The Way Some People Die Read Online Free PDF Page A

should be back before long. They don’t let visitors stay after four o’clock.”
    “I’ll try the hospital, thanks.” It was a quarter of four by my watch.
    At five to four I was back where I had begun. The nurse at the information desk told me that Mr. Tarantine was in room 204, straight up the stairs and down the hall to the right, and warned me that I only had a minute.
    The door of 204 was standing open. Inside the room a huge old woman in a black and red dotted dress stood with her back to me so that I couldn’t see the occupant of the bed. She was arguing in a heavy Italian accent:
    “No, you must not, Mario. You must stay in bed until the doctor says. Doctor knows best.”
    A grumbling masculine bass answered her: “To hell with the doctor.” He had an incongruous lisp.
    “Swear at your old mother if you want to, but you stay in bed now, Mario. Promise me.”
    “I’ll stay in bed today,” the man said. “I don’t promise for tomorrow.”
    “Well, tomorrow we see what the doctor says.” The woman leaned over the bed and made a loud smacking noise. “
Addio, figlio mio. Ci vediamo domàni.”
    “Arivederci
. Don’t worry, Mama.”
    I stepped aside as she came out, and became interested in a framed list of regulations on the wall. If her hips had been six inches wider she’d have had to take the door sideways. She gave me a black look of suspicion, and bore herhuge flesh away on slow waddling legs. Varicose veins crawled like fat blue worms under her stockings.
    I went into the room and saw that it contained two beds. A sleeping man lay on the far one by the window, an ice-bag around his throat. On the near one the man I was looking for was sitting up against the raised end, with two pillows behind his head. Most of the head was hidden by a helmet of white bandage which came down under the chin. The visible part of it looked more like a smashed ripe eggplant than a face. It was swollen blue, with tints of green and yellow, and darker marks where the skin had been abraded. Someone who liked hurting people had used his face for a punching-bag or a football.
    The puffed mouth lisped: “What do
you
want, bud?”
    “What happened to you?”
    “I’ll tell you how it is,” he said laboriously. “The other day I took a damn good look at my face in the mirror. I didn’t like it. It didn’t suit me. So I picked up a ball-peen hammer and gave it a working over. Is there anything else you want to know?”
    “The pinball merchants find you, Tarantine?”
    He watched me in silence for a moment. His dark eyes looked melancholy in their puffed blue sockets. He rubbed a black-haired hand across the heavy black beard that was sprouting on his chin. There were scabs on his knuckles where they had been skinned. “Get out of my room.”
    “You’ll wake up your friend.”
    “Beat it. If you’re working for him, you can tell him I said so. If you’re a friggin’ cop you can beat it anyway. I don’t have to talk, see.”
    “I’m not on anybody’s payroll. I’m a private detective, not a cop. I’m looking for Galley Lawrence. Her mother thinks something happened to her.”
    “Let’s see your license then.”
    I opened my wallet and showed him the photostat. “I heard you drove her away when she left her apartment in town.”
    “Me?” His surprise sounded genuine.
    “You drive a bronze-colored Packard roadster?”
    “Not me,” he said. “You’re looking for my brother. You’re not the only one. My name’s Mario. It’s Joe you want.”
    “Where is Joe?”
    “I wish I knew. He blew three days ago, the dirty bum. Left me holding—” The sentence was left unfinished. His mouth sagged open, showing broken teeth.
    “Was Galley Lawrence with him?”
    “Probably. They were shacked up. You want to find them, huh?”
    I acknowledged that I did.
    He sat up straight, clear of the pillows. Now that he was upright his face looked even worse. “I’ll make a deal with you. I know where they lived in