The Good Old Stuff

Noose for a Tigress (aka Trap for a Tigress!)

The gooks were coming through the rice. I could see it moving, and there was no wind. I cursed Beldan, out at point, and I couldn’t move. A heavy automatic weapon started a slow cadence. Chaw-pah, chaw-pah, chaw-pah!

I did the only thing I could do: I woke up. Slick with sweat. Panting. The automatic weapon was the beat of steel wheels on the rail joints. Beldan was long dead. Maybe I was dead too. A bedroom, they called it. A moving coffin on wheels. Aluminum and stainless steel, boring a roaring hole in the afternoon.

I looked out. Flatland, a lot of horizon. A gray, baked ranch moved by in forgotten grandeur. I lay there, feeling rested in spite of the violent end of my nap, and scratched my naked chest while I conjured up a vision of bourbon in the lounge car. Taller than tall. Colder than cold.

I washed my face in my private little sink, put on some of the nice new San Francisco civilian clothes, and admired myself. Oh, you hollow-eyed veteran, you! Same face that I’d taken to Nam. Smug and bland. I looked like a prosperous young account executive from a New York agency. Which I had been, they tell me. But it didn’t seem right that I should look like that now.

Funny thing. The Marines get stuffy about whether or not you have toes. They said, “Captain Pell, you have lost your toes in the service of your country. You are obviously no good any more. No toes. Goodbye, and muchisimas gracias.”

The shoes were tricky. When you walk, your toes bend and give you a little spring. When you don’t have toes, they put the spring in the shoe. A steel one. So I went springing down to the lounge car, bourbon-minded.

Marj, my ex-wife, was sitting on the left as I entered. Hanneman, her dignified beefy lawyer, sat cozily beside her.

Marj opened her sweet, moist, musky lips. “You dirty stinking welcher,” she said melodiously.

I smiled. “Enjoying the choo-choo ride?”

Hanneman smiled stiffly. “Sit down, please,” he said. “I’m still sure we can make some arrangement.”

He’d been saying that ever since we all got on the train. I sat down and waited. You know. Eager expression. Avid. Boy listening to smart gentleman.

“You can’t talk to that,” Marj said to him.

“Please, my dear,” he said, patting her hand. “Please.”

So I said, “Gosh, Mr. Hanneman, I don’t know why she’s so sore. I’m the one who should be sore. She tricked me into standing still for the divorce, and then she nibbled the judge into giving her fifty percent of all my future earnings. Now she’s mad because I went off fighting the Communists and all she could collect was half my base pay.”

“You dirty stinking welcher,” Marj said, wetting her slightly redundant lip line.

“See?” I said. “See, Mr. Hanneman? Now she’s sore because I’m not going back to work. She wants me in there knocking off my seventy-five thousand like before. She’s like a fight manager, trying to put a poor tired pug back in the ring. I’m a crippled veteran. They’re giving me a very small amount of disability money for the rest of my life. That isn’t earnings, so she can’t have half of it. With what I’ve saved, I’m going to build a shack in the tropics and lie on my back for the rest of my life. Can’t a man retire, Mr. Hanneman?”

He looked at me as though he smelled something bad.

“Mr. Pell, Mrs. Pell considers your offer to be unsatisfactory.”

I had offered ten thousand cash for a cancellation of the alimony agreement. This was a poker game we were playing. They were bucking aces backed.

“What does she want?”

“We feel certain you could manage to scrape up thirty thousand, Mr. Pell.”

I yawned. I made it a nice big juicy yawn. “I guess it’s ten thousand or nothing. I’m retiring. No more work for Simon Pell.”

Marj worked her fingernails like a cat. “If I take the ten, you’ll go right back to your job, damn you!”

“And if you don’t take it, I’m through working. Why should I work just so you can get half? You were a dope. You should have taken a property settlement instead of that silly fifty-percent business, Marj. You’re over a barrel and you know it.”

“We can’t force him to work, Marjorie,” Charles Hanneman said.

Marj switched tactics. She leaned across Hanneman’s beefy thighs and laid her moist eyes and cream of raspberry lips against my little gray soul. “You’re making things so dreadfully difficult, Sim, darling.”

“Gosh,” I said, “I thought you were having fun. A nice train ride like this. You and the majestic Mr. Hanneman. It gives you such a cozy excuse, you know.”

She chopped to my face with those claws. I got a coat sleeve in the way, and she broke one nail back to the quick.

Charles Hanneman said floridly, “I don’t care for those implications, Pell.”

I swallowed the remains of the bourbon and waved for more. I said, “And you, sir, should smarten up. Missy, here, is a playmate for men, not boys. She walks in an aura of dangling scalps. She’s a gun-notcher. She’s a pelt-stretcher. Why don’t you trot home to the wife and kiddies, Mr. Hanneman? Your wife probably senses the phoniness of your excuse for this trip anyway.”

He rose to his full height, towering red-faced. He clenched his fists. “Stand up, sir!”

I smiled at him. He made the mistake of reaching with both hands for my new lapels. I put a hoof in his midriff and snapped my knee straight. The Hanneman bulk moved backward toward the waiter bringing my drink. In the narrow space, the waiter did a pass with the tray that would have pleased a matador. He watched Hanneman bounce off the doorframe and land on hands and knees on the rug. Then he served my drink with a special flourish and a white-toothed grin.

Hanneman grunted and stood up and clamped both hands over his kidneys. He wore the expression of someone listening for something. It had happened so quickly that the other people in the lounge car looked at the poor man who had tripped and fallen. Up the line, a perfect hood type in a sharp suit with the face of a depraved weasel watched alertly. Too alertly. As though he knew too much of the score.

Hanneman crouched behind a facade of upright dignity. “I shall not stoop to your level, Pell,” he said. He turned and strode off.

Marj stood up. She wears clothes that pretty up the merchandise, though the merchandise is such that it would make a flour sack blush. She gave a flaunt and twitch of her hips that melted ice in the drinks all down the line.

“You dirty little monster,” she said in that musical sand-throated gargle.

She tilted off on her mission of mercy to soothe the back-wrenched ego. I glanced up the lounge. The hood type’s nose was back in his scratch sheet. Up the line was an empty seat by a cornflower blonde. The petaled eyes drifted across my face with a sensation like butterfly wings. She looked like the kind who wants to talk baby talk and is smart enough not to.

I trotted up and sat beside her. She smelled the grandma’s garden.

I breathed deeply and said, “Hah!”

The blue eyes were sly. “What’s with the ‘Hah’?”

“It’s a substitute. I get tired of an opening wedge about weather, or how slow the trains are, or do you live in California. Hence the Hah.”

“Hah to you too. Now where are we?”

“Launched on my favorite hobby. Hacking at attractive females.”

“Hack away, MacDuff. You’ll just dull your little hatchet. The girl is armor-plated. I’ll angle you for a free dinner and then pat you on the head. I never get tight and I’m not impulsive, and I’ve got four brothers, every one of them over six feet.”

“Round one coming up. I just got back from Nam. I haven’t talked with a girl like you for many long months. My name is Simon Pell.”

“I just got back from Hawaii, and you’ve never talked to a girl like me, and my name is Skipper Moran. End of round one.”

“You must have read Thurber. The war between the sexes.”

“Nope. Just another Sweet Briar graduate. Fencing Three is a compulsory course.”

Then we laughed and began to get on well. So I drank two more than enough; and then we ate, and then we drank some more; and then, as promised, she patted me on the head and went off to bed, leaving my tentative kiss planted firmly in midair.

I trudged back to my little bedroom, whupped for the nonce. Marj was waiting outside my door. “Please may I come in, Sim? I have to talk to you.”

Her underlip was out like a candy shelf and her eyes looked like a stoked furnace.

I opened the door and waved her in. Courtly. Controlled. She had changed clothes. Where do they get that line about a “simple print dress”? Maybe the print was simple, but the dress was pretty complex. It had to be complex. It had a job to do. It had to fit like the hide of a speckled trout, play give-and-take with varied sinuosities, and still manage to make the package look like a lady.

She sat on the little padded shelf seat that folds down out of the wall beside the closed door. I sat on the unmade bed. She looked at me until smoke drifted out of my ears.

“We had something, Sim. Where did we lose it? How did we lose it?”

“Our pockets were picked, maybe?”

“Be serious, Sim. I’m serious. I’m dreadfully serious. You stopped loving me, Sim.”

“I’ve always hated crowds, honey. I got out when it started to look as if I was going to have to stand in line.”

“Don’t be cruel, Sim. Don’t throw that up to me. I’m weak. I know I’m weak. I don’t know how I could have done that to you.”

“You’re weak like the Kremlin.”

“I know why you say such dreadful things to me, Sim,” she said softly. “It’s because I hurt you so dreadfully. You’re striking back.”

I smiled at her. “When they flew me to Japan, there was a nurse there. A little bitty thing with a face like a hopfrog and a figure like a milepost. She smelled of anesthetic and walked so heavy she kept shaking the bed. I would rather spend five minutes with her than ten lifetimes with you, darling.”

She shut her eyes and her lips went taut. I guessed she was mentally counting to ten. She got it under control and stood up dramatically, spreading wide her arms. The simple little print cooperated nicely. She said, “Do I mean nothing to you, Sim?”

She moved closer to me, she and her perfume. I knew her, knew exactly how she looked in shadow or sunlight or under a two-hundred-watt bulb.

“Aren’t you getting a little hippy, Marj?” I asked her solemnly.

She pivoted and tried to spoon out my right eye with her thumbnail. I stood up and hammered her twice with the heel of my hand. Her eyes went blank and her knees wobbled. She sat down hard. Panting. And then she started to cry.

“Okay,” I said. “Now that we’ve had our little drama, get to the point.”

She looked at me. Now she was herself. Chrome steel and broken glass. “I’ve got to have money. Quickly.”

“How much and what for?”

“Thirty thousand dollars. I pay it or go to prison. I did something silly.”

“What did you do?”

“I met a man. I thought he was nice. He sent me to Juarez, and a Mexican gave me a package to bring back. He wouldn’t give it to me until I signed a receipt. I took the package back to the man, and he gave me five thousand dollars. They picked him up twenty minutes later.

“A month ago another man contacted me. He has the receipt I signed. He wants thirty thousand dollars for it. If I don’t give him the money, he’ll turn it over to the authorities and put them on me. I didn’t sign my right name. But the handwriting is mine, and the cops have my description. I told him he had to wait until you came back, when I could get the money from you.”

“What was in the package?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t try to kid me, Marj.”

“All right. It was heroin.”

“And you knew it in advance, before you went after the package.”

“No, I didn’t.’

“Keep lying, baby, and I won’t even give you the right time.”

“All right — so I knew what it was! But it meant five thousand dollars. That stinking allotment from you didn’t even buy cigarettes.”

“Anybody that gets messed up in a filthy business like that deserves to go to prison, Marj.”

She started to cry again. She covered her face and sobbed incoherently. “Work in prison laundry... starchy foods... come out when I’m an old woman...”

“Where does Hanneman fit?”

“He’s nothing. He’s just on the string. I can brush him any time.” She said it calmly, the tears gone.

“Why do you expect me to give you the money?”

“Because it is all your fault, Sim. If you hadn’t gone running off like a fool, I would have had enough money so I wouldn’t have gotten in a jam. Now you’ve got to get me out of it. You’ve got to!”

I pitied her. It wasn’t her fault she had been born this way. Marj grew up without the very essential knowledge of what is right and what is wrong.

“How much time have you got?”

“A week from today. He won’t give me any more time.”

“What am I supposed to get out of it?”

“I’ll do anything you want me to do. Anything, Sim.”

“There’s nothing you can do for me, Marj. When you cured me, you cured me for good. I really loved you. Seems funny as hell, now.”

“I wish I were back with you, Sim.”

“My friends miss you too.”

“Now you’re being cruel again. Please don’t be cruel, Sim. Give me the money. You have it. I know you have it.”

I sat and thought of all the times she had lied to me, her eyes bland and sweet and her mouth like an angel’s. Turnabout was fair play.

“I guess I’ve been kidding you along, Marj,” I said. “When I was ordered to active duty I liquidated my securities and put the whole works into irrevocable annuities. I couldn’t touch it if I wanted to.”

She looked at me. I saw her face change. First, incredulity. Then horrified belief. Then a fear that ripped through her like a rusty bayonet.

She stood up and reached blindly for the door. I said, “Let me know if they give you enough cigarettes while you’re doing time. I can afford that for old time’s sake.”

Marj went out and shut the door softly behind her. I looked at the door a long time. You think of some way to take revenge, and then you get your chance, and it leaves an evil taste in your mouth. I’d been a patsy for her, and now the situation was reversed. The saddle was strapped to her back now. And I had sharp spurs. Let her tremble. Let her eat dirt. Let her come out of the pokey with all the hopes and juices and muscled sheen dried up forever.

Serves her right, I said. But I knew that I couldn’t do it. I knew I was going to give her the money. Kiss it goodbye. I don’t know why I thought I owed her anything. On the other hand, maybe it was a good deal. In one year I’d make it back, once I got out from under that fifty-percent agreement.

Anyway, I could let her sweat it out until we arrived in New York. That would be time enough. I undressed and turned out the light and shoved the shade up. Starlight was bright, and I lay in the rattle-sway of the train, cradled in the night roar of wind and steel wheels. I like trains. I had told her I wouldn’t talk to her anywhere else.

I fumbled up out of sleep and snarled at the door. I wrapped myself in the sheet and, without turning the light back on, pushed the latch over. She came in with the recognizable perfume floating around her and shoved something toward me. “Take this, Sim.”

When awakening, I’m not at my best. I’m dull. I’ve got a reaction time like somebody in a morgue drawer. So I took it. It was sticky.

She shut the door with herself on the inside. I clamped the sheet with my arm, got the light on, and stared stupidly at what I was holding: a big fat switch knife with a six-inch blade. A blade that looked as though it had spent all day on the farm, butchering pigs.

I opened my hand. The knife fell out. I looked stupidly at the blood on my hand. And then I looked at Marj. She was the color of a skid-row handkerchief. Her eyes were holes in the side of the world, leading nowhere. She wore a blue something-or-other hung over her shoulders. Underneath the blue was black. Black lace and shiny black satin. She had blood on her hand, too. She was breathing fast and hard, putting considerable strain on the black lace.

I looked at the knife and then at her. “Who the hell did you kill?”

Her words were like moths trying to get out of a lampshade. “I didn’t kill anybody. Charles was in my compartment. I went down to the women’s room. When I came back, he was dead. I’ve got to get him out of there!”

“Complain to the conductor.”

“Hell with you, Sim. Now you’re in it too. You help me, or I say you came in and stabbed him. Jealous. Ex-husband. I’ll swear it on the stand, on a million Bibles. I’ll never change my story.”

“Who did it?”

“I don’t know who did it. Or why. I just know he’s there and he’s too heavy to lift.”

“So you came and gave me the knife. How sweet of you, darling!”

“I couldn’t take a chance on your saying no, Sim. Get him back in his place. Then we can put the knife back in him and get the blood off us.”

“Otherwise?”

“They’ll try to hang it on me, Sim. And I’ll tell them I saw you do it.”

It was nice and tight. A comfy fit. It was like a size fifteen collar on a size sixteen neck. A rope collar.

“You’re in the next car, aren’t you? Anybody see you come in here?”

There was triumph in her eyes. “I knew you’d help me. Nobody saw me.”

She scouted the corridor while I pulled on pants and a shirt and shoved my feet into the trick shoes. I wished very much that I hadn’t socked him in view of the whole lounge car. We went to her compartment in the far end of the next car toward the engine.

Charles Hanneman was exceedingly dead. He knelt beside the bed, chest and face flat against it, hands all tangled up in the blankets. The hole, like a wet coin slot, was on the left side of his back, just below the shoulder blade. Blood had run down his white shirt into the waistband of his trousers. Not much blood. I had recently seen some very messy bodies. This one had all its parts and did not bother me. And it didn’t seem to bother Marj.

“I’d hate to think you did this, Marj,” I said.

“I didn’t, if that makes any difference to you.”

“Where’s his place?”

“The second bedroom down the aisle.”

Hanneman’s suit coat was there. I worked his putty arms into the sleeves, rolled him onto his back onto the floor, and buttoned the coat in front.

“How do you want to do this?” she asked.

“I can manage him alone. Take a quick look and see if his bedroom is okay. Then come back and make like a guide.”

I pulled him into a sitting position, then hoisted him up onto the edge of the bed and held him so he wouldn’t topple over. His fat flesh jounced peacefully in the vibration of the train.

She came back and nodded. I pulled his arms over my shoulders, held his wrists down in front of me. Then I stood up, leaning forward like a man carrying a trunk.

I staggered like a nine-day drunk. I was carrying the horrid results of too much pastry and too many mashed potatoes. The motion of the train didn’t help a bit. By the time I rolled him off onto his own bed, my eyes were out on the end of stalks and I was puffing like an also-ran at Santa Anita.

She tried to hand me the knife.

“Uh-uh,” I said. “You take that into the women’s room, and if you’re real bright you’ll find some way to drop it out onto the tracks.”

Hanneman’s wallet had fallen out of his pants pocket. Marj sat on her heels on the floor and opened it. She looked at the sheaf of Uncle Sugar’s IOUs and her eyes shone like a bride’s.

“This will make it look like robbery,” she said.

“Odd, isn’t it? Let me see the wallet.”

She gave it to me, without currency. The card case was quite full. It was very interesting. Charles Hanneman, Attorney at Law. And some others, equally crisp, equally new. C. Arthur Hineman, M.D.; Charles A. Hand, Bursar, Powelton College; C. Andrew Hanson, Broker.

“What do you know!” I whispered.

“What’s that? What’s so interesting?” she said, breathing down my neck.

“Never you mind. Pop will take care of this.”

She used the blue thing to wipe the door, inside and outside. The coast was clear and we parted. I disposed of the wallet and cards in the manner I had suggested to her. I went back and sat on my bed and thought about obese, florid confidence men.

When she tapped on my door, I let her in without turning on the light. She came into my arms, trembling and whimpering. I held her and made comforting sounds. Pore little girl. Pore tired little girl. She was nice to hold. Her lips came up tentatively, then enthusiastically. I broke the clinch with the heel of my hand against her pretty chin. She blundered around in the little bedroom, grumbling and kicking anything handy, and then left in a tizzy.

As soon as she had gone, I put the light on and started hunting. It didn’t take long. It was under the bed where she’d tossed it, covering the sound with her pretended anger. I reached under and pulled the knife out and presently sent it to join the wallet.

Skipper Moran gave me a pretty smile that meant, Join me for breakfast. She said aloud, “Does your little head still burn where I patted it, Simon?”

“Burned all night. Throbbed like a toothache. All I could do was lie there and pant.”

“You lie as good as you pant, Mr. Pell.”

“We’re in Chicago in another hour or so. Are you going all the way through to New York? Can we get on the same train?”

She smiled. “Poor throbbing boy.” I made another inventory of the face. Sweet stubborn chin. Flower-petal eyes. “Why are you staring?”

“It’s just pleasant to look at a woman with a certain amount of decency in her face. You’ve a good face, Skipper. It has been around, and it has gotten wisdom instead of toughness.”

She looked at me oddly. “That’s quite nice. That you should think so. Trying to disarm me, Simon?”

“That’s a splendid idea.”

She grinned. “You’re too soon out of the hospital for the big leagues, rookie.”

Something was wrong. I didn’t catch on until the second strip of bacon. “I didn’t mention any hospital, Skipper. I mentioned Vietnam, nothing more. What kind of spy are you?”

She looked upset. Prettily confused. “You must have said something about it, Simon.”

“I was careful not to, Skipper. A sympathy pitch is not my style. And another thing. That empty chair in the lounge car was almost too opportune. There are never empty chairs by lovely blondes. And I did get the eye. Oh, very subtly, but I got it.”

She laughed. A good try, only faintly strained. “Oh, Simon! You’ve got to stop reading novels. I’m a gal on a train. I’m heading for New York.”

A neat brisk young man with a neat, close shave and an eye like the accounts receivable ledger came down the diner, looked through me, and put his lips practically against my gal’s little pink bunny ear.

She had been looking at me. She started looking through me. She got up, remembered her manners, gave me a smile about three millimeters long, and departed.

When I had gotten tired of toying with my third cup of coffee and half decided it was time to pack, she came back. She sat down and ordered coffee.

She balanced me on the razor’s edge of her eyes and said, “Your ex-wife’s friend was knifed during the night. Know anything about it?”

“I never knew Dick Tracy was such a master of disguise.”

“Don’t clown, Simon. I’m talking off the record and out of order and against instructions. So don’t clown. What do you know about it?”

I forked a groove in the tablecloth and admired it for a moment. I heard her coffee being brought. I heard her tear the paper off the sugar.

“My ex enlisted me last night. The corpus undelectable was in her boudoir. It was either pull an assist or try to talk myself out of an eyewitness report. So I moved junior back to his own room.”

“You just made a very intelligent decision, Mr. Pell.”

“Moving the body, or telling you?”

“Moving the body was almost unforgivably stupid. I suppose you told her you wouldn’t give her the money.”

“If I kept a diary, I’d swear you’d been peeking.”

“Why do you feel such a compulsion to be flip?”

“Counter question. Who are you?”

“A working girl. Working.”

“You don’t know what a shock this is to me. I thought it was my good looks and sparkling personality that intrigued you.”

“When, as a matter of fact, it was the criminal tendencies of your ex-wife. Marjorie has been a cooperative little morsel, Mr. Pell. Without knowing it, of course. We’ve had the net over her ever since Juarez, hoping for leads.”

“Hmmmm. A junior G girl.”

“No. A clerk-stenographer CAF-ten filling in because our little club is a bit shorthanded. The man who came and spoke to me is phoning ahead. I’m afraid we’re going to have to take her into custody now.”

“Do you think she killed Hanneman?”

“Oh, no. Hanneman was hired to ride herd on her and protect the investment. She must have told him you turned her down. My guess is that he tried to tell the others and they thought he was pulling a fast one. The knife work is typical of — some others we’ve found.”

“Hanneman had her convinced that he was a trustworthy legal eagle.”

She smiled sweetly. “No one is as gullible as a cheap crook, Simon.”

“Then you can just pick up the guy who did it, eh? No fuss. No problem.”

She snapped her fingers. “Sure. Just like that. All we’ve got to do is pick him or her out of a hundred and ninety-three passengers.”

“Maybe I’ve spotted him for you. The slick-looking punk in the sharp suit in the lounge car.”

“Mr. Delehanty is one of us, Simon. Sorry.”

“Nice guess, Pell. Try again. Some sweet little old lady, maybe?”

“I said others. We know of one of them. And we also know he didn’t have the opportunity to kill Hanneman. So there are two of them. That was our tip. Two aboard. Plus Hanneman and Mrs. Pell. These people are canny. They don’t contact each other. Not where it can be observed.”

I frowned. It didn’t seem to fit just right. “Look, maybe I’m stupid. But I thought, according to the comic books I read, that there was big dough in this importing dope for the twitch and glitter trade. So why the uproar over a lousy thirty thousand?”

“Thirty thousand, plus a willing tool, Simon. First they’d take the thirty thousand, and then they’d show her one of the photostats of that receipt she signed. And then they’d send her down to join the Mexican end of the organization. They have a spot all planned for her, we think. Using her obvious charms on gullible tourists to get them to take stuff across the border. She would do it well.”

“And enjoy the work,” I said flatly.

“She did hurt you, didn’t she?”

“A long time ago, Skipper. Just the scar itches sometimes.” I frowned again. “Say, don’t they organize the smuggling better than that?”

“My dear Mr. Pell. The very best man you can get is some banker from Toledo with shining face, balding head, and sterling reputation.”

“Marj could collect that type like postage stamps.”

“She’s still got a little too much spirit for them. They planned to break her down, flatten her out good, and then put her to work after they had taken her for as much money as they could get.”

“Lovely people.”

“I’ve seen what they’ve done. I’ve seen fifteen-year-old children who open their wrists with a pin and use an eyedropper to squirt in the dreams. I hate the peddlers, Simon. I hate their guts!”

“Look. I better pack. Not much time left.”

“You’ll have plenty of time, Simon. Everybody on this train is going to have a long personal interview and show credentials. All of them are going to be hopping mad except one. And he’s going to be scared and desperate.”

They ran the Amtrak train over onto a siding that hadn’t been used since Casey Jones took his header. It was in a wilderness of tracks, out near a jungle of derelict boxcars and rusting steam locomotives. Chicago came equipped with its usual strong wind. The train stopped and the men were already spotted. Spaced out. A perimeter guard with shotguns and riot guns through the crooks of their arms. Neat young men who leaned against the wind while their topcoats flapped.

A puffy little man with protruding glass-blue eyes collared me in the aisle. “Friend, this is an outrage,” he wheezed.

“What’s the trouble?”

“Haven’t you heard? Look where we are. Out in the middle of nowhere! Some bum was knifed on the train. Busybody cops have taken over one of the cars up front. We got to go up there, one at a time, and let them question us. Me, I got a meeting to go to.”

The little man stamped on down the aisle, grunting and wheezing with indignation.

An official came through. “Kindly remain in your own car until called.”

I looked out my window for a while. They were handling it pretty well. Every few minutes one person or a couple would head across the tracks, windblown Elizas crossing the ice, heading toward civilization.

I wondered about Marj and decided to pay a little social call. I went into her car and tapped on her door.

“Yes?” a stentorian female voice said.

I pushed the door open. An iron-gray slab-faced matron with eyes like roller bearings stared at me. She had three parallel scratches down her cheek. Marj sat on the bed. I forgot about the planted knife, about her greedy amorality. She was a child who now stood outside life’s candy store, nose flattened wistfully against the glass, looking in at the goodies she could no longer afford.

They’d put handcuffs on her. The sleeve of her dress was ripped and her cheek was puffed, turning blue. She looked at me and said in a soft voice, “Thanks so much, Sim. Thanks for turning me in.”

There was no hope of explaining to her. She had gone too far away. She wouldn’t hear anything I said.

“Out,” the matron said.

Out I went, feeling exactly as though, hat in hand, I had tiptoed into sickly flower scent to view a waxen face on the casket pillow. I felt soul-sick and emptied.

As I walked back, I told myself I was a big boy now. I shaved and everything. I’d even snuck up on a gook tunnel and dropped a present inside that went boom. So this was just a tramp I happened to marry once. Lots of people marry tramps. Lots of tramps marry people. The silken wench was no longer a part of my life. It would be easy to forget her. Just as easy as leaving your head in the hatbox along with your hat.

I went into the men’s room and sat on the leather bench and exchanged cool stares with a salesman type inhabiting same bench, lipping an evil cigar butt.

“Hell of a note,” he said.

“Yeah,” said I.

He got up and slapped himself vigorously in the belly, belched largely, and left, dropping the butt into a shallow spittoon, where it hissed softly like a dying balloon.

I got up and aimlessly tried the john door. Locked, of course. I had me a drink of ice water. I wondered if the lounge car was in a fluid state. I wandered back toward it.

A conductor in a dark blue shiny suit said, “Stay in your own car, mister.” He had bright red cheeks and frosty blue eyes and a shelf of yellow teeth that pushed his upper lip out of the way.

“Got the time?” I asked him.

He looked at his wristwatch. “Nearly eleven, mister.”

I clumped back to the men’s room. I stood and looked out the top of the window, the unglazed part. The staunch young men were still leaning against the wind. I wondered how they’d work out as replacements in Vietnam. Replacements are so shocked at having the countryside loaded with eager little brown men who desire earnestly to shoot them dead that they obligingly freeze and get shot. The ones who scramble fast enough to avoid this unhappy fate six or seven times thus become what the newspapers call “combat-hardened veterans.”

The unobliging conductor appeared from somewhere on my right, spoke to one of the young law enforcers, and plodded across the tracks toward the distant station, shiny shoulders hunched against the fingers of the wind.

In due course they got to me. They said, “Okay, Pell. Sit over there.” I sat. They were thorough with the ones who came after me. Name, occupation, residence, identification, any personal letters, please. Reason for the trip. All recorded neatly.

A hefty man with a tombstone face who seemed to be in charge said, with considerable satisfaction, “Okay. That’s one ninety-two. He’s on the train, boys. Go get him, and be careful.”

Skipper moved over and sat across from me. “He was afraid to try to bluff his way through. We’ve got him now, Simon.”

It took thirty minutes. The boys came back. They looked as if the old farmer had just rock-salted them out of the orchard.

“He’s gone, chief.”

Tomb-face stood up. “Gone! How?”

“Maybe he dropped off the train before it got here, chief.”

“Impossible! You know that as well as I do. Did you look everywhere?”

“Even the ladies’ rooms,” the thinnest one said with a pretty blush. “One part of them is locked, of course. The train people locked them as we were coming in.”

“Maybe he picked the lock on one of them. Where’s that conductor? Get his keys.”

“He went over to the station. He’ll be back.”

“Get keys someplace, dammit!”

“Yes sir, chief.”

Skipper said, “If they don’t find him that way, the only answer is that he brought his invisible coat along.” She tried to smile, but there wasn’t much heart in it. “We wanted to get this one. Our tipster told us he was very high in the organization.”

I stared at her. I said, too loudly, “He did bring his invisible coat, honey.”

Tomb-face glared at me. “Shut up, you.”

I looked at him steadily. “Friend, maybe you’ve gotten too accustomed to talking to the lower classes. You use that tone of voice on me again, and I’ll slap a little courtesy into you.”

“When we want suggestions, Pell, we’ll—”

“Ask me, because I happen to have one. Something has been nibbling away at the back of my mind. Now I know what it is. If you want to hear it, suppose you tell me that you’ll take it as easy as you can on Mrs. Pell.”

“That isn’t my decision to make, Pell.”

“Then kindly go to hell. Every minute you stall, your friend is getting further away from here.”

That got him. He probably had superiors riding him. He licked his lips and looked almost human.

“I’ll see what I can do,” he said uneasily.

“Okay. Did you ever ask a conductor what time it is? He pulls out a big gold turnip and tells you it is three and a half minutes to eleven. I ask a conductor the time. He looked at a wristwatch and said it was almost eleven. And then I saw him walk right through your cute little cordon out there. Who looks twice at a conductor’s face? I can even tell you where the real conductor is. Knocked out, or dead, and locked in one of the Johns with his own keys.”

“I don’t suppose you’d know what he looked like?” Tomb-face asked, but gently this time.

“I’ve got a vague idea. Five nine or ten. Hundred and sixty pounds. Gray hair, possibly bald on top. Bright red cheeks, high cheekbones, very cold little blue eyes. Big yellow teeth that stick out, making him look like Barney the Beaver. A lot of black hair on the backs of his hands. A gold ring, I think. Deep voice. Some holes in the side of his neck where he’d been lanced once upon a time. The right side of the neck.”

“I didn’t see him on the trip,” Skipper said.

“You’ll probably find a porter that brought his meals to his compartment or bedroom.”

Tomb-face roared out of the car and lit running, bellowing, waving his arms.

“You surprise me, Simon,” Skipper said. “That was a nice job of identification.”

“It doesn’t surprise me as much as it would have a year ago. I’ve just had a lot of training in observation, Skipper.”

They found the conductor with a mild concussion. He had opened a John door and a citizen had yanked him in by the front of his conductor suit and thumped his head against the wall. In there with the conductor was a nice gray expensive suit with the pockets emptied and the label ripped out of it. In a bedroom they found a brown bag, topcoat, felt hat. The hat had been purchased in Los Angeles, the bag in Seattle, and the laundry marks on the shirts were traced to a San Francisco hotel.

Skipper kept me informed. I had to remain in Chicago. I was the guy who could make a positive identification, when and if they picked up our boy. Evidently Barney the Beaver had walked through the station and into a bottomless pit. The man they had been able to grab on the train was small fry, and he was not inclined to be talkative.

Yes, Skipper kept me informed. She let me hold her hand in the movies. The petaled eyes stared at me over the rims of cocktail glasses. Her stride was long beside me as we walked dark streets. She let me kiss her, and, unlike Marj, it wasn’t a tigress reaction. It was more like a kitten when you start to cuddle and then it takes a surprisingly sharp slash at you. We traded life histories, exchanged likes and dislikes, discovered a song that was “our song,” and all the rest of it. You can’t dress it up. It is common, ordinary, everyday falling in love. To the people involved it feels like it had never happened before to anyone in just that way.

Marj’s charms had been startlingly self-evident. But Skipper had a knack of creeping up on you. She would happen, by accident, to turn just so or stand in a certain way, and whoomp! — there would be a line so breathtakingly lovely, so full of a soft and lingering promise, that it could make a bill collector weep.

Over 3 A.M. coffee in a bean wagon, I told her she better marry me. She was lifting her cup and it stopped in midair, wavered, and floated back down to the saucer. Her lips were the shape of your first game of post office.

“This is so sudden. Give me time to think it over... Okay, I’ve thought it over. Yes, Simon.”

The ham-handed counterman propped his chin on his fists and looked dreamy. “So lovely,” he purred. “Such a beautiful emotion, love.”

Coffee was on the house. Wedding present number one.

For three days I went around patting children on the head. Some of the hard-bitten Chicago tykes spat through a curled lip and said, “Go pat ya own head, ya creep.”

My phone rang beside my hotel bed in the middle of the night. “Simon, darling. I’m down in the lobby.”

“Check in with the house dick and come up.”

I had time to ice-water my face and belt myself into a robe and jam the ugly toeless foot stubs into the trick shoes before she came through the door I had opened for her.

I kissed her. “Aha! You are now in my powah, fair maid,” I said.

She didn’t smile. “Simon, I had to come and tell you this. I had to be the one to tell you. Dear Simon. I’ve been so jealous of her, of what she had of you and what she took away from you. Now I’m so ashamed.”

I stared at her, at tears she ignored. “You talking about Marj?”

“Get yourself a drink, Simon, and sit down.”

I obeyed orders. I slugged myself with a dollop of bourbon. I had the feeling I wasn’t going to like this.

I didn’t like it at all. Mrs. Pell, in the middle of the night, had taken her baggy gray prison dress and had ripped it into strips, woven the strips into a makeshift rope, fashioned a slipknot. Then she had soaked the rope so that the knot would slide tight. There being nothing in the cell she could hang herself to, she had merely put the noose around her neck, tied the free end to a bar of the cell door, then thrown herself backward. Apparently she had tried to change her mind later. She had clawed and torn her throat in the area of the wet knot, but it had buried itself too deeply.

I got up and walked to the windows, looking out, seeing nothing. I was remembering things. The position in which she always slept. Curled up, childish, seemingly innocent. Her passion for lizard shoes. Sound of her laughter. Her warm lips.

Though I had thought myself cured of her, some part of me died while I stood and looked out the windows at the sleeping city.

Incongruously, I remembered two marine sergeants who had hated each other with bloody fervor. Twice they had gone after each other with knives. No name was too foul to call the other. Fate had trapped them in the same outfit and kept them there. And then I had seen one of them by a swing bridge over a jungle river, crying like a child, vocalizing his sobs, staring at the mortar-smashed body of the other.

Skipper came up to me and put her hand on my shoulder. “Do you want me to stay for a while, Simon?”

“No, thanks. I’ll be okay in the morning. Thanks for telling me right away, Skip.”

“I love you, Simon. Remember that.”

“You’re my girl. That woman was a stranger. Someone I happened to know once upon a time.”

I smiled at her, but I guess the smile wasn’t too convincing. Maybe the ache and sense of loss was showing. Her tears had stopped and her smile was measured, precise, careful.

“Good night, Simon.”

I walked her to the door and opened it. Barney the Beaver slid in, kicked the door shut, and slid along the wall. His gun was aimed in exactly the right place to keep me from moving — right where Skipper’s high round hip curved into her slender waist.

“You’re the bright boy,” he said huskily.

“You’re looking a little shopworn,” I said. “Lost weight, haven’t you? Where have you been hiding? In the zoo with the rest of the beavers?”

“Pick the girl up. Go on. Pick her up.”

I did so. One arm under her knees, one arm under her shoulders, my left hand under her armpit where I could feel, against my fingers, the delicate rib cage, the hard ka-thud of her heart. It was a cute idea. She couldn’t do anything and neither could I. Unless I wanted to rush him, using her as a shield.

“What are the plans?” I said.

“With you gone, Pell, they haven’t got anything that will stand up in court. They can inconvenience the hell out of me, but they can’t prove anything for keeps.”

“Sounds logical. Gets you out of one jam and into another.”

It is distinctly a lot of Shinola about guys fresh from combat sneering at a feeble little thing like a Police Positive with a two-inch barrel. I did not feel confident that I could catch those slugs in my teeth and spit them back at him. I felt that they would make large holes in me and those holes would hurt like hell, and I wanted no part of them.

His face was more yellow than I remembered it. He still looked, though, as if he should be wearing a conductor suit. He chomped his underlip with those horse teeth.

He appeared to be thinking.

Skipper looked at him for a long time, then turned her face toward my chest. Her arm was around my shoulders. I didn’t blame her for looking away. A truly evil man is never pretty, particularly when he is busy contemplating evil. He gave a little shrug that meant he had made up his mind.

“Now do just like I tell you, and it won’t hurt either of you a bit.”

“What are we going to have, a suicide pact?”

He sucked the big teeth. It sounded like a Ubangi kiss. “Out the window hand in hand,” he said. “Lover’s leap. But you’ll be sleeping while you drop, kids.”

Skipper took a deep breath and began to tremble more violently. She wasn’t at all brave. Me, I showed no reaction at all, if you don’t count the sweat that was running down into my socks.

“Set her down,” he said. I did. “Now come here, girl. Circle around so I can keep an eye on smart boy. That’s a girl. Now turn around. Easy.”

As soon as her back was to him, he reached out with his free hand and grabbed her wrist, twisted it up between her shoulder blades. Her small whimper was quickly stifled. I saw her face turn gray.

“Now, smart boy, sit down at that desk and write. Move!”

Any hesitation I felt was immediately canceled out by her slightly shriller sound of pain. She didn’t break down. She didn’t cry. She stood and took it and shut her teeth hard on the pain of it.

Chess is a lovely game. The opponent starts making a series of forcing moves. You make the predicted answering move each time. And you wait and you hope to find a hole in the attack.

“Write what I say. ‘To whom it may concern. We are taking the only way out. We have no regrets.’ Got that?”

The hotel nib scratched along the stationery.

“Sign it,” he said.

I signed it. My own death certificate.

“Now don’t move. Put your hands flat on that table and don’t move a muscle.”

My chance. I put my hands flat on the table. My ears went to work for me. I could hear the grass growing in a park three blocks away. I could hear city traffic in Cleveland. And with my hands braced, I heard the soft scuff of shoe leather on the rug. I heard the fabric of his sleeve scrape against the fabric of the side of his coat as he lifted his arm.

I shoved myself back toward him, hard. With all the strength I could put into my arms and legs, I shot back at him. And shot back into the direct path of some damn fool who was driving through the hotel room with a tractor-trailer combo. He ran me down and smashed my head like a stomped pumpkin.

I was nine fathoms deep in a warm tank of oil, dirty oil that would raise hell with your ring job. I was swirled gently, end for end, in the depths of the oil tank. And then I stopped whirling and began to float slowly toward the surface, face down. Surface tension held me under, then let me up with a popping sound. Now I rested my cheek on top of the surface of the oil. And under my cheek the texture changed. From oil to hotel rug. The truck had run over my head with tire chains on.

I have a notoriously hard skull. In my school we used to have butting contests. Simon the Goat, they called me. Flushed with victory, I let a girl named Hortense tap me one day with the flat of a hatchet. She used both hands. I was punchy for three weeks but otherwise undamaged.

I had come recently from a place where, if you are knocked down, you do not sit up until reasonably certain that what you intend to sit on has not been shot off in the excitement.

Shoes whispered on the rug. Hard fingers got hold of my ear and twisted it. My head was lifted off the floor by the ear. When the fingers let go, I let my head bounce on the rug. I looked through the lashes of the eye closest to the rug. A large shoe was three inches from my nose. It went away. Beyond it I saw my girl. Not all of her. Just the pleasant curvature of her back as she lay face down on the floor. Her back moved just enough so that I could tell she was breathing.

And suddenly she was hauled out of sight. The window was over that way. I took a look. Barney the Beaver was dragging her to the window. I didn’t want my girl dropped out the window. My room was on the fourteenth floor. Barney had said we were going out hand in hand, not one at a time. Drop one first and somebody is going to look up in time to see the second party get thrust out. But it was hell to keep my head down and wonder if he’d changed his plans.

His feet came over again. He hoisted my ankles and dragged me over to the window, face down. I let my head roll to the side. Warmth touched my hand. Warmth under the girl’s clothes. The window slip up. Nice and wide open. Probably the Beaver planned to put us face down over the wide sill, side by side, then upsy-daisy with our heels.

Thoughts and conjectures were roaring through my mind like trains heading through a tunnel. And before the sound of the opening window had completely ceased, it occured to me that the most natural thing for any man to do when planning to drop a heavy package out a window is to take a look down and make certain that there is nothing in the way of the drop.

I counted up to the square root of minus three and came up fast.

Maybe some character comes to rescue the girl on horse-back, waving the lance like crazy. And some other joker bares his manly fists and whips the seven villains while she looks on, her eyes glowing with girlish pride. Me, I merely put each hand firmly against the two hemispherical sections where his shabby pants were the tightest and gave a nervous shove. I think I also gave a nervous giggle. I didn’t feel heroic. I even felt it was a dirty trick.

He went out like the fat clown who always gets pushed into the swimming pool. His legs scissored through the open window without even brushing the sides.

He must have taken a big gulp of that cold night air as he went out. Because the whistling scream started immediately, and he screamed all the way down through the night, like one of those whistling skyrockets they used to shoot off on the fourth of July.

When the scream stopped, I looked out cautiously, gagged weakly, and sat on the floor.

My girl had blood in her hair. I pulled her head into my lap. I kissed her lips, nose, cheeks, forehead, and eyelids. I tried to pick her up, but she had gotten too heavy for me. I looked at her, and Marj was something that had happened to another guy in another country in another generation. I knew that Skip would be very glad to know that this had happened to me, and I would tell her as soon as possible.

I struggled up with her and wavered over to the bed. There was a knock at the door. I opened it.

A chesty somebody beefed his way in and said, “You got some kind of fight going on in here, fellow?” As he asked the question, he was staring at Skipper.

My lovely sat up. Great girl. Bust her one on the head and she wakes up looking like a mattress ad.

“That is no woman, sir, that is—”

“Don’t give me no smart talk, bud.”

A siren moaned in the distance, drawing nearer. I said, “Excuse me, sir, but I’m afraid we dropped something out that window a few moments ago. It landed down by the streetlight.”

“Bud, there’s an ordinance against dropping stuff out hotel windows. If it was hotel property, you got to make it good.”

My cornflower blonde had begun to comprehend. Her eyes looked faintly sick, but at the same time awfully glad.

The beef trust waddled over and stuck his head and shoulders out the window. He stiffened, and his wet lips made flapping sounds in the night. I paused behind him and looked, with a tinge of regret I must admit, at the general area where his pants were the tightest.

I put my hands firmly in my pockets. You’ve got to watch a thing like that. It can turn into a compulsion neurosis.

My lovely lassoed me with her big shining eyes, and I didn’t hear a yammering word the beef trust said, even though he was jumping clean off the floor every time he took a breath.