll get to her and put a stop to these noises in my head...”

Eddie flinched as he looked into George’s milky eyes. Eddie gulped. His scalp prickled. He kept a tight control on his voice, and the urge to run. “But you got to be smart, George. You can get out of here easily enough, but you got to be smart to keep them from dragging you back. Here...” He quickly fumbled a fifty dollar bill into George’s hand. “This will help. You’ll know where to buy a gun in some pool hall.” Eddie jumped to his feet. “I got to go now, George. Really I have.”

“You been a real pal, pally. I won’t fergit. Spades... he was my boy... my only kid...”

Eddie kept his report to Aunt Crabby brief, stating only that he had seen Mrs. Dutcher and the poor woman had been quite grateful.

“You were gone a long time, dear,” Aunt Crabby said from the provincial writing desk where she had been penning a note.

“Had the car checked over,” Eddie mumbled. “The engine started missing a little. Nothing serious. It’s all fixed. Everything, in fact, is fixed.”

“Well, tell cook you’re here. She’s been holding your dinner.”

“Right-o,” Eddie said cheerfully. He paused at the doorway, glancing back at her. He returned her sweet smile. Hmmmm, he thought, who’ll I get for pall bearers?

With its mad, conspiratorial smile, Dutcher’s lumpy face was a horror from another realm. He inched his right hand up to show Eddie that he was holding a gun.

“You planned great, pally. It’s a snap. Now where’s the witch what had my boy’s heart cut out?”

“Listen,” Eddie gasped, “it’s all a mistake!”

“And it’s the last one she’ll make,” Dutcher said. “You can take a walk, pally — while I pay off for Spades.”

As Dutcher edged toward the stairway, Eddie wrenched movement from his muscles. He grabbed Dutcher’s arm.

“Please, George, she’s got to live. As long as she lives, I’ve got it made. But the minute she dies a bunch of guys with test tubes and microscopes pass Go and collect two million dollars! George... you’ve got to understand!”

Eddie flung himself between George and the stairway. It was like trying to turn aside a ponderous slab of cement.

“George,” Eddie screamed softly, “you simply can’t kill her! You wouldn’t kill an innocent woman, would you, George?”

George slowed. “Innocent?”

“Sure,” Eddie said. “She wasn’t the one who busted Spades’s skull.”

George’s eyes focused on Eddie. They were wracked with the pain of trying to link up a thought process. Then, as an invisible switch clicked behind them, they escaped. The eyes were almost at peace. George’s voice was almost gentle. “I get it, pally. I been around. I know the score. You was covering — for yourself! That’s the only way you could’ve knowed so much. So here’s a present for Spades!”