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:
A feeling of faintness smote Eddie when he entered a dark hole furnished with a sway-backed bed carelessly covered with dirty linens, a broken-down washstand, and a sofa with gray stuffing spilling from rents in its filth-greased arms. He glimpsed the adjoining kitchen, where swarming flies battled with a colony of marching cockroaches over a table littered with tin cans, dirty dishes and wine bottles.
“I told Spades he was going to get in trouble fooling with them gangs.” Mrs. Dutcher shoved several tattered confession magazines aside to make room for Eddie to sit down. Crossing the room to turn off the battered, snow-blurred TV set, she added, “Like a good mother should, I warned him. Did my duty, I did. Think it helped, changed anything? Not a bit, it didn’t. He was down there in the next block — it’s all colored — busting windows with the best of them the night the riot happened. Some excitement around here for awhile, I tell you! Six big buildings going up in smoke. People running around like crazy. Say, don’t you want to sit down, Mr. Crabtree?”
“Well, I... what I have to say won’t take long.”
“If it’s about money, let’s get on with it. It’s high time I was getting a break. Never had one. Like Spades, my poor boy. Running across the street, he was, when some joker tossed that hunk of busted cement from the roof of the building. Spades and the brickbat... they both picked the same spot on the street at the same second. Knocked a hole right in his skull.” Her head moved slowly from side to side. The watery content of her eyes overflowed a trifle. Her huge, pulpy chin snapped up. “And where the hell was the pigs, the lousy cops? They’re always there to kick you in the teeth, but how come they couldn’t stop somebody from busting my poor Spades in the head!”
The lumpy sofa sagged a few inches further as her ample bottom dropped onto it. She sat there for a moment, raising a thick-fingered hand to knuckle moisture from her eyes. “Anyhow, guess you ain’t here to talk about all that. You know the rest. Spades was taken to the hospital, and he was dying sure enough, and this doctor tells me he’s got a waiting list a yard long of patients who need and want new hearts real bad.” She squinted up at Eddie. “And this lady what sent you is the one got Spades’s.”
“That’s why the bank will be in touch, Mrs. Dutcher. You won’t move into the Hilton by any stretch of the imagination, but neither will you have to worry about beans or a roof.”
“It’s hard to believe... hard to believe.” She shook her head. Gradually, she became very still, staring at a crack in the floor.
The moments passed. Eddie cleared his throat in twitchy discomfort.
“I don’t want you telling George about this,” she muttered, not looking up.
“What?”
“George, my husband.”
His eyes popped behind the heavy glasses. “A husband? I thought you were a widow.”
“Might as well be.” She wiped her nose with the back of a forefinger. “If you’re worried about them legal papers I signed for the doctor, don’t. I told the doctor about George. I guess he just didn’t bother to tell you. George can’t sign no papers, no-how, him being out in the state run loony bin.”
“I’m sorry,” Eddie said.
“Sure, I know. But it’s all right. George had his day, he did. Two-hundred and thirteen fights. He fought in every tanktown ring from Maine to Miami. Ring Magazine even mentioned him once. Great days, those, Mr. Crabtree. George paid down on a real fur coat for me one time and I got to wear it nearly the whole winter before the finance company nailed us in Greensboro, North Carolina.”
Her sigh was heavy. “Last fight... George couldn’t stand the bees buzzing in his head no more. Couldn’t hear nothing else. Kept right on fighting after the bell ended the fourth. Liked to have killed the other fighter, and the referee, and the two cops it took to drag him out of the ring.
She looked toward the kitchen, probing the wine bottles. “George is all right most of the time, Mr. Crabtree. They let him walk around the grounds when the keepers are watching, and even have company. But sometimes it don’t take much to tee George off, real bad. So just let him be. He’s real happy where he is, and he might get a crazy idea if he learned I come into a little money.”
Eddie’s silence, his very stillness, drew her attention from the wine bottles. She began to frown as she looked at him. She stood up slowly. “Something wrong, Mr. Crabtree?”
“Wrong?” He looked at her, starry-eyed. His happy laugh burst against the scaly walls. “Mrs. Dutcher, you’re a source of sheer inspiration, no less! I’ve never enjoyed meeting anyone so much in all my life!” As if quite out of his senses, he reached and gave her repulsive hulk a quick hug.
As he turned and dashed for the doorway, she lunged after him. “Hey, about the money...”
“The bank will be in touch.” He threw the words over his shoulder as he disappeared in the stairwell.
A big man with iron gray hair and a creased face as patient looking as a hound’s, the white-coated warder strolled the grounds of the state mental hospital keeping an eye on his charges. It was a lovely afternoon, very quiet and peaceful. Little Miss Quackenbush was quietly reading the same thin volume of poetry over and over as she strolled about the walkways bisecting the green lawns. Mr. Heaterly was quietly leaning against the trunk of a huge oak tree discussing the market situation with an invisible broker; Mr. Heaterly’s short-circuited brain had arranged for that black market day in 1929 to be always in a non-existent tomorrow.
The warder glanced toward the long wings of the brick buildings that were beginning to cast shadows over the lawns. Just about time to herd them in, see that they didn’t try to eat their spoons for dinner, and tuck them in for the night.
The warder yawned, stretched, and then lowered his arms slowly. He mused on the pair of men sitting on the low stone bench near the splashing fountain.
Now don’t it take the cake? The warder’s head moved in a wry shake. All this time everybody had thought George Dutcher was nothing more than a beat-up, punch-drunk ex-pug. Then this skinny young guy wearing the heavy glasses comes swooping up in a snazzy Continental. Says he’s a cousin from a distant branch of the family. Been in Europe a long time. Tried to look up George and was shocked to find him out here. Wants to see the old boy. Maybe arrange for him to enter a private sanitarium. After all, says the young fellow, one doesn’t like to think of one’s family being in a public institution, does one?
George hadn’t remembered his visitor at all. That wasn’t surprising. Sometimes George Dutcher remembered things in detail that had happened twenty years ago. Simple unimportant things that most people couldn’t have recalled at all. Then, in the next second George might forget what had happened five minutes ago.
Anyway, the young guy had been pleasant and easy and patient with George. That was good. The visit should be fine for George.
“...He’s watching us,” Eddie said softly, his face close to George Dutcher’s frightfully lumpy visage. “The big man with the iron gray hair.”
“I’ll break ’im in two!” George graveled.
Eddie quickly laid his hand on the hairy mitt that was curling into a fist. “No, no, George! Don’t even look around. He’ll suspect. He’s the warder, remember, and we don’t want anybody to suspect, do we?”
George’s elephantine shoulders relaxed. His hands, twisted and misshapen from bone and tendon breakage, slowly uncurled. He sat hunched, popping his knuckles in his lap. “Nah! Nobody. Just me and you, pally. And thanks for coming out and giving me the tip.”
“You sure you got it all?” Eddie said. “You won’t forget? Her name? Where she lives? How to get to her house?”
“I won’t fergit nuttin!”