The Third Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 25 Classic Mysteries
- Автор: Пауэлл Тэлмидж
- Год: 2020
- Язык: английский
- Год: Wildside Press LLC
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Third Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 25 Classic Mysteries». Краткое содержание книги:
“What is it?” he snarled through the open bathroom doorway.
The maid’s voice drifted from the hallway: “Mr. Crabtree, Mrs. Harper wants to talk to you.”
Eddie slammed the glass into its porcelain holder and glared at himself in the medicine cabinet mirror. Sucker... you’ll probably pop off with a bleeding ulcer long before she ever again thinks of dying...
Aunt Crabby was reposing on a white chaise lounge near the tall, gossamer-curtained windows when Eddie entered her room. She dropped the book she was reading, smiled at him. “Thank you for coming so quickly, Edward. I excused Miss Mayberry. I wanted us to have a chat, just the two of us.”
From long habit, Eddie’s face was a bland, myopic mask. Only a tremor in the jaw muscle suggested a gritting of teeth.
She studied him as he shuffled forward, his bony shoulders slightly stooped. A glow of compassion softened her brown eyes. “You poor boy, the lines in that dear little pale face are my doing, aren’t they?”
She held up a slender hand as Eddie started to speak.
“No, dear. You don’t have to fib to me.” She drew a breath. “Don’t forget, I’ve had weeks in which to think, about myself, other people, life, the really important things. Did you know there’s no place quite like a hospital to do some heavy thinking?”
She reached out to pat the arm of the nearby boudoir chair. The gesture was quick and lively. One thing for sure, the restoration of life — in the midst of certain death — seemed to have peeled the years from her. It was hard to look at the almost youthful glow of her face and imagine the drawn, vulturous visage that had entered the hospital.
“Please sit down, Eddie. Bear with me for a moment. What I have to say isn’t easy.”
“Aunt Violetta...”
“No, Eddie. Don’t try to gloss it over. I know what a real shrew I’ve been.” A smile trembled in the dainty oval face. “Vixen. Harridan. Old witch. I made life perfectly dreadful for all those around me. I repaid kindness with ire, compassion with wrath. But I was lost, Eddie. Nothing was real to me except suffering and the darkness of death. I know now that I was lashing out...”
She drew a breath. “Yes, just lashing out.”
Staring at her, Eddie eased to the edge of the boudoir chair.
“But Dr. Picard... the new heart...” Her solemn eyes sought his face. “What I’m trying to say is that the old heart, Eddie, and all the vile rancor that stemmed from it are gone. I can’t go back and undo the meanness of the old witch that I became. So we must let her rest in peace, mustn’t we?
Eddie glanced away, hating the vitality of her. “Why not?”
“I knew I could count on your kindness and understanding!” She sat up, a fire of excitement building in her eyes. “I want to start writing on the new page of life with a little act of repayment, Eddie. My new heart has given me faith and hope. Now it behooves me to express charity.”
Eddie held his breath. Was she actually going to do something decent for him?
Then the burning sensation began to spread throughout his insides as he heard her intention, this big deal she’d dreamed up in the hospital.
“This boy whose heart beats at this moment within my own breast...” she was saying. “This Spades Dutcher... I had a hospital orderly make inquiries on his days off, Eddie.”
“But I didn’t know you were...” Eddie burst out.
She cut him off with a pat on his hand. “Yes, you would have tackled the chore, had I asked. I know that. But you’d have stuck out like a little green man from Mars in that poor, ghetto neighborhood. No one would have told you anything.”
“And what did this accepted individual, this hospital orderly, learn on his days off?” Eddie asked stiffly.
“Much that I’ll remember always,” Aunt Crabby gazed thoughtfully at the sunny window for a moment. Then her eyes gradually re-focused on Eddie.
“Never mind all the little details,” she sighed. “You need only the highlights for your chore.”
“Chore, Aunt Violetta?”
“Yes, dear. That’s what I’m getting to. The boy, Spades Dutcher, had so little. Broken home. Lack of education. All that. Yet he left me so much. He also left a poor old mother who lives all alone.”
Eddie stared at Aunt Crabby blankly. She caught the look and smiled wryly.
“Yes, Eddie,” she nodded. “The old Violetta Crabtree Harper, wrapped in her own troubled self, wouldn’t have cared two pins about Mrs. Dutcher. She was just a signature on the legal papers necessary for the transplant, obtainable at the cheapest price possible. But now she is a person, Eddie. And I want to do something for her. Something lasting, for the memory of her son.”
Aunt Crabby pointed toward her dressing table. “You’ll find her address written on the pad there, Eddie. Go to this poor woman. Tell her that my bankers will arrange for her to draw on a small but adequate account monthly, for so long as she lives. The bank will advise her the details later. But hurry now, with the good news! She need never be cold or hungry again.”
Eddie groped with a feeling of blindness to the dressing table. He ripped the top sheet from the waiting pad. He was tempted to turn and stuff the address down Aunt Crabby’s throat. She’d do a kindness for a stranger — but for him... nothing. She’d had a change of heart, all right. She was a worse creep than ever!
Eddie expected to find a pitiful, malnourished, rickety scarecrow of the slums. Instead, meeting Mrs. George Dutcher was something of a shock. She lived in a two-room walkup in a scabby, century-old brick building. Eddie parked the Continental at the trash littered curbing, and it was the immediate center of a gang of ragged, fearsome looking kids. Eddie didn’t dare open the door until a beat cop came up.
Eddie thumbed the button that opened the electrically-operated window, thrust his head out of the car, and explained to the cop that he had important business upstairs.
“Better make it snappy,” the cop said. “I can’t keep an eye on the heap all day, and if I didn’t you wouldn’t have even a sparkplug left when you come out.
Eddie nerved himself, dashed across the sidewalk, and scurried up the dark, stinking stairway. His stomach was a bubbling cauldron of hydrochloric acid by the time he reached the fourth floor, sought out a rusty number hanging by one tack, and knocked on the door.
A big woman in a greasy wrapper opened the door. She had a bulbous, liverish colored face and the frizzled ragtags of hair that perhaps in a dim and forgotten past had been a rather luxuriant dark blonde.
“Yeah?” she snarled. “If you’re a bill collector, beat it. I’m broke.”
“No, M’am.” Eddie gulped. He fought the urge to hold his nose. The woman’s breath was coming on like a lion with a three-day muscatel hangover. “I mean, are you Mrs. George Dutcher?”
“So what if I am?”
“My name is Edward Crabtree.” He glanced up and down the gloomy hallway where wooden lathes showed here and there like gaunt ribs exposed by fallen plaster. “Could we talk — briefly — inside?”
“What about?”
“Doesn’t my name — Crabtree — mean anything to you?”
“Can’t say that it does.”
“How about Harper? Mrs. Violetta Crabtree Harper?”
Came the dawning of knowledge to the wine-soaked gray eyes in their folds of greasy fat. “Sure — Harper... The woman who got my son’s heart — for a lousy hundred bucks.”
“It’s about the stipend that I want to talk to you, Mrs. Dutcher.”
“The what?”
“Money.”
“Well, why’n’cha say so! Come in.” She jerked the door wide.