Корнелл Вулрич - A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

His face, as he bent over me, was white as plaster. I shut my eyes and thought, “Well, here I go — or here I stay!” I felt a number of dull blows on my jawbone. Then suddenly something seemed to crumble and a puff of ice-cold air went way up inside my head. I lay there rigid and — nothing happened.

“Got it!” Steve breathed hotly into my face. He started to work the rubber lining carefully out past my lips and I felt a little sick. When it was clear he passed it over to the detectives without even a look at its contents, and kept his attention focused on me. “Now, watch yourself, don’t move yet!” he commanded nervously. He took a spray and rinsed out the inside of my mouth with water, every comer and crevice of it, about eighteen times. “Don’t swallow,” he kept warning me. “Keep from swallowing!” Keenan, his chief, and the others had their heads together over the spread-out contents of the little rubber sack, meanwhile.

Steve turned off the water and took the pads away from my gums finally. He sat down with a groan; I sat up with a shudder. “I wouldn’t want to live the past five minutes over again for all the rice in China!” he admitted, mopping his brow. “Maybe I would!” I shivered.

“Packed with cyanide crystals,” the chief said, “enough to kill a horse! Go up there and make the pinch. Two counts, murder and attempted murder.” Two men started for the door.

“Top drawer left for the caps, bottom drawer right for the cy,” I called after them weakly and rather needlessly. They’d find it, all right.

But I was very weary all at once and very much disinterested. I stumbled out of the chair and slouched toward the door, muttering something about going home and resting up. Steve pulled himself together and motioned me back again.

“Don’t forget the nerve is still exposed in that tooth of yours. I’ll plug it for you right, this time.” I sat down again, too limp to resist. He attached a new drill to the pulley and started it whirring. As he brought it toward me I couldn’t help edging away from it. “Can you beat it?” He turned to Keenan, who had stayed behind to watch, and shook his head in hopeless amazement. “Takes his life in his hands for a friend, but when it comes to a little everyday drilling he can’t face it!”

When the policeman came to the door and asked if Eddie Mason lived there I knew right away something had happened to him. They always break it to you that way.

“Yeah. I’m his brother.”

“Better come down and see him,” he said. I got my hat and went with him.

Eddie was in the emergency ward of the Mount Eden Hospital, he told me. He’d been found lying on his back on a lonely stretch of road out toward White Plains, slowly bleeding away.

“What is it, hit and run?” I cried, grabbing him by the sleeve.

He didn’t want to tell me at first. Then, just before we got there he said, “Well, you may sis well know now as later, I guess.” Eddie’s tongue had been tom out by the roots and all ten of his fingers had been cut off at the base, leaving just the stumps of both hands.

I went all weak at the pit of my stomach when I heard it. And then when I got the full implication of the thing, it was even worse. That poor kid. Just turned twenty. Yesterday with his life all before him. And now he’d never be able to speak another word as long as he lived, never be able to feed himself or dress himself or earn a decent living after this.

“He’d have been better off dead!” I groaned. “What did it?” I kept saying. “What was it?”

“I don’t know,” said the cop sadly. “I’m just a sidewalk-flattener with the pleasant job of breaking these things to people.”

Eddie hadn’t come to yet, so just standing there looking at him didn’t do much good. It broke my heart, though. One of the doctors gave me a good stiff drink of whiskey and tried to be encouraging.

“He’ll pull through,” he said. “No doubt about it. We’ve made a preliminary examination, and I don’t even think we’ll have to resort to blood transfusion. What saved him more than anything else were the makeshift bandages that were found on him. If it hadn’t been for them he’d have been a goner long before he was picked up.”

This went over my head at the time. I didn’t understand. I thought he meant their own bandages, the hospital’s.

A couple of detectives had already been assigned to the case from the moment the cop who had found him had phoned in his report. Why wouldn’t they be? No car has ever yet been designed so that it can rip the tongue out of a man’s mouth without leaving a scratch on the rest of his face. Or deposit him neatly on the side of the road, with his feet close together and his hat resting on his stomach as if he were dozing. There wasn’t a bruise on him except the mutilations. They were waiting in the other room to talk to me when I came out of the ward, looking like a ghost.

“You his brother?”

“Yes, damn it!” I burst out. “And all I want is to get my hands on whoever did this to him!”

“Funny,” said a dick dryly, “but so do we.”

I didn’t like him much after that. Sarcasm is out of place when a man has just been brought face to face with personal tragedy.

First they told me what they already knew about Eddie, then they had me fill in the rest for them. There wasn’t very much of either. I mean that had any bearing on this.

“He runs the elevator at the Hotel Lyons, works the late shift alone, from midnight to six in the morning,” I explained.

“We checked down there already. He never showed up at all last night; they had to use the night watchman as a substitute on the car. What time did he leave your house to go to work last night?”

“Same time as always. Quarter to twelve.”

“That don’t give him much time, does it?” remarked my pet aversion irrelevantly.

My nerves were raw and I felt like snapping, “That’s no reason why he should be half tom to pieces,” but instead I said, “He only has two express stops to go, the hotel’s on Seventy-second.”

“How do you know he rode?”

“I can give you a lead on that,” I offered. “The station agent down there knows him — by sight, anyway. Kelsey’s his name. Ask him if he saw him come up last night at the usual time or not.” He went out to find a phone. “He don’t know his name,” I called after him warningly, “so just say the young fellow from the Hotel Lyons he let pass through one time when he’d lost all his change through a hole in his pocket.”

“Not bad,” remarked his mate admiringly while we were waiting. “You’ve got a good head, Mason. What do you do?”

“Master electrician. I’ve got my own store on upper Amsterdam.” The other one came back and said, “I had to wake him up at home, but he knew who I meant right away. Yeah, your brother came through the turnstile about five of twelve. Says he flipped his hand up and said, ‘Hello, you bird in a gilded cage.’ ”

“Well,” I said, and my voice broke, “then it’s a cinch he still had — his voice and his — fingers when he got out of the train. And it’s another cinch it didn’t happen to him between the station and the hotel. It’s right on the comer, that hotel is, and it’s one of the busiest comers on Broadway. Looks like the management gave you a bum steer and he did go to work after all.”

“No, that was on the up-and-up. They were even sore about it at first, until we told them he was in the hospital.”

“What were those sandwiches doing in his pocket?” the other one asked. “Looks like he stopped off somewhere first to buy food. They were still on him when he was found, one in each pocket.”