The Golden Goose (4 page)

“Where is Slater, young woman?” Dr. Appleton demanded. He had a voice like a gnome's, too—high and clear, a piping sort of voice with a snap in it.

“He's up in his room, Doctor,” said Prin, “as I told you over the phone.”

“So you did,” piped Dr. Appleton nastily, “and it's awfully queer. Slater's keeling over like this, I mean. Are you sure he's dead?”

“Everyone keeps asking me that! Go see for yourself, Dr. Appleton. That's why I called you. Aunt Lallie and Peet and Twig and my brother Brady are in the living room. Do you want them?”

“Good God, no. If there's one thing I can't stand, it's relatives of dead patients. Who found Slater?”

“I did.”

“Did you touch him?”

“No.”

“Did anyone?”

“The only other one who's looked at Uncle Slater was my brother, who went upstairs after I came down. And I'm sure Brady didn't get farther than the doorway. He's one of those tough, rugged lads who faint at the sight of their own blood.”

“You'd better come along with me.”

Prin dutifully followed Dr. Appleton upstairs to Uncle Slater's room. Brady had left the door open, and the doctor went briskly in. Prin hesitated; she would much have preferred to stay in the hall. But she supposed Dr. Appleton needed her to answer questions or something, so she followed him into the bedroom. And there was Uncle Slater, lying on the floor exactly as she had left him, which for some reason was rather a shock. Dr. Appleton was just getting down on his knees. He rolled Uncle Slater over, felt the temple where Uncle Slater used to have a pulse, thumbed up Uncle Slater's eyelids and peered, opened his black bag and took out his stethoscope and listened here and there; finally he got to his feet and stuck the stethoscope in his hip pocket, so that it hung down in a loop under his seat.

“He's dead, all right.”

“Well,” said Prin. “
That's
settled.”

“And,” the doctor went on thoughtfully, “it's damned odd.”

“Odd?” Prin said. “What's odd about it, Doctor? People—especially people Uncle Slater's age—die all the time.”

“Not for no apparent reason.”

“Well, for goodness' sake, Doctor, I'm no doctor and even I know
that
. His heart stopped.”

“Agreed,” snapped the little old doctor. “I've never known a dead man whose heart kept on beating.”

Prin blushed. “What I meant, Dr. Appleton, was that Uncle Slater must have had a heart attack.”

“That,” said Dr. Appleton in a very queer way, “is questionable.”

“But why?” Prin cried, bewildered.

“Because Slater O'Shea has come to my office for regular checkups every six months since he married Millie Quimby. I have a file on him a foot thick, including electrocardiograms. I last examined him no later than a week or ten days ago. He had a heart like a bull and the blood pressure of a young man. There's never been the slightest indication of a coronary condition, incipient or otherwise.”

“But, but,” said Prin, “couldn't he have had a heart attack, anyway? Or couldn't there have been something wrong that you missed?”

“Possible,” said Dr. Appleton frostily, “and no doubt it would be convenient to think so. But I don't. There wasn't a thing wrong with your Uncle Slater except a very slight kidney condition from his drinking.”

“But you've got to put
something
down on the death certificate, Doctor. What are you going to do?”

“What I am going to do,” piped the little doctor, “is call the police.”

He motioned her peremptorily to precede him, and Prin did so. She noticed that he removed the key from the room side of the door and moved the little doo-jigger by the knob into the lock position before he shut it. Then he tucked the key away in his vest pocket. Prin frowned. It seemed to her that Dr. Appleton was making a great deal more of Uncle Slater's death than needed to be made of it. It was her private opinion that Horace Appleton was the kind of doctor who might miss a case of leprosy in a routine check, let alone a leaky valve or a thrombus or something like that. There was nothing to be gained by saying this, however, so she silently went downstairs with him. The family was in conclave, whispering. It immediately became a public hearing as the doughty old physician stalked into the living room.

Little do they know, Prin thought.

“Dr. Appleton,” Aunt Lallie said, addressing a point three feet above his head, “have you examined my brother Slater?”

“I have,” said Dr. Appleton.

“What is your professional opinion?”

“My professional opinion is that he's dead.”

“Oh, dear,” said Aunt Lallie, as if this was what she had been afraid of all along.

“Did Uncle Slater just die?” asked Peet. “Or did he die of
something?”

“I don't know,” said Dr. Appleton, adding grimly, “yet.”

“What do you mean you don't know?” demanded Twig. “Are you a doctor or aren't you?”

“I sometimes wonder.”

“What the doctor means,” explained Prin, “is that he won't be able to tell until there's an autopsy, so he's going to call the police.”

“Police!” Brother Brady whirled from the bar as if he already felt the first surge of high voltage. “What do you want to do that for?”

“So he'll get his name in the papers,” said Twig.

“Maybe me, too,” said his sister, clapping her hands.

“Peet,
stop,”
said Aunt Lallie. “Doctor, I insist on knowing this very instant what you have in your mind!”

“It's not so much what I have in my mind,” said the doctor, looking almost as if he were beginning to enjoy himself, “as to what your brother may have in his belly.”

“His belly,” said Brother Brady.

“His belly?” said Cousin Twig.

“His … belly?” echoed Aunt Lallie faintly.

“Please,”
said Peet. “Must you use such words?”

“Doctor,” said Prin, looking sick. “Do you mean that Uncle Slater might have died of—of being given something?”

“Might have,” said Dr. Appleton, looking around as if inviting more questions. “Just might have.”

“Ridiculous,” said Brady. He groped for his drink.

“Stupid,” said Twig. “The only thing you'll find in his belly is bourbon or Irish whisky, or more likely both.”

“Will somebody please tell me what an autopsy is?” asked Peet. “I don't think I really know.”

“An autopsy,” said Brady, swallowing, “is when they cut somebody open and poke around to see what's in there.”

“They only do it to dead people,” said Twig, sounding as if he would have felt far happier with a more liberal policy on the part of the authorities.

“How perfectly
icky,”
said Peet. “I'm against doing a thing like that to Uncle Slater.”

“I'm against it, too,” said Brady quickly. “You, Twig?”

Twig turned a splayed thumb down.

“Well, so am I,” said Aunt Lallie sharply. “As Slater's next of kin, I definitely will not permit it.”

“Madam,” said little Dr. Appleton, “and ladies and gentlemen, I'm for it; and in this case, I think, none of you will have a damned thing to say about it.”

With which he went out into the hall to the phone. They heard him dial, and then talk, presumably to a policeman. Peet had just said that she didn't believe she liked Dr. Appleton very much, to which Brady had muttered that he didn't like Dr. Appleton at all, when the doorbell rang. Everyone looked at Prin. So she went out past Dr. Appleton and opened the front door; she was instantly glad that she was the one who had to do it, for there, across the threshold, stood Coley Collins.

4

Prin did not feel her usual responsible self where Coley Collins was concerned. When she was with him she felt cooperative with, if not dedicated to, his unoriginal designs. This was all the more remarkable because she had been with him, on and off, for only about two weeks—the entire duration of their acquaintanceship. Sometimes, in fairness to herself, she felt she ought to insert in the Cibola City
Daily Views
a variation of one of those little ads that disclaimed responsibility for someone else's debts:
Miss Princess O'Shea hereby and henceforth will not accept responsibility for any folly she may commit while in the company of Mr. Coley Collins
. She did not suppose that such a public announcement of her feelings would exempt her from their consequences, but at least it would be decent warning to the community of how things were between them.

Prin was on the whole a rational young woman. She had tried hard to delve into the possible sources of her curious response to Coley Collins, with a view to coming up with an answer that made sense. She had found herself floundering in the sloughs of “body chemistry” and other such nonexplanatory explanations; and the one hard conclusion she reached—that Coley Collins ought to be someone she could take or leave at will—proved more convincing in theory than in practice. The fact was, she could not leave Coley alone. Since Coley was enjoying the same disease, they had decided to make the best of whatever was ailing them—and the best of it was pretty wonderful. Even the worst of it had its moments.

They had met in the taproom of the Coronado, Cibola City's only “good” hotel. Nice girls do not appear unaccompanied in hotel taprooms without raising questions about their niceness; however, Princess O'Shea was the sort of nice girl who turned her nice nose up at questions to which she had answers that satisfied her. So it was an inevitable encounter. Because once Prin decided she wanted a daiquiri in the Coronado taproom, she
had
to meet Coley, Coley being the bartender on duty. They had not met in the Coronado taproom before because Coley had not been the bartender on duty there during Prin's last solo, having acquired the job in the interim. But on this particular evening there he was, a few minutes past five, dressed in a white mess jacket, the kind that makes almost any young male look like a soldier of fortune who ought to be in Maracaibo or Darjeeling or some place drinking—instead of making—gin slings. Coley
was
a kind of soldier of fortune, being lost in a way—having knocked about here and there, in the course of which he had acquired odd skills, like bar-keeping, and never having accomplished much; never, indeed, having known what if anything he would like to accomplish. This was a great pity, as Prin came to see it, for Coley had superb equipment for the accomplishment of almost anything, if only he could have made up his mind what it should be.

On this evening, two weeks or so before, Prin had settled her nice little bottom on a stool at the taproom bar—thinking how delicious a cold tart daiquiri was going to taste after her odious afternoon constructing obscene sundaes at the soda counter of Free's Drug Store—and when she looked up, there Coley was. Nothing was quite the same ever after. He had crisp cropped dark hair and a lean dark disturbing face and dark eyes that always seemed to be laughing, sometimes at and sometimes with, depending on what or whom they were looking at; and now, looking at Prin, it was with, at once, and for good and all.

“Good evening,” Coley said softly. “Your pleasure, Miss?”

“Good evening,” Prin said back, and immediately felt that they had exchanged intimacies. “I believe I'll have a really frigid daiquiri.”

She watched him as he did things swiftly and expertly. The daiquiri, when she tasted it, met her specifications so perfectly that she felt it only fair to say so.

“This daiquiri is
quite
superior,” she said.

“A daiquiri, when properly made, merits praise indeed,” he said, leaning over the bar. He had a dark sort of voice that went with his hair and skin and eyes, and it made Prin want to wriggle all over. “It is, in fact, a drinker's drink, one might say. I have never been able to grasp the greater popularity of, for example, the martini, even in our supposedly cultivated circles. Are you aware that the late Ernest Hemingway drank daiquiris by the gallon? Not all at once, of course.”

Prin was enchanted. “Perhaps that was because he lived in Cuba. A rum country.” She waited for this delightful young bartender to laugh appreciatively at her play on words; but he did not, and she felt somehow that it had been unworthy of her. “I mean, environment and all that.”

“I doubt it,” said Coley indulgently, and she knew he had forgiven her momentary lapse from good taste. It made her feel better. “I consider it much likelier that it was the esthetic instinct. In serious matters like the gustative arts, writers—serious writers, of course—tend to be connoisseurs.”

“You mean that all serious writers drink daiquiris?”

“Well, no, they don't. I admit it's an egregious fallacy in my syllogism. Some drink whisky, some gin, some vodka—I've heard that the late Bernard Shaw drank carrot juice or some such incredible fluid.”

“Do you always use words like gustative and egregious and syllogism?” Prin said. “If you do, I shan't be able to talk to you. I'm almost over my depth already.”

“I'm only showing off.” Oh, that
grin
. “It's the grown-up substitute for boyhood handsprings when a pretty girl is watching. Please go on talking with me. I promise to use only one-syllable words.”

“It's not necessary to go to extremes,” Prin retorted, a little nettled, but pleased at the same time by the adjective he had used before the word girl. “Anyway, there are too many one-syllable words that are not quite
gentil
, if you know what I mean.”

“I do indeed,” said Coley. “I'll keep everything proper, at least for the nonce. Which reminds me. We haven't been properly introduced.”

“Since when does propriety require a bartender to be introduced to a customer?” Good grief, Prin thought, I'm being
arch
.