Hunger and the Hate

by Dixon, H. Vernor

  “Yeah.” Clyde leaned back in his creaking chair and swiveled about to stare out the window. “It’s hurting some already. I heard Steve Moore had to borrow a stack of green yesterday.”

  Dean snapped, “Which bank?”

  Clyde indicated the building they were in with a wave of his hand. “This one, of course.”

  Dean picked up the telephone and in a moment had the bank manager on the line. He asked immediately, “How much money did Moore borrow yesterday?”

  The bank manager replied, “Now, Mr. Holt, you know that’s a confidential matter.”

  Dean snarled, “Listen yourself, you damned fool. If I have to walk downstairs to get the information I’ll take your job with me. Remember me? I’m on the board. I want that information.”

  “Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Of course. Sorry. I just wasn’t thinking there for a minute. The — ah — the amount — ah, yes — two hundred thousand dollars. That was it.”

  “What about collateral?”

  “Well, of course, the Moore buildings, ice plant, various properties.”

  “O.K. Thanks.”

  He hung up and told Clyde, “Two hundred grand. Why the hell does he need that much dough?”

  “Well, Dean, you know how the old man was. Steve is still operating under his contracts. The old boy hated to kick loose on percentage profits with growers, so he invariably made the standard deal, a hundred and fifty bucks per acre to the grower and the usual fifty-fifty split after the one-fifty is paid in. Steve has a tremendous amount of acreage on lease and on most of it he has to return to the grower from six bits to a dollar a crate. Right now that hurts.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So he’s losing about three hundred bucks on every car he sends out on these standard contracts. Good deal on an up market, rough on a down. That’s why he needs cash now.”

  “If it drops another quarter he’s going to be screaming for mercy. He may not be able to pull through this season.”

  “It wouldn’t take much to tip him over, I grant you that.”

  Dean nodded and got to his feet to leave. As Clyde stood up, too, he noticed a change in the big man. He had lost considerable weight, both about the waist and in his jowls. His face was leaner and his clothes had been taken in to fit better. There was a haggard expression in his eyes and he looked somewhat like a man convalescing from a long illness, yet, with the soft fleshiness of good living leaving him, his appearance was better than it had been before.

  Dean could not resist asking, “Have you ever learned who put that Bide-A-Wee sign in front of your place, Clyde?”

  Clyde walked to the window and stood there a moment with his hands clasped behind his back. He turned about to face Dean, his eyes narrowed to tiny slits. “Not yet.”

  “Any ideas?”

  “I have a private detective working on it.”

  Dean had not thought of that possibility, and his brows pulled together in a worried frown. “Hell, man, don’t you think that’s carrying things too far? After all, whoever the guy was, he meant it as a joke.”

  Clyde said softly, “You call it a joke? I don’t. For your information, Elsie is in Reno getting a divorce.”

  “Jees, I never thought — ”

  “We’ve been married seventeen years. Most of them were good. All right, so when I wanted to play the past years I did it with younger gals. People thought it was because I didn’t give a damn about Elsie. They didn’t know.” He returned to the swivel chair and leaned his great arms on the desk and said, “But I’ll tell you, Dean. You should know. Elsie had one of those female operations about eight years ago. It didn’t work out right. She was no longer any good in bed. She used to scream with pain. I quit with her and got it by hire. It changed her other ways, too. Made a kind of dry, sour, cantankerous woman out of her. But it wasn’t her fault, you see, and I never held it against her. Maybe it wasn’t love, but I thought a great deal of Elsie. For seventeen years she’d been part of me, helping me along, someone to turn to, taking the good with the bad. You don’t throw seventeen years out the window. It takes a lot out of a man. Leaves him all empty inside. You know what I mean, Dean? Probably not.”

  Dean wet his lips with the tip of his tongue and mumbled, “I — ah — I guess I’d better be — ”

  Clyde continued relentlessly, “And you call it a joke. Everyone’s had a lot of fun with it. Kids get a bar of soap and scratch Bide-A-Wee on my car. Someone branded a prize bull of mine with B-A-W. I get it through the mail. I can’t go anywhere without some son-of-a-bitch snickering behind my back. It’s a very funny thing. It’s a big laugh to everybody — except me and Elsie. Seventeen years, Dean. Think of it. Seventeen years down the drain, all because some bright bastard thought he had to have a laugh.”

  “I — ah — ”

  “One day I’ll find out, Dean. I don’t care who he is, one day I’ll find out. And then you know what? I’m going to hit him where it hurts most. I know everyone in this town and I know all their weaknesses and I know where each one can be hurt the most. There are only so many people capable of this thing. I’ve made a list. You’re on it, by the way.”

  “Hey, wait a minute!”

  Clyde went on softly, his voice rumbling deep in his barrel-like chest. “I didn’t say you were the one. But you’re on the list, Dean. You’re right at the top. Maybe it’s you and maybe it isn’t. It could be someone else.” He leaned back in his creaking chair and smiled. “But whoever it is, Dean, one day I’m going to hurt him in a way he’ll never forget. Maybe that will make up for the seventeen years.”

  “Yeah. Sure. Know how you feel. Well — ah — ”

  Dean groped for the doorknob and hurried out of the office.

  A private detective, he thought. If the guy had any sense, all he had to do was hire a good interpreter and question the Mexicans in the area. Even if none of the crew had known him personally at the time, they would since have learned the identity of the redhead with the big joke. But, on second thought, maybe that wouldn’t be so easy. Mexicans had an odd sense of humor, especially the peon type. They appreciated a man who would take tremendous pains and risks just for the sake of a laugh. And they had an unusual sense of loyalty. It amused them to know a secret about someone they liked and to keep that secret. It might not be so easy, after all, to get information from them.

  On the other hand, it was a risky business. Clyde was dangerous and he had the power to enforce his threat. The longer he stayed around, the better the chances were that someday — Dean paused on the hot sidewalk and stepped back into the shade of an awning to consider an idea that presented a solution. The thing to do was to get Clyde out of town. He had already become something of a recluse, and his bitterness was increasing with each passing day. He was on the verge of retiring, anyway, so if he could be made to turn that bitterness upon Salinas itself, he would probably leave town. There would then be little or nothing to worry about.

  Dean knew a young man named Jim Haley who had been born a juvenile delinquent and had spent most of his subsequent years in reformatories and county jails. He specialized principally in stealing hub caps and other small articles easily disposed of, and had a gang to assist him in his endeavors. The criminal business he was engaged in, however, had little profit in it and Haley was usually broke.

  Dean found him that day shooting pool with some of his gang and motioned him outside for a little talk. Haley knew who Clyde Davenport was and had heard about the Bide-A-Wee sign, though he failed to see the humor of stealing something so big that could not be sold. Dean then promised to pay him a hundred dollars a week, in cash, if he and his gang would wage psychological warfare on Clyde. They were never to let a day pass without bringing the words Bide-A-Wee to Clyde’s attention — soaped on his car, painted on his barn, scratched on his office door, chalked on the sidewalk, or burned into his ranch fences. With all the gang working on the project, in their spare moments, it would not be possible for Clyde to go through a day without seeing Bide-A-We
e staring him in the face somewhere. What was also important, it would appear to be the malicious work of numerous persons, the townspeople, rather than of any single jokester he could put a finger on.

  The slow-witted Haley could see no sense in the idea, but a hundred dollars a week, of which he would keep the lion’s share, was the conquering factor. Haley closed the deal with a limp handshake and promised to do his best. Dean walked away from him chuckling to himself. A few weeks of Haley’s treatment and Clyde would be ready to close shop and run.

  When Dean returned to his office that afternoon his secretary informed him that Hal Smith had been calling. Dean went into his own office, closed the door, and dialed the Moore plant. When he had Hal on the wire he asked, “What’s up?”

  Hal said, “Just a minute,” and there was silence as he switched from his desk phone to another in a more secluded location. Then he whispered into the telephone, “You asked me to find out about the Joe Biancoli commission account.”

  “So?”

  “I haven’t been able to learn much. The shed boss here knows, but he isn’t giving out. All I’ve been able to put together is that Joe and Tom Moore had some kind of sub rosa agreement. I don’t know what it is and I don’t even know if Steve is following up on it.”

  “Joe still buys ten cars a day, doesn’t he?”

  “More or less. It averages out at ten.”

  “Then, whatever the agreement was, it’s still working. I’d still like to know what cooks.”

  “Freeman knows.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because the shed boss made a crack that couldn’t mean anything else.”

  “O.K. I’ll talk to him. Meanwhile, you make a friend out of that shed boss and learn everything you can. Call me back when you have something.”

  “Sure.”

  Dean hung up, opened the office door, and looked out into the sales room. Since Freeman’s advent, business had increased so much that he had had to add another bookkeeper, an extra stenographer, and two order clerks. The room was overcrowded and added desks were shoved together end to end. However, Metzner was out of the vacuum plant now, and the entire sales force was to be moved there over the week end. There was much more room at the plant and Dean looked forward to enjoying a better office for his own use.

  Freeman was at his desk winding up affairs for the day, a hectic proposition on a bad market. Two teletypes were going and three telephone circuits were open on his desk. A shipper had a half carload of carrots going out to Kansas City and wanted to fill out on lettuce. Freeman yelled through an open window to the shed boss standing by, “What’s Baby?” Baby was any number of surplus crates that made up less than a car. When he learned that Baby was 124 crates, he picked up one phone and told the shipper that he could have them at the market and closed the deal. He turned to one of the teletypes to bang out an answer to an inquiry from Chicago: All fives were going down the cull chute and only quality fours were available at two-forty. The buyer wanted something cheaper and rang off with “Thanks” and “Out.” Freeman tackled the other teletype concerning a floater on the rails billed to self at Kansas City and sold it at two-thirty-five to a buyer in Louisville. He disposed of a New York buyer on another phone by telling him, with tongue in cheek, that the market was bound to rise and he would take no orders on cheap lettuce that would hit the East during the Jewish holidays.

  “No dice,” he said. “You characters get caught short with a surplus on holidays, you make a phony door inspection, and then we’re stuck with a car that can’t go any farther east on our freight rates unless it’s dumped in the Atlantic Ocean. But if you make an advance buy without inspection — No? O.K. Forget it.”

  He hung up, leaned back in his chair, and stared into space for a moment. He looked wearily down at his desk, checked the running inventory for the day, and glanced down the columns of the sales book. He shoved everything aside, spun about, and saw Dean standing in the doorway of his office. He walked to a water cooler, drank three cups of water, then joined Dean where he stood by the door.

  “Jee-zuss H. Kee-rist,” he said, running the back of his hand over his forehead. “What a day!”

  Dean grunted, “Rough?”

  “Like always, this kind of market. The bastards know they got us by the short hairs, so they try to pull ’em out by the roots. I’m hurting. Just one big battle all day long.”

  “What’s in the shed?”

  “Nothing, as soon as Baby goes out.”

  Dean’s eyebrows raised. “Any cars on the siding?”

  Freeman grinned. “All gone. We’ve finished the day with a clear deck.”

  Dean matched his grin and slapped him on the shoulder. “By God, that’s a job. I’ll bet no other house on the row can say the same.”

  “No, I don’t think they can.” Freeman took a cigarette from him and a light and puffed thoughtfully for a moment. Then he looked into Dean’s eyes and said, “V know, when I got over my mad I had some regrets about making this switch, but now I’m damned glad I did it. I’ll probably make more dough with you than I could have with a quarter slice of Moore.”

  “Especially the way Moore is going.”

  “Well, I don’t mean to boast, but I think if I’d stayed there the outfit would still be in good shape. That isn’t the idea, though. I like working in a place where things happen and there’s still room to move ahead. So I’d like to ask you something.”

  “Shoot.”

  “The way things look, I’m due for a very fat bonus at the end of the season. How about using that and each subsequent bonus to buy in with you?”

  “You get fifteen per cent of the net now.”

  “That’s on contract. I’d like something better than that. I’d like to own a piece of the business, say a quarter of it. I should be able to pay off that much over a period of five or six years.”

  “Yeah, I guess you could. But I don’t know, Freeman. I’ve always been a lone wolf. I don’t know. I’ll think it over, though.”

  “There’s no rush. Let’s say we decide on it the last month of the season.”

  “Good enough.”

  He yawned and stretched his arms. “I’d better get home to Sue.” He grinned and said, “You sure screwed things up for me by giving us that Cadillac. Now she wants the Davenport house to go with it.”

  “You can afford it.”

  “The hell with that noise. I’d rather use the money where it can do more good.” He started to turn away, but paused and looked back at Dean. “Incidentally, the Diamond chain in San Francisco could buy more stuff from us than they’re taking. I’ve talked with them practically every day on the phone, but I’m not getting anywhere. Why don’t you run up to the city tomorrow and talk things over?”

  “You think it’s worth while?”

  “Well, it could mean four or five cars a day with no freight or icing problems. If this market drops lower, which it will, we could use a deal like that. It might be a good idea to offer them strictly quality stuff. You know how it is — all our best stuff is shipped to the East and the West gets the junk. Make them a good deal and I think they’ll go for it.”

  “O.K. Tomorrow’s Saturday, so don’t expect me in until Monday.”

  “Good.”

  He started to turn away again, but Dean stopped him with a hand on his arm. “Just a minute, Freeman. Something I’d like to find out.”

  Freeman dropped the cigarette butt to the floor and crushed it out under his heel. “What is it?”

  “You know Joe Biancoli. You know he’s been one of the Moores’ biggest buyers for years. You had to handle his business when you were with the old man.”

  “Uh-huh. What about him?”

  “I understand he averages about ten cars a day from Moore. It’s been going on year in and year out. There’s a reason for it. Got any ideas?”

  Freeman’s eyes slid away from Dean’s and his face became a hard mask erased of all expression. “Why do you want to know?�
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  “What the hell do you mean, ‘Why?’ That’s a sweet setup to have. I’d like to get it.”

  Freeman shrugged and said cautiously, “I guess he and the old man had some kind of deal.”

  “I’ve heard you know all about it.”

  Freeman stared silently into space for a long while, then looked at Dean with ice in his eyes. “You’ve heard wrong.”

  “I don’t think so. You know what cooks.”

  “Supposing I do?”

  “Then I’d like to know.”

  Freeman put his hands in his pockets and nervously jiggled some coins and keys. “Maybe,” he said, “it’s a good thing this came up. We can have an understanding right now. The deal the old man had with Joe is the kind of thing that shouldn’t exist in this business. It’s bad for everyone concerned, it means falsification of records, and it turns a man rotten inside. I’ll have absolutely no part of it and I advise you to do the same. Now, is that good enough for you, or isn’t it?”

  Dean felt sudden anger pounding in his brain and for a moment stared hotly at Freeman. Any other man he would have fired on the spot for defying him. But his anger died almost as quickly as it had been born. It was the reaction he should have expected from Freeman. Oddly enough, too, as soon as anger subsided, he was rather pleased. The code that Freeman lived and worked by was the same code that enabled Dean to trust him. Otherwise he would have had to police Freeman’s every move, especially when he was gambling on the market. The way it was, he trusted Freeman implicitly and never lost a moment worrying about his actions. It was a code that worked two ways.

  Dean chuckled and said, “One minute you’re asking to buy into the firm and the next you’re practically telling me to go to hell. But it’s O.K. I’ll find out some other way.”

  Freeman chewed anxiously on his lower lip, frowning at Dean. Then he said, “I wish you wouldn’t.”

  “Why not? It’s business.”

  “Not with Joe it isn’t. It’s dirty. You haven’t played that way — not yet.”