out loud, because Mr. Harsh might like to know about it.”
The officer read from the card. “The
The cop turned the card over. He looked puzzled. “What does this add up to?”
“It means you get twenty-five dollars, John, if you notify that outfit right away.” The doctor looked pleased. “I just happened to remember that card, which came in a while back, and I dug it out of the file. John, you get twenty-five, the mechanic who donated the blood gets twenty-five. How does that strike you?”
The cop grinned. “I’ll be goddamned.”
The doctor waved a hand. “They got Foundations for everything these days. Some rich guy with O-negative blood probably kicked the bucket and left all his money to this Foundation, and this is the way they figure out to spend it.”
Harsh had listened. It was all right with him if some bughead Foundation wanted to throw its money away, but it was a shame, he thought, to see any of it going to a cop.
The hospital was as noisy a place as Harsh had ever been in. There was continual tramping up and down the hall, talking, bottles and bedpans clanking. When finally he couldn’t stand it, he yelled, “Shut the goddamn door!” Someone hurriedly closed the door, after which it was quieter, but not much. The sun was shining; if he had just felt better, it would be a good day to walk out of the hospital. The way he was now, stuck in the hospital bed, he was helpless, and anyone who wanted to do a job on him would have a free hand to do so. He was thinking of the policeman. If Harsh could get out of the hospital, he could find a private room and sack up there with no cop in his hair, stay there until he was in physical shape to cope with the situation. He could even get hold of Vera Sue if he got the notion. He fancied the idea of Vera Sue for a nurse. If a man was red-blooded, that was the stuff that would cure him.
Harsh tinkered with his left arm, feeling the cast with his fingers. It felt like a sack of concrete that had set. The arm throbbed. Could he make it out of here, he wondered, if he gave it another try? He’d better, Harsh thought. The cop was a beaver, a guy like that might hear about D. C. Roebuck being found dead in a field not all that far away and put two and two together. He picked up his left arm with his right hand and inched it toward the edge of the hospital bed. The cast weighed a ton. His hand sticking out was swollen and bluish. He clenched his teeth, worked his legs around, got them hanging off the bed. It was a high hospital bed, a long way down before his feet found the cold bare floor. He rested, panting, studying the plaster cast on his arm, noticing it was shaped so it could be carried in a sling. He pulled one of the sheets loose from the bed and tried to tear it, but his strength was not up to that, so he folded the whole sheet and knotted it in a sling that was big as a tent. His belly hurt from lying bent over backward on the bed. Okay, he thought, here it goes. He stood and took two steps and went down on the floor with a crash that shook the building and put out his lights.
Awakening, Harsh found he was back in the hospital bed. He was getting nowhere fast. He had a hazy impression he had tried to get out of the bed numerous times and each time had crashed on the floor, but that was probably all imagination. He wondered how long he had been lying there, whether it was hours or days. Then he heard a conversation outside his door. It was a nurse and the policeman, John. The cop was arguing. “Nurse, the Doc said he should be over the shock from the fall by now. He said it was okay for me to go talk to him if I wanted to.”
The nurse put her head in and looked at Harsh. Unfortunately she caught him with his eyes open. “He seems to be awake. But we’ve had him under medication two days, so I don’t know what shape he’ll be in to talk.”
The officer pushed past her. “I’ll give it a whirl.”
The cop closed the door in the nurse’s face and came over to look down at Harsh. “You ever been in jail, Harsh?”
“Officer, I’m awfully sick. I can’t talk to you now.”
The officer ignored this. “Where were you in jail, Harsh? Come on with the answers.”
“You sure are a guy who gets it wrong, Officer. I never been in anybody’s pokey.”
“Yeah? Then why has a detective showed up around here making inquiries about you, Harsh?”
“I don’t know anything about any detective, or anybody like that.”
“Neither do I, but I plan to find out. All I know, you’re being investigated by somebody—the F.B.I. or a detective or someone. I ain’t run into this investigator myself, as yet, but I’ve heard tell.”
“It must be a mistake.”
“Well, maybe and maybe not. I heard about it, and I’m going to look into it. I’ve already been looking into you, Harsh. And let me tell you, I got the stuff on you. You’re one of these packs of jack-leg grafters who are traveling around our small towns skinning the people out of their money. That’s what you are, and we been having trouble with your kind. Complaints, that’s what. We been wanting to lay our hands on one of you skunks.”
“Officer, shouldn’t you be looking for the guy who sideswiped me? Isn’t he the real criminal, not me?”
“Never mind that. Where is the rest of your pack of crooks?” The officer was scowling. “You birds work in gangs. Where’s the rest of your outfit?”
“Officer, under the circumstances, I guess I got to give you the right answers.”
“Well, what is the right answer?”
“To hell with you, you son of a bitch.”
The officer started back. Anger came over his scrubbed and shaven face. “You are a dumb one, Harsh.”
“I must be, if you think you can walk on me.”
“We already located your gang, Harsh. One of them anyway. Over in Edina, east of here. A young woman named Vera Sue Crosby.
“Officer, as you say, I’m pretty dumb, I don’t remember.”
“Maybe you would like us to speak of her as Mrs. Walter Harsh, your wife. That’s how she’s registered in this hotel in Edina. Mrs. Walter Harsh. But she admits her name is
“What you haven’t got, Officer, is somebody to show you how to do your duty, to kick your fat ass into finding that hit-and-run driver who smacked into me.”
“Miss Vera Sue Crosby, of Quincy, Illinois. You get it, Harsh. Quincy, Illinois. Edina, Missouri. A state line is in between those two towns, Harsh. You see now what I got? Statutory rape.”
“How was that last?”
“Statutory rape. You’ve had it, mister.”
“I may be dumb, but Mrs. Harsh never raised any kid dumb enough to have that hung on him.”
“I’m talking about what the law says, Harsh. Here is a fifteen-year-old girl, and you bring her from Illinois into Missouri, which is across a state line, and you shack up with her. That is violating the Mann Act. That is statutory rape. That is up to twenty years in the Jefferson City pen.”
The sides of Harsh’s face felt like china saucers. The officer had not frightened him appreciably until he brought in the thing about Vera Sue being fifteen years old. Good God, she could be fifteen years old, although she had told him she was twenty-three and he had chosen to believe her. If she was fifteen and she had lied, and if they scared her into getting up in court and admitting some other things, then the cop was right, he’d had it.
The officer watched him. “What’s the matter, Harsh? Don’t you want to call me another dirty name? You brought a fifteen-year-old girl across the state line for immoral purposes, and that makes you the kind of a rat I like to hear call me names. That’s the way I feel, only it ain’t really half the way I feel.”
“I’m a sick man, officer. I got an arm broken all to hell. You come back after I get some strength, I’ll tell you
