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

There hadn’t been a sound behind him, not even a single footfall. It was done so easily, gently almost, that for a moment he wasn’t even frightened but thought that it must be something like a rag or piece of goods that had fallen out of some window up above and blown up against his face. Then when he tried to raise his hand and brush it away, he felt something holding it. And he started to feel lazy and tired all over.

Then he felt himself being drawn backwards, like a swimmer caught in a current, but when he tried to pull away and fight off whatever it was that was happening to him, it was too late. Instead of being able to get any air in his lungs, all he kept breathing was something sweet and sickly, like suffocating flowers, and after that he didn’t know any more. When he woke up he was in agony in the hospital.

Kane got a little vial of chloroform from the nurse and wet the stopper and held it near Eddie’s face.

“Was that it? Was that what it smelt like?”

He got wild right away and tried to back his head away and nodded yes like a house afire and made growling sounds deep in his throat that went through me like a knife.

The three of us went outside to talk it over.

“Mistaken identity,” decided Kane. “Whoever was waiting in that car expected somebody else to go by and thought they had him when they jumped on the kid. That’s all I can make of it. Either they never found out their mistake until it was too late, or else they did but went ahead and did it anyway, afraid he’d give way on them. It’s not fool-proof, but it’s the best I can do.”

“It’s as full of holes as a Swiss cheese,” his partner told him disgustedly. “It’s like I told you before. The kid knows and he’s not telling. He talked too much, got a little present for it from somebody, and now he’s learned his lesson and isn’t making the same mistake twice.” He took the penciled sheets from Kane and shuffled through them. “It don’t hang together. Chloroform my eye! Husky twenty-year-olds don’t stand still waiting to go bye-bye like that. It don’t get them that quick; their wind’s too good. He was politely invited to step into that car by someone he knew and he didn’t dare refuse. What they did after proves it. Why the tongue and the fingers? For talking. You can’t get around that.”

I had stood all of that I could.

“Listen,” I flamed, “are you on a job to get whoever did it, or are you on a job to stand up for ’em and knock my brother?”

“Watch yourself,” he said. “I don’t like that.”

Kane came between us and gave me the wink with one eye. I suppose he gave his partner the wink with the other eye at the same time; peacemakers usually do.

Poison-mouth would have the last word, though. “If your brother would open up and give us a tip or two instead of holding out, we’d probably have the guy we want by this time.”

“And what if he’d been a stiff and couldn’t tip you off?” I squelched him. “Does that mean the guy would beat the rap altogether?”

It was probably this little set-to more than anything else that first put the idea in my mind of working on my own hook on Eddie’s behalf. Kane’s partner had him down for a gangster more or less. I knew that he wasn’t. I wanted to get even for him, more than I ever wanted anything before in my life.

Let them tackle it in their own way! I’d do a little work on the side. I didn’t have any idea of what I was going to do — then or for some time afterwards. All I knew was whoever did that to Eddie wasn’t going to get away with it — not if it took me the rest of my life to catch up with them.

They had left the charts behind while they were out rounding up small-time racketeers and poolroom-lizards that had never heard of Eddie, and I worked over them with him daily. We got so that we could handle them much faster than in the beginning.

And then one day, out of all the dozens, the hundreds of questions I kept throwing at him, the right one popped out. The minute I asked it, even before he gave me the answer, I knew I had hit something. I wondered why I hadn’t asked it long ago.

He had worked at another hotel called the San Pablo before going to the Lyons. But this had been quite awhile before.

“None of the guests from there ever turned up later at the Lyons while you were there, did they?” I asked.

Yes, one did, he spelled back. His name was Dr. Avalon. He’d left the San Pablo before Eddie himself did, and then when Eddie got the job at the Lyons he found he’d moved there ahead of him, that was all.

Maybe this was just a coincidence, but all the same I kept digging at it.

“Did he recognize you?”

He nodded.

“What did he say when he first saw you?”

He’d smiled jovially at Eddie and said, “Young fellow, are you following me around?” Then he’d given him a five-dollar tip.

“Pretty big tip, wasn’t it?”

Yes, but then at the San Pablo, Eddie recalled, he had once given him a ten-dollar one. This was getting interesting.

“Whew!” I said. “What for?”

Eddie smiled a little.

Something about a woman, as I might know.

“Better tell me about it,” I urged.

One night about one o’clock, his message ran, a young woman who acted kind of nervous had got on the car and asked Eddie which floor Dr. Avalon was on. So he took her to the door and showed her. But it was a long hallway and before he could get back to the cage again, Avalon had let her in and he heard him say in a loud voice: “You shouldn’t have come here! I don’t see anybody here! You should have seen me in my office tomorrow.”

And she had answered, “But I had to see you!”

Well, Eddie had thought it was the usual thing, some kind of a love affair going on. But about half an hour later he was called back to the floor and when he got up there he found Avalon standing waiting for him, all excited, his face running with sweat, and he shoved a piece of paper with something written on it at him and told him to run out and find an all-night drugstore and bring back some medicine as quickly as he could.

“Hurry! Hurry!” he said. “Every minute counts!”

Eddie did, and when he got back with it he knocked on the door, but not very loudly because he didn’t want to wake up people in the other rooms. The doctor must have been too excited to pay any attention because he didn’t come to the door right away, so Eddie tried the knob, found that it had been left open, and walked in. He saw the doctor’s visitor stretched out on a table with a very white light shining down on her and a sheet or something over her. Then the doctor came rushing over at him and for a minute he thought he was going to kill him, he looked so terrible.

“Get out of here, you!” he yelled at him. “What do you mean by coming in here?” and practically threw him out of the door.

About an hour later the young lady and the doctor showed up together and rode down in Eddie’s car as cool and collected as if nothing had happened. The doctor showed her to a taxi at the door, and it was when he came in and rode upstairs again that he gave Eddie the ten dollars, saying he was sorry he had lost his head like that, but she had had a very bad heart attack and it was lucky he had pulled her through.

“Did he ask you not to say anything?”

Eddie nodded, and again smiled a little sheepishly. But I knew he didn’t get the point at all. He thought it was just some love affair that the doctor wanted kept quiet. I knew better. The man was a shady doctor and ran the risk of imprisonment day and night.

“Then what happened?”

Eddie hadn’t opened his mouth at all to anyone, but not long after some men had come around and stopped at the desk and asked questions about the doctor, men wearing iron hats and chewing cigars in the corner of their mouths, and when they learned he wasn’t in they said they’d come back next day. But before they did the doctor had left, bag and baggage. Eddie said he never saw anyone leave in such a hurry. It was at five thirty in the morning and Eddie was still on duty.