The Third Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 25 Classic Mysteries

A Change of Heart

Originally appeared in The Executioner Mystery Magazine, August 1975.

Turning the continental onto the white-graveled driveway of Aunt Crabby’s estate, Eddie Crabtree listened to the chit-chat in the back seat between his aunt and Dr. Picard. Each innocent word distilled another drop of venom in Eddie’s reservoir of bitterness.

He choked back a monstrous case of heartburn as he tooled the heavy car through spangles of bright sunlight filtering through the elm-shaded lane. Today, he hated mother nature along with everything else. As if by special arrangement, a lovelier spring day couldn’t have been imagined for Aunt Crabby’s homecoming from the hospital. The first subtle taste of summer was in the air. The sky was a misty blue. Quickened and freshly green, the very earth shared with Aunt Crabby a bursting of new life, renewal. The death rattle of falling leaves was past, for Aunt Crabby as well as the trees.

The glistening, steel-gray car wended around the terraced front lawns and gardens. Ahead loomed the imposing, two-story, brick neo-colonial home that Aunt Crabby’s husband, deceased, had left as a reflection of himself. Its quiet, fortress-like solidity was relieved by the touch of ivy growing on the walls. The servants, five in number, had noted the car’s approach and were lining up on the veranda beside the front door to welcome Aunt Crabby home.

Aunt Crabby was holding her breath as she leaned forward for her first look after all these long weeks. “Home...” she murmured from just behind Eddie’s right ear. “I can’t wait to get inside and caress every stick of furniture!”

“You’re not eighteen, my dear,” Dr. Picard grumped, “even if you do have the heart of an eighteen-year-old. You follow my orders, now. No overdoing it.”

“I certainly don’t feel my forty-nine. But I don’t want a shaggy old bear of a heart surgeon growling at me,” Aunt Crabby giggled happily.

Eddie stared hard through the windshield. Laughing? Aunt Crabby? It didn’t seem possible. He was dreadfully certain her new vitality would last another fifty years...

He stopped the car at the shallow front steps, which were flanked by a pair of stone lions. He jumped out and opened the rear door. His face a carefully-composed and long-practiced mask, he offered a tender hand to help Aunt Crabby from the car.

Her gaze lingered on his face. Her eyes were almost like those of a stranger, deeper, gentler, quieter than the eyes he remembered. “Thank you, dear,” she gave his hand a quick, motherly squeeze.

Dr. Picard bumbled out beside her. He permitted her to take the short walk up by herself, slowly and carefully, one step at a time while the servants strained with each of her movements.

She paused on the veranda to accept their welcome. Cook, gardener, maid, butler, the spare-boned registered nurse who had been assigned by Dr. Picard to live in for awhile.

“Welcome home, mum...

“It’s so good to have you back!...”

When all the murmured greetings were over, the servants sneaked bewildered glances at each other. The eyes of Mrs. Violetta Crabtree Harper had actually filled with tears of tenderness and gratitude!

Aunt Crabby led the way into the spacious foyer with its vaulted ceiling, gold-framed mirror, antique hat-rack and umbrella stand. Eddie was the last to enter, on dragging feet.

The servants scattered to their tasks. Dr. Picard gave Aunt Crabby a few moments to look about brightly and exclaim how good it was to be home. Then he ordered her into the chair-lift that had been installed at the graceful, curving stairway.

“Up we go, my dear,” he said. “You’ve had plenty of excitement for the first day. Don’t rush things. You’ve years and years to enjoy your home now.”

He was a big, slovenly looking man whose appearance belied his genius as a heart surgeon. It took the setting of an operating room the touch of a scalpel in his hand to transform him.

Aunt Crabby, Dr. Picard, and the skeletal nurse (Miss Mayberry was her name) disappeared in the upper reaches toward Aunt Crabby’s bedroom. Eddie slouched into the living room and flopped in a huge wingchair upholstered in dark green silk. The chair seemed to shrink his slender frame. Behind heavy black glasses, his face was sparrow-like, with a thin cap of brown hair plastered on a long, narrow skull.

He stared blindly. His scanty, wiry muscles twitched now and then, visible echoes of his churning thoughts.

Right up until today he’d fought the idea that Aunt Crabby would leave the hospital alive. Sure, heart transplants were no longer news. But it just hadn’t seemed possible to Eddie that Dr. Picard could tear the heart from the still-warm body of the Dutcher youth, jam it into Aunt Crabby’s bosom, and have the whole thing work out. Her tissues would reject the alien flesh; her kidneys would collapse; her lungs would fill with fluids and she’d drown in pneumonic juices. But her tissues, kidneys, and lungs had performed with the ease of a computer.

“She’s a lousy, sneaky cheat!” Eddie whispered, his voice quivering with savagery even as it cracked on a note of intense self-pity.

That was the sum and substance of it. For two long, insufferable years he’d played the role of dutiful nephew. Whipping boy. Slave, no less.

He’d leaped to obey her whims. He’d soothed away her fears of death when nightmares had brought her screaming to wakefulness at three in the morning. He’d borne her vituperations as she’d grown to hate those whose days weren’t numbered.

The seemingly certain and foreseeable goal had sustained Eddie. He’d stuck it out, even if the effort to stay in the compliant nephew character had cost him an ulcer. Each day she’d used up had brought him twenty-four hours closer to the moment when he could buy his dear, departed aunt the biggest funeral wreath in town.

He’d played the game honestly. Like the time when he was a kid with the Monopoly game in the neighborhood, skipping squares on the board.

When the sole surviving relative passes “Go” he collects two million dollars. Wasn’t that the rule?

But they had conspired, that horrible old man with the doctors degrees and Aunt Crabby. And they had reached into the “Chance” pile and sneaked out for Eddie a card that read: Go to jail. Go directly to jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect two million dollars...

A burning-knife sensation gathered force behind Eddie’s navel and shot through viscera to his spine. He gritted his teeth, labored out of the chair, and struggled upstairs to his room. He was in the bathroom, chasing a slug of Amphojel with a shot of Alka Seltzer, when timid knuckles rapped on his bedroom door.

“What is it?” he snarled through the open bathroom doorway.

The maid’s voice drifted from the hallway: “Mr. Crabtree, Mrs. Harper wants to talk to you.”

Eddie slammed the glass into its porcelain holder and glared at himself in the medicine cabinet mirror. Sucker... you’ll probably pop off with a bleeding ulcer long before she ever again thinks of dying...

Aunt Crabby was reposing on a white chaise lounge near the tall, gossamer-curtained windows when Eddie entered her room. She dropped the book she was reading, smiled at him. “Thank you for coming so quickly, Edward. I excused Miss Mayberry. I wanted us to have a chat, just the two of us.”

From long habit, Eddie’s face was a bland, myopic mask. Only a tremor in the jaw muscle suggested a gritting of teeth.

She studied him as he shuffled forward, his bony shoulders slightly stooped. A glow of compassion softened her brown eyes. “You poor boy, the lines in that dear little pale face are my doing, aren’t they?”

She held up a slender hand as Eddie started to speak.

“No, dear. You don’t have to fib to me.” She drew a breath. “Don’t forget, I’ve had weeks in which to think, about myself, other people, life, the really important things. Did you know there’s no place quite like a hospital to do some heavy thinking?”

She reached out to pat the arm of the nearby boudoir chair. The gesture was quick and lively. One thing for sure, the restoration of life — in the midst of certain death — seemed to have peeled the years from her. It was hard to look at the almost youthful glow of her face and imagine the drawn, vulturous visage that had entered the hospital.

“Please sit down, Eddie. Bear with me for a moment. What I have to say isn’t easy.”

“Aunt Violetta...”

“No, Eddie. Don’t try to gloss it over. I know what a real shrew I’ve been.” A smile trembled in the dainty oval face. “Vixen. Harridan. Old witch. I made life perfectly dreadful for all those around me. I repaid kindness with ire, compassion with wrath. But I was lost, Eddie. Nothing was real to me except suffering and the darkness of death. I know now that I was lashing out...”

She drew a breath. “Yes, just lashing out.”

Staring at her, Eddie eased to the edge of the boudoir chair.

“But Dr. Picard... the new heart...” Her solemn eyes sought his face. “What I’m trying to say is that the old heart, Eddie, and all the vile rancor that stemmed from it are gone. I can’t go back and undo the meanness of the old witch that I became. So we must let her rest in peace, mustn’t we?

Eddie glanced away, hating the vitality of her. “Why not?”

“I knew I could count on your kindness and understanding!” She sat up, a fire of excitement building in her eyes. “I want to start writing on the new page of life with a little act of repayment, Eddie. My new heart has given me faith and hope. Now it behooves me to express charity.”

Eddie held his breath. Was she actually going to do something decent for him?

Then the burning sensation began to spread throughout his insides as he heard her intention, this big deal she’d dreamed up in the hospital.

“This boy whose heart beats at this moment within my own breast...” she was saying. “This Spades Dutcher... I had a hospital orderly make inquiries on his days off, Eddie.”

“But I didn’t know you were...” Eddie burst out.

She cut him off with a pat on his hand. “Yes, you would have tackled the chore, had I asked. I know that. But you’d have stuck out like a little green man from Mars in that poor, ghetto neighborhood. No one would have told you anything.”

“And what did this accepted individual, this hospital orderly, learn on his days off?” Eddie asked stiffly.

“Much that I’ll remember always,” Aunt Crabby gazed thoughtfully at the sunny window for a moment. Then her eyes gradually re-focused on Eddie.

“Never mind all the little details,” she sighed. “You need only the highlights for your chore.”

“Chore, Aunt Violetta?”

“Yes, dear. That’s what I’m getting to. The boy, Spades Dutcher, had so little. Broken home. Lack of education. All that. Yet he left me so much. He also left a poor old mother who lives all alone.”

Eddie stared at Aunt Crabby blankly. She caught the look and smiled wryly.

“Yes, Eddie,” she nodded. “The old Violetta Crabtree Harper, wrapped in her own troubled self, wouldn’t have cared two pins about Mrs. Dutcher. She was just a signature on the legal papers necessary for the transplant, obtainable at the cheapest price possible. But now she is a person, Eddie. And I want to do something for her. Something lasting, for the memory of her son.”

Aunt Crabby pointed toward her dressing table. “You’ll find her address written on the pad there, Eddie. Go to this poor woman. Tell her that my bankers will arrange for her to draw on a small but adequate account monthly, for so long as she lives. The bank will advise her the details later. But hurry now, with the good news! She need never be cold or hungry again.”

Eddie groped with a feeling of blindness to the dressing table. He ripped the top sheet from the waiting pad. He was tempted to turn and stuff the address down Aunt Crabby’s throat. She’d do a kindness for a stranger — but for him... nothing. She’d had a change of heart, all right. She was a worse creep than ever!

Eddie expected to find a pitiful, malnourished, rickety scarecrow of the slums. Instead, meeting Mrs. George Dutcher was something of a shock. She lived in a two-room walkup in a scabby, century-old brick building. Eddie parked the Continental at the trash littered curbing, and it was the immediate center of a gang of ragged, fearsome looking kids. Eddie didn’t dare open the door until a beat cop came up.

Eddie thumbed the button that opened the electrically-operated window, thrust his head out of the car, and explained to the cop that he had important business upstairs.

“Better make it snappy,” the cop said. “I can’t keep an eye on the heap all day, and if I didn’t you wouldn’t have even a sparkplug left when you come out.

Eddie nerved himself, dashed across the sidewalk, and scurried up the dark, stinking stairway. His stomach was a bubbling cauldron of hydrochloric acid by the time he reached the fourth floor, sought out a rusty number hanging by one tack, and knocked on the door.

A big woman in a greasy wrapper opened the door. She had a bulbous, liverish colored face and the frizzled ragtags of hair that perhaps in a dim and forgotten past had been a rather luxuriant dark blonde.

“Yeah?” she snarled. “If you’re a bill collector, beat it. I’m broke.”

“No, M’am.” Eddie gulped. He fought the urge to hold his nose. The woman’s breath was coming on like a lion with a three-day muscatel hangover. “I mean, are you Mrs. George Dutcher?”

“So what if I am?”

“My name is Edward Crabtree.” He glanced up and down the gloomy hallway where wooden lathes showed here and there like gaunt ribs exposed by fallen plaster. “Could we talk — briefly — inside?”

“What about?”

“Doesn’t my name — Crabtree — mean anything to you?”

“Can’t say that it does.”

“How about Harper? Mrs. Violetta Crabtree Harper?”

Came the dawning of knowledge to the wine-soaked gray eyes in their folds of greasy fat. “Sure — Harper... The woman who got my son’s heart — for a lousy hundred bucks.”

“It’s about the stipend that I want to talk to you, Mrs. Dutcher.”

“The what?”

“Money.”

“Well, why’n’cha say so! Come in.” She jerked the door wide.

A feeling of faintness smote Eddie when he entered a dark hole furnished with a sway-backed bed carelessly covered with dirty linens, a broken-down washstand, and a sofa with gray stuffing spilling from rents in its filth-greased arms. He glimpsed the adjoining kitchen, where swarming flies battled with a colony of marching cockroaches over a table littered with tin cans, dirty dishes and wine bottles.

“I told Spades he was going to get in trouble fooling with them gangs.” Mrs. Dutcher shoved several tattered confession magazines aside to make room for Eddie to sit down. Crossing the room to turn off the battered, snow-blurred TV set, she added, “Like a good mother should, I warned him. Did my duty, I did. Think it helped, changed anything? Not a bit, it didn’t. He was down there in the next block — it’s all colored — busting windows with the best of them the night the riot happened. Some excitement around here for awhile, I tell you! Six big buildings going up in smoke. People running around like crazy. Say, don’t you want to sit down, Mr. Crabtree?”

“Well, I... what I have to say won’t take long.”

“If it’s about money, let’s get on with it. It’s high time I was getting a break. Never had one. Like Spades, my poor boy. Running across the street, he was, when some joker tossed that hunk of busted cement from the roof of the building. Spades and the brickbat... they both picked the same spot on the street at the same second. Knocked a hole right in his skull.” Her head moved slowly from side to side. The watery content of her eyes overflowed a trifle. Her huge, pulpy chin snapped up. “And where the hell was the pigs, the lousy cops? They’re always there to kick you in the teeth, but how come they couldn’t stop somebody from busting my poor Spades in the head!”

The lumpy sofa sagged a few inches further as her ample bottom dropped onto it. She sat there for a moment, raising a thick-fingered hand to knuckle moisture from her eyes. “Anyhow, guess you ain’t here to talk about all that. You know the rest. Spades was taken to the hospital, and he was dying sure enough, and this doctor tells me he’s got a waiting list a yard long of patients who need and want new hearts real bad.” She squinted up at Eddie. “And this lady what sent you is the one got Spades’s.”

“That’s why the bank will be in touch, Mrs. Dutcher. You won’t move into the Hilton by any stretch of the imagination, but neither will you have to worry about beans or a roof.”

“It’s hard to believe... hard to believe.” She shook her head. Gradually, she became very still, staring at a crack in the floor.

The moments passed. Eddie cleared his throat in twitchy discomfort.

“I don’t want you telling George about this,” she muttered, not looking up.

“What?”

“George, my husband.”

His eyes popped behind the heavy glasses. “A husband? I thought you were a widow.”

“Might as well be.” She wiped her nose with the back of a forefinger. “If you’re worried about them legal papers I signed for the doctor, don’t. I told the doctor about George. I guess he just didn’t bother to tell you. George can’t sign no papers, no-how, him being out in the state run loony bin.”

“I’m sorry,” Eddie said.

“Sure, I know. But it’s all right. George had his day, he did. Two-hundred and thirteen fights. He fought in every tanktown ring from Maine to Miami. Ring Magazine even mentioned him once. Great days, those, Mr. Crabtree. George paid down on a real fur coat for me one time and I got to wear it nearly the whole winter before the finance company nailed us in Greensboro, North Carolina.”

Her sigh was heavy. “Last fight... George couldn’t stand the bees buzzing in his head no more. Couldn’t hear nothing else. Kept right on fighting after the bell ended the fourth. Liked to have killed the other fighter, and the referee, and the two cops it took to drag him out of the ring.

She looked toward the kitchen, probing the wine bottles. “George is all right most of the time, Mr. Crabtree. They let him walk around the grounds when the keepers are watching, and even have company. But sometimes it don’t take much to tee George off, real bad. So just let him be. He’s real happy where he is, and he might get a crazy idea if he learned I come into a little money.”

Eddie’s silence, his very stillness, drew her attention from the wine bottles. She began to frown as she looked at him. She stood up slowly. “Something wrong, Mr. Crabtree?”

“Wrong?” He looked at her, starry-eyed. His happy laugh burst against the scaly walls. “Mrs. Dutcher, you’re a source of sheer inspiration, no less! I’ve never enjoyed meeting anyone so much in all my life!” As if quite out of his senses, he reached and gave her repulsive hulk a quick hug.

As he turned and dashed for the doorway, she lunged after him. “Hey, about the money...”

“The bank will be in touch.” He threw the words over his shoulder as he disappeared in the stairwell.

A big man with iron gray hair and a creased face as patient looking as a hound’s, the white-coated warder strolled the grounds of the state mental hospital keeping an eye on his charges. It was a lovely afternoon, very quiet and peaceful. Little Miss Quackenbush was quietly reading the same thin volume of poetry over and over as she strolled about the walkways bisecting the green lawns. Mr. Heaterly was quietly leaning against the trunk of a huge oak tree discussing the market situation with an invisible broker; Mr. Heaterly’s short-circuited brain had arranged for that black market day in 1929 to be always in a non-existent tomorrow.

The warder glanced toward the long wings of the brick buildings that were beginning to cast shadows over the lawns. Just about time to herd them in, see that they didn’t try to eat their spoons for dinner, and tuck them in for the night.

The warder yawned, stretched, and then lowered his arms slowly. He mused on the pair of men sitting on the low stone bench near the splashing fountain.

Now don’t it take the cake? The warder’s head moved in a wry shake. All this time everybody had thought George Dutcher was nothing more than a beat-up, punch-drunk ex-pug. Then this skinny young guy wearing the heavy glasses comes swooping up in a snazzy Continental. Says he’s a cousin from a distant branch of the family. Been in Europe a long time. Tried to look up George and was shocked to find him out here. Wants to see the old boy. Maybe arrange for him to enter a private sanitarium. After all, says the young fellow, one doesn’t like to think of one’s family being in a public institution, does one?

George hadn’t remembered his visitor at all. That wasn’t surprising. Sometimes George Dutcher remembered things in detail that had happened twenty years ago. Simple unimportant things that most people couldn’t have recalled at all. Then, in the next second George might forget what had happened five minutes ago.

Anyway, the young guy had been pleasant and easy and patient with George. That was good. The visit should be fine for George.

“...He’s watching us,” Eddie said softly, his face close to George Dutcher’s frightfully lumpy visage. “The big man with the iron gray hair.”

“I’ll break ’im in two!” George graveled.

Eddie quickly laid his hand on the hairy mitt that was curling into a fist. “No, no, George! Don’t even look around. He’ll suspect. He’s the warder, remember, and we don’t want anybody to suspect, do we?”

George’s elephantine shoulders relaxed. His hands, twisted and misshapen from bone and tendon breakage, slowly uncurled. He sat hunched, popping his knuckles in his lap. “Nah! Nobody. Just me and you, pally. And thanks for coming out and giving me the tip.”

“You sure you got it all?” Eddie said. “You won’t forget? Her name? Where she lives? How to get to her house?”

“I won’t fergit nuttin!”

“She’s the one, George.” Eddie glanced over his shoulder. The white-coated warder was strolling toward the old geezer at the oak tree, suspecting nothing. “She had a guy bust Spades’s skull with a brickbat. Then she had your boy’s heart cut out.”

George lifted his left hand and beat the palm against his skull just above the ear.

“George?”

“Yeah, pally? Okay... I’m okay... Don’t worry about me. Nobody flattens Battlin’ George. I’ll get to her and put a stop to these noises in my head...”

Eddie flinched as he looked into George’s milky eyes. Eddie gulped. His scalp prickled. He kept a tight control on his voice, and the urge to run. “But you got to be smart, George. You can get out of here easily enough, but you got to be smart to keep them from dragging you back. Here...” He quickly fumbled a fifty dollar bill into George’s hand. “This will help. You’ll know where to buy a gun in some pool hall.” Eddie jumped to his feet. “I got to go now, George. Really I have.”

“You been a real pal, pally. I won’t fergit. Spades... he was my boy... my only kid...”

Eddie kept his report to Aunt Crabby brief, stating only that he had seen Mrs. Dutcher and the poor woman had been quite grateful.

“You were gone a long time, dear,” Aunt Crabby said from the provincial writing desk where she had been penning a note.

“Had the car checked over,” Eddie mumbled. “The engine started missing a little. Nothing serious. It’s all fixed. Everything, in fact, is fixed.”

“Well, tell cook you’re here. She’s been holding your dinner.”

“Right-o,” Eddie said cheerfully. He paused at the doorway, glancing back at her. He returned her sweet smile. Hmmmm, he thought, who’ll I get for pall bearers?

With its mad, conspiratorial smile, Dutcher’s lumpy face was a horror from another realm. He inched his right hand up to show Eddie that he was holding a gun.

“You planned great, pally. It’s a snap. Now where’s the witch what had my boy’s heart cut out?”

“Listen,” Eddie gasped, “it’s all a mistake!”

“And it’s the last one she’ll make,” Dutcher said. “You can take a walk, pally — while I pay off for Spades.”

As Dutcher edged toward the stairway, Eddie wrenched movement from his muscles. He grabbed Dutcher’s arm.

“Please, George, she’s got to live. As long as she lives, I’ve got it made. But the minute she dies a bunch of guys with test tubes and microscopes pass Go and collect two million dollars! George... you’ve got to understand!”

Eddie flung himself between George and the stairway. It was like trying to turn aside a ponderous slab of cement.

“George,” Eddie screamed softly, “you simply can’t kill her! You wouldn’t kill an innocent woman, would you, George?”

George slowed. “Innocent?”

“Sure,” Eddie said. “She wasn’t the one who busted Spades’s skull.”

George’s eyes focused on Eddie. They were wracked with the pain of trying to link up a thought process. Then, as an invisible switch clicked behind them, they escaped. The eyes were almost at peace. George’s voice was almost gentle. “I get it, pally. I been around. I know the score. You was covering — for yourself! That’s the only way you could’ve knowed so much. So here’s a present for Spades!”

“No, George... George, you have to...”

George didn’t have to do anything but press the trigger once, twice, three times, to stop the noises in his head. The bullets punctured a lung, the solar plexus, and a bleeding ulcer.

Just after midnight, a young intern brought Mrs. Violetta Crabtree Harper the news. She rose quietly as he crossed the hospital waiting room.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Harper. Everything possible was done for Eddie. But your nephew has only a few more hours at best. Dr. Picard sent me ahead. He’ll be down as soon as possible.

“No,” Aunt Crabby said after a thoughtful moment, “the need for Dr. Picard is much greater in surgery...” Aunt Crabby took a long breath. “Please advise him to begin immediate preparations for the next heart transplant on his waiting list. It appears we shall have a donor — and I’m sure poor Eddie’s dear, wonderful heart will keep life’s blood pumping for someone else for a long time to come...”

The nervous sweats didn’t hit him until late that evening. In his bed-sitting room suite down the hall from Aunt Crabby’s, he tried to focus on a TV show. He’d expected tension, not knowing precisely when George Dutcher would make his move. He could handle himself — if his ulcer didn’t start bleeding. Every few minutes he went from his sitting room to the medicine cabinet to gulp soda mints, tranquilizing pills.

He fiddled with the TV set while his mind rolled a film of his own. He was talking with quiet grief to a policeman: Yes, sir, I drove up-county to the mental hospital. I saw Dutcher. My aunt asked me to do so. She’d learned that Mrs. Dutcher had a living husband. She told me to stop by Mrs. Dutcher’s first and then visit Mr. Dutcher on some kind of pretext. My aunt wanted to help both of them. She was going to set up a small fund for Mrs. Dutcher. The bankers will tell you that. She wanted to know something about Mr. Dutcher, how he looked, what he was like. Then, I suppose, she planned to take further steps on his behalf... Yes, sir...terrible thing, Mr. Dutcher breaking in and killing her like that... But no doubt at all as to who did it... I’m sorry, sir... Only my aunt could tell you any more, and she’s no longer with us...

Pat story. Stand on it. Stick to it. No one could disprove it. If the police started whistling, it would be in the dark.

The acid fount was loosed for the third time since dinner. Eddie clutched his stomach, came off his sitting room couch, and headed for the medicine cabinet with its woefully inadequate balms.

Halfway across the bedroom, he grimaced as someone knocked on the door. He turned to the door and yanked it open. Dr. Picard was standing in the hallway.

“Well...” Eddie said. “How are you, doctor? I didn’t expect to see you.”

“Routine call on my patient — in a way.” Dr. Picard chuckled. “But it turned into quite a chat. Say, my boy, do you feel up to par? You look very pale.”

“Just tired.”

Dr. Picard laid his hand on Eddie’s shoulder. “You’ve been through it, all right. But you can relax now. Take a vacation. Start enjoying yourself.” He glanced down the empty hallway. “She really is a changed woman, Eddie. I think she’s going to open up the purse strings — for as long as she lives. And you do deserve it, you know. You’ve attended her faithfully for a long time now.”

“For as long... as she lives?”

Dr. Picard’s hand gave Eddie’s shoulder a benign squeeze. “No, no, my boy! I didn’t mean it that way! She’s taken no turn for the worse. By the time she passes away you’ll be an old retired businessman yourself.”

“Then what did you mean?”

“She wants to further the kind of research that did so much for her. In fact, during her last days in the hospital she whiled away some of the boredom of convalescent time by discussing it with her lawyer and having him draw up all the necessary papers.” Again Dr. Picard looked in the direction of Aunt Crabby’s closed door. “I think it wonderful of her. Upon her demise, the bulk of the estate will go for heart research.” The hand lifted. “Just thought you’d like the news about those loosened purse strings. If her present mood lasts — and I think it will — you won’t have to worry about settling down for a long time yet. You’ll have a ball, the kind young men dream about. But see a good G.P. and have a check-up so you can really enjoy yourself.”

With a final slap on the shoulder, Dr. Picard was gone.

Eddie came out of his stupor with a spasmodic shudder. He dashed down the stairway, grabbed the phone in the foyer, glaring wildly. Who to call? Who to warn that a madman was probably already loose and had armed himself? Hospital? Police? An anonymous call, that was the ticket.

His finger was stabbing at the dial when a voice graveled from the shadows, “Hullo, pally.”

Eddie dropped the phone and spun, his back against the table. George Dutcher was standing just inside the open front doorway. “Had to let that guy drive off, pally,” Dutcher said, shuffling forward. “Almost bumped into him.”