by Anthony Rome
I told him thanks again and went down the narrow stairway. Something new had been added at the bottom of the steps. An old wino was stretched out asleep on the pavement, snoring alarmingly. I stepped over him and turned right, into The Gulch.
It was a plain, square room with walls that couldn’t remember their last whitewash. The cleanest object in the room was the jukebox in one comer blasting out a hillbilly-rock number at full volume. The wooden bar along one wall and the battered tables and chairs scattered about were crowded. Drunken laughter and shouting competed with the jukebox, the sounds of the men blending into the general noise level, the shriller voices of the women biting through it. The men were all ages, but the women, except for a couple of ancient hags sharing a bottle of wine at the bar, were young; some couldn’t have been more than thirteen.
By the time I’d gotten three steps inside The Gulch, only the racket from the juke filled the room. If King Kong had walked in there, he couldn’t have gotten more of a reaction than I was getting. Everybody shut up and craned their heads to look at me. Ugly stares clawed and beat at me as I made my way to the bar. The place was frozen like a movie in which part of the sound is suddenly cut off and the reel stops turning.
There was a little space at the bar—between the two wine- drinking hags and a grizzled old man with a three-day growth of gray whiskers stained with tobacco juice. He had one hand up under the shirt of a smirking fifteen-year-old girl, the other hand wrapped around a beer bottle. As I eased against the bar, he let go of the girl and shifted his grip to the neck of his beer bottle, eying me with hot suspicion. He didn’t bother me too much. It was keeping my back to the rest of them in that room that gave me the jittery feeling.
A tall, skinny barmaid in tight Levi’s and a cowboy shirt planted herself across the bar from me, her gaze expressionless.
“Sally Bullock around?” I asked her.
“I don’t know you,” she stated flatly.
“My misfortune. I’m looking for Sally Bullock.”
“She ain’t here tonight.”
A nasal voice spoke from behind my right shoulder: “Wha’ the hell you want ’round here?”
I turned my head. The voice belonged to a teen-age boy with a brutish face, stocky build, and Marlon Brando slouch. An empty wine bottle dangled from his hand.
I shifted my stance so I could look at him and the barmaid at the same time. “How about Fat Candy?” I asked her.
She glanced away down the bar. “Hey! Fat Candy! Guy here wantsa see you.”
At the end of the bar, a girl disengaged from a man’s arms and looked our way. The barmaid pointed at me. “Him.” Fat Candy strolled toward me, blank faced. She fitted the first part of her name, at least. She wore a tight skirt and a red sweater. The sweater might have been big enough for Jane Russell, but it was way too small for Fat Candy. The man who’d been clutching her lumbered behind her. He had the walk and build of a full-grown rhino.
“Y’want me?” Fat Candy demanded as she reached me. “Sally Bullock’s a friend of mine,” I told her. “So’re you from what she says. She told me a lot about you.”
“Yeah?” The implied flattery in my look and voice got to her. She showed the tip of her pink tongue between her teeth, raised a slow hand to fluff the hair at the back of her neck. “What’d Sal say?”
“Can we go somewhere for a while? Be alone?”
She eyed me calculatingly. “You wanna buy me?”
I glanced around at all those silent, listening faces. “Something like that,” I told Fat Candy.
“For how long?”
“Not long.”
“How much?”
“Five?”
“Make it ten,” she said automatically.
“All right.”
She smiled then, pleased with her financial cunning. “Okay, dear. Come with me.”
She turned her back on me, patted the chest of the rhinosized hillbilly she’d been with. “Stick around, dear,” she told him, and strolled toward the rear door of the place.
I followed her, running the gantlet of all those unfriendly eyes. In the darkness outside behind The Gulch, the outlines of a one-room shack bulked. Fat Candy opened the shack door. I followed her inside, feeling my way in the blackness.
She struck a match. By its flare I watched her light a kerosene lamp hung on one of the plank walls.
The inside of the shack contained an iron-frame army cot with a bare, dirty mattress, and two wooden chairs. That was all. There were no windows. Just the door. As I shut it, Fat Candy shuffled to the side of the cot and grasped the bottom of her sweater to peel it off.
Hold on,” I said quickly. “It’s just some talk I want.”
“Huh?” She stared at me, letting go of her sweater. “Talk?” Her face hardened abruptly, her eyes narrowing to slits buttressed by ripe flesh. “You said ten bucks. You try foolin’ me and I’ll yell for some of my friends. They’ll take care of you good.”
I got out a ten-dollar bill, thankful that it was Kosterman’s pocket the money was coming from. I dropped the ten on the mattress. She snatched it up, examined it and raised puzzled eyes to my face.
“It’s Sally Bullock I want,” I told her. “She said I could find her here. I was supposed to meet her in The Gulch last night. But I wasn’t able to make it last night.”
“Then you’re outa luck,” Fat Candy said. “Last night she was here. Tonight she ain’t. Since she moved away, she only comes around when her man’s gone off someplace. She gets the lonesomes when he’s away. I tole her she would moving away. She won’t ever find real friends anywhere like she had here.”
“Her man? Sally didn’t tell me she had a man. Who is he?”
“I dunno. She don’t say anything about him. ’Cept about all the dough he’s got. She’s always showin’ off when she comes around. Buyin’ drinks for everybody.”
“I’ve got to find her,” I said. I dug more bills from my pocket, peeled off five ones, showed them to her. “Tell me where to find her.”
She eyed the money, licking her lips greedily. Wheels of thought turned slowly behind her eyes.
“No reason not to tell me,” I said. “I’m new down here. I haven’t made a contact for the stuff yet. Sally said she’d introduce me to her pusher.”
Fat Candy looked at me with more interest. “I can usually spot ‘em. But you I didn’t figure for a user. What’re you on, Charlie or H?”
“Heroin. I need a source of the stuff down here. That’s why I have to find Sally Bullock.”
“Yeah? You don’t look like you need a fix so bad.”
“I don’t,” I told her. “I’ve still got a couple days’ supply. But when that runs out I’ll have to head back North. Unless I make a contact down here. I need Sally Bullock to make the contact.”
Fat Candy’s eyes took in the bills I held again. “I got no idea where Sally lives now,” she said. “But you don’t need her. I know her pusher. He used to peddle around here till he moved on up to where they pay more. He’s the one first got Sal hooked a couple years back.”
I thought about it. It would have to do. I waved the five one-dollar bills. “Okay. Give me the contact, and these’re yours.”
“Make it five more,” she said.
“That’s too much. You’ve already got ten from me.”
She grinned, eying me out of the depths of her wisdom about dope addicts. “You’ll pay it,” she stated.
I sighed and got the extra five out. “The contact, first.”
“You try renigging after I tell you,” Fat Candy warned me, “and you won’t get a block away from here. My friends’d catch you and tear you apart.”
“You give me Sally Bullock’s pusher, I’ll give you the ten.”
“His name’s Vic Rood. He peddles on The Beach. Got an apartment there down near the dog track.” She told me the address.
I gave her the bills. She added them to the original ten and folded them into a tight wad. She pulled up her sweater and tu
cked the wad in a little pocket in the waistband of her skirt.
“You can still have me for another ten,” she suggested. “Not tonight.”
She shrugged. “Sure. Or any night. That’s the trouble with you junkies. You got a needle fulla junk, you never need anything else.”
CHAPTER
19
THE APRATMENT building was close to the water—a long, modern two-story structure bent like a horseshoe around a dark courtyard of flagstone, coconut palms, and the inevitable swimming pool. I followed the inner lanai to the door of Victor Rood’s ground-floor apartment at the base of the courtyard. I rang the bell and waited.
In a moment a man’s voice came to me through the door panel, “Who?”
“Fat Candy sent me,” I answered loudly.
There was silence. Then, “Wait a minute.”
I waited almost the full minute before the lock was turned inside. The door opened. About a foot, no more. The man in the opening wore pegged trousers with razor-sharp creases and a beautiful white silk shirt with the initials VR embroidered on the pocket in red. He had the face of a bulldog. His eyes were vicious and he smelled bad to me. But then, all dope pushers smell that way. The rot of their victims’ souls clings to them.
“Rood?” I asked.
“Yeah. What d’you want?”
His left hand was in plain view, the thumb hooked on his belt. But his right forearm was out of sight behind the partly opened door.
“Fat Candy sent me,” I repeated. “I need some H. Enough to hold me a few days.”
Rood looked me up and down slowly. “I don’t know you.”
“I’m from Philadelphia. Down here for a few weeks. I’ve just about run out of the caps I brought with me and—”
“I got no idea what you’re talking about, pal.”
“Fat Candy said you could help me out.”
He shook his head. “Fat Candy’s got a fat mouth. She must’ve been conning you.”
He could be right. She might have been.
“Listen,” I said, “don’t be like that. It’s just I’m staying down here a week longer than I’d planned. I only need enough to tide me over three more days. I’ll pay you whatever’s fair. Hell, I’ll pay you more than fair. I’ll pay double the usual tab. How’s that?” I forced a grin. “Why not? I’m on an expense account. I’ll charge it to the company under business entertainment.”
I saw the hesitation in his eyes. The temptation of my offer contended with the ingrained caution of his trade. Fat Candy hadn’t conned me.
I hit the door with my side, all my weight and the strength of my legs behind the jolting push. The door slammed against his right arm, spinning him away inside. I was through the doorway, kicking the door shut with my heel, by the time he recovered his balance. He twisted back toward me, bringing around the .45 automatic he’d had in his right hand all the time. I caught his right wrist with both hands and twisted. He gritted his teeth to keep from yelling as his fingers sprang open. The .45 thudded to the rug. Rood clubbed his left fist at my face as I yanked him toward me. I took his knuckles on my ear. It hurt, but not enough to stop me from kneeing him in the groin.
A thin cry of horror and pain hissed through his teeth. He bent over his agony and I jerked my knee up into his face, felt teeth breaking against my kneecap.
He sprawled away from me, and I let him go. He went down on his hands and knees spitting jagged tooth ends and blood. He started crawling to his fallen .45. I bent and picked it up before he reached it and dropped it in my jacket pocket. I grabbed him by his silk shirt, lifted him off the floor, and threw him on the living-room sofa.
He sat in the middle of it, hunched over, with blood trickling down his chin, his hands clutching at his hurt. He moaned softly, piteously, his eyes squeezed tightly shut. I glanced around the place, giving him time to recover.
The living room was vast. Its lavish furnishings showed the touch of an excellent interior decorator. I could see part of a bedroom through an open door; it was more of the same. Rood’s apartment would have cost a lot anywhere. On Miami Beach, in season, the rent would be staggering.
But Rood could afford it. I thought of all the men and women and kids who lived in hell so that Rood could live here. People for whom Rood was the only one who could dispense the magic to stave off the claws waiting to rip their insides, the agony ready to eat their brains.
Rood raised his head and looked at me. His eyes killed me a dozen times over in a dozen different ways.
“Why don’t you yell?” I suggested. “Somebody’ll hear and call the cops. You hid your stock before you opened the door, but I’ll bet they’d find it.”
He described my ancestry with a few short, blunt words.
I slapped him as hard as I could, knocking him down sideways on the sofa. A tiny scream choked through his clenched teeth. I grabbed him by the hair and jerked him upright again.
“Don’t call me names,” I told him gently. “That’s pressing your luck. I don’t like you. Even without knowing you. There’s just one line of work I’ve got a deep hate for. And you’re in it. So watch your tongue.”
His dazed eyes blinked at me. There was fear in them now.
“Who’re you?” he slurred through his broken teeth.
“I’m looking for Sally Bullock. Where do I find her?”
“Who?”
I took his .45 from my pocket, removed the clip, and tossed it away. “No sense my hurting my hands on you,” I said, and hefted the gun like a club.
Rood looked at it, then at my eyes. “Wait!” he pleaded raggedly. “Just tell me what this is all about. Just . . .”
I shook my head once. “Sally Bullock,” I said tonelessly. “Where do I find her?”
“I don’t know,” he whispered.
I raised the automatic to hit him.
“I swear it!” he bleated, cringing away from me. The begging words tumbled past his bleeding mouth: “I don’t know where she lives! It’s the truth! She’s shacked up with some guy named Catleg, but I don’t know where . . . She comes here for her caps. Why should I care where she goes the rest of the time?”
I lowered the gun just a little. “What’s this Catleg look like?”
“Skinny little guy. Bent nose. He limps.”
I held back the excitement rising in me. “What’s Catleg’s first name?”
“How should I know?” Rood muttered. “I only saw him once. With Sal. In one of the joints off Alton. I don’t know anything about him.” He sat up straighter, some of the fear of being hit again easing up. He pulled out a handkerchief, dabbed at his tom mouth, looked sickly at the blood that came off on the white cloth. “Look,” he said weakly, “give me a break. Tell me what it’s all about. I got dough. We can square any beef . . .”
“Nothing to square,” I told him. “I’m not the cops. Just keep talking. When was the last time you sold Sally Bullock a supply of heroin?”
“Couple days ago.”
“When’s she due back here?”
He shrugged. “How should I know?”
I grabbed the front of his shirt and dragged him up off the sofa, letting him feel the cold metal of the gun butt against his cheek. “What you’ve got now is nothing,” I told him softly. “A little dentistry and some false teeth’ll fix you up. But if I let you have it with this gun, they’ll have to wire your jaw back together. You’ll spend a year taking your meals through a glass straw. So no more funny answers.” His hands fumbled weakly at my chest. “Please . . .” he whispered raggedly. “Don’t blow your top. I . . .”
“You know how many caps you sold Sally Bullock last time. You know exactly how deep she’s hooked, how many caps a day she needs. You know when she’ll run out of ‘em and need more.” I drew back the automatic, eying his face. “She’s just about due!” Rood gasped out.
I opened my fist and let him fall back to the sofa. “What does that mean? Exactly.”
“She should be out of caps by now,” Rood mumbled. “I figure
d she’d of showed up by this time. She’s late.”
I considered it. I moved to the phone table, keeping an eye on Rood, and looked up the name Catleg in the phonebook. He wasn’t in it. I hadn’t really thought he would be. That left waiting. There was just one good thing about dope addicts. You could depend on them. They could never move far away from their source of supply. And they had to keep coming back to it for more.
I made Rood get his stock of dope. He’d concealed it up inside his fireplace chimney when I rang the bell and he didn’t recognize my voice. It was in a canvas airline bag. I unzippered the bag and glanced inside. There were some sticks of marijuana and some decks of cocaine—called Charlie by users. But most of Rood’s stock consisted of capsules of diacetylmorphine, known to the public as heroin, to addicts as Horse or H.
I explained to Rood exactly what I expected of him. Then I let him use the bathroom to clean up. While he was in there, I slipped a fistful of heroin caps out of his bag and hid them under the cushion of his sofa.
After that we waited.
By five fifteen A.M. I was wilting, in spite of the three cups of strong black coffee I’d brewed for myself in Rood’s gleaming, modern kitchen. For Miami Beach it wasn’t terribly late; but I’d had a full day after a not-too-satisfying sleep on Georgia McKay’s trailer sofa.
In the long interval of waiting, a succession of cash- bearing, anxious-eyed supplicants made a pilgrimage to Rood’s door—none of them Sally Bullock.
Rood and I played out the same little scene each time a knock sounded at his door.
We played it again for the five-fifteen knock.
I hid in the dark bedroom, with the door open just a couple of inches—enough for me to watch Rood, to shoot him if he made it necessary.
Rood went up to the closed living room door and asked through it, “Who?”