Fools' Gold

by Dolores Hitchens

  DOLORES HITCHENS

  FOOLS’ GOLD

  WITH A FOREWORD BY

  DUANE SWIERCZYNSKI

  LIBRARY OF AMERICA E-BOOK CLASSICS

  Copyright © 2020 by Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., New York, N.Y.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Library of America.

  Visit our website at www.loa.org.

  Fools’ Gold was published by Doubleday & Company, Inc. in Garden City, New York, on March 20, 1958, as a selection of the Crime Club. An English edition was published the same year by T.V. Boardman as part of the American Bloodhound Mystery series. The text printed here is that of the first American edition.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Distributed to the trade in the United States by Penguin Random House Inc. and in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Ltd.

  Cover design by Donna G. Brown

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019952175

  eISBN 978-1-59853-459-7

  CONTENTS

  Foreword by Duane Swierczynski

  Fools’ Gold

  Biographical Note

  Notes

  FOREWORD

  Early in the pilot episode of Better Call Saul, bottom-feeding attorney Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) is stuck defending three young men charged with a truly heinous crime. “Oh to be nineteen again!” he bellows to the jury. “Ladies and gentlemen, do you remember nineteen? Me personally? If I were to be held accountable for some of the stupid decisions I made when I was nineteen, oh boy wow . . . Which brings us to these three.” He points at the defense table. “These three knuckleheads—and I’m sorry, boys, that’s what you are—they did a dumb thing.”

  Now I don’t know what Dolores Hitchens’s family life was like. But one thing is certain: Hitchens knew nineteen-year-olds could be complete knuckleheads, and could be counted on to do dumb things. Take Skip and Eddie, the young protagonists of Fools’ Gold, Hitchens’ 1958 caper-gone-way-way-wrong thriller. Bitter that life has handed him a raw deal, Skip comes up with a plot to steal a fat stack of cash from a high-rolling boarding house guest in Pasadena. Skip’s lifelong pal (and self-described “follower”) Eddie thinks this plot has more than a few cracks in it—but doesn’t want to disappoint Skip, who’s already spending the cash in his imagination. The caper hinges on Karen Miller, a shy orphan girl who lives in the same boarding house with Mrs. Havermann, the widow owner who has raised her since she was ten. Karen, who’s enrolled in a secretarial course, is flattered by the attention from Skip and would do pretty much anything to make him happy.

  A punk kid and his two clueless worshippers, planning on a big score with no real idea of who they’re robbing, already seems like a recipe for disaster. But Skip’s dumbest move is telling his uncle Willy—a fiftyish ex-con who immediately sees the heist as a way out of his dead-end caretaking job. Willy, in turn, enlists the aid of an old criminal pro who soon takes charge and makes Skip wish he’d never opened his mouth.

  Suddenly—and this is the genius of Hitchens’s novel—you can see this going wrong in a million different ways. Hitchens so brilliantly establishes this hierarchy of crime that after a while, you start rooting for the knuckleheads. Skip, at worst, is guilty of trying to claw his way out of a life that seems predestined, inescapable. Sure, nineteen-year-olds can be fools. But grown-ups who take advantage of them? Man, they should know better.

  In the late 1950s, drug store racks were full of juvenile delinquent pulp stories by writers like Vin Packer (the hardboiled pseudonym of novelist Marijane Meaker), Evan Hunter, and Hal Ellson. And at first, that’s what I thought Hitchens was writing—a story of luckless Pasadena street kids running afoul of the law. But with the introduction of Uncle Willy and his gang, Hitchens hits the accelerator and t-bones this juvie pulp tale into the side of a late-50s model hardboiled crime caper—the kind of rough stuff Peter Rabe and Lionel White were writing for Gold Medal Books. I don’t think such a hybrid existed before Fools’ Gold—heists were supposed to be serious adult business. Kids, meanwhile, were supposed to be getting into street rumbles, greasing their hair, and rolling cigarette packs up in their sleeves.

  Today we see this fusion all over the YA bookshelves, with kids thrust into dire situations that would make those hardboiled writers of the 1950s blush. Hitchens’s 1958 novel, as it turns out, is both of its time and way ahead of it. If her originality hasn’t been acknowledged, it’s only because those coming after failed to see her skid marks on the road.

  — Duane Swierczynski

  FOOLS’ GOLD

  CHAPTER ONE

  The first time they drove by the house Eddie was so scared he ducked his head down. Skip laughed at him. Above the rattling of the motor, Skip jeered, “What’s the matter with you? Afraid the old woman’s got X-ray eyes or something? She’s a mind reader, maybe? She’s looking out now and spotting us? You nuts?” What he really meant, as Eddie knew, was that Eddie was chicken.

  Now that they were past the house, headed downhill past empty lots, Eddie cast a glance back. “Hell, it’s such a doggone big place, that’s all. Important-looking.” And in this hour of near twilight, in his opinion, kind of spooky and ominous.

  “The bigger they come the harder they fall,” Skip pronounced. He was peering ahead to the corner where the side street entered the main boulevard from Pasadena. Suddenly he chucked Eddie in the ribs. “Hey, there’s the chick now!” His tone had taken on a certain confidential excitement.

  A girl of around seventeen sat on the bench at the bus stop. She had a couple of books in her lap, one open between her hands, and her head was bent over it, the book slanted so that its pages caught the last thin light from the sky. Her hair was short and curly, a soft lustrous brown. “Look at that. A dish,” Skip was saying. As they went by Eddie gave her a single nervous glance and Skip an all-out stare, but she didn’t look up. She wore a plain blue coat that looked old for her, white sandals, and a small white handbag hung from her wrist. Her lashes and little winglike brows were dark against the creamy color of her skin.

  “She’s on her way to night school now,” Skip explained. “Taking a secretarial course. The old lady tried to goose her into nursing school, but she wouldn’t bite. You want to meet her tonight? I could introduce you when typing class is out. Be in the hall.”

  “Maybe one of us ought to kind of lay low,” Eddie said. “I mean——” He paused to watch what Skip was doing with the car. Skip had waited for a lull in the traffic on the boulevard, then cut sharply into a U-turn. “Hey, for the lova Pete!”

  “Just going back for another look. We’ve got to have that layout down pat.”

  “Oh, Lord.” Eddie hunkered down into the seat, trying to squirm out of sight of the bench. “You want her to know we’ve been out here?”

  “Why not? It’s a free country.” Skip often pretended to be dense like this.

  “Look, afterwards, when the thing happens, won’t they begin to ask about strangers hanging around, other people in the neighborhood——”

  “Oh, relax, for Chrissakes.” Skip swung the car jauntily close to the bench on which the girl sat, then whistled his wolf call. She lifted her face at that, staring at the car; but Eddie sensed that she hadn’t recognized Skip. She wore a confused, foggy expression, as if her mind were on the book or as if her eyes, tired from reading, had trouble adjusting to the distance.

  The old car puffed and rumbled as it started back up the grade. Skip nu
rsed it with gas from the choke. Eddie said, “She didn’t seem to know you.”

  “Getting dark,” Skip said. “Anyhow, we’ll meet her tonight at school.”

  He had already dismissed Karen Miller from his mind, Eddie saw, and was again fascinated by the house. The roof made a tall, turreted line against the darkening sky. It was an aloof and aristocratic old house, settled in amid dusty cedars and deodars, surrounded by almost a square block of lawns and shrubs. A mansion, Eddie thought, and the idea of fooling around it and the old woman who owned it made prickles of icy bumps crawl on his arms.

  Suddenly a couple of lights went on inside, one upstairs and one down. “Doggone!” Skip muttered. “You see that? Both at once? Somebody’s there with her. I’ll find out from Karen tonight who it is.”

  “Maybe a maid.” Eddie needed to do something with his hands, so he took cigarettes and a pack of matches from his jacket pocket and lit a smoke.

  Skip shook his head. “She doesn’t keep a servant. Too cheap. She makes the chick help her and together they do it all, a hell of a job from what Karen tells me. A regular moperoo.”

  “A place that big . . . must be a hundred rooms——”

  “Nah. All she has is a gardener. He comes by the day, three times a week. Old guy, deaf as a post. Lives miles from here.”

  “Well, then, this relative of hers——”

  Skip’s teeth gleamed as he smiled. He was small and wiry, a reddish blond with pale, stony eyes, and when he smiled he looked like a fox. “Yeah, it must be him, the guy from Las Vegas.” They were past the house now. Looking back at it through the masking branches of trees, Eddie caught a cold, faint twinkle of light like a star’s, and this somehow seemed a warning, making the place more dangerous, more impregnable than ever. He choked over words he couldn’t get out.

  The car picked up speed as the street leveled out. Beyond the Havermann place the street skirted vacant hilly acres rising to foothills, then descended again to another through boulevard, this one cross-town from Los Angeles, the route they’d taken to get here. Neon signs and street lamps were beginning to flare against the dusk. “Well, what do you say?” Skip asked. “Want a hamburger and coffee before we go on?”

  “Sure,” Eddie said, trying to sound easy. His hands were cold and his fingers kept wanting to twitch; he felt a repeated need to swallow. He hoped that Skip didn’t notice his nervousness, and at the same time he envied Skip’s cool manner. This was something to keep you bug-eyed.

  They parked near a diner and went in. It was fairly full, but they found a couple of stools near the end. When the waitress had come, taken the order and gone again, Skip began to toy with a pencil on a paper napkin. He muttered to Eddie, “I’ll bet it’s at least fifty grand.” He wrote it out on the napkin: $50,000.00, and Eddie broke into a sweat. They were right in the open, under lights, next to other people. He grabbed the napkin and shoved it in his pocket and Skip laughed.

  “What’s the matter, Eddie?”

  “Well, that just wasn’t smart.”

  “Who says?”

  “I do.” But Eddie didn’t back it up with a glance at Skip; he fiddled with the coin receiver for the juke box, reading the array of record titles, finally dropping in a dime for a tune.

  “You got a complaint? You want to run this show?”

  “It’s still your show,” Eddie said stiffly.

  Skip stared for another moment and then his mood underwent one of its quick causeless changes. He stuffed the pencil into his coat pocket and slumped on the stool, bracing his head with his hand. “Oh, what the hell.” He began to watch an old man working behind the counter, cleaning off the dirty dishes into a big tin tray. The man was about sixty, going to fat, had watery eyes and almost no hair, wore a white tee shirt and a white duck apron. His big arms were pocked with scars and a network of broken veins. “See him? You know what? In a few years that’s you and me, Eddie old boy. Restaurant swampers. Or dishwashers. If we’re lucky. If we aren’t lucky we’ll be hobos, freezing in rags in a culvert.”

  Eddie felt cornered. “Ah, don’t start singing the blues for Chrissakes.”

  But Skip slumped lower, his eyes dull. “Figure it out. I’m twenty-two. You’re almost as old. Who’re we trying to fool, going to night school, me taking typing and bookkeeping and you studying metalwork. Who’s going to hire us when we finish?”

  Eddie looked at him. “We could get a break.”

  “Who from? Some personnel manager? Some cluck too dumb to want to know what we’ve been doing up to now?”

  Eddie shifted his position, began to fish for another dime to drop into the record player. But Skip grabbed his wrist and held it, his finger digging into his flesh. “They give you a form to fill in, see? Every year for the past five years——” With his free hand Skip sketched five imaginary lines on the counter. His lips were pulled off his teeth in a fierce, foxy grin. “Where were you last year, friend? And the year before that? Weren’t you in some kind of little trouble? Would you care to give us your former address? Wasn’t it out in the country and weren’t you sort of working for the state?”

  Skip released Eddie’s hand suddenly and Eddie sat huddled, wondering who had been watching.

  After a minute in a low tone Eddie said, “Look, Skip, I’ve told you I didn’t——”

  “You mean they took those two years for nothing?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s kind of expensive nothing. Don’t you think you might have some change coming?” The waitress came and put down the food and the coffee, and there was silence while they dug out the money to pay her. “Now look. Afterwards, when we’re swamping dirty crockery, we can’t say we never had a chance. We had a big one. We had four cherries and a bell going bong-bong-bong and everybody screaming jackpot. We just pushed it away, that’s all.”

  “Who’s pushing it away? I’m not,” Eddie said humbly.

  “You’re not?”

  They began to eat. Eddie wondered why Skip had the recurring urge to test and torment him. He ate and thought. Under the uneasiness he knew that Skip was right; there were freakish circumstances here which wouldn’t be apt to happen again. How often did you run into a girl like Karen, an odd ball, trusting Skip and telling him all that stuff about the old woman and the guy from Las Vegas and the money? In some ways Karen must be a dope, because what did she know about Skip? If she had known the truth, she wouldn’t have told Skip a word about anything bigger than a nickel.

  Skip chewed slowly and then he said, “What we ought to do now is to go back to the house and scout around. It’ll be dark. With lights on inside we might see something.”

  Eddie looked at him. Skip was all right again, friendly, sure of himself. “What about classes?”

  “So we’re fifteen minutes late.” Skip shrugged.

  Eddie didn’t argue because he wouldn’t admit even to himself the squeamish dismay in his own vitals. He had to measure up and quit being a drag on Skip. He and Skip had been friends for years, ever since grammar school, with Skip the leader and organizer and Eddie the follower. Even the separations, while one or the other served time in reformatories and jails, hadn’t broken the pattern. “What do you think you’ll see? The money?” he asked finally.

  They went out to the car again. Skip said, “I’ve got to make sure it’s on the up-and-up and Karen isn’t just handing me a line. I want to see the old woman and the inside of the house, and check what Karen told me. If I see the relative counting his dough, all the better.”

  Eddie sensed that Skip, in spite of what he said about Karen, was pretty sure of her. Skip had never had any trouble with women lying to him. Something in his face and manner discouraged it.

  They drove back the way they had come. The last of the twilight had faded and the street lamps had a yellow brightness against the night. In the block next to the Havermann property a thin grove of young eu
calyptus trees straggled down from the hilly rising almost to the curb. Here and there were a few wild and neglected lantana thickets almost as high as a man’s head. Eddie parked, got out, looked around. He nodded toward the hills. “Up there. Get it?”

  Eddie could make out only the line of hills against the sky, the thicket dark among the trees. “What do you mean?”

  “High ground. We go on up there and circle around, we can look down. Down into the house.” Skip shuffled his shoes. “Anything looks interesting, we’ll creep in close.”

  He started off with Eddie following in his tracks. Dead leaves crackled underfoot and occasionally out of the dark the lantana brushed them with a thorny prickle. When they came to a clear spot Eddie paused and looked back and was surprised at how far they’d climbed above the road. The lights of Pasadena across the Arroyo Seco made a great glow to the east and south. To the right, far away, downtown L.A. lit up the horizon.

  “Come on,” Skip muttered. He circled east toward the upper end of the Havermann place. There was lawn here, glimmers of light through the thick old trees. “Well, let’s try a little closer.”

  There was a sudden loud crashing and bounding through the shrubs and Eddie turned hot with fright. He knew at once what it must be and that Karen hadn’t said a word about a dog. Skip was cursing, and then the dog jumped on him out of the dark and Skip thrashed to the ground. There was a lot of racket and Eddie stood frozen, expecting someone to follow, a light to shine on them, a gun pointed, anything. Instead the dog leaped off Skip and bounded around playfully, letting out little yelps. He wanted Skip to chase him.

  Skip got up, still cursing, and brushed at his clothes. There was enough light for him and Eddie to see the dog, still leaping around and wagging his tail. “Hell,” Skip said, “the damn dog didn’t even bark.”

  “Let’s go back,” Eddie said suddenly.

  “No, look, this is important. Karen never said a word about a dog, and I kind of hinted, too. She’s holding out on me. Who does she think she is?” Under his breath he cursed the girl fiercely. “The thing is, the important thing, he’s no good for a watchdog.” Skip squatted and whistled softly, and the big collie came over and tried to lick his face. The dog made whining sounds and Skip patted his head.