Blonde Bait for the Murder Master

Chapter One

“It’s like in a bank,” Brock Sentosa said, smiling at me. “You count this stuff long enough and maybe you could be counting beans, or old movie stubs.”

Maybe Brock had given himself time enough to get casual about the greasy wads of currency that covered the two card tables in what had been a “Play room” in the cellar of the rented house at 1012 Cramer. But I couldn’t be casual about it; I was too new at it.

Anna Garron sat at another card table off to one side, checking the winning ticket returns against the amounts turned in by the retailers. She was blonde and lovely, and if you didn’t think about it, she looked like any pretty and competent secretary working in any office. But then you’d notice that her clothes weren’t quite the sort that would be acceptable in an office; and her makeup was just a shade theatrical, and tiny lines that edged the corners of her mouth gave her a hard look.

Brock had finished counting the twenties, tens and fives, and was putting the ones in stacks of a hundred. The silver was already in a canvas sack. I leaned against the door and watched him and thought of how little I knew about him. Brock Sentosa is a man with a smiling face. Meeting him on the street or in a bar you’d take him for a goodnatured clown. His dark hair is thin and receding and his cheeks are plump, like a squirrel with a hazelnut in each cheek. It’s the eyes that give him away. They are a pale and yellowish brown, and have a dull tarnished look, as though they had been buffed with fine sandpaper. It is although a corpse wore the mask of a living man.

But I had no kick coming. He had picked me up when I was the lowest, and started me in at more money than I had ever seen before.

He could afford it, because the syndicate he works for has the formula for success. It is an old story but none the less effective because it is old. Take a place like Murrisberg, my home town: one hundred and forty thousand people; freight yards; slag heaps; slums and the oily smoke of a dozen factories. A Saturday night town, a brawling, hard-fisted town, where the mills hands and the freight-yard boys look on everything in the world with deep suspicion — with the exception of green money, hard liquor, fast cars and careless women.

Five days a week, the paper carries the figures which show the treasury balance. You get a local, down-at-the-heels, printer to make up a hundred thousand tickets each week; you sell them at two bits apiece. A ticket is good for a whole week, and there are five winning numbers each week. Your odds of hitting a winning number are twenty thousand to one. The payoff is two thousand to one, except the Friday number; that pays four thousand to one. The dream payoff. A thousand dollars for a quarter.

And so I knew that the money on the cardtables was money that should have gone for groceries, or medicines, or interest on the mortgage, or payments on the car. Greasy bills slipped to the vendor with a wise look. “Give me four tickets, George. This week I’m going to hit.”

And George, having learned the patter, says, “You hear about that guy named Baker offer to the tool works? The son-of-a-gun hits a five hundred buck winner two weeks ago, and last week he gets the big one. One thousand bucks.”

“Better make it eight tickets, George. Here’s the two bucks.”

It started in a small way in Murrisberg with a local group of sharpies, and then the syndicate came in and took over. It wasn’t hard. The sharpies were small time. A few mashed faces and broken teeth and they were glad to have the state-wide syndicate take over.

The syndicate, which sent Brock Sentosa to Murrisberg, is not too greedy. They get the tickets printed up and sell them to the local distributor for thirteen cents each; that includes insurance on the big hits, the big winners. In Murrisberg the distributor was Johny Naga. His spread was three cents a ticket. Out of that he had to pay off the consolation prizes. Small winners. A dollar here, five there. The men who worked for Naga, distributing the tickets around at candy stores, bars, cigar counters, made four cents a ticket. That left a nickel a ticket for the cut on over-the-counter sales.

So each week the treasury pool took in roughly $25,000 — took it right out of the pockets of the mill hands. That is why, each week, Brock Sentosa counted up the thirteen thousand dollars. Naga got three thousand, the distributors got four and the candy stores knocked off five.

Each week I stood in the cellar with the automatic in the spring clip making a small bulge in my coat, while two other boys hung around upstairs. Brock Sentosa counted up the thirteen thousand, took out enough to pay the hits that had been made during the week — generally not more than two thousand — took fifteen hundred for himself. Out of which he gave me two hundred, the girls a hundred each and the boys upstairs a hundred each.

The rest was shipped to the syndicate. Taken to the syndicate by Brock, in person, driving the big black sedan one hundred and forty miles, to leave the dough in a very businesslike looking office in a large office building.

Both Anna Garron and Brock Sentosa had been sent in by the syndicate. The other girl, Joyce Kitnik, a heavy-thighed redhead, was a local. While Brock counted the cash, Joyce was over in the other end of the cellar, running the tickets for two weeks ahead through the fancy stitching machines sent in by the syndicate. The tickets are stitched into a double fold, and an end has to be torn off to open them up.

Brock counted out fifteen hundred in one pile, twenty-five hundred for the five winners that week into the second pile and shoved the rest down into a canvas sack along with his code report.

“Pay day,” he sang out. Joyce giggled, as usual, and tucked her hundred down the front of her dress. Anna Garron clicked open her purse and stuffed the hundred inside. Brock gave me four hundred, two for me and one each for the boys upstairs.

While his back was turned, Anna Garron gave me a long, steady look. I knew what it meant. We both knew that our footing was dangerous, and that what we planned to do was unhealthy, though profitable. She was good. Brock would never have guessed, unless he intercepted one of those infrequent looks, that she felt anything other than contempt for me.

Brock picked up the two sacks, grinned at me and said, “Okay, Brian, let’s roll.”

“Look, will Billy be all right for this trip?”

He frowned. “Billy is fine but he’s excitable. I’d rather have you.”

“Okay,” I said. “It’ll be me. But the blonde stenographer is going to be sore.”

He thought it over carefully. Then he smiled and said, “I’ll take Billy. You see what you can find out.”

I wanted to laugh in his face. Maybe if it hadn’t been for those dead brown eyes, I would have risked it. I was surprised to feel a trickle of ice cold sweat run down my ribs. The blonde stenographer was Kit Robinson, and she worked in the D.A.’s Office.

I went up the stairs with him and, as he took the money out to the sedan, I paid off Billy Browne and Oley Gerraine. It was funny, but whenever I had anything to do with those two, I felt like a cop again. I felt like maybe my brother, Quinn, would feel.

Quinn and Brian Gage. Brothers on the Force. Large-sized laugh.

I had seen Quinn just the day before. He had been walking up Baker Street toward his house, Molly, the kids and the mortgage and the frayed easy chair where he could take off his shoes and move his lips as he read the paper.

The crate was new. I had had it three days. So when I saw him, I pulled in at the curb about twenty feet ahead of him and lit a cigarette. When he came alongside, I said, “Hello, Quinn.”

He stopped, turned and walked heavily over to the car, put his big hands on the top of the door and looked at me with that infuriating combination of pity and dull contempt.

“New car, kid?” he asked.

“Yeah. Like it?”

“Well, it goes with those clothes, kid.”

“It’s nice not to hear that old leather harness creak when you take a deep breath, Quinn. How many years is it before they let you retire on ten dollars a week, Quinn? Not over thirty, I hope.”

Quinn is me, with heavier bones, four more years, twenty-five pounds extra. I saw the dull red flush under his weathered skin as the words struck home. I guess he counted to ten. When he spoke he said gently, “I know you got a raw deal, kid, and...”

“Hell, they did me a favor. I’m doing okay.”

“I know who you’re tied in with, kid.”

“So do half the people in town; it’s no secret. If you law boys get upset, you can haul me in and fine me and let me go. I can afford a fine; the maximum the law allows is two hundred and fifty bucks, isn’t it?”

Then, for the first time, he got under my skin. He gave me a long, superior grin. He grinned even though his eyes looked tired. “Everything you’ve ever touched, kid, has turned queer. You figure you’re a pretty bright lad. Well, when you get down to where you need eating money, you know where I live.”

He turned and walked away. I was sorry the crate had fluid drive at that point. I wanted to rip it away from the curb fast enough to scream the tires. Three blocks further on I realized that I had been holding the wheel so tightly that my fingers were cramped.

He was a great one to get holier-than-thou.

The war had snatched me out of the state university after I had worked three years in the freight yards to get the dough to go there. I had to work while I was there, and the grades weren’t too good. The army let me out so late, that I couldn’t get in any place.

And big hearted Quinn, the big brother type person, had gotten me appointed to the force. I couldn’t admit it to him, and I rarely admitted it to myself, but I had liked it. A corny thing to like, I guess — being rigged out in police blues, with a gun on your hip and a badge on your chest and a big glare for overtime parkers. Nearly two years of it. Well enough set so that Kid Robinson and I were beginning, to talk about setting the date.

By then I was riding in a prowl car rather than standing traffic duty. At two A.M. one morning. I was driving and I had dropped Sig Western, my partner, at a drugstore to call his wife about something he had forgotten. While I was waiting for him the motor idling, a car steamed through the intersection ahead, going at least seventy. I pulled out onto his tail, and managed to edge him over and forced him to stop up by the vacant lots near the edge of town. Like a damn fool, I forgot to give communications a buzz and tell him what I was doing.

I came back to the car, wishing I had Sig along, because I wanted to take the guy in. I never got a look at him. He got out and said something in a low voice, and then I leaned on the shoulder of the road. When I got up, I realized I was drunk. I stank of liquor. The wise apples in the car had knocked me out and poured me full.

I weaved and staggered back to the prowl car and tried to send in a call, but I couldn’t make my lips fit around the words. I decided to drive the car back to pick up Sig. Halfway back the world took a big swoop and I slammed against a tree and blacked out.

My story stank as badly as I did. No license to give them. Drunk on duty. Busting up police equipment. And out of the files they dug up the old case about when I was in high-school and another kid and I got into his pop’s liquor and we were booked for busting street lights. That was all, brother. And so the cheery little city of Murrisberg owed Brian Gage a lot. I was out to get mine — all that was coming to me, and a little more for mental anguish.

I knew that I wasn’t any better than Billy and Oley, the kid gunmen, but I still felt like a cop whenever I talked to them. They both had those little rodent faces, that way of keeping their eyes moving, that self-conscious foulness of mouth that they seem to need to feel like men. Yet I knew they couldn’t even be hauled in for lugging weapons. Wallace Rome, attorney at law, had put pressure in the right places to get the licenses.

Billy climbed in beside Brock Sentano, and he backed the big car out into the dusk. I stood on the porch steps and watched it head down the street. Oley squeezed at a pimple on his chin with nails that he wore too long, and said, “How’s chances a lift into town, Brian?”

“Slim,” I said.

He shrugged. “Okay, okay,” he said, and walked off down the street. He wore metal things on his heels, and scuffed as he walked.

I sat on the porch steps and lit a cigarette. The dusk turned slowly to night and pretty soon I heard the heavy tread of Joyce Kitnik coming across the porch as the front door slammed. I knew what she was going to do before she did it, and my mouth twisted in disgust. She came up and stood beside me. Her leg brushed my shoulder and then she leaned the solid meat of her knee heavily against me. “Nice night, hah?” she gave me in husky MGM voice.

Joyce was okay, except that she had some highly exaggerated ideas about her own charms. I didn’t answer; I just moved the glowing end of my cigarette close to her ankle.

She jumped back. “Clown!” she rasped, in her normal voice.

“Oh, sorry!” I said politely. She sniffed and clumped heavily down the steps and walked toward the bus stop. I knew that she was sore and I knew that she would try again.

When she had rounded the corner, I snapped the butt off into the grass in a shower of sparks, stood up and went into the house. I could hear the sound of Anna’s typewriter in the cellar. According to the official records, Brock Sentosa ran a wholesale food business. He had a couple dozen cases of canned goods stacked in one end of the cellar to prove it. Anna kept the books and made out the state and federal forms, withholding and so on. According to the official records, I was paid forty dollars a week and she was paid twenty-five. That eased the tax situation considerably.

I went quietly down the stairs and stood in the shadows for a moment, watching her. I would have felt more at ease about her, if I could have learned more about her past. But Anna did little talking about anything except the future.

When I moved out toward the cone of light made by the hanging lamp, she looked up. It was typical of her that she didn’t jump or look surprised. Her face showed nothing.

As always, I thought about the difference between her and Kit Robinson. Superficially, they were alike. Both tall, blonde, grey-eyed, with a faintly cool manner. But the resemblance stopped right there. Sometimes I felt toward Kit as though she were my kid sister; it was doubtful whether anybody had ever felt like a brother to Anna Garron.

“One more minute,” she said. She turned back to her work, her white fingers flying over the keys, then took the sheet out of the machine, placed it in a notebook, carried the notebook over and locked it in a cheap steel filing case, and, on her way back, covered the typewriter and clicked out the light.

Her foot made one small scuffing noise against the concrete, and then she was in my arms. There was never anything soft or warm or relaxed about her kisses. Her body became like a bundle of steel wires, and her arms tightened.

We stood together in the darkness and she said, “Afraid?”

“Not very.”

“It’s better to be afraid. Then you’re more careful, Brian.”

“We’ll be careful.”