He did not sneak down the steps, but neither did he turn on the outside light at the top landing. The windows of the first-floor flat were to the rear of the diagonal staircase; he was farther from them at each phase of the descent. It was his practice coolly to ignore the fat couple on the ground floor if they were sitting on their porch. He worked on the principle that an obvious slyness called attention to itself. As a used-car merchant he enjoyed a great latitude in his social connections. He might be demonstrating, delivering, or collecting an automobile, wherever or with whomever he was seen.
Beyond this, boldness created its own immunity. In the early days of their association, it had happened more than once that while downtown in the city with Laverne he had recognized local persons, but always from the side or back, and a magical force restrained them from turning towards him. For some time now, the rewards of the domestic experience had kept the lovers at home. So much the worse for any observers who might be counting his visits.
Most people were too yellow to go beyond clandestine gossip and, say, write Naomi a poison-pen letter; and if they did and she read and understood it, he was still her meal ticket, and she was not noted for her pride. Anyway, he planned to have her killed soon. But then would not his association with Laverne, which it stood to reason had been noticed by someone, be incriminating? Not if he had an ironclad alibi. He was indifferent to suspicions that could not be legally implemented. In the time to come a strained reputation might even bring him more business: he knew that much about the human race. A divorce would hurt him worse, being negative. Buddy had thought about this for a long time, but in fits and starts, not continuously. He was impulsive, no plodder.
He found his car around the corner, eased it away from the curb, made one turn, drove a block and made another, heard the crash of breaking glass, and saw two boys running along the sidewalk. When they reached the streetlight he recognized one as Ralph. He had no concern for the other, who anyway broke from the pavement as the car approached and plunged into a darkened side yard.
Buddy swept into the gutter and flung open the door on the passenger’s side. Ralph halted as if a net had been thrown over him.
“Hey.”
“Yes,” Ralph said, without apparent recognition. He came obediently to the car. “You see—oh…”
“Surprise,” Buddy said. Then, pointing to the seat: “You just get in and keep your trap shut.”
Ralph obeyed, and Buddy drove rapidly until they were across the iron bridge. “Now,” he said, slowing down, “I want to know why I oughtn’t take you to the police station—or maybe the mental asylum.”
Ralph was looking into his own lap. “I can’t give you any good reason.”
“Then I’ll tell you why,” Buddy said levelly. “Buddy Sandifer’s boy up on vandalism charges: that would be swell for business.” He whipped his head towards Ralph and then back. “Have you possibly turned into a rotten little punk? Tell me I’m wrong, if you can.”
He had stopped the car now. Ralph looked out and saw the railroad station again. It was depressively fascinating to think that in this place, not long ago, though drunk, he had not been in any trouble.
“I certainly wish I could,” said he.
“You’re talking like a bum, Ralph. Who was that other kid?” He revved the engine and then turned off the ignition. Crickets were singing in the weeds below the platform. “I can sit here till the cows come home.”
“It’s an outlandish story,” said Ralph. “I’ll admit that. You know what was tied to that brick we threw in the window? Money.”
Buddy repeated the word without expression.
“I knew you wouldn’t believe it.”
“Money?”
“Six or seven dollars, I think,” said Ralph, “though I never counted it, true. Whatever the original amount was, plus a dollar for the window, which was the basement window. The main window is plate glass, and if you broke it, it would certainly cost more than a dollar, so we—”
“You’re talking junk now, Ralph,” Buddy said in despair. “Nobody throws money away for a cheap laugh.”
“Well, it’s the God’s honest truth that that brick had money tied to it with a shoelace.” In fact the lace was Ralph’s own. Consequently he hadn’t been able to run well; his gym shoe threatening to fall off, he had surrendered at the appearance of the car. He had rather be caught than lose one Ked. “Actually it won’t cost a dollar to replace that small amount of glass, so there’s something extra for the inconvenience caused Mr. Bigelow.”
Buddy sighed. For once Ralph looked at him, and saw a weird, wolfish grin in the light from the dashboard.
“It wasn’t vandalism,” Ralph assured him. “You could check that tomorrow. You could go around there and I’ll bet he would tell you.”
Buddy maintained his queer, sinister expression until Ralph turned away. “I wasn’t an angel myself at your age.” said he. “I helped myself to something from the collection plate once in Sunday school, and ate ice cream till I got sick. But I never destroyed property and can’t understand anybody who does.” He changed pace with a harsh accusation: “I guess you think it’s exciting to break glass?”
“Not me.”
“It’s dumb, Ralph, is what it is. What have you accomplished?”
“You’re not getting the point. You’re not paying attention to what I said.”
As could be expected, neither did his father listen to this. “Tell you what you’re going to do, Ralph. Tomorrow you’re going around to that store and make a clean breast of it to the owner. You’re going to have to take a chance he’ll have you arrested. But I don’t think that will happen. I think he will realize the courage it took on your part and your honest desire to make good on the damage.”
Buddy lifted a hip and fetched the wallet from his back pocket. “Here.” He handed a bill to Ralph. “You give him that.” He started the car, but before pulling away from the station he said: “I bet he’ll end up thinking more of you than if you hadn’t broken the window at all. People are like that.”
Ralph closed his eyes in acquiescence, though his father wasn’t looking at him. He opened them as they passed under a streetlight and saw that the bill was a two-dollar note, the standard fee for a whore, if you could believe Horse Hauser, who had quoted his brother Lester, who if you could believe him, was by now screwing Imogene Clevenger under a bush in the park.
“So far as I’m concerned, I’ll never mention it again,” said Buddy.
When they got home Ralph went to his room, realized he had been stinking drunk for hours, fell onto the bed, and went to sleep with his clothes on.
Naomi sat in the living room, reading a book. She was wearing the same housedress as at lunch and sheenless cotton stockings, in view from the calf down. Her skirt never climbed very far up when she sat, but her stockings invariably drooped in whatever attitude.
She peeped over the top of the volume at Buddy’s entrance. “You must be devastated after a day like this. I trust you had a bite somewhere. If not, there’s some salmon left.”
“And how,” said Buddy, sitting down on the couch. He ignored the mention of food. Naturally he abhorred salmon. “I ran across Ralph and gave him a lift.”
“Wasn’t that lucky,” said Naomi, lowering the book to her lap.
“Say,” said Buddy, “you see more of him than I do. How’s he getting along?”
“Oh, you never need worry about Ralph. He’s very self-sufficient.”
Buddy grimaced inwardly at her pretentious lingo; what showed was a smile. “You know how it is with a kid that age. He plays his cards close to his chest. The last guy he’ll shoot straight with is his old man. I was like that myself. I wonder if he’s tried smoking yet. I sneaked a few drags on my pop’s pipe once, made me sick as a dog, haven’t smoked again till this day. God rest his soul.” All of Buddy’s immediate family were dead, except a sister who moved to Massachusetts and hadn’t been heard from since, nor had she been sought. He was a loner.
He regretted having introduced this subject. Naomi went to the drumtop table and took a cigarette from a brass box, now greened, which had been a wedding gift years before.
Buddy resumed: “If I could find the time I ought to take Ralph fishing or to a ballgame.”
Back in her chair, Naomi slowly released the smoke from her first draught. “I wonder.”
“Don’t he like baseball?”
“If so, it had better be tomorrow. High school begins on Monday.” She returned deliberately to the cigarette, placing it in an ashtray on the little disc-shelf affixed midway down the shaft of the floorlamp.
Buddy repressed most of his annoyance. “It was just an idea. I’d like to do something for him.”
Naomi thought about this. Then she said: “Well, no one need be embarrassed by good motives.”
When she was dead Buddy intended to put Ralph in a military school.
Oddly enough, though they usually retired at different hours, Buddy and Naomi slept together in a double bed. He even put it to her occasionally. It was not altogether without satisfaction that he ran her skinny body through with his lethal weapon. This however was not one of those nights. He pretended to be asleep when she slopped in, semicircled the bed in her old nightgown, got into the far side, and, tilting the lampshade and leaving it askew, turned out the light.
chapter 5
NEXT MORNING Buddy arrived at the lot fifteen minutes early for his appointment, opened the safe to get the money, and found the cashbox empty.
However, after a moment of panic he remembered his instructions to Leo and realized that the latter had taken all the cash to the night depository, including the sum that had been kept for the hiring of a killer. Buddy had assembled a fund of approximately three hundred and fifty dollars by diverting amounts from the cash payments for car sales. This lode remained always available in the metal box, which lay behind the locked door of the safe at night and on weekends. A burglar might of course blow the safe and be rewarded. But if, after Naomi’s death, suspicious investigators checked Buddy’s bank accounts they would find no large withdrawals that could not be innocently justified.
Now of course this careful provision had been destroyed, and Buddy could blame nobody but himself. How could he have made such an error? Going back over the events of the day before, he recalled that he had already asked Leo to make the deposit before the sorry incident with Ballbacher. Having arranged the appointment with Clarence, he had been over-eager to join Laverne. It was as if Naomi had already been disposed of. This was his initial mistake. The resulting elation had vanished with the blow of Ballbacher’s fist. Buddy’s luck, good or bad, was often serial, having a run, in whichever direction, until the god in power was appeased.
His job now was to arrest and reverse the momentum of failure. Above all he must keep his head: no more unwarranted glee, no loss of control when surprised, no surrender to confusion when as now he was discomfited by his own blunder. Calm reasoning revealed that, the bank being closed all weekend, Leo’s deposit would not be dealt with until at least 9 A.M. on Monday, at which time Buddy could report there and correct it.
That left the matter of the colored hoodlum whom Clarence was due to bring around momentarily. It had been Buddy’s intention, after establishing, as well as you could in an interview, that the man was capable of performing the deed, to pay him something down. Now that the supply of money was not at hand, no such deposit could be issued.
Buddy’s sole argument being cash on the barrelhead, he had no idiom in which to negotiate. Until he retrieved his treasure next morning, his proposition must be theoretical. For twenty-four hours there would be extant a colored hoodlum who was privy to his plan and, having taken no money, without personal implication. Were he arrested for another crime during the night, he might seek favor with the authorities by informing them of Buddy’s proposal.
In a town this size, a merchant like Buddy knew all members of the modest-sized police force, remembered them at Xmas, and gave them special consideration on purchases. In return he got no traffic citations for either his personal infractions or those made in the name of his business, for example if a client or salesman had too heavy a foot on a test drive: younger customers often wanted to try the “pickup” of a given car when starting off at a green light.
The cops would not, certainly, be eager to believe the story told by a Negro under arrest, yet all who heard it would remember if Naomi subsequently died of other than natural causes.
Buddy retained his self-possession, but he had not worked out an answer to the problem by the time Clarence arrived at the office. Therefore he was relieved to see that the ex-boxer was alone, even though the lone appearance implied that he still would not have his hired killer.
Clarence wore a black suit so often pressed as to show a glint, a glaring white shirt, and a dull black tie bearing a series of small red figures. Buddy had never seen him dressed in other attire than work clothes. His bearing went with the suit: Buddy saw it as pompous.
In ambivalent reaction he said derisively: “I see you flopped.”
Clarence gravely strode behind Leo’s desk and, unbuttoning his jacket, sat down.
“That’s the ticket,” Buddy said. “Make yourself to home. Maybe you’d like a cigar.”
“I don’t use them,” said Clarence, apparently without intentional irony, though his dead eye always provided some, willy-nilly.
“Well now, that’s very interesting, sir. I figure all big muckety-mucks smoked El Ropos.” Buddy exposed his teeth and spoke through them. “What the hell’s your idea coming here empty-handed and all dressed up like a Christmas tree? Didn’t I warn you about getting fresh?”
Clarence put his big hands onto Leo’s desk and shot each white cuff. Then he leaned back deliberately. “I got that man you wanted.”
Buddy felt a twinge of fear, and, outraged by it, he reinforced his snarl. “You leave him tied up outside like a dog?”
Clarence frowned. Buddy saw that the sarcasm was too obscure for him. “I told you to bring him here this morning, and I don’t see nobody. Now, when I asked you yesterday you could have told me you didn’t have nobody, but you had to play the big shot and come here in that suit and sit down like you owned this place and—” Buddy cleared his throat violently.
Clarence chose this moment, during the clamor, to speak.
Buddy shouted: “What, what?”
“You looking at him.”
Buddy amazed himself by understanding this statement instantly. Clarence of course was the perfect man for the job, subhuman, moronic, disposable, and otherwise useless. Buddy realized he might have had him in the ulterior mind for some such purpose as long ago as the night on which he had apprehended the one-eyed Negro in the attempt to steal a car.
Yet he was cautious, shouting: “You? You couldn’t even steal an automobile!”
“Maybe that is so,” said Clarence, all at once producing a bold yet also sly smile, which was at odds with his ministerial attire. His teeth were not of the notorious Negro white, but rather yellow in contrast to his dazzling shirt collar. “But I can sure strike a match.”
Now Buddy was baffled. “You already drunk at eleven A.M.?”
“Only thing is,” Clarence proceeded to say, “if I roast the meat, I want a nice slice.”
Buddy made an expression in which the rest of his face converged on his nose. “Well,” he said, “if you are talking the English language, I’m a sheep-fucker.”
“You want me burn this place down so’s you can get the insurance,” said Clarence. “I know that soon’s you open you mouth.”
Buddy imitated a carp with bulging eyes and protruded lips, and then he laughed so hard he felt it in his gut.
Clarence extended the reach of his own grin. “When them gas tanks go you will have something.”
Buddy ended his laugh with: “Whooee! Goddam, you are one smart cookie.” He frowned suddenly. “But what gets me if you got that much upstairs is w
hy you wash cars for a living instead of being on the brain trust down in Washington, D.C.” He poked a finger at the ex-boxer. “You just let me do your thinking for you, Clarence. I don’t want you laid up with brain damage.”
Buddy rose from the one-buttocked perch on the window-sill, kicked the cramp from his leg, loosened the fabric that clung to his crotch, and plunged both hands into his side pockets.
“I tell you though,” said he, “I might buy the idea you’re the bozo I been looking for. I might just do that, Clarence.” He squinted as if smoke had been blown into his eyes.
“Figured you would.”
“Oh you did, did you? Well, you just wipe off that grin now, because you are full of condensed horseshit, see.” Buddy punched a finger at him. “You don’t know what or why or how, sonny boy.”
Clarence leaned back in the chair, his expanding chest putting tension on the buttonholes of his shirt. He had added weight since his ring days, owing to a diet of canned spaghetti, potato salad, baked beans, and the packaged bakery goods he got from the day-old shelves at the A & P. A forty-five-year-old widow who lived down the hall in his rooming house would sometimes invite him in for a warm meal, but she expected the use of his tool in return, feeling for it with her stockinged toe under the card table while he ate; and since losing the sight of one eye, there was nothing in the world he so hated as to be bought by a woman.
Buddy smirked. “It ain’t setting fire to nothing either, like Sid Birchbaum.”
Clarence pinched his own nose.
“I refer,” said Buddy, “to the Yiddish gentleman who got caught over in your neck of the woods.”
Clarence seldom heard anyone’s name if they were white; he thought of them according to their professions or locations. Among his own kind he usually knew only a one-word designation per person: first, last, or nick-. As to his own name, which was properly Clarence Honeywell, he had fought as Kid Hammond.