The Nothing Man

by Jim Thompson

  I looked down at my glass, slowly added more whisky. I shook my head firmly. “That’s an old story, Stuke. Every crooked cop I’ve ever talked to has the same alibi. He’d like to go straight, but—”

  “I ain’t said I’d like to. I ain’t no hero. I’m just telling you why it’s this way, and why it’s going to keep on being this way. Yeah, it’s an old story, all right, but I don’t figure you know it very well so I’ll give you the rest. There’s the fines we take in from those places. We pull the grifters in once a week, they pay their fines, an’ then we let ’em go back to work. It’s like taxes, keed, and it comes to enough to pay the overhead for the whole damned department. More than a hundred grand a year that them best people—the regular taxpayers—can keep in their pockets. And that’s—”

  “Stuke. Please,” I said. “You don’t have to defend yourself to me. I know your conscience is spotless, your soul pure as driven snow, and—”

  “You asked for it,” he said stubbornly. “I’m telling you. You claim I’m always layin’ into the colored folks—blaming everything that happens on them. Well, maybe I do, kind of, but I got a damned good reason to. Not one out of a hundred can get a decent job, a job where he can get as much as you do, say, or even half as much. They don’t make no dough, but they got to keep laying it on the line. They get stuck every time they turn around. Their rents cost ’em plenty, because there’s just one section of town they can live in. If they don’t want to walk two–three miles to a store in a white neighborhood—where they’ll probably get a good hard snooting—they have to buy from the little joints in their own section, places where there ain’t much of a selection and the prices are high. It takes every nickel they can get just to keep goin’, just to live like a bunch of animals. They’re always about half sore, an’ it don’t take much to make ’em more than half. They make trouble; they start playin’ rough. And all me and my boys can do is play a little rougher. Flatten ’em out or get ’em sent up for a stretch. We can’t get to the bottom of the trouble, try to fix it so there won’t be any more. All we can do is…All right,” Stukey sighed, “go on and laugh at me. But just the same, I’m giving it to you straight.”

  “I wasn’t laughing at the remarks,” I said, “only at their author. I was wondering what irresistible sociological forces moved you to offer to hush up a murder that you thought I had committed, providing I would play ball?”

  He hesitated, frowning. I really think he had forgotten all about it. “All right,” he said. “I play along. I got just so much to work with, and I try to get all I can out of it. What about you?”

  “About me?”

  “Sure. You’re smart. You got a good education and a good trade. If things don’t go to suit you, you can move on to another job. You don’t have to play with anyone.”

  “I don’t understand you,” I said.

  “Why don’t you do something? You’ve got influence with Lovelace. You can swing your weight with him, and if he swings back you ain’t really lost anything. Me, I’m nothin’ to him. If he gets sore at me, I’m sunk. So how’s about it, keed? If you really want somethin’ done about Pacific City, why don’t you go to work on it?”

  “It seems to me,” I said, “that I’ve already—”

  “Huh-uh. You ain’t done nothin’, and you ain’t goin’ to. This clean-up wasn’t nothin’ to you but a way to swing the old needle. You could make Lovelace squirm. You could turn the heat on me. You could shake everything to hell up, and it gave you a bang. That’s all it meant to you. That’s all anything means to you. Just a chance to make someone sweat. From what I hear, you’ve driven this Randall guy halfway off his rocker. You’ve got him sweatin’ blood, afraid he’s going to lose his job. But I could tell him he ain’t going to lose it. You won’t carry things that far; you don’t want him to get away from you.”

  I poured another drink, and for some reason my hand shook.

  “Anything else?” I said.

  “Uh-huh. The county judge thing is out. I’ve been studyin’ it over, an’ I can see it was just a pipe dream. Maybe I could make it, but I wouldn’t last much longer than it would take me to open my mouth. That’s the way you figured, huh, keed? That’s why you wouldn’t give me a boost? You knew I’d lose out all the way around, and you couldn’t ride me any more.”

  “That’s all?” I said. “You’ve nothing more to say?”

  “I guess that’s about it, Brownie.” He shrugged good-naturedly. “No hard feelings?”

  “I’d like to say something, then. About Ellen. Now, I believe the evidence indicated that she revived after the murderer’s attack. She was up on her feet in an enclosure less than fifteen feet square, and yet she couldn’t make it to the door or a window. She died of asphyxiation.”

  “Yeah,” Stukey nodded. “Like I was sayin’, keed, the guy acted like—”

  “I know. Like he wasn’t serious. Like he must have had some help from a second guy. Someone, say, who was being blackmailed by her.”

  He stared at me silently. There was a peculiar hardness in his small round eyes.

  “Which raises this question, Stuke,” I said. “Why did you send her almost three thousand dollars in a little more than two years’ time?”

  23

  His face went completely blank. Then, slowly, a strange look spread over it—not of fear, as I had expected, but rather a compound of regret and annoyance and, mayhap, embarrassment.

  He stood up and went out into the kitchen. I heard the ice box door open and close.

  He came back and sat down, a freshly opened bottle of beer in his hand.

  “A blackmailer,” he said thoughtfully. “Not just a one-shot, not just a gal squeezing a little dough when she was in a pinch, but a steady worker. That’s the way you saw your wife, Brownie?”

  “I—” I paused. “I asked you a question, Stuke.”

  “And you got an answer. An’ here’s one to the next question. Why does a guy give a woman dough? Why would he keep sendin’ it to her month after month when he ain’t even seein’ her?”

  I heard a laugh. One that was not mine, although it came from me. “Oh, no,” I said. “No, Stuke. That I can’t believe.”

  “I know you can’t. I knew you wouldn’t. But that don’t change nothin’. I liked her—just liked to talk and visit with her, and she seemed to like it, too. She never asked me for no dough; she never tried to make me for a penny. So…so maybe that was part of it. Maybe that meant a lot to a guy who never saw a dame without her hand out. I liked her, and when you like someone you try to help ’em.”

  I laughed again, the laugh that was not my laugh. So he just liked to talk to her, visit with her; he was content with that. And I—

  Somehow—I believed him.

  “That was all, keed. I can buy the other for a hell of a lot less than three grand, and I can get it a lot handier. I don’t have to cover up and sneak around. That wasn’t easy for me to do, Brownie. Talkin’ about her like I did, pretendin’ like I thought—”

  “Why did you?”

  “Why?” He shot me a puzzled glance. “You mean I should show how I felt in front of you? I shouldn’t cover up about a guy’s own wife? I guess you and me went to different schools, keed.”

  I reached for my drink, and the glass slipped from my fingers. It bounced from the coffee table and rolled splashing to the floor. I picked up the bottle and drank from it.

  “I believe you threatened me,” I said. “I was to lay off of this deal or you’d make me wish I had.”

  “Let’s skip it, huh, pal? I wouldn’t do it even if you was to try to make somethin’ out of this. Maybe it would give you some trouble, but it would hurt me more. If it got around that I was spreadin’ a story like—like—”

  “Go on,” I said.

  “Ah, hell, Brownie.” He tilted his chair back against the wall. “I was just sore. It—it ain’t really nothin’. It didn’t make no difference with me, did it? Why, Jesus, I had it doped out right from the beginning
almost: that pension, with nothin’ wrong showin’ on you, an’ breaking up with your wife when there wasn’t another babe, an’ your drinkin’ and ridin’ everyone, an’—and this place. You wantin’ a home—not just a room—and doing your best to have one. It wasn’t hard to figure out for a guy that was really interested. So I did, and what the hell? If it didn’t mean nothin’ to a lowdown jerk like me, why would—”

  “You’ve known all along,” I said. “You’ve let me think—You let me go ahead and—”

  He mumbled apologetically. He raised the beer bottle and drank, his head thrown back to avoid my eyes.

  He’d let me go ahead and…

  It had all started because I was afraid that he…

  “Let’s talk about somethin’ else, huh, keed?” He gave me a pleading look. “About this doll, now, that your friend Randall’s been playin’. She’s no good in trumps, an’ you can tell him I said so. He’d better pull out while he’s still able to.”

  “Doll?” I said. “Doll?”

  It didn’t register on me. There was no room for it in my mind.

  “You didn’t know about her? Well, damned near everyone else seems to. The guy’s practically been livin’ with her at night, and she’s the kind that talks.” He started to raise the beer bottle again, paused. “Come to think of it, maybe you better not tell him nothin’. Just leave her to me. I’ll run the little bitch out of town.”

  The bottle went up. He threw his head back to receive the beer.

  Then…

  I doubt if he knew what happened then.

  I hurled the whisky bottle and it crashed sickeningly against the bottle he was holding. His tilted chair shot from under him. He went over backward in a tinkling shower of glass, and his head hit the floor with a thud.

  He lay there crumpled and groaning, his face bleeding from a dozen cuts.

  I got a length of clothesline rope from the kitchen, swung an end over one of the living-room rafters, and gave him a boost. After all, he’d always wanted me to boost him, hadn’t he?

  And then I fled the place. I took a room at a hotel. And I have not been back since. And now I am back at the newspaper. The others have all gone, but I think someone has come in, has been sitting in the darkness at the other side of the room.…

  Of course, I didn’t kill him. I know now that I am incapable of killing anyone. He has been missing for more than a day, but not because he is dead. I don’t know what—why—

  I don’t as yet have the answer to certain other questions, I only know that I have not killed and cannot kill, and…

  He is stirring at last, the man who has been sitting there behind me. He has come forward and his hand has dropped down on my shoulder. It is a well-manicured hand. I can smell the odor of hair oil and talcum powder and freshly shined shoes. The hand moves from my shoulder to the stack of manuscript. It rakes it off the desk and into the wastebasket.

  “Jesus, keed. You hadn’t ought to write things like that. People might think you’re crazy.”

  24

  He grinned down at me through slightly puffed lips. There was a wide strip of adhesive tape across his nose. His talcumed face was a network of red scratches and cuts.

  “I look like hell, huh, keed? Jesus, what’d you run out on me for? That wasn’t no way to treat a pal. A guy’s chair slips out from under him, and he smashes his face on a bottle an’—”

  “What—what are you trying to pull?” I said. “You know I tried to kill you. I botched the job the first time, and you’ve been waiting for me to try again. You’ve had the shack staked out. You had them give out the report that you were missing, and—”

  “Why, keed”—he widened his eyes in exaggerated amazement—“I don’t dig you, a-tall. Like I said, my chair slipped. I’d swear to it, Brownie, get me? I’d swear it happened that way.”

  I got him, all right. I was beginning to get him.

  I saw what he intended to do, and a shiver of sickness ran through me. “Why?” I said. “Why did you drop the stake-out? What made you see that I wasn’t—that I couldn’t—”

  His grin widened. His eyes shifted a little, and he jerked his head toward the Teletypes. “Looks like you got a lot of news there, keed.”

  “Why?” I repeated.

  “Maybe you ought to take a look: Maybe it’s the same news we got at the station a couple hours ago.”

  I turned slowly. I walked over to the Teletypes. A long streamer of yellow paper drooped from each. I picked up the one from the A.P. machine.

  And I read:

  LOS ANG IOI AM SPL TO COURIER

  THOMAS J. JUDGE, UNTIL RECENTLY A REWRITE MAN ON THE PACIFIC CITY COURIER, CONFESSED TODAY TO THE MYSTERIOUS MURDER OF ELLEN TANNER BROWN, ESTRANGED WIFE OF ANOTHER COURIER EMPLOYEE. BROKE AND OUT OF WORK, THE SULLEN STOCKY NEWSMAN TOLD POLICE THAT HE ‘JUST WANTED TO GET EVERYTHING OVER WITH.’ ‘I’M NOT SORRY ABOUT HER,’ HE DECLARED. ‘SHE HAD IT COMING TO HER.’ JUDGE’S EARLY MORNING CONFESSION TO LOS ANGELES AUTHORITIES EXPLODED A WIDELY HELD THEORY THAT MRS. BROWN’S DEATH WAS ONE OF THREE SOCALLED SNEERING SLAYER MURDERS. WHILE UNABLE TO EXPLAIN CERTAIN SIMILARITIES

  MORE MORE MORE

  I swallowed heavily, and my head swam for a moment. Then I read on down the yellow stream into the additional dispatches.

  Tom had been lying under the cottages (while I was there) and had returned to consciousness from his drunken stupor (just after I left). He was miserable and thoroughly angry. He had been sorely mistreated, as he saw it; she had lured him there and then laughed at him.

  He crawled out from beneath one of the cottages and re-entered hers. She, half hysterical and painfully burned—and engaged in trying to beat out the fire in the bed—had hurled herself at him. He had brutally knocked her to the floor. Then, frightened by what he had done, he had hastily wiped up the room with his coat and fled. There was no actual intent to kill, of course, but still he had brought about her death. He had—and I hadn’t. And I knew it was the truth.

  “Well, Brownie?” Stukey said. “I guess that cleans it up, don’t it?”

  I stared at him blankly, thinking about Tom Judge, thinking of how much alike Tom and I were. Doubtless that was why I had always detested him so much, because he was so accurate a mirror of my own faults. Tom demanded the benefit of all doubts, but he could give no one the benefit of any. A frown was suspicious, but so also was a smile.…Tom Judge, plowing stubbornly down one rocky path when he could have moved over into an easier and friendlier one. He wouldn’t try to reorient himself. He wouldn’t try to adapt himself to another way of life which, while it would not have been wholly satisfactory, could have been far better than the one he had. Not Tom. Not me. We preferred being miserable, martyring ourselves. Living not as men but human gadflies.

  “You see, keed? I figured like everyone else that the three deaths were all tied together. That’s what had me thrown. But when this Judge character confessed, I seen right away that you hadn’t—”

  Stukey had been right about me. I hadn’t wanted any change. All I had wanted was to keep everyone under my thumb, to gouge and nibble away at them while I watched them squirm.…Dave Randall. He hadn’t always let Kay wear the pants in the family. It was I, not Kay, who had stripped him of all his self-confidence. She had merely taken over where I left off.…So that was the way it was. Then, when I wearied of the game, when I could no longer continue it, I would kill myself. Or, no—No! I would make Them kill me. I would do something so blatantly criminal—so botched—that They would know I was guilty, and They would have to…

  They would have to, wouldn’t They?

  They couldn’t leave me to go on…into nothingness.

  Stukey was watching me, narrow-eyed. He said, “Get it through your noggin, keed. You—”

  “You’re wrong,” I said. “Tom’s lying. I went over to the island that night. We argued, and she threatened me, and—and—”

  “Huh-uh.” He wagged his head. “He ain’t lying. Anyway, you couldn’t have been
over on the island that night. You couldn’t have got across the bay. Everyone knows that.”

  “I tell you I did! I hit her with the bottle. I—”

  “Yeah? How you goin’ to prove it—and what if you did? You want to be sent up for a couple of years on an assault charge, Brownie? You want to lay around in a cell with no booze and nothin’ to do but think?”

  He chuckled softly. But his round little eyes were like brown chunks of ice.

  “I killed Mrs. Chasen,” I said. “I met her in Los Angeles when I went up for the funeral, and—”

  “You didn’t kill her. She killed herself.”

  “I tell you I did kill her!” My voice rose. “I can tell you just how I did it. I’d been out drinking, and when I came back she was lying on the bed asleep and…”

  I told him.

  He listened thoughtfully, but his head wagged again. “So that was how—” He hesitated. “But you didn’t kill her, keed. She was already dead.”

  “I tell you…What makes you think—?”

  “You remember them sleeping pills she had? Five-grain amytals? Well, we checked back on the prescription and she’d had it filled the day before. She’d got thirty of those goofballs and there was only five left in her purse.”

  “But that doesn’t prove she took—”

  “I’m tellin’ you, keed. We didn’t have much in the way of a body to work on, but there was plenty of blood. And that blood was loaded with the goofer dust. More than enough to kill her. Sure, I kept it quiet. The deal was futzed up enough as it was, and it didn’t make sense. How in the hell if she’d killed herself could she have wound up in the dog pound? I figured maybe the coroner had called his shots wrong. But—well, it makes sense now. She was already dead when you hit her. And by the way, you didn’t break her neck. The coroner would’ve spotted that. Huh-uh, you hit her, I guess, but you didn’t kill her.”