The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction

by Maxim Jakubowski

  “Not as an employee of the Bureau. A private citizen has no standing.”

  “Do I have your permission to dictate a resignation to your secretary?”

  He shrugged. “Go ahead. Make it effective as of now.”

  With my hand on the doorknob I turned and said, “Thanks.”

  He looked as though he had already forgotten me. “Oh . . . that’s all right, Gandy. Just remember that this talk was off the record.”

  “Of course.”

  After I dictated the resignation and signed it, I went and cleaned out my desk. In four years I’d cleaned out a lot of desks. This was different. There was no new desk waiting.

  My file on Torran belonged to the Bureau. I flipped through it. I knew it by heart. I took out two pictures – not the best two – but good enough, folded them and stuffed them in my pocket. They’d been taken with a telephoto lens from the window across the way where Aragon was holed up.

  I left the office without kissing anyone goodbye. The check would be sent to my bank marked for deposit. Four hundred and twenty something. The last check.

  * * *

  I went back to the crummy room I’d rented and in which I’d spent only sleeping time. On four years of salary and expenses, when all you think about night and day is a job of work, you save dough. I looked at the bankbook. Twenty-nine hundred in the savings account. Four thousand in the checking account.

  I’d left the little badge and the Bureau weapon and the identification card with Broughton. I sat on the bed and cried without making a sound. Like a kid. He’d been too right. I was ambitious. And they’d taken away my toys.

  What the hell was Torran to me now? I took out the pictures. I looked at them. One was an enlargement of the face. Aragon had caught him just as he came out into the sunlight. Torran. A bad boy. No punk. Thirty-four, approximately. Eight of those thirty-four years had been spent in prison. Auburn, Atlanta, Ossining. Armed robbery. Extortion. Now it was a big one. Bank robbery, kidnapping and murder.

  The joker was that he looked like a nice guy. Big mouth, slightly crooked nose. Laugh wrinkles around the eyes. The old prison pictures were no good because he’d been out for five years. In the picture he looked like he was on the verge of smiling. Or laughing – at me. How do you figure a guy like that? You can’t blame society. Good family, good education. So he was just a wrongo. One of those guys who work twice as hard as anyone else while they try to make it the “easy” way.

  Now he had made a big strike. But keeping it was a horse of a new shade.

  I looked at the pictures and called him everything in the book. I went out and had a steak; then bought a bottle, brought it home and killed it. It came close to killing me. When I woke up after fifteen hours of sleep it was nine in the morning.

  Torran’s pictures were on the floor. I picked them up and cursed him some more. It was easier to hate him than to hate myself. Before the war I was an accountant. One year at a desk telling myself I’d get used to it sooner or later. Then five years of war to prove to me that I couldn’t settle down. I took the exams and made the Bureau.

  After four years it had begun to look to me as though pretty soon I’d be telling J. Edgar to move over and make room for new blood. I liked the chase and I liked to catch them. But you try to be too smart – you try to move too fast. Boom.

  I wanted to catch Torran. I wanted to catch him so very bad I could taste it.

  But what can one man do? Now the Bureau would be going after him twice as hard. Good sense would have said to drop it. I went in and looked at myself in the mirror. I didn’t look so sensible. In fact, I thought I looked a little bit like some of the boys I’d caught during the last four years. Long hard face with heavy bones. Lids that cover maybe too much of the eyes at the outer corners. Big stubborn cleft chin. Hair that’s mine, but looks as though it were made from the end of the tail of a handy horse. Beard stubble. I shaved it off. My hand shook. I stopped now and then to drink more water. I got so full of water I wondered when I’d start to make sloshing noises.

  After three cups of coffee at the corner café, I could think again. What Broughton had said about private citizens stuck in my head.

  My local contacts weren’t too bad. By late afternoon it was fixed. In three days I’d have my license as a private investigator in the State of Illinois. License and a permit to carry a gun. So I got in the car and went to Boston. Once you start to do something, you can keep on even though you know it isn’t smart.

  I left Chicago on Monday at six p.m. I went through Toledo, Cleveland, Buffalo, Syracuse and Albany. I was in Boston at eight o’clock on Tuesday. I went to bed, got up at eight in the morning and located the house in Newton Center where May Marie Sipsol lived with her aunt. It was her bearer bonds that Torran had taken along with the cash. It was just her bad luck that her daddy died exactly when he did.

  She was a blonde with a skin like milk in a blue glass – a trembly uncertain mouth, and eyes so close together they threatened to overlap. She wanted none of me. She was a timid eighteen. She spoke of the authorities and what they were doing and she said she couldn’t pay me. I said I didn’t want pay. I said I wanted a percentage on recovery. I said ten would be enough. The bonds totaled a ten thousand face. Eleven thousand for Russ.

  We were alone in a room with Italian antique furniture. It smelled like dust. When I realized that she meant what she said, I took her by the shoulders and shook her until her eyes didn’t focus. Her aunt came in and bellowed at me. I pushed the aunt out of the room and locked the door. May Marie whimpered. I shook her again and she wanted to kiss me. Her breath was bad.

  Pretty soon she decided that this was a “great love” and that I was a very dramatic type and it was all pretty much like out of a Raymond Chandler movie. By the time the cops the aunt had called started beating on the door, I had our little contract all signed and tucked into the back of my wallet – the wallet with the little holes where the gold badge had been pinned.

  She gave the cops and her aunt undiluted hell. She raged like an anemic tigress. I held my breath and kissed her again and left with my contract.

  I was back to Chicago on Thursday afternoon. I picked up my documents, bought a .357 Magnum, phoned the office and found out from my only friend there that – in cautious doubletalk – Torran was still at large.

  On Friday morning I got up and went to work. I went on the basis that he had left town. Assuming that, I knew he was too smart to use any common carrier. He had no car. So he had stolen a car. Most cars not stolen for repaint and resale are recovered. He wouldn’t drive it too far. Not Torran. He’d want to get well out of town. An hour out, or maybe two. I went to headquarters and my pretty new documents gave me the in I needed. Torran had left the apartment house at eight o’clock on a Thursday evening. I copied down a list of the cars stolen after eight and before ten. I was informed that my ex-coworkers had been in. That was all right with me.

  One, and the one I liked the best, I almost missed, because it wasn’t reported until nearly midnight. The people had gone to a movie eight blocks from where we had Torran bottled up. Their car, a black Pontiac sedan, 1947 model, had been left in the parking lot near the theater. They’d gone into the theater at twenty after eight. That made sense. Torran was smart enough to pick a car that had just been parked, and he’d have had time to get there and watch the lot entrance. He wouldn’t want a flashy car.

  There was a blue check after the entry. I looked it up in the recovery register. Recovered in Beloit, Wisconsin, on Friday – reported to the Chicago police at one in the afternoon. They had informed the owner and he had said he’d go up and get it Saturday.

  None of the others looked as promising.

  Friday noon I was in Beloit. When I made inquiries about the car, the local cops gave me a bored look and said that it had already been checked by the Bureau.

  After I smiled enough, they let me know the facts. It was on the main drag in a meter zone. It had been tagged for all night parking
, then tagged again for overtime in a meter Friday morning. Then they checked against stolen car numbers and towed it in and told Chicago. The answer to my big question was disappointing. Were there any cars stolen from here Thursday night – any time between ten and two? Sorry, no. No missing persons – with car and all? Nope.

  A sour lead, and I couldn’t tell if I was right. I went back to Chicago and checked out of my room. I waited until night before leaving. Then I left from the parking lot street at eight-thirty. I was Torran, wearing women’s clothes. My feet hurt. I was in a stolen car. I wanted to shed the clothes.

  I took Route 20 out through Elgin. I stayed well within the speed limits, as no doubt Torran had done. I pretended it was raining. I looked for a chance to change my clothes. I’d need some sort of shelter from the rain, or else have to do it in the car. The longer I kept my own clothes wrapped around me, the more wrinkled and conspicuous they’d get. The ideal spot would be one where I could change and also ditch the women’s clothes.

  That’s a tough assignment on a rainy night in a heavily populated section. I didn’t have much hope of it working out. He could have pulled off in any number of places after leaving Starks. At Rockford I turned right on Route 51. I crossed from South Beloit over into Beloit and parked as near as I could to where the car had been found. It was twenty-five after ten. Allow Torran ten minutes to change and he would have gotten in just before quarter to eleven at the latest.

  I lit a cigarette and sat in the car for a few minutes trying to think. I went for a walk. Three blocks away was a bus station. Every night a southbound bus left for Rockford, La Salle, Bloomington, Decatur and Vandalia at eleven-fifteen. I liked that one. The hunted animal doubles back on its tracks.

  I found the driver having coffee. I asked him if he’d taken the bus on that run the previous Thursday week. He took a tattered mimeographed schedule out of his inside pocket, studied it and said that he had. I asked him if he remembered any specific people on that trip and he gave me a look of complete disgust. “I drive one hell of a lot of buses,” he said. I showed him the picture of Torran. It rang no bell.

  He warmed up a bit for a five-dollar tip. I sat beside him with my coffee. “Now think back. Did anything happen that was unusual that night? It was raining. Remember? Anything at all that might have puzzled you?”

  He started to shake his head slowly and then stopped shaking it. He looked into space for a moment. “Now wait a minute. I don’t know if this is anything or not. I make my Bloomington stop. Below there, some place just outside Heyworth, a car goes by me doing maybe ninety. Up ahead it slows down to a creep and I got to pass it. Zoom, it goes by me again. Looks like a girl driving. She slows up again and I got to pass her. Then she scoots by again and I don’t ever catch up to her again. The third time she goes by she leans on the horn like she was saying hello to somebody. You know – shave and a haircut, two bits.”

  “Could she have been looking for somebody on the bus?”

  “That’s what I was thinking.”

  “Anybody get off at Decatur?”

  “Three or four, I think.”

  “Nothing funny about them, about any one of them?”

  “Now, you know, I just remembered. One of them had a ticket to Vandalia, but she got off at Decatur.”

  “She?”

  “Yeah. Big heavy woman with no baggage.”

  “And a big hat?”

  “Damn if that isn’t right! One hell of a big hat!”

  I added another five to what he already had. I thanked him and went to the ticket office and got a timetable of that late run. It’s roughly a hundred and forty miles from Beloit due south to Bloomington. Even with two stops the bus made it in under three hours, getting to Bloomington at ten after two in the morning.

  I was in Bloomington at ten minutes of two. A bored man with gray pouches under his eyes lounged behind the ticket grille.

  “Were you on a week ago Thursday at this time?”

  He yawned. “I’m on every night, friend. In the daytime I try to sleep. The neighborhood is full of kids. I’m learning to hate children.”

  “Would you remember if someone, it might have been a girl, just missed the southbound bus from Beloit to Vandalia?”

  “If you’d come around a year from now, friend, I’d still remember the lady. You don’t see much of that material in bus stations. She came plunging in here five minutes after number seventy had pulled out.”

  “Nice?”

  “About five eight. She stood right where you’re standing. Hair like harvest wheat – with rain beads caught in it. Moon-pool eyes, pal, and a funny, tough, scratchy little voice, like a tired phonograph needle. She asked me if the bus had left and I said yes and away she went. It was like she pulled me along on a string. I went right to the door. She got into a big gray sedan and went away from here so fast that the tires yelped.”

  “What make?”

  “Oh, the car? Who knows? Big and new. Cad, Buick, Packard. Take any car. Say, that’s pretty good! Take any car.”

  “A dark-eyed blonde. Hair cut short?”

  “Nope. Nice and long. The kind to run barefoot through.”

  “Age?”

  “Twenty-two, three, four.”

  “Clothes?”

  “Brother, I was too busy taking them off to take a look at them. Something green, I think. But it could have been blue.”

  At Decatur I found that I was too close to falling asleep at the wheel, so I checked in at a hotel. In the morning I bought a road atlas and took it into the sandwich shop with me to read while having breakfast. I looked at the map with the idea of trying to outguess them – rather than guess the way they would.

  Obviously Torran had phoned from some place along his escape route and told the girl his plan. I had them spotted at Decatur in the rain in her car with Torran still in his disguise and with dawn not too many hours away. Either they were going to make a long run for it together, or she was going to take him to some hideout. If he had called from Beloit – which seemed the most probable, then I could draw a circle two hundred miles in radius around Bloomington and safely assume that she had roared over to Bloomington from some place within that circle.

  It didn’t look as though she could have made it from St Louis. If she had to get ready for a trip, Springfield might be a logical starting point. Yet, if it were Springfield, why not let Torran ride all the way to Decatur? If it were Peoria, she should have been in Bloomington in plenty of time. Galesburg seemed just about right. If she’d been in Chicago, then why hadn’t he gone to see her before he began to suspect that he was being covered?

  At any rate, Torran was going to be too smart to make any two-hundred mile run in a big car at that time of night. There are two many town cops who like to wake themselves up in the small hours by hauling down big cars on the road. Torran had gotten into Decatur by bus at just about three in the morning. He hadn’t seen the blonde in a long time. He needed to change back to his own clothes. Everything pointed to their holing up close to Decatur. A tourist court was indicated. I was in for some routine legwork.

  2

  I hit twelve places before lunch. Each place I hit drained some of the confidence out of me. The second place after lunch was called the Sunset Rest Courts and it was three miles out of town on Route 36 heading east.

  The woman was very brisk and friendly. “Yes, we had a girl and her mother register a week ago Thursday – I should say Friday morning at three-fifteen. The girl woke me up. We had a light burning that night because we had a vacancy. She said she had planned on driving all night but her mother was taken sick. Nothing serious.”

  “A blond girl?”

  “Yes. Quite pretty. I showed her the vacant room and she seemed satisfied. Here’s the register card.”

  I looked at it. Mrs Walter B. Richardson and Anne Richardson, of Moline. Make of car – Buick. License – Illinois 6c424. All in angular backhand script – finishing school script. I wrote down the license number, fairly ce
rtain that they had taken advantage of the dark night to put down the wrong number.

  “Are you from the police? Is something wrong? We’ve never had any trouble here. We try to run a—”

  “You’re in no trouble. I’m just looking for someone. This won’t even get on the records. Do you know which way they went?”

  “Well, Mrs Richardson must have recovered in a terrific hurry. They left here a little after seven. They went out of here so fast that I actually dressed and went over to see if they’d taken anything from the room. I can see the road from my bed. They went up the highway, heading east, and then turned up there at the fork and went south on Route One Twenty-one.”

  “Did they have any reason to believe that you might have seen which way they went?”

  “No. I’m a very light sleeper. I was about to get up anyway. As I say, I just happened to see them turn south.”

  “Could I take a look at the room?”

  “If you want to. There’ve been quite a few people in it during the week.”

  “Then maybe there’s no point in it. Who cleaned it after they left?”

  “I did.”

  “Did you find anything of interest that was left behind?”

  “N-n-no, not really.”

  “What did you find that puzzled you?”

  “A razor blade in the bathroom waste-basket. Lots of women use razor blades, of course. But this one had stiff black stubble on it, and caked shaving cream of some sort. I just thought it seemed odd. No one was in there but the two women between the times I cleaned the bathroom.”

  I left and drove slowly down 121. It was definitely a secondary road. The shoulder was narrow and the brush was high in the shallow ditch. In the patches where the brush was thickest I went about eight miles an hour.

  After about two miles I saw something in the brush. I got out and took a look. An old white rag caught on the base of some weeds. The second time I saw something, it was jackpot. A brown wool dress, ripped down the back and under the arms. Big shoes with the leather stiff from dampness, the stitches pulled by strain. Heavy stockings, a rain cape and a big floppy hat. The works had been rolled into a tight bundle and fastened with a woman’s belt. After I was certain of what I had found, I bundled it back up and got ready to toss it farther into the brush. A truck went by, a farm truck, and the driver looked curiously at me. I locked the bundle in the back end of my car with my luggage.