The Walt Whitman MEGAPACK ™

by Millard, Joseph J.

  I swung around and had both the gun and Casso in line of fire. Everything was under control.

  The mistake I made was turning my back on the blonde. The blow came so suddenly and unexpectedly the whole train seemed to buckle and jump upward as the floor came up and hit me.

  Vaguely I saw Casso heave the Count past me and saw him reach for his gun.

  Twice I triggered rapidly. Casso stood upright, but Scarface went down folding both hands across his stomach.

  The blonde behind me screamed. Jergin made a grab for the Count.

  The gun got to him first—and pulled him up under his right arm.

  Outside the compartment I could hear passengers screaming. Then Casso’s gun leveled down upon me and spat flame.

  I felt nothing. The head just jerked. There was no feeling of pain. Oblivion swooped.

  It was later in a Provo, Utah, hospital that I awoke. The bullet had only creased the skull—but now that crease hurt like the Devil incarnate.

  There was a forlorn feeling, like you feel when you mess up an important job. There were cops and nurses and doctors there; but they weren’t too inquisitive about me.

  They seemed to be interested mostly in Jergin, who was in the next bed. There didn’t seem to be much wrong with him save an egg-sized lump on his head.

  “I tell you,” he was telling the police, “it was a robbery—no more—no less—just a robbery.”

  He did not mention the Count—and so I kept mum about that even without being asked. I, too, was curious.

  The questioning of Jergin went on. Casso and the gun, it developed, had made their getaway. But I’d killed Scarface, and Casso had nearly killed the blonde.

  It was hard to control myself until the cops finished their questioning. I wanted to ask Jergin a few myself.

  Finally that opportunity came.

  Jergin came out with it himself.

  “Mike Grady,” he called softly from the next bed. “Are you awake, Mike Grady?”

  “Yes.” Doubtfully.

  “I’m sorry about you having to risk your life.”

  “Yeah?”

  “That’s right. I didn’t plan it that way. I just thought they would take the Count away from you.”

  “If you wanted him taken away by hoods, why didn’t you just hold onto him yourself?”

  “I wanted to make it look important—that I was trying to protect him. That he was of great value to me.”

  “Isn’t he?”

  “As a dummy—no. As a killer for the next two months—yes.”

  Well, if I hadn’t been flat on my back in the first place, that crack would have laid me there. How could a dummy kill?

  “Casso just got out of Sing Sing,” Jergin whispered. “I knew he was coming for me—and I knew how he would figure—that he wanted the Count.”

  “Yes?”

  “You look like an okay guy. If you think I should be turned in—go ahead. But after all—I’m not killing Casso.”

  “Casso’s being killed?”

  “Yes. Minute-by-minute. While he waits for me to ransom the Count, the dummy he kidnapped is slowly killing him.”

  This was a different Jergin than the one on the train. There was something intense, urgent and sincere in his voice. I found myself liking him. There was something plaintive, appealing and honest about him as he discussed murder-in-the-making.

  “Call it poetic justice, if you will,” he said softly. “It goes back fifteen years.”

  I waited tensely, swearing to myself that Jergin was to land in the brig for what he had done to me. He sounded like a killer.

  “I was an intern at a hospital,” he said. “I was in love with a nurse. We had a small tube of radium worth a quarter of a million dollars. And that’s what Casso meant when he set that value on the Count. He came in with his mob and raided the room in which my sweetheart was working. To get the tube he had to kill her.

  “I heard the shot and came running, only to be taken as a hostage and shield as Casso made his getaway. The mob fled to Pennsylvania and there had to bury the radium tube.”

  “Why bury it?”

  “Ever hear of radium poisoning?”

  “Sure.”

  “It causes osteomyelitis, an infection of the bones. Radium makes them gradually disintegrate. It’s a very painful death.”

  “But sure death?”

  “Right. It’s impossible to counteract.”

  “What happened in the Pennsylvania hideout?”

  Jergin shrugged. “I was held captive for weeks. The New York papers—and the police, of course—because of my disappearance—got the idea that I was a member of the gang. The gang finally was captured. I told the truth, but Casso swore I actually was a member of the gang to weaken my testimony against him. When the gang was convicted I, too, was sent away—and for the murder of my own sweetheart. It was heartbreak, Mike; nutty as all get out—but true.”

  His voice was husky and just looking into his sad eyes and the hentracks surrounding them, I knew he was speaking the truth.

  “I had always been interested in ventriloquism,” he said, “so when in the big house I made Count von Mike. He started me on my career.”

  “But where does Casso come into the picture?”

  “He’s a fair ventriloquist of sorts—and he loves the Count.”

  “You’re out of business when he has him.”

  “No—nothing of the sort. I’m going to stay off the air and out of films for a couple of months, making Casso believe I cannot operate without the Count. In any business you take insurance. I wouldn’t take a chance on having just one Count von Mike. Some hoodlum dumber than Casso might have thought of kidnaping him.”

  “That’s right, too. But who was the blonde?”

  Jergin looked away, then turned his head slowly again. “She was the sister of the girl I was to marry. I guess I’ll marry her now. All she’s been living for was the day when Casso would walk into his own trap—and die.”

  “Casso die? How can anyone arrange that?”

  “Well, that’s up to you to decide. I certainly am not knocking him off—and neither is the Count. Casso brought it all upon himself when he put on the snatch.”

  “Now look,” I said, “that sounds nuts.”

  “Okay—it’s nuts; but look at it this way: I’ve been out of the pen for eight years. Casso only got out last week. Only a few of us knew where that tube of radium was buried. I got to it first, and I knew Casso would come looking for me. Either the tube or one-quarter million. Both would have been the same. You were simply stage dressing.

  “Well, he got the Count—and the tube that I put inside the Count a few days ago. There wasn’t very much radium in that tube, Mike—only a very little in fact; that was the important thing. You see, the quantity wasn’t large enough to kill a man quickly, the way being in contact with a large amount can do. There isn’t enough to hurt a man who was just in contact for a little while. But Casso’s going to be in contact with it for a long time, Mike—and for long periods at a time. I know him, he loves the Count, loves to sit it on his lap and practice ventriloquism. Get it?”

  I got it—and I also got my other $1000, for I never told Jergin’s story.

  Casso happily bounced the Count on his knee for a little more than two months, until he was forced to go into a hospital. The Count was found—and the tube of radium returned to its original hospital. Casso died.

  The Count is back in the movies and on the air again, but I never hear the act without repressing a shudder. Did either Jergin or the Count kill Casso, or did Casso kill himself? At any rate, as Jergin said—it’s what you’d call poetic justice.

  RAINY TUESDAY, by Jack Halliday

  I called Waldo at about twelve thirty. I g
uess I just needed to know that everything was exactly how I’d wanted it to be. After that I cradled the phone and leaned back in my office chair and looked out the window over my left shoulder. The streets were almost completely vacant of cars. The entire neighborhood seemed strangely silent, except for the rain.

  I finished my coffee and set the cup in its saucer. I rocked forward in my chair, placed my elbows on the desk blotter, steepled my fingers and rested my chin on them. My eyeballs were dull marbles set in sockets of sand. I let my vision go slightly out of focus until the familiar peace settled over me as my brain waves slowed down to what scientists who study these matters term the “alpha state.” That was the realm were it always seemed almost anything was possible. After all, it was in just that delicious psychological state that I came up with this plan. A perfect plan for the perfect murder. Impossible to solve, improbable to prosecute, incomprehensible to understand or calculate.

  * * * *

  I suppose it all started when I first suspected the affair.

  You have to understand that I’m not the jealous type; I just don’t have the energy nor the inclination for it. Like anger and fear, jealousy is just too expensive of an emotion for the nervous system. It keeps the subconscious multi-tasking, robbing the conscious mind of needed energy to live, to love and to construct the perfect crime.

  So, when I connected the dots and finally, fully realized that Stella and Jim were more than just acquaintances, “doing the dirty,” often and uninhibitedly, I coldly, calculatingly concocted a bitter end for her.

  Him? He was just a dupe, a bit player in her sad script of revenge against me for succeeding so splendidly even as her supposed motion picture career careened south, plummeting into the boulevard of broken dreams that is Hollywood’s graveyard for the talentless masses.

  I was an award-winning surgeon, board certified in a half dozen specialties, with a client list that included some of the very luminaries in whose company my wandering wife dreamt of living.

  Ironic, isn’t it? How one person can strive and connive and still come up short while another individual can succeed in the same arena without so much as a drop of perspiration expended in a search for significance. The universe favors the unconcerned more often than the success gurus can begin to imagine (no pun intended). Perhaps when this is all over I’ll write a bestseller: “How to Succeed Without Trying.”

  In any case, Waldo, my insurance agent, had just confirmed to me that our yearly financial checkup had revealed everything was perfectly in order to my precise specifications. Specifications that included the increase in Stella’s insurance I had requested at our previous year’s mini-conference. Though she was now worth next to nothing to me alive, she would be nearly priceless dead.

  Although the AMA frowns on a physician tending to the needs of his own family, there’s nothing strictly illegal about a spouse trained in medicine looking after the health of one’s mate. I had no doubts at all that I was the only living person who was aware of Stella’s severe allergy to any medicine even remotely related to penicillin. The smallest amount would push her respiratory system “over the top” bringing her lying life to an abrupt and decidedly deserved end.

  It was allergy season again and I was definitely going to misdiagnose her condition as the onset of bronchitis, prescribing a general antibiotic, of course.

  How could I possibly be expected to remember all the particulars of family practice concerns when I’d been a specialist in surgery all these many years? It would be tantamount to demanding that the pilot of a 767 possess the ability to dial his aeronautical expertise back several notches in order to flawlessly fly a Cessna.

  The plop of the morning mail through the slot in my office door to the floor brought me back to the present. I slid my chair back and ambled across the room, retrieved the handful of flyers, junk mail and other correspondence and returned to my desk, tossing the items on the aged green blotter.

  I peered between the slats of the blinds and watched the rain softly, relentlessly falling upon the street below. I could have been in England, the way it looked for all the world like early evening, rather than just after noon. I’d been to London just a few years previously, been there with Stella, taking her to Harrod’s and all of the other tourist spots in that bustling metropolis.

  But that was before a two-bit pharmacist had somehow insinuated himself into the position of interloper between an eminently successful physician and his outwardly adoring wife. I can’t count the number of dinner parties where, inevitably, someone or other would insist upon comparing Stella to an older version of Scarlett Johansson. I would smile politely but wince inwardly, knowing that such unsolicited flattery would only serve to lengthen the life of her doomed dream of super-stardom. To be honest, my attitude, if not my actions, probably contributed to her looking outside of our marriage for the acclamation and encouragement she felt she deserved from me but was denied.

  But all of this would be behind me in a few short days. I would return from the office early one afternoon, only to find her dead at the hands of her own overly-sensitive body. A fitting end for an incurable narcissist, in my opinion.

  * * * *

  With a sigh I resumed my chair and sorted through the mail, tossing most of it into “file thirteen.” I nearly included an envelope, which upon closer inspection, I found to be, not the presumed nuisance of yet another piece of solicitation, but, rather, a letter of correspondence, addressed personally to me.

  The return address was my own.

  For some reason, I hesitated to even open the envelope. A strange sense of foreboding suddenly overtook me. For no understandable reason I just sat and stared, alone in my office, listening to the rain which was occasionally pelting the office window behind me.

  In a sudden burst of adrenaline, I quickly tore open the envelope and slid the perfume-scented stationery out and onto my desk. Grabbing my reading glasses, I switched on my desk lamp and began reading what appeared to be a letter from my wife.

  “My Dear Roy,

  You may have heard that spouses—like us—who have lived together for many years, know each other so well, they even begin to resemble each other. Does that mean your looks will someday still improve?”

  My insides stung as I realized the diatribe I had begun to read.

  “In any case, I’m counting on the truthfulness of that dictum, at least as far as your daily routine is concerned. Tuesdays you arrive early at your personal office. You don’t do rounds at the hospital and you don’t stop anywhere for breakfast. You simply arrive, switch on the coffee maker, which you’ve gotten ready the night before, read the morning paper (which you’ve purchased at the same quickmart you’ve always patronized), and then go through the mail.”

  “How am I doing so far, lover?”

  She was succeeding brilliantly at disgusting me, is how she was doing. I wanted to pitch the piece in the bin and yet I couldn’t manage to take my eyes from the page. Her poor attempt at provocative prose kept me reading, in spite of my emotional revulsion. Her words kept my eyes riveted to the page the way even a hack writer’s crude attempt at storytelling can sometimes compel you to continue on to the inexorably poor excuse for a satisfying conclusion.

  “But enough of the ‘whys and wherefores.’ ‘Let’s get the cotton out of the bottle and get right down to the aspirin’ as Leslie Neilson’s character said in that lousy excuse for a comedy you are so enamored of.

  “Our facade of a relationship is over, finally. And I’m not speaking of separation or divorce. I mean over in the ‘forever’ dimension of the word.

  “You see, Roy, you are not the only ‘doctor in the house.’ James is so much more than a compounding chemist. He is also a physician and he practiced successfully for many years, mostly overseas, primarily in Africa.

  “You’d be surprised at what he learned there. T
here are all kinds of natural remedies that a person skilled, not only in medicine, but also in pharmaceuticals, could experiment with. ‘First do no harm’ does not necessarily resonate with everyone who has the letters M.D. following his name.”

  I set the paper down, rocked back in my chair, looked over my shoulder and again watched as the relentless rain continued to provide a numbing background to Stella’s verbose verbiage. The sense of foreboding was becoming full-fledged fear now, an apprehension of the unknown that was taking on a lethal quality. I forced myself to return to the letter.

  “James was fascinated by one particular herb, akatharisis-something-or-other. It is completely undetectable in the bloodstream in as little as one hour following its introduction to the human system. Yet it induces something that for all the world passes for an acute and fatal stroke in about that same amount of time. It’s odorless, tasteless and colorless. It’s also emotionless: it cares not whose life it ends. Like an obedient house pet, it simply and effectively does what it’s told.

  “By the way, your office seemed fairly tidy last evening.

  “Did you enjoy your coffee this morning, Roy?”

  The sympathetic portion of my body’s autonomic nervous system took over with lightning-like speed. In a flash, perspiration burst from the pores of my forehead, my breathing and heartbeat raced in unison and a nervous tingling surged through my hands and feet in a full-blown panic attack that any ER physician would have nominated for the medical equivalent of an Oscar.

  “If my intuition is trustworthy—and it always has been—you should be feeling a little numb about now. A sensation I endured for more of our mismanaged marriage than I can stomach remembering. You’d think a doctor like you, with all of that knowledge of the human anatomy, would know at least a little of how to sexually satisfy his life partner. But not my dear Roy. You were not only a bore out of the bedroom, but a burden in it. How unbelievably happy I will be to be forever rid of the nuisance you are!”