Headed for a Hearse Read online

The guard had moved to the next cell. “Ain’t you hongry?” he demanded of Connors. He was holding the food out temptingly.

  Connors came forward and grasped two bars. Muscles bunched on his back. “Either give me that food or don’t,” he snarled. “It don’t make any difference to me as long as you get the hell out of here.”

  The easy smile was blotted from Guard Galt’s thin face. He looked frightened for a second, then he regained his mocking manner. “Tough boy has a nasty temper,” he said. His shadow, against the white corridor wall, bulked like a turkey buzzard, hunched and unsteady and black.

  Connors’ voice rasped, “Get out!” His bare shoulders rounded as he pulled down on the bars.

  An unpleasant croaking seemed to come from the birdlike shadow. It was Guard Galt laughing. He controlled himself after a time and said, “Let’s see you make me.” He laughed again. He was going to have a good one to tell the boys in the guards’ mess hall.

  “Get out,” said Connors again.

  The guard’s eyes rolled, inspected the cell door. It was locked. Then, his cadaverous face vicious, he slowly poured the warm, steaming stew out of the tin plate onto the cement floor. With mock daintiness, he dropped the bread into the mess and poured the beige coffee over it. He bared his teeth. “I can’t help it if a prisoner throws his food into the hall.” His bulging veined eyes were triumphant.

  Rigid against the bars, Connors spoke without moving his lips. “Your mother was a nigger.”

  Guard Galt put the tin plate and the coffee container on the tray. “Stick your dishes in the hall when you’ve finished, boys,” he said.

  His departing footsteps diminished, halted while he swung open the steel doors at the end of the corridor, and then passed into silence.

  Dipping the bread in the stew, Robert Westland ate carefully from the near side of his deep tin plate. He could hear Varecha licking his pan and making choked animal noises in his throat as he finished his food. When exactly half his own stew and half the bread was gone, Westland slipped from the bunk and walked carefully to the left front of his cell. Connors’ hands still grasped the steel. A black shadow from one of the bars ran vertically down his face, concealing his left eye.

  Westland asked, “Could you eat some of this stuff? I’m not so very hungry.”

  Anger pinched the gangster’s eyebrows. He stared at Westland through his pale blue eyes. In the silence Varecha made sucking noises with his cheeks and teeth. Then, surprisingly, Connors said, “Thanks.” His face relaxed. “You eat it. I ain’t hungry at all.”

  “Come on,” Westland said. “I really don’t want it.”

  “Naw,” said Connors. He appeared embarrassed.

  “Hey, mister.” Isadore Varecha leaned against his bars, his loose mouth quivering. “Mister,” he said. His disheveled head jerked convulsively, and he kept glancing apprehensively over his shoulder. “I’ll eat it, mister.”

  Westland took a tentative step toward Varecha, saying, “Somebody better eat it before it gets too cold.”

  “Hey!” Connors’ teeth gleamed. “I believe you would give it to that rat, just to show me.” He pushed a hand through the bars so that it was in front of Westland’s cell. “I ain’t as proud as all that.”

  Westland gave him the plate and the bread. “Thanks,” said Connors. He tilted the plate slightly, pulled it between the bars. Varecha’s licorice-drop eyes were hurt; tears formed in them and rolled down his sooty checks. He drew back in his cell, noisily nuzzled his own pan.

  Half the coffee finished a few minutes later, Westland carried the tin cup to the edge of Connors’ cell. This time the big man took the offering without comment. They understood each other, and in a way they were pals. Westland felt fine about this, and for a while he stopped wondering how much it hurt when they switched on the current in the electric chair.

  Some time after midnight Westland awoke. Clammy air still moved along the corridor, and under his sleazy blanket he was cold. Isadore Varecha was muttering quite loudly.

  “I don’t … I don’t … I don’t…” he repeated indistinctly. Then his voice merged with an animal wail and ceased in a racking cough, as though he were vomiting.

  There was a timelessness about the unblinking lights in the bare corridor and the waiting shadows and the silence and the eternally moving current of air and the inhuman sobbing and muttering and choking of Isadore Varecha, and Robert Westland’s nerves suddenly uncoiled like the mainspring on a broken watch. He scrambled from his bed and beat frantically at the steel bars of his cell, his eyes staring at the white wall of the corridor.

  “Wait a minute, buddy,” said someone on his left. “That won’t get you anywhere.” It was Connors, and his chest was bare. He must have been standing there.

  Robert Westland realized his hands were bruised, that the cement floor was cold on his bare feet. “It isn’t right,” he said confusedly. “They shouldn’t do it this way. They ought to give you a chance.”

  Connors, his voice soothing, said, “You gotta take it the way it is. You can’t make the rules as you go along.” His brows cast pale shadows over his eyes. “I been thinkin’ a bit about it myself.”

  Unblinking lights blazed in the corridor. There was hardly any movement to the air, but soon it would be passing again, damp and chill.

  Varecha muttered, “Don’t let me die, God! I don’ wanta die!”

  Westland said, “These damn lights! Why don’t they put them out?” He looked at Connors. “How can you sleep with them on?”

  “I sleep on my belly, but you could put your towel over your eyes.”

  Varecha was tossing on his bed. “Don’t let me die,” he yelled. His voice rose to the jangling pitch of a faulty chalk on a classroom blackboard. “Don’t … Don’t … DON’T…!”

  Connors’ angry bass voice filled the corridor: “Shut up, you Polish sheeny. Shut up!”

  Varecha choked, coughed, was silent for a moment. Then he began to whimper softly. “What’s he in for?” asked Westland. The gangster shook his blond head. “I think he knocked off some dame.”

  “Like me,” Westland said bitterly.

  Varecha whimpered pianissimo.

  “He didn’t get so much publicity,” said Connors. Tiny muscles crinkled the skin at the corners of his shadowed eyes. “I would’ve had a lot more myself but for you.”

  “I read about you,” said Westland. “It seemed to me a restaurant was a pretty public place to shoot those two fellows.”

  “They were a couple of New York torpedoes hired to fog me. Some guys wanted to muscle into my union—the Coal Wagon Chauffeurs, Local 241—but they had to get me out of the way first. I heard about the torpedoes an’ decided I better get them before they got me.” His right hand appeared to be pushing someone away from him. “How’d I know there’d be a lot of dicks in the joint at the same time?”

  “One of the policemen shot you, didn’t he?”

  “Yah, after I dropped my gun, the yellow bastard.”

  Westland said bitterly, “At least they got you for shooting men.”

  Light from the electric bulb changed the pupils of Connors’ wide open eyes from blue to ash gray. “Listen,” he said, “I didn’t think you were guilty.”

  “You’re about the only one.”

  “I figure this way—a guy will never fog his wife.” Connors’ blond head moved negatively from right to left and back. “He might choke her or beat her to death, but he’d never shoot her.” He pushed an invisible someone away again. “Besides, your case was too open and shut. It looked like a frame to me.”

  “I don’t know why anybody would want to put me out of the way.”

  “Maybe not.” Connors’ mouth was close to Westland’s left ear. His voice was a low rasp. “Anyway, if you’d had the right mouthpiece, he’d got you out.” Westland started to protest, but Cononrs continued: “Yah, I know you got the best money could buy, but what does a society guy like you know outside of the brokerage racket? You get an expensive lawy
er and he thinks you’re guilty and he lets you go the chair.” Connors’ voice was earnest. “Now you take a mouthpiece like Charley Finklestein. He’d prove you were in Milwaukee on the night of the killing, and he’d get everybody except the mayor to swear to it.”

  Westland interrupted. “How about the people who saw me going into her apartment?”

  “They wouldn’t worry Finklestein. Some would change their stories, and those that didn’t would disappear. He’d fix things so’s the jury would give you a vote of confidence, instead of the chair. Of course, it would cost a lot of jack, but it’d be worth it.”

  “I guess it would.” Westland blew on his injured hands. “But why didn’t Finklestein get you off?”

  “Even Finklestein couldn’t alibi six coppers.”

  Westland’s feet and legs were extremely cold. He felt sleepy and less nervous. “I guess I’ll turn in,” he said.

  “Sure,” Connors said. “A guy’s gotta sleep.”

  Westland awoke with a realization he had been having bad dreams. His head ached sullenly; his left arm, under his chest, was numb. There were voices in the corridor.

  “Throw some water on his face,” he heard a man say.

  Westland rolled over in the bunk, sat up. Dazzlingly illuminated, the corridor was like a Klieg-lighted set in a macabre German motion picture. Two men, blue coated and with brass buttons on their sleeves, stood in front of Varecha’s cell, their backs toward Westland. They were looking at something on the cement floor; their India-ink shadows, heads down, splashed on the wall opposite the cells. Westland walked to the front bars.

  On oiled hinges Varecha’s door swung open, gave way in front of Guard Percival Galt. He bent with a tin cup in his hand, dashed water onto the face of Isadore Varecha, sprawled on the corridor floor. Westland goggled in horror at Varecha’s face. It was the face of something dug from the earth, monstrous and corrupt. The skin was blue-black; the eyes were fixed open and unseeing; saliva and blood, together the color of ethyl gasolene, drooled from a lipless mouth; the black hair gleamed wetly.

  Westland asked, “Is he dead?”

  The taller of the two men in uniform had a pleasant face. “He’ll come out of it,” he replied. “He tried to hang himself with his trousers.” He had more brass buttons than the other man.

  Guard Galt returned from the cell with another cup of water. This time he washed away the trickle of blood. He said importantly, “It’s a good thing I made my round when I did, or he’d have done it.”

  The blue was lighter in Varecha’s face. He began to breathe hoarsely, with difficulty. His legs twitched and trembled. “Carry him into the cell,” said the tall man with the most buttons.

  The other men lifted Varecha roughly by hands and heels and took him through the door. Westland felt sick to his stomach. He kept saying to himself, I don’t want to die either, not if it’s like that. The man with the buttons looked at him questioningly.

  Westland said, “Listen, I must see the warden in the morning.” His voice was uneven. The man studied him with noncommittal eyes, and Westland added, “I must see him, I must.…”

  “I’ll tell him,” said the man. His voice was calm. “I’ll tell him first thing in the morning. You better get some sleep.”

  The other man came out of Varecha’s cell, and Guard Galt locked the door, and all three of them left without speaking. Westland laid on his bunk, but the light shone in his eyes, and he did not sleep.

  CHAPTER II

  Sunday Morning

  Warden Benjamin Buckholtz’ shoulders brushed the sides of the corridor as he waddled towards Robert Westland. He was an immensely fat man; a living cube as wide as he was high and, so it seemed to Westland, as thick as he was wide. He wore a blue uniform with more brass buttons than even the tall man of the night before, and he was freshly shaved and powdered, and his hair was slicked down on his head. There were dimples as big as half dollars at the ends of his pouty mouth.

  By taking progressively smaller steps, he managed to halt in front of Westland’s cell. He said, “Good-morning. I hear you want to see me?” There was a handful of fat on each of his jowls.

  Behind the warden smirked Guard Galt, his mouth full of saffron teeth. “Look what I have for you, Mister Westland,” he said with artificial gayety. “Look.” He held up a green-and-white wicker basket of fruit.

  Westland ignored Galt. “I’d like to see you alone, Warden.”

  Warden Buckholtz said, “Sure.” He unlocked the cell door, took the basket from Guard Galt, handed it to Westland. There was a ruffle of fat on his wrist. “Galt, you wait down at the end of the hall.” He squeezed into the cell, his breath coming in short puffs.

  Westland set the basket on the floor, plucked an envelope from under a bunch of purple grapes. The envelope was grimy from having been opened by someone. Inside, a note on blue paper read:

  Dearest Robbie:

  I have never felt so tender toward you, my darling, nor so confident of your fineness—nor ever before realized how terribly important you are to me.

  I feel we will have things straightened out soon, and you will be with me, darling, consoling me, and taking away the hurt and the pain of this awful business.…

  Emily Lou.

  There was a faint scent of lavender about the paper. “Your girl?” asked the warden. The bunk groaned under his weight. “My fiancee,” said Westland.

  The glass panes in the corridor skylight shook in an abrupt gust of the autumn wind. Splotches of light dimmed and brightened in the corridor as thin clouds scudded past the sun.

  “Warden,” said Robert Westland, “I think I can save myself yet, if you will help me.”

  Warden Buckholtz’ face was inscrutable.

  Westland said, “I am not asking for much.” He unfolded a piece of creased paper. “First read this.”

  Thrusting the paper into a sulphur-colored beam of light, the warden laboriously read:

  I don’t know who gave it to your wife, but I know you didn’t. I thought they would turn you loose, but you must have had a bum mouthpiece. I didn’t want to take a rap for what I was doing in the building that night, or I would have alibied you before. If you can fix it so I don’t have no trouble, I’ll tell the D. A. what I know. I don’t like to see an innocent man suffer. You can get me through Joe Petro, 901 S. Halstead Street—just ask for M. G.

  Warden Buckholtz blinked his small eyes. “When did you get this?”

  “Two weeks ago.”

  “Probably a crank.” The warden’s fat hands turned the paper over, smoothed it against his knee. “Lot of ’em around.”

  Westland rubbed a palm against his aching eyes. “I don’t know.” He spoke breathlessly. “But I want to find out. It’s my only chance.”

  “Why didn’t you go after the guy when you got the letter?”

  “I didn’t care then. I wanted to die, I guess.” Westland paced the floor. “But last night I changed my mind. That little Jew next door trying to hang himself and yet so afraid to die, it made me afraid to die too—at least in this way.” He halted in front of the squatting warden. “This place gets me too, it’s so horrible and impersonal.”

  “Now, now,” said the warden. “We do everything we can to make you comfortable.”

  “You’ve got to help me,” said Westland. “It’s my only chance.”

  The warden fished an envelope from his packet, pulled from it a decayed cigar stub. This he thrust between his thick lips. “What do you want me to do?” He found a match in his vest pocket.

  “I’ve got to find out about this letter and do whatever else I can to save myself,” Westland said. “I’ll have to see a lot of people.”

  Steel-blue smoke issued from the warden’s mouth in quick puffs. He shook the match, tossed it into the toilet, and said, “That’s very irregular.…” His voice rose questioningly.

  Westland said, “I just want to talk to some people each day, that’s all. I’ll talk to them in my cell, or any place you like.”<
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  Complacently, Warden Buckholtz sucked his cigar. “I don’t see how I can do it. It’s against the rules and my job’s none…” There was that rising note in his voice again.

  Westland sat on the bed beside the warden. “I’ll make it worth your while. It’s my only chance, and I’m willing to pay.”

  With thick fingers, Warden Buckholtz spun the cigar in his mouth. “A fellow once offered me two hundred bucks to let him escape.” His voice was ominous with memories of what he had done to that fellow.

  “How about ten thousand dollars?” Westland asked. “Just to let me see a few people each day?”

  Puffy lids widened around the warden’s eyes. He bit his cigar, straightened his back, asked, “What was that?”

  “Ten thousand dollars.”

  Warden Buckholtz nodded. His ears hadn’t deceived him. He extracted the cigar from his mouth. “Cash or check?” His manner was cautious but friendly.

  “Cash, of course.”

  The warden’s cigar hit the porcelain toilet seat, caromed to the floor. He plucked another, new and black and thick, from the outside coat pocket over his heart and offered it to his prisoner. Westland said, “No, thank you.” The warden undid the red-white-and-green band, had trouble getting it unstuck from his thumb, but finally rubbed it off on the bunk. “You ain’t going to say anything about this?” he asked.

  “Not to a soul.”

  “When do I get it?”

  “I’ll have one of my partners bring it around tomorrow morning.”

  “Ten thousand?”

  “Ten thousand.”

  The warden heaved himself to his feet. In the corridor the sun was bright yellow. “Wait a minute,” Westland said. “I want to see an attorney, Charles Finklestein, today. Will you get him for me?”

  “Charley Finklestein?” The warden had hold of the steel door. “I’ll get him on the phone right away.” He swung the door shut, rattled the key. “Right away.”

  His pants were shapeless over his departing posterior.

  The afternoon had passed slowly. The sun was low; the light was no longer unbearably bright in the corridor; the draft in the hall was cooler. Isadore Varecha slept in his cell. He had not cried at all during the day, but his silence was almost worse than his sobbing. He had appeared from the back of his cell to accept breakfast and dinner with the air of a brutally whipped dog, and the rest of the time he lay outstretched on his bed in a trancelike sleep, his thin gray face, with its broken nose and twisted lips, as unhuman as a mask in a cheap waxworks. His neck was muffled with a livid bruise.