“You must be coming down with a cold,” I said.
She wobbled when we got out of the hack and she held her throat. I had to half carry her up the steps of the brownstone house and into our room. As I turned from her to switch on the light, she moaned, “Johnny!” and she was doubled over, clutching at her stomach.
For the next hour I had my hands full with her. She seemed to be having quite an attack of indigestion. I undressed her and put her to bed and piled blankets on her because she couldn’t stop shivering. I found baking soda in the kitchen and fed her a spoonful and made tea for her. The cramps tapered off and so did the burning in her throat.
“Something I ate,” she said as she lay huddled under the blankets. “But what? We didn’t have anything for dinner that could hurt us. How do you feel, honey?”
“Fine.”
“I don’t understand it. That Abby didn’t serve anything to speak of. Nothing but some chopped liver and—” She paused. “Honey, did you have the liver?”
“No. I can’t stand the stuff.”
“Then it was the liver. Something wrong with it. Call up Oscar and see if the others are all right.”
I dialed his number. Oscar answered after the bell had rung for some time. His voice sounded weak.
“How are you over there?” I asked.
“Terrible. All four of us sick as dogs. And you?”
“I’m all right, but Stella has indigestion. We figure it was the chopped liver because that was the one thing she ate that I didn’t.”
“Could be,” Oscar said. “Georgie seems to be in the worst shape; he’s sleeping it off in the spare room. Tiny left a short time ago. Abby’s in bed, and that’s where I’ll be in another minute. What bothers me most is a burning in my throat.”
“Stella complained of the same thing. First I ever heard of indigestion making your throat burn.”
“All I know,” Oscar said, “is that whatever it is I have plenty of company in my misery. Abby is calling me.”
He hung up.
I told Stella what he’d said. “The liver,” she murmured and turned on her side.
That was at around one o’clock. At three-thirty a bell jarred me awake. I slipped out of bed and staggered across the room to the phone.
“I need you at once,” Oscar said over the wire.
“Do you feel worse?”
“About the same. But Georgie has become a problem.”
“Is he that bad?”
“Uh-huh. He went and died on my hands. I need your help, Johnny.”
Georgie lay face-down on the bed in the guest room. He was fully dressed except for his shoes.
“Tiny took him in here before he left,” Oscar told me. “After that I didn’t hear a sound out of Georgie. I assumed he was asleep. Probably he went into a coma and slipped off without waking. When I touched him half an hour ago, he was already cold.”
Oscar’s face was the color of old putty. He could hardly stand without clinging to the dresser. Abby hadn’t come out of the other bedroom.
I said, “Died of a bellyache? And so quickly?”
“I agree it must have been the chopped liver, which would make it ptomaine poisoning. But only Georgie ate enough of the liver to kill him. Abby says she remembers he gorged himself on it.” Oscar held his head. “One thing’s sure – he mustn’t be found here. Brant is enough trouble already.”
“This is plainly an accidental death.”
“Even so, the police will use it as an excuse to get as tough as they like with us. We can’t afford that, Johnny, so soon after the Coast City job. Best to get the body out.”
I looked him over. He didn’t seem in much better condition than the man on the bed.
“I can’t do it alone,” I said.
He dug his teeth into his lower lip and then fought to draw in his breath. “I’ll help you.”
But most of it had to fall on me. I fished car keys out of Georgie’s pocket and went looking for his Ford. I found it a block and a half up Riverside Drive and drove it around to the service entrance of the apartment building. At that late hour it was possible to park near where you wanted to.
Oscar was waiting for me on the living-room sofa. He roused himself and together we got that inanimate weight that had been pot-bellied Georgie Ross down the three flights of fire stairs and, like a couple of men supporting a drunk, walked it between us out of the building and across the terribly open stretch of sidewalk and shoved it into the Ford. For all we could tell, nobody was around to see us.
That was about as far as Oscar could make it. He was practically out on his feet. I told him to go back upstairs and I got behind the wheel and drove off with Georgie slumped beside me like a man asleep.
On a street of dark warehouses over on the east side, I pulled the car over to the curb and got out and walked away.
Stella was up when I let myself in. She asked me if I’d gone to Oscar’s.
“I was worried about them,” I told her. “Tiny and Georgie left. Oscar and Abby are about in your shape. How’re you?”
“Better, though my stomach is very queasy.”
I lay in bed wondering what the odds were on chopped liver becoming contaminated and if a burning throat could possibly be a symptom of ptomaine poisoning. I watched daylight trickle into the room and listened to the sounds of traffic building up in the street, and I was scared the way one is in a nightmare, without quite knowing of what.
Eventually I slept. It was past noon when I woke and Stella was bustling about in the kitchen. She was pretty much recovered.
Toward evening I went out for a newspaper. When I returned, Brant was coming down the stoop. Being a cop, he wouldn’t have had trouble finding out where I’d moved to.
“Nice arrangement,” he commented. “You shack up with Oscar’s woman and Oscar with Wally Garden’s widow. This way nobody gets left out in the cold.”
“You running a gossip column now?” I growled.
“If I were, I’d print an item like this: How come Johnny Worth’s pals are getting themselves murdered one by one?”
I held onto myself. All I did was raise an eyebrow. “I don’t get it.”
“Haven’t you heard? George Ross was found dead this morning in his car parked near the East River Drive.”
He had already spoken to Stella, but I didn’t have to worry that she’d told him about last night’s party and who’d been there. She wouldn’t tell a cop anything about anything.
I said, “That’s too bad. Heart attack?”
“Arsenic.”
I wasn’t startled. Maybe, after all, it was no surprise to me. Arsenic, it seemed, was a poison that made your throat burn.
I lit a cigarette. Brant watched my hands. They were steady. I blew smoke at him. “Suicide, I suppose.”
“Why suicide?”
“It goes with poison.”
“Why would he want to die?”
“I hardly knew the guy,” I said.
“You’ve been seeing him. You were in a beer joint with him a week ago Wednesday.”
“Was I? Come to think of it, I dropped in for a beer and there were some guys I knew and I joined them.”
Brant took his pipe out of his fat face. “Two days later you and he were both in on that Coast City stickup.”
“Who says?”
A cop who was merely following a hunch didn’t bother me. We sparred with words, and at the end he sauntered off by himself. He hadn’t anything. He couldn’t even be sure that Georgie hadn’t been a suicide.
But I knew, didn’t I? I knew who had murdered him and had tried to murder all of us.
Oscar didn’t say hello to me. He opened the door of his apartment and just stood there holding onto the doorknob, and his eyes were sick and dull behind his glasses. Though it was after six o’clock, he was still in his pajamas. His robe was tied sloppily, hanging crooked and twisted on his long, lean body. He needed a shave. He looked, to put it mildly, like hell.