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

The Commissioner’s face is beet-red. He’s about ready for a stroke, but he speaks softly, persuasively. “An eighty-odd-year-old colored man who is so feeble he can’t even go upstairs half the time, who has to have his food pulleyed up to him through the window in a basket, is killing — whom? A white stumble-bum his own age? No-o-o, Mr. Eddie Bloch, the premier bandsman of America, who can name his own price in any town, who’s heard every night in all our homes, who has about everything a man can want — that’s who!” He peers close, until their eyes are on a level. His voice is just a silky whisper. “Tell me just one thing, Mr. Bloch.” Then like the explosion of a giant firecracker, “How?” He roars it out, booms it out.

There’s a long-drawn intake of breath from Eddie Bloch. “By thinking thoughtwaves of death that reached me through the air.” The poor Commissioner practically goes all to pieces on his own rug. “And you don’t need a medical exam!” he wheezes weakly.

There’s a flutter, the popping of buttons, and Eddie Bloch’s coat, his vest, his shirt, undershirt, land one after another on the floor around his chair. He turns. “Look at my back! You can count every vertebra through the skin!” He turns back again. “Look at my ribs. Look at the pulsing where there’s not enough skin left to cover my heart!”

Oliver shuts his eyes and turns toward the window. He’s in a particularly unpleasant spot. New Orleans, out there, is stirring, and when it hears about this, he’s going to be the most unpopular man in town. On the other hand, if he doesn’t see the thing through now that it’s gone this far he’s guilty of a dereliction of duty, malfeasance in office.

Bloch, slowly dressing, knows what he’s thinking. “You want to get rid of me, don’t you? You’re trying to think of a way of covering this thing up. You’re afraid to bring me up before the Grand Jury on account of your own reputation, aren’t you?” His voice rises to a scream of panic. “Well, I want protection! I don’t want to go out there again — to my death! I won’t accept bail! If you turn me loose now, even on my own cognizance, you may be as guilty of my death as he is. How do I know my bullet stopped the thing? How does any of us know what becomes of the mind after death? Maybe his thoughts will still reach me, still try to get me. I tell you I want to be locked up, I want people around me day and night, I want to be where I’m safe—”

“Shh, for God’s sake, Mr. Bloch! They’ll think I’m beating you up—” The Commissioner drops his arms to his side and heaves a gigantic sigh. “That settles it! I’ll book you all right. You want that and you’re going to get it! I’ll book you for the murder of one Papa Benjamin, even if they laugh me out of office for it!”

For the first time since the whole thing has started, he casts a look of real anger, ill-will, at Eddie Bloch. He seizes a chair, swirls it around, and bangs it down in front of the man. He puts his foot on it and pokes his finger almost in Bloch’s eye. “I’m not two-faced. I’m not going to lock you up nice and cozy and then soft-pedal the whole thing. If it’s coming out at all, then all of it’s coming out. Now start in!

Tell me everything I want to know, and what I want to know is — everything!”

The strains of Goodnight Ladies die away; the dancers leave the floor; the lights start going out, and Eddie Bloch throws down his baton and mops the back of his neck with a handkerchief. He weighs about two hundred pounds, is in the pink, and is a good-looking brute. But his face is sour right now, dissatisfied. His outfit starts to case its instruments right and left, and Judy Jarvis steps up on the platform, in her street clothes, ready to go home. She’s Eddie’s torch singer, and also his wife. “Coming, Eddie? Let’s get out of here.” She looks a little disgusted herself. “I didn’t get a hand tonight, not even after my rumba number. Must be staling. If I wasn’t your wife, I’d be out of a job, I guess.”

Eddie pats her shoulder. “It isn’t you, honey. It’s us. We’re beginning to stink. Notice how the attendance has been dropping the past few weeks? There were more waiters than customers tonight. I’ll be hearing from the owner any minute now. He has the right to cancel my contract if the intake drops below five grand.” A waiter comes up to the edge of the platform. “Mr. Graham’d like to see you in his office before you go home, Mr. Bloch.”

Eddie and Judy look at each other. “This is it now, Judy. You go back to the hotel. Don’t wait for me. G’night, boys.” Eddie Bloch calls for his hat and knocks at the manager’s office.

Graham rustles a lot of accounts together. “We took in forty-five hundred this week, Eddie. They can get the same ginger ale and sandwiches any place, but they’ll go where the band has something to give ’em. I notice the few that do come in don’t even get up from the table any more when you tap your baton. Now, what’s wrong?” Eddie punches his hat a couple of times. “Don’t ask me. I’m getting the latest orchestrations from Broadway sent to me hot off the griddle. We sweat our bald heads off rehearsing—”

Graham swivels his cigar. “Don’t forget that jazz originated here in the South, you can’t show this town anything. They want something new.”

“When do I scram?” Eddie asks, smiling with the southwest comer of his mouth.

“Finish the week out. See if you can do something about it by Monday. If not, I’ll have to wire St. Louis to get Kruger’s crew. I’m sorry, Eddie.”

“That’s all right,” broadminded Eddie says. “You’re not running a charity bazaar.”

Eddie goes out into the dark danceroom. His crew has gone. The tables are stacked. A couple of old colored crones are down on hands and knees slopping water around on the parquet. Eddie steps up on the platform a minute to get some orchestrations he left on the piano. He feels something crunch under his shoe, reaches down, picks up a severed chicken’s claw lying there with a strip of red rag tied around it. How the hell did it get up there? If it had been under one of the tables, he’d have thought some diner had dropped it. He flushes a little. D’ye mean to say he and the boys were so rotten tonight that somebody deliberately threw it at them while they were playing?

One of the scrubwomen looks up. The next moment, she and her mate are on their feet, edging nearer, eyes big as saucers, until they get close enough to see what it is he’s holding. Then there’s a double yowl of animal fright, a tin pail goes rolling across the floor, and no two stout people, white or colored, ever got out of a place in such a hurry before. The door nearly comes off its hinges, and Eddie can hear their cackling all the way down the quiet street outside until it fades away into the night. “For gosh sake!” thinks the bewildered Eddie. “They must be using the wrong brand of gin.” He tosses the object out onto the floor and goes back to the piano for his music scores. A sheet or two has slipped down behind it and he squats to collect them. That way the piano hides him.

The door opens again and he sees Johnny Staats (traps and percussion) come in in quite a hurry. He thought Staats was home in bed by now. Staats is feeling himself all over like he was rehearsing the shim-sham and he’s scanning the ground as he goes along. Then suddenly he pounces — and it’s on the very scrap of garbage Eddie just now threw away! And as he straightens up with it, his breath comes out in such a sigh of relief that Eddie can hear it all the way across the still room. All this keeps him from hailing Staats as he was going to a minute ago and suggesting a cup of java. But — “Superstitious,” thinks broadminded Eddie. “It’s his good-luck charm, that’s all, like some people carry a rabbit’s foot. I’m a little that way myself, never walk under a ladder—”