A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

I

There was another patient ahead of me in the waiting room. He was sitting there quietly, humbly, with all the terrible resignation of the very poor. He wasn’t all jittery and alert like I was, but just sat there ready to take anything that came, head bowed a little as though he had found life just a succession of hard knocks. His gaze met mine and I suppose he could tell how uncomfortable I was by the look on my face, but instead of grinning about it or cracking wise he put himself out to encourage me, cheer me up. When I thought of this afterward it did something to me.

“He not hurt you,” he murmured across to me confidentially. “Odder dantist say he very good, you no feel notting at all when he drill.”

I showed my gratitude by offering him a cigarette. Misery loves company.

With that, Steve Standish came in from the back, buttoning his white jacket. The moment he saw me professional etiquette was thrown to the winds. “Well, well, Rodge, so it’s finally come to this, has it? I knew I’d get you sooner or later!” And so on and so on.

I gave a weak grin and tried to act nonchalant. Finally he said in oh, the most casual manner, “Come on in, Rodge, and let’s have a look at you.”

I suddenly discovered myself to be far more considerate of others than I had hitherto suspected. “This — er, man was here ahead of me, Steve.” Anything to gain five minutes’ time.

He glanced at his other patient, carelessly but by no means unkindly or disdainfully. “Yes, but you’ve got to get down to your office — he probably has the day off. You in a hurry?” he asked.

“Thass all right, I no mine, I got no work,” the man answered affably.

“No, Steve, I insist,” I said.

“Okay, if that’s the way you feel about it,” he answered genially. “Be right with you.” And he ushered the other patient inside ahead of him. I saw him wink at the man as he did so, but at the moment I didn’t much care what he thought of my courage. No man is a hero to his dentist.

And not long afterwards I was to wonder if that little attack of “cold feet” hadn’t been the luckiest thing that ever happened to me.

Steve closed his office door after him, but the partition between the two rooms had evidently been put in long after everything else in the place. It was paper-thin and only reached three-quarters of the way up; every sound that came from the other side was perfectly audible to me where I sat, fidgeting and straining my ears for indications of anguish. But first of all there was a little matter of routine to be gone through. “I guess I’ll have to take your name and pedigree myself,” Steve’s voice boomed out jovially. “It’s my assistant’s day off.”

“Amato Saltone, plizz.”

“And where do you live, Amato?” Steve had a way with these people. Not patronizing, just forthright and friendly.

“Two twanny Thirr Avenue. If you plizz, mista.”

There was a slight pause. I pictured Steve jotting down the information on a card and filing it away. Then he got down to business. “Now what seems to be the trouble?”

The man had evidently adjusted himself in the chair, meanwhile. Presumably he simply held his mouth open and let Steve find out for himself, because it was again Steve who spoke: “This one?” I visualized him plying his mirror now and maybe playing around with one of those sharp little things that look like crocheting needles. All at once his voice had become impatient, indignant even. “What do you call that thing you’ve got in there? I never saw a filling like it in my life. Looks like the Boulder Dam! Who put it in for you — some bricklayer?”

“Docata Jones, Feefatty-nine Stree,” the man said.

“Never heard of him. He send you here to me?” Steve asked sharply. “You’d think he’d have decency enough to clean up his own messes! I suppose there wasn’t enough in it for him. Well, that headstone you’ve got in there is going to come out first of all, and you just pay me whatever you can afford as we go along. I’d be ashamed to let a man walk out of my office with a botched-up job like that in his mouth!” He sounded bitter about it.

The next thing that came to my ears was the faint whirring of the electric drill, sounding not much louder than if there had been a fly buzzing around the room over my head.

I heard Steve speak just once more, and what he said was the immemorial question of the dentist, “Hurting you much?” The man groaned in answer, but it was a most peculiar groan. Even at the instant of hearing it it struck me that there was something different about it. It sounded so hollow and faraway, as though it had come from the very depths of his being, and broke off so suddenly at the end.

He didn’t make another sound after that. But whatever it was it had taken more than a mere twinge of pain to make him groan like that. Or was it just my own overwrought nerves that made me imagine it?

An instant later I knew I had been right. Steve’s voice told me that something out of the ordinary had happened just then. “Here, hold your head up so I can get at you,” he said. At first jokingly, and then — “Here! Here! What’s the matter with you?” Alarm crept in. “Wake up, will you? Wake up!” Alarm turned into panic. “Rodge!” he called out to me.

But I was on my feet already and half across the waiting room, my own trivial fears a thing of the past. He threw the door open before I got to it and looked out at me. His face was white. “This fellow — something’s happened to him, he’s turning cold here in the chair and I can’t bring him to!”

I brushed past him and bent over the figure huddled in the chair. Horrible to relate, his mouth was still wide open in the position Steve had had it just now. I touched his forehead; it was already cooler by far than the palm of my hand and clammy to the touch. I tried to rouse him by shaking him, no good, then felt for his heart. There was no heart any more. Steve was on the other side of him, holding his dental mirror before the open mouth. We both watched it fascinatedly; it stayed clear as crystal.

“He’s gone,” I muttered. “What do you make of it?”

“I’m going to try oxygen,” Steve babbled. “It may have been his heart—” He was hauling down a big, clumsy looking cylinder from a shelf with jerky, spasmodic movements that showed how badly shaken he was. “You’d better send in a call for an ambulance.”

The phone was outside in the waiting room; that didn’t take any time at all. When I came back there was a mask over his face and a tube leading from his mouth to the cylinder. Steve was just standing there helplessly. Every few seconds he’d touch a little wheel-shaped valve on the cylinder, but the indicator showed that it was already as wide open as it could go. “Keep your hand on his heart,” he said to me hoarsely.

It was no use. By the time the ambulance doctor and a policeman got there (with a deafening crashing of the rigged-up doorbell apparatus) Steve had taken the tube out of his mouth and turned off the flow of oxygen from the cylinder.

“Gave him nearly the whole tank,” I remember his saying to me.

The ambulance doctor took one look at him as he came in and then told us what we already knew. “All up, eh?” he said. He then stretched him out on the floor, of all places, with the help of the cop, and began to examine him. I cleared out of the room at this point and sat down to wait outside — fully imagining I was being big-hearted and staying on of my own free will to brace Steve up instead of going somewhere more cheerful. It would all be over in another five or ten minutes, I thought unsuspectingly, and then maybe Steve and I better go and have a drink together some place and both of us take the rest of the day off.

The patrolman came out to me and asked if I’d been in there when it happened. I told him no, I’d been out here waiting my turn. I was about to add for no particular reason that I was a very good friend of Steve’s and not just a stray patient, when things began to happen rapidly.

So far everything had been just pure routine on their part. But now the ambulance doctor finished his examination and came out, kit in hand, Steve trailing after him. What he had to say was to the policeman though and not to Steve at all. “It wasn’t his heart,” he said. “Better phone Headquarters and tell the coroner to come up here. He might want to bring a couple of boys with him.”

“What’s up?” Steve tried to sound casual but he wasn’t very good at it. The cop was already at the phone.

“Not natural causes at all,” the doctor said grimly. He wouldn’t say anything more than that. The shrug he gave plainly meant, “It’s not my job.” I thought he looked at Steve a little peculiarly as he turned to go. The hideous bell had another spasm of its jangling and the door closed after him.

II

The cop became noticeably less friendly after that; he remained standing to one side of the door and had a watchful air about him. Once when Steve made a move to go back into the other room for something his upper lip lifted after the manner of a mastiff with a bone and he growled warningly, “Take it easy, fellow.” Nice boy he was — as long as you were on his side of the fence.

They didn’t take long to get there, the coroner and “a couple of the boys.” They looked more like high-powered real estate agents to me, but this was the first time I’d even been in the same room with a detective.

“What’s about it?” began one of them, lingering with us while the coroner and his pal went on inside and got busy.

Steve told him the little there was to tell; the man had climbed into his chair, Steve had started to drill, and the man had gone out like a light. No, he’d never treated him before, never even laid eyes on him until five minutes before he’d died.

That was all there was to this first session, a harmless little chat, you might call it. The cop went back to his beat, a stretcher arrived, and poor Amato Saltone departed, his troubles at an end. Steve’s, though, were just beginning — and possibly mine with them. The second detective came out with the coroner, and the atmosphere, which hadn’t been any too cordial, all at once became definitely hostile.

“Cyanide of potassium,” snapped the coroner. “Just enough to kill — not a grain more, not a grain less. I pumped his stomach, but the traces were all over the roof of his mouth and the lining of his throat anyway. I’ll hold him on the ice in case they want a more thorough going-over later.” And he too departed. That bell was driving me slowly insane.

The second detective held the inner door open and said, “Come inside, Dr. Standish.” It wasn’t said as politely as it reads in print.

I’ve already mentioned that every word spoken could be heard through or over the partition. But I was only allowed to hear the opening broadside — and that was ominous enough, Lord knows. “Where do you keep your cyanide, Dr. Standish?”

The detective who had remained with me, as soon as he realized what the acoustics of the place were, immediately suggested with heavy emphasis: “Let’s just step out in the hall.”

After we’d been standing out there smoking awhile Steve’s office phone rang. My guardian took it upon himself to answer it, making sure that I came with him, so I had a chance to overhear the wind-up of Steve’s quizzing. The call itself was simply from a patient, and the detective took pains to inform her that Dr. Standish had cancelled all appointments for the rest of that day.

I didn’t like the way that sounded; nor did I like the turn the questioning had taken.

“So a man that’s going to commit suicide goes to all the trouble of having a cavity filled in his mouth just before he does it, does he?” Steve’s interlocutor was saying as we came in. “What for — to make himself beautiful for St. Peter?”

Steve was plenty indignant by now. “You’ve got a nerve trying to tack anything on me! He may have eaten something deadly outside without knowing it and then only got the effects after he was in my chair.”

“Not cyanide, pal, it works instantly. And it isn’t given away for nothing either. A fellow of that type would have jumped off a subway platform, it’s cheaper. Where would he have the money or drag to buy cyanide? He probably couldn’t even pronounce the name. Now why don’t you make it easy for yourself and admit that you had an accident?”

Steve’s voice broke. “Because I had nothing to do with it, accidentally or otherwise!”

“So you’re willing to have us think you did it purposely, eh? Keenan!” he called out.

We both went in there, Keenan just a step in back of me to guide me.

“There’s no trace of where he kept it hidden, but it’s all over his drill thick as jam,” Keenan’s teammate reported. He detached the apparatus from the tripod it swung on, carefully wrapped it in tissue paper, and put it in his pocket. He turned to Steve.

“I’m going to book you,” he said. “Come on, you’re coming down to Headquarters with me.”

Steve swayed a little, then got a grip on himself. “Am I under arrest?” he faltered.

“Well,” remarked the detective sarcastically, “this is no invitation to a Park Avenue ball.”

“What about this fellow?” Keenan indicated me. “Bring him along too?”

“He might be able to contribute a little something,” was the reply.

So down to Headquarters we went and I lost sight of Steve as soon as we got there. They kept me waiting around for awhile and then questioned me. But I could tell that I wasn’t being held as an accessory. I suppose my puffed-out cheek was more in my favor than everything else put together. Although why a man suffering from toothache would be less likely to be an accessory to murder than anyone else I fail to see. They didn’t even look to see if it was phony; for all they knew I could have had a wad of cotton stuffed in there.

I told them everything there was to tell (they asked me, you bet!) — not even omitting to mention the cigarette I had given the man when we were both sitting in the waiting room. It was only after I’d said this that I realized how bad it sounded for me if they cared to look at it in that way. The cyanide could just as easily have been concealed in that cigarette. Luckily they’d already picked up and examined the butt (he hadn’t had time to smoke more than half of it) and found it to be okay. Who says the innocent don’t run as great a risk as the guilty?

I told them all I could about Steve and, as soon as I was cleared and told I could go home, I embarked on a lengthy plea in his defense, assuring them they were making the biggest mistake of their lives.

“What motive could he possibly have?” I declaimed. “Check up on him, you’ll find he has a home in Forest Hills, a car, a walloping practice, goes to all the first nights at the theatre! What did that jobless Third Avenue slob have that he needed? Why I heard him with my own ears tell the guy not to be in a hurry about paying up! Where’s your motive? They came from two different worlds!”

All I got was the remark, Why didn’t I join the squad and get paid for my trouble, and the suggestion, Why didn’t I go home now?

One of them, Keenan, who turned out to be a rather likable sort after all, took me aside (but toward the door) and explained very patiently as to a ten-year-old child: “There’s only three possibilities in this case, see? Suicide, accidental poisoning, and poisoning on purpose. Now your own friend himself is the one that has blocked up the first two, not us. We were willing to give him every chance, in the beginning. But no, he insists the guy didn’t once lift his hands from under that linen apron to give the stuff to himself — take it out of his pocket and pop it in his mouth, for instance. Standish claims he never even once turned his back on him while he was in the chair, and that the fellow’s hands stayed folded in his lap under the bib the whole time. Says he noticed that because everyone else always grabs the arms of the chair and hangs on. So that’s out.

“And secondly he swears he has never kept any such stuff around the place as cyanide, in any shape or form, so it couldn’t have gotten on the drill by accident. So that’s out too. What have you got left? Poisoning on purpose — which has a one-word name: murder. That’s all today — and be sure you don’t leave town until after the trial, you’ll be needed on the witness stand.”

But I turned and followed him back inside and started all over again. Finally when I saw that it was no use, I tried to go bail for Steve, but they told me I couldn’t spring him until after he’d been indicted.

I spent the rest of the night with a wet handkerchief pasted against my cheek, doing heavy thinking. Every word Steve and the victim had spoken behind the partition passed before me in review. “Where do you live, Amato? Two-twanny Thirr Avenue, mista.” I’d start in from there.

I took an interpreter down there with me, a fellow on my own office staff who knew a little of everything from Eskimo to Greek. I wasn’t taking any chances. Amato himself had been no Lowell Thomas, I could imagine what his family’s English would be like!

There seemed to be dozens of them; they lived in a cold-water flat on the third floor rear. The head of the clan was Amato’s rather stout wife. I concentrated on her; when a fellow has a toothache he’ll usually tell his wife all about it quicker than his aunts or nieces or nephews.

“Ask her where this Dr. Jones lived that sent him to Standish.”

She didn’t know, Amato hadn’t even told her what the man’s name was. Hadn’t they a bill from the man to show me? (I wanted to prove that Amato had been there.) No, no bill, but that didn’t matter because Amato couldn’t read anyway, and even if he had been able to, there was no money to pay it with.

If he couldn’t read, I persisted, how had he known where to find a dentist?

She shrugged. Maybe he was going by and saw the dentist at work through a window.

I went through the entire family, from first to last, and got nowhere. Amato had done plenty of howling and calling on the saints in the depths of the night, and even kept some of the younger children quiet at times by letting them look at his bad tooth, but as for telling them where, when, or by whom it had been treated, it never occurred to him.

So I was not only no further but I had even lost a good deal of confidence. “Docata Jones” began to look pretty much like a myth. Steve hadn’t known him, either. But the man had said Fifty-ninth Street. With all due respect for the dead, I didn’t think Amato had brains enough to make up even that little out of his head. I’d have to try that angle next, and unaided, since Amato’s family had turned out to be a flop.

I tackled the phone book first, hoping for a short cut. Plenty of Joneses, D.D.S., but no one on 59th. Nor even one on 57th, 58th, or 60th, in case Amato was stupid enough not even to know which street he’d been on. The good old-fashioned way was all that was left. At that, there have been dentists before now who couldn’t afford a telephone.

III

I swallowed a malted milk, tied a double knot in my shoelaces, and started out on foot, westward from the Queensboro Bridge. I went into every lobby, every hallway, every basement; I scanned every sign in every window, every card in every mail box. I consulted every superintendent in every walk-up, every starter in every elevator building, every landlady in every rooming house.

I followed the street west until it became fashionable Central Park South (I hadn’t much hope there), then further still as it turned into darkest San Juan Hill, gave a lot of attention to the Vanderbilt Clinic at 10th Avenue, and finally came smack up against the speedway bordering the Hudson, with my feet burning me like blazes. No results. No Jones. It took me all of the first day and most of the second. At 2 p.m. Thursday I was back again at the Bridge (I’d taxied back, don’t worry).

I got out and stood on the corner smoking a cigarette. I’d used the wrong method, that was all. I’d been rational about it, Amato had been instinctive. What had his wife said? He was going by and most likely saw some dentist working behind a window and that decided him. I’d been looking for a dentist, he hadn’t — until he happened on one. I’d have to put myself in his place to get the right set-up.

I walked back two blocks to 3rd Avenue and started out afresh from that point on. He had lived on 3rd Avenue, so he had probably walked all the way up it looking for work until he got to 59th, and then turned either east or west. West there was a department store on one side, a five-and-ten and a furniture store on the other; they wouldn’t interest him. East there were a whole line of mangy little shops and stalls; I turned east. I trudged along; I was Amato now, worrying about where my next half dollar was coming from, not thinking about my tooth at all — at least not just at that moment.

A shadow fell before me on the sidewalk. I looked up. A huge, swaying, papier-maché gold tooth was hanging out over the doorway. It was the size of a football at least. Even Amato would have known what it was there for. Maybe he’d gotten a bad twinge just then. The only trouble was — I’d seen it myself yesterday, it was almost the first thing that had caught my eye when I started out. I’d investigated, you may be sure. And the card on the window said “Dr. Carter” as big as life. That was out — or was it? Amato couldn’t read; “Carter” wouldn’t mean any more to him than “Jones.” But then where had he gotten “Jones” from? Familiar as it is, it would have been as foreign to him as his own name was to me.

No use going any further, though. If that gold tooth hadn’t made up Amato’s mind for him, nothing else the whole length of the street could have. I was on the point of going in anyway, just for a quick once over, but a hurried glance at my own appearance decided me not to. Serge business suit, good hat, dusty but well-heeled shoes. Whatever had happened to Amato, if he had gone in there, wasn’t likely to happen to anyone dressed like I was. If I was going to put myself in his place, I ought at least to try to look like him. And there were a few other things, too, still out of focus.

I jumped in a cab and chased down to Headquarters. I didn’t think they’d let me see Steve, but somehow I managed to wangle it out of them. I suppose Keenan had a hand in it. And then too, Steve hadn’t cracked yet, that may have had something to do with it.

“What enemies have you?” I shot out. There wasn’t much time. “None,” he said. “I never harmed anyone in my life.”

“Think hard,” I begged. “You’ve got to help me. Maybe way back, maybe some little thing.”

“Nope,” he insisted cynically, “my life’s been a bed of roses until day before yesterday.” He had a purple eye at the moment and a forty-eight-hour beard.

I turned cynical myself. “Let’s skip it then and look at it the other way around. Who are your best friends — outside of myself?”

He ran over a list of names as long as a timetable. He left out one, though. “And Dave Carter?” I supplied. “Know him?”

He nodded cheerfully. “Sure, but how did you know? We used to be pretty chummy. I haven’t seen him in years, though; we drifted apart. We started out together, both working in the same office I have now. Then he moved out on me, thought he could do better by himself, I guess.”

“And did he?”

“He hit the skids. All the patients kept on coming to me, for some reason, and he just sat there in his spick-and-span office twiddling his thumbs. Inside of six months the overhead was too much for him and here’s the payoff: he ended up by having to move into a place ten times worse than the one he’d shared with me. What with one thing and another I lent him quite a bit of money which I never got back.”

“And did he turn sour on you?”

“Not at all, that’s the funny part of it. Last time I saw him he slapped me on the back and said, ‘More power to you, Stevie, you’re a better man than I am!’ ”

“In your hat!” I thought skeptically. “When was the last time you saw him?” I asked.

“Years back. As a matter of fact, I clean forgot him until you—” I stood up to go without waiting for him to finish. “Excuse the rush, but I’ve got things to do.”

“Dig me up a good lawyer, will you?” he called after me. “Price is no object. I’m getting sick of hitting these dicks in the fist with my eyes!”

“You don’t need a lawyer,” I shouted back. “All you need is a little dash of suspicion in your nature. Like me.”

I got Keenan to take me in and introduce me to the chief while I was down there — after about an hour or so of pleading. The chief was regular, but a tough nut to crack. Still he must have been in good humor that day. If he reads this, no offense meant, but the cigars he smokes are fierce. I had a proposition to make to him, and two requests. One of them he gave in to almost at once — loving newspapermen the way he did. The other he said he’d think over. As for the proposition itself he said it wasn’t so hot, but to go ahead and try it if I felt like it, only not to blame anyone but myself if I got into trouble.

From Headquarters I went straight to a pawnshop on 3rd Avenue. It was long after dark, but they stay open until nine. I bought a suit of clothes for three dollars. The first one the man showed me I handed back to him. “That’s the best I can give you—” he started in.

“I don’t want the best, I want the worst,” I said, much to his surprise. I got it all right.

From there I went to a second one and purchased what had once been an overcoat before the World War. Price, two fifty. The coat and suit were both ragged, patched and faded, but at least the pawnbrokers had kept them brushed off; I fixed that with the help of a barrel of ashes I passed a few doors away. I also traded hats with a panhandler who crossed my path, getting possession of a peculiar shapeless mound he had been wearing on his head. I was doing more than laying down my life for my friend; I was risking dandruff and Lord knows what else for his sake.

I trundled all this stuff home and managed to hide it from my wife in the broom closet. In the morning, though, when she saw me arrayed in it from head to foot she let out a yell and all but sank to the floor. “Now never mind the hysterics,” I reproved. “Papa knows just what he’s doing!”

“If this has anything to do with Steve, you’re a day late,” she told me when she was through giggling. “They’ve dismissed the case against him.” She held out the morning paper to me.

I didn’t bother looking at it; in the first place it was one of the two requests I’d made at Headquarters the night before; in the second place it wasn’t true anyway.

Keenan was waiting for me on the southwest comer of 59th and 2nd as per agreement. Anyone watching us would have thought our behavior peculiar, to say the least. I went up to him and opened my mouth as though I was Joe E. Brown making faces at him. “It’s that tooth up there, that molar on the right side. Take a good look at it.” He did. This was for purposes of evidence. “Got the picture?” He nodded. “I’m going in now, where that gold tooth is, half-way down the block. Back in half an hour. Wait here for me and keep your fingers crossed.”

This statement wasn’t quite accurate, though. I was sure I was going in where the gold tooth was, but I wasn’t sure I was coming back in half an hour — I wasn’t sure I was coming back at all, any time.

I left him abruptly and went into the office of Dr. Dave Carter. I was cold and scared. The accent bothered me too. I decided a brogue would be the safest. No foreign langi ages for me. Carter was a short, dumpy little man, as good-natured and harmless looking as you’d want. Only his eyes gave him away. Slits they were, little malevolent pig eyes. The eyes had it; they told me I wasn’t wasting my time. The office was a filthy, rundown place. Instead of a partition, the dental chair was right in the room, with a screen around it. There was an odor of stale gas around.

My feet kept begging me to get up and run out of there while I still had the chance. I couldn’t, though; Keenan was waiting on the corner. I wanted to keep his respect.

Carter was standing over me; he didn’t believe in the daily bath, either. “Well, young fellow?” he said sleekly. I pointed sorrowfully at my cheek, which had been more or less inflated for the past three days. The pain had gone out of it long ago, however. Pain and swelling rarely go together, contrary to general belief.

“So I see,” he said, but made no move to do anything about it. “What brings you here to me?” he asked craftily.

“Sure ’tis the ellygant gold tooth ye have out, boss,” I answered shakily. Did that sound Irish enough? I wondered. Evidently it did.

“Irishman, eh?” he told me not very cleverly. “What’s your name?”

“McConnaughy.” I’d purposely picked a tongue-twister, to get the point across I was trying to make.

He bit. “How do you spell it?”

“Sure, I don’t know now,” I smiled wanly. “I nivver in me life learned to spell.” That was the point I was trying to make.

“Can’t read or write, eh?” He seemed pleased rather than disappointed. “Didn’t you ever go to school when you were a kid?”

“I minded the pigs and such,” I croaked forlornly.

He suddenly whipped out a newspaper he’d been holding behind his back and shoved it under my nose. “What d’you think of that?” It was upside down. He was trying to catch me off my guard, hoping I’d give myself away and turn it right side up without thinking. I kept my hands off it. “What do it say?” I queried helplessly.

He tossed it aside. “I guess you can’t read, at that,” he gloated. But the presence of the newspaper meant that he already knew Steve was back in circulation; the item had been in all of them that morning.

He motioned me to the chair. I climbed into it. I was too curious to see what would happen next to be really frightened. Otherwise how could I have sat in it at all? He took a cursory glance into my mouth. Almost an absent-minded glance, as though his thoughts were really elsewhere. “Can you pay me?” he said next, still very absent-minded and not looking at me at all.

“I’ll do my best, sorr. I have no job.”

“Tell you what I’ll do for you,” he said suddenly, his eyes dilating. “I’ll give you temporary relief, and then I’ll send you to someone who’ll finish the job for you. He won’t charge you anything, either. You just tell him Dr. Smith sent you.”

My heart started to go like a trip-hammer. So I was on the right track after all, was I? He’d picked a different name this time to cover up his traces, that was all. And as for the gold tooth outside the door betraying him, he was counting on something stopping me before I got around to mentioning that. I knew what that something was, too.

He got to work. He pulled open a drawer and I saw a number of fragile clay caps or crowns, hollow inside and thin as tissue paper. They were about the size and shape of thimbles. I could hardly breathe any more. Steve’s voice came back to me, indignantly questioning Amato: “Looks like the Boulder Dam, some bricklayer put it in for you?”

He took one of these out and closed the drawer. Then he opened another drawer and took something else out. But this time I couldn’t see what it was, because he carefully stood over it with his back to me. He glanced over his shoulder at me to see if I was watching him. I beat him to it and lowered my eyes to my lap. He closed the second drawer. But I knew which one it was; the lower right in a cabinet of six.

He came over to me. “Open,” he commanded. My eyes rolled around in their sockets. I still had time to rear up out of the chair, push him back, and snatch the evidence out of his hand. But I wasn’t sure yet whether it was evidence or not.

Those caps may have been perfectly legitimate, for all I knew; I was no dentist. So I sat quiet, paralyzed with fear, unable to move.

And the whole thing was over with almost before it had begun. He sprayed a little something on the tooth, waxed it with hot grease, and stuck the cap on over it. No drilling, no dredging, no cleansing whatsoever. “That’s all,” he said with an evil grin. “But remember, it’s only temporary. By tomorrow at the latest you go to this other dentist and he’ll finish the job for you.”

I saw the point at once. He hadn’t cleaned the tooth in the least; in an hour or two it would start aching worse than ever under the fake cap and I’d have to go to the other dentist. The same thing must have happened to Amato. I was in for it now! “Don’t chew on that side,” he warned me, “until you see him.” He didn’t want it to happen to me at home or at some coffee counter, but in Steve’s office, in Steve’s chair!

Then he gave me the name and place I was to go to. “Standish, 28th and Lexington, second floor.” Over and over again. “Will you remember that?” That was all I needed, I had the evidence against him now. But I didn’t make a hostile move toward him, instead I stumbled out into the street and swayed toward the corner where Keenan was waiting for me. Let the cops go after him. I had myself to worry about now. I was carrying Death around in my mouth. Any minute, the slightest little jolt—

Keenan had been joined by a second detective. They both came toward me and held me up by the elbows. I managed to get my mouth open, and Keenan looked in. “Get the difference?” I gasped.

“It begins to look like you were right,” he muttered.

He phoned the chief at Headquarters and then got me into a taxi with him. The second man was left there to keep an eye on Carter and tail him if he left his office.

“What’re you holding your mouth open like that for?” he asked me in the cab.

“A sudden jolt of the taxi might knock my teeth together,” I articulated. I had seen how thin those caps were.

We raced down Lexington and got out at Steve’s office. Steve had been rushed up there from the detention pen in a police car along with the chief himself and two more detectives. He had to have facilities if he was going to save me from what had happened to Amato.

“He’s got the evidence,” Keenan informed them as he guided me past the jangling bell. I pointed to my mouth. “In there,” I gasped, and my knees buckled up under me.

Steve got me into the chair. Sweat broke out on his face after he’d taken one look at Carter’s work, but he tried to reassure me. “All right, all right now, boy,” he said soothingly, “You know I won’t go back on you, don’t you?”

He looked around at them. The chief had his usual rank cigar in his mouth, which had gone out in the excitement. One of the others held a pipe between his clenched teeth.

“Where’s your tobacco pouch?” ordered Steve hoarsely. “Let me have it, I’ll get you a new one.”

The lining was thin rubber. He tore that out, scattered tobacco all over the floor. Then he held it up toward the light and stretched it to see if there were any holes or cracks. Then, with a tiny pair of curved scissors, he cut a small wedge-shaped hole in it. “Now hold your mouth open,” he said to me, “and whatever you do, don’t move!” He lined the inside of my mouth with the rubber, carefully working the tooth Carter had just treated through the hole he had cut, so that it was inside the pouch. The ends of the rubber sack he left protruding through my lips. I felt a little as though I were choking. “Can you breathe?” he said. I batted my eyes to show him he could go ahead.

He thrust wedges into my cheeks, so that I couldn’t close my jaws whether I wanted to or not. Then he came out with a tiny mallet and a little chisel, about the size of a nail. “I may be able to get it out whole,” he explained to the chief. “It’s been in less than half an hour. Drilling is too risky.”

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!”