A Shot in the Arm Read online

  Contents

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION2

  CHAPTER ONE3

  CHAPTER TWO8

  CHAPTER THREE20

  CHAPTER FOUR32

  CHAPTER FIVE42

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  “A Shot in the Arm” was originally published in Black Mask, July 1948. Copyright © 1948, renewed 1976 by Richard Deming. All rights reserved.

  Published by Wildside Press LLC

  wildsidepress.com | bcmystery.com

  CHAPTER ONE

  How I became legally responsible for an adult incompetent was primarily a matter of economics. For if anyone at all, in the two months prior to Mrs. Quentin Rand’s request for my services, had offered me three meals a day to walk his dog or shadow his wife, I’d have steered clear of Vivian Banner as though she had scabies.

  But right at a time when food prices were climbing, the demand for private investigators—or at least the one named Manville Moon—dropped to zero. And having a mouth the size of two to feed, I require lots of energy-building food, even when I’m doing nothing to expend the energy.

  So, much as I disliked the job, for a month I had lived at the oversized home of Mrs. Quentin Rand as twenty-four-hour-a-day watchdog over her niece, Vivian Banner, and prospects were good that the month would stretch to seven.

  Just to make everything cozy, a court had committed Vivian to my care, and she couldn’t legally even take a bath unless I gave the okay. Days she was allowed to move about as she wanted, within the limits of my field of view, but nights I kept her in the locked and barred bedroom between my own room and Mrs. Rand’s.

  One key had been made for each of Vivian’s three doors, and there were no extras. The one to the hall door and to the connecting door between my room and Vivian’s were in my possession, but Mrs. Rand had the key to the door between her own room and her niece’s.

  Vivian might not have cheered if I dropped dead, but she wouldn’t have cried either. My job was to see that she kept from morphine until the doctor decided she was free of the habit, and Vivian liked morphine almost as much as she disliked me. Tonight she disliked me more intensely than usual because with Dr. Yoder’s permission I had allowed her out of the house for the first time, and her attempt to run away and shoot herself full of dope had been singularly unsuccessful.

  When I knocked on her door at dinner time, she inquired through the panel: “Who is it?”

  “Moon,” I said.

  “Go away,” she said crossly.

  “Time for dinner.”

  “I don’t want any.”

  I shrugged and went downstairs alone to the bleak prospect of dinner with Vivian’s angular aunt. The dinner was hot, but the atmosphere was clammy. Mrs. Rand let me build no illusions concerning my social status. I was an employee, not a guest, and she obviously would have preferred that I eat in the kitchen. Nor was it politeness which prevented her from suggesting it, but only the certain knowledge that I would tell her to douse her head in the kitchen sink. With her continual peering at me through the distorting lenses of ribboned nose glasses, as though checking my use of the proper fork, Mrs. Rand was not an inspiring mealtime companion. Immediately after the last silent course, I grunted an apology, went up to my room and rapped on the connecting door.

  “I don’t want to talk to you,” Vivian called loudly.

  Mildly irked, I moved out into the hall and tried her front door. I found it locked and continued on to Mrs. Rand’s room. I knew Mrs. Rand was still downstairs because I had just left her there, but I knocked in order to prove I was a gentleman, pushed open the door and entered. The connecting door to Vivian’s room was locked as tightly as the others.

  As I started back out into the hall, I noticed a key lying on Mrs. Rand’s dresser. Picking it up, I saw it was the key to Vivian’s door.

  Back downstairs, I gave the key to Mrs. Rand and said: “You left this on your dresser again. That makes twice.”

  All that got me was a curdling look through her thick glasses, but she took the key and wrapped it in her handkerchief.

  Returning to my own room, I stared at the walls and thought over my next move in the campaign to keep Vivian from dope. Before accepting the job I had realized that once Vivian’s treatment reached the stage where she was allowed out of the house, it would be impossible to keep the girl in sight constantly for six months. She probably would spend most of her time trying to shake me and would only have to be lucky once. I had reasoned that my only chance of success was to let her run, tail her to her source of drug, and eliminate the source.

  * * * *

  That afternoon, her first outside the house since the treatment started, Vivian obligingly but unknowingly had led me to private detective Joseph Alamado, who maintained his office in a ramshackle building on Second Street. Now, my problem was how to pin the goods on Joe and shove him behind bars, while I was handicapped by not being able to leave Vivian. I still hadn’t solved the problem when I feel asleep.

  When I awoke at eight, I shaved and dressed, then tapped on my incompetent charge’s door. When there was no answer, I tapped again, waited a minute, then unlocked the door and walked in.

  I thought she was sleeping until I caught the faint purplish cast of her features and saw that her eyes were wide open. For a moment I stood looking down at her, feeling a dull rage mount within me and mix with self-recrimination. Drawing back the covers, I lifted one thin arm and found the fresh needle puncture just above the wrist. Vivian had had her last shot in the arm, and it hadn’t been morphine. It hadn’t been self-administered either, because the syringe was missing.

  I tried to tell myself there had been no intimation of danger to Vivian’s life, and even if there had been, keeping her in a locked and barred room was ample protection, but I couldn’t sell myself the alibi. For this was the second murder, and after the first, I should have been on guard. Half-heartedly I told myself Vivian’s mother had been murdered before I took this job, that her killing had apparently been done by a motiveless maniac, that I hadn’t been retained either to solve Mrs. Banner’s murder or prevent Vivian’s, but any way I looked at it, the situation boiled down to one point: I had let a client get murdered right under my nose. And the fact that I thought I could guess the murderer, or at least the instigator, was little consolation to either Vivian or me.

  The door to Mrs. Rand’s room stood slightly ajar. I pushed it open, saw the key was in the lock and walked over to the bed, where Vivian’s aunt still lay sleeping. I stood over her long enough to decide from the even rise and fall of her covers that she was all right, then went to the open window. A light gardener’s ladder leaned against the side of the house immediately beneath the window.

  Returning to the bed, I shook Mrs. Rand awake. She looked up without surprise, and I was startled by my first glimpse of her eyes unprotected by their heavy eyeglasses. Weak and watery and red-ringed, they gave her an appearance of meek frustration, entirely counter to their imperious haughty glint when magnified.

  Apparently conscious of my surprise, she shielded her eyes from the light with back of one hand and said: “Hand me my glasses from the dresser, if you please.”

  I found the ribboned, thick-lensed spectacles and gave them to her. When she had them adjusted to her nose, she sat up, pulled the sheet protectively across her shoulders and asked: “What’s the matter?”

  “You left the key on your dresser again,” I said. “Somebody borrowed it.”

  “Has Vivian run away?”

  “She’s dead,” I said bluntly.

  Behind their thick lenses, her eyes widened.

  “How… What
happened?”

  “Murder. You’d better get up and phone the police. I have to see a man.”

  She stared at me as though she had never seen me before. “Where—where are you going?”

  “To pick up a guy. Tell the cops to put out a call for Joseph Alamado, a private dick with an office on Second Street. I’m going after him, but he may have holed up. If I find him, I’ll bring him back here and turn him over to the cops. Got the name?”

  “Alamado. Joseph Alamado.” Her eyes were wide and frightened. “Did he kill Vivian?”

  “Probably. If he didn’t, he knows who did. He’s the peddler who supplied Vivian’s drugs, and yesterday she threatened to turn him over to the police.” I added thoughtfully: “It was probably a hired job. Don’t believe Joe has the guts for murder himself. If I thought he had any guts, I’d have squashed him yesterday and Vivian would still be alive.” I pondered this idea for a moment, then said impatiently: “But I didn’t squash him, and post mortem strategy can’t bring Vivian back to life. I want to use Harry and the Packard.”

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll phone Harry to bring it around front.” She reached for her bedside phone.

  I said: “I have to get some things from my room. Tell Harry to honk when he’s ready.”

  She had the phone to her ear and was pressing the inter-house switch when I pulled her door closed behind me.

  Back in my room, I slipped off my suit coat, strapped on my shoulder holster and put the coat back on. From my bag I took a pair of handcuffs and stuffed them in my hip pocket. Then I went down to the kitchen, found Nellie, the housekeeper, pouring herself a cup of coffee and had a cup myself while waiting for Harry to honk.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Discreet and Incorruptible

  The first time I saw Vivian Banner, six weeks before her death, I was impressed by her beauty. And since few beautiful women call at my apartment, which for reasons of economy doubles as an office, I racked my brain for a method of keeping her for cocktails and politely sending her aunt home as soon as the aunt got around to stating her business.

  In a tone of quiet innocence, which suited her soft skin, delicate features and large-irised eyes, Vivian said: “What aunt is trying to say, without shocking you, is that I’m a drug addict.”

  I quickly adjusted my thinking and examined the girl again. Her hair was as smooth and golden as the first time I looked, her figure as soft and her complexion as clear. But now I noticed pinched lines at the edge of her nostrils and a faint redness of the eyelids. The large irises I had admired took on a different significance, too. They were large because the pupils had contracted to points.

  I said inanely: “I’m out of dope, but I can offer you a cocktail.”

  Too often my humor convulses no one but myself. Neither woman died laughing.

  Mrs. Quentin Rand said coldly: “My lawyer recommended you, Mr. Moon. Alexander Carson.”

  “Alex?” I said, surprised. Alex Carson once remarked that his highest social ambition was to be seen at my funeral.

  “He said you were both discreet and incorruptible.”

  “Alex said that?” I asked, even more surprised.

  Vivian Banner’s soft voice put in: “He also described you as insulting, flippant, and uncouth.”

  I relaxed. “That sounds more like Alex.” I had once insultingly refused his bribe to commit perjury, flippantly gathered up the seat of his pants and uncouthly tossed him downstairs.

  Mrs. Rand said: “As my niece so abruptly put it, she has been unfortunate enough to contract the morphine habit.” Through ribboned glasses with thick, distorting lenses, she frowned at Vivian exactly like my sixth grade teacher used to frown when I failed to do my homework.

  Mrs. Quentin Rand was tall and spare, and faintly disapproving of social inferiorors like myself. From hearsay and the society news section, I knew a little about her. Her husband was one of the broker suicides of 1929, but something must have been salvaged from the crash, because Mrs. Rand maintained an expensive home complete with servants, and more than once her chauffeur-driven Packard had passed street cars on a which I happened to be riding.

  “We want Vivian cured of the habit,” : Mrs. Rand said.

  “Who’s ‘we’?”

  She raised her eyebrows. “The whole family. Myself, Vivian’s parents—she’s my brother’s step-daughter—and of course, Vivian herself wants to be cured.”

  I said: “You must have gotten the wrong address. I’m not a doctor. I’m a private detective. Aren’t there sanitariums for that kind of treatment?”

  “I’ve flunked out of the three best in the country,” Vivian said. “They rate me incurable.” She flashed a mocking smile but deep in her eyes was a quivering fright. She fished a cigarette from her purse and her hand shook when she put it into her mouth.

  Mrs. Rand said: “Dr. James Yoder is now treating Vivian. Her parents have placed her completely in my charge until the cure is effected, and I’ve had a room prepared at my home. I have also engaged three private nurses. Under the treatment Dr. Yoder has outlined, Vivian must stay in bed for two weeks, be confined to home for another two, and then constantly watched for six months, making the whole treatment run for seven months.”

  I asked: “Where do I come in?”

  “You’re to stay with or near Vivian from the time treatment starts until she’s cured.”

  I blinked. “For seven months?”

  Mrs. Rand nodded.

  “What am I supposed to do?”

  Mrs. Rand drew her lips into a prim line. “I know nothing about drug habits, but Dr. Yoder says an addict will use every subterfuge to get drugs while a treatment is being attempted. Right now Vivian wants nothing so much as to be free of the habit. But once the cure starts, she’ll try bribery, she’ll attempt to sneak out at night, she’ll try literally anything she can think of to get more morphine. It will be your job to make sure she doesn’t get it. That’s where previous treatments have failed, and Dr. Yoder believes if we can actually keep her from drugs for six months after the initial treatment, the cure will be permanent.”

  I thought over the proposition before I said anything. Then I said: “Seven months of my time will run into money.”

  Mrs. Rand waved that aside. “Expense is not a consideration.”

  “My fee is twenty-five dollars a day, plus expenses.”

  Mrs. Rand’s straight back straightened even more. “Twenty-five dollars! The nurses I engaged charge only nine!”

  I shrugged. “Then hire another nurse.”

  Vivian said: “After all, Aunt Grace, Dad will be paying for it.”

  Mrs. Rand gave in, though not graciously. “I suppose we have no choice. But twenty-five dollars! Everywhere you turn, you meet inflation.” She looked me over distastefully. “When will you be available?”

  I shrugged again. “Maybe tomorrow. Maybe never. Depends on my talk with Dr. Yoder.”

  “Dr. Yoder? What has he to do with it? We’ve agreed to your exorbitant fee, and you’re engaged.”

  “Listen, lady,” I said, “I’m not for sale like a pound of sausage, and I won’t starve next week if I turn you down.” I neglected to mention I would starve the week after. “I’ll tell you tomorrow if I want the job.”

  She didn’t like it, but there was nothing she could do. She fumed a bit, and talked down to me as though I were one of the hired help, but in the end she left Dr. Yoder’s address and her own telephone number, and departed with her niece.

  I came out of the war with only a leg and a half instead of the usual quota of two legs. The cork, aluminum, and leather substitute, which the Veterans’ Administration furnished to replace the missing portion, is as useful and comfortable as science has yet been able to devise, but it is neither as useful nor comfortable as the original right leg.

  I started a blister on the stump by wal
king the six blocks to Dr. Yoder’s office, and arrived in a sour mood. Having a false leg has restricted my physical activity very little except when I rub a blister, and then it sometimes leaves me a cripple for as long as two weeks.

  Dr. James Yoder was a general practitioner of the type commonly called a “society doctor”, which meant his oversized fees were not necessarily a criterion of his training and ability. He was in his sixties—stocky, bland and courteous—with an affability which would have made him a pleasant barroom companion, but which failed to inspire my confidence in his professional ability.

  “Normally wouldn’t discuss a patient’s condition with a layman,” the doctor said. “But since Mrs. Rand informs me you’re to act as some kind of guardian or watchdog over Miss Banner during her treatment, suppose that makes you sort of a colleague.”

  He showed his teeth in a confidential smile. “Actually, I don’t hold much hope for a cure. Nearly as I can determine, Miss Banner’s been a morphine habitué since she was twenty, and she’s twenty-four now. Claims she takes but one injection a day, but I suspect she uses at least three, and possibly four or five.” He frowned slightly and pulled at his lower lip. “Trouble with morphine is it acts on that part of the brain controlling moral tendencies. Habitués are always such infernal liars, even when there’s no point in it. Especially dreamers.”

  “What’s a dreamer?” I asked.

  “An addict who takes enough drug to throw himself into a dream state. Morphine affects different people differently, you see. Some get all pepped up and don’t act any different from you or me, except they’re more full of energy. Others pass into a drowsy state and imagine all sorts of things. Have dreams something like opium dreams. Morphine’s an alkaloid of opium, you see. All morphine habitués are liars, but dreamers are the worst, and Miss Banner sometimes drugs herself into a coma lasting hours. Awfully hard to treat a patient who won’t tell the truth, you know.”

  He looked at me for sympathy and I nodded my head. Encouraged, he went on.