by Ted Lewis
“I did it right,” Murdock says. “Don’t crap all over the interior.”
I pull away from the curb and drive back to my place. I give Murdock a hand upstairs with his stuff and once it’s in there and the doors closed behind us, Murdock being Murdock starts right in unpacking and carving himself out a little segment of my living area So I think what the hell, and lay the divan out for him and go and get some sheets and blankets and dump them down on the divan.
“Thanks,” Murdock says, turning around from trying to find a place to hang one of his shirts. “Don’t bother making it up. I’ll do that myself.”
“You don’t say,” I reply, and go into the bathroom to begin running my tub.
When I get back to Sammy’s, Sammy isn’t around, just Joan, and the bar’s empty of customers. She smiles the same smile she always does as if I had no relation whatsoever to the person who’s tried to get her in the sack on several occasions.
“Twice already,” she says when I got to the counter. “You trying to turn us into an ‘in’ place?”
“Yeah,” I tell her. “I need the commission.”
“Not from what I heard,” she says.
“One to you,” I say.
She keeps her smile going and gets my drink for me.
“Where’s Sammy?” I ask her.
“Lying down,” she says.
I leave that one where it is except to say, “Listen, if you’ve got things to do, I’ll be fine. I’m waiting for a call so I can just sit here and read the paper. Don’t worry about me.”
“Well,” she says, “if you don’t mind, I guess I might just go and see if Sammy needs anything. You sure?”
I nod my head and there is a slight flickering of her eyelashes then she turns away and goes out through the door. I take my drink down the bar a way close to where the phone’s kept and take a look at the sports page and while I’m doing that the phone rings. I lean over the bar and lift the phone from its cubby hole and when I’ve put it down, I lift the receiver and I hear Joan on the extension asking who’s calling. Fleming’s voice begins to ask if I’m in the bar but I cut in and tell Joan it’s okay; I’m on the line and I hear the extension click and then I say to Fleming, “It’s okay, you can go ahead.”
“He’s back home,” Fleming says. “Or should I say, down home?”
“How long?”
“Ten minutes ago.”
“Right, well, you and your helper can take the rest of the day off.”
“You mean we’ve got that long left?”
“If you play it the way I tell you, yes.”
Then I give him the outline and tell him what to do and how and where to be in town tomorrow, and when I’ve done that I put the receiver down and put the phone back in the cubby hole. After that, I look at the door that Joan went through then I slide off my stool and go back to Murdock.
“Do you mind if I open the window?” Murdock says.
“Help yourself,” I tell him.
“I can’t stand a stuffy room.”
Murdock gets up from the armchair opposite me and pushes up the window. On his way back, he pauses by the table and freshens up both our drinks then sits down. I reach out from my own armchair and take a sip of my drink. I think that it needs more ice but I can’t be bothered to reach out again and take the lid off the ice bucket. A minute or so later Murdock sits up and says, “You want more ice?”
I watch him take the lid off the bucket.
“Only a couple of cubes left,” he says. “You want some?”
I shake my head. Murdock drops the cubes into his drink and then gets up, picks up the bucket, goes through into the kitchen and I can hear him refilling the bucket. When he comes back, he takes out a couple of cubes and drops them in the glass I’m holding as he passes by the chair.
“I hate to see a man make a martyr of himself,” Murdock says, and sits down again.
“I guess the Chandler spoiled you a little bit, George,” I say eventually.
“It didn’t exactly do you a whole lot of good,” Murdock says.
I look at him and say nothing. After a while I drain my drink and get up and put on my coat.
“Where’re you going?” Murdock says.
“Somewhere where the help doesn’t talk back.”
Murdock grins. “Have one for me while you’re out.”
“Fuck off,” I tell him, and close the door behind me.
Clark’s is bursting at the seams. Even Moses’s select court on the raised part seems to be crowded but I guess he won’t mind too much. The drinks I’ve had already don’t help the feeling the shoving crowd gives me, and I wish to Christ at least the crowd’d sway the same way I’m swaying. I beat my way to the bar and, of course, while I’m waiting the seventy-five years it takes for me to get attention, I begin to wish I’d stayed at home with Murdock instead of touring the bars after I’d found Jo-Ann and the spade were engaged all night. While I’m thinking that thought I start getting attention, only it’s not from one of the bartenders; it’s from a hand that’s slipped between my legs from behind. Even if it wasn’t accompanied by the “Hi” I get from Agnes, I’d still be able to guess at who the fingers belonged to—not that I’d ever experienced them before, but handling is what you’d expect from someone like Agnes. The bar is so crowded that Agnes’s attentions go unnoticed, not that anybody’d care anyway.
“You feeling good?” Agnes says, as she slides around to lean against me as much as against the bar, and the hand now slips between me and the bar.
“You certainly are,” I tell her.
“I know it,” she says. “No good being modest about it.”
“This is modest?” I say to her. “In any case, where’s your partner. I thought that you worked as a pair?”
“As a pair, not always. With them, all the time.” I get an extra bit of pressure to accompany that remark, and then she unzips me and her hand slides inside.
“Christ,” I tell her, “you want Moses complaining about the mahogany getting stained?”
“You’re not going to come, sweetheart,” she says. “When that happens, it’ll be the way I want it to happen.”
“In that case, what do I have to do to get a drink around here?”
“Wave the magic wand, baby,” she says and inside of my Jockeys she does just that. The sweat on my brow is not entirely due to the alcohol in my system. But, like magic, a bartender gets free and asks for my order. I tell him and whatever Agnes wants which is the same and then a voice at my ear on the opposite side of which Agnes is says, “Make that three.”
I turn my head and Marcia’s squeezed herself in next to me. I tell the bartender to make it three and then Marcia makes the Agnes routine a double act by slipping her hand through and grabbing a piece of the action herself.
“Like I thought,” Marcia says. “I thought I’d recognized a familiar handshake.”
Agnes says, “Well, at least we know now he’s got one. All those excuses about Moses weren’t just excuses.”
“And balls,” Marcia says. “They always say Boldt’s got balls even if they say nothing else.”
I push my own hands down which is a pretty difficult operation considering the kind of crush I’m in but I finally manage it and push their hands away.
“I guess this is what is called a squeeze play,” I say to them, “but however effective it is, it’s not going to be effective enough to get me into one of Moses’s dens with you two.”
“You don’t have to worry tonight,” Agnes says. “Moses has a real friend with him. He only has eyes for him.”
“Yeah, but what does he have for me?”
“You’re crazy,” Marcia says. “Tonight we’re working for ourselves.”
The drinks arrive.
“Even supposing I
could believe that,” I say to them, “how much would it cost me?”
Agnes shakes her head.
“Only the pleasure of your company,” she says.
“Sure,” I say. “And then I’m in there and suddenly it’s go down Moses.”
“Listen, one thing Moses doesn’t do,” Marcia says. “He doesn’t fuck pigs.”
“That’s about the only thing he don’t do,” Agnes begins to say, but before she can say it all, I’ve whirled around on Marcia and grabbed hold of her by her neck, just below the upward angle of her jawbone, close to the tendons of her neck. I do this just as she’s put her drink to her mouth and she’s swallowing; the drink spews out of her mouth and onto my face and the crowd stops swaying and quiets a little bit because nobody’s ever seen Marcia handled like this, especially together with the fact that it’s going on before Moses’s eyes.
“Listen,” I say to Marcia. “Listen, you whore, you’re talking to me. If you want to look good enough to turn up for work tomorrow, remember that.”
While I’m saying this a lot of things happen all at the same time. Moses rises from his throne, the heat of his outrage burning a path through the crowd. Moses’s boys in the anteroom have had the message passed to them and they come steaming in through the crowd, and Agnes jumps on my back and grabs hold of me by my hair. I push Marcia and the guy she’s leaning against away from me and I grab Agnes’s arms, leaning forward like somebody heaving a sack of coal, and twist my body to one side, dumping Agnes flat on her back on top of the bar amongst all the glasses. She shrieks and pedals her legs around in the air, trying to get off her back, but I give her a two-handed push and she slides across the alcohol-covered bar and disappears over the opposite edge. By the time that has taken to happen, Montgomery and the boys and Moses as well are almost on to me so I have no choice but to draw my gun and wave it around saying to Moses, “You really want gunshots in here, Moses?”
Moses and the other fellows stop a couple of feet short of me. Now the crowd is very quiet indeed.
“You got no witnesses,” Moses says. “I got plenty. And I got you covered anyhow.”
I hear one of the bartenders take a few steps closer to the spot directly behind me.
“Yeah and there’s plenty in here who’d like to make a little bread on telling where I was when I got it.”
“You mean you think somebody actually cares enough?”
“That’s for you to decide, Moses,” I tell him.
Moses thinks about that for a moment or two.
“I guess just about anything’s possible, even that,” Moses says.
“And the thick ear your guy’s thinking of giving me as compensation. However hard he hits, I’ll wake up and I’ll be coming back.”
After I’ve spoken, the dead silence goes on a little bit longer and then Moses says, “Leave the pig alone. He’s a pig. He’s got to live with being one. That’s enough.”
Montgomery and the boys hesitate slightly and then they start to go back to the anteroom. Moses gives me his earthquake look and turns away and the crowd parts like a San Francisco chasm as he makes his way back to his platform. I then turn back to face the bar and the bartender who had me covered has discreetly replaced whatever he was carrying and he’s look-ing at me, standing rigid, while Agnes uses his body to pull herself up off the floor. When she sees me, she goes for the nearest broken glass and picks it up but the bartender grabs her by the other wrist so that all she can do is make sweeping movements with the glass that stop a foot or so short of me. And as she makes these movements, she shrieks obscenities at me but I turn away and begin to make for the door. As I’m doing so, I hear Agnes grind the glass into the countertop and scream out.
“Next time he’ll get it in the balls, Christ help me.”
Murdock’s still up when I get back. The bottle’s a quarter the way down since last time I was home and he’s sitting in the same chair with his feet up watching a movie on T.V.
“Have a good time?” he says, not looking away from the set.
I go over and stand a little behind his chair and I look at the screen. A car chase is taking place, a lot of patrol cars after a car full of hoods.
“I had some fun, yeah,” I tell him.
“That’s great,” Murdock says.
“Yeah,” I tell him.
I watch the movie for as long as it takes for the hoods to overturn against the studio street lamppost and then I tell Murdock I’m going to bed. I go through to my bedroom and while I’m taking my pants off, I can hear the movie being wound up, the martial music, the stern voice pronouncing on the futility of crime in the face of our vigilant law enforcement agencies.
“The same deal,” Fleming says. “Only today they’ve been to the movies. A couple of Disneys.”
“And the girl?” I ask him.
“Almost the same. She goes out an hour or so after him and takes a cab and wanders around the stores, finishes up at the boutique only this time she buys something without bumping into the guy and starting a lifetime’s friendship.”
“What does she buy?”
“Some kind of evening dress. They boxed it for her; she took it on approval.”
“What was the box like?”
“The box? Well, it was long enough to take the dress without folding it up. I guess they wrapped it that way so if she takes it back, there’s less chance of getting it all creased up.”
“Yeah,” I tell him. “Well, keep up the good work.”
Before he can make his joke, I put the receiver down.
“I want you to cover Mercer Street and Grove Street,” Draper says. “Then when he’s passed through those, you drive ahead through the back streets and cover him getting out at the campus. Bolan’s got everything tight and you just keep hanging in looking for faces, anything. We got the guy who sent the note, but like I say, this thing might have caught on like streaking become a national pastime. And since you didn’t manage to fall over our own local chapter member, you stay awake this time, will you?”
“We’ll sleep only in shifts,” I tell him. “When it’s Murdock’s turn, I’ll nudge him and he can take over.”
“Joke about it,” Draper says. “I hope you’re still in a joking frame of mind in a couple of days’ time.”
“We will be,” I tell him. “Good old Jimbo’s in there pitching for us.”
The evening call comes through and it’s like before. Both back home. I make tomorrow’s arrangements and I pass this news to Murdock. Murdock as usual thinks about it for a while and then asks the question I expected he’d have asked before this late date. “Why,” he asks, “don’t we cover them around the clock just in case they don’t play it the way we think they are?” Wearily I tell him that none of them are going to chance being fallen over by us until the last minute they have to. Murdock puts up a few arguments against what I’ve told him but in the end he accepts what I’ve told him because he’s not got any better ideas himself. I wish I had because I hope to Christ I’m right; I’d hate to see Styles walk away from this after everything that’s happened.
“Feel like some poker?” Murdock says.
I look at my watch and shake my head.
“No,” I tell him. “I’m going to have an early night.”
I walk through into the bathroom and start to run my tub. I get my robe from the bedroom and go back into the bathroom then in comes Murdock as I’m climbing in the tub.
“You’re turning in early?” Murdock says.
“That’s right,” I tell him, sinking down into the warm foamy water and closing my eyes.
I hear Murdock flip down the lid on the toilet seat and sit down on it and then he says to me, “Now if I was smart I’d run out and get a photographer. I’d bring him in here and I’d hold a large clock above your head and he’d take your picture and I’
d be worth a fortune.”
“You’re already worth a fortune,” I tell him. “You’re worth a fortune because you’ve taken what I’ve taken. We’re about even-Stephen on that score.”
“Yeah,” Murdock says. “If I ever go back to her in about twelve months’ time, my old lady’s going to get one hell of a surprise.”
“Won’t she just.”
I begin soaping myself and after a while I say to Murdock, “How come you never told her?” I’m looking at him now and he makes a face and sort of shrugs. “Well, how is it she never asked you how you got to be able to afford things on your pay?”
“I was careful,” Murdock says. “I never went over the top. I stashed it, like you. And that’s the funny thing. All this time, Joyce, she’s done her best to make things work out on what I get. She’s really worked at it, you know what I mean? And she never knew because I didn’t want her to. All these years she’s given her best and I never let her know what I’d got cooked up for us in the future. Just selfishness really. I just never wanted her to know. So she’s given all that, her youth, and all the time we’ve had the bread. Now sometimes I think maybe I can’t even tell her. Maybe if I tell her, she’ll pick up a meat cleaver and split me down the middle and all she’ll be able to collect is a manslaughter rap.”
“You tell her,” I tell him. “You tell her, and while you’re telling her have a big suitcase with the money in it on the kitchen table; open it in front of her and let her see how good it looks. Just do that and you’ll have no problems.”
