Fools' Gold

by Dolores Hitchens

  The cop shouted behind him. Skip darted into a club, worked his way across it, found himself at a dead end. There was no other exit on this side.

  A sliding door clicked open and he saw the inside of an elevator. He rushed into it. The operator looked at him politely and said, “Sorry, sir, we’re going down. Basement offices.” His look invited Skip to leave before he was suspected of being a holdup artist.

  Skip ran for the front of the club, out upon the sidewalk, across Virginia Street, down the block, around the corner beside a bank. Here was a cross street, not as crowded, no gambling clubs but cafés and small stores. He went into a souvenir store and pretended interest in some painted ties; and then in another two minutes the cop was out there, staring in at him.

  There wasn’t anything else to do. Skip grabbed for the little gun in his pants pocket, the tiny toy he had inherited from Stolz. The little gun spoke quickly and willingly, and a spray of little holes danced across the plate glass at the front of the store. The cop ducked. Something big and black sprang into his hand. The sound it made was nothing like the small pockety - pock of Skip’s tiny automatic. It went booomp.

  Skip went down, clutching the rack of ties.

  He had three bullets in his liver, one in his groin, and by the time he reached the hospital in the city ambulance he had only moments to live. A nurse bent over him, asking his name, his home address, and Skip spoke to her in return.

  The doctor came toward the stretcher with a hypo in his hand. “What did he tell you?” he asked of the nurse.

  “I can’t repeat it,” she said. “It was too nasty.”

  The doctor reached for Skip’s arm, then suddenly for his pulse. But Skip was dead.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Eddie woke at about daybreak. He was chilled, his muscles stiffened by the long hours in the seat of the car. He had spent a lot of time in thought; and the conclusion, though he hated to face it, was that he did not have money enough to repair the jalopp, even if the old car had been worth it.

  He hitched a ride eastward with a chicken farmer who had a pickup with crates of white leghorn fryers in the back. The old man chewed snuff and talked about raising pullets and the price of chicken feed and how much he got for chicken manure and feathers. Eddie learned for the first time, though he didn’t think about it long, that chicken feathers were used for fertilizer.

  At a roadside garage Eddie got out, while the chicken farmer waited for him, and rang the night bell. The mechanic stuck his head out of a window at the back. “Yeah?” Eddie went back there to talk to him. He described what had happened to the car, its age and condition, and the mechanic shook his head. “Tell you what, after I’ve finished breakfast I’ll run out there and take a look at it. Won’t cost you nothing,” he added, perhaps because Eddie showed so few signs of having a bankroll. “Where you headed now?”

  “L.A.”

  “Stop here on your way back to the car and I’ll tell you what I think, what it’ll cost to fix it, and if I think you might as well junk the heap, or what.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  The chicken farmer let him out in Reseda, and on the far outskirts of the town Eddie caught a second lift, this time from an expensively dressed heavy man driving a Cadillac. The man had whiskey on his breath and proceeded to unload his troubles on Eddie. He had spent the night with his girl friend, and his wife was going to raise hell. She was getting ready to take the kids and leave, and he was scared to death she wouldn’t even be home when he got there. His father-in-law was threatening to run him down with a shotgun. At the same time he couldn’t leave this other woman alone. She was his former secretary, married to an airline pilot who was gone a lot. She had red hair and weighed one hundred and fifteen pounds and had been a New York model.

  Eddie was glad to escape in Studio City.

  He caught a bus, using some of the money his mother had given him. It was getting later by now, the sun was high, and he began to worry about Karen. She’d think he wasn’t coming back. He should have telephoned from Reseda.

  In downtown L.A. he tried to call the Mosby café in Oxnard, but the operator could find no number listed for it. Eddie recalled distinctly the big black phone on the wall at one end of the counter and told the operator about it, and she suggested that it may have been a pay phone and told him that such phones were not listed under the name of the establishment; there was a separate list for them and it would take a little time to check this. Eddie told her he couldn’t wait and hung up.

  By means of several bus transfers he finally reached Uncle Willy’s home. He went up the stairs softly, rapped at the door. Uncle Willy didn’t answer; but presently, from up there, Eddie saw him come out of the rear door of the big house at the front of the lot and throw some bread crumbs on the lawn for the birds.

  Eddie went down there. Uncle Willy noticed him and stood by the back door, waiting.

  “Is Skip around?”

  “Skip?” Uncle Willy looked innocent and wily, his old face with its startling foxy resemblance to Skip turned up to the sky as if expecting something to fly by within his field of vision. “Skip who?”

  “Your nephew.” Eddie had never met the uncle before, but the family pattern was too marked to be mistaken. “I’m Eddie. You know.”

  “You’re Eddie?” A touch of vindictive dislike appeared for a moment on Uncle Willy’s features, to be smoothed away at once as if by magic. “Oh yes. Eddie. Been a friend of Skip’s for a long time, haven’t you? You boys have been in trouble together, lots of trouble.” Uncle Willy came down the steps and faced Eddie closely. “Let me tell you just one thing. It’s time to change. It’s time for you to change and for Skip to change, to remake your lives, to give up the things that are going to ruin all the years ahead.”

  This was not the sort of talk Eddie would have expected, since he knew from Skip of his uncle’s record.

  “Now, Skip has gone,” Uncle Willy went on. “He was here packing his bag when I got home from the A.A. meeting and I talked to him, as much as he’d let me, and then he left. I’m not sure how much of an impression I made. Maybe I didn’t put it right. Maybe I should have waited until he was ready to listen. But now you’re here, and my conscience wouldn’t let me rest unless I’d told you a few facts for your own good.” He looked earnestly and determinedly into Eddie’s reluctant eyes. “The life you and Skip have led is nothing but a blind alley. It’ll get you nowhere.”

  Eddie said, “Where is Skip, please? I wanted to make sure he was all right, not hurt, not shot up or anything.”

  “He’s fine, perfectly fine,” Uncle Willy said. “It was Big Tom was shot up. Skip sneaked over there, wasn’t supposed to, of course, and heard it going on. Big Tom must of made a terrible booboo somehow. You just be thankful, Eddie my boy, that Skip eased you out of that job when he did. It could have been you on the receiving end of those bullets.” With a final, emphatic nod Uncle Willy went into the rear porch and shut the door.

  Eddie rapped on the door, full of anxious questions, but Uncle Willy called from the kitchen, advising him to go away and behave himself. Finally Eddie left the place, went down the block to an intersection, bought a paper off a newsstand, and read the account of the finding of Big Tom, dead in his car, and the identification of Big Tom as the intruder at the Havermann house. There was no mention whatever of Skip, nor of himself or Karen.

  Eddie couldn’t figure out this puzzle, but some things were obvious. Skip hadn’t been injured. He had been packing to leave when his uncle had reached home. He had apparently heard some sort of shooting inside the house where the dead woman lay. Could it have been possible that some other outfit had planned to get Stolz’s dough on the same night that they had?

  Much confused, as well as relieved about Skip, Eddie set about the long chore of returning to Oxnard.

  Anxious over the long delay in returning to Karen, he decided not to s
top and see about the mechanic’s report on the jalopp. He had a hunch what the mechanic had to say, anyhow. Something about throwing good money after bad—if he was honest, and he’d looked honest. Eddie bought a ticket on a Greyhound bus and rode straight through. At Mrs. Mosby’s café he found the elderly woman working at a counter full of customers, Karen nowhere in sight. Mrs. Mosby jumped on him for leaving Karen so long, and between scurryings told him Karen was feeling poorly. She was in bed, on the cot in the storeroom.

  When Eddie entered the storeroom, closing the door behind him, he could see Karen lying there on her back, face to the ceiling, eyes big and quiet, almost dreamy. She looked thinner, fine-downed. Mrs. Mosby had tacked some cotton material over the window, dimming the light, but Karen glanced over and saw Eddie at once. She said weakly, “I can’t really believe it’s you. I was sure the police had caught you.”

  He sat down, put his arms under her, lifted her close. “Not a chance. It’s all over now.”

  “It’s just beginning,” she whispered against his face.

  “We’re just beginning,” he agreed.

  “No, I don’t mean that. What I mean is, we’re going back. I thought of calling the police here, but it might make trouble for Mrs. Mosby. And she’s been kind. We’ll have to go back to L.A. and get hold of a policeman there.”

  Eddie put her down slowly. His expression was one of stunned amazement. “You don’t mean it.”

  “Yes, I do. As soon as I get over this chill, or whatever it is, I’m going to dress and leave.” She was looking up into his eyes with a steady, earnest gaze. “Don’t you see, what we were talking about in connection with Skip, that he wasn’t grown up, that there was something in him that would never develop; well, that would apply to us, too, if we didn’t go back and clear our consciences.”

  Eddie pounded his shirt. “I don’t have a conscience! Chrissakes, a conscience to make you put your head in a noose, I wouldn’t want a thing like that!”

  “Yes, you do. And I do. We’re grown up now, Eddie. We can take what’s coming to us. Perhaps it won’t be too bad. Perhaps, a long time from now, we can see each other again.” She moved closer, twined her hand in his. She gazed at him in a wholly new way, Eddie saw, calm and unafraid and utterly loving. A convulsion seized Eddie; he thought he was going to be sick. The thought of the cops, the questionings, the ordeal of being charged and condemned and put away ran through his mind like a leaping fire.

  “You must have a fever,” he said to her. “You’re out of your head. Crazy.”

  “No, I’m not. I’ve just got over being sort of crazy, I guess. I thought I could run away, leave everything. Leave everything I’d done, what I’d been. When you didn’t come back I panicked; I tried to hitch a ride on the highway. And then I saw”—her voice sharpened—“I saw what my whole life would be from then on. Just running. And not really getting away at all.”

  He argued with her. But nothing moved her or changed her. And finally, in some way Eddie couldn’t comprehend, some of her assurance and the peaceful acceptance transferred themselves to him. He didn’t try to fool himself about the actual situation. It was going to be tough; God, was it going to be tough! But since they’d be turning themselves in, confessing, perhaps there would be something to look forward to a long time from now. With everything wiped clean, paid up, no need to run and hide.

  He lay down close to her, and she stroked his hair and murmured to him. It seemed then to Eddie that the years he had known with Skip, along with Skip’s values and Skip’s outlook on life, dropped completely away so that for the first time he was really himself.

  Eddie’s mother had spent a wretched, sleepless, and tearful night. In the early dawn she arose, taking care not to wake her snoring husband, and went out to the kitchen. In the back of a cupboard, hidden from sight, was a box in which she had stored some mementos of Eddie’s growing up—school cards and various items of correspondence garnered through the years. Some she’d kept to reassure herself, good grades, encouraging notes from teachers. Other bits she’d retained to worry and puzzle over.

  During the night she had decided, in view of the circumstances, to burn all of this material. In some way, in the future, something in it might be damaging to her son.

  She took the box to the sink, brought matches from the stove, and then began to burn the cards and notes, one by one.

  A handwritten letter which had worried her particularly, coming as it had from an official in the California Youth Authority, someone who had taken an interest in Eddie, caught her eye just as she set a match to it. The words were distinct on the white page.

  . . . your son, I feel, is in danger of becoming a type of person called, in modern parlance, a socio-path. In other words, someone without moral sense in whom all ethical feelings are stunted. A man without compassion or conscience . . .

  The flame crept upward. She felt the heat in her fingers. She dropped the sheet into the sink, and it became crackling ash.

  “Not my Eddie,” she said, looking down at the blackened, curling remains. “I know better.”

  The page gave a final pop. She turned to the next item in the box.

  On the morning of the third day the patrolman on guard at the rear of the Havermann house took notice at last of the anxious dog. He went to the rear door of the house and rapped, and Stolz interrupted his breakfast in the kitchen to answer. “This dog’s hungry or something,” said the cop. He was a young husky cop with alert eyes and a square, businesslike chin. “You got anything to feed him?”

  “I’ve been feeding him well,” Stolz answered, regarding the dog with indifference. “He’s just restless, I suppose, since his mistress is dead.” Stolz wore crimson pajamas and a light silk dressing gown, oriental straw mules. He hadn’t been up long. He was eating scrambled eggs with yogurt and stone-ground whole-wheat toast. He had made Marvitch hunt up a healthfood store. In the store Marvitch had tried to become acquainted with the eighteen-year-old brunette clerk. “Perhaps you’d better tie him out beside his doghouse,” Stolz offered. “Then he won’t be in anyone’s way.”

  The cop took the patient, anxious collie out to his doghouse beyond the garage, squatted inside the heavy blue uniform, reached for the chain attached to the side of the opening. Then he got lower on his haunches, actually put one neat blue knee on the dirt, and peered hard inside. “Well, I’ll be switched,” the patrolman said to the dog. “No wonder you were worried. There isn’t enough room in there for your fleas.” He wooled the dog’s head with his hand, and the big collie jumped around, overjoyed at this show of friendliness. “What is all this stuff?”

  The cop reached inside and pulled out a plastic pillowcase, zippered shut, which through its pink color seemed marked faintly green and white. The cop unzipped the opening and stared in upon what he had found.

  He tried to say something, but his tongue froze.

  It was money, an unbelievable amount of cold green cash, and finding it like this, outside a bank or similar reservoir, had the funny effect of making it look like a lot of printed paper. He jiggled it, and other packets came to view, all fresh hundred-dollar bills packed into pads of similar size.

  He shoved off the bouncing dog, got to his feet, and with the plastic case swinging from his fingers he went through the kitchen to the phone in the front of the house, passing Stolz at the table on his way.

  Stolz got quickly to his feet, went into his room, and dressed in nothing flat. Marvitch had returned to Las Vegas; there was no way he could reach him at the moment. Marvitch would simply have to look after himself.

  Stolz was on his way out the front door when the dog met him, bouncing and barking, tremendously happy that these human beings had arranged at last a place for him to sleep. Stolz aimed a kick at the collie; at the next instant some instinct warned him to look behind him.

  The cop was there, the money in one hand and an authoritative gun
in the other. “You’ll please wait, sir. Inside.”

  Stolz went back inside. He braced himself. He was sharp and fit and clear-headed, healthy as an ox, and it was surprising that a shock like this could make him feel so disorientated and dizzy.

  He said to the officer, “I had nothing to do with the kidnaping, nothing at all; even the FBI will understand that. I just bought a piece of the loot.” He shrugged and the motion almost sent him off balance, as if he were drunk.

  “It’s a hell of a lot of dough,” the cop said.

  Stolz looked at it shimmering with newness inside the plastic case. “Ruin and death,” he said, blurting it out with melodramatic suddenness. “Ruin and death.”

  He put his hands over his face and began to weep.

  Biographical Note

  Notes

  BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

  Born Julia Clara Catherine Dolores Robbins on December 25, 1907, in San Antonio, Texas. Daughter of W. H. Robbins and Myrtle Statham, who married in Caldwell County, Texas, in 1901. Father died and mother remarried to a Mr. Norton. Moved with mother to Kern County, California, by 1920. Mother divorced and married a third time, to Oscar Carl “Arthur” Birk, in 1922. Took stepfather’s surname; family moved to Long Beach, California, by 1930. Published poems while completing graduate studies at the University of California; enrolled in a nursing school. She worked as a nurse at Hollywood Hospital, and later became a teacher before pursuing a professional writing career. In 1934 married Beverley Olsen, a radio operator on a merchant vessel whom she later divorced. Married Hubert Allen “Bert” Hitchens, a railroad investigating officer, who had a son, Gordon (later founder of Film Comment and contributor to Variety). Together they had a son, Michael, and a daughter, Patricia. As D. B. Olsen, published two novels featuring Lt. Stephen Mayhew, The Clue in the Clay (1938) and Death Cuts a Silhouette (1939); twelve novels featuring elderly amateur sleuth Rachel Murdock: The Cat Saw Murder (1939), The Alarm of the Black Cat (1942), Catspaw for Murder (1943), The Cat Wears a Noose (1944), Cats Don’t Smile (1945), Cats Don’t Need Coffins (1946), Cats Have Tall Shadows (1948), The Cat Wears a Mask (1949), Death Wears Cat’s Eyes (1950), Cat and Capricorn (1951), The Cat Walk (1953), and Death Walks on Cat Feet (1956); and six novels featuring Professor A. Pennyfeather: Shroud for the Bride (1945), Gallows for the Groom (1947), Devious Design (1948), Something About Midnight (1950), Love Me in Death (1951), and Enrollment Cancelled (1952). Published play A Cookie for Henry (1941) as Dolores Birk Hitchens; novel Shivering Bough (1942) as Noel Burke; and novels Blue Geranium (1944) and The Unloved (1965) as Dolan Birkley. Co-wrote five railroad detective novels with Bert Hitchens: F . O.B. Murder (1955), One - Way Ticket (1956), End of Line (1957), The Man Who Followed Women (1959), and The Grudge (1963). As Dolores Hitchens, published two private detective novels featuring California private eye Jim Sader: Sleep With Strangers (1955) and Sleep With Slander (1960); as well as stand-alone suspense novels Stairway to an Empty Room (1951), Nets to Catch the Wind (1952), Terror Lurks in Darkness (1953), Beat Back the Tide (1954), Fools’ Gold (1958), The Watcher (1959, adapted for the television series Thriller in 1960), Footsteps in the Night (1961), The Abductor (1962), The Bank with the Bamboo Door (1965), The Man Who Cried All the Way Home (1966), Postscript to Nightmare (1967), A Collection of Strangers (1969), The Baxter Letters (1971), and In a House Unknown (1973). Jean-Luc Godard adapted Fools’ Gold into the 1964 film Band of Outsiders. Died on August 1, 1973, in Orange County, California.