The Kind One

by Tom Epperson

  Hanley slapped Schnitter’s knee; Schnitter winced a little through his smile.

  “That’s true, Loy. We had our differences, but they’re in the past. Just like my friendship with Bud Seitz is in the past.”

  “Mr. Schnitter, what happened with that girl at your birthday party—I hope you don’t think it was some kind of practical joke or something. It was an accident. I know Bud felt really bad about it.”

  “Loyalty’s a virtue, Danny. Up to a point.” Then he said, very slowly: “And then self-preservation begins to set in.”

  I took another gulp of whiskey. Hanley lit his cigarette with a kitchen match that he struck off the bottom of his boot. Looked at me through the smoke with his hard, gunmetal gray eyes as he waved the match out.

  “We’re offering you a job.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Helping us get rid of your boss.”

  “But in a strictly legit kinda way,” said Otay. “Like they done in Chicago with Capone.”

  “That’s how the mayor wants it,” said Schnitter. “He’s been getting a lot of heat from the Reverend Briegleb and some of the papers to ‘clean up the city.’ And so Seitz becomes our sacrificial lamb. It was an easy choice to make. Repeal changed everything, Danny. The competition for new business is ferocious. But Seitz is stuck in the past. In the old ways of doing things.”

  With its windows closed, the car was already smotheringly hot, and now it was filling up with Hanley’s smoke. I could barely breathe, but the others seemed like creatures that loved the smoke and the heat. I resolved that I would say or do anything that would contribute to me getting out of the parking lot of the Pink Rat alive.

  “I see what you mean. But what do you need me for? You already got Louie Vachaboski.”

  Schnitter frowned. “Not anymore.”

  “Louie’s skedaddled,” said Hanley.

  “To Old Mexico,” said Otay.

  “Which means,” said Schnitter, “we have to start over. With a new case.”

  “What do you know about Bud’s wife?” said Otay.

  “Nothing. I never even met her.”

  “But you know Bud had her knocked off, right?”

  “I don’t really know anything about it.”

  “Everybody knows Bud wanted a divorce and she wouldn’t give it to him. So don’t it stand to reason that he knocked her off?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it was an accident. Or suicide.”

  Schnitter tugged pensively at the lobe of one of his pointy elfin ears.

  “I’ve never quite understood the relationship between you and Bud. You show up out of nowhere, and suddenly you’re his best friend. But it’s none of my business. I have secrets too. We all have secrets. We’re just hoping you can find out the truth about his wife. After all, if she was murdered, her killer should be brought to justice. Wouldn’t that be the right thing to do?”

  I nodded. I started to take a drink of scotch, but my glass was already empty. Otay obligingly refilled it.

  “Look,” he said, “we’re setting things up all sweet and pretty for you. Everybody knows you got the hot nuts for his girlfriend. Everybody but him, anyways. Help us put him away and you’ll have her all to yourself.”

  “Of course, we’ll also pay you well,” said Schnitter.

  “So what do you say, boy?” said Hanley. “You on board?”

  “Sure. Sure I’m on board.”

  Schnitter cocked his head a little to the side and gave me a quizzical look.

  “Why am I not convinced you’re sincere?”

  “I don’t know why. I’m very sincere.”

  “Used to know this feller named Herbert Stittmatter from up around San Joaquin,” said Hanley. “I thought he might be stealing from me, but he swore up and down he wasn’t doing no such of a thing. So I buttered up the barrel of a twelve-gauge shotgun and shoved it up his ass. Told him I was pulling the trigger if he didn’t convince me he was sincere.”

  “What happened?” I said.

  Hanley shrugged. “Son of a bitch didn’t convince me.”

  “Danny?” said Schnitter. “Finish your drink.”

  “Why?”

  “Just do it,” he said gently.

  The glass was nearly full. I swallowed it all down. It burned my gullet. I coughed and shuddered.

  Now Schnitter said to Otay: “Danny has a nice face. Leave it alone.”

  Chapter 9

  THE LIMOUSINE PULLED out of the parking lot, leaving me alone with Otay, Teddy, and Vic. My head was spinning with the whiskey. It was very dark. The crickets sounded about twice as loud as when we arrived.

  Otay walked over to the edge of the weedy lot and unzipped his pants. In a moment we heard the patter of pee, and Otay making noises like: “Arrrg! Oohhh! Ooook!”

  “What’s the matter with him?” said Vic.

  “He’s got the clap,” said Teddy. “Said he got it from that movie star he’s been screwing.”

  “Poor bastard,” said Vic, and they both snickered.

  Otay zipped up, and came back. In the starlight I could see a sheen of sweat on his ugly-handsome face. “Let’s go,” he said weakly.

  We walked to the back door of the Pink Rat. There was a padlock. Teddy had a key. “What are you gonna do?” I said.

  Nobody answered. Teddy lifted the padlock out of the hasp. Then he opened the door, and Vic shoved me into a foul-smelling darkness.

  Somebody turned on a light. I was in what used to be the kitchen. It was empty now, except for a few panicky roaches running for cover and a dried-up pile of human shit in the corner near the mummified corpse of a mouse in a trap. Swinging doors on the other side of the room led into the public part of the Pink Rat.

  I heard the door shutting behind me, and I turned around and saw the three of them standing together and looking at me. Otay took out a pair of handcuffs from under his jacket. I took a few faltering backward steps. Otay said: “Grab him, boys.”

  I turned and broke for the swinging doors, but Teddy and Vic caught up with me easily and, each taking an arm, they dragged me back.

  “Poor old Limpy,” laughed Teddy. “He just can’t run worth a shit.”

  Otay cuffed my hands behind my back; then he took a pair of soft brown gloves out of his pocket and began to tug them on.

  “Jack,” I said, talking fast, “I don’t know why you’re doing this. It’s not necessary. I meant it when I said I’d go along with you guys. Bud’s a bad guy. He needs to be put away. And you’re right, I want his girlfriend. You nailed it, Jack. I’ll be sitting pretty—”

  Otay’s fist whumped into my stomach. My shoulders hunched and my knees sagged and my eyes scrunched shut and out of my mouth came an explosive moan. He might as well have been Kid McCoy in his prime and myself his canvas punching bag as he alternated lefts and rights into my stomach and ribs and sternum. Once he hit me smack on my heart and darkness flashed in my eyes and I was like a tiny barrel tumbling over some vast black waterfall. When I came back to my senses and the Pink Rat, Teddy and Vic were still holding me up, and Otay was standing in front of me, red-faced and sweating, catching his breath, one gloved hand rubbing the knuckles of his other.

  “Stop it,” I said. “Please.”

  “Turn him around,” he said to Vic and Teddy.

  Now he went to work on my back. Rabbit-punched me until I blacked out.

  When I came to, I was sitting on the filthy floor in a little puddle of my pee. My back was against a cabinet and my legs were splayed out in front of me. The three of them were looking down at me. Otay was peeling his gloves off like a weary surgeon who’d finished an operation.

  “This isn’t nothing personal, Danny. Far as I can tell, you’re a nice enough kid, and I hadn’t got nothing against you. This is just so’s you’ll know what’ll happen if you ever fuck with us. ’Cept it’ll be about a hundred times worse. And you won’t live through it.”

  “Anything you want,” I gasped. “I’ll do anything.”


  “Your turn,” Otay said to Teddy.

  I’d thought it was over.

  “Wait,” I said.

  But Otay walked away. Teddy grinned down at me.

  “Wait,” I said. “Wait.”

  Teddy pulled out of his pocket a pair of wire pliers.

  “Wait!”

  Chapter 10

  “DRINK THIS.”

  It was a murky brown liquid steaming in a teacup.

  “What’s in it?” I said.

  “A drop of dragon’s blood,” said Dulwich. “A pinch of dirt from the Lone Sod. A sprinkling of dust from the dark side of the moon.”

  I took a sip. It tasted lousy. I coughed, which hurt my ribs. I winced.

  Dulwich frowned down at me.

  “Perhaps we should take you to the hospital, and have your ribs X-rayed. Make certain there aren’t any fractures.”

  “I hate hospitals. I wanna stay here.”

  I was in Dulwich’s bed, wearing a pair of his pajamas. I’d stumbled to his door after Teddy and Vic had brought me back. He’d already cleaned me up and bandaged my toes and wrapped my ribs, all without asking a single question.

  I choked down some more of the vile stuff in the cup.

  “No kidding. What is this?”

  “A tea I got from an herb doctor in Chinatown. It will help you sleep.”

  It did, though I didn’t realize it till I found myself waking up. The bedside lamp was still on. I heard the rustle of a turning page. Dulwich had pulled up a chair beside the bed. He was reading a book called The Well at the World’s End.

  He didn’t notice I had awaked. He seemed a fatherly, reassuring presence. It felt safe to go back to sleep.

  It wasn’t, though. I found myself being tortured back at the Pink Rat. But everything looked different, there was a big picture window with tatters of fog floating past it, and my torturers were different too. Tommy and Goodlooking Tommy were holding me down, and Ching-wei, the Chinaman who worked at the Peacock Club, was wielding the pliers. He seemed to want me to confess to something, but since he was questioning me in Chinese, I didn’t know how to reply.

  At a table in the corner, Darla was playing cards with Vera Vermillion.

  “You got any elevens?” said Darla.

  Vera was naked, and her skin was turning blue.

  “No way, honey. Go fish.”

  Neither paid any attention to my screaming.

  “Wake up, Danny. Everything is all right.”

  I opened my eyes. Dulwich was bending over me.

  “They can’t hurt you now.”

  My, Dulwich’s, pajamas were soaked in sweat, and my mouth was bone-dry. “I’m thirsty,” I croaked.

  He was back a moment later with a glass of water. With one hand he supported the back of my head, and with the other he held the glass to my lips.

  I drank my fill; then I started getting drowsy again. As my eyelids drooped, I saw Dulwich looking down at me.

  “Poor boy,” he murmured, then he bent and kissed my forehead. “Dear boy.

  “Sleep.”

  Over breakfast in bed the next morning—scrambled eggs, buttered toast, raspberry jam, and orange juice—I told Dulwich everything.

  “I always wondered how I would stand up to torture,” Dulwich said as he munched on his toast. “Fortunately, I was never in a position to find out.”

  “I was pathetic. I cried. I yelled. I begged.”

  “But Danny, you’re not giving yourself enough credit. You already had the information about Mr. Seitz and his late wife that they wanted you to obtain. And yet you withheld it from them. The question, of course, is: why? Why did you protect him?”

  “Well—he is my father. And he’s always been nice to me. Even though everybody says he’s a monster.”

  Dulwich wiped a glistening smear of jam off his thick lips with his napkin.

  “I suppose,” he said, “if you were to rake over the ashes of what remains of Seitz’s soul, and you were to find a few glowing embers of decency left, probably those embers would have to do with you.”

  After breakfast, Dulwich put his cat in a wire cage, then left in his ancient, barely running Franklin convertible for the dog and cat hospital. It turned out it had been Tinker that had been involved in the fight the other night; she’d suffered a nasty scratch behind her ear, and Dulwich was concerned it was getting infected.

  He left me with the morning paper. The first story my eyes fell on began: “Out of work for months, W. E. Main, 50, engineer, ended his life yesterday in a rooming house at 142 West Jefferson Street by sending a bullet through his heart.” I sighed, and tossed the paper down. Thought about W. E. Main for a while. It seemed like a curtain of crumminess was descending on the whole world.

  I got out of bed, and tottered to the bathroom. I was appalled to see what looked like strawberry Kool-Aid streaming into the toilet. I finished up and flushed; then I heard somebody knocking at the front door.

  It was Sophie.

  “I just ran into Mr. Dulwich, and he said you were here. Can I come in?”

  “Maybe now’s not the best time.”

  “Please? There’s something I have to tell you.”

  I let her in, then limped over to the sofa. She watched me ease myself down like an old man.

  “Mr. Dulwich said you’d been in some kind of accident, but you were going to be fine and I shouldn’t ask you about it.”

  “He’s a smart fella, Mr. Dulwich. You should always listen to him.”

  Sophie perched awkwardly on the edge of the sofa, her hands clasped in her lap.

  “So what did you want to tell me?”

  She looked away, toward the door, like somebody had suddenly arrived there. Her eyes filled up with tears.

  “Sophie? What’s the matter?”

  “My mom’s sending me away. To some kind of reform school.”

  “You’re kidding. When?”

  “Next week.”

  “But—how come? When did all this happen?”

  “My mom lost her job at the department store. She said it was because her boss didn’t like her, but I think it was because she was drinking. She drinks all the time now. Anyway, Jerry’s been coming around again. He’s got some kind of job now, selling carpet cleaner or something. And one night, they thought I was asleep, but I could hear them talking. And she was trying to talk him into coming back, but he said he wouldn’t as long as she had that little brat living with her. Me—I’m the brat. And she said don’t worry, they’ve got places for crazy kids like her, kids that try to burn down houses.

  “Then a few days later a policeman came to see me, and he had a man and woman with him. Mr. McNamara and Miss Hazeltine. Mr. McNamara seemed kind of like a preacher, he was dressed in black and he was really old and he wore glasses. Miss Hazeltine was younger and kind of fat, but she wore glasses too. They said they were from the Sonoma State Home in Eldridge. They said they’d come to see me because they’d heard I was a troubled little girl and they thought they could help me. I said I wasn’t a troubled little girl, and they asked me then why did I set fire to the house, and I said I didn’t. Then they gave me a written test with a lot of crazy questions.”

  “What kind of questions?”

  “Well, like, how many boys have you kissed, and have you ever dreamed you went to school in your underwear, and if you were an animal, what kind of animal would you like to be, and why? I wrote I’d like to be a bat, ’cause if I was a bat I’d be blind, and I wouldn’t be able to take this dumb test.

  “I don’t know whether I passed the test or not. All I know is Mr. McNamara called my mother yesterday and said they’d be coming back on Monday. To take me to Eldridge.”

  She sniffled, and swiped at her nose with the back of her hand.

  “I’ve seen lots of movies about reform schools. They make you wear dopey uniforms and they feed you something called ‘gruel’ and they make you stand out in the rain for punishment. You should’ve just let me run away.”

&nb
sp; “Oh, it might not be so bad,” I said without much conviction.

  “I’ll probably never see you again.”

  “You’ll see me again. I’ll come visit. Dulwich and I both will.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise.” Then I tapped the tip of her nose with my finger and said: “Did you know you have exactly eleven freckles?”

  The droopy corners of her mouth turned up in a smile, and then we heard: “I’m gonna have to put you on a leash, honey!”

  Lois Gubler barged through the door, looking awfully happy for ten o’clock in the morning. Her platinum-blonde hair looked as stiff and dry as straw. She didn’t seem to be wearing any underwear under her sloppy dress; I could see her nipples, along with some sort of yellow substance dripping down the front.

  “I made us some breakfast. French toast. Your favorite!”

  “So that’s why you got egg all over you,” said Sophie.

  “Where?” she said, then she saw the yolk and laughed. “Oops! Betty Crocker I ain’t! Come on, Sophie. It’s gonna get cold.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “But I made it just the way you like it.”

  “She said she’s not hungry,” I said.

  Lois turned her unsteady attention on me and my red silk pajamas.

  “Nice peejays,” she sneered. “So you living here now?”

  “He had an accident,” said Sophie, “and Mr. Dulwich is taking care of him.”

  “What kinda accident?”

  “None of your business,” I said.

  “You know, Jerry always thought there was something funny about Mr. Dulwich. Maybe there’s something funny about you too. I’ve got a good mind to call the cops. They got laws against guys like you.”

  “They oughta have laws against mothers like you.”

  “Yeah? What do you mean by that?”

  “A mother oughta raise her kid—not ship her off someplace just so she can shack up with a bum like Jerry.”

  Lois was looming over us now, her different scents billowing over us like a cloud: booze and perfume, tobacco and B.O.

  “Oh, I get the picture. Sophie’s been giving you an earful. But she probably didn’t tell you this is all for her own good. See, my daughter’s got this problem. I mean, besides being a firebug. She’s boy-crazy. Just can’t control herself. She’s always shaking her skinny little fanny in the faces of my fellers. But probably I ain’t telling you nothing you don’t already know. No telling what you two have been up to. But this new place she’s going, they’re gonna take care of all that. She won’t be acting like a little whore no more ’cause they won’t put up with it.”