Big Man

by Ed McBain

  “We may need a doctor on this,” she said. “Is the bullet still in there?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Can’t you feel it?”

  “I can’t feel nothing below the knee.”

  She came over to the bed and sat down. She bent over and the silk wrapper fell loose in the front, and the gown under the wrapper was nothing but cheesecloth practically. I could see her almost as if she was bare, and she knew I could see her but she didn’t do nothing to pull the wrapper closed. She kept leaning over, looking at my leg, and then she said, “This looks pretty bad. I’m gonna tell Andy to get a doctor.”

  She lifted her head, catching my eyes on the front of her gown. She stared at me for a second, and I lowered my eyes, ashamed because she’d caught me looking. She raised her eyebrows just a tiny bit, as if she was surprised—but I knew she wasn’t—and then she smiled a very little and slid off the bed, walking to the door, swinging her hips more than she had before. She opened the door just a crack, and I heard Andy saying, “… and he’s never been in a jam before, is that right? You can vouch for that?”

  Jobbo didn’t get a chance to answer. Celia interrupted him with, “You better call Murray on this, Andy. I can clean the leg, but that’s all. It’s pretty bad.”

  “All right, clean it,” Andy said. “I’ll call Murray when I get done here. Close the door.”

  She shrugged and closed the door, and then she walked back to the bed, looking down at me, her hands on her hips, a smile on her mouth. “I’ll get some alcohol,” she said. She crossed the room to the door again, stopped before opening it, and said, “Don’t go away, boy.” Then she went out.

  I lay back on the bed, looking the joint over. It was really nothing special, the usual railroad flat you find all over East Harlem, the chipped plaster, the peeling paint, the big ugly radiator. The room was furnished with a bargain set you could pick up in any of the cheap furniture stores. A big picture of Jesus suffering on the cross was over the bed, and a candle burned in a light red glass on the dresser, probably for somebody who was dead. There was a smell in the room—I got a very sensitive nose, you probably gathered by now—and I recognized it was perfume. But the perfume didn’t hide the fact that the apartment was a dump. Whatever Andy was, he wasn’t no wheel, that was for sure. Unless this was all a front, and that didn’t seem hardly possible. He certainly seemed to know the right people to contact, though, and I wasn’t gonna look no gift horse in the mouth. Without his help …

  The door opened again, and Celia came in. Outside in the living room, I could see Andy dialing the phone. The phone was covered with one of these cheap plastic things that’s supposed to make it look like an expensive colored telephone, only it don’t. It makes it look like a black telephone covered with a cheap plastic thing. Celia closed the door and walked over to the bed. She doused a rag with alcohol and then she sat down and went to work on my leg.

  I’m not a baby. I mean, I had things happen to me before, things that hurt. Like once I busted my arm playing football in the street. Not really football. We used to roll up a newspaper and tie it with a piece of cord, or sometimes a rubber band, and this made a long cylinder which we used for a ball. The name of the game, actually, was Touchball, I guess. Anyway, I busted my arm because this kid named Tommy threw a pass, and I was running for it, looking back at the ball, and I ran right into a parked car and I busted my arm. That really hurt. I mean, my leg hurt right then too, but the arm that time had really hurt like a bastard. I’m not trying to be a hero or anything. I’m only trying to say that though the alcohol stung when she poured it on the wound, it wasn’t real pain like the time I busted my arm. So I didn’t expect her to mention anything about it, but she wiped the wound and made it nice and clean, and then she looked at me and said, “You’re a brave kid,” and then she kissed me.

  It was a real quick kiss, her mouth was there one minute and the next minute it was gone. It surprised the hell out of me because even though she was walking around half-naked, I certainly didn’t expect to be kissed, even a quick kiss like that. She stood up and smiled at me and I didn’t know what to say and maybe it’s better I didn’t say, nothing because right then the door opened and Andy walked in with Jobbo behind him.

  “How’s it going?” Andy asked, smiling. I guess he was happy about the way his phone call turned out. I kept thinking how he wouldn’t have been so happy if he’d walked into the room about two minutes earlier.

  “Fine,” Celia said. She turned to me. “We’re doing fine, aren’t we, boy?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Murray’ll be over in a few minutes,” Andy said, “and I got a car coming in about a half-hour. You ever been to Jersey, kid?”

  “A few times,” I said.

  “We got a motel in Jersey. We can put you up there until the leg’s all right.”

  “You got a motel in Jersey?” I asked.

  “Me?” Andy chuckled. “No, not me, kid.” He paused. “Murray’ll look over your leg when he gets here. He used to be a very high-priced doctor, kid.”

  They stood around the bed, with Celia sitting at the foot now. With Andy in the room, she didn’t even look at me. I began to think maybe she hadn’t kissed me after all. Maybe I was just delirious or something.

  “Why are you doing all this for me?” I asked.

  “Why not?” Andy said.

  “Sure, it’s nice of you. But why?”

  “You sound pretty handy with a gun.”

  “Are you kidding?” I said.

  “You killed two cops, didn’t you? Jobbo told me how cool you were.”

  “That was the first time I ever had a gun in my hand,” I said. “I don’t know a gun from a—”

  “Imagine when you’ve had a little practice, kid,” Andy said.

  “Practice? What do you—?”

  We heard a knock on the door. Andy said, “There’s Murray now.” He walked out of the bedroom, and Jobbo followed behind him.

  “What did he mean?” I asked Celia. “About practice?”

  “They’ve probably got room for somebody who can use a gun, that’s all,” Celia said.

  “But I can’t—”

  “Go along with it, boy,” she said. “It’ll be interesting.” She was sitting at the foot of the bed. She lifted one hand and put it on my ankle, and her fingers tightened there. “You’ll get lots of practice, boy,” she said, and her eyes held mine. She nodded her head, unsmilingly, and then pulled her hand back when she heard footsteps coming toward the bedroom.

  “Murray, meet Frankie,” Andy said, coming into the room with a hawk-faced, serious-looking guy. Murray nodded, glancing briefly at my leg.

  “Why do they always get shot in the middle of the night?” he said sourly. Andy laughed, and Celia laughed too, a high laugh the crack didn’t warrant. I looked at her. Her face was flushed, and her eyes were sparkling. Murray took off his jacket and then rolled up his sleeves. His arms were skinny and covered with thick black hair, but his hands looked strong. He blinked behind his glasses and then walked to the bed.

  “All right,” he said, “let’s have a look at it,” and then in the same breath, without even looking at her, “Hello, Celia.”

  “Fix him up good, Murray,” Andy said. “He’s a good boy.”

  3

  They took me to a town named Spotswood, and then out past the town to a small motel off the main highway. The motel had about a dozen cabins and another cabin that served as the office. A guy named Dirk was in charge of the operation, but he didn’t own the place, either, and after I was there a while he told me he was on salary.

  It didn’t take me long to figure out what the motel was. I ain’t the smartest guy in the world, that’s a cinch, but I’m pretty quick on the uptake. The trade at the motel was usually at night, and I never saw any young kids in the crowd. The cars would pull up to the cabins around eight thirty or so, and then leave around midnight. Whatever the place was, you could bet it hadn’t been recom
mended by the AAA. Nobody came to my cabin, and nobody went to Cabin Three, either. I found out from Dirk that Three was “occupied,” but he wouldn’t tell me nothing about who was in it.

  In all the time I was there, not a single cop came to visit the place. Murray came to see me every day. He told me I was lucky that cops carry .38’s and not .45’s because a .45 can leave a very nasty hole which takes a long time to heal. He said I would have been luckier still if cops carried .22’s, which they don’t, because a .22 makes a very tiny hole which you got to search for to find, and which heals pretty quick. As it was, he said I’d be on my back for about three weeks, and that the wound would be scabbed over by that time, and eventually I’d have a little scar on my leg. He had to change the dressing on the wound every day because he said there was a lot of drainage. He also didn’t want me to get gangrene or anything and so he put me on some pills which he said was a “broad spectrum antibiotic.” I guess he meant penicillin. He was a very educated man, Murray, and he never used a simple word where a complicated word would do. For example, he said I had “remarkable recuperative powers,” when all he meant was I healed pretty quick.

  He didn’t tell me much about himself, but what he told me was enough. Like I said, I’m pretty fast on the uptake. He would drop little things from time to time, and the little things didn’t mean nothing until you put them all together and then they spelled out how come a guy like Murray was fixing up a guy who’d got in trouble with the cops. I found out, for example, that he went to med school at Cornell and was among the top ten in his class. He didn’t tell me that directly, it just sort of came out in conversation, a sort of sarcastic remark he was making about himself. I also found out that he used to practice medicine in a town called New Canaan, which is in Connecticut someplace and which is mostly full of Madison Avenue advertising guys.

  At first I figured maybe Murray had lost his license because he did an abortion or something. That seemed pretty corny, and it’s always what you see in the movies, the noted brain surgeon who could have discovered the cancer cure, for Christ’s sake, if he hadn’t goofed just that once and helped out his maiden aunt who got knocked up by the local minister. Well, Murray lost his license not because he was a good guy but because he was a rat, which shows what the movie people know. Living in this town of New Canaan, Murray began to suspect that some guy was playing around with his wife. He kept trying to figure out a way to put the blocks to the guy, but his chance didn’t come until one night the guy got involved in an automobile accident and Murray was called in by the troopers to take the usual ten c.c.’s of blood for the blood-alcohol test to find out whether the guy was crocked or not.

  Well, the guy wasn’t crocked. He hadn’t even been drinking at all. But Murray took his sponge and wiped it on the guy’s arm just before he took the blood sample. The sponge was sopping with alcohol. Murray stuck his needle through the alcohol smear and into the guy’s arm, taking enough alcohol—two-tenths of a milligram would have been enough, Murray said—in with the blood to contaminate the test. The guy was accused of drunken driving. Murray thought he’d done a great job. Except that the trooper who’d brought the guy to Murray happened to see him wipe the guy’s arm with the alcohol-soaked sponge. So the trooper went to bat for the guy and Murray was found guilty of “fraud or deceit in the practice of medicine,” and that was enough to cause the yanking of his license.

  I gather he knocked around a long time before he fell back again on the only thing he really knew: medicine. Only, of course, he couldn’t legally practice any more, so he had to practice illegally, and that’s how come he was the guy who dressed my leg that night and took care of it all the while I was in Spotswood. I was thankful, believe me. A legit medic would have had to report the gun wound. And there was no danger of that with Murray.

  I did a lot of thinking up there in Spotswood.

  There wasn’t much else to do, you see. I wasn’t allowed out of the cabin, not even to walk around the grounds. Dirk brought me my meals, and sometimes he stayed for a few games of checkers or a round of pinochle, but most of the time I was alone. I never liked reading, so I hardly touched any of the pocket books Dirk brought. I just laid on the bed mostly and looked up at the ceiling, remembering that night with the cops, and remembering too the kiss from Celia.

  I’d killed those cops, all right. There was no doubt about that. The newspapers had carried the full story the next day, and then a follow-up story the day afterwards. During the next two weeks, I watched the story get smaller and smaller as the police leads fizzled out. The last time they ran it, it was buried in the middle of the newspaper, a small item over an almost full-page Macy’s ad. I knew this wasn’t the end of it. I mean, cops never let go of something. You’re always reading about them picking up a guy on a drunk charge or something and they go to work on him, and it turns out he done the Brink’s robbery years back. Like that. So I figured my best bet was to keep away from the cops from now on, otherwise I’d be like they say, up the creek. But I wasn’t taking any credit away from Andy and the people he worked for. I was safe in Spotswood. My leg was healing. And the cops had put the case on ice for now. So I was grateful to Andy.

  But the more I thought about his helping hand, the more I wondered about it. I liked being helped, sure, but I didn’t like what I figured was expected in payment. Now don’t misunderstand I’m a welsher or anything like that. I ain’t. I’ve always paid the piper, and I was willing to give Andy and his higherups anything reasonable for helping me. It was on the “reasonable” that we might have a little trouble, I figured. To make it short, I didn’t like the idea of being considered a torpedo. What the hell, I’d shot those cops in self-defense, sort of. When the heat’s on, you’ll do anything to get yourself out of the soup. All right, the cops happened to hand in their chips, but that didn’t make me a killer, not in the sense Andy was thinking of. I knew I should have told him that the night Jobbo took me to his pad, and I’d really tried to tell him, but then I figured it was best to keep quiet until the leg was better. But I wasn’t going to run around killing anybody else, no matter what they thought.

  Celia was something else again. Now I’m pretty hip to the sex bit. I’ve had it, you know, and a broad’s a broad. But Celia was maybe thirty years old or around there, and there’s something gets me excited about an older dame. I don’t know what it is, except you think they’ve got a little more experience and know just what they want. Whatever, an old dame has always seemed more passionate to me, and I sure as hell didn’t mistake that kiss she gave me. But there was still Andy to consider, and he wasn’t exactly no shrimp, not with that chest and those arms, and not even mentioning his connection with the higher-ups. Celia was something, and I filed her away under Unfinished Business, but I didn’t want a hassle with Andy over her, and I didn’t want a hole in the head some night, either.

  So I thought about all these things, waiting for the day I could leave Spotswood. I decided finally to play it cool and see which way the cards fell.

  The leg healed in about three weeks, just like Murray said it would. He came in one Saturday, and there was the stink of booze on his breath, and he gave me an examination and said I could join the human race again in a few days. Those were his exact words. He didn’t much like the human race, Murray. He always talked about humans as if they were only animals who just by luck discovered how to stand up and use their front paws. Anyway, he said he’d call Andy, and I guess he did because Andy showed up on Monday morning.

  He was driving an old Chevy, not that I was expecting a Cadillac, but I still found it hard getting used to the idea of him living in a dump and driving a low-priced car. He pulled up in front of the office. I looked through the blinds, and when I recognized him I began to feel free already. He talked with Dirk for a few minutes, and then walked up the gravel to my cabin. He knocked on the door, and I asked, “Who is it?” even though I knew it was him, just to show him I was being careful.

  “It’s Andy, kid,” he
said. “Open up.”

  I opened the door for him and looked out at the Chevy. Celia was sitting in the back, and I felt my blood get a little quicker, and then I told myself to be careful, Andy was there.

  “Walking around, huh, kid?” Andy said, smiling.

  “I been walking for a long time,” I told him. “Why don’t you bring Celia in with you?”

  “What for? You ready to leave?”

  “Sure.”

  “Then come on. No sense hanging around.”

  I went in the bathroom and got my toothbrush and razor, which I maybe used six or seven times all the while I was there. I don’t have a very heavy beard. I got black hair and brown eyes, and lots of guys with that color combination have these thick, heavy five-o’clock-shadow things. But not me. I shave maybe every three days, and I look fine in between. The guys on the block used to rib me about the beard. They think to be a man you got to be hairy. Well, I ain’t hairy, but that don’t make me any less a man. I could knock down any guy on the block, that’s the truth. I was fighting all the time when I was a kid. I figured out pretty early that the only way to get what you want is to show you want it. And nothing speaks louder than your hands. That’s the truth. And there were plenty of five-o’clock-shadow bums I knocked on their asses for just looking at me crooked. I just wanted you to know, in case you think a guy needs whiskers. He don’t.

  When I finished picking up the few things I had in the cabin, I went out to the car with Andy. I climbed in, and then turned on the seat to say hello to Celia, giving her a big smile. She didn’t smile back. She had her legs crossed, and a gold ankle bracelet caught the sun and made it dance. She had good legs, and her dress was high enough to be showing a lot of them. I kept thinking how she was thirty years old or around there, and I began to get a little parched in the mouth.