One Night Stands; Lost weekends

by Lawrence Block

  “Look,” said the second, “perhaps I’m squeamish. I don’t know. But are you sure he can never escape?”

  “Positive.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  The first Althean sighed. “The tower is one hundred thirty feet high. A drop from that distance is obviously fatal. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “The prisoner’s quarters are at the top of the tower, and the top is wider than the base—that is, the sides slope in. And the sides are very, very smooth—so climbing down is quite impossible.”

  “Couldn’t he come down the same way he’ll go up? It only stands to reason.”

  “Again, quite impossible. He’ll be placed in his quarters by means of a pneumatic tube, and the same tube will be used to send him his food. The entire tower is so designed that it can be entered via the tube, and can only be left by leaping from the top. The food that he doesn’t eat, as well as any articles which he tires of, may be thrown over the side.”

  The second Althean hesitated. “It seems safe.”

  “It should. It is safe.”

  “I suppose so. I suppose it’s safe, and I suppose it’s not cruel, but somehow…Well, when will the prisoner be placed in the tower? Is it all ready for his occupancy?”

  “It’s ready, all right. And, as a matter of fact, we’re taking him there in just a few minutes. Would you care to come along?”

  “It might be interesting at that.”

  “Then come along.”

  The two walked in silence to the first Althean’s motor car and drove in silence to the tower. The tower was, indeed, a striking structure, both in terms of size and of design. They stepped out of the motor car and waited, and a large motor truck drew up shortly, pulling to a stop at the base of the tower. Three Althean guards stepped out of the truck, followed by the prisoner. His limbs were securely shackled.

  “See?” demanded the first Althean. “He’ll be placed in the tube like that, and he’ll discover the key to his shackles in his quarters.”

  “Clever.”

  “We’ve worked it out carefully,” the first explained. “I don’t mean to sound boastful, but we’ve figured out all the angles.”

  The prisoner was placed in the tube, the aperture of which was located at the very base of the tower. Once inside, it was closed securely and bolted shut. The three Althean guards hesitated for several moments until a red light at the base indicated that the prisoner had entered his quarters. Then they returned to the motor truck and drove off down the road.

  “We could go now,” said the first. “I’d like to wait and see if he’ll throw down the shackles, though. If you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all. I’m rather interested now, you know. It’s not something you see every day.”

  They waited. After several minutes, a pair of shackles plummeted through the air and dropped to the ground about twenty yards from the two Altheans.

  “Ah,” said the first. “He’s found the key.”

  Moments later, the second pair of shackles followed the first, and the key followed soon thereafter. Then the prisoner walked to the edge of the tower and leaned over the railing gazing down at them.

  “Awesome,” said the second Althean. “I’m glad he can’t escape.”

  The prisoner regarded them thoughtfully for several seconds. Then he mounted the railing, flapped his wings, and soared off into the sky.

  ONE NIGHT OF DEATH

  IT WAS JUST SEVEN O’CLOCK. I heard the bells ring at the little church two blocks down Mercer Street, and the bells set me on edge.

  Seven o’clock.

  In five hours they would kill my father.

  They would take him from his cell and walk slowly to a little room at the end of the corridor. It would be a long walk, but it would end with him inside the little room, alone, with the door closed after him. Then he would sit or stand or wait.

  At precisely twelve o’clock, they’d open the gas vents. The cyanide gas would rush into the chamber. Maybe he’d cough; I didn’t know. But whether he did or not, the gas would enter his lungs when he breathed. Oh, he’d try to hold his breath as long as he could. My dad’s a fighter, you see, but there are some things you can’t fight.

  The gas would kill him. Then they would draw the gas back into the tanks to save it for the next one, and they’d take my father’s body out of the room. It would be buried somewhere.

  I couldn’t stay in the house another minute. I couldn’t sit watching my mother try to dull the pain with glass after glass of cheap muscatel, couldn’t listen to her crying softly. I wanted to cry, too—but I didn’t know how anymore.

  I slipped on my jacket and left the house, closing the door softly. It was cool outside. The air was crisp and fresh, with a breeze blowing and the fallen leaves skittering along the pavement.

  It could have been a beautiful night, but it wasn’t.

  My father was a murderer, and tonight they were going to kill him.

  Murderer. The picture that word makes isn’t right at all. Because my dad’s not a cruel or a vicious man or a money-hungry man. He was a cutter in a dress shop, not too long ago, and he saved his money so that he could go into business for himself in the Seventh Avenue rat-race.

  It was no place for him, a mild, easy-going guy. The law of the Avenue is kill or be killed, screw the competition before they screw you. But Dad didn’t want to hand anyone a raw deal. He just wanted to make pretty dresses and sell them. And Seventh Avenue isn’t like that, not at all.

  He managed to stomach it. It kept us eating good and he managed to make the kind of dresses he wanted. A man can learn to adjust to almost anything, he told me once. A man does what he has to do.

  Dad’s partner was a man named Bookspan, and he handled the business end while Dad took care of production. Bookspan was a crook, and the one thing Dad couldn’t adjust to was a crooked partner, a partner who was cheating him.

  When Dad found out, he killed him.

  Not impulsively, with the anger hot and fresh in him, because he’s not an impulsive sort of man. He bided his time and waited, until he and Bookspan took a business trip to Los Angeles. He picked up a pistol in a hockshop in L.A. and blew out Bookspan’s brains.

  And they caught him, of course. The poor guy, he didn’t even try to get away. It was an open-and-shut case, premeditated and all. He was tried in L.A. where the murder took place, and he was sentenced to death at San Quentin.

  I walked around aimlessly, just thinking about it. Here I was in New York, and my father was going to die on the other side of the continent. In less than five hours.

  Then, of course, I realized that it would be eight hours. There’s a time difference of three hours between New York and California. He had eight hours to live, and I had eight hours before it was time to mourn him.

  How do you wait for a person to die? What do you do, when you know the very minute of death? Do you go to a movie? Watch television, maybe? Read a magazine?

  I hadn’t even noticed where I was, and I looked up to discover that I’d drifted clear over to Saint Mark’s Place. It was natural enough. I used to spend most of my time on that little street, just east of Third Avenue and north of Cooper Square. I used to spend my time with Betty, who used to be my girl.

  Before the murder.

  Murders change things, you see. They turn things upside down, and suddenly Betty wasn’t my girl anymore. Suddenly, she wasn’t speaking to me any longer. I was a murderer’s son.

  Dan Bookspan wasn’t a murderer’s son, though. He was the same rotten, smooth-talking, crooked kind of a bastard as his old man, but his old man was dead now. So Dan Bookspan had my girl.

  I got the hell away from Saint Mark’s Place. I walked south to an old joint on the corner of Great Jones Street and the Bowery. I sat down on a stool in the back and ordered rye and soda. I sat down there with bums stinking and babbling on either side of me, in a Bowery bar where no one cared that I was just seventeen and too young to drink, and I pou
red the rye in.

  The time passed, thank God. The television was going but I didn’t look at it, and there were a few brawls but I didn’t watch or participate. I just wanted to get loaded and watch the hours go by until it was three in the morning and my father was dead.

  I didn’t get drunk. I drank slowly, for one thing. More important, I had too much of a fire going inside of me to get tight. I burned the alcohol up before it could get to me, I guess.

  By midnight I couldn’t stand it any longer. I wanted to be with someone, and being alone was impossible. I couldn’t go home, for I knew how important it was to Mom that she be by herself. She had a lot of crying and drinking to do, and I didn’t want to get in her way.

  There was no one I wanted to see. No one but Betty.

  It would have been so good to be with her then, to have her in my arms, holding me close and telling me that everything was going to be all right. What the hell, I thought. I walked over to the phone booth and gave her a ring.

  The phone rang ten times without an answer. If I’d had anything better to do, I’d have given up. But I didn’t so I stayed in the booth listening to the phone ring. And after ten rings, she answered it.

  She couldn’t have been sleeping, for there was a tension in her voice that showed she’d been busy. Her voice was tight and husky.

  “Betty,” I said “Betty, I want to come over.”

  There was a pause. “You can’t.”

  “Look, I won’t bother you. It’s…it’s a bad night, Betty. I need someone, you know? Let me come over.”

  Again a pause, and a boy’s voice in the background. Bookspan’s. I gritted my teeth and banged the phone down on the hook. I needed another drink, and I had one. And then I had another, and another.

  I left the joint at one, and I walked home. I felt fine, in spite of the liquor I’d had. I walked a straight line and my head was clear as crystal. I tiptoed up the stairs, past the living room where Mom was drinking and crying.

  I found what I was looking for in Dad’s bureau drawer. He’d tried to kill Bookspan before, you see. Once he bought a gun at a Third Avenue hockshop, but he never used it, never even pulled its trigger. When he finally shot the bastard, he was in California and the gun was still in the bureau drawer. It was almost as though he had left it there for me.

  I left the house as silently as I had entered it, the gun snug and comfortable in my jacket pocket. At one-thirty, I climbed the stairs to the apartment house on Saint Mark’s Place.

  She didn’t let me in, because she didn’t have to. They’d left the door open, and I walked in without knocking. I walked through the familiar kitchen to the equally familiar bedroom. I knew that I’d find them there.

  I flung open the bedroom door and I saw them lying there, in each other’s arms. My girl. My girl, with the guy I hated most in the world. I’d expected it, but it was a hard thing to watch.

  Her lips parted for a scream, but she stopped instantly when she saw the gun in my hand. Her face froze in terror, and she looked like a very little girl just then, a little girl trying to pretend she was a woman.

  Bookspan just looked scared. I enjoyed the fear in his eyes, as much as I could have enjoyed anything at the time. I let them look at the gun for several minutes, without saying a word.

  Then I told them to close their eyes, and then I walked to the side of the bed and struck each of them on the head with the barrel of the gun. I just used enough force to knock them unconscious. I didn’t want to kill them; I couldn’t do that.

  I tore a bedsheet into strips of cloth and tied them up. I put their arms tight around each other, tying his hands around her back and her hands around his. Then I gagged them, and I waited.

  When they came to, they struggled helplessly while their bodies pressed together. It could have been funny, if the circumstances had been different.

  But I didn’t laugh. I just watched them for a while, waiting. I put the gun back in my pocket, because I didn’t need it anymore.

  Later, I walked around the apartment, making sure that all the windows were closed tightly. It was precisely three o’clock when I opened all the gas jets full blast and left, shutting the door behind me.

  But it was midnight in California.

  PACKAGE DEAL

  “IF I WERE YOUNGER,” John Harper said, “I would do this myself. One of the troubles with growing old. Aging makes physical action awkward. A man becomes a planner, an arranger. Responsibility is delegated.”

  Castle waited.

  “If I were younger,” Harper went on, “I would kill them myself. I would load a gun and go out after them. I would hunt them down, one after another, and I would shoot them dead. Baron and Milani and Hallander and Ross. I would kill them all.”

  The old man’s mouth spread in a smile.

  “A strange picture,” he said. “John Harper with blood in his eye. The president of the bank, the past president of Rotary and Kiwanis and the Chamber of Commerce, the leading citizen of Arlington. Going out and killing people. An incongruous picture. Success gets a man, Castle. Removes the spine and intestines. Ties the hands. Success is an incredible surgeon.”

  “So you hire me.”

  “So I hire you. Or, to be more precise, we hire you. We’ve had as much as we can take. We’ve watched a peaceful, pleasant town taken over by a collection of amateur hoodlums. We’ve witnessed the inadequacy of a small-town police force faced with big-town operations. We’ve had enough.”

  Harper sipped brandy. He was thinking, looking for the right way to phrase what he had to say. “Prostitution,” he said suddenly. “And gambling. And protection—storekeepers paying money for the right to remain storekeepers. We’ve watched four men take control of a town which used to be ours.”

  Castle nodded. He knew the story already but he wasn’t impatient with the old man. He didn’t mind getting both the facts and the background behind them. You needed the full picture to do your job properly. He listened.

  “I wish we could do it ourselves. Vigilante action, that type of thing. Fortunately, there’s also a historical precedent for employing you. Are you familiar with it?”

  “The town-tamer,” Castle muttered

  “The town-tamer. An invention of the American West. The man who cleans up a town for a fee. The man who waives legality when legality must inevitably be abandoned. The man who uses a gun instead of a badge when guns are effective and badges are impotent.”

  “For a fee.”

  “For a fee,” John Harper echoed. “For a fee of ten thousand dollars, in this instance. Ten thousand dollars to rid the world and the town of Arlington of four men. Four malignant men, four little cancers. Baron and Milani and Hallander and Ross.”

  “Just four?”

  “Just four. When the rats die, the mice scatter. Kill four. Kill Lou Baron and Joe Milani and Albert Hallander and Mike Ross. Then the back of the gang will be broken. The rest will run for their lives. The town will breathe clean air again. And the town needs clean air, Mr. Castle, needs it desperately. You may rest assured of that. You are doing more than earning a generous fee. You are performing a service for humanity.”

  Castle shrugged.

  “I’m serious,” Harper said. “I know your reputation. You’re not a hired killer, sir. You are the twentieth-century version of the town-tamer. I respect you as I could never respect a hired killer. You are performing an important service, sir. I respect you.”

  Castle lit a cigarette. “The fee,” he said.

  “Ten thousand dollars. And I’m paying it entirely in advance, Mr. Castle. Because, as I have said, your reputation has preceded you. You’ll have no trouble with the local police, but there are always state troopers to contend with. You might wish to leave Arlington in a hurry when the job is finished. As I understand it, the customary method of payment is half in advance and the remaining half upon completion of the job at hand. I trust you, Mr. Castle. I am paying the full sum in advance. You come well recommended.”

 
; Castle took the envelope, slipped it into an inside jacket pocket. It made a bulge there.

  “Baron and Milani and Hallander and Ross,” the old man said, “four fish. Shoot them in a barrel, Mr. Castle. Shoot them and kill them. They are a disease, a plague.”

  Castle nodded. “That’s all?”

  “That is all.”

  The interview was over. Castle stood up and let Harper show him to the door. He walked quickly to his car and drove off into the night.

  Baron and Milani and Hallander and Ross.

  CASTLE HAD NEVER MET THEM but he knew them all. Small fish, little boys setting up a little town for a little fortune. They were not big men. They didn’t have the guts or the brains to play in Chicago or New York or Vegas. They knew their strengths and their limitations. And they cut a nice pie for themselves.

  Arlington, Ohio. Population forty-seven thousand. Three small manufacturing concerns, two of them owned by John Harper. One bank, owned by John Harper. Stores and shops, doctors and lawyers. Shopkeepers, workers, professional men, housewives, clerks.

  And, for the first time, criminals.

  Lou Baron and Joe Milani and Albert Hallander and Mike Ross. And, as a direct result of their presence, a bucketful of hustlers on Lake Street, a handful of horse drops on Main and Limestone, a batch of numbers-runners, and a boatload of muscle to make sure everything moved according to plan. Money being drained from Arlington, people being exploited in Arlington, Arlington turning slowly but surely into the private property of four men.

  Baron and Milani and Hallander and Ross.

  Castle drove to his hotel, went to his room, put ten thousand dollars in his suitcase. He took out a gun, a .45 automatic which could not be traced farther than a St. Louis pawnshop, and slipped the loaded gun into the pocket which had held the ten thousand dollars. The gun made the jacket sag a bit too much and he took out the gun, took off the jacket, and strapped on a shoulder holster. The gun fit better this way. With the jacket on, the gun bulged only slightly.