Free Small Felonies - Fifty Mystery Short Stories by Bill Pronzini Page A

lady action until tonight.
    "Sure," he said. "Why not."
    "Good," Giftholz said. "Wunderbar."
    He gestured for Mitchell to come around behind the counter and then doddered through a door into the kitchen. When Mitchell went through after him he didn't see anything particularly interesting. Just a lot of kitchen equipment, a butcher's block table, a couple of cases of beer, and some kind of large contraption in the far corner.
    "So what do you want to show me?" he asked.
    "Nothing," Giftholz said.
    "Huh?"
    "Really I would ask you a question."
    "What question?"
    "If you speak German."
    "German? You putting me on?"
    "Putting you on?"
    For some reason Mitchell was beginning to feel short of breath. "Listen," he said, "what do you want to know a thing like that for?"
    "It is because of my name. If you were to speak German, you see, you would understand what it means in English translation."
    Short of breath and a little dizzy, too. He blinked a couple of times and ran a hand over his face. "What do I care what your damned name means?"
    "You should care, Mr. Mitchell," Giftholz said. "It means 'poison wood.'"
    "Poison—?" Mitchell's mouth dropped open, and the toothpick fell out of it and fluttered to the floor. He stared at it stupidly for a second.
    Poison wood.
    Then he stopped feeling dizzy and short of breath; he stopped feeling anything. He didn't even feel the floor when he fell over and hit it with his face.
    Giftholz stood looking down at the body. Too bad , he thought sadly. Ah, but then, Mr. Mitchell had been a strolch, a hoodlum; such men were not to be mourned. And as he had said himself in his curious idiom, it was a dog-eat-dog world today. Everything cost so much; everything was so difficult for a man of honesty. One truly did have to make ends meet any way one could.
    He bent and felt for a pulse. But of course there was none. The poison paralyzed the muscles of the heart and brought certain death within minutes. It also became neutralized in the body after a short period of time, leaving no toxic traces.
    Giftholz picked up the special toothpick from the floor, carried it over to the garbage pail. After which he returned and took Mr. Mitchell's wallet and put it away inside his apron.
    One had to make ends meet any way one could. Such a perfect phrase that was. But there was another of Mr. Mitchell's many phases which still puzzled him. The same old grind. It was not the same old grind; it had not been the same old grind for some time.
    No doubt Mr. Mitchell meant something else, Giftholz decided.
    And then he began to drag the body toward the large, gleaming sausage grinder in the far corner.

HIS NAME WAS LEGION
     
    H is name was Legion.
    No, sir, I mean that literal—Jimmy Legion, that was his name. He knew about the biblical connection, though. Used to say, "My name is Legion," like he was Christ Himself quoting Scripture.
    Religious man? No, sir! Furthest thing from it. Jimmy Legion was a liar, a blasphemer, a thief, a fornicator, and just about anything else you can name. A pure hellion—a devil's son if ever there was one. Some folks in Wayville said that after he ran off with Amanda Sykes that September of 1931, he sure must have crossed afoul of the law and come to a violent end. But nobody rightly knew for sure. Not about him, nor about Amanda Sykes either.
    He came to Wayville in early summer of that year, 1931. Came in out of nowhere in a fancy new Ford car, seemed to have plenty of money in his pockets; claimed he was a magazine writer. Wayville wasn't much in those days—just a small farm town with a population of around five hundred. Hardly the kind of place you'd expect a man like Legion to gravitate to. Unless he was hiding out from the law right then, which is the way some folks figured it—but only after he was gone. While he lived in Wayville he was a charmer.
    First day I laid eyes on him, I was riding out from town with saddlebags and a pack all loaded up with small hardware—
    Yes,