Yellow-Dog Contract

Chapter Twelve

We took mubfin’s car, the big brown 450 SEL Mercedes that he drove carelessly, almost recklessly, the way a lot of people drive leased cars, secure in the knowledge that somebody else will have to pay for the skinned paint or the nicked bumper.

“You wanta know something?” Murfin said.

“What?”

“I like this car better’n any car I ever had except one. You wanta know what that one was?”

“A 1957 Cadillac convertible that you had when you were nineteen,” I said. “It was yellow.”

“I already told you about it?” He sounded disappointed.

“You already told me.”

He told me again anyway.

When Murfin was graduated from high school in 1956 he hadn’t gone on to college because there hadn’t been any money to send him and because he really hadn’t wanted to go anyway. Instead he had gone to work for something called the Acme Novelty Company in Pittsburgh. The Acme Novelty Company supplied Pittsburgh with most of its pinball machines, which were legal, and with all of its slot machines, which weren’t.

The principal owner of the Acme Novelty Company was one Francesco Salleo, quite often referred to in the Pittsburgh papers as Filthy Frankie, who was alleged to have certain important connections Back East (New York) and Out West (Las Vegas). Filthy Frankie was quick to recognize Murfin’s genuine mechanical ability, as well as his flair for sound business practices. As a result Murfin quickly went up the promotional ladder at the Acme Novelty Company and soon was in charge of the placement and servicing of all slot machines in Pittsburgh’s numerous fraternal halls, country clubs, veteran’s posts, after-hours joints, and whorehouses.

As a reward for his diligence, ability, and unswerving loyalty to the firm, Filthy Frankie rewarded Murfin, by then nineteen, with a salary of $500 a week, not an insignificant sum to a nineteen-year-old back in 1957 or, for that matter, today.

It was with his newly gained prosperity that Murfin purchased the 1957 yellow Cadillac convertible, a car remembered, if not cherished, for its enormous tail fins. In it he went courting Miss Marjorie Bzowski, eighteen, daughter of Big Mike Bzowski, business agent for Local 12 of the United Steelworkers of America (AFL–CIO).

Filthy Frankie was to have been best man at the marriage of Murfin and Miss Bzowski and doubtless would have been had he not been found floating in the Monongahela River on the wedding day, the back of his head blown off by a shotgun blast.

Frankie’s connections Back East (New York) started feuding over the spoils with his connections Out West (Las Vegas) and the feud developed into a minor war that left dead bodies about. Murfin, forced to take sides in the war, unfortunately chose the wrong side. As a result he was hailed before a grand jury, but with the aid of an expensive lawyer he managed to escape being indicted. However, it cost him his job, his savings, and his treasured 1957 yellow Cadillac convertible.

Burdened, or perhaps blessed, with a young wife who was expecting their first child Murfin took the only job he could get. It was obtained for him in a Pittsburgh steel mill by his father-in-law. It was a job that required Murfin to rise early, work hard, get his hands dirty, and he loathed it. He soon saw that union officials had to work nowhere nearly as hard as did the rank and file members and within a year he was secretary-treasurer of his local union.

Soon after that he went on the steelworkers’ payroll as a full-time organizer. He was an excellent organizer and in 1960 when he was twenty-two he switched to the Public Employees Union. By the time he was twenty-six he was the PEU’s Director of Organization.

“You know,” he said as we drove east on Pennsylvania Avenue, “that was the best goddam job I ever had in my life, that time when I was with Frankie.”

“You’re lucky you didn’t get killed,” I said.

“I don’t know,” he said, “if Frankie could’ve stayed alive, there’s no telling where I might be today.”

“Vice lord of Pittsburgh, huh?”

He looked at me. “What’s wrong with that?”

“Not a thing,” I said.

When we got to Twelfth and Pennsylvania Avenue we turned right, drove a block, and started looking for a place to park. The house number that Audrey had given me was in the middle of a block that so far had resisted the renaissance of Capitol Hill which seemed bent on turning the area into another Georgetown. The renaissance meant, in effect, that a house that a speculator bought for $15,000 in 1970 would, with a little renovation, command an $80,000 price today.

The block that we parked in was a sullen stretch of row houses, most of them three stories tall and most of them in evident need of paint. It was largely an all-black block lined with aging cars. Some of the cars had no wheels and some of them had no doors and nearly all of them that had no wheels or doors had no glass. Some kids played in and near several of the cars but they didn’t play very hard. At three o’clock on an August afternoon in Washington it was too hot to play hard.

When we got out of the Mercedes Murfin made sure that all of the doors were locked. He loosened his tie and I wondered whether he had picked it out that morning while he was still asleep. It was a big, wide fat orange and green tie that screamed and fought for attention with a French blue shirt, a reddish plaid jacket, and lilac windowpane slacks. I also wondered if Murfin were colorblind. It was something that I had often wondered.

The house that we were looking for was in a little better condition than most of its neighbors. It was three stories tall with an English basement and somebody had bothered to give it a coat of fresh white paint and put new screens on all the windows. The house also boasted a covered porch with a wooden railing. A man in an undershirt sat on the porch in a tilted-back kitchen chair, his feet up on the railing, a can of beer in his hand. He was a black man of about sixty with close-cropped white frizzy hair. He sat underneath a dime-store sign that advertised rooms for rent.

Murfin and I headed for the cement walk that split the narrow, shallow front yard in half and led to the house. The yard had a few patches of brown grass that seemed to have given up and died in the August heat. The rest of the yard was hard-packed brown dirt in which nothing could grow. For decoration there were a few empty bottles that nobody had bothered to collect yet.

We heard the scream when we were about twenty feet from the walk that led to the house. The man on the porch heard it, too, because the front legs of his tilted-back chair came down on the porch floor with a hard crack. He turned his head as if he could look into his house and see who was screaming.

The screen door flew open and she burst out of the house, all pale brown and dark red from the blood that ran from her nose and mouth down her chin to her throat and her breasts. She raced down the steps of the porch to the sidewalk and paused. She looked down at herself and touched the blood that had reached her bare breasts. She stared at the blood for a moment and then almost absently wiped it on the side of her leg. The leg was bare, too, as was the rest of her. Sally Raines was naked.

I yelled, “Sally!” and she looked my way, but I don’t think she really saw me. Her eyes jumped from me back to the house. She threw her head back and screamed again. It was a long scream that rang of terror and panic and near hysteria.

In the middle of her scream the door opened and the two men with the guns came out. They wore ski masks. One mask was blue and the other was red and I remember thinking that ski masks in August must be hot and sweaty.

The man with the red mask waved his gun almost idly at the white-haired black man who still clutched his can of beer. The black man shrank back, pressing himself against the wall.

The man in the blue mask moved quickly and smoothly down the three porch steps. He went into a crouch and used both hands to aim his pistol. It was a revolver with what looked like a six-inch barrel. He aimed it at Sally Raines.

She stopped screaming and started to run. She ran down the sidewalk. I snatched up an empty pint bottle that had once contained Old Overholt, a pretty good rye. I threw it sidearmed and I threw it hard. The bottle glittered, spinning in the August sun as it flew at the man in the blue ski mask who was aiming his pistol at Sally Raines. It hit him high on the left arm. A lucky throw. It didn’t make him drop his pistol. It just made him look at me. He changed his stance with a jump and came down in a crouch again, his pistol aimed at my head or my heart. It was hard to tell. I didn’t move.

The other man, the one in the red ski mask, glanced our way almost casually and then slowly raised his pistol with both hands. He took his time. He shot Sally Raines twice in the back and once in the head as she ran down the sidewalk. The first bullet struck her in the small of the back and her arms went out and up toward the sky as though there was something up there that she wanted to touch. The second shot slammed into her left shoulder and spun her around in a curiously graceful motion, almost like a pirouette. The third shot went into her face, just below her left eye, and she may have been dead by the time she crumpled to the ground although they say that it takes longer than that to die.

The man who had shot Sally Raines looked at Murfin and me. Then he moved over and touched the other man on the shoulder. The other man nodded and started backing toward the house, still pointing his gun at me. The two men turned and disappeared through the screen door, letting it slam behind them.

I didn’t move for a while. Neither did Murfin. The man on the porch slowly raised his beer can to his mouth. Another screen door slammed. It seemed to come from the rear of the house. A moment or two later we heard a car engine start. And then we heard a car drive off.

They started coming out of their houses then. They came singly and in groups of two or three to stare down at the dead young woman who lay awkwardly on the sidewalk. At first they murmured about it and then their voices rose as they started telling each other what had happened. One of them, a woman of about fifty, started to sob.

I turned to Murfin. “I’ve got to get to a phone,” I said.

He nodded. “That was her?”

“Yes,” I said. “That was Sally Raines.”

I started toward the porch where the man with the beer can still stood. “You got a phone?” I said.

“That mother almost shot you,” he said. “When you went and threw that bottle he almost shot you.”

“You got a phone?” I said again.

“Yeah, I got a phone.” He took another swallow of his beer and started into the house. Murfin and I followed. “You must be fuckin’ crazy, man, throwin’ somethin’ at a man with a gun,” the man with the beer said over his shoulder, then stopped, turned, and looked at me. “Pretty good throw though.”

He led us into the house and we turned right into a living room where a large color-console television set played silently to some unseen audience.

“Phone’s over there,” he said.

I picked up the phone and made my first call. When Audrey answered I said, “I’ve got some bad news. Some very bad news. Sally’s been shot. She’s dead.”

There was a silence and then she whispered, “Oh-mygodno.”

“There’s nothing you can do for her.”

“When did it happen?”

“Just a few minutes ago.”

“Oh, shit, it’s my fault. It’s all my goddamn fault.”

“Audrey!” I said, barking her name.

“Yes,” she said, her voice still almost a whisper.

“It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault at all. Listen, I want you to do something and I want you to do it right now.”

“What?”

“I want you to throw some clothes together for you and the kids and I want you to get in your car and drive out to the farm. Ruth’ll be there.”

“Ruth’ll be there?” The shock of Sally Raines’s death must have hit then because her voice had gone dull and childlike, although it sounded pleased about Ruth.

“She’ll be expecting you and the kids,” I said.

“You want us to go to the farm?”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to be there?”

“I’ll be there later.”

“You want us to go now?”

“That’s right.”

“And Ruth’ll be there.”

There was another silence and then she said in a low, tortured voice, “Oh, God, Harvey, why’d it all have to happen?”

“We’ll talk about it later. At the farm.”

“At the farm,” she said and then hung up without saying good-bye.

I put the phone down and looked around the room. The black man was staring at his television set. “I don’t much watch it, y’know. I just kinda like the colors all moving around. I reckon it’s sorta like a fireplace.”

“Where’d the other guy go?” I said.

“The other guy? He went upstairs. He went upstairs because he wanted to pee and because he wanted to look at her room. Shit, I don’t wanta look at her room, do you?”

“No,” I said, picked up the phone and made a collect call to Ruth. When she answered I told her about Sally Raines and that Audrey and the children would be coming out to stay for a while.

“I’m terribly sorry about Sally,” Ruth said. “She and Audrey were so close. Is Audrey all right?”

“She might need a little comforting.”

“Of course.” There was a pause and then Ruth said, “Did you see it happen?”

“Yes. Murfin and I saw it. We’re going to have to talk to the police.”

“Harvey?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t take any more chances. It’s not worth it.”

“No,” I said, “it really isn’t.”

After we said good-bye I made my third call. It was to my lawyer, Earl Inch. When he came on I said, “I think I’m in even more trouble than I thought I was.”

“Excellent,” he said and when I told him about it and where I was he said he would be right over. “Have you called the cops?” he asked.

I could hear a siren somewhere. It seemed to be coming closer. “No,” I said. “Somebody else did.”

After talking to Inch I turned from the phone just as Murfin came into the room. The white-haired black had got himself another can of beer and was drinking it as he stood staring reflectively into the silent color of the television set that served as his surrogate fireplace. Murfin looked at the man, then at me, and jerked his head toward the door, indicating that he wanted us to go outside. I nodded, thanked the man for the use of his phone, and went out onto the porch with Murfin.

“Jesus, I had to piss,” he said.

“What was her room like?”

He shook his head. “Her clothes were lying all over everything. Looked like they tore ’em off her. What does Chad mean?”

“How do you spell it?”

He spelled it for me.

“It’s the name of a country in Africa. It also could be a man’s name, usually his first name, although it’s not too common. You know anybody named Chad?”

“No.”

“Why do you want to know?”

“There was a little old beat-up desk in her room. There were a couple of pieces of paper on it, all wadded up. There wasn’t anything on one of them. But on the other somebody’d written down Chad. It looked like a girl’s writing.”

“Jesus,” I said, “maybe it’s a clue.”

“Yeah,” Murfin said happily. “Maybe it is.”