Pulp Crime

by Jerry eBooks

  The customer stood there, slight, medium height, hunching his narrow shoulders continually under the field jacket, both hands thrust into his pockets, and kept looking at the fat man. He watched the waiter take the fat man’s order and move away. The owner wondered what was bothering the customer now, what was keeping him from leaving. And then he saw.

  The prosperous-looking fat man was wearing an expensive sport jacket and slacks and a sport shirt but no tie. He suddenly became aware of the customer in the field jacket staring at him. He glowered back at him, indignantly, reddening around his puffy jowls a little.

  The customer walked over to the fat man. He pointed at him and turned to the owner. “Where’s his tie?” he demanded. His voice was raggedly shrill now. It stopped every other sound in the place.

  He turned back to the fat man and moved right up next to the booth. He said in the same keening voice, right into the fat man’s now apoplectic face: “You’ve got to wear a tie to eat here, mister. They told me that. I can’t eat here without no tie. You can’t, either. A bare neck like you and I got ain’t no good, you understand?” His voice rose until it hurt the eardrums. He mimicked the owner: “I’m sure you understand.”

  He drew a sobbing breath. “You got to have something around your neck. They said so. You got to.” He giggled. “I’ll give you something. I’ll give you a necktie.”

  He pulled one hand from his pocket and it held a straight razor. He flicked it open. He reached down and caught the fat man’s long white hair in his other hand and yanked his head back. “A Goddamn necktie you got to have to eat here.” He slashed the razor across the fleshy folds of the fat man’s throat. The fat man’s big head looked as though it was going to fall off his shoulders but it didn’t. The blood came out of him like a red waterfall and went all over the table and as he staggered up out of the booth and before he fell it went across the floor, halfway to the bar.

  The customer with the razor jumped back out of the way of the blood. He wheeled as the screams of people at the bar shook the place, as they turned over bar stools, lurched, bleating, toward the door. He grabbed a woman and swiped the long straight blade across her bare arm as she raised it to protect her face. Her wrist and hand hung loosely for a moment from the rest of her arm before she fainted.

  The owner stood staring in stupefaction at the customer. He told himself that this couldn’t be. This didn’t happen in his place. And then he saw the customer coming toward him with the razor uplifted. The owner wanted to move, to run. He couldn’t. He wanted to raise his arms to protect himself but they were too heavy. They wouldn’t move. He watched the customer, rabid-eyed, his face twisted grotesquely, rushing toward him and knew that he was going to die but couldn’t seem to understand it. Absurdly, he found himself wondering what had gone wrong, how could this have happened.

  Then he saw the bartender pick up a bar stool and run up behind the customer and bring the stool down onto the back of his head. The customer’s knees went out from under him but instead of falling, he half turned around. He saw the bartender with the stool raised and arcing toward him again. The customer said: “I got to have a necktie, too.” He stroked the glistening red blade across his own throat and looked down, smiling hideously at all the new blood before the stool hit him the second time and he went down.

  The owner stood there for a long time, looking around, while the customers who hadn’t reached the door before it was all over, tried to help the others who had fainted or gotten knocked down. Nobody was doing anything about the woman with the severed arm.

  “Get a mop!” the owner screamed at the bartender. “Don’t just stand here.” He made a deep sucking breath. He said: “My place! My God, my place, look at my poor place!”

  He leaned his elbows on the bar by the cash register and put his face into his hands and firmly but gently began to cry.

  STEP DOWN TO TERROR

  John McPartland

  The girl and the young man were uneasy at the door of the cheap little night club, and for a moment they felt just an edge of fear. Then, like the coils of a snake, the jungle closed around them

  ERIKA LONDON and Arthur Johnstone Mitchell walked into the Cirque Room of the Fairmont Hotel about eleven on this warm spring evening. People turned to watch the couple as they passed down the broad, plush-marble-and-tradition corridor. Their glances were long at the girl because she was lovely, and brief at him because he was with this lovely girl. Her hair was short, with a kind of sunset glow of red and gold. She wore a white gown that began simple and straight above her breasts and swirled wide and frothy around her long legs.

  Erika London, a senior at Berkeley, very lovely and very happy with life. The boy with her looked as if he belonged beside her, and in the easy pattern of their lives he did. The Mitchell family had bought land cheap eighty years ago and had held most of it. What they had sold was now covered with apartments and stores, and it had brought comfortable trust funds. As a man, Arthur Mitchell was better than ordinary—tall, straight, the tennis player and the oarsman rather than the football kind of college man. He handled himself well. Since he had been a small boy he had beer, taught that handling one’s self well was next in importance to having been born to money, and possessing a strong, handsome body.

  A minute or two after eleven, Erika swung the long legs over a bar stool at the Cirque, lifting the frothy skirt with long, slender fingers. Arthur ordered old-fashioneds and turned to look at her. He was wondering, maybe a little too carefully, like one of the trust-fund attorneys ticking off points on his fingers, whether he loved Erika enough for marriage now rather than in another year or two.

  He was twenty-three and she was a few months over twenty-one. Around them now was the pleasant carelessness of the Cirque, and around it was the careful pleasantness of the Fairmont, high on Nob Hill above the glory of the night over San Francisco. They were young and fine in the white marble cocoon of the Fairmont; the trust funds were rows of figures and contracts and solidly-filled safety deposit boxes at the Anglo-Californian. The society editors at the Examiner and the Chronicle had penciled the index cards that big-city society editors keep on the new, young, and some day important people. On Erika’s neatly typed cards they had each written: “maybe Art Mitchell—Russian Hill Mitchells.”

  The barman smiled and bowed slightly as he set their old-fashioneds before them.

  And Arthur Johnstone Mitchell was thinking that, the year before, Erika’s hair had been long and he’d had a crew-cut. They seemed to walk together through these first full-grown years, through the change of the right things to do and the right places to be. Maybe it would be better not to wait another year. He didn’t see how he could wait. Erika was lovely beyond words.

  DOWN the steepness of Mason Street from Nob Hill, over on O’Farrell a few blocks is a ratty small bar called the Bada. Last year it was the Desert Club and it has had other names through l lie years back to the night madness that was San Francisco when the streets belonged to the sailors and soldiers.

  There were three young men and a girl in a booth in back. The girl was mostly called Honey, and the two young men, who didn’t much matter, usually liked to be called Kicks and Gage. The other young man was called Big Tom.

  Honey had perfect skin, creamy as if it had not quite lost last summer’s tan, and short, glossy black hair with a heart-shaped brow line.

  “Go! Go! Go!” Honey was chanting, her small fists pounding the booth table. Almost whispered, a low, breathless frantic chant that beat into the juke-box frenzy. Kicks was watching her, his mouth hanging open and his lips wet.

  “That’s it, Honey chick, that’s it—” he said.

  “Go! Go! Go!”

  Big Tom stretched his body. He liked the feel of his muscles flexing.

  “We got to make some money tonight, Kicks. I’m tapped. Got to go out on the streets tonight.”

  “Like you say, Big Tom. When the joints close, huh? About two?” Kicks was a nervous type, with a grinning-dog smile
that came and went between words as he talked. Lean and bony, with dank hair in a duck-tail cut.

  “The hell about two. Right quick. I need some fun money because this is going to be a fun night.”

  “The streets are too damn hot this early, Big Tom. It’s only eleven—” He froze, the grinning-dog smile hesitating on his white, thin face. Big Tom’s fist was against Kicks’ cheek, turning slowly, and the brazil-nut knuckles pulled and twisted the white skin.

  “Don’t trouble me. man.” said Big Tom. “I can get my fun listening to you making hurt music. Don’t trouble me none, man.”

  THE boy called Gage watched, smiling.

  Almost anything was fun. Seeing Big Tom smash up on Kicks would be fun. Anything was fun when somebody else was being hurt.

  “Go! Go! Go!” The frantic, whispered chant ended with the click of the juke box. Honey turned great shining eyes toward the boys. Her small tongue crept out between the almost perfect arched-bow lips.

  “Put another round into the beat box, boy, before some apple gets to it and plays something out of nausea.” said Honey, her voice soft and clear. She looked like somebody important’s very beautiful and highly competent secretary in her trim, simple suit and white shirt with a narrow black bow tie. Honey was nineteen, and the big-faced prostitutes of the human-sewer hotels off Howard Street were innocents compared to Honey.

  Big Tom rubbed the heel of his hand across Kicks’ mouth, chuckled, and dropped it to the table.

  “Em restless, man. We’re going out and make us some money. Then we’ll go to the fine places until they close and then we’ll pad out with plenty of the stuff. Plenty, man, and we’ll pad for a couple of lights and darks. The long, sweet dive into the green water for those many hours, man.” Big Tom was smiling.

  “Going to wait for Gopher?” asked Gage. “He might raise up something on his prowl.”

  “Yeah, that boy is the cool one. He’ll find somebody to work on,” said Kicks.

  The police records of San Francisco and the Peninsula cities listed Big Tom, Kicks, Gage and the Gopher. They had no record of Honey. Not yet.

  Big Tom. Twenty-two now. Arrested at nineteen for selling marijuana cigarettes at the high school in the Twin Peaks neighborhood where he’d been a football star the year before. Came from a good upper-middle-class family, and his father was an assistant cashier of an outlying branch bank. Probation for the boy. The students, boys and girls, who had known him at high school could have added more to the record. Big Tom was a brutal bully, a sadist who had raped at least seven of the high school girls who had gone on dates with him. Possibly thirty more had submitted willingly. Big Tom Kuppfen.

  Kicks. Twenty-three. His real name was Harold Johnson and at times he worked as a nonunion piano player. His arrests had been for petty theft, bad checks and assault. He’d served four months in the county jail.

  Gage. He was twenty-two and his real name was Duane Freeposter, the son of a divorcee who held an executive job in a social service agency of the State of California. She took him to a psychiatrist when he was sixteen, and in the six years since then he had been in analysis much of the time. His two arrests were both for contributing to the delinquency of minors; each of the girls had been sixteen. Both charges had been dismissed.

  The Gopher. In some ways he was the most interesting boy of the four. His troubles with the police of San Francisco, San Mateo and Burlingame covered drunk-driving, three arrests; possession of marijuana, two arrests; assault, two arrests; contributing to the delinquency of a minor, three arrests. At the moment he had more than twenty worthless checks out, cashed in bars, hotels, night clubs and stores. The Gopher—Frank Worth Williams—was twenty years old, but he looked at least twenty-six, and he had the casual, certain charm of a young man who had spent his adolescence traveling with wealthy parents rather than in Juvenile Hall at San Francisco.

  Frank Worth Williams wore a soft, charcoal-gray hat with a high crown, a light vicuna topcoat, a tab-collared shirt, a well-draped, blue-gray suit. His face snowed a friendly boyishness and his manners were careful copies of those of motion picture actors. He spent almost every afternoon in a picture theater. Less than middle height, soft-spoken, quick to laugh, casual but determined—this was the Gopher, Frank Worth Williams.

  At twenty minutes past eleven he was speaking to Erika London at the bar of the Cirque Room.

  “You dropped your gloves, girl.” he said, smiling. She liked the way he used the word “girl.”

  “Thanks.” And she smiled. Their eyes met for a few seconds and she looked away first. Arthur Johnstone Mitchell glanced across Erika at the stranger. He looked all right and he didn’t look like an intruder.

  HAVE you noticed the drummer in this little band here?” asked the Gopher, directing the question to Mitchell.

  “Not especially. Is he supposed to be good?”

  “Got a bit of style. I like him.”

  “Are you interested in music?” asked Erika. The young man had an odd quality of charm.

  “Very much.” said Frank Worth Williams. “Progressive stuff mostly. Some Chicago Dixie for variations.”

  “Whom do you like?”

  “Oh, Brubeck, of course. Shearing’s new stuff. The Norvo trio is fine.”

  Mitchell ordered drinks and included the stranger in the round. By the time the drinks were finished and the Gopher had bought another round it was midnight and introductions had been made. The slight, well-dressed young man was Derek Fielding, he said, and he was up to visit friends in Mill Valley. He was a graduate student at Cal Tech, majoring in aeronautic design. Plausible, friendly, charming.

  At five minutes after midnight Erika and Arthur agreed to join the Gopher at a “pleasant little place just off an alley, where some kids are doing some really important adventures in music. Astonishing kids.”

  To Erika it sounded interesting and a little exciting. There were dozens of little combos in San Francisco places, and some of them were worth discovering. It was the kind of adventure that was fun.

  “We’d take you in my car,” apologized Arthur, “but it’s an XK—”

  “Oh, a Jag. Wonderful car. But only two seats. I understand.” The Gopher smiled. “Tell you what. I promised to meet some friends at a dreary place on O’Farrell. We can all meet there and go over to hear these new sounds. A spot called the Bada.”

  Erika and Arthur looked at each other in brief questioning. A stranger, a strange place, a strange crowd. But then this Derek Fielding was a Cal Tech graduate student, he dressed the right way, talked the right way, and he had charm.

  “Fine,” said Arthur Johnstone Mitchell as his Erika whirled smoothly from the stool. “Just tell us how to find it. We’ll meet these friends of yours and go on to this music cellar from there. Right?”

  “Right,” said the young man, his soft, bright eyes holding the smile of his soft, amused mouth.

  Mitchell and Erika stopped for a moment before they slid into the smooth compactness of the Jaguar open two-seater and looked at the lights of the town below them, at the lights of the Bay Bridge beyond.

  “Lovely,” said Erika. A spring night, and the top of Nob Hill never becomes common nor ordinary; the enchantment of the city spreads before you like a sparkling, magic valley.

  “Seems like a good man,” said Arthur Mitchell.

  “He has a sort of charm,” Erika said, still looking toward the sparkle of the town. “Funny, there’s an eagerness to this Derek that’s strange. A cat—why a cat? Oh, I know like a cat walking neatly through the flowers—”

  “Toward a bird?”

  She laughed. “Let’s go down and meet these people. May be some Berkeley people we might know.”

  They got into the low, deep seats of the car.

  CHAPTER TWO

  AT A phone booth in a corridor of the hotel Frank Worth Williams was calling the Bada.

  “Hey, somebody’s calling for Big Tom?” yelled the bartender, holding the phone away from his body.

&nb
sp; The sleepy-lidded eyes widened, and the six-foot-four body moved lazily.

  “I’m the man,” he said, and he walked to the end of the bar, taking the phone. “Hi. Tom?”

  “Gopher?”

  “Yeah. I found me a couple of pigeons. The doll’s fabulous, with a real strong touch of class. The guy’s a kid loaded with gold. Both apples, just stumbling through the dark, not knowing. Are you with me?”

  “I’m with.”

  “They bought me on a fancy tale. I’m Derek Fielding, up from Cal Tech. Got that Derek beat?”

  “Got.”

  “Derek Fielding. They’re meeting us at this crumb-joint you’re at, right now.”

  “So?”

  THEN we go somewhere. Some joint where we’ve never been made. We make our play on out from there.”

  “I was figuring on knocking off a couple of guys around the town tonight. What’s with these pigeons?”

  “The doll is worth a caper all by herself. The guy is maybe carrying a bill or two. We’ll see if they go for sticks. If they do, it’s great. If not—”

  Big Tom smiled. “If not—”

  Frank Williams, the Gopher, walked to the entrance and the doorman waved a cab over. Williams was fingering the three dollars he had left.

  “If I had a few bucks more I’d never have brought that muscle-buster in,” he thought, his soft mouth curled in bitterness. “Just a few lousy bucks and I’d have figured out some play all by myself. Now Big Tom will go crazy when he sees this Erika. Like a mean, mad bull.”

  He gave the driver the O’Farrell address and lay back against the seat, his palms rubbing against the softness of the vicuna.

  “Maybe this better be the last night in San Francisco,” he whispered to himself. “Too damn many bum checks out. They’re looking for me, and I got a feeling tonight’s going to be too rough to cool. Too damn rough to ever cool.”