The Third Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 25 Classic Mysteries

Parole Violation

Originally appeared in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, May 1973.

The parole supervisor’s office fitted the man. It was gloomy, a little seedy, with a feeling of dusty untidiness.

The big cop who’d escorted me in said, “Here he is, Sam. Fred Davis. Another nose to wipe.”

A cop of the old school, he shoved me another step toward Sam Lagin’s desk and then turned around and went out.

“Pull up a chair and sit down, Freddie,” Lagin said.

He stood behind his desk, a moth-eaten, bullish figure. Baggy gray suit, rumpled shirt, necktie with a wrinkled knot. Big, fleshy face with a drab, brown, old-uncle mustache that matched his hair and mean little eyes that were almost colorless.

With the power of the state to back him, Sam Lagin was the parole officer who’d run my life for the next two years, and I wondered if the pokey may not turn out to be just the frying pan...

As I eased onto a scuffed wooden chair, Lagin settled behind his desk. He pawed through the litter until he found the file he wanted.

He let me sweat while he read, grunting now and then while he did so. He looked at me at last, the loose lips below the unkempt mustache tightening into a smile that was more sly and secret than happy.

“Fred B. Davis, age twenty-five, fair education, better than average I.Q.,” he recited. “What’s your trouble, Freddie? Can’t stand the routine of punching a time clock?”

I let it hang there, and after a few seconds his heavy face darkened a shade.

“Boy, you answer when I speak to you!”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

His eyes drifted back to the folder. “Bought yourself some real trouble, didn’t you? Mugged a well-heeled citizen one dark night and took his cash, watch, ring, credit cards and car. Picked up your chick Clemmie and partied through three states before the law put the arm on you.”

“I’ve learned my lesson, Mr. Lagin,” I said earnestly.

“Have you, Freddie? I’m betting you’re a natural born criminal, easily bored, lacking in self-discipline, itching for excitement, and always looking for the easy way out. You’re a good looking kid, Freddie, even if it’s on the tall, skinny side. That boyish face and wide brown eyes might fool a lot of people — But not me. I’m pegging you as lazy, self-centered, with no stomach for the responsibilities acceptable to most members of society.”

His words brought a pink anger to my face, but I pressed my elbows hard on the wooden arms of the chair and kept my mouth shut.

Lagin spotted my reaction, and the first glint of pleasure came to his smile.

“Well,” he said, “we’ll see. Seventy-eight percent of your kind return to crime almost the minute you’re back on the streets. It’s my job to whittle away at that figure, Freddie, and I do the best I can. I’ve fifty-three of you to wet-nurse at the, moment, and despite the gloomy prospects I’m pulling for you, Freddie.”

“Thank you, Mr. Lagin,” I said, because it seemed the thing to say.

He dropped the folder carelessly on the desk. “You know the rules. You entered a contract when you applied for parole.”

“You’ll have no trouble from me, Mr. Lagin.”

“Thus spake seventy-eight percent,” he muttered dourly. “But in prison or out, you won’t make much difference in the crime rate, Freddie. It always rises, no matter how hard Mrs. Lagin’s boy Sam tries.”

He pushed back his chair, ending the interview. “Even with fifty-three, I always try to keep an extra close eye on new members of the club for awhile.”

“I understand, Mr. Lagin.”

“I hope so. Get a good night’s sleep, stay off the streets and on the job that’s been arranged for you. It’s up to you, Freddie. It’s your parole.”

I didn’t get a good night’s sleep. Sam Lagin’s face drifted through too many dreams.

It was a day laborer’s job on the construction site of a housing development, the kind where the shortage of bone and flesh makes even a parolee welcome. It was hodding bricks, barrowing loads of cement, and staggering under burdens of lumber. It was a big-mouthed foreman and an hourly wage barely over the minimum.

At night I was too gut-wrung for even the threat of Sam Lagin to bother my sleep, the daytime nightmare being more than enough. Prison began to look good by comparison. In the pokey I’d been the star hitter on the softball team, the chow had been better than greasy spoon slop, and the cell bunk cleaner than the cot in the flophouse room my paycheck could afford.

Worst of all were the tormenting memories of the times with Clemmie and the woman-hungers a guy builds during three years of prison.

I didn’t see hide or mustache of Sam Lagin for three weeks, and I began to relax on that score. I figured out how much time it would take him to chase around after fifty-three of us and decided that no man could move that fast. With seventy-eight percent of fifty-three always in trouble, Lagin needed to divide himself into five parts. It was some pleasure to fancy the old galoot’s headaches.

By the third weekend I couldn’t stand the nothingness any longer. Without admitting to myself that fresh plans for the future were stirring in my mind, I ambled out of the rooming house. Wow! I blinked. There was sunshine on the sidewalk!

I set off with the old blood turning warm and red in flesh that had been too long in cold storage.

Finding Clemmie was easy, although it took a good part of the day. She’d moved half a dozen times since I’d last seen her, changing from one job to another. At each place she’d either left a forwarding, or somebody who’d worked with her knew the location of the next job.

I traced her to a blue-collar bar and grille run by a scrawny, tough little gamecock named O’Leary. I reached the place after dark. It was fairly crowded with guys working their jaws with talk, pastrami, beer, boilermakers, and pickled eggs.

My pulse rate slipped into high gear as I threaded through the talk, juke box noise, and lazy layers of tobacco smoke, craning my neck for the first sight of that center-fold figure, that impish face, that golden tumble of hair.

My knees shivered suddenly. I threw out my arms. “Clemmie!”

She almost dropped the tray of drinks she was carrying. “Freddie!” she squealed.

She plopped the tray on the nearest table. We met in the middle of the room, my hug lifting her feet from the floor. Several of the customers tossed laughing remarks and clapped their hands.

We tugged each other to a small vacant table against the further wall.

“Freddie,” she said, her shining blue eyes dancing all over me, “it really is you!”

She seemed so happy I didn’t tell her I’d been out going on a month. I wondered at my dumb, earlier fears of Sam Lagin.

“Baby,” I said thickly, “you look so good—”

“And you, Freddie.”

“It’s been so long. Say, you haven’t got married or anything?”

“Nothing I can’t break off like kicking off an old shoe, Freddie.”

“That’s great, baby.”

“There’s never been anybody but you, Freddie. Not in my heart, where it counts.”

I laughed, just from the way the world had changed all of a sudden.

“You were so sweet, Freddie,” she said, “the way you protected me when they arrested you.”

I shrugged, feeling like a big man. “I told you a long time ago you were my girl, didn’t I? I take care of what’s mine. Anyway, the fuzz had me dead to rights. The least I could do was stick to my story that you didn’t know I’d been operating with somebody else’s dough, car, and credit cards. No matter what they suspected, they couldn’t build a case against you.”

“Freddie,” she said through moistly parted lips, “you are the bravest, greatest, most loyal man—”

Her sweet music was interrupted by the arrival of her boss at the table. Clemmie introduced us, explaining that I was an old friend of the family and schoolmate she hadn’t seen in years. O’Leary’s ire was somewhat soothed. Reminding me of a twitchy mouse, he shook hands and suggested to Clemmie that she get back to work.

It was great, sitting there and chugging my first cold beer in more than three years and watching Clemmie’s bright movements from table to table.

A beautiful half hour passed, and then I felt like I was being stared at. My eyes cut along the bar. A big, dark-haired man had come in and was being served a shot glass. His gaze caught with mine. He glanced away, as if trying to decide whether or not to admit he’d seen me.

He was Porter Attics, a bricklayer on the construction job. Making up his mind, he tossed his drink down in one swallow, swiped the back of his hand across his mouth, and came over to the table.

“How goes, Freddie?”

“Okay. Sit down, Port.”

He lowered his beef into the chair Clemmie had vacated, sat looking at his knuckles, then lifted his eyes to mine.

“Freddie,” he said with some hesitation, “ain’t neither of us seen the other in a gin mill. Okay?”

I didn’t dig. He saw the frown grow on my face.

“I mean when we have to report to Sam Lagin,” he explained. “He’ll figure we’ve met on the job. You’ll find that he’s always picking, trying to make a stoolie out of you.”

I gawked at him, then laughed. “Well, how about that! Two members of the fifty-three club.”

“Yeah,” Attics said, “and joints serving booze are off-limits to us — with six more months of my parole to go.”

I slapped him on the shoulder. “So forget it, Porter! Sam Lagin, the creep, couldn’t make me stoolie if he ran over me with a bulldozer.”

“Likewise,” Port nodded, relaxing. “I had you pegged as a right guy, first day you reported on the job. How about I buy?”

“To drink to Sam Lagin,” I suggested.

He got a laugh out of that. “I got a feeling you and me is going to get along, Freddie.”

Lovely evening. I’d found a pal with common interests, common lingo, and Clemmie was serving the drinks.

I reported in to Sam Lagin at my appointed hour. He grunted that he was glad to see my punctuality, asked me how I was getting along on the job.

I conned him with some talk about how I wanted to look into this job training deal.

“Don’t want to barrow cement for the rest of my life, Mr. Lagin.”

“Well, that sounds fine, Freddie. Always good to see a man who wants to better himself. We’ll certainly look for an opening in some line of work you’d like to do.”

I halfway listened to him ramble along about various opportunities in the job training programs. I nodded when I was supposed to and asked a question when it seemed proper. But in my mind, I was way ahead of him. Now that I was back with Clemmie, the job was a hole in the head.

There was a big, wide world out there waiting for Clemmie and me. We’d already talked about it some. Sam Lagin would be no problem at all. I was already more than up to here with him, his stinking job, with wrestling piles of lumber all day after a night with Clemmie.

Parole violation had lost its first fears for me. The country was full of parole absconders, as file legal term put it. I’d got caught the first time because I’d played it dumb. I wouldn’t play it that way again.

Question was, what kind of hit? Not a two-bit job like sticking up a filling station? I wanted loot Clemmie and I could really enjoy.

I wondered — for a second — if Porter Attics might have some ideas. He and I had got to be real pals since the night we met in O’Leary’s. But I nixed him. We only had a few more months until he could thumb his nose at all the bricks his parole slavery had forced him to lay. Also, he’d done time twice for rough stuff, assault with a deadly weapon and a truck hijacking. I wanted a hit that was much less spectacular...

“Got all that, Freddie?” Lagin finished, lifting his baleful little eyes.

“Oh, yes, sir, Mr. Lagin.”

“Fine. Just stick with it and we’ll get you into one of those tech school night classes when the new semester starts in the fall.”

“I’m looking forward to it, Mr. Lagin.” And that was partly the truth. I didn’t bother to mention to him that I was looking forward to being with Clemmie on a nice southern beach when autumn rolled around.

Clemmie wanted to go out that night, but the best I could go was drag into her apartment and flop on the couch, bushed from laying sewer line laterals all day.

“You poor baby,” she said, flinging me a beer and stroking my forehead with her tantalizing fingertips, “what are they doing to you?”

“Killing me,” I said.

“Like you were no better than a mule. Freddie, it’s not fair — we’re going to put a stop to it!”

I forced my beat-up muscles to work me to a sitting position, asking a book full of questions with a single word: “How?”

She snuggled down beside me. “You remember when I was a cocktail waitress in the hotel lounge, I spotted the guy with the car, the cash, credit cards?”

“Sure do,” I said.

“Best job I ever had,” she mused. “But I didn’t regret walking off from it, not for a minute, Freddie.”

“Likewise. Great party while it lasted.”

“The next will last a lot longer, Freddie.”

“With whose loot?” I asked.

“O’Leary’s.”

I drew away from her a little, looking her full in the face.

“It’s like this,” she explained. “Every first and third Saturday of the month, when Kreighton Mills makes a payday, O’Leary’s does a land office business from early opening to late closing. Sometimes there’s nearly five or six thousand dollars-in the kitty by the time O’Leary locks up.”

“And O’Leary with that big forty-five automatic he keeps under the bar and police cruisers prowling the neighborhood! Even if I got out of the bar, one yell from O’Leary and the fuzz would corner me in half a block. Uh-uh, baby, heist at gunpoint isn’t my prescription.”

Clemmie kissed me lightly on the ear. “I know, darling, and I wouldn’t have you take that risk. I want you to walk out of O’Leary’s with everything nice and quiet, and the money under your shirt.”

“O’Leary doesn’t strike me as the nice, quiet, donating type.” I killed the remainder of the beer, crumpling the empty in my fingers. “We’ll have to think of something else, Clemmie.”

She pouted, tilting her cute blonde head. “Don’t you want to hear the rest of it?”

“Is there a rest of it?”

“You just listen, honey pot.” She wriggled comfortably on the couch. “This is how it is. O’Leary used to take all that bread to the night depository of the bank. But when he was stuck up for the third time, he made some changes.”

“I’ll bet he did. Third time’s always the charm.”

“Please, Freddie,” she huffed. “Will you let me finish?”

“Be my guest.”

“Well, O’Leary turned his private office into a fort. Steel bars on the windows. Burglar alarm wires all over the place. And a huge, burglar-proof safe to keep his boodle in until he can make trips to the bank in daytime hours with a security guard.”

“That really cuts it. Steel bars, hot wires, and huge safes are all beyond my calling.”

“You need another beer,” she said in that endearing, unpredictable way. She was up and back with the beer like a golden wisp.

She sat down and rested her head against my shoulder. “O’Leary unlocks his private office door, walks to the safe, opens it, and puts his money in. If someone quick and strong, like you, Freddie, were hiding inside the office, it would be simple to tap O’Leary on the head — not too hard so he isn’t seriously hurt — as he walks through the door. Then someone quick and strong could take the money and walk right out that door, quiet as a little old kitten.”

“Yeah, if someone could melt his way through steel window bars and burglar alarm wires and be inside the office when O’Leary entered.”

“Just slip into the short hallway that leads to the office, Freddie. You could do it, easy, with that late, noisy crowd in the bar. Then unlock O’Leary’s office, close the door so the lock clicks, and be waiting in there when the unsuspecting little hamster comes in with the loot.”

“Let’s forget the impossible right now,” I said, nuzzling her cheek. “With the beer and rest, I’m feeling like a new man. Also I couldn’t pick the lock on a piece of discount house luggage, much less the lock O Leary s bound to have on that office door.”

She didn’t move away from my nuzzling, but it didn’t have the desired effect on her chemistry either. As if her mind was elsewhere, she said, “Freddie, a girl working in a place like O’Leary’s learns to keep her eyes open. She meets all kinds of people, too.”

I shifted position, taking a swallow of beer, “So?

“So she knows where Mr. O’Leary keeps his bundle of keys, beside the automatic gun under the counter,” Clemmie said. “She knows how to make an impression of a certain key in a piece of wax in a few seconds when nobody is looking. And she knows a fellow or two who will make a key from that impression for a twenty-dollar bill, no questions asked.”

She stirred, sitting up and wriggling her fingers into the slash pocket of her hotpants. She slipped out the duplicate key to O’Leary’s office.

Dangling in her fingers, bright new metal catching the fire of reflected light, it positively hypnotized me.

One thing O’Leary had failed to put in his office was air-conditioning. Or maybe the sweats came from the waiting there in the darkness.

From the bar came the muted sounds of the last customers leaving, guys shouting good night to O’Leary, a character with too many under his belt singing a mournful song.

The song was cut off in the middle of a flat note and I knew O’Leary had closed the door behind the customer.

Silence.

Nothing, except this vacuum sucking at my ears and trying to stifle my breath.

I stood pressed close to the wall beside the office door, the length of old pipe in my gloved hand.

Distantly, I heard Clemmie say good night.

“See you tomorrow, Clemmie,” O’Leary responded in his high, thin voice.

More silence.

All of them were gone now, except O’Leary and the bartenders. The bartenders would be rinsing the last of the glasses, shucking their barman’s jackets, gulping tired yawns. O’Leary would be taking the last of the receipts from the cash register.

Time was the slow crawling of hot lava.

A few more muffled words out there that I couldn’t make out. O’Leary seeing his barmen off. O’Leary closing the front door and springing the lock, alone in the bar now. Giving the place the final glance for the night. Cutting the lights to night-dim.

The sudden rattle of his key in the office door lock almost jarred me out of my shoes.

The door swung open, and too suddenly almost, he was there, a scrawny silhouette in the very faint night light filtering from the bar.

I suddenly felt so clumsy and awkward that I almost panicked. The pipe weighed half a ton. He surely knew I was there.

I didn’t realize it was over until I heard the pipe thunk against his crown. He folded without a whisper, and I stood looking at the dim shadow of him, too scared to move. Was it I who actually hit him?

The pipe bumped on the floor. I kneeled beside O’Leary. I’d padded the pipe with a wrap-around rag, and the skin on O’Leary’s scalp wasn’t even broken. He looked for all the world like a little kid dreaming happily as he lay there. His breathing was steady, and I figured he wouldn’t be unconscious for more than half an hour. It was time enough for our purposes.

He’d carried a heavy brown paper bag into the office. I opened it just long enough to make sure it was full of money.

When I crossed the bar and reached the front door, I clung to shadows, looking at the street. A car slipped past, then the wee-hours desertion returned to the street.

I worked quickly, going out, making sure the door spring-locked behind me, and then, the money stashed under my jacket, I strolled along innocently whistling a Bacharach tune until I had rounded the corner. There, I moved faster, using the next twenty minutes to put me into Clemmie’s apartment.

We had to tone down the celebration somewhat to keep from waking other tenants in the grubby old building. I spilled the bread in a lovely green mound on the coffee table. We laughed. We hugged. I picked her up and we went round and round. We kissed and kissed again. Then she popped the cork on a bottle of champagne she’d bought for the occasion.

We were just lifting the glasses when, quite without warning, a big brute in the hallway put a heavy heel against the door and kicked it open, tearing the lock into several dozen pieces.

The open doorway framed Sam Lagin, and Clemmie and I stood looking at him, two frozen stills cut from a movie by a film editor.

Lagin was breathing hard, and his eyes had color now. Deep pink was the hue, almost blood red.

I moved then, trying to shield the money from Lagin’s sight. But he’d seen it already. He heeled the broken door closed, crossed to Clemmie and me, and strangely enough, instead of touching the money, he picked up the champagne bottle and looked at the famed label.

He had his breathing steadied down. He set the bottle slowly on the table.

“Celebration’s kind of premature, isn’t it, kids?”

“Whoever you are,” Clemmie said angrily, “you can’t break in here and—”

“I can’t?” Sam Lagin said. He looked at the broken door lock, then all around the room. “But it seems I have, doesn’t it?”

“Throw the nut out of here, Freddie,” Clemmie’s voice was a suppressed shriek. “I’ll call the police and—!”

It was my turn to interrupt her. “Easy, baby. He’s Sam Lagin.”

“Your parole officer?” she choked.

“Awakened by a telephone call at an unearthly hour, which I don’t like,” Lagin added in venomous complaint. He cut those chilling eyes at me. “I told you, boy. I always keep close tabs on new members of the club.”

I looked from Sam Lagin to the money, and I went over to the couch, clutched the arm weakly, and sat down.

“How?” I asked. “You haven’t been around.”

“Spies, boy. I keep the club shot full of spies. You haven’t made a move without my knowing.”

My teeth clicked together. Feeling surged through me. Almost as great as my sense of loss was the anger I suddenly felt for Porter Attics. The rotten stoolie! Tipping Lagin off to everything I did or said.

Grizzly mean, Lagin stood before me, hands on hips. “I see you guessed about Porter Attics, boy. Now there’s a man who values his parole, just as you should. You lifted a few with him tonight.”

“You know I did!” I said, my throat filled with the bitterest frustration.

“And he figured, from your manner, that you were plenty up, boy. Planning something, maybe. He said good night and drifted out — and drifted back in again. He saw you slip into O’Leary’s hallway and not come out again. Enough to heighten his suspicions, wouldn’t you say, boy? So when the bar is closing and you still haven’t showed up, he drifts across the street and takes up a station in a dark doorway. He sees you come out at last — after everybody, except O’Leary, has left and O’Leary has locked up for the night.”

“That rat,” I said, clenching and unclenching my hands, “that scum of scum!”

Clemmie simply crumpled in a heap beside me and started crying.

Lagin let out a long sigh. “Don’t feel so hard at Porter, boy. Doing his job, that’s all. He sees you clutching that bulge under your jacket and he naturally assumes a heist. At least, he figures it’s enough to call me. And while I’m cranking up my car I hear the news on the police band. O’Leary has recovered consciousness and hollered cop. So all I had to do was to decide whether to head for your place or here.” He laughed, drily.

“You know the saying, Cherchez la femme,” he said. “So Clemmie’s place it was. And look what I find.”

He turned toward the coffee table and touched the money with a fingertip. “Boy,” he said, “a long time ago I decided I was on the losing end of a lousy, thankless job. That’s what I sure did decide, boy. Downtown they think I’m a great parole officer because my boys always beat the seventy-eight percent average who return to crime. It’s the way I handle them, boy, the way I do my job. The worst ones, murderers, rapists, I send back, boy, the minute they breathe wrong on the rules of parole. But there are others. Bright kids, the naturals — they’re the ones I work hardest with, boy, in private little efforts to preserve their paroles. That’s why I’m working so hard with you, boy.”

I inched to a tight, sitting position while I watched him drag a hassock over to the coffee table.

“Sam,” I husked, “what is it you want?”

He sat down, wet his fingertips, and began counting the money. “My half, boy. I always want my half — and if you value your parole you’ll always make damned sure you’ve got it ready!”