The Bind

by Stanley Ellin

  Elinor considered this, then nodded solemnly. “I guess that’s so. Because nobody here has any idea of all the good things Castro is doing in Cuba. All you get is lies about him.”

  Jake gave her a long, contemplative look. “Now my day is complete. I take it Fidel is one of your heroes?”

  “Some. Mostly, I dig Che.”

  “That figures. And I’ll bet Andy’s father wrote some pretty keen songs about Che to sing around the East Village.”

  “Well, he didn’t, but what if he did? It so happens he made the scene all over Cuba and South America. Anybody who makes the scene there digs Che.”

  “Anybody? It seems to me there’s a couple of hundred thousand Cuban refugees in these parts who might not.”

  Elinor said heatedly: “Because they don’t know any better, that’s why. And with somebody like Nera, it’s because she’s just sick. She is decadent. And you know why she told you all this hokey stuff? Because she’s hot for you. Because she is just itching to have you think she’s a poor, frightened little thing with the big, bad Commies after her.”

  “Now that is a fact,” Jake said.

  Elinor looked at him blankly. “You knew about it?”

  “Baby, it would be hard not to, the way she comes on so strong. If I don’t show up there again pretty soon, I wouldn’t be surprised to get a late night call from her, asking me to report there and protect her from some mystery man she saw near the house with a bomb in his hand. She’s so damn devious and heavy-handed, all mixed together, that it’s funny. At the same time, she’s got a real poisonous streak in her. Like trying to score against Mrs. Thoren by implying she connived at her husband’s death. You can’t get much more poisonous than that.”

  “You can’t? Well, she thinks we’re married. How about getting you out of bed with your wife so you’ll get in bed with her? That’s not just talking poisonous.”

  Jake craned his neck to see the clock on the night table. He said brightly: “My, my, almost four-thirty. Sleepy time, and here I am, getting you all wide awake and fired up. And you have a date to do research early in the morning, too.”

  “Don’t be cute. If you want me to shut up, just say so.”

  “Then I’m saying so.” He wearily stood up. “Now how about moving over and giving me some room? I won’t crowd you. There’s enough room on this thing for four.”

  “You can have it all. I’ll go finish my sleepy time on the couch inside.”

  Jake said flatly: “Well, I sure as hell won’t. No more waking up with a broken back for me. And I thought we came to an understanding. I wish you’d settle it in your mind, one way or the other.”

  She seemed to wilt under his hard-eyed appraisal. “I know.” Her voice was suddenly anguished. “Jake, listen. After you went next door I was laying here and thinking about it—I mean, about where you were and what was going on there—and I kept getting sicker and sicker in the stomach and finally I had to run to the bathroom and throw up. I couldn’t stop. My throat is still all sore. How can I go along with any understanding that makes me throw up? It just doesn’t make sense.”

  “Well, what does make sense to you? Having Andy without benefit of clergy? Getting high on pot? Giving three cheers for Che? You’re willing to buy that kind of stuff, but when it’s me and my job you come on like some goddam stupid little Polack convent novice. That’s what doesn’t make sense.”

  “Yes it does, the way I feel about you.”

  Jake clapped a hand to his forehead. “Now I get it. It’s a plot. Sherry secretly hated me, so she sent you here in her place for revenge. If she only—”

  “That’s right. Stand there stinking from that fifty-dollar-a-bottle perfume and be funny about it.” Elinor awkwardly got to her knees on the bed, still clutching the blanket to her. She pointed at him. “And you know what made me even sicker? Talking to that Maniscalco. Because what you were doing with Nera was just doing a job for him. You know what that makes him?”

  “And me,” Jake said. He patted her cheek before she could draw it away. “And you, Sister Sanctimonious. And everybody in the whole world except noble characters like Andy’s father and Che. It’s all right. I’ll take the couch. Gladly.”

  He went into the study, pulled the bedding from the closet shelf and flung it on the couch. He was tucking the sheet into place when Elinor came to the doorway, swathed in the blanket.

  “Jake?” she whispered, and when he didn’t answer, she said pleadingly: “Jake, I’m sorry.”

  “I’ll credit it to your account. Now beat it.”

  “Please, Jake, don’t be like that. I have to tell you something.”

  He switched out the light and stretched out on the couch, face deep in the pillow. Elinor felt her way across the darkened room until she was standing over him. “It’s something I never told any man before in my whole life, not even Andy’s father. I mean, you just don’t tell it to anybody who comes along. It’s got to be somebody who really makes you blow your mind. So now I’m telling it to you.” She drew a long breath. “I love you. I wish I didn’t, but that’s how it is. And that’s what the trouble is. When I even think about you I’m in a bad way. When I’m around you it’s that much worse. So I open my big mouth and shove my foot into it. Half the time I want to kill you, the other half I want to climb into bed with you, and either way I keep saying something wrong. That’s not my fault. Honest to God, I don’t see how people ever say anything right to somebody they love. How do they?”

  Jake rolled over on his back with an effort. He looked up at her through one barely open eye. “Most people don’t have your problem. They go on a romantic jag when they’re kids, and then they grow up. And growing up means seeing things as they are, taking them as they come. Those who don’t can make a stiff pain of themselves.”

  “I know,” Elinor said mournfully. “I guess you’re still mad at me, aren’t you?”

  “I’m not sure. I am so dead tired right now, baby, that I can’t get my feelings sorted out. But tomorrow—”

  She patiently waited a long time for him to finish that before she realized he was sound asleep.

  39

  In the morning he delivered her to the Jordan Marsh store near the Miami exit of the causeway, gave her another twenty dollars’ spending money, and added to it cab fare for the trip to the library and back to the house when she was finished with the newspaper files.

  During breakfast and the drive to Miami she had managed a strained cheeriness, evidently in response to his own casual dismissal of last night’s passage between them. Now she looked dismayed. “You mean you won’t pick me up? I’m supposed to go back home alone?”

  “Yes. What’s left of the library job won’t take you all day, and I might not be home if you phone me to pick you up. Don’t let it worry you. Matter of fact, you’ll probably be better off that way.”

  “Why will I? Jake, you’re not going out looking for trouble, are you?”

  “Who has to look for it? Now go on, be a good little wife. Buy some more shoes and then get on the job.” He reached across her to push open the car door, but instead of climbing out directly she turned her face up to him with a sort of hopeful expectancy, and he gave her a lingering, unhusbandly kiss. Then he drove home to catch up on the rest of his sleep. The green Chevy with the conspicuous aerial, he observed, was as close behind him on the way back as it had been on the way out.

  He got to Wolfie’s at two and nursed a glass of ice water at the usual back table until Magnes arrived fifteen minutes later, badly winded. Magnes was coatless, and the chest and back of his shirt showed broad patches of sweat. He wearily slid into the banquette seat beside Jake and mopped his face with a sodden handkerchief.

  “Some business to be in for a heart case,” he said. “First I got tied up settling things with this accountant from Bayside Spa. The one who has the old payroll sheet with that sweat-bath rubber’s name on it. It cost an arm and a leg, but now we know the rubber’s name was Earl Dobbs and the home addres
s for him on the sheet was Ocean Drive near Biscayne Street right here on the Beach. So even if the address was from three years back, I drove down there to see if maybe he was still around or if somebody remembered him. It’s a boarding house from the Year One. A miserable dump. Not so many customers, but plenty of palmettoes.”

  “Palmettoes?”

  “Those king-sized cockroaches we got around here. The Chamber of Commerce thinks if you call them palmettoes, it don’t sound so disgusting to the tourists. Anyhow, this weasel that owns the place remembered all about Dobbs. Not only that, he thinks he spotted him a few weeks ago right there in a bar on the corner. Only when he went over to say hello, the guy took one look at him and headed out of the door. So in my opinion, this was positively Dobbs, and he positively did not want to be spotted by somebody that knew him.”

  “Then why does he stay around that neighborhood?”

  “He most likely don’t. The weasel says he came to put in a night at the dog track, which happens to be right across the street there. He says this Dobbs was a real nut about the dog races.”

  Jake said: “What would make him doubt at all it was Dobbs?”

  “Something which also fits in with our angle. Dobbs three years back, he says, was a real dorfying. A peasant such as you wouldn’t believe. But in the bar it was no more peasant. The same dorfying face, but very expensive clothes. And when he ran outside he got behind the wheel of a very expensive car. So it looks like this is one sweatbath rubber who somehow came into money inside the last three years. And do I have to tell you whose money?”

  Jake shook his head. “It would be a hell of a coincidence if he wasn’t our man. What else did you pick up about him?”

  “He’s about forty-five, fifty years old. A six-footer, but skinny like a pool cue. Big pointy nose and not much chin. Mortimer Snerd in the flesh. But to me”—Magnes abstractedly started to polish the tines of his fork with a paper napkin—“I don’t know. To me, what sticks in the mind is the dog-track betting. It gave me kind of an idea. Maybe meshugeh, maybe not, I happen to think not.”

  “An idea about what?”

  “About who Dobbs’ partner could be. The big-timer who figured how to make a beautiful ten-grand-a-month blackmail out of what was maybe a two-bit shakedown. The way I see it, this could be a hood, name of Gela. An enforcer for the Mob. Not only is this real old-fashioned muscle who would break your back for laughs, he is also Frank Milan’s nephew. It so happens Milan’s real name is Gela.”

  Jake said: “So far, so good. How’d Dobbs’ being a dog-track nut lead you to think of Gela?”

  “Call it an inspiration. In the Mob, Gela’s nickname is Pooch. Pooch Gela. And a pooch means a dog. So while the weasel is telling me about Dobbs and the betting, it suddenly came to me maybe Gela got such a name because he’s a dog nut too. I called up a contact right there from the boarding house, and he told me yes, Gela’s a very big man for the dogs, that’s how he got the name. So to me, at least, it ties him in with Dobbs. What do you think?”

  Jake said without enthusiasm: “I don’t know. It’s like putting money on a horse because of the way its name sounds.”

  “So what about Gela being Milan’s nephew?”

  “That’s something, not a lot. If Milan’s not running the blackmail, just lending a hand to someone who is, it doesn’t have to be a relative. It could be anybody close to him. And Gela sounds like just another strong-arm guy. This kind of elaborate blackmail deal is way out of that class.”

  Magnes put down the fork and irritably went to work on a spoon. “What’s to say a strong-arm guy can’t have a little ambition, too? And maybe a little brains to go with it?”

  The waitress came up. She said good-humoredly to Magnes: “Ready to order now, Mr. M., or do I wait until the end of the shmoos?” and left with their orders.

  Magnes nodded after her. “A lovely woman with four lovely kids, and her husband walked out on her. I located him for her, so now at least he’s paying support for the kids.”

  “That’s very touching,” Jake said. “Anyhow, I don’t think Gela’s much of a lead. It’s up to you, if you want to put a man on him.”

  “You mean pay for the man out of my end?”

  “Why not? You said my ten grand covered all expenses.”

  “I thought that was coming. Look, sonny, from this job I am already paying hospital expenses for one guy, and I got two more living it up in Belle Glade, and now I probably got to have somebody help me hunt up this verkockteh Earl Dobbs. When I told you all expenses I did not mean you should fix me up with a payroll like General Motors.”

  Jake said with malice: “The more you invest, the more you speed up the job, so the more you’ll have left out of that ten thousand. But if you don’t think a bet on Gela is worth backing—”

  “All right, let’s forget it.” Magnes made a sweeping gesture of dismissal. “You think I’m making a wild guess about something, I won’t argue. Now what about those notes from Thoren? Is there something I’m supposed to do about them?”

  “First look them over and see if they make any sense to you.” Jake laid the copies of Thoren’s three notes on the table, and Magnes, silently mouthing their syllables, studied them in turn. Then he said: “This one makes some sense. Thermos, rations, cigars, charts—it’s like a list of what to take on the boat when he went sailing that day. These other two definitely look like code. You want my opinion, you’ll give them to a code man to work on.”

  Jake said: “That happens to be my opinion, too. But can you get me a first-class man around here? And not somebody on the cops.”

  “Sure.” Magnes folded the notes and held them poised. “Out of your end.”

  “Out of my end,” Jake said.

  Magnes tucked the notes into his shirt pocket. “Code,” he said sourly. “That’s all we need to stall the works real good. And we don’t even know how much we’re on the right track so far with anything.”

  Jake said: “Take it easy. Last night I had another little talk with the señora next door and heard enough to know we’re on the right track.” He recounted the significant parts of the talk, and concluded: “So a lot of maybes are sure things now. Like Thoren committing the crime in the Everglades thirty years ago, and Dobbs witnessing it. That’s why Thoren wouldn’t even drive through the Everglades. Because it was the scene of the crime, and he might run into Dobbs there. Another thing is that he lied when he told Ortega he had been an army demolitions expert who saw action in Europe. Mrs. Ortega shook me up with that at first, and then I realized Thoren must have been lying. He never saw action in Europe.”

  “Because they can’t turn up a service record for him? Maybe it was under a different name.”

  “Under any name. He was here in Miami by the middle of 1942. We didn’t get an army into Europe until long after that.”

  Magnes said: “Suppose it wasn’t our army? Suppose it was maybe the Danish army?”

  “If it was, he wouldn’t have seen action either. In case you don’t remember it, the Nazis walked in and took over Denmark without a fight.”

  “I can see you’re a regular history book, tokkeh. So what does it all mean in a practical way?”

  “It means for sure Thoren lied in the insurance application about that big L-shaped scar on his back being a war wound. I’ll swear to it now he got that wound back in the Everglades about thirty years ago—twenty-seven or -eight years ago, to be more exact—and Earl Dobbs was there to see him get it. One thing that’s been bothering me all along was how somebody who hadn’t seen Thoren since 1942 could recognize him so easily. But when Thoren laid down on that rubbing table, and Dobbs got a close look at the scar, he must have had the past come right up and hit him in the face.”

  Magnes nodded thoughtfully. “It adds up. It adds up.”

  “It does. But I have to know who Thoren really was and exactly what crime he committed. That’s what’ll give me clout in making Dobbs cooperate when the time comes. Once he believes I have the
goods on him and will turn him in for blackmail unless he backs me up in getting Mrs. Thoren to sign a release, he’ll cooperate.”

  Magnes raised his eyebrows in inquiry. “And the silent partner? The big-timer who Frank Milan is doing favors for? Even if it turns out he ain’t a natural-born murderer like Pooch Gela, how glad will he be to get dished out of two hundred grand?”

  “I know. So the trick is to hold both him and Milan to a stand-off until the release is signed. After that I won’t be sticking around to hear their complaints. If you’re smart, you’ll clear out of town for a while, too, after it’s all over.”

  The waitress placed their sandwiches before them, and Magnes regarded his without appetite. He remarked: “I went once to this Serpentarium place down around Homestead. That’s where this guy grabs these cobras and rattlesnakes and holds them down by the neck, and this good-looking girlie—all the girlies there are very good-looking, only with a scientific head on them—she puts a jar by the snake’s mouth so the guy can make it squirt poison into it. All of a sudden I got this feeling I’m right down there on the snake farm again, only now I’m the one holding the snake by the neck.”

  “You knew what you were getting into from the beginning,” Jake pointed out.

  “Which shows I’m not as smart as I look. You got somebody tailing you all the time?”

  “Sure. Guy in a green Chevy.”

  “Mine is a green Olds. You think maybe green is like school colors for Frank Milan?”

  Jake said: “It’s the color of money, so why not? Did the guy in the Olds follow you down to Dobbs’ old boarding house?”

  “He followed me there and back here, and right now he’s probably playing two-handed pinochle with your guy. This is Miami Beach, sonny, not Miami. A small town with water all around it. If somebody wants to tail you and don’t care if you know it, he can do it like watching a baby in a crib.” Magnes pressed his denture tighter into his upper jaw with a thumb and took a bite of sandwich. “So now I’ll ask you something. How about our girlie?”