The Name of the Game is Death

IV

A year after I left home I worked the midnight-to-eight shift in a gas station near the edge of a northern Ohio town. It was colder than a whore's heart in December, but it kept me eating. From two to seven in the morning I wouldn't average half a dozen cars. I'd sit inside with my feet cocked up on the heater and wait for daylight.

Or listen to Oily Barnes.

He was an odd one. I couldn't figure why a good-looking guy with a college degree should spend his time hanging around a gas station till all hours in the morning, talking to a kid like me. At first I thought he was a queer, naturally. Then I decided he wasn't, but I still couldn't make him out.

He was slender, with a pale, narrow face dominated by a high forehead, straw-colored hair, and steel-rimmed spectacles. He was about thirty. His small, well-shaped hands usually fluttered nervously while he talked. He had a beautiful speaking voice.

Two or three nights a week he'd hang around the station till five in the morning. I never understood how he could keep his eyes open on his bookkeeping job. I noticed one thing about him: he talked a lot about the places he'd been and the things he'd seen, but never about the people. He talked travel, books, painting, opera, ballet; talked with a passionate intensity. I tried to tell him he was way over my head with what he had to say. Then I saw it didn't matter, and I shut up and listened. Oily brought me books I didn't read, and he tried to hide his disappointment when I didn't.

And then one morning the police came and took him away. It was about three-thirty, and he'd been talking about books as usual, when the cruiser pulled up outside. Olly's good-looking face crumbled like aspirin in water when he saw the big man in plainclothes walking toward the station entrance. I thought for a second he was going to run, but if he considered it he didn't have time.

The big man stood in the open doorway, cold air pouring in all around him. "Let's take a ride, Oliver," he said. He had a broad, flat face with high cheekbones and no more expression than an iron skillet.

"No," Oily whispered. "No!" The second time it was a scream. Then he started to run, all right, toward the garage area, but the big man cut him off and scooped him up by the shirt front, like I'd snatch a fly from a table. He half-carried, half-dragged Oily outside without saying another word. The door slammed behind them.

I went outside to the cruiser. It was none of my business, but I went out, anyhow. A uniformed man was driving. I rapped on the rolled-up front window. I could see Oily and the big man in the back seat. Oily was crying. The uniformed man lowered the window and looked out at me. "What's it all about?" I asked him.

lie sat with his head cocked as if he were listening for something from the back seat. Nobody said anything, and after a minute he rolled the window back up and wheeled the cruiser around the pumps and out onto the highway.

I watched the tail-lights diminishing up the road. It was a bitterly cold night, without stars or lights of any kind except at the station. It wasn't any of my business, and I couldn't walk off and leave the place. I went back inside, out of the cold. Olly's overcoat was still draped on a chair where he'd dropped it when he came in.

I called the police four times between then and seven o'clock. No one I talked to had ever heard of Oliver Barnes. I described the big man who had taken Oily away.

They knew him, all right. His name was Lieutenant Winick. No one had seen him, either.

A little after four it started to snow. Between calls to the police I was kept busy clearing the station's driveways. My dawn there was six inches on the ground, and it was blowing hard. After seven I was too busy to call any more. When my relief came on at eight I had to stay over an hour to help with the rush of cars.

There were no buses running by the time I was able to get away. I put Olly's coat over my arm and walked the mile-and-a-half into town. Drifts were already a couple of feet high in some places, and the wind was spraying line-drive sheets of snow. Cold as it was I was sweating by the time I reached the police station. That kind of weather made heavy going.

I didn't really know what I was doing there. I guess I'd always known Oily wasn't exactly a hundred cents on the dollar. Still, a deal like that—what if it had been me? Wouldn't I have wanted someone to find out the score?

I might as well have talked to a totem pole as the sergeant at the desk. He asked a hell of a lot more questions than he answered. Who I was. Where I lived. Where I worked. What my interest was. He finally made a pretense of checking the blotter and said that no Oliver Barnes had been booked for anything. For him that ended it.

I hung around anyway. Nobody actually tried to run me out, but they didn't make it easy for me to stay. I tried my questions on two or three newcomers, with the same results. The heat in the waiting room kept putting me to sleep every time I sat down. At eleven o'clock I gave up. J left Olly's overcoat with the desk sergeant in case he came in looking for it, I said—and went home to bed.

It was still snowing when I woke at four. I dressed and walked back to the police station after a quick meal. The same sergeant spoke before I could when he saw me come in. "Lieutenant Winick wants to sec you, kid," he said, pointing to a door. "Second door on the left inside."

Winick looked up from the paperwork on his desk when

I knocked and entered his office. The room smelled of cigar ash and stale coffee. Winick's high-cheekboned features were just as expressionless as they'd been before. He leaned far back in his chair, folded his arms, and looked me over. "Stanton said you wanted to see me," he said at last.

As though he'd just got the word. "Where's Oily?" I asked.

"In a cell. Where he belongs."

"Why? What for?"

Winick's slitted eyes were unwinking. "Your friend has a bad habit. He coaxes little girls behind buildings and takes their pants down." His harsh voice deepened as his eyes bored into mine. "Little girls. Seven, eight, nine. He's done it before, you know. So it wasn't hard to know where to look, even without the kid's description of him, when her mother brought her in."

The roof of my mouth felt dry. "How good—what kind of a description?"

"Oliver Barnes' description." Winick's voice blared at me suddenly. "He served a reformatory term and a prison sentence for the same thing. You're not very choosy of your company. How long have you been in town?"

"Six mouths. When what lime did it happen?"

The big shoulders rose and fell in an elaborate shrug. "Five, six o'clock yesterday. The kid wasn't sure."

I felt a quick stir of excitement. "Five or six o'clock in the evening?"

"Five or six o'clock in the evening," Winick conceded with exaggerated patience.

"Then it couldn't have been Oily!" I said triumphantly.

Winick smiled, "lie confessed."

"Confessed?" I felt staggered. "Look, you said it happened between five and six yesterday?"

He was watching me narrowly. "That's what I said."

"Then it couldn't have been Oily," I repeated. "He brought Mime books over to my room at four in the afternoon and he stayed until I went out to eat at seven. It couldn't have been Oily, you hear me?"

Winick stood up behind his desk. "You're mixed up on the days. It happens to you nightworkers. Besides, he confessed."

"The hell I'm mixed up on the days! How could he confess to something he didn't do? You must have—"

"Careful of the territory you're taking in, kid," Winick's hard voice cut me off. "Where do you fit into this? What kind of friend is Barnes to you?"

"Why don't you ask me what kind of friend I am to Barnes? The way I see it, I'm the friend he needs. I want to talk to him."

"Sorry." Winick shook his head. "He's havin' a fit of remorse."

I could feel myself shaking. "Listen, I tell you I'll testify Oily couldn't possibly have—"

"You're goin' off half-cocked, kid." Winick's voice could have cut wood. "Did you hear me say Barnes had confessed? In stinking detail?"

"You made him confess! He was afraid the minute he saw you. Because he did it before doesn't mean he did it this time. You must have forced—"

"Listen to me." Winick's voice was quiet again. "He did it. He confessed. Can you get that through your thick skull?"

"There must be somebody else for me to talk to around here besides you," I said desperately. "You're not even listening. Oily couldn't have—"

"You're not listenin' to me." Gimlet eyes drilled into mine. "Barnes is a menace to society. He's proved it. He should never have been out on the street. This time I'm tuckin' him away for a good long stretch."

"But he didn't do it! Not this time!"

"He did it." Winick's heavy voice was Hat with authority. His eyes appeared almost closed. "Should I ask Barnes if you were with him?"

My hands clenched. "Is that supposed to make me run out of here? I know what I know, by God. I don't care what he did before. This he didn't do, and I'll talk till I get someone to listen."

Winick's voice became slow and draggy, emphasizing each word. "You sound to me like someone fixin' to get his balls caught in the machinery, kid." He leaned down over his desk, resting his weight on his big-knuckled hands. "I know what Barnes is. The people in this town know what he is. When you talk to me, you're talkin' to all of them."

I went out of there in a tearing rage.

I didn't believe Winick, but I found out he was right. Everyone I tried to get to listen to me gave me a blank stare. Nobody would believe it couldn't have been Oily.

Then I found out the hard way that some of them were never going to believe it. The next day I lost both my job and my room. Winick had been to see my boss and my landlady. All of a sudden I was on the street with twenty-three dollars between me and the icy gutter.

I stuck around another day, still trying to get someone to listen. I was half out of my mind, crazy-mad at the town and the people in it. And at Winick. Especially at Winick. That night I slept till four A.M. in the railroad station with my head on my bag. Winick's cops found me then and threw me out into the snow. I must have ground a quarter-inch oil my teeth, stumbling around the slippery, frozen streets, lugging my bag. I was half numb by the time the first one-arm coffee joint opened.

In the cold gray light of morning I gave up. I walked out to the edge of town and stopped a highway bus and told the driver to take me eleven dollars' worth away from there. I purposely hadn't bought a ticket at the bus station because I figured if Winick wanted to keep a string on me he'd have checked there.

I wound up across the state, a hundred-eighty miles away. I got a job as a stockboy in a chain grocery. Three times a week I bought a northern Ohio newspaper and read every word of it, looking for news of Oily.

It was three months before I found it.

The black headline said Oily had been sentenced to fifteen years.

That day I quit the human race. I never went back to my job. The only legitimate work I've done since has always been with an illegitimate purpose in mind. If that was the way it was, I'd play it as it lay.

I bought a gun in a hockshop. I didn't even have a car. The local paper nipped hard at police heels about the series of gas station holdups by a quick-moving pedestrian who always disappeared into the darkness.

I was surprised at how easy it was. I had only two close calls. Once I was scared off before I'd committed myself, and another time I had to stop an attendant from chasing me by shooting over his head.

I was no high liver, and the money piled up. I had a purpose for it. I bought a secondhand car and learned how to drive it. Ten weeks after Oily started his sentence I drove the hundred-eighty miles back across the state.

Back to Winick.

I rang his doorbell at ten o'clock at night. He opened the door himself. Not that it made any difference; I was all ready to go right into the house after him.

I shot him in the face, four times. He went backward in a kind of shambling trot. "That's for Oily, you bastard," I told him, but I don't think he heard me. I think he was dead before his big shoulders hit the floor.

Winick was the first.

I woke at sundown in the Bracketville motel, humped myself across the street to a combination grocery-restaurant, and loaded up on bacon, eggs, and black coffee. I recrossed the highway and went right back into the sack. I woke the next morning at five-thirty, feeling better physically than I had in weeks.

I had breakfast at the same restaurant and was ready to leave. I climbed into the new Ford, listened appreciatively to the engine sound when I started it up, and tried to back out of my parking place. The car rocked back and forth, but it wouldn't budge. I sat there blankly for a moment before it dawned on me what had happened. All that Texas gumbo I'd driven through had frozen the brakes, including the emergency, when dried.

I went back across the road again. I rousted out a barefoot kid at the restaurant and brought him back to the car. He crawled underneath it and clawed out a couple of pecks of rich-looking mud. He had trouble freeing the emergency, but he finally managed it. I gave the kid two dollars, and he turned cartwheels all the way back to the restaurant.

It was a beautiful morning when I hit the highway. Everything was fresh and clear after the storm. The road was dry and there was no traffic that early in the day. I laid into the accelerator the first straight stretch to see what the engine in the Ford could actually do. I chickened out at 116, and it felt like I had an inch of gas pedal left. The thing was a fireball. It held the road well, too.

I drove on through Uvalde, San Antonio, Seguin, and Luling. I had lunch in Weimar. In the afternoon I plowed on through Houston, Beaumont, and Orange. I spent the night in Lake Charles, Louisiana. The odometer said 469 miles for the day.

I'd pushed it a little because I wanted to make Mobile the following night. I could get guns and other things I needed in Mobile from Manny Sebastian. I had to ditch the artillery I was carrying. One gun traced to two bank guards in Phoenix, the other to a body floating in a rain-swollen ditch. If Manny hadn't lost his contacts, I could get a Florida license and registration from him to match what I was driving.

1 was out on the highway again by six-thirty the next morning. Ten miles east of Lake Charles I turned north on Route I ON at a little place called Iowa. I stayed with the new route for twenty miles to Kinder, then headed east again on 190, the New Orleans bypass.

I sailed through Eunice, Opelousas, Baton Rouge, and Hammond in Louisiana, then crossed into Mississippi at Slidell. A few miles farther on 190 hooked back into 90 again, and I rolled along the Old Spanish Trail through Liny St. Louis, Pass Christian, Gulfport, Biloxi, and Pascagoula. Along that sunlit stretch I was seldom out of sight of white sand and blue Gulf. When I pulled into a motel in Mobile about five o'clock, the odometer said 343 miles.

I washed up, had dinner, and drove downtown to the Golden Peacock, Manny Sebastian's joint. After midnight the place swung like a steeple bell, but at this time of night it was quiet. Manny had a finger in a lot of pies. He hadn't seen me in quite a while, but he recognized me as soon as I walked in. He came over and shook hands. He'd put on weight since I'd last seen him, and his jowls and extra chins transformed the face I remembered as jovially ugly Into something sinister.

"The back room?" he asked with a cocked eyebrow.

I nodded. He walked behind the bar and engaged in small talk with a couple of the half-dozen customers. After live minutes he selected a key from a huge ring on his belt and opened an unmarked door at the end of the bar alongside one marked "Office."

I gave it a couple of minutes before I went to the door and tapped. Manny let me in and closed and barred the door. He had a bottle and glasses already out on a small table—the room's only furnishing except an old-fashioned Iron safe in one corner.

"Long time, man," Manny said expansively. "How's old hit-the-squirrel-in-the-eye-at-a-hundred-yards?" He poured and handed me a drink. "What's your problem?"

"Not the same as yours, I hope. You talk too much, Manny." I took a swallow from my glass. "How are you fixed on Florida registrations?"

He nodded. "What're you driving?"

"A Ford all over mud on your parking lot." I handed him one of my Chet Arnold business cards. "Have your boy match that up and run off a license while he's at it."

Manny went to the door and unbarred it. He called someone over to whom he spoke in a low tone, then closed the door again. "Ready in an hour. Like what else?"

"Hardware. Preferably a Smith & Wesson .38 police special and a Colt .22 Woodsman."

He nodded again. "I'll have to send for the Woodsman but I've got a .38 right here." He was already whirling the dial on the old safe. He produced the Smith & Wesson with a flourish. "Never been fired except by me an' never in anger."

"Okay. What's the damage?"

He squinted up at the ceiling. "Oh, say six hundred. Paperwork comes high these days."

I paid him. Paperwork wasn't the only thing that came high, but I had to have those guns.

"Grab a seat at the bar," Manny said. "It's on the house. It'll give you the office when I get your stuff together. How're things in general?" Shrewd eyes in the larded-over features studied me.

"Quiet, Manny."

He chuckled. "A hundred seventy-odd thousand quiet?"

I forced my face into a smile. "I read about that. A nice touch. It sounded like Toby Coates. Or Jim Griglun."

"Toby's in Joliet," Manny said smoothly. "And Jim lost his nerve after the time in Des Moines."

"Sometimes a man gets it back."

Manny shook his head. "Not if he didn't have too much to begin." He grinned at me companionably. "That Phoenix job had your pawprints all over it. "You ought to miss a shot once in a while."

Out of the mouths of fools.

I made a mental note.

"Sorry to disappoint you," I said lightly. "I've been in hibernation." But I felt a growing sense of irritation. This kind of earache I didn't need.

I le seemed to sense my mood. "Who should know better?" lie said, cryptically enough, then opened the door. "Order up. It's on the house, remember."

I sat at the bar and ordered a highball I didn't want. Through a window at the right I could see the parking lot. A slim redhead with a limp was walking around the Ford. He raised the hood as I watched, then opened the front door, leaned inside, and wrote something down. The engine number, I figured. The redhead went back to the hood and looked inside for two or three minutes before closing it.

I nursed my drink for half an hour, then had another. I was two-thirds of the way down to the bottom of it when Manny slid onto the next stool and laid a package in my lap. "Eddie says that's a real fireball you've got on the lot," he said softly. "I got a wheelman would give his front teeth for it. You want to trade? I'll give you something to boot."

"Not right now, Manny. I'll keep you in mind, though."

I waited until he left and then went out to the car. I unwrapped the package, put the new license and registration in my wallet, and switched loads from the old guns to the new. I tried them for balance, and they felt all right. I'd check them out for sighting accuracy as soon as I had a chance.

I drove out of the lot. T doubled and twisted over a circuitous route back to my motel, more from force of habit than from any real belief that someone might be following me. Still, the conversation with Manny bothered me. Manny was a gossip. Never to the wrong people, so far as I knew, but a gossip is a gossip. This business of driving around the country so soon after a job bothered me, too. Usually I had a nice, quiet place to hole up in between jobs. This time I wasn't calling the tune, though.

I slept solidly that night.

The next morning was my fifth day since leaving Phoenix. I made another early start and left Highway 90 about thirty miles beyond Seminole, at Milton. On 90-A I hustled along through Galliver, Crestview, DcFuniak Springs, Marianna, Chatahoochee, Talahassee, and Monticello. I was on the homestretch now.

At Capps I turned south on US 19. I picked out two swift-running rivers fifty miles apart, and I threw the old Smith & Wesson into the first one and the old Woodsman into the second.

I saw a sign at the side of the highway late that afternoon. It said Town Limits, Hudson, Florida. I drove

through the main square and found a motel called the Lazy Susan on the south side of town. I'd covered 362 miles since morning. I registered, showered, ate at the motel, went into the lobby and worked my way through a month-old copy of Time, then went to bed early. I wanted to start fresh in the morning.

I had breakfast in town at a place called the Log Cabin. The building looked like stucco over logs. It was early, but the place was busy. The breakfasters were blue-collar, a factory crowd. There wasn't much conversation, even from the good-looking young waitress who wore an engagement ring but no wedding band.

I walked around the square afterward. I'd estimated the town at six or eight thousand the day before. That morning I upped it a little. The store windows looked clean, and the displayed merchandise looked fresh. There were no empty stores near the main intersection. The merchants must at least be making the rent money.

I walked past the bank with its protective iron grille drawn. It was an old building, bristling in its external impression of maximum security. Like the kind of two-dollar watch that used to be called a bulldog.

I bought a local paper at the drugstore, carried it to the little park in the square, and sat down on a bench in the early morning sunlight. The park faced the shabby-looking town hall and the post office. I looked at the post office a couple of times. To be diverted, registered mail almost had to be tampered with by post office personnel. Although of course Bunny's packaged money meant for me might not have been registered when it was intercepted.

The newspaper was a weekly. I read every line of it, including the classified ads. It's a habit of mine. Tips are where you find them. For years, I've had a subscription under one of my names to Banking, the Journal of the American Hanking Association. There's a column in it called " The Country Banker," and two of the best tips I'd ever had came right out of that column. Banking used to publish pictures of newly remodeled bank interiors, but

they've mostly cut that out. It must have occurred to

someone that they were being too helpful.

I trail the classified section carefully. If there was a tree surgeon in Hudson, Florida, he wasn't using the local paper to attract customers. I folded up the paper and walked back to where I'd parked the Ford.

Main Street in Hudson ran east-west from the traffic light in the square, not north-south on 19. I drove east on Main. When the stores thinned out, I slowed down. The first homes were small, with tiny yards or none at all. No work for a tree surgeon there.

A mile beyond the built-up section of town the area south of Main Street became a swamp. I recalled seeing it listed on a map as Thirty Mile Swamp. From its looks it was no kitchen-garden swamp, either, but a fibrous jungle of cypress and mangrove in brackish-looking water, the trees drearily festooned with Spanish moss. A hand-painted sign beside a shack said "Airboat for Hire."

I turned around and started back. Near the edge of town again I turned north and began crisscrossing side streets. Gradually I worked into higher ground and an unproved residential section. I turned finally into a block-long street with only three houses on it. Big houses. Estates. I slowed down again. This was what I needed: property that required upkeep and people with the money to pay for it. I made notes on the edge of my newspaper while I drove around.

I headed back to the town square when I'd accumulated half-a-dozen addresses. I parked in front of the local five-and-dime. Above it a sign fisted a real estate office. I climbed a flight of stairs with my paper under my arm. A young fellow hopped up from behind a desk as I entered. He had on a short-sleeved white shirt with a black tie. Below the executive level the short-sleeved white shirt is almost a uniform in this latitude. Nobody wears a jacket, and after lunch the ties come off. Nobody is ever in a hurry.

"Yes, sir?" the real estate man said briskly. He had a nice smile. "Jed Raymond, sir. May I be of help?"

"Chet Arnold," I said, and handed him one of my business cards. "I just came in to pick your brains." I looked at the notes on my paper. "There's a big white Georgian house at Sand Rock Road and Jezebel Drive." I glanced at Jed Raymond. "Odd name for a street, that."

"Old man Landscombe named it, Mr. Arnold. They do say he had his reasons." Jed Raymond looked up from a quick inspection of my card. "You want the tree work there?" He shook his head doubtfully. "Mr. Landscombe died six months ago, and there's an unholy dustup about his will. Three sets of presumptive heirs suing each other. The estate'll probably be in probate for years." Young Mr. Raymond had a soft drawl and a mournfully humorous smile. His bright, heart-shaped face was under a ginger-colored, conservative haircut. Any woman over thirty would have taken him to raise, glad of the chance.

"Who's the estate administrator?" I asked. "He shouldn't want the property run down."

"I believe it's Judge Carberry." He pronounced it "Cah'bry." "If he's not he'll know who is. You could have somethin' there."

I wrote the name down. "How about a fieldstone rancher up on University Place and Golden Hill Lane?"

"Belongs to Mr. Craig at the bank. His daddy used to be in the lumber business. So'd Roger Craig, until he had a heart attack a while back. He came into the bank then. I guess his family owned most of it, anyway."

I decided to skip the remainder of my list for the time being. A judge and a banker. Better still, a banker who had been in the lumber business. If I could crack either one, I was in business in Hudson, Florida. "You know your real estate," I told Jed Raymond. "Anything in the regulations says I can't buy your lunch one of these days?"

"II there is I'll get it amended," he grinned. He tucked my business card into his shirt pocket. "I'll keep this, if you don't mind. I might hear of something for you."

" Thanks. I'm at the Lazy Susan now. If I change, I'll let you know. D'you happen to have a detailed map of the area?"

He reached in a counter drawer and handed me a thickly folded-over packet. "This one's even got the projected streets in the new development east of town." He waved me off when I put my hand into my pocket. "Hope you do y'self some good locally, Mr. Arnold."

"Chet," I said.

"Jed," he returned with another smile.

I went back down the stairs to the street. I always carry two toolkits with me, a large one to work from and a small one for show. I got the small one out of the trunk of the Ford after tucking two double-bitted axes into the loops on either side of the chest.

When a man formerly in the lumber business saw such a kit, I shouldn't have too much trouble getting into his office to talk to him.