The quiz question that won the prize was a real toughie: “Mrs. Aarons, who succeeded Franklin D. Roosevelt as President of the United States? Now take your time and think.” The person being called on the telephone always won the wonderful big free prize, because Harsh had to get into their homes to shoot the negatives and come back and push the prints. It was legitimate. The mark got the three free pictures, and unless he could say no faster than a squirrel chatters, he would find twenty or thirty dollars worth of additional prints crammed down his throat. Harsh would snap a lot of shots of the kids with their toys and he had a way of putting all the prints together in an accordion-pleat folder that the parents went for. When he flipped all those shots of the kid out on the living-room rug, mom’s eyes would pop. The telephone quiz gimmick got them around the anti-door-knocker law, the radio gave a cloak of respectability and substance, and National Studios of Hollywood, that sounded like something too.
Vera Sue Crosby was Harsh’s advance girl. Vera Sue went into the small towns and rented the desk space and the telephone and did the calling. Vera Sue was a real gem in a boiler room. She had a voice like the Mona Lisa over the telephone, a nun-pure voice that sounded naive and honest. The voice certainly didn’t sound like Vera Sue, as full of sex as a thirty-dollar call house.
There was sunshine in the room when the doctor came in and thrust the thermometer in Harsh’s mouth, which was less embarrassing than having it stuck in his bottom the way the nurses had been doing. Harsh watched the doctor stand there counting pulse with one eye narrowed at his wristwatch while he waited for the thermometer to stabilize.
“Well, Harsh, I guess you are up to it. If you still want, you can use the telephone.”
The doctor brought a telephone with a long cord and plugged it into an outlet in the wall and put the instrument on the bed. Harsh seized it, the hospital operator came on the wire, and he placed a person-to-person call to Mrs. Walter Harsh in Edina, Missouri. When the doctor heard that, he looked surprised. “I didn’t understand you were married, Harsh.”
Better get the old pill-snapper out of the room, Harsh thought. “Look, Doc, this is kind of personal. Do you mind?”
“Harsh, if you’re married we should have notified—”
“Doc, you stick to your pills and your thermometer, and leave the women to me, then we would both know what we were doing.”
The doctor went out reluctantly. An old guy like him, wanting to eavesdrop, when he should be sitting on a creek bank waiting for a catfish to grab a worm, Harsh reflected.
“Vera Sue?”
“Walter!”
“I wasn’t sure my call would catch you, after all this time.”
“Walter, honey, pep it up, will you? I mean, whatever you got to say, get it said.”
“Well, for crying out loud, aren’t you the interested one! Haven’t you wondered where I was? Listen, I had an accident, and I’m in the hospital.”
“I know where you are. Walter, the bus is about due, and the man said it was always on time.”
“Where are you catching a bus to?”
“To see you, what do you think? I already got my ticket, Walter, so don’t talk all day.”
“Good for you, baby. Jesus, I’m glad you used your head so quick. I didn’t know you had it in you. But listen, here’s what you do first. I need you to stop off in Illinois. The minute you get back to Illinois, the very minute you get in Illinois, dig up your birth certificate. Birth certificate. You got that?”
“Walter, I can’t.”
“You can’t?” He lowered his voice. “You don’t mean you really are fifteen years old? Goddamn you if you lied to me—”
“Don’t you goddamn me, Walter, I am twenty-three and you know it.”
“All right, as soon as you hit Illinois, you dig up a birth certificate to prove it. Otherwise I’m on the hook. If you don’t dig up a birth certificate, they’re going to soak me with the Mann Act and statutory rape and God only knows what. They claim you’re fifteen years old. I don’t know where they got that fifteen stuff. Did you tell them anything like that?”
Vera Sue burst into laughter. Her laughter was a wonderful sound like a nightingale chorusing out in the moonlight. “I was only kidding the cop. He was such a square.”
“You picked a great lie to tell him.”
“It was just a joke.”
“It was some joke. He came in here and scared the bejesus out of me with that fifteen story. Is that how you found I was knocked out in the hospital? Did the cop tell you?”
“Yes. But did you know there’s someone else checking on you too?”
“Who?”
“A private cop. From Kansas City, I think. Anyway he’s going around asking all kinds of questions and showing your picture.”
“There really is such a guy? I thought the cop was stringing me.”
“Well, you were wrong, Walter. This fellow talked to me quite a while, wanting to know different things about you and showing me this picture he had of you. Listen, Walter, when did you have the scar taken off your face?”
“Scar taken off my face? I never had a scar on my face.”
“I saw it.”
“What are you talking about? Where?”
“On your left cheek, high up. A fair-sized scar.”
“That proves they’re looking for somebody else, not me. I never had such a scar, never in my life.”
“But Walter, it looked just like you, I recognized you right off. The only difference was the scar. And it described you, down to the last detail, even your blood type, O-negative.”
“Goddamn it, you fell for something, some kind of racket. You know why I’m sure? Because nobody knew I had O-negative blood, not even me, until I lit in this hospital.”
“Well, this guy knew it. Anyway, I’m coming over there. If you think I am going to pay no attention to five thousand dollars floating around, you’re crazy. I got my bus ticket, and if you shut up, I may catch my bus.”
“Wait a minute, what’s this about five thousand dollars?”
“This private peeper from Kansas City told me there was five thousand dollars in it if you turned out to be ‘completely acceptable,’ whatever that means. I asked him, but he either didn’t know or put on the clam. Anyway, I’m coming over to see if I can get a piece of that five thousand for baby.”
“You must have got real chummy with this fellow from Kansas City.”
“Oh, we had a couple of short beers. I found out that was enough to make him windy.”
“Listen, Vera Sue, you go to Illinois and get that birth certificate.”
“Nothing doing. I’ll be sitting on the edge of your bed in a couple of hours.”
He thought they would come and take the telephone away as soon as he hung up, but no one came. It seemed like time was turning into forever as he lay there with the stuff they had been shooting into him beginning to wear off so that his arm felt like a balloon full of pain. His head seemed to be trying to split itself. He wished he was out of the hospital. He wondered how it would go if he would roll out of the bed and let himself down on the floor real easy and crawl on the floor into the hall and out of the place. It wouldn’t work, of course, but a man could wish.
He lay back, breathing heavily, his head feeling as though it was rolling over and over down a hill. A private detective from Kansas City, how did you figure that one? If D. C. Roebuck had had insurance, then the man might be an insurance company investigator engaged in getting the goods on him. The idea worried him. An insurance detective could be worse than the police. A damn insurance company, he thought, didn’t care how much it spent as long as it was trying to get out of paying a claim.