Ellery Queen’s Double Dozen

Avram Davidson Blood Money

This story has a curious history. It gave your Editors what might he called “the daisy petals” — did we like it, did we not...

Obviously, the last daisy petal said “yes” to us, but whatever the last petal may indicate for you, this is an important story. It has something important to say, something that should be said, something that we should all listen to...

It was shortly before five o’clock on the afternoon of August 10th (the hottest August 10th in eighty-six years, the newspapers pointed out helpfully) that Charley Rosco saw, and at once recognized, Ben Lomax.

For three days in a row the heat had been killing; the plant wasn’t air-conditioned (what laundry ever was?), and each day fewer and fewer employees had turned up for work. Some had taken their cars and headed for cooler climate, others sought refuge in deliciously chill bars or movie houses, others simply stayed at home and drank cold bottles from the refrigerator and turned the fans up.

As a result, Charley had little to deliver that day. He had a private hospital and two nursing homes on his route, and by pleading “Emergency” to Max White, the foreman, had managed to get most of their linen finished. After delivering that, only a few bundles remained in his truck. Most of these, he found, belonged to customers who had evidently also fled the sweating little city.

So he had nothing to do, really; by one o’clock he could have gone home. If his car had been in good repair — but it wasn’t. Marie, his wife, didn’t take the heat too well — it made her cross, and when Marie was cross with anything, Marie was cross with everything.

So Charley did something he almost never did: he gold-bricked. He thought of it in exactly that term, and thought, too, that it had been a long time since he’d heard anybody use the word.

Anyway, he parked the laundry truck in an alley, gathered up the few bundles, and went around the corner to a bar. He made two bottles of beer last over three hours as he watched TV and joined in the conversation. It was all very pleasant, and he hated to leave.

Charley saw the man bent over the motor of the car, hood up, when he was driving back to the laundry. Sympathetic, remembering his own out-of-commission automobile, he slowed down as he came abreast of it, with some thought of stopping and offering help. The man lifted his head, and Charley, incredulous, recognized him instantly.

The man’s hair was matted with sweat — not neatly combed back, as in the pictures — and his hairline mustache was almost obliterated in stubble: but it was him. There was no doubt about it. It was Ben Lomax.

The man wiped his wet face with a grease-smeared arm, bent over the engine again immediately. Obviously he hadn’t realized he’d been spotted. Charley Rosco, his heart thumping queerly, drove on, wondering what to do. And as he drove he saw another laundry truck ahead of him. This had to belong to Lew Livingston, whose route adjoined his own.

Charley blew his horn, waved Lew over to the curb, jumped out of his truck, and ran up to him.

Lew was a stocky sort of fellow, with a seamed face. If Charley ever got sorry for himself thinking over his own domestic troubles, he thought about Lew’s problems, and his own went away.

“Listen,” he said, panting a little bit.

“Whaddaya holding me up for, Charley? I gotta get back to the plant!”

“Listen, Lew — back there on Hargraves, near Poplar — there’s a guy trying to fix a car. I’m sure he’s Ben Lomax. Y’know—?”

For a moment Lew continued to scowl irritably. Then he made a long face, pushing out his mouth. “Benny the Barber? The... the bank robber?” Charley nodded quickly. “You sure?”

“Lew, I’m sure. What should I do, Lew? Huh? What’s your idea?”

Livingston didn’t hesitate. “My idea? Call the cops! Let them handle it. He killed a guy, that last bank he robbed, didn’t he? So let the cops take the risk. They get paid for it!”

A sudden idea seemed to strike Lew. He pulled his head back into the truck, turned the truck ponderously around, stuck his head out again.

“Stay here, Charley,” he said. “I’m gonna take a little ride — see if he’s still there, see if it’s really him... Wait here.”

What with the beer, the heat, and the excitement, Charley Rosco didn’t feel like moving, much, anyway. He stood in the shade of his truck and fanned himself with a bundle of laundry tickets. He had never taken any part in having anyone arrested, and he felt somewhat uncertain about the whole thing.

Charley Rosco had some vague idea that it would go like this: Lew Livingston returning, followed by several squad cars. You positive it’s Benny the Barber? the cops ask. Absolutely, says Charley. The cops exchange glances. Benny’s a hard man, one of them says. And a dangerous one, the other says. They reflect. Tell ya what we’re gonna do, one says at last. You — addressing Charley — you park your truck across the road at Linden. The cop turns to Lew Livingston. You do the same at Poplar. That’ll cut that block on Hargraves completely off, so he won’t be able to make a getaway in his car. You’re not scared, are you? the cop asks. Lew snorts. I’m not afraid a nothing, he says, tough. Charley’s reply has more dignity. I know my duty as a cit—

Charley looked up, his train of thought abruptly cut. Lew was back. Alone. He seemed annoyed.

“The cops picked him up,” he said.

“Then it was him?”

“How do I know? Think I tagged along? You crazy? I watched from two blocks away, through my rear mirror. They picked him up and they left his junk-heap sitting there in the street.” Lew hesitated, seemed about to say something else. He shook his head instead. Then he muttered, “Gotta get back to the damn plant,” and was off.

After a moment’s confused thought, Charley followed him.

After he got home and took a shower, he was about to tell his wife. But Marie put an envelope in front of him, then busied herself setting supper — cold cuts, pickles, delicatessen potato salad, iced tea — from commercially bottled concentrate — and supermarket cake. It had been too hot for cooking. Charley picked up the envelope, addressed in his daughter’s not-yet-firm script, and took the letter out.

Underneath, in a string of wild print, up hill and down dale: Lier i was not Dear Momm and Dad pies send me dolar love Joh

A wormlike squiggle at the margin evidently did duty for the missing terminal. Charley said, “What the heck, they’re supposed to go swimming and boating every day, aren’t they?”

“They do,” Marie said, “but she loves it so much she just has to mention it.”

Her husband nodded. By severe saving and self-denial, and by borrowing on their insurance policies, they had managed to send both children to summer camp for the first time. Thinking of this made Charley think of something else.

“Uncle Eddie Aurelius in town today?” he asked. She nodded. It was her uncle who, by agreeing to take a second mortgage, had enabled them to buy the house: Uncle Eddie Aurelius, so-called to distinguish him from Uncle Eddie Jackson, who didn’t have a button to his name. “What did he say?”

“He said not to worry about it.”

The little knot in Charley’s stomach went away. He reached for a slice of head-cheese, dropped it, smacked his forehead.

“It’s those screens,” Marie said hopelessly. “The mosquitoes—”

“No, no! Listen, Marie, what do you think happened today?” And he told her.

When he was finished she said very quietly, “Are you crazy? Are you out of your mind?”

“Huh? What do you mean?”

“Why did you have to tell Lew anything? Why did you need Lew? You could have told the police yourself.”

“I don’t get you, Marie. What difference—”

“Charley. Are you the only person in town who doesn’t know that there’s a ten-thousand-dollar reward out for Benny Lomax?” Charley gaped. After a moment he said, “I forgot. Would you believe it? I forgot all about it. Yeah, I did know, but I—”

“Well, you can be sure Lew Livingston didn’t forget. You notice how quick he went to the police without coming back for you?”

Reflecting, Charley did notice. The more he thought, the more he thought he saw.

“The devil with it!” he said abruptly. “If that’s what he wanted — the reward — he can have it. You think I’d touch it?”

“Listen here!” Marie’s voice went shrill. “Don’t be so generous! ‘He can have it’? Oh, no—”

Charley slammed his hand on the table. “Shut up!” His own voice went shrill. “You realize they could send this guy to the electric chair? How do you suppose I’m going to feel if that happens? If I’d stopped to think about it this afternoon, maybe I never would have done it. I never had anybody’s blood on my hands before! What do I need it for now?”

Very quietly she said, “He killed a man. If he wasn’t captured, maybe he would’ve killed a lot more.”

Her husband nodded. His fingers played with a piece of bread. “Okay,” he said after a moment. “Granted. I should have turned him in. It was my duty as a citizen. Okay. I had to do it But I don’t have to take blood money. Oh,” he went on, speaking more quickly, “I know what you’re going to say. There are so many things we could do with the money. There always is. The house. The kids. Sure. Suppose I take it. I pay off what we owe. I buy a piano. I buy bikes. And then one of the other kids says, ‘You bought this piano with blood money. They electrocuted a man so your dad could get the money for that bike.’ Huh? Sure they would. You know that.”

Marie looked down. Charley continued, “What am I breaking my back for, carrying bundles of laundry up and down stairs — just to keep a roof over their heads, just to send them to camp? Marie! I am trying,” he said doggedly, hitting each word hard, “I am trying to raise them up, and so are you, to be honest people. To know that you just don’t do something just to get money. That if a person can’t get money in a good and honest way, then they do without the money, and what it can buy. I—”

His voice choked. Very gently Marie said, “Eat your supper.” And he knew he had won.

It was after he finished the iced tea that he reflected, aloud, that he still didn’t know, after all, if the man was Ben Lomax. Call the police, Marie said. And so he did.

“Headquarters, Sergeant Callan speaking.”

“Say... This fellow you picked up on Hargraves Street a little after five — is he Ben Lomax, or isn’t he?”

There was a pause. Then Sergeant Callan said, “Who is this? Who are — who wants to know, huh?”

Confused, annoyed, and with the average man’s almost instinctive reluctance to give his name to the police, Charley asked, “What difference does it make, who? All I want—”

The voice of Sergeant Callan, which had kept caution for its main note, now became openly hostile, “Yeah? Well, don’t worry about it!” the Sergeant snapped, and hung up.

“They must of thought I was one of his gangster pals,” he told Marie. Later it occurred to him that perhaps the man had turned out not to be Lomax after all, and that the police were too embarrassed to discuss it. He was wrong, of course, on both counts.

As he found out the next afternoon.

Lew Livingston, face inflamed with sun and rage, came over to him, half on the run, waving a newspaper, shouting as he came.

“You see this? Charley! You see the paper? Those dirty, rotten—” His voice went on and on.

Charley took the local paper, tried to concentrate. There it was. The same picture of Lomax, neat and slick, that the papers and television and reward posters had featured; next to it the picture of the man as he had been when Charley saw him — dirty, stubble-faced.

And the headline read: CITY POLICE TAKE BANK ROBBER.

After that everything moved so fast that Charley, afterward, was not so clear about the details. Lew was loud and outraged, Max White the foreman came out to protest. It was still hot, the plant was steamy. Charley went to get a drink of water, but even the water was almost hot, it seemed. A picture came to him of Benny the Barber being led to execution, the grease from the motor of his car still there on his forehead where Charley had seen him wipe it.

He tried to obliterate the picture with another — of Frank Foster, the bank guard, struggling to rise from the pool of his own blood. Foster had been shot in the stomach, and Charley remembered that long ago he’d heard that this was the most painful kind of gunshot wound. In the Army they’d said that a man with a gunshot wound there should never be given anything to drink — no, no matter how much he begged for it, screamed for it...

He was still thirsty. The water had a coppery taste to it. He took his lips away from the tiny bubble of water... There was a reporter. Max had called him. Charley told him the story, then Lew — calmer now, though not by much — told him his.

“You two better go with him,” Max said. “What do you mean, your deliveries?” he said fretfully to Charley’s low-keyed protests. “Those few bundles? The route man will take care of them, and take care of Lew’s too. Go on.”

First they went to the editor of the paper. He called the Commissioner, the Commissioner called the Chief of Police. Then they were all in the Commissioner’s office — Charley, Lew, the reporter, the Commissioner, the Chief, and the two cops, Colcott and Trapp.

Trapp brazened it out all the way, but Colcott got confused. It didn’t take long before the Chief got him to admit he’d been lying. What was the idea? the Chief demanded. How come they tried to file a false report?

Sweating copiously, standing on one foot, then the other, Colcott said, “Yeah, but Chief, all right, I agree—”

“You agree! Thanks a lot!”

“Yeah, but Chief, me and Syd, Patrolman Trapp, I mean, uh, we took the risks. Right? You know, a guy like that, a hood like The Barber, it was just luck he wasn’t armed, but we didn’t know that, we took the risk he could of shot us both, maybe, like Foster—”

“Will you for crysake get to the point?”

Trapp, blank-faced, but with a note of something close to contempt in his voice, said, “The point is the reward, Chief.”

Then:

Lew: “There! You heard him! Did you hear—”

Reporter: “Now we’re getting some place!”

Chief: “What reward, you blockhead?”

And the Commissioner, lips compressed to a thin line, moist hands folded across his bulging, translucent shirt, nodded his head.

“Now listen,” said the Commissioner. “Everybody. Okay?” Everybody listened. “All right. Too hot to shout. Now. The policy of this department, like the policy of most other departments of public safety, is that police don’t collect rewards. Right, Chief?”

The Chief nodded. Once.

“The reason is,” the Commissioner went on patiently, “that they cannot take outside money when the City is paying them. See? You took a risk? Correct. That’s your job. If you hadn’t tried to make monkeys out of the Chief and me, maybe we would’ve seen to it you got a department medal.” Trapp’s mouth went ugly. “In fact, if I’m not mistaken, the courts have held that a peace officer isn’t entitled to a reward for an arrest made in his own jurisdiction. You go to the beach, you pick up somebody there and turn him in to the local authorities like any private citizen, you collect the reward. If there is one. But for any arrests you make here, or any information you give here, you don’t collect a reward.”

“Charley and me collect it,” Lew said.

The Commissioner’s face showed a degree of annoyance, very quickly concealed. Lew, after all, was a citizen, residing locally, and might possess a large family of actual or future voters.

“I trust you may, Mr. Livingston,” he said. “I sincerely hope that you and Mr. Rosco will collect the reward. I’m sure you deserve it. But let’s not be premature.” The smile left Lew’s face. “The reward money was put up, as you probably know,” the Commissioner continued, “partly by the bank, partly by the County Bankers’ Association, partly by the newspaper and the Chamber of Commerce, and the rest was contributed by private citizens. Now,” he said briskly, as Lew began to become restless, “the reward was offered in the usual terms — ‘for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Ben Lomax, alias Benny the Barber,’ and so on. He’s been arrested. But he hasn’t even been indicted, let alone brought to trial and convicted.”

Lew gaped, showing the backs of his teeth. He seemed shocked. The Commissioner got up, shook hands with him and Charley and the reporter. “Public-spirited citizens are an example to everyone,” he said. Then he asked them to excuse him, as he and the Chief had some official business to conduct His eyes rested on the two policemen. Their eyes did not rest on him. Colcott looked at the floor; Trapp looked, first at Lew Livingston, then at Charley. Hot as the air in the office was, Charley felt the coldness of that look, and wondered at it, but not for long.

The reporter’s questions made him forget Patrolman Trapp.

“What are you planning to do with your shares of the reward,” the reporter asked.

“That’s my business,” said Lew, automatically truculent. He had sense enough to amend his words at once, “I mean, I dunno exactly what my plans are, as yet. Let’s not be premature,” he concluded, his words a forlorn echo of the Commissioner’s.

The reporter then put the same question to Charley. The answer was almost whispered.

“What did you say?”

Louder, but still low: “I wouldn’t touch it.”

Nor would Charley elaborate. Lew, for once, had nothing to say. He seemed in a reverie.

Charley’s refusal to explain was not allowed to stand. And so, later, he got the reporter off his back by making a short statement:

“My only reason for reporting Lomax was my fear that he was capable of killing more people” — so ran the polished, published version of Charley Rosco’s faltering words. “I did my duty as a citizen, and not for a reward. Lomax’s fate is up to the jury. He will probably be sentenced to death, or at least to life imprisonment. I couldn’t accept any money for that.” He thought that only his mind had repeated the words, blood money; but there they were in the newspaper. It would be blood money.

The account held a further surprise for him. Lewis Livingston, who joined Rosco in reporting the killer’s whereabouts to police, concurred in his coworker’s decision. Somehow, Charley thought he would not want to talk to Lew about it.

Other people wanted to talk to Charley about it, though.

Patrolman Colcott: “Well, I guess you got the right idea. I thought you was trying to beat us out of the money, was all. To tell you the truth, just in confidence, it wasn’t my idea to put in that report. But I got, like, carried away, you know? It was somebody else’s idea. The Commissioner, he really threw the book at us. But I got to admire you for sticking by your principles.”

Jeanette Rosco: “ ‘Oh I was so exitted when I read the nespaper clipings and shoewed them to everybody in Camp and Ant Sussan our cownsiler said your father is not only breave he is ethicle to and I was so prowed.’ ”

Uncle Eddie Aurelius: “Well, Marie, that’s quite a guy you married. But me, I’d think twice before turning that much money down.”

John Rosco: “ ‘Dadd he shut any bulits at you Ples send me a suvenir of the robbery alll the gys say you are rite its blod money.’ ”

And so, finally, Lew.

“I don’t know what got inta me, Charley. I just kept thinking of all the things I could do with the money — I didn’t even think of it as $5,000, just the whole amount. I mean, to get so carried away that I didn’t even think of sharing it!”

“You couldn’t share it with me, Lew. Far as I’m concerned, you can have the whole amount.”

“Ah, no. Ah, no. No blood money for me. I put the whole thing out of my mind. Hey — you know — I was talking to one of my customers, name of Bergdol, I think he must change his tablecloths after every damn meal — half his wash is tablecloths! Well, so he says, Lomax got off with, what was it? $73,000? Besides those other jobs he pulled. So he can afford the best criminal lawyer, Bergdol says, and maybe he can get a hung jury or a, whaddayacallit, a mistrial. After all, it’s been done. But that’s not all: Bergdol says he could do it again, with a big lawyer, even a second trial. Fix the jury, maybe.”

“Well—”

Lew, carried away by Mr. Bergdol’s fancies, swept on. “So if he does it twice, Charley, maybe gets a reversal or one of them legal things, and the government or the D.A. figures, What the hell. How much is this going to cost? So they wait till everybody’s forgot about it and they let him go. Happened before. So — bloong! — there goes your reward. Huh? So I put the whole thing outa my mind.”

But Charley couldn’t put it out of his.

Whatever the sum of money was that Ben Lomax — he had, for one brief fortnight, fifteen years before, been a student at a barber college, which was enough for an imaginative reporter to tag him “Benny the Barber” — had made off with, none of it remained with him. Not one of Mr. Bergdol’s high-flying conceits was realized. Lomax was defended by a court-appointed lawyer, who used no histrionics, no movie or television techniques, baffled no witnesses, found no legal loopholes, demanded no mistrial.

In his summing-up he reminded the jury that although the defendant had been convicted of bank robbery twice before, he had never been accused of violence against any of his victims, and this, the attorney said, lent credence to the defendant’s claim that he had not intended even to fire his gun during the commission of the crime he was now charged with; that it had gone off by accident. Therefore, even if the jury should find the defendant guilty of first degree murder, they would have ample grounds to make a recommendation for mercy.

The jury was out two hours and brought in a verdict of guilty of murder in the first degree. There was no recommendation of mercy.

Lomax said he hoped his case would be a lesson to young people everywhere to “keep clean.” He did not elaborate.

The judge confined his words to the legal formula of the sentence itself.

“We will appeal,” said the condemned man’s lawyer. “Of course we will appeal.”

He did not bother to point out that one appeal was mandatory — and free. After that, the condemned man might appeal, of course, as many times as he could pay for. As he could not pay for any, there was no reason to believe that he would not be executed in the briefest time that the ponderous progress of the law allowed.

“Well, what do you think about it?” everybody — it seemed like everybody — asked Charley. He said that he didn’t want to think about it. But that night he dreamed about it. Once again he saw Ben Lomax, grease-smeared, led to execution; once again Frank Foster lay writhing in his life’s blood.

But this time there was something else: he, the dreamer, was compelled to look at his own hands. Unwillingly, in fear and trembling, he finally looked. His relief at finding them clean of any trace of blood was so great that he awoke.

The local newspaper carried an editorial which briefly reviewed Lomax’s crime, his trial, and its own role in setting up the reward. The editorial went on to say, “That it is entirely proper for such rewards to be offered, goes without saying. Nevertheless, public opinion has not always been kind to those who have accepted them. It was the hope of a reward, not civic consciousness, which brought about the downfall of Jesse James, as cold-blooded a killer and thief who ever lived. It is ironic that the bandit himself has been glorified by those who should know better, while Robert Ford, who shot him, has gone down in popular history as ‘a dirty little coward.’

“No such stigma can be placed on two local men whose prompt, courageous actions resulted in the career of a latter-day Jesse James being brought to an end. Charles Rosco and Lewis Livingston deserve the plaudits of their fellow-citizens. They did what decent men should do, and they staunchly refuse any reward for having done so. What a lesson their brave, selfless conduct should be to those, alas, too many, who are always seeking handouts.”

And the editorial concluded with a denunciation of subsidized medical care for the aged.

Charley’s children (now back from camp with summer’s end) returned from school with shining eyes and flushed cheeks to report that their teachers had read the editorial aloud in class, and that the principal had made it the subject of an address during assembly.

“All right. This is what your mother and I always try to teach you,” Charley said. “You do the right thing because it is the right thing. And if you know that it’s wrong to take money for something, well, you don’t take it, even though you might need it, for instance,” he wound up — somewhat confused, not being used to moralizing. And the two children listened to him, soberly, intently, without wriggling.

Strangers stopped him in the street to shake his hand.

Lomax’s appeal for a new trial was refused by the court. Another date was set for the execution of the death sentence. His lawyer, occupied with a trial for embezzlement, said he could not discuss plans for another appeal. Professional etiquette prevented his asking, “Who’s going to pay for it?” Only action by the Governor could prevent a certain electrician, name never mentioned — thus giving the impression that it was not a man, but some impersonal force — from earning his fee of $250 for killing Lomax. And there was no reason to expect the Governor to act.

And then, one evening, Lew Livingston visited the Rosco home. Marie set out coffee and crackers, apologizing for there being no cake. “How is Clara?” she asked.

Lew made a gesture which almost upset the coffee.

“It’s not Clara,” he said, answering, not Marie’s question, but some question unmasked outside of his own mind. “It’s her old lady.”

“Mrs. Barnett is sick?”

“Sick in the head!” said Lew in a rush of words. He hesitated, then let it all come out.

“The old lady gets up at six in the morning and turns on the television. She sits and she looks at the college professor — don’t ask me what the hell she understands — she just sits and looks. She watches all the programs for the little kids who aren’t even old enough to go to school, she— Listen.” Lew’s mouth worked, his hands moved, before he could catch hold of his words. “All day long, from six in the morning until whenever the Late Late Show goes off, the old lady sits in the living room and watches the television.

“She eats in front of the television, Clara has to bring it to her. She’s hard o’ hearing, so she keeps it up high. Her eyes aren’t too good, so it’s focused just right for her, which means it’s blurred for everybody else. You dasn’t turn it down for even a minute, you dasn’t focus out the blur even for a minute, you dasn’t try and watch another program even for a minute — and, Charley, lemme tell you, may heaven help you if you try to turn that damn box off for even so much as half a minute!”

Charley and Marie made sympathetic noises. This was not news.

“I’m going outa my mind,” Lew said, holding his head as if only the pressure of his hands could keep the skull from falling into two separate parts.

“But that’s not the worse,” he went on. “Ohmigod, that’s bad enough, because what can ya do? You try to fix the television any way but the way she wants it and she carries on. She screams, she yells, she grabs my hands. What can ya do? The kid gives me a hard time, but can I hit an old lady? They’d put me in jail. We have company in the house, we hafta have’m in the kitchen.

“But that’s not the worse of it...” He paused, and the furrows in his long face deepened in misery. “The kid is fourteen years old now. But she’s, uh, well, she could pass for seventeen, eighteen, easy. The kids nowadays, they seem to grow up like mushrooms, you know? Overnight.

“She sleeps in the same bedroom with the old lady. Tiny little room, two beds, one dresser. Our bedroom, Clara’s and mine, the same size. But suppose she wants to bring in a friend? Where’s she going to go? Entertain anybody in the same room where that loud, blurry set is blasting away? She going to entertain her friends in the kitchen?” Lew’s eyes were bloodshot.

“When she was little and she had a girl friend, so they went and sat on her bed together. But she ain’t little any more... What’s the result? The result is she’s hardly ever at home any more. She says she’s with this friend, with that friend, at their house, and they do their homework together. Maybe so. But — all the time? Charley, she’s a pretty girl, the boys all like her, she likes them. Not the ones her own age, a boy fourteen years old doesn’t have a car—”

Marie sighed deeply, nodding.

Abruptly Lew said, “So I’m taking my share.”

After a second Charley asked, “Your share of what?” And almost instantly understood.

“With that,” Lew said, nodding his head as he spoke, “I can put another room on the house. The kid can have a decent room of her own to fix up. Move her bed out of the old lady’s room and I can move that damn television set and the old lady in. She won’t care. Then the kid can have her friends in, with the living room to themselves, and Clara and me can sit in the kitchen — what the hell? — but keep an eye on things, you know...”

His voice died away.

“It’s up to you,” Charley said.

“Maybe you don’t know how easy it is for a girl to get in with the wrong crowd, your kids are too young, but if you were in my shoes you’d do just what I’m doing — take the money, put on the extra room, and have your kid stay around the house instead of going off who knows where and doing who knows what with a bunch of wild kids older than her.”

“It’s up to you,” Charley repeated.

“She looks like sixteen or seventeen, see, but she’s only got the sense of her own age, only fourteen—”

“Lew,” said Charley slowly and stiffly, “for the last time — it’s up to you.”

Lew relaxed. “Then you agree, huh? It’s all right, then. We take the money.”

The stiffness left Charley in an instant. “ ‘We? There isn’t going to be any we about it! You want the damned money, you take it. That’s your privilege. I wouldn’t touch it with a—”

Lew bounded to his feet; his face convulsed. “So you’re still on your high horse, huh? You’re gonna leave me take the dirty looks and the wisecracks all by myself! You’re gonna be the good one, huh, and I’m gonna be the bad one, huh? What makes you so high-class? When did you become a preacher, Rosco? ‘Rosco’? That’s a laugh, all by itself. My old man knew your grandfather when he couldn’t speak six words of English. His name wasn’t no Rosco! Rocco — that’s what it was, Rocco! And you—”

Charley got up and Marie quickly ran between the two of them and grabbed her husband’s arm.

“Get out of here,” he said. “Get out, Lew—”

“Wait,” said Lew as he left “You wait!”

They heard him drive away. Then Marie said bitterly, “That’s a nice enemy you found for yourself.”

“I found?” He stared at her. She met his eyes defiantly. He yelled. “You know what that money is? It’s the price of Frank Foster’s blood!” He pounded on the table. “Did anybody give Frank Foster’s widow five thousand dollars?”

“That has nothing to do with it,” she yelled back. And then they shouted at each other, neither hearing the other, till they suddenly fell silent on seeing the children at the door of their room — open-mouthed, astonished, all set to whimper. Charley turned on his heel and walked out.

Next morning, Max White, the foreman said, “Boss wants to see you, Charley?” And he repeated it, assuring him it was no joke.

So Charley made a brief trip to the washroom and then passed through the outer office, where he almost never went, into the outer office, where he had absolutely never gone before.

He could remember quite well when old Mr. Damrosch had not been old, had been in the full flower of vigorous late middle-age. Mr. Damrosch had not been seen too often around the plant in those days; he had let his brother-in-law, Mr. Cooper, stay in the office while he himself had spent long, long vacations in Saratoga Springs, Daytona Beach, Bermuda, and similar places. But Mr. Cooper was dead, the laundry business was not what it was, and although he still wore spats and a flower in his buttonhole, Mr. Damrosch nowadays stayed on hand most of the year — “Minding the stoor,” as he put it.

He looked very natty this morning. And very old.

“The fact of the matter is, Charles,” he said, as if continuing a discussion only recently interrupted, “that this business is not growing.” He waved his hand: he had conceded a point, but it was not, the gesture said, a very important point. “But on the other hand,” he stroked his neat white mustache, “on the other hand, neither is it shrinking. Not any more. Not for the past few years. You’ve noticed that. Everybody who wants a washing machine has got one. Everybody who prefers a laundromat goes to one. We have leveled off, you see. We have a sound business here, a very sound business.

“The hospitals and nursing homes are not going to go out of business, and neither are they going to make the tremendous investment of putting in their own laundries, having to hire extra help, and so on. Not worth it. No, sir. Neither will our linen supply customers go out of business. As long as hair grows, people will need barbers, barbers will need towels, jackets, and so on. Hotels—”

He leaned forward as if something had just occurred to him. “And I tell you what!” he said. “I shouldn’t be surprised to see, oh, any number of motels opening up on the outskirts when this new highway they’re talking about goes through! And why shouldn’t we get some of those, eh? — some of their business. No reason why old Ben Steinberg should be allowed to get it all, eh, Charles?” And as he mentioned the name of the owner of his chief competitor, the old man quirked one side of his mouth. Charley recognized a Traditional Joke, and smiled.

“Well, I don’t mind saying, Mr. Damrosch” — Mr. Damrosch nodded his head rapidly and encouragingly, as if he very much wanted to hear what Charley didn’t mind saying — “that if any of these new motels should happen to be opened on my route, well, it would certainly be very welcome.”

Almost before Charley had finished the old man began to talk. “Oh, you can do better than that, Charles,” he said, almost reproachfully. “You can certainly do better than that. Sure... We can do better than that for you.”

“What do you mean, Mr. Damrosch?”

Mr. Damrosch opened his humidor, took out a cigar which certainly had never come from Havana, and offered it to Charley, who declined. The old man lit the cigar with deliberation, and puffed. Then he said, “You know this has always been a family-owned corporation, Charles. Stock has never been available to the general public. But—” His voice took the last word on a rising note, and he cocked his head and looked at the smoke. “The Cooper Estate is willing, for the first time, to make some of its shares of stock available.” The Cooper Estate, as everyone knew, consisted of Mr. Damrosch’s niece, her son, and her third husband. The old man himself, a widower, was childless.

“There have been certain expenses which have to be met rather quickly.” He gestured again. Details, details, the gesture said — unimportant details. “I have a certain say in the matter, and I say—” his eyelids, coming down, emphasized his words. “I say, Charles, I do not want this stock to fall into the hands of outsiders, new faces with unfamiliar ways.” He paused. “I want you to be the one to take it. Don’t disappoint me, Charles.”

Charley swallowed. “I don’t have any money, Mr. Damrosch. Just my salary.”

The old man’s eyes, hand, mouth, cigar, signified: An acceptable gambit. One which need not, however, detain us very long.

“For five thousand dollars, Charles,” said Mr. Damrosch, “you can secure a nice little block of stock in the firm for which you have worked all these years. Which has given you the possibility of maintaining your family. You realize, Charles, this would, in effect, make you my partner. How about that?”

“I don’t have five thousand dollars.”

The old man smiled. “Oh, I understand... You’d like a little cash, a nice roll of bills, to play around with, eh? Only natural. Get the wife, the kiddies, some presents. Go away to a decent place on your vacation. I understand. I’m with you. I can swing it. I’ll tell Lundquist — you know Hannon Lundquist, he was poor old Joe Cooper’s lawyer — I’ll just tell him that he will have to modify his demands. Forty-five hundred, I’ll say, is the most you can offer. Or,” he looked sharply up, as Charley still said nothing, “four thousand. He’ll have to sit still for it. That will give you a thousand to play with, and you’ll have four thousand dollars’ worth of stock in the plant to sock away till your kids are ready to go to college. Plus the div-i-dends, Charles. Plus the div-i-dends.”

Speaking rather more loudly than he intended, Charley said, “I just don’t have that kind of money, Mr. Damrosch!”

“Oh,” said the old man softly, “but you can get it. All you have to do is pick up the telephone. Eh?”

“Lew Livingston can do that if he wants to. Not me.”

The old man asked him if he’d prefer if he, Mr. Damrosch, did the telephoning? He could take care of everything. He could promise that nothing would even appear in the newspaper.

“No.”

Suddenly the old man became pathetic. He slumped. They were coming at him like lions, he said, like wild lions. Money — that was all they wanted. His own flesh and blood. They wanted to give the business away to strangers. He’d bought stock from them — and bought again, when they wanted more. But he couldn’t go on buying it, could he? He simply didn’t have that much capital any more. He looked up, pleading.

“No,” Charley said. He wondered if Mr. Damrosch had approached Lew and been turned down. Probably.

Mr. Damrosch shook his head. He seemed crushed. Then, very slowly, still shaking his head, he straightened up. “I’m older, a lot older than you, Charles,” he said, “I’ve seen more of this rotten world than you, and I’ll tell you what, Charles, I’ll tell you this: money never stinks.”

But still Charley shook his head.

Mr. Damrosch sighed. “Well, you’d better get back to your route,” he said. “If you see Freddy Choynsky outside, send him in. He’s been hanging around, asking for a route. There’s none open, but — well, I don’t know, maybe we can find one, somehow.”

Charley didn’t need to have this spelled out for him. Fear, anger, despair... “Freddy Choynsky?” he said. “Didn’t you say, when you fired him that last time, that you couldn’t stand to see his face around?”

The old man’s hooded eyes held him fast.

“Well...” the old man said deliberately, “maybe I could learn to...”

When he got home that evening Charley found Uncle Eddie Aurelius there.

“Look who’s here,” said Marie brightly, with a tight smile. “Uncle Eddie came in especially to see you.” Her eyes and mouth sent him an unmistakable message.

Uncle Eddie Aurelius was a keg-shaped little man, with no neck and no hair, snapping blue eyes, and a cauliflower ear.

“You going to stop this nonsense?” he demanded.

Charley felt very tired. “How about some coffee, Marie?” he asked.

“You listen to what Uncle Eddie has to say,” she said implacably.

What Uncle Eddie had to say was to recount, omitting no detail, the story of how he was asked to take the second mortgage in order to enable the Roscos to get their house; of what Charley had said, of what Marie had said, of what Aunt Loraine (Mrs. Uncle Eddie) had said, and, finally, what he, Eddie Aurelius had said. He then reminded them of each and every time a payment had been late and of what he had said on each occasion, having invariably been understanding and magnanimous.

“I know, Uncle Eddie. I know. You been very, very—”

“I’ve been very, very kind,” the uncle snapped. “I know I have. I haven’t pressed you. Am I a bloodsucker? I’m no bloodsucker. You are in to me for plenty of money. Do you think I’m a millionaire? Well, I’m not, kiddo — get that idea out of your soft head right now. Long as I knew you didn’t have the money,” he said, “long as I knew you couldn’t get the money, I was willing to wait. But why in the hell should I wait now, when all you got to do is just pick up the phone and ask for the money?”

Charley said, “I can’t.”

“Oh, yes, you can,” snapped Uncle Eddie, quick and fierce. “Oh, yes, you can. And you will, too. You want to be a hero? Not on my money, sonny, you’re not going to be any hero. Listen. I wouldn’t put you out of the house. Couldn’t do it. But if I don’t get the money owing to me, the money that’s coming to me, I’m going to drop the whole thing. Sell out. Turn the mortgage over to a mortgage company. You think they will let you wait like I done? Ho ho. That dirty dog up there in the State pen, you think he’s going to be grateful to you for not picking up the check?” He snorted, sought Marie’s eyes.

She began to cry.

Charley threw back his head, spread his arms. He struck the table with his clenched fist. He seemed to be striking it into a pool of blood. Deeper and deeper his fist went into the blood. He sobbed. He sat and looked at his hands.

Then he walked over and picked up the telephone.