Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 26, No. 6, May 27, 1981

Spinning the Bottle by Edwin P. Hicks

“You’ve got sense enough to pick up a buck or a five-dollar bill or maybe a ten-spot when you find it in the middle of a sidewalk, haven’t you, kid?”

“Why, sure,” I said, “but I don’t want to go to no jail for mugging a guy.”

Lefty Warren finished his bottle of Coke and winked. “You won’t be muggin’ no guy, and if I should miss — which ain’t likely from a distance of twenty feet — you’re faster than a greased alley cat at making tracks. Come on. We split everything fifty-fifty, right down the middle, and you ought to make more in a couple of hours than in a whole week washin’ dishes in this greasy joint.”

It was my break time at the Golden Horseshoe, where I had been washing dishes on the night shift for the past six weeks. The pay wasn’t much — a dollar a night — but I got three square meals and a warm place to sleep, and that was better than I had done since I’d run away from school and Aunt Martha in New York City the year before.

We stepped outside the restaurant, and Lefty went on up the block to the west and turned the corner into a dark alley, while I leaned against the wall and smoked a cigarette.

A young couple passed by, and then an old fuddy-duddy in his late sixties with a cane. He was fairly well dressed. I trailed him pretty close. He reached the dark alley and was halfway across when I saw the flash of the Coke bottle. The old man’s hat went flying and he fell to the sidewalk. I ran to him, and there was a big lump of grey hair sticking up where the bottle had hit him, but there was no blood, and I figured he’d come around all right. My hands flashed over him quicker than a cat grabbing a fat mouse in a corner, and I got his wallet, his wristwatch, and a stickpin. I turned and looked around. Nobody had seen what had happened. There wasn’t a sign of Lefty anywhere. So I trotted back to the restaurant.

“Here’s Lefty’s empty,” I said, dropping the empty Coke bottle into a wooden case behind the counter. “Well, I guess it’s time to hit that stack of dirty dishes.”

“It sure is,” said Mr. Turner, the night manager. So I left my coat with the loot hanging on a rack and began digging into the dishes.

After the place had closed up at midnight, Lefty rapped on the back door and I let him in.

“Let’s see what we got,” he said.

The old man’s wallet contained twenty-seven dollars. Lefty kept fourteen and gave me thirteen. And he took the watch and stickpin. “I know a fence,” he said. “We’ll divvy up what it brings later. That’ll be another three or four bucks for you and the same for me. Good job you did, picking up the empty Coke bottle. The police won’t have any idea what hit him.”

“What happened to the old man?” I asked.

“After I beaned him I circled up the alley and out a couple of blocks up the street. Somebody came in all excited and called an ambulance. We all run down there, but the old guy wasn’t hurt at all. He didn’t even want to go in the ambulance, but they made him.”

It was a pretty good go, and we played it all over town. I’d pick up a job as a dishwasher, Lefty would come in on my break, I’d follow him out, and bang! He’d let some well dressed guy have it with a Coke or beer bottle out of the darkness. How that guy could throw a bottle!

He said he’d learned it by accident. One night there was a tomcat yowling in the alley in back of his place, and he found an empty Coke bottle and let fly. The bottle sailed and smashed into a thousand pieces when it hit an iron pipe.

“It exploded just like a hand grenade,” Lefty said. “I didn’t miss that cat more than three inches.

“That got me to thinking. You’ve no idea how accurate you can throw a bottle when you hold it by the neck. One day me and another guy got into a fight with six members of the old Reuben gang in back of a grocery store. There was a Coke truck parked there while the driver was making a delivery. We grabbed Coke bottles by the neck and started throwing. We had so many bottles sailing through the air and bustin’ against the brick walls we chased them for three blocks, just the two of us.

“Well, every time I could get my hands on a Coke bottle or a long-necked beer bottle after that I practiced with it. Boy, how they can bust when they hit something solid! I got to be real good throwing bottles, and that’s what I been doing ever since. It’s a good racket — better than muggin’. You never know what’s goin’ to happen when you mug a guy — sometimes you get hold of someone you can’t handle. But a bottle comes out of the darkness and beans a guy on the side of the head, he goes out like he’s been hit by Joe Frazier.”

“Yeah,” I said. “You throw the bottle and bean a guy and then hightail it without anybody ever seeing you. You leave all the dirty work to me. Somebody’s going to see me frisking the guy.”

“Listen, kid — for the tenth time. Someone comes up on you going through a guy flat on the sidewalk, you’re giving him first aid. Get down over him and give him mouth-to-mouth — whatever you call it. You’re trying to bring him to. You saw him suddenly tumble to the street in front of you, like he had a heart attack or something. You didn’t see no Coke bottle hit him. You’re a hero. You’ll get your picture in the paper! Ain’t no risk at all for you. I’m takin’ the risk, fencin’ the jewelry and watches and stuff.”

O.K., so we went along together, playing it good and cool and averaging ten or fifteen bucks a night easy, besides the money we got from the fence. We got away with it for three months, changing our scene of operation about every two weeks. And then a guy looking out the second-story window of a cheap rooming house saw me going through a gent’s pockets. He came downstairs and followed me back to the restaurant where I worked, put in a call from a telephone booth, and brought the cops. They found the old duffer’s wallet with fifty bucks in it, his watch with his initials engraved on it, and a diamond fraternity ring with his initials inside the band in my coat. My rap was six years in the state prison.

If I’d been a model prisoner I’d have been paroled in two years. But I wasn’t a model prisoner, because one day I happened to read in the paper how Lefty Warren, a local young man, had been seen pitching for a sandlot team by a Big League scout and had been signed for a tryout as pitcher for the Arkansas Travelers in Little Bock. For a minute I saw red. Unfortunately, there was a guard nearby and I slugged him.

So it was four long years before I got out of stir, and every waking hour of them I thought about Lefty. I’m not the smartest person in the world, but I could see now how he had played me for a fool from the very first. Having developed that wonderful throwing arm of his, he could stand way back in the dark alleys, cold-cock a guy with a Coke bottle, then beat it and be blocks away from the scene while I had the dangerous job of going through the victim’s pockets. If anybody was going to be caught it was me, not Lefty.

Lefty had two good years in a row with the Travelers and then was promoted to Tulsa. After two years there, there was talk of him going up to the St. Louis Cardinals next season.

Out of the penitentiary at last, I was sitting in the grandstand at the Tulsa ballpark one night in September when Lefty was pitching. He had a real system, and I knew where it had originated — in back alleys, with a bottle in his hand. Every first pitch went straight for the batter’s head. If that didn’t scare the pants off the batter, the second pitch either hit him or sent him to the dirt. He’d already hit more batters than anybody in Big League history, and every hitter knew he was taking his life in his hands whenever he faced Lefty at the plate. The night I watched, he didn’t throw a single curve or slider, just a straight overhand hard one with a hop on it. The pitch either came rising up toward the batter’s whiskers or cut the middle of the plate. Twice batters charged him and when one threw his bat at him Lefty ducked and the bat almost hit the infield umpire.

Lefty had as fast a pair of legs on him as he had a fast ball. He hit two batters, struck out eleven, and didn’t walk a man. The way he could move when a batter was charging him, bat in hand, was something to see. It took me back to the time when he and I were a team and how after he’d put a pedestrian on the ground with his Coke bottle he sped like the wind down the alley and out of sight. Now he was fleeing to the umpire for protection — or to the wide open spaces in centerfield, if necessary — to escape a charging batter.

Lefty had real talent. And he’d always known I’d never squeal on him. He’d sized me up, he said, before he ever let me be his partner. But when you spend four years in stir and the other guy, equally guilty, gets off free and has his name glorified in the sports pages, you begin to see things in a different light.

Me, I got a hot temper — like the time I slugged the guard and had to do two extra years — but I also brood a lot, and I never forget something when I feel like I ain’t been treated right.

The morning after the game I saw Lefty pitch, the Tulsa sports pages really made Lefty a big man. Eleven strikeouts — a shutout for the team. Lefty, they said, was certain to make the Cardinals next year. He had the speed of Bob Gibson, they said.

But I knew the sports writers were talking through their hats. Lefty wasn’t going anywhere next year. I bought the heaviest bat I could find at a sporting-goods store, stationed myself in an alley near the Tulsa ball club’s hotel, and waited there several nights, knowing my time would come. Once or twice Lefty passed with several other players, his mouth moving, same as usual. I could hear him coming long before he reached the alley, but I couldn’t do anything with those other guys around.

Then one night he came past alone, after the club’s curfew hour. He was starting out for a spree and was already half lit. The night was young for him and his future looked great.

“Lefty!” I called from the alley.

He stopped. “Who’s there?”

“It’s me, Mickey — your old pal.”

“Hey, Mickey! What do you need? A handout?”

His voice had the old arrogance I’d hated. He stepped toward me in the darkness of the alley. I swung for a home run with the power that had made me the home-run king of the prison league. The blow almost tore off the top of Lefty’s head. The Cardinals would have to get along without him next year.

I hurried through the darkness for blocks until I reached the bank of the Arkansas River, where I tossed the bat as far as I could. It hit the water with a slap out there in the darkness. It might float clear to the Gulf of Mexico before anybody noticed it. Anyway, my fingerprints would be washed off.

I turned back then, whistling. A burden had been lifted from my shoulders. Tomorrow was a new day. Maybe I could get a job selling peanuts and Cokes at the Tulsa ball park. And who could tell? Maybe in time I could become the best selling vendor at Busch Stadium in St. Louis.