by Tom De Haven
Twenty minutes ago Curly Ike, Milt, and Claude staged an automobile breakdown near the corner of Maple Street and North Watkins. When the Poore family’s chauffeur got out to help, Claude knocked off the dummy’s cap, as he’d been told to, and shot him twice in the brain. After they dragged his body into some hedges, Curly Ike drove the limousine to the church. Claude and Milt followed in the gang’s last remaining vehicle, a 1931 DeSoto woodie.
It is almost two o’clock, and within a few minutes the little Poore snot should be leaving Bible school, conducted in the basement of the church meeting hall.
Time for a quick smoke? Probably not.
Already some children are heading his way along the sidewalk.
Curly Ike lurches from the limo and runs around the hood, pulls open the rear curbside door. Then he tears back and gets behind the wheel again. He hopes Claude and Milt are paying attention. Posted near the church’s bulletin board, they are both pretending to read the daily worship times and the title of the upcoming Sunday sermon: “Manna From Heaven … Or A Comet?” Curly Ike wonders what the hell that’s all about—manna from a comet. He has an abiding interest in religion, Ike does, especially miracles.
He hopes he doesn’t need one today.
Here comes the kid.
Curly Ike averts his face, turning it toward the street so Donny won’t notice he isn’t the regular driver. The privacy window is up between the front and the rear with the curtain drawn. Ike can’t see what’s happening back there, but the car lists suddenly to the right—someone climbing in—and now the door slams shut. And here’s Claude hunched down and peering through the passenger-side front window while he thumps twice on the roof. The kid is inside, and Milt is too.
Curly Ike pulls out of his parking space and drives slowly to the corner where a Bible-school teacher is acting as crossing guard. A dozen children walk slowly in single file in front of the Cadillac. He breathes with relief when the woman waves him through.
As the car is rolling past her, the privacy window bursts into pieces.
He knew it! He just knew this wasn’t going to go smoothly.
“Milt?”
“He bit me!”
“Put him under!”
“I’m trying to!”
For the next half minute there is a lot of thumping and terrified screeching back there. Then abruptly it gets quiet.
“Milt?”
“I’m bleeding all over the place!” He puts his face near the broken glass. Ike glances at him, then back at the road. Milt’s cheeks are raw with long red scratches.
“But he’s out now?”
“Cold.”
“Make sure you put the cap back on the chloroform.”
“Okeydokey, Ma.”
Two miles beyond Smallerville, Curly Ike steers the limousine into a belt of trees they selected as their rendezvous. Claude drives up a minute later, and he and Milt drag Donny Poore, limp and anesthetized, from the limousine. They dump him into the DeSoto’s trunk. Last night they drilled air holes in it.
“All set?” says Curly Ike, now behind the wheel of the DeSoto.
“That went okay,” says Claude.
“Easy for you to talk,” says Milt. “I’m all scratched up. Look at me! If I was that kid’s daddy, I wouldn’t pay no ransom.”
“Well, you’re not his daddy,” says Curly Ike.
3
“Hello?”
“It’s me.”
“Oh my God—Willi!”
He pulls shut the bifold door of a telephone booth on the corner of North Main and Schaffenberger streets.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. What’s going on there?”
“My classes are all pretty good, but you wouldn’t believe how much work I have—”
“Dammit, Lo, I mean what’s going on?”
“Well, there’s nothing about you anymore in the paper if that’s what you mean.”
“That’s what I mean. And don’t get snippy. How would you like driving around Kansas?”
“That cop you know came by to see me. Twice.”
“Dick Sandglass?”
“He said if I was ever to hear from you, I should tell you to call him. I think he wants to help.”
“Oh, sure. And what’s going on with our favorite alderman?”
“I don’t know, but Lucky Luciano’s in jail, and Meyer Lansky and Benny Siegel both took off for California.”
“I’m sunk!”
“Just hold on tight, honey. It’ll work out. I promise. Hey, where are you calling from?”
“Lois, I should go.”
“Write? Please? Once in a while?”
“What if the cops are checking your mail?”
“Then send it to General Delivery.”
“Okay,” says Willi, “I’ll try.”
“I miss you.”
Willi says, “Yeah, me too,” and prongs the receiver.
Stepping from the booth, he looks up and down the street. Which way? Does it matter? He starts to walk. After a few minutes Willi spots that same kid again—Clark something—that he gave a lift. He’s coming out of a storefront—ah, the venerable Herald-Progress. Hailing him, Willi trots over. “Hey, let me ask you a question. Anything interesting I should take a picture of here in town?”
Clark thinks. “We got a pretty impressive town hall.”
“Yowsah,” says Willi, and rolls up his eyes.
When he rolls them down again, Clark is gone.
Solid gone.
If he were the type to scratch his head, Willi would be scratching it now.
What’s with that guy?
With a shrug, he starts back to where he parked the car (he’s already decided to pass on the “impressive town hall”) when a Smallville police car pulls over to the curb.
His impulse is to cut and run, but he doesn’t. You’re Willi Boring. You work for the WPA. It says so in your wallet.
Nevertheless he is immediately handcuffed and placed under arrest, shoved roughly into the back of the cruiser, and driven straight to the city jail.
4
From the holding cell where he stands at the steel bars, Willi can look directly across the muster room at a batch of wanted posters pinned sloppily to a bulletin board. And his—Willi Berg’s—is among them. If he squints he can read his alleged felonies (Murder, Burglary, Interstate Flight) and see the two small mug shots but not whatever is printed below. Does it say that he’s armed and dangerous? Urge extreme caution? God, this is torture! Torture that one or another of Smallville’s finest—thankfully, there aren’t many here right now—might happen to glance at the poster, and torture as well that his vital and criminal statistics are out of reading range. He always read about himself in the New York papers, which stoked both his vanity and his outrage. But he has to be careful no one catches him now, peering at those wanted posters. So it’s a relief when the other WPA guys are all marched into the Smallville police station and locked up along with him. “Hey, it’s the rest of my kidnapping gang,” says Willi.
Nobody thinks that’s funny.
After a while he is gladly distracted by the poker game Nero suggests. They wager with cigarettes, Life Savers, and sticks of chewing gum.
Willi keeps losing.
It is almost five o’clock.
Two federal agents in gray fedoras and dark suits bustle in, followed no more than ten minutes later by a large man in a white cowboy hat and wearing a western-style lawman’s star. Sheriff Dutcher, Willi hears one of the deputies call him. The sheriff! And a couple of G-men. It’s like two kinds of Saturday-matinee movies colliding before Willi’s eyes. Which is almost funny except that the more police that fill up the place, the more anxious he becomes.
When he realizes that he’s staring at those wanted posters again, he shakes his head, looks down at his cards—another dismal hand—and folds.
“Say, you can’t gamble in there!” It’s one of the townie cops that arrested Willi because he was a stranger
and so probably a career kidnapper. He’s standing at the cell door barking at the card players. “Hand over the deck.”
“Surely you jest,” says Whitey Wolverton. “First you lock us up for no good reason, then you treat us like we’re in a girls’ school?”
“Give,” says the townie cop, snapping his fingers.
Everybody throws down their cards, and Floyd Price gathers them all up and decks them.
“Let the boys play, for pete’s sake.” One of the FBI agents. “You people here. No wonder you’re still a dry state.”
“That’s our business,” says the cop.
“You’re right, it is.” The G-man looks at Floyd. “Give him the cards.”
Floyd passes the deck through the bars.
“You boys WPA?” says the G-man. “That what I heard?”
Everyone says yes, WPA. Eager to display their common federal origins.
“Ah, don’t worry, nobody thinks you done anything. We’re pretty sure who took the kid.”
“Yeah?” says Willi. “Who?”
But the G-man doesn’t reply. Instead he locks his attention on Willi’s face, staring so intently that Willi begins to fidget.
“Do I know you?”
“I don’t think so,” says Willi. His voice doesn’t wobble—does it?
The agent slowly rubs his jaw. “New York?”
“Jersey,” says Willi. “Hoboken.”
“You look familiar.”
“Nah.”
“Ah, give it up, kid,” says Studs Dillon, “it’s all over.” Cupping a hand around one side of his mouth, he pretends to speak confidentially. “You got him, G-man, this is Machine Gun Boring, public enemy number nine.”
And now it’s like all the atoms of Willi’s body are fizzing off into space, it’s like he’s dissolving. But everybody laughs, so he does too.
“That must be it,” says the federal, then he raps on the bars with his wedding band—shave-and-a-haircut-two-bits—and walks away. He joins his colleague in conversation with the sheriff. The three of them stand only a few feet away from the wanted posters but with their backs to them.
“Why’d you say that?” says Willi, turning on Dillon.
“It was just a crack.”
“Yeah, well, keep your stupid cracks to yourself.”
5
By six o’clock both the Cadillac limousine and the dead chauffeur have been located, miles apart, and F. O. Poore the banker has received two telephone calls from the kidnappers. The first announcing the fact of his son’s abduction, the other setting the ransom at twenty-five thousand dollars in cash. Between the time he parks his father’s truck and walks a block to the police station in the early-evening light, Clark hears the same news at least five separate times from small groups clustered on sidewalks and lawns.
The murdered chauffeur’s name was Pete Santella. No, it was Louis. Louis Santella. No, it wasn’t either, it was Pete, Pete Santo. Whatever his name was, nobody ever met him. Seen him a few times. Driving around. Filipino, supposedly. Poor little flip. And Donny! Donny Poore! Good kid. Bit of a scamp, though. Think he’s dead? Hope not. Think he is? Clark knows most of the people, but when he realizes the ones he doesn’t are probably out-of-town newspapermen, he feels an aggressive, proprietary quickening through his chest. Digging out his press ID, he pushes his way up the steps to the police station. They’d better let him in! He is ready to argue. That proves unnecessary. The officer posted at the door turns out to be Janey Laster’s older brother Merle.
“Hiya, Clark,” he says. “How you been?”
“Pretty good, Merle. And hey, congratulations on your engagement.”
“Thank you kindly. Was it you wrote up that announcement in the paper? Nice job.”
“Appreciate that.”
“But Amy don’t work at that seed company no more like you put, she’s over at Peterson’s nursery these days.”
“ ’Scuse me, Merle,” says Clark, squeezing past him.
The station house is mobbed and noisy—telephones ringing, fans buzzing on file cabinets, everybody talking—and he can’t find the chief. But he does spot Willi Boring looking pale and wretched inside a holding cell with several other men.
“Get us out of here, Clark, can you?”
“What are you doing in there?”
“Your Keystone Kops arrested everybody they didn’t recognize. And now they forgot about us!” Willi’s eyes dart left and right, then focus on something. When Clark turns to see what, all he sees are a bunch of uniformed cops and two men in dark suits and blue ties and a cork bulletin board covered in wanted posters.
“I’ll see what I can do,” says Clark. But he has no intention of doing anything. What can he do? And why should he even try to help that patronizing city slicker?
With his notepad in his back pocket and a pencil in his left hand (he really ought to get a pen, but the cheapest you can buy costs a buck and they tend to leak), he wanders around, excusing himself to cop after cop, pardoning-me to the vice mayor and a selectman, clearing his throat beside the young town attorney huddled in conversation with the Poore family’s gray-haired lawyer. But nobody will speak with him on or off the record. He feels scorned and clumsy. And not sure what he’s supposed to do.
Yet again Clark wishes he were smarter, lots smarter, that his polish was as marvelous as his body’s capacity to perform. He’s no dope, he knows that, but neither is he anything special in the brains department. He wishes he were smarter, had a better vocabulary, didn’t mispronounce words and use bad grammar, and he wishes above all else that he knew how to be in the world, that it came as easily as running.
It’s seven o’clock. It’s ten past. Half past.
There is an electric percolator on a small table, and he goes over there and pours himself a half cup. Drops in three cubes of sugar.
It’s twenty of eight.
It’s five till.
“Clark.” Sheriff Dutcher is standing next to him now fixing coffee, blowing across the surface, taking a sip. “How’ve you been, son?”
“Fine, sir, thank you.” Then he feels compelled to explain: “I’m working for the newspaper now. Part-time. That’s why I’m here.”
“Well, good for you. Good for you.”
“So … is there anything you can tell me, Sheriff?”
“Probably not. You understand.”
“Yes, sir.”
“But if I could, I might tell you there’s a good chance we’re looking for a 1931 or ’32 DeSoto woodie with a busted headlamp.”
Clark is so astonished—he’s talking to me!—that it takes the sheriff’s prompting gesture, an index finger flicked toward his notebook, to realize that he should probably write it down. “Thirty-two or ’33?”
“Thirty-one or ’32.”
“Right.” He scribbles. DeSoto. Do you spell woodie with a “y” or an “i-e”? Clarks spells it with a “y.” “Thank you, Sheriff.”
“For what?” Dutcher drains his cup, then half turns away, burying a yawn in his shoulder. “Excuse me,” he tells Clark. But tired as he may be, the sheriff is alert again the moment two federal men step out of the police chief’s office. He watches one collect his hat and duck out by a side door while the other—slight, pale, and fussy-looking—struts this way across the station house. “Agent Foley,” says Dutcher.
Clark can tell Foley would just as soon keep walking. But with the briefest tightening of his mouth, he comes over. “Sheriff.”
“Excuse me again, Clark,” Dutcher says and moves away with Foley.
Speaking together, they both lower their voices.
But to Clark they might just as well be a pair of console radios with the volume knobs turned all the way to the right.
“We’ll be taking the kid’s father back to his office in a couple of minutes,” Foley tells Dutcher. “To wait for the call.”
“Just let me know, I’ll head on over there with you.”
“That won’t be necessary, sheriff.”
“Oh no?” says Dutcher. “And why is that?”
“Because it won’t.” Foley comes back to where Clark is still loitering, glances at him, glances away, and picks up the electric percolator. Shakes it. Making a disgusted face, he pours the last sludgy drips into a cup.
It is six minutes past eight.
Here’s what happens before it is seven past.
Foley swallows his mouthful of coffee and rubs the back of a hand across his lips. Then, raising his eyes, he looks straight ahead at a wanted poster pinned to the corkboard.
Foley’s heartbeat sounds to Clark like a baseball card clothespinned to a bicycle spoke, the bike flashing down a hill.
Clark looks up at the same poster.
Murder, Burglary, and Interstate Flight.
“Son of a bitch!” says Foley. “I knew I’d seen that guy’s face!”
Dutcher says, “What guy?”
“That guy!” says Foley, turning and pointing to Willi in the cell across the room. “Look,” he says, turning back to the corkboard.
“At what?”
“You blind?” says Foley, and tap-taps the wanted poster with an index finger. Tapping till he says, “What the hell?” And freezes with his fingertip pressed to the mug shot of a Negro male with a shaved head and a thick mustache, Edward Thomas Burt, 45, 6′2″, 230 to 250 pounds, occupation truck driver, wanted for theft of government property. “But I saw it! It was right here.”
Dutcher cranes an eyebrow.
Foley randomly skips his glance from flyer to flyer. “I saw it,” he says. But very quietly.
It is now seven minutes past eight.
Without another word Agent Foley walks away, past the muster desk, out through the front door.
Dutcher shakes his head. After he is unable to suppress a grin, he winks at Clark. And strolls off, a man with nothing at the moment he can think of to do.
Willi is standing with his arms stretched up and his hands gripping the bars of his cell. Face clammy white as new butter.
