Seven Steps East

by Ben Benson

  “Sure,” I said. “Thanks for calling me, Andy.”

  “It’s okay. I called Middleboro first. They told me why you were in town.”

  “All right,” I said. “Where’s Charley Groote now?”

  “I sent him back to watch the house. He’s not to do anything until we get there.”

  “You think Aguerra is still in there?”

  “Most likely. When he gets drunk nothing bothers him.”

  I nodded. I knew Shacktown. I had covered it before. Several towns in that area of Cape Cod had shacktowns of their own. They were usually at the end of town and off the main road. Here the itinerant cranberry workers lived. Also the alcoholics, the scavengers and the outcast Bravos. Bravos were the dark-skinned immigrants from Portuguese Africa and the Cape Verde Islands who had come to the Cape many years ago. Some had intermarried with the Indians. Mostly they were a hard-working, industrious people, doing the manual labor in the cranberry bogs. But like every ethnic group they had their problem people. The alcoholics, the lazy, the thieves, the sexually promiscuous. These would congregate in the shacktowns.

  “What about Groote’s gun?” I asked.

  “It had a broken firing pin,” Reardon said. “No cartridges.”

  I didn’t say anything. In police work you didn’t carry a weapon for show. You either carried a firearm or you didn’t. If you carried one, you made sure it was in working order. An enemy did not know of any broken firing pin and might fear that your gun would kill him. He might try to kill you instead. A disabled revolver was of not much use under those circumstances.

  South of the town we came down a grade and turned into a narrow road. The car radio squawked and rasped. The call was not for us.

  Reardon said, “We’ve got a couple of other cars on the stolen list that fit the same description. So it’s not necessarily Kirk’s. But I thought you’d like to be around. Just in case.”

  “I sure appreciate it, Andy,” I said.

  “Kirk’s a hell of a good kid,” Reardon said tersely. “I’ve happened to know him all his life. They don’t come any better than Kirk.”

  He slowed the car and turned off his lights. Ahead of us, on the left, an old pickup truck was parked.

  “Charley Groote’s,” Reardon said.

  Just beyond, on the right, was a shabby old cabin with a rusted, corrugated tin roof. Slivers of light came from the sides of the drawn window shades.

  We stopped, opened the doors quietly and got out of the car. We went over to the truck. A man was leaning against the side of it—Charley Groote, middle-aged, paunchy, his gray shirt soiled. He wore a strip of adhesive tape over one eye. His cap was the same as Reardon’s except for the silver cord and the silver cap device. His leather holster was empty.

  He looked at us in the darkness. Suddenly he bent forward and retched.

  “What’s the matter, Charley?” Reardon asked, taking his arm.

  “Sick,” Groote said. “Sick to my stomach. My head’s been buzzing like hell. Sal give me a hell of a whack.”

  I looked over at the house. I could see the Ford parked in front of it. But just ahead of the Ford, parked diagonally, was another car.

  “Whose car is that?” I asked.

  “Just came a minute ago,” Groote said. “Two men. Inside the house with Aguerra.” He bent forward again, his shoulders jerking spasmodically.

  “We’d better get you to a doctor,” I said to him.

  “I’ll wait,” Groote said. “Go in and get Aguerra.”

  “Go sit in the truck,” Reardon said. He peered at the house, then said to me, “Aguerra lives there with Mrs. Aguerra. Four kids. Mrs. Aguerra is young but she likes the wine, too. We’ve had Aguerra in on nonsupport, assault, petty larceny, D and D. The usual. Have to send him to the county house of correction again, I guess.”

  I nodded. It was the same sordid story, the same pattern. The shiftless, indolent, irresponsible man and the frowsy woman who begat children. You sent the man off to jail and the town had to support the mother and the children and watch over them and try to keep them properly clothed, cleaned and fed. The father didn’t care.

  We put Charley Groote onto the seat of his truck and started for the house. The Ford was parked parallel to it. There were no number plates on it now.

  I walked around the car. Then I opened the door softly and fished into the glove compartment. I could find no registration slip. I straightened up. There was a loud burst of laughter from the inside of the house.

  Reardon was now standing next to me. He said, “This looks like Kirk’s car.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s the same model and has the same colors. But this one looks beat. Kirk kept his in good condition.”

  “He’s been missing since Friday night,” Reardon said. “Doesn’t take too many days to run any car into the ground.”

  “When we get a chance we’ll check the serial number,” I said. “There’s no key in the ignition.”

  Reardon was peering ahead. His hand tightened on my arm. “That’s a black Chrysler in front,” he said softly.

  “Yes.”

  I went over. The car was cut diagonally across the front of the Ford, its nose into the littered yard. I felt the hood. It was very warm.

  Reardon was behind me. “Black Chrysler,” he said. He cleared his throat. His voice sounded very dry. “Bank holdup in Fall River Friday afternoon.”

  “I heard about it,” I said.

  “Three guys wearing silk-stocking masks. They pistol-whipped an old guard and one of the tellers. The guard is on the danger list at the hospital. He was beat up for no reason at all. He offered no resistance. The pickup car was a black Chrysler.”

  “Aguerra?” I asked.

  “Could be. He’s a good wheel man and he might have been used on the job. Not very dependable though. Likes the wine too much.”

  “The take was seven thousand dollars, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Were they all armed?”

  “The two who came into the bank were.”

  I looked silently at the house. Then I said, “Kirk might have stumbled onto it. Maybe he came down around here Friday night.”

  “He might have,” Reardon said.

  I unbuttoned my jacket and loosened the snub-nosed revolver in its hip holster. “Where does the back of the house lead?”

  “To a rubbish heap and then down to the pond. Ralph, there are four sleeping kids in there.”

  “I’ll be careful of them,” I said. “You cover me, Andy.”

  “You’re going in?”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s more than Sal Aguerra in there,” Reardon said. “I count three of them. We’ll need help.”

  I looked at the drawn shades of the house. “I’m not going to wait, Andy,” I said.

  “I feel bad about Kirk, too,” Reardon said. “Maybe I wasn’t as close to the family as you, but I knew him longer.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “If you cover me, I guess I can handle it.”

  “Look, you’re upset,” Reardon said. “Forget Kirk for the moment. What’s the sensible thing to do now? Stop and think a minute, kid.”

  I rubbed my face. I was so tense I was shivering. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

  “Thanks, Andy,” I said. “You’re right. Use your radio. We’ll wait.”

  “I can get a couple of Falmouth cops here in about ten, fifteen minutes. The troopers will take a little longer.”

  “All right,” I said. “Before you go—how was this Aguerra on gambling?”

  “Used to be a bookie.”

  “Recently?”

  “No. A couple of years ago he stole some money from the big man. They cut off his left ear.”

  “Nice folks.”

  “The best. He hasn’t been in the business since.”

  “You sure?”

  He shook his head. “Who’s sure of anything these days?”

  He left me and went back to
his car. I waited. There was a gust of laughter from the house. A woman swore in a high-pitched voice.

  Reardon came back. “On the way,” he said.

  “Good. How’s Charley Groote?”

  “Sick. He’ll be no good to us here.”

  We moved behind the Ford in front of the house. Reardon took out his revolver and checked the cylinder. As he slipped it back into the holster, the front door of the house opened suddenly. A short, squat man, with the big shoulders of a wrestler, lurched out onto the porch landing.

  “Cripes,” Reardon whispered. “It’s Aguerra.”

  Aguerra turned and called in through the open door. “Wait,” he said arrogantly. “The stuff is in the trunk.” His voice slurred drunkenly. “My dear friends, I will personally get it for you.”

  He started down the stairs for the car. We came out from behind it and raced in on him. He stopped.

  “Hey,” he called. “Hey, who the hell are you?”

  “Reardon,” the chief said. “Sal, we’re taking you in.”

  “Cops,” Aguerra shouted. “Goddam cops.” He lunged at me, cocking a massive right fist. I waited. As he swung, I brought up my left forearm and caught his. Then I brought my arm down sharply in an arc, pinioning his between my own and my body. I thrust the heel of my right hand up, catching him on the chin and pushing him back. Reardon came in with a leg trip. Aguerra crashed to the ground.

  “Handcuff him,” I said to Reardon. “There’s no time to wait now.”

  I ran up the stairs, through the open door and into the house. The room was slovenly and rank-smelling. On an old round table was an empty quart bottle of wine, three glasses, a small straw sewing basket with banknote wrappers in it, and a well-oiled, blued-steel revolver with a four-inch barrel. In a corner was a studio couch. A blowsy-looking woman of about thirty lounged on it. Her skirt was up, showing heavy white thighs. She was disheveled and she looked at me with drunken stupefaction.

  Two men had been staring at the doorway from the middle of the room. One was tall and heavy, with a thick bull neck. The other was shorter and thinner. They seemed to be in their early twenties. The big one was blond, wearing his hair in a long ducktail. The other was swarthy.

  “State Police,” I said to them. “This is a pinch.”

  The tall one’s lips parted, showing yellow teeth. He turned quickly and grabbed for the revolver on the table.

  I went for him. He turned to ward me off. In his haste in scrabbling for the gun he had seized it by the barrel. The smaller man had begun to move around to my side.

  It all happened very quickly. I went into a crouch as the taller man rushed me, his arm raised high, holding the gun. He brought the butt down viciously toward my head. I moved my arms up high, crisscrossing them above the wrists. As the blow came down his wrist hit mine. The blow was cushioned. I grabbed the wrist. Then using an arm bar lever, I threw him to the floor. The gun dropped from his fingers and his stiffened arm snapped under the pressure. I heard him suck in his breath in a sobbing sigh.

  The other man had come around behind me. He kicked me behind the knee, making my leg buckle slightly with the pain, then slugged me with his fist on the side of the head. Then he reached and put a strangle hold on my throat from behind, squeezing hard with wiry fingers. I brought my right arm up high and stiff, not bending the elbow, twisting toward him, breaking his grip with a rear strangle break. I had his arm trapped. As I threw him, I kicked him in the groin.

  I picked up the gun and slipped it into my pocket. The two men on the floor were sick. The blond one had a broken arm. The science of judo is not a pleasant game. It can disable and kill. In practice you use your opponent’s strength and momentum against him and to his own disadvantage. You utilize your own maximum strength against his minimum. After four weeks at the Academy I was in good practice.

  The swarthy man was getting slowly and rockily to his feet. I took his left wrist, bringing up the back of his hand in a bar hammer lock. He whimpered. I grabbed him by the shoulder and pushed him out of the house and down the stairs. Andy Reardon was coming up to help. Behind him I saw Sal Aguerra sitting on the ground, his wrists locked in the handcuffs.

  “Any trouble?” Reardon asked.

  I was searching the swarthy man’s clothes. There was a gun strapped in a shoulder holster. I took it out. “No trouble,” I said. “There’s a big one in there on the floor. He’s semiconscious and his arm is broken. I think we’ll need an ambulance for him. We’d better scoop up the woman, too.”

  Chapter 6

  It was four o’clock in the morning when I came limping out of the small white building of the Town Hall. Parked in front were a number of police cruisers and an FBI car.

  As I walked painfully toward my car I saw a girl standing near it. She had black silky hair and was wearing a short beige woolen jacket with a shawl collar.

  “Ralph,” she called.

  I stopped and rubbed my knee. She ran up to me, her high heels clicking on the old cobblestones.

  “Ralph,” she said again. Her arms were around me, clutching me fiercely. I could smell the perfume of her hair.

  She released me, fished into the pocket of the jacket and brought out a lacy little handkerchief to dab at her eyes.

  “Iva,” I said. “It’s four o’clock. What are you doing here?”

  “I called Andy Reardon’s house. Marge told me something was happening and you were with Andy. So I rushed down. I’ve been waiting outside. Ralph, I was hoping—”

  “Nothing, Iva,” I said. “False alarm. Wrong car, wrong number plates. But we do have three bank robbers.”

  “Oh,” she said quietly. She turned her head for a moment to look back at the Town Hall. In profile she had the same retroussé nose. But Iva Hancock had become more attractive since I had last seen her. I remembered that she had worn her hair with short bangs in front and a wispy little pony tail in back. Now her head was covered with little ringlets. When I had first known her she was a slim, supple girl of eighteen. A year and a half had made a big difference in her. Her body had become more rounded. She had ripened into womanhood.

  “I’ll take you home,” I said.

  “There’s no news?” she asked anxiously.

  “Not yet.” I opened the door of my car for her and she got in. I went around to my side.

  “What’s the matter with your leg?” she asked.

  “Knee’s a little swollen,” I said. “It’ll go away.” I had been anxious, too. It was wrong to go in against two armed-robbery suspects without covering them with my gun. But the feeling that they might have had something to do with Kirk’s disappearance made me want to take them on with my hands. It was wrong and I would be censured for it.

  I drove down through the tree-lined streets of Sachem and turned onto Mohican Avenue. Nothing had seemed to change. The foliage of the trees was so heavy that it obscured the street lamps. I had always remembered that. Every so often a group of citizens would complain about the hazard of poorly lighted streets and would want the branches cut. But most of the townspeople wanted the majestic beauty of the spreading oaks. The oaks stood.

  The Hancock house was at the end of Mohican Avenue. The street was small and narrow and had no sidewalks. The lawn was sandy, as usual, and the house had the same white paint and the green trim. It was a Cape Cod cottage, but so small it resembled a summer cabin.

  The lights were on. We went inside. Her mother was asleep. I remembered Mrs. Hancock as a pale, shriveled woman with a whining voice. As long as I had known her she had always been glued in front of the television set in a blue bathrobe. She seldom left the house and invariably complained about her health.

  Mr. Hancock I had never known. About eight years before, he had decided he had had enough of Mrs. Hancock. He had been employed as an accountant in a cranberry canning factory in Buzzards Bay. One day he packed his clothes and walked out. The next time they heard from him he was on the West Coast, working in a fruit cannery. He sent his wife an allow
ance every month. Once, on Iva’s graduation from high school, he had come East to see her. He had not been back since. Mrs. Hancock had an older, unmarried sister whom we called Aunt Beth. She was a schoolteacher in Scranton, Pennsylvania, who came to Sachem every summer and stayed in the cottage.

  I looked around the living room. The old green sofa was now re-covered with a warm brown striped material. There were two new lamps.

  I said, “You’ve done some things to the house. Looks very nice.”

  “Thank you,” she said. She sat down on the sofa and tucked her long pretty legs under her blue skirt in one quick motion. I sat down in the chair opposite her, holding my sore knee out awkwardly.

  “You always did have good taste,” I said. I was thinking back to her tastes and to her ambitions and to all the things she had wanted and had never attained. The tragedy of it was that she had been so intense and so desperately urgent about wanting those things. And here she was, still in the little cottage where nothing had changed except for the new material on the sofa and the two new lamps.

  Her ambition, when I first knew her, was to go to college. She had started at Bridgewater State Teachers College, majoring in home vocational sciences. But her father was in California and her mother complained bitterly and querulously of being sick and alone with nobody to help. In her first year at Bridgewater Iva had come home for the Christmas vacation. She never went back.

  “Remember all those places we went?” she asked.

  Yes, I thought of those, too. Of the many times when she insisted we ride over to the Mount Puritan just so that we could sit in the lobby for a few minutes. She was transported into ecstasy. She had an almost abnormal fascination for rich decor, expensive clothes and wealthy people. She studied what the people wore and what cars they drove. When a well-known personage went by she would squeeze my arm convulsively. She used to tell me it made her scalp tingle. Once I took her to the dining room of the hotel for dinner. She said it was the most exciting thing that had happened to her and she could scarcely eat. She had always wished she were over twenty-one so that she could go into the Gay Nineties Lounge and order a very, very dry Martini. That summer I took her to the Falmouth Playhouse and also to the one in Dennis. She loved to mingle with the well-groomed people. She insisted on riding by the big summer estates in Osterville and Falmouth and Cotuit. The world of wealth always enraptured her.