by Jerry eBooks
“I probably won’t ever work for you in Homicide.”
“Hmm,” he murmured, “I see how you’re figuring. You’ve got two hundred dollars now. You won’t be hungry for a couple weeks.”
“There’s one thing wrong, though,” I complained.
“What’s that?”
“I solved the wrong death, didn’t I?” I asked.
“Oh, murder!” Scott sighed disgustedly.
FIRST AID FOR MURDER
Bramley Fox
Little, inconsequential-seeming details were out of place. Dr. Mahlon Steele, a man of careful precision, noted these inconsistencies; he added them up, and the sum was murder!
JOE, THE elevator man, worried what would happen when Dr. Mahlon Steele, the psychiatrist, left the office of his chief, Dr. Hugo Sunderland, and went to the lobby to meet the girl who waited for him.
She sat on the middle bench, her knees together, a black Corday pocket-book on her lap held by her small, white gloved hands. A smart, sleek blond muskrat fur coat was draped over her shoulders. She wore no hat, and that was a blessing, because even the tiniest bit of milliner’s fancy would have distracted from the perfect glory of her hair. It was satin-black, and had a sheen like precious metal. Yet, the weight of it bunched loosely and spreading like two raven’s wings on each side of her neck conveyed the illusion of exotic softness. Her skin was clear, and her cosmetics applied lightly in deference to custom—not because her rich red lips needed delineation, or her wide, curiously direct brown eyes needed darkening or accentuation.
She was Lisbeth Steele, Dr. Steele’s wife.
Joe answered the call-board when the light flickered, seven.
Lisbeth watched the indicator crawl upward, swore to herself in a most unladylike fashion, reset her watch, and rehearsed what she was going to say to her husband.
A moment later she forgot the tongue-lashing she had practiced. “Hello, darling. Been waiting long?”
Dr. Steele took two long, lithe steps toward his wife, put his hand on her arm and squeezed. She felt claimed.
A thin wire-like line of scar extended from his left jaw to the hairline. His left ear had been involved in the same injury that had split open the side of his face, and a bridge of cicatrix attached the earlobe peculiarly to his cheek.
The defect was noticeable, but by no means disfiguring. The dignity in the wide-set amber eyes, the experience and competence declared by the lines etched about the corners of his mouth took attention from the scar.
A plastic, molded left hand looked lifelike and natural until studied carefully. The curved fingers did not move although the wrist flexed and rotated. There was a shell covering three shiny steel prongs that jutted from Dr. Steele’s left forearm. With these cleverly-designed metal fingers, Dr. Steele had trained himself to do almost everything a man could do with a normal hand.
Scar, ear-deformity, and artificial left hand had merited the psychiatrist the Purple Heart, a memento of an incident on Saipan when a Japanese mortar shell had exploded near a Battalion Aid Station.
LISBETH made indignant commentary on the plight of being a doctor’s wife while Dr. Steele hailed a cab, and directed the driver to take them to a restaurant near Times Square.
She heaved a big sigh and happily turned to her husband, nestling against him. “I finally got you away from that smelly old hospital. Do you realize we haven’t been out in weeks? First, I want a big, delicious Martini; and then some salad, jellied consomme, roast lamb with sweet potatoes—” Mahlon smiled at her possessively. The cab crawled crosstown in heavy traffic and reached Sixth Avenue, south of Forty-second Street, when their driver suddenly exclaimed, “Say, I wonder what’s going on over there?” He pointed to where a crowd was collecting.
“Pull up to the curb; we’ll get out here,” said Mahlon. The cab stopped. Steele paid the fare and with a guiding hand on Lisbeth’s elbow he turned toward the opposite side of the street.
Lisbeth looked annoyed. “But Mai, it’s six-thirty. We’re going to have to wait in line to get a table.”
“Someone may be hurt.”
She picked her footing across the cartracks and cobbled road-bed obediently, and they let themselves be sucked into the stream of jostling, morbidly-curious people who wanted a touch of drama to take into the subway with them.
Some of the homeward-hurrying throng, inured to any surprise New York could invent, cast no more than a glance and hopefully held their tokens in their hands, ready for the turnstiles.
“A guy—looks like he’s fainted—”
“I saw him come out of the restaurant—”
“Did you see his face?”
“There’s a doctor there. Lucky thing—”
Dr. Steele and his wife knew from the snatches of conversation they heard trickling back through the shoving ranks that there had been some sort of accident.
A big policeman with a sweaty face kept shoving at the horde and was fast losing his patience while assuring all and sundry, “It’s nothing folks. Nothing at all . . . now break this up before I start taking names.”
It decidedly was something.
A well-dressed man lay supine on the sidewalk with his brown alpaca top-coat flung loosely about his sprawled limbs. His black felt hat had rolled away from his lax hand; his face was any age but very young or very old, its mouth was open and sagging like a wet paper cup; the skin was purplish and congested.
A thin, ascetic-looking, middle-aged man sat on his heels next to the body and looked very much as though he wished he’d never left his office.
The crowd watched and admired his coolness. The doctor knew exactly what to do. He felt the outstretched wrist for the artery that no longer pulsed. He loosened the collar and belt. He put his thumbs against the victim’s lower eye-lids and pulled downward, looking attentively at what he saw.
Then he slipped his hand underneath the coat of the figure, and concentrated. He hardly moved for half a minute.
He changed his hands, impatiently, and a long sigh went up from the crowd, reading the diagnosis from his fixed expression, the professional declaration-of-bad-news-without-words.
He withdrew his hand, stood up a bit creakily, and remained staring at the man with the blue face.
“I’m afraid he’s dead, officer,” he apologized.
There was a commotion.
A tall, blond, mustached man with yellow pigskin gloves and a black homburg called out, “Say there, anything I can do? I am Dr. Barrett. I was just passing and thought I might be of assistance.”
The examiner reached over the heads of some high school kids who ducked, and he shook hands with his colleague. “I’m afraid it’s over. Dr. Barrett. I’m Dr. Gordon Roscoe from Cleveland. I happened to be in the telephone booth in the coffee shop, saw the—this fellow grab his chest and go down.”
Dr. Barrett flicked a negligent hand. “Embolus, most probably—coronary—maybe a hypertensive stroke—” he surmised, as if he and Dr. Roscoe were talking over the case in a Medical Society meeting, and there was no fascinated crowd, silent now, drinking in every syllable.
The policeman asked respectfully, addressing Dr. Roscoe, “Would you mind, sir, remaining just a while until the ambulance gets here?”
THE LITTLE doctor looked a bit uncomfortable and embarrassed, but with an I’ll-see-it-through expression, nodded his acquiescence.
Dr. Barrett tipped his homburg and philosophized, “That’s what you get for being a Good Samaritan in New York. By the way, Dr. Roscoe, are you from Western Reserve? I knew some people there in ’30 . . .”
They were old friends now. Hardly anybody in the crowd was listening to them—only those who weren’t deaf.
Dr. Roscoe smiled quickly. “No. I’m a graduate of Michigan.”
His associate demanded politely again, “Sure there’s nothing I can do?” It was rhetorical. “Then I’ll be getting along.” The black homburg disappeared.
An obese woman in a shocking purple dress and wadded cloth coat sn
eered audibly and spoke aloud. She leaned toward Lisbeth, confidingly. “If they’d have let me take care of him with some old-fashioned spirits of ammonia, he’d still be alive . . . I saw him when he came out of the door, his face like a pickled beet, tearin’ at his collar, hardly seeming to breathe.”
“What would you have done with the spirits of ammonia?” inquired Mahlon in a low voice addressed only to her.
She stared at him, the fleshy wattles on her chins shivering, then lifted a condemning eyebrow at Lisbeth. “Why, the old remedy—put a teaspoon in a half a glass of water and push it down his throat . . .” She sniffed.
Mahlon smiled grimly. “But wouldn’t that go down his windpipe, if he were unconscious? Seems to me you might just as well put your hands on a man’s throat and choke him as drown him in medicine . . .”
It hadn’t been subtle enough, the pretended attitude of Socratian inquiry. Lisbeth correctly guessed her husband had come near losing his temper.
The fat lady glared at Dr. Steele. “Some people like to give themselves airs,” she spat viperishly. “Decent folks don’t come to watch a man die for the fun of it, or ridicule their elders, young man.”
Lisbeth’s bag fell, she was so astonished.
Mahlon’s left hand came out of his pocket. There was a flash of metal as he retrieved the bag.
The chins were rippling again.
“The artificial hand doesn’t impress me, my boy. I know about you jokers. My brother-in-law was in the war, too. He told me about you left-handers. Every one self-inflicted,” she spat. “Shot themselves because they were scared to do their share. Sometimes they got into a little trouble, didn’t they, wise guy? And the medics would take off a little more than they bargained for—didn’t they?”
She laughed shrilly, her voice traversing the tonal range of white metal slipping on glass. Lisbeth dragged her husband from the harpy.
Making little grieving noises, she pressed Mahlon away from the thinning crowd. “Oh, Mai, how could she!”
With a drawn face, Mahlon thought of a little clearing on a Pacific Island on a dusty June day.
A tent with a big Red Cross on it . . . A surgical team working furiously inside . . . The explosion . . . The wreckage of hopes of a career in surgery that came with the return of consciousness at a base hospital.
Self-inflicted. He sighed, and said quietly, “How about some coffee, honey? Let’s go in there.” He nodded his head toward the hamburger house.
THE AMBULANCE had not yet arrived, which was not surprising in view of the rush-hour traffic.
Dr. Roscoe and the policeman stood smoking and chatting together. An unleafed newspaper covered the dead man, its pages spread like white shingles on a roof. Most of the crowd had disappeared. The fat lady still held her position, determined to see to it that the dead man was at least given into the hands of those competent to receive him. And now the high school kids forgot their morbid interest, remembered what theatre featured a stage show with Guy Lombardo and drifted off.
Without looking at the harridan, Mahlon and Lisbeth slipped into the steamy coffee house, and looked about for seats. One wall was occupied with the steam table, the opposite with booths. A few tables sat between the stools at the long counter and the booths. Along the back wall was a door with the polite legend, Ladies Only, and a four-foot window with a wide ledge on which hands put plates full of the Special Dinner. It would always be roast beef.
Near the door there was a telephone in an all-glass enclosure.
A couple evacuated a booth and paid the cashier, a middle-aged man with a tired expression, beetle-browed, pale-skinned. You could almost see the rusting links in the chains that went from his neck to the cash register. He was that tired.
Dr. Steele and Lisbeth started to walk to the empty table, but were beaten to it by two middle-aged women. They had come in the door behind Mahlon, whispering about, “The horrible thing on the sidewalk”.
“Lost by a nose,” said Mahlon, smiling at Lisbeth’s outraged dignity. “Get on your mark for the next vacant table.”
The cashier was sympathetic, “Some people have no bringing up and fewer yet, have any consideration for a fellow creature these days.”
Dr. Steele leaned against the counter and shrugged. “You sound as if you’ve got troubles, too.”
Lisbeth sighed. That was the way it always was. Mahlon worked at his trade twenty-four hours a day.
The cashier lifted his shoulders. “Everybody’s got troubles. Some got more, some got less.” He glanced down the aisle. “Another minute and you’ll get the table there, by the lamp,” he said.
“How’s the place? Doing all right? You look pretty busy,” asked Mahlon picking his words out of the air for their casual value.
Sharply, Beetle-brows looked at them. “Who wants to know? You thinking of buying? It’s a good spot; the gross take is near two thousand a week with enough net so you make a hundred fifty—two hundred after all expenses including three shifts.”
Mahlon laughed, “No, just curious. How’s the food?”
He shrugged. “How’s the food any place? As good as you can get. Most people don’t complain.”
He laughed grimly. “Last guy who complained got himself a heart attack he was so excited. Didn’t like my coffee, he said.” He jerked his head toward the street.
Mahlon looked at him. “The man who fell down on the sidewalk? Did you see him?”
“Did I see him!, He slapped his check down on the rubber with a half-a-buck—said the coffee was getting worse and worse every day. All the time he’s breathing slow and deep and his eyes are getting tiny, he’s so burned up. Must have had a bit more coffee, too, the way he walked on his heels. Say, mister, do those guys know you?”
He pointed down the crowded, humming room. The smell of roasting meat, frying potatoes, and burnt chocolate was heavy in the thick air.
About midway down the restaurant, two men sat opposite each other at a booth. One man in a bright-checked, out-of-season sports-jacket had his back to them. The other, a thin-faced, dark-complexioned man with an extraordinary mouth, thin as a slot, as if it had been cut in his face by a butcher knife, was beckoning to Dr. Steele, bobbing his head in happy recognition.
Lisbeth looked at Mahlon questioningly. She had never seen the man at the table before. Mahlon’s face looked thoughtful, calculating, and intense. For a second, the thin scar turned livid as he flushed with some controlled emotion Lisbeth alone could sense. Swiftly, he glanced out of the window where an arch of letters in reverse spelled out Manny’s Restaurant. The cross-bar of the “A” in “Manny” and half of the capital “R” of “Restaurant” was missing. The evening breeze picked up the corner of the mounded newspaper like a disrespectful and curious child. Both the policeman and the little doctor ran forward at the same moment and restored the paper bier to the corpse. The fat lady stolidly watched. The sneer would have to be chiseled off her face.
MAHLON took a long deep breath and looked deliberately down the restaurant and acknowledged the waving gesticulations of the man at the table as if he accepted a challenge.
If anything, his voice was more casual, more disinterested. He said, “Yes, I remember him. We are old—acquaintances. Does he come here, often?”
Unaccountably, Lisbeth’s heart began to pound. She was beginning to get a little afraid of . . . What? She didn’t know.
The cashier took a toothpick from a dispenser, used it, and then said in the manner of a man who would like to share a bit of gossip, “I see him a lot. Him and the guy with the noisy jacket . . . They’re friends of the one lying out in the street, and—” he shook his head, “it’s funny that with him lying dead out there, that they don’t seem interested. After all, they know who he was.”
“Oh?” said Dr. Steele.
Lisbeth had the absurd feeling that if she put her hand on his sleeve he would throw it off.
“Something funny going on with those people,” said the cashier. “Whenever they come in, i
t’s an act. First the one out there takes a seat at a table, the same booth every time. Then in about ten minutes, the others—”
“What others, aside from those two?” asked Mahlon. He stopped as he saw the expression of suspicion in the eyes of the cashier. “You see, I haven’t seen the fellow in five years. I’d like to get an idea whether any more of my—friends come in with him.”
The hostile look vanished. “Well, aside from those two, there’s the fat lady and a professional guy. Got a little mustache and always wears a homburg. I think he has offices around here somewhere. I see him in the neighborhood a lot.”
Dr. Steele’s mouth hardened. “That could be Dr. Barrett. Was he out there a few minutes ago, talking to the doctor taking care of the dead man?”
Beetle-brows nodded. He said, “Yeah” over the heads of two pretty girls who had time, as they paid their checks, to exchange stares with Lisbeth that almost twanged with envy.
MAHLON leaned across the counter, his face stern with the effort to remain polite. Lisbeth could see he was consumed with impatience, and breathed easier, thinking she finally knew why he was so overwrought. Naturally! He was just as anxious to get to the theatre as she was.
She nudged him. “Mai, we’ve only got about an hour—” she began.
“You mean we’ve got less than fifteen minutes,” he said flatly. “Hold everything.” The girl had the weird idea that they weren’t taking the same language; that suddenly she couldn’t understand him and he couldn’t understand her. She bit her lip.
Later she remembered that that was the low point in the evening—when Mahlon turned his back on her to interrogate the cashier. Everything got better from then on, but that part was low water.
“What happened tonight? I mean, when the man in the brown coat came in?” he was inquiring.
The cashier shrugged. “The usual funny business. The doctor who is waiting with the cop out there was sitting at the table. The dead guy—he wasn’t dead then, of course—went up to the booth and you could just see him politely asking the Doc to change his seat—that he expected guests. Well, the doctor got up, picked up his hat and coat, paid his check, and went into the phone booth.”