More Good Old Stuff

Chapter One Appointment With Death

Chowder gave me the assignment one hot afternoon in Chicago. I like to stay in shape and that morning I had gone three fast sets of tennis with a pro at the club. It was one of those afternoons. Chowder was at the big desk he keeps in the front room of his apartment, and I was in sweat shirt and shorts over on the couch. Chowder was going over the coded reports from the outlying districts. Syndicate business.

Gloria was sitting cross-legged on the floor beside me, hunched over a magazine. I had my right hand on the nape of her neck, running my fingers up through her bronze hair. Gloria is a good kid, but not too bright.

Her drink was on the floor beside me, and her cigarette smoke was curling up through the still air. She has never gotten it through her head that I don’t smoke or drink just because I don’t like the tastes involved.

I’ve told her that a gentleman is a guy with none of the minor vices, but she merely gives me a blank look.

Chowder got his name because he started in a political way in some small New England town trying to buy the voters with free chowder and beer at picnics. He has a flat white face, no hair and a little mouth like an upside-down U. He is a very rough man indeed.

“Go down to the bar and buy yourself a drink, Gloria,” he said.

She gave him a look of quick annoyance. “I like it here.”

I took my hand away from the back of her neck, put my palm flat against her ear and pushed. She sprawled over and jumped up, hopping mad.

Before she could start yapping, I said, “Do like the man says, honey.”

She walked to the door with an insolent strut that showed off certain clothing concessions she had made to the Chicago summer weather. The door banged behind her.

“Sit up when I talk to you, Wally,” Chowder said.

I swung around to a sitting position, yawned and smiled at him. He rapped a report with the back of his fat white hand.

“Now you go to work,” he said.

“Who gets roughed up?” I asked.

He stood up, frowning. “Wally, we got an investment in you. You know that.”

I didn’t know it. For a little AWOL, hijacking and black-market stuff in West Germany, they had given me ten in Leavenworth. The reviewing authority had set me loose after thirty-seven months. With a dishonorable discharge on the record, people like me had best make some contacts in Leavenworth for work on the outside, or else settle down to a life of manual labor. My army background had given me some skills useful to the organization, and I knew who to go to when I was released.

I had been here with the syndicate for a little over a year at five hundred a week, and had drawn only four assignments in that time, each one involving using muscle on people who felt that they deserved a larger slice of the sucker money than the organization was willing to give them. Oh, there had been a lot of small errands for Chowder. Go leave off the Continental and pick up the Mercedes. Stop on the way back for that case of wine.

In the real action, I had given them their money’s worth.

“Why are you talking about the investment in me?”

“Because this is a different kind of deal, Wally. This one is what you could call maybe a permanent fix.”

“Then you should send somebody too dumb to care what happens later. I have this aversion to electric furniture.”

He ignored me. “This one comes from the very top. Up until six months ago the company was grossing fifteen thousand a week out of Bruerton. That’s in upstate New York. Our local guy is Sid Marion. You met him at the meeting. The gross is from machines, books and grass.”

I waited patiently. “So when the gross sagged off to eight a week, the big man called Sid in and found out that a couple of years ago they put the cops on a merit basis, and six months ago the old Chief of Police died, and a younger man, this James Fosting, was put in. He can’t be bought. We can buy the number two in line, but that doesn’t do us any good while Fosting is there. The loss comes to a total of three hundred and fifty big ones a year, so the big man asked Sid to go to work on the new chief. Smear him. Buy him. Whatever. What happened was that even more of the action got closed down. There are a hundred and forty thousand people in that town up there. It should turn twenty thousand a week, not six. The front office has confidence in you, Wally. He’s yours.”

“Isn’t it work for a button man? Like you can borrow one from St. Louis or someplace.”

“No, because then the locals get very upset, and maybe our number two man won’t get in after all. This has to be accidental, Wally. Very smooth and very cool. You are coming along nice. You are very bright. I keep telling them that.”

“Thanks. I’m bright enough so I know that five hundred a week doesn’t buy that kind of work.”

“There’s a bonus authorized if you make out okay.”

“Like how much?”

“Like twenty.”

I thought it over and did some mental arithmetic. “Twenty is fine, plus ten percent of the total gross for the first year after he’s gone.”

Chowder shook his head sadly. “Wally, you should know I can’t go back to the front office with a crazy idea like that.”

At the door to the bedroom I turned and said, “While I’m dressing, maybe you should contact somebody and get an okay — or go get somebody else.”

“Will you drop down just a little?”

“Let’s get their offer first. Okay?”

I showered, shaved, put on a white shirt, the new cord suit, knotting the pale blue tie just the way I like it. I looked over the finished product in the full-length bedroom mirror. When I was eighteen, a lady told me that I reminded her of a big sleepy blond cat. She told me my eyes had a cold look.

I always think of her when I look in the mirror.

When I came back out, Chowder said, “He’ll go along at seven and a half percent.”

I walked to the door. “Okay. A deal.”

“Where are you going?” he asked.

I grinned at him. “First, I’m going downstairs and get my girl out of the bar. Then I’m coming back here and draw five thousand bucks advance. Then she’s going to pack my stuff, and I’m leaving for Bruerton. Okay with you?”

Gloria was at a corner table, and a slicker type had moved in on her. Gloria likes games. When she saw me coming, she unwrapped her fingers from the glass, and slapped her palm across the dummy’s mouth. He was one startled guy.

He looked up at me and Gloria pouted and said, “Honey, this man has been annoying me.”

I just looked at him. He knew his cards had come off the bottom of the deck. For three seconds he thought it over. Then he got up and slid away fast. I realized I was getting weary of Gloria’s little tricks.

“Why didn’t you hit him?” she demanded.

“Come on,” I said. “Time to pack.”

The eager light came into her eyes. Gloria likes far places. She likes to be on the move.

But she was disappointed. I checked her packing job on my stuff, folded the crisp bills Chowder gave me out of the safe, went in to where Gloria was packing her own rags and said, “Snap it up, baby.”

She smiled up at me. I told Chowder what I planned for Gloria and tipped the doorman off too. She was to wait in front for me while I got the car. I stacked her bags on the sidewalk and carried mine around to the car. I grinned to myself as I waited for a light six blocks away, thinking of the expression on Gloria’s face when she finally realized I wasn’t picking her up and she couldn’t get back into the building. The doorman would have a hard time scaring her off. In a week she’d cool off and be back at her job as dice girl in one of the bars.

It’s kid stuff to barrel along in a car like a big shot. I kept the needle right on fifty-five.

The bad thing about driving is that it gives you too much time to think. I had hoped to inch my way up in the organization without ever having the pressure on too hard. This was a horse of a new color. It gave me the trembles. It had been a long time since I had killed a man. The last one was in a Hamburg alley two weeks before I was picked up in the big raid. And that hadn’t been a pretty one. We couldn’t risk a shot, and I had to whip him to death with the gun barrel. He had been softening up and we were afraid he was going to the MPs, to clear himself by turning us in.

But that had been sort of a spur-of-the-moment deal. I remembered how sick to my stomach I had been after it was over. This was worse. This was more cold-blooded. I had the idea that it had been Chowder who recommended me for the job, hoping that I would foul up. I knew that Chowder was afraid of me.

The difference was in the background, I guess. When Chowder was a kid, he had been brought up in comfortable middle-class surroundings. While his mother was tucking him in bed, I had been sneaking out over the orphanage wall with Mick and Chucky, heading through the dark streets down to the waterfront, rolling the drunks we hauled into the alleys.

When I was fifteen, I drove for two crazy guys who specialized in gas stations. They chiseled me on my cut and I quit them the week before they stepped into a trap. It hadn’t been pretty. Their new driver caught one over the ear and sheared off a gas pump and they went up in flame and black smoke.

Rufe Ventano was the guy who smartened me up. During the three years I worked for him, making book, he taught me how to dress and act. He taught me the right line of chatter and the proper fork to use. The week he was dying in bed of pneumonia, I was picked up on a breaking and entering, and the court gave me a choice of state prison or the U.S. Army. I enlisted the day they buried Rufe.

After Basic I had another long training session at Benning for the Airborne. I found out I was not crazy wild about jumping out of airplanes and wangled a transfer to the MPs. I took their training and got sent to Germany. After a month of watching the clumsy crooks making big dough, I moved in. During the seven months I was AWOL, I made two hundred thousand dollars. I had it in hundred-dollar bills. When they closed in, I buried the fat stacks behind a rock in the subcellar we used as a headquarters.

As I drove toward Bruerton, I realized that if I could carry off the job they had given me, I could ask for a month off. The dough I would get, if properly placed, would get me legitimately to Germany. I wanted to dig behind that rock.

With the two hundred thousand, I could buy myself a little talent among the syndicate personnel, enough to move Chowder out of my way and take over his job.

So it all depended on how I worked it out with James Fosting, Chief of Police of Bruerton.

I left the car in a storage garage and took a cab to the hotel. I signed in as Thomas Quinn, giving a Chicago address.

My room with bath in the Stanley Hotel in Bruerton was that size where you can’t open the room door and the bureau drawer at the same time. The bed was narrow and hard. But it was a respectable hotel. That was important.

With the room door locked, I sat on the bed and went over, for the twentieth time, a few of the tentative plans I had made on the road. The day was fairly cool for September, so, after a shower, I changed to a tweed coat and gabardine slacks.

I got some of my shopping done that first day. I bought a used portable typewriter, a ream of paper and a briefcase. Then I had the room clerk get on the ball and get a suitable table for my room.

The other little item was more important. I had to be careful about it. After breakfast the second day, I walked around, heading toward the shabbiest part of the business district, until at last I found a print shop that looked next door to bankruptcy.

A bell jangled when I went in, and an old guy in a green eyeshade came out peering nervously through the gloom.

Even though I explained carefully that it was a joke I was playing on a friend, he didn’t want to cooperate until I let him see the corner of the twenty-dollar bill. I waited while he ran off the letterhead I wanted. It looked okay, and I paid him the twenty for five copies on his best-quality bond paper.

The letterhead was that of one of the top-flight publishing houses.

Back in the room, I wrote a rough draft of the letter, and then carefully typed it, I addressed it to my fake name, Mr. Thomas Quinn, at the address I had given on the register card when I checked in.

In composing the letter, I was aided by the three years of education I received while locked up. If I made Fosting suspicious in any way, he would check back with the publishing house. I had to carry off the act, and do it well.

My next job was to go to the public library, read some of the articles in municipal journals and make a list of a few men who were written up with loud praise. I was careful to select them from cities with which I was reasonably familiar.

From a drugstore phone booth, I called the number Chowder had given me for Sid Marion. When he came on the line I said, “Sid, just listen and don’t ask questions. I’ve come here to help out. You know who sent me. You met me at the annual meeting. Don’t blink an eye if you see me in funny company. I’ll call on you, if and when I need help.”

I hung up before he could answer. I had the feeling that the further I stayed from Sid Marion, the better I could operate. If he had been on his toes, he would have thrown some syndicate dough around in the Common Council to spike the police merit system before it ever got underway.

I expected that he would be surrounded with the usual group of amateur and semipro sharpies, ward heelers and buck-hungry hangers-on.

For guaranteeing him freedom from competition and a war chest to tide him over the rough times and legal talent to keep him out of the pokey — the syndicate stepped in to take half his net. A syndicate spy had, of course, been sent in to make certain that Sid wasn’t holding out.

The way the force was set up, the Deputy Chief had his office at Police Headquarters, and the Chief had an office over in City Hall, adjoining the office of the Commissioner of Public Safety.

I went in, sat on the bench in the outer office and spent some happy moments admiring the talent he had at the secretarial desk before I got the call to enter the sanctum.

James Fosting turned out to be a tall guy with a long leathery-looking face. About thirty-five, I guessed. He wore the local equivalent of a Brooks Brothers suit, and under the high forehead, the blue eyes had a harsh and knowing gleam.

I gave him my best-variety smile and handed him the letter. I didn’t sit down until he asked me to. There are cops who claim that they can tell a wrongo in one third of a second. Those cops have holes in their heads. No hick cop has ever made me on first look. You have to have presence. And a nice, open, honest smile.

I sat and watched him read the letter. His eyes flicked down it, then he started in again from the beginning and read it more slowly.

“Hmmmmm,” he said. “Very flattering, Mr. Quinn. I’m honored.”

“Can I assume that it’s okay with you, Chief?”

“With strings. One — I took over a very bad situation here, Mr. Quinn. Very bad. Straightening it out is still a fourteen-hour-a-day job. I can’t slight that job. You’ll have to get a lot of your information secondhand. Two — I want to read every word you write, and approve the final draft. One wrong sentence, and my political enemies might use it as an excuse to move me out of here.”

I knew he was normal, and I knew he had swallowed the hook. I didn’t even have to give the line a yank to set the hook.

Already he was thinking of himself in that book. City builder. Ha!

He had been crisp and businesslike, but now he had that old pleased gleam in his eye. He pushed a button on his desk.

The lush item came in briskly. “Miss Calder, this is Mr. Quinn.” I stood up, and we nodded at each other.

“Mr. Quinn is including a write-up of me in a book that has been accepted by a good publishing house. What shape is your work in?”

“I’m nearly caught up.”

“Good. I’m assigning you to Mr. Quinn. Have Miss Willington take over your desk. Explain the ropes to her. You are at liberty to give Mr. Quinn any information he may request. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

I was still standing. Chief Fosting stood up too. He stuck his hand out, and I took it. “When she’s given you all she knows, come to me to get the blanks filled in.”

I sat patiently on the bench again while Miss Calder finished a few letters and got hold of a chubby item named Willington and gave her the routine. Willington acted nervous, but pleased.

She sat on the other side of the booth.

I think of women in terms of music. I don’t know why. Gloria was barrelhouse piano with a driving bass.

There have been women who were bright, raw trumpet, or the gutty blast of a trombone. One or two have been a tom-tom beat.

But this Janet Calder was something else. A string section. Violins. The longhair brand of music. But neither cool nor faint nor dull.

She was nineteen or twenty. Blond. A wide, sensitive mouth, with a flare to her nostrils and wide eyes of a blue-violet shade. Keen eyes. They didn’t look as if they’d miss a great deal.

Her young body was almost excessively feminine, but she didn’t throw it around. She carried herself in a way that showed she could swim, play tennis, ride. Her hands and arms were tanned. Her eyebrows made her hair look dyed, which it wasn’t. They were thick black eyebrows, unplucked. They made me want to lean across the table between us and run the tip of my finger along them. They looked as though they would feel like fur.

Fosting knew what he was doing when he attached me to her for information. I scribbled in my prop notebook while she filled in the background.

It was an unusual background. Law degree. FBI before Vietnam. G-2 during that war. He had come back to his hometown in late ’77 just as the merit system went in. And he had become a rookie cop. With his talents, he passed the competitive examinations with a rating and performance record that got him up to sergeant in the middle of 1978, lieutenant by the spring of 1979, captain by Christmas of 1979. Oddly, the other men on the force didn’t resent his extremely rapid rise. When the Chief died, his grading was tops, and he moved into the hot spot.

I asked a few questions, scribbled down the answers.

“How come you know him so well, Janet?” I asked.

I saw the faint blush. She spun her Coke glass in a wet pool on the black marble tabletop, making a pattern of interlocking rings. She watched those rings as though they were very important and said, “My dad was a policeman for years. I was in business school when Dad was shot and killed on New Year’s Eve in 1977. Chief Fosting, then a rookie, took an interest in me and saw that there was enough money for me to finish the course. Then he helped me get a job.”

“Nice guy,” I said casually.

“It’s stronger than that!” she snapped. “He’s — he’s a wonderful man. I respect him and admire him more than any man I’ve ever met. He’s fair and honest and...”

I grinned at her. “How long have you been in love with him?”

For a minute I was afraid I had gone too far. Her face got white and her lips were firmly compressed. She had been calling me Tom, as per agreement, but she said, “Mr. Quinn, I hardly think that your job gives you any right to—”

“Hey, wait a minute, Janet!” I said. “I was just kidding. Take it easy. He’s a nice-looking guy and I thought you two maybe had some arrangement.”

Her anger faded. She looked rueful. “You know, he doesn’t even know I’m alive. As a woman, I mean. I’m just an efficient piece of office equipment. Sorry I flared up. I guess — well, I guess I am in love with him.”

There was no reason under the sun why her words should irritate me. But they did. It was certainly none of my business who she was in love with.

To cover up, I asked quickly, “Where does he live?”

“In a little room in the Stanley Hotel. It’s a horribly bare little room. He doesn’t seem to care about his environment. He’s so wrapped up in his work.”

That gave me a jolt. Fosting right in the same hotel with me. It might be a break.

“Any wine, women and song?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I sometimes wish he’d — well, get out sometimes. He looks so tired. But he says that there’s too much for him to do.”

“You live with who?” I asked.

She tilted her head to one side. “What has that got to do with your write-up, Tom?”

“I just wondered who you’d have to call to tell them I was taking you to dinner.”

“Are you?”

“You heard the Chief’s orders, Janet.”

Her smile was a little-girl grin. It wrinkled her nose and made me want to kiss her. “Okay,” she said. “Chief’s orders. If you must know, I live all by myself in an apartment complex for singles on Maple Terrace. And now you can take me back there so I can change.”

I compromised by putting her in a cab and promising to call for her in an hour.

Chapter Two Juggernaut

I found myself singing in my shower, and wondered why. I picked the answer up an hour later.

Funny how it happens to you. You think you have the world cased, have yourself all set from here on in. And then somebody throws a blond monkey wrench into the machinery. I decided that I was silly to keep the car out of circulation. So I took it out of the garage and called for Janet.

Janet came down looking like one of the girls they should put on magazine covers and don’t because they can’t find them often enough.

“Yours?” she asked when I opened the car door for her. When I told her it was, she said, “Writing must be pretty profitable. Maybe I’m in the wrong business.”

The steak house she suggested was fair, and, over the coffee, in order to make my story look good, I hauled out the notebook again.

I asked her to describe each of his movements on an average day. The guy was a bear for punishment. To the office by seven-thirty, on foot. Half an hour for lunch. Usually not through until nine. I casually worked in the idea that, since he had clamped down so hard on gambling, he must fear personal reprisals and go around with a bodyguard.

She laughed at that one. “Heavens, no! Jim — I mean Chief Fosting has put the fear of God into all the sneaking little men in this town. He’d consider it beneath his dignity to go around with a guard.”

I smiled. “Maybe I hadn’t ought to put that in the article. It might encourage somebody to potshot him.”

“I think he’d like them to try. He carries his own revolver and he’s an expert shot with it.”

That was an important fact to file away. Not that I was going to gun him down. I had better plans.

I folded the notebook, slipped it into my side pocket. “Working day over?” she asked.

“No. Not by a long shot. Now you’ve got to give me some of the local color. I can’t write a good chapter on Fosting until I know what the city is like. Where do we go from here?”

“I’m going to demand overtime!”

“Am I that bad?” I asked her.

“You’ll do, Quinn,” she said softly.

Some dregs of a long-forgotten conscience stirred me. Maybe some of it showed on my face.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

I smiled. “Where do we go?”

“There’s one place I’ve always wanted to go,” she said, “and I’ve never had an excuse before. But this could come under the heading of local color. I want to go to the Key Club.”

“Sounds interesting,” I said. “What is it?”

She had a pixie look in her eyes. “A disco where they gamble upstairs,” she said in a conspiratorial tone.

“Hey, I thought your boss closed those all up!”

“He did. All of the ones inside the city. This one is over the line.”

From the way the place was running, I knew that the fix was in, but good. Thus the peephole setup to get to the upstairs games was just so much thrill for the suckers, plus insurance against somebody knocking the place off with profit in mind.

It was a penny-ante outfit, with a dapper male cashier dispensing chips at the one, five, ten and fifty levels. There weren’t many fifties in play. I tried to stake Janet, but she shook her head, took a twenty out of her purse and bought twenty one-dollar chips. I did the same.

They were getting a college crowd at the place, plus the old-lady business, plus the beer-salesmen set. There was a bar in the corner.

Roulette, birdcage and the crap tables were getting a decent play. Janet stared around like a school kid in the principal’s office. The sign near the birdcage said that they would take a maximum fifty-dollar bet with a limit of six doubles. Thus the most that could be placed on a number on one turn of the cage was thirty-two hundred. Not good and not bad. The limit on doubles made the house percentage high enough to keep it honest.

I don’t know why I felt so proud to be with Janet Calder. She made all the other women up there look like harpies. She was like a fresh breeze blowing through the stale smoke.

She settled for the crap table. When I saw that the table posted no limit, I knew that the house had it gimmicked. With the education Chowder gave me, it didn’t take long to figure it out. They were set up to handle a routine switch of the dice, and they were playing on an oilcloth surface. That spelled trippers. It is the simplest dice fix.

The dice can be square and true and properly weighted, but on the side opposite the one they don’t want to come up, they have some sticky stuff, not noticeable to the touch. The dice will always roll, tumble and slide to a stop. They don’t slide on that sticky stuff. It will trip the dice over.

We found a place at the table wide enough for the two of us, and the pressure of her shoulder against my arm was very sweet indeed.

A florid yokel across the way was betting heavy, the sweat standing on his upper lip.

I told Janet to follow my lead and I started betting the other way, with the dice. The switch was pulled so smoothly that I didn’t see it. Sure enough, the red-faced citizen threw two aces, deuce-ace the second time, then tossed a six followed by a seven, while both Janet and I let our bets ride to a happy little total, which we dragged in.

Janet’s face was flushed with excitement. She didn’t understand what was going on, but she liked winning. I knew that if I was running the game, I’d feed her dice that build up a few naturals, so when they came to her, I told her to try five dollars. I was beginning to get on to the switch. Seven came out and I told her to let it ride. Seven again, the same way, and there was twenty in front of her. Suckers along the table piled on, hoping she was having a run, and I made a quick estimate, decided the stick man would let her get one more natural. Eleven came out and he paid off nearly all the way around. A lot of them were letting it ride, so I reached out and hauled in all but one chip for her.

“Whyn’t ya let the li’l lady play her own game, doc?” the stick man said.

I didn’t bother to answer him. He’d already pulled the switch. The dice came to a four, and then a seven. I passed them along. We’d each picked up fifteen bucks on the florid man’s bad luck, and thirty-four more on Janet’s passes. Total of ninety-eight.

It looked like the sort of bust-out house that would hate to have you walk out with even that much. I didn’t want a fuss, so I decided to drop my share and get out. A floor man had his eye on us and I guessed that the stick man had tipped him that I might be a little too wise for their good.

I wanted to drop the few bucks at the same table, but then Janet saw a poker game getting underway over in an alcove.

“There’s my game,” she said. “Come on!”

I didn’t like it. At first I was going to sit it out, but then I began to wonder just how far they’d go.

There were eight of us. The house dealt and took a cut of each pot. I took a long look at the other six players. They really had that game stacked. Two of them were house men, though trying not to look that way. The dealer had a mechanic’s grip on the deck.

It was five-card stud. No ante, of course. Five-buck bet, and after that it was pot limit. No limit on raises.

To warm the game up, the cards were dealt honestly the first few hands. The house boys were getting the feel of the six suckers. I folded my hand the first few rounds, and watched Janet handle her cards. She seemed to know what she was doing. When she had a ten of hearts in the hole, a nine of hearts up, she stayed once, and folded when her third card turned out to be the trey of spades.

Then the house began to go to work. A skinny citizen across the way, who kept biting his lip, got an ace up. He peeked at his hole card and bet five. A house man bumped him, and when it came around, Skinny advertised his aces back to back by bumping again.

It cost Skinny a hundred bucks to look at his last card. The house man came through, of course, with three sevens, whereas Skinny didn’t improve on his original pair of aces.

The next few hands were dull, and then I felt the kill coming. After the opening bet, Janet and me and the two house men were left. I had eights backed. She was on my left with a queen showing. The house man was on my right with a jack showing. The other house man had a ten showing.

I guessed that everybody had them back to back. Janet, with queens back to back, was looking down everybody’s throat. And, with my eights, I had to follow. The man with the jack showing bumped, and Janet bumped back, catching me in the middle.

The next card, the third card, didn’t help anybody but me. It gave me three eights. To make it look good, I bet fifty. Everybody stayed. The fourth card didn’t help me a bit, but it gave Janet three queens, gave the guy on my right his third jack and the other house man his third ten. At that point the two house men started bumping each other, with both Janet and me caught in the squeeze. Janet took the last of her money out of her purse, and I slipped her two hundred over her protest, telling her that she could pay it back out of the pot — if she won.

There was well over a thousand bucks in the pot by the time the flurry stopped. Janet’s hands were shaking. I was cold inside, figuring an angle.

It all depended on the first card dealt. That went to the house man with the three tens. If he collected the fourth, we were licked. He got a four. The next card came to Janet. An ace. No improvement.

My timing had to be just right. I waited until the card was free of the pack, the card that I suspected would give me the fourth eight. As soon as it was free, I slapped my cards over and said, “Folding!”

I kept my eye on that card that was free of the pack. I wanted to laugh at the expression on the face of the dealer. It was a stupid thing for me to do, as I could have called Sid in the morning and gotten my losses back. But I had to show off for Janet.

The dealer couldn’t stick the card back in the pack. It was frozen in the air for a moment and he said, “You can’t fold while the cards are coming.”

Without taking my eye off the card he held, I said, “I can fold anytime, brother.”

He had to give it to the other house man. My fourth eight. And the unused card on the top of the deck, I felt certain, was the fourth jack that the house man didn’t get.

Janet took another hundred, pushed it out into the pot and whispered to me, “Stupid! You threw in the winning hand!”

The house man didn’t call. Janet pulled in the big pot. The dealer gave me a long look.

We walked slowly to the desk and converted the chips into cash. The usual bouncer stepped up to me and said, “Sir, there’s a call for you on the phone in the office.”

“Wait down in the lounge,” I told Janet, and followed the guy. He opened the door, stepped in right after me and leaned against it. An ex-cabby type sat behind the desk, picking his teeth with a split match.

They gave me the silent treatment. I smiled amiably.

“Wise guys we don’t go for around here,” he said, favoring me with a black scowl.

I thought there was more to come, so I was off guard. The bouncer’s fist, cased in brass, caught me on the mastoid bone, and the edge of the desk hit me across the bridge of the nose as I went down.

Through a swirling mist, I heard the man behind the desk say, “Clean him, Al, and roll him down the back stairs.”

Al rolled me over onto my face. He started to fumble at my pockets. His necktie hung free. I got it in my hand and yanked down hard as I brought my knee up. The middle of his face made a sound like a ripe apple being run over.

As he fell across me, I reached through the kneehole of the desk, got one of the ex-cabby’s ankles in my hand and dragged him under there with me. He didn’t seem eager to join me. But he stopped objecting when I got him by the throat and banged his head against the leg of the desk a few times.

When they began to stir, I was seated at the desk talking to Sid. Al held a large handkerchief to the middle of his face. I smiled at them.

I finished my conversation and hung up. I put my fingertips together, my elbows on the desk. “You two shouldn’t have any trouble finding a job,” I said. “In some other town. Mr. Marion has just advised me that he’s replacing you, as of tomorrow night. You can pick up your pay from him. The new man will clean out these thumb-handed mechanics you’ve got in here and put in some artists. This place could net twice as much, if you let the public win once in a while.”

As I came around the desk, they started to make their apologies. I pushed my way out, glad that the brass hadn’t broken the skin, and wondering how soon I’d have to cover my black eyes with dark glasses.

Janet stood up as I appeared in the doorway of the downstairs lounge. In her eyes was mirrored the surprise that I had seen in the eyes of the boys on the upstairs door.

“What on earth did—?”

“Not here, baby,” I said. I took her arm, and we went out the side door to the floodlighted parking lot.

She didn’t speak until we were a half mile away, and picking up speed. Then she said, “You’ve got to explain, Tom.”

I found a quiet spot near a country crossroad, and pulled over. I cut the lights and motor, and held a match for her cigarette. She moved around in the seat so she could face me. “What happened back there?”

“Why do you ask?”

“A horrible little man came up to me in the lounge and said that you’d fallen and hurt yourself and that in a little while you’d be out in the car. I told him I’d wait right where I was. He shrugged and went away. I was getting scared. I didn’t know what to think of that phone call.” She paused. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, Tom.”

There was enough pale moonlight so I could see the lovely planes of her face, the delicate hollows at her temples.

“I did fall, but I wasn’t as badly hurt as they thought, Janet,” I said quietly.

“What happened at that dice table?” she asked. “What happened in the card game? Why did they act so funny? It was as though they knew something, and so did you, and they didn’t like your knowing it.”

I was right about those smart eyes of hers. She saw things, and her mind meshed very nicely. By trying to be Mr. Smooth, I had put myself neatly out on a limb.

There seemed to be a very good answer. I put my hands on her shoulders, pulled her toward me, slipped my arms around her. She ducked her lips away from me. But I caught her and kissed her. She went limp and dead, her lips firmly compressed. It’s as good a defense as any. I kissed her ummoving lips until I began to feel silly. Then I felt her stir in my arms, felt her arms creep up and circle my neck. And suddenly she was the most alive creature in the world. It lasted while the car seemed to spin like a crazy top, and then she tore herself away and planted a stinging slap, high on my face.

“Damn you!” she whispered. “Damn you!”

She moved over into the corner of the seat near the door and said in a small voice, “Take me home, please.”

No words were spoken on the trip back to her place. I let her out and walked up to the foyer door with her. She had been fumbling in her bag. In the darkness, after she had unlocked the door, she turned and thrust a wad of bills at me. As I bent to pick up the ones that fluttered to the porch, the front door shut firmly.

I shrugged, stuffed the money in my side pocket, parked the car in an all-night lot near the hotel and went up to my room.

While I was in the shower, the phone rang. I went to it, lifted it off the cradle and said cautiously, “Yes?”

Her voice. “Tom?”

“Yes?”

“Good night, darling.” She hung up.

Once again I found myself humming in the shower. I went to sleep thinking of her.

She must have changed her mind again. During the three days that followed, she gave me, in cool and precise tones, the answers to my questions. She refused to go out with me. I began to run out of questions. I had become an expert on James Fosting. I knew his shirt size, brand of toothpaste and next dental appointment.

On the fourth day, she broke down.

We were awkward with each other during dinner, with more things being said with our eyes than with our empty words.

Then we got in the car and, as I drove out of town, she leaned her head against the back of the seat. Her blond hair was tossed by the wind. We didn’t talk.

I found a secluded spot, and she came into my arms with a little sob that started deep in her throat. When I kissed her, I felt the tears on her cheeks. It wasn’t the sort of kiss I was used to. It was sort of a dedication. There’s no better word.

In my arms, she looked up at me and said, “Who are you and what do you want?”

I held her tight and smiled down at her. “I’m the guy who is writing a book. Remember me?”

She looked up at me, her eyes grave in the moonlight, and shook her head from side to side. “No, Tom. You’re not writing a book. Your publishers have never heard of you. No man named Al Justin has ever worked for them.”

I sat very still, and something inside of me turned to ice. I had guessed the reactions of Fosting, but I hadn’t taken into account the emotional reflexes of a woman.

Before I could answer, she said, “I don’t want anything to hurt him, Tom.”

“Who wants to hurt him?” I said.

“I think you do. You were at home in that gambling place, Tom. You were at home with those people. I–I don’t know what to think. There’s something fine and clean and decent about Jim Fosting. And there’s something about you as black as the grave.”

It jolted me. I tried to laugh it off. “You make me sound like a fiend!”

“Maybe you are, Tom,” she said softly.

“Then why are you here?” I asked her, tightening my arms to show her what I meant.

Her voice was broken. “I don’t know, Tom. I don’t know. I don’t trust you and I don’t love you and yet I can’t help...”

I tilted her chin up and kissed her again. She was eager in my arms, and a dull roaring obscured my hearing. I was conscious only of her, and then, as from a great distance, I could hear her saying, half moan, half sob, “No — no — no — no...”

I fought my way back to sanity and opened the car door. I stood out in the night, breathing in the cool air in great gulps. When I turned and smiled at her, her face was pale but composed.

“Thank you,” she said in a little-girl voice.

I knew it was time to go back. There was work to do. I left her at her door, kissed her lightly on the lips and walked back out to the waiting car.

Chowder had bribed his way into my room. He was sitting on the bed, waiting for me. One of the punks he collects was standing by the bureau, cleaning his nails with my file.

After I shut the door, Chowder said, “The boss thought you were taking too long, Wally. He wants it for tomorrow.”

“Okay, he gets it for tomorrow. Bright and early,” I said.

Chowder liked the plan I outlined. The best plans are the simple ones. This was simpler than most. Three blocks from the hotel was a small freight depot. Big trucks. Fosting left the hotel at seven sharp every morning. To get to the City Hall, he walked down a street with a narrow sidewalk, walled with red brick buildings.

At a quarter to seven there was only one man in the freight depot, a driver who came to hook his tractor onto a trailer full of groceries.

The plan was to get into the freight yard, sap the driver, hoist him into the cab and time it to move up over the sidewalk and crush Fosting against the bricks. The man handling it, which would be me, could then pull the unconscious driver over under the wheel, slip out and make like he was a witness.

The driver’s lack of memory would be taken to be the result of concussion. Shock amnesia. Routine accident. Too bad.

Chowder questioned me in detail. The punk filed his nails as he listened. I explained how the man with the sap could hide just inside the freight-yard gate and lay it gently over the driver’s ear as he came in. He’d never be seen.

All the time I was telling Chowder, I was thinking of Janet. She was a clean kid, a good kid. Fosting, in spite of the age difference, would be right for her.

But there wouldn’t be any more Fosting. And if there was the slightest slip, she knew enough to point the finger right at me. And that wasn’t good.

Chowder had a bottle and he kept nipping at it. He told me his room was right down the hall.

I couldn’t stop thinking of Janet, of the smell of her hair and the taste of her lips.

“What’s the matter with you?” Chowder asked. “You nervous?”

I was pacing around. I stopped and grinned at him. “Should I be?”

“I don’t know. You look edgy to me, pal. I hope you can handle this picnic okay. The front office wouldn’t want any slips.”

“But you wouldn’t mind, would you?”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“You’d like to see me nailed for it, wouldn’t you, Chowder?”

He sulked. “Ah, shove it, Wally.”

He sat on the bed and I could see that he was getting an idea. It was slow coming to him, and he had to nibble on it for some time. Then, when he had it set, he looked up at me without expression.

“You’re too nervous for the job, Wally,” he said.

I got it right away. “That’s right. Things weren’t going good. You came down here. Poor old Wally had a good plan lined up, but no guts. So you took over. Yep, Wally is all right for dreaming up things, but no follow-through. That means Wally wouldn’t ever fit into a responsible position like yours. Very cute. The point is, Chowder, how do you make it stick?”

Like a sucker, I had let the punk ease around behind me. I caught the signal that Chowder gave him, I ducked, and the sap nearly tore my ear off. I spun and he gave it to me, backhand across my mouth. I felt the teeth give as I dropped toward the floor. I never felt myself hit the floor.

When I came out of it, I was on the bed. Chowder was in the chair. His jaw sagged open and he was snoring. My ankles were tied together and my wrists were tied to the two bedposts at the head of the bed. Some kind character had stuffed a pair of my soiled socks in my mouth and tied them in place with a necktie. One end of a sock stuck out just far enough so I could see the pattern when I looked down my nose.

My head hurt just enough so that I knew the punk had sapped me again as I was falling.

Chowder slept like he’d had a lot of practice. I had a lot of time to think. And none of the thoughts were good. I knew that Chowder wouldn’t do the job himself. He’d get the punk to do it. Then he’d pay off the punk and say he did it. If it went wrong, the punk would be on a limb and Chowder would be out of town.

The organization would never forgive me after a foul-up like that. I’d never be paid more than muscle rates.

And yet, those reasons didn’t seem to be enough for the way I felt. I felt dirty all the way through — as dirty as that pair of socks that kept me from waking up Chowder.

The feeling of being dirty was all tied up with Janet Calder. It was as though I had been living in a box and she had torn off one wall and let some light in so I could see my own pigpen.

There aren’t any other words to explain it.

I stayed right there, thinking thoughts that hurt, until, as the windows started to get gray with dawn and the light from the lamp began to look watery and pale, there was the sound of a key in the lock, and the punk came in. He was a dark kid, with a weak mouth and long sideburns.

He saw that my eyes were open and he said, “Good morning, Glory!”

I got a look at his eyes and saw that he was stoned. Chowder was a damn fool to use a snowbird for that kind of a deal.

He shook Chowder, and the broad white face slowly came back to life, the eyes squinting at the light, the little upside-down U of a mouth working as though there was a bad taste inside.

“Whatsa time?” he demanded.

“Six. I just got back from the freight yard. I can get in okay. Everything set?”

“Sure. Get on your horse. Don’t let the driver see you when you sap him. You saw the street. And I showed you the picture of Fosting. Cruise along behind him until the street is empty. Then go in fast, Joey.”

Joey left. Chowder squinted at me and heaved himself out of the chair. He tested the neckties he had used to tie my wrists. Fifteen-dollar ties. And he had soaked them in water to get the knots tight enough. He cuffed me alongside the head, making my ear ring.

Then he went into the bathroom and pulled the door shut. I pulled hard, but those were good ties.

They hadn’t tied my ankles to the footboard. They had just tied them together.

I swung my legs up over my head until I was standing on the back of my neck. I got my toes on the headboard and pushed. The headboard was a good foot from the wall. They had moved the bed out, apparently, to fasten the knots and hadn’t pushed it back.

I got my numb fingers wrapped around the posts.

As I pushed with my legs, wood splintered and with a sudden, startling crash the whole pillow end of the bed dropped onto the floor.

I rolled up onto my feet, bringing the headboard with me. I held it above my head. I struggled for balance, made one hop toward the bathroom door. It was a good thing the room was small.

The bathroom door swung open and a startled Chowder ran out. I swung down with all my strength and the edge of the headboard hit him right at where his hairline would have been if he’d had hair on top.

He went back into the bathroom faster than he had come out. He slid across the short tiled space and piled up half under the john. I turned sideways to get the headboard into the bathroom and hopped in. When I got close enough to him, I jumped up in the air and came down on his face with my heels. It had to be that way because my ankles were tied together. The bad footing spilled me, and I hurt my back as I fell.

I soon found out that I couldn’t roll back up onto my feet in that restricted space. On my fanny, I inched over to the sink, reached up and knocked my razor off the shelf above the sink, using the leg of the headboard. It took me a long time to get my numb fingers to work properly so that I could open the razor. The blade fell out. I managed to pick it up, wedge it on end in a crack between two of the tiles. In the process of slashing the damp necktie, I took a piece out of my wrist.

With one hand free, I cut the other one loose, and freed my ankles.

Chowder had stopped worrying about this world. I weigh two hundred and five. Being too eager to keep him out of action for a little while, I had put him out for a long, long while — forever.

By the time I was ready to leave, it was ten minutes of seven. Knowing Chowder’s habits, I felt around his pulpy middle, and felt the hard butt of the belly gun that he kept wedged under his belt. It had no trigger guard, no sights and a barrel about an inch and a half long. But it threw a .38 slug.

I was telling myself that nobody was going to queer me with the front office by knocking off somebody in the method that I was going to use.

But I wasn’t believing the words I was telling myself.

They had made me stand to hear the fat jury foreman yell out the verdict. Even though I knew what it was going to be, it still sounded much worse than any words are supposed to sound.

The lawyer assigned to me had done his best, but there was too little for him to work with. Even if I’d told him the whole story, he wouldn’t have had enough to go on. He was willing, but he knew when he was licked.

Something was holding me up, but I didn’t know what it was.

The case had been pretty simple. I’d made no attempt to cover my tracks as far as Chowder was concerned. A splinter of his cheekbone had been driven down into the brain. My heel marks were on the flesh of his face, and they had found blood on my heels.

There had even been witnesses to the second murder. Fosting was a half block ahead of me. The big red tractor-trailer had come roaring along, not too fast. Not too fast to keep me from angling over and jumping up on the driver’s side.

Ahead was Fosting. He didn’t turn until the slugs from the .38, at close range, broke Joey’s head like a rotten melon.

Fosting turned as the truck bore down on him. I saw the comprehension, the sudden realization in his face...

A man with sweat stains at his armpits came over to me and took my arm and urged me gently toward the door where I was supposed to go out. The judge had finished mumbling over me. The jury faces had a sick, yet satisfied look. “I sure hate to do this but I’m doing my duty.” That kind of look.

He was urging me toward the door over at the side. Beyond that door was the long corridor, the stairs, the short sidewalk and the waiting police car. And a few months beyond the police car, hazy, and yet promising to grow much clearer, was the picture of a squat chair, a sullen, brooding chair.

A waiting chair.

At the doorway, I turned and looked back at the courtroom. Every day of the trial she had been there. Alone. White, white face and blue-violet eyes. Wide, wide eyes. Lips I had kissed.

Maybe I looked toward her for three seconds before the guy got my arm again. Beside her was the lean leathery face of James Fosting. He had made it for the last day. The kiss-off. I wondered what he was thinking. He knew that I had wrenched the truck out of the course that would have killed him. Yet he had to cover me, to force me to drop Chowder’s belly gun onto the asphalt.

They were sitting very close together. Her lips formed a word. “Thanks.”

And suddenly it seemed as if a lot of things were worthwhile.

But you can’t go soft. Out in the hallway the guard offered me a cigarette. I said, “Don’t smoke, friend. I’ve got none of the minor vices.”

As usual, the tired old gag worked. And I was in a slot to give it a little more impact than it usually had.

He caught on and he repeated the tag line. “None of the minor vices.” The other guard was waiting in the hall.

Between the two of them I walked down toward the stairs.

He was giggling so that his fat belly shook. “This guy’s got none of the minor vices, Harry,” he said, gasping, because, to him, it seemed like a very good joke.