The 2nd Golden Age of Mystery and Crime MEGAPACK ™: Ruth Chessman

by Ruth Chessman

  Corning looked at the words which he read upside down on the Sergeant’s desk. Unlawful entry. The doctor’s bag, big with jewels, sat on the desk beside the book. Nobody had even bothered to open it.

  “Are you really a doctor?” Phelan asked reproachfully.

  Corning did not answer. He was too busy wondering where his exquisite plan had slipped.

  “So you won’t talk?” the Sergeant asked. “We’ll see.” He snapped open the black bag and gawked at what he saw. “Well, I’ll be—” It took a little time, but of course the jewels were identified as Mrs. Corning’s. Only now it was Corning’s turn to be astonished.

  “What did you think?” he asked shortly.

  “Truth is,” the Sergeant said, leaning over his desk confidingly, “we didn’t know what to think. The trouble started with Mrs. Corning missing some food tonight—”

  “Food!”

  “She counts everything,” said the Sergeant, as if he wanted to hear it out loud in order to believe it himself. “Each slice of bread and ham and so forth. She accused the cousin of pinching it. By her count two slices of bread were missing, and one slice of ham. So she and Eudora went at it hammer and tongs, and in the middle of it her heart—and the phone was dead so she couldn’t call a doctor—” Corning reeled at that. If only he hadn’t put the phone out—or was that all he’d done wrong? No, it was more basic—it was that ham sandwich! He began to feel quite sick.

  “You look green,” the Sergeant remarked, adding kindly, “Musta been something you et.”

  “No doubt,” said the man who called himself Corning with fatalistic resignation. One ham sandwich.

  THE PERFECT HUSBAND

  Originally published in Four Quarters #1, Nov. 1960

  Ellen felt the first faint hint of disaster when Rickey stepped into the house. Tonight was a Friday night like almost a hundred that had gone before—they’d been married close to two years. Rickey Garber came home every Friday night after five days on the road. This time, as always, he set down his sample bag and bent to kiss her. The set of his shoulders reminded her of Tony Curtis, the way so many things about Rickey reminded her of different actors.

  There wasn’t a thing about all this to stir the subtle fear in Ellen. She knew it, but knowing it didn’t drive the feeling away. Nevertheless she had very good news to tell Rickey. She waited for him to ask her. She wanted to burst out with her answer. Yes, she would say, yes, darling, we’re really going to have a baby. But in spite of his anxiety about it before he’d left Monday, in spite of his insistence that she must go to the doctor that very day, he never even mentioned it once. That must have been why she had this odd feeling that there was something wrong with tonight.

  Maybe it was just that she was so much happier to see him than he ever was to see her. It was all on her side, all the feeling. She was sure Rickey loved her, of course; he was her husband, faithful and steady—but so cold, so unreachable! Now as he shrugged out of his topcoat, she thought tenderly, look at how handsome he is. Rickey had once told her he’d always wanted to be an actor, and with those looks he’d surely have been a success. Brawny, black-haired, and with quiet eyes—something like Errol Flynn—she was sure she hadn’t been the only girl in love with him. Tonight he seemed a little pale, though.

  “Tired, honey?” she asked. He shook his head, looking into the mirror that hung in their small reception hall. His eyes did not flick the short distance to meet hers.

  “No.” He amplified: “I hurt my arm, is all.”

  At her expression of concern he said quickly, “Nothing much, Ellie. My right arm, though, so I can’t hand over my pay,” and at last he grinned at her. “Here, reach into my pocket.” He held his arm motionless while she took the pay envelope from his pocket. On Fridays he went to the home office of the McCracken Tool Company in Lower Falls to turn in the orders he’d taken during the week, and to get his pay. He followed this procedure religiously, although it meant that after a week’s driving to cover his territory, he had an additional three-hour ride home from the Lower Falls office to here in Canton.

  “Gotta get my dough, honey,” he’d said, when she suggested he mail his orders in and have the company send him a check, so she decided he must simply enjoy the meetings he had with his boss. Anyway, she wouldn’t interfere—she hoped she’d never be that kind of wife!

  Ordinarily she opened the envelope at once so he could preen himself in her pride at the amount of his extra earnings, the commissions which varied from week to week. Tonight, however, she tossed it carelessly onto the kitchen table and said anxiously, “Let me help you with that arm, Rickey.”

  He said carefully, “No, honey. I’ll take care of it. It isn’t much, anyway. A sliver of steel chipped off a machine, and I caught it. McCracken had to show me the new assembly line at the plant; you’d think it was his own little egg he just laid, so I had to be the mickey. If the nurse hadn’t knocked off for the day, I’d have been fixed up there before I left. Just let me have your eyebrow tweezers and a Band-Aid.”

  In silence she obeyed. He went into the bathroom, locking the door. A little later she heard him groan, and she felt faint with fright, but it was only an instant after that when he opened the door. He was paler now, but he was smiling a little.

  “Here,” he said, and dropped the tweezers into her hand. They were still wet with the hot water he had used to rinse them.

  “Open my envelope, Ellen,” he said, and walked past her into the back hall. The incinerator door opened and shut with a little clang. How odd, throwing a piece of steel into the incinerator, she thought fleetingly, but it was one of those thoughts that come and go before you know it.

  She opened the envelope, then gasped at the fat pile of tens. “Two hundred extra!” she said with an astonishment she knew would please him.

  “Commission deluxe,” he said proudly.

  “Well,” said Ellie, but try as she would, her customary enthusiasm was absent. That arm—“Come, eat,” was all she could think of. “Your supper’s ready.”

  “No, never mind. This arm hurts like the devil. I’m going to lie down. Take a couple of aspirins, maybe.”

  Ellie listened as the bed sounded all the familiar squeaks and noises. Her heart pounded with fear. What if he’s really sick? she thought. Not once since they first met had he ever been even slightly ill. One of the first things she’d noticed about him had been that air of good health. It was as much part of him as his good looks. It was one of the things that had attracted her in the first place. She had never so much as smiled at a stranger before Rickey, but she had put a beckon on her lips for him. She had been lonely at her first job and her first time living away from her father. Rickey, withk loneliness that mirrored her own, had reached out to her hopefully. A handsome man in a handsome car, a stranger passing through town. His strength had promised strength to spare. A pickup, she’d thought at the time, a little shocked but mostly hugging herself with joy at all the wonderful things his practiced kisses promised her. But now he was her husband, and it scared her to think his strength might be failing at last.

  She shook her head as if to ward it off. She was thin and small, an unspectacular blond girl who had by sheer good luck married a successful, clever husband.

  Rickey was fast asleep a few minutes after he lay down, and she sat quietly on the bedroom chair watching him for a long time. At nine o’clock she tiptoed out of the apartment. She had no special place to go, but she left the privacy and safety of their three snug little rooms, just because she had to be moving. She walked down the hill to the noisy Rapanne River that outlined the east side of the city. She stood in the dark, staring down, listening to the slapping flow of the water.

  Suddenly, as if she were saying the words aloud to Rickey, she heard them in her mind: It was a bullet, wasn’t it?

  But it couldn’t have been. He had told her the truth. Never had she found anything he told her to be a lie: therefore it followed that he could speak only truth. Rickey worked
hard, had no secrets from her. He just couldn’t possibly have a bullet in his arm. It was simply out of character, that’s all. It was like expecting Van Johnson to go home to his wife with a bullet in his arm. Rickey simply could not have a bullet wound, not even a flesh wound, that a man could take care of himself with a pair of eyebrow tweezers.

  She turned, impatient with herself over all this nonsense, and started back. What if Rickey woke needing her? She began to hurry, and as she almost ran, she began to list the comforting facts in her mind: Fact. Rickey was respectable for all his secretiveness. Fact. She loved Rickey and he loved her. Fact he had never to her knowledge lied to her.

  Except for her father, now living his quiet life in Chicago, Rickey was her everyone. Her whole life was wrapped up in their future, in their coming child. So he couldn’t lie to her.

  But as she reached the foot of the hill, she knew there was one other fact, contradictory as it might seem in the face of everything she called fact. She knew from her heart that there had been a bullet in Rickey’s arm.

  She let herself into the apartment quietly. She undressed in the bathroom, then walked on bare feet into the bedroom. Rickey was breathing evenly, quietly. She let up the shade slowly so that she could open the window. The street light lit up the room a little, and she could see that he seemed relaxed and comfortable. She felt a dozen years older than Rickey at that moment, and yet she was barely twenty to his thirty. But his sleeping look reassured her, and she got into bed beside him with the same grateful feeling she always had. How lucky she was! He was really the perfect husband every girl dreamed of.

  In the morning, she could see that Rickey was all right. He was perfectly all right.

  “Oh, Rickey,” she said awkwardly.

  He looked at her lazily and grinned. “Hi, honey,” he said. “Did I scare you?”

  In spite of herself she burst into tears of relief. He said gently, “Honey, don’t you know you’re not supposed to worry about husbands? It’s their job to do the worrying. They provide and care for the family.”

  The words sounded quaint. They made her catch her breath, touched as she often was by his oddly idealistic views. It was when he spoke like this that she’d remember he had been no average boy, growing up in the home of affectionate parents. Handed about from unwilling aunt to aunt since he was an infant, no wonder he had learned to live by dreams. Reality had been none too sweet. He was lonely, he would always be lonely, with the wistful, insurmountable loneliness of the unwanted child.

  “I can’t help worrying about you,” she said tearfully.

  “Well, you don’t have to any more,” he told her cheerily.

  For a moment she expected him to pull her to him for a kiss, he always showed his love for her in a clear conventional pattern, satisfying to both of them, but still one that always reminded her of a movie romance. She’d grown dependent upon these gestures which years of movies had taught her to interpret as proof of true love. And she could tell now, watching him, that he thought of it. But he did not move towards her, and suddenly she cried, “Your arm, Rickey!”

  He lifted it a little way, as if to look at it, then he let it drop. Although her eyes never left his face, she did not see a wince or any other sign of pain. So it must really be all right.

  “Hungry?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. She felt startled. Rickey was a very satisfactory man to feed, and this absence of appetite was entirely without precedent. He added hastily, “Just coffee. I must be coming down with a cold.”

  She got him the coffee, and watched warily as he drank it.

  “You’re using your left hand,” she said.

  At the same instant, by what seemed a magic choice of subjects, he asked the one question that could certainly drive all thoughts of his wound from her mind.

  “You haven’t told me what the doctor said, Ellen.”

  She felt silly and childish, but she could feel the blush begin at her heart and spread over her shoulders and finally cover her face. Rickey smiled tenderly and reached across the table to take her right hand. With his left. All thoughts of the precious plans they were going to make, the sweet plans for the house with a yard for the baby, the crib, the delicious, infinitesimal, silly details everything fled.

  “Rickey, are you sure that arm is all right?”

  “It’s okay, it’s okay,” he said impatiently.

  “Promise, if it isn’t better by tomorrow, you’ll let me call a doctor.”

  “Sure, sure,” Rickey said impatiently. “Now, forget it.”

  There was no forgetting it. Rickey was not himself. There was no movie this weekend, to both of them a real loss; there was no Sunday dinner out. Sunday night Ellen said again pleadingly, “Just let a doctor look at your arm to please me, Rickey.”

  “I’ll be all right after a good night’s sleep,” he said. “If I’m not all right by tomorrow, I’ll stop off at a doctor’s before I get going for the day.”

  He fell asleep as soon as he went to bed, but anxiety kept her awake. It was early morning before she herself dozed off. She awoke almost at once to the sounds of his stirring as he dressed. She sat up, completely awake at once. The clock said six, his usual Monday rising hour.

  “Rickey—how are you?”

  “Better, much better,” he told her briskly.

  She got out of bed and ran across the room. He winced at the touch of her hand on his—his right hand, not the arm at all, but he winced!

  “You’re not going out!” she pleaded.

  He did not answer, just marched about the room steadily, finishing his dressing in awkward movements, sparing his right arm. He did not pack his bag, and she said gently, “I know you like to pack your bag yourself, Rick. But just this once let me?”

  Ho shook his head. “I’m not taking it. The way I feel I may be back before I need a clean shirt. If I don’t come home ahead of time, you’ll know everything is all right, and I’ll pick up clean stuff wherever I happen to need it.”

  He was gone suddenly, with hardly a kiss.

  It was terrible. She had long since forgotten to worry about whether it was a bullet he had in his arm. His condition was all that concerned her now. Her groping fears began to increase, and suddenly, on an impulse, she called her father in Chicago. She called him at the metal products factory where he was head shipper. When she heard his calm “Hello?” she experienced a moment of deep terror and shame. She didn’t know what to say, or how her father could explain away her skyrocketing fears. It took a second or two longer before she could say, “Dad—oh, Dad! It’s good to hear your voice.”

  “Anything wrong, Ellen?” he asked quickly.

  She laughed nervously. “Oh, no, nothing,” she said.

  There was maybe fifty cents worth of silence, then her father asked a strange question. “It isn’t anything Rickey’s done, is it? You can always come home to Chicago, you know.”

  She grabbed at the telephone as if it were going to spring away.

  “Why—why Dad, what could he do?”

  Her father didn’t answer that. He waited long enough for her to remember the way he’d said, “Rickey Garber? Never heard of him. He’s a mighty slick-looking article, isn’t he? Are you sure—?”

  But of course two years ago she’d been sure, and her father hadn’t said another word. Now just in the same way, he dropped Rickey and said, “You’re all right, Ellen?”

  “Fine,” she said automatically, hut the tone of his voice softened her so that she almost burst into tears. She remembered his unfailing understanding. When his factory had opened a branch in Chicago, and he’d been sent to take over the shipping there, he’d made no effort to force her. Her mother had just died, and she hadn’t wanted to leave the East. He was good to her, and she had no right to saddle him with worries that might have no foundation. She thought suddenly of what she could say that would give reason to her call, and she rushed eagerly into it: “I wanted to tell you you’re going to be a grandpa by Christmas.”


  Her father was suitably surprised and pleased, and best of all, he was reassured. When she hung up she thought, what a fool I was! She felt so good after her talk with her father that the worry about Rickey began to recede until by the end of the day it all but vanished.

  The week trickled by. She made her first purchase for the coming child, a tiny yellow nightgown. She wanted to buy more, but she couldn’t raise any enthusiasm over it. She thought she would wait until Rickey came home, and they would shop together, a little each week. She wished it was time for Rickey to come home. She kept wishing it was Friday, and then one day it was Friday, and suddenly all her scared thoughts came right out into the open. The morning dragged, lasting forever. By noon she had made up her mind. She would put in a call to his office, and as soon as he got in, he could call her back. That would save her at least three hours of worry.

  “McCracken Tool Company?” the operator repeated. “Is that capital em, see, capital see?”

  “That’s right,” Ellen said.

  After a moment. “I’m sorry,” the operator said. “There is no phone listed under that name.”

  Ellen got a little impatient. She wasn’t suspicious, only impatient. “There must be a number,” she said positively. “It’s in the McCracken building,” she added, thinking about Mr. McCracken as she waited.

  Mr. McCracken was a big fat redhead with a piping voice. Although she had never seen him or talked to him, he was as real to her as if he stood in the room. Rickey had described him, and with that trick that made him seem able to change personalities at will, he had dropped into McCracken’s, had brought him to life for her, big lumbering body and thin high voice.

  “I’m sorry,” said the operator again, after a lapse of time. “Are you sure you’re spelling it right?”

  Ellen hung up. A manufacturing plant that could afford to have a dozen salesmen—Rickey had once told her at least a dozen—must certainly have been big enough to have a switchboard full of phones. She sat still, unable to move. First Rickey’s arm, with a bullet in it (no quibbling now). Next, no McCracken Tools. She picked up the phone again, very slowly, and called the station. There was a train in fifty-eight minutes that stopped for a minute at Lower Falls.