Hard Case Crime: Honey in His Mouth Read Online Free PDF Page A

receive an extra listener’s prize.”
    The quiz question that won the prize was a real toughie: “Mrs. Aarons, who succeeded Franklin D. Roosevelt as President of the United States? Now take your time and think.” The person being called on the telephone always won the wonderful big free prize, because Harsh had to get into their homes to shoot the negatives and come back and push the prints. It was legitimate. The mark got the three free pictures, and unless he could say no faster than a squirrel chatters, he would find twenty or thirty dollars worth of additional prints crammed down his throat. Harsh would snap a lot of shots of the kids with their toys and he had a way of putting all the prints together in an accordion-pleat folder that the parents went for. When he flipped all those shots of the kid out on the living-room rug, mom’s eyes would pop. The telephone quiz gimmick got them around the anti-door-knocker law, the radio gave a cloak of respectability and substance, and National Studios of Hollywood, that sounded like something too.
    Vera Sue Crosby was Harsh’s advance girl. Vera Sue went into the small towns and rented the desk space and the telephone and did the calling. Vera Sue was a real gem in a boiler room. She had a voice like the Mona Lisa over the telephone, a nun-pure voice that sounded naive and honest. The voice certainly didn’t sound like Vera Sue, as full of sex as a thirty-dollar call house.
    There was sunshine in the room when the doctor came in and thrust the thermometer in Harsh’s mouth, which was less embarrassing than having it stuck in his bottom the way the nurses had been doing. Harsh watched the doctor stand there counting pulse with one eye narrowed at his wristwatch while he waited for the thermometer to stabilize.
    “Well, Harsh, I guess you are up to it. If you still want, you can use the telephone.”
    The doctor brought a telephone with a long cord and plugged it into an outlet in the wall and put the instrument on the bed. Harsh seized it, the hospital operator came on the wire, and he placed a person-to-person call to Mrs. Walter Harsh in Edina, Missouri. When the doctor heard that, he looked surprised. “I didn’t understand you were married, Harsh.”
    Better get the old pill-snapper out of the room, Harsh thought. “Look, Doc, this is kind of personal. Do you mind?”
    “Harsh, if you’re married we should have notified—”
    “Doc, you stick to your pills and your thermometer, and leave the women to me, then we would both know what we were doing.”
    The doctor went out reluctantly. An old guy like him, wanting to eavesdrop, when he should be sitting on a creek bank waiting for a catfish to grab a worm, Harsh reflected.
    “Vera Sue?”
    “Walter!”
    “I wasn’t sure my call would catch you, after all this time.”
    “Walter, honey, pep it up, will you? I mean, whatever you got to say, get it said.”
    “Well, for crying out loud, aren’t you the interested one! Haven’t you wondered where I was? Listen, I had an accident, and I’m in the hospital.”
    “I know where you are. Walter, the bus is about due, and the man said it was always on time.”
    “Where are you catching a bus to?”
    “To see you, what do you think? I already got my ticket, Walter, so don’t talk all day.”
    “Good for you, baby. Jesus, I’m glad you used your head so quick. I didn’t know you had it in you. But listen, here’s what you do first. I need you to stop off in Illinois. The minute you get back to Illinois, the very minute you get in Illinois, dig up your birth certificate. Birth certificate. You got that?”
    “Walter, I can’t.”
    “You can’t?” He lowered his voice. “You don’t mean you really are fifteen years old? Goddamn you if you lied to me—”
    “Don’t you goddamn me, Walter, I am twenty-three and you know it.”
    “All right, as soon as you hit Illinois, you dig up a birth certificate to prove it. Otherwise I’m on the hook. If you