Dram of Poison Read online

  Mr. Gibson went meekly, and climbed into the front seat as she shoved over. She seemed to be quite sure that Paul was coming to do the driving.

  Paul came in an instant, buttoning a blue shirt over his naked chest. He shoved long legs under the wheel. “Where to, Rosie?”

  “The market,” she said decisively.

  Mr. Gibson’ sat in the middle. He might as well have been a wax dummy.

  “I called Jeanie to come home,” Paul said, speaking as if his teeth were ready to chatter. “She’s at her music lesson. Mama will be all right alone for half an hour. I’d just helped her to lie down. Didn’t tell her why. Couldn’t leave her with a shock.… What got into him?” said Paul angrily.

  “I must have been crazy,” said Mr. Gibson quietly. It was the easiest thing to say. He was beyond horror and beyond pain.

  “Pray it’s in the market,” said Rosemary, “and they’ve found it. Paul, do you know what it is? It is poison?”

  “It’s dangerous stuff, all right. As I told him—How did he get at it?” Paul demanded with that anger.

  The ghost of Mr. Gibson explained, and Paul grimaced as if he had to hold his teeth clenched: There seemed a convention that Mr. Gibson could speak and be heard and yet not be considered quite solidly there. Paul was perspiring. The car went jerkily. It was only three blocks to the market. “What are you doing home, Rosie?” Paul said in a nervous explosion.

  “I wanted to talk to him. Alone. I didn’t like—This is the first day Ethel’s been …” They had turned the corner “Look! A police car!”

  If Mr. Gibson felt a twinge: it felt like simple wonder. What, he wondered, was going to happen next?

  He tried to push at this wonder and make himself feel alive. What was he doing plunging around the streets—? Who was he? Who were these people, young, busy, pushing people … Rosemary thrusting both legs out of the car to the pavement of the market’s oarking lot and Paul yanking on the brake and tumbling out the other side.

  Mr. Gibson sat for a moment, abandoned and strangely exposed, for both front doors of Paul’s car were flapping open. When he felt a stirring somewhere at the bottom of his being it was still remarkably simple. It was curiosity.

  So he slid under the wheel and got, as nimbly as he could, out of the car. He limped rapidly after them into the market.

  Chapter XIII

  SURE I know him,” The little checker girl was saying. She had black tangled hair, enormous dark eyes, and wore huge gold buttons in her ears. “I always thought he was nice, you know what I mean? Sure, I saw him. That’s him, isn’t it? But I didn’t see no green paper bag. It wasn’t in with his groceries. He didn’t have no green paper bag. See …” She moved closer to the tall policeman and looked up at him almost yearningly. “We aren’t busy so close to lunch. We never are. So I seen him come in. Right in that door. He didn’t look good. He looked like he was sick or something. I seen his bare hands. If he had it, then he musta had it in his pocket. Did you look in his pockets?”

  “Did you look in your pockets?” Rosemary flashed around and seemed to bear down upon him. (She wasn’t anybody he knew.) Then the policeman seemed to be searching him while Mr. Gibson stood helpless as a dummy or a small child whose elders don’t trust the accuracy of his reports.

  The checker girl said, almost weeping, “Why’d he want to do a thing like that? Gee, I thought he was nice… . I mean some customers aren’t so nice, you know, but he was nice.” She used the past tense as if he had died. Nobody answered her.

  “And listen,” she sobbed. “I didn’t put no green paper bag in with anybody else’s stuff, either. Only been three or four people through my stand. It isn’t here. Probably he never had no poison.” She peeked at Mr. Gibson fearfully.

  “If it isn’t here,” said Rosemary, tensely, “it must be on the bus.”

  “Wa-ait a minute,” the policeman said. “Now—” His eyes were cold. They fixed upon Mr. Gibson as if he were an object and an obstacle. One could tell that he was used to obstacles. “You are positive that you had this green paper bag with this poison in it when you got on the bus?”

  “Yes, I am positive,” said Mr. Gibson with perfect composure.

  “And when you got home?”

  “It wasn’t there.”

  “You were emotionally upset?” the policeman said. “You think you forgot it on the bus, then?”

  “I ‘forgot’ it,” said Mr. Gibson, “because, I suppose, subconsciously I did not really want …” The words were coming out of him as from a parrot.

  Rosemary took his arm rather roughly. “Do you want a stranger to die?” she cried at him.

  The knife went in. “No,” said he. “No. No.”

  “Well, then!” said Rosemary with a curious air of triumph. “You see. it isn’t true!”

  Paul said, “Wait a minute. What are the police doing?”

  The policeman said. “They are after the bus, all right. And we are broadcasting. I’ll search this building thoroughly, now, just in case …”

  “What do you think the chances …?”

  The policeman shrugged. He didn’t think much of them. He was a sad man. He’d seen a lot of trouble. He did his best and let it go at that. “Whoever might find a bottle—looks like it’s olive oil—might throw it away,” said he. “Might take it home—use it. Who can say what people are going to do?”

  Ethel can, thought Mr. Gibson, and for a moment feared he might whinny this forth nervously.

  “Can’t we find the bus?” Rosemary was urging.

  “Gee, Rosie, I dunno,” said Paul. “Are you sure he shouldn’t be seeing a doctor …” Paul jittered.

  Rosemary said, “Hurry, hurry …”

  The checker girl said, “Oh gosh, I hope you find it! I hope nothing bad is going to happen!” She peered at Mr. Gibson from her eye corners. “Look, you’re all right now, aren’t you?” She seemed to care.

  Mr. Gibson couldn’t answer. What was it to be “all right,” he wondered, with a shadowy sadness.

  Then they were back in the car, as before.

  “Number Five. That is the bus that goes on out the boulevard?” asked Rosemary.

  “Yes.”

  “But how will we know which one? Did you notice any number on it?”

  “No.”

  “But the police could get the number of the right bus, couldn’t they? Since they know the time you caught it downtown, the time you got off at the market.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Then, maybe they have caught it already. They must have. It’s two fifteen.”

  Rosemary was babbling! It was vocalized worry. Mr. Gibson was answering in monosyllables. Paul was driving the car. He wasn’t driving it very well. The car jerked and jittered. The man was nervous. Mr. Gibson—so curiously removed from self by his ruination (which was complete)—found his serses able to perceive. He felt a resurgence of an old power. He was no longer cut off. Paul, he realized, shrank from him as evil. Paul was almost superstitiously afraid of a man who had intended to kill himself.

  Mr. Gibsor wondered if he ought to try to explain. The trouble was … he could not now remember how it had gone all his reasoning. He thought it odd to be sitting in the middle with the two of them so bent on preserving him from the doom of becoming a murderer. Doom … ah yes, that was the word. Now he remembered.…

  “I was going to write a letter,” he said out loud. “I was going to explain … At least, I—”

  “Well, don’t” said Rosemary vehemently. “Not now. Just don’t talk about it. Whatever you thought, whatever it was, whatever it is. Now, we have to find that terrible stuff and stop it from hurling anyone. Afterward,” she said grimly. “you can talk about it if you want to. Paul, can you drive faster?’”

  “Listen,” said Paul, nervous and sweating. “I’d just as soon not wreck us, you know …”

  Rosemary said, “I know. I know,” and she pounded with her small female fists the side of Paul’s car. “But I am to blame for this,”
said Rosemary.

  Mr. Gibson tried to protest but she turned and looked fiercely into his eyes. “And you are to blame. We are to blame. That has to be true. I’ll prove it to you. I’m tired,” she cried. “I am so tired—”

  Paul said, “Don’t talk, Rosie. He must have been crazy. Let it go and say he was crazy.”

  But Mr. Gibson had a strange feeling of solidity. He thought, Yes, of course, I am to blame.

  The boulevard was a divided street. In the weedy center space there lay old streetcar tracks, now superseded by the bus line. The boulevard was lined with little low apartment buildings, arranged in the charming California style, around grassy courts, and in a gay variety of colors … pink ones, yellow ones, green ones … all sparkling clean and bright in the light of this fine day. Like big beads on the pretty chain, there came from time to time the shopping centers. A huge food market, with banks of red and yellow and orange fruit along the sidewalk, its bulk like a mother hen beside its chicks—the drugstore, laundromats.

  After ten minutes of going, the boulevard lost its center strip and became just a street curving off through residential patches into a long valley, where houses became smaller and shabbier and more countrified as the city frayed about the edges. Mr. Gibson, sitting in the middle, looked at all this scenery as if he had come upon a new planet.

  They passed one bus going their way, and, after a while, another. Neither could be the right one.

  It was Paul Townsend, now, who was doing the talking. “Number Five turns around at the junction, I think Let’s see. If you got off about one forty-five, then it would get to the end of its line around two forty or a bit after. We might meet the right bus, coming back. What is it now? Two thirty.”

  “I can’t tell the right bus,” Mr. Gibson said.

  “The police can. Watch the other side of the street …”

  Mr. Gibson’s brain, although feebly, was turning over. “Whoever found the bottle,” said he with detached composure, “may have gotten off the bus at any stop along the way.”

  “Yes, but—” Paul’s eye flirted nervously toward him. Paul wanted to worry out loud, but not this much.

  “In fact, once the bus has turned around to come back—that means that every person who was on it while I was on it, must not be on it any more.”

  “Maybe whoever found it turned it over to the driver. Maybe they have like a lost and found department …”

  “Maybe,” said Mr. Gibson stoically.

  “Who’s going to take and eat food that he just found?” said Paul. “Especially if it looks as if it has been opened. Did you break a seal?”

  “No seal. It was a question of turning the cap …”

  “How full was the bottle?”

  “Full enough.”

  “It wouldn’t pour quite like olive oil.”

  “It’s oily enough,” said Mr. Gibson. “The bottle will smell of olive oil.”

  “Listen—” said Paul, “even if we don’t find it … don’t forget the police are putting the alarm on the air. That’s what he said.”

  “Not everyone,” said Mr. Gibson, “Listens constantly to the radio.”

  Rosemary said, “And we should face the facts, shouldn’t we?” She turned her head and looked fiercely at him as before. Her eyes were such a fierce blue. Mr. Gibson realized that inside the body of Rosemary—behind the face of Rosemary—within all the graces of Rosemary, which graces he loved there was somebody else. A fierce angry determined spirit he had never met and never known. This spirit said boldly, “If anyone dies of that poison, you’ll go to jail, I suppose?”

  “I suppose,” he said and felt indifferent.

  “In any case, you’ll lose your position?”

  “Yes.”

  “People will know …”

  The people in the market, the people on the bus, the police, the neighbors, the puolic. Yes, thought Mr. Gibson, everyone will know.…

  “But if nobody dies and we find the poison,” said Rosemary, “everything else we can bear. Isn’t that a fact?”

  Mr. Gibson put his hand up to shield his eyes. It was a fact, as far as he could tell.

  “Keep your chin up,” said Paul nervously. “Who knows? What time is it? Ten of three—the bus has turned around.”

  “Look!” said Rosemary. “Look … up ahead! There it is! There it is!”

  Chapter XIV

  THERE WERE in fact, two buses. One wide yellow vehicle was pulled up on the shoulder of the road. A black-and-white police car nosed against it from behind. Beside it stood a group of three, two policemen and the bus driver.

  The other bus had stopped a few yards ahead and a group of people—ten or a dozen—were climbing on. These people seemed, all of them, to be looking back with crooked necks toward the policemen.

  Paul made a wild U-turn. His car stuttered and bounced and stopped behind the police car. The time was 2:54. Mr. Gibson found himself limping after his companions over lumpy sod through tall dust-plastered weeds that grew between the road and a patched wire fence. It was an unexpected setting for a crisis. Most crises, thought Mr. Gibson, take place in unexpected setting.

  “I’m Mrs. Gibson,” he heard Rosemary cry. “It was my husband. Did you find it? Is it here? The poison?”

  Not one of the three men opened his mouth. So Mr. Gibson knew that they had not found it.

  “Who are those people getting on that other bus?” cried Rosemary against their silence. “What’s happening?”

  “Passengers,” said one of the policeman. “They don’t—none of them—know anything. We’re letting them go about their business.” He swung around. “You the man left this poison someplace in the olive oil bottle?” He had selected Mr. Gibson instead of Paul … and Mr. Gibson nodded.

  “Well, we can’t find it on this bus.”

  “Which seat did you sit in?” snapped the second policeman.

  Mr. Gibson shook his head.

  “How big was the package?”

  Mr Gibson showed them mutely, using his hands.

  “In a paper bag?”

  Mr. Gibson nodded. This policeman, a young one, gave him a disgusted look, sucked air into the corner of his mouth, and swung up through the open door of the bus. He didn’t like any part of this situation. His partner, an older man, with a thicker mask on, helped Rosemary up by her elbow. Paul went, too. Four of them ducked and bobbed, searching in there, where the policemen must already have searched.

  Mr. Gibson stood in the dusty weeds. This was the bus? He had ridden this bus? He had no recollection of any details at all. Now, here he was, standing in the sun, on the dusty earth, with a field spreading away from him and he, his own survivor.

  The bus driver, a lean man in his thirties with a long and rather surprisingly pale ace, stood in the weeds, too, hands deep in trouser pockets, watching him. “So you would your own quietus make? Hey?” said the bus driver softly.

  Mr. Gibson was immeasurably startled. “I botched it,” said he pettishly.

  The bus driver poked out his hand and seemed to be touching his tongue up over his teeth. He moved back far enough to lean in at the door of the bus. “This man sat halfway back on the right side, near the window, alone,” he bawled.

  The four inside responded by gathering together on the right side of the bus. The driver came orward far enough to lean on the high yellow bus wall.

  “You botched it, all right,” he said to Mr. Gibson. “Hamlet made a mess of it, too. Hey? Going to try again?” He had sandy lashes.

  “I doubt it.” snapped Mr. Gibson. “I’ll take what’s coming to me.” He pulled back his shoulders.

  “Gibson, hey? Teach at the college, don’t you?” the man said. “What do you teach?”

  “Poetry.”

  “Poetry! Hah!” The man grinned. “There’s a million poems about death, I guess.”

  “And about love, too.” said Mr. Gibson with frozen-feeling lips. This was the oddest, the most unexpected conversation he had ever gotten into.
/>
  “Sure—love and death,” the bus driver said, “and God and man—and all the real stuff.”

  “Real?” Mr. Gibson blinked.

  “You think it ain’t?” the bus driver said. “Don’t gimme that.”

  The younger policeman came out of the bus. “Nope,” he said. “No soap. We’ll look again in a few minutes.”

  “Yeah?” said the driver. “Whassa matter? Don’t you trust yourselves?”

  “Eyes can do funny tricks,” the policeman said stiffly.

  “O.K. by me. I don’t mind being out of service. Nice day.” The bus driver looked at Mr. Gibson again with contemplative eyes.

  Rosemary jumped down out of the bus. “What can we do?”

  Paul behind her, took her arm. “Better go home, Rosie,” he murmured. “The broadcast is the only hope, now. Nothing we can do but wait.”

  “You remember him?” cried Rosemary to the bus driver.

  “Sure do, ma’am.”

  “Did you see the paper bag?”

  “Might have,” said the bus driver, narrowing his eyes. “Seems to me I get the impression he shifted a little package to his other hand when he put his fare in. It’s just an impression but I got it. Might mean something.”

  “Did you see it in his hand when he got off?”

  “No, ma’am. People getting off have their backs to me.”

  “Did you see who took the seat he’d been sitting in …?”

  “No, ma’am. Lessee. He got off at Lambert? Well, I had a little poker game with a green Pontiac there—where he got off. This Pontiac and me was outbluffing each other, so I paid no attention.…”

  “Was the bus full?”

  “No, ma’am. Not at that hour.”

  “Do you understand?’’ said Rosemary. “It’s a deadly poison. In the wrong bottle. Do you understand that?”

  The bus driver said sweetly. “I understand.”

  “Did you notice anyone getting off with a green paper bag?”

  “I can’t see their hands when they’re getting off, ma’am,” he reminded her patiently.

  Rosemary clasped her own hands and looked off across the field.