The Galton Case

Chapter 26

I WAITED for the Lembergs on the dark porch. They came home after midnight, walking a bit unsteadily down the street. My parked car attracted their attention, and they crossed the street to look it over. I went down the front steps and across the street after them.

They turned, so close together that they resembled a single amorphous body with two white startled faces. Tommy started toward me, a wide lopsided shape. His arm was still in a white sling under his jacket.

Roy lifted his head with a kind of hopeless alertness. “Come back here, kid.”

“The hell. It’s old man trouble himself.” He walked up to me busily, and spat in the dust at my feet.

“Take it easy, Tommy.” Roy came up behind him. “Talk to him.”

“Sure I’ll talk to him.” He said to me: “Didn’t you get enough from Mr. Schwartz? You came all this way looking for more?”

Without giving the matter any advance thought, I set myself on my heels and hit him with all my force on the point of the jaw. He went down and stayed. His brother knelt beside him, making small shocked noises which resolved themselves into words:

“You had no right to hit him. He wanted to talk to you.”

“I heard him.”

“He’s been drinking, and he was scared. He was just putting on a big bluff.”

“Put away the violin. It doesn’t go with a knifing rap.”

“Tommy never knifed anybody.”

“That’s right, he was framed. Culligan framed him by falling down and stabbing himself. Tommy was just an innocent bystander.”

“I don’t claim he was innocent. Schwartz sent him there to throw his weight around. But nobody figured he was going to run into Culligan, let alone Culligan with a knife and a gun. He got shot taking the gun away from Culligan. Then he knocked Culligan out, and that’s the whole thing as far as Tommy’s concerned.”

“At which point the Apaches came out of the hills.”

“I thought maybe you’d be interested in the truth,” Roy said in a shaking voice. “But your thinking is the same as all the others. Once a fellow takes a fall, he’s got no human rights.”

“Sure, I’m unfair to organized crime.”

The wisecrack sounded faintly tinny, even to me. Roy made a disgusted sound in his throat. Tommy groaned as if in response. His eyes were still turned up, veined white between half-closed lids. Roy inserted one arm under his brother’s head and lifted it.

Peering down at the dim face, unconscious and innocent-looking, I had a pang of doubt. I knew my bitterness wasn’t all for Tommy Lemberg. When I hit him I was lashing out at the other boy, too, reacting to a world of treacherous little hustlers that wouldn’t let a man believe in it.

I scraped together a nickel’s worth of something, faith or gullibility, and invested it:

“Lemberg, do you believe this yarn your brother told you?”

“Yes.”

“Are you willing to put it to the test?”

“I don’t understand you.” But his white face slanted up fearfully. “If you’re talking about him going back to California, no. They’d put him in the gas chamber.”

“Not if his story is true. He could do a lot to back it up by coming back with me voluntarily.”

“He can’t. He’s been in jail. He has a record.”

“That record of his means a lot to you, doesn’t it? More than it does to other people, maybe.”

“I don’t dig you.”

“Why don’t you dissolve the brother act? Commit yourself where there’s some future. Your wife could do with a piece of you. She’s in a bad way, Lemberg.”

He didn’t answer me. He held his brother’s head possessively against his shoulder. In the light of the stars they seemed like twins, mirror images of each other. Roy looked at Tommy in a puzzled way, as if he couldn’t tell which was the real man and which was the reflection. Or which was the possessor and which was the possessed.

Footfalls thudded in the dust behind me. It was Mrs. Fredericks, wearing a bathrobe and carrying a pan of water.

“Here,” was all she said.

She handed me the pan and went back into the house. She wanted no part of the trouble in the street. Her house was well supplied with trouble.

I sprinkled some water on Tommy’s face. He snorted and sat up blinking. “Who hit me?” Then he saw me, and remembered: “You sucker-punched me. You sucker-punched a cripple.”

He tried to get up. Roy held him down with both hands on his shoulders:

“You had it coming, you know that. I’ve been talking to Mr. Archer. He’ll listen to what you have to say.”

“I’m willing to listen to the truth,” I said. “Anything else is a waste of time.”

With his brother’s help, Tommy got onto his feet. “Go ahead,” Roy prompted him. “Tell him. And no more kid stuff.”

“The whole truth, remember,” I said, “including the Schwartz angle.”

“Yeah. Yeah.” Tommy was still dazed. “Schwartz was the one hired me in the first place. He sent one of his boys to look me up, promised me a hundred bucks to put a little fear into this certain party.”

“A little death, you mean?”

He shook his head violently. “Nothing like that, just a little working over.”

“What did Schwartz have against Culligan?”

“Culligan wasn’t the one. He wasn’t supposed to be there, see. He got in the picture by mistake.”

“I told you that,” Roy said.

“Be quiet. Let Tommy do the talking.”

“Yeah, sure,” Tommy said. “It was this beast that I was supposed to put on a little show for. I wasn’t supposed to hurt her, nothing like that, just put the fear of God in her so she’d cough up what she owed Schwartz. It was like a collection agency, y’unnerstan’? Legit.”

“What was her name?”

“Alice Sable. They sent me because I knew what she looked like. Last summer in Reno she used to run around with Pete Culligan. But he wasn’t supposed to be there at her house, for God sake. The way they told it to me, she was alone by herself out there all day. When Culligan came marching out, armed up to the teeth, you could of knocked me over with a ’dozer.

“I moved in on him, very fast, very fast reflexes I got, talking all the time. Got hold of the gun but it went off, the slug plowed up my arm, same time he dropped the gun. I picked it up. By that time he had his knife out. What could I do? He was going to gut me. I slammed him on the noggin with the gun and chilled him. Then I beat it.”

“Did you see Alice Sable?”

“Yeah, she came surging out and yelled at me. I was starting the Jag, and I couldn’t hear what she said over the engine. I didn’t stop or turn around. Hell, I didn’t want to rough up no beast, anyway.”

“Did you pick up Culligan’s knife before you left, and cut him with it?”

“No, sir. What would I do that for? Man, I was hurt. I wanted out.”

“What was Culligan doing when you left?”

“Laying there.” He glanced at his brother. “Lying there.”

“Who coached you to say that?”

“Nobody did.”

“That’s true,” Roy said. “It’s just the way he told it to me. You’ve got to believe him.”

“I’m not the important one. The man he has to convince is Sheriff Trask of Santa Teresa County. And planes are taking off for there all the time.”

“Aw, no.” Tommy’s gaze swiveled frantically from me to Roy. “They’ll throw the book at me if I go back.”

“Sooner or later you have to go back. You can come along peaceably now, or you can force extradition proceedings and make the trip in handcuffs and leg-chains. Which way do you want it, hard or easy?”

For once in his young, life, Tommy Lemberg did something the easy way.