The Doomsters

21

THE DOOR behind her opened. Tom Rica leaned in the opening, with one frail shoulder propped against the doorframe. His sharp tweed jacket hung loosely on him.

“What’s the trouble, Maudie?” His voice was thin and dry, denatured. His eyes were puddles of tar.

Maude resumed her smiling mask before she turned to him. “No trouble. Go back in.”

She put her hands on his shoulders. He smiled past her at me, detachedly, pathetically, as if there was a thick glass wall between us. She shook him: “Did you get a needle? Is that where you were?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” he said in dull coquetry, using his hollow face as if it was young and charming.

“Where did you get it? Where did you get the money?”

“Who needs money, honey?”

“Answer me.” Her shoulders bowed across him. She shook him so that his teeth clicked. “I want to know who gave you the stuff and how much you got and where the rest of it is.”

He collapsed against the doorframe. “Lay off me, bag.”

“That isn’t a bad idea,” I said, coming around the counter.

She whirled as if I’d stuck a knife in her back. “You stay out of this, brother. I’m warning you. I’ve taken enough from you, when all I want is to do what’s right for my boy.”

“You own him, do you?”

She yelled in a brass tenor: “Get out of my place.”

Tom moved between us, like a vaudeville third man. “Don’t talk like that to my old buddy.” He peered at me through the glass wall. His eyes and speech were more focused, as though the first shock of the drug was passing off. “You still a do-gooder, old buddy? Myself, I’m a do-badder. Every day in every way I’m doing badder and badder, as dear old mother used to say.”

“You talk too much,” Maude said, laying a heavy arm across his shoulders. “Come in and lie down now.”

He turned on her in a sudden spurt of viciousness. “Leave me be. I’m in good shape, having a nice reunion with my old buddy. You trying to break up my friendships?”

“I’m the only friend you got.”

“Is that so? Let me tell you something. You’ll have dirt in your eyes, and I’ll be riding high, living the life of Riley. Who needs you?”

“You need me, Tom,” she said, without assurance. “You were on your uppers when I took you in. If it wasn’t for me you’d be in the pen. I got your charge reduced, and you know it, and it cost me plenty. So here you go right back on the same crazy kick. Don’t you ever learn?”

“I learn, don’t worry. All these years I been studying the angles, see, like an apprenticeship. I know the rackets like I know the back of my hand. I know where you stupid hustlers make your stupid mistakes. And I’m not making any. I got a racket of my own now, and it’s as safe as houses.” His mood had swung violently upward, in anger and elation.

“Houses with bars on the windows,” the blonde woman said. “You stick your neck out again, and I can’t cover for you.”

“Nobody asked you to. I’m on my own now. Forget me.”

He turned his back on her and went through the inner door. His body moved loosely and lightly, supported by invisible strings. I started to follow him. Maude turned her helpless anger on me: “Stay out of there. You got no right in there.”

I hesitated. She was a woman. I was in her house. With the toe of her shoe, Maude pressed a faintly worn spot in the carpet behind the counter: “You better beat it out of here, I’m warning you.”

“I think I’ll stay for a while.”

She folded her arms across her breasts and looked at me like a lioness. A short broad man in a plaid shirt opened the front door and came in quietly. His smile was wide and meaningless under a hammered-in nose. A leather blackjack, polished like a keepsake, swung from his hand.

“Dutch, take this one out,” Maude said, standing away.

I went around the counter and took Dutch out instead. Perhaps bouncing drunks had spoiled him. Anyway, he was easy to hit. Between his wild swings, I hit him with a left to the head, a right cross to the jaw, a long left hook to the solar plexus which bent him over into my right coming up. He subsided. I picked up his blackjack and moved past Maude through the inner door. She didn’t say a word.

I went through a living-room crowded with overstuffed furniture in a green-and-white jungle design from which eyes seemed to watch me, down a short hallway past a pink satin bedroom which reminded me of the inside of a coffin in disarray, to the open door of a bathroom. Tom’s jacket lay across the lighted threshold like the headless torso of a man, flattened by the passage of some enormous engine.

Tom was sitting on the toilet seat with his left shirtsleeve rolled up and a hypodermic needle in his right hand. He was too busy looking for a vein to notice me. The veins he had already used and ruined writhed black up his arm from wrist to wasted biceps. Blue tattoo marks disguised the scars on his wrists.

I took the needle away from him. It was about a quarter full of clear liquid. Upturned in the bright bathroom light, his face set in hard wrinkles like a primitive mask used to conjure evil spirits, its eyeholes full of darkness.

“Give it back. I didn’t get enough.”

“Enough to kill yourself?”

“It keeps me alive. I almost died without it, there in the hospital. My brains were running out of my ears.”

He made a sudden grab for the needle in my hand. I held it out of his reach.

“Go back to the hospital, Tom.”

He swung his head slowly from side to side. “There’s nothing for me there. Everything I want is on the outside.”

“What do you want?”

“Kicks. Money and kicks. What else is there?”

“A hell of a lot.”

“You’ve got it?” He sensed my hesitation, and looked up slyly. “Do-gooder ain’t doing so good, eh? Don’t go into the old look-to-the-future routine. It makes me puke. It always made me puke. So save it for the birds. This is my future, now.”

“You like it?”

“If you give me back my needle. It’s all I need from you.”

“Why don’t you kick it, Tom? Use your guts for that. You’re too young to go down the drain.”

“Save it for the boy scouts, den-father. You want to know why I’m a hype? Because I got bored with double-mouthed bastards like you. You spout the old uplift line, but I never seen a one of you that believed in it for himself. While you’re telling other people how to live, you’re double-timing your wife and running after gash, drinking like a goddam fish and chasing any dirty nickel you can see.”

There was enough truth in what he said to tie my tongue for a minute. The obscure pain of memory came back. It centered in an image in my mind: the face of the woman I had lost. I blotted the image out, telling myself that that was years ago. The important things had happened long ago.

Tom spoke to the doubt that must have showed in my face: “Give me back my needle. What’s to lose?”

“Not a chance.”

“Come on,” he wheedled. “The stuff is weak. The first shot didn’t even give me a lift.”

“Then you don’t have so far to fall.”

He beat his sharp knees with his fists. “Give me my needle, you hot-and-cold-running false-faced mother-lover. You’d steal the pennies off a dead man’s eyes and sell his body for soap.”

“Is that how you feel? Dead?”

“The hell I am. I’ll show you. I can get more.”

He got up and tried to push past me. He was frail and light as a scarecrow. I forced him back onto the seat, holding the needle carefully out of his reach.

“Where did you get it in the first place, Tom?”

“Would I tell you?”

“Maybe you don’t have to.”

“Then why ask?”

“What’s this fine new racket of yours that you were warbling about?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know.”

“Pushing reefers to school kids?”

“You think I’m interested in peanuts?”

“Buying and selling old clothes?”

His ego couldn’t stand to be downgraded. The insult blew it up like a balloon. “You think I’m kidding? I got a piece of the biggest racket in the world. Before I’m through I’ll be buying and selling peanut-eaters like you.”

“By saving green stamps, no doubt.”

“By putting on the squeeze, jerk, where the money is. You get something on somebody, see, and you sell it back a little piece at a time. It’s like an annuity.”

“Or a death-warrant.”

He looked at me imperviously. Dead men never die.

“The good doctor could be very bad medicine.”

He grinned. “I got an antidote.”

“What have you got on him, Tom?”

“Do I look crazy enough to tell you?”

“You told Carl Hallman.”

“Did I? Maybe he thinks I did. I told him any little thing that came into my little pointed head.”

“What were you trying to do to him?”

“Just stir him up a little. I had to get out of that ward. I couldn’t make it alone.”

“Why did you send Hallman to me?”

“Get him off my hands. He was in my way.”

“You must have had a better reason than that.”

“Sure. I’m a do-gooder.” His wise grin turned malign. “I thought you could use the business.”

“Carl Hallman’s got a murder rap on his hands, did you know that?”

“I know it.”

“If I thought you talked him into it–”

“What would you do? Slap my wrist, do-gooder?”

He looked at me through the glass wall with lazy curiosity, and added casually: “Anyway, he didn’t shoot his brother. He told me so himself.”

“Has he been here?”

“Sure he was here. He wanted Maude to hide him out. She wouldn’t touch him with gloves on.”

“How long ago was this?”

“A couple of hours, maybe. He took off for town when Maude and Dutch gave him the rush.”

“Did he say where he was going in town?”

“No.”

“He didn’t shoot his brother, you say?”

“That’s right, he told me that.”

“Did you believe him?”

“I had to believe him, because I did it myself.” Tom looked at me dead-pan. “I flew over there by helicopter, see. In my new supersonic helicopter with the synchronized death-ray gun.”

“Turn off the stardrive, Tom. Tell me what really happened.”

“Maybe I will, if you give me back my needle.”

His eyes held a curious mixture of plea and threat. They looked expectantly at the bright instrument in my fist. I was tempted to let him have it, on the chance that he knew something I could use. A few more caps in those black veins wouldn’t make any difference. Except to me.

I was sick of the whole business. I threw the needle into the square pink bathtub. It smashed to pieces.

Tom looked at me incredulously. “What did you do that for?”

Sudden fury shook him, too strong for his nerves to carry. It broke through into grief. He flung himself face down on the pink tile floor, sobbing in a voice like fabric tearing.

In the intervals of the noise he made, I heard other noises behind me. Maude was coming through the jungle-colored living-room. A gun gleamed dully blue in her white hand. The man called Dutch was a pace behind her. His grin was broken-toothed. I could see why my knuckles were sore.

“What goes on?” Maude cried. “What did you do to him?”

“Took his needle away. See for yourself.”

She didn’t seem to hear me. “Come out of there. Leave him alone.” She pushed the gun toward my face.

“Let me at him. I’ll clobber the bastard,” the man behind her lisped in punchy eagerness.

An Argyle sock hung heavy and pendulous from his hand. It reminded me of the blackjack in my pocket. I backed out of the doorway to gain elbow room, and swung the leather club over and down at Maude’s wrist.

She hissed with pain. The gun clanked at her feet. Dutch went down on his hands and knees after it. I hit him on the back of the head with the blackjack, not too hard, just hard enough to stretch him on his face again. The heavy sock fell from his numb hand, some of its sand spilling out.

Maude was scrambling in the doorway for the gun. I pushed her back and picked it up and put it in my pocket. It was a medium-caliber revolver and it made a very heavy pocket. I put the blackjack in my other pocket so that I wouldn’t walk lopsided.

Maude leaned on the wall outside the door, holding her right wrist in her left hand. “You’re going to be sorry for this.”

“I’ve heard that before.”

“Not from me you haven’t, or you wouldn’t be running around making trouble for people. Don’t think it’s going to last. I got the top law in this county in my pocket.”

“Tell me more,” I said. “You have a lovely singing voice. Maybe I can arrange a personal appearance, in front of the Grand Jury.”

Her ugly mouth said yah at me. Her left hand came out stiff, its carmine talons pointed at my eyes. It was more of a threat than attempt, but it made me despair of our relationship.

I left her and found a back way out. There were soft lights and loud noises in the cottages on the terraces, music, female laughter, money, kicks.