Blonde Bait for the Murder Master

Chapter Three

It is an odd and lonely thing to drive down a quiet, faded street where the houses need paint, and the children, playing in the night shadows, make small hoarse sounds — and see, behind the familiar elms, the house where you grew up.

That room on the second floor on the side: Quinn and I had shared that room. Banners on the wall, and mechano set under the table by the window. And the quiet grey woman is dead; her big husband is dead; there are strangers in the house, and nothing is ever the same.

Except that Kit Robinson still lived diagonally across the street, and her house was still green with white blinds.

When I had still been on the force, I had been a welcome visitor. “Why, hello, Brian! Come right in. Kit’ll be down in a minute. Oh, Kit! Brian’s here, honey.”

But then the papers had a little spread about a cop who got tight on duty; there was a picture of the mess I had made of the prowl car, and they had found me drunk, it seemed only fitting that I should spend a good portion of my time getting to that state again. I went back and worked in the yards for a time, but everything was sour.

Kit’s father had ordered me out of the house, with Kit standing, white-faced, at the foot of the stairs, her heart in her eyes and tears on her pale face. And when I started to get next to the wise money, Mr. Robinson’s mind didn’t change. He had a pretty shrewd idea where the money came from.

I drove slowly down the street, turned in a driveway and parked in the spot we had decided on several months before. I knew that she was up in her room with the door shut, looking out her window toward that spot. Her window was the only one in the house which faced it.

I put my foot on the floor button and clicked the headlight beams up and down three times. I waited a moment, and did it again. Then I turned out the lights, slouched in the seat and lit a cigarette.

I could visualize what was going on in the green house. Kit would grab her jacket, saunter with great nonchalance down the stairs and say, “I’m going down to the corner for a magazine.” Or cigarettes, or a coke, or some fresh air.

Maybe there’s be a shade of suspicion in the air. Maybe not.

In the stillness I heard a door open, and close. High heels on wooden steps. Then her free stride, the heels clicking on the sidewalk. The tree shadows were dense where I parked. I saw her tall figure, and I leaned over and quietly opened the door on her side.

Seconds later she slid in beside me and the door chunked shut, not too loudly. Her warm arms circled my neck and her hair, the color of honey in the sun, and as fragrant, tickled my cheek while she said my name over and over.

“How long can you be out?” I asked.

“Maybe a half hour. Let’s stay right here instead of driving around, Brian.”

“What about the neighbors?”

“I’m getting sick of worrying about the neighbors; I’m getting sick of this whole thing.”

“They making it rough on you, darling?”

“Every chance they get they slip in some sly remark about you, Brian.”

“You know the answer to that one.”

She sighed. “I know your answer. It isn’t that simple. Come marry me, he says; leap right into the wild blue yonder, he says. What kind of a life would it be, Brian? Wondering from one minute to the next how long it will be before we get a call from the police.”

I flushed with annoyance. It was the same old song. “Maybe you’d like it trying to scrimp along on what I would be making as a cop. Look at Quinn.”

“Molly is a happy woman, Brian. She works hard; there aren’t many luxuries, but she’s happy and secure.”

I knew well the stubborn honesty of her, and I knew exactly what I was going to do. I had planned it enough times. What if I was lying to her? As soon as the doublecross had been accomplished, I would be making enough money to buy that respectability she prized so highly.

I made my voice stern and said, “Kit, we can’t go on this way. We’ve got to come to a decision, and soon. Will you marry me?”

“If you get an honest job, yes,” she said with a chill in her voice.

Maybe I hammed up the heavy sigh of resignation. “You win, Kit,” I said.

Her face was a pale oval, her breath warm on my lips, “You mean...”

I pulled the slip of paper out of my pocket. “Here. Take this. It’s a list of addresses showing where a raid can knock off the stitching machines, the printer, the books, the supply of tickets, twenty of the route men and a long batch of over-the-counter outlets. As long as I have to get out of the business, I might as well do a clean job of it.”

That wasn’t too much of a lie. I wouldn’t have the same job in the new setup; I’d have a better job. No hired boy stuff. One of the managers, with a salary to match. Nothing less than five times what I was making. Then I’d make them see my point. Hell, I’d even buy the house next door, set up an amplifier and drum it into them until they cried quits. And Kit would want that big house on the hill.

“Darling!” she breathed, and her lips were fresh and warm. Totally unlike the lips of Anna Garron, totally unlike anything else in the world.

Then she backed away. “But won’t they... get you? Hurt you?”

“The list you got is typed on a machine they can’t trace. Unless you tell, nobody will know. The D.A. won’t make you give away your source. I’ll even let them drag me in and I’ll post my own bail and pay my fine when the case comes up. They’ll never know.”

“And then after it blows over, darling, I’ll marry you right away. I can keep working and that’ll give you a chance to find a really good job.”

“Sure, sure,” I said, and kissed her.

The plan was in motion, and Anna and I were being carried along on it. From then on, the plan was boss. No backing down. “Look, Kit. The right time for the raid is on Thursday at noon. Today is Friday. Tell them to hold off until then, or they won’t get much. Okay?”

A few minutes later she slipped out of the car and I heard her footsteps going back toward the house. They seemed freer, happier footsteps than had been before. For a minute or two, I almost wished that what I had told her had been the truth. Then I remembered Brock stuffing those wads of currency down into the sack. No, my way was the right way; she’d see it, sooner or later.

I clicked the lights on, held my watch down so that the dash lights touched it. Twenty after nine. Plenty of time to line up Gulbie Sherman out by the tracks. I knew Gulbie since before college. He was ideal for our purposes. There was no danger of his getting wise and holding out on us, and there was no danger of his talking.

There are mammoth freight yards at Murrisberg. The yards themselves are enclosed by hurricane fence, and are floodlighted at night. But out on the edge of town, heading east, the number of track decreases. That end of town is pretty grim. The city dumps smoke endlessly, and the narrow asphalt roads are pitted with deep potholes. One road runs on a sort of ledge about ten feet higher than the tracks. From the road you can barely see the edge of the roof of Gulbie’s shack. He built it of stuff he rescued from the city dump. It nestles down under the ledge and his door is about fifteen feet from the nearest tracks. Right across the way is a semaphore.

As I pulled off onto the shoulder, a light rain started, dotting my grey gabardine suit. I cursed, turned the lights and motor off, slipped and slid down the steep narrow path. There was a flickering light in Gulbie’s window I hammered on his door, and pushed it open.

Inside, the shack was just as I remembered it. Ten feet square, with a broken chunk stove propped up on bricks, rags stuffed onto the chinks in the walls; a broken down cot along the far wall, a lantern on a bracket over the cot.

Gulbie sat on the cot and looked up at me, his mouth open. He could have been wearing the same clothes I had last seen him wearing years before. On his bare feet was a pair of discarded overshoes. His once white shirt was greyish and ragged, and his dark trousers were held up with a length of rope. He hadn’t aged a bit. His long knobbly face was like cracked red clay, his eyes a light and surprising blue, candid as the eyes of a child. His big-knuckled hands rested on his bony knees. As I had expected, he was just sitting. There was the smell of cheap gin in the shack, and a bottle, half-ful; rested by his hairy ankles.

There is only one thing wrong with Gulbie he can’t seem to remember. As far as he was concerned, I knew he didn’t remember ever having seen me before. Some little gadget was left out of his brain when he was put together. It had taken him all his life to establish the habit pattern of eating, sleeping and finding his way back to the shack when he leaves it.

But buried underneath the perpetual daze caused by his poor memory, he is keen. He taught himself to read. He trades off things he finds in the dump for eating money and gin money. The dump clothes him and houses him.

“Who are you?” he demanded.

I sat down in the ragged cane chair opposite him and smiled. “You remember me, Gulbie. Jake Shaw. Hell, I haven’t seen you for years.”

“Jake. Jake Shaw. Sounds sort of familiar, at that. What you doing these days, Jake?”

“Making a fast buck here and there. I want to share some of it with my friends.”

“Not buying anything,” he said.

“And I’m not selling anything, Gulbie. Here, have ten dollars.” I handed him a bill. He took it, looked at it suspiciously and tucked it in his shirt pocket.

“Thanks,” he said. “Who do I have to kill?”

I had some unsold, out-of-date tickets in my pocket. I took them out. “Know what these are?”

“Them green things? Wait a minute, now, I think so. Hold on just a minute. Yeah. Those are pool tickets, to win money with.”

“Where can you buy them, Gulbie?”

“Why, down where I get my chow. Haiger’s Market. I seen fellows buying them there.”

“You want to make some more money, Gulbie?”

“Guess I don’t mind if I do.”

“What I want you to do, Gulbie, is buy some of those green tickets next week. Ten dollars worth. Understand?”

He nodded in a bewildered way. “I buy ten dollars worth. How do I make any money?”

“Don’t open them in the store. Bring them back here and save them. I’ll come around and open them for you. Then you cash them in; they’ll give you a lot of money, Gulbie. I’ll be around to remind you of all this. Okay?”

“How much do I make?”

“Maybe as much as fifty dollars. How does that sound?”

He smiled shyly. “Sounds pretty good, Jake. Yes sir.”

I stared hard at him for a few minutes, making up my mind. Yes, Gulbie would do very well indeed. I could control him, and afterwards I could confuse him so badly that he wouldn’t be able to tell anyone a thing about it.

His foot touched the bottle and tipped it over. With incredible speed he caught the neck of the bottle before a drop spilled. I had forgotten that animal quickness of his.

“Want a drink?” he asked politely.

He stood in the doorway as I scrambled up the path. I turned and looked back. The rain made red and green halos around the semaphore, and the tracks shone like silver. I could hear the stolid chuffing of the switch engines down in the yard, the clunk and rattle of the couplings as trains were being made up.

Back inside the car, I sat and smoked for a minute or two before turning and heading back to town. The big plan was beginning to roll, but I didn’t want to be a chump; I didn’t want that smart money Anna had found to ease me out before I was even in. Priority one was to protect myself from a cross within a cross.

I wondered if Johnny Naga could be part of the smart money, changing horses in midstream. Time to check. Johnny Naga collected his three thousand a week and paid off all the consolation winners.

I found him, as usual, behind his own bar, the outside neon flickering redly, repeating, “JOHNNY’S PLACE” over and over and over.

The bar was always packed with the squareheads from the neighborhood, largely a beer type business. In addition to backing the distribution angle of the pool, Johnny runs a baseball and football pool setup on the side.

He is a wide, redfaced man in his fifties, with a broad mouth. His head is the general shape of a pear with the little end of top. His voice is highpitched and when he giggles, which he does a great deal, his big belly jounces. He talks with a faint Slovak accent, as do most of the people in the neighborhood where his bar is.

There is more than enough dough laying around for Johnny to take it very easy indeed, but his favorite indoor sport is tending his own bar and kidding with the men he’s known all his life and pretending that he’s no better off than they are. But they all know that Johnny Naga is rolling in it.

I pushed my way into the bar, and he saw me immediately and gave a little jerk of his head toward the back room. I picked up a beer on the way and carried it back in there with me. The back room was empty. I drank the beer and put the empty glass on the table.

In a few minutes, Johnny came puffing back, wiping his hands on his white apron.

“How you doin’, Brine?” he asked in his high voice. He can’t seem to say Brian.

“Just fair, Johnny. What’s new?”

“Brine, you know this Skippy Jorio?”

“One of the route boys, isn’t he? Used to be a fighter?”

“That’s a one, Brine. This week I got to put in his dough myself. He tell me to go to hell. Seventy-one bucks he owes, Brine. You get it?”

“Oh, fine!” I said in disgust.

“Brock, he says you help, Brine. Your job. Brock, he says one route man goes out of line, maybe all of them do.”

I sighed. “Where is he?”

“Upstairs at 519 Fonda. With a woman. She gets the money I think.”

The opening was as good as any. I said, “Sometimes, Johnny, I think we’d be further ahead if we ran this show ourselves and paid out the big winners and cut out the darn syndicate. Then we could afford to write off a lousy little seventy-one bucks.”

He looked at me and suddenly he wasn’t smiling. “Don’t talk like that, Brine. Bad talk, I know. Don’t mess with those boys. Out of town. Rough. You don’t mean.”

I gave him a close look. Either he was as good as Lynn Fontaine, or he was seriously jarred by my idea. I decided it was the latter. Scratch one prospect.

“I was just kidding, Johnny,” I said.

His smile came back. “Good thing,” he said, slugging me on the shoulder and nearly paralyzing my arm.

Before calling on Skippy Jorio, I made the usual precautions. It took me fifteen minutes to locate our local eagle, Mr. Wallace Rome. Finally I caught him at the Coral Club. Rome is one of those tall, swarthy young men with feline grace, a sunlamp tan, a small black mustache and startling white teeth. He has made a very good thing out of close-to-the-line practices, sucking up to the politicos, and playing the social game.

He answered the phone with liquid charm, and then shifted to bored irritability when he found out who he was talking to. “All right, all right. You don’t have to draw pictures,” he said. “Any trouble and I’ll cover you. You’re working for me while you make the collection.”

“Don’t forget to put all this on the bill,” I said.

He hung up.

Five nineteen Fonda was in the middle of a row of buildings facing the freight yards. They seemed to lean against each other for support. A cheap restaurant, with white tile across the front, looked like a clean bandage on a dirty wound.

The way up was locked, but the wood was rotten and a little steady pressure tore the lock free. I went quietly up the stairs, crouched and listened at the door. A thread of light came from under it, and I heard a woman’s drunken giggle. I backed up three steps, then hit the door with my shoulder. It crashed open and Skippy Jorio, in the act of pouring a drink, whirled, dropping the glass. A plump girl in a rather dull state of undress sat on a couch. She didn’t stop giggling; her eyes were shut.

Skippy threw the bottle at my head, and came in fast. I sidestepped the bottle, yanked my gun free and slammed him in the side of the head as he reached me. Then I had to sidestep him; he tried to knock the side off the building with his skull.

Fatty still giggled insanely, but her eyes were open. I found some loose bills in Skippy’s side pocket, and among them was a fifty and two twenties. Fatty stopped giggling when she saw the cash.

I took all he had and, as he started to moan, I went down the stairs fast, walked quickly to the car and drove away. Object lesson. The news would get around fast enough, thereby discouraging the next citizen who tried to hang onto the funds.

Johnny Naga took his seventy-one with beaming thanks and I tucked the collection fee into my wallet.

An hour later I was full of steak, and streached out on my bed in my room at the Murrisberg House, but sleep wouldn’t come. Somewhere on the road Brock Sentano was headed back toward Murrisberg. Anna Garron was probably back in her room at Sentano’s place, the blank tickets carefully hidden away. And somewhere, some monied citizen was licking his chops in anticipation of the riches to come.

The plan was rolling, and it couldn’t be stopped. There was trouble ahead, but it would be trouble for somebody else — I hoped. I remembered the look on Quinn’s face as he stood with his big hands on my car door. Contempt and pity. I’d show Quinn. I’d show them all. I began to think of myself as the biggest man in Murrisberg.

“See that fellow over there? Brian Gage. Owns a piece of the paper, and a couple of night spots, and a lumber mill and some garages and gas stations. That blonde is his wife. She used to work for the D.A. Wish I had his dough, by God!”

Then I began to make up a floor plan for the big house on the hill that I was going to build.

When I walked through the front door of that house, I was asleep, and the dreams were good. Except that, in my dreams, I seemed to feel someone watching me. Constantly. Every move I made...