“I quite agree with you,” the Old Man said. “Dow knows the most of everything that’s going on downtown.”
“Was there anything about this Bennett,” Charlie asked me “that might give you a clue—any kind of clue?”
I shook my head. All I could remember of him was the total baldness of his head and the fly crawling on that baldness and his paying no attention to it.
“Well, thank you, Parker,” said the Old Man. “I would imagine you did your usual job. Highly competent. With men like you and Dow and Gavin out there in the city room we don’t have any worries.”
I got out of there before he broke down to the point where he might have tried to raise my salary. That would have been an awful thing.
I went back to the newsroom.
The papers had just come up from the pressroom and there on the front page was my story with a twelve-point by-line and the headline spread across eight columns.
Also on the front page was a picture of Joy holding a skunk and seeming charmed about it. Underneath the picture was the story she had written, and one of the jokers on the copydesk had achieved one of the standard sappy headlines on it
I went over to the city desk and stood alongside Gavin.
“Any luck,” I asked him, “in your hunt for Bennett?”
“No luck at all,” he told me wrathfully. “I don’t think there was ever such a man. I think you made him up.”
“Maybe Bruce—”
“I called Bruce. Bruce says he figured Bennett was staying at one of the hotels. Said the man never talked anything but business. Never once mentioned personalities.”
“The hotels?”
“No, and he never has been. None of them has had a Bennett for the last three weeks. We’re working on the motels now, but I tell you, Parker, it’s a waste of time. There isn’t such a man.”
“Maybe he’s registered under a different name. Check on bald men .. .”
“That’s a hot one,” snarled Gavin. “Have you any idea how many bald men register in our hotels each day?”
“No,” I said, “I haven’t.”
Gavin was in his usual home-edition lather, and there wasn’t any use in talking further with him. I walked away and started across the room to have a word with Dow. But I saw he wasn’t there, so I stopped off at my desk.
I picked up the paper that was lying there and sat down to look at it. I read through my story and was furious with myself over a couple of paragraphs that read jumbled up and jerky. It always happens that way when you write a story under pressure. You get it down the best way that you can and then, for the next edition, you get it all smoothed out.
So I jerked the typewriter over to the desk and rewrote the paragraphs. I used a straightedge to tear the printed story from the page and pasted it up on two sheets of copy paper. I crossed out the two offending paragraphs and marked them for a sub. I went through the story again and caught a couple of typos and fixed up another place or two to make the language better.
It was a wonder, I told myself, that I’d got the story down at all with the copydesk leaning back and hollering that it was way past deadline and Gavin there beside me, jigging from one foot to the other and panting out each line.
I took the inserts and the marked-up copy over to the city desk and dropped them in the basket. Then I went back to my desk again and picked up the mangled paper. I read Joy’s story, and it was a lulu. Then I looked for the story Dow had gone out to the airport to get and it wasn’t in the paper. I looked around again and Dow wasn’t anywhere in sight.
I dropped the paper on the desk top and sat there, doing nothing, idly remembering what had happened in Franklin’s conference room that morning. But all I could remember was the fly crawling on the skull.
Then, suddenly, there was something else.
Gunderson had asked me if there had been anything about Bennett that might be a clue to his identity and I had said there wasn’t.
But I had told him wrong. For there had been something. Not a clue exactly, but something damned peculiar. I remembered now—it was the smell of him. Shaving lotion, I had thought when I first got a whiff of it. But not any kind of lotion I had ever smelled before. Not the kind of lotion any other man would ever tolerate. Not that it was was loud or strong—for there had been no more than that correct, faint suggestion of it. But it had been the kind of odor one does not associate with a human being.
I sat there and tried to classify it, tried to think of something with which I might compare it. But I couldn’t, because, for the life of me, I couldn’t remember exactly what it had smelled like. But I was mortally certain I would recognize it if I ever came in contact with it again.
I got up and walked over to Joy’s desk. She stopped typing as I came up to her. She lifted her head to look at me, and her eyes were bright and shiny, as if she had been trying to keep herself from crying.
“What’s the matter here?” I asked.
“Parker,” she said. “Those poor people! It’s enough to break one’s heart.”
“What poor—” I started to say, and then I had a hunch what had happened to her.
“How did you get hold of that one?” I demanded.
“Dow wasn’t here,” she said. “They came in asking for him. And everyone else was busy. So Gavin brought them over.”
“I was going to do it,” I told her. “Dow told me about it and I said I would. Then this Franklin’s thing came up and I forgot everything about it. There was supposed to be just a man. You said them …”
“He brought his wife and children and they sat down and looked at me with those big, solemn eyes of theirs. They told me how they had sold their home because it wasn’t big enough for a growing family and now they can’t find another one. They have to be out of their house in another day or two and they have nowhere at all to go. They sit there and tell their troubles to you and they look so hopeful at you. As if you were Santa Claus or the Good Fairy or something of the sort. As if your pencil were a wand. As if they were confident you can solve their problems and make everything all right. People have such funny ideas about newspapers, Parker. They think we practice magic. They think if they can get their stories into print, something good will happen. They think that we are people who can make miracles. And you sit there and look back at them, and you know you can’t.”
“I know,” I told her. “Just don’t let it get you. You mustn’t be a bleeder. You’ve got to harden up.”
“Parker,” she said, “get out of here and let me finish this. Gavin has been yelling for it for the last ten minutes.”
She wasn’t kidding me a second. She wanted me out of there so she could burst out crying quietly.
“OK,” I said. “Be seeing you tonight.”
Back at my desk, I put away the columns I had written earlier in the morning. Then I got my hat and coat and went out to have a drink.
VII
Ed was alone in his place, standing behind the bar with his elbows on it and his hands holding up his face. He didn’t look so good.
I got up on a stool and laid five dollars down.
“Give me a quick one, Ed,” I said. “I really need it bad.” 1 “Keep your money in your pocket,” he told me gruffly. “The drinks are all on me.”
I almost fell off the stool. He’d never done a thing like that before.
“You out of your mind?” I asked him.
“Not that at all,” said Ed, reaching for my brand of Scotch.
“I’m going out of business. I’m setting them up for my old, loyal customers whenever they come in.”
“Made your pile,” I said carelessly, for the guy is always . joking, anything at all just to get a yak. “I’ve lost my lease,” he told me.
I sympathized with him. “Well, that’s too bad,” I said. “But there must be a dozen places you can get, right here in the neighborhood.”
Ed shook his head dolefully. “I’m closed up,” he said. “I have no place to go. I’ve checked everywh
ere. If you want to know what I think, Parker, it’s dirty pool down at the city hall. Someone wants my license. Someone slipped a couple of aldermen a little extra dough.” He poured the drink and shoved it over to me. He poured one for himself, and that is something that no bartender ever does. It wasn’t hard to see that Ed just didn’t give a damn.
“Twenty-eight years,” he told me mournfully. “That’s how long I’ve been here. I always run a respectable joint. You know, Parker, that I did. You’ve been a regular customer. You’ve seen how I run the place. You never saw no rowdy stuff and you never saw no women. And you seen the cops in here, plenty of times, lined up and drinking on the house.”
I agreed with him. Everything he’d said was the gospel truth. “I know that, Ed,” I said. “Christ, I don’t see how that gang of ours will get the paper out if you have to close. The boys won’t have a place to go to get the taste out of their mouths. There isn’t another bar within eight blocks of the office.”
“I don’t know what I’ll do,” he said. “I’m too young to quit and I haven’t got the money. I have to earn a living. I could work for someone else, of course. Almost anyone in town would find a place for me. But I’ve always owned my own joint and it would take some getting used to. I don’t mind telling you it would come a little hard.”
“It’s a stinking shame,” I said.
“Me and Franklin’s,” he said. “We’ll go out together. I just read it in the paper. The story that you wrote. The town won’t be the same without Franklin’s.”
I told him the town wouldn’t be the same without him, either, and he poured me another drink, but this time he didn’t take one for himself.
He stood there and I sat there and we talked it over—about Franklin’s closing and the lease he’d lost and neither of us knowing what the goddamn world might be coming to. He set up a couple more and had another one himself and we had some more after that and I made him let me pay for them. I told him even if he was going out of business he couldn’t just give away his liquor and he said he’d made enough off me hi the last six or seven years that he could afford an afternoon of some free ones.
Some customers came in and Ed went to take care of them. Since they were strangers, or maybe just poor customers, he let them pay him for their drinks. He rang up the tab on the register and gave them their change and -then came back to me. So we talked the situation over once again, repeating ourselves a good deal without noticing or caring.
It was two o’clock before I got out of there.
I promised Ed, somewhat sentimentally, that I’d come back for one last talk before he closed up the place.
I should have been drunk, the amount of liquor I’d poured into me. But I wasn’t drunk. I was just depressed.
I started back to the office, but halfway there I decided that it wasn’t worth it. I had only an hour or so to go to fill out the day, and this late in the afternoon, with most of the editions put to bed, there’d be nothing I could do. Except maybe write some columns, and I didn’t feel like writing any columns. So I decided I’d go home. I’d work over the weekend, getting out the columns, to make up for goofing off.
So I went to the parking lot and got my car untangled and headed home, driving slow and carefully so no cop would pick me up.
VIII
I pulled into the alley and swung into the area back of the apartment building, parking the car in the stall that was reserved for it.
It was peaceful back there and I sat for a while in the car before getting out. The sun was warm and the building, wrapped around three sides of the area, kept out any wind. A scrubby poplar tree grew in one angle of the building, and the sun was full upon it, so that, with its autumn-colored leaves, it glowed like a tree of promise. The air was drowsy, filled with sun and time, and I could hear the clicking toenails of a dog trotting up the alley. The dog came in sight and saw me. He sat down and cocked anxious ears at me. He was half the size of a horse and he was so shaggy he was shapeless. He lifted a ponderous hind leg and solemnly scratched a flea. “Hi, pup,” I said.
He got up and trotted down the alley. Just before he went out of sight, he stopped for a second and looked back at me. I got out of the car and went down the alley and around the corner to the building’s entrance. The lobby was hushed and empty and my footsteps echoed in it. There were a couple of letters in my mailbox and I jammed them in my pocket, then trudged slowly up the stairs to the second floor.
First of all, I told myself, I would have a nap. Getting up as early as I had was catching up with me.
The semicircle of carpeting still was missing from before my door and I stopped and stared at it. I’d almost forgotten it, but now last night’s incident came back with a rush. I shivered looking at it, fumbling in my pocket for the keys so I could get inside and shut the semicircle in the hall behind me.
Inside the apartment, I shut the door behind me and tossed my hat and coat into a chair and stood there and looked around me. And it was all right. There was nothing wrong with it. There was nothing stirring in it. There was nothing strange.
It wasn’t a fancy place, but I was satisfied with it. It was my very own and it was the first place for a long time that I’d lived in long enough to really count as home. I had been there six years and I fitted into it. I had my gun cabinet against one wall and the hi-fi in the corner, and one entire end of the front room was filled with books, piled into a monstrous bookcase I’d cobbled up myself.
I went into the kftchen and looked in the refrigerator and found tomato juice. I poured a glass of it and sat down at the table and, as I did, the letters in my pocket rustled, so I pulled them out. One was from the Guild, and I knew it was another warning about delinquent dues. The second was from some firm with a many-jointed name.
I opened that one up and pulled out a single sheet.
I read: Dear Mr. Graves: This is to notify you that under the provisions of clause 31 we are terminating your lease on apartment 210, Wellington Arms, effective January 1.
There was a signature at the bottom of it that I was unable to make out.
And there was something terribly fishy about it, for these people who had sent the letter didn’t own the building. Old George owned it—Old George Weber, who lived down on the first floor in apartment 116.
I started to get up, intending to go charging down the
stairs and ask Old George just what the hell this meant. Then I remembered that Old George and Mrs. George were out in California.
Maybe, I told myself, Old George had turned the operation of the building over to these people for the time that he was gone. And if that were the case, there was some mistake. Old George and I were pals. He’d never throw me out. He sneaked up to my place to have a drink or two every now and then, and every Tuesday evening the two of us played pinochle, and almost every fall he went out to South Dakota with me for some pheasant shooting.
I took another look at the letterhead and saw that the name of the firm was Ross, Martin, Park & Gobel. In little letters under the firm name was another line, which said “Property Management.”
I wondered exactly what clause 31 might be. I thought of looking it up, then realized that I had no idea where I’d put the copy of my lease. It was probably in the apartment somewhere, but I had not the least idea.
I went into the living room and dialed the number of Ross, Martin, Park & Gobel.
A telephone voice answered—a professionally trained, high-pitched, feminine, how-happy-that-you-called voice.
“Miss,” I told her, “someone at your office has pulled a boner. I have a letter here throwing me out of my apartment.”
There was a click and a man came on. I told him what had happened.
“How come your firm is mixed up in this?” I asked him. “The owner, to my knowledge, is my good neighbor and old friend, George Weber.”
“You are wrong there, Mr. Graves,” this gent told me in a voice that for calmness and pomposity would have done credit to a judge. “Mr. W
eber sold the property in question to a client of ours several weeks ago.”
“Old George never told me a word about it.”
“Maybe he simply overlooked it,” said the man at the other end, and his voice held a tone just short of a sneer. “Maybe he didn’t get around to it. Our client took possession the middle of the month.”
“And immediately sent out a notice canceling my lease?”
“All the leases, Mr. Graves. He needs the property for other purposes.”
“Like a parking lot, for instance.”
“That’s right,” said the man. “Like a parking lot.”
I hung up. I didn’t even bother to say good-bye to him. I knew I wouldn’t get anywhere talking to that joker.
I sat quietly in the living room and listened to the sound of traffic on the street outside. A couple of chattering girls went walking past, giggling as they talked. The sun shone through the westward-facing windows and the light was warm and mellow.
But there was a coldness in the room—a terrible iciness that crept from some far dimension and seeped not into the room but into my very bones.
First it had been Franklin’s, then it was Ed’s bar, and now it was this place that I called my home. No, that was wrong, I thought: first it had been the man who had phoned Dow and who had finally talked with Joy, telling her how he had been unable to find a house to buy. He and all those others who were being quietly desperate in the classified columns—they had been the first.
I picked up the paper from the desk where I had thrown it when I came into the room and folded it back to the want ads and there they were, just as Dow had told me. Column after column of them under the headings of “Houses Wanted” or “Apts. Wanted.” Little pitiful lines of type crying out for shelter.
What was going on? I wondered. What had happened so suddenly to all the living space? Where were all the new apartments that had sprouted, the acre after acre of suburban building?
I dropped the paper on the floor and dialed a realtor I knew. A secretary answered and I had to hold the line until he finished with another call.
They Walked Like Men Page 4