Lucky Stiff by Craig Rice (best large ebook reader txt) đź“•
This was their wedding anniversary. He couldn't even remember which one. It didn't really matter. All that mattered was the waking up every morning and seeing her long, silky hair spread out on the pillow, and her face, childlike in sleep, nestled in her arm. Coffee in the sunroom in the morning, Helene in her violet chiffon negligee, or her fluffy white robe, or her bandanna sunsuit, or, on special occasions, the blue satin house pajamas she'd been wearing the first time they met.
"Helene," he said, "every time I look at you I feel as if someone had just given my heart a hot-foot."
Her eyes warmed. "Darling," she whispered, "I didn't know you were a poet!" This time her hand reached out for his, and it wasn't icy cold.
Jake Justus, ex-reporter, ex-press agent, and, as he occasionally reminded himself, definitely ex-amateur detective, sighed again. Happily, this time. That unpleasant knot of anxiety in h
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“No you don’t!” John J. Malone said. He slid off the bar stool, overturning his glass, grabbed the gin bottle, and fled into the back room of Joe the Angel’s City Hall Bar.
He sank into the farthest booth and sat there shuddering, his face in his hands. When he looked up again she was across the table from him, smiling.
“Go away,” John J. Malone said. “Go away. You’re not there. I’m drunk. It’s a hallucination. Go away. I didn’t do anything to you, did I? You know I didn’t do anything to you. I could have saved your life.” He drew a long, shivering breath.
“You didn’t do anything to me,” she whispered, “but you can help me now. You want to help me, don’t you?”
“Anything,” John J. Malone said. In the half-lighted booth, through the blur before his eyes, she seemed misty, all gray and shadows, and more beautiful than ever. “I’ll do anything,” John J. Malone repeated, and buried his head in his arms.
When he looked up again, she was gone.
Reason was what he needed, the lawyer told himself. Cold, hardheaded reason. And a breath of fresh air. And a long period of total abstinence.
He rose by bracing both hands against the table, caught his breath, and managed to walk out into the bar with a show of nonchalance. It was strangely quiet. Everyone seemed to be looking at him.
Malone nodded to Joe the Angel and said, “Put it on my bill.” He started for the door.
“Wait a minute,” Joe the Angel said hoarsely. “Where is she?”
“She?” Malone repeated. “Have you been seeing things?” Get a grip on yourself, he thought. There is such a thing as mass hallucination. He’d read about it once. “Good night, Joe.”
But there on the bar was the glass from which shed drunk her bourbon and water. Malone stared at it for a horrified moment, and fled out to the sidewalk, leaving a white-faced Joe the Angel, who promptly sent all his customers home, closed up his bar for the first time in nine years, and headed for the nearest church.
She was there, smiling at him, out on the sidewalk, beside the open door of a waiting taxicab.
Suddenly John J. Malone’s fear left him. Anna Marie St. Clair was so beautiful. And she needed his help. She wasn’t there to harm him or to frighten him; she was there because she needed him. And he was still in love with her.
He found himself smiling at her as he got into the taxi. He felt numb, numb all over, his skin was cold and damp, but he wasn’t frightened.
“Where do you live?” she whispered.
Automatically he gave the name of the Loop hotel where he’d lived so many years. His heart began beating so hard he was afraid it might burst. She was going home with him, just as she had in a few of the more spectacular of his dreams.
Then he leaned forward and told the driver to go to the side entrance, the one near the freight elevator. The desk clerk in the hotel had been a trifle difficult lately, and he might not realize that Malone’s companion was an illusion.
John J. Malone almost forgot that fact himself as he paid the cab driver, ushered Anna Marie St. Clair through the side door, and rode with her up the freight elevator. For the moment, she was just the most beautiful girl in the world.
He’d hung the “DO NOT DISTURB” sign on his door, locked the door, tossed his hat on the dresser, and said, “Can I give you a drink, dear?” before he remembered.
She was misty and lovely, standing there dressed in gray and pink and gold, smiling at him, encouraging him, perhaps even liking him.
He knew he should be afraid, but he wasn’t.
“I like you, Mr. Malone,” Anna Marie St. Clair said. There was a warm, almost an alive, note in her voice.
Malone stood there, looking at her, at every detail of her costume, the gray suit with its collarless neck and slightly flaring skirt, the tiny gray shoes, the skin-colored stockings, the hat, the veil, the purse, the gloves. Then suddenly it was as though an electric light bulb had flashed on in his brain.
“Now I know,” he said hoarsely. “Now I know why you couldn’t have killed him. The one thing I needed to realize. The proof. I can see it, now.” He took a step nearer to her. “I can prove that you didn’t kill him.” Then there was a sob in his throat. “I could have proved it, I mean,” he said, as he reached for her.
He’d dreamed the whole thing.
The realization was a great relief to John J. Malone, lying there in bed with his eyes still closed. Because there were only two alternatives to its having been a dream, and he couldn’t face either of them, especially at this hour in the morning. It didn’t happen, he thought, and he wasn’t crazy. Just a dream.
He regretted having wakened from it. It had been a beautiful dream, and an ecstatic one. “For a little while,” he whispered, “I thought you were really here.”
“I’m still here,” a soft voice said, not very far away.
John J. Malone opened his eyes and sat bolt upright, clutching the sheet around his shoulders. There she was, Anna Marie St. Clair, sitting in the one easy chair, wrapped in his old bathrobe, her tawny hair loose over her shoulders, sipping a cup of coffee. And there on the floor was the newspaper, telling how Anna Marie St. Clair had been electrocuted last night at twelve.
“I phoned downstairs for coffee,” she said. “I hope you don’t mine. You’d probably like some yourself.” She poured out a second cup and handed it to him.
He took it automatically and drank it, still staring at her, while his mind slowly snapped back into focus. Suddenly the empty cup slid from his fingers and rolled down to the floor, unnoticed.
“You had a double,” he said. “I mean, she had a double. You were identical twins.”
She laughed pleasantly and lit a cigarette. “Nothing like that. I’m Anna Marie.”
Malone crossed himself hastily and instinctively. Then he looked at her for a moment. Some of the details of what he’d considered to be a bright and colorful dream began to come back to him. “You’re not a ghost,” he said, almost accusingly.
She laughed again. Of course not, she said. I never was one.” Her face grew sober. “I’m terribly sorry, really. But I couldn’t resist. I had to find out what the effect would be. If people would—believe in me. Really, you’ve no idea how glad I am that you did.”
“But damn it,” Malone said crossly, “you looked—” his eyes narrowed. Her face had been white, dead white, her eyes enormous and shadowy, her lovely mouth almost blue. Now, though there was a faint prison pallor on her smooth cheeks, her skin was alive and glowing, her lips red, her eyes bright. “Make-up!” he said. “For the love of Mike—”
He grabbed the newspaper, read hastily through the story of how Anna Marie St. Clair had died at midnight, a smile on her lips, protesting to the last that she was innocent.
“All right,” he said. “Tell me.” His voice was hoarse.
“The confession got there in time,” she said. “Lucky, isn’t it, that they broke the news to me before they gave it to the newspapers.”
She told him the rest of it. The trial, the bland assurances that she had nothing to worry about, the verdict and the sentence, the appeal for a new trial, automatically refused, the long weeks in prison when no one, not even Jesse Conway, had come to see her and when she couldn’t get in touch with anyone.
Malone already knew all the legal details, he’d read them again and again in the newspapers. And what she’d thought, and felt, during those weeks was something he’d not only guessed at, but lived through with her.
She told him about what she’d thought were going to be her last few hours alive, and the walk to the warden’s office, and what had happened there.
“Now,” she said, “I’m a ghost.” She glanced at the tiny platinum watch on her wrist and said, “And a damned hungry one. It’s eleven o’clock.”
“I’m hungry, too,” Malone said. He reached for the phone and said, “What do you want?”
“Anything, as long as it isn’t lukewarm oatmeal, dry toast, and thin coffee.”
The little lawyer shuddered, called room service, and demanded a rush double order of pancakes with sausage scrambled eggs, hot biscuits with marmalade, coffee, half an apple pie, and a quart of cold beer.
There’s a lot more to discuss,” he said as he hung up the phone, “but I dislike doing my discussing on an empty stomach.” He managed a delicate operation of wrapping the sheet around him, squaw fashion, and getting out of bed, all at the same time. “I’m going to take a shave and a shower. There’s all kinds of make-up and stuff in the top left-hand dresser drawer in case you want any. And if you want a drink, there’s a bottle of gin under the clean socks in the middle drawer.”
He stood under the shower for a long time, and lingered over his shave. He should have had a hangover, but he felt like a million—hell, two million—dollars.
He knew what Anna Marie was doing. He knew why she was doing it. Frankly, he didn’t blame her. But maybe he could talk her out of it. Because if she went ahead with what was undoubtedly in her mind, she was going to blow the lid off a political pot that was already beginning to steam a little.
It would destroy a number of his best connections, if such a thing took place, but that wasn’t his reason. He could always make new connections. It would ruin a number of his friends. Or were they his friends? Malone paused, razor in hand, and the lathered face that looked back at him from the mirror answered, “No.”
It might bring about a reform administration in the next election, and he’d have to find a new place to play poker. That had happened before, and he’d always managed.
There would be danger to Anna Marie herself. Malone’s razor paused again, halfway down one cheek, and he said, “Not with me around, there wouldn’t.”
But there would be trouble, big trouble, before the thing was through. Some of it he could anticipate, some of it he could sense. Murder, and suicide, and ruin, and political upheaval. Anna Marie was holding dynamite in her frail, lovely hands. Malone didn’t like explosions.
He finished shaving and began rubbing lotion on his face. Maybe he could talk her into giving up the whole thing. If she wanted to have a little fun with Bugs Brodie, or Butts O’Hare, or some of the boys at the City Hall first—well, he, Malone, was always willing to lend his hand to a practical joke. Then the whole thing could be explained as a joke. He grinned at the recollection of how Joe the Angel’s face had looked, and sobered quickly when he thought of how his own face must have looked. All right, a joke was a joke.
Sure, that was the thing to do. Talk her out of it.
Malone patted talcum powder on his face and brushed
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