The Cocktail Waitress (25 page)

“I love
you,
Earl.”

I said it without a hitch in my voice this time, without hesitating, and without, I hoped, Tad’s look of fear in my eyes.

“Maybe so,” he said, “in your own way. At least I do know you don’t wish me dead, as if you did you’ve had plenty of opportunity to let me die, last night included. But still and all—” He waved back in the direction of the bank. “… I’m glad to get this done. Now you have every bit as much with me alive as you’d have with me gone.”

“Please don’t talk like that.”

“I just don’t ever want it to be an issue, in your mind or anyone else’s.”

That night, he was as I wanted him to be, quiet, courteous, and not demanding, physically, I mean. We watched television, and when I, very nervous about it, said I wanted to go to bed, he patted me,
kissed me, and took me upstairs, but made no attempt to follow me into my room, and didn’t knock after I turned in. What a relief! At last I could sleep without fear sleeping with me. In the morning he came in and kissed me, I being still in bed, then drove off to work with Jasper. In the afternoon he came home, changed his clothes for his walk, set out for the Garden, and returned without incident.

That evening was another like the one before, and likewise the one after that. Next evening, however, things weren’t the same, even a little bit. He took his walk as usual, came home, and kissed me, but in a queer, guilty way, and at once went upstairs, asking me to stay off the phone so he could make a call. Then when dinner was served he didn’t come down. I went up, knocked on his door, and pushed it open, and found him sitting with his intravenous mechanism attached, the rubber tubing feeding his medicine from an elevated bottle into his arm. He started, looking embarrassed, almost as if he’d been caught at something, which was silly, since I knew he was taking the treatments and he knew I knew. I said nothing about it, just informed him that dinner was on the table, and he said he didn’t want any— “not just yet anyway.” It was an odd way of putting it, as though he was hungry but was putting off food for some reason. He didn’t look at me, and I went down, had dinner myself, and tried to figure it out, with no success. I was in the drawing room later when the doorbell rang. No one was due that I knew of, and I had a sudden feeling about it. “I’ll take it,” I called to Myra, who had started for the door to answer it.

When I opened, a girl was there, in a sort of nurse’s uniform, a coat over her shoulders, a cab in the drive behind her. She blinked, then said: “… If you’re the housekeeper, I’m Bella, calling on Mr. White.”

I confess I felt rocked down to my feet. She was here at my suggestion, no doubt about that, but actually to see her, with her cab
waiting outside, set my head to spinning around. “Oh yes,” I said, “I think Mr. White is expecting you—come in, please.”

She did, and I got my bag from the drawing room, went out and paid off the cab—twelve dollars and something. I gave him fifteen, then went back inside. Running upstairs I knocked on Earl’s door and called: “Earl?
Company!”

I guess I did it with malice, at least a little bit, as someone had told me once that that’s what a madam calls when a visitor comes—“Girls! Company!” Anyway, I beckoned her up, showed her the door to knock on, and went down. When I heard it open and close, I went to the kitchen and told Araminta, “Mr. White has a visitor. He’s not to be disturbed, but if anything happens—if he has an attack—you can reach me at this number.” I wrote the Garden number on her kitchen memo pad. To make sure she understood, I asked her: “You understand about his attacks?”

“You mean the pain he gets in the chest?”

“That’s it. Let me know,
at once.
You can give him his pills if he needs them, but don’t call anyone else, even the doctor, till I get here. It’ll take me no more than ten minutes.”

“Yes, Mrs. White. I got it.”

She looked at me very oddly, but I felt warmth under the squint, and felt things would be under control. Then I put on my coat, got out my car and drove down to the Garden.

It was a Friday in early November, with the hatcheck open again, the first time in months, as of course in summer no hats are worn, or coats, or anything checkable, and October had still been warm. A new girl was on the booth that I didn’t know, but it’s where the phone was and I had to depend on her. I gave her a buck and when I told her my name she knew who I was, and was quite excited at meeting me. I guess I was known as the girl who’d made good. I told her: “I’m expecting a call, a very important call, and I’ll be in the bar. Don’t fail
me please. I may be helping Liz, so if you don’t see me, tell her.”

“You can depend on me, Mrs. White.”

“Joan.”

Liz first seated me at the bar between two other customers, then moved me to my regular little table when it opened up. I didn’t really expect any call, and was happily losing myself in helping her with her orders when something touched my arm, and when I turned it was the new hatcheck girl. “Call for you, Joan. Woman says it’s important.”

It was Araminta: “Get out here, Miss Joan—it’s hit him. He’s bad off this time—real bad.”

I parked the car out front, and she had the door open by the time I jumped out. I went in and upstairs. Myra was there, in a chair by the bed, and Earl was there, under the covers with no clothes on, judging by the pile strewn on the floor, pants, shirt, underwear and all. Beside it was a dainty lace brassiere, left behind by its owner in her hurry to exit.

He was holding his chest and had his eyes tightly shut, but when he heard me enter he forced them open. “Thank God you’re here, Joan,” he groaned, each word coming at a great cost. “This is it—you win.”

“Win?
Win?”

“You were right, I’m trying to say.”

I told Myra: “O.K.—you’ve done the right thing, all of you. Now—”

“Let me know if you need me, Miss Joan.”

She went and I asked: “The girl left you like this?”

“… I told her, go. She was scared.”

I saw the pill bottle lying on its side on the bed, empty. “The medicine didn’t help?”

“Not this time. This time’s the end, I can feel it. You—win.”

“Will you please stop saying
I win?
If it turns out the way you say, I’m the biggest loser of all time.”

“It
will
turn out that way. It’s not only the pain this time—I can’t get my breath—a new twist. It can’t go on. If I’d only listened to you—”

“Stop it. Stop it.” I had the phone in hand and looked up Dr. Cord’s number in the book beside it. There were two numbers, one with an ‘H’ alongside, which I took to mean it was his home; when you’re rich enough, and I suppose sick enough, I guess your doctor gives you his home number to call him day or night. Sure enough, Dr. Cord picked up at home, and before I got through a sentence of explanation he said he’d be over at once. When I returned to Earl’s side, he looked worse, his jaw clenched against the pain. Through it he said: “I heard you—beat a guy up once—at the Garden.”

“… I certainly did beat him up.”

“For—trying something with you.”

“Yes.”

“If you’d only—beat me up. Just once. If you’d beat some sense in my head.”

For a couple of minutes then he didn’t say anything, and I didn’t either, just watched him struggle to get air and held onto his hand. He let out a little whimper.

“It’s my fault,” I said. “This whole thing was my idea, I thought you’d be safer here—”

“No. Not—your idea.”

“I was the one told you to call her.”

“I had the idea—weeks—before you popped it out. It was so crazy —couldn’t make myself say it. But I had it. Joan, listen—there’s one thing still unsaid.”

“Yes, Earl. What?”

He raised up on one elbow to say it, but what it was I didn’t find out and don’t know to this day. When he fell back he was gone, and at
that moment a man walked in that I’d never seen, who I realized was Dr. Cord. I told him: “Thanks for coming, Doctor. However, I think you’re too late.”

He went over to Earl and felt for a pulse, and finding none let Earl’s arm gently down. “He was long overdue, Mrs. White.”

He began with the death certificate, then interrupted to call the police, “so there can’t be any question,” and then turned to me and said: “He probably didn’t mention it, but I tried to tell him that marriage could well be fatal. I was upset when I saw the news in the paper, that he had wed—”

But I cut in to say: “He told me everything, especially what you said, and we got married anyhow. He knew the risk, I begged him to remember it, but he wanted a normal life.”

Dr. Cord looked me over then, in a way that was all too familiar to me—Sergeant Young had done it, and the lawyer, Eckert; Tom had done it, and Lacey, and Luke Goss, and plenty of other customers at the bar; all sorts of men had, hundreds probably, since I turned twelve and first began developing a woman’s figure. At the job I’d invited it, I suppose, what with my uniform putting my legs and my bust on display, but there was nothing inviting it here, in my husband’s bedroom, with his body not ten feet away, and
my
body in nothing revealing or alluring at all. But Dr. Cord, perhaps used to dead bodies in his line of work and so not deterred by Earl’s, looked me over all the same. I felt tears come then, if only tears of rage, of frustration.

“Earl was certainly entitled to a normal life,” Dr. Cord said, “but I’m not so certain that’s what he had.” He gestured in the direction of the intravenous chelation equipment, still standing by the armchair in the corner, hypodermics for the vitamin injections lined up on the shelf behind. Then he bent and picked up the brassiere between the
tips of his second and third fingers, like something unclean. “This is a lovely piece of lingerie, Mrs. White, but unless I’m mistaken, at least two sizes too small for you to be its owner.” I snatched it from him and jammed it in the pocket of my jacket.

He went on: “The police will be here momentarily, but it needn’t be anything but a routine matter for them. I’ll let them know of Earl’s medical history, his prior attacks. They won’t even perform an autopsy if I do that. They won’t see any reason to. Assuming…”

“Assuming?”

“Assuming I don’t tell them about the article of clothing in your pocket.” He walked over to the chair and lifted the empty bottle from its hook. “About medical treatments I didn’t sanction. They might do an autopsy then. I really don’t think I need to tell them, though. As a favor to Earl, rest his soul. He deserves better than to have his good name tarnished by a scandal in the papers. There isn’t a man, alive or dead, who can’t use a favor now and again.”

I knew then what he thought me, what he thought I’d been to Earl —something like what Bella had been, only better paid.

“You go ahead and tell them,” I snapped. “Tell them anything you want, everything you want. I have nothing to cover up. Nothing.”

“Mrs. White—”

“I don’t want any favors. I don’t offer them, either, not the sort you mean. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself asking …?”

I heard footsteps in the hallway then, and the sound of the door opening behind me. Looking over my shoulder Dr. Cord stood up straighter, which told me it was the police. I didn’t know how much of what we’d been saying they might have heard, but I at least hadn’t been quiet. I only prayed that when I turned I’d see faces I’d never seen before.

Like so many of my prayers before it, this one went unanswered.

“If you could step aside, doctor, and put that bottle down,” said Private Church, “we’d appreciate it.”

*

They were neither of them in uniform, Church or Young, both looking as though they’d been rung up in the middle of an evening at home and had rushed over when they heard my name. It made me anxious—while once again I’d done nothing to answer for, it looked bad that here I was with a second dead husband on my hands.

Dr. Cord gave them the full report he’d threatened and I found myself having to explain the brassiere in my pocket, and the chelation, and pretty soon the whole story had come out. Only I didn’t tell them that it had been my idea for Earl to call Bella, since after all he’d said he’d had the same idea himself, hadn’t he? Nor did I know Bella’s name, or the Kitty-Cat’s, I was sorry to say. I’d simply received the call at the Garden and come running, much as they had, to find the room as they saw it and my husband on the verge of dying. It was the truth, with only a small lie attached, and not one of any consequence, merely one that spared me a measure of embarrassment.

“Why did you pick up the other woman’s clothing?” asked Private Church, his voice neutral as ever, but his meaning much less so.

“The doctor picked it up, not me. He handed it to me. Said he wouldn’t want Earl to suffer from a scandal.”

The doctor had gone home by them, leaving behind the completed death certificate and a general air of having washed his hands of us all—Earl, me, the police, everyone. His patient was dead. His job was done.

“And who was she?”

I shrugged. “I gather there are women around this town, as around any, that will take money for intimate acts. Men know where to find them, somehow.”

Sergeant Young was looking at me with grave sympathy in his eyes, or so I thought. It was Church, however, junior partner or not, that was leading the grilling, and I saw that his zeal for pinning something
on me had not ended with the exhumation of Ron’s body, but had merely gone into hibernation, or what they call remission if you have had cancer. The danger never wholly goes away, it merely sleeps for a time.

“We’re going to have to take some of these things back with us, have our laboratory men inspect them. And we
will
do an autopsy.”

“… Do what you must.”

“You could save us some time if you’d tell us now of anything we’re going to find when we do.”

“You’d have to talk to Dr. Jameson about that—he’s the one set all this up, the treatment Earl was on, the chemicals.”

“Then why did you call Dr. Cord when your husband needed help? Rather than Dr. Jameson?”

I waved a hand at the equipment. “Because I didn’t trust it, any of this. I told Earl I didn’t. Dr. Cord was the one warned him of the risk, the one who told him he might die of it. So he’s the one I called.” Private Church nodded, as if he thought that very reasonable, and I breathed a little easier. He extended a hand and ushered me toward the door.