“Well, I wouldn’t confide in this one either. She might not last any longer than the others.”
“Who’s confiding? I never confided the time of day t’ none a them.” Harry sniffled into the phone. “Business is business and dolls is dolls. That’s my motto!”
Big Tom dropped it. “Busick just called.”
“Yeah, what’s he say now?”
“More of the same. Lay off, it don’t smell right. He’s got butterflies in his underpants.”
“Well, what you going t’ do?” Harry asked uncertainly.
“I’m going to pull it. To hell with him.” He waited, and Harry said nothing. “I don’t see what could be wrong.”
“Well, like you said yourself, it’s funny that it’s laying there where it is and nothing guarding it.”
“I’ve made up my mind to get it and take a look at it,” Big Tom said. “Then if there’s something queero we can have a bonfire. I wanted Busick outside just in case, but he won’t come back now.”
“Ah, we can do it ourselves, you and me,” Harry said with renewed confidence. “It’ll be a snap.”
“You know what to bring,” Big Tom told him. “Be here by ten.”
“Sure, I’ll be there.”
Big Tom put the phone into its cradle. The look of anger and disgust had smoothed from his face. He went out into the small kitchen again and found three newcomers mewing into the fish bowl. He fed them, then went out the rear door to the yard. Shaded by a big pepper tree, this area was cool and breezy. He walked the narrow bricked path back to the lath house. Before stepping inside he looked around carefully.
He watered the potted fuchsias and the ferns. He had another look outside. Then he went into a corner of the lath house and lifted a flat stone set into the creeping green moss. Below the stone was a small compartment lined with brick. From among other things Big Tom selected a plastic-wrapped object which had, in spite of the wrappings, the unmistakable shape of the Luger.
Carrying the wrapped gun, he went back into the house. He stood for a minute in his small front room, listening to the silence of the canyon. Then he sat down, unwrapped the Luger and inspected it thoroughly, meanwhile whistling through his teeth.
Skip went into the bathroom and examined his face. What Eddie had done looked like a mere scratch; the damage wrought by Big Tom darkened the whole side of his face. Skip washed and dried himself, brushed his teeth. He’d slept later than usual. Well, that was all right. He’d be up later tonight, too. He looked at himself again in the mirror, and the thought of Big Tom brought flickering lights into his eyes.
He went back to the outer room, dressed, went downstairs, and crossed the yard to the big house. Uncle Willy was in the outer porch on his hands and knees, wielding a scrub brush. A pail of soapy water stood by him. “Watch it,” he yelped at Skip. “It’s all wet in here. Go around to the side door. Watch that kitchen. Where it’s still damp, I don’t want it all tracked up.”
“Give me fifty cents, I’ll get something down at the corner.”
“Fifty cents, hell. I’ll be through here in a minute. Ten minutes, it’ll be dry as a bone here. Those eats in the kitchen are free, Skip. Don’t forget that. Don’t try to fifty-cent me when there are free eats for the cooking.”
Skip moved a little closer. “You ought to try to start getting used to having dough, Unc. Now handing out fifty cents would be a good beginning. Practicing, you could say.” Uncle Willy was shooting poisonous looks at him and jerking his head toward the inner recesses of the house where Mr. Chilworth might be listening.
“You weren’t worried about him hearing you talk about his free eats,” Skip pointed out reasonably. “What’s wrong now? Chrissakes, he’s got it bugged out here or something?”
Uncle Willy propped himself on his heels. A thin lock of gray hair had fallen over his eyes. “Skip, you try me. You really do. If you weren’t my own sister’s boy, I swear I’d kick your butt in.”
“Want to try?” But Skip went around to the side door and let himself into the pantry, walked on to the kitchen, and looked around for something to eat. Willy scrubbed his way to the rear door. He propped the mop there, dumped the water on the shrubbery, and came to the side door and was soon in the kitchen with Skip. By now Skip was frying three eggs in about an equal quantity of butter.
Willy heated the coffee, poured two cups full.
“Oh, God, that damned business of working on your hands and knees always did get my back to aching. I bet I washed ten thousand miles of corridor when I was inside. It just wore my spine out. I can’t hardly stand to get down like that any more.”
Skip flipped the eggs around to get them thoroughly covered by the butter. “You won’t have to work like this much longer. You’ll be flying high.”
Uncle Willy frowned at him across the cup. “Are you nuts? I’m not going to make a move for a year. What I learned, I learned the hard way, but I got a few things that stuck with me and one is—one important one is—you flash it, they nab you. You want a collar, just start living high and throwing it around.” His voice was low, little more than a whisper. “And that’s my word to you, Skip. Look poor and talk poor and ride poor. A Cadillac will get you the jug as sure as the sun rises.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Skip took a plate out of the cupboard, dumped the eggs on it, took bread from the toaster and buttered it. He ate standing up at the sink as usual. “Suppose the law never hears about it? Suppose Stolz can’t afford to let on what’s happened?”
“That’ll be even worse,” Uncle Willy whispered. “That chance, that Stolz is hiding tax dough, is what made me take the job away from you and give it to Big Tom. Big Tom can protect himself. If the heat’s too bad he’ll make a deal. He’ll sell it back to Stolz himself, for a cut, of course. Now how would you and Eddie ever have handled that?”
“You talk like Stolz is the bugger-man,” Skip jeered, but a memory jumped into his mind: the big man with granite fists who had stood outside Mr. Salvatorre’s door in the Solano Sea.
The man with the granite fists was one of Stolz’s little helpers. He could crush you like a marshmallow with one wallop. Under the repose, the cumbersome politeness, lay a well of savagery. You saw it in his cold and measuring stare.
Skip looked at Uncle Willy; a nervous smile flitted across his face. Willy didn’t see. He was staring into his coffee.
“What are you going to use for an alibi?” Skip wondered.
Chapter Eleven
AT SIX-THIRTY Uncle Willy was dressed in a blue suit, a pale blue shirt, red bow tie; and his black shoes shone like Mr. Chilworth’s front windows. Skip, too, had on the outfit he usually wore to go out, slacks and the leather jacket. He had scrubbed, his hair was combed neatly, and a faint dusting of talcum subdued the bruise along his jaw. Uncle Willy came out of the bathroom drying his hands. He was smiling foxily. “I’ve really got a good one this time.”
“You really have,” Skip agreed. “Who’s this bird who’s going to pick you up?”
“Name of Mitchell, he said over the phone. The meeting’s out on West Larchmont. My God,” Uncle Willy said wonderingly, “just think! I’ll be sitting in a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous telling the folks my drinking problems when Big Tom is pulling that job.”
“It’s a real good alibi,” Skip agreed again. Privately he was surprised that Uncle Willy had thought up so original an idea.
“You know,” Uncle Willy went on, his tone warming, “at first when Big Tom nixed the idea of being in the can, I thought of going to a bar, talking to somebody there, making an acquaintance. But then I thought, hell, the bastard would be drinking and, with my luck, he wouldn’t be able to pick me out of a line of midgets when the time came. So then I thought, What’s the opposite of a goddamn bar? And the answer came, Why—Alcoholics Anonymous.” He beamed at Skip in pride. “I figured it out all by myself.”
True, Skip thought. Everybody at the A.A. meeting would be interested, observant, and sober. You couldn’t ask for a bette
r batch of witnesses. “It’s okay,” he said.
Uncle Willy brushed some lint off his pants with a flick of the damp towel. “I’ll be hard put to keep from laughing, though. I’ll be thinking to myself of all that dough I’m making. Just sitting there and spinning yarns, and I’ll be making more money than anybody else ever did for one night at A.A.”
Skip glanced at him coldly. “You’re right.” He thought it over for a moment while he checked the stuff in his pockets, change and keys and cigarettes. “You never were a drunk. You’re going to have to make it convincing.”
“Oh, hell,” Uncle Willy said cheerfully, “I had a cellmate in Quentin had been on every skid row from here to Brooklyn. The stories he told, I could keep gabbing for a week. You know, the damnedest thing, he said one time when he was in Seattle—at that time they didn’t sell any liquor on Sunday, and this was Sunday—and he and some pals got some canned heat and strained it through a rag. Damned near blinded ’em.”
A faint honk sounded from the street beyond Mr. Chilworth’s house.
“That must be him,” said Uncle Willy. He straightened his coat, picked his hat off the table, and ran out.
Skip listened to his dying footsteps with a sour look. He lit a cigarette, went into the bathroom for a last look at himself, ran the powder puff over his darkened jaw, snapped off the light. Outside in the alley the fragrance of the lime tree lay heavy on the air. There was no light at this point; the last traces of twilight, dying in the west, gave his hands on the lock a ghostly grayness. Skip opened the garage. Inside to the left was Mr. Chilworth’s ancient Buick. Skip ran the jalopp out into the alley, closed the doors again, and drove away.
There was no way he could pay Uncle Willy back for bringing Big Tom into the job, or at least none at present. The loss of the money would have to suffice.
Karen was in the classroom, though the bell hadn’t yet rung. She was sitting motionless before the typewriter. Skip slid into the empty chair in front of her, swinging a leg over so that he faced her, putting his hands on the chair back. “Hiya. Got the key?”
The little wing-like brows looked very dark against her pale skin, and her eyes, when she raised them, seemed buried in black lashes. “It wouldn’t have done any good.” Her voice was hoarse, and Skip caught the listless note and his attention sharpened. “She sent me downtown for the afternoon,” Karen went on, “and when I got back there were all new locks on Stolz’s room—the door, the windows too. I could see the new brass fixtures from the yard.”
“How does she act to you?”
“I thought for a moment——” Karen bit her lip. “I thought she was going to talk to me about it.”
Skip leaned closer, his stare narrowing. “How does she look at you? As if she thinks you’re up to something? You’d catch that, wouldn’t you?”
“She looks at me the way she always does.”
“That’s good.” Skip thought about it, teetering on the legs of the chair. A few early arrivals were coming in; he lowered his tone to a whisper. “Look, I don’t really care what kind of damned lock is on the door. Not tonight. This is the night we roll. If she’s scared, scared enough to give us the key, good. If not——”
Karen seemed panic-stricken. “You’d let her see you?”
Skip nodded. “Why not? I’ll fix it so she’ll never recognize me.”
Her hands fluttered on the keys of the machine. All color had left her face and her eyes burned with fright. “I won’t let you in to hurt her or scare her.”
Skip shrugged. “You getting ready to tip the old woman off?”
“I wouldn’t do that.”
“Look, you don’t seem to understand the choice you’ve got here. You either line up with Eddie and me and help us in the house, or you tip off the old woman and she calls the bulls. There isn’t going to be any way for you to chicken out, do nothing, keep your goddamn skirts clear.” He reached, grabbed one of her hands, twisted the fingers painfully. “If you help us, you help all the way. See? A nice quick job, and we’ll be cleared out and miles away by nine-thirty, if we leave class right at nine.”
He got out of the chair and went quickly from the room. He had no doubts about Karen. Besides, he had an errand to do. He crossed the street from the school and entered a drugstore and asked to see some rubber gloves. If there had to be work done on that door they’d need these. He was particular, inspecting several pair. Finally he chose two pair, light in weight, in natural rubber, paid for them, stuffed the package into his jacket pocket. Too keyed up to return to class, he killed time then by strolling around and smoking cigarettes.
He didn’t waste even a moment worrying about Mrs. Havermann and her new locks. You busted locks when you had to, and she was nothing. There was danger if she had called Stolz already, but this was a chance he had to take.
At a quarter of nine Eddie came out of class, having told the instructor a lie about a stomach-ache. He and Skip went for Karen. When she came out into the hall Eddie saw at once how bleak and depressed she looked, and he wanted to say something but held his tongue in front of Skip. At twelve minutes past nine they swung up the driveway of the Havermann house, motor cut and lights out. Skip guided the car into the dense shadow of some shrubbery. Skip and Eddie got out of the car, Karen dragging after them, and then Skip said to her, “Take off your stockings.”
She didn’t catch on at once, and Skip cursed her under his breath. Then when she had taken off her shoes and removed the nylon hose he and Eddie pulled a stocking apiece over their heads. Their features flattened weirdly, the skin whitening over the bones, eyes pinched up between folds of flesh. When Eddie looked at Skip he wanted to shudder.
Skip took the package from his pocket, removed the gloves, gave a pair to Eddie.
There were several lights on inside the house: the kitchen, upstairs, a room on the lower floor near the front of the house. “Now this is what you do,” Skip said to Karen, his voice distorted and muffled by the flattening of his lips. “First, the dog. Shut him up where he won’t get out, won’t bark or bother us. Then come to the back door and fix it so we can get in. Then go and tell the old woman there’s something she ought to look at in the kitchen. You smell gas leaking there, or something.”
“She’s going to be terribly scared,” Karen protested. “Can’t you do it some other way?”
“How? Now how could we do it another way?” Skip’s manner was mild now, almost patient, but Eddie sensed the violence just under the surface, and Karen must have felt it too.
“Promise me,” Karen got out, “that when she gives you the key you’ll leave her alone. You won’t hurt her.”
“Now why would I do that?” Skip wondered.
“Promise,” Karen insisted.
“Okay, okay. Now snap it up.” Skip stretched inside the leather jacket as if he were almost bored. The light silk encasing his head gave him a strange brightness, almost a halo, in the dimness. It was crazy, Eddie thought, to think of Skip with a halo. Any time.
Karen walked away, the sound of her steps diminishing; the dark swallowed her, and then a few moments later Eddie could hear the front door rattle. The interval following seemed unending to Eddie; he kept expecting some disastrous eruption of sound from the house, the old woman screaming, perhaps, as Karen betrayed their presence and their intention. He breathed thickly through the silk fabric pressing his face and felt as if he would choke.
Suddenly in the light reflected through the kitchen door they saw Karen in the porch. She fumbled with the lock, then moved quickly out of sight again. Skip turned toward Eddie and jerked his head in a summoning motion. They walked to the door. Eddie tried to lick his lips; his tongue snagged in the knitted silk and he was almost sick.
They went into the laundry room, not making any noise, and then Skip padded on into the kitchen and stood close to the wall on one side of the door to the hall and motioned Eddie to stand opposite. They hadn’t been there more than a few seconds when Mrs. Havermann walked in. At the sight of
the old woman, the realization that they were actually embarked on this thing, Eddie’s heart gave a great lurch.
Mrs. Havermann went several feet past the door and then looked back over her shoulder. She glanced at Eddie, then switched her head all the way around to look at Skip. She turned a little, as if she meant to face them, and then her knees must have given out, for she reached a hand to prop herself against the table in the middle of the room.
“Who are you?” The words were plain enough in her high-pitched old woman’s squeal, but they were mechanical and called for no reply. She knew who Eddie and Skip were: they were the double image of her nightmare, and her face shook and twitched at the shock of recognition. Then, “Go away!” she muttered in her throat. “Karen! Karen, send them away!”
Karen appeared in the hall. She was crying, making no attempt to wipe away the tears. She looked terribly young in her distress. She said, “I don’t know what to do, Aunt Maude!” It had the ring of terrified truth.
Skip had put his hand in his jacket pocket, Eddie noticed, and had a finger poked forward to make it seem he held a gun. Eddie thought Mrs. Havermann was too stunned with fright to notice. She seemed ready to drop. As he watched, she actually tottered, then recovered. “Please don’t . . . don’t do anything violent,” she stammered.
“That depends on you,” Skip said in a perfectly indifferent manner. He was smiling a little, and the effect of the flesh moving and whitening under the knitted silk was uncanny. “We want the key to Stolz’s room and then we want you to keep out of our way.”
There was a moment of waiting while she made up her mind about it, or gained control of her shaking limbs, and then she slowly led the way out of the kitchen. They passed Karen, who shrank aside, then upstairs. At the top of the stairs Mrs. Havermann turned to face them. She seemed to have better control of herself. “You’re wasting your time,” she said to Skip. “There is nothing of value in Mr. Stolz’s room.”
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