Free Marihuana by Cornell Woolrich

Marihuana
     
    by Cornell Woolrich (1941)
     
    The bell rang at about eight that night, and it was a couple of King Turner's friends, Bill Evans and Wash Gordon, come to take him out. "To get him away from himself," as they would have put it. They had a girl with them whom they introduced simply as Vinnie.
     
    That he mightn't want to go out, or if he did, that he mightn't want to go out with them, didn't enter into their calculations at all. They couldn't imagine anyone not wanting to go out with them, especially when they went to all that trouble just to brace him up.
     
    Turner opened the door and just looked at them when he saw who it was. He didn't say "Come in" or anything. He didn't have to with them. They parted in the middle, the girl and Evans pushed past on one side of him, Gordon on the other, and all of a sudden his apartment was full of noise. The radio was going at three-quarters tone, the girl named Vinnie was experimenting with a cocktail-shaker that played a tune, and Evans was busily slapping the lids of boxes up and down looking for a cigarette. This came under the general heading of camaraderie. Turner had experienced a lot of it since his wife had left him and he'd been living alone. As long as the fort had already been taken over, he went ahead and closed the door; but with a rueful look, as if he would rather have done it while they were still out there in front of him.
     
    Evans spread his hands astonishedly, said: "Well, come on, get your things, what're you waiting for?"
     
    "Know where we're taking you?" Wash Gordon added. "To a ranch. To a ranch to blaze weed."
     
    "What's a ranch?" Turner asked. "And what's weed?"
     
    The three of them exchanged a pitying look among themselves, as if to say "Isn't he corny? Doesn't know anything, does he?"
     
    "Marihuana. The ranch is the flat where you smoke it. We just found it ourselves."
     
    Turner sliced his hand at them in rejection, turned away.
     
    "No, he'd rather stick around here and brood down his shirt-collar all evening. Brood about Eleanor."
     
    "It's just for you," Evans urged. "It'll make you think you've got her back." He dropped one eyelid toward the other two.
     
    The girl had found a picture, was studying it. "I don't see so much to brood about," she said felinely.
     
    Turner came over and hitched it away from her, turned it face-down.
     
    "Not on that subject," Gordon warned her in an undertone. "Can't take it."
     
    "Well, are we going or aren't we?" she wanted to know sulkily.
     
    "Sure we're going." Evans found Turner's hat, flattened it down on his head, slapped his topcoat lengthwise around his neck like a scarf. "So is he." He caught him by one arm and pulled him, Gordon by the other. "We know what's good for him, don't we, Wash?"
     
    "I don't think it'll be much fun taking him along," the girl commented under her breath to Gordon.
     
    "Sure it will, watch. He's never tried it before; he'll hit the ceiling. You should always have an amateur along on this kind of a party, for comic relief."
     
    After they'd finally hauled him across the threshold, Turner quit trying to dig his heels in.
     
    The girl came out last and closed the door after her, after sticking out her tongue at Eleanor's photograph. "You'll thank us for this," she promised Turner pertly. "It'll put a little life in you, Old Faithful."
     
    "I left my latchkey in there," Turner protested. "I won't be able to get in again when I come home."
     
    "It'll be so long before you come home," Gordon jeered, "the building'll probably be condemned and torn down from old age."
     
    They got into a cab and drove west to Tenth Avenue, then up that into the lower Sixties, the Hell's Kitchen district, without giving any exact address.
     
    "We ought to get a rebate for bringing a new customer," the girl said breezily.
     
    Evans motioned to his lips and jerked a cautioning thumb toward the driver. "Wait'll we get outside again," he warned.
     
    They got out at a blind