Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 23, No. 12, December 1978

Killer Instinct by Jerry Jacobson

Morris couldn’t come in for the kill...

I hadn’t planned on stopping in at McGuire’s that morning. It was 4:00 a.m. and I was beat from playing and from lack of sleep. My hands were shaking from too much coffee, but not out of nervousness or fear. I haven’t shot a scared stick since I was nine years old back in Omaha shooting with the old timers and the young slicks who’d play their own mothers for quarters at one-pocket, making them show their money in front of the rack. I wasn’t nervous, just tired, like a machine that was a little overused and needed its plug pulled so it could cool off.

Alter midnight, McGuire’s can be a pretty bad place. Bad people crawl out of the woodwork, like mice in homes when the family’s gone to bed. There’s more commerce in McGuire’s some nights than in the whole damn town from nine to five. Drugs, hot merchandise, dock jobs for a week’s pay — the works.

I do most of my hustling out of Packy’s on Jade Avenue and Palladium Billiards and Kosko’s Smoke Shop out on Drumheller Street, and a few bars and taverns downtown. McGuire’s has never been a hot spot for any of the pros. It’s about six cue-lengths from the city college — a bad location, since you can turn a dozen college kids upside down and shake them and not see five bucks in change hit the pavement. Nobody plays much pool at McGuire’s. There’s just too much other big business floating around to make it profitable.

But that morning I felt drawn to McGuire’s, whether on the faint promise of action or that the visit might be providential for me I can’t say. I moved on tides of hunch and promise in those days, always thinking I would have a long life and a painless death. I was like a thrown cat that continually landed on its feet.

McGuire’s always smelled of beer and fried green-pepper sandwiches and cheap perfume. I took a seat at the counter alongside all the furred pimps with their women clustered around them — Mickey Stollson, a fading second-story man; Ace McCausland, who ran poker games all over town; and a couple of strange male faces, who looked gaunt and secretive and on the run from a wife or a crime — you never knew which and so you never asked, because that could have you crawling around on the floor looking for your head.

Greta, pursing her full rose-petal lips in a mock kiss, leaned over at me. “You got serpentine eyes, Tony. There’s nobody in here worth hustling.”

“All hustled out,” I told her.

“Where you been bein’ bad? Jade Avenue?”

“Some there.”

“Packy’s?”

“It was profitable to stay an hour or two, yes.”

“But you brought your stick in with you. I seen you sneak it down to the floor when you sat down.”

“It’s an anatomical part of me. If I left it behind, I’d bleed to death.”

She winked. Her mascara was washing and running. She’d been on duty since 8:00 P.M. No woman ever looks good at 4:00 A.M., so she could be forgiven. “You don’t bleed, Tony. If I cut you open I wouldn’t have to use the ice machine for a week. You want a pepper sandwich?”

I nodded and Greta swished off to the grill, advertising her parts. A stripper’s habits never die, they merely become less and less alluring. The day before her father died, I scooped him up out of an alley near Polk Street. The poor guy was lying in his own vomit and a pool of tokay, his face the color of silver. That single act made Greta my friend for life, no matter what horrible or despicable things I would do to her or anyone else in the future.

There was another man at the counter whose presence had completely escaped me at first. He sat two stools down from Mickey Stollson, who was whispering with a college kid, wheeling and dealing some sort of stolen merchandise. The guy was thin, with an educated face. His suit was narrow and dark grey. He didn’t look like the kind of man who’d be sitting at the counter of a place like McGuire’s in the small hours. If he was a thief, he was either a poor one or a petty one. If he had just come from murdering someone, he was a solid 8-to-5 to have loused it all up from beginning to end, and would be propped up in a detective’s interrogation room by dawn. He wasn’t paying the slightest attention to the pimp and his circle of girls, making it clear he didn’t want or need a woman just then.

Greta brought my pepper sandwich and a cream soda. A bleary-eyed boy hustled in an armload of morning papers wrapped tightly with a strip of wire and placed them on the floor behind the cigar stand at my back. When he left I got up and slipped one out of the middle of the stack without disturbing the others and took it back to my seat.

I started to consume box scores of the pro basketball games when out of the corner of my eye I saw the thin guy in the bland suit get out of his seat and come walking tentatively my way. Conscious of the wallet on my hip fat with pool winnings, I watched him furtively, ready to make him part of a wall if he was another of those fleet-footed wallet grabbers finishing up a night of sweeping small change from tavern bartops and coats and jackets from all-night restaurants.

He slipped onto the stool next to me carefully, as if he were sensitive about disturbing the volume of space occupied by another human. Very softly he said, “I’m not disturbing you, am I?”

I looked at his eyes. They had a lazy, tired look.

“Not yet,” I said to him.

“I notice you have a pool cue down on the floor.”

I told him he was very observant for such a late hour.

“I’m a graveyard supervisor at the post office. Down at the Terminal Annex Building, Registry Section.”

I recognized a hint of apology in his manner, as if he were saying he was sorry for having reached a dead end in his life so soon. There was something else in his manner as well — a fool’s eagerness, a desperate man’s reckless courage. He wanted to play pool. A thin sweat began to rise on my palms. Damn! A mark in McGuire’s at 4:00 A.M.! Were there any more wonders for fate to toss down?

“I wondered if you wanted to shoot a couple of games,” the man said. “My name is Morris Dunkirk. I don’t feel much like going straight home. My wife and I are on the outs at the present. She’s a nurse at Providence Medical Center and she leaves for work around six A.M.”

Although he didn’t say so, I took him to mean that he and his wife were two opposing forces, chess bishops escaping confrontation by never meeting on a mutual path.

“I have my stick out in the car,” Dunkirk said. “What do you say?”

“You haven’t even asked my name yet,” I said.

“It doesn’t matter. I just want to play a few games.”

“It’s Tony.”

His handshake wasn’t firm or resolute. Good players have a way of making a handshake more a test of strength than an expression of greeting, as though they intend to gain complete control of you even before the balls are racked. Dunkirk, it was clear, wasn’t at all into the psychology of games playing.

“I’ll get my cue. I won’t be but a minute.”

He left. I hastily finished my sandwich and chugged down the rest of my cream soda. I saw Greta roll her eyes at me as I brought my stick up from the floor. To her it was a fishing rod with which I would shortly reel in another fish.

“You got the feelin’, Tony? Yeah, I can see you got the feeling all right. Be decent and leave him with cab fare, Iceman.”

All the tables were empty. I went to the front one and slipped a quarter into the slot. My game is one-pocket, though not to the exclusion of some others when a mark begins to feel uncomfortable with a game he doesn’t play all that often. Rotation, straight pool, three-ball, nine-ball — I always let the mark pick his game. That way, he becomes disturbed that he’s picked the wrong game to play when he begins to lose, not the wrong player to play against. There’s only one pool game I won’t play a mark, and that’s eight-ball. Any near-fool or strung-out wino is liable to beat you at eight-ball, slamming those balls around the table with all those rails and pockets to catch them. Eight-ball is a hustler’s suicide.

Dunkirk came back. He took his two-piece stick out of its cloth holder and put it together. I unzipped my battered leather case, with the velvet stripped from the inside to make it look like it was picked up at a garage sale after the garage had fallen on it. I paid $200 for my stick and then beat it against walls and chairs until it looked like something you’d start a beach fire with. But it was weighted and balanced to 18 ounces. Dunkirk’s weighed a preposterous 22 ounces — as cumbersome as Nellie Fox’s baseball bat!

“Nice stick,” I told him, handing it back with mock care. A tavern stick, a bludgeon — a barkeep might slip you a five-dollar bill to walk out with it. “What’ll we play, Morris?”

“How about some eight-ball?”

“That’s kind of a boring game, isn’t it? I mean, you and me can probably play that game in our sleep. You ever play YMCA pool?”

“No, I don’t think I ever have.” Dunkirk fooled with his necktie-knot a bit. “Is it anything like rotation?”

“No, no. You don’t have to play the balls in order by number. You play them in any order. Just call the ball and the pocket. We play to a total of sixty points. When both our scores add up to sixty, the player with the lesser amount pays the other the difference at a dollar a point. For instance, if you score thirty-two points and I score twenty-eight, I owe you four bucks.”

“I think I get it,” said Dunkirk. “We count the numbers on the balls, right? If I make a nine-ball and the ten, the running total is nineteen. If you follow with the five-ball, the total goes up to twenty-four, with my score nineteen and yours five.”

“You got it, Morris.”

I coasted through the first two games. Morris won them both. I paid him six dollars. He was elated and therefore blinded to the fact that I had gone after only low-numbered balls. He bought us both a Heineken and told me to rack them up.

He was purely apples on a low tree-limb — there to be picked. To pile up point totals he began shooting at distant balls with the big numbers on them. He was behind 32–20 the next game with a fairly easy shot on the 15-ball in the side for game. He set it up and I watched the end of his stick fishtail with nervousness. It was a cut-shot and he stepped back from it twice to check the angle.

Stepping back from a shot after you’re locked in on it is the kiss of death and Dunkirk had just kissed himself twice. I could almost see the cue ball dancing under his gaze like a laser illusion. He rechalked, swigged some beer, and took a third stance over his shot. His eyes had already given it up. His stroke came in segments, like a sequence of stop-action photos of a golf-swing. The 15-ball hit the edge of the rail and ran down the table to come to rest less than six inches from an end pocket. A tap-in putt. Dunkirk sighed and handed me a twenty, a five, and two ones.

He was caught by panic now to recoup his losses. He went for outlandish shots on high-numbered balls, while I chipped away at the small. He lost the next two: $23.00 in the first, $31.00 in the next. He broke his stick down and put it back into its cloth covering, giving me a drained smile. There was no animosity in his expression, only resignation.

“I don’t have the killer s instinct,” he said when we were back at the counter for our final Heineken. “My life story, I’m pained to say, is never to be able to finish much of what I initiate. My father was like that, too easygoing, too self-effacing. When he was a young man, he was fired from a pulp mill because the foreman suspected he was after his job. Instead of fighting the dismissal, he wrote a letter to the mill owner thanking him for the work experience.”

It was almost dawn. Dunkirk finished off his beer and rose. “I’d like to play again sometime. I come into McGuire’s nearly every morning.”

“Well, I don’t play all that much,” I told him. “But if you’re around when I stop in for a pepper sandwich, we’ll play a few games.”

“I’d like that,” said Morris Dunkirk, with those bleak eyes, a man who seemed to have burned all the bridges to his world.

Four mornings later, we played again. We played four games of nine-ball, betting a five-spot on the five and ten bucks on the nine. Dunkirk had a good clean stroke. He could play angles and make cross-corner shots with real skill. It was evident he had played a good deal of pool in his youth. But when it came to the big shots there seemed to be a massive unseen barrier between him and winning. He took three five-balls; I took the other and all four nines. And Dunkirk took a thirty-dollar loss, which he paid without heavy grief or malice.

“When I was a young man,” he began, after we’d finished and had what was to be our ritualistic Heinekens at the counter, “in the early years of my marriage, I was a welfare clerk. I typed the SSI checks. It was pretty much of a dead-end job. I knew it and so did my wife. It was a point she rarely ignored when we argued about money and goals and my lack of ambition.

“We did a lot of fencing in those days — attack, parry, riposte, redouble. Polite viciousness. Nothing visceral, not the kind of fighting married couples usually do. No sparring, or boxing, or street brawling or tavern fighting. Knockdown, drag-out stuff wasn’t Margo’s style. I acquitted myself better in those days, but it was very brutal just the same.

“Anyway, we’d just had another match over why I wasn’t getting anywhere in my job. One day at work — it was noontime and everyone was across the street in the park eating lunch — I began to devise this scheme with the checks.

“I would type about two dozen of them for around $400 each, using my own name. Then I’d type Void on the carbon copies. I’d cash the checks and on the same afternoon send in the first carbons on the Daily Void List, knowing the second and third carbons wouldn’t go to the State Capitol until the end of the month.

“Morris Dunkirk, mysterious welfare client — it would have been months before anyone at the welfare office put it all together and came up with me. Ten thousand dollars, free and clear. I could have invested, started a business, got that clean slate Margo was continually torturing me to make.”

“But you didn’t go through with your scheme,” I said.

“Tony, do I look to you like a hunted man? A haunted man, yes, but not a hunted one. No, the combination of all that risk and my lack of nerve made me back off. But it was a wonderful notion to have, if only for a brief madness.”

A week later, we played again. I was beginning to place more distance between our meetings. Postal supervisors with their woefully low five-figure incomes couldn’t afford to be high rollers, and reeling him in with such ease wasn’t setting all that well with me. Hustlers, when they get too close to their marks, never fare well. And I was beginning to like Dunkirk, starting to sympathize with him in his failing marriage and his missed opportunities.

“Lately my wife has acquired the perverse pleasure of inviting her relatives to stay with us so she can design events to embarrass me. Bridge, backgammon, paddleball, badminton — she knows I’m poor at games and sports. Physical coordination is not one of my strong points. Her brother was an oarsman in college, her oldest sister a tennis player — on the men’s team! After I’m thoroughly humiliated by losing every game, Margo will turn to career success. The brother is a physician, the sister is the first woman port commissioner in the state of Massachusetts. I endure it as long as I can and then I go out to my garden for a little peace.

“I have a beautiful garden, Tony, with zebra plants, Rex begonias, aralia plants that grow seven feet high, autumn crocuses whose colors take your breath away. Sometimes when I spend time there I wish I never had to rejoin the real world. One day Margo will push too far, embarrass me once too often, devise one more game I can’t play...”

There was no finish to the sentence, simply a shrug of the shoulders to indicate an impasse, a woeful want of an instinct for retaliation he knew didn’t exist within him.

We played three games of rotation, after which Dunkirk handed over forty dollars, thanked me for the games and conversation, and left McGuire’s without a backward glance. They were games I hated to win. His technique was becoming so much better, his selection of shots almost professional in their gradation. And yet there was this terrible lack in his game of finishing off the opponent when the opportunity came.

We were, I knew, coming to the end of our games together because Morris Dunkirk was becoming a friend. At pool I didn’t know how to compensate for that. I couldn’t make adjustments in my play, friend or enemy, and I knew I would begin to feel bad about taking his money. The loss of income caused me no concern. There was always plenty of fresh meat at Packy’s and the Palladium and Kosko’s, foolish punks who would get caught too far downtown for their own good. Pickings for a pool hustler are never slim.

For the next couple of weeks, my schedule didn’t permit me to stop at McGuire’s. Two naval training ships had docked in the bay that curled north of town, and there seemed no end to young sailors in crisp dress-whites with base-exchange pool cues tucked under their arms and fat wallets folded into their beltlines. Every so often I thought of Morris Dunkirk, waging his little war and trying to resurrect his deadened instincts. I also gave serious thought to going out to California for a while. Spending too much time in one place always unnerves me.

One morning after the training ships had moved out of port, I stopped in at McGuire’s again, merely out of a craving for a pepper sandwich. I took a seat at the counter. Greta looked up from slicing green peppers and her face seemed suddenly to fill with an odd combination of grief and confusion. She bent to a shelf below the grill where some bread loaves were stacked and took out her purse, pulling a scrap of paper from it.

“Tony, I got something here I cut out of the paper I think you oughta see. Just in case the cops come to visit you out of the fact you been seen playing pool with him.”

It was a local news story dated a week earlier, a single-column story beneath a photograph of Morris Dunkirk, and a two-line headline that read LOCAL MAN, WIFE VANISH.

The article related a tale of disappearance that police, friends, and relatives were at a loss to explain. Neither Morris nor Margo Dunkirk had shown up for work at their respective jobs and their stone rambler on Grandview Street remained vacant. Margo Dunkirk’s late-model Vega station wagon was parked and locked in the double garage, but Dunkirk’s four-year-old light-green sedan was missing from its accustomed spot next to the Vega.

“They’ve been murdered, that’s what,” said Greta in a voice filled with foreboding. “The police will find the two of them dead in that other car someplace, shot to death or worse.”

To calm her, I told her things less heinous were possible and that she shouldn’t leap to hasty conclusions. I handed back the clipping and ordered a sandwich and a cream soda. Greta turned back to the grill.

It was then that he came into McGuire’s, all wild-eyed and unshaven, his pool cue under his arm. He wore tinted glasses and a dark moustache was gaining good growth on his upper lip.

He slipped onto the stool next to me and ordered a Heineken. Greta didn’t recognize him.

When she served him and left, I said to Dunkirk, “Do you know the police are looking for you? Have you seen the article in the paper?”

“Seen it.” There was a new forcefulness to his tone, a recklessness. But he didn’t appear drunk or crazy.

“Where have you been, Morris?”

“Here, there, and everywhere. On vacation. I’ve been playing poker, shooting pool, keeping company with midnight women. I spent two days in Las Vegas — just bought a plane ticket and climbed aboard! I played blackjack, saw some shows. That Buddy Hackett can really make me laugh, you know?”

And then Dunkirk was up and out of his stool, heading for the pool tables, and I followed him. He put his cue together with lightning speed, throwing its cloth covering aside with the dash of a medieval warrior hurling down a gauntlet. He took some bills from his wallet and slapped them down on the apron of the table, then racked the balls, chalked his stick, and pulled a quarter from his pocket.

“Call it for break.”

“Heads,” I said, still flabbergasted at his manner.

The coin fell tails. “We’ll play YMCA to sixty points, two bucks a point,” Dunkirk announced and then broke the rack of balls viciously, sending them scattering like fifteen beads of water in a hot frying pan. The five-ball fell. He ran six more to bring him to a tricky cross-corner on the fourteen-ball for a 61-point total. He chalked once, took a reading on the shot, stepped up to it, and calmly put it down.

“That’s $122, Tony. Rack ’em and let’s play this damn game!”

He had the instinct now; at long last and a little late in life, but he had it. Morris Dunkirk was haunted no longer. Now, he was only hunted, even as he was hunting me. And as we continued to play, I pondered the proper time to ask Morris Dunkirk where he had buried his wife.