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

Eddie’s facing the crew, his back to Judy, and as he vibrates to the rhythm, some pin or other that he’s forgotten to take out of his shirt suddenly catches him and sticks into him. It’s a little below the collar, just between the shoulder-blades. He jumps a little, but doesn’t feel it any more after that...

Judy squalls, tears her tonsils out, screeches words that neither he nor she know the meaning of but that he managed to set down on paper phonetically the other night. Her little body goes through all the contortions, tamed down of course, that that brownskin she-devil greased with lard and wearing only earrings performed that night. She stabs the bird with her fake knife and sprinkles imaginary blood in the air. Nothing like this has ever been seen before. And in the silence that suddenly lands when it’s through, you can count twenty. That’s how it’s gotten under everyone’s skin.

Then the noise begins. It goes over like an avalanche. But just the same, more people are ordering strong drinks all at once than has ever happened before in the place, and the matron in the women’s restroom has her hands full of hysterical sob-sisters.

“Try to get away from me, just try!” Graham tells Eddie at curfew time. “I’ll have a new contract, gilt-edged, ready for you in the morning. We’ve already got six grand worth of reservations on our hands for the coming week — one of ’em by telegram all the way from Shreveport!”

Success! Eddie and Judy taxi back to their rooms at the hotel, tired but happy. “It’ll be good for years. We can use it for our signature on the air, like Whiteman does the Rhapsody.”

She goes into the bedroom first, snaps on the lights, calls to him a minute later. “Come here and look at this — the cutest little souvenir!” He finds her holding a little wax doll, finger high, in her hands. “Why, it’s you, Eddie, look! Small as it is, it has your features! Well isn’t that the clev—”

He takes it away from her and squints at it. It’s himself all right. It’s rigged out in two tiny patches of black cloth for a tuxedo, and the eyes and hair and features are inked onto the wax.

“Where’d you find it?”

“It was in your bed, up against the pillow.”

He’s fixing to grin about it, until he happens to turn it over. In the back, just a little below the collar between the shoulder blades, a short but venomous-looking black pin is sticking.

He goes a little white for a minute. He knows who it’s from now and what it’s trying to tell him. But that isn’t what makes him change color. He’s just remembered something. He throws off his coat, yanks at his collar, turns his back to her. “Judy, look down there, will you? I felt a pin stick me while we were doing that number. Put your hand down. Feel anything?”

“No, there’s nothing there,” she tells him.

“Musta dropped out.”

“It couldn’t have,” she says. “Your belt-line’s so tight it almost cuts into you. There couldn’t have been anything there or it’d still be there now. You must have imagined it.”

“Listen, I know a pin when I feel one. Any mark on my back, any scratch between the shoulders?”

“Not a thing.”

“Tired, I guess. Nervous.” He goes over to the open window and pitches the little doll out into the night with all his strength. Damn coincidence, that’s all it was. To think otherwise would be to give them their inning. But he wonders what makes him feel so tired just the same — Judy did all the exercising, not he — yet he’s felt all in ever since that number tonight.

Out go the lights and she drops off to sleep right with them. He lies very quiet for awhile. A little later he gets up, goes into the bathroom where the lights are whitest of all, and stands there looking at himself close to the glass. “Look at your fingernails sometime; look at the whites of your eyes,” Staats had said. Eddie does. There’s a bluish, purplish tinge to his nails that he never noticed before. The whites of his eyes are faintly yellow.

It’s warm in New Orleans that night but he shivers a little as he stands there. He doesn’t sleep any more that night...

In the morning his back aches as if he were sixty. But he knows that’s from not closing his eyes all night, and not from any magic pins.

“Oh, my God!” Judy says, from the other side of the bed, “look what you’ve done to him!” She shows him the second page of the Picayune. “John Staats, until recently a member of Eddie Bloch’s orchestra, committed suicide late yesterday afternoon in full view of dozens of people by rowing himself out into Lake Pontchartrain and jumping overboard. He was alone in the boat at the time. The body was recovered half an hour later.”

“I didn’t do that,” says Eddie grimly. “I’ve got a rough idea what did, though.” Late yesterday afternoon. The night was coming on, and he couldn’t face what was coming to him for sponsoring Eddie, for giving them all away. Late yesterday after — that meant he hadn’t left that warning at the dressing-room or left that death sentence on the bed. He’d been dead himself by then — not white, not black, just yellow.

Eddie waits until Judy’s in her shower, then he phones the morgue. “About Johnny Staats. He worked for me until yesterday, so if nobody’s claimed the body send it to a funeral parlor at my exp—”

“Somebody’s already claimed the remains, Mr. Bloch. First thing this morning. Just waited until the examiner had established suicide beyond a doubt. Some colored organization, old friends of his it seems—”

Judy comes in and remarks: “You look all green in the face.”

Eddie thinks: “I wouldn’t care if he was my worst enemy, I can’t let that happen to him! What horrors are going to take place tonight somewhere under the moon?” He wouldn’t even put cannibalism beyond them. The phone’s right at his fingertips, and yet he can’t denounce them to the police without involving himself, admitting that he was there, took part at least once. Once that comes out, bang! goes his reputation. He’ll never be able to live it down — especially now that he’s played the Voodoo chant and identified himself with it in the minds of the public.

So instead, alone in the room again, he calls the best-known private agency in New Orleans. “I want a bodyguard. Just for tonight. Have him meet me at closing-time at the Bataclan. Armed, of course.”

It’s Sunday and the banks are closed, but his credit’s good anywhere. He raises a G in cash. He arranges with a reliable crematorium for a body to be taken charge of late tonight or early in the morning. He’ll notify them just where to call for it. Yes, of course! He’ll produce the proper authorization from the police. Poor Johnny Staats couldn’t get away from them in life, but he’s going to get away from them in death, all right. That’s the least anyone could do for him.

Graham slaps a sawbuck cover on that night, more to give the waiters room to move around in than anything else, and still the place is choked to the roof. This Voodoo number is a natural, a wow.

But Eddie’s back is ready to cave in, while he stands there jogging with his stick. It’s all he can do to hold himself straight.

When the racket and the shuffling are over for the night, the private dick is there waiting for him. “Lee is the name.”

“Okay, Lee, come with me.” They go outside and get in Eddie’s Bugatti. They whizz down to the Vieux, scrounge to a stop in the middle of Congo Square, which will still be Congo Square when its official name of Beauregard is forgotten. “This way,” says Eddie, and his bodyguard squirms through the alley after him. “ ‘Lo, suga’ pie,” says the elbow-pusher, and for once, to her own surprise as much as anyone else’s, gets a tumble. “’Lo, Eglantine,” Eddie’s bodyguard remarks in passing, “so you moved?”