The Seven File

Two

Replacing the phone in its cradle, Eddie Grant glanced at the slender graying man who sat facing him in an overstuffed chair on the opposite side of the living room. “The cottage is all set,” Grant said, without expression. “That was Duke. His brother will be away fishing during the week we need it. Nice timing, eh?”

The man in the chair smiled faintly. “Simply perfect,” he said, in a mannered British accent; its inflection and tone were meant to suggest a good school and good regiment, but they smacked unmistakably of pretense and phoniness, of small shady deals rushed through in an atmosphere of anxious haste and pressure. It was a voice trained to say such things as “Your coat? Why, so it is! I say, what a stupid mistake...”

The man’s name was Howard Sydney Creasy. He was small and frail, a gnome of a creature in a shiny black suit that was relieved by a gray silk tie and a tiny pearl stickpin. There was nothing unusual about his appearance; his features were small and commonplace and over the years he had cultivated a simpering smile that was, to his thinking, both civil and superior at once. He seldom allowed his confused hatreds to break through the barriers he had set up against them — and then only when he was alone. To the world he presented a bland, good-humored mien, and a whimsical courtesy that was his only defense against ridicule or anger.

Now he said to Grant, “Are you quite sure of Duke’s brother? I mean, are you sure he’ll go off fishing on schedule?”

“Duke is sure of him,” Gram said.

“Then the question is — are we sure of Duke?”

Grant stared at him for a second or two, then shrugged his wide shoulders. Lighting a cigarette, he sat down on a window seat that ran beneath the front windows of the room. From here he could look down the length of the apartment — living room, dining room, short hallway, kitchen. The furniture was cheap and the colors had been chosen without imagination; it was a depressing prospect, relieved only slightly by the knowledge that he would never see it again after a week or so. He had sublet it for two months, and the original tenant had replaced the furniture with bargain-basement specials before turning over the key. Only two more weeks, Grant thought. And then the big-time again.

Stocky and powerfully built, he was a big man, clumsy with muscle and heavy bone; he worried constantly about his weight. The morning sun touched his lifeless blond hair, and revealed the network of tiny cracks that gave his face the surface look of yellowing parchment. He was only forty-five, but the stamp of worry and tension was on him; most of those forty-five years had been spent solving the simple but violent problem of keeping alive.

“Duke’s okay,” he said at last. “Don’t worry about him.”

“Do you know anything about his brother?” Creasy said.

“I’ve never met him, if that’s what you mean. But Duke’s filled me in on him. They’re different types.” Grant smiled faintly. “There’s an understatement for you. The kid brother, Hank, went off to Korea and piled up a big record. After that he didn’t come home. His parents were dead. Maybe it was that. Or maybe he wanted to get away from Duke. Anyway he went to Maine, and got into the real estate business with an old-timer up there. He’s a very respectable type, which is just what we want.”

“They don’t sound like chips from exactly the same block,” Creasy said.

“Splinters is the word maybe. They’re half-brothers. Same father, different mothers.”

“Do they see each other regularly?”

“No, they had trouble in the past. I don’t know just what, but Duke’s got the kid over his hip. When he needs dough he just shoots off a wire, and back comes the cash. The kid’s afraid of him, I guess. But that doesn’t matter to us.”

“But Duke matters to us.”

Grant stared at him. “I told you he’s okay. I’ve known him for years. I met him in stir, back in ’43.”

“Forgive me, but I don’t consider that last any recommendation,” Creasy said, with a mannered little smile.

“Shut up!” Grant said, spacing the words slowly and deliberately.

“I say, it was only a joke.” Creasy’s smile became strained. “No offense meant.”

“I said shut up!” Grant stood and pounded a fist into his palm. “I don’t like being kidded.” He stared at Creasy, his big chest rising and falling slowly. “Understand that? Fifteen years ago I ran two wards in Chicago. The numbers, horse rooms, everything. I was just thirty then, and I had it made. Dough, cars, broads, a job that was getting bigger every year. I was on the inside of the city. I saw the wheels that ran it, and I watched them turn, fast or slow, the way the big boys wanted. You know where I’d be today if I hadn’t been sent up?” He shook his head disgustedly, as some of the anger drained from him. “I’d be running the city, that’s about all. But I shot a bookie, a thieving little creep, and there was a lot of reform talk in the air, so I got tossed to the do-gooders. Yeah.” He jerked a thumb at his broad chest. “Me, Eddie Grant, the bogey man behind all the dirt in the city. They talked like I was Capone. And I got twenty years. So don’t kid me about making mistakes. Understand that?”

“Yes, of course—”

“And do you think the big boys got a place for me now?” Grant said, staring down at Creasy. “Like hell they have. So I’m on my own. But they’ll hear from me again.” He made an abrupt, dismissing gesture with his hand. “That’s my baby, not yours. Now: you got everything clear?”

“Certainly. We’ve been over it a hundred times, at least.”

Grant was obviously pleased by Creasy’s answer. “That’s right. I planned this job good. We’ve got nothing to worry about.”

A key turned in the front door and a blonde woman with a bag of groceries in her arms entered the room. “Hello, Eddie,” she said, closing the door with her foot. She was in her early forties, with a good but matronly figure and a plump pretty face. Her eyes were large and blue, and hopelessly nearsighted. She narrowed them down to slits as she noticed Creasy. “Oh, it’s you, Howard,” she said at last.

Creasy was standing like a Guardsman. “How are you, Belle? Silly question. I can see you’re blooming as usual.”

“Why, thank you!” Belle put a finger under her chin and made a playful curtsy. “Eddie, can I bring you two a drink?”

“No,” Grant said shortly. “Creasy is just leaving.”

Creasy cleared his throat. “I must be popping off, actually.” Picking up his Homburg and umbrella, he glanced at his watch. “I’m late now, as a matter of fact.” He smiled winningly at Belle. “Do you think she’ll forgive me?”

“Oh, I’m sure of it,” Belle said.

And Creasy made his exit, bowing gracefully to her and bobbing his head at Grant, hurrying off to his customary rendezvous with himself and loneliness.

Grant was methodically performing his setting-up exercises when Belle returned from the kitchen with a glass of sherry. Smiling at him, she sat down in a deep chair and adjusted her skirt to reveal a smooth round knee. She had pretty legs and enjoyed displaying them; flirtation was a habit with her, a reflexive response to men of all kinds. “You’re cheating,” she said. “You’re bending your knees.”

“Like hell I am.”

“I was just teasing. You take this physical culture stuff pretty grimly. Are you aiming at the Mr. America finals?”

Grant didn’t bother answering her. He completed his waist exercises and went into the bedroom. Belle sipped her sherry and picked up a magazine. She was used to his indifference, and rather liked it. In the bedroom Grant was staring at himself in the mirror above the dresser, critically examining the wrinkles that covered his face like fine lace. It was natural enough at forty-five, he thought. He pulled a lock of his gray-blond hair down on his forehead, and then cautiously touched the thinning area at his crown. Plenty of it left... He thought: I don’t look any older than when I went to jail. Harder maybe, but not older. They’d know him when he came back. They wouldn’t frown and say, “Wasn’t that Eddie Grant?” No, they’d know him. He wasn’t one of the slobs who went old and weak in stir. Whining for a handout, broke, old...

“Belle, did you get that face cream I told you about?” he called to her.

“Yes, it’s in the medicine cabinet.”

Grant studied his reflection for a few more seconds, drawing in his breath to accentuate the size of his chest, the hard line of his waist. All right, all right, he thought, and walked back into the living room. “That place in Maine sounds great,” he said. “Duke’s brother’s place. Good fresh air, clean living.”

“Judas! You talk like we’re going on a camping trip.”

“I know where we’re going,” he said, staring at her, suddenly irritable and nervous. “Don’t make cracks like that.”

“What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing. Nothing’s the matter.”

“Which one of them worries you?” she asked in the mild, little girl’s voice she affected occasionally. “Duke or Creasy?”

Grant frowned at her, his eyes sharp and cold. “Don’t talk trouble. They’re both okay. As good as I could hope for.”

“Well, what is it then?” she said plaintively.

Without answering her he turned back to the windows and stared at the sunlight that glinted in the leaves of the little maple trees along the block. Finally he said heavily and quietly, “I’m worried, sure. We’re trying something the biggest mob in the country wouldn’t touch for ten million bucks. That’s something to worry about.”

“But you’re going ahead with it,” she said, turning the sherry glass slowly against her lower lip.

“A kidnapping is different from any other job,” he said, still staring down into the street. “Contacts, cash, they’re no good. You don’t have a friend in a deal like this. We’ll be hot the way no killer or bank robber is ever hot. They can go to the mobs and pay for a hideout, transportation. But no mob would help us. They’d finger us straight to the cops.” Turning, he looked at her then, his eyes curiously flat and pale. “That’s going to work on us, you and me, on Duke and Creasy. That’s what we got to fight. The feeling that we’re all alone, that if we slip we’ll be in the chair thirty days later.”

“But you’re going ahead with it?” she asked him again, moving her foot about in a slow circle.

He nodded at her, his eyes bright and hard and dangerous. “You’re damned right I am. And nothing is going to stop me...”

At five o’clock on the afternoon of the 17th, a black Jaguar pulled up and stopped before the Bradleys’ brownstone on Thirty-first Street. A young man in a leather windbreaker hopped out, closed the door neatly and reverently, then trotted up the stone steps and rang the bell. When the Bradleys’ housekeeper, Mrs. Jarrod, opened the door, he tossed her a mock salute. “One Jaguar, all set to growl,” he said. “You keep an eye on him, I’ve got to get back to the garage.”

“They’ll be leaving directly,” Mrs. Jarrod said.

The young man smiled up at the rectangular section of blue sky and white cloud that was visible from the street. “They got a nice week end coming up,” he said. “They going sailing?”

“I presume so,” Mrs. Jarrod said.

“That’s the life.” He sighed. “When I make my pile, that’s for me. The blue sea, the bounding main, a bottle of beer — living, eh?”

Mrs. Jarrod stiffened. Gray-haired, stout and conventional, she brooked no nonsense from the world; and this struck her as nonsense. “You won’t make your pile, as you put it, wasting time chattering with me,” she said.

The young man laughed and trotted down the steps to the sidewalk. He headed toward Third Avenue, swinging his arms briskly, obviously savoring the clean feeling of the spring air.

From his room across the street Howard Creasy watched the scene. He stood in darkness, peering through the heavy curtains that covered his windows. The room behind him was close and warm, smelling faintly of the liver-sausage sandwich and coffee he had brought in for his supper. Creasy’s body was motionless, almost inert, and his face was impassive. Only his eyes seemed alive; behind rimless glasses they burned now with a curious intensity.

When the door opened and the Bradleys appeared, Creasy felt the sudden nervous stroke of his heart. He moved closer to the window and a shaft of sunlight touched the beads of perspiration on his forehead.

Dick Bradley, a dark-haired young man in his middle thirties, took the luggage down to the car. Two pigskin bags, a leather cosmetics case, luxuriously thick car robe — Creasy made a bitter and envious inventory. No stickers on the suitcases, he noticed with a stab of anger; they’d been around the world more than likely but they wouldn’t use labels for fear people would take them for common tourists. They were the Bradleys, so naturally they stopped at all the fine places — no need to paste up the itinerary for fools to stare at.

Creasy was enjoying his anger; it quickened his pulse and respiration, and suffused his body with a sense of power and urgency that was almost unendurably exhilarating.

Mrs. Bradley (who was called Ellie, he knew) was having a last word with the housekeeper while her husband stowed their things away in the back of the car. Final orders, Creasy thought sullenly. “Do this, do that,” he said aloud, and his voice was a mincing little snarl. “Use up the meat loaf and left-overs. And don’t be hanging on the telephone.”

Creasy knew all about people with money, people like Ellie Bradley. And he hated them with all the power and strength of his small body and soul. She had the stamp of money on her, he saw. It was something they couldn’t camouflage. She was beautiful and correct, of course, in a great gray tweed topcoat that went perfectly with her ash-blonde hair and cool, stylish manners. Anointed and perfumed and pampered, he thought, with alligator pumps and matching handbag, and the bright yellow cashmere scarf blazing at her slim throat. But it wasn’t only the clothes that marked her in his eyes; he saw the arrogance in the turn of her narrow elegant head, the contempt in every studied line of her tall graceful body. That’s what they couldn’t hide, he thought, watching them with cold, cunning eyes. Their merciless disdain for the poor and the weak...

He felt his heart lurch with fury as he stared at them; they were so fabulously equipped, so sure of themselves, so casual and secure in their acceptance of privilege. They wouldn’t notice him if he were lying in the gutter at their feet with a broken back. Oh, but if he didn’t leap to open a door, or bow and smile to her — yes, that would be different. They only noticed you if you inconvenienced them, intruded on their serene pleasure. There was only one way to gain their attention — by hurting them.

“Enjoy yourselves, my chickies,” he murmured into the silence of his room. He thought with bitter relish of their week end — of tennis and golf and sailing, of the salty wind whipping ruddiness and health into their clean-limbed handsome bodies. And then the long nights, reveling in pleasure, creating more of their own to enjoy the blessings of the rich. “Enjoy yourselves,” he said, and his voice was suddenly harsh and ugly in the dark room.

Dick Bradley called to his wife, smiling up at her, and she said a last good-by to Mrs. Jarrod and came quickly down the stairs, her slim legs flashing in the sunlight. They climbed into the car, waved to Mrs. Jarrod and drove off. She watched them for a second or two, then went inside, closing the door against Creasy.

He walked across the room and picked up the telephone. Enjoy yourself, he thought, smiling faintly. When you come home life will be very different.

Grant answered and Creasy said, “They’ve just gone.”

“Good. Call me when the housekeeper leaves.”

“Of course,” Creasy said.

The receiver clicked in his ear.