Sally

by Howard Fast

  Then she stopped and there was silence for a little while, and it was Rothschild who broke the silence by asking her, “What request?”

  “I asked him to direct me to a man in New York where I could hire someone to kill someone else.”

  “Would you say that again?” Rothschild asked her.

  She looked at them with a different kind of fear. Gonzalez nodded at her and smiled. He was guessing. He was a step ahead of her, and he was guessing and he was saying to himself, “The kind of things these Anglos do, God help them.”

  That was unusual. He didn’t use the word “Anglo” unless he had to—he didn’t like the word. Anyway, it wasn’t a good New York word. It was a Mexican West Coast word and not for him. Still, it was the only way he could think now. The only thing he could say to himself was, “My God. If there is a God, then let Him help them—those poor, poor bastards.”

  But he was watching her and it was not in the nature of him to think of her in that way. He said, “It’s all right, Miss Dillman. You go ahead and tell the lieutenant.”

  “Do you read all this?” Rothschild said to him roughly.

  “Let her tell it, Lieutenant, huh? Let her tell it. So you went to Spider Maxton,” Gonzalez continued. “You said you went to him to hire him to kill someone for you.”

  “No—not that exactly. I wanted him to direct me to someone who, well, someone in New York, not in Timmerville, someone in New York who—who would tell me how to hire a killer.”

  “And this Spider Maxton just did it? He said, O.K., lady, you want a contract with a New York gun, I put you in touch with our New York office.” Rothschild snorted.

  “Nothing is simple like that. Don’t you realize—”

  “He realizes,” Gonzalez whispered. “Go on, please.”

  “But Spider Maxton knew about me. Timmerville is a tiny place. There aren’t any real secrets in a place like that. He has a daughter, a poor, distressed child, and she was in my class and I was good to her. So I could ask a favor—”

  “Murder?” Rothschild snapped.

  “No, no—”

  “Why didn’t you kill yourself if you couldn’t face it?” Rothschild demanded brutally. “Why all this crazy nonsense about hiring a killer?”

  “Do you think you could face it?” Gonzalez demanded of the lieutenant. “You read up on leukemia tonight. Just take the trouble to find out what it does to a person before he dies—”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I just happen to know, because I had a cousin and I had to watch—”

  “All right, all right,” Rothschild said brusquely.

  “I thought of killing myself,” she said. “I thought of it. But you are raised in a certain way, and maybe it doesn’t seem that your religion means anything until you reach a time like this—and I couldn’t. Maybe I was afraid. I don’t know. But I couldn’t kill myself. So I ran instead. I wanted to stop thinking about my—about leukemia. So I would avoid it with a different kind of death. But I had to leave Timmerville. I went to the bank where I kept my savings—everything I had realized from the house and my parents’ insurance—and it was a lot of money. It was about twenty-five thousand dollars at this point, and I had it transferred to the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York, and then I cut my bonds with Timmerville. I didn’t even tell Dr. Kaldish what I was doing because, you know, when you’re dead, you have a kind of freedom, a kind of sick, terrible, desperate freedom that you never have at any other time in your life. So I packed the two suitcases. The storage people had taken away practically everything except a few dresses and coats of mine that didn’t fit into the suitcases, and I just left the clothes in the closet. I called the taxi and then I told him to go ahead and drive me to the airfield at Rochester, and when he told me how much it would cost, I said to him, ‘I don’t care how much it costs.’ And that was just the way I felt about it. I didn’t care about how much anything cost. I was just leaving. I was going away—for good—forever.”

  “Spider Maxton,” Rothschild said coldly. “Suppose you tell us what he told you.”

  “Yes. He told me where to go, but shouldn’t I put that in it’s own place?”

  “Just so long as you don’t forget it,” Rothschild said.

  “She’s not going to forget it,” Gonzalez told Rothschild. “Why don’t you leave her alone? Why don’t you let her tell the story?”

  Rothschild’s face tightened and he waited and listened.

  “Yes,” she went on, “Spider Maxton gave me the name of a man. I suppose that’s the most important thing, because that’s why I’m here. But I want to tell it in my own way. Otherwise it becomes a lunatic thing, and it’s not a lunatic thing the way it happened to me. I took the plane into New York, and then I took a taxi and I told him to take me to the St. Regis Hotel. I registered at the St. Regis and I took this suite for seventy-six dollars a day, which was so much money that it terrified me. They said that if I stayed by the month, I could have it for two thousand a month, and, of course, that too was an unreal sum, but I didn’t care. I mean, what difference did two thousand dollars a month make to me? And then, after I had been at the St. Regis one day and a night—a night when I could not sleep at all—I just lay awake all night thinking—well, then I realized that what I had done with Spider Maxton was right and that I had to see the man whose name he gave me. Joey Compatra, the owner of a gym at Eighth Avenue and Fifty-third Street—Joey’s Gym and Sport Center, it is called—where fighters train.

  “I waited until ten o’clock, and I walked across town to Eighth Avenue and then I walked downtown the few blocks to where the gym was. There were men there already who were in shorts and sweat shirts, and they were skipping rope and punching bags and shadowboxing. I don’t know whether you know about the place, but there is a sort of a boxing ring in the center, and then this small, fat man was standing at the other side of the room, smoking a cigar. I asked this man with the cigar whether he knew where I could find Joey Compatra. He said that he was Joey Compatra and what did I want with him? And I said, well, Spider Maxton had told me to see him about a business matter. And then he asked me to come into his office. I followed him in there and he closed the door behind us—and then he asked me who I was and I told him. I told him where I was from and what I wanted, and I told him that I could pay his price. I told him that I wanted to hire a killer to kill someone.”

  “Just like that,” Rothschild said slowly, emphatically. “You told him you wanted to hire a killer—to kill someone.”

  “Yes.”

  “All right, Miss Dillman, who did you want your hired gun to kill?”

  “Myself. I wanted him to kill me. I had to persuade him. I had to explain. But finally I convinced him and he agreed, and I gave him all the facts and three pictures of myself for identification.”

  “Let’s have that again,” Rothschild said sourly.

  “It’s plain, isn’t it?” Gonzalez told him. “My God, Lieutenant, don’t you see it? She hired some creep to kill her.”

  “Why?” Rothschild shouted. “Why in hell—” And then he stopped. They both stared at her.

  She nodded. “That’s right,” she said. “You see, I couldn’t go on and wait for my death. So I said, well, according to what the doctor said, I still have four months left, and that means that sometime in April I will die unless I die before then. Somehow I didn’t feel that I would die before then. I felt that it would be sometime in April, so I picked today’s date, Wednesday, the sixth of April, and I said to myself, ‘This is the day that I will die. Or else I will be so close to death that this is the date and I want to die on this date—on today—and it’s as good as any other time, and by then I will have done all that I want to do.’ And, well, it doesn’t sound very sane or real, does it?”

  “It sounds real,” Gonzalez said. “It sounds sane. Maybe I know how you were thinking. Maybe I’ve thought that way myself. Maybe everyone has at some time.”

  Rothschild said nothing.

 
; “Well, anyway, I thought that way and I couldn’t wait. I paid Compatra three thousand dollars, and he said all right, he would make a contract with somebody. He said it would do no one any good for me to know who the contract was with, and I would be better off and happier if I didn’t know, and that sometime during what is now today I would be killed without knowing when or how. And then I just went out of there and left it that way.”

  Rothschild said, “I don’t believe it.”

  “Believe it, Lieutenant,” Gonzalez told him.

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “Why not?” Gonzalez said. “She’s telling us the truth. Do you think she’s lying to us?”

  “I don’t think she’s lying to us,” Rothschild replied. “I just don’t believe it, but that’s all right—there are a lot of things I don’t believe. Is that all, Miss Dillman? There must be more to it. When was that?”

  “At the end of November,” she said.

  “All right,” Rothschild said, “between the end of November and now—what happened?”

  “Isn’t it plain what happened?” she asked them.

  “I came to New York to have this great, magnificent, wonderful whirl. But do you know, I didn’t have any great, magnificent whirl. I didn’t want to. I just sat in my room day after day after day. Sometimes I would go out and walk and try to plan to go somewhere, but it was no good, and always I went back to my room and sat there in my room. In the beginning I took my temperature constantly. I had a little temperature and a sore throat. And my symptoms were what the doctor had told me my symptoms would be. But then I stopped taking my temperature, and I stopped caring. And time passed—how long I don’t know.

  “Then after the first deadly weeks I began to force myself to go out, to go to the movies. But that didn’t mean anything because I couldn’t even follow what was happening on the screen. Then I bought a lot of tickets to the theater and every night—almost every night—I would be in the theater. I couldn’t concentrate. All I could do was sit there and think about how I was already dead and ask myself why was I pretending to myself that I wasn’t dead?

  “I remember how terrible it was at Christmas. That was the worst time. After Christmas, toward the end of January, I just stopped feeling and I stopped caring, and I didn’t take my temperature any more and the pain in my throat had gone away, but I didn’t think about that. I didn’t even know about that. It just happened. Then there came a day about three or four weeks ago. It was one of these beautiful March days, with the wind blowing cold and the sky clean and blue as ice. I woke up in the morning and I looked out of the window, and for the first time the awful depression lifted. Suddenly I felt alive, and I said to myself, ‘I don’t care if I die in the next ten hours. I’m alive and happy now.’ I put on a suit and went outside and I was a bit cold at first, but I walked briskly, and then because of the walking I stopped being cold. I walked across the park to the other side of the park—to the west side of town—and then I walked all the way downtown to Fifty-ninth Street, and by then I was warm and flushed and sweating a little. And suddenly I realized I was not sick—not at all sick—and I left there and I began to walk across town and I kept saying to myself, ‘I am not sick. Nobody who feels the way I do is sick. Nobody who feels the way I do is going to die.’

  “I knew about Mount Sinai Hospital, because I read something in the paper about it the day before. So I went in there and I said to the nurse that I wanted to be examined by a doctor, and she said, do I have an appointment, and I said, ‘No, I don’t have an appointment, but it’s terribly, terribly important for me.’ And finally I persuaded her, and she sent me in to another building to a Dr. Kaplan there. I had to wait for a while, but finally Dr. Kaplan saw me and I poured out to him the whole story that I’ve told you except for the part about the hired killer.

  “He gave me a thorough examination, and then he talked to me and he asked me a great many questions about the examination Dr. Kaldish gave me, and how I felt, and about my mother and my father, and my reactions to their deaths, and then he said, ‘Look, Miss Dillman, get hold of yourself, because I must tell you something very important, so just get hold of yourself and sit down and listen to me.’ And then he said to me, ‘You know, Miss Dillman, I don’t want to blame Dr. Kaldish. I am not accusing your physician of stupidity or malpractice of any kind. He made an understandable error. There are times when the symptoms of infectious mononucleosis and monocytic leukemia are so alike that only the most careful and precise laboratory investigation will establish the difference. Even a bone-marrow biopsy may be inconclusive. But now that is over, and you must relax. In other words, I am telling you that you do not have leukemia. You never had it. You evidently had a bad case of infectious mononucleosis, which cured itself. You are one of the healthiest young women that I have seen in months.’

  “So that’s my whole story. I learned that I was not going to die. But when I went back to Joey Compatra, he was gone. And nobody was there who could tell me anything about him, and I don’t know who the killer is, and so I don’t know whether Dr. Kaplan gave life back to me. Maybe I’m going to die anyway.”

  CHAPTER

  4

  SHE finished and she sat there, just looking at them; and then she began to cry, and Rothschild said, “Well, it’s no goddamn use crying about it now, Miss Dillman. You told us the story. Let’s get down to it and see what we can do.”

  Gonzalez had a clean handkerchief, which was folded precisely and neatly. His mother ironed his handkerchiefs as if each in itself was a work of art. He took out this clean handkerchief and handed it to Sally Dillman. Drying her eyes, she whispered, “Could you spare a cigarette—please?”

  Rothschild got out his pack. Gonzalez saw the yellow stain on her fingers, and scolded himself for not having realized how much she would want to smoke at this moment. Himself, he was on principle against young girls smoking, yet considering what she had been through, he was ready to forgive her. Forgive her! “Just who the devil are you,” he asked himself angrily, “to demand anything or forgive anything?” She dried her eyes and she thanked Rothschild for the cigarette, Gonzalez for the handkerchief.

  Gonzalez felt himself compelled to state, “I believe her!” He stared at Rothschild belligerently as he said this. Rothschild only shrugged. “Maybe,” Gonzalez said with irritation, “you don’t think a kid like this can go out and hire a gun. Just like that! Hire a killer the way you hire a cab! Well, I tell you, in this lousy city of yours, it is possible.”

  “My city?” Rothschild smiled thinly.

  “Possible! I know ten lousy punks in this precinct alone who will kill for hire. Of course she can hire a gun. So what is not to believe?”

  “It’s not a question of believing her,” Rothschild said. “You believe her, I believe her. Why shouldn’t I believe her. Stupidity is not a thing to be doubted. The whole human race suffers from the particular disease. It is epidemic and in season always.”

  “I don’t think it was stupid,” Gonzalez said. “Look what she was up against.”

  “I know what she was up against.” Rothschild turned to Sally Dillman. “What do you think now, Miss Dillman? Was it stupid or wasn’t it?”

  “I guess it was stupid.” She nodded wanly.

  I still say—” Gonzalez began, and Rothschild shook his head impatiently.

  “Stupid—not stupid—that’s beside the point. The point is she bought herself a killer. Now the question is, who did this stinking creep, Compatra, give the contract to, and where is the contract man and where is Compatra?”

  “I think he was,” Gonzalez said shortly.

  “Was? What do you mean ‘was’?”

  “She said she couldn’t find him.” Then to Sally, “What about it, Miss Dillman? You looked for him. How did you look for him? You went into the gym?”

  She nodded.

  “You asked around the people there? What was happening at the gym? Was it business like usual?”

  “No,” she said. �
��There was nobody there except an old man. He was sweeping up the place when I came in there. He said that the gym is closed indefinitely. Then I asked him where Compatra was. He didn’t know.”

  “That was the second time,” Gonzalez said. “You were in there before, weren’t you?”

  “Yes, that was the second time.”

  “Well, did you ask him—I mean, did you keep after him—or did you just let it go at that?”

  “I don’t know how to keep after anyone,” she said. “I don’t suppose I’m much good at anything except making a mess. I’ve made a mess, haven’t I? Of life and of death too. I couldn’t even die decently.”

  “Now look here,” Rothschild said flatly, his nasal voice rasping and impatient, “I got no time for pity. Miss Dillman, you want to feel sorry for yourself, that’s your business. Our business is to find out whether there’s a legitimate price on you and a legitimate contract on you and see what we can do about it. I don’t want you to get killed. I suppose this is an occupational distaste. Cops don’t like for people to be stupidly killed in their territory. It is true that you are living at the St. Regis now, but you came to us with the story—and you are our headache. Now what about Compatra?” He turned to Gonzalez. “What about it, Frank? You know something?”

  “Maybe he’s dead,” Gonzalez answered sadly.

  “What do you mean, maybe he’s dead?”

  “They brought in a stiff yesterday,” Gonzalez said. “They got him down on the ice. One of the boys downtown thought it was Compatra. We don’t know yet for sure. Compatra was a funny guy. From the way I hear about it, he was maybe the biggest dealer in contracts in this town. He elevated killing. He did it as a sober business and he made it almost as respectable as abattoir work. They said he was going to bring his outfit into the AF of L.”

  “Was he alone,” Rothschild asked, “or was he a part of the syndicate?”

  “Maybe alone, maybe a part of the syndicate,” Gonzalez replied. “I don’t know, and I don’t know if I’ll ever find out. The point is, he was a connection man for making the contracts, and evidently he did something wrong and one of the guns got him. If it’s Compatra in the morgue—downtown they think it’s Compatra, but there’s no fingerprints on him. Funny, a guy like Joe Compatra—maybe he’s got forty, fifty murders on his mind—on his soul if he has one—and there’s no record, no fingerprints, nothing. That’s something to think about, isn’t it? That’s sloppy police work, if you ask me.”