No Cure for Death
( Mallory - 1 )
Max Allan Collins
Max Allan Collins
No Cure for Death
PART ONE
NOVEMBER 26, 1974 TUESDAY
ONE
He had the kind of face that said “hate me,” and I wasn’t arguing.
Let’s just say he made a bad first impression, and I don’t really think his being black had anything to do with it, though the missing eye and jagged stitched scar running above and below the empty socket sure did. His head was totally hairless-not just bald, but no eyebrows, either-and his mouth was frozen open, a down-slanting hole showing only the lower row of crooked yellow teeth, and the overall effect of his formidable visage was that of an eightball come to life-and a very mean, very ugly eightball at that-on the lookout for a white cueball to knock around.
The body below the face was equally menacing and seemed to have trouble just squeezing through the doorway of Port City’s cubicle-size bus terminal. He was huge, an exaggeration, more a cartoon than a man, like that guy in the leopard skin who tags along with Mandrake the Magician, or Daddy Warbucks’s jinni strongarm Punjab. He turned one bloodshot eye loose on the room, and I worked at making myself inconspicuous, though I felt like I was in a closet trying to convince a murder-intent cuckold I was a coat hanger.
The guy was a stranger to me, but I had the paranoid feeling that he’d been sent by somebody somewhere to make up for some nameless forgotten foul deed I’d once done, maybe in another life. Not that I was alone in the tiny waiting room, although Meyer, the depot man, was out for coffee. There was a young woman next to me on the bench, a young blonde with a tired but attractive face. But she looked innocent enough, hardly the type who’d have somebody like this out to get her.
I’d been trying, incidentally, for the previous half hour to strike up a conversation with her, as she was slender and well-formed and appealed to me as much as Punjab didn’t. Besides, I’ve always been partial to blondes, even with roots. But I hadn’t got nerve up to make my move; too shy, I guess-and too shy, too, to go rushing over to Punjab when he rolled in to express my instinctual dislike for him.
It didn’t take long, not as long as it seemed anyway, for that one eye to pick out which of us it was looking for. He drove his truck body over to where the blonde and I were sitting and planted himself in front of her, a big paw nervously smoothing the coat of his surprisingly well-tailored, well-pressed suit-custom-cut from a houndstooth tent, no doubt. A noise came rumbling up out of the depths of his throat and became something that sounded vaguely like “Bitch.”
My ears discounted that, and I looked away. He seemed to know her, after all, and who was I to get involved in an argument between friends?
But it must have been “Bitch” after all, because the noise came out again, and this time was distinctly “Bitch,” and louder, and part of a sentence: “Get on your damn feet, bitch, we got business.”
There was terror in her face, which didn’t surprise me, but there was also an unmistakable lack of recognition, which did. She’d obviously never seen her one-eyed “business” partner before-he’d been just as much a black bolt-from-the-blue for her as for me.
And he was impatient.
He grabbed up a bunch of fuzzy blue sweater in a bulky fist and lifted her off the bench, and I hit him in the throat.
He did three things.
He released the girl.
He touched, lightly, his Adam’s apple.
He knocked me across the room into an upright Pepsi machine, with a fly-swat backhand.
My hands groped behind me, feeling the cold metal of the soft drink machine, searching for something to grip to push to my feet. I got off my knees and started up and watched his huge body come slowly toward me in a sway reminiscent of the Frankenstein monster, and I ducked and his hamhock fist put a dent in the Pepsi machine big enough to hold a political rally in.
But that was only one of his hands, and it left him another to give me a second fly-swat, and then I was on the floor again, waiting for whatever was coming, my hands scrambling aimlessly across the surface of anything.
Where the empty Pepsi bottle came from I couldn’t say, but it was in one of my hands now, and that was good enough for me. I got my eyes working and saw him barreling toward me with that reflecting skull lowered and charging and I laid the bottle across it.
He went down.
And out.
I covered my mouth with my hand and then took the hand away and looked at it. Some blood, but not too bad. I jiggled some teeth with a finger and found them safe, if not sound. My feet were under me, shaky but under me, and I leaned against the machine. Punjab lay on his stomach like a tree I had chopped down.
The young woman was sitting back on the bench, almost as though nothing had happened, although she’d turned very, very white. She was looking directly at me. “Are you all right?” she said.
I nodded and went over to the pay phone hanging on the wall by the Pepsi machine and dropped a dime in.
“Sheriff Brennan, please,” I said.
“Who’s calling…”
“Tell him Mallory.”
A few moments later Brennan was on the line, saying, “Mallory, it’s nearly seven o’clock. You and John should’ve been here fifteen, twenty minutes ago. What’s the holdup?”
“John’s bus is late.”
“Well, come on over to the jailhouse when he gets in. Been too damn long since I seen the boy.”
“John’s bus being a few minutes late isn’t exactly why I called.” Down on the floor nearby, Punjab was stirring, just starting to shake himself out of it. “Just a second, Brennan.”
“What…?”
I let the phone hang loose and reached down for the bottle I’d used on Punjab, broke it against the edge of the Pepsi machine and stood there with the jagged half that was left in my hand, like a tough guy in an old B-movie. The rousing bear pushing up from the floor with his hands took it all in with that single penetrating eye of his.
That eye followed me back over to the phone, which I spoke into, the makeshift weapon in my free hand.
“Sheriff,” I said, with some dramatic emphasis on the word, “suppose I told you a guy bigger than a bus rolled into the terminal and tried to run me over?”
Brennan’s voice said, “What the hell…?”
And Punjab was up and gone. Like maybe he’d borrowed one of his namesake’s flying carpets.
Brennan’s voice was saying, “What the hell’s going on there?”
“Easy, Sheriff, just kidding around. Stay put and I’ll bring your stepson around soon as his bus pulls in.”
“Listen you spaced-out creep, if this is your idea of a joke…”
I put the receiver back and walked over to a wooden empty bottles case and stuck my half-a-one gently in a hole.
Meyer, who’s a runty guy of twenty-six or so whom I play poker with occasionally, shuffled quickly in from his hourly coffee break at the cafe next door. His eyes were portholes. “Did you see the size of that guy?” he wanted to know.
I touched my still bleeding mouth with the tip of my sweat shirt. “What guy?” I said.
Meyer gave me the same sort of look he gives me when he wonders if I’m bluffing (I usually am, but don’t tell Meyer) and got behind his desk and started reading the new Penthouse.
I glanced over at the bench and took a look at the stakes of the fight in which I’d played feeble knight to Punjab’s heavyweight dragon.
She was still looking white, very, and she was shivering, rubbing her arms as if the steaming hot pipes next to her were an air conditioner, and as though her arms were bare and not in the long sleeves of her sweater.
TWO
And sat back down next to her on the bench.
I said, “Mallory.”
Her eyes went from half-lidded to round, and I saw that they were blue and rather glazed. She said: “Pardon?”
“My name. That’s what it is.”
“Oh. Right.” Air emptied out of her, a delayed reaction from the tension of the confrontation moments before. The glaze lifted off her eyes and they seemed relieved, though still tired, and somehow old. Her hands came out and reached my hands and clutched them tightly in a cold grasp. She managed a smile, not much of one, but a smile.
I said, “What’s yours?”
She released my hands, taken mildly aback. “My what?”
“Name.”
“Oh.” She swallowed. “Janet. Janet Taber.”
“Hello, Janet.”
“Sorry I’m so dopey. I’m just a little shook, I guess.”
“Understandable. Feel the same myself.”
“What… what did you say your name was?”
“Mallory. Mal.”
“Mal. Hello, Mal.”
“Hello. How would you like a cup of hot coffee, Janet?”
“Oh….”
“I noticed you shivering. Come on. We can duck in Johnny’s next door and grab a couple cups.”
“I do have a bus to catch.”
“Meyer over there’ll come get us.” I looked over at Meyer, who was slumped behind his desk studying the Penthouse. “Won’t you, Meyer?”
He said, “Screw you, Mallory.”
“That’s his way of saying yes,” I said. “Now, what do you say?”
She smiled. Full out. It was a nice smile; she didn’t look quite so tired, so prematurely old, when she smiled that way.
She brushed some blond hair out of her face and said, “Okay.”
Two minutes later we were together in Johnny’s Grille in a back booth, both sitting on one side, snuggled together, almost like lovers. But there wasn’t much sex in it, really; just the closeness of two people who have shared something, which we certainly had, thanks to Punjab.
“How can I thank you?” she said.
“You can’t,” I said. “A hero like me comes along once per damsel-in-distress lifetime.”
Martha, the manager of the place, who also waited tables during slow times, stopped by the booth and I asked for a couple coffees.
Janet touched my hand. “Would you mind terribly if I had hot chocolate instead?”
I grinned, shrugged and made the correction, opting for hot chocolate myself. When I looked at her I saw she was grinning, too. A playful grin, and even with the wan face with its prematurely deep lines ’round eyes and mouth, and roots marring the beauty of blond hair that swept around her face in two gentle arcs, and eyes that had an old woman in them, even with all of that, she was a child. A child who’d walked home from school in a snowstorm and when the winter dark began to fall, got scared and cold; when she finally got home her mother fixed her hot chocolate and then she was better. That kind of child.
“I-never-saw-that-horrible-man-before-in-my-life,” she said suddenly, “ever.”
“Listen,” I said, “don’t feel obligated to tell me anything you don’t want to. No explanations necessary.” In a way I meant it: momentary heroism or not, pretty blonde or no, I had no driving compulsion to “get involved.” As if I wasn’t already.
“I’m telling you the truth, Mal.”
“I believe you, Janet.”
“It’s just that it must seem kind of unbelievable to you that something like that could just walk in out of nowhere and accost somebody.”
“Not so unbelievable. I just experienced it myself, remember? It must’ve been some weird mistaken identity trip, that’s all.”
“It must have.” She looked at me, reached for my hand and squeezed: she sensed my disbelief, evidently, despite my claims to the contrary. “I’m not putting you on, Mal. I never saw him before, and I don’t know anyone who’d have any reason for sending somebody like that.”
“I said I believe you, Janet.” And I was almost starting to.
“Christ, he was big. And that eye… the one that… wasn’t there. Brrrrrr. I have to say you handled yourself well, Mal. It must not be the first fight you were ever in.”
“No.”
“You know, sometimes when I’m waiting by myself, at a bus stop or in a reception room, I sometimes play a game of trying to guess people from their looks-I guess that’s something everybody does, huh? But that’s what I was doing with you while we were sitting waiting in the terminal….”
Martha came with our hot chocolate and I said thanks and Janet continued. “Anyway,” she said sipping, “I couldn’t get a reading on you. Nothing. Not a thing.”
I blew some heat off the chocolate. “You could’ve guessed anything and probably hit something I’ve been one time or another.”
“Just what are you now?”
“Have to tell you?”
“Have to.”
“A college student. Of sorts.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Not at all. Right now I’m on quarter break. Thanksgiving vacation.”
“Come on.”
“I know, I know. I look a little weathered for a college boy. Well, I’m not twenty-five yet, I’ll have you know, and people a hell of a lot older than that go to college.”
“Don’t be so defensive about it. I didn’t mean you seemed too old or anything… you just don’t look the college type. How’d you end up that way?”
“Ran out of other things, I guess. I was in Vietnam a short tour, got wounded and sent home. I worked construction. I was a cop for a while, a little while, tried newspaper work, tended bar, finally dropped out, as they used to say, and was into the dope thing, briefly. Things were seeming kind of pointless, so I tried coming home and starting over. Been back since August, started school in September.”
“And you’re not putting me on? You were a cop, and a doper, too?”
“I just saved your rear end, lady, would I put you on? Besides, wait till you hear what I do for a living.”
“Oh? What’s that?”
“I write mystery stories.”
“You’re kidding!”
“No, really. Although saying I make a living out of it may be stretching a point.”
“You mean, like you write books?”
“Not yet. But I’ve been selling short stories to Ellery Queen and Mike Shayne. Those are mystery magazines.”
“I’m impressed,” she said, meaning it, smiling.
“Don’t be,” I said. “What about you? Janet Taber? What’s the story of your life?”
It was like a shadow came over her face. The brightness, the child in her was gone, and she looked tired again and the old woman was back in her eyes.
“Janet? Hey, I didn’t mean to bring you down….”
She shook her head; the hot chocolate in her hands shook, too, spilled a little. “Christ, self-pity brings you down after a while. Listen, if I went into all of it, it’s just a friggin’ bore, real bummer, the depression that comes with it and all.”
I held up a hand. “Any way you want it, Janet.”
“You don’t mind? I just rather not go into any of that.”
“Hell, no-unless,” I said, and I slurped at my hot chocolate for dramatic effect, “unless maybe there’s something back there in what you don’t want to think about, and don’t want to talk about, that’s… dangerous.”
She got my meaning and started to stiffen up. “I told you I never saw him before.”
“And I told you I believe you.”
“Well…” She stared down into her mug of chocolate. “I got to admit it isn’t the only strange thing that’s happened to me lately.”
“Oh?”
“Well, not to me exactly. To my mother.”
“Your mother?”
“That’s what the bus is all about. I live here in Port City,
have lately at least. I’m going up this afternoon to Iowa City, to the University Hospital.”
“I don’t follow you, Janet.”
“My mother. That’s where she is. The hospital.”
“I’m sorry. What’s the trouble?”
“She’s dying, I’m afraid.”
“You want to tell me about it?”
She sipped at the mug of chocolate calmly and told me that somebody had beaten her mother half to death and set the house on fire and left the old lady to burn.
THREE
“I’d been living for the last four or five years with a guy in Chicago-a guy I met during my first and last year at Drake in Des Moines. We weren’t married, but it was more than a shack-up thing, you know. We, uh, had a kid, and you know, stuck it out together.
“We were part of the Old Town scene-he turned out op art paintings and sold ’em on the street and through various shops, and I clerked in a bookstore-just a couple hippies with a love child, right? Gradually we both got into drugs, him kind of heavy, me not so-I found I couldn’t let go of the idea I was supposed to be a ‘good mother’ to my child.
“The kid was getting along fine, until one day he-by this time he was about three-and-a-half-he started acting sickly. Short of breath all the time, and complaining sometimes about chest pain. I took the kid to a doctor-and from the doctor to a specialist, and found that he had a heart condition that… that could eventually require surgery. Boy, did I come down quickly out of that druggie fantasy-world. I immediately started making mental lists of the changes that would have to take place in my life; that night I tried to tell my soulmate what the score was and he said, ‘No more fuckin’ hassles,’ and walked out. I haven’t seen him since.
“The moment the door closed behind my ex, I reached for the phone and called my mother and started pouring it all out. It’d been years since I talked to her, years since I’d dropped out of college, turned runaway, moved to Old Town and had a kid and all. I’d hardly got a word out when Mom told me that Dad died three years ago. I… I slammed the receiver down and waited for the tears, but there weren’t any, so I laughed instead. The kind of laughing that doesn’t have a damn thing to do with being happy, y’know? And, after the laughter, I thought of suicide. Real seriously thought of suicide. But my kid came first, before any such luxury, so I picked the phone up again and called Mom back.”
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