Honey in His Mouth

ONE

He should have paid the bill. But who would have thought that some afternoon he would drive into a filling station and there would be D. C. Roebuck standing by a gas pump? He saw that Roebuck was holding up five fingers to the attendant and could hear Roebuck’s harsh voice, like glass being chewed: “Five regular, Mac. And check the oil.”

Walter Harsh did the only thing he could think of, sit there with hands on the steering wheel, foot on the brake, a mouse nest gathering in the pit of his stomach. He wished he had not talked D. C. Roebuck into letting him have seven hundred and twelve dollars worth of photographic supplies on tick. Mostly he wished to hell and gone that he had not run into D. C. Roebuck.

It came to him that just sitting there in the parked car he was a sitting duck. He eased the gear shift into drive position and pressed the gas pedal with his foot. Just then Roebuck turned and saw him. “Hey!”

Walter Harsh pushed the gas pedal to the floor.

Roebuck leaped over the gas hose and ran forward. “Hold it, Harsh! I want to see you, you son of a bitch. Hold it!”

Harsh did not look around. The cushion felt like a big hand pressing against his spine as the car gained speed. He almost didn’t make it at that. Roebuck overtook the car, but he couldn’t find anything to grab with his hands. Harsh heard Roebuck’s hands clawing at the car. Then there was a thud. When he turned his head for a quick look, he saw the big man had hit the back window an angry blow with his fist. It had cracked the window glass. He saw Roebuck back in the street floundering the way a big man flops around when he tries to stop running abruptly, and he heard what Roebuck shouted. “I’ll fix you. Thieving bastard, I’ll fix you good.” Roebuck stopped, turned, ran toward his own car.

The filling station was on the north edge of a small Missouri town named Carrollton. The sun was shining on the concrete highway. There was a ridge of snow mixed with dirt along the shoulder on each side of the pavement where the highway plow had pushed it. There was some snow in the fields with weeds and corn stalks sticking out of it.

Harsh’s car went faster and faster, passing several signs in fields. Thank You, one sign said. Come again to Carrollton, Missouri, the second said. God Bless You, the Carrollton Baptist Church, said the third sign. The rear-view mirror was a little off. He reached up and adjusted it and saw Roebuck’s car swing into view, following him. Well, that ties it, he thought, the big guy is going to give me trouble.

He veered to the center of the highway to get a full swing at a curve he saw ahead, figuring that way he could go into the curve ten miles an hour faster. There was some howling from the tires in the curve. When he straightened out, he looked back, saw Roebuck seemed to be gaining on him already.

They were headed north. The highway went straight for a while, but with ups and downs over the hills. He began to wonder, suppose he couldn’t outrun Roebuck, what he was going to do? There was no use to try to talk the man out of anything. Talk was what Roebuck had already heard. Talk was what had cost Roebuck seven hundred and twelve dollars. The company had forced Roebuck to make the bad credit good out of his own pocket. He had told Harsh about this in a bar in St. Joseph, and Harsh had said he thought Roebuck was a damn fool for working for that kind of a company, which was when Roebuck grabbed a bottle off the display on the backbar. Roebuck was an enormous man with long powerful arms, a bad-tempered man. He chased Harsh out of the bar and for two terrifying blocks before Harsh outdistanced him. It had been a shattering experience. The man would have killed him.

Roebuck was gaining, all right.

Harsh reached down and punched the choke button with the ball of his thumb to make sure the choke was not pulled out. His car engine was cold-blooded these winter days and had to be choked before it would start; sometimes he forgot and left the choke out. He thought of something and eased the choke back out a little to enrich the mixture to see if that would add any speed. The speedometer dropped from ninety-five to ninety. He pushed the choke back in. He couldn’t think of anything more to do. The old heap just didn’t have it. Put off the valve job too long, he thought.

On a road as straight as this it did not help a man to be a skillful driver. Any fool could tramp the gas and tool down the middle of the road. A crossroads snapped past. What about trying to make it into the next crossroads, he wondered, and take off down some country road. Try to lose Roebuck that way. Oh sure, he thought, let the son of a bitch catch me on a lonely back road and he’ll kill me sure.

The car behind continued to gain on him.

He gripped the steering wheel and kept the gas pressed down with all the strength in his foot. He saw now what he should have done was stay put in the service station— that way there would have been a witness handy when Roebuck jumped him. He had seen one man around the filling station, a tall fellow with pale curly hair, who would have been a witness. One witness was better than none.

Roebuck’s car was about three hundred feet behind.

Harsh was not panic-stricken, he did not think he was going to pieces or anything, but he knew there was real danger from Roebuck. He remembered Vera Sue had said Roebuck was dangerous. “Walter, I know you’re fixing to screw Mr. Roebuck, and I wish you wouldn’t. He gets real wild when he’s excited, real awfully wild. I am afraid you’ll wish you hadn’t messed with him.” Vera Sue Crosby was Harsh’s business associate and she had lent him a little help, at his suggestion, in suckering Roebuck. “Walter, the guy goes nuts, you get him excited.” At the time, Harsh had laughed because he knew that being in a hotel room with Vera Sue would make most fellows rattle their marbles.

One hundred feet behind.

Harsh supposed that using the girl to con Roebuck out of seven hundred and twelve dollars worth of photo supplies was what had driven the man crazy. If Harsh had stuck to the straight con and left out sex, maybe Roebuck wouldn’t have blown his top. However it made no difference now, it was water past the bridge. Harsh had used the photo supplies. He did not have money to pay up. All he could do was run for it. The roar from his engine was deafening and the whole car pounded and shuddered. Son of a bitch trying to fly to pieces, he thought.

The chase was beginning to look like a matter of time, time and providence. If they would only pass a highway cop. But he knew they wouldn’t. When you needed a highway cop they were always gassing a waitress in a restaurant. If he hadn’t been fleeing for his life, if he’d been burning up the highway at ninety-five just for kicks, a cop would be popping from behind every fencepost. That was the way it went, he thought, the potlickers never around when you wanted them.

Fifty feet.

He glanced over the inside of his car looking for something he could use for a weapon to defend himself. In the front seat there was nothing. The only loose objects in the back seat were his camera in its case and the tripod, but the tripod was strapped tight to the camera case, and he knew from experience it would not be easy to unstrap it at this speed. The camera had cost too much money to use it for a weapon. Bust it all to hell, he thought, if I go banging it on that bird’s thick skull. Traveling at this speed he wondered if he dared fool around unstrapping the tripod. It was not very heavy anyway, not much use if he did get it loose. The car took another curve, not much of a curve, but the tires skidded and gave out high girllike shrieks. Coming out of the curve the speedometer read ninety miles and it quickly climbed to ninety-seven.

When the roar of passing air began to have a different quality, he knew what caused it before he swung his head to look. Roebuck was pulling abreast in the left lane.

“Hey, Harsh! Stop your car!” Roebuck had rolled down his right-hand window. “You want me to knock you off the road?” He sounded as if he was chewing rocks now.

“Get away from me,” Harsh shouted. The road ahead lay straight over rolling hills. “Let me alone!”

The cars touched, bounced, wobbled. Harsh brought his machine under control readily enough. He was afraid to hit the brakes because at this speed no telling if it would throw the car off the road. They sped on, the other car drawing up slowly until it was nearly abreast. His throat felt tight. Let the other car get far enough ahead, nudge his front wheel, and he was a goner. He threw a look at Roebuck. The man was steering with just his left hand on the wheel, and there was a metal object in his right. Roebuck’s thick body began squirming toward the middle of the seat. The metal object was a small hydraulic jack weighing about twenty pounds, and he was going to hurl it at Harsh’s head. Oh Jesus, Harsh thought, and he threw up his left hand to fend off the jack. But the wind-stream struck his arm a blow, driving the arm back and actually causing his hand to bang against the outside of his car.

At that moment the cars came together. The impact did not seem violent. A gentle kiss of heavy metal bodies. But Harsh’s left hand was hanging out between the cars and his arm was broken. The ends of the bones appeared through the cloth of his coat sleeve like two large fangs.

Roebuck’s car swerved left and the outside pair of wheels dropped off the slab. Both machines were going downhill, speed slightly over 100 mph. Roebuck’s car hooked into the snow, slewed over and collided with a concrete culvert. The culvert wall, reinforced concrete three feet high, a foot thick, nearly fifteen feet long, sliced through Roebuck’s car like a hatchet through a shoebox. What was left of the car went end over end, hitting and bouncing, hitting and bouncing, landing on Roebuck’s body the third hit, passing through a barbed wire fence and rolling about one hundred feet further into a bean stubblefield. A large cloud of snow and loose earth accompanied it into the stubblefield.

Harsh did not know he was injured until he noticed his left arm was still hanging out the window, and he started to draw it back. He almost screamed from the pain. He looked at the arm, the grayish bone ends sticking through the cloth of his sleeve. He found he had no control of the arm from the shoulder down. He felt a warm slippery quality in his trousers, decided he had shit his pants. He cursed his luck, his carelessness, his stupidity. The arm had been between the cars when they came together, he thought, and it was busted all to hell.

He cut his speed down to about twenty, which seemed awfully slow by comparison, almost as if he could step out and walk faster. He wondered, should he go back and learn how Roebuck had fared. Maybe the man needed help. He could work up no enthusiasm for this idea, however. He really should get his arm back inside the car, he thought. Wonder how bunged it was, bad as it looked? To be safe he had better stop the car. He did so, but did not pull over on the shoulder because of the snow. There was no traffic in view anyway. He reached over, gritted his teeth, took hold of his left arm with his right hand. Oh God! He almost passed out. Then he was sick and his arm hurt so he could not put his head out of the window, resulting in his making a mess inside his car.

Presently he felt some better, and wiped the tears out of his eyes. Better get the damn arm in, give it one big jerk if no other way. Suddenly he seized the mangled arm and yanked it back into the car. Then his head bent back and he screamed several times. He couldn’t help it.

Well, the arm was in the car, and now he should get to a hospital probably. That was the ticket, a hospital. He shoved the gear shift into forward drive and fed the gas slowly so as not to jerk the car and hurt his arm. The machine rolled quietly, and driving was not as much work as he had feared. Damn car, he thought, runs like a baby now. Turned into an old man when it mattered. Trade the son of a bitch off, he thought, first chance I get. Swap it for a mule, if he had to. He looked down at his lap and saw a pool of blood from his arm. This scared him, for he had heard a man could bleed to death and never know it. He watched the arm closely, between keeping his eyes on the road, but the blood pool did not seem to be growing. He was going to make it, he decided.

He crossed a bridge over a small river and saw a series of billboards, which meant a town. He would keep his eye open for some building that looked like a hospital. He could not see any buildings extending above treetop level. A hospital worthy of the name would be higher than the treetops, he felt, and he began to suspect this was a jerk town that didn’t have a decent hospital. Another thing: The way Roebuck’s car had gone end over end, he felt Roebuck had been killed for sure. What if someone had seen his car give D. C. Roebuck’s car the nudge that sent it stem-winding into the bean field? Had anyone been watching? He tried to remember. He decided that as fast as he had been traveling and the rest of it, he wouldn’t have noticed the U.S. Marine Corps if they had been lined up in dress parade along the highway. Can’t stop in this town. I better keep going far enough nobody will connect me with Roebuck. He decided he felt up to going on.

So he did not turn off the highway as he had planned. There was no stop sign, only a SLOW, which he observed carefully, then drove on. He could make it somewhere. Make it, hell, he thought, he could drive a hundred miles if he had to. Maybe a couple hundred would be better.

Presently he decided he could use a smoke. He felt out the pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket and pulled forth one cigarette. He had to bend forward to reach the lighter on the dash and when he did, his left arm slid off his lap down into the narrow space between the left side of the seat and the car door. The pain pried his mouth open as if invisible hands had wrenched at his jaw.

As he had reached for the lighter, in the moment before pain paralyzed him, he noticed blood on the carpet. He looked down again. The cigarette had fallen from his lips, was lying in a pool of blood on the floor. He stretched out his left leg and saw the cloth was soaked with red. The arm, unknown to him, had been bleeding down the trouser leg. He became frightened again. What if he passed out and the car went off the road? That would fix him, wouldn’t it?

TWO

It was late afternoon when Walter Harsh’s car turned into a service station across from a chicken hatchery in a small water tower town in northeast Missouri. A bell gave a ping when the wheels ran over a rubber hose, the car stopped, an attendant came out and dipped a sponge in a bucket of water. He took his time squeezing excess water from the sponge. He began to swab the windshield.

“Tell me, Jack, you got a good doctor in this town?” Harsh was not completely sure that the car had stopped moving. Pain made everything look as if it had a short red fuzz growing on it.

The attendant misunderstood. “How many gallons was that?” He rubbed at the windshield. His neck stiffened a little. He had smelled the vomit inside the car.

Harsh was completely confused by receiving a question in answer to what he recalled was a question the way he asked it. What had he asked the bird anyway? Ain’t in no shape to figure something out, he thought. But he was very scared inside, and being scared caused him to wish to be agreeable, so he smiled. It felt as if a hook had fastened under his upper lip and was dragging it up against his nose.

“How many you say, sir?”

Harsh could not think what he was doing here. Something to do with a damn building that would not stick up above the trees.

The attendant finished the passenger side of the windshield and walked around to the other. He saw blood on the side of the car, and there was a faint whistling sound as his breath left him.

“Holy Moses, Mister. What’s this stuff all over the side of your car?” The attendant bent down and peered, put the end of a finger in the blood, which was coagulated and about like gravy. “Holy Moses!” He ran into the service station and seized the telephone. “Flo, this is Jiggs. Get Doc over here in a hurry. Got a man here bled near to death.” The attendant now had a high thin voice. The telephone fell to the floor when he tried to put it back on the desk. He let it lie. He ran out for another look at the man in the car. “Harold! Harold!” He ran across the street to the chicken hatchery. Soon he came back with Harold, a stocky alert-eyed man. Harold said not to move the victim, never move an accident victim, and was Doc coming?

Harsh did not bother to comment. Lot of silly rummies, running around hollering, like chickens that had jumped out of that place across the street.

He closed his eyes, didn’t open them again till he heard another car squeal to a stop ten feet away, then a man’s voice. “What have you here, Jiggs?”

“Doc, I think he was shot. I didn’t touch him.”

Doc had the gaunt frame of an Abe Lincoln and the lazy movements and drawl of a cane-pole fisherman. “Jiggs, you better call Kenny Wilson for his ambulance.”

“Sure, Doc.”

A hypodermic needle was waved near Harsh’s face. “This won’t hurt. And you are going to be all right.”

Sure he was all right, Harsh thought, he was fine, they could fart around all day.

He was on a cart. A fat man in a white suit pushed him along between white walls under a beige ceiling. A nurse walked alongside, wiping the sweat off his forehead and from around his eyes. He was pushed into a room and the attendant left but the nurse stayed. Presently the doctor came in and stood looking at him.

“Feeling fine, eh?”

“You want the truth, Doc, I feel like I ain’t all here.”

The doctor got out a stethoscope, stuck the prongs in his ears and listened to Harsh’s chest. “You have a heart like a horse.”

“A galloping horse, maybe. What’s the matter with it?”

“It’s okay. How does your arm feel?”

“Feel? I don’t feel nothing.” They had cut off his arm, he decided. He was afraid to feel or even look to make sure, yet he wanted very much to know.

The doctor smoked a cigarette. He put his foot on a chair and knocked the cigarette ash into his trouser cuff. The room was soundless, but there was plenty of noise in the hallways. The bed smelled faintly of stuff they had put in the sheets to sterilize them.

“Tell me, Doc.”

“Yes?”

“My left arm, where did you cut it off?”

The doctor laughed as if someone had cracked a huge joke. “My lord, man. Your arm is full of medication, is all. You’re not going to lose the arm.”

“Oh. It didn’t feel as if it was there.” He felt good about the arm, and asked the doctor for a cigarette. The first puff made him sick and he tried to heave and his left arm hurt as though lightning had struck it. “Jesus God! What did you do to it?”

“Set it.” The doctor waited for the attack of pain to subside. “The arm was badly broken. But listen, the arm’s not the thing. Here’s the thing: Did you know you have O-negative blood?”

“What?”

“You have O-negative blood. Rather rare around here —only seven people out of a hundred have it. Do you know anybody we can get hold of who does? Any blood relatives in these parts?”

“Doc, I didn’t know there was such a thing as O-negative blood, whatever it is.”

“Well, you need a blood transfusion, Harsh, and we have no O-negative in our blood bank. If you know anybody that we can reach who has it, you had better tell me.”

“I can’t help you, Doc. How about just any old blood?”

The doctor shook his head. “If you’ve got O-negative, you can’t take any other type. It could kill you.” A heavy, white-haired, middle-aged nurse came into the room. She said she had been on the telephone to the Red Cross and learned they had an O-negative donor listed in a nearby town. He was a mechanic and was out at somebody’s farm fixing a tractor, but the police were sending a car over to bring him in. The doctor turned to Harsh. “You’re a lucky man, Harsh. I guess we’ll be able to get you fixed up.” But Harsh was asleep.

It was morning. He was lying on a hospital bed as naked as a jaybird under the sheet. The doctor came in and yanked back the sheet and pressed thoughtfully on his body with fingertips, then drew the sheet up to his chin.

“You’re feeling great, my boy.”

“That is one hell of an overstatement, Doc. What did you do to me?”

“The donor got here, that mechanic. You’re full of his blood now and good as new.” The doctor took a chart off a hook at the foot of the bed, looked at it, and put it back on the hook. “By the way, Harsh, there’s a city policeman out front. I’ll bring him in, so you can thank him for getting that blood donor up here for you.”

“Tell you the truth, Doc, I feel too sick to be seeing any cop.”

“Nonsense. You’re not that bad off.”

The doctor turned and went out. As soon as he had gone, Harsh tried to get out of bed. He did not want to talk to a police officer. But weakness seized him and he had to flop back on the bed and lie helpless. The blood out of that grease monkey, he thought, didn’t have much strength in it.

The policeman threw the door wide and came in. He was a big man with a bald head and an unfriendly manner, and it was immediately clear he was interested in getting more than thanks. He listened while Harsh said he understood the police had hunted up the blood donor, and thanks. Thanks a lot. Harsh wanted to get rid of him, and he was very polite.

“No sweat at all, fellow. Line of duty.” The officer got out a notebook. “Now, about that arm. What happened to it?”

“Well, a car sideswiped me, officer. Like I put in the report.”

“What report?”

“Hey! Say now, I guess I didn’t get around to that. Tell you the truth, I was in pretty bad shape. All the time I remember thinking, my arm is all smashed to hell, I got to get to a Doc, and I got to report this like the law says.”

“So those were sideswipe marks on your car?”

“Tell you the truth, officer, I wouldn’t know if my car was marked up or not. With this arm the way it was, I just couldn’t get up the steam to notice anything else.”

“How did it happen?”

“I had my elbow out the open window, the way a fellow drives along. Then like I say, here comes some bird and sideswipes me. You know something, officer, for a while there I didn’t even know I was hurt.”

“You remember anything about the car?”

“I couldn’t swear, but I think it was a green Chevy, this year’s model, a four-door, I think. The guy, he was in it all by himself, a smallish guy with a dark face, and he was wearing a tan cap. You know, that’s about all I remember. Maybe it was my fault. Maybe I was crowding the center line.”

“When it happened, didn’t the other car stop?”

“Not that I saw. He high-tailed it right on down the road.”

“Where was this?”

“Officer, I wish I could tell you for exact sure, but it was south of the Iowa line a little ways, is the best I can do.”

The officer took a bite at the end of his pencil. “Your correct name is Walter Harsh. You’re from Hollywood, California. Right?”

“No. I don’t know where you got your information about me, officer, but I ain’t from Hollywood, California. I’m from Quincy, Illinois. Say now, wait—I’m the president of National Studios of Hollywood, that must have given you the idea I’m from Hollywood, California.”

“The National Studios of Hollywood, eh?”

“You got it.”

The officer put this down in his notebook. “But your name is Walter Harsh?”

“Yes.”

“All right. Now what is the address in Hollywood of this National Studios?”

“You’re mixed up, officer. There ain’t any address in Hollywood. The address of National Studios of Hollywood is in Quincy, Illinois, the same as my address.”

“Oh.”

“I hope you got it right now, officer.”

The policeman pulled a chair to the bedside and put one foot on it to make a desk for his notebook. “Harsh, are you a movie guy?”

“Motion pictures? Me? Oh brother, did you miss it again.”

“Well, what are you?”

“I’m nothing but a photo drummer.”

“What is that?”

“I take pictures of people house-to-house. Which reminds me, officer, in my car. My box. I mean my camera, did you notice was it still in my car?”

“The hospital people had your camera and suitcase brought in and put with your other stuff in a locker here at the hospital.”

“Say, that’s all right. I was afraid somebody would make off with it. That camera set me back.”

The policeman’s eyes were not leaving Harsh. The creases in his uniform were very neat, as if this was the first time he had worn the uniform. There was the faint smell of gun oil about him, and his brass and leather were shiny.

“Now, Harsh, let’s get one more thing. Who do we notify at National Studios of Hollywood. I mean who do we notify that you are laid up with an accident?”

“Well, I guess it won’t be necessary. I am the company.”

“How is that now?”

“I am National Studios of Hollywood. I am all of it.”

The officer removed his foot from the chair, put his notebook away, buttoned the pocket flap, then straightened his coat by giving little tugs at the skirts. He took a deep breath, causing his leather harness to squeak audibly. “Well, now.” The officer inflated his chest again, as if he liked the sound of the leather when it squeaked. “If this checks out, I guess you’re all in the clear.”

If this checks out. You’re not out of the woods yet, Harsh thought. The cop was going to do some prying around.

The policeman had his hand on the doorknob when the door opened and the doctor came in. The doctor grinned. “How did it go, John? Get the information you needed?”

The officer patted a spot on his coat over the notebook. “I guess he told me enough to start on.”

The doctor pointed to a chair. “Stick around a minute, John.” The doctor took Harsh’s pulse and patted him on the chest. “Nothing to keep you down, my boy.” He turned to the policeman. “I have a pleasant little surprise for you, John.”

“How’s that, Doc?”

The doctor produced a postcard from his pocket and handed it to the officer. “Read that, John. Better read it out loud, because Mr. Harsh might like to know about it.”

The officer read from the card. “The O-Negative Blood Group Foundation. The Foundation is endowed for the purpose of aiding individuals who possess this rare blood type. Accordingly, a reward of $25.00 will be paid to any person making a direct donation of O-negative blood to another individual. An additional $25.00 will be paid to any individual instrumental in finding a donor for such a person in need of O-negative blood. The Foundation is doing this to facilitate a supply of O-negative blood. The above rewards will be paid only if immediate notice is telegraphed to the O-Negative Blood Group Foundation, 1133 Nash Street, New York, N.Y.”

The cop turned the card over. He looked puzzled. “What does this add up to?”

“It means you get twenty-five dollars, John, if you notify that outfit right away.” The doctor looked pleased. “I just happened to remember that card, which came in a while back, and I dug it out of the file. John, you get twenty-five, the mechanic who donated the blood gets twenty-five. How does that strike you?”

The cop grinned. “I’ll be goddamned.”

The doctor waved a hand. “They got Foundations for everything these days. Some rich guy with O-negative blood probably kicked the bucket and left all his money to this Foundation, and this is the way they figure out to spend it.”

Harsh had listened. It was all right with him if some bughead Foundation wanted to throw its money away, but it was a shame, he thought, to see any of it going to a cop.

THREE

The hospital was as noisy a place as Harsh had ever been in. There was continual tramping up and down the hall, talking, bottles and bedpans clanking. When finally he couldn’t stand it, he yelled, “Shut the goddamn door!” Someone hurriedly closed the door, after which it was quieter, but not much. The sun was shining; if he had just felt better, it would be a good day to walk out of the hospital. The way he was now, stuck in the hospital bed, he was helpless, and anyone who wanted to do a job on him would have a free hand to do so. He was thinking of the policeman. If Harsh could get out of the hospital, he could find a private room and sack up there with no cop in his hair, stay there until he was in physical shape to cope with the situation. He could even get hold of Vera Sue if he got the notion. He fancied the idea of Vera Sue for a nurse. If a man was red-blooded, that was the stuff that would cure him.

Harsh tinkered with his left arm, feeling the cast with his fingers. It felt like a sack of concrete that had set. The arm throbbed. Could he make it out of here, he wondered, if he gave it another try? He’d better, Harsh thought. The cop was a beaver, a guy like that might hear about D. C. Roebuck being found dead in a field not all that far away and put two and two together. He picked up his left arm with his right hand and inched it toward the edge of the hospital bed. The cast weighed a ton. His hand sticking out was swollen and bluish. He clenched his teeth, worked his legs around, got them hanging off the bed. It was a high hospital bed, a long way down before his feet found the cold bare floor. He rested, panting, studying the plaster cast on his arm, noticing it was shaped so it could be carried in a sling. He pulled one of the sheets loose from the bed and tried to tear it, but his strength was not up to that, so he folded the whole sheet and knotted it in a sling that was big as a tent. His belly hurt from lying bent over backward on the bed. Okay, he thought, here it goes. He stood and took two steps and went down on the floor with a crash that shook the building and put out his lights.

Awakening, Harsh found he was back in the hospital bed. He was getting nowhere fast. He had a hazy impression he had tried to get out of the bed numerous times and each time had crashed on the floor, but that was probably all imagination. He wondered how long he had been lying there, whether it was hours or days. Then he heard a conversation outside his door. It was a nurse and the policeman, John. The cop was arguing. “Nurse, the Doc said he should be over the shock from the fall by now. He said it was okay for me to go talk to him if I wanted to.”

The nurse put her head in and looked at Harsh. Unfortunately she caught him with his eyes open. “He seems to be awake. But we’ve had him under medication two days, so I don’t know what shape he’ll be in to talk.”

The officer pushed past her. “I’ll give it a whirl.”

The cop closed the door in the nurse’s face and came over to look down at Harsh. “You ever been in jail, Harsh?”

“Officer, I’m awfully sick. I can’t talk to you now.”

The officer ignored this. “Where were you in jail, Harsh? Come on with the answers.”

“You sure are a guy who gets it wrong, Officer. I never been in anybody’s pokey.”

“Yeah? Then why has a detective showed up around here making inquiries about you, Harsh?”

“I don’t know anything about any detective, or anybody like that.”

“Neither do I, but I plan to find out. All I know, you’re being investigated by somebody—the F.B.I. or a detective or someone. I ain’t run into this investigator myself, as yet, but I’ve heard tell.”

“It must be a mistake.”

“Well, maybe and maybe not. I heard about it, and I’m going to look into it. I’ve already been looking into you, Harsh. And let me tell you, I got the stuff on you. You’re one of these packs of jack-leg grafters who are traveling around our small towns skinning the people out of their money. That’s what you are, and we been having trouble with your kind. Complaints, that’s what. We been wanting to lay our hands on one of you skunks.”

“Officer, shouldn’t you be looking for the guy who sideswiped me? Isn’t he the real criminal, not me?”

“Never mind that. Where is the rest of your pack of crooks?” The officer was scowling. “You birds work in gangs. Where’s the rest of your outfit?”

“Officer, under the circumstances, I guess I got to give you the right answers.”

“Well, what is the right answer?”

“To hell with you, you son of a bitch.”

The officer started back. Anger came over his scrubbed and shaven face. “You are a dumb one, Harsh.”

“I must be, if you think you can walk on me.”

“We already located your gang, Harsh. One of them anyway. Over in Edina, east of here. A young woman named Vera Sue Crosby. Miss Vera Sue Crosby. She said it was Miss, and I would say it was Miss. You know it is Miss Vera Sue Crosby, don’t you, Harsh?”

“Officer, as you say, I’m pretty dumb, I don’t remember.”

“Maybe you would like us to speak of her as Mrs. Walter Harsh, your wife. That’s how she’s registered in this hotel in Edina. Mrs. Walter Harsh. But she admits her name is Miss Vera Sue Crosby. You see what I got on you, don’t you, Harsh?”

“What you haven’t got, Officer, is somebody to show you how to do your duty, to kick your fat ass into finding that hit-and-run driver who smacked into me.”

“Miss Vera Sue Crosby, of Quincy, Illinois. You get it, Harsh. Quincy, Illinois. Edina, Missouri. A state line is in between those two towns, Harsh. You see now what I got? Statutory rape.”

“How was that last?”

“Statutory rape. You’ve had it, mister.”

“I may be dumb, but Mrs. Harsh never raised any kid dumb enough to have that hung on him.”

“I’m talking about what the law says, Harsh. Here is a fifteen-year-old girl, and you bring her from Illinois into Missouri, which is across a state line, and you shack up with her. That is violating the Mann Act. That is statutory rape. That is up to twenty years in the Jefferson City pen.”

The sides of Harsh’s face felt like china saucers. The officer had not frightened him appreciably until he brought in the thing about Vera Sue being fifteen years old. Good God, she could be fifteen years old, although she had told him she was twenty-three and he had chosen to believe her. If she was fifteen and she had lied, and if they scared her into getting up in court and admitting some other things, then the cop was right, he’d had it.

The officer watched him. “What’s the matter, Harsh? Don’t you want to call me another dirty name? You brought a fifteen-year-old girl across the state line for immoral purposes, and that makes you the kind of a rat I like to hear call me names. That’s the way I feel, only it ain’t really half the way I feel.”

“I’m a sick man, officer. I got an arm broken all to hell. You come back after I get some strength, I’ll tell you about how I feel. I’ll spit in your eye while I do it.”

“I accept your invitation, Harsh, to come back. I’ll bring a pair of handcuffs, too.”

“You do that, while I save up spit.”

“You want to tell me who this stranger is who’s fishing around about you?”

“There is no such guy, and you know it.”

The officer opened the door to leave. “Fellow, you are in a real mess. I hope you can see that.” He went out, and Harsh lay for several minutes waiting for him to come back, but he didn’t. There was a rubber sheet under Harsh, and he had perspired such a pool on it that when he turned over there was a wet sucking noise like a pig in a mud puddle.

FOUR

“Hey, Doc.”

“Yes, Harsh.”

“You gotta fix it so I can use a phone.”

“You’re in no shape to do any telephoning, Harsh.”

“Listen, I got to hit the telephone, Doc. It’s urgent.” He was talking around a thermometer the doctor had stuck in his mouth.

The doctor came over and took out the thermometer, put on his glasses, and threw his head back to see through the bifocals. Then he took Harsh’s pulse.

“The cop sort of upset you, eh?”

“Sort of.”

“He’s a pretty nice guy, really.”

“Yeah, it was easy to see what a nice guy he is. What about me and the telephone?”

“Well I tell you what, you rest a few hours, get some sleep. Then we may fix you up with a telephone call.”

“Doc, it can’t wait.”

“Well, it can try.”

Walter Harsh lay on the hospital bed and thought about the photography business. The way it was, anyone who could get together a dollar ninety-eight could be a photographer, for that would buy a cheap box with a piece of windowglass for a lens and a roll of low-cost film. That put anyone in business, the snapshot business, and that was the trouble, since that was all the value the public put on it. The twelve-jumbo-size-prints-for-thirty-five-cents roll film finishing business was another problem, a picture for less than a nickel. That was the price tag John Q. Public liked to put on a picture, and anything above that, they called it robbery. That made it a difficult business.

Harsh was a good portrait photographer, he was sure of that. He had started out very young with a cheap snap box when he was a kid on the farm, securing his camera for the labels off five sacks of hog supplement and a dollar. He sold muskrat pelts to buy a roll of film, sold more muskrat hides and a mink he was lucky enough to trap and bought some D76 and hypo and contact paper. Later when the army got him, he talked his way into a photo section, where he learned a lot. He used the G.I. Bill of Rights to go to a photographer’s school in Kansas City and another portrait school in New York. By then he was a good portrait man. He was no Bannerman, no Kirsh, but he was an above average portrait man.

He had thought that would be enough, but it wasn’t. He soon decided there were only two ways up as a photographer, and both ways required a gimmick. The best gimmick, which was out of his reach, was a plushy downtown studio with chrome-edged showcases and plenty of gold-toned sepia samples and a blond office girl and a reputation for high prices and being twenty years in the business. The other way up was to go out and knuckle doors. That had its drawbacks, since just about every town had an ordinance against door knocking and an out-of-towner needed a gimmick to get around this. Harsh knew he was right about one thing, the ordinances were barriers the local sit-on-his-bottom photographer had talked the city fathers into passing to protect his laziness. So Harsh felt no remorse about the gimmick he was using.

Harsh’s gimmick was tailored for small towns. He would send a woman with a nice-sounding voice into the small town a few days in advance to rent desk space and a telephone and buy some spot announcements over the local radio station. Then the woman would sit down at the telephone in the rented desk space and turn to A in the directory and call every subscriber through to Z. “Good morning, Mrs. Aarons. This is Miss Crosby, with National Studios of Hollywood. Mrs. Aarons, you have heard our program on the radio, no doubt. If you can answer today’s quiz question, you will receive an absolutely wonderful big free prize of three size eight-by-ten portrait photographs of yourself and any other two members of your family. If you heard our sponsored program today, you will receive an extra listener’s prize.”

The quiz question that won the prize was a real toughie: “Mrs. Aarons, who succeeded Franklin D. Roosevelt as President of the United States? Now take your time and think.” The person being called on the telephone always won the wonderful big free prize, because Harsh had to get into their homes to shoot the negatives and come back and push the prints. It was legitimate. The mark got the three free pictures, and unless he could say no faster than a squirrel chatters, he would find twenty or thirty dollars worth of additional prints crammed down his throat. Harsh would snap a lot of shots of the kids with their toys and he had a way of putting all the prints together in an accordion-pleat folder that the parents went for. When he flipped all those shots of the kid out on the living-room rug, mom’s eyes would pop. The telephone quiz gimmick got them around the anti-door-knocker law, the radio gave a cloak of respectability and substance, and National Studios of Hollywood, that sounded like something too.

Vera Sue Crosby was Harsh’s advance girl. Vera Sue went into the small towns and rented the desk space and the telephone and did the calling. Vera Sue was a real gem in a boiler room. She had a voice like the Mona Lisa over the telephone, a nun-pure voice that sounded naive and honest. The voice certainly didn’t sound like Vera Sue, as full of sex as a thirty-dollar call house.

There was sunshine in the room when the doctor came in and thrust the thermometer in Harsh’s mouth, which was less embarrassing than having it stuck in his bottom the way the nurses had been doing. Harsh watched the doctor stand there counting pulse with one eye narrowed at his wristwatch while he waited for the thermometer to stabilize.

“Well, Harsh, I guess you are up to it. If you still want, you can use the telephone.”

The doctor brought a telephone with a long cord and plugged it into an outlet in the wall and put the instrument on the bed. Harsh seized it, the hospital operator came on the wire, and he placed a person-to-person call to Mrs. Walter Harsh in Edina, Missouri. When the doctor heard that, he looked surprised. “I didn’t understand you were married, Harsh.”

Better get the old pill-snapper out of the room, Harsh thought. “Look, Doc, this is kind of personal. Do you mind?”

“Harsh, if you’re married we should have notified—”

“Doc, you stick to your pills and your thermometer, and leave the women to me, then we would both know what we were doing.”

The doctor went out reluctantly. An old guy like him, wanting to eavesdrop, when he should be sitting on a creek bank waiting for a catfish to grab a worm, Harsh reflected.

“Vera Sue?”

“Walter!”

“I wasn’t sure my call would catch you, after all this time.”

“Walter, honey, pep it up, will you? I mean, whatever you got to say, get it said.”

“Well, for crying out loud, aren’t you the interested one! Haven’t you wondered where I was? Listen, I had an accident, and I’m in the hospital.”

“I know where you are. Walter, the bus is about due, and the man said it was always on time.”

“Where are you catching a bus to?”

“To see you, what do you think? I already got my ticket, Walter, so don’t talk all day.”

“Good for you, baby. Jesus, I’m glad you used your head so quick. I didn’t know you had it in you. But listen, here’s what you do first. I need you to stop off in Illinois. The minute you get back to Illinois, the very minute you get in Illinois, dig up your birth certificate. Birth certificate. You got that?”

“Walter, I can’t.”

“You can’t?” He lowered his voice. “You don’t mean you really are fifteen years old? Goddamn you if you lied to me—”

“Don’t you goddamn me, Walter, I am twenty-three and you know it.”

“All right, as soon as you hit Illinois, you dig up a birth certificate to prove it. Otherwise I’m on the hook. If you don’t dig up a birth certificate, they’re going to soak me with the Mann Act and statutory rape and God only knows what. They claim you’re fifteen years old. I don’t know where they got that fifteen stuff. Did you tell them anything like that?”

Vera Sue burst into laughter. Her laughter was a wonderful sound like a nightingale chorusing out in the moonlight. “I was only kidding the cop. He was such a square.”

“You picked a great lie to tell him.”

“It was just a joke.”

“It was some joke. He came in here and scared the bejesus out of me with that fifteen story. Is that how you found I was knocked out in the hospital? Did the cop tell you?”

“Yes. But did you know there’s someone else checking on you too?”

“Who?”

“A private cop. From Kansas City, I think. Anyway he’s going around asking all kinds of questions and showing your picture.”

“There really is such a guy? I thought the cop was stringing me.”

“Well, you were wrong, Walter. This fellow talked to me quite a while, wanting to know different things about you and showing me this picture he had of you. Listen, Walter, when did you have the scar taken off your face?”

“Scar taken off my face? I never had a scar on my face.”

“I saw it.”

“What are you talking about? Where?”

“On your left cheek, high up. A fair-sized scar.”

“That proves they’re looking for somebody else, not me. I never had such a scar, never in my life.”

“But Walter, it looked just like you, I recognized you right off. The only difference was the scar. And it described you, down to the last detail, even your blood type, O-negative.”

“Goddamn it, you fell for something, some kind of racket. You know why I’m sure? Because nobody knew I had O-negative blood, not even me, until I lit in this hospital.”

“Well, this guy knew it. Anyway, I’m coming over there. If you think I am going to pay no attention to five thousand dollars floating around, you’re crazy. I got my bus ticket, and if you shut up, I may catch my bus.”

“Wait a minute, what’s this about five thousand dollars?”

“This private peeper from Kansas City told me there was five thousand dollars in it if you turned out to be ‘completely acceptable,’ whatever that means. I asked him, but he either didn’t know or put on the clam. Anyway, I’m coming over to see if I can get a piece of that five thousand for baby.”

“You must have got real chummy with this fellow from Kansas City.”

“Oh, we had a couple of short beers. I found out that was enough to make him windy.”

“Listen, Vera Sue, you go to Illinois and get that birth certificate.”

“Nothing doing. I’ll be sitting on the edge of your bed in a couple of hours.”

He thought they would come and take the telephone away as soon as he hung up, but no one came. It seemed like time was turning into forever as he lay there with the stuff they had been shooting into him beginning to wear off so that his arm felt like a balloon full of pain. His head seemed to be trying to split itself. He wished he was out of the hospital. He wondered how it would go if he would roll out of the bed and let himself down on the floor real easy and crawl on the floor into the hall and out of the place. It wouldn’t work, of course, but a man could wish.

He lay back, breathing heavily, his head feeling as though it was rolling over and over down a hill. A private detective from Kansas City, how did you figure that one? If D. C. Roebuck had had insurance, then the man might be an insurance company investigator engaged in getting the goods on him. The idea worried him. An insurance detective could be worse than the police. A damn insurance company, he thought, didn’t care how much it spent as long as it was trying to get out of paying a claim.

Sweat had come out on him while he was talking on the telephone to Vera Sue and since, and he was wet with it. He was in bad shape. Being so helpless brought tears of rage to his eyes. Here he was like a mouse with its tail caught in the trap, he reflected, and all the cats walking around smacking lips. One cat, two cats, three cats. The city policeman, the Kansas City sherlock, and now Vera Sue, trying to cut herself in on a reward at his expense...

He did not remember going to sleep, but he awakened when the doctor came in. He felt very weak and shaky.

“Doc, you sure stayed away long enough.”

“I was invited to leave, remember?”

“Ah, Doc, don’t be an old woman. You know, I don’t feel so hot.”

“What’s the matter? The arm hurt?”

“The arm, the head, all over. I feel like one big sore ball, Doc, you want to know the truth.”

The thermometer went into his mouth again, feeling like an icicle, while the doctor counted his pulse. “You have some temperature. What happened with that telephone call to upset you this way?”

“Nothing, Doc, that I know of.”

They brought in a transparent canopy and set it up on the bed with him inside, then wheeled in a cylinder that had gauges on it and a tube running under the canopy. They hooked up the thing, and stood watching the gauges while the tube hissed close to his nose. “Doc, what is this thing?”

“An oxygen tent.”

“That’s what they put on guys who are dying, ain’t it? Take it away. I’m afraid of the thing.”

“We probably won’t be that lucky with you.”

The morning sun was splintering into his eyes. The way the sunlight was hitting the oxygen tent canopy he could see very little in the room. Finally he realized someone was sitting by the bed. A nurse, he thought, sitting there like an albino crow waiting for him to die. “Nurse, I got to piss.”

There was a giggle. The corner of the oxygen tent was lifted and Vera Sue looked in at him. “Hello, Walter.”

She kissed him. He kissed her back. Her mouth was warm and moist, tasting of spearmint.

“Jesus, honey, what I said there a minute ago. I thought you were the nurse.”

“It was kind of funny, Walter.”

“She’s an old crow, always sticking her cold thermometer in my ass.”

“Walter, I been sitting here a long time. They told me not to wake you—they said I could sit in here, but I should let you sleep. I told them a lie. I said I was your wife.”

“I wondered how you got in.”

“Walter...I couldn’t go to Illinois. I couldn’t make myself do it. You know something, after I talked to you on the telephone, I missed my bus sitting there trying to make myself go to Illinois like you wanted, but I just couldn’t.”

“Baby, I knew you wouldn’t, so you can stop kidding around.”

She kissed him and held him close. Her moist mouth moved all over his. “I’m glad you’re not mad. Walter, I wish I could get in bed with you right now.”

“That would be something. I bet this oxygen stuff would go flying all over, and somebody would come in to see what was wrecking the joint.”

“I wouldn’t give a damn if they did.”

A nurse came in with two glasses of orange juice, one for him and one for Mrs. Harsh, she said. The nurse was a different one, a large plain woman.

“Walter, is she the nurse you were talking about?”

“No, but she gives you an idea.” He lay back holding his orange juice. “Well, I’m glad you’re here. You got no idea what it is to be nailed down like this. Now, what was this about a detective from Kansas City asking about me?”

“Hasn’t he been around to see you yet?”

“I haven’t seen him, but I don’t know if he was here or not. I made the Doc think I was too sick to be bothered.”

“That’s funny. I got the idea he was finding out all about you, getting ready to offer you a proposition. I don’t really understand what he’s up to, Walter. He didn’t say you were accused of anything. He just said there was five thousand in it for him if you turned out to be acceptable and satisfactory, and he would appreciate anything I could tell him about you. He didn’t seem to be after any specific information, just general stuff. Walter, what is he up to?”

“I sure would like to know myself.”

“You sure got to help me figure a way to get my mitts on that five thousand.”

“Our mitts, you mean, don’t you?”

“What? Oh, sure, that’s what I mean.”

“Vera Sue, you be careful. You let me know before you make any moves. You let me supply the brains around here.”

“Well, how about me working some more on Kansas City as our first move?”

“All right with me. But watch out for that local city cop, John Something-or-other. He’s no pushover. How are you going to get in touch with this Kansas City dude?”

“I’m going to call him and invite him to have breakfast with me. He left me his hotel address here.”

“Say, I would like to have a look at that picture the guy is showing around, the one that looks like me except for the scar on the face. Can you swing that?”

“I bet I can, Walter.”

He would bet she would too.

At noon they gave him a lamb chop and some mashed potatoes and peas and a cigarette and a newspaper. The policeman had not come back. The doctor had not come back. And Vera Sue had not come back. He had turned into a forgotten man, he decided, and it was all right with him. He was nervous. His mind was jumpy. He thought of his mind as acting like a bird with its legs chopped off so it couldn’t come to roost on anything.

He lay there with his fists clenched and his eyes closed, and one of the things he could not keep out of his mind was the way D. C. Roebuck’s car had gone over and over in the field, in one of the flips landing (he was now able to remember) on D. C. Roebuck himself.

Suddenly he remembered the newspaper they had brought him with his lunch. What was wrong with him? A thing as important as the newspaper, and he had hardly noticed it. Where was the paper anyway, on the floor, or where? He saw the paper on the floor, and when he leaned off the bed for it, the blood ran to his head and made him dizzy, and he almost fell off the bed before he clutched the newspaper.

The story from Carrollton, Missouri, was a small item on an inside page. It said the body of D. C. Roebuck, Kansas City photographic supply salesman, had been found with his demolished automobile in a field near Carrollton Friday and had been taken to his home in Kansas City for burial. That was all. Nothing there to hook him up with Roebuck’s death, he reflected, though that did not necessarily mean a thing. He imagined the police, and even more so an insurance company, worked undercover until they had all the evidence they wanted, then bang, they let you have it.

The next thing was the jury. The idea of a court trial worried him, but if he had to have one, he hoped the jury would be made up of farmers, so he could have his lawyer bring out that he grew up on a farm. Thinking about his early days on the farm made him feel maudlin. It was a good life, that farm, and he wished he had stuck with it. He would have, too, only a man needed a million dollars and a million acres to make a go on the farm; it was just impossible for a young man to save enough to start farming. It was equally hopeless the way his own parents had tried to make it, which was by share-farming. It was all the same hind tit and impossible to suck more than a bare existence out of it. But one thing he could say for the farm, it was man against nature, and not man against man the way it was in the city. In the city it was every man for himself: talk sweet and polite, act like a shark. He had to laugh at the memory of how he came off the farm a green one, and he had taken it in the neck too, until he got unsquared. Since then, he had handed them back a few licks himself.

Better have the lawyer soft pedal that to the jury, he thought, the jury might not understand quite how it was, on the bum, hitchhiking, pearl-diving for handouts, even panhandling. He had been in the pokey three or four times; he had not told the policeman the truth about that. What the hell, he thought, it was none of the town law’s business.

He wondered if the cop had shared that twenty-five bucks around. He would bet not. The town cop was just like anybody else, give them a whiff of easy money, put the golden odor in their nose, and they went haywire. Free money was the worst. Take the big free prize National Studios of Hollywood offered the marks over the telephone, it was not much, just three portraits that cost twenty-five cents apiece to turn out. But it was free, something for nothing, and common sense went flapping out of the window. Like Vera Sue, he thought, and that five thousand dollars she was chasing with her tongue hanging out. All she had to go on, some guy she had barely met had said somebody was paying him five thousand dollars for something that didn’t make sense. And Vera Sue was hard at it, trying to grab the five thousand as if it was right there in front of her. The smell of money had her wild.

But maybe the worst was, he could smell it a little himself.

Early in the afternoon the nurse came in. “Mr. Harsh, a letter for you.”

“For me? Who would be writing me?”

It was a large plain envelope with his name on it, a special delivery stamp, and the name of the hospital. Inside was a photograph. Nothing else. Harsh had a look at the photograph. He put it under his pillow in a hurry.

“Nurse.”

“Yes.”

“If you will close the door when you go out, I guess I will have me a nap.”

The nurse did not take the hint right away, but fussed around a while longer with the sheets, put out a fresh glass of water with the bent glass straw in it, and put the bedpan where he could reach it. Finally she left, closing the door.

Harsh got the picture out and had a long look at it. The thing was as close a likeness to him as he could imagine, except for the scar, which began at the left eye corner and ran down and forward, a scar about three inches long.

FIVE

He was smearing scrambled egg on toast and taking slow bites when Vera Sue came in the next morning. It was ten o’clock. Vera Sue wore a grey sweater, tight-fitting, a shiny wide black belt, and a charcoal skirt with enough material in it for several skirts. She had a pert and jouncy new charcoal hat with a feather. She came to him and began kissing him. He held her and kissed back. Presently an embarrassed smile came to the nurse’s face, and she left the room.

“Walter, did you get my letter?”

He feigned surprise. “What letter was that?”

“You didn’t get it? A special delivery I sent you?”

“Never heard of it.”

Vera Sue slapped her forehead with her palm. “Oh, Jesus Christ, Walter, something went wrong.”

“Well, somebody did send me a picture of myself, or my almost-self.”

She leaned over and damn near bit the end off his nose. “There! That will teach you to joke.”

“Sure I got your letter and I must say it convinced me I was wrong about there not being any picture. Ouch! Goddamn, you could ruin the end of a man’s nose that way.”

“Walter, you scared me. I thought that cop had got wise or something and headed it off.”

“How did you get the picture?”

“Off of Kansas City. I picked his pocket.”

“That’s okay, as long as his pants weren’t hanging on the bedpost when the pocket got picked.”

“Walter, you know me better than that.” She slapped her forehead with her hand again. “Walter! For God’s sake, your face!”

“Huh?”

“What did you do to your face?”

“This? Oh, that’s an experiment.” What he had done was take a teaspoon, the one out of the medicine glass on the table by the bed, and place the edge of the handle across his cheek about where the picture showed the scar to be. Then he had lain on the spoon handle. He had been lying on the spoon handle nearly an hour, and it had made a groove in his face. “Let me have the mirror out of your purse, so I can check on the results.”

“Walter, why did you do that?”

“You took your time noticing it. Let’s see the mirror.”

She fished in her purse, found the mirror, and he held it in front of his face, moving his head from side to side to view the results of his experiment. There was a deep crease on his cheek. It looked somewhat like a scar. He was stunned at the resemblance he now bore to the picture.

“I wish you hadn’t fooled with your face, Walter.”

“This really makes me the double for the guy in the picture, though, don’t it? That’s what I wanted to find out.”

Vera Sue began to walk around the room. “I’m not so sure. You may have fouled things up.”

“How is that?”

“A man’s here.”

“Who? Your guy from Kansas City?”

“No, a man from New York. A new man. Mr. Brother, he said his name is.”

“Mr. Brother? I don’t know anybody by that name.”

“Well, he’s here now.”

“How in the name of creeping Jesus did he happen to show up, and what does he want?”

“That John What’s-his-name, the city policeman, sent him a telegram.”

“Oh, that. The O-Negative Blood Foundation thing. Twenty-five bucks reward for everybody connected with getting that blood except the guy who needed it, which is me. The cop was supposed to telegraph to get the reward. If you ask me, it’s as cockeyed as the rest of this. You say this Mr. Brother is here? Here at the hospital?”

Vera Sue nodded quickly. “He’s in the waiting room now.”

“Right outside?”

“Yes.”

“Oh what a stupid trick, bringing him here now.”

Vera Sue’s face became sullen. “Don’t call me stupid.”

Harsh was angry that she hadn’t consulted him. If she were standing a little closer, he thought, he would give her one with his fist, smack her across the room. He would teach her to talk over a move with him before she made it. Then he felt shaky inside, realizing he was helpless here in bed, and if Vera Sue walked out on him, he would really be up the creek.

“Vera Sue, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have called you dumb. I guess I said it because I’m sick.”

She took the mirror away from him and put it in her purse. “You’re a no good son of a bitch, did you know that?”

“Yes, I’m no good, and I’m sorry and I love you.”

“The hell with you, Walter.” She adjusted her new hat. “I’m going to bring in Mr. Brother.”

Just wait until he got up and around, he thought, and he would show her a couple of things.

Brother was a soft-looking man in an extremely neat brown suit. He had a straight slender nose with no flare at the nostrils, a nose like a hatchet blade. He had thick lips, oversize brown eyes. His skin was tanned a trifle lighter shade of brown than his suit, which was a ripe tobacco leaf. He carried a leather briefcase, the folder type without a handle that closes with a zipper. He kept the case under his right arm.

“Mr. Harsh?” He had a pronounced accent which Harsh identified at once as Spanish.

“That’s me.”

The man stepped to the bedside and took a close look at him. The effect on him was violent. His hands tightened convulsively on the briefcase. Harsh got the impression the man wanted to leap upon him and strike him, that the man hated him utterly and irrationally at first sight.

“Mister, the scar ain’t real, if that’s what startled you.”

“El hermano, por Dios!” The man’s eyes protruded. They were shiny and brown like the eyes of a choked dog.

Presently the man stepped back and hauled out a tan silk handkerchief of unusual size. By the time he had blotted his hands, lips and forehead, he had regained some control. He turned to Vera Sue. “Will you step outside, Miss, in order that Mr. Harsh and I may be alone?”

Vera Sue looked so disappointed that Harsh wanted to laugh. She had been going around doing as she damn pleased, he thought, and missing out on this talk was going to brown her off good. Vera Sue finally went out, but left the door open.

Brother closed the door, came back to the bed, seized the sheet and gave it a jerk, exposing Harsh in the altogether. “Hey! What’s the idea, Mister?”

“Turn over.”

“Mister, just who do you think you are, coming in here and yanking the covers off me and ordering me ass up and belly down? Who the hell do you think you are?” When he got that much said, Harsh wished he had kept still. It was the look that came into the man’s eyes. It made the hair on the back of Harsh’s neck turn cold, as if a frosty-footed mouse had walked across his spine. Harsh turned over on the bed as directed. The way he was lying then, he could not see the man’s face, but the effect of the stare stayed with him. Jesus, was the guy nuts? “Mister, I got this bum arm and lying this way it don’t feel too hot. How about turning back the way I was?”

After an uncomfortable few moments longer, Harsh felt the sheet come back down over him. He rotated onto his back once more.

“The young lady indicated she would tell you who I am,” Mr. Brother said.

“She said a man named Mr. Brother was here to see me. She didn’t say anybody would come in here jerking the covers off me.”

“Who told you to put that mark on the side of your face?”

“Nobody. I just laid the wrong way, something under my face.”

“You are lying to me, Mr. Harsh.” There was a carefulness about the way he formed his words that indicated he did his thinking in another language—either that, or that he was straining to hold back a monumental temper.

“Fine. I saw a photograph of a face looked something like mine, only it had a scar. I wanted to see how such a scar would look on me, so I laid down on the spoon handle. And you happened to show up before the marks went away.”

The man didn’t respond—it was as if he hadn’t heard. Everything Harsh said or did seemed to be beneath contempt to him. He whipped out a sheet of blank paper, folded it precisely, uncapped a fountain pen.

“Mr. Harsh, how would you like to earn twenty-five dollars? I will pay you five dollars each for five names. The five names are to be of people who have known you within the last few years.”

“How is that? You mean you want references of some sort—but you want to buy them from me?”

The man looked at Harsh as if he was considering spitting on him. “I wouldn’t think a man like you does much without being bought.”

“Look, goddamn you, I can be run over just about so far.”

The man’s face became calm, but his eyes glittered. “Mr. Harsh, the only way I will deal with you is to buy you. I do not care to work with you on any other basis. I buy you or nothing. You are a cheap man, so buying you will not be expensive. Get it straight—I buy you, or I have nothing to do with you.”

Harsh lifted himself on his good elbow. “Look, I don’t know why you should be such a crock, but if you want references, I’ll give them to you for nothing. I won’t sell them, though. I got some pride too.”

Harsh was amazed when the man capped the fountain pen, put it away, tucked the blank paper in his pocket, and strode purposefully to the door. He was going to leave, the crazy fool, twenty-five dollars was going to walk out the door.

“Hey, Mister! If you insist, I’ll take your money.”

Again the man seemed not to hear, and walked out the door, leaving Harsh watching the door and waiting, hardly believing the fellow was gone. Harsh watched the door for some time. His arm, which had been giving only mild pain, now started hurting in earnest. It felt as if a cat was crouched on it, eating away. No one came through the door, not Brother, not Vera Sue, not the policeman, not even a doctor or a nurse.

What should he make of this Brother anyway, he wondered.

Several hours later when Vera Sue did appear, he saw she had been up to something. She was as warm and contented as a baby who had found a full breast, and she was wearing a new dress with the new hat. “Oh, Walter, he is just slightly terrific, isn’t he?”

Harsh scowled at her. He did not know who she was talking about, but he would bet it was somebody who wore pants with well-filled pockets. “Where have you been all day?”

“Don’t be sore. Someone had to show Mr. Brother around, after he came all the way out here to Missouri from the east just to look you over. And you should see what he came in. Walter, you should see it! He has a big private airplane all his very own.”

“Is Brother still around here?” Harsh lifted up on the bed. “The way he took out of here as if he’d been turpentined, I figured school was out. Did he leave for good?”

“And what an airplane, Walter. Instead of just seats for passengers, private cabins and a private office and a private television set. Inside, it’s all lined with velvet that’s a kind of bedroom purple and the two fellas flying the thing for him wear liveries the same purple color.”

Harsh was speechless with rage.

Vera Sue lifted on tiptoes and did a turn in front of him. “Walter, notice anything new has been added?”

“Goddamn it!” His voice shook with fury. “I asked you, is the guy still in town?”

“Yes. Didn’t you notice my new dress?”

“The hell with the new dress.”

“Walter, I wish you wouldn’t be nasty. I like to hear you say nice things about my clothes, and not growl at me like a bear.”

He wanted to grab hold of her, shake some sense into her—but he forced himself to grin weakly instead. “Sure, honey, I know. It’s just that I lie here not knowing what’s going on and it makes me blow my top.”

“Well, it isn’t very nice.”

Walter bit back a curse. “I’m nuts about you, honey, you know that.”

“You’re awfully sweet when you want to be, Walter. I wish you would want to be all the time.”

“Kiss me, honey.”

She kissed him and he discovered her mouth tasted of eight-dollar-a-bottle Benedictine. So she had gotten her hands on more than just what it took to buy the new dress and the new hat. The Benedictine was a giveaway, because on special occasions she would buy a bottle and carry it around in her purse and nip at it. He suspected that someone had once told her Benedictine was the liqueur of quality folks, but had neglected to tell her it was supposed to be sipped out of thimble-sized glasses after dinner. Anyway, she had gotten hold of some money, and he had a good idea where.

“Vera Sue, I hope you didn’t go making any deals with this Brother guy. We can’t until we know more than we know now.”

“How do you mean, Walter?”

“He gave you some dough, right?”

She stroked her hair with her hand, and the innocent expression on her face told him she was trying to think up a lie.

“Look, Vera Sue, it’s all right with me for you to latch on to his money. I got no kicks, I want you to have dough, only you should talk it over with me first.”

“I was almost broke, Walter, and you were acting snotty.”

He controlled his fury with difficulty. “Well, like I say, I got no kicks. But baby, the only thing is, you and me are in this together, and we got to keep our eyes open. I know how to handle guys like Brother, so you better let me handle him. I’ll give you a sample of how I would handle him. He wanted me to give him some references, see, but he’s not going to get any names from me for nothing. I’m going to make him pay me five dollars a name. If he wants five names, it will cost him twenty-five bucks.”

Vera Sue’s expression became odd. “How much for each name, Walter?”

“Five dollars. He pays five bucks, or he won’t get a single name.”

Vera Sue’s mouth started twitching, and suddenly a shriek of laughter escaped her. She laughed so hard that she had to lean on the bed for support.

Harsh glared. “What’s killing you now?”

“Walter, you sure are some whiz-bang businessman.”

“Huh?”

She picked up a corner of the bed sheet and wiped the tears of mirth out of her eyes. “So, you can get five dollars a name. Five dollars.” She blew her nose in the sheet.

“Yeah, at least that much.”

“I got one hundred dollars, Walter. That’s what I got apiece for five names. Five hundred dollars. You say you can get five a name, but I got one hundred. What do you say to that?”

Harsh tried to sit up but his arm shot pain through his body and he lay back gasping. “You got five hundred?” What was there for him to say? He could not remember when any news had made him feel so sick and defeated. He swallowed some of his own saliva, and it tasted like gall. “Hand over my share.”

“What?”

“Hand over my share of what you got, baby. My half.”

She withdrew a step. “Your share is half of twenty-five bucks, Walter, if you got any share coming.”

“Don’t start pulling stuff like that, Vera Sue.”

“Listen, lover boy, I talk to dumb clucks any way I want, and you’re a dumb cluck, and also a cheap cluck. You’re a five-dollar cluck, that’s what you are.”

He struggled to a sitting position on the bed, ignoring the pain from his arm. “You watch out, or I’ll bat you one.”

She laughed nastily and buttoned the new coat over her new dress. “If that’s the way you feel, you can go to hell.”

She left the hospital room, not bothering to close the door. He fell back on the bed, causing his arm to hurt violently, and looked silently at the ceiling. Presently, when the nurse put her head in the door and looked at him and saw the expression on his face, she gasped and came in and thrust the thermometer in his mouth and took his pulse. She carried the thermometer to the window to examine it and shook her head, murmuring that if visitors excited him so much, he would just have to stop having them. Harsh bellowed at her, “Jesus God, get out of here and leave me alone!” This made the nurse angry, and instead of leaving the room, she forced him to take a drink of water, jamming the glass against his teeth hard enough that it grated. He swallowed some water. She placed the glass on the table and snatched an object off a chair. “Who left this here?”

Harsh looked and saw that she had picked up Brother’s briefcase. He had not noticed Brother had left it behind.

“They left it here for me to look at.” He turned his face away from the nurse so she would not see he was lying. “Why don’t you get out of here?”

The nurse shrugged, put the briefcase back on the chair, and left.

Harsh did not move a muscle for a while, thinking she might come back. He was furious about the five hundred dollar thing. He had as much right to the money as anybody, but getting it away from the greedy bitch was another thing. He found it incomprehensible that Brother should pay five hundred dollars for five names which Harsh had offered to give the man for nothing. It proved one thing, he decided, it proved Brother was no insurance company detective. No insurance company would hire a man who threw their money around in such a crazy way.

He became convinced the nurse was not coming back, and he turned crosswise on the bed, stretching out his serviceable arm for Brother’s briefcase. He was able to reach it and drag it onto the bed. It was not locked. He gripped the zipper tab with his fingers and pulled it open. He looked inside.

What is this thing? he thought. He lifted out a device with a leatherette covering. It was about the size of a cigar box for twenty-five cigars. On the outside were two knobs and a red light. When he accidentally tapped the device while handling it, he noticed the light glow.

He got it. The device was a battery-driven wire recorder. Since the light was glowing, it obviously was operating. There was nothing else in the briefcase.

More frosting on the cake, he thought.

He considered smashing the recorder against the floor or at least pulling the wire off the uptake spool and ruining it, crumpling it into a little metal wad—but in the end he just put the device back and returned the briefcase to the chair.

Let the bastard hear what he wanted to hear. Maybe it would mean getting to the bottom of things that much faster.

SIX

If Harsh retained any doubts about Brother being an oddball, they were removed when Brother paid a second visit. Harsh was lying with his eyes closed trying to doze. Four or five hours had gone by and he had more or less calmed down. He knew he needed rest. When he heard the door open, he supposed the nurse was back, and he kept his eyes shut until he heard the newcomer pick up the briefcase and heard the zipper rasp as it opened. Harsh lifted his head.

Brother was removing the little wire recorder from the case, and looking at Harsh with an expression of contempt. Without speaking he placed the recorder on the bed and turned one of its knobs. The recorder whirred as it rewound. Brother adjusted the knobs again. The recorder began to talk, playing back what Brother and Harsh had said on their first meeting. Then came what Vera Sue and Harsh had said to each other. The device evidently had a triggering mechanism so that it only recorded when there was sound being made in range of the microphone.

Brother shut it off. His lips twitched with amusement. “The young lady made a fool of you.”

Harsh had decided he was not going to let the man get his goat. “Did she?”

“She showed you up.”

“Well, if you say so.”

“Harsh, I can tell you something that may make you feel better. She did not have any idea of asking five hundred dollars for those names. Or asking anything. I merely made her the offer and she grabbed it.”

Harsh gave this some thought. “Can you prove Vera Sue didn’t make a fool out of both of us?”

“How is that?”

“You paid her five hundred dollars for something worth nothing. What does that make you? I may have been a dope, but I didn’t pay out five hundred for the privilege.”

Brother shook his head. “You miss the point.”

“I guess I miss it, all right. What is the point?”

“Everything has to be done my way.”

“That is the point?”

“Exactly. Everything has to be done my way. Remember that. When I ordered you to give me five references in return for twenty-five dollars and you refused, I paid the young woman five hundred dollars for the same information. I was teaching you a lesson. I hope you got it.”

Harsh reached out a hand and his fingers felt on the table for cigarettes. Dumb bastard, Harsh thought. He pulled a cigarette out of the pack and put it between his lips. I’ll be goddamned if I ever heard the like of this.

“Mr. Brother, you gave me something to think about, I admit that.”

“When I give an order, it must be obeyed without question or haggling. That is what I am trying to establish. Do you understand?”

“I don’t know how you could say it any plainer, Mr. Brother.”

“But do you comprehend?”

“Sure.”

“I doubt it, Harsh.” Brother’s eyes were contemptuous. “I do not think you are very good at comprehension.”

“If you want to think so, okay. You could be wrong, though.”

“No, Harsh. I have had you investigated thoroughly.”

Harsh lifted his hand, removed the cigarette from his lips, and looked at it. He did not want the man to see his expression. “I heard there was a private detective from Kansas City snooping around. Was he your boy?”

“One of them. One of about twenty.”

“I don’t know what you thought that would get you.” Harsh rolled the cigarette slowly in his fingers.

Brother smiled with dislike. “It got you something, Harsh.”

“It did? How is that?”

“It enabled me to arrange to protect you from the police in the matter of D. C. Roebuck.” The man’s teeth were small white chisel edges under his lifted lip. “Providing you cooperate, of course.”

Harsh closed his eyes. For a moment he thought he was going to faint. His hand holding the cigarette lay limp on his chest.

“Harsh, I am going to talk steadily for several minutes. Making explanations. Do not interrupt.”

Harsh’s mouth was becoming very dry. He merely nodded his head.

“Harsh, I have been searching for a man to fit a certain exact description. The man must look exactly like the picture you have seen. He must have O-negative blood. The man must be of near criminal character, and he must be for sale. To find such a man I set up a so-called foundation and offered a reward, twenty-five dollars, for each O-negative blood donor, and I have expended many thousands of dollars fruitlessly on the device. Finally a local policeman notified me of someone who had needed such a donor here. It was you. I had a firm of private detectives from Kansas City investigate you at once, as I have had every possible candidate investigated in the past. The detectives found you had crowded D. C. Roebuck off the road and he was killed. They found a man in a service station in Carrollton, Missouri, who saw Mr. Roebuck drive away in pursuit of you. I have had them pay the service station man in Carrollton a sum of money to be silent. My detectives also found that locally the police wished to charge you with statutory rape, and I have stopped that by obtaining a birth certificate showing Miss Crosby is over twenty-one years of age. I have sold your car, and you will receive the price of a new one. I have paid your hospital bill here. The private detectives have checked your references, and I find you are a borderline crook. I have paid off the detectives, and they are gone. In other words, you are satisfactory, Harsh. I find you acceptable. Therefore only one thing remains to be settled.”

Harsh slowly put the cigarette between his lips. He felt for the book of matches on the bedside table, bent a match back to light it one-handed, and held the flame to the end of the cigarette. He noticed his hand was unsteady. He took one puff, and after that the cigarette hung on his lip with the tip smoldering.

“Mister, you kind of took the wind out of my sails.”

“You have questions, Harsh?” A sneer curled his lip.

“Yeah, I got a bushel of questions, Mister. You say you bought the service station guy in Carrollton, but will he stay—”

“I will answer no questions whatever, Harsh. You have been told the essential facts. That is sufficient.”

Harsh frowned at the thin curl of blue smoke coming off the end of the cigarette. “You’re kind of a puzzle to me, Mister.”

“Are you for sale, Harsh?”

“Eh?”

“Are you for sale. You heard me.”

Harsh took the cigarette away to moisten his lips with his tongue. “I admit taking Roebuck off my neck is worth something. But will it stick? I got to know more about—”

“I am talking about selling yourself for dollars, Harsh.”

“Oh. Well, you hadn’t mentioned money, only Roebuck, and I thought you meant one favor in exchange for another.”

“I will never need a favor from a man of your caliber, Harsh.”

“Well, if you say so. But a man never knows.”

“I asked you if you were for sale, you fool.” The man looked at Harsh with eyes as cold and moist as those of a dead cow.

“I guess the answer is yes.”

“Good. It is settled.” Brother began buttoning his topcoat preparatory to leaving. “This is as far as our discussion need go.”

“Wait a minute.” Harsh stubbed out the cigarette. “Nobody said how much money we’re discussing.”

“I already know your price tag, Harsh.” Brother drew a package of money from his pocket and tossed it on the bed. “That is the full amount we are discussing. There will be no more. Count it. It is not yours until your job is done. I will be back later.”

The sheaf of currency was held by a rubber band. It had come to rest exactly in the middle of Harsh’s stomach. He could see it by looking down his nose. He did not touch it.

“Harsh.”

“Yes?”

“You are to be removed from this hospital and taken to another city. That will happen this afternoon.”

Brother swung and walked to the door, opened it and went out, closing the door behind him.

I’ll be damned, Harsh thought, wondering how much money was in the packet. His palms suddenly felt sweaty and he rubbed the right one on the sheet. He pulled the money to him and slipped off the rubber band and began to count. He counted off five or six bills and stopped. He took one of the greenbacks with his fingers and held it up to the light, turning it this way and that and speculating on whether it was counterfeit. He did not think it was phony. It was a one hundred dollar bill. His palm was still sweating and he rubbed it on the sheet again, then went on counting, moving his lips and concentrating. Halfway through the pile his hand shook so that he had to pause. Jesus, he thought. He had a coughing spell that wracked him and he wondered if he was out of his goddamn mind. He seized all the money and shoved it under the sheet and lay there breathing heavily. He began to have visions of the nurse coming in and jerking the sheet off him and finding the money and taking it away from him the way they had taken away his clothes. He must be dreaming. Oh hell if he was dreaming, he might as well get the full effect of the dream and finish counting the money. He began counting again and his lips felt very stiff when he tried to move them to frame the numbers. He began to hear the blood going through his ears like water in a faucet. Finally he finished counting the money and clutched it all together and put it under the sheet with him and rolled over on it so the money was under his belly. He lay there having difficulty breathing. He felt the money pushing against the outside of his belly. Then he got the impression the money was penetrating right into his gut and making a lump like a barrel. The lump became as hot as fire. Then it began to melt and as it melted the gold fluid ran through his veins, ran through his veins into his throat, making him sick, making him have to vomit. He did not want to vomit on his bed. He lurched up but he had to let go anyway when he put his weight on his broken arm without thinking and the arm exploded with pain. He had to scream. The scream sounded like a fire engine to his ears. The whole hospital would hear the squall, he thought, and come running to take the money away from him. Oh, Lord. His bed was a mess. So this was how it felt, he thought, to get your hands on fifty thousand dollars.