Catch and Release

“Walters has gone over,” Jondahl said. He was cleaning his glasses with a specially impregnated tissue. “His was a very sensitive position, you know. He had access to his department’s most important plan. Took a copy of it and ran with it.” He crumpled the tissue, studied the lenses, put the glasses on and looked across his desk at me. “Now he’ll peddle it to the highest bidder.”

“It’s important?”

“Vital. Walters thinks he’s clear. He’s not. Security’s had an eye on him for months, waiting for something like this. He’s been followed, went to ground in a cheap hotel. The hotel’s under surveillance.” Jondahl looked at me, his glance apologetic. “You have to get to him before the competition does. You see that, of course.”

“We want the plan back, I suppose.”

“More than that. Walters was in a sensitive spot, I told you that. The plan is on paper. It’s in his head as well. He could hurt us.”

“So I have to hurt him first.”

Jondahl grunted. He passed me an airline ticket folder. “Your flight’s in three hours. Don’t suppose you’ll want to pack much. You can return as soon as you’ve made contact.”

“Good word for it.”

“Well. You know the game, of course. Walters knew the rules too, you might keep that in mind. He knew the risks, evidently felt the rewards justify them. Money, glory, whatever he wants. Whatever such people think they want. Well. You’ll recover the plan, you’ll deal with Walters, you’ll return as soon as possible. It’s your job.”

“Grand job.”

He looked at me. “Somebody has to do it. I don’t say it’s fun, but it needs doing. Most people barely know we exist, but—”

“They sleep better at night because we do our job.”

“Well,” he said.

I went back to my flat and packed a bag. I knew Walters, a nervous young man with brooding eyes and a high forehead. I had played chess with him several times, and once we had had lunch together. I wondered what made that sort of man decide to go over.

A taxi took me to the airport. I carried my one bag onto the plane. The flight was smooth and generally uneventful. The stewardess declined my dinner invitation, then sent me wistful looks suggesting that she might change her mind if I asked her again. I didn’t.

The plane touched down a half hour after sunset. I lugged my bag into the terminal building and dropped a dime in the telephone slot. I dialed and the phone was answered on the third ring. I said, “Marriage has many pains.”

“Celibacy has no pleasures.”

“Marvelous,” I said.

“We’ve made a reservation for you at his hotel. His room is 412. He’s not in it at the moment. He’s at dinner. We have two men on him. He didn’t meet anyone for dinner.”

“Good.”

“We believe he has someone coming to see him tomorrow morning. Perhaps earlier.”

I hung up and checked to see if they had returned my dime by mistake. They did once, years ago, and ever since I’ve looked for them to repeat this error. I took a taxi to Walters’ hotel. It was seedy. The lobby carpet was threadbare and all the furniture prewar. I signed in at the desk. The clerk punched a bell, and we waited in silence until a bellhop finally appeared. He escorted me to a room on the second floor. I had no change. I gave him a dollar and watched him gape at it. After he went away I put my clothes in the dresser, slipped the gun in one pocket and the ice pick in another. Then I walked past the elevator and climbed two flights of stairs and found 412. I knocked, and no one came.

The lock was laughable. I slipped the bolt with a strip of celluloid, let myself in. I gave the room a toss. The plan didn’t turn up, and I gave up and parked myself in a chair. I might have looked more carefully but didn’t care to make a mess. Jondahl would want this one to look like natural causes. If it was just a question of recovering the plan I would have tossed the room thoroughly and been gone before Walters returned, but since a confrontation was inevitable I decided to save myself the work and worry and let Walters find it for me.

Evidently he liked a leisurely dinner. I sat in the chair for half an hour before I heard his footsteps in the hall, then his key in the lock. I moved to the side of the door, and when he came through it I put the gun in the small of his back. He gasped, and I kicked the door shut and bolted it. I said, “Hello, Walters. The plan, if you don’t mind.”

“My God.” He looked at me, his mouth trembling. “Please. I never thought—”

“You never thought you’d be caught. No one ever does. I want the plan, then I’ll be going. That’s all.”

“I could cut you in.”

“The plan, Walters.”

“I’d give you half. One hell of a lot of money, all of it cash, and no one would have to know you took it.”

“I’m loyal. I don’t bite the hand that feeds me.”

“Loyal!” He looked again at the gun, then at me again. “Loyal. My God, you’re not human.”

“If that’s an insult, it’s the sort I can live with. The plan, and then I don’t care what you do.”

He may not have believed me. But there wasn’t much else to believe. It turned out that the plan was still in his suitcase, tucked between the lining and the frame. I looked it over, and it was what I was after.

“What’s that?”

“Where?”

I pointed, and he looked, and I hit him back of the ear, just hard enough to knock him out and not hard enough to leave a bruise that would make anybody wonder. He fell face downward. I rolled him over and stuck the ice pick into a nostril and on into the brain. A heart attack, or, if they checked more carefully, a brain hemorrhage.

The body remained undiscovered when I checked out early the next morning. I had breakfast on the plane. When I tossed the report on Jondahl’s desk he glanced at it, smiled at me. “And the contact?”

“Clean and neat.”

“Excellent. A good job.”

“Oh?”

My face bothered him. “You did well,” he said. “Take the rest of the week off.”

“I intend to.”

“Good. Get some sunshine, catch up on your sleep. This was just part of the job, you know that. You know what this—” he tapped the sheaf of papers “—would mean to our competitors.”

“Yes.”

“A detailed report of our fall merchandising program. Advertising, promotion, packaging, distribution, price structure. Everything.” He smiled at me. “I’m recommending a bonus for you. You’ve got a fine future. General Household Products is a grateful employer.”

“And I’m a loyal employee,” I said. I went outside to get some fresh air.

The Story About the Story...

...is arguably better than the story itself. Here’s an introduction I wrote to accompany “Part of the Job” when it appeared — finally! — in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine:

In May of 2011 I was in Orange, California, signing copies of A Drop of the Hard Stuff at Book Carnival. Lynn Munroe, the dealer/collector with a vast knowledge of mid-century genre fiction and erotica, turned up with a couple of rarities for me to sign. And he showed me a copy of the December 1967 issue of a magazine called Dapper. “There’s a story of yours in here,” he said.

Oh?

I looked at the story, and it had my name on it. I didn’t recognize the title, and I knew I’d never had a story in Dapper. Far as I could remember, I’d never even laid eyes on a copy of the magazine.

I gave “Part of the Job” a very quick scanning, and it didn’t ring any kind of a bell. At the same time, I didn’t spot any sentences that I could swear I hadn’t written. (Sometimes, you know, you can tell. Back in the early 1960s, I wrote pseudonymous erotic novels for publishers like Midwood and Nightstand under names like Sheldon Lord and Andrew Shaw, and I also licensed those pen names to ghostwriters. I’ve lately been reissuing some of those works as eBooks — for as surely as rock breaks scissors and paper covers rock, so does avarice trump almost everything. But I’ll only bring out those books I wrote myself, and I rarely have to look at more than a page or two to see my own hand at work, or be certain of its absence.)

“Well, it could be mine,” I told Lynn. “I have absolutely no recollection of it, but at the same time I can’t rule it out.”

“I bought two copies,” he said magnanimously, “and one’s for you. I figured you didn’t have the magazine, or you would have included the story in One Night Stands & Lost Weekends.”

That was a collection of my earliest work, and “Part of the Job” would have fit in perfectly — if it was mine and if I’d had a clue it existed.

I read the story that night in my hotel room. By the time I’d finished, I was willing to acknowledge the story as my own work. There was not a line in it I couldn’t have written, and there were phrases and sentences that sounded to me like my own voice. Moreover, I saw the ending coming — in a way that suggested I had had a hand in devising it.

But how could I have so utterly forgotten it?

I know when I must have written the story. It would have been in late 1962 or early 1963, when I was living on Ebling Avenue in Tonawanda. I’d been writing stories for the crime magazines since 1957, when I’d made my first sale (“You Can’t Lose”) to Manhunt. Sometime in ’62 I managed to sell a story to AHMM, and that encouraged me to write several more with that market in mind. Some of them sold. One that did not, I’m reasonably certain, was “Part of the Job.”

It is, as you’ll see, not a terribly complicated story. I’m sure the basic idea occurred to me, and once it did I sat down and wrote it. Since then I’ve learned to live with an idea for a little while, giving the subconscious a chance to develop it, but back then I would take the idea straight to the typewriter and stand up an hour or two later with a finished manuscript. Short stories were done of an evening; the daytime hours were devoted to the production of twenty or more pages of a novel.

So the story wasn’t on my mind for very long before it was in the mail to my agent. It would have gone to AHMM — I believe the magazine was edited in Florida back then — and I wouldn’t have necessarily been notified that it failed to sell, but after that happened my agent would have sent it somewhere else.

And so on.

And then, in late ’63 or early ’64, my agent and I split the blanket. I represented myself for a few months, and then got another agent, and moved to Wisconsin to take an editorial job with Western Printing. I was there for a year and a half, wrote some books nights and weekends, and returned to the New York area to resume writing full-time with a new agent.

So what happened to “Part of the Job”? I can only guess that it was on some editor’s desk when that first agent returned my unsold manuscripts to me, and that it kept getting sent out even though I was no longer a client. (That particular agent wasn’t overly scrupulous about that sort of thing.) And somewhere down the line it went to Dapper, which would have been a market of last resort, and someone there bought it. And paid $50 for it, I would guess, which never found its way to me. (The agent in question wasn’t overly scrupulous about that, either.) I never learned of the sale, I never got paid for the sale, and but for Lynn Munroe’s good work, you wouldn’t be reading it today.

It’s not much of a story, and I have to say the story about it is better than the story itself. But here’s the part I really like: It’s appearing now, at long last, in the magazine for which it was originally written. And here’s the part I like even better: I’m getting paid for it!