Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 174 - I Died Yesterday

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I DIED YESTERDAY
A Doc Savage Adventure by Kenneth Robeson
This page formatted 2004 Blackmask Online.
http://www.blackmask.com
? Chapter I
? Chapter II
? Chapter III
? Chapter IV
? Chapter V
? Chapter VI
? Chapter VII
? Chapter VIII
? Chapter IX
? Chapter X
? Chapter XI
Originally published in Doc Savage Magazine February 1948
Chapter I
THE new client was a long-faced, sack-suited young man who came in wearing his lips drawn flat against
his teeth. I remember having a first thought about him. . . . He needed the sun.
Miss Colfax came forward and bent her shining head at him, and he asked, “What is this place? A beauty
shoppe? . . . Okay. I'll take the works.”
I walked on. I was just passing anyway. Miss Colfax was an iceberg, and she was hired to preside at the
door and throw out fat women who thought they could just walk in and become customers. It was part
of the system. To become one of our customers was a shade more difficult than being presented to the
court of St. James. That was part of the service they got for the prices we charged.
Miss Colfax could handle him. Miss Colfax could freeze a battleship, Admiral included, and send it
rocking away with no steam left and full of respect. Miss Colfax was master of the most queenly snub yet
invented. She was well-paid for it.
But she came into my office a few minutes later. “Miss Savage, I'm awfully sorry to trouble you,” she
said.
“Yes?”
“I've got one I can't handle,” Miss Colfax said.
“The young man who came in a while ago?”
“Yes.”
I thought about the young man for a moment. There had been something that was odd about his way. But
then, what would you expect of a man who walked into an exclusively female establishment the way he
had? Or even walked in.
“Intoxicated?”
“I think not,” Miss Colfax said. She didn't look upset, but then she never had, and probably never would.
“Exactly what seems to be the difficulty?”
“He just walked in and asked for the works. I gave him my best no. He walked past me. He walked until
he came to an analysis room, and went in and sat down. He won't budge.”
“Is that all?”
Miss Colfax nodded. “Shall I call a cop?”
I left off frowning at the ceiling, and frowned at Miss Colfax. She wouldn't normally refer to a policeman
as a cop. Not Miss Colfax; she would have more regal terminology for a cop. So she was flustered after
all.
“What is he doing, Colfax? Chasing our girls around and around the furniture?”
Miss Colfax did not smile, and said, “Quite the contrary. I imagine some of them wouldn't be adverse.
He's not bad looking.” Then she lowered her eyes to her hands and examined one of our best ten-dollar
manicures. “I think they're looking forward to watching you throw him out,” she added.
“Who is?”
“The hired help.”
“Oh, they are, are they? And what is behind that kind of anticipation?”
Colfax lifted her head at my tone and said, “You've got me wrong. . . . It's just that they've heard about
you.”
“What,” I asked, “have they heard about me'?”
“Things. About excitement.”
“I see.”
“I'm afraid you haven't been living up to your reputation,” said Colfax quietly.
I told her that some others hadn't been living up to their reputation around here, one of them being Miss
Colfax, who was supposed to brush off pests. I said I would brush off this pest personally, then we
would go into the other matter, the one about maintaining reputations.
“Yes, Miss Savage,” Colfax said.
She wasn't very impressed, and I thought about that for a minute. Colfax was supposed to be awed by
me, even if she wasn't spellbound by anyone else. Hitherto she had been. She wasn't now. She was even
giving me, her employer, a little of the sass that our prestige-minded customers paid money for. There
was just one answer—Colfax was right, and I hadn't been keeping up my reputation as a hair-raising
adventuress, and I was losing standing. That sort of thing was bad. It could trickle down to the
customers, and business would get bad.
“Throwing one obnoxious young man out won't prove anything, Miss Colfax,” I said. “But I'll throw him
out anyway. Where did you say he is?”
“In Analysis Room Three.”
Our analysis rooms were like the settings they made for ten-carat diamonds; they were intended to
emphasize the richness of the merchandise. Number Three was done in blonde mahogany and pastels of
azure and dove, and it was calculated to make a frustrated customer feel that she had stepped upon the
threshold of symphonic harmony with nectarian living; it was a room ambrosial with the muscadine
vibrations of the psyche aesthetic and the body sublime—that was the way the decorator had put it, or
words almost like those, and he had achieved something that would be about like that if put into words.
There was a more earthy way of putting it: the room was guaranteed to impress over-moneyed,
over-jaded rich-witches who were accustomed to being impressed. It did the job, too. We charged them
fifty dollars for just being in the room.
The young man I was going to throw out had certainly made himself at home. He was stretched out on
the astral blue couch, the one that was like a psychoanalyst's consulting couch. His fingers were laced
together, his eyes were closed.
He was, as Colfax had said, not bad-looking. His gaunt good looks were of the Lincoln and Eamon de
Valera sort, and his sacky tweed suit indicated he wasn't unaware of his typing and not above enhancing
it a little with an outdoorsy motif. But his paleness detracted from the effect considerably.
Opening his eyes wearily before I could speak, he said, “Where am I? Would you mind telling me that?”
“Why bother? You won't be here long enough to make it important,” I said.
“It's quite a fancy trap, whatever it is.” He closed his eyes then, and I noticed that his face looked weary,
infinitely tired and spent. The weariness was almost an ugliness. “You're not such bad bait, either.”
“I'm glad we're not going to have any polite preliminaries. I was afraid we'd be delayed by them.” I told
him.
“You're beautiful,” he said. “You're as lovely as the golden morning sun on a spring raincloud. I didn't see
you very well. But I'm sure you are.”
“You think so? Wait until—”
“There's more shines from you than just startling loveliness,” he continued tiredly, his eyes still closed.
“There's more, an electrical quality, a vibrating force. I think it's like a chemical reaction in a test-tube,
like the mingling of strong acid with helpless fluid. You have a strong effect on everyone around you,
don't you? Going out with you would be about as placid as carrying a lighted candle through a gasoline
refinery, wouldn't it? Where did you get that combination of bronze hair and flake gold eyes?”
“Listen, I've had that kind of ammunition shot at me by experts,” I said. “You might as well save your
breath.”
He turned his head away a little, with his eyes still shut. He wasn't concentrating on me, or on anything.
“It don't amount to one little thing how lovely you are.” His voice was low now, thin and far, a weak thing
that didn't reach the walls of the room. “I wish it did. I sure wish it did.”
I began to think seriously of throwing him out the hard way. I'm supposed to be pretty good at judo.
“Would you like to go out head-first or feet-first?” I asked coldly. “We don't usually extend a choice, but
you're beginning to seem like a special case.”
“You effervesce,” he said. His voice crawled further back into him. “That's it. You effervesce. You sizz.
You're a Fourth-of-July sparkler. You're self-igniting, and you must be lovely to watch. . . . I can't see
you. I wish I could.”
“You might try opening your eyes.”
“Why trouble? It wouldn't do any good. . . . No, I prefer to keep them closed, and that way I can
compare you to Lucia. Lucia makes quite a contrast. Lucia isn't like you. Her misfortune. . . . And mine.”
“So you've got woman-trouble?”
“Maybe I have. . . . I haven't thought it all the way out yet—but maybe I have. Could be.”
“Name of Lucia?”
“Lucia. Yes.”
“Doesn't Lucia appreciate a great big lanky hunk of man like you?”
A smile that was nothing but the spirit of a smile haunted his lips.
“Lucia is married to a helluva nice guy named Rich Thomas,” he said.
“Oh, you've been jilted?”
“Lucia married Rich ten years ago,” he said. I went a few steps closer, because his voice was now dying
before it reached me. I listened to him add, “Lucia carries the world on her shoulders. That's her
trouble.”
“It looks to me,” I told him, “as if Lucia isn't carrying you, but let you drop with a thud.”
“Lucia should have been born God.”
“Lucia sounds stuffy.”
He didn't seem to be hearing me. “But it is the other way around,” he continued. “Rich was born God.
Rich is going to remake the world, and it won't take him any seven days, either.”
“This seems to be rather divine company you've been keeping,” I told him coolly. “Now let's get back to
fundamentals. We can't use you around here. Even if you're an assistant Angel, which could be the
impression you're trying to give, we still couldn't use you. How about taking a walk?”
He loosened a little more on the couch. There wasn't any animation in him anywhere. He might have been
more pale, or it might only have seemed so. I had to lean forward to get the sound of his voice where it
stopped, which was no more than six inches from his lips.
He said, “Would you run an errand for me?”
“Errand?”
“As far as the door,” he said. “Go see if they've come in yet to finish killing me.”
I went to work on him then. I could see that there wasn't any more time to lose, and that it was quite
possible that too much had been lost already. What was wrong with him wasn't easy to find. He helped
me a little; he had barely enough left in him to do that. He managed to get a hand around to his back and
lay a finger on the spot.
I couldn't tell exactly what they had put into him, but it had a thin blade, and they had broken it off,
snapped off the handle or whatever had been attached to the blade. There was just a small bead of bluish
blood, and when I pressed on it with a finger, I could feel the sharp edge of steel underneath.
Chapter II
I WALKED to the door, threw it open, and told Colfax, “Get Farrar in here fast.”
Colfax stared with pale, detached wonder. She wasn't alone. All the other employees who could
decently loiter there were present, waiting to see me in action. But they hadn't expected to see a young
man possibly in the act of dying, and on their faces was the thin shrill silence of horror.
“Pat, is he—” Colfax made a wooden movement with her hands. “I'll get Farrar!” she cried, and whirled
and ran.
Farrar was my plastic surgeon, and he was also, with the exception of one man, probably the best in the
business. The exception, the one man better than Farrar, and better than any specialist was likely to be
for a number of generations, was my cousin, Doc Savage. But Doc Savage didn't demean his skill by
sculpturing the faces of vain women, and Doc didn't work for money anyway, and also he wasn't too
long on approval about my beauty salon business; and so Farrar was the best available.
Farrar came in a hurry. He began doing what he could.
“Colfax,” I said. “You were at the door when he came in.”
“Yes.”
“You see anyone following him?”
“Who would—”
“Someone thrust a thin blade, ice-pick, or something of the sort, in his back, trying to kill him. He came in
here to escape them.”
Colfax's head came back stiffly and fear stirred in her eyes, like pale smoke.
“I saw no one.” She said this with her lips only.
I said, “I'm going out and look around. Help Farrar. If he needs an ambulance, call one. Get him anything
he needs.”
“You're going out and— No! No—they may still be there!”
I went into my office, opened a cabinet, and took out a family heirloom, a little more than four pounds of
old-fashioned single-action six-shooter. Hoglegs, those implements of mayhem were called in their day. I
had inherited it from my father, who hadn't exactly used it as a paperweight in his time. I could stick five
matches in a crack in a fence post at thirty yards and light at least four of them with it, and that was my
father's doing too. He had shown me how.
Stowing the family treasure in a handbag a little smaller than a valise, I went out to look for murderers.
The hired help, who were never called by anything as vulgar as hired help, watched me depart with a
collective expression of hair-on-end. My reputation was on the upswing, I gathered.
It wasn't quite as devil-may-care as they seemed to think it was. I gave some thought to that, to the effect
that excitement seems to have on me, while I was sauntering along the hallway looking for anything
suspicious, and the result of my thought was a thankfulness that Doc Savage was not there watching.
Excitement in any of the three forms it usually takes—danger, suspense or anticipation of
violence—undeniably has a stimulating effect on me, and this trait, if it should be called a trait, must be a
family inheritance just as much as the six-shooter in my handbag. Doc Savage once told me that it was a
blemish that passed along in the Savage blood. He said this unhappily. He also said that he was going to
cure me of it, and he said the same thing on other occasions, but never very confidently. Firmly, yes.
Angrily, also. But never with much certainty.
My cousin Doc Savage has the same blemish himself, although he just looked erudite and poker-faced
when I pointed this out. He was a victim of the same intoxication about excitement that I was, because
nothing else would very well explain the odd profession he followed, a profession which was—and
nobody should be fooled by the Galahadish sound of his work—righting wrongs and punishing evildoers
who were out of reach of the usual law enforcement agencies.
Doc Savage, who had been literally lifted from the cradle by a rather odd-minded father and put in the
hands of scientists and specialists for years of training, was a remarkable combination of scientific genius,
muscular marvel and mental wizard. To say that about Doc sounds melodramatic and a little ridiculous,
but the fact remains that he was a startling individual. He was primarily trained as a surgeon, and could
easily have led that profession in practice. He was also an electrical engineer, chemist, and several other
things, of startling ability.
But Doc followed none of these professions. He did research in them, sporadically, and contributed his
discoveries, which were outstanding, to the general welfare. The rest of the time, he followed adventure,
in the company of five specialists—Monk Mayfair, the chemist; Ham Brooks, the lawyer; Johnny
Littlejohn, the archaeologist and geologist; Renny Renwick, the engineer, and Long Tom Roberts, the
electrical wizard—men who had the same liking for adventure that Doc Savage had.
Doc Savage led a wonderful life. His name could make men shudder in the far corners of the earth—the
sort of men who should shudder, that is. Someone tried to kill him at least once a month. It was always
the very best talent that tried, because the idea of going up against Doc Savage would scare a
second-rater green. Doc was appreciated, too. He could, by making the mildest sort of a request, get
unbelievable coöperation from any governments of the right sort. He did things daily, as a matter of
course, greater and more exciting than most people achieve in their lifetime. He really did. He was my
cousin, and members of a family usually underrate the accomplishments of the rest of the kinfolks. He
was probably even better than I thought he was.
Doc Savage and I had our differences. Personally, I could use money, and I didn't mind chipping it off
those who were heavily plated with it. Doc was independent of money. He had—and this was true,
far-fetched or not—a lost tribe of Mayans in Central America who supplied him with fabulous quantities
of gold, out of gratitude for a service he'd done them. That was the way Doc Savage was. A little
unbelievable.
But the main difference, and point of dissension, between Doc Savage and myself was this first matter of
liking excitement. Danger affected me in a way that was—well—a little abnormal, as I am sure it did Doc
also. To me, excitement was a heady thing, irresistible, fascinating, drawing wildly at me. Not that I didn't
have fear at the prescribed times. Whether it was a normal amount of fear, I don't know, because who
can measure a thing like that in himself or herself? What do you use for a yardstick?
Oh, to sum it up, Doc Savage and I were bitterly at odds on one point—he wouldn't let me take part in
the wonderfully exciting adventures he was always having. He called it keeping me out of trouble,
because I was a girl. He was stubborn as a mule about this. He didn't even let me know when he was in
New York part of the time, for fear I'd horn in on something.
Naturally, I jumped in whenever I could. Who was I to defy a family trait? It was too interesting not to
defy it.
I nearly didn't find the killer, due to the fact that I almost overlooked a kindergarten item that every
policeman knows: Murderers don't necessarily look like murderers.
He was a bobbing little fuss-duddy of a man. He should have chirped as he hopped along. He looked
like a bird, a drab one, a sparrow.
He came out of an office and went into another one. He came out of that one, and entered still another,
and I followed him into that one, not really suspecting him yet, but interest ed in him because I couldn't
figure what business would take him into the office of an oil-well tool supply concern, a fashion magazine,
an insurance agency.
He took off his hat, and his hair was the same coal smoke grey as his suit. He said to the receptionist in
that office, “I was to meet Doctor Cleagle here.”
“I'm afraid I don't know Doctor Cleagle,” he was told.
“But I don't understand. . . . I was told the Doctor came—there had been an accident—a young man,
something had happened to him.”
“Sorry.”
“Perhaps, if I described the young man who was—ah—injured . . .”
And so help me if the little sparrow didn't describe young Abraham Lincoln-De Valera who was lying in
my establishment with the sliver of steel in him.
“No, sorry,” said the receptionist, who then turned to me and asked, “What can I do for you, Miss?”
I leaned over the desk and told her that I would like to see Mr. Illminer—one of the names on the
door—about some insurance. Not a bad idea to have insurance, either, I thought. I could see the little
man from the corner of an eye. He was looking absently at me, not at my legs but at a spot on my back
that corresponded to the resting-place of the thin steel in the lanky young man, or so it seemed to me. It
was quite a creepy sensation. Then he took out a handkerchief, a neat white one which he unfolded, and
he blotted at his face. He turned and left while the receptionist was telling me that I would have a short
wait to see Mr. Illminer, and I said sorry, I'd have to run along.
The business end of my big gun had a satisfyingly firm feeling when it came against his back. We were
alone in the office-building hall. Just to make it better, I put the gun nose to the spot where the steel
reposed in the other man.
“This is a gun,” I told him. “And if you have any preconceived notions about women, don't be misled by
them.”
He twisted his head around sufficiently on a thin neck to see that it was a gun, and his eyes, brightly round
and bird-like, came out a little.
“I understand,” he said.
“Remember, don't be misled.”
“I won't.”
I pushed on the gun so that it gouged into the significant spot on his back, and asked, “Remind you of
anything?”
He said, and it sounded surprisingly mild, “I'm afraid visions of my long and misspent life aren't going to
flash before my eyes, as they are supposed to do. Really, young lady—”
“It was in him right at that spot.”
“I don't believe I—”
“It was a small blade. It didn't make the commotion that this thing will if I let it go.”
He stood as still then as the statue of General Grant on Riverside Drive, and he began to get a little of the
General's marble coloring. His shoulders became concave, a trifle saucer-shaped, trying to get away from
the hard iron touch of the gun. And he was thinking. His mind was chasing ideas like a fox after rabbits.
“You heard me asking about young Thayer,” he said finally. “Yes, you followed me into that office and
heard my inquiry. Well, I can explain that. You see—”
I said, “You've had time to think up a nice lie. I'll bet it's interesting. But let's save it a minute. . . . Do you
think you could perform a simple act like raising your hands without provoking me into shooting you?”
“You wouldn't shoot me.”
“You think so? Try me and see.”
His shoulders squirmed a trifle more, and dropped a bit in discouragement, or I hoped it was
discouragement, and he said, “I wish I had taken a closer look at you. You seemed to be a very lovely
girl, the sort who would howl like anything at a mouse. Yet now you sound—there's something about
you—I can't be sure—”
“And you're not a mouse. The hands up, do you mind?” He lifted his hands then, and I noticed that they
didn't tremble, which was a bad sign, a warning to be careful with him. There are ways—they teach them
to policemen and soldiers—of taking a gun from another person, and they work astonishingly well. I
摘要：

IDIEDYESTERDAYADocSavageAdventurebyKennethRobesonThispageformatted2004BlackmaskOnline.http://www.blackmask.com?ChapterI?ChapterII?ChapterIII?ChapterIV?ChapterV?ChapterVI?ChapterVII?ChapterVIII?ChapterIX?ChapterX?ChapterXIOriginallypublishedinDocSavageMagazineFebruary1948                             ...

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