Win Some, Lose Some

by Brett Halliday

  Nothing was said for a time. Then Pam stirred.

  “Do you mind at all?”

  “Damn right I mind. I’ve tried New York. The building business is so frozen up there—”

  “I know,” she said more gently. “What I’m edging into, because something is right for you doesn’t make it automatically right for me. Things are just—closing in. One year from now, do you want to look back and see three hundred and sixty-five days like today? Or yesterday?”

  “We made love a couple of times yesterday, I seem to remember.”

  “And when it was over, it was over.”

  He made an effort to get some of the good feeling back. “Will you stay if I kidnap somebody and make a lot of money?”

  “Conceivably. How much should we ask?”

  Whirling like a gunfighter, he pointed an index finger at the side of her head. “One hundred thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills, or I’ll put a bullet in your ear.”

  “That’s not the way it’s done. A note to the wife. One hundred thousand if you want to see your husband alive, and don’t tell the fuzz.”

  “True. For the note we cut words out of the newspaper.”

  “But not the Times. That would give you away.”

  They did some more improvising, causing the idea to lose what little reality it had had to begin with. But God, if they could pull it off! It was a lovely dream.

  Werner had had his degree for two years, and he hadn’t set foot in an architectural office. They let him press his nose to the window and watch the draughtsmen, but that was about all. They weren’t hiring, they were firing. Firms were merging and shutting down. Housing starts were at their lowest point in thirty years.

  And Werner, again in the middle of a third martini, had come up with a great idea. Nobody would pay him to design a house unless he had done a house for somebody else, so they could see how his mind worked. So the thing to do, for Christ’s sake, was to borrow money and build a house with himself as client, general contractor, and carpenter. He could sell at cost, below the market, because the object wasn’t to make a profit, but to get pictures in the architectural magazines, to become known. He needed $60,000. He went to bankers and got down on his knees. A flat no, everywhere.

  “A fantasy,” Pam said. “We’ll never do anything so adventurous. We might as well fuck. That we know how to do.”

  Later Werner put on the hamburgers, this being his night to cook. Pam, still in her one-article costume, perched on the counter to watch.

  “You know I meant that about New York.”

  “I had that feeling.”

  “I have friends there. Here they’re all your friends. I’m told I can transfer my unemployment.”

  “By friends, you mean Les.”

  She looked at the end of her burning cigarette. “I think he’s still there.”

  “Why shouldn’t he still be there? A terrific Brooklyn Heights apartment with a terrace where he can raise his own chives. Expense-account lunches. People ask him to parties—”

  She slid off the counter and took him around the waist from behind. “It’s so grubby here, sweetheart. Let’s try being in different places for a while.” He turned the hamburgers. “I thought of somebody who could recommend the right loan shark. That cop, Downey.”

  Her fingers stopped moving. “You mean bring him in on it?”

  “In the planning stage. For instance, how about guns? They’re supposed to be so easy to get, but you wouldn’t want to use one that was registered in your name. When Downey was here for supper that time, he kept talking about how he hated those people.”

  “With a passion,” she agreed.

  “They have contempt for the law. They don’t deserve to be protected by the law. Civil liberties for hoodlums? Don’t be naïve.”

  She let go. “But boy, how would you bring something like that up?”

  “Ask a hypothetical question.”

  That was all until after dinner. Their eyes met from time to time and jumped apart. Werner really was crazy about this girl. He wasn’t sure why. As the songwriters keep saying, the thing is a mystery. She would be a terrible person to go into a kidnapping with, where close timing was essential. She was invariably late. They never got to a movie in time for the titles. He knew she meant it about going to New York. She meant everything she said in that tone of voice. One day in New York and she would be back with Les Carter, the embodiment of everything Werner detested. Bullfight posters on the walls. Wine talk all the time, a subject Les didn’t know shit about in Werner’s opinion.

  Sergeant Jack Downey had come into their life five weeks ago and left it again almost immediately. They came home from a late pizza to find that their house had been thoroughly looted. Luckily Pam had been wearing her good rings. The main thing they lost was the stereo, which dated back to architectural school when Werner was still in his mother’s good graces. Sergeant Downey showed up to make them feel better. He had picked up after thousands of these petty break-ins. It happened to everybody, he told them, and there wasn’t much you could do. He had hooded gray eyes, heavily creased skin. Whenever he finished one cigar, he lit up another, and they were exceptionally foulsmelling cigars. But Werner, who had sensitive antennae for such things, caught a funny vibration between the policeman and Pam. Among male movie actors, she preferred the veterans, the Charles Bronsons and Robert Mitchums, who had played the same part for decades and acquired a kind of solid strength and authority. Downey’s eyes had looked at every kind of depravity, and nothing impressed him anymore. He gave Pam a straight look when he was leaving. The look meant: “If you’re serious, fix a time and place and I’ll be there.”

  He dropped in a week later to report the recovery of a trackload of hi-fi components. They didn’t include Werner’s, and he probably knew that. He probably also knew that Werner worked late Tuesday nights. Werner arrived to find them drinking gin-and-tonics in the kitchen. Downey was telling her some of his career highlights. He had taken his jacket off, and the gun showed. He ended up staying for supper. If he called again, Pam didn’t mention it. She made the rules in that area.

  In bed, after turning off the light, Werner said abruptly, “In plain English. You’re leaving?”

  “I really am,” she said quietly. They were lying on their backs under the sheet, watching headlights move across the ceiling. “I bought the ticket on the way home. I haven’t been brooding about it exactly. It just struck me all at once that I can’t live this way.”

  “It’s been nine months. Would you consider rounding out the year?”

  “Darling, I can’t. That would include my twenty-fourth birthday, and I take birthdays seriously. You don’t really want to kidnap anybody, do you?”

  “I guess I really don’t. The martinis were talking.”

  “I keep thinking about those people who kidnapped the bookie. They weren’t professionals. Professionals would go for higher stakes. They were people like us, Werner! People who needed a specific sum and couldn’t get it any other way. They’ll never do it again. It took a certain amount of planning, but a hell of a lot less than goes into designing a house. We’d want to research it carefully to be sure of picking the right person. That’s why I think Downey’s such a marvelous idea. He must have a list of every loan shark in town.”

  The lifting effect of the gin was completely gone, and the headache was closing in. “How much do you think we’d have to pay him?”

  “A full third.”

  “The whole idea is to keep it small. Finish in twenty-four hours. Pam, seriously—can you see yourself putting a gun in somebody’s ribs and telling him to keep quiet and he won’t be hurt?”

  “Not yet. It makes me sort of shivery. But if you really want some honesty, I feel shivery about New York, too.”

  “Then don’t go, stupid.”

  “Werner, I have to. Either that or give up.”

  “We’ve spent some nice Sunday mornings in this bed.”

  Her hand gripped his und
er the sheet. “You know I’m not going to turn into one of those dumb wives.”

  “Les is pretty bossy with women. You’d have to admire his taste in wines.”

  “Did I say I’m going back to Les? He was trying to change at the end, but God knows he had a long way to go. I prefer it with you. You know that. But not the way it is now.”

  “We’d have to rent another house under another name. A different car. Steal one maybe. Think of some clever way to collect the ransom.”

  “But not too clever. And wear masks.”

  They were testing each other. Pam was the one who would have to approach Downey. That was the delicate part because of the real possibility that he might pretend to play along, fattening them up for the table—a standard police technique, as they both knew. It would be necessary to feel him out over a number of meetings. Meanwhile she would be postponing her departure, and Werner had a faint hope that even if the thing with Downey didn’t work out, she would change her mind about leaving.

  They had a spaghetti party. Pam called Downey and told him her friends wouldn’t believe she knew a real flesh-and-blood detective, and would he drop in and prove it? Werner had reconciled himself to the fact that they couldn’t be sure of Downey—and even then they wouldn’t be altogether sure—until Pam had been to bed with him a few times. He didn’t like it, but he liked her New York idea even less. He managed to be away the next weekend, looking for work in Tampa. There was as little work in his field in Tampa as there was in Miami. On Monday, Pam reported that Downey had a pragmatic attitude to the matter of under-the-table income. He didn’t make regular collections, like many cops. The whole idea of being paid off by those vermin was repugnant to him. He took occasionally, but they didn’t pay him. He took. He didn’t want to co-exist. He wanted to wipe them out. That was his motivation. And in spite of the Nice Nellies and their regulations, he had wiped out a few! He had pulled his twenty-five years, and he could retire any time. But he wanted to make one clean score before he went, to supplement the pension. And loan sharks, it turned out, were high on his list, just below heroin pushers.

  Chapter 3

  Downey logged a few hundred miles following Eddie Maye and learning his schedule. They decided on a price of $125,000. Eddie wouldn’t have that much lying around probably, but he had been part of Larry Canada’s organization a long time, and there would be no problem about raising it. Maye lived normally, taking no unusual precautions. He had been picked up several times for one infraction or another, and he had never been caught carrying a gun. Werner liked hearing that. Eddie did things at regular times. He had an easy disposition and never yelled or jumped up and down at the races. Never angry, never in a hurry, he would give them no trouble.

  Every Tuesday night, regularly, he visited a woman in Miami Springs. The set-up there was ideal, an attached two-car garage nearly as wide as the house itself, on a narrow lot. One of the garage doors would be left open for Maye’s VW, a weather-beaten red beetle with a joke bumper sticker: “Mafia Staff Car, Keep Ya Mitts Off.” Some sense of humor! Eddie followed an unvarying procedure. He drove in, closed the garage door, entered the house through the kitchen, stayed about an hour and a half, and went home. They decided to be in the garage waiting, Werner and Pam—with Downey in reserve in case anything went wrong and they needed a lift getting away. But what could go wrong?

  On the Tuesday night they had fixed for the action, Downey was behind Eddie as usual. All of a sudden, the VW turned off abruptly without making a signal, darted into the exit from a shopping-center parking lot, ran through a stop sign on the way out, and was gone by the time Downey recovered. Downey drove straight to the Springs, parked at the curb four spaces down from the woman’s house, and waited to see if Eddie would keep his usual Tuesday night date. The garage door was up. The night before, cruising past very late, Downey had shot out the streetlight. In this sort of neighborhood, the sidewalks were never used. He slid low in the seat and started a cigarette.

  Inside the garage, Pam and Werner were leaning against the second car, a medium-priced Chevy. They wore loose-fitting sweat shirts and hockey goalkeepers masks, very spooky, with slitted eyes and savage faces. Werner’s long hair, like Pam’s, was tucked up in a stocking cap. The props were ready. This was going to be quiet and painless. They had told each other that so often that they nearly believed it.

  The TV was running in the house. In the garage, they could hear only an occasional gunshot and the scream of tires. Werner reached out, and his fingers grazed an unfamiliar object: she had wrapped strips of a torn sheet around her chest to alter her silhouette.

  “Pretty soon now,” he whispered.

  “It better be soon.”

  He followed her arm upward and stopped with his thumb on the pulse in her throat. It was quicker than usual. She shook off his hand as a pair of headlights turned into the driveway.

  They ducked out of sight. Werner shook chloroform onto the pad in his hand. The little car entered the garage, flooding the wall with light. The motor went off, then the lights.

  Werner moved to the front of the Chevy. They had rehearsed these moves while they were alone. Any small noises would be covered by the sounds made by Maye getting out of the car. But Maye held up after opening the door. Werner’s receptors were quivering, and he heard a slight clicking sound from Pam. Her teeth had come together.

  “Oh, God,” Maye said heavily from the VW, “I don’t think I can make it.”

  He came out. Werner moved, and the garage door slammed down.

  The plan was for Pam to throw the light switch, and while Eddie was immobilized by the sight of her terrifying mask, Werner would come in from behind and clap the chloroformed cloth over his mouth. But when the light flashed on, Maye was coming back in the space between the two cars, and that little change threw them completely off.

  Maye was removing his glasses. He was a plump man with a ruddy face, usually smiling. Werner knew Maye had to be seared, but instead of standing shocked and motionless, permitting himself to be mugged, he went into a flurry of violent motion.

  He threw the glasses at Werner and came straight at him, striking him in the face with an extended hand. Werner went backward, and Eddie literally ran right over him. Werner’s head made contact with the hard floor. For an instant, things were fuzzy and confused. He managed to roll.

  The light went off. A gun banged in the wrong part of the garage. Maye wasn’t supposed to be carrying a gun. Downey had practically guaranteed. Maye was at the door now, trying to wrench it open. As Werner came to his knees, his hand closed on something metallic. He had no idea what it was, but it was small enough to throw and he threw it. Another shot from Maye went into one of the cars.

  Pam, moving, kicked something over. The garage door went up on its overhead tracks. Werner, suddenly furious at this mild-looking man who ought to be surrendering to them quietly, went over the top of the Volkswagen, leaping on Maye from behind before he could get through the door. He had lost the chloroformed pad. He grappled with Maye, who was trying to bring the gun over his shoulder to shoot Werner loose. They came back hard against the Chevy’s fender. Werner shifted his grip. Pam was hitting at Maye’s arm with her gun. They would have him in another moment.

  Then Downey, in a mask like a skull, stepped in and chopped at Maye’s head. The impact was sickening. The taut body went limp in Werner’s embrace.

  Downey snapped, “Put him in.”

  In the narrow space between the cars, it wasn’t easy. Downey had to do most of it, grunting and swearing.

  “We’ve got about ten more seconds here.”

  Pam came in the opposite door, and together they wrestled the unconscious loan shark into the narrow space behind the tipped-forward seat. Werner and Downey crammed themselves in. Werner ended up on the driver’s side. He fumbled with the switches, and when he had the motor started, he backed out fast. In spite of the shots and the clatter, the neighborhood seemed unchanged.

  “Jesus,” Downey sa
id with feeling. “Did you fuck that up!”

  “He wasn’t supposed to have a gun,” Werner said.

  “You mean it was Eddie doing that shooting? That’s funny.”

  “Funny? I’m laughing.”

  “Well, we’ve got the bastard. Take off the masks now.”

  He stripped off his skull, changing back into Jack Downey, the leathery veteran of twenty-five years in the Miami Police Department.

  “So the son of a bitch was carrying a gun. That’s going to cost him another twenty-five G’s. I didn’t even want to be out here, but it’s lucky I came. You’d be dead now. If he got out of there, he would have picked you off one at a time.”

  As a matter of fact, Werner thought they had been doing well without help. The shooting was over by the time Downey got there. But Downey needed to take credit, and that was fine with Werner as long as he was out of their lives at the end of twenty-four hours.

  “Stop here,” Downey said. “I’ll walk back and get my car. If he’s too heavy for you, wait for me and I’ll help carry him in. Give me about fifteen minutes.”

  He fixed the dome light so it wouldn’t come on when the door opened, got out, and walked away. On the back seat, Maye groaned and flung out an arm.

  “We’d better give him the Demerol,” Werner said.

  Pam rolled back Maye’s sleeve. Werner had the loaded hypodermic in a toothbrush box. He tapped Maye’s arm smartly with the needle and emptied the syringe. Maye subsided.

  “Now we relax and collect the money,” Werner said.

  They had rented a house in Hialeah, on the other side of Okeechobee Road. Here, too, the garage was attached, but it only had room for one car. There were several “For Sale” signs on the block, and the lawns were baked out and unappealing. Werner was learning that there was no possible way they could foresee everything, and as he got out to open the garage door, a black Labrador frolicked up to pee on the rear wheel.

  Werner had trouble making the key work, and before he could get back in the car, the Lab’s owner, a middle-aged woman with her hair in curlers, came out of the shadows.