Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 17, No. 4, April 1972

Among Thieves by Alberto N. Martin

The natural inclination of Homo sapiens, one might note, is remarkably similar, whatever his social stratum.

The three of US entered the brightly lighted barroom a few seconds apart, with me the last one through the door. As I stepped from the street, I pulled a stocking mask down to cover my face and took the sawed-off shotgun from beneath my topcoat. I just stood there, cradling the shotgun in my arms. I didn’t say a thing. I didn’t have to.

The room was crowded, with customers filling all the seats along the mahogany bar and most of the tables and booths. It was only seconds before a red-faced fat man noticed me and nudged the brassy redhead next to him. The news crossed the room silently, like ripples on water.

When everyone’s eyes were on me, Pete and Rocky went into action. They had walked barefaced and unnoticed through the crowd until they flanked the door to the card room. Now they pulled down their own masks and brought out their shotguns.

All conversation had stopped. Pete spoke in a normal tone, but it cracked across the large room like a lightning bolt and the heads swung to face him. “Mr. Larson,” he said politely, addressing the bar owner who was seated on a high stool where he could supervise the cash register and his bartenders. “Push the buzzer. Unlock this door.”

This had promised to be a profitable caper and it was going well. There was a high-stakes poker game going full blast in that back room with only an electric latch separating us from the money. Since the players were almost always made up of big-shot politicians and racket guys, we didn’t expect the holdup to be reported in any formal way. No one would want the kind of publicity a police report would bring.

Larson tried to stall, so Pete raised his weapon and spoke over the top of it. “Mister, if you don’t push that buzzer, I’m going to blow you all over the back bar.”

Larson released the latch, and Rocky opened the door and charged through the opening with Pete on his heels. There was a rumble of voices from the back room and then silence. I stayed where I was so no one would get the idea of leaving before the show was over.

That’s when I spotted Blacky Tolger. He was sitting at the end of the bar nearest to me, and from the set of his narrow shoulders I could tell he was wishing he were somewhere else. We’d been in the state prison together five years before and, though we’d never been close, I knew him.

Prison is full of creeps. Only one or two men in a hundred are worth a damn. The rest are all informers or worse. It’s not uncommon for cellmates to knife one another over something petty like a pack of cigarettes, or for the inmate nurses in the hospital to sell the victims their medicine. The lowest animals in prison are the merchants and informers, but Blacky Tolger was neither. He had never sold anything he had stolen from the officials, had never talked about another man to the guards, and had a solid reputation as a good convict. He had stood out like a ten-carat diamond in a refuse pile.

I took a couple of steps to my right. From there I could still cover the entrance, but I could speak to Tolger, too. “Hey, Blacky,” I said, speaking low. His head jerked up and he looked at me apprehensively in the mirror behind the bar. “You got a problem?”

He licked his lips and nodded. “I’m on paper,” he said.

That was just another way of saying he was on parole, and it explained his nervousness. Parolees aren’t allowed in bars, not in this state. If the wrong person saw him there, and the robbery was sure to get people looked at, the glass of beer he had in front of him could cause him to be sent back behind the walls.

Parole is almost always a reward given to the first offenders and creeps. If a man is an informer and displays a few other traits no sane person would want a neighbor to have, he invariably receives a parole. I was pleased to see that at least one regular guy had won an early release, and I wanted to help him stay out.

“Okay,” I said, motioning toward the door with the barrel of the shotgun. “Beat it while you can.” Blacky might not have remembered me even without the mask, but with it I was sure he didn’t recognize me.

“Thanks, fella,” he said, slipping from the stool. He disappeared through the entrance a few seconds before my partners emerged from the back room.

Rocky led the way, knocking people out of his path as he came. He had someone’s black trousers over his arm. The legs had been tied with shoelaces to form twin sacks for the loot. Pete brought up the rear, walking backward and swinging his weapon in short arcs. As they passed me, they turned their backs to the barroom and tore off their masks. Then they were through the entrance and gone into the night.

I remained planted where I was, covering their retreat, until I heard the sound of an automobile horn-two long blasts and a short tap. Then I backed through the doorway and threw myself to one side as the door closed. I was just fast enough. Six bullets ripped through the center of the door from the inside at about the level of my waist. If I hadn’t jumped out of the way, I’d have been cut down.

I went back to the door and threw it open. The crowd was surging toward me, led by a weasel-faced man with a revolver in his hand. The cylinder was swung out. He’d already ejected his spent shells and was fumbling fresh loads into the chambers with his left hand as he came. The people around him saw me at once and stopped dead in their tracks, but he must have been looking at his pistol because he took another three strides before sliding to a halt.

I brought up the shotgun and laid it on its side, pulling both triggers. One charge caught him in the chest, throwing him backward with his arms wide, while the other blast tinned his face into hamburger.

This time I didn’t worry about pursuit. I stepped out into the night and took my time walking to the car.

“Did you waste someone?” Rocky wanted to know as Pete put the car in motion.

“Yeah. There was a wise guy with a revolver.”

“Jeez — did you have to?”

I shrugged. “No,” I admitted. “I didn’t have to. I wanted to.”

Pete kept his eyes on the road and didn’t say anything. Rocky’s lips tightened and he gave an exasperated snort through his nostrils, but he was smart enough to keep his mouth shut, too.

We had almost seventy thousand to cut up. That was about twice as much as we’d expected. We divided the loot in Rocky’s girlfriend’s apartment, and then split up. That same night Pete headed for a Florida vacation, and the following morning Rocky and his girl went west. I planned to cool my heels for a month or so and then recruit another partner or two.

Under normal circumstances I never would have given the caper at Larson’s Bar another thought. Unfortunately, it turned out the circumstances were far from normal. The fool who had emptied his gun at me had been an off-duty cop. Now there was a dragnet out for a cop-killer. No one with a police record could stick his nose outdoors without getting picked up for questioning.

That wasn’t the worst of it. Half the customers in the bar had seen me speak to Blacky Tolger and let him walk out of the place. His photo had been picked out of the mug books and he had been arrested. He had exchanged a simple parole violation for an accessory-to-murder charge.

I felt guilty about the whole thing. If I hadn’t played favorites and let him walk out of the bar, or if I hadn’t killed the dumb cop and caused all the heat, he wouldn’t have been sitting in jail. I decided to see what I could do to help him. I don’t know how much my thinking was influenced by my being fresh out of partners, but that probably entered into it, too. If I could get him out of jail, I figured I could use him.

I spent a few days doing a little investigating of my own, then went back to Larson’s Bar. I wore the same topcoat and hat I’d worn during the holdup and carried the same sawed-off shotgun. The place was almost deserted. The regular customers expected the place to be crawling with cops, so they stayed away; and since the police had no reason to hang around when there were no customers to question, that left just Larson, his bartenders — and me.

I pulled down my stocking mask as I entered and quickly herded the three bartenders along the bar to where Larson sat beside his empty cash register.

“Remember me?” I asked with exaggerated good humor. “I’m your friendly neighborhood bandit come to have a friendly, neighborly chat. You fellas have made a false identification, and I think you should do something about it, understand?”

“We’re not the only ones who identified that guy Tolger. Half the customers did, too,” Larson said defensively.

“Yeah, well, you four are going to change your minds. You’re going to tell the police you’ve been thinking it over and are sure Tolger is not the guy I let walk out of here that night. Tell them Tolger looks something like the guy, but the man was a regular customer you’ve all seen many times. You’d know him anywhere and Tolger isn’t the right guy. Do you have that straight?”

“What if they don’t listen to us?” Larson asked. Perhaps his position high on the stool made him feel less vulnerable. Anyhow, he was the only one of the four with enough saliva in his mouth to permit speech. There’s something about looking down the barrel of a sawed-off shotgun that dries a man’s mouth.

“You’d better hope to hell they do listen. You’ve a pretty blonde daughter going to City College. How’d you like someone to cut her eyes out with a dull knife some night?”

They all had relatives and friends they wouldn’t want hurt. I named one or two for each of them, along with the kind of “bad luck” they might experience. Not once did I threaten anything as unimaginative as death. They got my message.

“Okay,” I said finally. “You’re on your own and you’d better be convincing. If the police don’t release Tolger, you’re all in trouble. I’ll hold you responsible, and you’ll never be able to get police protection for as long as you, your relatives and your friends will need it.”

They were convincing. Four days later the police released Tolger. What else could they have done? When the owner and bartenders swore they knew the wanted man well and that he wasn’t Tolger, no amount of customer identifications based on a one-time viewing would be strong enough to get a conviction.

The newspaper printed a photo of Tolger walking down the jail steps with a smile on his face. I was surprised to see he was unmarked. In a hunt for a cop-killer I would have expected him to have been worked over pretty thoroughly. I was pleased to see that police methods really were changing.

I waited a couple of weeks and then telephoned Blacky Tolger at the rooming house where he was staying. “Do you recognize my voice?” I asked.

“I sure do,” he answered with a trace of pleased excitement in his tone. “I suppose I have you to thank for the bartenders changing their identifications?”

“That’s right,” I said lightly. “Think nothing of it. It’s all part of the service.”

“Well, I really want to thank you, buddy. Can’t we meet someplace and have a drink together?”

“Sure,” I answered, and told him where to meet me.

I left the phone booth and went to a bar to wait for Blacky. I didn’t even get a chance to finish my first drink. In less than five minutes a squad of cops charged in and beat me half out of my mind with their billy clubs before dragging me to jail. I had tried to surrender peacefully, but that wasn’t in the script they were following.

Despite the bad turn of events, I was still optimistic. I figured they’d have to let me go. It was obvious to me that they’d been tapping Blacky Tolger’s phone illegally. They knew they had their cop-killer, but they could never prove it. I didn’t keep my work clothes or shotgun in my apartment, so they’d never find them to use as evidence against me. And how could the customers and bartenders make a jury believe they could be certain about the identification of a man whose face had been completely covered? I knew the cops would have to let me go.

They didn’t let me go. I’m being held for trial, and my cell partner just gave me some bad news. He told me Blacky Tolger will probably be the state’s star witness against me. He said that Tolger has been a police informer ever since he got out of prison a year ago, and before that, he’d been a fink inside the walls, too. Blacky may have been a good guy when I knew him, the fellow said, but that was a long time ago.

No wonder Blacky was nervous when I spotted him during the robbery. He must’ve been afraid that my partners or I might really know him and blow his informing head off. No wonder the cops hadn’t given him a bad time while he was in jail. They knew he was telling all he knew, which was nothing. When I was working hard to get him out, the cops had probably been trying to find an excuse to release him despite the identifications. He was no good to them locked up, and their only hope was that I’d contact him. They didn’t have to bug his telephone — they were probably paying his phone bill.

My cell partner said I should have been warned. “How do you think Blacky Tolger had earned his parole?” he asked.

He’s right. I should’ve known.