by Orrie Hitt
“I ought to hate you,” she said as I lay down beside her.
“But you don’t.”
I drew her close and her lips brushed against my mouth.
“But I don’t,” she repeated.
She cried and moaned a little as I found and knew her again. She bit my lip, low on the inside, and some of the blood got on her and she didn’t mind a bit. She swore at me and she told me I was no good and she loved me all the way.
I was five minutes late getting out to Connors’ place but I was able to explain that pretty easily.
I just told him that I’d been real busy.
CHAPTER IX
The Big Wheel
CONNORS and his wife sailed from New York the following Saturday. After the boat wandered off down river Beverly and I went back to the car and I drove her home. I now had the apartment to myself, so I spent the weekend in there sleeping and thinking and drinking. Monday morning I went over to the office and fired Moss Collins.
“My God, Johnny!” he said, pushing his chin down into his chest. “You can’t do this to me!”
We were in my office — Connors’ office — and I was sitting there behind that great big desk looking across at him. He was a tired little man, about sixty, and the wrinkles in his face were all pulled out of shape.
“I’m doing it,” I said.
He jerked up his head and put his hands on the desk. He leaned across it, toward me, his brown eyes steady and wet.
“I’ve always done my job here, Johnny.”
“Sure.”
“Mr. Connors wouldn’t let you do this, Johnny. If he were here, he wouldn’t let you do it. I’ve worked twenty years for him, night and day. Sometimes, at the start, he couldn’t pay me every week and I worked just the same.”
“I’m telling you how it is, Moss.”
The tears crowded out of his eyes and sparkled on his pale cheeks.
“Tell me what’s wrong, Johnny.”
I stood up.
“You’re a damn crook,” I told him.
He backed up like I’d whacked him one across the face. I went around the desk and took him by the elbow and opened the door. I pushed him out into the office and over to the cashier’s box.
“Count that money,” I told him.
His hands shook as he pulled the big box open and stared down at the tray of money. A white slip of paper lay in one of the sections on top of some twenties.
“What’s that paper say, Moss?”
“Eight hundred and ninety dollars and forty cents.”
“Yeah. And that much is supposed to be in there?”
“That’s right, Johnny.”
“Then count it.”
“All right,” he said. “I’ll count it, Johnny.”
While he was doing that I wandered around the office. It was pretty crowded back there with machines and files and that sort of stuff.
The nose and the glasses I’d met on my first visit to the Connors Agency belonged to Stella Fisher. She’d spoken to me twice — that first day and the day Connors told everybody I was top dog.
“Hello, Stella,” I said.
She sat at a small desk deep in one corner, her back to everybody, her mind just about as blank as the wall itself.
“Why, Mr. Reagan!”
Her eyes rolled around behind the glasses. She pushed some of the stringy hair out of her face and tried to smile.
“I wanted to talk to you,” I said.
“Yes?”
“Hell, I don’t even know what you do around here,” I said.
She eased her chair back and stood up. She was a short woman with slightly hunched shoulders on the frame of a skeleton. She always wore black, making herself look like something that was ready to crawl into a six-foot hole.
“I answer the phone sometimes,” she said.
I knew that. And she wasn’t any good at it. Her telephone voice was even worse than her face.
“Go on.”
“And I do some typing.”
“All right.”
“And the daily record, Mr. Reagan.” Her face brightened. “I keep a daily record of everything that goes on. I’ve been doing that ever since I worked for Mr. Connors. It’s sort of a — diary.”
“It’s a waste of time,” I said. “We won’t do that any more.”
“But, Mr. Reagan, I — ”
“There won’t be any discussion about it,” I said. “That junk is out. From now on we’re working in this office, doing business. No more part-time writing jobs and goofing off. This is a business office and that’s the way we’re going to run it.”
“I see.”
“But you don’t see, Stella. I’m trying to give it to you slow and easy. I’m trying to tell you that you don’t have a job any more. Not after today. I’m giving you two weeks pay and that’s the end of it.”
Pain pulled at her lips and then rode up into her eyes. She started to tremble and I thought she was going to drop as though I’d slugged her with a club.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know.”
“You’ll get something else.”
Her lips curled away from her teeth.
“Of course, Mr. Reagan.”
“If there’s anything I can do — ”
She nodded.
“You can do something. You can tell me how I can take care of my sick sister when I don’t have any work. You can tell me how I can get an office job at sixty. You can tell me those things, Mr. Reagan.” Her voice rose sharply. “Can you tell me, Mr. Reagan? Can you!”
“No,” I said, turning away. “Figure them out for yourself.”
I walked off and left her. I heard her sit down and I heard her start to cry. A thing like that wasn’t good for the office but it’d be over with pretty soon and she’d be on her way. She could sit home and keep her own diary. She wasn’t going to hang around me and put down on paper, for Connors to read, all of the things I had in mind doing. He might read it. And he might not like it.
“Hi, Skippy!”
“Hi, Johnny!”
The girl who took care of the overdue premiums, typing reminders to policy-holders, was short and overstocked with bulges. She had thick legs and wide, uneven teeth. I guess she liked to be called Skippy because maybe it put her in mind of being small and light and full of hell. Her boy friend called her Skippy and every time he got home from his job on a ship, for a few days, she wasn’t worth a damn for a week afterward. They said that she didn’t sleep while he was home and that she didn’t sleep after he’d gone, either, because she kept thinking about it so much.
“What’s Stella crying for?”
“She got the boot.”
“Well, you won’t see me crying.”
“Or me.”
“She’s just an old bag.”
The inside office was laid out in sort of an L shape and I went around that. Three more girls worked back there. Cindy Bartlet, a flashy little redhead who was married to some shoe clerk, took care of checking over the agents’ accounts. She had a nice smile and they didn’t argue with her very much.
“Doing all right, Cindy?”
“Okay, Johnny.”
“Let me know if those guys give you a hard time.”
“I’m watching the boss,” she said. I laughed.
“Bring your husband around to the party Friday night,” I said. “Tell him he can get crocked.”
“What party?”
“Right here. On me. Nothing to eat and plenty to drink.”
“Sure, Johnny. We’ll bring a pail and take some home.”
“Bring a barrel.”
I went on by and said hello to Ester Denning. Ester checked new policies and raised hell with the home office and tried to get the agents what they wanted. Ester was around forty but she used plenty of paint and wore enough support for half a dozen women. She always gave me the impression that she’d be willing to sleep with anybody who’d stay awake half the night.
“That party go
es for you, too,” I told her.
“You couldn’t keep me away.”
“You have any preference?”
She glanced up from a policy she was checking and smiled.
“Men? Or drinks?”
I gave her a big grin.
“Drinks, of course.”
She sighed and leafed through the policy.
“Anything I can swallow,” she said.
I gave her a pat on the back, feeling the strap of her brassiere, and swung away.
“I’ll be there,” she said.
I started across to Julie’s desk and then I stopped. Her chair was as empty as the day it had left the factory. A gray line of smoke crept up from a cigarette that had burned short and toppled off the ash tray onto the top of the desk. I went over and stubbed the cigarette out, getting the ends of my fingers black.
“Thanks, Johnny. Careless of me.”
“Yeah.”
I could smell her perfume but when I turned around I stopped smelling.
She had on a pale yellow skirt that matched her hair and she was wearing a purple sweater. The sweater had narrow, yellow half moons in it that came up and met in a V shape between her pointed breasts. I had all I could do to stop from putting my hands where they hadn’t ought to go.
“You’re going to drive the agents nuts,” I told her.
“You’re going to get them so they won’t work at all.”
“Always cracking off, aren’t you?”
I shrugged and lit a cigarette. A typewriter clicked around the corner of the L and out on the street a couple of car horns fought a fast duel.
“Why don’t you tell Stella some of your jokes?” Julie demanded, going around her desk. “Get her to laugh some, Johnny. She’s crying her heart out.”
“She’ll get over it.”
“You get over dying, too, Johnny.”
I circled the desk and came up beside her. She picked up some papers and shuffled them around.
“Moss is crying, too,” she said. “It’s an awful thing to see a man cry.”
I’d seen men cry plenty of times — at the tracks because they’d lost money, at a bar because they’d lost a woman, on a park bench because they didn’t have anything to lose.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s a jerky thing to do.”
She held the papers tight in her fist for a second and then she yanked a drawer open and slammed them inside. She got up, pushing past me, and went over to the window. I followed her, wondering why she should get so sore.
“Look,” I said, but she wouldn’t look. I put my hand on her shoulder and she edged away. “Look, Julie, I’m only doing these things to try to make this a better organization.”
“I didn’t know you were a crusader.”
“And none of this affects you — none of it. You’ve got the same job and you’re going to get more money and you haven’t a thing to worry about.”
“What do you think Mr. Connors is going to say about all this?”
“That’s my business, Julie. That doesn’t concern anybody else.”
By the time Connors got back and started doing any real thinking he’d only be wasting his time.
“You think he’s going to blow a tire off of his wheel just because I canned somebody who wasn’t doing hardly anything?”
She thought about that for a moment.
“Come to think of it, Johnny, Stella’s job never did make sense. She was supposed to break me in when I started here and she hardly knew what it was all about.”
“See what I mean?”
“But Moss Collins — gee, Johnny, he’s working all the time, trying to keep things — ”
“He’s a crook,” I said.
She pulled herself around, her eyes blazing.
“That’s a damn lie! He’s just an old man and you’re stepping all over him!”
I liked the way she looked when she was mad, her face flushed and her lips trembling slightly.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll show you.”
She was the only person in the office I had to prove anything to. She’d known me down there on Clarke Street, how I used to swipe apples off the corner fruit stand and lift the change out of the milk bottles over on Willard Street. They were little things, maybe, but there had been some others, too — the time I was booted out of the Methodist Sunday School because I’d used the class funds to get myself a new bike. And the time the cops had yanked me down to the station because some chippie claimed I’d rolled her for fifty bucks after she’d left her man. They weren’t much, just enough for her to remember. And I didn’t want her to think about them too much. If she thought about them she might get some ideas about my plans for the Connors Insurance Agency, and then I’d have to get rid of her. I didn’t want to get rid of her. She had something that I wanted.
I went around the L and right over to Moss Collins. He stood there by the money, looking down at it.
“How’d it come out?” I asked him.
He shook his head, saying nothing.
“Answer me.”
“It was short,” he said listlessly. “Almost two hundred short.”
“Okay,” I said. “Get your coat and beat it.”
“But what about the — shortage?”
“You won’t get your two weeks’ pay,” I told him. “Now, beat it before I get the bonding company on your back.”
He turned away, stumbling toward the door. I didn’t even watch him go. I was looking at Julie’s face, finding fifty percent of what I wanted. But the fifty percent she wouldn’t give me was the kind of stuff you get on back roads after dark.
I went inside my private office and closed the door. I’d only been in there a couple of seconds when the buzzer under the desk snarled like a cat with a broken leg. I picked up the phone.
“Reagan speaking.”
“That’s not very businesslike, Johnny.”
“Oh, hello, Beverly.”
“You ought to say Mr. Reagan.”
“Okay.”
I guess she thought she had a nice laugh on the phone because she did it all the time. She sounded like a dull saw going through a wet plank. It was just one of those things that I had to endure, simply because Connors had been stupid enough to have slept one night too many with her mother.
“Things going pretty good, Johnny?”
“Not bad. I’ve been on a firing jag this morning.”
“Who got it?”
I told her. It seemed better for her to get it straight from the horse’s mouth.
“I’m glad I don’t know anything about the business,” she said. “I can’t even get interested in it.”
“I was just telling you, that’s all.”
She laughed some more and I laid the phone down on the desk until she stopped.
“I’m lonely as hell, Johnny,” she said. “Why don’t you run out for dinner tonight and cheer me up?”
That was one sure way of wasting an evening.
“I ought to do some work,” I said.
“You don’t have to stay long. I’ll have steaks and we can cook them over the fireplace. I’m closing up the cabin tomorrow and moving back to town. We won’t have another chance.”
That was tough.
“I really ought to work,” I insisted.
I didn’t have a thing to do. If I could arrange it, I might call on Janet and get in some exercise.
“I wish you would,” she said.
She was the boss’s daughter and she could cause me plenty of trouble if she made up her mind to it. Janet didn’t finish work until nine and sometimes she got stuck for a while after that. It seemed rather silly to argue with Beverly about such a minor thing.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll be out around seven.”
“Bring your cook book.”
“Yeah.”
I hung up and went around the desk and sat down. I made a complete circle in the old swivel chair but the thing wouldn’t squeak the way it would for Connors. I grinned. Pretty so
on it would screech so much I wouldn’t be able to stand it. I’d take up where he’d left off.
Sammy Grick called about noon and wanted to know if he could have the afternoon off. He said he had a gut ache and that he wanted to lay down for a while. I laughed and told him to get up and take off before her old man got home. He said he would.
I went out for lunch at one and came back around two. There was a note on my desk to call operator 4 in New York. I put in the call and hung around waiting for it to come through.
It was the agency supervisor of The Provider Insurance Company. Yes, he’d received my letter and everybody down there was real hot about the Connors Agency taking on a franchise. They’d looked up the agency and they’d found out it was big, with plenty of power behind it. Did we have a local radio station? Hell, yes, we had one that blabbed all day long. That was fine, just fine, because we were in a lush area and this was great stuff to sell over the air.
“Somebody’ll be up to see you in a few days,” he said. “Maybe the boss’ll be up.”
“Okay.”
“We ought to be able to do some business, Reagan.”
“That’s why I wrote.”
“And that’s why I called.”
We said good-bye and I hung up. I lit a cigarette and walked around the office. Finally I stopped walking and stood looking down at the street. Some people mooched about in the sun, pushing baby carriages, carrying groceries. I grinned. They didn’t know what it was all about.
I knew a little bit about The Provider Insurance Company. They were licensed in New York State and that’s why I’d gone after them. They had a real trick policy, one for sickness and accident, the kind that gives the sucker all the protection he needs on the first page — and then uses up the next seven pages quoting clauses that take the benefits away from him.
I went over to the cabinet, where I’d hidden the bottle, and had a drink. To luck. To screwing the public. To Johnny Reagan.
I went out and wandered through the office, came back inside and did some work until four. When I had it figured out how I could make twenty-five grand a year I stopped working. I tried to call Janet but remembered Monday was her day off at the place and she didn’t have a phone at her home. I thought maybe I ought to call Beverly and tell her I couldn’t make it but I changed my mind about that. I never got over to Janet’s before nine, anyway, and, besides, I ought to start breaking off with that. She was scared all the time and sometimes she cried because she was afraid our luck would run out. Once in a while I got the creepy feeling that she cried because she couldn’t get herself fixed up real good.