There was a red light ahead. The Belleville cut-off. He kept the gas pedal on the floor, and when he reached the intersection, he shut his eyes for a moment, waiting for the collision that was almost sure to come. Brakes-screamed and tires squealed on both sides of him, but no one crashed into him, and he started down the long straight stretch of highway that would bring him to Coachman Road.
Eighteen minutes later, Earl Munger sat on Doctor Hampton’s operating table, a rubber tube in his stomach, while the doctor filled a hypodermic needle, and then, without Earl’s feeling it at all, inserted it in the back of his upper arm.
“And so you spread your lunch out right there where the insect spray could get to it,” Hampton said, almost with amusement. “And sat there eating sandwiches garnished with arsenic, without even knowing it.” He glanced at Earl as if he expected him to say something, tube in his stomach or not. “Well,” he went on, “you wouldn’t be able to tell, of course. That’s the insidious thing about arsenic. There’s no smell or taste. That’s why it’s been a poisoner’s favorite all through the ages.”
“You want me to come back again, Doc?” Earl asked when Hampton had removed the tube.
“Not unless you feel ill again,” Hampton said. “That will be ten dollars, please.”
On his way home, Earl Munger, for the first time in his life, knew the meaning of pure elation. It was a strange feeling, one he couldn’t quite trust at first; but with every mile the feeling grew, and the happiness that flooded through him was the kind of happiness he had known as a child when things and people were the way they seemed to be, and not, as he had learned all too soon, the way they really were.
He took the long curve above the old Haverman place almost flat out, feeding more gas the farther he went into it, the way he had read that sports car drivers did. Even the old delivery truck seemed to handle like a sports car, and it amused him to think that, with the way he and the truck felt just now, he could show those fancy Ferrari and Lotus and Porsche drivers a thing or two.
He felt like singing, and he did. He felt like a fool; he felt as if he were drunk, but he sang at the top of his voice, and he was still singing when he braked the truck to a stop in front of the feed store and got out.
He would take the long way home, he decided. It was the better part of two miles that way, but he felt like walking, something he hadn’t felt like doing in more years than he could remember.
He began to sing again, walking slowly, enjoying himself to an extent he would once have believed impossible. He sang all the way to his rooming house, and then, just as happily but a bit more quietly, continued to sing as he climbed the stairs to his room on the second floor and opened the door.
Sheriff Fred Stratton sat there in Earl’s only chair, the pink moon face as expressionless as so much suet, the small hands lying quietly on the brim of the spotless white Stetson in his lap.
Earl stared at him for a moment, then closed the door and sat down on the side of the bed. “What are you doing here, Sheriff?” he asked.
“We were waiting for you at the store,” Stratton said. “My deputy and me.”
“I didn’t see anybody,” Earl said. “Why would you be wait—?”
“We didn’t mean for you to see us,” Stratton said. “It didn’t take us long to find that money, Earl. And the gun too, of course.”
“Money?” Earl said. “What money? I don’t know anything about any money. Or any gun, either.”
Stratton reached up and took the small, ivory-colored envelope from the breast pocket of his shirt. “Letter from my youngest daughter,” he said. “Looks like she’s bound and determined to make me a proud granddaddy again.”
“That’s the same letter you told everybody Charlie Tate gave you just before he—” Earl began, then broke off abruptly.
“That’s right,” Stratton said, putting the envelope back in his pocket and taking out the small blue-and-yellow tin. “Just like I told them this little box of throat lozenges was ratsbane.”
Earl felt his mouth go dry. “Not poison?” he heard himself say. “Not arsenic?”
“No,” Stratton said. “And even if Charlie had been meaning to poison himself, he wouldn’t have put the poison in a bottle of whiskey. He never took a drink in his life. That bottle on the table was mine, son. Charlie always kept a bottle on hand for me, because he knew I was a man that liked a little nip now and then.”
Stratton glanced down at the tin. “I dropped this at Charlie’s house when I was there the first time, and so I went back to get it. When I saw what had happened, and that Charlie had opened his back door to somebody, I knew the killer had to be a man he knew pretty well. Otherwise, Charlie would never have let him in the house.”
“But why?” Earl said. “Why did you...?”
“Why’d I make up all that about the letter and the lozenges?” Stratton said. “Well, I got the idea when I noticed the killer had helped himself to the whiskey. I’d had a drink myself, the first time I was there, and I could see that somebody had taken it down another couple of inches, not to mention spilling some on the table. I figured the killing must have rawed somebody’s nerves so much he’d had to take a couple of strong jolts to straighten himself out.”
Stratton paused, studying Earl with tired, sleepy eyes that told him nothing at all. Earl waited until he could wait no longer. “And then?” he asked.
“Well,” Stratton said, “there’s one sure thing in this world, son. A man that thinks he’s been poisoned is going to get himself to a doctor, and get there fast. And since there’re only four doctors within thirty miles of here, all I had to do was call them and ask them to let me know who showed up.”
“But I had the symptoms,” Earl said. “I was in pain, and I—”
“Sometimes if a man thinks a thing is so, then it is so,” Stratton said. “You were dead certain you’d been poisoned, and so naturally you had the symptoms.” He got to his feet, put the big white hat on his head very carefully, and gestured toward the door. “Well, Earl, I reckon we’d better head over toward the jail.”
“A trap,” Earl said bitterly. “A dirty, lousy trap. I guess you figure you’re pretty smart, don’t you?”
Stratton looked surprised. “No such thing,” he said. “Just pretty lazy. I saw a chance to make your guilty conscience do my work for me, and I took it. That’s how it is with us lazy folks, son. If there’s a way to save ourselves some work, we’ll find it.”
The Patient
by David Blinick
As time passes, medical men seem to assume more and more the aspect of good mechanics. Some, however, must be careful not to lean over too far backward.
It was a quarter past nine when Mrs. Ellis left. He accompanied her to the door and opened it. “Stay out of those overstuffed chairs for a while, and be sure you sit up straight when you’re watching television,” he cautioned her again. “You’ve got to be careful with that back.”
Mrs. Ellis smiled her thanks, and he stood leaning against the door, gazing down th corridor at her figure, noting with satisfaction that the slight limp was now gone.
No lights shone from the doors of the other offices on his floor. Jackson City’s only professional building closed early. Ordinarily he too would have been gone, but Mrs. Ellis had a flare-up of her sciatica and had to wait for her husband to return from work to baby-sit for her.