by James M. Fox
“Where you from, stranger?”
I told him New York City, barely subduing the croak that wanted to ride my tongue, and he loosened his grip.
“We got crosswalks for pedestrians heah, for yore own protection. We don’t want y’all to get hurt in this heah city. Whatcha nervous about anyways?”
“Sorry, officer. You startled me. I didn’t know.”
He shrugged and released my shoulder and pointed to the crosswalk ten yards away. The trolley was still there, waiting for the lights. I climbed aboard on brittle wooden legs and dropped half my change on the floor paying the fare. The Mexican motorman showed me a toothy grin.
“¿Dedos de hilacha, Señor?”
I ignored him and pushed toward the rear of the car. It carried a near-capacity load, mostly of overalled workmen and elderly women shoppers in cotton serapes, but there was a sprinkling of tourists—two paunchy, middle-aged Babbitt types with cameras, a freckled young man reading a copy of This Week in El Paso, and a pretty blonde in a white linen dress who toted one of those flat wooden cases artists use for carrying their sketching-supplies.
When the trolley groaned around the curve into the bridge approach I dropped off and watched it rumble on to the bridge. On the sidewalk two Indian squaws had spread their wares, and I had to pretend some interest in blankets and pottery as a cover for hanging around. The trolley hit the bridge, slowed down, and squealed to an unscheduled stop in front of the little customs shack on the American side, where they normally halt only incoming traffic. Two men in Panama hats and sleekly tailored brown gabardines boarded the car. They walked through it and jumped off again, bringing the freckled lad and the blonde out with them. The trolley waited while the sketching-case was being opened and the girl’s purse inspected; the man produced his wallet and showed papers. Everybody seemed to be quite casual about it all, and I was close enough to catch a shred of the girl’s laughter as she got back on the trolley, assisted by her fellow victim. The motorman clanged his bell complacently, and the men in the Panama hats waved him on his way. At the shack, the uniformed customs officer on duty shifted his back off the wall and spat reflectively to leeward over the bridge balustrade. Fifty yards up the bridge, with its rear wheels touching the boundary line, a plain black sedan with a long buggy-whip antenna hugged the curbside. It was too far away for me to see who might be in it, mostly because I was already crossing the street and walking back into the city just as fast as could be managed with decorum.
Lorna was in bed, still wide-awake, staring at the ceiling. I dropped into a chair by the open window and looked at the view—the clean white battlement of roof tops and terraces, the glittering corkscrew thread of the river, the parched brown foothills reaching far beyond.
“You’ve got to get some sleep.”
“Yes. I know.”
“I’ll find you a couple of Amytals. We can’t leave tonight. Not until you’re in better shape.”
“I’ll be all right.”
“No, it’s like this. Mexico is out. They’re watching the bridges.”
“Oh.”
“It doesn’t mean anything. I don’t think they know we’re here yet. Closing the border is an easy routine, in a case like this, because there are only three or four points where we could be expected to try—say Tijuana, and here and Laredo and maybe Reynosa. They’ll check the airlines and the railroad, of course.”
“I see.”
“Don’t worry. We can still make it. They can’t block the roads. Not until they’ve actually narrowed down the search to this area, and even then it’s a hell of a job. I’m going out again the minute you’re asleep, to buy a good used car, borrow a couple of dealer’s license plates for a day or two. Tomorrow night we’re pulling out of here with the week-end crowd. We’ll be in New Orleans by Tuesday morning, a cool thousand miles across country. I’ve got friends there who know the ropes, who can put us up and get us on a Caribbean freighter for a few hundred bucks, without any nonsense. That’s all there is to it. Sound okay?”
“Whatever you say.”
I turned around and frowned at her, and she barely smiled back at me. Against the white pillow there was little more of her than a stain of black curls and darkly shadowed eyes. I went over and felt her brow, pressed the veins of her arms. “Does that hurt?”
“No.”
“Be right back with the snooze dope.”
She took two, as meekly as a small child. “Rick, don’t go.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Hold me, darling. I’ll go to sleep if you stay with me.”
“I was going to.”
She was too tired and too self-conscious about her hands to reach for me. “Please, Rick. I’m frightened by myself. Don’t leave me any more.”
“Take it easy. I’m not even supposed to be here at all. A little thing like the maid coming in with towels could settle our hash. You won’t know I’m gone, honey.”
“Yes, I will. I will know it. Rick, tell me again!”
“I love you. I love you so much it hurts. I don’t give a damn if you killed the guy. I don’t care if you were Vanni’s mistress, or Chiang Kai-shek’s. You belong to me now, and it’s going to stay that way.”
The haunted dark-blue eyes flickered at me and changed to violet and closed gently. When she was breathing regularly in my arms I laid her back on the pillow and quietly drew the curtains. I left the room on tiptoes and hung out the “Do Not Disturb” sign, and went out again. Buying a car was almost too simple. At the lot on Alameda I had to make myself pretend that I wasn’t a suspiciously easy mark. I even forced myself to do a little haggling. The salesman took one look at my roll and eagerly agreed to lend me a pair of plates for the week-end. He sold me a conservative gray Chrysler sedan that was only a few months old. He filled it up for me himself and drove it on the grease rack and supervised the Negro mechanic who gave it a lube job. He made out a bill of sale to Donald Wells, of Des Moines, Iowa, took my money, and almost jumped to attention when I drove off.
I parked in an all-night garage two blocks from the Cortez, had a snack in the coffee shop, and looked in on Lorna before returning to my own quarters. She was sleeping peacefully, even snoring a little, completely relaxed. The hideous yellow gloves were below the sheet. She did not look like a murderess any more; she was a small, uncommonly beautiful child who had been very sick, but who was going to be allowed to sit up tomorrow and play with her dolls. I wanted to smile at her, but I couldn’t quite make it, being a hundred years old myself and barely able to walk without crutches.
This morning I got up at six, and she is still fast asleep. She will need all the rest she can get, of course, and it seems at least possible now that we shall be safe here for the day. It is even possible that time and distance and our own stumbling efforts will really let us slip off the hook. With luck we might last a year, perhaps two years, before they can catch up with us. The money will help, and it’s the kind of money that doesn’t bother my kind of conscience a great deal. It feels like money she and I have worked and paid for all our lives.
But something tells me that this is no show. Any gambler develops an instinct that warns him when he hasn’t got a prayer. I’ve chucked away hands with four kings in them and dropped the dice as if they’d scorched me after six straight passes. Only this time the house won’t let me quit, and I don’t mean Sergeant Dettlinger, or the FBI, or the California courts, either. A murder rap is something you can beat, or any good attorney can, and we’d always be able to make out a pretty fair case of self-defense if a jury should ever get to hear it. If we should live that long.
So I am spending today in writing down how it happened, all of it. Maybe I can hide the result somewhere, such as under the seat of the car, where the cops will find it, but where they won’t bother to look. The newspapers and the true-crime magazines will have a field day with it; the lawyers and the politicians will call it a confession, but at least the truth will be known, and the deal will have to
be from the top of the deck.
Chapter Two: RUBBER CHECK
IT started last Monday. I had a room in an old clapboard flytrap in East Hollywood that called itself the Sierra Lagos, where they made me a special weekly rate and didn’t always lock me out if I got a day or two behind on the rent. On Monday I was three days behind. I owned a suit of clothes, a pair of shoes, two shirts, two sets of underwear in bad repair and thirty-two cents cash. The car I drove around was a ’36 Ford. I couldn’t have sold that, or hocked it, either. The papers were still in the dealer’s name, but in California even a bum has to have a car.
When the colored boy knocked on my door around noon and shouted something about a man on the phone I thought at first it was a gag, because not even Marion was supposed to know where I lived. It was that kind of an address, and there were other reasons. Then I got up after all and put some clothes on and went down to see for myself. The phone was a rusty coin-box affair on the wall under the stairs. It talked to me impatiently in a clipped, high-class European accent. It said this was Mr. Kovacs, who was speaking for Mr. Walter Hitchcock, and invited me to see Mr. Hitchcock that same afternoon at three o’clock on a matter of business.
I got quite a bang out of that. I knew I’d been a bad boy who was due for a spanking, but it hardly seemed like a case for the Board of Education. I said so after I got my breath back, and Mr. Kovacs sneered at me in agreement. He informed me this was about a job.
There wasn’t much else I could say except Oh, and promise to be on deck at three. He told me where and hung up. I put a nickel in the slot to call Marion at the office, which left me twenty-seven cents for orange juice and sinkers, standard Hollywood bum fare. She sounded snippier than usual, after last night’s fight about one thing and another.
“Isn’t this pretty early for you to be up and around?”
“Yes. I guess it is.”
“Rick, I can’t talk now. People are waiting to see me, and there goes my other phone. You can call me later this afternoon.”
“ Just a second. I may not be here this afternoon.”
“What do you mean?”
“Man called me up just now and offered me a job.”
Her tone changed instantly. “Isn’t that wonderful! Darling, I’m so happy for you. But it’s here in town, isn’t it? Which man, Rick?”
“The name’s Hitchcock. You don’t know him. Not the movie director.”
“Walter Hitchcock, who owns all those hotels?”
“Yes.”
“Of course I know him, silly. We used to handle some of his publicity. Oh, Rick, that’s grand! What sort of a job?”
“He didn’t say. Look, I may have to go away for a while. Don’t worry if you don’t hear from me the next couple of weeks, and don’t talk about it, will you, honey?”
“Why can’t I? Rick, you’re making this up!” she accused me heatedly.
It was reasonable enough for her to think so, and very unreasonable of me to slam the phone on the hook. I wasn’t mad at her or anything; I just didn’t want to have another fight. I went back upstairs and finished dressing and sat around trying to figure things out on an empty stomach.
I forget who told me the story, but the way I heard it they had a serious meat shortage in Germany back in 1921, and in the town of Hanover a butcher named Haarmann was arrested for selling steaks and chops off carefully selected two-legged carcasses. When the news hit New York there were quite a few citizens who hustled into court to see about swapping the family name for something that would sound a little less indelicate, and among them was this small-time Park Avenue bootlegger, Walter Haarmann. The German handle cramped his style anyway, with his particular type of clientele, and the change improved business prospects to a point where he was able to hold his own with outfits like Dutch Schultz’s and Legs Diamond’s, who were less interested in the private carriage trade than in the massive night-club and speak-easy markets. By the time Repeal came around things were different; the depression had already creamed off most of his profits, and the only place where people still carried wallets and checkbooks was out West.
He arrived in California in the spring of ’34, opened a string of liquor stores, and went bankrupt within six months, the lucrative kind of bankruptcy. With his profits he bought a piece of the old Nevada Syndicate and started working his way through college. Before Pearl Harbor they had everything wrapped up—the cops, the lawyers and the politicians, the bookies and the wire services, the plush casinos and the little dark-town social clubs, the coin-machine routes and the punchboard routes and the tipster sheets, the whole elaborate network of lottery-ticket salesmen and numbers-game pools, everything snug and cozy and strictly on the square, with all the flimflam boys and the hop-head triggers crowded outside looking in.
By 1943 they were in the hotel business from Cuba clear across to Honolulu. They had to find some way of investing the stuff and beating the U.S. Treasury on capital depreciation.
But on the other hand they did not care for deadbeats very much themselves. It made them pretty cross when anyone would try to pull something, such as for instance sign a piece of paper that would come back from the bank in a few days, neatly endorsed in purple No Account.
Getting out of town wasn’t going to be easy, not on twenty-seven cents. I could thumb a ride east, but that was a slow business, and it was exactly what they’d expect me to do. Maybe they would be satisfied to let me go, but if they were laying for me to make an example I wouldn’t get very far that way. They had organized themselves a thousand miles of territory west of the Rockies, and they’d be likely to consider this a question of prestige. They had Tijuana and Acapulco sewed up, too. Then there was always the Pacific Ocean. I picked up the Sunday paper and checked the shipping list. The Lurline was sailing at eight from Wilmington, and a small Norwegian tub at midnight from San Pedro. If I could shake them off that long. Then again it was an odds-on bet which might be worse—play stowaway or take a pistol whipping and be done with it. I wasn’t far enough out of line to rate much more than a couple of days in the accident ward at the County Hospital.
What bothered me was why they would go all the way up through channels to command level about such a minor tactical operation as a rubber check. I didn’t like that worth one broken little white chip. They weren’t kidding me about it, either. There wasn’t any particular mystery involved, but they were generally discouraged from taking the names of the high brass in vain.
It didn’t really take nerve to make me decide against running, after all. I’d picked up a Silver Star and a couple of Purple Hearts in the Army, but even a cornered and hungry rabbit would just as soon jump into the cooking-pot by himself, and in my case I knew full well that the only party responsible for this awkward situation was one Richard Bailey, 31, of White Plains, New York, formerly a dance orchestra leader, more recently a sergeant-gunner of Company B, 144th Tank Destroyer Regiment, and still more recently a lousy, no-good petty grifter, completely assembled with his own private and highly efficient self-starting jinx.
Chapter Three: FRAME-UP ON A MODEL
THE address I’d been given was on one of those quiet backwater canyons out in Bel Air, at least a mile north of Sunset Boulevard, where the building restrictions specify brick garden walls and no lots under five acres. I found an open gate featuring a set of flying cupids in heavy wrought iron and the initials WH inside a bronze laurel wreath. The black composition driveway curved away among the jacaranda trees. I was still wondering about whether to use it or park outside in the street when trumpet horns blared imperiously, and a long, low-slung gray sporting roadster swept around the curve with a roar and a whine of gears. It skidded out through the gate, casually clipped off one of my fenders, and screamed to a stop twenty yards behind me nuzzling a lamppost.
I sat very still, watching the driver in my mirror. He had climbed out and came stalking me on stiff long legs, like a terrier pup who’s found an alley cat trespassing in his back yard. He was a tall, slender y
outh in polo flannels and a rather loud Paisley scarf, the blond, quasi-athletic type without any real co-ordination or hard muscle, the frustrated, emotional type that is considered handsome by all the girls and dated by few. His pale-blue eyes were snapping at me and at the battered old Ford; his drawl had a tight, expensive, private-school quality tightly kept under control. “Manage to kill a lot of people with that junk pile of yours, I should fancy.”
He wasn’t fooling. He really believed I had hit him, probably on purpose, and he resented it with an intensity that verged on tears of fury. I just sat there, looking up at him. It stumped me how I was going to handle him. I mumbled something about insurance, and he curled his lip for me.
“Don’t tell me you can get insurance on that bucket.”
“Take it easy, fellow,” I said. “Maybe I’m not the one who needs it.”
That was enough to set him off. He went white all over under his smooth coat of tan and called me a name that almost cracked his voice. He reached inside and grabbed a handful of my shirt and tried to haul me out through the window. He was so young and arrogant, so desperately unsure of himself, I didn’t even have the heart to punch him in the nose.
“Something wrong, Mr. Stuart?”
There were two of them standing behind him. They had heard the crash, of course, and they were still breathing fast from running, but now they did not seem to be worried any more. The one who looked like an Irish pug in chauffeur’s blue serge cap and leggings had a familiar face—I couldn’t place him accurately, but we had certainly been frequenting the same dice joints and horse parlors. The other one wore beautifully tailored summer tweeds and the deeply lined, faintly sinister features, the glossy patent-leather hair streaked with gray of an elderly gigolo.