I thought for a minute he was going to faint, too, but he managed to gasp, “Three.”
I said, “You wait here,” then turned and ran up to the house. The door was partly ajar, and I hit it and charged inside, the gun in my right hand. There wasn’t anybody in sight, but another door straight ahead of me had a sign, “Office,” on it. As I went through the door a car motor growled into life behind the house. I ran for the back, found a door standing wide open, and jumped through it just as a sky-blue Oldsmobile sedan parked in the alley took off fast. I barely got a glimpse of it, but I knew who was in it. The three con-men were powdering now that they had all the dough they were after. There was a chance they’d seen me, but it wasn’t likely. Probably they’d grabbed the dough and left by the back way as soon as Strossmin stepped through the front door.
I race out front again and sprinted for the Cad, yelling to Strossmin, “Call the police!” He sat there, probably feeling pleased at the coup he’d just put over. He’d call the cops, next week, maybe. I ripped the Cad into gear and roared to the corner, took a right, and stepped on the gas. I had to slow at the next intersection, looked both directions and caught a flash of blue two blocks away on my right, swung in after them, and pushed the accelerator to the floorboards. I was gaining on them rapidly, and now I had a few seconds to try figuring out how to stop them. Up close I could see the Olds sedan, and the figures of three men inside it, two in the front seat and one in back. Con-men don’t usually carry guns, but these guys operated a little differently from most con-men. In the first place they usually make the mark think he’s in on a crooked deal, and in the second they almost always try to cool the mark out, allay his suspicions so he doesn’t know, at least for a long time, that he’s been taken. The boys ahead of me had broken both those rules, and there was a good chance they’d also broken the rule about guns.
But I was less than half a block behind them now and they apparently hadn’t tumbled. They must figure they were in the clear, so I had surprise on my side. Well, I’d surprise them.
We were a long way from downtown here, but still in the residential section. I caught up with their car, pulled out on their left and slightly ahead, then as we reached an intersection I swung to my right, cutting them off just as I heard one of the men in the blue Olds yell loudly.
The driver did the instinctive thing, jerked his steering wheel to the right, and they went clear up over the curb and stalled on a green lawn before a small house. I was out of my Cad and running toward them, the Colt in my fist, before their car stopped moving twenty feet from me. And one of them did have a gun.
They sure as hell knew who I was by now, and I heard the gun crack. A slug snapped past me as I dived for the lawn, skidded a yard. Doors swung open on both sides of the blue Olds. Black-haired Pretty Boy jumped from the back and started running away from me, lugging a briefcase.
I got to my knees, and yelled, “Stop! Hold it or you get it, Foster.”
He swung around, crouching, and light gleamed on the metal of a gun in his hand. He fired once at me and missed, and I didn’t hold back any longer. I snapped the first shot from my .38, but I aimed the next two times, and he sagged slowly to his knees, then fell forward on his face.
Gray-haired Harrison was a few steps from the car, standing frozen, staring at Foster’s body, but Whitey was fifty feet beyond him running like mad. I took out after him, but as I went by Harrison I let him have the full weight of my .38 on the back of his skull. I didn’t even look back; he’d keep for a while.
I jammed my gun into its holster and sprinted down the sidewalk, Whitey half a block ahead but losing ground. He wasn’t in very good shape, apparently, and after a single block he was damn near staggering. He heard my feet splatting on the pavement behind him and for a moment he held his few yards’ advantage, then he slowed again. He must have known I had him; because he stopped and whirled around to face me, ready to go down fighting.
He went down, all right, but not fighting. When he stopped I had been less than ten feet from him, traveling like a fiend, and he spun around just in time to connect his face with my right fist. I must have started the blow from six feet away, just as he began turning, and what with my speed from running, and the force of the blow itself, my fist must have been traveling fifty miles an hour.
It was awful what I did to him. I caught only a flashing glimpse of his face as he swung around, lips peeled back and hands coming up, and then my knuckles landed squarely on his mouth and his lips really peeled back and he started going the same direction I was going and almost as fast. I ran several steps past him before I could stop, but when I turned around he was practically behind me and there was a thin streak of blood for two yards on the sidewalk. He was all crumpled up, out cold, and for a minute I thought he was out for good. But I felt for his heartbeat and found it.
So I squatted by him and waited. Before he came out of it, a little crowd gathered: half a dozen kids and some housewives, one young guy about thirty who came running from half a block away. I told him to call the cops and he phoned. Whitey was still out when the guy came back and said a car was on its way.
Finally Whitey stirred, moaned. I looked around and said to the women, “Get the kids out of here. And maybe you better not stick around yourselves.”
The women frowned, shifted uneasily, but they shooed the kids away. Whitey shook his head. Finally he was able to sit up. His face wasn’t pretty at all. I grabbed his coat and pulled him close to me.
I said, “Shell Scott, huh? I hear you’re a tough baby. Get up, friend.”
I stood up and watched him while he got his feet under him. It took him a while, and all the time he didn’t say a word. I suppose the decent thing would have been to let him get all the way up, but I didn’t wait. When he was halfway up I balled my left fist and slammed it under his chin. It straightened him just enough so I could set myself solidly, and get him good with my right fist. It landed where I wanted it to, on his nose, and he left us for a while longer. He fell onto the grass on his back, and perhaps he had looked a bit like me at one time, but he didn’t anymore.
The guy who had called the cops helped me carry Whitey back to the blue Oldsmobile. We dumped him and Harrison inside and I climbed in back with them—and with the briefcase—while he went out to the curb and waited for a prowl car. I got busy. When I finished, these three boys had very little money in their wallets and none was in the briefcase. It added up to $67,500. There was Elmlund’s $24,000, I figured, plus Strossmin’s $41,000, plus my $2,500. I lit a cigarette and waited for the cops.
It was two P.M. before I got away. Both cops in the patrol car were men I knew well; Borden and Lane. Lane and I especially were good friends. I gave my story and my angles to Lane, and finally he went along with what I wanted.
I finished it with, “This Strossmin is still so wound up by these guys he’ll probably figure it out about next week, but when he does, he should have a good witness. No reason why Elmlund can’t be left out of it.”
Lane shook his head and rubbed a heavy chin where bristles were already sprouting. “Well . . . if this Strossmin doesn’t come through in court, we’ll need Elmlund.”
“You’ll get him. Besides, I’ll be in court, remember. Enjoying myself.”
He nodded. “O.K., Shell.”
I handed him the briefcase with $41,000 inside it, told him I’d come to headquarters later, and took off. I’d given Lane the address where I’d left Strossmin, as well as his home address, but Strossmin hadn’t waited. I drove to his house.
I could hear them going at it hammer and tongs. Mrs. Strossmin didn’t even stop when I rang the bell, but finally her husband opened the door. He just stood there glowering at me. “Well?” he said.
“I just wanted to let you know, Mr. Strossmin, that the police have caught the men who tricked you.”
I was going on, but he said, “Trick me? Nobody tricked me. You’re trying to trick me.”
“Look, mister, I just want you to know your money�
�s safe. The cops have it. My name is Shell Scott—”
“Ha!” he said. “It is, hey? No, it’s not, that’s not your name, can’t fool me. You’re a crook, that’s what you are.”
His wife was in the door.
She screeched in his ear, “What did I say? Old fool, I warned you.”
“Mattie,” he said. “If you don’t sit down and shut up—”
I tried some more, but he just wouldn’t believe me. A glowing vision could have appeared in the sky crying, “You been tricked, Strossmin!” and the guy wouldn’t have believed it. There are marks like him, who beg to be taken.
So finally I said, “Well, you win.”
“What?”
“You win. Nothing I can do about it now. Store’s yours.” I put on a hangdog look. He cackled.
I said, “You can take over the place today, you know. Well, good-bye—and the better man won.”
“Today?”
“Yep. Folsom’s Market, isn’t it?”
“Yes, yes.”
“Well, you go right down there. Ask for Mr. Gordon.”
“Mr. Gordon?”
“Yep.” I shook his hand. He cackled, and Mrs. Strossmin screeched at him, and he told her to shut up and I left. They were still going at it as I drove away to the Elmlunds.
Mr. Elmlund didn’t quite know what to do when I dropped the big packet of bills on his table and said the hoods were in the clink. He stared at the money for a long time. When finally he did speak it was just, “I don’t know what to say.”
Jan came out onto the porch and I told them what happened and I thought they were going to crack up for a while, and then I thought they were going to float off over the trees, but finally Mr. Elmlund said, “I must pay you, Mr. Scott. I must.”
I said, “No. Besides I got paid.”
Jan was leaning against the side of the door, smiling at me. She’d changed clothes and was wearing a smooth, clinging print dress now, and the way she looked I really should have had on dark glasses. She looked happy, wonderful, and her light blue eyes were half-lidded, her gaze on my mouth.
“No,” she said. “You haven’t been paid.”
Her tongue traced a smooth, gleaming line over her lower lip, and I remembered her fingers on my cheek, her lips against my skin.
“You haven’t been paid, Shell.”
I had a hunch she was right.
JOHN LUTZ
When John Lutz (1939– ) won the Edgar for best short story, a number of critics pointed out that such recognition was long overdue. Whether writing his Fred Carver or Alo Nudger books—or his suspense novels, one of which, SWF Seeks Same, was the basis for the hit movie Single White Female—Lutz brings to the noir school of writing a sympathy for the average man rarely seen in contemporary fiction of any kind.
Lutz knows how most of us live and manages to give engaging (and sometimes sad, sometimes violent) portraits of life lived here in the cities and suburbs of the United States at the start of the new millennium. Novels such as The Ex, recently produced as a made-for-cable movie, illustrate how characters and situations, in his skillful hands, can come back to haunt you.
His quiet, elegant prose stays with you far longer than the bestseller bombast so much in fashion these days.
The Real Shape of the Coast
Where the slender peninsula crooks like a beckoning finger in the warm water, where the ocean waves crash in umbrellas of foam over the low-lying rocks to roll and ebb on the narrow white-sand beaches, there squats in a series of low rectangular buildings and patterns of high fences the State Institution for the Criminal Incurably Insane. There are twenty of the sharp-angled buildings, each rising bricked and hard out of sandy soil like an undeniable fact. Around each building is a ten-foot redwood fence topped by barbed wire, and these fences run to the sea’s edge to continue as gossamer networks of barbed wire that stretch out to the rocks.
In each of the rectangular buildings live six men, and on days when the ocean is suitable for swimming it is part of their daily habit—indeed, part of their therapy—to go down to the beach and let the waves roll over them, or simply to lie in the purging sun and grow beautifully tan. Sometimes, just out of the grasping reach of the waves, the men might build things in the damp sand, but by evening those things would be gone. However, some very interesting things had been built in the sand.
The men in the rectangular buildings were not just marking time until their real death. In fact, the “Incurably Insane” in the institution’s name was something of a misnomer; it was just that there was an absolute minimum of hope for these men. They lived in clusters of six not only for security’s sake, but so that they might form a more or less permanent sensitivity group—day-in, day-out group therapy, with occasional informal gatherings supervised by young Dr. Montaign. Here under the subtle and skillful probings of Dr. Montaign the men bared their lost souls—at least, some of them did.
Cottage D was soon to be the subject of Dr. Montaign’s acute interest. In fact, he was to study the occurrences there for the next year and write a series of articles to be published in influential scientific journals.
The first sign that there was something wrong at Cottage D was when one of the patients, a Mr. Rolt, was found dead on the beach one evening. He was lying on his back near the water’s edge, wearing only a pair of khaki trousers. At first glance it would seem that he’d had a drowning accident, only his mouth and much of his throat turned out to be stuffed with sand and with a myriad of tiny colorful shells.
Roger Logan, who had lived in Cottage D since being found guilty of murdering his wife three years before, sat quietly watching Dr. Montaign pace the room.
“This simply won’t do,” the doctor was saying. “One of you has done away with Mr. Rolt, and that is exactly the sort of thing we are in here to stop.”
“But it won’t be investigated too thoroughly, will it?” Logan said softly. “Like when a convicted murderer is killed in a prison.”
“May I remind you,” a patient named Kneehoff said in his clipped voice, “that Mr. Rolt was not a murderer.” Kneehoff had been a successful businessman before his confinement, and now he made excellent leather wallets and sold them by mail order. He sat now at a small table with some old letters spread before him, as if he were a chairman of the board presiding over a meeting. “I might add,” he said haughtily, “that it’s difficult to conduct business in an atmosphere such as this.”
“I didn’t say Rolt was a murderer,” Logan said, “but he is—was—supposed to be in here for the rest of his life. That fact is bound to impede justice.”
Kneehoff shrugged and shuffled through his letters. “He was a man of little consequence—that is, compared to the heads of giant corporations.”
It was true that Mr. Rolt had been a butcher rather than a captain of industry, a butcher who had put things in the meat—some of them unmentionable. But then Kneehoff had merely run a chain of three dry-cleaning establishments.
“Perhaps you thought him inconsequential enough to murder,” William Sloan, who was in for pushing his young daughter out of a fortieth-story window, said to Kneehoff. “You never did like Mr. Rolt.”
Kneehoff began to splutter. “You’re the killer here, Sloan! You and Logan!”
“I killed no one,” Logan said quickly.
Kneehoff grinned. “You were proved guilty in a court of law—of killing your wife.”
“They didn’t prove it to me. I should know whether or not I’m guilty!”
“I know your case,” Kneehoff said gazing dispassionately at his old letters. “You hit your wife over the head with a bottle of French Chablis wine, killing her immediately.”
“I warn you,” Logan said heatedly, “implying that I struck my wife with a wine bottle—and French Chablis at that—is inviting a libel suit!”
Noticeably shaken, Kneehoff became quiet and seemed to lose himself in studying the papers before him. Logan had learned long ago how to deal with him; he knew that Kneehoff�
�s “company” could not stand a lawsuit.
“Justice must be done,” Logan went on. “Mr. Rolt’s murderer, a real murderer, must be caught and executed.”
“Isn’t that a job for the police?” Dr. Montaign asked gently.
“The police!” Logan laughed. “Look how they botched my case! No, this is a job for us. Living the rest of our lives with a murderer would be intolerable.”
“But what about Mr. Sloan?” Dr. Montaign asked. “You’re living with him.”
“His is a different case,” Logan snapped. “Because they found him guilty doesn’t mean he is guilty. He says he doesn’t remember anything about it, doesn’t he?”
“What’s your angle?” Brandon, the unsuccessful mystery bomber, asked. “You people have always got an angle, something in mind for yourselves. The only people you can really trust are the poor people.”
“My angle is justice,” Logan said firmly. “We must have justice!”
“Justice for all the people!” Brandon suddenly shouted, rising to his feet. He glanced about angrily and then sat down again.
“Justice,” said old Mr. Heimer, who had been to other worlds and could listen to and hear metal, “will take care of itself. It always does, no matter where.”
“They’ve been waiting a long time,” Brandon said, his jaw jutting out beneath his dark mustache. “The poor people, I mean.”
“Have the police any clues?” Logan asked Dr. Montaign.
“They know what you know,” the doctor said calmly. “Mr. Rolt was killed on the beach between nine-fifteen and ten—when he shouldn’t have been out of Cottage D.”
Mr. Heimer raised a thin speckled hand to his lips and chuckled feebly. “Now, maybe that’s justice.”
“You know the penalty for leaving the building during unauthorized hours,” Kneehoff said sternly to Mr. Heimer. “Not death, but confinement to your room for two days. We must have the punishment fit the crime and we must obey the rules. Any operation must have rules in order to be successful.”
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