Pulp Crime

by Jerry eBooks

“They could just as easily have jumped your car, Jerry.” The boy swallowed. “I guess they could. It was Dick’s bad luck they picked him.”

  “If they’d picked you, Dick would have helped you.”

  Jerry stared at them. “You don’t know that. You can guess, but you don’t know it. I figure he would have driven off too, like I did.”

  “Who did it, Jerry?” Browden asked.

  “I tell you and I tell you, I don’t know. I didn’t see anything.”

  Lieberman said gently, “You live in the world, Jerry. You can’t shut your eyes all the time. What happens to your friends is your business, and it’s ours. You have an obligation.”

  “I don’t see as I got an obligation. I never got close to Reilly. He takes himself serious. He’s a wheel. Student council and all that stuff. And he’s got a stuck-up girl. What business is it of mine?”

  “Then you did recognize the boys?”

  “You’re trying to mix me up. I didn’t say that.”

  “First you said it was a private fight and that’s why you didn’t jump in. Now you say it was because you didn’t know them well enough. You imply that you knew what was happening.”

  “It could have been a private fight. How do I know? We didn’t see anything, either of us.”

  Browden glanced at Lieberman and said, “Come on, Mose.”

  As they walked down the walk to their car they heard Jerry call after them, “I’d be glad to help if I could. You know that.”

  They didn’t turn or answer. As they drove away Lieberman said, “Worth a dozen of that one.”

  “The Reilly kid?”

  “Who else? A code they’ve got. Fine. Don’t tell the cops the right time. Comic book ethics. Maybe the girl will be easier.”

  “I have my doubts. She’ll have had her instructions from Traybor.”

  Ann Hawks, daughter of a construction worker, lived in a large maroon trailer in a park on the south edge of town. She was alone in the trailer. She wore blue-jean shorts and a tight yellow sweat shirt. Her blonde hair was tied back in a skimpy ponytail.

  “Gee, I can’t tell you any more than Jerry did. Like I guess he told you, we just didn’t see anything. It was—you know—all confusing.”

  “You’re a little bit better liar than he is, but not much, Ann.”

  “How come you think you can come in here and talk to me like that?”

  “Don’t get lippy, Ann,” Lieberman said in his customary gentle tone. “We won’t talk about what you saw or who you recognized or anything like that. Let’s talk about your father for a minute.”

  “So what about him? I don’t get it.”

  Lieberman, sitting on a couch in the cramped, cluttered trailer, leaned forward, his face intent. “Honey, suppose somebody was getting beat up and they yelled to your father for help. What would happen?”

  “He’d jump right in, swinging.”

  “I guess your father is a man, isn’t he?”

  “Sure he’s a man.”

  “But, honey, you go out with a punk who runs like a rabbit. It doesn’t figure.”

  “I tried to get him to help out.”

  “But he didn’t want to get mixed up in anything.”

  “That was it, I guess.”

  “Six thousand kids in that school. Three thousand boys. Out of three thousand you pick yourself a real tiger.”

  “Jerry’s all right,” she said sullenly.

  “Too scared to help out and now he’s too scared to tell us who did it.”

  “He can’t tell you who did it. Gosh, you don’t know the score. They’d maybe kill him.”

  “Honey, I want you to think real hard about something else. Just what would Jerry have done if they’d picked your car?”

  “He’d fight.”

  Lieberman smiled. “Would he? You think he would? Or maybe beg for mercy? Or maybe run down the road and all the way home and hide under the bed?”

  “He isn’t a bad kid.”

  “Not bad, honey. Just weak as water.”

  Browden sensed it was his turn to come in again. “Mose, I think if we take them both down and put them in separate cells, we can get an answer in a day or two.”

  He sensed at once that it was a bad estimate. The girl’s gray eyes seemed to darken. “Go ahead. You do that. Have fun. You could keep us in there forever and you won’t get a damn thing.”

  Lieberman gave Browden a quick glance of regret. When they were back at the car Lieberman said, “I was getting close, Ed.”

  “I know. I sensed it. I tried to push, but I pushed too hard and spoiled it. I’m sorry.”

  “Okay with you if I try her alone tomorrow?”

  “It’s okay with me.”

  “There’s more there than with the Traybor kid. Same bad sense of values, but more underneath. More decency. She’s the one to work on.”

  On Monday afternoon Lieberman reported failure. “I think I got close, but not close enough. She understands what the word obligation means. But she feels it’s to the Traybor kid first. She recognized those kids, same as Traybor. But . . .” He shrugged. “They got a date tonight, Ed. You want to play a little game?”

  “I’ve heard that before, Mose. Do we, as officers of the law, exceed our authority?”

  “What else?”

  “I got to get me a new partner, or I’ll never end up with a pension.”

  “Think of how I keep your life bright and exciting.”

  They used Lieberman’s own car, a dark, elderly, asthmatic sedan. They used the patience that had been trained into them. Browden, as the better driver, waited behind the wheel. At midnight they picked up Jerry Traybor’s distinctive chopped-down Ford as it turned out of Sandy’s and headed toward town. Browden followed without lights. If it showed signs of turning into a chase, he was going to break it off. They had agreed on that.

  “Traffic is okay, Ed, and this looks like a good place,” Lieberman said, betraying his excitement by his casualness of tone.

  Browden accelerated and passed the Ford. When his back wheel was even with the Ford’s front wheel, he bore gradually right. There was one small thump and clash of metal. Both cars dipped down through the wide, shallow ditch and the Ford stopped with its nose against a barbed-wire fence.

  They swung out of the sedan into the night shadows. Traybor had vaulted out of the open Ford. He ran down the road, shoes slapping the asphalt, a thin, frantic, receding figure in the faint starlight.

  The girl had gotten out of the car and she was backing slowly away, ready to panic, aware she had no chance against the two figures.

  “Relax, honey,” Lieberman said, stopping. “It’s me again.” Browden stopped too.

  Her voice was tremulous in the dark. “The cop?”

  “That’s right. Don’t be afraid.”

  “I—I don’t understand.”

  Browden got in the back. Ann Hawks sat up front with Lieberman. He said, putting the old sedan into gear, “Honey, it could have been your friends, you know. Those ones you won’t identify.”

  “He—he ran.” She began to cry. Lieberman dug Kleenex out of the glove compartment.

  “Like a big rabbit,” Lieberman said.

  “This time it could have been you instead of Betty Lee Nichols.”

  “I—I know. I thought it was going to be.”

  They waited in silence.

  “Ricky Wyostek,” she said. “He was standing by Dick. Junky Turner was holding Betty Lee. I think his real name is Ronald. I don’t know who the other one was, but it was probably Skip French. Those three run around together. Skip carries a switchblade.”

  “I know French and Turner,” Browden said. “They got off on a stolen car rap over a year ago. They must be nineteen. They still in high school?”

  “Not any more, Ricky Wyostek is real old. He’s over twenty.”

  “I think I am a sadistic cop,” Lieberman said softly, “and I think I am going to dearly enjoy picking up those little playmates. Let’s go get ’em, Ed.�
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  They took the girl home and then they went and got them.

  LUST SONG

  Stuart Friedman

  Cha cha cha-tiyata . . . cha-ta-cha,” her chirpy voice sang. The melodious sound penetrated the closed windows. “Cha cha cha-tiyata . . . cha-ta-cha.”

  In the dim old bedroom, Barton stood listening behind lowered blinds. Tall and gray in workshirt and overalls, his sinewy old body was bent forward and motionless like a taut bow and his mouth was open slightly like a crater in the dry crust of the seamy skin of his face. His big, knuckly hands were clenched and still as weights. “Cha cha cha-tiyata . . . cha-ta-cha.” He straightened up, moistened his lips, drew a long breath and shook his head. His hands opened. He turned and started for the door, but some counter-will in him made him veer to the bureau. He opened a drawer and took out the binoculars.

  He went to the window, inched it up and raised the blind two inches from the sill, squinting briefly against the glare stripe of sunlight. He went to the chair at the end of the room, where light wouldn’t catch on the lenses, and put the binoculars to his eyes, his heart beginning to thump against his ribs. Cha cha cha-tiyata . . . cha-ta-cha, he whispered as the sound of her came again, louder, richer through the opening. His thick fingers became tremulous on the delicate adjustment wheel as he found her and brought her into focus, her red hair in the wind glowing like embers in a forge.

  Deena May, his hired hand’s wife . . . the “child bride” as Barton thought of her . . . was hanging clothes in her yard and dancing to her own foolish, delicious music. She wore a loose, carelessly buttoned, pink house dress . . . and probably nothing else . . . and she came toward him from the clothes basket to the line, lifting her knees in quick, prancy steps. She was a pretty little thing, as lively and mindless as a bird, with a tiny waist and dainty legs. She wasn’t fully fleshed out yet and her lines were clean as stems and from the front or back or side views, the roundings of her femaleness showed clearly when the wind pressed the thin dress to her flesh.

  She moved back to the clothes basket, not in a straight line, but in a prancing, dancing half circle to the beat of the “Cha cha cha-tiyata . . . cha-ta-cha . . .” On the “tiyata” part her thin voice rose high as a cat’s, then swiftly dipped with an oddly stroking sound that was nakedly voluptuous in quality. She accompanied the sound with a tantalizing motion: a fluid roll, tilt and swish of her hips. She came back to the line with another garment . . . a pair of her husband’s underwear shorts . . . and as she pinned them up her knees flashed higher than ever, showing the smooth pale nakedness of her inner thighs. Pain stabbed at Barton’s eyeballs and he shut his eyes, resting the binoculars on his knees. Warm, warm her young body would be, warm as new milk . . . or cool in the fresh breeze, cool as silk. Warm, cool, whichever, whatever, it didn’t matter.

  He pulled her to him again with the binoculars. She had a saucy round face with round blue eyes and a round dimple in her chin. Down in the mule country, where she came from, the dimple meant the devil was in her, Deena May said. Ignorant superstition. But Barton supposed it had been drilled into her child mind till she believed it. With her showing her flesh and singing and stepping high to the devil’s beat, anyone could believe it.

  He saw she kept turning her head to her shoulder and he was so enrapt with the brilliant image of her red hair, like a wanton brand of flame on her cheek, that he didn’t realize she was looking back at the house. Then the screen door flew open and her husband Hugh charged out. Barton realized then that Hugh had been watching from inside and Deena May had been putting on the show to work him up. She whooped and shrieked and took off across the yard. He caught her by the hair in a dozen long-legged strides and dumped her. She kicked her bare legs in the air and rolled onto her knees and tackled his lanky legs and in a moment he was on the ground with her, scowling and mussing her up. She got away and he chased her out of sight around the front of the house. In awhile he came marching her in front of him, twisting her arm. She stopped every few steps and bumped her bottom back against him, a look of high glee on her excited face. She boasted how she could get him excited any time, morning, noon and night, and could wear him down to a frazzle even if she was only fourteen and he thought he was a man because he was twenty-one. Hugh pushed her inside the house with a loud spank and the screen door whacked shut. Barton lowered the binoculars, his mouth clamped in a straight line.

  Barton thought of Hugh with a bitter scorn. For all his big talk about being man enough to handle her, all she had to do was swish her tail to bring him down on all fours and use him up. He went to the bureau, dropped the binoculars in the bureau drawer and kneed it shut with an air of finality. That’s all there was these days, animals yielding to their pleasures, no discipline, no pride in strength, only in weakness. Barton caught sight of himself in the bureau mirror, which was flaking and yellowed, decaying like everything else in this dying house. Light from the peephole opening of the window shone on one side of his face, leaving the other in shadow, and an uneven line ran down the center as if a jagged axe blade had tried to split his head—and struck granite, he told himself. He had lived his life on his hind legs, and nothing, nothing short of God could bring him low at the end . . . no, not even the devil.

  He left the bedroom and went along the hall, past the shut doors of the long-empty bedrooms, where the rugs and curtains and chairs and made-beds remained, unused, and giving off the silent musty breath of slow decay. He went down the gloomy central stairs and looked in at the big, glassed-in porch that had served as a play room and sewing room and second parlor, where the girls could entertain their beaux, and in the final years Melly, his wife, had made it her afternoon headquarters, for reading or sewing or just contenting herself looking out at the side lawn and her flowers and their fields. Often she would have her nap there after the midday meal and he’d come down from his own nap and they’d have coffee together before he went out to work. Sometimes he thought a belief in ghosts would be a help, so he could imagine her there smiling and asking if he’d had a good nap . . . though he was inclined to wake grumpy and had usually been aggravated by the question. On an impulse he went over and started to raise the blinds; a little clean light in this room of Melly’s might give the whole dreary house a better feel.

  He glanced around to look at the furnishings when the first blind was up. Slowly, he lowered the blind again. The furnishings were shabby and graceless and heavy, nothing anybody would want today. It had been mighty pretty once. He shrugged. Better to leave it with the dead past.

  He went to the kitchen and set coffee warming while he tidied up the mess from his dinner, his mouth down at the corners, a sourness in his stomach and at the base of his tongue. He took some baking soda and belched, looking with distaste at the leftovers in pans and skillet. He still ate the same old greasy food, and too much of it, just as if he still worked from “sun to sun.” He drank his coffee standing up; then marched out like a man going to work, but he wasn’t going to do anything but putter . . . maybe fix up that board in the corn crib, or maybe mend harness. He shook his head; damnfoolishness mending harness for a team of horses that never did anything but pasture and once in awhile some light hauling. The tractor did their work better and cheaper, and there wasn’t really enough land left to require a tractor. He had sold off all but the sixty acres he and Melly had started out with. He’d saved his three boys and two girls the trouble of waiting for him to die by giving them their patrimony shortly after Melly passed on. He had a few thousand and this place and he wouldn’t have to crowd any of his grandchildren out of their rooms, which was probably luckier than an old man had right to be.

  He dawdled around in the barn, feeling that there wasn’t any point in doing anything in particular. He went and stood in the barn door and looked out over the green expanse of growing corn and beyond it in the south field to the vast great yellow square of young wheat. It would grow and ripen and then be cut down and there’d be another winter and maybe another spring .
. .

  He spat! God damn a self-pitying man. Whining at his age, worse than a whelp. He heard the tractor start up and located it out in the field with Hugh on the seat, riding young and high and mighty. Then his gaze slid toward the little house, the one he and Melly had started out in. Deena May would be up and chippying around at her chores . . . or maybe sprawled in the bed, sleeping and renewing that radiant, lustrous, sweet vital young body. The mere sight of that little house roused his belly to life.

  He walked up the lane, toward the houses, toward the old barn, thinking of his Bible and the times of greatness when the old men were kings and Solomon lay cold on his bed and they brought to his bed the choicest virgins and . . . The land swirled in the bright heat and Barton stopped and lighted a cigarette . . . and there had been King David who had looked upon the flesh of Bathsheba . . . the smoke dry-tickled his throat and he coughed violently . . . and the great king had sent the young husband off to his death . . . in the Bible, yes, in the good Book, and it had been recorded, the living truth . . . wicked though it might be, it was the nature and the Fate of Man . . . and when a man grew cold with age he could not help himself if he went to the life-saving fire . . . it was his own life he saved, even if it came to King David’s way . . . Scraped down to the raw an animal had to choose to save his own life . . .

  An animal, yes, an animal killed or was killed . . . but not a man, not a human standing on his hind legs. NO! He didn’t wipe out the pride of all his achievements at his life’s end . . .

  Barton turned into the old barn, got into his car and drove to town. Maybe there would be a few cronies around the grain elevator or the feed store. He parked on Main Street. He sat, debating. He didn’t have many cronies left. And all they could do together would be to carp about the way things were and down in all their bellies was nothing but the cold fear of death and the fear of life and the aching, hopeless wish to be men again. He didn’t want the smell of them. He went over to the bank and cashed a check and drove on into the city. He parked and roamed the bright, busy streets, looking sharply in at the women’s shops, tempted and afraid to go in and buy some pretties for her. Panties and stockings and shoes and perfumes and dresses. He felt flushed and excited and he stopped at a travel agency window with its pictures of gay, carefree foreign places and girls in bathing suits and without exactly knowing what he was doing he got the car again and drove to the airport. He watched the great, shiny planes, landing and taking off; he mingled with the moving, lively crowds waiting to go or going and he longed to have Deena May there to see it and feel it and catch the fire and enthusiasm. He could take her and give her the sparkling brightness and the go go go that she craved. What did it come to, all his hard work and sober virtue? It came to dullness and death.