The county was filing a suit for the back taxes. Mona had been served with a thirty-day eviction notice.
I threw the paper away. I drove on to the store, thinking that the poor kid really wasn’t getting any breaks. If the property had been clear, she might have got a nice piece of change for it. Enough to live on a couple years and make a new start somewhere. But it just wasn’t in the cards; she was just the original hard luck kid. Of course, I’d give her a few bills—I wouldn’t let her be put out on the street with no clothes and not a dime to her name. But it would have been a lot better if she’d had some real dough.
I wondered if she had any money to eat on, and I thought for a minute of slipping a few bills in an envelope and sending it to her. I felt sorry for the kid and I really wanted to help her, you know. But I finally decided against it. The police might be keeping an eye on the place. With all I had to lose, I wasn’t taking any chances.
She’d get by all right. The way she was used to living, she probably wouldn’t feel right if she had enough to eat.
Staples usually opened the store at eight-thirty, a half hour before I and the other outside men went to work. But he hadn’t done it that morning. It was a few minutes before nine when I got there, and the place was still closed up tight. And the other guys were waiting out front for him to show.
I got out of my car and joined them. We waited around, smoking and talking, wondering if the son-of-a-bitch had got run over by a truck and hoping to hell that he had. But there was no such luck, of course. At nine-thirty, he showed up.
He unlocked, and we followed him inside. It didn’t seem to be done deliberately, but somehow the other guys were all checked out ahead of me, and I was left alone with him. He began checking me out, kidding and laughing. I felt myself getting uneasy.
He just wasn’t himself, know what I mean? He was in too damned good a humor. Well, sure, he was always ribbing and making with the fast talk, but it wasn’t because he was Mr. Gayheart, scattering pearls of joy and so on. It was about as genuine as a dime-store diamond. He couldn’t work you over with a ballbat, like he wanted to, so he swung the old needle. Making like it was a joke in case you got sore.
This morning, though, it was different. The son-of-a-bitch was really tickled pink about something.
I picked up my cards, and asked him what the big joke was.
“I’ll bet I know,” I said. “You tripped a blind man on your way to work.”
“Ah, Frank,” he giggled, giving me a pussy-cat tap on the wrist. “Always putting others in your place. As a matter of fact, I paid a call on an old friend. Someone I hadn’t seen in almost twenty years.”
“No kidding,” I said. “You mean you go out to this nut house—they got you inside—and then they let you go?”
He giggled again, made another pass at my wrist. “You’re getting warm, dear boy. Strange how our minds seem to run in the same sewer. The friend I visited, the acquaintance I should say, was in a public institution.”
“Jail, huh? I knew it,” I said. “Well, it’s a good thing you’ve got a stand-in with the local cops.”
“A stand-in I’ve gone to some pains to develop, Frank. It proves very useful in a position such as mine. But, no—you’re still a little wide of the mark. It wasn’t actually jail. More of a corollary establishment, I should say.”
“Yeah?”
“Mmmm. An adjunct to the jail…But I see that I’m boring you, and I’ve already delayed you unpardonably. Away with you, good friend! On to the assault on the heels, and may their Achilles heel be bared to you.”
“I don’t dig this,” I said. “This party you visited—he was in some kind of trouble?”
“No—ha, ha—I wouldn’t say that, Frank. At least, the party made no complaint to me.”
“Well, hell, then. What—”
“No—” He held up a hand. “No, I won’t let you, Frank. You’re just being polite, pretending an interest in my poor conversation, and I can’t allow it. Do run along, now, I insist on it. And—oh, yes…”
“I know,” I said. “I know. You want me to knock ’em dead again.”
“Knock them—? Oh, well put! Oh very well put,” and he grinned.
I turned my back on him and walked out.
My stomach was all tight and funny feeling. It seemed to be narrowed, drawn down at the bottom, like I’d swallowed something heavy. And there was a sickish feeling in my throat, and hot-icy needles were jabbing through my head.
I got in my car, so shaky that I could hardly turn the switch key. I backed away from the curb and started driving, aimlessly, sort of blind. Finally, I pulled up at a bar, and parked myself in a rear booth.
The drink helped. The drinks helped. I began to calm down.
He couldn’t know anything. The cops didn’t, so how could he; and what the hell? Somehow he’d spotted that I was a little uneasy. He’d seen it and started working on it, trying to needle out the answer. He was swinging every which way, throwing out the scatter shots in the hope that one of them would hit something.
This frammis this morning, now; it just about had to be a dammed lie, when you started studying it. An ordinary guy would have come right out and admitted that he overslept or got stuck in an elevator, or something of the kind. But Staples wasn’t an ordinary guy—a decent one, I mean. He’d lie just for the hell of it. Climb a tree to lie when he could stand on the ground and tell the truth. So, since he wanted to needle me anyway, he’d come up with this story about visiting an old friend.
A friend that wasn’t anywhere, know what I mean? No place I could pin down. No place that I could check on if I took a notion. The party was in jail, but he wasn’t—and so on. A big mystery. A lot of double talk.
If he just hadn’t been so damned tickled, so pleased with himself…but that would be part of the act, another scatter shot. Or maybe he had actually screwed someone, and it had put him in a good humor. He’d been boasting around about how he was going to make one of the maids at his hotel. He’d been working on it for weeks, hinting that he was going to get her fired, then turning the other way, sweetening her up with little presents from the store. So maybe he’d finally connected.
Anyway…
Anyway, he didn’t know anything.
DAMMIT, HE DIDN’T KNOW ANYTHING!
But I sure didn’t feel like working. I couldn’t whip the deadbeats today. If I tackled ’em the way I felt, they’d probably wind up collecting from me.
What I wanted to do was go home. Not do anything, you know, but just be there; stay there all day close to Joyce. But, hell, it was out of the question. She was already plenty bothered about the money, so upset that she hadn’t even wanted me to leave it there in the house with her. She was about ready to go along with keeping it, instead of going to the police, but she still didn’t like it. And if I laid off today she’d realize that there was a lot more not to like than she knew about.
I had four or five drinks in that bar, stretching them out until around noon. Then, I went back to my car and started driving again.
I drove to the outskirts of town, and turned off on a dirt road. I parked. I leaned over the seat, and opened my sample case.
I took twelve of the five-dollar bills this time. Enough to add up to a full day’s work. I fingered them hesitating, thinking, and then I put six of them back and took three tens instead.
That was more like it. Twelve fives and nothing else might look a little funny.
I put the bills in my cash bag.
I spread the collection cards out on my clip-board, and doctored them.
Then…well, that was all. There was nothing left to do, and I had almost five hours to do it in.
A picture show? Hell, who wanted to go to a picture show…sit there in the dark…alone. I could have enjoyed reading, because I’m quite a reader, see. But I couldn’t sit out on the street and do it, and there’s never a damned thing worth reading in these libraries. No good confession stories or movie magazines, or anything in
teresting.
I started driving again.
I guess there’s nothing that’ll get you down so fast as driving when you’ve got no place to go.
I kept thinking how nice it would be to go home—knowing it was out of the question—and I began to get pretty sore. What the hell, anyway? A guy’s sick and worried and he can’t even go to his own home, talk to his own wife. It was a pretty damned sorry state of affairs, if you asked me. A man knocks himself out—puts himself on the spot on account of her—and she keeps right on giving him a hard time. Banging his ears and worrying him, as if he didn’t have enough to worry about already.
Mona wouldn’t act like that. That little Mona, now, there was a real sweet kid, a real honey. She’d had to do a few things that she shouldn’t have done, so maybe she wasn’t high-class like Joyce…like Joyce pretended to be. But—
Huh-uh: about Joyce. Joyce wasn’t much good at pretending; she’d told me off plenty of times in the past. The way she acted was the way she felt, and no put-on about it. But—Mona was okay, too, and I needed to see her, I needed to be with someone, talk to someone.
Someone—almost anyone—that was on my side.
I drove across town to that center where she sometimes shopped. I went into the little bar there, next to the drugstore, and sat down near the door.
It was one of those places: the kind that makes you wonder how the hell they stay in business. Because this joint, it sure didn’t have any. An old codger nursing a dime beer. Some painted-up dame getting high on sherry, and counting her change every two minutes…That’s all there was.
I had a couple of double Scotches. I told the bartender to pick himself up a buck tip, and I thought he was going to drop dead.
He set a bowl of peanuts in front of me. He dropped a handful of slugs into the jukebox. I told him the light up front was pretty bright and would he mind turning it off. Or, rather, I started to tell him. He had it turned off before I could finish the sentence.
“Okay? Anything else, sir?”
“I’ll let you know,” I said. And he took the hint and left me alone.
I turned a little sidewise on my stool. I sat looking up front, one elbow on the bar, drinking and thinking. And the time loafed by.
I bought another drink, and the bartender bought me one. I took a swallow or two from it, glanced at my watch. It was a few minutes after three. Probably she wouldn’t be by. You never can see people when you really want to, so probably I wouldn’t get to see her.
I got up and went back to the john. I came out…and there she was, just going by. I just got a glimpse of her. I sauntered up to the door, like I wanted to get a breath of air.
She went into the super market. I waited a couple of minutes, and then I went back to my stool. I stood by it, sipping my drink and watching the door out of the corner of my eye.
The jukebox had run out of slugs. The dame and the old codger had left. It was quiet in there and kind of echo-y, and I heard her—heard those fast footsteps of hers—before I saw her. I got to the door, just as she was passing. And, yeah, I let her pass.
I wanted to talk to her, but there was something I wanted worse. Something I wanted to know. So I let her go right on by, and stood in the door watching.
I watched her until she rounded the corner, two blocks away. I watched her and the cars on the street, the people, and then she was out of sight; and I felt a hell of a lot better. She wasn’t being tailed. The police weren’t keeping an eye on her. She was in the clear, which meant I was. So that jerk, Staples, could take his goddamned needle and…
I went back to my stool, kind of sorry that I hadn’t got to talk to her—because she was a swell kid, you know—but glad that I’d handled it this way. Now, I was sure, and now I didn’t need to talk to her. I was feeling okay, and I had the biggest part of the day licked.
I motioned to the bartender. He made with the whiz and the soda. I took out a cigarette, and he lit it for me, smirking and giving me the wink.
“Quite a dish, huh, sir? A really well-stacked babe.”
“What?” I said. “What babe?”
“You didn’t notice her, the one that just went by? Pretty little girl with so much above the belt she can hardly see over it?”
“Oh, her,” I said. “Yeah, I believe I did notice her. Went by when I was getting some air, didn’t she?”
“That’s the one. Lives around here someplace, I guess. A real hot customer from all I hear.”
“No kidding?” I said. “I thought she looked like a pretty nice girl.”
“Well, you know the saying, mister. The nicer they look, the lower down they are. I—”
He caught my eye, and broke off. He began scrubbing the counter with the bar-towel, his smirk drawing in around the edges.
“Of course, I don’t really know anything,” he said. “All I’ve got to go on is what some of the fellows around here have said. Could be a lot of lies, and probably is.”
I took another swallow of my drink. I said, well, I didn’t know about that. “The way I figure, where there’s so much smoke there’s got to be fire.”
“Well…” His smirk started to spread again.
“She didn’t get them breastworks from chinning herself. I wonder how a guy would go about getting some?”
“Well, they tell me it’s pretty simple. From what I hear—and I got no reason to doubt it—all you got to do is give her the old proposition.”
“Yeah? Just like that, huh?”
“So they tell me. They tell me it’s just a matter of howsabout it, toots, and you can get out the coal shovel.”
He nodded, giving me another wink.
I picked up my change—every damned penny of it—and left.
I drove around a while, got myself some coffee and ate a handful of mints. It was that time, by then, so I went to the store and checked in. There was no hurrahing or needling from Staples. He had a dinner date, I guess, or maybe he’d decided that there wasn’t anything he could nose out. Anyway, he checked me out fast, and I went home.
Everything was about like it had been the night before. A good dinner; Joyce being sweet and nice despite the way she was worried about the money. I couldn’t think of much to say to her talk, so I just let her ramble on. At one time I got to frowning, unconsciously, staring around the living room and frowning. I wasn’t really thinking about it at all, you know, but she thought I was.
“I’m sorry, darling,” she apologized. “I’ve been meaning to clean house from top to bottom, but I’ve been so—well, never mind. I’ll get busy on it the first thing in the morning. You won’t know the place when you get home.”
“Oh, hell,” I said. “Let it go. It looks okay to me.”
“No,” she said, “I’m going to do it. It’ll help to take my mind off of…of…” She didn’t finish.
The next day was Thursday. Like the other days since Joyce had come back, it started off good. Breakfast was ready and waiting for me. Joyce was swell. There was no mention of the mur—of the case—in the morning papers.
I thought, well, everything else is so good, that goddamned Staples will probably give me a hard time. But I was dead wrong about it. I was the first guy he checked out, and he didn’t waste any time about it.
I went back around the corner, and climbed into my car. I backed away from the curb, and—
I don’t know where she’d been hiding, waiting. Back in some doorway, I guess. But suddenly there she was—Mona was—piling into the car with me. Stammering scared. So scared that I could hardly understand her.
“S-something’s w-wrong, D-Dolly! T-t-the p-police are f-f-following me…”
17
The police! Great God, the police were after her and she’d led them right to me!
My foot slipped off the clutch, and the car leaped forward. I jammed my foot down on the gas. Inside of two blocks I was doing seventy, right through the early morning traffic, and God, I don’t know how I kept from being pinched or from smashing into som
eone. Then, I began to think again, and I slapped on the brakes. But I didn’t stop.
The hell the police were following her! I knew damned well they weren’t. But I wanted to get her away from the store neighborhood. If Staples saw us together, it would be just as bad as if the police were on our tail.
“Now, what’s this all about?” I said, finally, heading the car toward the country. “I know the police aren’t watching you. I know, see.”
I told her about the afternoon before, how I’d wanted to see her but I wasn’t the kind of guy to give way to my emotions. The important thing was to take care of her, make sure that everything was okay. So I’d taken time off from my job, gone to all kinds of trouble, and done it.
“B-but they don’t do it in the daytime, Dolly. J-just at n-night. Tuesday night and last night. I was afraid to call you or g-go to your house, and I knew you wouldn’t be there during the day, s-so…”
Well, that was a break. It would have been a hell of a note if she’d come busting in on me and Joyce.
“Never mind,” I said, pretty damned disgusted with her. “Never mind the trimmings. You say the police have been watching you. How do you know they were police?”
“W-well, I—” She hesitated. “I d-don’t know, but I supposed—”
“Tell me what happened. Start with Tuesday night.”
“Well, I—I was just going out for a walk, Dolly. That house…I get so scared in it now. I’ve hardly been able to sleep s-since—”
“Never mind, dammit. Just tell me what happened.”
“This car. It was p-parked up at the next corner. Right where they—whoever was in it—could watch the house. And just before I got to it they turned the lights on me. I went on by and they started up—I m-mean, the car started up. It turned around in the street and began to follow me. I walked five or six blocks and it followed me until I turned the corner to go home.”
“Well?” I said.
“Well—” She looked at me, looking like I was supposed to turn flipflops or something. “Well, I went for a walk again last night, and the same car was there. It was over on the other side of the street and they didn’t turn the lights on, a-and—and I started walking pretty fast, so I didn’t hear it when it started up. But I’d only gone a block when—”