Built for Trouble

by Al Fray

  MY BLOOD PRESSURE jumped a few points. I was beginning to smell the money; this wasn’t the time to ease off. “All right, speak up,” I said shortly.

  “Maybe we can come to some terms.”

  “You already know the terms. Seventy-five thousand dollars! If you want to talk about pay-off, we’ll continue the discussion on a when and where basis, but we aren’t going to waste any more time on will you or won’t you.”

  “We will. Come on back.” He turned and I followed along to Nola’s apartment. She was different now, different like a hellcat cornered. Gone now was the smooth control, the easy confidence. She smoked in short fast puffs and moved around the room, her fingers touching a lamp here, straightening a doily there, her eyes flashing at me every second or so.

  “You blackmailing bastard,” she said in a low voice.

  “Now, now,” I said, grinning at her, “let’s not start calling names. You gambled and you lost; it’s no deeper than that. So what about the money?”

  “All right, Baker,” Joe said. “You might as well know from the start that we don’t have all of the money from Apex and can’t possibly pay off all in one chunk. Not until they pay us. You don’t understand the business, so I’ll—”

  “Let’s stop being cute. What was the advance on signing contracts for this two hundred thousand package?”

  “One fourth. We get another fourth when Alex Coleman finishes a script satisfactory to Apex, and the last fifty per cent thirty days after final shooting. But we had to pay for the book right away and Coleman will have to be paid before—”

  “I understand that the script should take about six weeks; it’ll be finished in a little more than a month from today. That right?”

  He nodded and I turned to Nola. “Where are they shooting it? How long?”

  “Catalina Island, at the Isthmus. I’ve heard that they figure on six weeks.” She said it in hard strained tones, her blue eyes cold as she watched me. I’ve seen that look a lot of times in my life. You step into the ring with some big joker who’s marked you for a breeze and he’s sure he’ll tag you by the end of the second round, and then you nail him hard about three times before the first round is ten seconds old. He backs off to regroup forces and there’s a new respect in his face, a grim and determined set to his jaw. He may still be confident and he may even wind up putting you away, but he knows now that he’s got a fight on his hands and you can see it in his eyes.

  “We’ll put it on a pay-as-you-go basis,” I said, and put a hand on the doorknob. “I’m an easy-going guy and you’ve had to lay out a lot of the initial payment already. Fair enough, you can give me ten G’s out of what’s left. I want twenty-five more when you get the next payment and they start shooting. The remaining forty will be due and payable when Apex makes final settlement, a month at most after Island Love is finished. I’m willing to give you an easy-payment plan, but I want my cut in full.”

  “I’d like to give you your cut,” Nola said. Her nervous fingers tugged at the smooth white skin of her neck above the black sweater.

  “Don’t be bitter,” I said. “You staged a publicity campaign and I was part of it. You just forgot to let me in on it, but you’re forgiven. Or will be, as soon as you’ve contributed my half of the take. And remember this, a month ago you were a now-and-then actress wondering when your next week’s work in a B picture would turn up. Now you’re known all over the country, and unless you goof on this Island Love, you’ll be a big star. You’ll have gotten that way by stomping Eddie Baker into the sand. You owe me money, sweet, and sure as hell I’m going to collect.”

  “You—you’ve decided on when the first ten thous—”

  “You’ll need a day or so,” I said. “But get it together by Monday noon. Have it and be here in the apartment with the dough in twenties and fifties. I’ll be by for it.”

  I was sweating like an overworked heavyweight in the tenth round when I got out to my car. They had to pay once, that much was sure, but there was going to be a lot of time between the first payment and the rest of the cash. A lot of time—and a thousand things they might think of to unhorse me. One of the first steps toward disaster would be to assume that I had them tied up so tight there was no possible escape. I thought I had. But there are a lot of people in the graveyard who were sure they could get away with a murder, who were sure they could swim the lake, who were sure they could shack up with the neighbor’s wife. And there are probably some in the cemetery who were sure they could get away with a caper like this. I didn’t want to add my name to the list, and I was willing to surrender right now on one of the fronts. I drove toward Main Street in downtown Los Angeles, parked in a lot, and started hitting the hock shops along the line. In the third place I found the only kind of gun I know enough to handle well, a service automatic that had found its way here after a succession of owners, starting with Uncle Sam.

  “How much?” I asked, and slipped out the clip, checked the chamber, and made sure the rifling in the short barrel wasn’t pitted.

  “Forty-two fifty,” the pawnbroker said. He was a young guy and fat, and he was playing it with an I-don’t-care-if-you-buy-or-not attitude. He wasn’t kidding me. He had to sell to stay in business.

  “Thirty,” I said. I worked the slide, put the clip back in, and laid the gun on the varnished counter.

  “Forty-two fifty.” He turned his back and began to rearrange some cameras on the shelf.

  “Thirty once and so long,” I said. I started for the door. He’d probably picked it up from some hungry Joe for ten.

  “We’ll come to thirty-five,” Fatty said. He swung away from the cameras and held the gun out to me.

  “No dice,” I said. When I reached the door he sighed heavily behind me.

  “Thirty’s okay. Fill out the form.” I came back and wrote a lot of answers on a sheet of paper, and he made out the bill of sale. I paid the cash, he marked the bill paid and then said, “There’s a seventy-two hour wait. Suicide clause. It gives a guy who’s all steamed up time to cool off. I have to hold on to it that long.”

  “I’ll pick it up Monday morning,” I said.

  “And you have to register it with the police department.”

  “So I’ll register it,” I said. They don’t tell you these two facts until you’ve paid the cash, but to me it made no difference. I folded the receipt and went back to my car, drove out to Santa Monica, picked up a carton of .45 slugs in a hardware store, and went back to my hideaway.

  But I couldn’t calm down. Maybe it was the aroma of big dough getting close. Maybe it was an accumulation of nerves piled up for the last three weeks. At any rate I kept thinking about the time gaps ahead, kept worrying about pay-offs two and three. The first one would be easy; I was moving too fast for them to set up a block on Monday. But after that?

  I brewed a pot of coffee and sat down in the miniature kitchen to think. Suppose I was caught in a bind like this and someone was putting the bite on me for big money. Two solutions, pay or kill. And how could I go about it?

  There were a dozen possibilities, and when I ran them down to the end, at least four seemed sound enough for a reasonable gamble: How many could Nola Norton come up with? Or Joe Lamb? The answer was unpleasantly obvious. There would be plenty of ways to handle this, if they decided on killing me. Even though I knew they would come into big trouble when my suitcase was opened down in the check station at Union Depot, it still wasn’t much comfort. One thing—I’d have to make damn sure they were sold on my mailing-out-the-package hoax. Once they stopped buying that, they could measure me for a box.

  Sitting around the apartment until Monday didn’t particularly appeal to me; so I locked the joint, hopped into the hack, and headed north along the Coast Highway. Early evening found me in Santa Barbara, where I pulled into a big motel with over fifty units and blue roofs and a heated pool. The south boundary of the premises was the Pacific Ocean. It looked like a decent spot for Eddie Baker to sweat out the wait.

  Afte
r dinner and a couple of drinks I went for a late swim. The pool was pretty well populated with couples, but here and there you could spot a free agent. I swam a couple of lengths of the plunge, paying careful attention to stroke and turning on the steam at the same time. So I’m a ham, but in the water a fairly good one, and my performance didn’t go without notice.

  Back in my room, I found a pack of cards and returned to the pool, where I picked out a metal table and laid out a game of Klondike. The table I’d picked was next to a threesome, twin sisters and a guy. I missed a couple of plays, drew a kibitz or two, and the four of us wound up shooting a few hands of bridge.

  The guy was a free bidder, his wife a conservative type who didn’t quite understand voiding out to use small trumps in the dummy before she led trump. Peg and I clobbered them three in a row. Peg was a trim number just under thirty, stacked nicely but not heavy, and she laughed easily. The kind that makes a guy figure he’s really a wit, strictly a card, and I went along with the gag. We wound up with a couple of beers in the bar, the four of us, and then the three of them called it a night. They were staying one more day, so it provided a substitute game to keep my mind off the one I was playing down in L.A.

  In the morning I took my swimming down at the beach, and about eleven Peg came down. She was wearing a red-and-white peppermint-stick job that had elastic in the legs and billowed nicely. Her hair was light brown and her eyes laughing. We shared a blanket, and she told me that her sister and the husband were on a shopping forage in town. We kidded away the afternoon and had dinner with the other couple. Later I took Peg to a show and a moonlight ride, but when I tried to turn on the heat she went into defensive formation. She still laughed, still made a ball of it, but she knew the moves and where to throw a block. We parted friends, and I went back to my own cabin to nurse a wounded ego and ponder the wisdom of that honorable adage “All is not tit that titters.”

  Monday morning early I picked up the .45 automatic at the hock shop. He had it wrapped, and mumbled something about a concealed weapon if it was loose in your pocket. I went across the street and down to the police station to register it, and when I got back to my car I drove out to a deserted area in the hills above Malibu. I loaded a clip, slipped it into the gun, and looked around for something to shoot at. There was a can on the ground fifty or so feet away. I started to bring the gun up, but before I was anywhere near ready the damn thing went off. It scared hell out of me and the slug slammed into the dust less than ten feet in front of me.

  I stood there trying to think. The trigger hadn’t been that light yesterday. I’d snapped it off three or four times. And besides, these have a grip safety. You can’t fire unless you’re squeezing the butt. I shook my head and brought the gun up carefully this time, and then began to close my fist.

  It fired again. Before I much more than touched the trigger, the blast came. I took the clip out, emptied the chamber, and went back to the car. Sitting in the front seat, I made sure it was unloaded once more, then snapped the thing off. It was by far the lightest gun on the trigger I’ve ever seen, and in four years of service you handle quite a few, even on a shore base. I began to dismantle this one and before long I found the trouble. The grip safety is so arranged that the trigger can’t come back unless you’re pressing forward on the grip, the natural squeezing of the fist. But someone had worked on this one—the grip safety was inoperative. Entirely.

  I whipped out my wallet, but the receipt bore the right serial number. He’d been real cute about it, sold me one gun but wrote in the serial number of a dog he had on his hands. And when I came to get what I thought was my gun, he’d had the other all wrapped for me.

  I bounced the damn thing in my hand. It wouldn’t be too bad; no one else would be using it. If I was careful I’d get by and I wouldn’t have to carry it often. I slipped the clip back in, tucked the gun inside my shirt, and started back to town. I wasn’t going to out-draw Billy the Kid that way, but it would be handy to have around if the need arose.

  In Santa Monica I phoned Nola. “Eddie Baker,” I said. “I hope everything is ready.”

  “It will be. You said noon.”

  “That’s right. Will Joe Lamb be there with the cabbage?”

  “We’ll both be there. You—will be here at twelve?”

  “Depend on it,” I said. For what I had in mind I was going to need to know the size of the party. “What about the redhead? Is she in on the deal?”

  “Carol? Not exactly.” Nola hesitated as though choosing her words out of respect for the phone. When she spoke, her voice was reasonably low. “Carol Taylor was in on the planning only—only in so far as the—the publicity part is concerned. She knows nothing of—of the rest of the developments, if you follow me, except that you would like to be paid. The other part she hasn’t heard about yet. It might be better if you remember that, Mr. Baker.”

  “Sure, sure,” I said, “see you at twelve.”

  But I wasn’t going to run out to Nola’s apartment. Not today. Eddie Baker wasn’t going to set himself up any more than he had to. I drove down to Echo Park and eased over to the curb not far from the hamburger joint below. Then I hiked to the corner, caught a bus, and rode into downtown L.A., transferred over to Fifth Street, and rented a U-Drive Chevy sedan. This I also wheeled out to Echo Park, but I parked it on the other side of the lake. That shot half an hour; I spent the next half hour watching the four-handed, cut-throat pinochle games near the rest room. When it was noon I walked the hundred feet to the combination hamburger hut and boat rental at the edge of the lake, went into the phone, and called Nola’s number.

  “A change of plans,” I said in a low voice. This wasn’t a booth and I had to be careful. “Bring the present down to Echo Park. Know where it is?”

  There was a short interval. I heard her say something to someone else in the room. Then she spoke to me. “Yes. Joe knows.”

  “Fine. I’ll be sitting on a stool in the hamburger place. Both of you come down; we’ll go on from there.”

  “But I thought—Well, I suppose if that’s the way it has to be—”

  “It does. The two of you, and only the two of you. I’ll be waiting.”

  Ten minutes later, and it seemed like ten weeks, I saw Nola’s MG wiggle into a parking spot up on the street. Joe got out and swung the door for Nola, and the two of them came down the hill. I went to the counter in the front and dropped a five-dollar bill.

  “A boat,” I said. “There’s going to be three in it.”

  “Dollar a half hour,” the woman said. She slid a card into the clock, punched the time, and handed me a pen. “Read it and sign.”

  The card was the standard pitch about being responsible for damage and that I’d lose my deposit if the boat was abandoned and they had to get it. I scribbled Bill Walker on the thing, she tore off my claim half, wrote five in the place marked deposit, and gave me the chit. Nola and Joe were coming through the door then and most of the stags loafing around the counter had stopped talking. Joe had a nice bulge in the pocket of his sports jacket. I grinned and nodded toward the other door leading to the float.

  “Let’s take a boat ride,” I suggested. The old guy handling the hook stepped lively handing Nola in. I followed Joe into the boat, and the old fellow dropped the canvas top back down. He pushed us out into the lake, and Nola, who was on the port side in front, pushed the lever forward and turned the wheel. We took off at a fast snail pace and worked up to about two miles an hour. There was the hum of the battery-driven electric motor behind me as I sat in the back seat. The lake is only about a block or so wide and not too much more than that in length, but at our speed it took a while to reach the middle. When we did, Joe turned in the front seat and looked at me.

  “Put the lever in neutral,” I said to Nola. “We’ll drift a while. Now how about the money?”

  Wordlessly, Joe Lamb fumbled in his pocket and handed over the seat a package wrapped in white paper. I took it, stripped off the wrappings, and riffled the en
ds of the green bills. They weren’t new stock, just a packet of fifties. I drew in a quick breath. To carry off my role as a money-hungry chiseler, I began to flip through the ends in a hasty count. Then Nola spoke.

  “There’s—there’s only eight thousand,” she said in a small voice.

  “Then I don’t want it. To hell with it; I’d rather go back to being a lifeguard.” I tossed the packet into the front seat.

  “Now wait a minute, Baker,” Joe said. “You’ll get the rest of it. Tonight. Tomorrow at the latest. Damn it, listen to reason. Sure we had a lot of cash on hand when Apex put up the first payment, but there’s been dough to the author of Island Love and dough to Hank Sawyer, and—”

  “What’s the pitch on the balance? I expected my dough.”

  “You’ll get it,” Nola said. She tossed her head and then wiggled a little farther around in the seat, giving me a full profile. “I have some money in the bank at home, but we couldn’t get to it in time. I mean we thought we could raise it here in L.A. and then it was Saturday and the banks were closed, but I sent an airmail check to my dad yesterday and he’ll cash it this afternoon. Tonight I’ll drive down to San Diego and get it. We’re going to pay you, Mr. Baker.”

  “When?”

  “Joe told you. By tomorrow.” Nola picked up the money and handed it back to me. “You can call me tonight. I’ll know exactly then, and you can make arrangements. Please, Mr. Baker.”

  “So today is Monday. The banks close at three: if your old man has picked up your cash you’ll know it by then.”

  “That’s right,” Nola said, “but we have a story conference this afternoon on Island Love. We can’t duck that and it may run until five o’clock, or even six. Will you phone me about seven? I’ll have an answer by that time.”

  I slid the bundle of cash into my jacket pocket and motioned toward the far side of the lake. “Run us over to the shore,” I said, pointing.

  “On—on that side?”

  “On that side!”