Death Comes Early

by William R. Cox

  She did not evaluate it in any way. She only knew that she needed reassuring and that sooner or later they would awaken and there would be no need for words, for discussion. Jack was strong, stronger than Ted, who had failed her in more ways than one. If she could gain a modicum of relief from him, she would be grateful forever.

  Oddly, she fell asleep at once.

  seven

  Hal Damon rubbed a hand over his face, hard. He needed sleep. He drove the police car he sometimes used to a spot down the street from the Greystone Club and parked it.

  He was frightened a bit, way down deep, but something stubborn made him clear of mind, able to think. He was a bit surprised to find that there was iron in him. He had not suspected that he could keep going, he had thought to remove himself from the case when it got too hot. Now he knew he would not do it, that he had to go on.

  He was not displeased that Jack Ware had been hit in the head. He figured Ware had it coming to him. He was, however, preoccupied by the fact that it had happened where and when it did. His fear of Cancelli was real but he saw a way out for himself if he could learn enough about the attack on Ware.

  He was also intrigued by Lila’s actions. He had known within minutes that Ware was in her apartment. He was so certain that Lila had been in love with Ted, had been ready to marry him, that he could not adjust to this circumstance. It lowered Lila in his esteem; it marred the picture he had of her.

  He was, like the rest of them, enamored of the girl. He admitted it, but his dreams were lowly, he knew where he stood, even if that bastard, Jack Ware, had not told him in no uncertain terms. There were several other of them, midtown broads, for whom he lusted in vain. The hell of it was that damned Ware had been partly right. That’s what made it hurt.

  To be born ugly wasn’t so bad. To be born poor and ugly was too much handicap for a man without any particular useful talent. Damon was also sensitive. The inside of him in no way resembled the outside.

  He had aspirations without the wherewithal to realize them; a curse, indeed. He wanted to be comely and likable and suave and desirable to women. He was homely and crotchety and rough and women simply did not notice him.

  That is, they did not unless he forced himself upon them. The hat check girl from the Greystone was named Nola. She was a dish-faced bleached blonde notable only for protuberant bosoms and long legs which looked well in a net leotard. She came hurrying out of the club, looking back over her shoulder, then slid into the police car like a plump ghost. She brought the aroma of perspiration covered with drug store perfume which Damon recognized only too well, the odor of all women he was able to make.

  He pulled away without turning on his lights, went around the corner toward Third Avenue. She kept looking back every moment or so.

  He said harshly, “Cancelli’s not tailing you.”

  “How do ya know?” Her voice was nasal, flat, New York at its worst. “If he ever knew, he’d moralize me.”

  “Did you keep your eyes open?”

  “How should I keep ’em? He din’t leave the joint. None of his mob left the joint, I tole you onna phone.”

  “What else did you learn?”

  “What should I learn?” She did not quite pronounce it “loin,” which would be Brooklyn or Jersey City, she cut the sound in between, connoting the Bronx or Newark. “There was a beef, Lila she run out after Mr. Ware left, Pete was askin’ for her. Porter, he got smart with me. I should hang around with some people, I told him, no, I told him, I got a home, I got sore feet, what does he think?”

  Damon yawned. “Nothing else?”

  “What else should there be, except I told you onna phone? I gotta watch that phone business, they could catch on, you callin’ me.”

  “Nuts. They think it’s your boy friend.”

  She leaned toward him, her wide mouth grinning. “It ain’t true, a’ready? Where we goin’?”

  He did not answer at once. He wished he could tell her to get out, to get lost, to go away. He had a rap hanging over her, shoplifting, nothing that would stand up well, but enough to scare her and keep her docile. He glanced at her with tired eyes and caught the lift of her breasts against a street light. They were real enough, a bit too heavy, but needing no artificial aid.

  He said, “To my pad.”

  “To the pad a’ready, without eatin’? I’m hungry,” she whined.

  “All right, we’ll grab something.”

  “Grab somethin’? Can’t we hit Lucy’s, get a steak?”

  “I need some shut-eye.”

  “Some shut-eye, you need? I need some food, I’m sicka hamburgers an’ java. Gee, Hal.”

  He turned downtown. He lived on 15th Street in a walk-up flat he had furnished rather well from his pay and a few outside “investments.” He said flatly, “Look, I’m telling you, Lopez.”

  “My name ain’t Lopez.”

  But she was daunted. He only called her Lopez when he was sore at her. “My name is Nola Shenovitz.”

  “Your name is mud if you don’t get off my back.”

  He stopped near an all-night lunchroom and called in to have the car picked up. She went reluctantly to buy food. In a few moments a squad car came by and one of the officers dropped off and took over, driving away. Damon followed the girl into the food emporium and saw her slumped on a stool, overdone, blowsy.

  This was his speed, he thought, Nola “Lopez” Shenovitz, once a prossie, sometime shoplifter, handy woman for Porter Hull and Pete Cancelli. He could—and would—take her to bed because he had to have somebody to assuage the fires. He would not gain other than momentary relief. Worse, he would in no way alleviate his utter, dismal loneliness.

  He thought, then, of Lila and Jack Ware. He did not feel rage or resentment against either of them, he felt only sadness and envy. They were alike in many ways, they probably deserved each other. His cop’s mind took over and he began to wonder how he could use this alliance to his own ends.

  He walked around the corner with the voluble, protesting Nola, went in the front door and up the narrow stairway of the converted tenement near First Avenue. He let himself in with the key, allowed the girl to go to the kitchen with the greasy package of hamburgers and the damp cartons of coffee.

  He went to the phone and dialed Lila’s number. When she answered, her low voice full of sleep, he said, “Listen carefully, Lila… The way I see it now, there’s something upstate that needs checking. When Jack is able to get around, I want to talk to him about it.”

  “It’s four-thirty,” she mumbled. “I’m too dopey to make sense.”

  “Make a note,” he insisted. “I want Jack to start thinking about the lodge upstate. There’s a girl involved. She was Alvin’s girl.”

  “What do you know about her?” She was waking up.

  “Not enough. I can’t get permission to go up there. If I work the ticker, some small-town snooper may squeak and blow the bit. Jack will want to know, I tell you, that there’s something smelly up there.”

  She said, “I’ll tell him.” Then she said sharply, “When I see him.”

  Damon permitted himself the luxury of a meaningful chuckle. “Honey, you think I don’t know where he is?”

  There was a moment’s silence, then she said, “The hell with you.”

  “Good—uh—sleeping,” said Damon. He hung up and wiped sweat from his brow. He could see Nola in the kitchen, wrapping herself greedily around a roll full of meat, gulping coffee to wash down the unappetizing mess.

  Well, he thought, join her. Swallow the garbage. Make her take a bath. Change the sheets on the bed. Drop some cologne around, so that she doesn’t stink up the joint. So she has body odor. Good enough for Hal Damon. A cop might scare some people, he might throw around some weight, he might mingle with the people he admires and wishes to emulate, but he goes to bed for free, with whatever he can get.

  He shook himself. Not a cop, he reprimanded himself, not because you’re a cop. Because you’re Hal Damon, an ugly man with nothing to o
ffer a better woman.

  At least he had sown a seed in Lila, who would transplant it in Jack Ware. Or vice-versa, if it was the way he knew in the back of his mind it would be when Jack woke up in that apartment with that woman…

  He went into the kitchen and reached for a hamburger. With the other hand he pinched Nola’s left breast.

  The woman on Pete Cancelli’s right leaned close and whispered in his ear with consummate indelicacy, offering him things he did not, at the moment, want. He shoved her back to a semi-upright position on her chair and said, “You’re drunk. I don’t have anything to do with drunk broads.”

  There was only the table lamp and around the table the indistinct figures of Simon and Katz Manning and the other women. There was one left over, a young one, with wide, slanting eyes of startling intensity. Now she was smiling wickedly at the drunk woman who had made the pass at Pete.

  He got up and walked around the table and said, “Stick here, baby.”

  “Are you sure you want me to?”

  “I want you to.”

  “What about her—the alcoholic lady?”

  “They’ll sweep her out.”

  “Are you going to be long?”

  “Does it matter?”

  She looked straight at him. There was a restrained ferocity in her despite her clear, literate speech, her fine, smooth skin, her youth. “Not tonight, it doesn’t matter.” He did not touch her. He went into Porter Hull’s private office. His manager looked up, nodded, tore a slip from a small electric adding machine and handed it to him.

  Pete said, “It figured to be a good night for business.”

  “Even if two customers got murdered.”

  “Because they got murdered.”

  Porter Hull said, “I liked Ted. Alvin was a stinker, but he was always nice to me.”

  Pete picked up the phone and dialed a number. When a voice answered, he said, “Pete here.”

  “You sure we ain’t bugged?” said the man on the other end.

  “I’m goddam sure. What am I, an amateur?”

  “Well, the way things are…” He spoke as an equal. “Okay. I got a few things. Ware is at Lila’s place. He ain’t hurt too bad, just bad enough.”

  “Nothing’s enough to stop that bastard from being a nuisance. I wish he was dead.”

  “You wish everybody’s dead, most of the time. Get that out of your head, Pete, it ain’t healthy.”

  “You going to psychoanalyze me? I pay a stinkin’ fortune to a head shrinker already, he can’t do me anything. So I don’t like people, so screw them.”

  “My head shrinker thinks that is bad. He is always after me, don’t hate, only a weak man hates. He says I am a strong man with a Napoleon complex. Like I wish I was boss over everything.”

  “Don’t even think it.”

  “Who thinks it? Who wants a concrete benny? So what is with you? That Gold Bug business, that was bad.”

  “Fifty gees it was bad.”

  “I didn’t like it neither, Pete.”

  “Okay, okay. Look, I got to find out about a lotta things. Maybe you can help?”

  “You’re all right with the boys. Just ask.”

  “Business is good?”

  “So long as the average dope plays the numbers, the baseball and football pools, we’re all right.”

  “The houses still closed?”

  “Yeah. Nothing left but a few call girls. You can’t hardly make it off broads no more.”

  Pete said, “I dunno, that was always chicken to me. I was never in that. I hate a goddam pimp.”

  “Pimps they still got. Us organizers is the ones that suffer. So far as broads is concerned, what the hell, they’re gonna peddle it anyway. We used to could keep the fuzz off them. We had doctors. What the hell?”

  “I never went for it.”

  “You got to take the buck where you find it. Me, now, I hate junk. A junky can drive me nuts. Is that any reason we shouldn’t make the buck off the dumb bastards who get hooked? What the hell’s the difference? Did we invent it? We got a right, way I see it.”

  “Yeah, guess you’re right. Nothing else for me, huh?”

  “Sure, there is. We get gassin’, I forget what the boys brought in. It’s about that cop, Hal Damon.”

  “Screw him.”

  “Well, it’s the hat check broad. Nola?”

  “Yeah, the big Polack?”

  “Yeah, with the tits. He picked her up when she left the club. You oughta know about things like that.”

  Pete was silent for a moment, then he said, “I had a hunch, is why I asked for the check-up. Thanks, Frankie.”

  “I’ll be needin’ a favor myself, some day. You got anything at the track for me?”

  “Not anything for sure.”

  “Okay. I don’t bet for fun, Pete. When you get something rigged, lemme know. But not like Gold Bug. I don’t want to hear any more like that one.”

  “It went wrong. I offered to pay you back what you lost.” Pete’s voice was flat and sour now.

  “Nothin’ like that, pal. Just remember, you owe me one. Okay, sweetheart?”

  “Okay.” Pete hung up. He hated to think of Gold Bug and the way it had gone. He couldn’t stand thinking of failure. The head doctor had talked about that at some length, but Pete was inclined to get sulky under such pressures and scarcely listened. He didn’t know why he paid the man all that money. Maybe just because Frankie and the other mains went to the analyst, and all the Hollywood people and the Madison Avenue television boys that he secretly admired and envied.

  He said to Porter Hull, “That Damon is makin’ it with Nola.”

  “I’ll fire her tomorrow.”

  “Don’t be dumb,” said Pete.

  “But if she’s talking to Damon!”

  “Let her. What can she tell him?”

  “Well, if we’re careful.” Hull brightened. “We can feed her, of course. Now that we know it. I say, you are clever, Pete.”

  “Feed her nothing. Damon’s no fool. I trained him myself. He wouldn’t trust his mother, much less that tomato. Just continue the way we’re going, careful of everything, everybody. Damn it, don’t try to think, will you? Stick to the club, you’re doing a good job here.”

  Porter Hull sulked. “You shouldn’t scream at me, Pete.”

  “That’s right. I shouldn’t.” The protuberant eyes retreated behind hoods, the thin mouth smiled. “I appreciate you, pal. Now, will you have that drunken blond dame taken some place, nice and quiet, no rough stuff?”

  “She giving you trouble?”

  “She’s loaded and I hate loaded broads.”

  Porter Hull said slyly, “She’s special, if you know what I mean. Mind if I take her?”

  “So long as you keep her away from me.”

  “Can do.”

  “Fine, pal. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  They shook hands ceremoniously, as if they had concluded a business arrangement. Pete went back into the darkened club. Simon and Manning were restless, they wanted to go to their apartment with the women. They shared everything, Pete thought amusedly, two brothers together.

  He went to the dark girl and sat beside her. “Ready?”

  “I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t ready.”

  “Haven’t seen you around before.”

  “You may never see me again.”

  He said, “We’ll know better about that tomorrow. Let’s get out of this bat cave.”

  She walked straight, one foot ahead of the other, as he had read somewhere that Indians walk. She was copper colored, maybe she had Indian blood. Fennimore Cooper, he thought. The name hadn’t come to his mind for years. He must ask the head shrinker about that, how a guy could remember like that, all of a sudden, about books he had read when he was a kid on Long Island. And about the dirt farm and his drunken old man and his flighty mother who used to lay the neighbors and the hired hand and anyone else who came along, which was why he couldn’t stand to hear traveling salesman stories. It
would make the doc real happy to open up another can of beans along those lines.

  eight

  It was four days before Jack Ware could move without pain. There were still bruises, dark and angry, his ribs hurt and his left arm was a bit stiff, but he could dismiss these as minor. What he could not put out of his mind was the terrible feeling of helplessness which had come upon him when he was being beaten, or his hatred of the two men who had attacked him. He knew this was wrong, that the men had merely been hired to do a job, that they had instructions not to kill him, that on their part it had been a neat piece of work, without emotion. Still he brooded, wanting them, both of them, where he could have warning and a chance.

  Maybe they would get him again, he thought, but he would at least give out receipts. He would at least get in a couple of tricky little things he knew about. He might de-ball one of them and blind the other. He imagined himself doing this but it wasn’t any good, he knew he could not identify the men and the odds were high that he would never see them again.

  On the fifth day he snapped out of it. Lila sat up in the bed about noon and he was grinning at her, smoking a cigarette, admiring her. She covered her naked breasts with the sheet and said, “Well! You’re going to be all right.”

  “And thanks very much.”

  “For what?”

  “For many things.”

  “I hope everything was satisfactory,” she said meekly. He deliberately put out the cigarette and slid down next to her beneath the sheet. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath and shuddered and met him, turning to him.

  After a while she said, “I guess it was satisfactory, all right. I guess everybody is satisfied.”

  “For now,” he said. “I got to get up out of here. I got to get back to attending to things.”

  “The restaurant is doing fine.”

  “Sure it is. They need me like a shot in the head.”

  “My contract is up in another month. We could go away and I could get the divorce.” She added hastily, “For me, I mean. Because I want to. Not that it means anything to you.”