Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 49, No. 1 & 2, January/February 2004

Fall Guy by Dave Reddall

The snow was tapering off, coming straight down now. Small flakes that glistened like diamond dust. Even without the wind it was bitterly cold.

Kermit stashed the morning’s haul of returnable cans and bottles where they would be safe and set off for Liberty Street. He needed gloves, and Saturday was the day people usually chose to drop off food and clothing at the shelter.

Luck was with him for once: a brand new pair of insulated gloves. The right size, too. Kermit was a big man and rarely found anything to fit. As he stood in front of the shelter, flexing his fingers in his new gloves, Cadillac Jack stepped up and said good morning.

Most of the people on the street had nicknames. Kermit quickly became Froggie, from the television puppet. He detested the name but, short of kicking someone’s slats in, there was little he could do about it. And despite his size, he had a horror of violence.

Cadillac Jack got his nickname when he appeared at the shelter a couple of weeks earlier. He was dropped off by a midnight blue Coupe DeVille and you had to wonder, because he looked then like he looked now: ragged. But climbing out of a Caddy, nonetheless. He came and went and pretty much kept to himself, rarely engaging in conversation. Which made this morning’s greeting unusual.

“Want to make a quick hundred bucks, Frogman?”

Kermit was on guard at once. There was no such thing as free money.

“How?”

“Simple. You just fall down.”

Kermit grinned. “Hell, Jack. I’ve been known to do that on occasion.”

Jack moved closer, eyes narrowed. He was short and scrawny, not enough meat on him to make a sick man a sandwich, thought Kermit. But he vaguely remembered from his school days that Stalin was only about five foot four, and one of his legs was shorter than the other. Kermit wasn’t sure who Stalin was — probably a Nazi — but he knew that the little man had killed a lot of people, so you just never knew. And right now Cadillac Jack seemed just a little menacing.

“Listen up, Froggie. You need to be stone cold sober for this gig. Otherwise, forget it.”

Kermit considered what a hundred dollars would mean: a fistful of lottery tickets, something to drink besides cheap muscatel, a half hour with one of the whores down on Exeter Street.

“Okay. What’s the deal?”

“You know where the Big League Deli is on Dudley Avenue?”

“Sure.”

“Okay. Right in front there’s a heave in the sidewalk — one section’s raised up an inch or two.” He flashed a thin smile. “Hell, someone could trip on that, get hurt.”

“Like me,” said Kermit.

Jack nodded. “At exactly twelve forty-five this afternoon you take a flop on that sidewalk. Make it a good one, and don’t get up right away. Your hip hurts. Your back hurts. You got some serious pain, right? So you lay there awhile until a guy wearing a long red scarf offers to drive you to the E.R. Go with him.”

“When do I get paid?”

“This guy will take you to see someone who’ll give you the yard.” He looked Kermit over critically. “Put on your best clothes, if you got any. And for crissake, shave. You want to make a good impression, don’t you?”

It was a piece of cake.

Kermit arrived at the designated time, stubbed his foot on the broken sidewalk, and went pinwheeling to the ground. He lay there, moaning and refusing help, until a well-dressed man in a red scarf offered assistance.

Now he leaned back in the plush leather seat of the blue Cadillac, shooting occasional glances at the silent driver.

“I was good, huh?”

“Yeah, a regular Bogart. Get out at the next corner. Go into the Starlight Lounge, take a booth, and wear this.” He handed Kermit the scarf. “Someone will be right along.”

The Starlight was a step above the places Kermit frequented when he had some money, but not a very big step. The tabletops were grimy and the place smelled of disinfectant and stale beer. An elderly number slept quietly, the side of his face flattened against the mahogany bar.

A few minutes later a corpulent balding man in a blue overcoat squeezed in across from Kermit. The veins in his nose were busted, and despite the weather, he was sweating.

“The scarf, please.”

Kermit surrendered the scarf and the fat man handed him fifty dollars.

“Supposed to be a hundred,” said Kermit.

“Shut up and listen. My name is Victor Quantz. I’m your lawyer. In a few minutes you will leave here and walk across the street. Next to the Army Navy Store you’ll see a clinic. Go in. Listen to what the doctor says and then do it. Do it without any questions, without any deviation. Got it?”

Kermit nodded. The lawyer struggled to his feet and leaned over the table, jabbing a fleshy forefinger at Kermit.

“Don’t screw up.”

The door of the clinic was open. In the dimly lit room stood an X-ray machine covered in dust, an examination table with an unused paper sheet, and a metal desk. Seated behind the desk was a gaunt, grayhaired man wearing dark glasses. Several forms were spread before him on the desk.

“Have a seat. I’m Doctor LaFleur. You’ve had a nasty fall, Mr. — What is your name?”

“Kermit McGuire.”

“Age?”

“Thirty-seven.”

“Alright, Mr. McGuire. You are suffering from decreased range of motion, tenderness of the paraspinal areas, decreased deep-tendon reflexes, positive straight-leg raising of only, oh, say ten percent, decreased abduction of the hips, and — are you married? Girlfriend?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Very well. No loss of consortium.” He put down the pen and steepled his hands. “As I said, a bad fall. You will be partially disabled for some time.” He produced a pair of crutches. “You will need these. Now please attend closely. You are incapable of any kind of normal activity.” He tapped the desktop for emphasis. “Do not, for any reason, go anywhere without the crutches, and do not discuss your case with anyone. There may be insurance investigators nosing around. Now, sign here, and here.”

He handed Kermit fifty dollars and a business card.

“Starting next week you’ll begin seeing this woman. She’s a chiropractor.”

“A what?”

“A backcracker. Her office is a couple of blocks from the shelter, so you can walk. But remember—”

“I know. Use the crutches.”

By Tuesday the money was gone and Kermit was growing weary of the invalid act. It made collecting cans and bottles, which he was now forced to resume, awkward and time consuming. If he’d known ahead of time that it was going to be a long-term deal, he would have asked for two hundred. Maybe he would anyway next time he saw Cadillac Jack.

He was working his way up Washington Street, pleased with the day’s take. The large plastic garbage bag was nearly full. He set it down and hobbled over to a refuse can. As he was removing the lid, he caught a rapid motion out of the corner of his eye.

The kid wore a black hooded sweatshirt and hightop sneakers. And he was fast. Before Kermit could react, the kid snatched up the bag of cans and darted across the street.

Kermit immediately gave chase, dodging cars and pedestrians as he sprinted east up Washington. The thief vaulted a low picket fence and disappeared behind a three-decker. Kermit leapt the fence and rounded the corner of the house, but the kid was already a block away and Kermit was winded.

“Little bastard!” he fumed. Five bucks or so, gone with the wind. He made his way back down the street to where his crutches lay.

And then he spotted the videocamera.

It was perched on the shoulder of a very large black man and it was pointed directly at Kermit. The cameraman’s face bore a wide grin.

A setup! And like a fool he’d fallen for it. Hadn’t the doctor warned him about insurance investigators? And he clearly remembered the look on Quantz’s face when he’d said, “Don’t screw up.”

As he stood wondering what to do next, his gaze wandered across the street, then froze. Standing at the curb, one hand resting on the hood of the blue Cadillac, was the man who had driven him to meet Quantz. He wasn’t moving, just staring fixedly at Kermit.

Fear then hit him like a lead weight. The crutches were still several feet away and who knew how much of Kermit’s blunder the man had witnessed. Probably all of it.

Kermit turned and ran. He didn’t stop until he reached Hudson Boulevard where he ducked into the Elite Diner. He ordered coffee and took a seat where he could keep an eye on the street.

The magnitude of what he had done was beginning to register. Scamming the insurance companies was, he assumed, a serious crime. Through his carelessness he had made everyone involved subject to exposure. A lot of people were going to be very angry.

He checked his resources: five dollars and eleven cents, minus the coffee. Why had he blown through the hundred so fast? If only he’d put some aside he could get a room, or even leave town. Instead, he’d pissed it away on scratch tickets and booze and — he’d squared accounts with Gomez.

He paid for the coffee and walked three blocks to the Mediterranean Hotel, the roach trap where Gomez lived. Gomez could afford a room because he received SSI “crazy checks,” as he called them. Kermit wasn’t sure if Gomez was crazy or not, but he was decidedly weird. For a while he had wandered around town pointing a television remote control unit at the passing cars and people and screaming that he couldn’t change the channel. They sent him to Bridgewater for observation after that, but he was back in a month, although without the remote.

Kermit had paid Gomez a visit on the day of his “accident.” He had owed his friend twenty dollars for some time and was glad for the opportunity to finally pay it back. When Gomez had inquired about the crutches, Kermit told him the whole story. He was quite proud of himself at the time.

He entered the small room and was immediately blinded. Walls and ceiling were lined with aluminum foil, which bounced the light from the bare bulb pitilessly into his eyes. Even the window was covered. Gomez sat in an armchair that leaked stuffing, smoking a cigarette.

“What’s this?” Kermit gestured at the walls.

“Protection,” Gomez said, lighting a fresh cigarette from the old.

“From what?”

“The rays, man.”

“What rays?”

“Jeez, Froggie, don’t you watch the news, read the papers? Rays. Radio waves, television waves, shortwaves, microwaves, X-rays, cosmic rays. Guy on the tube says we’re all swimming in an ocean of electronic waves.” He inhaled deeply, reducing a quarter of the cigarette to ash. “Not me. Uh-uh. I stay in as much as I can. The tinfoil keeps the rays out. You ever seen what a microwave does to a piece of meat? Well, we’re meat.”

“Yeah, sure. Look, I need a place to stay. Just for a few days. I was wondering if maybe—”

“Cops?” said Gomez, visibly alarmed.

“No, nothing like that. Couple of guys are looking for me. No big deal. How about it?”

Gomez squinted through the haze of cigarette smoke. “Where are your crutches, by the way?”

“Ah, that’s history. Deal fell through.”

Gomez smoked furiously for a minute as he considered his friend’s answer.

“Deal fell through, or something went wrong?”

Kermit shifted his weight from one foot to the other and then, because he was not a practiced liar and because he needed to talk to someone about his problem, he told Gomez what had transpired.

“So that’s it, and now I need a place to hole up until things cool off a little. What do you say?”

Gomez shook his head vigorously. “I don’t think so, Froggie. I mean, I don’t feel comfortable with guests, you know? This is a small space. Someone else is here, it feels like they’re using up the air. I have trouble breathing. Uh-uh. No can do.”

Kermit noted the overflowing ashtrays and was about to suggest that there would be more air to breathe if Gomez simply stopped smoking. But he didn’t want to offend his friend, and besides he sensed it would be futile: the sudden fear in the room was as palpable as the cigarette smoke.

After a few more minutes of small talk, Kermit returned to the street, hair and clothes reeking of tobacco. It was dark now and snowing harder. Light from the stores spilled out onto the snowy sidewalks and for a moment the scene reminded him of the town he’d grown up in. Not for the first time he wondered what his life would have been like had he stayed there, gone to work for his father, maybe met a girl.

A bus ground by, filling his nose with diesel fumes. Kermit snapped to and turned his mind to the problem at hand. He felt exposed on the street and there was no way he could return to the shelter. He decided to seek help from the smartest person he knew, the Professor.

The Professor’s tent consisted of several blue tarps stretched over an old tent frame and held down at the edges by cinder blocks. It was located roughly in the middle of eighty acres of woods behind the municipal airport, land that had so far escaped development and sometimes served as shelter for the homeless.

Kermit came prepared with an offering, a bottle of Night Train, which had used up the last of his money. He explained his predicament and fell silent. There was only one seat, a weathered barber chair that served the Professor as both chair and bed. Kermit had to remain standing, the alternative being to sit on the damp ground.

Light from a pair of flickering candles chased shadows across the Professor’s face. He was a huge man, bigger even than Kermit, his size accentuated by a full gray beard and bulky overcoat. It was rumored that he had once been a lawyer. For a few bucks or a bottle he would render advice on state and local ordinances governing vagrancy, trespassing, petty larceny, and other statutes of concern to his constituents, or on anything else that anyone cared to ask.

To Kermit he said, “It’s a clear case of a fronte praecipitium a tergo lupi, Froggie.”

“I don’t understand Spanish, Professor.”

“Latin, m’boy. It’s Latin meaning there’s a precipice before you and wolves behind. A tough spot.” He took a judicious sip of Night Train and grimaced.

“First, the wolf, a k a Victor Quantz. He is a disreputable man, a blot upon the legal profession. You, Froggie, faked a fall on a broken sidewalk. You can be certain that Quantz, or one of his people, had already filed a report on that sidewalk some time ago with the DPW. As of that moment, the city was officially on notice and had a specified amount of time in which to repair the structure. After the allotted time passed and no repairs were made, the city became legally liable for any injuries at that location. The DPW is busy. It can’t get to every pothole and heave.” Another sip. Another grimace.

“So, Victor Quantz sends out one of his cappers, in this case Cadillac Jack, to find a ‘victim,’ ideally someone who will work for peanuts.” He gave Kermit a significant look.

Kermit hung his head. “A hundred bucks,” he admitted.

“A hundred bucks?” roared the Professor. “Why you imbecile! Within a month or two the quack and the backcracker would have submitted bills for at least six or eight thousand dollars to whatever company insures the city against liability. They’d probably have settled the case for thirty, forty, maybe fifty thousand bucks.” He sighed. “Oh well, your immediate problem is Quantz. Let me tell you a little story about the learned counselor.

“Jimmy Dukes owed him a couple of grand. He kept coming up with excuses, but no money. One night a couple of Quantz’s boys grab Jimmy off the street and drive him out to the docks. They take away his clothes, give him a quarter, jam him into a phone booth, and tell him to call his employer, Ross the Boss Capello, another citizen of questionable repute and a competitor, you might say, of Quantz’s.

“Anyway, they tell Jimmy to tell Capello he should pay the debt off for him. To make sure Capello gets the message, they pour gasoline into the booth, shut the door, and light a match. The poor bastard’s on the phone screaming and begging Capello to for crissake give Quantz the money.” He raised the bottle again. A healthy swallow this time.

“What happened?”

The Professor frowned. “Capello hung up. They dropped the match. Jimmy died a horrible death. And nobody has held out on Victor Quantz since. Which was the point of the exercise.”

Snow hissed against the roof of the tent. Kermit shivered. He felt nauseous.

“As to the precipice, by now Quantz has put the word out that he wants to talk to you. And maybe that’s all he wants to do. Talk.” He raised the bottle, examined the dwindling contents, lowered it again. “Or maybe not.”

“What am I going to do?”

The Professor shrugged. “Hide, leave town, or get your affairs in order. I really don’t care.” He levered the chair back to a reclining position.

“But whatever you do, don’t come back here.”

Kermit had barely regained the street when a voice behind him said, “Hey, Frogman. Just the guy I’m looking for.”

Kermit turned, ready to flee.

“It’s cool,” said Cadillac Jack, hands held at shoulder height. “I’m here to help.”

“Jesus, Jack, I’m sorry! Some little punk, a guy with a camera, I don’t know—” Kermit was practically blubbering. Jack threw a friendly arm around the big man’s shoulders.

“No sweat, Froggie.”

“I’ll keep my mouth shut, Jack. Honest.”

“Like I say, no sweat. These things happen. Goddam insurance investigators, they got a bag of tricks.”

“But Quantz—”

“Don’t worry. It’s all square. You see, if you aren’t here, you can’t be squeezed. So, how do you feel about relocating? To Florida, say?”

“Seriously?”

Jack placed hand over heart. “Absolutely. Think about it — sunny and warm all year, beautiful babes, sandy beaches, no more goddam snow. Hell, I’d go with you if I could. What do you say?”

“Sure, Jack, sure.”

“Quantz is an okay guy, Frogman.” He glanced over his shoulder, lowered his voice. “Just between you and me, I think he shorted you on the deal, what with a hundred bucks. But he’s willing to front you, say four or five hundred, to get you started off on the right foot in Florida, to sort of make up for it. But,” he raised a cautionary finger, “you can’t come back here no more. What the hell, after a few days down there you won’t want to anyway. Now, here’s how it works.” He slipped two twenties into Kermit’s pocket. “You go on down to Mahoney’s, have a few pops. I got some details to work out. I’ll be by at closing time to pick you up, take you to the station. Look for the blue Caddy. That’ll be me.”

Kermit stepped out of Mahoney’s and heard the lock snap behind him.

One o’clock. Cold. No blue Caddy. No pedestrians. Nothing moving. The only sound the metronomic click of the traffic light flashing amber-amber-amber. He pulled on his new gloves and started across the street. Then he stopped.

There were three of them. The sodium lamps threw their shadows onto the fresh snow like oil slicks.

All four streets out of the intersection were blocked, three by the men now converging on him, the fourth by a construction barricade. Kermit cast a hopeful look back at Mahoney’s. There was still light showing inside. He ran to the door and began pounding.

“Leo, open up! For God’s sake, let me in!”

The bartender’s pale, neon-streaked face appeared at a window.

“Leo, it’s me, Froggie. Open up. I’m in trouble here.”

Leo’s impassive eyes swiveled left, then right, noting the three men, the desolate streets beyond, the snowy halos shrouding the street lamps.

With a quick motion, the shade was pulled down.

Kermit sagged, then turned, looking for a way out, finding none.

The last of the lights in the tavern went out. The snow was slanting down now, driven by a bitter east wind.

The three men closed in, faces eclipsed by hat brims and upturned collars.

Kermit put his back to the wall and waited.