A Century of Noir

by Max Allan Collins

  The jury was out twenty-two hours, a state record for that kind of case. Jules Redman was found guilty of resisting arrest, reduced from assaulting a police officer (he had lost his temper and knocked down a detective during an unsuccessful search of his office for evidence), and was acquitted on three counts of bribery. He was fined a hundred dollars.

  Adamson was out the door on the reporters’ scurrying heels. Murch hurried to catch up.

  “You just don’t live right, Charlie.”

  The bookkeeper held up at the hissed comment. Redman’s diminutive frame slid past him in the aisle and was swallowed up by a crowd of well-wishers gathered near the door.

  The agent kept a twelve-by-ten cubicle in the federal building two floors up from the courtroom where Redman had been set free. When Murch burst in, Adamson was slumped behind a gray steel desk deep in conversation with his rock musician partner.

  “We had a deal,” corrected the agent, after Murch’s panicky interruption. His colleague stood by brushing his long hair out of his eyes. “It was made in good faith. We gave you a chance to volunteer any information from your past that might put our case in jeopardy. You didn’t take advantage of it, and now we’re all treading water in the toilet.”

  “How was I to know they was gonna dig up that stuff about those other two jobs? You investigated me. You didn’t find nothing.” The ex-witness’s hands made wet marks on the desk top.

  “Our methods aren’t Redman’s. It takes longer to subpoena personnel files than it does to screw a magnum into a clerk’s ear and say gimme. Now I know why he didn’t try to take you out before the trial.” He paused. “Is there anything else?”

  “Damn right there’s something else! You promised me Iowa, win or lose.”

  Adamson reached inside his jacket and extracted a long narrow folder like the airlines use to put tickets in. Murch’s heart leaped. He was reaching for the folder when the agent tore it in half. He put the pieces together and tore them again. Again, and then he let the bits flutter to the desk.

  For a numb moment the bookkeeper goggled at the scraps. Then he lunged, grasping Adamson’s lapels in both hands and lifting. “Redman’s a killer!” He shook him. The agent clawed at his wrists, but Murch’s fingers were strong from their years spent cramped around pencils and the handles of adding machines. Adamson’s right hand went for his underarm holster, but his partner had gotten Murch in a bearhug and pulled. The front of the captive agent’s coat tore away in his hands.

  Adamson’s chest heaved. He gestured with his revolver. “Get him the hell out of here.” His voice cracked.

  Murch struggled, but his right arm was yanked behind him and twisted. Pain shot through his shoulder. He went along, whimpering. Shoved out into the corridor, he had to run to catch his balance and slammed into the opposite wall, knocking a memo off a bulletin board. The door exploded shut.

  A group of well-dressed men standing nearby stopped talking to look at him. He realized that he was still holding pieces of Adamson’s jacket. He let them fall, brushed back his thinning hair with a shaky hand, adjusted his suit, and moved off down the corridor.

  Redman and his lawyer were being interviewed on the courthouse steps by a television crew. Murch gave them a wide berth on his way down. He overheard Redman telling the reporters he was leaving tomorrow morning for a week’s vacation in Jamaica. Ice formed in the bookkeeper’s stomach. Redman was giving himself an alibi for when Murch’s body turned up.

  Anyway, he had eighteen hours’ grace. He decided to write off the stuff he had left back at the hotel and took a cab to his house on the west side. For years he had kept two thousand dollars in cash there in case he needed a getaway stake in a hurry. By the time he had his key in the front door lock he was already breathing easier; Redman’s men wouldn’t try anything until their boss was out of the country, and a couple of grand could get a man a long way in eighteen hours.

  His house had been ransacked.

  They had overlooked nothing. They had torn up the rugs, pulled apart the sofa and easy chairs and slit open the cushions, taken pictures down from the wall and dismantled the frames, removed the back panel from the TV set, dumped out the flour and sugar canisters in the kitchen. Even the plates had been unscrewed from the wall switches. The orange juice can in which he had kept the rolled bills in the freezer compartment of the refrigerator lay empty on the linoleum.

  The sheer cold logic of the operation dizzied Murch. Even after they had found the money they had gone on to make sure there were no other caches. His office alone, its contents smeared out into the passage that led to the stairs, would have taken hours to reduce to its present condition. The search had to have started well before the verdict was in, perhaps even as early as the weekend he had spent in that motel by the railroad tracks. Redman had been so confident of victory he had moved to cut off the bookkeeper’s escape while the trial was still in progress.

  He couldn’t stay there. Probably he was already being watched, and the longer he remained the greater his chances of being kept prisoner in his own home until the word came down to eliminate him. He stepped outside. The street was quiet except for some noisy kids playing basketball in a neighbor’s driveway and the snort of a power mower farther down the block. He started walking toward the corner.

  Toward the bank. They’d taken his passbook, too, but he had better than six thousand in his account and he could borrow against that. Buy a used car or hop a plane. Maybe even go to Jamaica, stretch out on the beach next to Redman, and wait for his reaction. He smiled at that. Confidence warmed him, like whiskey in a cold belly. He mounted the bank steps, grasped the handle on the glass door. And froze.

  He was alerted by the one reading a bank pamphlet in a chair near the door. There were no lines at the tellers’ cages and no reason to wait. He spotted the other standing at the writing table, pretending to be making out a deposit slip. Their eyes wandered the lobby from time to time, casually. Murch didn’t recognize their faces, but he knew the type: early thirties, jackets tailored to avoid telltale bulges. He reversed directions, moving slowly to keep from drawing attention. His heart started up again when he cleared the plate glass.

  It was quarter to five, too late to reach another branch before closing, and even if he did he knew what would be waiting for him. He knew they had no intention of molesting him unless he tried to borrow money. They were running him like hounds, keeping him within range while they waited for the go-ahead. He was on a short tether with Redman on the other end.

  But a man who juggled figures the way Murch did had more angles than the Pentagon. He hailed a cruising cab and gave the driver Bart Morgan’s address on Whitaker.

  Morgan’s laundromat was twice as big as the room in back where the real business was conducted, with a narrow office between to prevent the ringing of the telephones from reaching the housewives washing their husbands’ socks out front. Murch found the proprietor there counting change at the card table he used for a desk. Muscular but running to fat, Morgan had crewcut steel-gray hair and wore horn-rimmed glasses with a hearing aid built into one bow. His head grew straight out of his T-shirt.

  “How they running, Bart?”

  “They need fixing.” He reached across the stacked coins to shake Murch’s hand.

  “I meant the horses, not the machines.”

  “So did I.”

  They laughed. When they were through, Murch said, “I need money, Bart.”

  “I figured that.” The proprietor’s eyes dropped to the table. “You caught me short, Charlie. I got bit hard at the Downs Saturday.”

  “I don’t need much, just enough to get out of the city.”

  “I’m strapped. I wish to hell I wasn’t but I am.” He took a quarter from one stack and placed it atop another. “You know I’d do it if I could.”

  The bookkeeper seized his wrist gently. “You owe me, Bart. If I didn’t lend you four big ones when the Dodgers took the Series, you’d be part of an off-ramp somewhere by now.�
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  “I paid back every cent.”

  “It ain’t the money, it’s doing what’s needed.”

  Morgan avoided his friend’s eyes.

  “Redman’s goons been here, ain’t they?”

  Their gazes met for an instant, then Morgan’s dropped again. “I got a wife and a kid that can’t stay out of trouble.” He spoke quietly. “What they gonna do I don’t come home some night, or the next or the next?”

  “You and me are friends.”

  “You got no right to say that.” The proprietor’s face grew red. “You got no right to come in here and ask me to put my chin on the block.”

  Murch tightened his grip. “If you don’t give it to me I’ll take it.”

  “I don’t think so.” Morgan leaned back, exposing a curved black rubber grip pressing into his paunch above the waistband of his pants.

  Murch said, “You’d do Redman’s job for him?”

  “I’ll do what I got to to live, same as you.”

  Telephones jangled in back, all but drowned out by the whooshing of the machines out front. The bookkeeper cast away his friend’s wrist. “Tell your wife and kid Charlie said goodbye.” He went out, leaving the door open behind him.

  “You got no right, Charlie.”

  Murch kept going. Morgan stood up, shouting to be heard over the racket of the front-loaders. “You should of come to me before you went running to the feds! I’d of give you the odds!”

  His visitor was on the street.

  Dusk was gathering when he left the home of his fourth and last friend in the city. His afflicted shoulder, inflamed by the humid weather and the rough treatment he had received at Adamson’s office, throbbed like an aching tooth. His hands were empty. Like Bart Morgan, Gordy Sharp and Ed Zimmer pleaded temporary poverty, Zimmer stepping out onto the porch to talk while his family remained inside. There was no answer at Henry Arbogast’s, yet Murch swore he had seen a light go off in one of the windows on his way up the walk.

  Which left Liz.

  He counted the money in his wallet. Forty-two dollars. He had spent almost thirty on cabs, leaving himself with just enough for a room for the night if he failed to get shed of the city. Liz was living in the old place two miles uptown. He sighed, put away the billfold, and planted the first sore foot on concrete.

  Night crept out of the shadowed alleys to crouch beyond the pale rings cast by the street lights. He avoided them, taking his comfort in the invisibility darkness lent him. Twice he halted, breathing shallowly, when cars crawled along the curb going in his direction, then he resumed walking as they turned down side streets and picked up speed. His imagination flourished in the absence of light.

  The soles of his feet were sending sharp pains splintering up through his ankles by the time he reached the brickfront apartment house and mounted the well-worn stairs to the fourth floor. Outside 4C he leaned against the wall while his breathing slowed and his face cooled. Straightening, he raised his fist, paused, and knocked gently.

  A steel chain prevented the door from opening beyond the width of her face. Her features were dark against the light behind her, sharper than before, the skin creased under her eyes and at the corners of her mouth. Her black hair was streaked in mouse-color and needed combing. She had aged considerably.

  “I knew you’d show up,” she snapped, cutting his greeting in half. “I heard all about the verdict on the six o’clock news. You want money.”

  “I’m lonesome, Liz. I just want to talk.” He’d forgotten how quick she was. But he had always been able to soften her up in the past.

  “You never talked all the time we was married unless you wanted something. I can’t help you, Charlie.” She started to close the door.

  He leaned on it. His bad shoulder howled in outrage. “Liz, you’re my last stop. They got all the other holes plugged.” He told her about Adamson’s broken promise, about the bank and his friends. “Redman’ll kill me just to make an example.”

  She said, “And you’re surprised?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” He controlled his anger with an effort. That had always been her chief weapon, her instinct for the raw nerve.

  “There’s two kinds in this world, the ones that use and the ones that get used.” Her face was completely in shadow now, unreadable. “Guys like Redman and Adamson squeeze all the good out of guys like you and then throw you away. That’s the real reason I divorced you, Charlie. You was headed for the junkpile the day you was born. I just didn’t want to be there to see it.”

  “Christ, Liz, I’m talking about my life!”

  “Me too. Just a second.” She withdrew, leaving the door open.

  He felt the old warmth returning. Same old Liz: Deliver a lecture, then turn around and come through after all. It was like enduring the sermon at the Perpetual Mission in return for a hot meal and roof for the night.

  “Here.” Returning, she thrust a fistful of something through the opening. He reached for it eagerly. His fingers closed on cold steel.

  He recoiled, tried to give back the object, but she’d dropped her hand. “You nuts?” he demanded. “I ain’t fired a gun since the army!”

  “It’s all I got to give you. Don’t let them find out where it came from.”

  “What good is it against a dozen men with guns?”

  “No good, the way you’re thinking. I wait tables in Redman’s neighborhood, I hear things. He likes blow-torches. Don’t let them burn you alive, Charlie.”

  He was still staring, holding the .38 revolver like a handful of popcorn, when she shut the door. The lock snapped with a noise like jaws closing.

  It was a clear night. The Budweiser sign in the window of the corner bar might have been cut with an engraving tool out of orange neon. Someone gasped when he emerged from the apartment building. A woman in evening dress hurried past on a man’s arm, her face tight and pale in the light coming out through the glass door, one brown eye rolling back at Murch. He’d forgotten about the gun. He put it away.

  His subsequent pounding had failed to get Liz to open her door. If he’d wanted a weapon he’d have gotten it himself; the city bristled with unregistered iron. He fingered the unfamiliar thing in his pocket, wondering where to go next. His eyes came to the bright sign in the bar window.

  Blood surged in his ears. Murch’s robberies had all been from company treasuries, not people, his weapons figures in ledgers. Demanding money for lives required a steady hand and the will to carry out the threat. It was too raw for him, too much like crime. He started walking away from the bar. His footsteps slowed halfway down the block and stopped twenty feet short of the opposite corner. The pedestrian signal changed twice while he was standing there. He turned around and retraced his steps. He was squeezing the concealed revolver so hard his knuckles ached.

  The establishment was quiet for that time of the evening, deserted but for a young bartender in a red apron standing at the cash register. The jukebox was silent. As Murch approached, the employee turned unnaturally bright eyes on him. The light from the beer advertisement reflecting off the bar’s cherrywood finish flushed the young man’s face. “Sorry, friend, we’re—”

  Murch aimed the .38. His hand shook.

  The bartender smiled weakly.

  “This ain’t no joke! Get ’em up!” He tried to make his voice tough. It came out high and ragged.

  Slowly the young man raised his hands. He was still smiling. “You’re out of luck, friend.”

  Murch told him to shut up and open the cash register drawer. He obeyed. It was empty.

  “Someone beat you to it,” explained the bartender. “Two guys with shotguns came in an hour ago, shook down the customers, and cleaned me out. Didn’t even leave enough to open up with in the morning. You just missed the cops.”

  His smile burned. Murch’s finger tightened on the trigger and the expression was gone. The bookkeeper backed away, bumped into a table. The gun almost went off. He turned and stumbled toward the door. He tugged at
the handle; it didn’t budge. The sign said PUSH. He shoved his way through to the street. Inside, the bartender was dialing the telephone.

  The night air stung Murch’s face, and he realized there were tears on his cheeks. His thoughts fluttered wildly. He caught them and sorted them into piles with the discipline of one trained to work with assets and debits. Redman couldn’t have known he would pick this particular place to rob, even had he suspected the bookkeeper’s desperation would make him choose that course. Blind luck had decided whom to favor, and as usual it wasn’t Charlie Murch.

  A distant siren awakened him to practicalities. Soon he would be a fugitive from the law as well as from Redman; he wasn’t cold enough to go back and kill the bartender to keep him from giving the police his description. He pocketed the gun and ran.

  His breath was sawing in his throat two blocks later when he spotted a cab stopped at a light. He sprinted across to it, tore open the back door, and threw himself into a seat riddled with cigarette burns.

  “Off duty, bub,” announced the driver, hanging a puffy, stubbled face over the back of his seat. “Oil light’s on. I’m on my way back to the garage to see what’s wrong.”

  There was no protective panel between the seats. His passenger thrust the handgun in his face and thumbed back the hammer.

  The driver sighed heavily. “All I got’s twelve bucks and change. I ain’t picked up a fare yet.”

  He was probably lying, but the light was green and Murch didn’t want to be arrested arguing with a cabbie. “Just drive.”

  They passed a prowl car on its way toward the bar, its siren gulping, its lights flashing. Murch fought the urge to duck, hiding the gun instead. The county lock-up was full of men who would ice him just to get in good with Redman.

  He got an idea that frightened him. He tried pushing it away, but it kept coming back.

  “Mister, my engine’s overheating.”

  Murch glanced up. The cab was making clunking noises. The warning light on the dash glowed angry red. They had gone nine blocks. “All right, pull over.” The driver spun the wheel. As he rolled to a stop next to the curb the motor coughed, shuddered, and died. Steam rolled out from under the hood.