No Cure for Death (A Mallory Mystery) Page 5

  Jack is five-eight, and near as wide as he is tall, though he isn’t fat. He’s chunky, and he’s got a paunch, but he isn’t fat. His age is indeterminate: he could be forty, he could be fifty. He looks more like a truck driver than a Dean of Admissions of a college, and he’s black.

  Jack was a token black who backfired profoundly on his employers. Besides championing liberal causes and pushing his own and other minorities’ down the throats of an unwilling school board, Jack didn’t play by the unspoken rules. For instance, there was the case of the woman he was living with—a white woman. She had an apartment downtown over one of Port City’s many taverns, and unofficial word came from the school board that the Dean of Admissions shouldn’t be seen coming in and out of the apartment of such a woman (“such” being a euphemism for “white,” one supposes). Jack said, well, fine, then he’d be glad to marry the gal and make it legal. No further criticism of the Dean of Admissions’s love life was heard.

  I watched as he hung up the phone. He spotted me waiting and grinned and waved me in.

  “You got a minute, Jack?”

  “Sure, Mallory, sure.” He gestured to the chair opposite his desk. He didn’t have his Hamm’s shirt on this time, just an off-white sport shirt.

  I sat down. “Been going a few rounds with the superintendent?”

  “Naturally.” He offered me a cigarette and I declined while he lit one up. “From major issues to minor. Like, he thinks the Ag boys should be excused from the Humanities, but I think they need a history course, not just history of the plow, and a literature course, not just ‘How to Read a Harvester Manual.’ And then there’s that black kid from Moline he wants expelled, just because the kid called his gym instructor a mother.”

  I laughed. “Sounds like a term of endearment to me.”

  He shook his head, smiled. Slapped his desk. “Well, what can I do for you, Mallory? You don’t need counseling, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I need some information. And it’s nothing to do with school.”

  “What is it, then?”

  It was something like the hundredth time I’d gone through the story, but if it seemed stale to me, it didn’t to Jack: he leaned forward, intense interest on his walnut-stained face.

  When I finished, Jack leaned back and said, “So what now? What’re you going to do? Investigate? You’re no detective.”

  “I know that. But all I’m going to do is ask some questions, do a little research. If I can come up with anything really concrete, I’ll turn it over to Brennan.”

  “Why not leave it to him now?”

  “I didn’t think you thought much of Brennan, Jack.”

  “I don’t. But in the context of this town, he’s a pretty good man. Port City’s sheriff has to be a little lazy and a little corrupt if he’s going to be an accurate reflection of his town. But when the need arises, Brennan pulls himself up to it.”

  I nodded. “Well, then, you can see why I’m going to have to come up with something solid, something Brennan can’t ignore, if I’m to possibly get him up off his can.”

  Jack shrugged. “All well and good, but I still can’t give you my approval of what you’re up to.”

  “I don’t want your approval. Just some help. And I think you know in what way you can help me.”

  “Sure. The big black guy with one eye you tangled with.”

  “Do you know him?”

  “Maybe. I’ll go even so far as to say probably. After all, there can’t be too many six-four, one-eyed blacks around these parts. But it surprises me to hear of this, for two reasons. First, I haven’t seen him around in maybe a year. And second, he was an okay guy, I’d almost say he was a gentleman.”

  “Take my word for it, he wasn’t gentle. How do you know him? You know his name?”

  “His name is Washington. I don’t know if it’s his first or last. I’ve heard him called Eyewash, by his close friends. I used to run into him up in the Quad Cities, Davenport mostly, in any of three or four bars, bars catering to blacks, or to blacks and whites who wish to mix.”

  “You still hit those clubs?”

  “Once in a while. Since they moved me up from Sociology prof to desk jockey, I’ve had more responsibility on my hands than free time. I still make the rounds of the bars once a month or so, and I haven’t run into Washington in a year at least.”

  “In spite of that, it does sound like the same guy.”

  “Probably is. But if he’s moved from the Cities to somewhere else, it isn’t Port City, or we’d both know about it. He isn’t the kind of guy you don’t notice.”

  “Anything else you can think of about him?”

  “Yeah, he’s got a sister. I’m not talking soul sister, either, an honest-to-God blood sister. Rita, her name is. Very nice.”

  “That so?”

  “Pretty thing. Younger than her brother. ’Round twenty-five or so. I’ve seen her around some.”

  “Lately?”

  “Yeah, last time I was up there. She’s still around.”

  “Maybe I can track her down and find Washington through her.”

  “Could be.”

  “How’d he lose the eye? He ever mention it?”

  “I hear he lost it in a gang fight, when he was a kid. He came from Chicago originally. South Side.”

  “Thought you said he was gentle.”

  “Far as I know, he is. Always nice to the ladies. Saw him back down from a few fights, too. Big guy like him always has challengers, you know, and he’d just ignore any flack.”

  “What does he do for a living?”

  “I got no idea. He dressed well, but most of the brothers—all but me, anyway—dress to the teeth.” He got out a piece of paper and scribbled down several lines. “Here’s the names and addresses of a couple clubs you can try, to run down his sister. But Mallory...”

  “Yes, Jack?”

  “Watch your lily-white ass.”

  I grinned. “At all times.”

  He leaned back again, stabbing out his cigarette in a tray. “You know, though... if I were you I’d try a safer approach.”

  “Such as?”

  “Explore that Norman character. Both the old man and the son. Check it out before you go any further and see if it’s just a coincidence, this Colorado Hill thing.”

  “I might just do that.”

  “It ought to be fun, researching the old man. Simon Harrison Norman. Hell of a character.”

  “Oh?”

  “Sure, hell, didn’t you ever hear about how he raised his fortune?”

  “Something to do with patent medicine, wasn’t it?”

  “I’ll say! It’s one of Port City’s few lasting claims to fame. Sy Norman, back in the thirties, was the country’s leading cancer quack. Sold mineral water in a bottle as a cancer cure. Made a pile. Rumor has it he’s a silent partner back of the five major industries in this town. Look it all up. It’ll be good reading, if nothing else.”

  NINE

  I was hunched over, staring into the microfilm viewer at the city library, turning the crank that caused day after day of Port City Journals to glide across my vision. I’d started with January three years past, had gone through the first roll, which took me to April, and was now on the second, just into May. I was half-hypnotized by the filmed pages as they swam across my path of sight, but was shaken awake by a screaming headline: SENATOR NORMAN DIES IN CRASH. A smaller, unintentionally ambiguous headline above said WIFE AND CHILD CRITICAL.

  A studio photograph of Norman, his wife and daughter, taken only a month before, was on one side of the single column story that ran down the center of the page. On the other side was a long shot of the precipice at Colorado Hill where the Norman car had gone over. The picture showed Sheriff Brennan standing at the edge, looking down over the drop-off, much as he’d been last night when John and I approached him.

  According to the Journal account, the Norman family had been on the way home after spending an evening with friends in Davenport. The night
had been a particularly dark one, no moon, and the senator apparently had “simply misjudged” the curve at the Hill. The account said the senator had not been speeding, and that the senator had not been drinking. This denial raised the questions it sought to suppress.

  I spun the manual control on the machine and eased the next day’s front page into view. Reported there was the death of Norman’s wife, and both Mr. and Mrs. Norman’s obituaries; printing an obituary on the front page is (speaking as an ex-newspaperman) the highest honor a paper can pay a corpse. From Norman’s obit I learned nothing John’s sister Lori hadn’t already told me. I kept turning. Two Journals later I read of the young daughter’s death. Her obit was shortest and saddest.

  I got up from the machine and went over to the desk where Brenda Halwin was working. Brenda is a nicely built, pretty blonde, a year ahead of me at the college, four years behind me in age. The sight and company of her could cheer me up after almost anything, and I hoped this would be no exception.

  “Finished?” Brenda asked.

  “I’m not sure. For right now, maybe. How far back do these microfilmed Journals go?” I’d never gone back past the early forties.

  “Very far. Seventy years, I think.”

  I thought about asking Brenda what she was doing tonight. I thought about the night two weeks ago when Brenda had been with me at my trailer. I thought about another blonde, almost as pretty, but with roots, and dead.

  I said, “I guess you better pull out the thirties drawer for me, Brenda.”

  I wasn’t cheered up; it wasn’t like I hadn’t tried to be. I just wasn’t.

  Brenda started me with January, 1930, and half an hour later I was beginning January, 1931, and had yet to see the name Simon Harrison Norman in print.

  “Reading the old comic strips again, Mr. Mallory?”

  I looked up from the machine. It was Miss Simmons, an elderly, attractive lady who’d been head librarian for as long as I could remember. She was the kind of “old maid” who makes it difficult to understand how she got that way; in Miss Simmons’s case, so gossip went, her true love had died in the Great War. Whichever war that was.

  “Frankly, Miss Simmons,” I said, “I’m trying to avoid the comics, though I find them and the old movie ads tempting. I’ve got more serious research on my mind.”

  “What subject, Mr. Mallory?”

  “A local recluse of sorts. Rich recluse. Simon Norman.”

  “Ah, Mr. Norman.” She smiled a small, mysterious smile, a smile out of a Gothic novel, and said, “Quite a personality, our Mr. Norman. But you won’t find much of him in the pages of the Port City Journal.”

  “Oh?”

  “That is, outside of, perhaps, a scathing editorial or two.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Mr. Norman was competition. He was publisher and editor of his own daily newspaper, the Midwest Clarion, which gave the Journal a run for the money. The Journal saw fit to exclude coverage of Mr. Norman in their pages.”

  “No kidding,” I said. I looked at the microfilm machine and the box of spools beside it. “But it does present a problem for me.”

  “Yes, of course. And for a long time now, Mr. Norman has displayed a distinct dislike for publicity, so recent write-ups are few and far between. You could check the Reader’s Guide for national coverage, but our magazine collection of the thirties is quite limited.”

  “You wouldn’t have microfilm files on the Clarion?”

  “No. None have survived to be filmed.”

  “And nothing on him in recent years? What about during his son’s political campaigns?”

  “Well, there were some attempts to smear the Norman boy by dredging up his father’s misdeeds. But such reports would hardly be objective. Besides, most of the newspapers in the state—the Journal and the Register included—supported young Norman and declined giving detailed accounts of the speeches that included such smears.”

  “Well.”

  “You seem disturbed, Mr. Mallory. More disturbed than problems with a research paper might warrant.”

  “This isn’t a research paper I’m working on. This is something more important than that.”

  She thought for a moment, then said, “I think I can help you.” She turned away and disappeared into her office.

  Five minutes later, while I was standing flirting with Brenda, Miss Simmons came up to us, gave her employee a sharp look that was mostly pretense, and handed me a small, square magazine. The magazine was marked with a white shard of paper.

  “If you can tear yourself away from Miss Halwin,” Miss Simmons said, “and rekindle your enthusiasm for research, this should prove sufficient.”

  I did, and it did.

  TEN

  The magazine was called the Periodical of Iowa History, was dated four years ago, and in an article called “Port City’s Millionaire Cancer Quack” had this to say:

  Port City has had more than its quota of controversial citizens during its century-and-a-half history.

  One local character spread his controversial nature nationwide: Simon Harrison Norman, “Doc Sy,” operator of a “cancer clinic” in Port City. Norman lives there to this day, in a seclusion markedly contrasting his days as a flamboyant con man, when he drove around the state of Iowa in his purple Cadillac and matching color shirt.

  “Doc Sy” was not a doctor, of course... he didn’t even make it out of the eighth grade. But higher education was no barrier for Simon Harrison Norman.

  Cancer is Cured

  By a skillful if crude manipulation of mass media, Norman drew thousands of the despairing and desperate to Port City in the early thirties, with his slogan “Cancer is Cured” as a lure.

  He printed his magazine TKO (Truth Kills Obstacles) and operated radio station KTKO, using Port City as his base. According to his magazine, “Doctor Norman has proven beyond any doubt that even the worst, so-called ‘terminal’ case of cancer can be cured.” Open air meetings, attended by as many as 40,000 persons (five times the size of Port City at the time), watched the showman Norman, an ex-stage hypnotist, perform his miracles.

  His purple Cadillac and purple shirt became trademarks of Norman’s when he moved his rallies to towns all through Iowa, touching at times Illinois, Nebraska and Wisconsin.

  Such activities brought money in by the barrelsful. The “clinic” reaped profits of $50,000 a month by 1932, and Norman boasted around that time that his “personal consultations” netted him $30,000 on an average week. That these profits were plucked from desolate, poverty-torn Depression families mattered not to Norman. Asked in 1934 by a Des Moines Register reporter how he (Norman) could live with himself after victimizing destitute families, Doc Sy said, “There are no ‘victims’ at the Norman Clinic—only cured, healthy patients, ready to embark on a new life—which my staff and I have given them.”

  Norman “gave” nothing—one fifteen-year-old Waterloo boy in later years reported paying Norman’s $100-a-week fee for the “treatment” of his father; comparable rates in a reputable hospital of the era, staffed by physicians, would be around $30 a week. The father, of course, died, in spite of Norman’s treatments and injections. One man used by Norman in a radio broadcast as “living proof of our miraculous cures” died within a month. The man’s wife later said that they had paid $300 for the cure, against the advice of their family doctor, who told them the case was without hope.

  A photo story in TKO called “Ten ‘New’ Men,” reporting on a number of “successful” Norman patients, included two who didn’t live long enough to see the article reach print.

  Quack King

  When an American Medical Association spokesman said, “Of all the heartless, vicious ghouls preying on the dead and those who are about to die, Simon Norman is quack king,” Norman took it as a compliment. Over the door of his clinic he hung a sign saying, “Docs quack—Quacks cure.”

  Norman guarded the secret of his “cure” very carefully, once saying, “A well-known doctor devised it f
or me, before his death,” another time saying, “A traveler to the Himalayas passed it on to me before his untimely demise.” (Norman apparently could cure neither of his benefactors.) Chemists of the day found the “secret” easily unlocked: one Norman concoction was made up of equal parts alcohol and glycerine, with a dab of peppermint oil; a second was nothing more than mineral oil; a third was red clover blossom syrup, which could be purchased in the early thirties for $2 a gallon. Ordinary facial powder served as treatment of external cancer.

  Norman was born in Port City and left in his mid-teens to take advantage of his tall, lean good looks—particularly the piercing gray eyes—by becoming a stage hypnotist. In the early twenties Norman was making calliopes on the side, selling them to the circuses, carnivals and riverboats in which he worked his stage act. By the late twenties he was a broadcaster, peddling clocks, brooms, coffee, underwear, flour, tires, furniture and silverware through the magic of radio.

  Sometime around 1929, when the fortunes of others were quite low, Norman apparently ran into either the famous doctor or the Himalayan traveler, because by late that year he was on the air pitching his cancer cures. By early 1930, construction had begun on his clinic; by mid-1931, he cut the ribbon on his radio station, and, by early ’33, had his own daily newspaper, the Midwest Clarion. President Herbert Hoover, himself a native Iowan from West Branch, had forged a golden key and sent it on to Norman for him to use to start the Clarion presses.

  Short Reign

  Norman’s reign as quackery king was not as long as he would have liked, but it did last a full decade. By 1940, he was out of Port City, after several legal battles, and by 1942 began serving the four-year term in federal prison handed down in ’41 by the courts.

  It was the AMA and other medical societies whose unofficial declaration of war on Norman finally caused his downfall. Ironically, his own reaction to their jabs at him in the AMA Journal caused him more trouble than the AMA itself: Norman vented so much fury in his KTKO counterattacks that the Federal Communications Commission yanked his license.