“Stevie,” he said, “how’d it go?”
“It went,” Steve said.
He looked at Ella. His chest was tight and there was sweat on his back. Ella had been alone with Doc from six till midnight—the best in the world playing cards with a heel like Doc. And Ella was smiling. Her eyes were bright and laughing. Steve drew a deep breath.
“I won three dollars,” she said.
“Good girl,” Steve said.
From Doc Pennypacker she had won three dollars. That was one for the book. Doc Pennypacker had given her three dollars, letting her win, making her happy. But he had an angle; he had a knife for Steve’s ribs. His look said that. And Steve couldn’t do anything. Not yet. Not until he knew what Doc had come up with this time. Steve put his jacket in the closet and took his lunch bucket to the kitchen. The table was set for his midnight meal. Ella came into the kitchen after him.
“I’ll have the soup hot in a jiffy,” she said.
He put his big hands on her shoulders. Her face came up, a laughing face and he kissed her. He kissed her hard. She tipped her head back to look at him.
“Well!” she said. “That was something. I think I’ll have another one of those.” She had another one. “Good, good,” she said. “Now clean up. The soup will be ready when you are.”
Steve Lacy went into the living room. Doc Pennypacker was lighting a cigarette. His eyes flickered over the match flame. He smiled again.
“Lipstick,” he said. “A great girl, your wife.”
Steve wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, staring at Doc Pennypacker. He took a deep breath and let it go. Easy, now. He had to hold it down so Ella wouldn’t know how wrong things were. “Doc,” he said. His voice was all right. “I thought maybe you’d figured we had a lousy town and hit the road.”
“It’s a good town, Stevie,” Pennypacker said. “A fine town.”
“Quiet,” Steve said. “Nothing doing here.”
“Quiet I don’t mind,” Doc said. “I tell myself Stevie invited me for home cooking. A couple of days, for old times, for sitting around batting the breeze. I couldn’t tell the boys I left Stevie’s the first day. They wouldn’t believe it. They’d want to know why.”
From the kitchen, Ella said, “Get a move on, Steve.”
“Right away,” Steve said.
He went toward the hallway, still looking at Doc Pennypacker, Pennypacker looked back at him. That was all. No words. But the way Doc looked said plenty. His eyes flicked toward the kitchen, flicked back. “Careful,” Doc’s eyes said. “Your wife’s out there, Stevie. You don’t want to worry your wife.” Steve Lacy looked at Doc Pennypacker’s thin throat. His hands and arms ached.
He said “One minute, baby. That’s all I need.”
He went down the hall to the bathroom. The bathroom door would not open all the way. Doc Pennypacker’s bag was behind the door. He had gone out and got his bag and moved in. He’d moved in on Steve Lacy and his wife. Like that. And what was Lacy going to do about it? He looked at this guy, Lacy, in the mirror. A face with murder in it.
“Not till you know what he’s got in mind,” he told the guy. “Even then, think twice, think hard. One scramble, one spot of trouble and you’re back in the pen.”
He washed his hands and face and scrubbed them dry on a towel. He looked down at the bag. New and expensive and locked. Heavy. Guns were heavy. Steve Lacy felt a cold wind around his head. Who did he think he was kidding? Doc Pennypacker was not here for a bed and a free meal. Any dope would know that. One dope did know it. Finally. Steve put the bag down and went out into the kitchen.
Pennypacker and Ella were there. They had coffee steaming in front of them. Ella smiled. “I thought we’d have coffee with you, Steve.”
“Good,” Steve said.
“A coffee drinker, your wife,” Doc said. “We drank about a gallon during the gin game.” He smiled. “That’s how she does it. She gets me looped on coffee and takes my money away from me. A smart little girl, your wife.”
No girl was smart enough to win from Doc Pennypacker.
“An angel,” Steve said.
“I’ll buy that,” Doc said. He was being a great guy, one of the family. “I look at her and I remember Benny—Benny Hastle. You remember Benny. That dream girl he used to talk about? It comes to me, Stevie. This wife of yours is a perfect fit for Benny’s dream girl. Fresh. Sweet. A looker with class. Including the coffee. Benny always said, ‘Give me a girl that likes coffee.’ ” He looked at Steve Lacy. “Remember, Stevie?”
This was the knife in the ribs. This was Doc’s angle.
“I remember,” Steve said. His food tasted like mud.
“This Benny,” Pennypacker said to Ella. “A really swell joe. Big and handsome. A friendly guy. You’d like Benny Hastle.”
They all liked Benny—at first. That was his stock in trade.
Steve said, “You look tired, hon.”
“I am,” she said. “I’ll leave you two.”
She went out of the kitchen. Steve looked at Doc Pennypacker. One swing, one bat with the back of his hand and he could turn that long nose of Doc’s into a pulp. And it would be fine. It would be real fine.
“You moved in,” he said. “Move out again.”
Doc’s face was pained. “A couple of days, Stevie. Is that too much to ask a friend?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re kidding.” Doc’s cold eyes said he knew Steve wasn’t kidding. “You’re giving me the old dig. And that’s okay. But now we talk sense. You got a nice town here.”
Steve pushed his plate away, still full. He locked his big hands in front of him on the table, one holding the other.
“A quiet town,” he said. “No good for you, Doc.”
“Just right for me,” Doc Pennypacker said. “I been here before. You know? I looked around. There’s a thing here I like. I thought about it the last seven years. I looked today. It’s still here. I still like it.”
Now it was coming.
“I don’t want to hear about it,” Steve said.
“A soft touch? Don’t give me that.”
“Any kind of a touch,” Steve said. “Get it through your head. Now. Don’t go any farther with it.”
Doc Pennypacker leaned back to light a cigarette.
Steve Lacy was sweating. He could hear Pat Simms saying, “What you hear I hear.” Saying that, and opening the steel gate. “Or else, Lacy.” He hadn’t heard anything yet. If he didn’t hear anything he’d be all right.
“Listen to me, Doc.”
“I got you figured for a piece, Steve.”
A piece? A piece of the rap. Ten like the last ten. The hair crawled on Steve’s neck.
“You’ve got it figured wrong, Doc,” he said. “I don’t want a piece of anything you’ve got. Get it in your head. I don’t want any. I’m clean and I’m going to stay clean. All I want is a chance to work.”
“Work’s for horses.”
“For me. I don’t want anything else.”
“What you want——” Doc shrugged. “I need a man I can trust.”
“Not me.”
Pennypacker’s thin lips smiled. “I thought I’d made it all clear. But maybe not. So I’ll go through it again. There was Devers, Benny, and me. I’m going out. They got a few months left. We need a roll. I tell them about this town, this thing I remember here. It looks good. Who do we know in this town? Steve Lacy. Will he play ball with us? Sure. Steve’s a great guy. Besides, I hear he’s got a sweet girl for a wife. This Steve’s in love with his wife. Word gets around, Stevie. You know how we hear things down there.”
Steve knew.
“So it figures. Benny says I’m to tell you hello for him. Devers too. I tell ’em they’re all wrong; we won’t need anything like that. Stevie will play ball with his friends. They want me
to tell you anyway. Especially Benny. The way it is—if something goes wrong, if somebody sings, they’ll collect. We have to collect. One guy sings and gets away with it, they’ll all sing. We got to stick together, Stevie. You know that.”
“No,” Steve said. “I don’t want any.”
“What I got in mind is easy, Steve. All you do is drive a car. I do the work, you drive. For that you get a twenty-five cut. It’s easy money, Stevie.”
Sweat stood on Steve’s face.
“I drove a car,” he said. “For that I did an easy ten years.”
“A punk, that Dianco. This is Doc Pennypacker talking. It makes a difference. I don’t miss.”
“You don’t miss? Where you been the last seven years?”
“Okay. A guy helped me, didn’t he? A no-good. A woman yelled and he came apart. You won’t come apart, Steve.”
“I keep telling you, I’m not in it.”
“You’re in it. I say so. Devers and Benny say so.”
Steve Lacy put his forehead on his hands. He did that to stop looking at Doc Pennypacker. He would take Doc by the throat if he kept on looking at him.
Doc said, “It’s the Zenner plant. A setup. Wholesale diamonds. We take it Thursday noon.”
And there it was.
Steve Lacy waited for something to happen inside him. A blowup. Something that would drive him out of his chair to collar Doc Pennypacker. Nothing happened. He thought of Ella in bed asleep and nothing happened. He got up slowly and began to clear the table. His full plate he emptied carefully in the garbage can so Ella wouldn’t know he hadn’t eaten. What good was a head on your shoulders if it wouldn’t work? His head wouldn’t work.
Doc Pennypacker said, “What d’you say, Steve? It’s big.”
“It’s lousy,” Steve said.
He ran water in the dishpan. Now his head began to work. Talk Doc out of it. Scare him out. If it looked too tough, Doc would go somewhere else. And it was tough.
“At noon!” he said. “For God’s sake, are you nuts?”
“That’s the trick,” Doc said. “Who’d figure it for noon? Me, and nobody else. Not them—not the Zenners. Too many people around. Okay, that’s what I like. I pick somebody, one of the customers. I put a gun in his back. I tell them they empty the box or the guy gets a hole in his back. They empty the box. Why? How would they look letting a customer get a hole just to keep their ice? When they got insurance. No, Stevie. They’ll give. And with you outside in that car. That fast car, Stevie. We get away clean.”
It was crazy. A hop dream. But Pennypacker would go for a crazy dream like that. The pen was full of guys like Pennypacker who went for dreams like that.
“Clean with what?” Steve said. “What have you got?”
“Twenty, thirty grand. Unmounted stones.”
“You think that’s something?”
“It ain’t tin.”
“Listen. Say it’s thirty grand. You’ve got to peddle those rocks. A fence pays you ten grand if you’re lucky. You split me a twenty-five cut. Say two for me, eight for you. Devers and Benny want in. More splits. If you come out of it with four grand, I’ll eat it.” He looked at Doc Pennypacker and found Doc grinning at him, shaking his head. “You think I’m wrong?” Steve said. “Okay. Double everything. What have you got? I can still make that much dough in a year with no gun in my hand and no rap waiting for me.”
“But you got to pay taxes, Stevie, boy.”
Doc Pennypacker was laughing at him.
This was the damnedest thing under the sun. The way these guys figured. Steve had heard them plenty, in the pen. Talking, talking, talking. How they were right and the rest of the world was wrong. The rest of the world was full of square-johns, guys dumb enough to work for a living, dopes. How come the smart guys were inside and the dopes outside? Ah, there’d been a little slip-up. But the next one. The next one would pay fine, a big haul.
Never mind trying to tell them about right and wrong. Break it down for them, like he had for Doc. Dollars earned against time spent in the pen. Not one in ten could show a dollar a day wages. But they couldn’t see it. They had a blind spot in their heads. They’d laugh at you, like Doc was laughing at him. They’d tell you you were the one with the crack in your head. While they were sitting their lives away behind the bars, they’d tell you that.
“This is a little piece of work,” Doc said. “A place to start. To pay expenses. The big jobs take time and money and organization. We’ll get to those, Stevie. Don’t worry. We’ll work up fast.”
“Maybe Fort Knox, eh?” Steve said.
Doc laughed at him. Doc wouldn’t be talked out of it. He wouldn’t scare. Steve looked down at his hands in the dishwater. Big hands, built for tools and engines, for washing dishes, for changing a baby. Not for guns. He couldn’t see a gun in those hands, ever. But he couldn’t see a way out of it.
“What do yah say, Steve?” Doc asked.
“I got to think,” Steve said.
“Sure,” Doc said. “If you got a brain behind that homely pan of yours go ahead and use it. Think about me and Devers and Hastle. Think about that lovely wife of yours, Stevie. You don’t want to make any mistakes. Sleep on it, Stevie. Think about it good.”
* * *
—
Ella was asleep. The tired clock on the bedside table groaned and whirred. Steve listened to the clock and tried not to hear Doc Pennypacker bubbling out on the davenport. He thought of Benny Hastle, the guy who was really dirt. Good-looking, eyelashes long enough to braid; but full of tricks. Women were Benny’s business—women and guns and dope, but women first. A girl worked for Benny two days, she had a job for life. Two days with Benny and they never went back; they couldn’t go back. And that coffee. Drink coffee with Benny and you were done. The coffee was Doc’s angle, his squeeze. The biggest squeeze of all. Doc’s way of saying, “Don’t cross us, Stevie. Don’t try to cross us, or we’ll get to Ella. One way or another, Stevie, we’ll get to that wife of yours.” Steve swore and turned, and Ella’s breathing changed. Ella was awake.
“Steve,” she said. “Can I ask you to do a favor?”
“Anything, Ella. You name it.”
“Take me out to the lake,” she said. “On a picnic. Just the two of us. I’ll do my shopping Thursday morning. I’ll get the groceries for the week. If you take the day off we can have all afternoon together at the lake.”
Thursday was her day off. He had forgotten that.
“Sure,” he said. “Whatever you say.”
“We’ll rent a canoe. We’ll go out to the island.”
“That island,” he said. “I love that island.”
“You think I don’t, Steve? The trouble I had with you. I thought you’d never ask me to marry you.”
“I had to tell you what you were getting into.”
“Then I told you,” she said. “You weren’t what they said, Steve. They put you in a cage, but they were wrong. They took ten years away from you and we had to hurry so we wouldn’t be too old to dance at our golden wedding.” Her hand found his. “I’m worried about you, Steve. You’re not sleeping the way you should.”
“I sleep all right,” he said.
“You will take me out to the lake. Promise, Steve.”
“Thursday afternoon,” he said. “I promise.”
She made a wordless sound of content and fell asleep again. That lake. He’d take her out there—he would if they didn’t have him in the cage again. He closed his eyes. No matter how his thoughts twisted and turned, there were barriers inside his head—Doc and Devers and Hastle in one direction; Pat Simms in another—barriers he couldn’t climb or get around no matter how he tried.
He closed his eyes and it was Wednesday. The clock on the bedside table yelled at him. His head still ached. The night hadn’t helped; he hadn’t found a way out yet. And Doc had used
his razor again. It lay on the washbowl, still wet. Steve changed the blade and shaved. He showered and dressed and went out into the kitchen. Doc was sitting at the table with the morning paper and a glass of milk.
“What hit you, Stevie?” he said. “You look sick.”
“I’m sick of you,” Steve said.
“Just nerves. You’ll get over it.” Doc turned his attention to the paper. “The Clipper hits a homer yesterday,” he said. “The Yanks win again.”
“Doc,” Steve said, “that car of mine——”
“Save your breath,” Doc said. “I looked at it yesterday. I had coffee with your wife this morning. She told me how you worked on that car. How fast it is. The body’s beat up, but the motor’s fine. She says it’ll do a hundred. Maybe better.”
“This stick-up won’t work, Doc. It’s crazy.”
“It’ll work,” Doc said. “You’ll see.”
Wednesday, and the hours were like sand spilling through his fingers. He finished tearing the tractor motor down. He made a list of the parts he needed, and the supply room sent it back. “You’ve got one part down here three times,” the shop foreman said. “Three generators. You’re getting fuzzy. You need a day off.”
Steve said, “How about tomorrow?”
The foreman nodded. “Sure. It’ll do you good.”
It was the lunch hour then. Steve sat on the floor with his back against the wall, eating sandwiches he couldn’t taste. He kept his eyes on the floor and a pair of legs walked into his range of vision. Steve didn’t have to raise his eyes. He knew those heavy legs, those lightly moving feet.
“I asked you nice,” he said. “Simms, get off my back.”
“I was out of the station,” Simms said. “I thought maybe you’d called while I was gone. I thought I better check.”
“I told you I wouldn’t call. I’ve got nothing to say.”
The Big Book of Reel Murders Page 131
