The Bind

by Stanley Ellin

  “Our girlie?”

  “Your girlie, my girlie, when you blew your cover to Mrs. Thoren she’s no more use here. So how about paying her off and shipping her back to New York? Around here, she is only a sitting duck.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “What you’ll be thinking about, sonny, is how nice it is to have a beautiful, zoftik little blondie doll climbing all over you like a puppy dog whenever you snap your fingers. I don’t even blame you. Ahlevai, I should only be young again. But in this town if you want to get laid, any fellow looks like you and with folding money in his pocket can take his pick. Amateurs or professionals. He don’t have to go depend on some dopey, big-eyed kid who, the way things shape up, would be better off back in New York from the start.”

  “Now you sound just like Mrs. Ortega,” Jake said.

  40

  He made sure the green Chevy was following when he pulled away from the restaurant and headed uptown along Collins. At 21st Street, he parked in the lot across from the Miami Beach library, a small, handsomely designed cultural oasis surrounded by gaudy restaurants and shabby strip-tease joints. Small as it was, its stacks turned up a fat volume on cryptography, and he spent an hour trying to match the curious system used in Thoren’s notes against likely samples in the text before he gave up the job as hopeless.

  Then, the green Chevy always in his rear-view mirror, he once more headed uptown on Collins, this time on a test run which carried him to Haulover Cut, the northernmost limit of the island, and back again. Going and coming, he tried every trick in the book to cut loose from his shadow, but without any luck.

  He got home close to dinnertime and found Elinor already there, hard at work in the kitchen, her transistor on the table blasting away deafeningly. He switched it off. “I could hear this thing from the driveway. With all that noise going on, baby, you could have the cavalry gallop through the door and never know it.”

  Elinor said apologetically: “I didn’t think of it that way. I left it on loud so as people would know somebody’s here, and they wouldn’t come sneaking in. And you’ll have to wait a little for supper. I didn’t heat it up yet, because I didn’t know when you’d be back.” She heaved her shoulders almost up to her ears and let them slump again. “If you’d be back.”

  “I’ll always be back. Did you find anything at all in those newspapers about a ship’s officer disappearing off a boat here?”

  “Nothing. Jake, I was wondering about that ship’s officer bit. If Nera said he was an army man—”

  “He wasn’t.”

  “Oh. Well, anyhow I went all the way back to the beginning of May, 1942, and there was nothing there. Where were you today? Did they find Mrs. Thoren yet?”

  “I was with Magnes. No, they didn’t find Mrs. Thoren yet, but Magnes found out who the guy was first started blackmailing Thoren. Redneck by the name of Earl Dobbs.”

  “Well, all right,” Elinor said.

  “Except for one little thing. Magnes is being tailed full-time by one of Frank Milan’s boys, and still he headed straight for the boarding house Dobbs used to stay at. So now they know we’ve worked our way right up to Dobbs. They’ll probably try to hide him out the same as they did Mrs. Thoren. Not that I blame Magnes too much for it. It’s tough to shake off anyone tailing you around this town unless you cross over to the Miami side. I tried it just now, so I know.”

  “You mean somebody’s tailing you full-time too?”

  “It’s nothing to turn green about, baby. The opposition wants to keep in touch with developments, that’s all. They know the case is set for trial in a couple of weeks and Guaranty would rather pay up than stand trial, so they just want to make sure there are no surprises coming up to spoil the party.”

  Elinor put her hands on her hips. She said menacingly: “But there are surprises coming up for them, aren’t there? You might as well know, Dekker, anything happens to you I won’t just turn green. I am going to have real loud Polack hysterics.”

  Jake laughed. He sat down on a kitchen chair and motioned to her. “Come on over here.”

  She gave him a speculative look, then walked over to him. He pulled her down on his knee and put an arm around her. She sat there stiffly for a moment, then relaxed against him. “You like me today, don’t you?” she said.

  “Why not? You’re a likable kind of girl today.”

  Elinor said placidly: “I’m a sellout, that’s what I am. A real fink. Because you know what you are? You’re Establishment. I always had a feeling some day somebody would come along—maybe like John Lennon or Paul Newman—who’d make me completely blow my mind. I mean, totally atomize me. I never thought it would be somebody Establishment.”

  “They’re not Establishment?”

  “No. Because it’s not if you get way up there that counts. It’s how you relate to the world.”

  “I see,” Jake said. “And I relate to it all wrong.”

  “Yes. But as long as you relate to me all right, I don’t mind. That’s why I’m a fink. You know what I bought with that money you gave me this morning?”

  “A hair shirt?”

  Elinor giggled. “No, but you’re close. Come take a look.”

  She led him to the bedroom and pointed at the box on her dresser done up in Jordan Marsh wrapping. “Now what do you think it is?”

  “A black lace nightgown?”

  “This time you’re not even close. It’s for you. It’s a present.”

  It was a handsome Pucci sports shirt. “This is one hell of a present,” Jake said. “Baby, don’t you know it’s dangerous giving members of the Establishment presents like this in a bedroom?”

  He was on the bed mouth-to-mouth with her, his hand moving slowly up her thigh under her skirt, when the phone in the study rang, and Elinor said: “Aw, that’s not even funny.”

  The caller was Magnes, his voice a hoarse whisper. “Dekker, I’m down here in Coral Gables. In a drugstore. I just got done with that code man I told you about. You want me to read you what’s in those notes?”

  “You mean he doped them out already?”

  “While I stood there. The only thing slowed him up a little was he started laughing so hard.”

  “Laughing?” Jake said. “What the hell are you getting at, Magnes? What’s in those notes?”

  “What I’m getting at, sonny, is when I told you Thoren never left anything in writing about being blackmailed, I was right. Your luck this code man not only handled such jobs for the FBI for ten years and he’s a big criminology professor down here at the university, he also sails a boat all the time around here. And he says these two notes are Coast Guard chart corrections, line for line. They give them out so you shouldn’t crack up your boat. Like take this first line, m 1td w b 2 and so on. From what he wrote down here, it means Miami lighted whistle buoy number two and Miami main channel buoy number three and lighted bell buoy number four were changed to flash every six seconds with a one-second flash after. And Meloy ain’t anybody you can call on the phone, it’s the name of a channel you go sailing on. It’s all like that. Chart corrections, only Thoren copied them down in abbreviations. You hear, shtarker? Because for all my chasing around with them and making myself look like a fool, these notes got nothing to do with blackmail. But Mr. Earl Dobbs got plenty to do with it, so now I’ll go find him for you.”

  With that, he hung up.

  41

  “What’s wrong?” Elinor said.

  “Nothing.” Jake stood looking at her abstractedly. “Except that your skirt’s all twisted around.”

  She twisted it back into place. “Sometimes you don’t have as much of a poker face as you think. What did he tell you about those notes?”

  Jake said: “Seems that they don’t have anything to do with Thoren’s making a blackmail payment the day he was killed.” He dug his fingers through his hair. “I don’t get it. The envelope I found along with them is dated March sixth. It was delivered to him on the seventh, the day he died. It must have h
ad something in it.”

  He abruptly sat down at the desk and flung open the drawer which contained the packet of cardboard scraps from Thoren’s wastepaper can. He spilled the scraps on the desk. Minute bits of slick-surfaced gray cardboard, with a black imprint showing on them here and there.

  Elinor said: “You going to work on that stuff now? What about supper?” She hastily added. “Not that it matters.”

  “No, it doesn’t. I’ll tell you when I’m ready.”

  The job took him longer at the outset than it should have, because, confusingly, some of the lettering as it emerged seemed to be printed sideways. Once that became a clue instead of a complication, things went faster. In the end, what he had lying before him, neatly taped together, was a fifty-cent ticket issued by the Miami Beach Kennel Club for one admission to a grandstand reserved seat. That sideways printing at each end of the ticket indicated that the seat was Number 9 in Row P, Section D. There was also the notice that the ticket was good only on the date for which it was issued, but there was no date given. However, there was the information that this was Day of Racing 55.

  Jake dialed the track’s ticket office. It took the woman at the other end of the line time to understand that he wasn’t applying for a refund on a ticket. “I’m sorry, sir, it’s only good for the racing date shown on it. We can’t make refunds or exchanges for it after that date.”

  “I know that. All I’m trying to find out is what the calendar date was for your fifty-fifth racing day.”

  “Oh, the calendar date.” There was a long silence. “It was March seventh. Is that all?”

  “It’s enough,” Jake said. “March seventh. Thank you, lady. And may the Lord continue to shed his bounties on you.”

  In the darkness of the living room he found Elinor on the couch, legs curled under her, watching a drama being played out soundlessly on the big television set. He said: “Set busted?”

  “No.” The light from the screen gave her eyes a catlike luminescence when she raised her head to look at him. “I was worried the noise would bother you. Anyhow, I was only watching to see if any friends of mine showed up in the commercials. I wish I could get some commercials to do. Those residuals are great. How’d you make out with your picture puzzle?”

  “All right.” He sat down beside her, and she immediately pushed up tight against him and drew his arm around her waist. She said: “I know you. When you say all right like that, it means a lot better than all right.”

  “Maybe it does this time. There was a ticket to the dog track mailed to Thoren in that envelope. I have an idea that told him when and where to make the blackmail payoff. Probably those payments were always made at whatever dog track was operating at the time. There’s three or four around here split up the season among them.”

  Elinor said doubtfully: “A payoff in a place like that? I mean, with so many people around?”

  “I know, but that crowd might have been Dobbs’ best protection. I’m positive Thoren would have killed him if he could have caught him alone somewhere.”

  “I guess he would. Not bad, finding all that out from one little ticket.”

  “And more. Magnes told me today who he thought Dobbs’ partner was. That one little ticket says he might have been right.”

  “Who did he say? I’ll bet that big slob Holuby.”

  “No, a dog-racing fan by the name of Pooch Gela. Very close to Frank Milan. And a professional gunman. That ticket of Thoren’s puts him right into the middle of the picture.”

  Elinor gently rubbed the crown of her head back and forth against his jaw. “Even so, better somebody like that than a monster like Holuby.”

  “You’re going by appearances, which could be a mistake. Holuby’s not as tough as he looks. It’s probably the opposite with this guy Gela.”

  “Holuby is so as tough as he looks. Only you’re even tougher, so how would you know. Do you still like me?”

  Jake tightened his arm around her. “I still like you.”

  “I turn you on, don’t I?”

  “You turn me on.”

  “I’m glad. Jake, you remember where we left off when Magnes called up?”

  “I don’t have to, because I’d just as soon start all over again from the beginning. But not now. First I want that supper you owe me, and then I’d like to get to the dog track before the last race and look it over.”

  “Yes, sir. I can go along, can’t I?”

  “No, sweetheart, what you can do is stay here in case Magnes calls. It won’t take me long.” He thrust his arm out into the pallid light from the television tube and studied his wristwatch. “It’s not nine yet. I’ll be back in plenty of time for the eleven o’clock news.”

  Elinor said reproachfully: “That’s not what I want you to have on your mind at eleven o’clock. All right, come on in the kitchen and talk to me while I get things ready.”

  She stood up and hauled him to his feet. After she had switched on the room light he went over to the television set and turned it off. It was as if his finger on that button triggered a chain reaction. He was facing the French doors that were wide open to the Florida room beyond. The windows of the Florida room offering a view of the bay were not solid panes of glass, but horizontal strips of it, each slightly overlapping the next. In lightning succession, he saw a strip of glass disintegrate, glittering splinters of it flying inward, heard the high-pitched whine of an angry hornet fill the room for an instant, and, superimposed on that shoud, the distant crack of a rifle.

  “Get down!” he yelled, and when Elinor still stood there in frozen bewilderment he hit her with a flying block, shoulder into belly. She went down under him with a gasp, her face agonized. He rolled clear of her, and before she could make any move, threw an arm across her to hold her down. Straining to catch her breath, flat on her back, she was in perfect position to see the next bullet slam through the top of the framed Van Gogh print on the far wall. Shards of glass spilled from the frame, the picture swung wildly back and forth on its wire and then followed the glass fragments to the floor with a crash. The hole in the wall behind it now showed clearly. It was a large shapeless hole with a thread of plaster sifting from it like a fine talcum powder.

  Elinor stared at it. “They’re shooting at us,” she said as if trying hard to comprehend this. Her voice rose. “They’re really shooting at us!” With a sudden convulsive strength she pulled free of his restraining arm and lurched to her feet. “Bathroom,” she said between her clenched teeth, and headed for it before he could grab her.

  He swore, and crouching low, got to the wall switch and flicked off the room light. Then, still in a crouch and holding as close to the wall as the furniture permitted, he made his way to the Florida room. There was no other shot. There was what might have been the drone of a high-powered boat moving out of range on the bay.

  He opened the door to the back yard an inch, lay down on the floor, and from that position, reached out and pulled the door wide open. By the light Milt Webb had strung up he had a shadowy view of the yard. Nothing menacing showed there. He stood up and cautiously went outside. Saturday-night company was being entertained at both the Webb house and the Ortegas’. Bright lights showed in the windows of both houses, and the company, soundless as the picture Elinor had been watching on television, could be seen having a time of it.

  He went back into the house, closed and locked the door, and drew the drapes over the windows. In the living room, he closed the French doors and threw their finger bolt. When he turned on the light again he saw for the first time that the door frame itself was made of metal. Centered in it overhead was a raw gouge, a gleaming metallic channel. The first bullet had hit there and then ricocheted. He searched around the floor until he found it. It looked to be a .30–30 and still had most of its shape. Climbing on a chair, he gouged the other out of the wall with his pocket knife. This one was almost shapeless.

  Standing there, he became aware of the sounds from the bathroom. When he opened its door he saw Eli
nor kneeling prayerfully before the toilet bowl. He squatted beside her, his hand clamped tight against her sweat-soaked forehead as she went into another spasm of retching. As soon as the spasm had passed she pushed the hand aside. “Go away. Please. I don’t want you here now.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Jake said.

  It was another bad ten minutes before she got the spasms under control. She emerged from them with her face red and swollen, eyes puffy, hair lank with sweat. He sat her down on the toilet lid and did what he could to make facial repairs with a damp washcloth. “Better now?” he asked.

  “I think so,” she said weakly. She gingerly prodded her lower ribs. “It hurts here, but that’s where you banged into me.”

  “If you’d hit the floor when I yelled, I wouldn’t have had to. When you hear a gun go off like that, baby, remember the best place to be is flat on the floor. And if you want to heave up, do it right there on the carpet.”

  “I didn’t want to. I couldn’t help it.” Her eyes opened very wide, the lids fluttering. “Jake, they were really shooting at us. They were trying to kill us.”

  “Not if you go by the angle those bullets took. They were deliberately aimed high. Didn’t I tell you the last thing they want is to knock me off so Guaranty would have something to take to the cops? And have a beautiful excuse for stalling on the payment to Mrs. Thoren?”

  “That’s what you want me to believe. Maybe you even believe it yourself. But I don’t. If you’re staying on this job, I want you to call the cops in. You have to. Honest to God, Jake, what’s wrong with doing it when things get this hairy?”

  “You shock me, sweetheart. A member of Che’s fan club talking about the fuzz so tenderly?”

  “I don’t care. I don’t want you dead, that’s all. Do you know what I thought when I saw that picture come down off the wall? It was wild. All I could think was it might have been you with a hole through you laying there dead, and we never even made it with each other!”