The Best American Mystery Stories 3

by Edited by James Ellroy

  Lewis cursed under his breath. He had lost. Disgruntled, he signed in at the reception window and found a place to sit that was well away from either of the other two. Controlling his annoyance at this unlucky turn of events, he took off his heavy coat, pulled a racing form from one of its pockets, and began to reevaluate bets he had made earlier that morning in the day’s lineup at Calexico Downs.

  An hour before catching a bus to the hospital that morning, Lewis had been knocking impatiently on the door of a basement apartment on the near Northwest Side, in the neighborhood where he had grown up, once all Irish and Italian, now mostly mixed black, Hispanic, and Asian. He had to pound on the door three times, the cold wind whipping at his ankles, before his friend Ralph opened the door.

  “What the hell, you going deaf?” Lewis complained peevishly. “I’m freezing out here.”

  “You’re lucky I’m letting you in at all,” Ralph replied without rancor. He closed and triple-locked the door behind Lewis. “This ain’t no Vegas casino, y’know. It’s a business. We got reg’lar hours. Especially on Thursdays and Fridays, which is count days.”

  The two men retreated into what had once been a basement apartment but had been converted into a neighborhood betting parlor, where bets were taken not only on daily lineups from seasonal racetracks around the country, but also on baseball, football, basketball, and hockey games, as well as major boxing matches. The parlor was owned by Cicero Charley Waxman, who was nicknamed after the Chicago suburb where Al Capone had once had his headquarters. Waxman had two dozen similar locations, all of which were illegal but much more popular than the state-owned off-track betting sites, because the former accepted wagers on all sports, the latter only horse racing.

  The parlor where Lewis gambled was managed by his friend Ralph, one of the gang he had grown up with, and the only one other than Lewis who was still around. Ralph had started as an errand boy for Cicero Charley while still in elementary school, and over the years had grown into gambling-parlor middle management. Even though his net income depended on the earnings of the parlor, he constantly nagged Lewis about his gambling problem.

  “Why the hell don’t you give it a rest for a few days, Lew?” he griped now. “Go out and buy yourself a decent overcoat instead of laying bets every day.”

  Lewis threw him a derisive look and did not even bother to respond to such an absurd suggestion. The day Lewis did not lay a bet would be the day when all racehorses, boxers, and football, baseball, basketball, and hockey players were dead. At a counter next to the betting cages, Lewis spread out a Green Sheet racing form and began filling out a wagering slip.

  “So how’s the gallbladder treatment going?” Ralph finally asked, seeing that Lewis was ignoring his advice.

  “Slow,” said Lewis. “The stones are shrinking, but slow.”

  Lewis had not told anyone what was really the matter with him; the thought of someone feeling pity for him was nauseating. Ralph thought he was going to the hospital every Thursday morning for some kind of treatment that shrank and dissolved gallstones. That was the reason he let Lewis in early to bet on Thursdays. The parlor normally opened at ten.

  Standing across the counter from each other, the two men were acutely but not uncomfortably aware of the marked differences between them. Both forty-six, Ralph now had a wife, two teenage daughters bound for finishing school, a two-story colonial home in an upscale suburb, two sedans, and a recreational utility vehicle. Lewis lived alone in a shabby little kitchenette in a tenement building in the same neighborhood in which they had grown up. He had no family, no regular job, and wore secondhand clothes from St. Malachy’s Thrift Shop.

  Over the years, Ralph had tried to interest Lewis in bettering himself. Just a month earlier he had talked to Cicero Charley Waxman about giving Lewis a janitorial contract for all of Waxman’s gambling parlors. “It’ll put you on easy street, Lew,” his friend had promised. “You hire a dozen welfare mothers to do the work, see, and you pay them in cash so they don’t have to declare the income. All you gotta do is supervise them. I know guys that would cut off a toe for a setup like that.”

  But not Lewis. He shied away from steady employment like a two-year-old resisted discipline. When he had to work — emphasize had to, as in riding out a losing streak — he took a temporary job as a dishwasher or a trucker’s helper, or delivered advertising fliers door-to-door, whatever — as long as it was not permanent. Lewis wanted nothing in his life that was permanent. Especially now.

  “Did I tell you Debbie finally got her braces off?” Ralph asked now, as Lewis continued to fill out his wagering slip. From his wallet, Ralph extracted a wallet-size photo of his eldest daughter. Lewis looked at it, seeing a girl who resembled Ralph too much to ever be pretty, but who did have, after thousands of dollars of orthodontics, a near-perfect smile.

  “She’s a looker,” Lewis lied. “You’re a lucky man, Ralph.” Inside, he shuddered at the mere thought of such responsibility.

  As they were standing there, another knock sounded on the outside door and Ralph went over to answer it. He admitted two men, both very large, wearing hats and overcoats, each carrying two large suitcases. As they walked past Ralph, one of them asked, “Count room unlocked?”

  “Yeah, go on in,” Ralph said. “I’ll be with you in a minute.”

  Returning to the counter, Ralph took the wager sheet, tallied it up, validated it in an automatic stamping machine, and shook his head in sad resignation as Lewis counted out sixty-five dollars and gave it to him.

  As Lewis made the bets, an old, familiar thought surfaced in his mind: Maybe today will be the beginning of a winning streak that will give me enough money to get the hell out of cold, dirty Chicago and go live where it is warm and sunny for the rest of my life.

  What was left of it.

  ~ * ~

  The following Thursday, he walked from the elevator to the outpatient radiology waiting room, again betting with himself that he would be the second of the three patients to arrive. When he got to the door and was about to open it, he paused, hearing a quiet voice inside. He did not think it was either of the other two patients, because they never talked. Opening the door, he went in and saw at once that Potts, the skinny white guy, sitting alone in a corner, appeared to be talking quietly to himself. When he glanced up and saw Lewis, he stopped at once. A nut, Lewis thought as he signed in. At that moment, Hoxie, the black man, came in, looking angry as usual, not speaking to either of them, and sat down as far away as possible.

  Just as Hoxie sat down, the waiting room door immediately opened again and two uniformed, armed men brought in a younger man, his wrists cuffed to a waist chain, wearing an orange jumpsuit stenciled on the back with large black letters: ISP Illinois State Prison. The radiology technician met them in the waiting room and escorted them directly into the treatment room.

  Lewis, Potts, and Hoxie exchanged curious looks, but none of them commented about it.

  A little while later, the young man was brought back through again, and this time the three regular patients were prepared and all got a better look at him. He was pretty ordinary in appearance, his only outstanding feature being a head of thick, curly black hair that, Lewis and the others knew, he would soon lose if his radiation treatment was above the neck. Potts, when Lewis had first seen him, had healthy blond hair combed straight back. Because he was undergoing radiation treatment for a brain tumor, he was now bald as an egg. Lewis, who had cancer of the pancreas, and Hoxie, cancer of the esophagus, were both radiated below the head and had kept their hair, such as it was. As if to make up for the hair loss, however, Potts did not have the other debilitating side effects; he experienced a temporary loss of taste, but that was mild compared to the vile nausea, vomiting, and fatigue suffered by Lewis and Hoxie.

  After his original diagnosis, Lewis had gone to the medical section of the main public library and researched his illness. He concluded that he had a one-in-five chance of living five more years. When he had subsequently le
arned in conversations with the radiology technicians the types of cancer Potts and Hoxie were dealing with, he had, out of curiosity, returned to the library and researched their illnesses. Potts he put at eight-to-one to reach five years, Hoxie at nine-to-five.

  Lurking somewhere in the back of his mind, Lewis had a vision of a huge national pool made up of cancer patients between the ages of forty and sixty. If each one put in a hundred bucks, the last patient still living would become a very wealthy person. He doubted, however, that the American Medical Association would approve such a plan. Doctors only approved of taking chances with life and death, never money.

  ~ * ~

  The following Thursday, Lewis was the first patient to arrive, and the first to go in for treatment after the young convict had been treated and taken away. While he stripped to the waist, and as the radiology technician adjusted the Cobalt-6o applicator for his treatment, Lewis surreptitiously looked down at the technician’s desk. As he expected, there was a new clipboard there, in addition to his and those of the other two regular patients. He was able to quickly read that the young prisoner’s name was Alan Lampley, age twenty-eight, residing in the Joliet Correctional Center south of Chicago, diagnosis lymphatic leukemia. Lewis was not familiar with that particular type of cancer, so he could not put any odds on it.

  “Ready, Lewis?” the technician asked, coming out of the little control room where he was protected from radiation.

  “Sure thing,” Lewis replied.

  Lewis stretched out on the leather treatment table. He stared at the ceiling as the technician began painting a design on his upper torso with water-soluble orange dye. When he was finished, he carefully placed leather pads filled with lead all around the outside of the pattern, to deflect the radiation from those parts of the body where it was not needed. The radiation itself would come from the Cobalt-6o applicator, which the technician had adjusted following instructions from a radiologist-oncologist as to the diameter and filtration of the cobalt beam and the target distance at which Lewis was lying. That beam was generated by radioactive cobalt pellets sealed in a stainless-steel cylinder mounted behind shields jacketed with sheet steel and carried by a mechanical arm to an open port through which it would be aimed at Lewis.

  It continued to amaze Lewis that such a powerful beam could penetrate his body without pain, without heat, without any sensation at all — yet that same ray would — could — might — destroy a malignant cancer that was trying to destroy him. The doctor had explained it to him, of course. The radiation beam did not affect ordinary body tissue; it merely passed through it. Radiation affected only what would absorb it: cells, cartilage, bone — and tumors.

  When the technician finished preparing Lewis, he retreated to his safe room and presently activated the Cobalt-6o applicator. Lewis closed his eyes. But instead of dozing, as he usually did, he found himself wondering what Alan Lampley had done to be sent to prison.

  ~ * ~

  On the next treatment day, after Alan Lampley had been taken through the waiting room by his guards, Lewis spoke up to the others and announced, “I know what he done.”

  Potts and Hoxie, startled at the sound of his voice, jerked their heads around to stare at him. “He killed a guy,” Lewis said.

  “Man, how do you know?” Hoxie challenged.

  Now Lewis and Potts stared at Hoxie. Neither of them had ever heard him speak before. His voice matched his demeanor: angry; it cracked like a whip.

  “I looked him up in the library,” Lewis said.

  “The li-brary?” Potts said incredulously He had a slow, Southern drawl, lazy-like. Lewis and Hoxie looked at each other in surprise. Both of them had the same thought: redneck. There had been an influx of them recently, Southerners coming north looking for high-paying factory jobs. It happened every time crops failed.

  “Yeah, the library,” Lewis confirmed. “I got his name off the chart in the treatment room. Alan Lampley. Then I looked up his trial in the old newspapers down there at the library. He was in a couple stories four years ago. Killed a drug dealer.”

  Hoxie snorted derisively. “Poor little white boy junkie got carried away, huh?”

  “He wasn’t the junkie,” Lewis said. “It was his sister. The dealer who got her hooked on crack put her on the street to hustle for him to support her habit. This kid Alan came looking for her; they were both from some little town in Indiana somewheres. When he found them in an apartment where she was living with the guy, the sister was so humiliated that she ran into the bedroom, got the dealer’s gun from a drawer, and blew her brains out right in front of both of them. The dealer panicked and tried to beat it, but Alan picked up the gun, ran after him, and shot him four times as he was getting into his car.”

  “Good for him, by God,” Potts drawled.

  “I suppose,” Hoxie said, glaring at both of them, “that the dealer was a black man.”

  “Paper didn’t say,” Lewis told him. “But what difference does it make?”

  “I’ll tell you what difference it makes,” Hoxie said, jabbing an accusing finger at both of them. “If he had killed a white dude, he wouldn’t be here taking no treatments; he’d be waiting on death row to get the needle.”

  Potts grunted disdainfully, looking down at the floor, shaking his bald head. Lewis just shrugged and said, “Maybe, maybe not. Works out about the same, anyway. The kid got fourteen years for second-degree murder. Far as he’s concerned, it’s still a death sentence.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Hoxie said, his voice almost a growl. “Why’s that?”

  “He’s got it in the lymph glands,” Lewis explained. “I seen on his chart that he’s getting megavolts that go three inches under the skin. That means it’s prob’ly spread too far to stop. I read up on all this cancer stuff at the library. Even money he ain’t got six months left.”

  Hoxie started to say something, reconsidered, and looked away. His fixed, dark countenance seemed to soften a little, and he blinked rapidly several times. Potts sat up straight instead of slouching. Lewis chewed on the inside of his mouth. Alan Lampley’s mortality had somehow synchronized with their own.

  None of them said anything further until the young prisoner’s treatment was over and his guards brought him back out. Lewis and the others then looked at him with new interest; he was a person now, with a story as well as a dread disease.

  When Potts rose to go in for his own treatment, he impulsively paused at the door and asked, “How long you fellers got after your treatment before you get sick?”

  Lewis shrugged. “I got about three hours.”

  “ ‘Bout four for me,” Hoxie said. “Why?”

  “Well, I don’t get real sick, you know, but I start to lose my taste after two or three hours. So what I do is, I go down Harrison Street ‘bout three blocks, toward the lake there, and around the corner on Ashland Avenue is a little bar called Billy Daly’s Place. I like beer, see — nice, cold, draft beer. An’ I only have a little while to drink it before my taste goes. So I was just thinking, if you fellers want to mosey on down when you get done here, I’ll buy you a pitcher of beer. What d’you say?”

  Lewis and Hoxie exchanged looks. Lewis sensed that it was up to him to speak first; Hoxie’s expression was again almost hostile.

  “I wouldn’t mind.” Lewis said. He and Potts looked at Hoxie, who glared back at them. “Come on, man,” Lewis said quietly. “We’re all the same inside — especially now.”

  Hoxie nodded curtly. “I be there.”

  ~ * ~

  Billy Daly’s Place was one of those Chicago neighborhood taverns that opened at eight a.m. to accommodate people who had to have one or two drinks to steady their morning shakes so they could go to work. Those who worked nearby were back in at lunchtime to steady their afternoon shakes.

  When Lewis arrived, Potts was at a small table in the back, almost finished with his first pitcher of cold draft. By the time Hoxie got there, Potts was well into his second pitcher, and Lewis was working hard on his first
. When the bartender put a glass and pitcher in front of Hoxie, he reached for his wallet, but Potts held up a hand and said, “Hey, no, I already paid for one pitcher apiece for you fellers. After that, you’re on your own.”

  As men who drink together for the first time invariably do, they got around to telling each other about themselves. Potts, who had drunk the most, got around to it first.

  “I come up to Chicago from a little town in Tennessee to find work. I had a good job down there in a paper mill, but some Japanese land group bought up all the property and closed down the mill. They was supposed to be going to develop some kind of industrial complex: said there’d be good jobs for ever’body. That was two years ago; they ain’t developed nothin’ so far. I went on unemployment for six months, then picked up odd jobs here and there for another six. But with a wife and three kids to take care of, things just kept gettin’ tighter and tighter, so finally I got on the bus and come on up here. Got me a pretty decent fac’try job with Motorola. Moved into a ratty little kitchenette so I’d be able to send home enough money ever’ week to take care of my family. I was riding the bus down twice a month to be with ‘em for a weekend. Ever’thing seemed to be going along fine — then I started having what they call focal seizures, where my arms and legs would start shaking like I was freezing to death. Fac’try doctor sent me for a MRI scan and they found a brainstem glioma. They put me on a anticonvulsant drug and started radiation. I collect disability pay, but it ain’t enough to send anything home. So me and my wife worked it out for her and the kids to go on state welfare by saying I’d abandoned my family. Now they get along pretty good — but I can’t come around in case somebody was to see me there. So here I am: got no job, got no family, got no hair, and ain’t got no future to speak of.” He grinned crookedly. “Like the feller once said: Life’s a bitch — and then you die.”