Just Another Sucker

I

When they released me at eight o’clock on a July morning, it was raining fit to drown a duck.

It was a pretty odd sensation to walk out into the world that, for me, had stood still for three and a half long years. I approached it warily, walking a few yards from the iron studded doors, then pausing to get the feel of freedom.

There would be a Greyhound bus at the corner to take me home, but for the moment, I didn’t feel like going home. I just wanted to stand on the edge of the sidewalk, to feel the rain against my face and to let the fact sink in that I was now free, that I wouldn’t have to spend another night in a cell and I wouldn’t any longer have to share my life with thugs, criminals and sex perverts as I had been doing for all these months.

The rain made puddles in the road. It beat down on my four year old hat and my five year old raincoat: warm rain, coming from a cloud-swollen sky as dark and as bitter as myself.

A glittering Buick Century slid up beside me and the electrically driven off-side window rolled down.

‘Harry!’

The car door swung open as I bent to stare in at the driver.

John Renick grinned at me.

‘Come on in — you’re getting wet,’ he said.

I hesitated, then I got into the car and slammed the door shut. Renick grabbed my hand and squeezed it. His dark lean face showed as nothing else could how pleased he was to see me.

‘How are you, you old sonofagun?’ he asked. ‘How does it feel to be out?’

‘I’m all right,’ I said, disentangling my hand from his. ‘Don’t tell me I’m getting a police escort back home.’

His smile slipped a little at my tone: his grey shrewd eyes searched my face.

‘You didn’t imagine I wasn’t coming, did you? I’ve been counting the days.’

‘I didn’t imagine anything.’ I looked at the ornate dashboard of the car. ‘Is this yours?’

‘You bet. I bought it a couple of months ago. She’s a honey, isn’t she?’

‘So the Palm City cops are still keeping themselves well heeled. Congratulations.’

His mouth tightened and there was a sudden flash of anger in his eyes.

‘Look, Harry, if any other guy but you had made that crack, I would have taken a poke at him.’

I shrugged.

‘Go ahead if you feel that way. I’m used to cops taking pokes at me.’

He drew in a deep breath, then he said: ‘Just for the record, I’m the D.A.’s Special officer now, and I have had a pretty substantial rise. I’ve been off the regular Force for more than two years.’

I was irritated to feel the blood rise to my face.

‘I see… I’m sorry… I didn’t know.’

‘How could you?’ He grinned and shifted into gear. The Buick drifted away from the kerb. ‘A lot of things have changed, Harry, since you’ve been inside. The old gang has gone. We have a new D.A. — he’s a good man.’

I didn’t say anything.

‘What are your plans?’ he asked abruptly.

‘I haven’t any. I want to look around. You know the Herald’s washed me up?’

‘I heard.’ There was a pause, then he went on: ‘It’s going to be a little rough for you at first. You know that, don’t you?’

‘Oh sure. When a guy kills a cop even accidentally, he’s not allowed to forget it. I know how rough it is going to be.’

‘You won’t have any trouble with the police. I didn’t mean that, but you may have to look around for a new career. Cubitt carries a lot of weight. He has his knife in you. If he can stop you, you’re not getting back into the newspaper world.’

‘You let me worry about that.’

‘I might be able to help.’

‘I don’t want any help.’

‘Oh sure, but there’s Nina…’

‘And I can take care of Nina.’

There was a long pause while he stared through the rain-soaked windshield, then he said: ‘Look, Harry, you and I are friends. We’ve known each other a heck of a long time. I know how you are feeling, but don’t treat me as if I were one of your enemies. I’ve talked to Meadows about you. He’s the new D.A. There’s nothing fixed yet, but there’s a chance we can use you in the office.’

I looked at him.

‘I wouldn’t work for the Palm City Administration if it was the last job left on earth.’

‘Nina’s had a pretty rough time,’ Renick said awkwardly. ‘She…’

‘I’ve also had a pretty rough time, so that makes the two of us. I don’t want anyone’s help. That’s final!’

‘Well, okay,’ Renick said. He made a helpless gesture with his hands. ‘Don’t imagine I don’t understand, Harry. I guess I’d be bitter too if I had been framed the way you were, but what’s done’s done. You have your future to think of now — Nina’s future too.’

‘What else do you imagine I have been thinking about all the time I have been in a cell?’ I stared out of the car window at the sea, grey in the rain, pounding against the sea wall. ‘Yes, I’m bitter all right. I have had time to realise just what a goddam sucker I’ve been. I should have taken the ten thousand dollars the Police Commissioner offered me to keep my mouth shut. Well, one thing I have learned since I have been in jail: I’m not ever going to be a sucker again.’

‘You’re just sounding off,’ Renick said sharply. ‘You know you did the right thing. The cards were stacked against you. If you had taken that rat’s bribe, you would never have been able to live with yourself, and you know it.’

‘Think so? Don’t kid yourself it’s going to be all that pleasant to live with myself now. Three and a half years sharing a cell with a child rapist and two thugs with habits that would sicken a pig does something to you. At least if I had taken that bribe I wouldn’t be now an ex-jailbird without a job. I’d probably be owning a car like yours.’

Renick shifted uneasily.

‘That’s no way to talk, Harry. You’re getting me worried. For Pete’s sake, get hold of yourself before you see Nina.’

‘Suppose you mind your own business?’ I snarled at him. ‘Nina happens to be my wife. She’s taken me for better or worse. Well, okay. You let me worry about her.’

‘I think you were wrong, Harry, when you wouldn’t let her attend the trial or even visit you in jail or write to you. You know as well as I do, she wanted to share this thing with you, but you turned her into an outsider.’

My hands closed into fists as I continued to stare at the rain-soaked beach.

‘I knew what I was doing,’ I said. ‘Do you imagine I wanted her to be photographed by those vultures in the court room? Do you imagine I wanted her to see me in that prison rig behind wire and glass? Do you imagine I wanted that jerk of a Warden reading her letters before I got them? Just because I acted like a sucker, there was no need for her to be dragged into it.’

‘You were wrong, Harry. Didn’t it occur to you she wanted to be with you,’ Renick said impatiently.

‘It was as much as I could do to persuade her not to come with me this morning.’

We were approaching Palm Bay, the swank residential district of Palm City. The long line of de luxe bathing cabins looked forlorn in the driving rain. The beach was deserted. The Cadillacs, the Rolls and the Bentleys stood in their parking squares outside the luxury hotels.

At one time Palm Bay had been my hunting ground. It seemed a long time now since I had been the gossip columnist of the Herald, the newspaper with the biggest circulation in California. Then, my column had been syndicated to over a hundred minor newspapers. I had been earning good money. I had lived well and had enjoyed my work. After a while, I had married Nina and bought a bungalow just outside Palm Bay where we set up home. I was doing all right, and looked set for life; then one night, when I was in the bar of the Beach Hotel, I happened to overhear a snatch of conversation between two strangers who had been hitting the bottle and had become indiscreetly loud.

Those few words put me onto something that was as hot and as dangerous as an exploding volcano. It took me two months of secret and patient investigation before I got the complete story. It was a story that would hit the headlines of the Herald for weeks.

A Chicago mob planned to take over Palm City. They planned to install slot machines, to set up brothels and all the rest of the paraphernalia of organised vice. The monthly take was estimated to be two and a half million dollars.

When I had convinced myself of the facts, I thought at first this mob must be crazy. I couldn’t believe they could just walk in and take over this city how and when they liked. Then I got a hot tip that the Palm City Police Commissioner as well as half a dozen of the important administrators had been bought and had agreed to give the mob the protection it needed.

Then I made my major mistake: I tried to carry on the investigation on my own. I wanted this to be a personal scoop, and it wasn’t until I had got the necessary evidence and an outline of the articles I intended to write exposing the conspiracy that I went to J. Matthew Cubitt, my boss and owner of the Herald.

I told him what was cooking and he listened, his grey, thin face expressionless.

When I was through, he said he would want to check my facts. There was a coldness in his manner and an odd lack of enthusiasm that should have warned me. Although I had dug deep and had persuaded a lot of people to talk, I hadn’t dug deep enough. The mob had bought the Herald. That was something I had never thought possible. I learned later they had promised Cubitt a seat in the Senate if he played along with them and the bribe had been too much for this grasping, ambitious newspaper owner.

He asked me to turn over all my information to him to check. On my way back to the bungalow to get the dossier, I was stopped by a police car.

The Police Commissioner, I was told, wanted to see me. I was escorted to police headquarters where I had an interview with the Commissioner.

He was a hard, direct man and he didn’t attempt to hedge. He put on his desk ten thousand dollars in new crisp bills. He would trade the bills for the dossier and I could forget the investigation. How about it?

Apart from the fact I had never taken a bribe and didn’t intend to start now, I knew the story I was ready to write would put my name on the front page for weeks and would establish my reputation in the newspaper world as nothing else could. I got up and walked out, and I walked right into trouble.

I turned my dossier over to Cubitt and told him of the bribe offered me by the Police Commissioner.

He stared at me with his hooded eyes, nodded and told me to come to his house at half past ten that night. By then I would have had time to check on my findings and decide the best way to handle the set-up. I guessed he burned the dossier. I never saw it again.

Nina had been in on the investigation from the start. She was scared sick about it, realising, as I did, the kind of dynamite I was handling, but she also realised this was my big chance and she went along with me.

I left home just before ten for my date with Cubitt. I could see how scared she was as she went with me to the car. I had an uneasy feeling myself, but I trusted Cubitt.

His residence was in Palm Bay. To get there, I had to drive along a stretch of lonely road. On this road, I ran into trouble.

A police car, travelling fast, overtook me and sideswiped me. The idea maybe was to force my car off the road and into the sea, but it didn’t work out that way. There was a pretty bad smash and the police driver got his ribs shoved in by his steering wheel. His companion, apart from a shaking, wasn’t hurt. He arrested me for dangerous driving. I knew it was a frame-up, but there was nothing I could do about it. A couple of minutes later, another police car arrived with Sergeant Bayliss of the Homicide Squad at the wheel. What he was doing on this lonely road no one ever bothered to ask. He took charge. The injured cop was rushed to hospital and I was taken to headquarters.

On the way, Bayliss suddenly told the driver to stop. We were in a dark, deserted street. He told me to get out. The driver got out too and grabbed me from behind, locking my arms. Bayliss took a bottle of Scotch from the glove compartment, filled his mouth with whisky and sprayed the whisky in my face and over my shirt. Then he produced a blackjack and clubbed me over the head.

I came to in a cell, and from that moment, I was sunk. The injured cop died. They nailed me on a manslaughter rap and I drew four years. The attorney who defended me fought like a tiger, but he didn’t get anywhere. When he introduced the conspiracy evidence, it was promptly thrown out. Cubitt, on oath, said he never had my dossier, and that he was going to get rid of me anyway as I was not only an unreliable newspaper man, but a secret drunk.

All the time I was serving my sentence I kept thinking what a sucker I had been. I told myself I must have been crazy to have tried to buck the Administration on my own.

It didn’t help me when I heard the Police Commissioner had resigned under pressure, and that the Administration had had a complete shake up. There had been an inquiry after the hints my attorney had dropped around and the Chicago mob had decided to move in elsewhere, but that didn’t help me. I was stuck with a four year sentence for killing a cop while drunk in charge of a car, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.

And now, after spending three and a half years in a cell, I was free again. I was a newspaper man with no other training. Cubitt had blacklisted me, and that meant I wouldn’t get any other newspaper work. I would have to make a new career for myself. I had no idea what I was going to do. Although I earned well, I had always been a spender. I hadn’t left Nina much to live on when I went to jail. There wouldn’t be much left now: if anything. I had worried myself sick wondering what she was doing and what was happening to her, but I was obstinate and stupid enough to insist through my attorney that she shouldn’t write to me. The thought of that fat, sadistic Warden reading her letters before I got them was something I just couldn’t take.

I said to Renick, ‘How has she been making out? How is she?’

‘She’s fine,’ he told me. ‘You didn’t doubt that, did you? She’s discovered a talent for art. She decorates pottery of all things and makes quite a good living out of it.’

He swung the Buick around the corner of the street in which I had my home.

The sight of the bungalow brought a lump to my throat. The familiar street was deserted. The rain came down in grey sheets, bouncing on the road and the sidewalk.

Renick pulled up outside the front gate.

‘I’ll be seeing you,’ he said and gripped my arm. ‘You’re lucky, Harry. I wish I had someone like Nina waiting for me.’

I got out of the car. Without looking at him, I started up the familiar path. Then the front door swung open, and there was Nina.

II

Around six-thirty on the seventh morning after my release from jail, I came awake abruptly. I had been dreaming I was back in a cell, and it took me a moment or so to realise I was in my own bedroom with Nina sleeping at my side.

I lay on my back and stared up at the ceiling and began to wonder, as I had been wondering for the past seven days what I was going to do to earn a living. I had already probed the newspaper world. As I had expected, there was nothing for me. Cubitt’s influence spread like the tentacles of an octopus. Even the minor local paper was afraid to touch me.

There wasn’t much else I could do. Writing was my profession, but I wasn’t a creative writer. I was a reporter. I had to have facts before I could produce good copy. Without the facilities of a newspaper behind me I was sunk.

I looked at Nina, sleeping by my side.

I had married her two years and three months before I went to jail. Then she had been twenty-two and I had been twenty-seven.

She had dark wavy hair and her skin was the colour of ivory. We both had agreed she wasn’t beautiful in the accepted sense of the word, but I had declared, and still thought so, that she was the most attractive woman I had ever seen.

Watching her, as she slept, I could see how much she had suffered. The skin around her eyes was too tight. There was a droop to her lips that hadn’t been there when I had left her to serve my sentence and she looked sad: a thing she had never looked when asleep in the old days.

She had had a rough time all right. I had left her three thousand dollars in our joint account, but this had gone quickly: my attorney’s fee and the last payment on the bungalow had taken most of it, and she had had to look for work.

She had had several jobs, then finally, as Renick had told me, she had discovered a talent for art and had got a job with a man who sold pottery to the tourists. He made the pots and she decorated them. She had been earning sixty dollars a week for the past year: enough, as she explained to me, to keep us going until I could take over again.

I now had only two hundred dollars left in my account. When that was gone, and unless I found a job, I would have to ask her for bus fares, money for cigarettes, and so on: the thought of having to do that demoralised me.

The previous day, growing desperate, I had tried to find a temporary job — anything that would bring me in a little money.

After tramping around most of the day, I came home still empty handed. I was too well known in Palm City to be offered a menial job. The guys who wanted a man were embarrassed when they saw me.

‘Aw, Mr. Barber, you’re kidding,’ they said to me. ‘This is no job for you.’

I hadn’t the guts to tell them how flat broke I was, and they were relieved when I made a joke and left.

‘What are you thinking about, Harry?’ Nina asked, rolling over on her side to look at me.

‘Nothing… I was dozing.’

‘You’re worrying, but you mustn’t. We’ll make out. We can get along fine on sixty a week. We’re not going to starve. You must be patient. The right job will come along.’

‘And while I’m waiting for the right job to come along, I will have to live on you,’ I said. ‘Well that’s wonderful. I’ll enjoy it.’

She lifted her head to stare at me. Her dark eyes anxious.

‘We’re partners, Harry. When you get a job, I’ll retire. As you haven’t a job for the moment, then I do the work. That’s the way a partnership should be.’

‘Thanks for telling me.’

‘Harry… you’re worrying me. You may not realise it, but you have changed so much. You’re so hard and bitter now. You must try to forget. We have our lives to lead together, and this attitude of yours…’

‘I know.’ I got out of bed. ‘I’m sorry about it. Maybe if you had spent three and a half years in jail, you might feel the same way as I do. I’ll fix the coffee. At least, that’s something I can do these days.’

All this that I’m telling you about happened two years ago. Looking back on it, and taking it now in its right perspective, I realise I was a pretty weak kind of character. I can see I had let this frame-up and the prison sentence get on top of me. I wasn’t tough and bitter. I was eaten up with self-pity.

If I had had what it takes, I would have got rid of the bungalow, and with Nina, I would have gone some place where I wasn’t known and made a new career for myself. Instead I went around looking for a job that didn’t exist for me in this town and making a martyr of myself.

For the next ten days I went around pretending to look for the non-existent job. I made out to Nina that I was hunting all day, but it was a lie. After making a couple of calls and being turned down, I sought sanctuary in the nearest bar.

When I had worked as a columnist, I had never been much of a drinker, but now, I began really to hit the bottle. Whisky was the one magic escape for me. With five or six whiskies inside me, nothing seemed to matter. I didn’t give a damn if I had a job or not, I could return home and watch Nina slave at her art work without feeling like a pimp.

With a load on, I even found it was easy to lie to her.

‘I was talking to a guy this morning, and it looks as if we can make a deal,’ I told her. ‘He wants me to write a series of articles around his hotel, but first he has to talk to his partner. If it jells, it’ll pay over three hundred a week.’

There was no guy, no partner and no hotel, but the lie kept me important, and it was essential to my ego that Nina should still think I was important. Even when I was forced to borrow ten dollars from her, I still tried to save face by telling her before long, I would be in the money.

But continual lies grow stale, and after a while, I began to realise that when I told Nina a lie, she knew I was lying. She pretended to believe me, and that’s where she went wrong. She should have called my bluff, and maybe I would have snapped out of this pipe dream of mine, but she didn’t, so I went on drinking, went on lying and went on getting nowhere.

Then one afternoon while I was sitting in a bar facing the beach, this thing I want to tell you about started.

The time was a little before six o’clock. I was pretty sloshed. I had knocked back eight whiskies and was looking forward to the ninth.

The bar was small and quiet and not well patronised. I liked it. I could sit in a corner undisturbed and look out of the open window and watch the people enjoying themselves on the beach. I had been a regular customer now for five days. The barman, a big, fat, bald-headed guy, knew me. He seemed to understand my need for whisky. As soon as I finished one drink, he brought me another.

There weren’t many drinkers in the bar. From time to time a man or a woman would come in, shoot a drink down their throats, hang around for a few minutes, then leave. They were like me — without an anchor, lonely and trying to kill time.

In a corner, near my table and out of sight of the bar was a telephone booth. There was a pretty regular traffic to the booth. People came in, made a call, then went out: men, women, boys and girls. The booth was the busiest place in the bar.

While I sat drinking, I watched the booth: it gave me something to do. I wondered a little drunkenly who these people were who shut themselves in behind the glass panelled door: who they were talking to.

I watched their expressions. Some of them smiled as they talked: some got worked up: some of them looked as if they were telling unconvincing lies the way I had been telling unconvincing lies. It was like watching a stage play.

The barman brought me my ninth whisky and put it on the table. This time he stood by me, not moving, and I knew it was time to settle the check. I gave him my last five-dollar bill. He grinned sympathetically as he handed me the change. The grin told me he knew a drunk when he saw one. I felt like getting up and driving my fist into his fat, stupid face, but I took the change and as I started to look for a small coin to tip him, his grin widened and he went back to the bar.

It was at this moment, when I realised he knew the kind of lush he was selling liquor to, that I felt pretty ashamed of myself. I felt so goddamed ashamed, I could have walked right out of the bar and under a fast moving car, but that kind of an end took guts, and I had left my guts in Cell 114. I wasn’t walking in front of any fast moving car. I was just going to sit here and drink myself silly. It was better and easier that way.

Then a woman came into the bar. She walked to the telephone booth and shut herself in.

She was wearing a close-fitting canary coloured sweater and white slacks. She had on bottle green sun goggles, and she carried a yellow and white plastic handbag.

She immediately attracted my attention because she had solid, heavy hips and her slacks were tight fitting. As she walked to the telephone booth the movement of her derrière was something that even non-drinking and respectable men would have stared at.

I was a drinking, non-respectable man, so I stared without any inhibition. When I had lost sight of this portion of her body as she shut the telephone booth door, I lifted my eyes to look at her face.

She would be about thirty-three: a blonde with clear cut, somewhat cold features, but as a general ensemble she was very, very attractive to any male.

I drank half my ninth whisky and watched her use the telephone. I couldn’t tell if her conversation was a happy one or not. The sun goggles made speculation impossible, but she was quick and to-the-point. She was in the booth under a minute flat. She came out and walked past me, without looking at me. I stared at her straight back and the heavy curve of her hips for a brief, pleasant couple of seconds before she let the door swing behind her.

I was drunk enough to think that if I had been a single man, she would be the one I would have gone for. A woman, I reasoned to myself, with a figure like that, with her poise and looks must be sensational in bed. If she wasn’t, then life was even a bigger illusion that I had imagined it to be.

I wondered who she was. Her clothes were expensive. The yellow and white handbag wasn’t something you picked up in a junk shop.

The yellow and white handbag.

She had taken it into the telephone booth with her, but I couldn’t remember her coming out with it.

I was now so sloshed, thinking became an effort. I screwed up my face, trying to remember. She had gone into the booth with the bag in her right hand. I was certain she had come out of the booth without anything in either hand.

I finished my whisky, then with a shaky hand, I lit a cigarette. So what? I said to myself. I had probably not noticed the bag when she came out.

Suddenly the bag became important to me. It became important because I wanted to prove to myself I wasn’t as plastered as I thought I was.

I got unsteadily to my feet and walked to the telephone booth. I opened the door and there on the shelf was the handbag.

Well, you old sonofabitch, I said to myself, you’re as sober as a judge. You saw at once she had forgotten her bag. You’re carrying your liquor like… like… well, you’re carrying your liquor.

The thing to do, I went on, talking to myself, is to look in the bag and find out who she is. Then you take the bag, telling the barman she has left it in the telephone booth — you must tell him otherwise if you are spotted walking down the street with a lady’s yellow and white handbag, some cop might pinch you — then when you have told the barman, you’ll take the bag to her address and who knows — she might reward you with something more than a kiss — who knows?

That’s how drunk I was.

So I stepped into the booth and closed the door. I picked up the handbag and opened it. As I did so, I looked over my shoulder to make sure no one was watching me. Ex-jailbird Barber: that was me: taking no chances; always on the look out for trouble.

No one was watching me.

I turned my back which was broad enough to fill nearly all the booth, and picked up the telephone receiver; a smart move this — and resting the receiver against my ears, I examined the contents of the bag.

There was a gold cigarette case and a gold lighter. There was a diamond clip which could have been worth fifteen hundred dollars if not more. There was a driving licence. And there was a fat roll of bills and the top one was a fifty. If the others matched it, there could be close on two thousand dollars in that nice looking, juicy roll.

The sight of all that money brought me out in a sweat.

The cigarette case, the lighter and the diamond clip didn’t interest me. All three could be traced, but I found myself being too interested in this fat roll of money.

With this money in my pocket, I wouldn’t have to ask Nina for five bucks tomorrow morning. I wouldn’t have to ask her for money neither tomorrow nor the day after, nor any time. I would be able to find a job by the time I had used up this money. Even if I kept on drinking, day in and night out.

I was plastered. I was not only plastered but I was demoralised. If this rich woman was so dumb as to leave the money right here, then she deserved to lose it.

Then far away, a faint voice that was my own said to me, ‘Have you gone crazy? It’s stealing! If they catch you with your record, you’ll go away for ten years. Put the goddam bag down and get the hell out of here! What’s the matter with you? Do you want ten more years in a cell?’

But the voice was too far away to make an impression. I wanted that money. It was easy. All I had to do was to take it out of the bag, put it in my pocket, close the bag, put it back on the shelf and fade away.

The barman couldn’t see me. There was a continual stream of people going in and out of the booth.

Anyone could have taken it — anyone.

The money was there — probably not two thousand dollars, but getting on that way.

I wanted it.

I needed it.

So I took it.

I dropped the roll into my pocket and shut the bag. My heart was thumping and I felt what I was — a thief. There was a tiny mirror above the telephone. I saw a movement in it. I still had the bag in my hand. I looked in the mirror.

She was right there behind me, watching me. Her sun goggles reflected the light so they made two little green spots in the mirror.

But she was there.

How long had she been there I didn’t know.

But she was there.