Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories

The New York World Telegram said of Benjamin Appel after the publication of his first novel, Brain Guy (1934): “Jimmy Cain hasn’t even a running chance as dean of tellers of hard-boiled stories. He is completely outpointed, outsocked, outslugged, and outcursed by Benjamin Appel.” Nelsoh Algren said of Appel’s first collection of short stories, Hell’s Kitchen (1952): “[His] stories have never been prettied up for the parlor. Their forthrightness will do more than leave the reader feeling that he has read an honest story: he will feel as well that he has met an honest man.”

The slum streets and back alleys of New York City were Appel’s primary fictional domain. Gangsters, whores, grifters, dope dealers and addicts, corrupt political and union officials, cops good and bad, and honest citizens trapped in poverty were the people he wrote about most convincingly. The comparison with Cain is valid enough; but whereas Cain’s prose is controlled, sparse, and strongly dependent on dialogue for its effects, Appel’s is raw, harsh, and sprawling, and it relies more on exposition and quick shifts of scene and viewpoint for its power.

About half of the substantial number of novels and stories produced by Appel can legitimately be termed hard-boiled. Brain Guy, a savage tale of the New York underworld, is darkly reminiscent of W. B. Burnett’s Little Caesar (1929) without in any way being imitative. The Power-House (1939), The Dark Stain (1943), and a paperback original, Sweet Money Girl (1954), are likewise tough and uncompromising studies of urban crime and corruption. The Raw Edge (1958) exposes the greed, graft, and violent struggle for power on the New York waterfront — the same theme, with a different slant, as that of the novelette that follows. Mordant and memorable, “Dock Walloper” was written expressly for, and became the title story of, Appel’s second collection, Dock Walloper (1953).

B. P.

Dock Walloper (1953)

Johnny Blue Jaw Gibbons offered Willy Toth the chance to get himself connected right on the waterfront — and not the first time either that opportunity has come knocking on a prison door.

Those two could have become buddies only in a clink, for they were about as different as a pearl-handled .38 is from a piece of lead pipe. Johnny Blue Jaw was a power on the New York waterfront where the steamship lines paid more for insurance against pilferage than for the rent of their piers. Willy Toth was a stickup man from Utica, working the upstate towns. A nobody who’d drawn a fifteen to twenty year sentence for a two hundred and eight dollar armed robbery in Schenectady. Willy thought he was lucky getting out the first week in March after serving only seven years. Johnny Blue Jaw, with a two year sentence for manslaughter, expected to be free in the summer after doing nineteen months. Was he satisfied? Not Johnny Blue Jaw. “My God damn lawyers!” he griped. “What’m I payin’ ’em for?”

They were different any way you took them. The New Yorker was the dark smoky Irish type. “I gotta shave every day, three times on Sunday,” Johnny Blue Jaw kidded himself. He was built small, except for his outsize dock walloper’s hands. Years ago he’d carried a hook himself. “The hook’s in my head now,” he explained once to Willy. Maybe it was at that. For his eyes were a metal-blue under his black hair. “I own a piece of the docks,” was how the ex-dock walloper described his present occupation. In fact, being an owner’d fouled him up with the law. “This bandit Nolan owns the Chelsea docks, see, and he tried to grab up my piece, too. I got the guy he sent after me. Self defense, see. Where they get off with manslaughter, I dunno. Just politics.”

Willy was blondish and he was big, almost six feet. Big and dumb, Johnny Blue Jaw thought with the razor-edged contempt of a small smart man for a big not-too-smart one. Willy never wisecracked like the tough little mobster; Willy was a great listener. And maybe that was why they were buddies. They were that different.

A few days before Willy hit the outside, Johnny Blue Jaw said, “You see this Clancy first thing. Clancy runs the union and he’ll take care of you ’til I get out.”

“Thanks,” Willy said gratefully. “That’s all I want. A job and no trouble.” He meant it with all his heart. Seven long years in Sing Sing’d given the stickup man the chance to do a little one-plus-two. Willy wasn’t really dumb. He was just another drifter — a drifter with a gun — and stick-ups were one way to make a living. But when a guy added seven years in Sing Sing to the four and a half at Wallkill, to the three years in the reforms, it was just too God damned much for one lifetime. If he broke parole, he’d have the rest of his fifteen-to-twenty to sweat out, another eight of thirteen years. The thought gave Willy the creeps. “The cat’s out of me,” he said to Johnny Blue Jaw. “I’m forty-three. All I want’s no more trouble.”

“There’s no trouble down the waterfront I can’t fix.”

“That’s all I want.”

Johnny Blue Jaw, who was only thirty, grinned. “The No More Trouble Kid himself! Maybe you even wanna go straight, Willy?”

“That’s okay with me too.”

“Yeh? Well, for a while it won’t kill you.”

Willy Toth arrived in New York on a bright blowy March day — an ex-con in a gray hat, a gray topcoat and a blue suit, the parting gifts of the institution where he’d finally learned something about the terrible arithmetic of time.

He walked along Ninth Avenue into a red brick neighborhood not too unlike the upstate slums where he’d lived between stretches in prison. Trucks rolled west towards Tenth and Eleventh and Twelfth Avenues, towards the piers and the deep green water where the big ships of the Cunard and French lines berthed when in port. The address he had from Johnny Blue Jaw was a two-story building between Eleventh and Twelfth Avenues, a tinsmith on the street, the union headquarters above. Up on the second floor, a blonde secretary led Willy into a private office. There behind a beat-up desk sat a big man in his fifties who looked like an ad for a soft life. Thomas E. Clancy, president of the union local, wearing an expensive suit. The Thomas E. Clancy jowl hung over a silk necktie shining orange and yellow against a light blue shirt, the color of the sky outside. The Thomas E. Clancy voice boomed. “I been expectin’ you, Willy.”

Willy stammered through his story.

“Any friend of Johnny’s a friend of mine. We’ll go out to the girl and get you a union book.”

The outer office was a dead ringer for Clancy’s private office. The same cheap buff paint was slapped on the walls, the same American flag covered with dust, and near the windows, a duplicate of the lithograph of the president — with the motto OUR PRESIDENT — that hung behind Clancy’s desk.

“Sign this man up, Alice,” Clancy said to the blonde. “Skip the initiation fee and monthly dues and send him to see Ray.”

“The monthly dues, too, Mr. Clancy?” she asked.

“We’re givin’ this man special consideration.” Clancy smiled at Willy. “When I started onna docks I only made thirty-three cents an hour,” Clancy said with a quick look down memory-lane. “I worked on the docks in my underwear.”

He turned his fat broad back covered with fine cloth and returned to his own office. The blonde reached for a pencil and pad. “What’s your name?”

It was seven years since Willy’d been alone in a room with a woman, and this one was ripe as only a blonde past thirty can be. Willy hadn’t heard her questions. He was staring at her round breasts as if they were lit up with neon. Her dress was made of some green shiny material so that her body, too, seemed to be shining at him, bursting with light and sex like the women he’d dreamed about in prison. A jailbird’s dream — woman come alive. Her pale golden hair, cut in a bang across her forehead, gleaming yellower than yellow, her lips redder than red.

“Through having a look?” the blonde asked him. She wasn’t angry. She was just asking, and besides she was used to dock wallopers. Once a month, more than two thousand of them tramped up into this office with their three dollar dues.

Willy was blushing like a kid, his jaw muscles tight. The blonde’s red lips showed a smile thin as the blade of a knife. She thrust that knife-edged smile into him and mockingly arched her breasts a little, for she was thirty-two and beginning to fade and she was out to get even with all the men who hadn’t married her.

The next day one of the dock wallopers in Willy’s work-gang answered his question. “Go to Florence’s. She’ll give yuh credit on yer union book.”

Florence’s was a side-street joint on 49th Street between Tenth and Eleventh, with two girls, a redhead and a blonde who’d once been a brunette. You noticed Florence who had the bulging eyes of a peke and was always taking cough medicine more than you did her girls. But the redhead Gloria and the blonde Lulu weren’t bad, Willy decided.

He wasn’t hard to please. He became a regular, and as March breezed into April, he kind of settled on Lulu. Lulu got to like him, too. One night she sat on his lap, just talking. Her lips, as hard under their lipstick as the cracked sidewalks down in the street, softened. “Wanna know my nickname, Willy?”

“Sure.”

“It’s Babe. I don’t tell that to all the boys. Oney those I like. You gotta nickname, Willy?”

He laughed and then as a tug boat whistle sounded from the waterfront, he remembered Johnny Blue Jaw’s wisecrack. “The No More Trouble Kid — that’s me, Lulu. Or should I call you Babe from now on?”

He wasn’t joking about being the No More Trouble Kid. After seven years in stir, Willy Toth, a dock walloper at the age of forty-three, didn’t want to make any more noise than a mouse. He worked when the ships were in, drank a whiskey or two at Reagan’s, the union hangout on the corner of 47th and Eleventh, and in the spring tenement night after a visit to Babe he’d walk home. On the stoops, the men sat smoking and in the gutters a few last kids like phantoms in sneakers raced their shadows. He lived in a Hotel for Men Only on the corner of 42nd Street and Tenth, in a room not much bigger than his cell at Sing Sing. But there were no bars in the single window.

Sometimes he wasn’t sure. Sometimes he’d wake in the dead hours, moaning with fear, and only when he hurried to the window, sticking his head and shoulders outside, could he relax. Down below, in the moonlight, down below, in the rain, Tenth Avenue stretched before him. Not heaven maybe. But pretty close. The stillness of the Avenue in the hours after midnight, a stillness that wasn’t really still, but beating ever so slowly, would fold about him like some huge and peaceful wing.

Another wing covered the waterfront: the racket. A wing with many feathers. Kickback and shape-up. Phoney charity raffle and whiskey tax.

At 7.30 each morning, Willy stepped into Pete’s Shoe Repairs on Eleventh to pay his kickback buck. Pete was only the collector for the hiring boss. But there was always some sorehead in the crowd of dock wallopers smoking their stogies and belching after their three fried-egg breakfasts, who’d let off steam against the kickback racket by cursing Pete. “Lousy ginzo!” the sorehead’d jabber. “He’s gonna buy a yacht with our bucks!”

At 7:40 Willy and his work-gang were loafing at the head of the pier where the shape was coming off. They knew they were going to work, but hundreds of other dock wallopers were there on the off-chance. Dock wallopers in caps that looked as if they’d been fished off a rag pile. Dock wallopers in two sweater combinations. Dock wallopers with lucky scarves around their necks. “I never get hurted when I wear it.” Maybe the Queen Mary or the United States would be towering up to the sky, immense and iron-walled and yet somehow human as all ships are somehow human.

At 7:55 the hiring boss, Red Rizzo, showed up, a short bulky man who looked like a light heavyweight whose legs’d been cut down. Red Rizzo blew a whistle. The dock wallopers shaped-up around him in a semi-circle. This particular hiring boss liked to stare up into the sky. “Mickey’s gang,” he called, his eyes on a little cloud. As Mickey’s gang stepped out of the shape-up, he fixed his eye on a wheeling seagull. “Fat Tony’s gang... Ray’s gang...”

Willy was one of the boys in Ray’s gang. He worked steady even when the steadies were s. o. l. Willy developed into a pretty good man with a hook. He was husky to start with and up in Sing Sing he’d been in the metal shop five years. Ray taught him how to use a sling. Pete Harris, an ex-con like himself, demonstrated a few tricks of the trade. “The load’s like a woman. She’s gonna give if you work her right.” Out on the piers jutting into the sparkling river, Willy’s face tanned and he began to feel good. Even when he climbed down into the holds of the great ships, he didn’t feel closed in as in prison where the bars somehow threw their shadows into the sunniest of yards.

Kickback? Shape-up? So what, Willy thought. Every morning he saw the beaten-hound look in the eyes of the men Red Rizzo hadn’t called. Some of those men’d been members of the union for twenty years and were still catch-ons. They could drag their tails home. Or if they were lucky, the hiring boss might let them treat him to a shot of whiskey at Reagan’s. Or even buy him a pint or a fifth.

No man in Clancy’s local drank anywhere else but Reagan’s. The rumble was that Johnny Blue Jaw was Reagan’s silent partner. And it was a fact that in the back-room at Reagan’s, the mob hung its hat. “Between you an’ me an’ the crapper,” a blarneying dock walloper by the name of Paddy Lynch said to Willy one night over a beer at Reagan’s brawling bar, “I’d like to be in the boots of the boyo who’s always needin’ a shave to mention no names. There’s the kickback king, himself.”

“Yeh?” Willy led him on. “That so?”

“Reagan kicks back to him, Red Rizzo kicks back to him.”

Willy asked himself if Paddy Lynch was one of the secret followers of Father Bannon. He’d heard of this Father Bannon, a waterfront priest always talking up Jesus Christ and reform. About Father Bannon, the dock wallopers said, “The father’s a nut. Nobody’s ever seen Jesus Christ down the waterfront, and nobody ever will.”

“Red Rizzo gets paid by the steamship an’ stevedore comp’nies,” Paddy Lynch was saying. “But who picked him for the job? The boyo who’s always needin’ a shave.”

“Lynch, you’re a God damned troublemaker!” Willy said and picking up his beer, he walked away. Before that night was over, Delaney, secretary-treasurer of the union, had soaked him for a raffle ticket. “You might win a Chewy and ride to work,” Delaney’d smiled. But every dock walloper stuck with a ticket knew the only riding they would do’d be inside their double-soled shoes.

“Everything’s a racket,” the ex-stickup man and ex-con would have said if anybody’d asked his opinion. And if this particular racket worked both sides of the street, Willy Toth for one couldn’t get excited. It was a racket that scrounged every loose buck it could out of the dock walloper’s pay. And it just about used a winch helping itself to steamship cargo. “That Johnny Blue Jaw deserves a lot of credit,” Willy used to say in a voice full of genuine admiration to Pete Harris. And that ex-con would answer with an admiration gone just a little sour. “Yeh. He’s a wonder, a cock-eyed wonder.”

Working the 5 P.M. or midnight shapes, the two best shapes for stealing, Willy had marveled at the operations of Al Linn, one of Johnny Blue Jaw’s top men. Al Linn was a gray-faced mobster, a sick man who couldn’t drink or chase women whom the dock wallopers called “Vice President of the Stealing Department.” All Al Linn had left were his brains. The rumble was that Johnny Blue Jaw listened to Al Linn when he wouldn’t listen to anybody else in his mob. One night Willy’d seen an Al Linn truck, loaded with ship’s cargo, almost run over a pier watchman. “Pete,” he said later over pancakes and coffee. “That watchman’d jumped out of the way like a rabbit and kept on jumping.”

“What’d you want him to do? If he ratted to the dock super he’d’ve had himself an accident.”

The huge ships were floating department stores full of Christmas presents all the year round — Christmas presents for the taking. And the “Vice President of the Stealing Department” took. And the dock wallopers said, “We gotta right to a lit honest stealin’ ourself. We’re entitle’ too!”

Down in the hold of the Ile de France, Ray’s gang broke open a box of perfume, stuffing the bottles under their shirts.

“I know a guy’ll gimme a buck apiece,” they said.

“Not for me. I want my ole woman to smell nice.”

“Yeh,” a wisecracker said. “Put this parley voo stuff onna tits and you won’t smell the cabbage and diapers.”

“So long I put it on her tits okay.”

Only Willy felt uneasy. He was stuffing perfume, too, but he couldn’t help muttering, “Our luck to have the watchman grab us.”

They gave him the horse laugh. “Hell,” Willy argued, “I don’t care how crooked they are, they have to make an arrest once in a while for the record.” He’d had his experience with crooked coppers.

Ray, the gang-boss, agreed. “Willy’s got something. There was a dumb mick Lacey once, something wrong with his head. Well, one night on a Queen ship, he stuffed a bunch of them soft wooly limey sweaters into his pants. Stuffed so damn many he looked like a clown in the circus. When Lacey walked out on that pier in broad daylight, the watchman just had to arrest him. They took that dumb mick Lacey to the judge and the judge says, ‘You plead guilty or not guilty.’ Lacey was so mixed up he says, ‘Guilty.’ The judge didn’t believe his ears. ‘Guilty?’ he says. ‘Guilty!’ says Lacey. ‘Six months,’ says the judge. ‘Sentence suspended.’ ”

Babe or Lulu couldn’t believe it when Willy gave her a bottle of French perfume. “Gee!” she exclaimed happily. “You’re a sweetie. I oney wished you hadda nickname, Willy. Suppose—” doubtfully — “do you like Big Boy, Willy?”

“Nope. Everybody calls me that. I told you once, Babe— No More Trouble suits me fine.”

Johnny Blue Jaw Gibbons came outside in July and spent a busy week or so picking up what he termed “the loose strings” and organizing new ones. Nights, he was dashing around like a terrier in a kennel of bitches. Then he sent for Willy. He was sitting in the back-room at Reagan’s with Al Linn and Red Rizzo when Willy came in. Johnny Blue Jaw shook hands with Willy, pounded him on the back, and invited him to have a double shot of the best whiskey in the house. “You know these guys?” he asked, jabbing his thumb at Al Linn and Red Rizzo.

Willy knew them all right. He knew also that he was just another face to them, if that. He felt as if he didn’t know Johnny Blue Jaw either. Johnny, the jailbird, yes. This big-shot Johnny, no.

The mob leader was dressed like a gigolo in the money — of a couple well-heeled dames. His gray summerweight suit was brand new, his dark gray shirt and maroon necktie out of a box, and on his right hand a huge diamond glittered. When Willy’s eyes shifted to the diamond, Johnny Blue Jaw raised his right fist. “How do you like it?” he said with a cocky grin. “The latest style in brass knucks.”

They all laughed and Willy said, “I heard a rumble you were out, Johnny.”

“Ask the girls that, Willy. Ask the girls. Clancy tells me you’re doin’ okay as a dock walloper.”

Al Linn sneered. “How would fatso know? He hasn’t been on a dock since the year one.”

“That blondie up there at Clancy’s—” Johnny Blue Jaw whistled between his teeth, his blue eyes shining. He seemed to’ve forgotten all about Willy. “I’m takin’ her out tomorrow.”

“She’s a hot piece,” Red Rizzo said in a flat voice as if talking about the morning’s shape-up, no more expression in his face than on a bulkhead. “That blonde likes to go out with big-shots.”

“That what you are?” Johnny Blue Jaw wanted to know.

“How do you spell big-shot?” Al Linn joined the kidding. “With an o or two i’s?”

Johnny Blue Jaw leaned across the table and pinched Willy’s cheek. “My old buddy. Aw, Willy, nineteen months a helluva time.” He shook his black-haired head. “Willy put in seven years!”

“I put in two, three years myself,” Red Rizzo volunteered.

Al Linn shrugged. “Okay, okay, we all put in time and we all had the clap. That’s supposed to’ve made men out of us.”

Johnny Blue Jaw laughed. “How do you like that Al? Hey, Willy, no more runnin’ around with a hook for you. When you hit the docks again, you’ll have yourself a lil cigar box.”

“A cigar box?”

“For the numbers.”

“What numbers?”

“Don’t you love them hicks?” Johnny Blue Jaw said delightedly to Red Rizzo and Al Linn. “What numbers, Willy, you shoulda give yourself back to the Indians. You’re gonna be a number collector, see.” Numbers was one of the new strings Johnny Blue Jaw’d promoted since his return to town.

“Oh!” Willy said. He wasn’t much of a newspaper reader. But lately the boys’d been chopping up a lot of words about an investigation into the gambling rackets. “I’m satisfied with what I’m doing, Johnny,” he said in a rush.

“You don’t want it?” Johnny Blue Jaw asked him unbelievingly.

“No, Johnny. Honest—”

“I’ll be damned! Here he is, guys! You can hunt high and low and up Mabel’s crotch and you won’t find another. The one guy who don’t want you should do him a favor! Willy, you dumb lug, you crazy?”

“I’m satisfied longshoring, Johnny. Honest—”

“You dumb sonovabitch, you’ll get your full day’s pay as a longshoreman and only work a coupla hours for it.”

“Johnny, I’m satisfied. I don’t need much to get along.”

The three mobsters stared at him as if what he really needed was a straitjacket.

“I know what’s eatin’ the poor guy,” Johnny Blue Jaw announced. “He’s got the balance of twenty years over his dumb head if he breaks parole. Willy,” Johnny said softly as if he were talking to a baby, “don’t sing them parole blues to me. Whatta you think I got protection for down the waterfront? The Big Mob’s behind this numbers deal. Who do you think kept my piece of the docks for me when I was up the river?”

That week Willy started to collect numbers. What else could a guy do? You did what you were told with Johnny Blue Jaw. What else was there? Stickups? He was finished with that. And besides there was Lulu whose nickname was Babe whom he’d gotten used to and Babe didn’t come free. “I’m carrying my cross these days,” he said to her when she asked him why all the worry.

“What is it, sweetie? You tell Babe.”

“It’s the numbers, the damn numbers. I smell trouble ahead,” he said with a sigh.

Every morning Willy put on his dock walloper’s clothes and ate a solid dock walloper’s breakfast; oatmeal, three eggs and bacon, rolls and two cups of coffee. “I got to force myself to eat,” he was complaining to Babe. Then he walked to his pier, and in the July sun, hot even in the early mornings, prepared for business. This was simple. He set his cigar box down on top of a barrel. He was ready. The dock wallopers, hanging around for the shape, came over to make their bets. They kidded him as they picked their lucky numbers, but Willy felt they were on different sides of the fence now. The men with the hook had a name for the guys like him — “the ex-cons’ club.” Even Pete Harris, an ex-con himself who was always softsoaping Willy in hopes of Willy putting in a word for him for a collecting job, was on the other side now. You were either in the club or you were out. With a double triple out.

The club met in the back-room at Reagan’s. Number collectors from every pier between 42nd and 57th Streets. Stealers from the Stealing Department. Gunmen whom Johnny Blue Jaw tagged “the Sullivan boys” or “the Sullivans” because they carried guns in violation of the New York State Sullivan Law.

That back-room was a parolee’s nightmare.

“Got to allow for what the boys put under their shirts,” Al Linn might be saying when he felt mellow and in a mood to chew the fat about the secrets of his trade. “Got to allow for what the company expects to be lifted. You can’t steal the anchors off the anchor chains. You got to leave ’em the eyes in their heads.”

Buyers of stolen goods, fences and middlemen dickered with Al about shipments of Swiss watches or Scotch whiskey. Loan sharks who wanted an exclusive on the two thousand members of the union local showed up to get things straight with Johnny Blue Jaw. Gamblers with floating crap games, pimps, sure-thing operators, and always a character or two about whom Willy didn’t want to know more than he had to. Maybe a sailor or a steward off a ship whose specialty was thinking up new ways to outsmart the Narcotics Squad. Willy always felt better after he got rid of his policy slips and could beat it out.

And when some newspaper featured a series of articles on the waterfront rackets, Willy only wished that Johnny Blue Jaw’d never come back to town. For not only was he collecting numbers for Johnny. He’d also been elected to his old job of number-one listener.

As Johnny Blue Jaw was the number-one collector. Collecting from number collectors and number players both, from dope smugglers and loan sharks, from Al Linn and his Stealing Department and from the steamship lines for keeping something called “Labor Peace” while he collected a thousand a month of the union dues from Clancy the representative of the laboring man.

Willy just didn’t want to know the details about Johnny Blue Jaw’s different collections. But practically every week, usually on a Tuesday or Wednesday night, “my take-it-easy night,” Johnny’d have him up to his hotel suite. It was a hotel in a sidestreet opposite Madison Square Garden. There with the fans blowing and a bellhop bringing in the gin and ice and lemons, it was like the old days up the river with Johnny doing all the talking, and Willy all the listening. “Know why I trust you, Willy,” Johnny Blue Jaw liked to say when he was tanked up. “S’because, Willy, you’re the one guy who don’ wanna damn thing outa me. You re okay, Willy, even if you’re a hick.” Stripped down to a pair of red or green silk shorts, Johnny Blue Jaw could’ve been a lightweight boxer himself escaped from the Garden. And the black-haired blue-eyed little mobster was in a fight sure enough. He was fighting a non-stop decision against the other big collectors.

Mainly, he was worried by his old enemy Nolan who owned the Chelsea docks, Nolan who had the Grace and U.S. lines in his pocket. “That bandit ain’t gonna feel good ’til he sees me inna silver coffin wi’ golden handles.” Johnny was worried, too, by the Big Mob. “See, Willy, I’m in good wi’ them. They kept Nolan from grabbin’ up my piece o’ the docks when I was in stir. Didn’ do it for nothin’ though. Hadda give ’em a fifty-fifty split on everything I make. I’m in good with ’em but you never can tell from one day t’ the next. Aw, let’s have another Tom Collins, Willy.” He had the drinking capacity of a big man. And Willy, his head reeling, would reach for his refilled glass and wish to God he was at Reagan’s where the drinks weren’t free, but where at least a guy could get stewed without filling his brain with another guy’s griefs. With another guy’s schemes, another guy’s secrets. And it was a guy who was about as hot as they come...

He was leaving Reagan’s back-room one August day when Johnny Blue Jaw caught up with him. “C’mon, Willy, I’ll give you a ride in my new boat.” The new boat was a cream-colored Cadillac upholstered in dark green leather. As they drove uptown, Johnny Blue Jaw smiled. “A car’s not broken in right ’til it’s had dames in it. Bring a dame to the hotel tonight, Willy. We’ll do the town. Know any classy dames?”

Willy thought of Babe down at Florence’s. “Only whores,” he admitted.

“Whores!” Johnny Blue Jaw said disgustedly. “Whores is out! I’ll have a dame for you.”

The dame was Clancy’s office girl, the blonde whom Willy’d last seen in March. He didn’t recognize her until Johnny Blue Jaw said. “Imagine a beaut like this workin’ in an office with only fat Clancy to look at her. Alice, I want you to meet Willy, a good pal of mine.”

The blonde smiled a come-on smile at him. Willy thought excitedly she didn’t remember him, and the hell with that. What counted was that he rated now. He was Johnny Blue Jaw’s pal.

They were all Johnny Blue Jaw’s pals; Willy his listening pal, and Alice his old bed-time pal and Dolores the new one. Dolores was a blonde, too, but she couldn’t have been more than seventeen, long-legged, thin-armed, slender and fresh as new grass with a KEEP OFF sign on it. There wasn’t a wrinkle or a line under her gray slanted eyes or at the corners of her lips. Next to her, Alice looked old, her body on the heavyish side, with only her white summer dress blooming like a fresh flower.

They had cocktails in the hotel bar, and then they drove north out of the city in the new Cadillac to a club where they had dinner and highballs until they were all floating. Johnny Blue Jaw listened to the blues singer, a tall girl naked except for three glittering metallic patches. “I might buy that,” he smiled. “If I do I’ll gi’ you Dolores, too, Willy. S’all inna fam’ly.”

Alice smiled at Dolores, a smile that was too sweet. “We’ll have a hotel for all the girls Johnny-boy’s played around with.”

Dolores giggled drunkenly, “He thinks he’s so great. Bet Big Boy can show him plenty. Can’t you, Big Boy?”

“Yeh! His arm pits!” Johnny Blue Jaw hooted.

“Let’s dance, Big Boy,” Dolores said.

Willy hadn’t said much all night; he’d concentrated on hoisting the drinks. But now he grinned foolishly. “First, I got to dance with Alice here, Dolores.”

“Dance with botha the tomatoes!” Johnny Blue Jaw yawned.

Out on the elbow-poking, packed dance floor, Alice pushed her body close to Willy. She smiled up at him and in the dim light, her eyes seemed as bright and fresh as Dolores’. Willy breathed in her perfume, and an unbelieving smile touched his lips.

“How long do you know Johnny-boy?” she asked him.

“I’m prackally his best friend,” Willy mumbled drunk and happy. “You’re somethin’, you know that, Alice? What Johnny sees in a bag of bones like Dolores, robbing the cradle, aw—”

“You down the waterfront, Willy?”

“With Johnny,” he said cagily. Willy was drunk and he wasn’t extra smart even when he was sober, but nobody had to explain some things to him. “I’m a big-shot on the waterfront you wanna know,” he said with all the delicacy of a dock walloper leaning on his hook.

He slept with Alice that night.

He began dating her, and towards the end of August, he rented a furnished apartment on West 23rd Street and she moved in with him. Johnny Blue Jaw grinned when he heard. “Willy, you’re gettin’ to be a great lover for an old guy.”

“Great lover, my foot! She knows you’re behind me.”

“Well, I am!” Johnny Blue Jaw stated. “You’re one guy I like. That’s why I’m a lil worried about this dame. She’s no bargain.”

But Willy thought Alice the best little bargain he’d ever made. And Babe agreed with him. He’d gone to see her for the last time to explain things all fair and square. “The girl’s got a steady job,” Babe said as she sat on Willy’s lap. “She cooks for you. And a girl over thirty ain’t burnin’ up like a young kid which is okay for you, Willy. For a ball of fire you ain’t no more neither.” Babe nodded, a philosopher in a red silk robe. “Nothin’ like home-cooked eats, I say.” Babe thought for a second. “She got a nickname?”

“No.”

Babe stroked Willy’s cheek with a hand whose nails were a brighter red than her robe. “If you wanna, for old times sake, you can call her Babe.”

The No More Trouble Kid gave her a big hug. He said sincerely, “Babe, you’re a good girl.”

“I did you a lot of good and you don’t appreciate it. I ask you to do something and you won’t do anything. Gwan back to where you came from. And take that fat-ass blonde with you.”

Willy was still too stunned by what Johnny Blue Jaw’d asked him to do to think of a good answer. Besides there were no good answers. It was either yes or no and neither of them was any good. Willy glanced at the bandage on Johnny’s neck. Then, at the gunman smoking a butt over on the couch.

The bandage and the gunman went together somehow like black crepe and an undertaker. The gunman’s name was Mack, one of “the Sullivan boys” from Reagan’s back-room. He was a narrow-built guy with blue eyes like any other blue eyes. If his mouth was tight and thin, so were the mouths of half the town, a town where everybody was hustling to make a buck. He looked like a shoe salesman or a junior executive. Only he happened to be a gunman and a killer.

“Beat it, you yellow bum!” Johnny Blue Jaw said to Willy.

“You got no right to call me that.”

“Why not?”

“You know why not.”

“Don’t start in on them parole blues again. I thought we were pals. Some pal! Soon’s I get in a spot, he turns yellow!”

“I’m not letting you down,” Willy said quietly.

Johnny Blue Jaw sighed. “I didn’t think you would.” He fingered the bandage. “You’re one guy I trust. You and Mack there.” But he had also trusted the man who’d slashed at his throat that morning — Bugs Dennis, one of the Sullivan boys, on his payroll for years. Johnny Blue Jaw’d come out of Reagan’s and Dennis was there waiting for him. With a knife. “A lil closer and he’d’ve cut through my juggler vein,” Johnny said gloomily. “Nolan reached him. Nolan maybe reached some of my other boys. You two guys—” He didn’t finish his sentence.

Willy peered over at Mack. They were the two guys Johnny Blue Jaw trusted most.

“We’re gonna knock down that Nolan bastid once and for all,” Johnny Blue Jaw said. “Nolan, we’ll let alone a while. Nolan expects us so we’ll let’m alone a while. There’s others...”

The next few weeks, for Willy, went off like an — endless bad dream. One night with the fog in from the waterfront, he was at the wheel of a car, piloting it into a sidestreet below 14th. Burnham’s block, it was. Burnham, the third or fourth biggest guy in the Nolan mob. The fog swirled around the big yellow street lamp and Willy thought giddily that only a few blocks away on 23rd, Alice was sitting cozy in their apartment. “Wait here,” Mack said. There were just the two of them. Willy watched Mack ease out of the car, cross the sidewalk and climb the stoop of a brownstone.

When the shots burst out, they sounded far away, muffled, as if the walls of the house had also turned into layers of blanketing fog.

Down the stoop, Mack came on the double. Into the car! Willy stepped on the gas while from behind them the muffled screaming of a woman tore at all his strained nerves.

It was Burnham’s wife who had roused the neighborhood.

“An easy mark,” Johnny Blue Jaw said grimly a couple hours later. “That Burnham never figured we’d want him.”

The next day Willy read the newspaper headlines WATERFRONT WAR... Following instructions, he stayed in his apartment. At night when Alice came home from her job he was drunk. He couldn’t eat supper. He couldn’t sleep. After a few hours, he awoke and began to curse his luck. She poured him a shot of whiskey like a mother feeding a baby medicine. And as he lay there in bed with his big head between her breasts, she whispered soft as a mother with a sick child. “It’s a ratrace, honey, so what can you do? Walk out on Johnny? No sense in that. Always been shootings on the waterfront. The cops never convict nobody. It blows over and things’re like before. It’ll blow over, you’ll see. And you’ll be set.”

Clancy’s secretary had latched onto the big numbers collector with the desperation of a woman whose mirror has begun to show the first silver hairs among the touched-up beauty-parlor gold.

“You’ll be set,” she repeated. “That’s one thing about Johnny. He don’t let his friends down. Look at Red Rizzo. Look at Al Linn—”

“Why don’t he have them gunning at Nolan’s mob?”

“They’re in it!” she assured him, stroking his hot forehead. “The whole organization’s in it one way or another. That is, everybody he trusts.”

“Yeh, but who gets the dirty work? Me and Mack. That Blue Jaw’s just trouble,” he said miserably.

He awoke in the morning, a hangover grinding inside his head like hundreds of raking little wheels. The newspapers Alice brought up only made those little wheels spin faster. The police had questioned a lot of characters, including Johnny Blue Jaw Gibbons and Nolan. But nobody could explain the Burnham killing. Nobody at all. “See!” Alice said triumphantly. “It’ll blow over.”

Towards the end of the second week, at supper-time, Mack called on them. He sniffed at the platter of pork chops and French fries on the table. “I’ll wait’ll you eat,” Mack said and sat down in his dark brown top coat, his brown felt hat balanced on his knees.

“What’s up?” Willy asked, pushing his plate away.

“Better eat,” Mack advised him and turned his eyes on the woman. He seemed to be sniffing all her curves over as he had the food. She smiled and brought him a cup of coffee. “Thanks,” said Mack.

It was drizzling when the two men walked downstairs. The lights of the stores on 23rd shone brightly from the wet black sidewalks. They walked east and Mack, who wouldn’t answer Willy upstairs, began to speak. “It’s Nolan, Willy. He’s out in Brooklyn in his sister’s house. With the flu. He wouldn’t lay up in his own place or go to the hospital. Had to go to his sister’s house. He’s got two of his boys with him.”

He’s out in Brooklyn in his sister’s house... Willy thought over and over again, riding the BMT subway. Johnny Blue Jaw’s stool-pigeons hadn’t missed a trick. That Johnny had himself an organization. An organization and a half. His heart thudded heavily. “Mack, what do I do? You haven’t told me.”

Mack eyed him. Reaching into his pocket he silently passed Willy a slice of gum.

“Well?”

“What’s the rush, Willy?” Mack said.

It wasn’t drizzling or raining in Brooklyn when they stepped out at their subway station, elevated here, and walked down to the street. In I front of a stationery store, a car was waiting for them. Inside they saw four men. As Willy squeezed into the front seat, glancing at the two pale blobs of faces there, he wondered why he was needed tonight. That damn Blue Jaw’d just gotten into the habit, he thought.

As if reading his mind, Mack said, “Willy, the boys Nolan got with him maybe know us. They don’t know you. You’ll ring the door bell. You’ll say you’re from Cunningham’s. That’s the drugstore they’ve been getting Nolan’s medicine from—”

“What am I? The clay pigeon!”

“Nobody’s going to pop at you. You’re from this Cunningham drugstore and we’ll be right behind you. That’s all you do! Ring the bell and get back into the car — to the wheel.”

The car cut into a quiet neighborhood of two-story brick houses, each sitting snug and solid behind its lawn.

“Okay,” Mack said to the driver. “Here’s good enough.” They all piled out on the sidewalk. “It’s the corner house. Willy, you go ahead!”

Willy walked up three stone steps to a door with two triangular panes of glass set in the wood. The pane’s shone yellow from a lamp inside the foyer. He rang the bell, saw a woman, followed by a man, come to the door. Their faces were framed in the yellow glass triangles, the woman fat and middle-aged, the man dark and slab-chinned, a face not too different from the faces of the mobsters who’d come to Brooklyn this night.

“I’m from Cunningham’s, Cunningham’s drugstore,” Willy said in a quick jittery patter. And miraculously, for he didn’t believe his own eyes, the door was opening. Wider and wider it opened, as Willy felt his heart turn into an empty hole. His nerves were laced across that empty hole, stretched tighter and tighter. What were they waiting for, his nerves shrieked. For the Nolan boy to pull his gun. And then in a rush, they weren’t waiting any more, hurling past Willy into the foyer. “Don’t try nothin’ or I’ll kill you!” Mack was warning the woman and the man.

Frantically, Willy dashed down towards the car. The woman shrilled, “No, no!” and then her voice suddenly vanished, the house door closing.

Willy sat at the wheel of the car: a car in another world.

He learned later that the Nolan bodyguard, seeing five gunmen, had folded like a folding chair, with only the woman having the guts to yell and warn her brother. A gun butt’d floored her. Johnny Blue Jaw’s Sullivans had moved fast. Two of them’d rounded up the woman’s husband and son and daughter listening to the radio in the living-room, while Mack and the others marched the disarmed bodyguard up to Nolan’s room. Up the stairs they raced, the radio blaring downstairs. Nolan’s second bodyguard had run out onto the landing, gun in fist. He’d hesitated a second because the first man coming up was his side. While he hesitated, one of the Sullivans’d plugged him through the head. They stepped over his body and finished off Nolan. The whole thing’d taken maybe ten minutes.

There were more headlines. Some editorialist wrote that the port of New York was more corrupt than Port Said, and over in Reagan’s backroom, Al Linn said, “If Port Said’s that crooked what’re we wasting our time here for?”

A few days after Nolan was buried, Fassetti, the number-two Nolan man who was now both number one and number three, sent his mouthpiece to meet with Johnny’s mouthpiece. A settlement was worked out. Fassetti promised to stay on his own docks, to deliver Dennis, and to pay ten thousand in cash for Johnny Blue Jaw’s slashed throat. Dennis was tortured before he was killed, and Johnny, completely satisfied, turned the ten thousand over to his boys. “I don’t want the lousy money,” he grandly said. “It’s the principle o’ the thing. Them Chelsea sonovabitches should be satisfied with their own docks.”

Mack, the brain, got five of the ten. The four gunmen who’d driven out to Brooklyn split thirty-five hundred between them and Willy got the remaining fifteen hundred.

When the winter winds began to blow the old newspapers with the old headlines of unsolved murders down the waterfront streets — when all good dock wallopers treated themselves to a rye fortifier before shaping up — Johnny Blue Jaw thought of his pal Willy collecting numbers on the bitter cold piers. One day when Willy, coughing and red-faced, entered Reagan’s back-room, Johnny called him over to where he was sitting with Al Linn. “It must be raw as an oyster down there, Willy. I’m thinkin’ of pullin’ you off ’til spring. How’d you like to work with Al here?”

“Let me think about it. Huh, Johnny?”

“There he goes again! Ain’t he a corker, Al! The one guy who never wants a favor. Okay, freeze ’em off. You’re so old you don’t need ’em anyway.”

Alice was excited when Willy told her. “Johnny-boy’s ready to pay off! That fifteen hundred wasn’t so much—”

“But who wants that Stealing Department,” Willy said uneasily as if he hadn’t been in on the business with Burnham and Nolan. “That Al Linn’s too damn wise. One of these days he’ll find himself in the clink. One of these investigators’ll mean something.”

“How about hitting Johnny up for something in the union then,” she said suddenly.

“The union? Clancy?”

“Things’re quiet at Clancy’s. Like an old age home!” She laughed out of sheer excitement: money excitement.

“What could I do there?”

“What they all do. Make some easy graft.”

The next day in the back-room, Johnny Blue Jaw laughed his sides off when Willy said, could he get into the union somewhere. But Al Linn only smiled. “Willy’s got an idea,” he said.

“You mean, his girl friend’s got an idea. That blonde’s one connivin’ dame!”

“Johnny, Clancy’s been operating all by his lonesome for years now,” Al argued. “We can put Willy in to keep an eye on him. You can’t trust those union crooks further than you can see them.”

“They’re entitled to a lil somethin’ outa the pot, Al.”

“Right, Johnny. But it’s a good thing to shake the pot once in a while. Willy can take Delaney’s job and Delaney can work for me.”

“Aw right,” Johnny Blue Jaw gave in. “We’ll shake the pot real good. Willy, your girl friend’s through at the office!” He grinned. “That’ll show Blondy to mind her own damn business, pal!”

Delaney had been the local’s secretary-treasurer, a job, as Willy learned, that was wearing mostly on the eyes. Sometimes as he read a little murder, a little sex, a little sports in the News, with Mary the new office girl reading her love magazine, he’d think he was getting three grand a year for belonging to a library.

Once a month though, for a couple of days there was some action. The dock wallopers’d come trooping into the office with their three dollar dues. They’d line up at Mary’s desk, whistling and wolf calling. Sometimes in the crowd, some trouble-maker, maybe a Father Bannon man, might stage-whisper, “Where do the rats go when the ship sinks? To the waterfront!” But Willy never let on he heard. Bunch of suckers, he thought.

There were no receipts, no books. “We’ll let them boondogglin’ Screw Dealers down there in Washington pile up the paperwork!” fat Clancy said slyly to his new secretary-treasurer as they cut up a pair of (union expense account) steaks at White’s Restaurant.

The local had over two thousand members and they paid in more than six thousand in cash every month. “I know where every nickel goes,” Alice said to Willy, “and don’t let Clancy double-talk you. A thousand goes for salaries, yours, Clancy’s and Mallet’s, the absentee vice-president. You’ll never see him in the office ’cause he’s always with the politicians. A thousand covers the office girl, the rent and such. Two thousand every month goes to ILA headquarters for general assessments and the per capita tax on the local membership. Clancy always holds out a couple hundred members on headquarters, Willy,” Alice tipped him off. “Be sure to get cut in on that graft. Johnny-boy’s graft is a thousand a month. He don’t need it but he takes it to keep Clancy from forgetting who owns the union. That leaves a thousand to be split up between Clancy, Mallet and you. Delaney used to get two fifty of it. Willy,” she said smiling. “You’re making enough to support a wife.”

“What!” he exclaimed, astonished.

She kissed him. “Honey, don’t faint. Just a lil idea. We’re set now, aren’t we, and whose idea was it about the union?”

In April, Clancy threw a quickie strike on two piers where the Mathews Stevedoring Company had contracts. Within twenty-four hours a messenger arrived with three gold Swiss watches. Clancy kept one and gave the others to his vice-president and secretary-treasurer. “Now we’ll go see old Dan Mathews and negotiate.”

“Don’t they get sore when you shake them down?” Willy asked.

“Shakedown’s a mobster word,” Clancy corrected him. “You better learn some union words, my friend. On the waterfront there’s the mob and there’s the union. You’re a union man now. As to Old Dan Mathews, he don’t expect nothin’ for nothin’. He’d be the first to tell you, Willy, that only tough leaders can keep the men in line.”

Willy shook his head. This union was a pie where you could come back for all kinds of helpings. And all of it legit! Like the raffle tickets he was selling to the dock wallopers over at Reagan’s bar. What a racket, Willy thought blissfully. He saw Johnny Blue Jaw less and less, traveling more with Clancy and Mallet. There were banquets and political balls where he took Alice. At a benefit for the benevolent order of firemen, between the chicken a la king and the ice cream, Alice pressed his hand under the table. “All these men with their wives, Willy. Why not you and me?” She was wearing a soft rose dress and her eyes were suddenly warm and even a little uncertain as if she were really worried Willy wouldn’t marry her after all. He was a big-shot in the union now.

“I never thought of it,” he admitted.

“Think of it, Willy.”

He laughed. “Maybe I will.”

They got married at City Hall. When Johnny Blue Jaw heard the news he said to Al Linn, “Only a hick’d marry a dame fadin’ like a funeral parlor lily. We were pals, but leave it to a dame!” He was bitter but when he saw Willy he poked him in the ribs. “Hi, stranger. No wonder I never see you no more. Remember who introduced you! Hey, the three of us could sleep in one bed. I’ll come around some night, Willy, okay?”

They grinned at each other. But both of them felt the difference. “Leave it to a dame to put the ring in the guy’s nose,” Johnny Blue Jaw jeered.

By summer, Willy’d put on fifteen pounds. His pants wouldn’t close and his jackets screamed at the shoulders. Alice laughed and said he deserved some new clothes anyway. In a new gray suit, his feet in fifteen dollar shoes, Willy attended the Union Convention at the Hotel Commodore. He sat between Clancy and Mallet and listened to a lot of speeches that made him yawn. Improve union conditions... A longshoreman’s lucky if he works half the year... He got more of a bang when Clancy arose to second some resolution and boom out a little speech of his own. “I started as a wagon boy on a one-horse team, a member of the teamster union! When I joined the longshoreman’s union I worked on the docks in my underwear! For thirty-three cents an hour! I worked all my life and I ain’t got a cent in the bank and I ain’t got a cent at home! Nobody gives the workingman a five cent piece...”

Later that night, in a suite of rooms over on the West Side, eight or nine delegates sat around smoking cigars and drinking whiskey, while they waited for the girls. Three call girls were en route. “Fifty bucks a lay stuff but t’night it’s free,” Clancy said to Willy. “You don’t tell my wife and I don’t tell yours. One of these girl’s not seventeen, Willy.”

“Who pays for them? The rank-and-file?” Willy smiled. It looked to him as if he’d got on that gravy train for keeps.

In the fall, at an election rally, Clancy introduced Willy to a man by the name of King who was in the contracting business. At a bar downstairs, King got to the point right away. “You boys run your local and your local unloads the biggest steamships that come into this port. Have you boys thought of getting into the stevedoring business yourself? Sure, you’re union men, but what’s to stop you from being silent partners? I’ll put up the capital but capital’s nothing. The big thing’s the in. With the in we can get our share of contracts from the lines.”

Nobody mentioned Johnny Blue Jaw, but he was the fourth man at that bar. The fourth man and the big man. Johnny Blue Jaw, who had picked Red Rizzo as hiring boss for the steamship and stevedoring companies, could also give the nod to an up-and-coming brand-new stevedore outfit out to make an honest dollar. King, Clancy and Willy met again, agreed on the details. King would get a third, Clancy and Willy between them a third, and a third for Johnny Blue Jaw. “You see him, Willy,” Clancy said later. “You’ve got the in with him. It’s a fair deal all around.”

Willy went up to Johnny Blue Jaw’s hotel room on a cool cloudy night. The sky was tinted pinkish from the bright lights on Broadway. Johnny fixed him a drink and Willy said, “I came to see you about a deal...”

When he finished Johnny Blue Jaw smiled. “You’ve got somethin’ there.”

“It’s okay then?” Willy said, beginning to smile, too.

“Sure, it’s okay. Okay for me. I don’t need this King! I don’t need nobody!”

Willy’d gained fifteen pounds or more, but now he almost seemed to sag inside his suit. His meaty cheeks went pale. He stared dumbly at Johnny Blue Jaw.

“For Christ sake, Willy! Don’t you put the cryin’ towel on with me!” Johnny Blue Jaw snapped at him.

“I thought—”

“Thought what? That I’d bite?”

“Bite? You’d be getting a third, Johnny—”

“Wouldn’t I be a sucker to take it when I can get it all?”

“But, Johnny—”

“But what? What the hell you beefin’ for! Ain’t I done enough for you?”

“Sure but—”

“Sure but,” Johnny Blue Jaw mimicked him. “You’re pullin’ down eight G’s a year at the union. Not to mention extras. So now you wanna be a stevedore boss.”

“What’s wrong with that, Johnny?” Willy pleaded, wiping his sweaty face. “What’s so wrong with that?”

“You’re what’s wrong! I send you to watch this Clancy crook and you turn crook yourself.”

“That’s a damn lie!” the big man shouted.

The little man whipped out of his chair and rushed to within a foot of where Willy was sitting. “Don’t you back-talk me!” His dark bluish lips had lifted over his teeth. “Where’d you be if not for me? Who connected you? Who made a walkin’ delegate outa you? What was you but a dumb heister?”

“Maybe I was but I’m no crook and you called me a crook.”

“What d’you call this stevedorin’ racket you and Clancy’ve rigged up?”

“You’d be getting a third!” Willy protested hoarsely as if Johnny Blue Jaw had only to be reminded of that detail and everything’d be okay.

“Ain’t that white of you and Clancy?” the mob leader yelled, the veins cording on his temples. “Whose docks’re they? Whose docks’d you be stevedorin’? The Chelsea docks or Brooklyn, or my damn docks! My docks!” he raged and lifted both his clenched fists over his head.

For a second he stood there and he no longer seemed small but big with ownership. He’d paid for his docks, all right. Paid with every kind of coin there was. With the blood-red coin of murder and the slimy thin one of treachery, with the fat coins that make no sound as they drop into the tin boxes of the politicians. Mouthpiece money, he’d paid that too. There wasn’t any kind of money that he hadn’t paid.

He stood there, not seeing Willy. Then he walked to his chair, again becoming a small black-haired man, not much bigger than a big jockey. He sat down, put a cigarette in his mouth and said flatly, “Nobody’s pullin’ a fast one on me.”

“Nobody’s trying to, Johnny—”

“Nobody will!” He had himself under control now. He was silent for a long second. “I had a hunch you shouldn’t’ve been in the union. You wanted it, I give it to you. So now you come ’round with this stevedore proposition.”

“For God’s sake, what’s so wrong with that, Johnny. Tell me, will you!” Willy pleaded.

“I think up the propositions on my docks — that’s what’s wrong with it! This King guy’s another thing wrong with it!”

“Why?”

“Who’s behind him? How do I know the Chelsea mob ain’t behind him? Burnham — hell, he’s gotta right to hate my guts. How do I know Fassetti’s not behind King? I made the wop shell out ten G’s, didn’t I? How do I know it’s not some kind of a scheme to muscle in on my docks?”

Willy said quietly, “I wouldn’t have any part of a scheme like that, Johnny.”

“You wouldn’t. But what about Clancy? That bum don’t love me.” His voice lifted. “What about Alice? Why was she so hot to get you into the union? She and Clancy—” His eyes narrowed with a hard-bitten pity. “You and me were buddies ’til you let her talk you into marryin’ her — fat-ass connivin’ whore!”

As Willy lurched up from the couch, Johnny Blue Jaw sprang to his feet and quick as a cat picked up a chair, ready for anything. But Willy was on his way out. He had his hand on the door knob when Johnny Blue Jaw hollered. “Where you goin’?”

Willy’s head pivoted on his thick neck. “No use talking to you, Johnny,” he said bitterly. “You don’t believe nobody, you don’t trust nobody! You’re crazy, that’s what you are. Crazy!”

“I’m crazy like a fox. And wait a minnit before you go! You’re through bein’ a walkin’ delegate, Willy! Clancy’s through! The rank-and-file, they can elect some new bums.” He became conscious of the chair in his hands for he lowered it to the floor. “You tell Clancy, I’ll give him a job in my stevedore firm. And you, you dumb heister, you’ll go back to collectin’ numbers. Tell that to your missus!”

In the apartment over on 23rd Street, Willy went over the whole thing again for Alice, while Clancy listened for the second time.

The first time, Clancy’d cried like a baby. Three straight shots of whiskey in a bar weren’t enough to straighten him out. The bottle of whiskey on the table around which they were sitting now hadn’t helped Clancy much either. “That bastid don’t trust you and he don’t trust me no more,” Clancy said when Willy stopped talking. “That bastid’s got to feel he owns you a hundred percent or nothin’. It’s nothin’ for us, Willy! All that stuff about you collectin’ and me workin’ for him’s just a lotta crap. We’re through!”

“Clancy’s right,” the woman said, her eyes like stones in her blonde pale face. Clancy’s face was twice the size of hers, big and jowly like an old-fashioned bartender’s. But now they seemed to look strangely alike: the face of the big town itself, the town of the whore’s mouth and the bought-and-paid-for heart, with the waterfront like a gleaming band around its forehead.

“Clancy’s right,” she repeated.

“I guess so,” Willy mumbled. The newspapers called the docks a jungle where there were no rules. But Willy knew better than that now. He was slow but he learned, and he’d learned the big lesson tonight. It was a jungle all right, but a jungle with rules. Rules galore. And all the rules made by Johnny Blue Jaw Gibbons.

“Funny,” he mumbled. “Funny how I was going to steer clear of trouble working in the union. Should’ve gone to work for Al Linn. Should never’ve bucked him.”

“You should never’ve breathed!” the woman shouted. “You make me sick! Clancy, what’re we going to do?”

Clancy shrugged hopelessly. He was an old and broken man, his jowls hanging like balloons with the air out of them. “I might’ve known it,” he groaned. “A third wouldn’t satisfy him. Has to hog it all. This King’s a gentleman and that bastid of a hog—”

“You men make me sick!” she burst out. “Clancy, what’re we going to do? Sit here and have a wake?”

Clancy lifted his head. “What can we do? Nothin’.”

“We can go to the guy who’s taken Nolan’s place, to this Fassetti—”

They stared at Alice as if something extraordinary had happened to her between one breath and the next. As if she’d exploded into light or crumpled into dust before their very eyes.

“What else?” she continued, obsessed. “We might do something with them—”

“Forget them ideas!” Clancy nodded at the whiskey on the table. “They come straight outa that bottle. I’m goin’ home.”

He took his hat and coat and left.

Willy poured himself another shot. His hand was trembling. “You shouldn’t have said that about Nolan.”

“Nolan’s dead, you dope!” she said in a fury.

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeh,” she said dejectedly. “I gave Clancy my head on a silver platter.” She shut her eyes so tight they crinkled at the corners.

“Alice,” he said in alarm.

Her breasts lifted convulsively, her eyelids sprang wide open. “Clancy left in an awful hurry, didn’t he? He on his way, I wonder—”

He guessed her meaning but he had to ask the question anyway. “On his way where?”

“To Johnny!”

“He wouldn’t do that!”

“How do you know?”

“I know!”

“You don’t know Clancy then! Didn’t he leave Mallet out in this stevedore deal, a guy he’s been with for years. He’d leave Jesus Christ out if he had to! Willy, you think Clancy’s going to let Johnny throw him out of his union without trying to save himself — just because you’re the secretary-treasurer and I’m your damn fool wife shooting off her fool mouth about Nolan? Nolan!” she spat out in terror. She stood there paralyzed for a second and then her arm swung and her hand pointed to the telephone. “Willy, call him up before Clancy gets there, Willy!” Willy’s shoulders smacked against the back of the chair where he was sitting as if something’d leaped at him. Something that hadn’t been there a second ago, something wet and bloated and evil like a drowned waterfront rat come alive.

“Willy, don’t waste time.”

He didn’t move. She ran to him. “Willy, we got no time to lose!” Her hands moved feverishly across his slumped shoulders, gripping at his heavy body.

“Lemme alone,” he muttered. “I got enough trouble—”

“Let Clancy have the trouble!” she cried pulling at him. “Willy, c’mon! What do you care about Clancy. Let him have the trouble! Let ’em all have it, the whole damn world!”

It was as if she’d forgotten about Clancy as a person. Was Clancy on his way home or on his way to Johnny Blue Jaw’s hotel? It didn’t matter any more. All that mattered was holding onto what they had. It was dog eat dog, and rat eat rat, down the waterfront. That was all that mattered now or ever.

She walked away from Willy, cursing him, and dialed the phone number of Johnny Blue Jaw’s hotel herself, and when she had it, and Johnny answered, she said. “Here Willy comes!” She clapped her free hand over the mouthpiece. “Willy!” She called him savagely, her teeth like fangs. “Willy! Willy!”

He shambled over, his eyes glazed, as reluctant as any man about to deliver another man to his death. But he came. Because he didn’t want any trouble.

The traditional Western story and the hard-boiled crime story are more closely allied than might be apparent at a glance. As is pointed out in the Introduction, hard-boiled fiction can be traced back to the early days of nineteenth-century American life and letters. Viewed in that context, the justice-seeking twentieth-century private eye is a direct descendant not only of James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo, but of the frontier lawman and the hard-nosed Pinkerton detective of the last century. The subject matter of the Western story and the contemporary noir story is similar: murder, murder for hire, bank and other types of robbery, kidnapping, extortion. Even such Western-fiction staples as cattle rustling and range wars have present-day counterparts and have been utilized in hard-boiled fiction.

The fundamental kinship between the two genres is one reason that so many writers have worked in both. Carroll John Daly was one of the first “crossovers”; Two-Gun Gerta (1926), written in collaboration with C. C. Waddell, chronicles the Mexican border adventures of silent-movie cowboy Red Connors. In the 1920s, when Black Mask regularly featured frontier fiction, Erle Stanley Gardner published several short stories about adventurer Bob Larkin that may be classified as Western; and in the 1930s, he wrote a series of Western-style stories set in the deserts of the Southwest. W. T. Ballard, Norbert Davis, John D. MacDonald, Fredric Brown, and Cornell Woolrich are just a few of the early crossover writers. Contemporary crossovers include Ed Gorman, Loren D. Estleman, Robert J. Randisi, Bill Crider, and Bill Pronzini.

No one, however, has been more successful in both genres than Elmore Leonard. Before he turned to the production of such outstanding urban crime thrillers as Fifty-Two Pickup (1974), Unknown Man No. 89 (1977), and City Primeval (1980), Leonard’s fictional output was confined to Westerns. His early pulp stories, which began appearing in the late 1940s in such magazines as Dime Western, Zane Grey’s Western Magazine, and Argosy, are of uniformly high quality. One of his frontier novels, Hombre (1961), can be found on numerous lists of the best traditional Westerns. Almost as fine are The Bounty Hunters (1953) and Valdez Is Coming (1970). Indeed, and despite the critical acclaim and bestseller status that his later crime novels have brought him, a strong case can be made that his most accomplished and memorable works are Westerns.

Certainly, “Three-Ten to Yuma,” which appeared in Dime Western in March 1953, is Leonard at his best and ranks with Hombre as a Western classic. (The 1957 film version, starring Van Heflin and Glenn Ford, is likewise considered by many to be a classic of its type.) But this tense account of a deputy marshal who undertakes the deadly task of delivering a killer to the Yuma penitentiary is also a distinguished noir story, with all the elements of character, plot, incident, and suspense of the best contemporary thriller. With a few alterations, it might well have been written and published as a tale of the 1990s rather than the 1890s.

B. P.

Three-Ten to Yuma (1953)

He had picked up his prisoner at Fort Huachuca shortly after midnight and now, in a silent early morning mist, they approached Contention. The two riders moved slowly, one behind the other.

Entering Stockman Street, Paul Scallen glanced back at the open country with the wet haze blanketing its flatness, thinking of the long night ride from Huachuca, relieved that this much was over. When his body turned again, his hand moved over the sawed-off shotgun that was across his lap and he kept his eyes on the man ahead of him until they were near the end of the second block, opposite the side entrance of the Republic Hotel.

He said just above a whisper, though it was clear in the silence, “End of the line.”

The man turned in his saddle, looking at Scallen curiously. “The jail’s around on Commercial.”

“I want you to be comfortable.”

Scallen stepped out of the saddle, lifting a Winchester from the boot, and walked toward the hotel’s side door. A figure stood in the gloom of the doorway, behind the screen, and as Scallen reached the steps the screen door opened.

“Are you the marshal?”

“Yes, sir.” Scallen’s voice was soft and without emotion. “Deputy, from Bisbee.”

“We’re ready for you. Two-oh-seven. A corner... fronts on Commercial.” He sounded proud of the accommodation.

“You’re Mr. Timpey?”

The man in the doorway looked surprised. “Yeah, Wells Fargo. Who’d you expect?”

“You might have got a back room, Mr. Timpey. One with no windows.” He swung the shotgun on the man still mounted. “Step down easy, Jim.”

The man, who was in his early twenties, a few years younger than Scallen, sat with one hand over the other on the saddle horn. Now he gripped the horn and swung down. When he was on the ground his hands were still close together, iron manacles holding them three chain lengths apart. Scallen motioned him toward the door with the stubby barrel of the shotgun.

“Anyone in the lobby?”

“The desk clerk,” Timpey answered him, “and a man in a chair by the front door.”

“Who is he?”

“I don’t know. He’s asleep... got his brim down over his eyes.”

“Did you see anyone out on Commercial?”

“No... I haven’t been out there.” At first he had seemed nervous, but now he was irritated, and a frown made his face pout childishly.

Scallen said calmly, “Mr. Timpey, it was your line this man robbed. You want to see him go all the way to Yuma, don’t you?”

“Certainly I do.” His eyes went to the outlaw, Jim Kidd, then back to Scallen hurriedly. “But why all the melodrama? The man’s under arrest — already been sentenced.”

“But he’s not in jail till he walks through the gates at Yuma,” Scallen said. “I’m only one man, Mr. Timpey, and I’ve got to get him there.”

“Well, dammit... I’m not the law! Why didn’t you bring men with you? All I know is I got a wire from our Bisbee office to get a hotel room and meet you here the morning of November third. There weren’t any instructions that I had to get myself deputized a marshal. That’s your job.”

“I know it is, Mr. Timpey,” Scallen said, and smiled, though it was an effort. “But I want to make sure no one knows Jim Kidd’s in Contention until after train time this afternoon.”

Jim Kidd had been looking from one to the other with a faintly amused grin. Now he said to Timpey, “He means he’s afraid somebody’s going to jump him.” He smiled at Scallen. “That marshal must’ve really sold you a bill of goods.”

“What’s he talking about?” Timpey said.

Kidd went on before Scallen could answer. “They hid me in the Huachuca lock-up ’cause they knew nobody could get at me there... and finally the Bisbee marshal gets a plan. He and some others hopped the train in Benson last night, heading for Yuma with an army prisoner passed off as me.” Kidd laughed, as if the idea were ridiculous.

“Is that right?” Timpey said.

Scallen nodded. “Pretty much right.”

“How does he know all about it?”

“He’s got ears and ten fingers to add with.”

“I don’t like it. Why just one man?”

“Every deputy from here down to Bisbee is out trying to scare up the rest of them. Jim here’s the only one we caught,” Scallen explained — then added, “Alive.”

Timpey shot a glance at the outlaw. “Is he the one who killed Dick Moons?”

“One of the passengers swears he saw who did it... and he didn’t identify Kidd at the trial.”

Timpey shook his head. “Dick drove for us a long time. You know his brother lives here in Contention. When he heard about it he almost went crazy.” He hesitated, and then said again, “I don’t like it.”

Scallen felt his patience wearing away, but he kept his voice even when he said, “Maybe I don’t either... but what you like and what I like aren’t going to matter a whole lot, with the marshal past Tucson by now. You can grumble about it all you want, Mr. Timpey, as long as you keep it under your breath. Jim’s got friends... and since I have to haul him clear across the territory, I’d just as soon they didn’t know about it.”

Timpey fidgeted nervously. “I don’t see why I have to get dragged into this. My job’s got nothing to do with law enforcement...”

“You have the room key?”

“In the door. All I’m responsible for is the stage run between here and Tucson—”

Scallen shoved the Winchester at him. “If you’ll take care of this and the horses till I get back, I’ll be obliged to you... and I know I don’t have to ask you not to mention we’re at the hotel.”

He waved the shotgun and nodded and Jim Kidd went ahead of him through the side door into the hotel lobby. Scallen was a stride behind him, holding the stubby shotgun close to his leg. “Up the stairs on the right, Jim.”

Kidd started up, but Scallen paused to glance at the figure in the arm chair near the front. He was sitting on his spine with limp hands folded on his stomach and, as Timpey had described, his hat low over the upper part of his face. You’ve seen people sleeping in hotel lobbies before, Scallen told himself, and followed Kidd up the stairs. He couldn’t stand and wonder about it.

Room 207 was narrow and high-ceilinged, with a single window looking down on Commercial Street. An iron bed was placed the long way against one wall and extended to the right side of the window, and along the opposite wall was a dresser with wash basin and pitcher and next to it a rough-board wardrobe. An unpainted table and two straight chairs took up most of the remaining space.

“Lay down on the bed if you want to,” Scallen said.

“Why don’t you sleep?” Kidd asked. “I’ll hold the shotgun.”

The deputy moved one of the straight chairs near to the door and the other to the side of the table opposite the bed. Then he sat down, resting the shotgun on the table so that it pointed directly at Jim Kidd sitting on the edge of the bed near the window.

He gazed vacantly outside. A patch of dismal sky showed above the frame buildings across the way, but he was not sitting close enough to look directly down onto the street. He said, indifferently, “I think it’s going to rain.”

There was a silence, and then Scallen said, “Jim, I don’t have anything against you personally... this is what I get paid for, but I just want it understood that if you start across the seven feet between us, I’m going to pull both triggers at once — without first asking you to stop. That clear?”

Kidd looked at the deputy marshal, then his eyes drifted out the window again. “It’s kinda cold, too.” He rubbed his hands together and the three chain links rattled against each other. “The window’s open a crack. Can I close it?”

Scallen’s grip tightened on the shotgun and he brought the barrel up, though he wasn’t aware of it. “If you can reach it from where you’re sitting.”

Kidd looked at the window sill and said without reaching toward it, “Too far.”

“All right,” Scallen said, rising. “Lay back on the bed.” He worked his gun belt around so that now the Colt was on his left hip.

Kidd went back slowly, smiling. “You don’t take any chances, do you? Where’s your sporting blood?”

“Down in Bisbee with my wife and three youngsters,” Scallen told him without smiling, and moved around the table.

There were no grips on the window frame. Standing with his side to the window, facing the man on the bed, he put the heel of his hand on the bottom ledge of the frame and shoved down hard. The window banged shut and with the slam he saw Jim Kidd kicking up off of his back, his body straining to rise without his hands to help. Momentarily, Scallen hesitated and his finger tensed on the triggers. Kidd’s feet were on the floor, his body swinging up and his head down to lunge from the bed. Scallen took one step and brought his knee up hard against Kidd’s face.

The outlaw went back across the bed, his head striking the wall. He lay there with his eyes open looking at Scallen.

“Feel better now, Jim?”

Kidd brought his hands up to his mouth, working the jaw around. “Well, I had to try you out,” he said. “I didn’t think you’d shoot.”

“But you know I will the next time.”

For a few minutes Kidd remained motionless. Then he began to pull himself straight. “I just want to sit up.”

Behind the table, Scallen said, “Help yourself.” He watched Kidd stare out the window.

Then, “How much do you make, Marshal?” Kidd asked the question abruptly.

“I don’t think it’s any of your business.”

“What difference does it make?”

Scallen hesitated. “A hundred and fifty a month,” he said, finally, “some expenses, and a dollar bounty for every arrest against a Bisbee ordinance in the town limits.”

Kidd shook his head sympathetically. “And you got a wife and three kids.”

“Well, it’s more than a cowhand makes.”

“But you’re not a cowhand.”

“I’ve worked my share of beef.”

“Forty a month and keep, huh?” Kidd laughed.

“That’s right, forty a month,” Scallen said. He felt awkward. “How much do you make?”

Kidd grinned. When he smiled he looked very young, hardly out of his teens. “Name a month,” he said. “It varies.”

“But you’ve made a lot of money.”

“Enough. I can buy what I want.”

“What are you going to be wanting the next five years?”

“You’re pretty sure we’re going to Yuma.”

“And you’re pretty sure we’re not,” Scallen said. “Well, I’ve got two train passes and a shotgun that says we are. What’ve you got?”

Kidd smiled. “You’ll see.” Then he said right after it, his tone changing, “What made you join the law?”

“The money,” Scallen answered, and felt foolish as he said it. But he went on, “I was working for a spread over by the Pantano Wash when Old Nana broke loose and raised hell up the Santa Rosa Valley. The army was going around in circles, so the Pima County marshal got up a bunch to help out and we tracked Apaches almost all spring. The marshal and I got along fine, so he offered me a deputy job if I wanted it.” He wanted to say that he had started for seventy-five and worked up to the one hundred and fifty, but he didn’t.

“And then someday you’ll get to be marshal and make two hundred.”

“Maybe.”

“And then one night a drunk cowhand you’ve never seen will be tearing up somebody’s saloon and you’ll go in to arrest him and he’ll drill you with a lucky shot before you get your gun out.”

“So you’re telling me I’m crazy.”

“If you don’t already know it.”

Scallen took his hand off the shotgun and pulled tobacco and paper from his shirt pocket and began rolling a cigarette. “Have you figured out yet what my price is?”

Kidd looked startled, momentarily, but the grin returned. “No, I haven’t. Maybe you come higher than I thought.”

Scallen scratched a match across the table, lighted the cigarette, then threw it to the floor, between Kidd’s boots. “You don’t have enough money, Jim.”

Kidd shrugged, then reached down for the cigarette. “You’ve treated me pretty good. I just wanted to make it easy on you.”

The sun came into the room after a while. Weakly at first, cold and hazy. Then it warmed and brightened and cast an oblong patch of light between the bed and the table. The morning wore on slowly because there was nothing to do and each man sat restlessly thinking about somewhere else, though it was a restlessness within and it showed on neither of them.

The deputy rolled cigarettes for the outlaw and himself and most of the time they smoked in silence. Once Kidd asked him what time the train left. He told him shortly after three, but Kidd made no comment.

Scallen went to the window and looked out at the narrow rutted road that was Commercial Street. He pulled a watch from his vest pocket and looked at it. It was almost noon, yet there were few people about. He wondered about this and asked himself if it was unnaturally quiet for a Saturday noon in Contention... or if it were just his nerves...

He studied the man standing under the wooden awning across the street, leaning idly against a support post with his thumbs hooked in his belt and his flat-crowned hat on the back of his head. There was something familiar about him. And each time Scallen had gone to the window — a few times during the past hour — the man had been there.

He glanced at Jim Kidd lying across the bed, then looked out the window in time to see another man moving up next to the one at the post. They stood together for the space of a minute before the second man turned a horse from the tie rail, swung up and rode off down the street.

The man at the post watched him go and tilted his hat against the sun glare. And then it registered. With the hat low on his forehead Scallen saw him again as he had that morning. The man lying in the arm chair... as if asleep.

He saw his wife, then, and the three youngsters and he could almost feel the little girl sitting on his lap where she had climbed up to kiss him good-bye, and he had promised to bring her something from Tucson. He didn’t know why they had come to him all of a sudden. And after he had put them out of his mind, since there was no room now, there was an upset feeling inside as if he had swallowed something that would not go down all the way. It made his heart beat a little faster.

Jim Kidd was smiling up at him. “Anybody I know?”

“I didn’t think it showed.”

“Like the sun going down.”

Scallen glanced at the man across the street and then to Jim Kidd. “Come here.” He nodded to the window. “Tell me who your friend is over there.”

Kidd half rose and leaned over looking out the window, then sat down again. “Charlie Prince.”

“Somebody else just went for help.”

“Charlie doesn’t need help.”

“How did you know you were going to be in Contention?”

“You told that Wells Fargo man I had friends... and about the posses chasing around in the hills. Figure it out for yourself. You could be looking out a window in Benson and seeing the same thing.”

“They’re not going to do you any good.”

“I don’t know any man who’d get himself killed for a hundred and fifty dollars.” Kidd paused. “Especially a man with a wife and young ones...”

Men rode to town in something less than an hour later. Scallen heard the horses coming up Commercial, and went to the window to see the six riders pull to a stop and range themselves in a line in the middle of the street facing the hotel. Charlie Prince stood behind them, leaning against the post.

Then he moved away from it, leisurely, and stepped down into the street. He walked between the horses and stopped in front of them just below the window. He cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted, “Jim!”

In the quiet street it was like a pistol shot.

Scallen looked at Kidd, seeing the smile that softened his face and was even in his eyes. Confidence. It was all over him. And even with the manacles on, you would believe that it was Jim Kidd who was holding the shotgun.

“What do you want me to tell him?” Kidd said.

“Tell him you’ll write every day.”

Kidd laughed and went to the window, pushing it up by the top of the frame. It raised a few inches. Then he moved his hands under the window and it slid up all the way.

“Charlie, you go buy the boys a drink. We’ll be down shortly.”

“Are you all right?”

“Sure I’m all right.”

Charlie Prince hesitated. “What if you don’t come down? He could kill you and say you tried to break... Jim, you tell him what’ll happen if we hear a gun go off.”

“He knows,” Kidd said, and closed the window. He looked at Scallen standing motionless with the shotgun under his arm. “Your turn, Marshal.”

“What do you expect me to say?”

“Something that makes sense. You said before I didn’t mean a thing to you personally — what you’re doing is just a job. Well, you figure out if it’s worth getting killed for. All you have to do is throw your guns on the bed and let me walk out the door and you can go back to Bisbee and arrest all the drunks you want. Nobody’s going to blame you with the odds stacked seven to one. You know your wife’s not going to complain...”

“You should have been a lawyer, Jim.”

The smile began to fade from Kidd’s face. “Come on — what’s it going to be?”

The door rattled with three knocks in quick succession. Abruptly the room was silent. The two men looked at each other and now the smile disappeared from Kidd’s face completely.

Scallen moved to the side of the door, tip-toeing in his high-heeled boots, then pointed his shotgun toward the bed. Kidd sat down.

“Who is it?”

For a moment there was no answer. Then he heard, “Timpey.”

He glanced at Kidd who was watching him. “What do you want?”

“I’ve got a pot of coffee for you.”

Scallen hesitated. “You alone?”

“Of course I am. Hurry up, it’s hot!”

He drew the key from his coat pocket, then held the shotgun in the crook of his arm as he inserted the key with one hand and turned the knob with the other. The door opened — and slammed against him, knocking him back against the dresser. He went off balance, sliding into the wardrobe, going down on his hands and knees, and the shotgun clattered across the floor to the window. He saw Jim Kidd drop to the floor for the gun...

“Hold it!”

A heavyset man stood in the doorway with a Colt pointing out past the thick bulge of his stomach. “Leave that shotgun where it is.” Timpey stood next to him with the coffeepot in his hand. There was coffee down the front of his suit, on the door and on the flooring. He brushed at the front of his coat feebly, looking from Scallen to the man with the pistol.

“I couldn’t help it, Marshal — he made me do it. He threatened to do something to me if I didn’t.”

“Who is he?”

“Bob Moons... you know, Dick’s brother...”

The heavyset man glanced at Timpey angrily. “Shut your damn whining.” His eyes went to Jim Kidd and held there. “You know who I am, don’t you?”

Kidd looked uninterested. “You don’t resemble anybody I know.”

“You didn’t have to know Dick to shoot him!”

“I didn’t shoot that messenger.”

Scallen got to his feet, looking at Timpey. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”

“I couldn’t help it. He forced me.”

“How did he know we were here?”

“He came in this morning talking about Dick and I felt he needed some cheering up, so I told him Jim Kidd had been tried and was being taken to Yuma and was here in town... on his way. Bob didn’t say anything and went out, and a little later he came back with the gun.”

“You damn fool.” Scallen shook his head wearily.

“Never mind all the talk.” Moons kept the pistol on Kidd. “I would’ve found him sooner or later. This way, everybody gets saved a long train ride.”

“You pull that trigger,” Scallen said, “and you’ll hang for murder.”

“Like he did for killing Dick...”

“A jury said he didn’t do it.” Scallen took a step toward the big man. “And I’m damned if I’m going to let you pass another sentence.”

“You stay put or I’ll pass sentence on you!”

Scallen moved a slow step nearer. “Hand me the gun, Bob.”

“I’m warning you — get the hell out of the way and let me do what I came for.”

“Bob, hand me the gun or I swear I’ll beat you through that wall.”

Scallen tensed to take another step, another slow one. He saw Moons’ eyes dart from him to Kidd and in that instant he knew it would be his only chance. He lunged, swinging his coat aside with his hand and when the hand came up it was holding a Colt. All in one motion. The pistol went up and chopped an arc across Moons’ head before the big man could bring his own gun around. His hat flew off as the barrel swiped his skull and he went back against the wall heavily, then sank to the floor.

Scallen wheeled to face the window, thumbing the hammer back. But Kidd was still sitting on the edge of the bed with the shotgun at his feet.

The deputy relaxed, letting the hammer ease down. “You might have made it, that time.”

Kidd shook his head. “I wouldn’t have got off the bed.” There was a note of surprise in his voice. “You know, you’re pretty good...”

At two-fifteen Scallen looked at his watch, then stood up, pushing the chair back. The shotgun was under his arm. In less than an hour they would leave the hotel, walk over Commercial to Stockman and then up Stockman to the station. Three blocks. He wanted to go all the way. He wanted to get Jim Kidd on that train... but he was afraid.

He was afraid of what he might do once they were on the street. Even now his breath was short and occasionally he would inhale and let the air out slowly to calm himself. And he kept asking himself if it was worth it.

People would be in the windows and the doors though you wouldn’t see them. They’d have their own feelings and most of their hearts would be pounding... and they’d edge back of the door frames a little more. The man out on the street was something without a human nature or a personality of its own. He was on a stage. The street was another world.

Timpey sat on the chair in front of the door and next to him, squatting on the floor with his back against the wall, was Moons. Scallen had unloaded Moons’ pistol and placed it in the pitcher behind him. Kidd was on the bed.

Most of the time he stared at Scallen. His face bore a puzzled expression, making his eyes frown, and sometimes he would cock his head as if studying the deputy from a different angle.

Scallen stepped to the window now. Charlie Prince and another man were under the awning. The others were not in sight.

“You haven’t changed your mind?” Kidd asked him seriously.

Scallen shook his head.

“I don’t understand you. You risk your neck to save my life, now you’ll risk it again to send me to prison.”

Scallen looked at Kidd and suddenly felt closer to him than any man he knew. “Don’t ask me, Jim,” he said, and sat down again.

After that he looked at his watch every few minutes.

At five minutes to three he walked to the door, motioning Timpey aside, and turned the key in the lock. “Let’s go, Jim.” When Kidd was next to him he prodded Moons with the gun barrel. “Over on the bed. Mister, if I see or hear about you on the street before train time, you’ll face an attempted murder charge.” He motioned Kidd past him, then stepped into the hall and locked the door.

They went down the stairs and crossed the lobby to the front door, Scallen a stride behind with the shotgun barrel almost touching Kidd’s back. Passing through the doorway he said as calmly as he could, “Turn left on Stockman and keep walking. No matter what you hear, keep walking.”

As they stepped out into Commercial, Scallen glanced at the ramada where Charlie Prince had been standing, but now the saloon porch was an empty shadow. Near the corner, two horses stood under a sign that said Eat, in red letters; and on the other side of Stockman the signs continued, lining the rutted main street to make it seem narrower. And beneath the signs, in the shadows, nothing moved. There was a whisper of wind along the ramadas. It whipped sand specks from the street and rattled them against clapboard, and the sound was hollow and lifeless. Somewhere a screen door banged, far away.

They passed the cafe, turning onto Stockman. Ahead, the deserted street narrowed with distance to a dead end at the rail station — a single-story building standing by itself, low and sprawling with most of the platform in shadow. The westbound was there, along the platform, but the engine and most of the cars were hidden by the station house. White steam lifted above the roof to be lost in the sun’s glare.

They were almost to the platform when Kidd said over his shoulder, “Run like hell while you’re still able.”

“Where are they?”

Kidd grinned, because he knew Scallen was afraid. “How should I know?”

“Tell them to come out in the open!”

“Tell them yourself.”

“Dammit, tell them!” Scallen clenched his jaw and jabbed the short barrel into Kidd’s back. “I’m not fooling. If they don’t come out, I’ll kill you!”

Kidd felt the gun barrel hard against his spine and suddenly he shouted, “Charlie!”

It echoed in the street, but after there was only the silence. Kidd’s eyes darted over the shadowed porches. Dammit, Charlie hold on!

Scallen prodded him up the warped plank steps to the shade of the platform and suddenly he could feel them near. “Tell him again!”

“Don’t shoot, Charlie!” Kidd screamed the words.

From the other side of the station they heard the trainman’s call trailing off, “...Gila Bend, Sentinel, Yuma!”

The whistle sounded loud, wailing, as they passed into the shade of the platform, then out again to the naked glare of the open side. Scallen squinted, glancing toward the station office, but the train dispatcher was not in sight. Nor was anyone. “It’s the mail car,” he said to Kidd. “The second to last one.” Steam hissed from the iron cylinder of the engine, clouding that end of the platform. “Hurry it up!” he snapped, pushing Kidd along.

Then, from behind, hurried footsteps sounded on the planking, and, as the hiss of steam died away — “Stand where you are!”

The locomotive’s main rods strained back, rising like the legs of a grotesque grasshopper, and the wheels moved. The connecting rods stopped on an upward swing and couplings clanged down the line of cars.

“Throw the gun away, brother!”

Charlie Prince stood at the corner of the station house with a pistol in each hand. Then he moved around carefully between the two men and the train. “Throw it far away, and unhitch your belt,” he said.

“Do what he says,” Kidd said. “They’ve got you.”

The others, six of them, were strung out in the dimness of the platform shed. Grim-faced, stubbles of beard, hat brims low. The man nearest Prince spat tobacco lazily.

Scallen knew fear at that moment as fear had never gripped him before; but he kept the shotgun hard against Kidd’s spine. He said, just above a whisper, “Jim — I’ll cut you in half!”

Kidd’s body was stiff, his shoulders drawn up tightly. “Wait a minute...” he said. He held his palms out to Charlie Prince, though he could have been speaking to Scallen.

Suddenly Prince shouted, “Go down!”

There was a fraction of a moment of dead silence that seemed longer. Kidd hesitated. Scallen was looking at the gunman over Kidd’s shoulder, seeing the two pistols. Then Kidd was gone, rolling on the planking, and the pistols were coming up, one ahead of the other. Without moving, Scallen squeezed both triggers of the scatter gun.

Charlie Prince was going down, holding his hands tight to his chest, as Scallen dropped the shotgun and swung around drawing his Colt. He fired hurriedly. Wait for a target! Words in his mind. He saw the men under the platform shed, three of them breaking for the station office, two going full length to the planks... one crouched, his pistol up. That one! Get him quick! Scallen aimed and squeezed the heavy revolver and the man went down. Now get the hell out!

Charlie Prince was face down. Kidd was crawling, crawling frantically and coming to his feet when Scallen reached him. He grabbed Kidd by the collar savagely, pushing him on and dug the pistol into his back. “Run, damn you!”

Gunfire erupted from the shed and thudded into the wooden caboose as they ran past it. The train was moving slowly. Just in front of them a bullet smashed a window of the mail car. Someone screamed, “You’ll hit Jim!” There was another shot, then it was too late. Scallen and Kidd leaped up on the car platform and were in the mail car as it rumbled past the end of the station platform.

Kidd was on the floor, stretched out along a row of mail sacks. He rubbed his shoulder awkwardly with his manacled hands and watched Scallen who stood against the wall next to the open door.

Kidd studied the deputy for some minutes. Finally he said, “You know, you really earn your hundred and a half.”

Scallen heard him, though the iron rhythm of the train wheels and his breathing were loud in his temples. He felt as if all his strength had been sapped, but he couldn’t help smiling at Jim Kidd. He was thinking pretty much the same thing.

Jonathan Craig (Frank E. Smith) was a staple of Manhunt during its best and most influential years, the mid-1950s. He was variously described in the magazine’s editorial column, “Mugged and Printed,” as a “former night-club pianist,” an “ex-trombonist,” an “erstwhile bartender,” a “carnival man,” and a “sailor.” The third edition of Lesley Henderson’s Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers (1991) presents a quite different and rather less rackety curriculum vitae, one that sits somewhat uneasily with his alleged Bohemian and freewheeling lifestyle. There Craig is said to have been “head research analyst for the U.S. navy, the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff during World War II,” a startlingly mature role for a man who was barely twenty-five years old at the time of the Normandy landings in 1944. Later he is reported to have been “adviser to President Truman at the Potsdam Conference, 1945.”

Given that the editor of Manhunt was keen to have his authors be seen as leading colorful, even mildly gamey lives, it is difficult to ascertain the truth about Craig’s history. But without a doubt, Craig clearly had more than enough experience of the hard end of life to become one of the leading chroniclers of the “JD” (juvenile delinquent), or “juvie,” genre, which was so popular with editors and readers in the “rebel without a cause” era of the mid-1950s. He combined a gritty realism with a sardonic outlook and mastered a style that was spare while at times hinting at lushness and moral decay. In his early novels, especially So Young, So Wicked (1957), young women are depicted as sly and knowing, concupiscently old for their years, and all too aware of their own sexual power. Yet in their greed lies the seed of their inevitable downfall. A palpable undercurrent of misogyny can be found in many of Craig’s stories, “The Bobby-Soxer” in particular. The theme was always power without responsibility, a hoary plot line that Craig hauled into the 1950s again and again, freshening it up each time.

Craig began his Sixth Precinct police-procedural series set in Manhattan with The Dead Darling in 1955, beating the first of Ed McBain’s famous Eighty-seventh Precinct books, Cop Hater, by a year. But whereas McBain began his long-running saga in paperbacks before graduating to prestigious hardcover houses, Craig worked on an altogether less epic scale, beginning and ending in paperback.

J. A.

The Bobby-Soxer (1953)

It was almost ten o’clock on a sultry August night when Donna Taylor turned the corner at Howard Street and started walking west toward Center Avenue. She was seventeen, but without make-up and dressed as she was now, in white blouse and plaid skirt and saddle shoes, she could have passed for a year or so younger than that.

She was a remarkably pretty girl, with slim tapering legs that were tanned to almost the same dark-gold color of the hair caught at the nape of her neck in a pony tail, but she seemed completely unaware of the appreciative glances following her.

She was humming to herself as she walked. Just before she reached the avenue, she paused to look at the display in a store window. A tall, middle-aged man in a pin-striped suit was looking at the display, too. When he saw Donna, he kept his face toward the window, but his eyes stayed on her. They were funny eyes, shifty and sort of wild.

She hesitated a moment, then moved around him, walking in the direction of the avenue again.

Just as she reached the mouth of the alley beside the store building, she heard a quick step behind her. A hand went over her mouth, and a man’s arm whipped around her body in such a way that her arms were pinioned to her sides. She felt herself being lifted off her feet, and then she was being dragged into the blackness of the alley.

She struggled against him, but it was useless. The man carried her as easily as if she had been a doll.

When he had taken her a dozen yards into the alley, he stopped and forced her down to the pavement.

Terror sickened through her. And then she felt the man’s sweaty palm across her mouth slip a half inch to one side, and she jerked her head violently in the other direction. For just an instant her mouth was uncovered, and she screamed. She knew, instinctively, that the man would be afraid after it was over and would try to kill her, and she screamed so loudly that her ears rang.

The man cursed and jumped to his feet, and his heels echoed hollowly on the pavement as he ran toward the mouth of the alley.

Then, out in the street, she heard the pounding of other feet, and men yelling, and she got up and steadied herself against the wall. Then she began to walk toward the mouth of the alley, very slowly, trying to catch her breath.

She came out on the street just as two shirt-sleeved men started into the alley.

“You all right?” one of the men asked.

She nodded. Across the street she caught sight of the man in the pinstriped suit. He was being held by three other men, one of whom had grabbed his hair and jerked his head back. He was trying to fight his way loose, but a man had hold of each of his arms, and they were standing slightly in back of him so that he couldn’t kick at them.

One of the men in shirt-sleeves put his arm around Donna and led her over to the man who had attacked her. She looked at him, and then looked down at the sidewalk.

The other shirt-sleeved man said, “Exactly what happened, Miss — not that I can’t guess.”

Donna didn’t look up. “He pulled me into the alley,” she said. “He... tried to...” Her voice trailed off.

“For God’s sake, Ed!” one of the men said. “Aren’t you bright enough to know what happened, without making her talk about it?” He stepped close to the man in the pin-striped suit and hit him flush in the mouth. “You son of a bitch,” he said softly.

Donna glanced about her. A crowd was forming now. She didn’t know any of the men and women who were pressing in close. The man in shirt-sleeves still had his arm around her, gently and protectively, the way her father sometimes held her. She heard the newcomers asking questions, and the indignant, angry replies they made when they learned what had happened.

She looked at the man in the pin-striped suit again. There was blood at the corner of his mouth and his eyes were sick with fear.

A woman stepped up to him and shook her fist in his face. “You ought to hang!” she said. “A little girl like that! Why, she’s hardly more than a baby!” She spat in the man’s face.

“Anybody call the cops?” someone asked.

“Joe’s just run back to his candy store to call,” someone else said.

The man in the pin-striped suit made a sudden, violent lunge and broke free from the men who had been holding him. He stumbled and went to one knee, then righted himself and started to run. A foot went out to trip him, and he sprawled headlong on the cement. Before he could get up again, a man in a flowered sport shirt leaped upon him and pulled his arm up behind his back in a hammerlock.

Another man drew back his foot and kicked the fallen man in the ribs. The attacker screamed, but the foot sank into his ribs again and again.

The woman who had spit at him said, “That’s the way, George! Kick him in the face!”

Donna turned away. She felt as if she might be sick at her stomach.

The man who had his arm around her said, “You poor little kid...” Then the man on the ground screamed again, and Donna heard the meaty impact of a shoe-toe meeting his face.

“Kick his damn head off, George!” the woman yelled.

“You better stop,” someone said. “You’ll kill him if you aren’t careful.”

A police siren keened on the heavy night air, rising and falling, coming fast.

The police cruiser turned the corner and squealed to a stop. The crowd moved back, and suddenly there was no sound other than the sobbing moans of the man on the sidewalk. He was lying on his back now, motionless, his face battered to a swollen, bleeding pulp. One wrist had been broken, and two inches of bone shard had pushed through the skin.

Fifteen minutes later, Donna sat on a wooden bench at the station house, talking to Sergeant Clinton. The police had taken her attacker to a hospital under guard.

“You sure you wouldn’t rather we took you home in a squad car?” Clinton asked.

She shook her head. “My folks, they would...”

“All right, then,” Clinton said gently. “But make sure you bring them right back here with you. We got to get your statement, and we got to have your folks here on account of you’re a minor.”

Donna turned and walked slowly out of the station house and along the street until she reached the corner. Then she quickened her pace, and another five minutes brought her to Center Avenue, the main drag along which she walked every evening, and for which she had been heading when she had paused to look in the store window. She was still shaken from her experience, but rapidly beginning to return to normal.

Half a block farther on, she stopped before another store window. And at this window too a man was looking at the display. He was about the same age and size as her attacker had been, but he looked all right, not funny and wild-eyed like the other one. This man, she knew, would be okay.

She glanced both ways along the avenue, and then she said softly, “You want to have a party, mister?”

The man looked at her, first with surprise and then with interest.

“What would it cost me?” he asked.

She smiled at him. “A fiver,” she said.

In the mid-1940s, David Goodis seemed to be on the brink of monumental success. A busy, published writer since 1939, he was the author of a reasonably well received first novel, Retreat from Oblivion (1939). He had discovered the pulp magazines and found he had a knack for combat fiction, especially in the air-war genre. Throughout the war, he provided a host of colorfully titled novelettes (“Sky-Coffins for Nazis,” “Doom for the Hawks of Nippon,” “The High-Hat Squadron from Hell”) for pulps such as Battle Birds, Air War, and Dare-Devil Aces. Under his own name as well as the pseudonyms Ray P. Shotwell and David Crewe, and the house name Lance Kermit, he contributed stories to such detective pulps as New Detective and Big-Book Detective. It is said that he also wrote torrentially, although pseudonymously, for the principal “shudder” pulps — Terror Tales, Horror Stories, and Dime Mystery — until their demise in 1941, although no one has yet cracked his pseudonyms for these markets. There is no doubt that he wrote radio scripts for Superman as well as Hop Harrigan: America’s Ace of the Airways (for which he became associate producer in 1945).

Goodis’s annus mirabilis was 1946. His novel Dark Passage (about an innocent man on the run) was sold to the Saturday Evening Post for $25,000, and the Warner Brothers film studio picked it up for the same, then-staggering sum. Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall starred. A promotional photograph shows a grinning Bogart with his arm through Goodis’s and Goodis’s other arm around Bacall. At that time, this was a portrait of triumph and fame. A six-year contract with Warner Brothers followed, its first fruit being a Goodis co-script (with fames Gunn) for The Unfaithful, which, along with Dark Passage, was a huge success. There followed three years of unsensational script tinkering before Warner’s dropped him completely.

Goodis fled home to Philadelphia and sat in his room, day after day writing archetypical noir paperback originals about small and hopeless lives. His first paperback original, the bestselling Cassidy’s Girl, was published in 1951. Both his writing and his life during the 1950s were obsessive to the point of madness. He wrote short, bleak sagas of lives lived at the edge of common decency, often tumbling over into a stew of alcoholism, paranoia, debilitating poverty, and failure. His own lifestyle could also be described as seriously eccentric, and for the last fifteen years of his life, he lived as a virtual recluse with his parents in Philadelphia.

First published in Manhunt in December 1953, Goodis’s “Black Pudding” is a tale of violence, hatred, and revenge — with the unusual addition of a modicum of hope.

J. A.

Black Pudding (1953)

They spotted him on Race Street between Ninth and Tenth. It was Chinatown in the tenderloin of Philadelphia and he stood gazing into the window of the Wong Ho restaurant and wishing he had the cash to buy himself some egg-foo-yung. The menu in the window priced egg-foo-yung at eighty cents an order and he had exactly thirty-one cents in his pocket. He shrugged and started to turn away from the window and just then he heard them coming.

It was their footsteps that told him who they were. There was the squeaky sound of Oscar’s brand-new shoes. And the clumping noise of Coley’s heavy feet. It was nine years since he’d heard their footsteps but he remembered that Oscar had a weakness for new shoes and Coley always walked heavily.

He faced them. They were smiling at him, their features somewhat greenish under the green neon glow that drifted through after-midnight blackness. He saw the weasel eyes and buzzard nose of little Oscar. He transferred his gaze to the thick lips and puffed-out cheeks of tall, obese Coley.

“Hello, Ken.” It was Oscar’s purring voice, Oscar’s lips scarcely moving.

“Hello,” he said to both of them. He blinked a few times. Now the shock was coming. He could feel the waves of shock surging toward him.

“We been looking for you,” Coley said. He flipped his thick thumb over his shoulder to indicate the black Olds 88 parked across the street. “We’ve driven that car clear across the country.”

Ken blinked again. The shock had hit him and now it was past and he was blinking from worry. He knew why they’d been looking for him and he was very worried.

He said quietly, “How’d you know I was in Philly?”

“Grapevine,” Oscar said. “It’s strictly coast-to-coast. It starts from San Quentin and we get tipped-off in Los Angeles. It’s a letter telling the Boss you been paroled. That’s three weeks ago. Then we get letters from Denver and Omaha and a wire from Chicago. And then a phone call from Detroit. We wait to see how far east you’ll travel. Finally we get the call from Philly, and the man tells us you’re on the bum around Skid Row.”

Ken shrugged. He tried to sound casual as he said, “Three thousand miles is a long trip. You must have been anxious to see me.”

Oscar nodded. “Very anxious.” He sort of floated closer to Ken. And Coley also moved in. It was slow and quiet and it didn’t seem like menace but they were crowding him and finally they had him backed up against the restaurant window.

He said to himself, They’ve got you, they’ve found you and they’ve got you and you’re finished.

He shrugged again. “You can’t do it here.”

“Can’t we?” Oscar purred.

“It’s a crowded street,” Ken said. He turned his head to look at the lazy parade of tenderloin citizens on both sides of the street. He saw the bums and the beggars, the winos and the ginheads, the yellow faces of middle-aged opium smokers and the grey faces of two-bit scufflers and hustlers.

“Don’t look at them,” Oscar said. “They can’t help you. Even if they could, they wouldn’t.”

Ken’s smile was sad and resigned. “You’re so right,” he said. His shoulders drooped and his head went down and he saw Oscar reaching into a jacket pocket and taking out the silver-handled tool that had a button on it to release a five-inch blade. He knew there would be no further talk, only action, and it would happen within the next split-second.

In that tiny fraction of time, some gears clanged to shift from low to high in Ken’s brain. His senses and reflexes, dulled from nine years in prison, were suddenly keen and acutely technical and there was no emotion on his face as he moved. He moved very fast, his arms crossing to shape an X, the left hand flat and rigid and banging against Oscar’s wrist, the right hand a fist that caught Coley in the mouth. It sent the two of them staggering backward and gave him the space he wanted and he darted through the gap, sprinting east on Race Street toward Ninth.

As he turned the corner to head north on Ninth, he glanced backward and saw them getting into the Olds. He took a deep breath and continued running up Ninth. He ran straight ahead for approximately fifteen yards and then turned again to make a dash down a narrow alley. In the middle of the alley he hopped a fence, ran across a backyard, hopped another fence, then a few more backyards with more fence-hopping, and then the opened window of a tenement cellar. He lunged at the window, went in head-first, groped for a handhold, couldn’t find any, and plunged through eight feet of blackness onto a pile of empty boxes and tin cans. He landed on his side, his thigh taking most of the impact, so that it didn’t hurt too much. He rolled over and hit the floor and lay there flat on his belly. From a few feet away a pair of green eyes stared at him and he stared back, and then he grinned as though to say, Don’t be afraid, pussy, stay here and keep me company, it’s a tough life and an evil world and us alleycats got to stick together.

But the cat wasn’t trusting any living soul. It let out a soft meow and scampered away. Ken sighed and his grin faded and he felt the pressure of the blackness and the quiet and the loneliness. His mind reached slowly for the road going backward nine years...

It was Los Angeles, and they were a small outfit operating from a first-floor apartment near Figueroa and Jefferson. Their business was armed robbery and their work-area included Beverly Hills and Bel-Air and the wealthy residential districts of Pasadena. They concentrated on expensive jewelry and wouldn’t touch any job that offered less than a ten-grand haul.

There were five of them, Ken and Oscar and Coley and Ken’s wife and the Boss. The name of the Boss was Riker and he was very kind to Ken until the face and body of Ken’s wife became a need and then a craving and finally an obsession. It showed in Riker’s eyes whenever he looked at her. She was a platinum blonde dazzler, a former burlesque dancer named Hilda. She’d been married to Ken for seven months when Riker reached the point where he couldn’t stand it any longer and during a job in Bel-Air he banged Ken’s skull with the butt end of a revolver. When the police arrived, Ken was unconscious on the floor and later in the hospital they asked him questions but he wouldn’t answer. In the courtroom he sat with his head bandaged and they asked him more questions and he wouldn’t answer. They gave him five-to-twenty and during his first month in San Quentin he learned from his lawyer that Hilda had obtained a Reno divorce and was married to Riker. He went more or less insane and couldn’t be handled and they put him in solitary.

Later they had him in the infirmary, chained to the bed, and they tried some psychology. They told him he’d regain his emotional health if he’d talk and name some names. He laughed at them. Whenever they coaxed him to talk, he laughed in their faces and presently they’d shrug and walk away.

His first few years in Quentin were spent either in solitary or the infirmary, or under special guard. Then, gradually, he quieted down. He became very quiet and in the laundry-room he worked very hard and was extremely cooperative. During the fifth year he was up for parole and they asked him about the Bel-Air job and he replied quite reasonably that he couldn’t remember, he was afraid to remember, he wanted to forget all about it and arrange a new life for himself. They told him he’d talk or he’d do the limit. He said he was sorry but he couldn’t give them the information they wanted. He explained that he was trying to get straight with himself and be clean inside and he wouldn’t feel clean if he earned his freedom that way.

So then it was nine years and they were convinced he’d finally paid his debt to the people of California. They gave him a suit of clothes and a ten-dollar bill and told him he was a free man.

In a Sacramento hash-house he worked as a dishwasher just long enough to earn the bus-fare for a trip across the country. He was thinking in terms of the town where he’d been born and raised, telling himself he’d made a wrong start in Philadelphia and the thing to do was go back there and start again and make it right this time, really legitimate. The parole board okayed the job he’d been promised. That was a healthy thought and it made the bus-trip very enjoyable. But the nicest thing about the bus was its fast engine that took him away from California, far away from certain faces he didn’t want to see.

Yet now, as he rested on the floor of the tenement cellar, he could see the faces again. The faces were worried and frightened and he saw them in his brain and heard their trembling voices. He heard Riker saying, “They’ve released him from Quentin. We’ll have to do something.” And Hilda saying, “What can we do?” And Riker replying, “We’ll get him before he gets us.”

He sat up, colliding with an empty tin can that rolled across the floor and made a clatter. For some moments there was quiet and then he heard a shuffling sound and a voice saying, “Who’s there?”

It was a female voice, sort of a cracked whisper. It had a touch of asthma in it, some alcohol, and something else that had no connection with health or happiness.

Ken didn’t say anything. He hoped she’d go away. Maybe she’d figure it was a rat that had knocked over the tin can and she wouldn’t bother to investigate.

But he heard the shuffling footsteps approaching through the blackness. He focused directly ahead and saw the silhouette coming toward him. She was on the slender side, neatly constructed. It was a very interesting silhouette. Her height was approximately five-five and he estimated her weight in the neighborhood of one-ten. He sat up straighter. He was very anxious to get a look at her face.

She came closer and there was the scratchy sound of a match against a matchbook. The match flared and he saw her face. She had medium-brown eyes that matched the color of her hair, and her nose and lips I were nicely sculptured, somewhat delicate but blending prettily with the shape of her head. He told himself she was a very pretty girl. But just then he saw the scar.

It was a wide jagged scar that started high on her forehead and crawled down the side of her face and ended less than an inch above her upper lip. The color of it was a livid purple with lateral streaks of pink and white. It was a terrible scar, really hideous.

She saw that he was wincing, but it didn’t seem to bother her. The lit match stayed lit and she was sizing him up. She saw a man of medium height and weight, about thirty-six years old, with yellow hair that needed cutting, a face that needed shaving, and sad lonely grey eyes that needed someone’s smile.

She tried to smile for him. But only one side of her mouth could manage it. On the other side the scar was like a hook that pulled at her flesh and caused a grimace that was more anguish than physical pain. He told himself it was a damn shame. Such a pretty girl. And so young. She couldn’t be more than twenty-five. Well, some people had all the luck. All the rotten luck.

The match was burned halfway down when she reached into the pocket of a tattered dress and took out a candle. She went through the process of lighting the candle and melting the base of it. The softened wax adhered to the cement floor of the cellar and she sat down facing him and said quietly, “All right, let’s have it. What’s the pitch?”

He pointed backward to the opened window to indicate the November night. He said, “It’s chilly out there. I came in to get warm.”

She leaned forward just a little to peer at his eyes. Then, shaking her head slowly, she murmured, “No sale.”

He shrugged. He didn’t say anything.

“Come on,” she urged gently. “Let’s try it again.”

“All right.” He grinned at her. And then it came out easily. “I’m hiding.”

“From the Law?”

“No,” he said. “From trouble.”

He started to tell her about it. He couldn’t understand why he was telling her. It didn’t make sense that he should be spilling the story to someone he’d just met in a dark cellar, someone out of nowhere. But she was company and he needed company. He went on telling her.

It took more than an hour. He was providing all the details of events stretched across nine years. The candlelight showed her sitting there, not moving, her eyes riveted to his face as he spoke in low tones. Sometimes there were pauses, some of them long, some very long, but she never interrupted, she waited patiently while he groped for the words to make the meaning clear.

Finally he said, “—It’s a cinch they won’t stop, they’ll get me sooner or later.”

“If they find you,” she said.

“They’ll find me.”

“Not here.”

He stared at the flickering candle. “They’ll spend money to get information. There’s more than one big mouth in this neighborhood. And the biggest mouths of all belong to the landlords.”

“There’s no landlord here,” she told him. “There’s no tenants except me and you.”

“Nobody upstairs?”

“Only mice and rats and roaches. It’s a condemned house and City Hall calls it a firetrap and from the first floor up the windows are boarded. You can’t get up because there’s no stairs. One of these days the City’ll tear down this dump but I’ll worry about that when it happens.”

He looked at her. “You live here in the cellar?”

She nodded. “It’s a good place to play solitaire.”

He smiled and murmured, “Some people like to be alone.”

“I don’t like it,” she said. Then, with a shrug, she pointed to the scar on her face. “What man would live with me?”

He stopped smiling. He didn’t say anything.

She said, “It’s a long drop when you’re tossed out of a third-story window. Most folks are lucky and they land on their feet or their fanny. I came down head first, cracked my collar-bone and got a fractured skull, and split my face wide open.”

He took a closer look at the livid scar. For some moments he was quiet and then he frowned thoughtfully and said, “Maybe it won’t be there for long. It’s not as deep as I thought it was. If you had it treated—”

“No,” she said. “The hell with it.”

“You wouldn’t need much cash,” he urged quietly. “You could go to a clinic. They’re doing fancy tricks with plastic surgery these days.”

“Yeah, I know.” Her voice was toneless. She wasn’t looking at him. “The point is, I want the scar to stay there. It keeps me away from men. I’ve had too many problems with men and now, whenever they see my face, they turn their heads the other way. And that’s fine with me. That’s just how I want it.”

He frowned again. This time it was a deeper frown and it wasn’t just thoughtful. He said, “Who threw you out of the window?”

“My husband.” She laughed without sound. “My wonderful husband.”

“Where is he now?”

“In the cemetery,” she said. She shrugged again, and her tone was matter-of-fact. “It happened while I was in the hospital. I think he got to the point where he couldn’t stand to live with himself. Or maybe he just did it for kicks, I don’t know. Anyway, he got hold of a meat-cleaver and chopped his own throat. When they found him, he damn near didn’t have a head.”

“Well, that’s one way of ending a marriage.”

Again she uttered the soundless laugh. “It was a fine marriage while it lasted. I was drunk most of the time. I had to get drunk to take what he dished out. He had some weird notions about wedding vows.”

“He went with other women?”

“No,” she said. “He made me go with other men.”

For some moments it was quiet.

And then she went on, “We lived here in this neighborhood. It’s a perfect neighborhood for that sort of deal. He had me out on the street looking for customers and bringing the money home to him, and when I came in with excuses instead of cash he’d throw me on the floor and kick me. I’d beg him to stop and he’d laugh and go on kicking me. Some nights I have bad dreams and he’s kicking me. So then I need the sweet dreams, and that’s when I reach for the pipe.”

“The pipe?”

“Opium,” she said. She said it with fondness and affection. “Opium.” There was tenderness in her eyes. “That’s my new husband.”

He nodded understandingly.

She said, “I get it from a Chinaman on Ninth Street. He’s a user himself and he’s more than eighty years old and still in there pitching, so I guess with O it’s like anything else, it’s all a matter of how you use it.” Her voice dropped off just a little and her eyes were dull and sort of dismal as she added, “I wish I didn’t need so much of it. It takes most of my weekly salary.”

“What kind of work you do?”

“I scrub floors,” she said. “In night-clubs and dance-halls. All day long I scrub the floors to make them clean and shiny for the night-time customers. Some nights I sit here and think of the pretty girls dancing on them polished floors. The pretty girls with flowers in their hair and no scars on their faces—” She broke it off abruptly, her hand making a brushing gesture as though to disparage the self-pity. She stood up and said, “I gotta go out to do some shopping. You wanna wait here till I come back?”

Without waiting for his answer, she moved across the cellar toward a battered door leading to the backyard. As she opened the door, she turned and looked at him. “Make yourself comfortable,” she said. “There’s a mattress in the next room. It ain’t the Ritz Carlton exactly, but it’s better than nothing.”

He was asking himself whether he should stay there.

He heard her saying, “Incidentally, my name is Tillie.”

She stood there waiting.

“Kenneth,” he said. “Kenneth Rockland.”

But that wasn’t what she was waiting for. Several moments passed, and then somehow he knew what she wanted him to say.

He said, “I’ll be here when you come back.”

“Good.” The candlelight showed her crooked grin, a grimace on the scarred face. But what he saw was a gentle smile. It seemed to drift to ward him like a soothing caress. And then he heard her saying, “Maybe I’ll come back with some news. You told me it was two men. There’s a chance I can check on them if you’ll tell me what they look like.”

He shook his head. “You better stay out of it. You might get hurt.”

“Nothing can hurt me,” she said. She pointed her finger at the wreckage of her face. Her tone was almost pleading as she said, “Come on, tell me what they look like.”

He shrugged. He gave a brief description of Oscar and Coley. And the Olds 88.

“Check,” Tillie said. “I don’t have 20–20 but I’ll keep them open and see what’s happening.”

She turned and walked out and the door closed. Ken lifted himself from the floor and picked up the candle. He walked across the cement floor and the candle showed him a small space off to one side, a former coal-bin arranged with a mattress against the wall, a splintered chair and a splintered bureau and a table stacked with books. There was a candle-holder on the table and he set the candle on it and then he had a look at the books.

It was an odd mixture of literature. There were books dealing with idyllic romance, strictly from fluttering hearts and soft moonlight and violins. And there were books that probed much deeper, explaining the scientific side of sex, with drawings and photos to show what it was all about. There was one book in particular that looked as though she’d been concentrating on it. The pages were considerably thumbed and she’d used a pencil to underline certain paragraphs. The title was The Sex Problem of the Single Woman.

He shook his head slowly. He thought, It’s a damn shame...

And then, for some unaccountable reason, he thought of Hilda. She flowed into his mind with a rustling of silk that sheathed the exquisite contours of her slender torso and legs. Her platinum blonde hair was glimmering and her long-lashed green eyes were beckoning to say, Come on, take my hand and we’ll go down Memory Lane.

He shut his eyes tightly. He wondered why he was thinking about her. A long time ago he’d managed to get her out of his mind and he couldn’t understand what brought her back again. He begged himself to get rid of the thought, but now it was more than a thought, it was the white-hot memory of tasting that mouth and possessing that elegant body. Without sound he said, Goddamn her.

And suddenly he realized why he was thinking of Hilda. It was like a curtain lifted to reveal the hidden channels of his brain. He was comparing Hilda’s physical perfection with the scarred face of Tillie. His eyes were open and he gazed down at the mattress on the floor and for a moment he saw Hilda naked on the mattress. She smiled teasingly and then she shook her head and said, Nothing doing. So then she vanished and in the next moment it was Tillie on the mattress but somehow he didn’t feel bitter or disappointed; he had the feeling that the perfection was all on Tillie’s side.

He took off his shoes and lowered himself to the mattress. He yawned a few times and then he fell asleep.

A voice said, “Kenneth—”

He was instantly awake. He looked up and saw Tillie. He smiled at her and said, “What time is it?”

“Half-past five.” She had a paper bag in her hand and she was taking things out of the bag and putting them on the table. There was some dried fish and a package of tea leaves and some cold fried noodles. She reached deeper into the bag and took out a bottle containing colorless liquid.

“Rice wine,” she said. She set the bottle on the table. Then again she reached into the bag and her hand came out holding a cardboard box.

“Opium?” he murmured.

She nodded. “I got some cigarettes, too.” She took a pack of Luckies from her pocket, opened the pack and extended it to him.

He sat up and put a cigarette in his mouth and used the candle to light it. He said, “You going to smoke the opium?”

“No, I’ll smoke what you’re smoking.”

He put another cigarette in his mouth and lit it and handed it to her.

She took a few drags and then she said quietly, “I didn’t want to wake you up, but I thought you’d want to hear the news.”

He blinked a few times. “What news?”

“I saw them,” she said.

He blinked again. “Where?”

“On Tenth Street.” She took more smoke into her mouth and let it come out of her nose. “It was a couple hours ago, after I come out of the Chinaman’s.”

He sat up straighten “You been watching them for two hours?”

“Watching them? I been with them. They took me for a ride.”

He stared at her. His mouth was open but no sound came out.

Tillie grinned. “They didn’t know I was in the car.”

He took a deep breath. “How’d you manage it?”

She shrugged. “It was easy. I saw them sitting in the car and then they got out and I followed them. They were taking a stroll around the block and peeping into alleys and finally I heard the little one saying they might as well powder and come back tomorrow. The big one said they should keep on searching the neighborhood. They got into an argument and I had a feeling the little one would win. So I walked back to the car. The door was open and I climbed in the back and got flat on the floor. About five minutes later they’re up front and the car starts and we’re riding.”

His eyes were narrow. “Where?”

“Downtown,” she said. “It wasn’t much of a ride. It only took a few minutes. They parked in front of a house on Spruce near Eleventh. I watched them go in. Then I got out of the car—”

“And walked back here?”

“Not right away,” she said. “First I cased the house.”

Silly Tillie, he thought. If they’d seen her they’d have dragged her in and killed her.

She said, “It’s one of them little old-fashioned houses. There’s a vacant lot on one side and on the other side there’s an alley. I went down the alley and came up on the back porch and peeped through the window. They were in the kitchen, the four of them.”

He made no sound, but his lips shaped the word. “Four?” And then, with sound, “Who were the other two?”

“A man and a woman.”

He stiffened. He tried to get up from the mattress and couldn’t move. His eyes aimed past Tillie as he said tightly, “Describe them.”

“The man was about five-ten and sort of beefy. I figure about two hundred. He looked about forty or so. Had a suntan and wore expensive clothes. Brown wavy hair and brown eyes and—”

“That’s Riker,” he murmured. He managed to lift himself from the mattress. His voice was a whisper as he said, “Now let’s have the woman.”

“She was something,” Tillie said. “She was really something.”

“Blonde?” And with both hands he made a gesture begging Tillie to speed the reply.

“Platinum blonde,” Tillie said. “With the kind of a face that makes men sweat in the wintertime. That kind of a face, and a shape that goes along with it. She was wearing—”

“Pearls,” he said. “She always had a weakness for pearls.”

Tillie didn’t say anything.

He moved past Tillie. He stood facing the dark wall of the cellar and seeing the yellow-black play of candlelight and shadow on the cracked plaster. “Hilda,” he said. “Hilda.”

It was quiet for some moments. He told himself it was wintertime and he wondered if he was sweating.

Then very slowly he turned and looked at Tillie. She was sitting on the edge of the mattress and drinking from the bottle of rice-wine. She took it in short, measured gulps, taking it down slowly to get the full effect of it. When the bottle was half-empty she raised her head and grinned at him and said, “Have some?”

He nodded. She handed him the bottle and he drank. The Chinese wine was mostly fire and it burned all the way going down and when it hit his belly it was electric-hot. But the climate it sent to his brain was cool and mild and the mildness showed in his eyes. His voice was quiet and relaxed as he said, “I thought Oscar and Coley made the trip alone. It didn’t figure that Riker and Hilda would come with them. But now it adds. I can see the way it adds.”

“It’s a long ride from Los Angeles,” Tillie said.

“They didn’t mind. They enjoyed the ride.”

“The scenery?”

“No,” he said. “They weren’t looking at the scenery. They were thinking of the setup here in Philly. With Oscar putting the blade in me and then the funeral and Riker seeing me in the coffin and telling himself his worries were over.”

“And Hilda?”

“The same,” he said. “She’s been worried just as much as Riker. Maybe more.”

Tillie nodded slowly. “From the story you told me, she’s got more reason to worry.”

He laughed lightly. He liked the sound of it and went on with it. He said, through the easy laughter, “They really don’t need to worry. They’re making it a big thing and it’s nothing at all. I forgot all about them a long time ago. But they couldn’t forget about me.”

Tillie had her head inclined and she seemed to be studying the sound of his laughter. Some moments passed and then she said quietly, “You don’t like black pudding?”

He didn’t get the drift of that. He stopped laughing and his eyes were asking what she meant.

“There’s an old saying,” she said. “Revenge is black pudding.”

He laughed again.

“Don’t pull away from it,” Tillie said. “Just listen to it. Let it hit you and sink in. Revenge is black pudding.”

He went on laughing, shaking his head and saying, “I’m not in the market.”

“You sure?”

“Positive,” he said. Then, with a grin. “Only pudding I like is vanilla.”

“The black tastes better,” Tillie said. “I’ve had some, and I know. I had it when they told me what he did to himself with the meat-cleaver.”

He winced slightly. He saw Tillie getting up from the mattress and moving toward him. He heard her saying, “That black pudding has a wonderful flavor. You ought to try a spoonful.”

“No,” he said. “No, Tillie.”

She came closer. She spoke very slowly and there was a slight hissing in her voice. “They put you in prison for nine years. They cheated you and robbed you and tortured you.”

“That’s all past,” he said. “That’s from yesterday.”

“It’s from now.” She stood very close to him. “They’re itching to hit you again and see you dead. They won’t stop until you’re dead. That puts a poison label on them. And there’s only one way to deal with poison. Get rid of it.”

“No,” he said. “I’ll let it stay the way it is.”

“You can’t,” Tillie said. “It’s a choice you have to make. Either you’ll drink bitter poison or you’ll taste that sweet black pudding.”

He grinned again. “There’s a third choice.”

“Like what?”

“This.” And he pointed to the bottle of rice-wine. “I like the taste of this. Let’s stay with it until it’s empty.”

“That won’t solve the problem,” Tillie said.

“The hell with the problem.” His grin was wide. It was very wide and he didn’t realize that it was forced.

“You fool,” Tillie said.

He had the bottle raised and he was taking a drink.

“You poor fool,” she said. Then she shrugged and turned away from him and lowered herself to the mattress.

The forced grin stayed on his face as he went on drinking. Now he was drinking slowly because the rice-wine dulled the action in his brain and he had difficulty lifting the bottle to his mouth. Gradually he became aware of a change taking place in the air of the cellar; it was thicker, sort of smoky. His eyes tried to focus and there was too much wine in him and he couldn’t see straight. But then the smoke came up in front of his eyes and into his eyes. He looked down and saw the white clay pipe in Tillie’s hand. She was sitting on the mattress with her legs crossed, Buddha-like, puffing at the opium, taking it in very slowly, the smoke coming out past the corners of her lips.

The grin faded from his face. And somehow the alcohol-mist was drifting away from his brain. He thought, She smokes it because she’s been kicked around. But there was no pity in his eyes, just the level look of clear thinking. He said to himself, There’s only two kinds of people in this world, the ones who get kicked around and the ones who do the kicking.

He lowered the bottle to the table. He turned and took a few steps going away and then heard Tillie saying, “Moving out?”

“No,” he said. “Just taking a walk.”

“Where?”

“Spruce Street,” he said.

“Good,” she said. “I’ll go with you.”

He shook his head. He faced her and saw that she’d put the pipe aside. She was getting up from the mattress. He went on shaking his head and saying, “It can’t be played that way. I gotta do this alone.”

She moved toward him. “Maybe it’s good-bye.”

“If it is,” he said, “there’s only one way to say it.”

His eyes told her to come closer. He put his arms around her and held her with a tenderness and a feeling of not wanting to let her go. He kissed her. He knew she felt the meaning of the kiss, she was returning it and as her breath went into him it was sweet and pure and somehow like nectar.

Then, very gently, she pulled away from him. She said, “Go now. It’s still dark outside. It’ll be another hour before the sun comes up.”

He grinned. It was a soft grin that wasn’t forced. “This job won’t take more than an hour,” he said. “Whichever way it goes, it’ll be a matter of minutes. Either I’ll get them or they’ll get me.”

He turned away and walked across the cellar toward the splintered door. Tillie stood there watching him as he opened the door and went out.

It was less than three minutes later and they had him. He was walking south on Ninth, between Race Street and Arch, and the black Olds 88 was cruising on Arch and he didn’t see them but they saw him, with Oscar grinning at Coley and saying, “There’s our boy.”

Oscar drove the car past the intersection and parked it on the north side of Arch about twenty feet away from the corner. They got out and walked toward the corner and stayed close to the brick wall of the corner building. They listened to the approaching footsteps and grinned at each other and a few moments later he arrived on the corner and they grabbed him.

He felt Coley’s thick arm wrapped tight around his throat, pulling his head back. He saw the glimmer of the five-inch blade in Oscar’s hand. He told himself to think fast and he thought very fast and managed to say, “You’ll be the losers. I made a connection.”

Oscar hesitated. He blinked puzzledly. “What connection?”

He smiled at Oscar. Then he waited for Coley to loosen the armhold on his throat. Coley loosened it, then lowered it to his chest, using both arms to clamp him and prevent him from moving.

He made no attempt to move. He went on smiling at Oscar, and saying, “An important connection. It’s important enough to louse you up.”

“Prove it,” Oscar said.

“You’re traced.” He narrowed the smile just a little. “If anything happens to me, they know where to get you.”

“He’s faking,” Coley said. Then urgently, “Go on, Oscar, give him the knife.”

“Not yet,” Oscar murmured. He was studying Ken’s eyes and his own eyes were somewhat worried. He said to Ken, “Who did the tracing?”

“I’ll tell that to Riker.”

Oscar laughed without sound. “Riker’s in Los Angeles.”

“No he isn’t,” Ken said. “He’s here in Philly.”

Oscar stopped laughing. The worry deepened in his eyes. He stared past Ken, focusing on Coley.

“He’s here with Hilda,” Ken said.

“It’s just a guess,” Coley said. “It’s gotta be a guess.” He tightened his bear-hug on Ken. “Do it, Oscar. Don’t let him stall you. Put the knife in him.”

Oscar looked at Ken and said, “You making this a quiz game?”

Ken shrugged. “It’s more like stud poker.”

“Maybe,” Oscar admitted. “But you’re not the dealer.”

Ken shrugged again. He didn’t say anything.

Oscar said, “You’re not the dealer and all you can do is hope for the right card.”

“I got it already,” Ken said. “It fills an inside straight.”

Oscar bit the edge of his lip. “All right, I’ll take a look.” He had the knife aiming at Ken’s chest, and then he lowered it and moved in closer and the tip of the blade was touching Ken’s belly. “Let’s see your hole-card, sonny. All you gotta do is name the street and the house.”

“Spruce Street,” Ken said. “Near Eleventh.”

Oscar’s face became pale. Again he was staring at Coley.

Ken said, “It’s an old house, detached. On one side there’s a vacant lot and on the other side there’s an alley.”

It was quiet for some moments and then Oscar was talking aloud to himself, saying, “He knows, he really knows.”

“What’s the move?” Coley asked. He sounded somewhat unhappy.

“We gotta think,” Oscar said. “This makes it complicated and we gotta think it through very careful.”

Coley muttered a four-letter word. He said, “We ain’t getting paid to do our own thinking. Riker gave us orders to find him and bump him.”

“We can’t bump him now,” Oscar said. “Not under these conditions. The way it stacks up, it’s Riker’s play. We’ll have to take him to Riker.”

“Riker won’t like that,” Coley said.

Oscar didn’t reply. Again he was biting his lip and it went on that way for some moments and then he made a gesture toward the parked car. He told Coley to take the wheel and said he’d sit in the back with Rockland. As he opened the rear door he had the blade touching Ken’s side, gently urging Ken to get in first. Coley was up front behind the wheel and then Oscar and Ken occupied the rear seat and the knife in Oscar’s hand was aimed at Ken’s abdomen.

The engine started and the Olds 88 moved east on Arch and went past Eighth and turned south on Seventh. There was no talk in the car as they passed Market and Chestnut and Walnut. They had a red light on Locust but Coley ignored it and went through at forty-five.

“Slow down,” Oscar said.

Coley was hunched low over the wheel and the speedometer went up to fifty and Oscar yelled, “For Christ’s sake, slow down. You wanna be stopped by a red car?”

“There’s one now,” Ken said, and he pointed toward the side window that showed only the front of a grocery store. But Oscar thought it might really be a side-street with a police car approaching, and the thought was in his brain for a tiny fraction of a second. In that segment of time he turned his head to have a look. Ken’s hand moved automatically to grab Oscar’s wrist and twist hard. The knife fell away from Oscar’s fingers and Ken’s other hand caught it. Oscar let out a screech and Ken put the knife in Oscar’s throat and had it in there deep just under the ear, pulled it out and put it in again. The car was skidding to a stop as Ken stabbed Oscar a third time to finish him. Coley was screaming curses and trying to hurl himself sideways and backward toward the rear seat and Ken showed him the knife and it didn’t stop him. Ken ducked as Coley came vaulting over the top of the front seat, the knife slashing upward to catch Coley in the belly, slashing sideways to rip from navel to kidney, then across again to the other kidney, then up to the ribs to hit bone with Coley gurgling and trying to sob, doubled over with his knees on the floor and his chin on the edge of the back seat, his arms flung over the sprawled corpse of Oscar.

“I’m dying,” Coley gurgled. “I’m—” That was his final sound. His eyes opened very wide and his head snapped sideways and he was through for this night and all nights.

Ken opened the rear door and got out. He had the knife in his pocket as he walked with medium-fast stride going south on Seventh to Spruce. Then he turned west on Spruce and walked just a bit faster. Every now and then he glanced backward to see if there were any red cars but all he saw was the empty street and some alley cats mooching around under the street lamps.

In the blackness above the rooftops the bright yellow face of the City Hall clock showed ten minutes past six. He estimated the sky would be dark for another half-hour. It wasn’t much time, but it was time enough for what he intended to do. He told himself he wouldn’t enjoy the action, and yet somehow his mouth was watering, almost like anticipating a tasty dish. Something on the order of pudding, and the color of it was black.

He quickened his pace just a little, crossed Eighth Street and Ninth, and walked faster as he passed Tenth. There were no lit windows on Spruce Street but as he neared Eleventh the moonlight blended with the glow of a street lamp and showed him the vacant lot. He gazed across the empty space to the wall of the old-fashioned house.

Then he was on the vacant lot and moving slowly and quietly toward the rear of the house. He worked his way to the sagging steps of the back porch, saw a light in the kitchen window, climbed two steps and three and four and then he was on the porch and peering through the window and seeing Hilda.

She was alone in the kitchen, sitting at a white-topped table and smoking a cigarette. There was a cup and saucer on the table, the saucer littered with coffee-stained cigarette butts. As he watched, she got up from the table and went to the stove to lift a percolator off the fire and pour another cup of coffee.

She moved with a slow weaving of her shoulders and a flow of her hips that was more drifting than walking. He thought, She still has it, that certain way of moving around, using that body like a long-stemmed lily in a quiet breeze. That’s what got you the first time you laid eyes on her. The way she moves. And one time very long ago you said to her, “To set me on fire, all you have to do is walk across a room.” You couldn’t believe you were actually married to that hothouse-prize, that platinum blonde hair like melted eighteen-karat, that face, she still has it, that body, she still has it. It’s been nine years, and she still has it.

She was wearing bottle-green velvet that set off the pale green of her eyes. The dress was cut low, went in tight around her very narrow waist and stayed tight going down all the way past her knees. She featured pearls around her throat and in her ears and on her wrists. He thought, You gave her pearls for her birthday and Christmas and you wanted to give her more for the first wedding anniversary. But they don’t sell pearls in San Quentin. All they sell is plans forgetting out. Like lessons in how to crawl through a pipe, or how to conceal certain tools, or how to disguise the voice. The lessons never paid off, but maybe now’s the time to use what you learned. Let’s try Coley’s voice.

His knuckles rapped the kitchen door, and his mouth opened to let out Coley’s thick, low-pitched voice saying, “It’s me and Oscar.”

He stood there counting off the seconds. It was four seconds and then the door opened. It opened wide and Hilda’s mouth opened wider. Then she had her hand to her mouth and she was stepping backward.

“Hello, Hilda.” He came into the kitchen and closed the door behind him.

She took another backward step. She shook her head and spoke through the trembling fingers that pressed against her lips. “It isn’t—”

“Yes,” he said. “It is.”

Her hand fell away from her mouth. The moment was too much for her and it seemed she was going to collapse. But somehow she managed to stay on her feet. Then her eyes were shut tightly and she went on shaking her head.

“Look at me,” he said. “Take a good look.”

She opened her eyes. She looked him up and down and up again. Then, very slowly, she summoned air into her lungs and he knew she was going to let out a scream. His hand moved fast to his coat pocket and he took out Oscar’s knife and said quietly, “No noise, Hilda.”

She stared at the knife. The air went out of her without sound. Her arms were limp at her sides. She spoke in a half-whisper, talking to herself. “I don’t believe it. Just can’t believe it—”

“Why not?” His tone was mild. “It figures, doesn’t it? You came to Philly to look for me. And here I am.”

For some moments she stayed limp. Then, gradually, her shoulders straightened. She seemed to be getting a grip on herself. Her eyes narrowed just a little, as she went on looking at the silver-handled switchblade in his hand. She said, “That’s Oscar’s knife—?”

He nodded.

“Where is Oscar?” she asked. “Where’s Coley?”

“They’re dead.” He pressed the button on the handle and the blade flicked out. It glimmered red with Oscar’s blood and Coley’s blood. He said, “It’s a damn shame. They wouldn’t be dead if they’d let me alone.”

Hilda didn’t say anything. She gave a little shrug, as though to indicate there was nothing she could say. He told himself it didn’t make sense to wait any longer and the thing to do was put the knife in her heart. He wondered if the knife was sharp enough to cut through ice.

He took a forward step, then stopped. He wondered what was holding him back. Maybe he was waiting for her to break, to fall on her knees and beg for mercy.

But she didn’t kneel and she didn’t plead. Her voice was matter-of-fact as she said, “I’m wondering if we can make a deal.”

It caught him off balance. He frowned slightly. “What kind of deal?”

“Fair trade,” she said. “You give me a break and I’ll give you Riker.”

He changed the frown to a dim smile. “I’ve got him anyway. It’s a cinch he’s upstairs sound asleep.”

“That’s fifty percent right,” she said. “He’s a very light sleeper. Especially lately, since he heard you were out of Quentin.”

He widened the smile. “In Quentin I learned to walk on tip-toe. There won’t be any noise.”

“There’s always noise when you break down a door.”

The frown came back. “You playing it shrewd?”

“I’m playing it straight,” she said. “He keeps the door locked. Another thing he keeps is a .38 under his pillow.”

He slanted his head just a little. “You expect me to buy that?”

“You don’t have to buy it. I’m giving it to you.”

He began to see what she was getting at. He said, “All right, thanks for the freebee. Now tell me what you’re selling.”

“A key,” she said. “The key to his room. He has one and I have one. I’ll sell you mine at bargain rates. All I want is your promise.”

He didn’t say anything.

She shrugged and said, “It’s a gamble on both sides. I’ll take a chance that you’ll keep your word and let me stay alive. You’ll be betting even-money that I’m telling the truth.”

He smiled again. He saw she was looking past him, at the kitchen door. He said, “So the deal is, you give me the key to his room and I let you walk out that door.”

“That’s it.” She was gazing hungrily at the door. Her lips scarcely moved as she murmured, “Fair enough?”

“No,” he said. “It needs a tighter contract.”

Her face was expressionless. She held her breath.

He let her hold it for awhile, and then he said, “Let’s do it so there’s no gamble. You get the key and I’ll follow you upstairs. I’ll be right in back of you when you walk into the room. I’ll have the blade touching your spine.”

She blinked a few times.

“Well?” he said.

She reached into a flap of the bottle-green velvet and took out a door-key. Then she turned slowly and started out of the kitchen. He moved in close behind her and followed the platinum blonde hair and elegant torso going through the small dining-room and the parlor and toward the dimly lit stairway. He came up at her side as they climbed the stairs, the knife-blade scarcely an inch away from the shimmering velvet that covered her ribs.

They reached the top of the stairs and she pointed to the door of the front bedroom. He let the blade touch the velvet and his voice was a whisper saying, “Slow and quiet. Very quiet.”

Then again he moved behind her. They walked slowly toward the bedroom door. The blade kissed the velvet and it told her to use the key with a minimum of sound. She put the key in the lock and there was no sound as she turned the key. There was only a slight clicking sound as the lock opened. Then no sound while she opened the door.

They entered the room and he saw Riker in the bed. He saw the brown wavy hair and there was some grey in it along the temples. In the suntanned face there were wrinkles and lines of dissipation and other lines that told of too much worry. Riker’s eyes were shut tightly and it was the kind of slumber that rests the limbs but not the brain.

Ken thought, He’s aged a lot in nine years; it used to be mostly muscle and now it’s mostly fat.

Riker was curled up, his knees close to his paunch. He had his shoes off but otherwise he was fully dressed. He wore a silk shirt and a hand-painted necktie, his jacket was dark grey cashmere and his slacks were pale grey high-grade flannel. He had on a pair of argyle socks that must have set him back at least twenty dollars. On the wrist of his left hand there was a platinum watch to match the large star-emerald he wore on his little finger. On the third finger of his left hand he had a three-karat diamond. Ken was looking at the expensive clothes and the jewelry and thinking, He travels first-class, he really rides the gravy train.

It was a bitter thought and it bit deeper into Ken’s brain. He said to himself, Nine years ago this man of distinction pistol-whipped your skull and left you for dead. You’ve had nine years in Quentin and he’s had the sunshine, the peaches-and-cream, the thousands of nights with the extra-lovely Mrs. Riker while you slept alone in a cell—

He looked at the extra-lovely Mrs. Riker. She stood motionless at the side of the bed and he stood beside her with the switchblade aiming at her velvet-sheathed flesh. She was looking at the blade and waiting for him to aim it at Riker, to put it in the sleeping man and send it in deep.

But that wasn’t the play. He smiled dimly to let her know he had something else in mind.

Riker’s left hand dangled over the side of the bed and his right hand rested on the pillow. Ken kept the knife aimed at Hilda as he reached toward the pillow and then under the pillow. His fingers touched metal. It was the barrel of a revolver and he got a two-finger hold on it and eased it out from under the pillow. The butt came into his palm and his middle finger went through the trigger-guard and nestled against the back of the guard, not touching the trigger.

He closed the switchblade and put it in his pocket. He stepped back and away from the bed and said, “Now you can wake up your husband.”

She was staring at the muzzle of the .38. It wasn’t aiming at anything in particular.

“Wake him up,” Ken murmured. “I want him to see his gun in my hand. I want him to know how I got it.”

Hilda gasped and it became a sob and then a wail and it was a hook of sound that awakened Riker. At first he was looking at Hilda. Then he saw Ken and he sat up very slowly, as though he was something made of stone and ropes were pulling him up. His eyes were riveted to Ken’s face and he hadn’t yet noticed the .38. His hand crept down along the side of the pillow and then under the pillow.

There was no noise in the room as Riker’s hand groped for the gun. Some moments passed and then there was sweat on Riker’s forehead and under his lip and he went on searching for the gun and suddenly he seemed to realize it wasn’t there. He focused on the weapon in Ken’s hand and his body began to quiver. His lips scarcely moved as he said, “The gun... the gun—”

“It’s yours,” Ken said. “Mind if I borrow it?”

Riker went on staring at the revolver. Then very slowly his head turned and he was staring at Hilda. “You,” he said. “You gave it to him.”

“Not exactly,” Ken said. “All she did was tell me where it was.”

Riker shut his eyes very tightly, as though he was tied to a rack and it was pulling him apart.

Hilda’s face was expressionless. She was looking at Ken and saying, “You promised to let me walk out—”

“I’m not stopping you,” he said. Then, with a shrug and a dim smile, “I’m not stopping anyone from doing what they want to do. And he slipped the gun into his pocket.”

Hilda started for the door. Riker was up from the bed and lunging at her, grabbing her wrist and hurling her across the room. Then Riker lunged again and his hands reached for her throat as she tried to get up from the floor. Hilda began to make gurgling sounds but the noise was drowned in the torrent of insane screaming that came from Riker’s lips. Riker choked her until she died. When Riker realized she was dead his screaming became louder and he went on choking her.

Ken stood there, watching it happen. He saw the corpse flapping like a rag-doll in the clutching hands of the screaming madman. He thought, Well, they wanted each other, and now they got each other.

He walked out of the room and down the hall and down the stairs. As he went out of the house he could still hear the screaming. On Spruce, walking toward Eleventh, he glanced back and saw a crowd gathering outside the house and then he heard the sound of approaching sirens. He waited there and saw the police-cars stopping in front of the house, the policemen rushing in with drawn guns. Some moments later he heard the shots and he knew that the screaming man was trying to make a getaway. There was more shooting and suddenly there was no sound at all. He knew they’d be carrying two corpses out of the house.

He turned away from what was happening back there, walked along the curb toward the sewer-hole on the corner, took Riker’s gun from his pocket and threw it into the sewer. In the instant that he did it, there was a warm sweet taste in his mouth. He smiled, knowing what it was. Again he could hear Tillie saying, “Revenge is black pudding.”

Tillie, he thought. And the smile stayed on his face as he walked north on Eleventh. He was remembering the feeling he’d had when he’d kissed her. It was the feeling of wanting to take her out of that dark cellar, away from the loneliness and the opium. To carry her upward toward the world where they had such things as clinics, with plastic specialists who repaired scarred faces.

The feeling hit him again and he was anxious to be with Tillie and he walked faster.

Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar) has been widely acclaimed as the most important successor to the tradition epitomized by the work of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, as well as the writer who elevated the hard-boiled private-eye novel to a “literary” art form (although it can be argued that Hammett and Chandler had in their own ways already done so.) In Macdonald’s case, the claim is based partly on the fact that his fiction sparkles with simile and metaphor; his descriptions of California, his adopted state, are poetic and bring its places and people vividly alive. In fact, however, it is the addition of deep psychological characterization and complex thematic content that is Macdonald’s primary contribution both to the hard-boiled genre and to the noir detective story.

Lew Archer, the narrator of most of Macdonald’s fiction, is more an observer than a fully fleshed-out human being. Indeed, it was the author’s stated intent that Archer be a camera recording events and the people involved in those events. This is both a strength and a weakness of the series, for Archer comes alive for the reader only in terms of his professional life. As he himself states in The Instant Enemy (1968): “I had to admit that I lived for nights like these, moving across the city’s great broken body, making connections among its millions of cells. I had a crazy wish or fantasy that some day before I died, if I made all the right neural connections, the city would come all the way alive.” The reader often has a similar wish or fantasy where Archer is concerned.

Some aficionados feel that the best Archer novels were written between 1949 and 1958, particularly those that appeared under the name John Ross Macdonald. (The “John” was dropped when John D. MacDonald complained that the similarity to his name confused readers.) These early works include The Moving Target (1949), The Way Some People Die (1951), and The Ivory Grin (1952). Others prefer such middle-period titles as The Galton Case (1959), The Chill (1964), and Black Money (1966), which have denser plots and larger themes. This middle group is also more consciously (sometimes self-consciously) literary than the early novels and is less deeply rooted in the hard-boiled tradition.

The few Archer short stories sparkle almost as brilliantly as the full-length works; the best, in fact, are miniature novels honed to the sharpest essentials of plot, character, and incident. Seven were published between 1946 and 1954 in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Manhunt, and American Magazine, and were then collected in The Name Is Archer (1955). Two additional stories were written and published in the 1960s, and in 1977 all nine were collected under the title Lew Archer, Private Investigator. “Guilt-Edged Blonde” originally appeared in Manhunt in January 1954. Despite the author’s claim that the first seven Archer stories were written to “show my debt to other writers, especially Hammett and Chandler, and in fact did not aim at any striking originality,” all are first-rate, and “Guilt-Edged Blonde” is original enough to satisfy any discerning reader.

B. P.

Guilt-Edged Blonde (1954)

A man was waiting for me at the gate at the edge of the runway. He didn’t look like the man I expected to meet. He wore a stained tan windbreaker, baggy slacks, a hat as squashed and dubious as his face. He must have been forty years old, to judge by the grey in his hair and the lines around his eyes. His eyes were dark and evasive, moving here and there as if to avoid getting hurt. He had been hurt often and badly, I guessed.

“You Archer?”

I said I was. I offered him my hand. He didn’t know what to do with it. He regarded it suspiciously, as if I was planning to try a judo hold on him. He kept his hands in the pockets of his windbreaker.

“I’m Harry Nemo.” His voice was a grudging whine. It cost him an effort to give his name away. “My brother told me to come and pick you up. You ready to go?”

“As soon as I get my luggage.”

I collected my overnight bag at the counter in the empty waiting room. The bag was very heavy for its size. It contained, besides a toothbrush and spare linen, two guns and the ammunition for them. A .38 special for sudden work, and a .32 automatic as a spare.

Harry Nemo took me outside to his car. It was a new seven-passenger custom job, as long and black as death. The windshield and side windows were very thick, and they had the yellowish tinge of bulletproof glass.

“Are you expecting to be shot at?”

“Not me.” His smile was dismal. “This is Nick’s car.”

“Why didn’t Nick come himself?”

He looked around the deserted field. The plane I had arrived on was a flashing speck in the sky above the red sun. The only human being in sight was the operator in the control tower. But Nemo leaned towards me in the seat, and spoke in a whisper:

“Nick’s a scared pigeon. He’s scared to leave the house. Ever since this morning.”

“What happened this morning?”

“Didn’t he tell you? You talked to him on the phone.”

“He didn’t say very much. He told me he wanted to hire a bodyguard for six days, until his boat sails. He didn’t tell me why.”

“They’re gunning for him, that’s why. He went to the beach this morning. He has a private beach along the back of his ranch, and he went down there by himself for his morning dip. Somebody took a shot at him from the top of the bluff. Five or six shots. He was in the water, see, with no gun handy. He told me the slugs were splashing around him like hailstones. He ducked and swam under water out to sea. Lucky for him he’s a good swimmer, or he wouldn’t of got away. It’s no wonder he’s scared. It means they caught up with him, see.”

“Who are ‘they,’ or is that a family secret?”

Nemo turned from the wheel to peer into my face. His breath was sour, his look incredulous. “Christ, don’t you know who Nick is? Didn’t he tell you?”

“He’s a lemon-grower, isn’t he?”

“He is now.”

“What did he used to be?”

The bitter beaten face closed on itself. “I oughtn’t to be flapping at the mouth. He can tell you himself if he wants to.”

Two hundred horses yanked us away from the curb. I rode with my heavy leather bag on my knees. Nemo drove as if driving was the one thing in life he enjoyed, rapt in silent communion with the engine. It whisked us along the highway, then down a gradual incline between geometrically planted lemon groves. The sunset sea glimmered red at the foot of the slope.

Before we reached it, we turned off the blacktop into a private lane which ran like a straight hair-parting between the dark green trees. Straight for half-a-mile or more to a low house in a clearing.

The house was flat-roofed, made of concrete and fieldstone, with an attached garage. All of its windows were blinded with heavy drapes. It was surrounded with well-kept shrubbery and lawn, the lawn with ten-foot wire fence surmounted by barbed wire.

Nemo stopped in front of the closed and padlocked gate, and honked the horn. There was no response. He honked the horn again.

About halfway between the house and the gate, a crawling thing came out of the shrubbery. It was a man, moving very slowly on hands and knees. His head hung down almost to the ground. One side of his head was bright red, as if he had fallen in paint. He left a jagged red trail in the gravel of the driveway.

Harry Nemo said, “Nick!” He scrambled out of the car. “What happened, Nick?”

The crawling man lifted his heavy head and looked at us. Cumbrously, he rose to his feet. He came forward with his legs spraddled and loose like a huge infant learning to walk. He breathed loudly and horribly, looking at us with a dreadful hopefulness. Then died on his feet, still walking. I saw the change in his face before it struck the gravel.

Harry Nemo went over the fence like a weary monkey, snagging his slacks on the barbed wire. He knelt beside his brother and turned him over and palmed his chest. He stood up shaking his head.

I had my bag unzipped and my hand on the revolver. I went to the gate. “Open up, Harry.”

Harry was saying, “They got him,” over and over. He crossed himself several times. “The dirty bastards.”

“Open up,” I said.

He found a keyring in the dead man’s pocket and opened the padlocked gate. Our dragging footsteps crunched the gravel. I looked down at the specks of gravel in Nicky Nemo’s eyes, the bullet-hole in his temple.

“Who got him, Harry?”

“I dunno. Fats Jordan, or Artie Castola, or Faronese. It must have been one of them.”

“The Purple Gang.”

“You called it. Nicky was their treasurer back in the thirties. He was the one that didn’t get into the papers. He handled the payoff, see. When the heat went on and the gang got busted up, he had some money in a safe deposit box. He was the only one that got away.”

“How much money?”

“Nicky never told me. All I know, he come out here before the war and bought a thousand acres of lemon land. It took them fifteen years to catch up with him. He always knew they were gonna, though. He knew it.”

“Artie Castola got off the Rock last Spring.”

“You’re telling me. That’s when Nicky bought himself the bulletproof car and put up the fence.”

“Are they gunning for you?”

He looked around at the darkening groves and the sky. The sky was streaked with running red, as if the sun had died a violent death.

“I dunno,” he answered nervously. “They got no reason to. I’m as clean as soap. I never been in the rackets. Not since I was young, anyway. The wife made me go straight, see?”

I said: “We better get into the house and call the police.”

The front door was standing a few inches ajar. I could see at the edge that it was sheathed with quarter-inch steel plate. Harry put my thoughts into words:

“Why in hell would he go outside? He was safe as houses as long as he stayed inside.”

“Did he live alone?”

“More or less alone.”

“What does that mean?”

He pretended not to hear me, but I got some kind of an answer. Looking through the doorless arch into the living room, I saw a leopardskin coat folded across the back of the chesterfield. There were redtipped cigarette butts mingled with cigar butts in the ashtrays.

“Nicky was married?”

“Not exactly.”

“You know the woman?”

“Naw.” But he was lying.

Somewhere behind the thick walls of the house, there was a creak of springs, a crashing bump, the broken roar of a cold engine, grinding of tires in gravel. I got to the door in time to see a cerise convertible hurtling down the driveway. The top was down, and a yellow-haired girl was small and intent at the wheel. She swerved around Nick’s body and got through the gate somehow, with her tires screaming. I aimed at the right rear tire, and missed. Harry came up behind me. He pushed my gun-arm down before I could fire again. The convertible disappeared in the direction of the highway.

“Let her go,” he said.

“Who is she?”

He thought about it, his slow brain clicking almost audibly. “I dunno. Some pig that Nicky picked up some place. Her name is Flossie or Florrie or something. She didn’t shoot him, if that s what you’re worried about.”

“You know her pretty well, do you?”

“The hell I do. I don’t mess with Nicky’s dames.” He tried to work up a rage to go with the strong words, but he didn’t have the makings. The best he could produce was petulance: “Listen, mister, why should you hang around? The guy that hired you is dead.”

“I haven’t been paid, for one thing.”

“I’ll fix that.”

He trotted across the lawn to the body and came back with an alligator billfold. It was thick with money.

“How much?”

“A hundred will do it.”

He handed me a hundred-dollar bill. “Now how about you amscray, bud, before the law gets here?”

“I need transportation.”

“Take Nicky’s car. He won’t be using it. You can park it at the airport and leave the key with the agent.”

“I can, eh?”

“Sure. I’m telling you you can.”

“Aren’t you getting a little free with your brother’s property?”

“It’s my property now, bud.” A bright thought struck him, disorganizing his face. “Incidentally, how would you like to get off of my land?”

“I’m staying, Harry. I like this place. I always say it’s people that make a place.”

The gun was still in my hand. He looked down at it.

“Get on the telephone, Harry. Call the police.”

“Who do you think you are, ordering me around? I took my last order from anybody, see?” He glanced over his shoulder at the dark and shapeless object on the gravel, and spat venomously.

“I’m a citizen, working for Nicky. Not for you.”

He changed his tune very suddenly. “How much to go to work for me?”

“Depends on the line of work.”

He manipulated the alligator wallet. “Here’s another hundred. If you got to hang around, keep the lip buttoned down about the dame, eh? Is it a deal?”

I didn’t answer, but I took the money. I put it in a separate pocket by itself. Harry telephoned the county sheriff.

He emptied the ashtrays before the sheriff’s men arrived, and stuffed the leopardskin coat into the wood-box. I sat and watched him.

We spent the next two hours with loud-mouthed deputies. They were angry with the dead man for having the kind of past that attracted bullets. They were angry with Harry for being his brother. They were secretly angry with themselves for being inexperienced and incompetent. They didn’t even uncover the leopardskin coat.

Harry Nemo left the courthouse first. I waited for him to leave, and tailed him home, on foot.

Where a leaning palm-tree reared its ragged head above the pavements, there was a court lined with jerry-built frame cottages. Harry turned up the walk between them and entered the first cottage. Light flashed on his face from inside. I heard a woman’s voice say something to him. Then light and sound were cut off by the closing door.

An old gabled house with boarded-up windows stood opposite the court. I crossed the street and settled down in the shadows of its verandah to watch Harry Nemo’s cottage. Three cigarettes later, a tall woman in a dark hat and a light coat came out of the cottage and walked briskly to the corner and out of sight. Two cigarettes after that, she reappeared at the corner on my side of the street, still walking briskly. I noticed that she had a large straw handbag under her arm. Her face was long and stony under the streetlight.

Leaving the street, she marched up the broken sidewalk to the verandah where I was leaning against the shadowed wall. The stairs groaned under her decisive footsteps. I put my hand on the gun in my pocket, and waited. With the rigid assurance of a WAC corporal marching at the head of her platoon, she crossed the verandah to me, a thin high-shouldered silhouette against the light from the corner. Her hand was in her straw bag, and the end of the bag was pointed at my stomach. Her shadowed face was a gleam of eyes, a glint of teeth.

“I wouldn’t try it if I were you,” she said. “I have a gun here, and the safety is off, and I know how to shoot it, mister.”

“Good for you.”

“I’m not joking.” Her deep contralto rose a notch. “Rapid fire used to be my specialty. So you better take your hands out of your pockets.”

I showed her my hands, empty. Moving very quickly, she relieved my pocket of the weight of my gun, and frisked me for other weapons.

“Who are you, mister?” she said as she stepped back. “You can’t be Arturo Castola, you’re not old enough.”

“Are you a policewoman?”

“I’ll ask the questions. What are you doing here?”

“Waiting for a friend.”

“You’re a liar. You’ve been watching my house for an hour and a half. I tabbed you through the window.”

“So you went and bought yourself a gun?”

“I did. You followed Harry home. I’m Mrs. Nemo, and I want to know why.”

“Harry’s the friend I’m waiting for.”

“You’re a double liar. Harry’s afraid of you. You’re no friend of his.”

“That depends on Harry. I’m a detective.”

She snorted. “Very likely. Where’s your buzzer?”

“I’m a private detective,” I said. “I have identification in my wallet.”

“Show me. And don’t try any tricks.”

I produced my photostat. She held it up to the light from the street, and handed it back to me. “So you’re a detective. You better do something about your tailing technique. It’s obvious.”

“I didn’t know I was dealing with a cop.”

“I was a cop,” she said. “Not any more.”

“Then give me back my .38. It cost me seventy dollars.”

“First tell me, what’s your interest in my husband? Who hired you?”

“Nick, your brother-in-law. He called me in Los Angeles today, said he needed a bodyguard for a week. Didn’t Harry tell you?”

She didn’t answer.

“By the time I got to Nick, he didn’t need a bodyguard, or anything. But I thought I’d stick around and see what I could find out about his death. He was a client, after all.”

“You should pick your clients more carefully.”

“What about picking brothers-in-law?”

She shook her head stiffly. The hair that escaped from under her hat was almost white. “I’m not responsible for Nick or anything about him. Harry is my responsibility. I met him in line of duty and I straightened him out, understand? I tore him loose from Detroit and the rackets, and I brought him out here. I couldn’t cut him off from his brother entirely. But he hasn’t been in trouble since I married him. Not once.”

“Until now.”

“Harry isn’t in trouble now.”

“Not yet. Not officially.”

“What do you mean?”

“Give me my gun, and put yours down. I can’t talk into iron.”

She hesitated, a grim and anxious woman under pressure. I wondered what quirk of fate or psychology had married her to a hood, and decided it must have been love. Only love would send a woman across a dark street to face down an unknown gunman. Mrs. Nemo was horsefaced and aging and not pretty, but she had courage.

She handed me my gun. Its butt was soothing to the palm of my hand. I dropped it into my pocket. A gang of Negro boys at loose ends went by in the street, hooting and whistling purposelessly.

She leaned towards me, almost as tall as I was. Her voice was a low sibilance forced between her teeth.

“Harry had nothing to do with his brother’s death. You’re crazy if you think so.”

“What makes you so sure, Mrs. Nemo?”

“Harry couldn’t, that’s all. I know Harry, I can read him like a book. Even if he had the guts, which he hasn’t, he wouldn’t dare to think of killing Nick. Nick was his older brother, understand, the successful one in the family.” Her voice rasped contemptuously. “In spite of everything I could do or say, Harry worshipped Nick right up to the end.”

“Those brotherly feelings sometimes cut two ways. And Harry had a lot to gain.”

“Not a cent. Nothing.”

“He’s Nick’s heir, isn’t he?”

“Not as long as he stays married to me. I wouldn’t let him touch a cent of Nick Nemo’s filthy money. Is that clear?”

“It’s clear to me. But is it clear to Harry?”

“I made it clear to him, many times. Anyway, this is ridiculous. Harry wouldn’t lay a finger on that precious brother of his.”

“Maybe he didn’t do it himself. He could have had it done for him. I know he’s covering for somebody.”

“Who?”

“A blonde girl left the house after we arrived. She got away in a cherry-colored convertible. Harry recognized her.”

“A cherry-colored convertible?”

“Yes. Does that mean something to you?”

“No, nothing in particular. She must have been one of Nick’s girls. He always had girls.”

“Why would Harry cover for her?”

“What do you mean, cover for her?”

“She left a leopardskin coat behind. Harry hid it, and paid me not to tell the police.”

“Harry did that?”

“Unless I’m having delusions.”

“Maybe you are at that. If you think that Harry paid that girl to shoot Nick, or had anything—”

“I know. Don’t say it. I’m crazy.”

Mrs. Nemo laid a thin hand on my arm. “Anyway, lay off Harry. Please. I have a hard enough time handling him as it is. He’s worse than my first husband. The first one was a drunk, believe it or not.” She glanced at the lighted cottage across the street, and I saw one half of her bitter smile. “I wonder what makes a woman go for the lame ducks the way I did.”

“I wouldn’t know, Mrs. Nemo. Okay. I lay off Harry.”

But I had no intentions of laying off Harry. When she went back to her cottage, I walked around three-quarters of the block and took up a new position in the doorway of a dry-cleaning establishment. This time I didn’t smoke. I didn’t even move, except to look at my watch from time to time.

Around eleven o’clock, the lights went out behind the blinds in the Nemo cottage. Shortly before midnight the front door opened and Harry slipped out. He looked up and down the street and began to walk. He passed within six feet of my dark doorway, hustling along in a kind of furtive shuffle.

Working very cautiously, at a distance, I tailed him downtown. He disappeared into the lighted cavern of an all-night garage. He came out of the garage a few minutes later, driving a prewar Chevrolet.

My money also talked to the attendant. I drew a prewar Buick which would still do seventy-five. I proved that it would, as soon as I hit the highway. I reached the entrance to Nick Nemo’s private lane in time to see Harry’s lights approaching the dark ranch-house.

I cut my lights and parked at the roadside a hundred yards below the entrance to the lane, and facing it. The Chevrolet reappeared in a few minutes. Harry was still alone in the front seat. I followed it blind as far as the highway before I risked my lights. Then down the highway to the edge of town.

In the middle of the motel and drive-in district he turned off onto a side road and in under a neon sign which spelled out TRAILER COURT across the darkness. The trailers stood along the bank of a dry creek. The Chevrolet stopped in front of one of them, which had a light in the window. Harry got out with a spotted bundle under his arm. He knocked on the door of the trailer.

I U-turned at the next corner and put in more waiting time. The Chevrolet rolled out under the neon sign and turned towards the highway. I let it go.

Leaving my car, I walked along the creek bank to the lighted trailer. The windows were curtained. The cerise convertible was parked on its far side. I tapped on the aluminum door.

“Harry?” a girl’s voice said. “Is that you, Harry?”

I muttered something indistinguishable. The door opened, and the yellow-haired girl looked out. She was very young, but her round blue eyes were heavy and sick with hangover, or remorse. She had on a nylon slip, nothing else.

“What is this?”

She tried to shut the door. I held it open.

“Get away from here. Leave me alone. I’ll scream.”

“All right. Scream.”

She opened her mouth. No sound came out. She closed her mouth again. It was small and fleshy and defiant. “Who are you? Law?”

“Close enough. I’m coming in.”

“Come in then, damn you. I got nothing to hide.”

“I can see that.”

I brushed in past her. There were dead Martinis on her breath. The little room was a jumble of feminine clothes, silk and cashmere and tweed and gossamer nylon, some of them flung on the floor, others hung up to dry. The leopardskin coat lay on the bunk bed, staring with innumerable bold eyes. She picked it up and covered her shoulders with it. Unconsciously, her nervous hands began to pick the wood-chips out of the fur. I said:

“Harry did you a favor, didn’t he?”

“Maybe he did.”

“Have you been doing any favors for Harry?”

“Such as?”

“Such as knocking off his brother.”

“You’re way off the beam, mister. I was very fond of Uncle Nick.”

“Why run out on the killing then?”

“I panicked,” she said. “It could happen to any girl. I was asleep when he got it, see, passed out if you want the truth. I heard the gun go off. It woke me up, but it took me quite a while to bring myself to and sober up enough to put my clothes on. By the time I made it to the bedroom window, Harry was back, with some guy.” She peered into my face. “Were you the guy?”

I nodded.

“I thought so. I thought you were law at the time. I saw Nick lying there in the driveway, all bloody, and I put two and two together and got trouble. Bad trouble for me, unless I got out. So I got out. It wasn’t nice to do, after what Nick meant to me, but it was the only sensible thing. I got my career to think of.”

“What career is that?”

“Modeling. Acting. Uncle Nick was gonna send me to school.”

“Unless you talk, you’ll finish your education at Tehachapi. Who shot Nick?”

A thin edge of terror entered her voice. “I don’t know, I tell you. I was passed out in the bedroom. I didn’t see nothing.”

“Why did Harry bring you your coat?”

“He didn’t want me to get involved. He’s my father, after all.”

“Harry Nemo is your father?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll have to do better than that. What’s your name?”

“Jeannine. Jeannine Larue.”

“Why isn’t your name Nemo if Harry is your father? Why do you call him Harry?”

“He’s my stepfather, I mean.”

“Sure,” I said. “And Nick was really your uncle, and you were having a family reunion with him.”

“He wasn’t any blood relation to me. I always called him uncle, though.”

“If Harry’s your father, why don’t you live with him?”

“I used to. Honest. This is the truth I’m telling you. I had to get out on account of the old lady. The old lady hates my guts. She’s a real creep, a square. She can’t stand for a girl to have any fun. Just because my old man was a rummy—”

“What’s your idea of fun, Jeannine?”

She shook her feathercut hair at me. It exhaled a heavy perfume which was worth its weight in blood. She bared one pearly shoulder and smiled an artificial hustler’s smile. “What’s yours? Maybe we can get together.”

“You mean the way you got together with Nick?”

“You’re prettier than him.”

“I’m also smarter. I hope. Is Harry really your stepfather?”

“Ask him if you don’t believe me. Ask him. He lives in a place on Tule Street — I don’t remember the number.”

“I know where he lives.”

But Harry wasn’t at home. I knocked on the door of the frame cottage and got no answer. I turned the knob, and found that the door was unlocked. There was a light behind it. The other cottages in the court were dark. It was long past midnight, and the street was deserted. I went into the cottage, preceded by my gun.

A ceiling bulb glared down on sparse and threadbare furniture, a time-eaten rug. Besides the living-room, the house contained a cubbyhole of a bedroom and a closet kitchenette. Everything in the poverty-stricken place was pathetically clean. There were moral mottoes on the walls, and one picture. It was a photograph of a tow-headed girl in a teen-age party dress. Jeannine, before she learned that a pretty face and a sleek body could buy her the things she wanted. The things she thought she wanted.

For some reason, I felt sick. I went outside. Somewhere out of sight, an old car-engine muttered. Its muttering grew on the night. Harry Nemo’s rented Chevrolet turned the corner under the streetlight. Its front wheels were weaving. One of the wheels climbed the curb in front of the cottage. The Chevrolet came to a halt at a drunken angle.

I crossed the sidewalk and opened the car door. Harry was at the wheel, clinging to it desperately as if he needed it to hold him up. His chest was bloody. His mouth was bright with blood. He spoke through it thickly:

“She got me.”

“Who got you, Harry? Jeannine?”

His mouth grinned, ghastly red like a clown’s. “No. Not her. She was the reason for it, though. We had it coming.”

Those were his final words. I caught his body as it fell sideways out of the seat. Laid it out on the sidewalk and left it for the cop on the beat to find.

I drove across town to the trailer court. Jeannine’s trailer still had light in it, filtered through the curtains over the windows. I pushed the door open.

The girl was packing a suitcase on the bunk bed. She looked at me over her shoulder, and froze. Her blonde head was cocked like a frightened bird’s, hypnotized by my gun.

“Where are you off to, kid?”

“Out of this town. I’m getting out.”

“You have some talking to do first.”

She straightened up. “I told you all I know. You didn’t believe me. What’s the matter, didn’t you get to see Harry?”

“I saw him. Harry’s dead. Your whole family is dying like flies.”

She half-turned and sat down limply on the disordered bed. “Dead? You think I did it?”

“I think you know who did. Harry said before he died that you were the reason for it all.”

“Me the reason for it?” Her eyes widened in false naiveté, but there was thought behind them, quick and desperate thought. “You mean that Harry got killed on account of me?”

“Harry and Nick both. It was a woman who shot them.”

“God,” she said. The desperate thought behind her eyes crystallized into knowledge. Which I shared.

The aching silence was broken by a big diesel rolling by on the highway. She said above its roar:

“That crazy old bat. So she killed Nick.”

“You’re talking about your mother. Mrs. Nemo.”

“Yeah.”

“Did you see her shoot him?”

“No, I was blotto like I told you. But I saw her out there this week, keeping an eye on the house. She’s always watched me like a hawk.”

“Is that why you were getting out of town? Because you knew she killed Nick?”

“Maybe it was. I don’t know. I wouldn’t let myself think about it.”

Her blue gaze shifted from my face to something behind me. I turned. Mrs. Nemo was in the doorway. She was hugging the straw bag to her thin chest.

Her right hand dove into the bag. I shot her in the right arm. She leaned against the door-frame and held her dangling arm with her left hand. Her face was granite in whose crevices her eyes were like live things caught.

The gun she dropped was a cheap .32 revolver, its nickel plating worn and corroded. I spun the cylinder. One shot had been fired from it.

“This accounts for Harry,” I said. “You didn’t shoot Nick with this gun, not at that distance.”

“No.” She was looking down at her dripping hand. “I used my old police gun on Nick Nemo. After I killed him, I threw the gun into the sea. I didn’t know I’d have further use for a gun. I bought that little suicide gun tonight.”

“To use on Harry?”

“To use on you. I thought you were on to me. I didn’t know until you told me that Harry knew about Nick and Jeannine.”

“Jeannine is your daughter by your first husband?”

“My only daughter.” She said to the girl: “I did it for you, Jeannine. I’ve seen too much — the awful things that can happen.”

The girl didn’t answer. I said:

“I can understand why you shot Nick. But why did Harry have to die?”

“Nick paid him,” she said. “Nick paid him for Jeannine. I found Harry in a bar an hour ago, and he admitted it. I hope I killed him.”

“You killed him, Mrs. Nemo. What brought you here? Was Jeannine the third on your list?”

“No. No. She’s my own girl. I came to tell her what I did for her. I wanted her to know.”

She looked at the girl on the bed. Her eyes were terrible with pain and love. The girl said in a stunned voice:

“Mother. You’re hurt. I’m sorry.”

“Let’s go, Mrs. Nemo,” I said.

Perhaps it was because David Alexander started writing late in life that his talent was so often overlooked. His first book was not published until 1951, when he was forty-four years old; but he went on to write fifteen novels and a volume of short stories entitled Hangman’s Dozen (1961). Alexander’s ten-year stint in the 1930s as managing editor of New York’s then-oldest sports and theater paper, the Morning Telegraph, gave him what many described as his unique insight into Broadway’s seamy side. He saw “the Great White Way” as an elongated carny midway — “the world’s most blatant.” Its theaters, movie houses, boxing booths, flea circuses, brothels, shops, hotels, and bars were glorified sideshows from which he delightedly extracted the raw material for his sardonic tales. Alexander believed that the only true individual left in the United States was the Bowery bum.

While Alexander’s novels are clearly hard-boiled, they are written in an idiosyncratic, sometimes self-consciously poetic and mannered style that some readers find off-putting. This is most likely the reason that his work is not more highly regarded. Alexander wrote three series of mysteries, the most prominent of which features Bart Hardin, a columnist for the Broadway Times, a sporting newspaper modeled after the Morning Telegraph. Most notable among the Hardin series are Paint the Town Black (1954) and Shoot a Sitting Duck (1957). One of his two earlier series stars the duo of Tommy Twotoes, an eccentric penguin fancier, and private eye Terry Rooke; the other features Broadway lawyer Marty Land.

After having become involved in television during the 1950s, Alexander was chosen to join the U.S. Academy of Television Arts and Sciences in 1957, along with Brett Halliday, Dorothy Salisbury Davis, and Mignon G. Eberhart. Their mission was to save “live” television, but Alexander had such a dim view of the medium, finding it difficult to take it entirely seriously, that the mission was doomed to failure.

At that time, television’s two primary taboos were sexual perversion and antireligious sentiment. Any synopsis submitted that incorporated even a whiff of such goings-on would likely be given a muscular rejection. The first story Alexander submitted concerned a sex-crazed religious fanatic who doubled as a serial killer of young girls. While he did sell this proposal, Alexander was considered anything but television’s savior.

A long-time fan of horse racing, Alexander was publicity director for the California Jockey Club before joining the armed forces during World War II. When he retired from mystery and suspense writing, he rekindled his passion for the horses by publishing The History and Romance of the Horse (1963) and A Sound of Horses (1966).

Originally published in the May 1955 issue of Manhunt, “Mama’s Boy,” the story of a vicious psychotic, is a fine example not only of Alexander’s hard-edged style and faintly amoral outlook, but also of his seemingly innate understanding of characters whose moral and social awareness is fast disintegrating.

J. A.

Mama’s Boy (1955)

Few readers of crime fiction are indifferent when it comes to the merits of Mickey Spillane and his creation, Mike Hammer. They either love or hate the pair, and with considerable passion in either case. Max Allen Collins, co-author of a book about Spillane and his work, One Lonely Knight (1984), considers him “one of the most remarkable literary artists ever to confine himself to a popular genre.” In a 1955 Good Housekeeping article on Spillane’s work, Philip Wylie concluded that “if millions of people are reading [his books] voluntarily the public must be losing its senses.” Anthony Boucher, who would later develop a grudging admiration for Spillane’s accomplishments, in 1951 reviewed The Big Kill as “the ultimate degradation of the [hard-boiled] school.”

The first Mike Hammer novel, I, the Jury (1947), sold 8 million copies in its various U.S. paperback editions; the five that followed it in the early 1950s were likewise multimillion-copy sellers. (Aggregate sales for all of Spillane’s novels were estimated in 1984 to be an amazing 160 million copies.) The Hammer books inspired ten theatrical and television films (in one of which, The Girl Hunters [1963], Spillane himself played Hammer), a radio show, two television series (with a third in the works at the time of this writing), and a syndicated comic strip.

Spillane’s influence began to wane in the 1960s. Mike Hammer was properly a child of the postwar 1940s and the Red Scare — dominated 1950s, and the tactics of a violent, vigilante private eye grew less appealing to readers and writers in later decades. Recognizing this, Spillane at first considered turning Hammer into a secret agent, so as to make his brand of justice more contemporary and therefore more palatable. He abandoned the idea, however, in favor of creating a new character, Tiger Mann, his American “answer” to James Bond. Mann is an agent in the employ of Martin Grady, an ultra-right-wing billionaire whose “Group” is his own privately financed personal espionage organization. In such novels as Day of the Guns (1964) and Bloody Sunrise (1965), Mann with impunity slaughters Russian assassins and other villains bent on destroying America’s democratic freedom. His adventures have neither the power nor the passion of even the minor Hammers; they are imitations rather than the real thing.

Spillane’s output of short fiction is relatively small and was produced for the most part between 1953 and 1960. A few of his stories appeared in Manhunt, notably a four-part serial, “Everybody’s Watching Me,” in the magazine’s first four issues; most of the rest were published in such men’s magazines as Cavalier and Male, and featured a variety of tough cops and criminals. None of his short stories or novelettes, significantly, has as its protagonist Mike Hammer or any other private detective. “The Screen Test of Mike Hammer,” which originally appeared in Male in July 1955 and was reprinted with the title “Killer’s Alley,” is as close as Spillane came to writing a Hammer short story (with one exception, an even shorter vignette for the cover of a radio-show-style record album entitled Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer Story, also produced in the mid-1950s). The playlet was written for a test film directed and produced by Spillane, in the abortive hope of casting a friend, actor Jack Stang, in the film version of Kiss Me, Deadly (1955). In microcosm, “The Screen Test of Mike Hammer” has all the hard-boiled elements and all the intensity of a Hammer novel.

B. P.

The Screen Test of Mike Hammer (1955)

SCENE: Mike in near darkness in narrow passageway between two buildings. Lighting from low left only, focusing on face. Mike smoking. He does not come in until he lights his cigarette, then the light holds. From outside camera range come feet running, pause, heavy breathing. Bum comes stumbling up, sees Mike, is terrified.

Bum (breathlessly): Mike... Mike! (Then fast.) They’re closing in. The cops got everything covered. There ain’t no place that kill-happy maniac can get out. He’s trapped on the street, Mike. (Pause.) Mike... he’s around here someplace. Already he shot up two more. Like he said, he’s gonna wipe out the whole street, piece by piece.

   Mike looks at him, lifts lip in a snarl that fades into a cold smile.

Mike (softly): Beat it. (Then drags on cigarette.)

Bum: Yeah... The great Mike Hammer. Nothing bothers him. Not even a maniac with a gun, or blood all over the street he grew up on. (Pause.) Maybe this’ll bother you. Maybe you’ll shake now. Maybe those eyes of yours will get alive for just once instead of being all dead inside. (Pause.) They’re using your girl for bait!

   Here Mike looks at him slowly, coldly, as if he doesn’t care.

Your girl, Mike. Your Miss Rich-Britches who grew up on the street, too, and is marked same as us. Carmen hates her worst of all for what she’s got and now the cops are using her for bait. They’re smart, the cops. All the way from Park Avenue they call her in because they know how Carmen hates her. She’s the bait, friend. You won’t be marrying no dead woman, Mike. How do your eyes feel now, big boy?

Mike (looks at him cautiously): Scram.

SOUND FROM BACKGROUND: Siren and police whistles.

Bum: They’ll get Carmen tonight. But he’ll get her first. Maybe you, too!

   Mike cracks him one and stands there smoking.

SOUND: Girl’s heels clicking. Fast. Faster. Stop, then on again. Suddenly Helen steps into camera range. Sees Mike. Eyes go wide, then happy, and she collapses on his shoulder.

Helen (crying): Mike! (Head goes down, Mike holds her, then head up.)

Mike: Easy, kitten.

Helen: Mike... you know what I’ve done?

Mike: I know. You’re nuts. Why, Helen?

Helen: Mike... oh, Mike... the police asked me to. Mike... I thought you’d be proud of me if... if...

Mike (overlap): If you baited a homicidal maniac into bullet range?

   Helen nods, jerkily, frightened.

I grew up on the street too, kid. I’m one of those he wants, too. Didn’t you think I’d be in on it?

Helen: I... thought you would... but I wanted to... help. Oh, Mike, I wanted you to be proud of me and now I’m scared. (Pause. She looks up, bites lip.) Mike... you don’t know what it is to be scared. You...

Mike: Don’t I, kid?

Helen: No... not like this. He’s trapped here on the street someplace, Mike.

Mike (looks over her head into the darkness): The street. Putrid Avenue. Killer’s Alley. They’ve called it everything. Just one street that isn’t even alive and it can make murderers out of some people and millionaires out of others. One street, Helen. (Long pause. Mike looks over her head.) I can hear them, kid. They’re closing in now. There’s no place for the maniac to go now. (Looks at her.) Can you imagine a mind filled with a crazy obsession for a whole lifetime? Imagine hating a street so hard you wanted to kill everybody on it. One stinking street that makes up your whole background that you can never escape from. Can you imagine that, Helen?

Helen: No, Mike... it’s incredible. It’s almost... impossible!

Mike: Is it?

   Now he gives her the cold look.

Helen: Your eyes... aren’t looking at me anymore.

Mike: That’s right, Helen. They’re watching you.

Helen (eyes widen — softly): Mike!

Mike: You’re a great girl to love, Helen. A beautiful, talented louse. (Here Helen injects a note of incredible curiosity into her look.) Beautiful enough to marry a playboy and leave the street. But the street was still there. You couldn’t escape it, kid. It kept coming back, didn’t it? It came back until it showed on you and the playboy couldn’t stand it so he gave you the heave. (Pause.) How you must have hated it. (Slowly.) Imagine hating one street so much you work a crazy man out of an asylum and have him try to kill off the whole street for you? It took talent to do that, kid. Enough talent to almost fool me.

Helen: Mike... please. You don’t realize... Carmen is still killing. Ten minutes ago he killed Gus and now...

Mike: Nah. (Pause.) Helen... he wasn’t the maniac. (Pause.) You were.

Helen: (scared stiff; crying): Mike... no... you... loved me. We were going to... be married. You...

Mike: So we were in love. Should it make a difference? Fourteen dead people. Should it make a difference? So because I loved you I’ll do you a favor, Helen. Nobody will ever know. They’ll have to think Carmen got you and I got Carmen. Like it that way, Helen?

Helen: No! Carmen is the...

Mike: He wasn’t, Helen. Thirty minutes ago Carmen was dead... before the last murders. I shot him right here...

   Camera goes to body on ground behind Mike.

Helen’s voice: Mike... you can’t... (Suddenly choked off)

Mike’s voice: Don’t pull your gun on me. So long, kid.

   Camera catches Helen, her neck in Mike’s hand, sinking... slowly on top of Carmen. Mike lets her fall, then flips cigarette on her back. Gun falls from her hand.

   Music up and out.

Blacks, Mexicans, Asians, and other minorities and foreigners received rough treatment in popular fiction during the first forty-odd years of this century. If ethnic characters were not portrayed as villains or dragged into stories for dubious comic relief, they were all too often shown as inferior to American-born whites — and were almost always made to behave in stereotypical fashion and to speak in atrocious dialect. Even the best writers of crime fiction, along with such generally progressive magazines as Black Mask, were guilty of racism in one form or another. But the grim years of World War II, and the new awareness and compassion that came out of that intense time of global strife, put an end to the worst offenses and helped to bring about a more honest and intelligent depiction of ethnic groups.

Still, relatively few realistic crime stories in the postwar years utilized race relations as a central theme. The ones that were written are for the most part excellent: Hal Ellson’s series of sociological novels, including Duke (1949) and The Golden Spike (1952), as well as his short stories for Manhunt and other magazines, about Harlem teenagers; Runaway Black, a 1954 paperback original by Evan Hunter (writing as Richard Marsten), which also has a New York street setting; and Gil Brewer’s “Home,” first published in the short-lived (four issues) Manhunt clone, Accused, in March 1956. This brief but angry condemnation of bigotry and racial violence is set in the Deep South, its message made all the more powerful by the brutal nature of its final paragraph.

Gil Brewer began writing after his army service in France and Belgium during World War II, and with the help of former Black Mask editor Joseph T. Shaw, he sold his first short story in 1949 and his first novel in 1950. His debut novel, 13 French Street, was a million-copy bestseller. Brewer’s prose is distinguished by a lean, Hemingwayesque style and by raw emotion genuinely portrayed and felt. His strongest work is A Killer Is Loose (1954), a truly harrowing portrait of a psychopath that comes close to rivaling the nightmare visions of Jim Thompson; it also contains elements of surrealism and an existentialist sense of doom.

B. P.

Home (1956)

Already he was wishing he hadn’t come home for this visit. He would not admit to the real reason, either. It was a bit past dawn now, and lying on the bed, he could see the room in the old mottled leaning mirror above the dresser. He could see himself and parts of his brothers and sisters, all in the same room. Three brothers and three sisters and two beds. In all, seven kinky black heads and parts of black bodies; arms and legs and here and there a foot. He closed his eyes.

He had lain here on his share of the bed since before dawn, listening to the mouth noises, the swallowings, the snores and careful turnings. The beds were small and creaky and the slightest movement brought a groan from somebody.

He’d forgotten how it was. He’d come home yesterday to spend a week and now he was remembering little things and he had to swallow against the shame that had become a ghost inside him since being away at school. The ghost was stirring, too.

He heard his mother in the kitchen, heard the stove.

He suddenly wanted to be out of the house.

“Chandler, Chandler,” his mother had said yesterday. “You set and tell me. How’s everything up there?”

“Fine, Ma.”

“Is the people nice?”

“Sure.”

“Reckon you learning something?”

“You bet, Ma.”

With her hands twisting in the old apron. She didn’t know what to do, what to say. Neither did he. And his brothers and sisters standing and leaning around, watching, not saying a thing. He was welcome. They wanted to see him. They were happy he was home, but they couldn’t tell him.

His mother was singing softly to herself in the kitchen and he heard one of his sisters stir with wakefulness. He wanted to get out. Fast.

He rolled carefully off the bed to the floor and found his socks and shoes and sat on the floor, putting them on. He didn’t want to wake them. He crept across the floor and got the dungarees he’d brought down and the clean T-shirt and slipped them on and rose quietly and went into the kitchen.

“You up already?” his mother said. “Ain’t you going to sleep in on your holiday?”

“I never sleep late.”

“But this is your holiday, son.”

She was standing over by the black stove. The wood was smoking. He could smell the pone. His mother wore a shapeless once blue dress, patched with pink cloth. Coffee water was already boiling in a black kettle. The same kettle.

“I gave you money, Ma,” he said. “Why don’t you fix bacon and eggs and grits for breakfast? That’s what it was for.”

“You used to that?”

“Well, I just thought it’d be a treat. Something.”

“We ain’t used to that, Chandler.”

He looked at his mother.

“Set down,” she said. “I’ll have breakfast ready for you, Chandler. You like pone.”

“I don’t think I want any breakfast.”

They watched each other and she did not move, her eyes getting that veiled look. They kept watching each other and he heard somebody speak in the bedroom and the years turned inside out, rushing backward.

“Think I’ll take a little walk around town,” he said.

His mother nodded. “I see.”

“All right, then. You go ahead and eat, Ma. I won’t be long. We’ll do something — maybe this afternoon.”

“Chandler.”

“Yes, Ma?”

“You got a chip, boy. I can see it plain. Big old axe chip, setting on your shoulder.” She folded her hands across the apron and clasped the long worn fingers. “Knock it off, boy!”

“Ma.”

She started to turn away, then turned back. “They a circus in town,” she said. “Maybe they’ll let you in and see it.”

“Sure.”

She sighed and turned to the stove. He went out, fast. He stepped into the alley and closed the door. An accordion-ribbed cat crawled under the house. A bird flew. There was no paint on the house. The boards were old and bare, with a kind of patina-like character of their own. Rich whites tried to achieve the effect of those old boards on their country places, their summer cottages, with chemicals. A raggy honeysuckle vine sprawled over the tiny porch roof. It looked hungry.

He started down the alley, walking fast past the short row of shacks which were homes like the one he’d just left. He felt to make sure he had his wallet with him. He’d put it in his jeans the night before and he realized now that he’d known what he was going to do.

He would have to come home slowly, meet them again. It would take more than a week and he only had a week, so he wouldn’t meet them again.

Why did I come home? he thought. It’s bad enough up there, but Christ, Christ!

He reached the street beyond the alley and stomped his shoes on the sidewalk. Tiny round rims of gray dusty earth marked the cement where he stomped. Dirt from the alley; the front yards. He had tried not to acknowledge the smell, the tin cans, the broken bottles.

It was very early and the sun was up and it possessed that quality of bright white light that could put you right back to sleep if you stared at it for a few seconds.

He remembered, that was how he’d lost the job at the car-wash place. He’d sat down early in the morning in the boss’ chair and looked into the sun. The boss knocked him out of the chair.

“You goddamned snoring black bastard,” the boss said. “Get out of here!”

Funny, remembering that. It had happened a long while ago.

He quit thinking with sudden familiar panic. It was bad to think. Right away all the recollections of agony rushed in.

He started along the street. It hadn’t changed much. Early cars swept past and the morning hadn’t as yet done away with the night. As he walked along, he began to feel hungry. He thought momentarily of the corn pone, then shut it all off. He made his mind a blank.

He passed a drunk leaning against the front of a bar. The drunk looked very pale and sick. The sidewalk was wet where the drunk stood.

He crossed the tracks and turned left, walking slowly. He passed a couple of men hurrying to work. They didn’t look at him. He walked on, saw the all night restaurant sign and turned in the door.

The cashier stared at him. He smiled at her and moved toward a booth.

“Wait,” the cashier said.

He turned and looked at her. Two men and a woman were drinking coffee at a nearby table. The woman looked at him, then stared.

“Jesus, will you look at that,” the woman said.

“What is it?” he said to the cashier.

A large man wearing a dirty white shirt came from the back of the restaurant, walking fast, saying, “What is this? What is this?”

He looked at the man.

“Get out of here,” the man said.

He couldn’t think for a minute. Then he realized what it was. He’d made a mistake. He turned toward the door, but the man had caught up with him, saying it low and harsh into his ear.

“You lousy black! What the hell you reckon you’re doing, coming in here?”

“I was just—”

“Sure!” the man said, shoving him through the door. “You cockeyed black-faced bastard!”

The man followed him through the door. He turned and looked at the man. The man shook with rage and began to curse until he was out of breath. Chandler kept watching the man, the fat jiggling jowls, and the man stepped up close, still cursing, gasping for breath, his eyes popping a little.

Chandler turned away and started back down the street.

He recrossed the tracks, keeping his mind shut tight up.

He started along the empty street, walking more slowly now. Suddenly, up there a white man ran from an alley. He came running by, panting and staggering and grinning and, as he passed Chandler, Chandler smelled gin trailing on the air.

He walked on down toward the alley.

Three men were coming up the street, about a block away, and two cars went by, tires hissing. A window rattled up across the street.

He reached the alley and started past the entrance, looking in there. He saw a girl and half paused. She didn’t see him. She was struggling, trying to put on a red dress, but she was drunk and couldn’t keep her balance. She reeled around, trying to pull the dress on over her head. Then she laughed to herself, and tried stepping into the dress. She didn’t see Chandler at first. She was naked, except for rolled stockings with a hole in one knee, her full white body stark against the alley dirt, the charred walls. She was standing on a broken cardboard box that was spread like a pallet on the alley floor. A stack of boxes in front of the cardboard half-hid the little nook from view.

He started moving on. This was no place to be.

She saw him. She lifted her eyes and chuckled and let the dress fall away onto the ground. Her long blonde hair swung across her face. Her lipstick was smeared down on her chin.

“Hello, black boy,” she said softly. She took a step toward him, staggered back and leaned against the wall. She moved her body for him. “Wait,” she said. “Come here, black boy. Come and fix me. You want some? Huh?”

He turned away, going on down the street.

“Come on, black boy. Don’t be bashful.”

He continued walking and passed the three men he’d seen coming along before.

A woman screamed. Chandler stopped and turned and looked back there. The woman was at the alley entrance, on her hands and knees, with the red dress trailing from one ankle. She sprawled out on the sidewalk, then sat up and got on her knees and began crawling again.

Chandler looked at her, thinking about the restaurant, and he wondered how he could have been so dumb as to forget? Forgetting a simple thing like that! He was home! And he kept looking back there at the girl with a kind of numbness, standing perfectly still.

The three men began running toward the girl.

“Help,” she called. “Help me, for God’s sake!”

As she crawled on hands and knees, one knee left a spongy pattern of blood on the cement. Her breasts slung loose and large under her arms. Her blonde hair straggled down over her wailing face.

“It was him!” she yelled. “Get him!”

She fell on her back and lay there writhing and screaming it into the morning, yelling it at the open blue sky, and windows rattled up on both sides of the street. She kept banging her head back against the sidewalk. A car horn began to blat. The three men bent over her, staring.

“Help!” she yelled.

One of the men pointed back at Chandler.

“Yes!” she yelled. “Him. That black!”

Two of the men turned and started to run at Chandler and he heard the sound of tires shrieking on the street and the soft moan of a tripped siren.

“I called the cops, you black bastard!” a man yelled from across the street in an open window directly opposite the alley. “I seen you! I called the cops!”

She rolled on the sidewalk, rolling back and forth, slamming her naked white body against the cement. She lay still on her back and wailed it.

“That black boy!”

Chandler turned and ran. The two men were very close to him. He kept calling back over his shoulder, running as fast as he could, “No. It’s a mistake. I didn’t do it. She’s drunk. Can’t you see?”

He heard the wild gunning of a car’s engine. He turned into the first alley at hand and ran down that. At the far entrance, he looked back. The two men were in front of the car. It was a police car, for Jesus Christ, and they had got in its way. They stopped running and the police car stopped and they began talking, waving their arms.

He turned and ran again. He ran across the street and down the other side, and up another alley. He got out of that alley, and turned straight up the street. Then he saw this was the wrong way. That was the way toward the center of town. He turned back the other way. He crossed the street, feet pounding, running with the panic inside him, his lungs burning.

Why had he stopped to look? Why hadn’t he stayed home?

Why had he forgotten all the things?

He turned into another alley, completely out of breath and dodged and huddled by a cellar door, hunkered down. He began to tremble, then shake all over. His head, his legs, his arms. He looked at his hands, trying to get his breath, gasping, watching the way his hands shook with a kind of detached wonder.

They shouldn’t do this. He was studying to be a doctor. He was going to college. He was just home visiting for a week, and he’d forgotten certain things.

He hunkered shaking by the cellar door.

His mind was already taken up with a certainty.

That girl. For spite, she’d done that. Or was it because she’d been ashamed to be seen naked and like she was by three white men? What reason was there? No reason. What if he’d gone in there with her?

He clamped his eyes shut, fighting a kind of craziness that seeped up into him.

He thought of his school, but it wouldn’t hold in his mind.

Only this. The great big booming now.

He didn’t want to be afraid. But he was. And he knew he had to get away from this section of town. He got up and staggered and ran again. Maybe he could get home and get his clothes and take a train out. A plane. Go back where he belonged.

Where did he belong?

He made himself run hard, out and across the street and into another alley. He saw the gray police car coming down the street. Somebody yelled at him. He saw still another car pass the police car, careening.

Halfway down the alley, he turned wildly and looked back there. A car slammed into the alley, engine roaring.

He stood there, watching it.

It wasn’t the police. Everybody was after him; they all believed that girl, because they wanted to. The whole world believed her. Then he saw the police car enter the alley behind the other car.

He turned and ran. He couldn’t run very fast now.

The car speeded up and smashed into him from behind, crushing his back and he screamed and went down, whipped. The car passed over him and brakes squealed as it stopped a few yards beyond.

“We get him?” a man shouted.

“We got him!”

He lay there on the alley floor, then pushed himself to one elbow. He could not see very well and he was broken and split with pain.

He heard the police car stop back there, siren softly moaning.

“Back her up,” the man said, from inside the car that had struck him. “Quick, back her up and make sure!”

He watched, unable to move, as the car gunned viciously backward. Steel bumpers smashed him in the face.

Until the runaway popularity of the female private eye in recent years, few women wrote hard-boiled and noir fiction. Most women authors seem to have preferred their crimes and misdemeanors to take place in surroundings more genteel than Raymond Chandler’s mean streets and to be couched in less graphic and violent prose. But a few women did enter what was perceived as a “man’s world” in the 1940s and 1950s, and some of them had significant careers. One was Georgiana Ann Randolph Craig, who (under the pseudonym Craig Rice) created Chicago lawyer John J. Malone. Other notables were Helen Nielsen, M. V. Heberden, and Dolores Hitchens. But the woman with the most impressive body of work, whose achievements rank her as one of the top hard-boiled-fiction writers of all time, was Leigh Brackett.

Brackett was an avowed admirer of Chandler and the Black Mask school, and her novel No Good from a Corpse (1944), a southern California tale featuring private detective Edmond Clive, is so Chandleresque in style and approach that it might have been written by Chandler. Indeed, Brackett was one of the co-authors of the screenplay of The Big Sleep in 1946, and twenty-five years later she wrote the script for the Robert Altman-Elliot Gould film version of The Long Goodbye (1973). The Tiger Among Us and An Eye for an Eye, her two 1957 suspense novels, are also powerful noir stories set against midwestern backdrops.

Oddly, 1957 was the only year in the 1950s in which Brackett published crime fiction; the balance of her output during that decade consisted of science fiction and screenplays. “So Pale, So Cold, So Fair,” a gripping tale of political corruption and murder in a small Ohio town where “sin is organized, functional, and realistic,” first appeared in the men’s magazine Argosy in July 1957. Like the best of her handful of crime shorts published in the 1940s, this story contains echoes not only of Chandler, but of both Dashiell Hammett and Paul Cain. It might well have been featured in Black Mask one or two decades earlier — a magazine in which Brackett did not appear even once.

B. P.

So Pale, So Cold, So Fair (1957)

From 1955 to 1958, Helen Berniece Nielsen wrote just six short stories for the seminal hard-boiled digest, Manhunt. Yet these stories add up to some of the toughest tales of the mid-century, written by an author who was unusually gifted in a number of fields.

A newspaper and commercial artist before World War II, Nielsen transferred from illustration to aeronautical draftsmanship during the conflict, working on the U.S. Defense Engineering Program. From her mid-twenties until her sixtieth year, she owned an apartment building. Managing this caravanserai, with its ever-shifting population, gave her a unique, invaluable view of her fellow humans — their foibles, their passions, their outlooks, and their obsessions. This insight later proved useful in such books as A Killer in the Street (1967), which begins in an apartment house in New York, and The Woman on the Roof (1954), in which murder takes place in the bungalow court owned by the heroine s brother.

Nielsen was also adept at most subgenres in the mystery field, from the pursuit thriller (the superb and claustrophobic Detour [1953], for instance, in which a man finds a whole community ranged against him) to the novel of bafflement. A good example of the latter is Nielsen’s second book, Gold Coast Nocturne (1951), in which the hero cannot even remember his own marriage because he was drunk at the time. Her later books generally concern the resolution of situations that threaten either career or life.

Nielsen seems to be appreciated most by British aficionados, and her last two books, The Severed Key (1973) and The Brink of Murder (1976), were published only in England. By the mid-1970s, Nielsen had virtually ceased writing, and her remaining work moved well away from her hard-boiled, Manhunt period. One of her last stories, “The Boom at the End of the Hall,” written for Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine in 1973, is an out-and-out ghost story, familiarly set in a residential hotel.

Chameleonlike, Nielsen could subtly alter her style with each new direction she took, each new subgenre she conquered. But none of her later work can compete with the early stories, celebrated in her one paperback-original collection, Woman Missing (1961). “A Piece of Ground” is a bleak and uncompromising noir tale that first appeared in 1957 in Manhunt.

J. A.

A Piece of Ground (1957)

They called him the farmer. He had a name the same as any man; but it was seldom spoken. Names weren’t important in the city. A number on a badge, a number on a time card, a number on the front of a rooming house — that’s all anyone needed. Names were for people who got into the newspapers; and, down around the warehouses that backed up against the river, a man didn’t get into the newspapers unless he was found with his throat cut or his head bashed in. Even then he rarely had a name. He was just another unidentified body.

He was a tall man. He stooped when he went through doorways, out of habit. He had long arms with big hands stuck on the ends of them — calloused and splinter-cut from handling the rough pine crates of produce; and he had large feet that hurt from walking and standing all the time on cement and not ever feeling the earth under them any more. He had a large-boned face and sad eyes, and he never laughed and seldom smiled unless he was alone, to himself, and thinking of something remembered. He worked hard and took his pay to the bank, except for the few dollars he needed for the landlady at the rooming house, the little food he ate, and some pipe tobacco. He never spent money for liquor or women. It was a joke all along the river-front.

“The farmer ain’t give up yet. He’s saving to buy out the corporation that took over his farm.”

It was a big joke, but it wasn’t true. Not quite. Once a week he wrote home:

The letters were pretty much the same every week, and the answers were pretty much the same, too, because he and Amy had never had to write letters to one another before and didn’t really know how. If he missed her, and he did, he couldn’t put it down on paper without feeling foolish; and if he hated every minute in the city, and he did, he didn’t want her to know it and worry. It was just one of the hard things that happened in life, like the kids getting whooping cough or the hail stripping the corn when it was ready to tassel. It was just one of the things that had to be endured.

The winter months were bad, but, when the last of the snows had melted and the first rains came, it was harder than ever. Spring was planting time. Even in a back room of the rooming house he could smell the earth around him. He took to walking out nights, smoking his pipe and looking for a plot of grass at his feet, or for a star in the strip of sky showing above the rooftops. The city wasn’t quite so ugly at night. The dirt didn’t show in the shadows. He walked slowly, and he never spoke to anyone until the night he met Blanche.

It was a Saturday night and warm. Spring came early along the river. There had been a shower earlier, and pools of water still stood in the street. When he came to the corner, he looked down and saw a star reflected in the puddle. It seemed strange. He’d looked for stars in the sky and never found them, and here was a star at his feet. He hesitated a moment thinking about it, and while he stood there a woman came and stood beside him. He knew it was a woman by the smell of her powder and perfume.

“It sure is warm tonight,” she said.

He didn’t answer or look around. The neighborhood was full of women of her kind, and he didn’t like to look at them. He hadn’t had any woman but Amy for the seventeen years of their marriage, and he missed her too much to dare look at a woman now.

But she didn’t go away.

“Lose something in the puddle?” she asked.

“The star—”

The words slipped out. He didn’t want to talk to her about anything, but especially not the star. That was crazy. Only she didn’t think so.

“Oh, I see it! It’s pretty, ain’t it?” She crowded closer to him. He could feel her body next to his. “You don’t see many stars in the city,” she added. “It’s because of all the lights, I guess.”

Her voice wasn’t the way he expected it to be. It had a kind of wonder — something almost childish in it. He looked at her then and was surprised at what he saw. She was young, not much more than a schoolgirl. She did wear powder, but not very much, and she had a soft look about her. She was small and dark and wore a plain blue sweater over a cotton dress.

“Are you—” He struggled with words. He hadn’t used them much for many months. “—from the country?”

She nodded. “A long time ago — when I was a little girl. I was born on a farm on the other side of the river.”

“Now that’s funny,” he said. “I was born on a farm, too, only I come from the other way — back towards Jefferson City. I only been here a few months.”

“Alone?” she asked.

“Yes, alone. That is, I got a wife and two girls, but they didn’t come.

I didn’t think this was any place—” He caught back the words. He’d started to say that he didn’t think this was any place to bring up his girls, but he didn’t want to insult her. “I just came to make a little money and go back,” he explained.

It was hard to be sure with her face ducked down and only the street lamp to see by, but she seemed to be smiling. Not a happy smile, but a kind of twisted one. Then she looked up, and for a moment he looked straight into her eyes and saw that they weren’t young at all.

But it was a warm spring night, and he hadn’t talked to a woman for a long time.

“I was just going down to the corner for a beer,” she said. “Maybe you were going the same place. We could walk together.”

He wasn’t; but he did. Some, of the faces that peered at them as they walked past the bar to the booths in the rear were familiar. He could see the grins and the heads wagging. The farmer had a woman. The farmer was going to spend some money. By this time he wished he hadn’t come; but the woman sat down in the last booth and he sat down across from her. They ordered two beers and he put a fifty-cent piece on the table.

“I didn’t mean that you had to pay for mine,” she said.

She didn’t seem at all like what he knew she was; and he did know. There was never any doubt about that. They talked a little more about the country, and about the weather, and then one of the men who had been drinking at the bar — one he didn’t recognize from the warehouse came back to the booth and stood looking down at them. He was a little man compared to the farmer; but his suit had wide shoulders, and he wore his roll-brimmed hat at a cocky angle as if he were the biggest man on the river-front.

“Well, if Blanche ain’t got herself a new friend!” he said.

“Knock it off, Morrell,” she answered.

Her voice had turned hard; but Morrell didn’t go away. Instead, he sat down beside her in the booth. He looked straight at the farmer.

“I heard about you,” he said, after studying him for a few seconds. “You’re the one they call ‘the farmer’ — the one who saves all his money.”

“I got a reason,” the farmer said.

“Who needs a reason? You think I’m like those stupid bums over at the bar? You think I make fun of a guy who saves his money? Look at me, I got a few put away myself. Only trouble is, Blanche don’t seem to like the color of my money. How do you figure that, farmer?”

“I said knock it off,” Blanche repeated.

“I guess there just ain’t no accounting for tastes,” Morrell added. “I guess a woman can have it for one guy and not for another.”

Morrell grinned at Blanche, but she didn’t even look at him. It was hard to know what to do or what to say. Maybe there was something between these two, and the farmer didn’t want to get mixed up in anything. He finished his beer and came to his feet.

“Leaving so soon?”

Blanche looked disappointed.

“I’ve got to get back to my room,” he said. “I’ve got to write a letter.”

“But it’s early.”

Morrell laughed.

“Leave him alone, Blanche. Can’t you see he don’t want any? Leave him be smart and save his money. It’s a good thing somebody has sense. Go ahead, farmer. I’ll buy Blanche another beer. Go write your letter.”

He didn’t like to go then. He didn’t like the way Blanche looked up at him, or the way she edged away from Morrell. But he still didn’t want to get mixed up in anything. He walked out, trying to not to hear the laughter behind him, and went back to the rooming house to write the longest letter he’d ever written.

It was a full week before he went out for a walk again. He didn’t pay any attention to the cracks made around the warehouse about him buying a beer for Blanche, and he tried not to listen to the things they said about her. He just made up his mind not to be so foolish again. When Saturday night came, he sat down and started his letter:

It was hot in the room. A bunch of kids were playing handball in the alley, and their screaming was in his ears until he could hardly think. He started to write again.

He put down his pencil and looked at the words. They were true. Everything was different in the city, but people were still people. They still got lonely and knew hunger. If a starving man stole a loaf of bread it wasn’t the same as stealing for profit. Everything was different in the city.

The ball kept bouncing against the wall, and now it was as if it were bouncing against his head. He wrinkled up the letter and threw it on the floor. It was too hot to write. He couldn’t sit in a hot room forever...

He met Blanche about three houses down the street. He never asked, but she might have been waiting for him.

“I’m going down to the corner for a beer,” he said. “Maybe you’d like to come with me.”

She wasn’t wearing the blue sweater. It was too warm for that. Spring and summer had a way of running together this time of year. She wore the cotton dress and that soft look that came sometimes when the shadows were kind.

“A friend of mine got generous and gave me a whole case of beer,” she answered. “Why don’t we go to my place? I don’t like the corner much any more.”

Her words were as good as any. He went along with her for a couple of blocks to a rooming house the duplicate of his own. She lived on the second floor. He stooped when he went through the doorway.

“You’re big,” she said, closing the door behind them. “Golly, you’re big — you know?” Then she ran her hand up his back and around his shoulders. “But you’re so skinny I can feel the bones through your shirt. I bet you don’t eat half enough.”

“I don’t like restaurant cooking,” he said.

“I don’t either! I tell you what you should do. I’ve got a hot plate, see?”

He saw. He saw a room no larger than his own, but with a hot plate and a sink and a yellowed enamel refrigerator in one corner. He looked for a chair, but the only one he could find had laundry on it. He sat down on the edge of the bed. By this time, she’d taken the beer out of the refrigerator, opened the cans, and handed one to him. All the time she kept talking.

“I do most of my own cooking, so if there’s something you’d like something you’re hungry for — you just buy it and bring it here. Those restaurants can kill you.”

She took a couple of pulls at the beer.

“God, it’s hot!” she said.

She pulled off her dress. She didn’t wear anything underneath except a slip as thin as a silk curtain. She was thin, too, her thighs, her stomach, her small breasts poking at the slip. She finished her beer and tossed the can into the sink, and then reached down for the hem of her slip. Then she looked at the window. The shade was rolled up to let in the night breeze in case one ever came, so she turned out the light.

Afterwards, he lay with her a while, staring at the ceiling and listening to his heart beat. Finally he spoke.

“That man at the bar last week — Morrell. Is he the friend who gave you the beer?”

It wasn’t that he had to make conversation. It was that he felt guilty and wanted to be reassured that it was nothing to her.

“What of it?” she answered. “I work for him sometimes. I entertain his customers.”

“He’s got some kind of business, then?”

“Morrell? He’s got all kinds of business.”

“I guess some people know how to make money. I wish I knew.”

“Morrell knows, all right. That’s one thing he knows.”

Blanche sounded sleepy. He waited a while, thinking she might speak again; but she didn’t and he left her that way. He wasn’t sure what to do, so he left two dollars on the refrigerator.

He didn’t intend to go back; but he did, of course. After a few more Saturdays it didn’t bother him. He’d give her a few dollars for groceries, and she’d have supper waiting when he got off work. The rest of his pay went into the bank the same as before, and he wrote home every week as usual. One night Blanche wanted to go out, so they went back to the bar on the corner and had a couple of beers and listened to the music in the record machine. Then Morrell came back to their booth.

“Well, it’s been a long time,” he said. “You don’t come around much any more, Blanche. What’s the matter? Got somebody keeping you busy?”

He had an obscene smile. He sat down beside Blanche again, and she edged over toward the wall.

“Still saving your money, farmer? Still going to buy back that farm?”

He shook his head. “I don’t aim to buy back anything,” he said. “All I want is a few acres for a truck garden and a house. Just a little piece of ground.”

Morrell nodded, still smiling.

“That’s what I like to hear — a man with ambition. But the trouble is, farmer, you’re going to be an old man before you get that piece of ground doing it the hard way.”

Morrell’s teeth were like pearls, and a diamond ring on his finger shot fire. The farmer listened.

“Is there an easy way?” he asked.

“Look at me,” Morrell said. “Six years ago I was broke — hoisting crates at the warehouse the same as you. But I got smart. I saved my dough, too, and then I did what the big boys do. I invested my dough.”

“In a business?”

“In the market, chum. Ain’t you ever heard?”

“But I don’t know anything about the market.”

“So who knows? I got me a broker — one of those young sharpies out of college. He studies all the time — tells me what to buy and when to sell. Not this six and seven percent old lady stuff, but the sweet stuff. You got to gamble to get anywhere in this world.”

Blanche was restless. She shoved her half-finished beer away from her.

“You talk big, Morrell,” she said, “but talk don’t do the farmer any good.”

“So why should I do the farmer good?”

“Why should you blow your mouth off?”

The farmer didn’t want any part of the argument. He would just as soon have dropped the subject; but Blanche’s taunt only made Morrell talk more.

“You think I talk big and that’s all?” he said. “You think I’m bluffing? Okay. I’ll show you how I’m bluffing. You want me to cut you in, farmer? It happens I’ve got a sweet thing going right now. Give me a hundred dollars and I’ll double it for you. Go ahead, try me and see.”

The farmer hesitated. He looked at Blanche and caught a glimpse of that twisted smile again.

“My money’s in the bank,” he said.

“Okay, so the bank opens Monday morning, don’t it? One hundred dollars, that’s all I’ll cut you in for. I know you’ve got it. You’ve got plenty.”

One hundred dollars. Monday noon he went to the bank on his lunch hour, and Monday night he gave the money to Morrell. He knew that he was a fool and never expected to see the money again; but Blanche had set it up for him and he didn’t want to back out.

It was exactly three weeks later that Morrell gave him two hundred dollars.

“You got lucky,” Blanche said.

“Luck?” Morrell laughed. “Using your head ain’t luck, honey. Any time you want to get smart again, farmer, let me know. Any time...”

It nagged at his mind. For the next few weeks everything went on as usual. He still went to Blanche every Saturday, and he still wrote home; but now the time seemed to pass more slowly because in the back of his mind he carried Morrell’s words. Only one thing about them bothered him.

And then one week the letter from Amy had news:

He read the letter over several times, and each time he could see the place more clearly and almost smell the earth and the water. Finally, he went to see Morrell.

“There’s just one thing I want to know,” he told him. “Why did you cut me in, and why did you say ‘any time’? You ain’t a man to give anything away.”

Morrell grinned.

“That’s right, farmer. You’re smart enough to think of that, but how come you ain’t smart enough to think of the answer? Don’t you know what I want? I want you to get that little piece of ground and clear the hell out of here!”

“Because of Blanche?”

“What do you think?”

“But she’s nothing to me.”

“It ain’t what she is to you that bothers me, farmer. It’s what she is to me — or could be with you out of the way. Now, what’s on your mind?”

“I need two thousand dollars,” he said.

“How much have you got to invest?”

He handed Morrell his bank book. All the months of saving had gone into it — the winter, the spring, the summer, and autumn on the way; but it was still only a little over a thousand dollars.

“Okay,” Morrell said. “I’ll meet you at the bank tomorrow — no, better make it tomorrow night at my office. You know where that is?”

The farmer nodded. He passed it every day going down to the warehouse.

“Make it about nine o’clock. That’ll give me time to see my broker and have him find something good for you. And don’t tell anybody what I’m doing. I’ll have every bum on the river-front trying to cut in.”

The next day at noon, he went to the bank and drew out everything. He kept it in an envelope pinned to the inside of his shirt until he was through work. After work he was too nervous to eat. He sat alone in his room until it was time to put the envelope in his pocket and start for Morrell’s office. Out on the street, he met Blanche. She was looking for him.

“I thought you might come over tonight,” she said. “I bought some pork chops.”

She clung to his arm, leaning against him. He pulled away.

“Maybe later,” he said. “I’ve got to see somebody first.”

“Morrell?”

“Just somebody. I’ll tell you about it later.”

He was lying. He walked off down the street knowing that he’d never go to Blanche again. That kind of life was over. He was going to go home and get clean.

After a time, he came to Morrell’s office. He opened the door and saw no one, but the door banged shut behind him and Morrell laughed once as he stepped forward. The farmer felt a gun cold against the back of his neck.

Even then he didn’t know what had happened or what had gone wrong; he wasn’t thinking at all. He felt terror and panic creep slowly up his body, but he made no move, not even when the door opened again and Blanche came in and walked past him.

“Has he got it with him?” Morrell asked from behind him.

“He’s got it,” Blanche said. “I felt it in his pocket.”

“Good. I’ll be up later with your cut. In the meantime, you don’t have to stay here. You might look around for another farmer who’s saving his money. You’ve got a real technique with the country boys, and there’s plenty of them around.”

Now the farmer knew that it was all over. He was finished. Fear remained, but the panic was gone; there was nothing for him to do. He felt only sick, and dirty, and he waited for Morrell to fire the gun and cleanse him.

“At least he’ll get what he wanted,” Blanche said, far away in the distance. “At least he’ll get a little piece of ground.”

A prodigious worker with a prodigious talent, Evan Hunter was multitalented from the very start of his writing career. Hunter was a prolific contributor to Manhunt during its most influential period, the early to middle 1950s. Although considered a mainstay of the digest, he had in fact only just made it into the last of the pulps: his earliest stories, written under the name Hunt Collins, had appeared in Robert Lowndes’s Smashing Detective and Famous Detective. In Manhunt, he ran a series featuring the tormented former private eye Matt Cordell, and he penned tough, shock-ending stories as Richard Marsten, a name he also used for his science fiction. Quite often, pieces by Marsten and Hunter sat next to each other in the same issue.

While writing hard-boiled short stories and novels for magazines such as Manhunt and for action-oriented paperback-original houses, Hunter was also producing thoughtful and engrossing science fiction for young people. He worked with the John C. Winston Company’s superior and influential “Adventures in Science Fiction” line, together with writers of the caliber of Arthur C. Clarke, Poul Anderson, and the anthropologist Chad Oliver. He wrote “JD” (juvenile delinquent) stories and novels, pulp science fiction, and private-eye tales before producing the novel that transformed him from a journeyman genre writer into a respected and world-famous figure.

Set in a New York City public high school, The Blackboard Jungle (1954) is still a compelling and intelligent novel forty years later. It was immediately recognized as a major work, having been serialized for the prestigious Ladies’ Home Journal, published to great critical acclaim, and bought for the then-record sum of $95,000 by a major film studio. This windfall freed Hunter from the tyranny of editors and publishers and enabled him to write only what he wanted to write. This included such fine mainstream novels as Strangers When We Meet (1958, filmed to Hunter’s own script two years later), Buddwing (1964), and the impressive Mothers and Daughters (1961).

Hunter’s greatest triumph, however, was undoubtedly the Eighty-seventh Precinct novels, a series of police-procedural stories set in a fictional, although far from imaginary, New York City. Using his pseudonym Ed McBain, he created the series in 1956 for a paperback house, later graduating to hardcover. It is said that his model was Sidney Kingsley’s celebrated 1949 play Detective Story, which was later filmed by William Wyler in a self-conscious pseudo-documentary style. The series consists of nearly fifty books, including one collection of novelettes. Perhaps only Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret series comes anywhere near Hunter’s epic achievement in terms of consistency and quality.

“The Merry, Merry Christmas” appeared in Manhunt in 1957 and is one of Hunter’s later stories; it was not a part of any series. While the tone seems sentimental, it is not at all a comfortable story. Rather, it is a superbly written tale about the randomness, the appalling arbitrariness, of violence.

J. A.

The Merry, Merry Christmas (1957)

Sitting at the bar, Pete Charpens looked at his own reflection in the mirror, grinned, and said, “Merry Christmas.”

It was not Christmas yet, true enough, but he said it anyway, and the words sounded good, and he grinned foolishly and lifted his drink and sipped a little of it and said again, “Merry Christmas,” feeling very good, feeling very warm, feeling in excellent high spirits. Tonight, the city was his. Tonight, for the first time since he’d arrived from Whiting Center eight months ago, he felt like a part of the city. Tonight, the city enveloped him like a warm bath, and he lounged back and allowed the undulating waters to cover him. It was Christmas Eve, and all was right with the world, and Pete Charpens loved every mother’s son who roamed the face of the earth because he felt as if he’d finally come home, finally found the place, finally found himself.

It was a good feeling.

This afternoon, as soon as the office party was over, he’d gone into the streets. The shop windows had gleamed like pot-bellied stoves, cherry hot against the sharp bite of the air. There was a promise of snow in the sky, and Pete had walked the tinseled streets of New York with his tweed coat collar against the back of his neck, and he had felt warm and happy. There were shoppers in the streets, and Santa Clauses with bells, and giant wreaths and giant trees, and music coming from speakers, the timeless carols of the holiday season. But more than that, he had felt the pulse beat of the city. For the first time in eight months, he had felt the pulse beat of the city, the people, the noise, the clutter, the rush, and above all the warmth. The warmth had engulfed him, surprising him. He had watched it with the foolish smile of a spectator and then, with sudden realization, he had known he was a part of it. In the short space of eight months, he had become a part of the city — and the city had become a part of him. He had found a home.

“Bartender,” he said.

The bartender ambled over. He was a big red-headed man with freckles all over his face. He moved with economy and grace. He seemed like a very nice guy who probably had a very nice wife and family decorating a Christmas tree somewhere in Queens.

“Yes, sir?” he asked.

“Pete. Call me Pete.”

“Okay, Pete.”

“I’m not drunk,” Pete said, “believe me. I know all drunks say that, but I mean it. I’m just so damn happy I could bust. Did you ever feel that way?”

“Sure,” the bartender said, smiling.

“Let me buy you a drink.”

“I don’t drink.”

“Bartenders never drink, I know, but let me buy you one. Please. Look, I want to thank people, you know? I want to thank everybody in this city. I want to thank them for being here, for making it a city. Do I sound nuts?”

“Yes,” the bartender said.

“Okay. Okay then, I’m nuts. But I’m a hick, do you know? I came here from Whiting Center eight months ago. Straw sticking out of my ears. The confusion here almost killed me. But I got a job, a good job, and I met a lot of wonderful people, and I learned how to dress, and I... I found a home. That’s corny. I know it. That’s the hick in me talking. But I love this damn city, I love it. I want to go around kissing girls in the streets. I want to shake hands with every guy I meet. I want to tell them I feel like a person, a human being, I’m alive, alive! For Christ’s sake, I’m alive!”

“That’s a good way to be,” the bartender agreed.

“I know it. Oh, my friend, do I know it! I was dead in Whiting Center, and now I’m here and alive and... look, let me buy you a drink, huh?”

“I don’t drink,” the bartender insisted.

“Okay. Okay, I won’t argue. I wouldn’t argue with anyone tonight. Gee, it’s gonna be a great Christmas, do you know? Gee, I’m so damn happy I could bust.” He laughed aloud, and the bartender laughed with him. The laugh trailed off into a chuckle, and then a smile. Pete looked into the mirror, lifted his glass again, and again said, “Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas.”

He was still smiling when the man came into the bar and sat down next to him. The man was very tall, his body bulging with power beneath the suit he wore. Coatless, hatless, he came into the bar and sat alongside Pete, signaling for the bartender with a slight flick of his hand. The bartender walked over.

“Rye neat,” the man said.

The bartender nodded and walked away. The man reached for his wallet.

“Let me pay for it.” Pete said.

The man turned. He had a wide face with a thick nose and small brown eyes. The eyes came as a surprise in his otherwise large body. He studied Pete for a moment and then said, “You a queer or something?”

Pete laughed. “Hell, no,” he said. “I’m just happy. It’s Christmas Eve, and I feel like buying you a drink.”

The man pulled out his wallet, put a five dollar bill on the bar top and said, “I’ll buy my own drink.” He paused. “What’s the matter? Don’t I look as if I can afford a drink?”

“Sure you do,” Pete said. “I just wanted to... look, I’m happy. I want to share it, that’s all.”

The man grunted and said nothing. The bartender brought his drink. He tossed off the shot and asked for another.

“My name’s Pete Charpens,” Pete said, extending his hand.

“So what?” the man said.

“Well... what’s your name?”

“Frank.”

“Glad to know you, Frank.” He thrust his hand closer to the man.

“Get lost, Happy,” Frank said.

Pete grinned, undismayed. “You ought to relax,” he said, “I mean it. You know, you’ve got to stop...”

“Don’t tell me what I’ve got to stop. Who the hell are you, anyway?”

“Pete Charpens. I told you.”

“Take a walk, Pete Charpens. I got worries of my own.”

“Want to tell me about them?”

“No, I don’t want to tell you about them.”

“Why not? Make you feel better.”

“Go to hell, and stop bothering me,” Frank said.

The bartender brought the second drink. He sipped at it, and then put the shot glass on the bar top.

“Do I look like a hick?” Pete asked.

“You look like a goddamn queer,” Frank said.

“No, I mean it.”

“You asked me, and I told you.”

“What’s troubling you, Frank?”

“You a priest or something?”

“No, but I thought...”

“Look, I come in here to have a drink. I didn’t come to see the chaplain.”

“You an ex-Army man?”

“Yeah.”

“I was in the Navy,” Pete said. “Glad to be out of that, all right. Glad to be right here where I am, in the most wonderful city in the whole damn world.”

“Go down to Union Square and get a soap box,” Frank said.

“Can’t I help you, Frank?” Pete asked. “Can’t I buy you a drink, lend you an ear, do something? You’re so damn sad, I feel like...”

“I’m not sad.”

“You sure look sad. What happened? Did you lose your job?”

“No, I didn’t lose my job.”

“What do you do, Frank?”

“Right now, I’m a truck driver. I used to be a fighter.”

“Really? You mean a boxer? No kidding?”

“Why would I kid you?”

“What’s your last name?”

“Blake.”

“Frank Blake? I don’t think I’ve heard it before. Of course, I didn’t follow the fights much.”

“Tiger Blake, they called me. That was my ring name.”

“Tiger Blake. Well, we didn’t have fights in Whiting Center. Had to go over to Waterloo if we wanted to see a bout. I guess that’s why I never heard of you.”

“Sure,” Frank said.

“Why’d you quit fighting?”

“They made me.”

“Why?”

“I killed a guy in 1947.”

Pete’s eyes widened. “In the ring?”

“Of course in the ring. What the hell kind of a moron are you, anyway? You think I’d be walking around if it wasn’t in the ring? Jesus!”

“Is that what’s troubling you?”

“There ain’t nothing troubling me. I’m fine.”

“Are you going home for Christmas?”

“I got no home.”

“You must have a home,” Pete said gently. “Everybody’s got a home.”

“Yeah? Where’s your home? Whiting Center or wherever the hell you said?”

“Nope. This is my home now. New York City. New York, New York. The greatest goddamn city in the whole world.”

“Sure,” Frank said sourly.

“My folks are dead,” Pete said. “I’m an only child. Nothing for me in Whiting Center anymore. But in New York, well, I get the feeling that I’m here to stay. That I’ll meet a nice girl here, and marry her, and raise a family here and... and this’ll be home.”

“Great,” Frank said sourly.

“How’d you happen to kill this fellow?” Pete asked suddenly.

“I hit him.”

“And killed him?”

“I hit him on the Adam’s apple. Accidentally.”

“Were you sore at him?”

“We were in the ring. I already told you that.”

“Sure, but were you sore?”

“A fighter don’t have to be sore. He’s paid to fight.”

“Did you like fighting?”

“I loved it,” Frank said flatly.

“How about the night you killed that fellow?”

Frank was silent for a long time. Then he said, “Get lost, huh?”

“I could never fight for money,” Pete said. “I got a quick temper, and I get mad as hell, but I could never do it for money. Besides, I’m too happy right now to...”

“Get lost,” Frank said again, and he turned his back. Pete sat silently for a moment.

“Frank?” he said at last.

“You back again?”

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have talked to you about something that’s painful to you. Look, it’s Christmas Eve. Let’s...”

“Forget it.”

“Can I buy you a drink?”

“No. I told you no a hundred times. I buy my own damn drinks!”

“This is Christmas E...”

“I don’t care what it is. You happy jokers give me the creeps. Get off my back, will you?”

“I’m sorry. I just...”

“Happy, happy, happy. Grinning like a damn fool. What the hell is there to be so happy about? You got an oil well someplace? A gold mine? What is it with you?”

“I’m just...”

“You’re just a jerk! I probably pegged you right the minute I laid eyes on you. You’re probably a damn queer.”

“No, no,” Pete said mildly. “You’re mistaken, Frank. Honestly, I just feel...”

“Your old man was probably a queer, too. Your old lady probably took on every sailor in town.”

The smile left Pete’s face, and then tentatively reappeared. “You don’t mean that, Frank,” he said.

“I mean everything I ever say,” Frank said. There was a strange gleam in his eyes. He studied Pete carefully.

“About my mother, I meant,” Pete said.

“I know what you’re talking about. And I’ll say it again. She probably took on every sailor in town.”

“Don’t say that, Frank,” Pete said, the smile gone now, a perplexed frown teasing his forehead, appearing, vanishing, reappearing.

“You’re a queer, and your old lady was a...”

“Stop it, Frank.”

“Stop what? If your old lady was...”

Pete leaped off the bar stool. “Cut it out!” he yelled.

From the end of the bar, the bartender turned. Frank caught the movement with the corner of his eye. In a cold whisper, he said, “Your mother was a slut,” and Pete swung at him.

Frank ducked, and the blow grazed the top of his head. The bartender was coming towards them now. He could not see the strange light in Frank’s eyes, nor did he hear Frank whisper again, “A slut, a slut.”

Pete pushed himself off the bar wildly. He saw the beer bottle then, picked it up, and lunged at Frank.

The patrolman knelt near his body.

“He’s dead, all right,” he said. He stood up and dusted off his trousers. “What happened?”

Frank looked bewildered and dazed. “He went berserk,” he said. “We were sitting and talking. Quiet. All of a sudden, he swings at me.” He turned to the bartender. “Am I right?”

“He was drinking,” the bartender said. “Maybe he was drunk.”

“I didn’t even swing back,” Frank said, “not until he picked up the beer bottle. Hell, this is Christmas Eve. I didn’t want no trouble.”

“What happened when he picked up the bottle?”

“He swung it at me. So I... I put up my hands to defend myself. I only gave him a push, so help me.”

“Where’d you hit him?”

Frank paused. “In... in the throat, I think.” He paused again. “It was self-defense, believe me. This guy just went berserk. He musta been a maniac.”

“He was talking kind of queer,” the bartender agreed.

The patrolman nodded sympathetically. “There’s more nuts outside than there is in,” he said. He turned to Frank. “Don’t take this so bad, Mac. You’ll get off. It looks open and shut to me. Just tell them the story downtown, that’s all.”

“Berserk,” Frank said. “He just went berserk.”

“Well...” The patrolman shrugged. “My partner’ll take care of the meat wagon when it gets here. You and me better get downtown. I’m sorry I got to ruin your Christmas, but...”

“It’s him that ruined it,” Frank said, shaking his head and looking down at the body on the floor.

Together, they started out of the bar. At the door, the patrolman waved to the bartender and said, “Merry Christmas, Mac.”