Turnabout

by Thorne Smith

  They had not progressed very far when they were accosted by an indignant but, unfortunately, myopic old lady who informed the genial Mr. Burdock that if he persisted in subjecting an innocent child to such inhuman treatment she would be forced to call a policeman. The situation seemed to tickle Tom Burdock. He proceeded to make it worse.

  “Innocent child!” he exclaimed huskily as he grabbed the doll’s neck with two powerful hands and began to choke it before the horrified eyes of the old lady. “Innocent child!” he repeated. “I like that. Why, this child has the heart of a fiend, you old owl. It won’t go to sleep. It won’t do a damn thing. I’m bored to tears with this baby and, madam,”—Tom Burdock lowered his voice—“I’m going to strangle it to death before your very eyes. Observe.”

  The old lady’s piercing scream collected a crowd with such startling swiftness that Sally gained the impression its individual members must have been rehearsed in their parts and had been merely awaiting the old lady’s signal to rush into action. In spite of Mr. Gibber’s adjurations to stick to Tom Burdock, Sally felt strongly inclined to remove herself as speedily as possible from the neighborhood of the Nationwide Advertising Agency’s most important client and to stay removed. Above the crowd Mr. Burdock towered, the doll raised aloft, its head shaking so violently that it gave every appearance of life and animation.

  “I’ll murder the child,” gritted Burdock. “It’s illegitimate, anyway. Better dead than alive.”

  The doll was moving so rapidly now that it was virtually impossible for the spectators to ascertain its true character. Several men covered their eyes with their hands in an endeavor to blot out the unnerving sight. The women stared as if fascinated and the old lady screamed.

  “Gord,” breathed a girl to her escort. “The poor kid must be used to such treatment if it doesn’t even cry.”

  “Can’t very well get used to a thing like that,” answered the man. “By the time you do you’re damn well done in.”

  Sally began to fear that the most important client was beginning to lose his head, to take his part too seriously. He was laughing like a demon and his eyes were flashing wildly. The success of his acting had overstimulated him.

  “Innocent child!” he cried, addressing himself to the crowd. “Ha! See what I do with it. I choke it. I twirl it. Thus.”

  And Mr. Burdock began to twirl the doll above his head.

  “I can stand very little more of this,” gasped a well-dressed gentleman. “I’m not very fond of children myself, but such treatment of a mere baby is going altogether too far.”

  “Stick out your tongue at the lady,” said Tom Burdock. “Go on, stick it out, you black-hearted brat.”

  “He’s gone mad,” ejaculated a woman. “He doesn’t know what he’s doing. For God’s sake get a policeman.”

  But already several members of the crowd were beginning to suspect the true state of affairs. They smiled with tolerant amusement and waited for further developments.

  “Are you a friend of this gentleman?” a man asked Sally.

  “Merely a business acquaintance,” Sally replied hastily.

  “He’s more than that,” cried Mr. Burdock, who had overheard the question. “He’s the father of this baby. He refuses to give it a name.”

  “Then why don’t you do something about it?” the old lady demanded of Sally. “Are you willing to see your own baby murdered?”

  “Yes,” replied Sally in a voice that carried conviction. “I don’t want it. Small children disturb me. And anyway, I can’t stop this madman. He might take it into his head to twirl me about. That would never do.”

  “Oh!” exclaimed the old lady. “I’ve never experienced such cowardice and brutality in all my born days. Why doesn’t a policeman come? Why don’t you men do something?”

  She kicked Mr. Burdock sharply on the shin, and that gentleman uttered a howl of rage.

  “Stop that!” he shouted. “You’re only making matters worse for the baby. I’ll snap the thing’s head off”

  “Don’t worry, lady,” a spectator said soothingly to the old woman. “It’s not alive.”

  “Do you mean to say it’s dead?” she asked. “Then that means murder. And every one of you are accessories before the fact for looking on and letting him do it.”

  And with this she lifted up her voice and called piercingly for the police. Presently Patrolman Riley sweated a path through the crowd. At the sight of the policeman Tom Burdock redoubled his efforts. The doll fairly sizzled in frantic revolutions.

  “What’s going on here?” demanded Riley. “What’s all the trouble?”

  Apparently the members of the crowd decided to let the officer find that out for himself.

  “Arrest everyone,” said the old lady. “Officer, they’re all in it. They’ve let this madman murder a baby before their very eyes. And there’s his friend, the father of the child.”

  Sally stood quakingly under the accusing eyes of the policeman, but at this moment a diversion occurred. The doll detached itself from one of its legs and described a jangling arc in the air. For a moment it poised over an open manhole in which some laborers were further confusing the electric system of the city, then dropped from sight within. Officer Riley, abandoning his tactics of tolerant inquiry, sped after the doll and followed it down into the manhole. For a moment Mr. Burdock stood looking at the leg in his hand.

  “Can’t do anything with that,” he said at last. “Perhaps a cannibal’s daughter might like it, but not mine. Here, old lady, you can have it as a little souvenir of your first murder.”

  He thrust the leg into the hand of the shrinking old lady and, breaking through the crowd, hailed and entered a taxi. Sally stuck to him.

  A few minutes later Officer Riley emerged from the manhole with a disgusted expression on his face and a disheveled doll in his arms. He approached the old lady and shook the bedraggled object under her nose.

  “Here’s your murdered baby,” he snarled. “I’ve a good mind to run you in for making a fool of the law.” He looked about for Mr. Burdock. “Where’s he gone?” he demanded. “Did you let that man escape?”

  “I couldn’t stop him,” the old lady faltered.

  With a cry of rage the officer dashed the doll to the sidewalk and shouldered his way through the grinning crowd.

  “Move on, the lot of you,” he shouted, “or I call for the patrol wagon.”

  Slowly the crowd dispersed, leaving a bewildered old lady peering down at the doll lying crumpled at her feet.

  Back at the hotel Sally was sitting on the bed and seriously considering Mr. Burdock, who was soothing himself with a bottle. She realized he presented a problem that would require some stiff solving. With the abandoning of the doll the man had severed the one tie he seemingly had with his home. She had an overnight job on her hands and a pregnant husband at home impatiently awaiting her return. Mr. Gibber had told her to stick to Tom Burdock. Her job depended on the success of her sticking powers. She would have to telephone to Tim.

  “Willows,” said Mr. Burdock, from his easy chair, “we know all about how to buy a doll, but we’re not so good at getting it home. I think I’ll have the next one sent.”

  “I would,” agreed Sally. “To the Aleutian Islands, for instance.”

  Disgustedly she rose from the bed and put in a call for Tim. When she heard his familiar voice coming to her over the wire she followed her natural instincts and spoke to him as a wife speaks to a husband—that is, as she speaks at times.

  “Oh, Tim, darling,” she called in a soft, feminine voice. “Yes, dear, of course, this is Sally. And I won’t be home to-night. No, not to-night. Don’t use such terrible language. It’s Mr. Burdock. Yes, yes, dear. Tom Burdock, a client. What’s that? A what? Oh, Tim, he’s a perfect dear. Yes, simply sweet. You understand. Will you miss me, old thing? That’s nice. Good-bye. Take care of Baby. It’s a big thing. Of course not. I don’t mean Baby.”

  When Sally turned back to Mr. Burdock he was looking a
t her with a very peculiar expression in his eyes, a mixture of fear and suspicion.

  “I always call my husband Tim,” she said rather pointlessly, becoming confused herself for a moment.

  “But I thought your name was Tim,” Tom Burdock replied.

  “That’s right,” said Sally. “We call each other Tim just for the fun of the thing.”

  It was Mr. Burdock’s turn to become confused. He scratched his mop of red hair and looked consideringly at Sally. He failed to see just where the fun of the thing came in.

  “Well,” he said at last, “I guess the best thing for us to do would be to take a little drink.” Then he suddenly elevated his voice and looked archly at Sally. “Do you drink, dear?” the great man lisped. This was followed by a roar of drunken laughter. Tom Burdock was under the impression that at the moment he was hugely amusing. Not so Sally. Quite cheerfully and without compassion she could have poisoned the man.

  Chapter 12

  Sticking to Mr. Burdock

  As the evening advanced, Sally’s opinion of Mr. Burdock was not favorably revised. The man was a cosmic consumer of strong drink. Sally would not have objected to this entirely forgivable weakness had the gentleman confined his indulgence to himself. Tom Burdock was not that way. Never had been. He insisted on others drinking. He forced vile libations on Sally. What had once eaten the enamel off bathtubs now got busily to work on the linings of their respective stomachs. They attended the performance of a play the name and meaning of which neither of them was ever able to remember. They slumbered disreputably through two acts and one intermission. Finally they were escorted to an exit by a contingent of ushers who bade them godspeed as they stood in the street wearily supporting each other while they strove to accustom their smarting eyes to the kaleidoscope of Broadway. To Sally’s way of thinking, the street had gone mad. Tom Burdock seemed to be trying to return to sleep by resting the upper half of his body on her head. Unsympathetically she moved away. Mr. Burdock followed. His mind was consumed with one idea to the exclusion of all others. He must get some sleep. For sleep he would commit every crime on the calendar and if necessary think up a few new ones. Sally was of a like mind.

  Even then all might have gone well for the ill-matched pair had not an unemployed baker by the name of Joe Clark allowed himself to be struck down by a taxicab. The collision looked more serious than it proved to be. By the time the ambulance arrived all that remained of the erstwhile baker was a battered hat. The man himself had washed his hands of the whole unpleasant incident. After roundly cursing the spot where Joe Clark had once lain, the ambulance surgeon hastened to a nearby cigar store while the driver returned to his seat and followed with hopeful eyes the frantic leaps of an elderly gentleman who seemed determined to make up for the delinquency of the baker by hurling his own frail body beneath the wheels of as many automobiles as would accept him.

  The sight of an empty and comfortably appointed ambulance presented itself to Tom Burdock as a God-given opportunity. As has already been stated, Mr. Burdock continued to act long after he had ceased to think. He did so in this instance. With the confidence born of a fixed idea he climbed into the ambulance and disappeared from sight beneath a blanket. Realizing the futility of any attempt to remove the body of the monolithic creature, Sally did the only thing left for her to do under the unprecedented circumstances. She followed him into the ambulance and sought the protection of another blanket. In the cozy darkness of the compartment Tom Burdock was chuckling like a well-disposed percolator.

  “Willows,” he said, in a subdued voice, “isn’t this great? Wonder what they’ll do when they find us in here.”

  “Quite a lot,” replied Sally. “Even more than enough.”

  “I guess they’ll do plenty,” Mr. Burdock agreed. “You’d never have thought of a thing like this.”

  “Never,” retorted Sally. “And I wish to God you hadn’t. All I can think of is the vast quantities of dead men who have from time to time occupied the same spot in which I am now lying—probably the same blanket.”

  “No doubt about it,” whispered Burdock. “I daresay this ambulance has had its fill of corpses and mangled bodies!”

  “A nice place you select for a pleasant nap,” observed Sally.

  “The way I feel,” replied Mr. Burdock, “I could sleep cheek and jowl with a corpse itself.”

  “You almost are,” breathed Sally.

  Further conversation was halted by the arrival of the surgeon. He swung himself into the back seat of the ambulance, looking back at the lights of Broadway. Gradually a peculiar sensation took possession of the man. He glanced into the body of the car and received the distinct impression that the blankets had come unrolled and were quivering as if with suppressed mirth. The possible significance of what he saw was not reassuring. Blankets that quivered of their own volition had no place in the general scheme of things. The young surgeon was not elated.

  For a long minute he sat considering the blankets with apprehensive eyes, then, opening his bag, he produced a flask which he applied to his lips. Placing the flask beside him on the bench, he returned to the objects of his contemplation. This time it seemed to him that the blankets were threatening to lose control of themselves and to become wildly hysterical. Were those strange, gurgling sounds of human origin or were his eyes and ears playing tricks on him—dirty tricks, at that? He gazed down a long street and thought of other things. He thought of an old man who had died in that ambulance the previous evening because he, the surgeon, had cynically mistaken acute starvation for sordid alcoholism. True, the old man’s breath had smelled strongly of bad whisky, but so did nine out of ten breaths along Broadway. Had the spirit of this hungry old man returned to taunt him with his neglect? The surgeon reached for his flask and was electrified to find it gone. Gurgling noises continued to issue from the blankets. Without further delay he called to the driver to stop; then he climbed up beside him. The blankets could have the entire ambulance for all he cared. Blankets that quivered were bad enough, but blankets that drank whisky were obviously out of the question. And, anyway, the investigation of occult phenomena was none of his business. He’d leave that to the cranks before he became one himself.

  “Get more fresh air up here,” he explained to the driver. “Back there the gasoline fumes from the streets are stifling.”

  “Maybe that’s what gets the best of your customers, Doc.,” suggested the driver. “Most of ‘em seem to pass out en route”

  Having no desire to be reminded of the high rate of mortality suffered by his customers, the surgeon made no comment and the drive was finished in silence.

  Four powerful attendants were awaiting the surgeon’s bidding.

  “What did you catch to-night, Doc.?” one of them inquired.

  “Look in the back and see,” replied the surgeon with simulated indifference.

  They looked in the back and saw. What they saw was in no wise startling. Since the advent of prohibition they had grown accustomed to such sights. Two well-dressed gentlemen were sleeping peacefully and comfortably on the floor of the car. Beside them was the surgeon’s flask. The surgeon, himself, unable to restrain his curiosity, and fortified by the presence of others, looked long and hatefully upon the oblivious bodies. His whisky must have been the last straw. Both Sally and Mr. Burdock had gently passed out. A look of profound trouble clouded the driver’s eyes.

  “I’ll swear to God the pair of them were born fully dressed in there,” he protested, peering over the surgeon’s shoulder. “We didn’t pick up one body, let alone two.”

  Acid bitterness then entered into the young surgeon’s soul. The ethical compulsions of his high vocation vanished from his mind. To him those two still bodies were not human. They were things to be made to suffer both physical and mental anguish. He spoke confidentially and persuasively to the attendants. Those stalwart worthies nodded with unqualified approval and did all that was required.

  Some hours thereafter Tom Burdock swam back to co
nsciousness through the alcoholic waves that were beating against his brain. He found himself cold, unreasonably and clammily cold. Removing the sheet from his head, he discovered that everything else also had been removed. “Strange,” he thought numbly, “I seem to have crawled into bed mother-naked. Wonder where Willows is.” He reached for the night lamp but was unable to find it. Then he sat up and looked about him. What he saw was not reassuring. Along the opposite wall were numerous rows of large drawers. Certainly this was not his hotel bedroom. “Might have barged into the linen closet,” he reflected, “and gone to sleep there. Damn fool thing to do.” Then in the dim light he noticed a number of slablike tables upon which sheet-draped figures were apparently sleeping the unstirring sleep of the weary.

  “I’ve got it now,” he decided. “We’re in some sort of a Turkish bath. They’ve taken all our clothes and now they’re freezing us to death.”

  He let himself down from the table and started out to search for his friend. At that moment two grey-clad figures came swinging into the room and marched up to one of the large drawers. Mr. Burdock modestly shrank down behind a table and observed a scene that was anything but happy, although his faculties were still too atrophied to comprehend the full significance of what he saw.

  The two men opened one of the drawers and snapped the body of an unpleasant-looking man into view. This they unceremoniously deposited in a basket-like arrangement.

  “Well, here’s the last of this beauty,” remarked one of the men, as if the final removal of the beauty was a pleasure that had been long deferred.

  “He’s still so full of slugs he’s as heavy as a graven image,” complained the other.

  Laying violent hands on the basket, the two grey-clad figures half dragged and half carried it through another door.