Росс Макдональд - Trouble Follows Me

“We were drinking some pretty terrible liquor,” I said with shame. “I passed out, too.”

“It would take a good deal of liquor to kill a man like that. How much did he have?”

“I don’t know. Maybe a pint in the last couple of hours.”

“Is there any of it left? I want a look at the stuff.”

The bottle of Bonded Bourbon was in plain sight on the floor near Hatcher’s limply spread field boots. At the sight of it my nerves crawled. I picked it up with aversion and handed it to him. He uncorked the bottle and took one sniff. His squinting little eyes narrowed to two steel edges.

“This man’s been drinking ether,” he said. “No wonder he’s dead.”

He recorked the bottle quickly and replaced it on the floor.

“Those poor bloody dog-faces never learn,” Teddy Trask said. “Two of my buddies in France drank poison liquor. One of them died, and the other’s blind.”

Major Wright looked at him sharply at the word ‘dog-faces.’ He said to me: “How much of this stuff did you drink, Mr. Drake?”

“A couple of short ones. But that was enough to put me out. How long did we stop at that last place?”

“Emporia? About five minutes. Why?”

I told him why.

“Do you suggest that someone deliberately dragged you under the wheels of the train?”

“I don’t suggest it. I state it. I know I didn’t do an Anna Karenina under my own power. I passed out on the rear platform, and if I’d fallen from there I’d have fallen either behind the train or to one side. I couldn’t have fallen under the wheels.”

“You can’t tell what you did when you were unconscious. Ether makes people do some awfully funny things.”

“Such as die,” I said.

“That’s true too. All the ether addicts eventually die if they keep it up. Where did this bottle come from?”

“He bought it somewhere in Kansas City. I think someone poisoned it.”

“Someone on the train, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“We’d better get the conductor and the Military Police,” Major Wright said.

“I’ll get them.” Teddy Trask slapped away again.

“That’s a genuine seal on the bottle, isn’t it?” I said.

He examined it near-sightedly. “Looks like it to me.”

“I broke that seal myself. I even smelled it when I opened it. It didn’t smell so good, but I didn’t smell any ether.”

“You didn’t smell the ether when you drank it, either. Some people don’t have a very good sense of smell, especially when they’ve been drinking. I think your olfactory evidence is questionable.”

I admitted sheepishly that that was true.

“Smell this.” He uncorked the bottle and passed it quickly under my nose. “Do you smell ether?”

“I can’t be sure. I’m not very familiar with drugs.”

The odor was a pungent, sweet and nauseous mixture. It reminded me of hospitals and of something else which I couldn’t place.

“That’s ether all right,” he said. “I’d stake all the money I ever earned in anaesthetist’s fees on it.”

“Is ether ever used in cheap liquor to hop it up?”

“I’ve never heard of it. But you can’t tell what these bootleggers will do. I’d never touch bootleg alky myself.”

A combination of things, the sick hospital odor in the air, the dead man on the unswept floor, and my own reaction from fear, made me dizzy again. The room lost weight and reality, became a foul shape-changing bubble in a dark stream. For a minute I held on to the curtain in the doorway with both hands. Then by an effort of will I focussed my eyes and mind again. But I felt shaky.

Major Wright was watching me narrowly. “See here, you’re looking terrible. Sit down on this seat.”

He took my pulse and listened to my chest. “You couldn’t have got a great deal of that stuff, or you wouldn’t be up and around. An ounce taken internally is enough to kill a man. But you’ve got to remember ether poisoning sometimes has secondary consequences. You go to bed now and let me look at you again tomorrow.”

There was the sound of several footsteps approaching in the passageway. “I’ll go in a minute. But first I want to talk to the conductor. That’s probably him now.”

The conductor came in preceded by his paunch and followed by a Shore Patrol man. He was biting his moustache hard as if the tobacco which stained its fringes was edible but bitter.

Then he saw the dead man waiting on the floor. A tremor of nervous anger went through him, from his knees through his belly and heavy shoulders to his multiple chin.

“What in God’s name happened?” he said.

Major Wright took natural charge of the situation. “This man is dead. I’d say it was ether poisoning, though I can’t be sure without an autopsy. The dead man and Ensign Drake here were drinking poison liquor.”

The conductor raked me with a hard old eye. “That’s what you were doing under the train, eh? Don’t you know it’s illegal to drink liquor on a train in the State of Kansas?”

“It’s more illegal to poison people,” I said unpleasantly. “Somebody poisoned that bottle.”

He picked up the bottle and examined it, turning it over and over in his hands. His palms were netted with dark lines like a railway map.

“Where did the liquor come from?” the S.P. man said. He added a perfunctory “sir.”

Wright answered him. “Private Hatcher – the man there on the floor – got it in Kansas City. The stuff’s got ether in it.”

“Look here,” the conductor said suddenly. “This is how the ether got in.”

He had turned the bottle up, and the discolored nail of his right forefinger pointed to something in the bottom. It was a small circular flaw in the center of the thick round glass.

“I’ve seen this done before,” he said, “mostly during Prohibition. In my state it would be technical homicide.”

“What is it?” Major Wright said.

“Somebody who handled this liquor drilled a hole in the bottom of the bottle and extracted the good liquor. Then he refilled the bottle with his own deadly concoction, and sealed the hole with molten glass.”

The S.P. man, who was young and eager, said: “I’ve seen that done, too. You can change the liquor without opening the bottle and breaking the seal. It’s a quick way to make money. If you don’t care what happens to the people that drink the cheap stuff.”

“Murder is a quick way to make money,” the conductor said solemnly. “This is technical homicide.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“The salesman who sells poison liquor is legally responsible for its effects. That’s probably the Missouri law the same as it is where I come from. But it’s going to be an awful job finding the liquor store where this bottle came from.”

My certainty that someone on the train had poisoned the bottle was dissolving and trickling away. I had a hard time trying to think clearly.

“Does this mean it couldn’t have been poisoned on the train?”

“It sure looks like it,” the S.P. man said. “You don’t get equipment on a train for melting glass and drilling bottles. It’s this consarned liquor shortage that does it. These fly-by-night sharks know that the boys will drink anything if it’s all they can get, and they take advantage of it. We get more trouble from bad liquor than from everything else put together.”

“Damn it!” I exploded. “I didn’t walk under the train by myself.”

Major Wright put his hand on my shoulder. The paternal effect was spoilt by the fact that he had to reach up. “You can’t tell what you did. Maybe it just looked like a comfortable place to lie down.”

The light dazzled me. My eyes were sore and heavy in my head. My throat felt raw, as if someone had reamed it out with a file. “This is the third death,” I said. “Yet nobody seems to give a damn. Don’t people get tired of all these deaths?”