Act of Fear

Chapter 5

The man who came out of the alley to maul me was big but slow.

‘Lay off Jo-Jo!’

I’m not big, and I’m not slow. About five-foot-ten, 160 pounds, and a face that is not the dream of even an ugly schoolgirl. (Especially an ugly schoolgirl. The ugly look for beauty. The beautiful don’t have to look for it in others.) But I can catch a fly in mid-air, and when I was a kid I ran the hundred in eleven seconds flat. I’ve run it faster since when there was no one to clock me except a shadow with hot breath behind me. When you have the average number and size of muscles, no fighting skills except cunning, and you’ve picked up a handicap like one arm along the way, you have to develop good legs and quick wits. It’s called compensation or adaptation or just learning to use what you have.

‘Lay off Jo-Jo!’

As I said, he was big but slow. He was also anxious. His first punch got my left shoulder. It was a good punch and would have paralysed my left arm if I had had a left arm. He only got the left shoulder because he had lunged off balance the way a man will who has been waiting too long to throw the punch. He was no trained fighter, but he had muscles. His fist felt like a small bowling ball. I bounced off a wall like a duck pin. His second punch was slow in coming. I had time to roll with it. That was lucky, because it was aimed at my chin and was a lot more accurate.

His trouble was that he had his message on his mind. Any good fighter, ring or street, will claim that to fight well you must have your mind on your work. The fighter who sees the crowd or keeps one eye out for the cops is a loser. His mind was too busy.

‘Layoff!’

I rolled with the second punch, that came too slow. I threw one short jab at his face just to slow him down, kicked his shin as hard as I could, and rolled two garbage cans into his path. He ducked my punch, howled when I got his shin solid, and sprawled over the garbage cans when he tried to get at me again. By the time he picked himself up I was nothing but heels going away fast. I think I was leaning on the bar in Packy’s Pub and halfway through my first whiskey before the big man knew for sure that I was gone. And my brain was at work. Because I had a clear picture in my mind — a picture of the big man’s feet and shoes.

I suppose I saw the shoes when the big man went down over the garbage cans. They were the ancient, pointed, two-toned brown and beige shoes the fashion-plate hoods used to wear in the twenties and thirties. Legs Diamond and oh you kid. And the feet on the big man were like doll’s feet. They were, of course, the shoes and feet of the man I had seen outside the precinct station on Monday. Which meant that the big man had been watching me three days. That figured, because he had known that I frequented Packy’s Pub, or he could not have been in the alley where he had been. He had probably made the silent call, too. All I had out of it was a cut lip that oozed blood, but I wanted to know who the man was.

‘A big guy,’ I said to Joe and Packy Wilson. ‘Blond or going grey. It was dark. A square face, big and flabby, with jowls and small eyes. A good enough suit, and some kind of accent. He wears small shoes for such a big man. The pair he had on were pointed, two-toned brown and beige. He needed spats.’

Joe thought hard. Joe has worked in most of the saloons in Chelsea, and he drinks in most of the others.

‘I don’t place him,’ Joe said. ‘He don’t drink around here.’

‘If he’s who I think,’ Packy Wilson said, ‘he drinks in the good places. The clubs over in the Village and Little Italy. Maybe the Fifth Avenue places and even uptown.’

‘Has he got a name,’ I said, ‘or do I have to guess?’

‘Olsen,’ Packy said. ‘Lars Olsen. They call him Swede.’

I did not need a sworn statement to know that the big man was Jo-Jo Olsen’s father. It made me think. There is a big difference between telling a friend like Pete Vitanza to mind his own business and trying to stop me asking questions about Jo-Jo by using his fists on my skull. It is a matter of degree, of importance. Swede Olsen really didn’t want anyone nosing around after Jo-Jo. Why?

‘Lend me your gun,’ I said to Joe.

I don’t carry a gun. It’s too dangerous. When you carry a gun you get to depend on it too much. Sooner or later you will use it. A man with a gun is a marked man. I’m a fair shot, but I don’t want to prove it and find out the hard way that the other man is better. A gun ruins the brains. But sometimes it can be a needed convincer. Olsen had already jumped me once.

‘Be careful,’ Joe said.

I put the. 38 Police Special in my belt. The night street was as hot as it had been at noon. Pete Vitanza’s list gave Olsen’s address as on Nineteenth Street, not far from Packy’s. I assumed that Swede would have gone home to clean off the garbage. Not that I felt the need for revenge. As far as I was concerned, Swede Olsen could go his way unchastised by me. I would be glad to never run into the Swede, or Norwegian, again. The gun was just for show. If it came to a fight, the odds were still all on his side. But if I was going on I had to talk to Swede sooner or later, and I could not let him think he had scared me, even if he had. That’s bad business and bad living.

It’s not so important to win a fight, but it is important to not let the other man win. I wanted Swede to get the idea that I’d get up each time he knocked me down. The fight wouldn’t end. That’s the best way to make a man stop knocking you down — make him know that it won’t get him what he wants. And I wanted him to know that I knew who had jumped me. I’m supposed to be a detective, and it might worry him to think that I knew my work.

The building was not too bad, and not too good. The usual six-storey old-law tenement with the fire escape in front. There were worse on the block, and there were better. It had been worked on some, but it had not exactly been renovated. In the white-tiled vestibule I studied the doorbells and mailboxes. I got a kind of surprise. The Olsens lived on the top floor, which is the cheap floor in a six-storey walkup. But from the look of the mailboxes they had the whole floor. That made their place the best apartment in the building, or at least the biggest. In this building, unrenovated, there were four to six apartments on each floor. The Olsens had a whole floor. Olsen had his name on all four mailboxes of the top floor. It meant that there was money around somewhere. It made them look like pretty fair-sized fish in a small and shabby pond.

From what Petey Vitanza had told me I’d already figured that the Olsens, except Jo-Jo, were not exactly a hard-working family. If they were parasites on some gaudier fish, it looked like that other bigger fish was making pretty big waves. While I was pressing another bell on the first floor I remembered Swede’s shoes and his decent enough suit and the information from Packy Wilson that Olsen drank in the better places.

The door buzzed to let me in, and I whipped through the downstairs hall fast. I waited out of sight on the first landing until the irate woman I’d buzzed on the first floor finished muttering a few obscene remarks on the ancestry and occupations of what she supposed had been the kids of the neighbourhood. When her door finally closed I started up the stairs. Not as quietly as a cat, but quiet.

Whatever else he was, Swede Olsen was not worried enough or cautious enough to wonder how come his upstairs bell rang without the downstairs bell. You can usually count on that in New York, because I never saw a building where the downstairs bells always worked or where the downstairs door wasn’t either broken half the time or left open to air out the hallways.

Swede opened the door himself and right away. He was my man. The suit had been changed, but the shoes were there on the small feet. The white of the shoes was stained with a mixture of coffee grounds and soggy orange peels. He was a big man, the face was square, and the blond hair was four-fifths grey. His hands were big and fleshy. There was discoloration on the knuckles of his right hand that would be a bruise tomorrow. His complexion was pale from too much time in places with dim light and no air. He was surprised. Even shocked. Me he hadn’t expected.

‘Dan Fortune, remember?’ I said. ‘Coffee looks good on the shoes.’

His jowled face went a bright shade of magenta. He clenched his bruised fist. I opened my suit jacket and displayed the police special. He took a step in my direction. I dangled the gun. I didn’t point it, you understand, I waved it lightly around under his nose, which was six inches above mine. He was a slow thinker. The danger was that he would start swinging before he thought it out. A smarter type would maybe have guessed that the last thing I would do was use the gun. With Swede the risk was that he would figure he could hit me before I used the gun. But the danger passed. His small eyes blinked at the gun and he stepped back. My diaphragm relaxed. He let me walk into the apartment.

‘What the hell do you want, Fortune?’

‘Some talk,’ I said. ‘It was too dark where we met last. Besides, we were both too busy in the alley.’

The apartment was big and ugly, just like Swede Olsen himself. Walls had been knocked down to make one large apartment out of the four small ones, but all they had accomplished was to make a big box out of small boxes. The place was not lack-of-money ugly; it was plain rotten-taste ugly. The whole place shouted of money made too late to know how to spend it. The living-room had cost a lot to furnish, but it still looked like the cheap room it was. The decoration was the kind they used to ship out to Africa to cheat the natives out of their ivory and gold. The couch and two chairs were purple-red velvet with gargoyle wooden legs. All covered with plastic to protect the beauty.

‘You crazy?’ Swede said. ‘I never saw you before.’

He was a terrible liar. He had known me on sight.

‘Then you don’t mind telling me about Jo-Jo,’ I said.

It confused him. His fists began to clench again. I guess that every problem that ever faced Swede Olsen had been met with his only argument — clenched fists. This time even he seemed to sense that he was not reacting very consistently.

‘What about Jo-Jo,’ he said cautiously.

‘Where is he, Swede?’

It was too much for him. ‘I told you to lay off!’

‘I thought you never saw me before?’

He blinked like a moth in a sudden light. His confusion was complete. I had a good chance of getting something out of him. The woman who spoke behind me must have thought the same.

‘Get out of here, mister.’

She looked like one of those Okie women you see in the pictures of the Dust Bowl in the Depression standing beside a grey and battered flivver piled with the junk that was all she owned. Her face looked like a ploughed field that had baked as hard and dry as stone in the sun. Her hair had started out blonde, and her eyes were washed-out blue. The eyes were now glacier blue, and the hair was grey and hung like limp string. Her hands were cracked like a dried-out mud puddle. But her clothes had cost a fair bundle, and the hands were clean. Her black sheath dress even had some style and taste, except that on her it looked like the shroud of a scarecrow. On her the triple strand of real pearls looked like rope. The years had left her nothing to hang clothes on but a bag of old bones and a leather skin.

‘I’ll handle it, Magda,’ Swede said.

His voice would not have convinced even me. The woman ignored him. I knew who was the real muscle in this house. Magda Olsen. The wife. She looked like Swede’s mother, but she was his wife, the mother of Jo-Jo. Magda had not had a rosy youth. She looked at me as if I were a cockroach she knew too well.

‘Forget my boy, you hear?’ Magda Olsen said.

‘What’s his trouble, Magda? Maybe he needs help.’

‘Get lost.’

‘You don’t want him found?’

‘Who says he’s lost,’ the woman said.

‘I say he’s lost,’ I said. ‘What I can’t say is if it’s voluntary or with some persuasion.’

‘Beat it,’ Magda Olsen said. She had a one-track mind, and she was brighter and quicker than her man. She knew that I knew nothing. She was not about to tell me anything. I decided to shoot in the dark. One thing was sure: if they knew anything, they knew more than I did. The dark was all I had to shoot in. But I knew now that something was not right with Jo-Jo. I thought about the most probable reason for Jo-Jo to run — that he had seen who mugged Stettin. In which case, someone else would be after him.

‘The other guy looking for Jo-Jo will play a lot rougher,’ I said. ‘If I found him, I could help.’

It was at this exact moment that I knew I had a real case on my hands. I was not just wasting time on a boy’s bad hunch, and Jo-Jo Olsen was not sunning himself on a cosy beach. My wild shot hit home.

Swede looked like he’d been kicked in a tender place. Magda Olsen froze into stone. Swede sweated through the fresh suit jacket. Swede was worried wet. Magda was worried, too, but she was also determined. She was determined to follow the course of action they were on, whatever that was. And I had a strange feeling about Magda and Swede Olsen. Call it a sensation. Call it an opinion. They were worried, yes. But they were not worried about Jo-Jo. They were worried about themselves.

‘Tell me about the other guy,’ I said.

‘Beat it,’ Magda Olsen said.

‘Did Jo-Jo see that cop mugged?’

‘Get lost, mister!’ Magda said.

If I had had Swede alone, I think I could have made some progress. As it was, I was ready to go on with the dance. I did not have the chance. Two men entered from some other room, and the music stopped. They were boys, not men, but they were big boys. They looked enough like Swede to tell me that I was looking at two of Jo-Jo’s brothers. There was a girl behind them. The girl was pretty. The boys were not.

‘Take off,’ one of the blond boys said.

‘My mother said get lost,’ the second giant said.

I had the pistol in my belt. I did not even show it this time. The two boys looked about as dumb as Swede, and they did not have his forty-odd years of learning that caution pays. They had not had all the long, hard years to develop doubts. They would not hesitate. I turned without a word and went.

I left them all there in that gaudy sewer of a living room, standing in a line like a firing squad. The boys and Swede were all broad grins. My back going away without a fight made them feel big and strong. The women were not grinning. The ruined face of the mother was as stony as ever above that expensive black dress. As I reached the door I glanced back and saw the old woman already talking hard to Swede.

Then I saw the girl. She had to be Jo-Jo’s sister. I saw her eyes watching me. I had the sudden impression that she was the only one of them who was not completely happy to see my back.