Hard Case Crime: Honey in His Mouth by Lester Dent Read Free Book Online Page B

mirth out of her eyes. “So, you can get five dollars a name. Five dollars.” She blew her nose in the sheet.
    “Yeah, at least that much.”
    “I got one hundred dollars, Walter. That’s what I got apiece for five names. Five hundred dollars. You say you can get five a name, but I got one hundred. What do you say to that?”
    Harsh tried to sit up but his arm shot pain through his body and he lay back gasping. “You got five hundred?” What was there for him to say? He could not remember when any news had made him feel so sick and defeated. He swallowed some of his own saliva, and it tasted like gall. “Hand over my share.”
    “What?”
    “Hand over my share of what you got, baby. My half.”
    She withdrew a step. “Your share is half of twenty-five bucks, Walter, if you got any share coming.”
    “Don’t start pulling stuff like that, Vera Sue.”
    “Listen, lover boy, I talk to dumb clucks any way I want, and you’re a dumb cluck, and also a cheap cluck. You’re a five-dollar cluck, that’s what you are.”
    He struggled to a sitting position on the bed, ignoring the pain from his arm. “You watch out, or I’ll bat you one.”
    She laughed nastily and buttoned the new coat over her new dress. “If that’s the way you feel, you can go to hell.”
    She left the hospital room, not bothering to close the door. He fell back on the bed, causing his arm to hurt violently, and looked silently at the ceiling. Presently, when the nurse put her head in the door and looked at him and saw the expression on his face, she gasped and came in and thrust the thermometer in his mouth and took his pulse. She carried the thermometer to the window to examine it and shook her head, murmuring that if visitors excited him so much, he would just have to stop having them. Harsh bellowed at her, “Jesus God, get out of here and leave me alone!” This made the nurse angry, and instead of leaving the room, she forced him to take a drink of water, jamming the glass against his teeth hard enough that it grated. He swallowed some water. She placed the glass on the table and snatched an object off a chair. “Who left this here?”
    Harsh looked and saw that she had picked up Brother’s briefcase. He had not noticed Brother had left it behind.
    “They left it here for me to look at.” He turned his face away from the nurse so she would not see he was lying. “Why don’t you get out of here?”
    The nurse shrugged, put the briefcase back on the chair, and left.
    Harsh did not move a muscle for a while, thinking she might come back. He was furious about the five hundred dollar thing. He had as much right to the money as anybody, but getting it away from the greedy bitch was another thing. He found it incomprehensible that Brother should pay five hundred dollars for five names which Harsh had offered to give the man for nothing. It proved one thing, he decided, it proved Brother was no insurance company detective. No insurance company would hire a man who threw their money around in such a crazy way.
    He became convinced the nurse was not coming back, and he turned crosswise on the bed, stretching out his serviceable arm for Brother’s briefcase. He was able to reach it and drag it onto the bed. It was not locked. He gripped the zipper tab with his fingers and pulled it open. He looked inside.
    What is this thing? he thought. He lifted out a device with a leatherette covering. It was about the size of a cigar box for twenty-five cigars. On the outside were two knobs and a red light. When he accidentally tapped the device while handling it, he noticed the light glow.
    He got it. The device was a battery-driven wire recorder. Since the light was glowing, it obviously was operating. There was nothing else in the briefcase.
    More frosting on the cake, he thought.
    He considered smashing the recorder against the floor or at least pulling the wire off the uptake spool and ruining it, crumpling it into a little metal wad—but in the end