Dimples looked at me.
“It’s true,” I said. “Joyce said so a minute ago. She said they almost got her, too.”
“Almost!” Dimples said loudly. “What do you call that?” she asked, pointing to Joyce’s arm. “But what the hell do they want with Mamie? Of all the unhep dames, she is it. Why that poor, old . . .”
“Shh . . .” Gee Gee grabbed Dimples’s hand. “Did you hear something?”
It was a car stopping in front of the trailer. The door was slammed loudly. Then there was a sharp knock on the trailer.
“This is Dr. Gonzales,” a voice said. “Open the door.”
The handle was turned roughly. Then Mandy called in to us.
“Come on, open up. The doc just got here.”
I turned the key in the lock before I remembered Biff’s warning. Gee Gee must have thought of it just as I did because she pushed me aside and relocked the door. She pressed her back against it and held her hands to her chest. Her eyes were frightened.
“Biff said not to open it for anyone . . .” she murmured.
Then I remembered the car leaving the driveway, Cullucio and the doctor together late at night. I thought of the room where Mother sat and played cards, the expensive books, the leather furniture. It wasn’t the house of a small-town doctor. The draperies alone were worth more than that kind of a doctor could make in a year.
“Let ’em in, you dopes.” Dimples looked at Gee Gee and me as though we had gone mad. “You want that poor kid to die with a doctor standing right outside? Get away from that door.”
Gee Gee shook her head wildly. “He could have done it easy,” she said. “He was with us in San Diego. He’s been around every time anything’s happened. He could even have done this to Joyce. How do we know where he’s been for the last half hour?”
I suddenly realized she meant Mandy Hill! Not Dr. Gonzales, but Mandy. She was right, too. He could have . . .
“Get my asthma powder, please.” Mother stood in the doorway between the two rooms. She held her robe tightly to her throat. Her breathing was heavy and uneven. She didn’t see Joyce. “Hurry, Louise—bad attack . . .”
The Life Everlasting was on the stove. I poured a mound of it into the container top and gave Mother a towel for her head. Then I lit the powder. Mother sank weakly into a chair and buried her face under the towel. Her shoulders heaved spasmodically as she tried to get her breath. Her bare feet and ankles were moist with perspiration.
“Let me in there at once!” the doctor shouted angrily. He began pounding on the door with his fists. “This man tells me a woman’s been injured. I demand that you open this door.”
The pounding stopped. For a moment there was a silence. Then he was at the window. He tapped on it with a cane or something. The noise rang through the trailer. That window was bolted but the others at the back of the trailer were not only unlocked, they were open.
Mandy called to me from the back window of the living room. I could see the bushy hair as he stood on tiptoe to peer into the trailer. “Have you dames gone nuts or something?”
Then Gee Gee turned off the lights. “We’re a solid target here,” she said softly. “Lock those windows, Gyp. I wouldn’t let them in if they showed me a badge from LaGuardia himself.”
I almost touched Mandy’s face as I slammed down the window and bolted it. Then I ran to the other two and locked them. Even before the last one was secured, I knew we were going to suffocate. Mother’s asthma powder burned black and heavy, the air was thick with the smoke. It choked me and made my eyes tear.
“I’m leaving for Ysleta,” the doctor said. His voice was steady with fury. “I’m returning with the sheriff, and you can do your explaining to him. If that woman dies, it will be criminal negligence on the part of each and every one of you.”
The car started up, and Mandy screamed, “Hey, wait for me! I don’t want to stay here alone with those dames. They blowed their tops. I’m scared to death of ’em.”
I heard him walk around to the front of the trailer, then silence. I felt around in the dark for the bed. Then I sat on the edge of it. Mother’s wheezing was the only sound in the trailer, the only sound in the night. I smelled Dimples’s cloying perfume as she sat down next to me.
“Where in hell is this damned business going to end?” she said. “Here we are, cooped up in this trailer with Mandy outside alone. We leave him out there because we think he’s the murderer, but what’s to stop him from thinking the same about one of us? Gee Gee, for instance, could be the murderer for all I know. Or Joyce. She could have stabbed herself or something to throw suspicion away from him. Biff even, or Evangie, or you . . .”
“Or you,” I said slowly.
Dimples waited a moment before she spoke. Her voice was husky when she said, “Sure, even me.”
The rain fell softly at first, then it pounded on the trailer roof like buckshot. Gee Gee went to the back window and unlocked it.
“I can’t stand it any longer,” she said irritably. “If I gotta go, I don’t want it to be by smothering to death. Anyway, if we can’t handle one murderer between all of us and a gun, we deserve to get knocked off.”
No one tried to stop her as she opened the window. The gust of air and rain that poured through the trailer was more important at that moment than all the murderers in the world. I fumbled for the matches and lit the lamp. Then I turned on the lights.
In the yellow glow I saw Mandy’s fuzzy head framed in the open window. The rain made his hair kinkier, and it stood up straight from his forehead. The window sill covered all his face, all but the eyes; they were wide and staring. Staring at Dimples.
She held the gun in her hand. Not as I had held it, but the right way, and she had it pointed straight at Mandy.
“Don’t move,” she said evenly.
Mandy didn’t move. His mouth sagged a little, otherwise he was motionless. Dimples didn’t take her eyes from the open window. “Open that door, Gyp,” she snapped. “I want to talk over a few things with this guy.”
I didn’t move. I couldn’t.
Dimples’s steady hand on the gun was wet with sweat. Her eyes had become pin points. “Let him in,” she said.
Then Mandy moved. His head disappeared, and there was a scurry of feet and a sloshing sound of his shoes sliding through the fresh mud.
Dimples turned to the door and threw it open. “Get in here, you,” she shouted.
“The hell I will,” Mandy screamed. His voice sounded far away.
Dimples stood swearing into the darkness through the open doorway with the rain beating against her thin kimono. The marabou clung wetly to her white cheeks, splotches of bluish red stained her neck and began traveling up her face. She swallowed painfully. Then her chin shook. The strap fell loose and the gun dropped from her fingers. A second later she followed the gun. Her body made a soggy noise as it sank to the floor. She looked soggy, too, as she lay there.
Gee Gee and I lifted her onto the daybed, and Mother poured out some water. The monkey, in his cage at the foot of the bed, grabbed out at Dimples’s kimono and Mother slapped his hand. He shrieked with anger. Then the dogs began barking. Mother ignored them as she poured the water on Dimples’s face.
“She just fainted,” Mother said.
Gee Gee lifted Dimples’s head and opened her eye gently. The pupil was gone. Nothing showed but a white round thing; white with thin veins of red lining it. Gee Gee looked up at Mother, then at me.
“I think she’s been doped or something,” she said hoarsely.
The dogs stopped barking as though they knew what Gee Gee had said. Bill’s ears dropped and he slunk away.
“Look at how strained her face is,” Gee Gee said. “Look at that funny color around her neck. Fainting doesn’t do that.”
Mother looked down at Dimples. Her asthma attack was wearing away, but she still breathed heavily.
“Who could have doped her though?” she said almost to herself. “She didn’t eat anything we didn�
�t eat. She didn’t drink anything but that liquor . . .”
Dimples opened her eyes. “Gimme a drink,” she said faintly.
“That’s the wrong dialogue,” Gee Gee said. “You shoulda said, ‘Where am I?’”
Dimples tried to sit up. Then she fell back on the pillow. “Look I paid five bucks for a bottle,” she complained weakly. “Just because the guy didn’t deliver it is no reason my intentions weren’t right.”
By the time Gee Gee had poured out the water, Dimples was in another coma. Saliva dripped from the side of her mouth, and Gee Gee wiped it away with a Kleenex.
“Do you feel all right, Gyp?” Gee Gee asked a moment later.
“I think so,” I said. “The air was making me dizzy for awhile, but I feel better now. Why?”
“Because I felt funny, too,” Gee Gee said, “You know, Gyp, I think that liquor was doped!”
I was too surprised to hear the car drive up. The first I knew about it was when Biff burst into the room.
“Hey, I thought I told you to keep this door locked,” he said. He wasn’t angry, though. I knew why when I saw the familiar bulge of a bottle in his hip pocket. He started for the bedroom. Then he saw Dimples. She was still unconscious.
Dr. Gonzales followed Biff into the trailer. He leaned over Dimples and, taking her wrist in his hand, waited quietly for a second. Then he looked up.
“What’s the meaning of this?” he said.
Gee Gee shrugged her shoulders helplessly. “Don’t ask me,” she said. “All of a sudden she just konked off, funnylike. Gyp and I carried her over to the bed and after awhile she came to, then she went out again. I thought maybe she’d been doped.”
“What made you think that?” the doctor asked.
“Well, Gyp felt dizzy and I felt sorta funny, too, not so much dizzy as silly. My hands got numblike, and I saw things. Then, when I lifted Dimples’s eyelid and saw the whiteness, I was pretty sure.”
Dimples opened her eyes then. She raised herself up on her elbow and stared outside the room. “What hit me?” she said. “I can’t get my breath. I’m all choked up . . .”
Mother went into action. She grabbed the box of Life Everlasting and poured a mound in the container top.
“Here, this will fix that. It makes my head clear right away . . .”
Mother touched a match to the powder and waited for the flame to die down before she reached for the towel.
Biff had been watching her. His mouth fell open and he pounded his fist on the stove top.
“That’s it!” he shouted. “Why didn’t I think of it before? Of course that’s the best place in the world to hide it!”
Biff snatched the asthma powder from Mother and shoved it toward the doctor.
“Can you tell what’s mixed up in this stuff?” he asked. “I mean can you tell if it’s all asthma powder or if something else is in it?”
The doctor took the container from Biff and put it into his pocket. “I’ll have to analyze it,” he said.
“The hell you do,” Biff said quickly. “I see it all now. Every time Evangie had an attack she inhaled it, she went a little nuts. It was the logical place to hide the dope. Nobody would think to look through a can of asthma powder for another kind of powder. Why I didn’t think of it before is beyond me.”
“You think that’s what happened to me?” Dimples asked.
“Sure,” Biff said with assurance. “I smelled the stuff the second I walked into the trailer. You must have gotten a couple good whiffs and, in your weakened, high-strung condition, you were just ripe for it.”
Dimples liked the remarks about her condition.
“Matter of fact,” she said, “I am run-down . . .”
She would have gone through a list of ailments if Biff and the doctor hadn’t left to see Joyce. Gee Gee waited until they closed the door. Then she eyed the bottle.
“You know,” she said, “even now, when I knew there’s no dope in that rye, I still don’t want a drink. I can’t understand it, I don’t want a drink!”
“Maybe you’re cured of the habit,” Mother said. “My sister married a man who took the Keeley cure, and believe it or not . . .”
Biff opened the bedroom door and came into the sitting room.
“Is Joyce all right?” Gee Gee asked.
Biff nodded. “Yeah, it’s only a scratch. She bled a lot and she’ll be a little weak for a while, but the doc’s taking her into town so she’ll get some rest. He just gave her a shot of something now to make her sleep, an opiate.”
The doctor called to Biff. “Put on some water to boil. I have to clean this up a bit.”
We crowded around the door as the doctor spoke.
“Are you positive she’s all right?” Dimples asked.
“Positive,” the doctor replied. “This won’t even leave a scar.”
Joyce stirred. She opened her eyes and stared at the doctor.
“Honest to Gawd?” she asked.
Opiate or no opiate, I thought, when you mention scars to strip teasers, they all come to.
“Honest,” the doctor said softly.
Joyce fell back on the pillow with a happy smile on her face.
23BIFF CLOSED THE BEDROOM DOOR. WITH A contented sigh he settled into the most comfortable chair in the trailer. Not because he was selfish, but because he was the man of the house and he wanted to look it. He wanted his womenfolk sitting around waiting patiently for the words to fall. His picture would have been complete had one of us placed his slippers at his feet.
Gee Gee climbed over his stretched-out legs and found a place on the bed next to Dimples. Mother, still a little wheezy, sat stiffly in a chair near the door. I stood beside the stove. Not because the bottle was there, but because I wasn’t in a sitting mood.
Our man of the house, being a comic, took his own sweet time in getting to the point. He pulled a cigar from his pocket and smelled it lovingly. As though that wasn’t bad enough, he had to touch a match to it.
“White Owl,” he said comfortably. “Smell the feathers burning?”
We laughed politely. It was an effort, but we made it. Then there was another long silence.
“Would you like a little entrance music?” I asked finally. “Maybe eight bars of “Happy Days Are Here Again,” as played on a comb?”
Silence. Nothing but the odor of burning feathers and Mother’s wheezing to fill the air.
“Perhaps you’d rather go into the act cold?”
“If,” Biff said with Theatre Guild enunciation, “you will allow everything in its chronological order and not make with the throat, I will name for you the murderer.”
Naturally I was insulted. The offstage dialogue about my throat had become a bit tiresome during the past few days. Biff was rather overdoing the act of Provider, too. But I was more curious than insulted, so I kept quiet. I did kick off my shoes, light a cigarette, and pour myself a drink. It was obvious that we were in for a session.
Biff began modestly enough: “I don’t know if you gals know just what kind of mental guy is sitting here talking to you. You got me pegged as a funny man. A man who makes with the stale jokes. What you overlook is that I am a guy who just found himself a murderer. I mean a murderer of the first water. Not somebody who lost their temper and skewered with an ice pick. Not a murderer who didn’t-know-it-was-loaded, but a scheming, conniving murderer. I am not one to brag, but, I, Biff Brannigan, alone, unabetted, unaided, in fact, hampered by the police, have solved the case of Evangie’s body!”
“My body!” Mother shrieked. “I’ll have you remember that I had absolutely nothing to do with that corpse. Nothing besides burying it and that is what any mother would have done. Any mother with true feelings. Any mother with a grain of love for her daughter.”
Mother had risen to her feet on that speech, and as she stood, one hand pressing against the side of the trailer, the other over her heart, she looked a little like Joan of Arc. She knew it too. She glanced around to see if the girls could get a good v
iew. They could. Mother lapsed into an asthmatic satisfied silence.
“Yes,” Biff said above the wheezing, “I know the murderer of a man named Gus. The murderer of Corny. The murderer of the second body. His name was Jones, incidentally. Ain’t that a hellova name for a corpse? Jones! If you saw it on a hotel register you’d swear it was a gag. Mr. and Mrs. Jones—”
“I knew a Mr. and Mrs. Jones once,” Mother said. “They lived next door to us in Seattle. He was a railroad man. A conductor on the Yessler Way cable car. His wife was a funny little woman, too. Three children, or was it four? I sort of remember a boy—Joe, no I think it was George—”
“I know all of this because of a little brush fire,” Biff said when Mother stopped to think of the Jones’s first names. “Everybody saw that fire. They could be in my shoes right this minute, but no! It was left to me, a burlesque comic—”
“And not too comical at this sitting,” Gee Gee said. “The only funny thing is the gag about the shoes. Who in the hell’d want to be in those Juliets?”
“If you will leave my sartorial effects out of this I will go on,” Biff said. “That is if you don’t mind too kindly.”
Biff wasn’t annoyed, but I could see that one more crack would do it. I couldn’t control Mother but I did give Gee Gee the eye. Biff waited until the eye talk was over.
“Yep, it was left to a comic to discover the weak point in an otherwise clever scheme to rob, plunder, kill, murder—”
“Nuts!” Gee Gee said. She reached for the bottle and tilted it to her lips. She gulped it daintily.
“You’ll never be able to top the opening of this dialogue brother,” she said. “Are you going to get to the blackout or is to be continued in this theater next week? Here we sit, the four of us, waiting for you to tell us something, and all you do is make words. Put ’em together! Answer me one quick question: have they got Cullucio? Yes or no? No gestures, no buildup, just a nice short yes or no!”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, they got him. But first I would like to tell you how and why. I will have to go back—”
“I wish to hell you’d go way back,” Gee Gee muttered.
Mother Finds a Body Page 19