The Seven File

Eleven

“Is the baby feeling better?”

“You heard the nurse, didn’t you?” Grant’s tone was abrupt and irritable. “The baby’s fever went up, she thinks. So how could the kid be better?”

“Well, don’t bite my head off.” Belle said.

It was nine o’clock Monday morning. Grant was fully dressed, but Belle wore only a slip and a pair of pink mules. The windows of their room faced the water, and Grant stood in front of them doing his deep-breathing exercises. The day would be clear and mild, he thought. And quiet... He was developing a compulsive anger at the look and feel of this countryside. The vivid colors hurt his eyes, and after last night’s storm the stillness seemed to be drumming against his nerves. He was becoming grateful for any noise that shattered the serene spreading silence. In the silences he found himself listening for things...

“What can we do for the baby?” Belle asked him.

She sat on the edge of the bed painting her nails. The smoke from her cigarette stung her eyes, and she tipped her head sideways to avoid it; the pose was rather birdlike and attentive, as if she were listening for sounds in another part of the house. She had decided that morning to make an effort at more careful grooming. If she let herself go to pieces she’d be miserable. She knew that from experience. No more liquor, she had decided. Just one or two highballs after dinner. Sometimes that helped her sleep. She had got up early this morning and forced herself under a cold shower, and now she felt not only clean but virtuous. With her foundation on, and plenty of make-up, she’d look fine. But she was almost too cold to care; her lips were stiff, and she could see the goose pimples on her bare arms and legs.

She realized that Grant hadn’t answered her question about the baby. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back, head thrust forward, staring out of the windows. Like an ox, she thought. And just as communicative. But her reflections were good-humored; she admired his bulk, his silent indifference to her feelings.

“This is really no place for a kid,” she said.

“We could have stayed at the Waldorf, of course.”

“Well, you might have found a place with central heating,” she said.

“Jails have central heating,” he said with heavy irony. “Would that make you happy?”

“What are you going to do about the baby?”

“Don’t worry, a fever won’t kill her.” Grant turned from the window and began pacing up and down the small room. Nothing could slip, he thought. They’d know this afternoon if the Bradleys had the money in their house. Undoubtedly they had; the old man wouldn’t have come all the way down from Boston without it. So it was just a question of the payoff. There was no problem there, either. The arrangements were sure fire. All Creasy had to do was pick up the money. Then they could split up.

“I don’t like the way Duke is acting,” Belle said, inspecting one hand critically. “He behaves like a high school kid when he’s trying to impress somebody.”

“Who’s he trying to impress?”

“Our road-company Florence Nightingale, who do you think?”

“So he likes girls. It’s not a Federal rap.”

“But he’s reckless, Eddie. Nothing matters to him. Not even his own neck.”

“Stop worrying about him. He’ll do what I tell him.”

Belle smiled and resumed work on her nails. She liked a certain amount of rough handling: it was a man’s world and that suited her perfectly. Considerate and gentle men made her uncomfortable. “I’m glad you’re running this deal,” she said.

Grant was smiling faintly as he sat down by the window and lit a cigarette. He wouldn’t have admitted it, but he was grateful for her complacent confidence in him. “You should have known me in the old days,” he said. “I had a dozen characters like Duke hanging around me just to light my cigarettes.”

“Oh, come on now.”

“Well, half a dozen anyway. I had it made all right,” he said, settling himself more comfortably in the chair. “There was a place called Donovan’s in my ward, Belle, a big steak house right near North Clark Street and McCormick. All during the Twenties it ran as a speak. It never closed.” Staring at the tip of his cigarette the smile faded slowly from his broad, pale face. “I went to lunch there every day. So did all the big shots in the city. The mobsters, the bookies and politicians, the big union wheels, even the mayor. They all turned up at Donovan’s two or three times a week. It was like a big club. A tourist couldn’t get a stool at the bar.” Grant frowned faintly, caught up in memories. The smell of the place hit you first, he was thinking; liquor and food and thick expensive cigar smoke, a smell as exciting as the idea of power. Next there was the bustle and noise, the waiters in starched shirts and black ties hurrying around with shots of whiskey and big steak platters, smiling and bobbing their heads to old customers, hardly seeing the people who didn’t count. It was a kick just to walk into the place. Being on the inside of all the deals, that was the big thing though. Getting the straight dope on horses, fights, the shiftings in the police department and the Hall, knowing why things happened when they did, who pulled the strings...

“I never had to order,” he said. “I had the same table for years. I drank twenty-year-old Scotch and ate nothing but steaks that cost six bucks a throw. Every waiter in the joint knew my order.” He glanced up and saw that she had stopped working on her nails and was smiling at him. “It sounds wonderful. Eddie,” she said.

“What’s wonderful?” he said, shrugging; he knew he had been talking foolishly and revealingly. “It’s just a steak house.” He dropped his cigarette on the polished pinewood floor and ground it out with the tip of his shoe. “I’ll go back there one of these days,” he said, and unconsciously his voice became bitter and hard. “They’ll be glad to see me.” The idea of Donovan’s had become a symbol of everything he had lost; in jail he had longed for the feeling of importance that came when the brass-bound door swung open for him. when he strolled into the big noisy room, at ease and at home with the big men who ran the city. And all those years in jail he had dreamed of returning to Donovan’s, planning his entrances to the smallest detail; he would wear a gabardine suit, a two-hundred-dollar job the color of well-creamed coffee, with brown-and-white shoes, a dark blue shirt and red tic, and he’d stop just inside the door for a few seconds, nodding to Joe and Max behind the bar. looking around slowly and easily, and then he’d light a cigarette and walk straight down the room to his regular table. Just like those years in jail had never happened...

Duke’s voice fell across his thoughts. “Hey, Eddie, come down here a second.”

“He couldn’t come up, of course,” Belle said.

Grant looked at her irritably, and then went downstairs to the living room Duke and the nurse stood at the front door, obviously ready to leave; they wore topcoats, and Duke was tossing the car keys up and down in his hand. His brother was standing at the fireplace.

“Keep an eye on him, Eddie,” Duke said. “See that he doesn’t get into the jam.”

“Where do you think you’re going?”

“Into town.” Duke smiled and took the girl’s arm. “Errand of mercy. The kid’s fever seems better, but she needs nose drops, a salve for her chest, that sort of stuff.”

Grant fought to control his swelling anger. “And you’re the hero that’s going to get it?”

“No, not me. the nurse,” Duke said easily. “The people in town know I’m Hank’s brother. If I was shopping for a sick kid the word would get around. Neighbors and friends might drop in to see if they could help. But nobody knows the girl. She can buy what she likes without causing any talk. See what I mean?”

He was right, Grant realized, but that wasn’t important — what mattered was that Duke hadn’t bothered to consult him first.

“We’re ready to go,” Duke said quietly. “Anything you want us to bring you?”

Grant hesitated, reluctant to force the issue. “Did you check the radio this morning?” he said. “The news show, I mean?”

“Sure. There’s nothing on us. Nothing at all.”

“Okay, get back here as fast as you can,” Grant said shortly. He tried to sound as if he were granting Duke permission to leave, but it didn’t come off that way; they all realized he was avoiding a challenge.

Belle came downstairs as Duke was starting the car. The noise of the motor was a series of shattering sounds against the silence. She smiled a good morning at Hank and then glanced at Grant who was still staring at the front door.

“Duke going somewhere?” she asked him.

“We need groceries. And the baby needs some things.”

“Oh.” Belle glanced at Hank, sensing that Grant’s mood was ugly. “Where’s the girl? The nurse, I mean.”

“She went with Duke,” Hank said.

“Was that smart?”

Hank shrugged. “I wouldn’t know.”

“Judas Priest. Eddie, what did you let them go for?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Grant said, without looking at her. “It’s all right.”

Hank knew that Grant’s temper was dangerously short; he had lost to Duke by default and that was eating at him.

“Eddie, it wasn’t smart,” Belle said. “Duke’s after that girl. You don’t know what kind of a dumb thing he might do while he’s alone with her.”

“Don’t worry about it, I told you,” Grant said.

“How do you know Duke didn’t wake the girl up the night he took the baby?”

“What do you mean?” Grant said, turning and staring at her.

“Maybe he woke her up deliberately, that’s what I mean. He says she caught him in the nursery, but how can you be sure? It’s his story, that’s all. I wouldn’t be surprised if he woke her up just so he could bring her with us.”

“Shut up!” Grant said, making an abrupt, silencing gesture with his hand. “Stop talking up trouble.”

“I may be saving us trouble, Eddie.”

“And I told you to shut up. Duke isn’t crazy. He’s thinking of his hide just like the rest of us.”

“That’s right,” Hank said.

They both looked at him and Grant said dryly, “Thanks a lot, Junior.”

“He’s his brother after all,” Belle said. “He should know.”

“All right, he knows. And he knows his brother is no crackpot. That’s why I’m telling you.”

Hank put a cigarette in his mouth and struck a match with his good hand. “It’s not quite that simple,” he said. “Duke makes sense to himself. But sometimes other people can’t see that so they’re liable to think he’s a little cracked.”

Belle smiled at him as she sat down and crossed her legs. “That’s an interesting way to look at it,” she said, moving her foot about in a small circle. “I’m not sure I understand it, but it’s interesting anyway.”

“It’s pretty deep,” Grant said dryly. “It means Duke is smart. It means he gets what he wants.”

“That’s it exactly,” Hank said. “Regardless.”

Grant turned away from them and strolled to the windows. He stood there for a few seconds and the silence in the room stretched into a curious tension; the conversation wasn’t over yet, and everyone realized that. Duke was a subject of desperate importance to Grant and Belle; they didn’t trust him but their lives were in his hands. They wanted clues to his character, indices to his patterns of behavior. They had to know what made him tick. Hank had guessed this earlier, but now he was sure of it; he could feel their uneasiness in the silence.

Grant turned slowly and looked at him. “What do you mean ‘regardless?’ ” he said.

“Regardless?”

“You said that he got what he wanted ‘regardless.’ ” Grant gestured irritably with one hand. “What do you mean?”

“Oh. Well, I simply meant that he’d scare you with the chances he’d take. If he wanted something, that is.” Hank smiled and shook his head as if he were savoring an old, bitter-sweet memory. “One summer, for instance, Duke looked like a cinch to win the first prize for the biggest muskie caught in Lake Sandstone. The prize was twenty-five dollars, quite a bit of money in those days, and it was put up by one of the big lodges on the lake. Duke caught a beauty in July, a forty-six-pounder, and the contest ended on Labor Day. By the first of September he looked like a shoo-in. No one else had caught anything close to his big one.” Hank took a drag on his cigarette, all of his movements casual and deliberate. Then he smiled at Grant who was watching him with a hard little frown.

“You wouldn’t think twenty-five dollars would mean such a lot to a man,” he said. “I mean, a fish is a fish. But Duke wanted that prize.”

“Okay, okay, so what happened?” Grant said.

“He won the contest, all right,” Hank said, “but it was no shoo-in. A day before the contest ended the word came into the lodge that one of Duke’s Friends had caught a whopper. He was still out on the lake with it, but he’d showed it to a man coming in. And this fellow said the fish might go sixty pounds. This was around dusk, and there was only a little bit of light still showing on the horizon.”

“Never mind the nature touches,” Grant said. “Let’s have the results. You said Duke won. How come — when somebody else caught a bigger fish?”

“Well, that’s what I meant by ‘regardless,’ ” Hank said. “Duke took out a motorboat and cut his friend’s boat in half. Ran him down. He said he didn’t see him in the dark.”

Belle drew a sharp breath. “I’ve never heard of anything so terrible.”

“But Duke got what he wanted. His friend lost all of his tackle, plus his record fish. And he almost lost his life. But Duke got the twenty-five bucks. So it made sense to Duke. Other people might not see it that way, of course.”

“Kids are always pulling damn-fool stunts like that.” Grant said. “How old was he then?”

“About twenty-three,” Hank said quietly.

Grant let out his breath slowly and turned back to the windows. He stared at the gravel road that wound past the house. The sun was stronger now, sparkling on the dew in the fields.

“Eddie?”

He turned and looked at her. She was very pale and her fingers moved nervously along the sides of her dress. “Well, what?”

“Oh, nothing.”

He swore softly and turned back to the window. Belle smiled tentatively at Hank, as if entreating him to ignore Grant’s bad manners. “This is going to be a nice day. isn’t it?” she said.

Hank glanced at the sun-bright windowpanes. “They picked a good morning for their shopping,” he said. “Half the country probably has the same idea.”

“That’s right,” Belle said slowly. She glanced at Grant’s tense shoulders, a worried little frown on her face. “The stores will be crowded, I suppose.”

Hank nodded. “Mobbed.”