by Jim Thompson
“They’re very fine gentlemen,” I said.
“Must be. Don’t see how they could be anything else,” he nodded firmly. “And with two high-placed people like that speakin’ up for you, I don’t see—”
“Yes?” I said.
“Nothin’. Just sort of talkin’ to myself, more or less. Kind of a bad habit of mine.” He stood up, slapping his hat against the side of his pants. “Let’s see, now. You was saying you planned on running into the city this weekend?”
“Tomorrow or Saturday,” I said. “If it’s all right.”
“Sure, sure it’s all right. You just go right ahead.”
He put out his hand, and gave mine a firm hard grip.
I went upstairs and my head had hardly touched the pillows before Fay Winroy slipped into the room.
“Carl. Was it—what did he want?”
“Nothing much.” I moved over on the bed to let her sit down. “Just came to tell me that I’d gotten a clean bill from Arizona.”
“Oh? But he acted so strange, Carl. I thought—”
“How about it?” I said. “You didn’t give him a bad time when he came here looking for me.”
“N-no.” She hesitated. “I mean, naturally I don’t like cops hanging around with their cars parked in front of the house, but—well, I’m sure I didn’t say anything out of the way.”
I wouldn’t have bet money on it. “I don’t imagine Kendall liked having him come to the bakery, either,” I said. “That must have been the trouble. The guy had his feelings hurt.”
“You can’t think of anything else?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know what it would be. How did you make out with Jake?”
Her eyes flashed. “I don’t want to talk about him.”
“Neither do I,” I yawned. “In fact, I’d just as soon not talk at all. I think I’ll take a nap.”
“Well,” she laughed, getting up. “Here’s my hat, what’s my hurry, huh? But it’s almost dinnertime, honey.”
“I’m not hungry,” I said.
“You could have something up here. Would you like to have me bring you up a tray in about an hour?”
“Well—” I frowned.
“It’ll be all right. Kendall will be gone back to the bakery—you’d think the guy would move his bed over there—and Ruth will have plenty to keep her busy in the kitchen. I’ll see that she does.”
I nodded. “In about an hour, then.”
She left. I closed my eyes and tried to forget about Kendall, and the sheriff, and The Man and Fruit Jar and…
I was still trying an hour later when she pushed the door open and came in with the tray.
She had a glass half full of whiskey on it, covered up with a napkin. I drank it down, and began to feel hungry.
It was a good dinner—a beef stew with vegetables, and apple pie for dessert. Fay lay back on the bed while I ate, her hands clasped under the back of her head.
I drank the last of my coffee. I lay down crosswise on the bed with her, pulling her around in my arms.
“Carl—”
“That’s me,” I said.
“Did you really mean what you said this morning? About us—me—going into New York?”
I reached the wallet out of my pocket, and took out two twenties. I tucked them into the front of her brassiere.
“Oh, Carl, honey,” she sighed. “I can hardly wait.”
I told her where to meet me, a hotel on West Forty-seventh where the fix was in strong.
“I’ll go in tomorrow afternoon,” I said, “and come back late Saturday night. You come in Saturday morning, and come back here Sunday night. And don’t forget to fix things up with your sister.”
“I won’t, honey!” She sat up eagerly. “I’ll be very careful about everything. I’ll tell Jake that sis sent me the money to come on, and—”
“All right,” I said. “Just be careful, and let it go at that.”
She took the bills out of her brassiere, and smoothed them over her knee. Then, she folded them neatly and tucked them back between her breasts.
“Sweet,” she said, huskily, laying her head against my shoulder. “You don’t mind waiting, do you, honey?”
I didn’t mind. I wanted it—who the hell wouldn’t have—but I wasn’t in any hurry. It was something that had to be done, the clincher to the bargain.
“It would do me good to mind?” I said.
“Yes,” she nodded. “I’m not—well, I know I’m a long way from being what I should be—but here, well, to do it—to start off here in Jake’s house…If you say so, I will but—”
“That’s okay,” I said.
“You’re not sore, Carl? You know what I’m trying to say?”
“I think I do,” I said, “and it’s all right. But I can’t say how long it will stay that way if you don’t beat it out of here.”
She looked at me teasingly, her head cocked a little to one side.
“Suppose I change my mind,” she said. “Suppose I wake up in the night, and—”
I made a grab for her. She leaped back, laughing, and ran to the door. She pursed her lips; then she whispered, “Good night, honey,” and slipped out of the room.
…I slept pretty good that night. Nothing out of the way happened the next morning. I got up around nine, after Kendall and Ruth had left, and fixed my own breakfast. I lingered over it, thinking Fay might join me, but she didn’t. So I cleaned up the dishes, left for the railroad station.
The Long Island was outdoing itself that day. It was only an hour late getting into New York. I picked up the suit I’d bought and checked in at the hotel. At six o’clock I called The Man from a booth telephone. Then I strolled down to the Automat near Forty-second and Broadway and waited.
Fruit Jar drove up in front of the place at seven o’clock. I got into the Cadillac, and we headed for The Man’s house.
8
You’ve heard of The Man. Everyone has. There’s hardly a month passes that the papers don’t have a story about him or you don’t see his picture. One month he’s up before some government investigating committee. The next he’s attending a big political dinner—laughing and talking to some of the very same people who were putting him through the wringer the month before.
The Man is a big importer. He controls shipping companies, and distilleries, race tracks and jobbing houses, wire services and loan companies.
He’s one of the biggest open-shop employers in the country, but it’s not because he’s opposed to unions. He’s a charter member of two old-line craft unions, and he’s supported their organizational drives, and he’s got letters from some of the top labor-skates thanking him for his “earnest endeavors in behalf of the American workingman.”
The Man controls race tracks—but he supports anti-race-track legislation. He can prove that he’s supported it, and you can’t prove that he controls the tracks. He controls distilleries—but can you prove it?—and he supports temperance movements. He controls loan companies—controls the men who control them—and he backs anti-loan-shark laws.
The Man donated heavily to the defense of the Scottsboro boys. The Man went bail for bigwigs in the Klan.
No one has ever pinned anything on him.
He’s too big, too powerful, too covered-up. You try to pin something on him, and you lose it along the way.
The Man lived in a big stone and brick house out in Forest Hills. He wasn’t married, of course—although I don’t know why I say of course—and the only servant around was the square-faced Japanese houseboy who let us in.
The boy took us into the library-drawing room where The Man was waiting. And The Man still stood beaming at me, shaking my hand and asking me about my trip East and saying how delighted he was to meet me.
“I’m so sorry I didn’t get to talk to you before you went down to Peardale,” he said, in his soft pleasant voice. “Not, I’m sure, that you need my advice.”
“I thought I’d better not lose any more time,” I said. “The scho
ol term has already started.”
“Of course. Naturally.” He finally let go of my hand and waved me to a chair. “You’re here, now, and that’s the important thing.”
He sat down, smiling, and nodded to Fruit Jar. “Perfect, wouldn’t you say so, Murph? We couldn’t have found a better man for the job than Little Bigger. Didn’t I tell you he’d be worth any trouble we went to in locating him?”
Fruit Jar grunted.
“Would you mind telling me how you did it?” I said. “How you found me?”
“Not at all. But I didn’t suppose it would be anything that would mystify you.”
“Well, it doesn’t exactly,” I said. “I mean, I think I have it figured out. I was red hot here in the East, and I’d had a little lung trouble—”
“And your teeth and eyes were very bad.”
“You figured I’d just about have to go West. I’d have to take some kind of unskilled outdoors job. I’d get my teeth and my eyes taken care of—not in the place I was living but some place nearby—and I’d be damned careful to build up a good reputation. And—and—”
“About all, isn’t it?” He chuckled, beaming at me. “The teeth and the contact lenses, of course, were decisive.”
“But the police knew as much about me as you did. Even more, maybe. If you could find me, why couldn’t they?”
“Ah, the police,” he said. “Poor fellows. So many distractions and diversions and restrictions. So many things to do and so little to do it with.”
“There’s the reward money. It totaled around forty-seven thousand dollars the last I heard.”
“But, my dear Charlie! We can’t expend public funds on the off-chance that the police may collect rewards. Of course if they wished to carry on their search on their own time and at their own expense—”
“Yeah,” I said, “but—”
“Some ambitious private investigator? No, Charlie. I can understand the slight trepidation which you may feel, but it is absolutely groundless. What would it profit anyone—some reward-hungry or public-spirited citizen—if he did find you? He would have to prove your identity, would he not? And who would believe that you, this soft-spoken slip of a youth, was a murderer? You’ve never been arrested, never mugged or fingerprinted.”
I nodded. He spread his hands, smiling.
“You see, Charlie? I didn’t need to prove who you were. With me it was merely necessary to know. I could then place my proposition before you and ask for your co-operation—I dislike the word demand don’t you?—and you were kind enough to give it. The police, the courts”—he shrugged wryly—“Paah!”
“I’d like to get just one more thing straight,” I said. “I wanted this job, but I don’t want any others. I don’t want to pick up again where I left off the last time.”
“Naturally, you don’t. What…Murph, didn’t you tell him?”
“Not more than a dozen times,” said Fruit Jar.
The Man gave him a long, slow look. He turned back to me. “You have my word on it, Charlie. It wouldn’t be practical to use you again, even if I wanted to.”
“Fine,” I said, “that’s all I wanted to know.”
“I’m delighted to reassure you. Now, to get down to the business at hand—”
I gave him a report on how things stacked up in Peardale—about my run-in with Jake and lining up a job at the bakery and how I’d made out with the sheriff. He seemed pleased. He kept nodding and smiling, and saying “Excellent” and “Splendid” and so on.
Then he asked me one question, and for a moment I was kind of stunned. I felt my face turning red.
“Well?” He asked it again. “You said the sheriff got his report on you yesterday afternoon. Did Jake stay at the house last night?”
“I”—I swallowed—“I don’t believe he did.”
“You don’t believe he did? Don’t you know?”
I should have known, of course. It was the one thing I should have known. I was pretty sure that he hadn’t stayed at the house but I’d been worn out and I’d got to grab-assing around with Fay Winroy and…
“That’s rather important,” The Man said. And waited. “If he wasn’t there last night, how can you be sure that he plans on staying there at all?”
“Well,” I said, “I—I don’t think—”
“You can say that again!” Fruit Jar snickered. “Boy, oh, boy!” That snapped me out of it.
“Look,” I said. “Look, sir. I talked to the sheriff yesterday for the second time in two days. I spent more than an hour with this man Kendall. He doesn’t know anything but he’s a pretty sharp old bird—”
“Kendall? Oh, yes, the baker. I see no cause to worry about him.”
“I’m not worried about him or the sheriff either. But with Jake feeling the way he does, I don’t have to move very far out of line to be in trouble. I can’t show any interest in him. I can’t do anything that might be interpreted as showing interest in him. I deliberately went to bed early last night, and I stayed there until late this morning. I—”
“Yes, yes,” The Man interrupted impatiently. “I commend you for your discretion. But there should have been some way to—”
“He’ll stay at the house,” I said. “Mrs. Winroy will see that he does.”
“Oh?”
“Yes.”
He shook his head, leaning forward in his chair. “Not just yes, Charlie. Are you telling me that after only forty-eight hours, you’ve made a proposition to Mrs. Winroy.”
“I’ve been leading up to one, and she’ll grab it. She hates Jake’s guts. She’ll jump at the chance to get rid of him and make herself a stake at the same time.”
“I’m relieved that you think so. Personally, I believe I’d have taken a little more time in arriving at such a decision.”
“I couldn’t take any more time. She was opening up to me before I’d talked to her five minutes. If I hadn’t played up to her right at the start, I might not have got another chance.”
“So? And you felt you had to have her assistance?”
“I think it will come in pretty handy, yes. She can still make Jake jump through hoops. She knows her way around. She could get tough if she thought she was losing her meal ticket with nothing to take the place of it.”
“Well,” The Man sighed. “I can only hope your appraisal is correct. I believe she’s a former actress, isn’t she?”
“A singer.”
“Singer, actress. The two arts overlap.”
“I’ve got her taped,” I said. “I’ve only known her a couple of days, but I’ve known women like her all my life.”
“Mmm. May I assume that there’s a connection between her and your arrival in town a day early?”
“She’s meeting me here tomorrow. She’s supposed to be visiting her sister, but—”
“I understand. Well, I’m rather sorry you didn’t consult me, but inasmuch as you didn’t—”
“I thought that was why you wanted me,” I said. “Because I’d know what to do without being told.”
“Oh, I did, Charlie. I do.” He smiled quickly. “I don’t at all doubt your ability and judgment. It’s just that your procedure seemed rather daring—unorthodox—for such an extremely important matter.”
“It seems that way here. Other things may seem that way to you. Here. What I have to go on is how things seem to me there. It’s the only way I can work. If I had to ask you every time I wanted to make a move—well, I just couldn’t do it. I—I’m not telling you where to get off, but—”
“Of course not,” he nodded warmly. “After all, we’re all intent on the same goal. We’re all friends. We all have a great deal to gain…or lose. You understand that part don’t you, Charlie? Murph made it clear to you?”
“He did, but he didn’t need to.”
“Good. Now, about the time. You’ll naturally be governed to an extent by the local factors, but the optimum date would be about a week before the trial. That will allow you to become firmly integrated into th
e life of the town, to allay the suspicion which always attaches to a stranger. Also, by disposing of Jake at the approximate time of the trial, the newspapers will have less to feed upon; there will only be one story instead of two.”
“I’ll try to handle it that way,” I said.
“Fine. Splendid. Now…Oh, yes”—his smile faded—“one more thing. Murph tells me that you pulled a knife on him. Actually stabbed him in the back of the neck.”
“He shouldn’t have been there in Peardale. You know he shouldn’t, sir.”
“Perhaps not. But that doesn’t excuse your actions. I don’t like that at all, Charlie.” He shook his head sternly.
I looked down at the floor and kept my mouth shut.
“Would you mind waiting out in the reception room, Murph? I have quite a few things to say to Charlie.”
“I don’t mind,” said Fruit Jar. “Take your time.” And he sauntered out of the room, grinning.
The Man chuckled softly, and I looked up. He was holding out the knife to me.
“Could you use it again, Charlie?”
I stared at him—pretty blankly, I guess. He put the knife in my hand and closed my fingers around it.
“You killed his brother,” he said. “Did you know that?”
“Christ no!” So that was it! “When—what—?”
“I don’t know the details. It was in Detroit, 1942, I believe.”
Detroit, 1942. I tried to place him, and of course I couldn’t. The name wouldn’t have meant anything. And there’d been four—no, five in Detroit.
“I was disturbed by the way he felt toward you. I made a few inquiries…It won’t do, Charlie. He’s stupid and vengeful. He could blow things higher than a kite.”
“Yeah,” I said, “but…tonight?”
“Tonight. You haven’t been here, Charlie. He was here to see me about a financial matter. I walked out to the car with him when he left. I saw him stop down there on the highway and pick up a hitchhiker. In fact, Toko and I both saw him.”
He chuckled again.
“You understand my position, Charlie? I depended on Murph, and he failed me. How long would I last if I tolerated failure in the people I depend upon? I simply can’t do it, Charlie, regardless of the person or cost. The whole system is based on swift punishment and prompt reward.”
