by Jerry eBooks
I looked around at Maria—and got one of the biggest jolts of my life.
She didn’t have a stitch on, except those nylons and that little white cap on her head.
“You damned tramp!” Bill yelled, and made a lunge at her.
I took a seat by the window and watched them put on their act—he chasing her around, she backing away—and I woke up at last to what I’d got my foot into. When Maria had gone to the door and opened it part way, it had been a signal to this big bruiser. She couldn’t have been wearing anything under her maid’s uniform, or she couldn’t have gotten so naked so fast. And now I was the sucker in a badger game, caught like a rat in a trap. This pair had me, and unless I wanted the house detective, and maybe even the police, all I could do was grin and kick in when the bite was made.
When the ruckus began to slacken off a bit, I said, “Okay, Bill, I get it. I don’t have to be hit with a brick. What is it you’re after? Let’s hear your pitch.” I hadn’t seen any bulges on him as he circled around, and it seemed to me that a gun was the last thing he should have if his caper went slightly sour and he had to face some cops. I couldn’t be sure, of course, but by then I didn’t much give a damn.
But all he did was blink.
“What’re you after?” I asked him again.
“Dough, Mister. Just dough.”
“How much?”
“How much you got?”
I took out my wallet, squeezed it to show how thick it was, and began dealing out tens, dropping them on the cocktail table. When I’d let eight bills fall. I stopped. “That’ll do it,” I said.
“Hey,” he said, “you got more.”
“I think you’ll settle for this.”
“And what gives you that idea?”
“Well,” I said, taking my time, “I figure you for tinhorn chiselers, a pair that’ll sell out cheap. It’s worth a hundred—this eighty and the twenty I already gave her, which I’m sure she’ll tell you about—to get you out of here. I’ll just charge it to lessons in life. But for more, I’d just as soon crack it open. You want this money or not?”
It wasn’t all just talk. From Maria’s eyes as she watched the bills, I knew that for some reason they worried her. She looked at them a second, and then said to me, “Will you please bring me my uniform, Mr. Hull? Like a nice fellow?”
I didn’t know why I was being got rid of, but when I went into the bedroom and had a peep through the crack in the door, Maria was down on her knees at the table, holding my tens to the light, looking for the punctures that are sometimes put on marked money. Bill was grumbling at her, but she grumbled back, and I heard her say, “Mademoiselle Zita.” When I heard Zita’s name, I saw red. I made up my mind I’d get to the bottom of this if I had to take the place apart piece by piece. The big problem was how. I sat down on the edge of the bed, and the more I thought about it the madder I got. I glared down at Maria’s uniform lying there on the bed beside me, and called her a few choice names under my breath. And then, still glaring at the uniform, I suddenly knew I had it. That uniform was going to be good for something besides showing off Maria’s legs.
I grabbed the uniform off the bed, went to the window and threw it out. Then I went back to the sitting room. Maria was still on her knees at the table.
“Lady,” I said, “if you want a uniform, you tell Mademoiselle Zita to bring it up here. Call her, and make it quick. Somebody else won’t do. I want to talk to her.”
“But my uniform! Where is it?”
“It’s gone,” I said.
“Where?”
“Out the window.”
“She gave a little scream, and Bill hauled off with a barroom haymaker. I stepped inside it and ducked beneath his arm. Then both of them ran to the window, put their heads under the blind, and looked down in the alley. “Good God,” Maria said, like there’d been a death in the family. Then she slid out from beneath the blind and ran over to me. “But my money!” she said. “You took my money! The twenty dollars you gave me! I had it in my uniform pocket!”
“Oh,” I said. “That.”
“Give it to me!” she said. “You took it. You—”
“Well, no, Maria, I didn’t,” I said. “Not that I wouldn’t have taken it. Not that you misjudge my character. I’m just that greedy. And just that mean. I didn’t remember it, that’s all.”
“Ah!” she said. “Ah!” She was standing with her feet spread apart and her hands on her hips. I’d never seen a nude woman so completely unconscious of her body as this one.
Bill came over from the window and slapped her—to make her pipe down with the racket, I suppose—and suddenly I realized I’d pulled a damn good stunt. It was now a question of who was trapped. All three of us were, of course, except that I didn’t care any more if the cops barged in or not. I didn’t care, but they did.
“Get on that phone,” I told Maria, “because you don’t get out till Zita comes—unless you go with the cops.”
“Call,” Bill told her. “You got to.”
He went to the phone in the foyer, put in the call, and gave Maria the receiver. She talked a long time in Hungarian, and then she hung up and came back into the living room. “She’ll be here,” she said. “She’ll bring me something to wear. And now, Mr. Hull, give me that money you threw out with my—”
I clipped her on the jaw, and I didn’t pull the punch. Bill caught her as she fell, which was his big mistake. I dived over her head and got both hands on his throat, and we all went down together.
I didn’t hit him, or take time to pull the girl away, or anything of the kind. I just lay there, squeezing my fingers into his windpipe, while he clawed at my hands and threshed. I let him thresh for one minute, clocking it by my wristwatch, which was as long as I figured him to last.
When he’d quit threshing, and lay there as limp as Maria was, I let go and dragged him away from her. I reached in his pocket and got my eighty dollars, and then I massaged his throat to give him a chance to breathe.
His face was almost black, but he began to fight for air, sounding like a windsucker horse.
I went over to Maria and aimed a kick at her bottom.
It gave me some satisfaction, sinking my toe in like a kick from the forty-yard stripe, and listening to her groan. I did it again, and when she sat up I said, “Once more, baby—what did Zita come here for? You ready to talk about it?”
She opened her mouth to answer me, but then she saw Bill lying there and she gave a yelp and scrambled on all fours to help him.
I had to slap her around a little more to get it through her head that I was the most important guy in this room. And I had to ask her a question.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s have it. What was it she came about?”
“To—warn you,” Maria said. “I knew she was becoming suspicious of Bill and me, and . . .”
She moistened her lips and turned to look at where Bill was still sleeping with his noisy gasps.
“The rest of it!” I said. “And hurry!”
She shrugged. “I phoned Bill right after I talked to you, so that he’d know where to come. I spoke softly—but even so, perhaps Mademoiselle Zita overheard enough to put two and two together.”
“You said she came here to warn me,” I told her. “Why didn’t she go ahead and do it?”
She shrugged again. “You ask her.”
She moved over and took Bill in her arms, and I didn’t try to stop her. I watched her stroking his face, and I was so surprised to see that a ferret like her could love that I was a second slow on the buzzer when it sounded abruptly.
I was a little groggy from all my exertion by then, but I staggered into the foyer, closed the living room door, and opened the one to the hall.
Sure enough, Zita was there again. She was holding a dress folded across her arms.
I jerked the dress away from her. “Come in, Zita,” I said. “Come in and join our fouled-up little party. We’re having one hell of a time here, Zita—thanks to the w
arning you didn’t give me.”
I took a breath, and was all ready to start in on her again, when she took a step toward me and fired a slap that stung clear down to my heels. Her eyes sparkled with anger.
“What did you expect?” she said. “You dated my maid! My maid!”
I stepped out of range and thought over what she’d just said. It could explain a lot, the warning she had expected to give some poor boob in this suite, and the warning she didn’t give when she saw that the boob was me.
The way she’d reacted when she knew it was I who had made the date with Maria was just feminine enough to be compatible with liking me pretty well.
All at once, Bill started that wind-sucking sound in the living room again, a truly frightening sound. Zita grabbed the dress away from me, brushed past me, and went in there.
It wasn’t more than a minute before Bill went staggering out, and after him Maria, zipping up the dress in back, and crying.
Zita came out of the living room and walked up to me slowly. She apologized then for having slapped me, and I apologized for having spoken so roughly to her, and she nodded at me and I nodded at her.
Pretty soon we were both smiling, and there didn’t seem to be much point in doing any more apologizing.
And so that was that. Starting from that moment, things moved along very smoothly, and Zita’s Hungarian accent never gave me a minute’s trouble.
It didn’t, that is, until a few afternoons later when we were faced with the novel situation of the bridegroom having to ask the bride what he should fill in under: WOMAN’S FULL NAME—PLEASE PRINT.
THE ICE MAN CAME
William Hopson
Something was off key on the carny, and murder added a sour note
I AM one of those men who were born at a time when Nature was in a capricious mood. In my case, she must have been laughing like hell; and you’d understand why if you could get a look at me.
My head is shaped like a .45 bullet, my eyebrows look like the hackles on an angry dog’s back, my nose is flat and wide, and my mouth makes me look like a second cousin of Cheetah of the Tarzan movies.
I’m about as ugly as they come in one hundred and twenty pound bundles, though I’m not exactly complaining. It’s paid off. It took a year in college to convince me that if I wanted to eat regularly I’d better forget about the books and concentrate on my face.
That’s how I wound up on a big carnival outfit as a “geek,” or wildman, sitting wrapped in a leopard skin full of moth holes and with two friendly little spider monkeys for company while, up above, flashy Ace Brugar exhorted the yokels to pay a dime and come up and see the ferocious wildman the show had captured.
When the outfit wound up in a small town down in the Arizona desert with a sheriff breathing down the boss’s neck I wired my old man for extra money, paid the bills, and took over the show.
The new geek’s name was Tony Perano. He wasn’t as ugly as I am, but the moth-eaten leopard skin fitted him, and the two spider monkeys liked him. Moose Leonard, who shared the trailer with me at the time, swore he was a no-good bum.
Moose himself is no beauty, not with a pair of tin ears as hard as shoe soles above two hundred and thirty-five pounds of iron-hard muscle. Moose was the head wrestler on the Athletic, or “At,” show.
So that’s about the way things shaped up when we blew into this Mexican border town of Nueces to cash in on a Cinco de Mayo—Fifth of May—celebration. Cinco de Mayo means to the Mexicans about what the Fourth of July means to the Norteamericanos. The American and Mexican businessmen on both sides of the Line hang out flags of both countries, the senoritas put on their brightest dresses, and the immigration and customs officers of both countries relax a bit on regulations and let them all cross back and forth without too much inspection. There’s a baile every night in the plaza on the Mexican side, tequila to drink, lovemaking, bull fights, and other fights in which the bulls play no part.
We had laid out the midway on the American side of the high wire fence about one hundred yards along the line from the customs house, and business had boomed that first night.
Moose and I had finished breakfast that following morning, cleaned up the trailer, and were whiling away time at a game of dominoes when Joe Wilson stuck his head inside the open doorway of my big two-room trailer. He’d been with the outfit for quite some time as a sort of truck driver, roustabout, and wrestler.
I didn’t particularly like him because he was a bit on the surly side and because he was making things a little rough for Leota, our prettiest cooch dancer. He was nuts about her. For that matter, so was Moose, Ace Brugar the geek barker, and Tony the geek, plus about every other guy who came in contact with her. She was that good looking.
“Company coming, boss. Looks like John Law,” he said in his clipped, dark-faced way.
“Of course it’s trouble,” I told him. “Mr. Padgett’s son Mike has never had anything but trouble since he bought this show.”
I got up and stepped outside. The midway was pretty well filled, and the rides and grifter joints were getting fair plays, though we hadn’t opened up the side shows yet. A car had eased its way down through the crowd and pulled up by the Athletic show and a burly looking john was getting out. He had a mean looking face, and it was primed for trouble. Not, you understand, that I’m prejudiced against small-town johns. Many of them are real decent guys. This didn’t look like one of that kind.
HE WAS followed out of the car by a big Mexican, some big-shot businessman who oozed importance. Tall and well-dressed. High-heeled cowman’s boots and a big white hat of the kind most Mexican ranchers wear. We strolled toward them.
“What do you think?” Moose asked.
Moose had established himself as a sort of selfappointed bodyguard to me, and if I’d given the nod he’d have slammed them both back in the car and carried it off the midway.
“If some of the outfit who went across the Line last night after we closed up have got themselves in a Mexican jail, then they can just stay there,” I said. We hauled up in front of the deputy sheriff. “Before you ask,” I told Beefy Belly, “all bills pending have deposits put up in advance. I’ve got your permit to operate right here in my wallet. No sucker got took enough last night to do any squawking. And if any of my outfit are in the can across the Line, I’m not shelling out any graft money to this Mexican pal of yours to get them out.”
He looked over my ugly pan the same way he had when he’d issued the permit, and I don’t think he liked what he saw. At that, I wouldn’t have traded with him. I didn’t like what I saw either.
“How about safes?” he asked. “Where was your safe cracker last night or sometime early this morning?”
“I kicked the heist man off this joint when I bought it,” I told him. “You’ll find no nitro man with this outfit.”
That was on the level. I’d told Beanie to pack up his tools and beat it. It had been getting monotonous, having the johns dust after us every time we pulled out of a town and there were a couple of busted sardine cans left behind. But they still had been making trouble for us occasionally, and I’d begun to get the hunch that Beanie had merely dropped a bit further behind and was coming right along on a cleanup route anyhow. There was just the barest possibility that somebody like Ace Brugar or Joe Wilson or Tony Perano was casing the towns while the crowds were at the carnival and leaving word for Beanie which joints to crack.
“There’s nobody among your outfit in jail because I call the Comandante de Policia every morning to find out,” Beefy Belly said heavily. “But last night some boy who knew his business cracked open the safe of the International Trading Company of Senor Villanova, here, and cleaned it out.” He added sarcastically, “Now go ahead and tell me some peon did it.”
“It was no Mexican,” Villanova put in agitatedly, and still oozing importance. “The job was too cleverly done. I mean,” he added hastily when I sneered at him, “no Mexican would have the eskill. It was the work of an Americano, and
there was forty thousand dollars in the safe.”
“I’m not in the trading business, I do not have the skill to crack a safe, and I didn’t lose any dough,” I told him. “So why come crying to me? There’s lots of other Americans in this town besides the people of my outfit. Why don’t you go see them?”
But they were playing a good hunch, and I knew it. A lot of carny people have police records of one kind or another, and I was beginning to get the idea that perhaps there was a joker in the deck. I knew that Wilson wasn’t Joe’s real name because he was Italian and was from the East. So was Tony Perano, the geek, who’d taken over my old job. About Ace, I didn’t know.
But safe crackers are scarce in small border towns, and it looked as though Beanie had decided to take advantage of the celebration to slip in and do a little work south of the border. With the customs and immigration men letting them through in droves it would have been an easy matter for the little rodent to secrete his nitro and a few tools in his clothes and slip across. Forty thousand bucks!
My hunch about trouble had been right. First there was Joe with his surly, possessive attitude toward Leota, and Ace moving right in. This same Ace wore diamonds and lots of them on a dime grind that didn’t rate the wearing of lots of ice. There was Tony, a wiry little ex-pug, who looked as though he had too many brains to be sitting in a leopard skin. And now this busted safe across the border.
ABOUT that time Tony himself came strolling up, though he usually had to keep pretty well out of sight until after the midway closed late at night. He was very light for a Corsican and he was almost as ugly as I am, except that his nose had been flattened in the prize rings. When two state highway police rolled past him and stopped, followed by two Border Patrol officers of the Immigration Service, I knew we were in for a regular little clambake.
Well, they turned the joint upside down for the next three hours, looking for a heist kit, even peering into the canvas pit where Bo-Bo, the ferocious forty-foot man-eating python, lay coiled up sound asleep. But nothing ever fazes that bum.