Smitty shifted his hat from northeast to southwest and started reluctantly toward the great outdoors once more. “Anything screwy like this that comes up, I’m always It,” he was heard to mutter rebelliously. “Nice job, shooing a dancing contest. I’ll probably get bombarded with powder-puffs—”
The chief reached suddenly for the heavy brass inkwell on his desk, whether to sign some report or to let Smitty have it, Smitty didn’t wait to find out. He ducked hurriedly out the door.
“Ah, me,” sighed the chief profoundly, “what a bunch of crumbs. Why didn’t I listen to me old man and join the fire department instead!”
Young Mr. Smith, muttering bad language all the way, had himself driven over to the unused armory where the peculiar enterprise was taking place. “Sixty cents,” said the taxi-driver.
Smitty took out a little pocket account-book and wrote down Taxi-fare—$1.20. “Send me out after nothing at four in the morning, will he!” he commented. After which he felt a lot better.
There was a box-office outside the entrance but now it was dark and untenanted. Smitty pushed through the unlocked doors and found a combination porter and doorman, a gentleman of color, seated on the inside, who gave him a stub of pink pasteboard in exchange for fifty-five cents, then promptly took the stub back again and tore it in half. “Boy,” he remarked affably, “you is either up pow’ful early or up awful late.”
“I just is plain up,” remarked Smitty, and looked around him.
It was an hour before daylight and there were a dozen people left in the armory, which was built to hold two thousand. Six of them were dancing, but you wouldn’t have known it by looking at them. It had been going on nine days. There was no one watching them any more. The last of the paid admissions had gone home hours ago, even the drunks and the Park Avenue stay-outs. All the big snow-white arc lights hanging from the rafters had been put out, except one in the middle, to save expenses. Pastemack wasn’t in this for his health. The one remaining light, spitting and sizzling way up overhead, and sending down violet and white rays that you could see with the naked eye, made everything look ghostly, unreal. A phonograph fitted with an amplifier was grinding away at one end of the big hall, tearing a dance-tune to pieces, giving it the beating of its life. Each time the needle got to the end of the record it was swept back to the beginning by a sort of stencil fitted over the turn-table.
Six scarecrows, three men and three girls, clung ludicrously together in pairs out in the middle of the floor. They were not dancing and they were not walking, they were tottering by now, barely moving enough to keep from standing still. Each of the men bore a number on his back. 3, 8, and 14 the numbers were. They were the “lucky” couples who had outlasted all the others, the scores who had started with them at the bang of a gun a week and two days ago. There wasn’t even a coat or vest left among the three men—or a necktie. Two of them had replaced their shoes with carpet-slippers to ease their aching feet. The third had on a pair of canvas sneakers.
One of the girls had a wet handkerchief plastered across her forehead. Another had changed into a chorus-girl’s practice outfit— shorts and a blouse. The third was a slip of a thing, a mere child, her head hanging limply down over her partner’s shoulder, her eyes glazed with exhaustion.
Smitty watched her for a moment. There wasn’t a curve in her whole body. If there was anyone here under age, it was she. She must be Toodles McGuire, killing herself for a plated loving-cup, a line in the newspapers, a contract to dance in some cheap honky-tonk, and a thousand dollars that she wasn’t going to get anyway—according to the chief. He was probably right, reflected Smitty. There wasn’t a thousand dollars in the whole set-up, much less three prizes on a sliding scale. Pastemack would probably pocket whatever profits there were and blow, letting the fame-struck suckers whistle. Corner-lizards and dance-hall belles like these couldn’t even scrape together enough to bring suit. Now was as good a time as any to stop the lousy racket.
Smitty sauntered over to the bleachers where four of the remaining six the armory housed just then were seated and sprawled in various attitudes. He looked them over. One was an aged crone who acted as matron to the female participants during the brief five-minute rest-periods that came every half-hour. She had come out of her retirement for the time being, a towel of dubious cleanliness slung over her arm, and was absorbed in the working-out of a crossword puzzle, mumbling to herself all the while. She had climbed halfway up the reviewing stand to secure privacy for her occupation.
Two or three rows below her lounged a greasy-looking counterman from some one-arm lunchroom, guarding a tray that held a covered tin pail of steaming coffee and a stack of wax-paper cups. One of the rest periods was evidently approaching and he was ready to cash in on it.
The third spectator was a girl in a dance dress, her face twisted with pain. Judging by her unkempt appearance and the scornful bitter look in her eyes as she watched the remaining dancers, she had only just recently disqualified herself. She had one stockingless foot up before her and was rubbing the swollen instep with alcohol and cursing softly under her breath.
The fourth and last of the onlookers (the fifth being the darky at the door) was too busy with his arithmetic even to look up when Smitty parked before him. He was in his shirt-sleeves and wore blue elastic armbands and a green celluloid eye-shade. A soggy-looking stogie protruded from his mouth. A watch, a megaphone, a whistle, and a blank-cartridge pistol lay beside him on the bench. He appeared to be computing the day’s receipts in a pocket notebook, making them up out of his head as he went along. “Get out of my light,” he remarked ungraciously as Smitty’s shadow fell athwart him.
“You Pastemack?” Smitty wanted to know, not moving an inch.
“Naw, he’s in his office taking a nap.”
“Well, get him out here, I’ve got news for him.”
“He don’t wanna hear it,” said the pleasant party on the bench.
Smitty turned over his lapel, then let it curl back again. “Oh, the lor,” commented the auditor, and two tens left the day’s receipts and were left high and dry in Smitty’s right hand. “Buy yourself a drop of schnapps,” he said without even looking up. “Stop in and ask for me tomorrow when there’s more in the kitty—”
Smitty plucked the nearest armband, stetched it out until it would have gone around a piano, then let it snap back again. The business manager let out a yip. Smitty’s palm with the two sawbucks came up flat against his face, clamped itself there by the chin and bridge of the nose, and executed a rotary motion, grinding them in. “Wrong guy,” he said and followed the financial wizard into the sanctum where Pastemack lay in repose, mouth fixed to catch flies.
“Joe,” said the humbled sidekick, spitting out pieces of ten-dollar-bill, “the lor.”
Pastemack got vertical as though he worked by a spring. “Where’s your warrant?” he said before his eyes were even open. “Quick, get me my mouth on the phone, Moe!”
“You go out there and blow your whistle,” said Smitty, “and call the bally off—or do I have to throw this place out in the street?” He turned suddenly, tripped over something unseen, and went staggering halfway across the room.The telephone went flying out of Moe’s hand at one end and the sound-box came ripping off the baseboard of the wall at the other. “Teh, tch, excuse it please,” apologized Smitty insincerely. “Just when you needed it most, too!”
He turned back to the one called Moe and sent him headlong out into the auditorium with a hearty shove at the back of the neck. “Now do like I told you,” he said, “while we’re waiting for the telephone repairman to get here. And when their dogs have cooled, send them all in here to me. That goes for the cannibal and the washroom dame, too.” He motioned toward the desk. “Get out your little tin box, Pastemack. How much you got on hand to pay these people?”
It wasn’t in a tin box but in a briefcase. “Close the door,” said Pastemack in an insinuating voice. “There’s plenty here, and plenty more will be coming in. How
big a cut will square you? Write your own ticket.”
Smitty sighed wearily. “Do I have to knock your front teeth down the back of your throat before I can convince you I’m one of these old-fashioned guys that likes to work for my money?”
Outside a gun boomed hollowly and the squawking of the phonograph stopped. Moe could be heard making an announcement through the megaphone. “You can’t get away with this!” stormed Pastemack. “Where’s your warrant?”
“Where’s your license,” countered Smitty, “if you’re going to get technical? C’mon, don’t waste any more time, you’re keeping me up! Get the dough ready for the pay-off.” He stepped to the door and called out into the auditorium: “Everybody in here. Get your things and line up.” Two of the three couples separated slowly like sleepwalkers and began to trudge painfully over toward him, walking zig-zag as though their metabolism was all shot.
The third pair, Number 14, still clung together out on the floor, the man facing toward Smitty. They didn’t seem to realize it was over. They seemed to be holding each other up. They were in the shape of a human tent, their feet about three feet apart on the floor, their faces and shoulders pressed closely together. The girl was that clothes-pin, that stringbean of a kid he had already figured for Toodles McGuire. So she was going to be stubborn about it, was she? He went over to the pair bellicosely. “C’mon, you heard me, break it up!”
The man gave him a frightened look over her shoulder. “Will you take her off me, please, Mac? She’s passed out or something, and if I let her go she’ll crack her conk on the floor.” He blew out his breath. “I can’t hold her up much longer!”
Smitty hooked an arm about her middle. She didn’t weigh any more than a discarded topcoat. The poor devil who had been bearing her weight, more or less, for nine days and nights on end, let go and folded up into a squatting position at her feet like a shriveled Buddha. “Just lemme stay like this,” he moaned, “it feels so good.” The girl, meanwhile, had begun to bend slowly double over Smitty’s supporting arm, closing up like a jackknife. But she did it with a jerkiness, a deliberateness, that was almost grisly, slipping stiffly down a notch at a time, until her upside-down head had met her knees. She was like a walking doll whose spring has run down.
Smitty turned and barked over one shoulder at the washroom hag. “Hey you! C’mere and gimme a hand with this girl! Can’t you see she needs attention? Take her in there with you and see what you can do for her—”
The old crone edged fearfully nearer, but when Smitty tried to pass the inanimate form to her she drew hurriedly back. “I—I ain’t got the stren’th to lift her,” she mumbled stubbornly. “You’re strong, you carry her in and set her down—”
“I can’t go in there,” he snarled disgustedly. “That’s no place for me! What’re you here for if you can’t—”
The girl who had been sitting on the sidelines suddenly got up and came limping over on one stockingless foot. “Give her to me,” she said. “I’ll take her in for you.” She gave the old woman a long hard look before which the latter quailed and dropped her eyes. “Take hold of her feet,” she ordered in a low voice. The hag hurriedly stooped to obey. They sidled off with her between them, and disappeared around the side of the orchestra-stand, toward the washroom. Their burden sagged low, until it almost touched the floor.
“Hang onto her,” Smitty thought he heard the younger woman say. “She won’t bite you!” The washroom door banged closed on the weird little procession. Smitty turned and hoisted the deflated Number 14 to his feet. “C’mon,” he said. “In you go, with the rest!”
They were all lined up against the wall in Pastemack’s “office,” so played-out that if the wall had suddenly been taken away they would have all toppled flat like a pack of cards. Pastemack and his shill had gone into a huddle in the opposite corner, buzzing like a hive of bees.
“Would you two like to be alone?” Smitty wanted to know, parking Number 14 with the rest of the droops.
Pastemack evidently believed in the old adage, “He who fights and runs away lives to fight, etc.” The game, he seemed to think, was no longer worth the candle. He unlatched the briefcase he had been guarding under his arm, walked back to the desk with it, and prepared to ease his conscience. “Well, folks,” he remarked genially, “on the advice of this gentleman here” (big pally smile for Smitty) “my partner and I are calling off”the contest. While we are under no legal obligation to any of you” (business of clearing his throat and hitching up his necktie) “we have decided to do the square thing, just so there won’t be any trouble, and split the prize money among all the remaining entries. Deducting the rental for the armory, the light bill, and the cost of printing tickets and handbills, that would leave—”
“No, you don’t!” said Smitty. “That comes out of your first nine days profits. What’s on hand now gets divvied without any deductions. Do it your way and they’d all be owing you money!” He turned to the doorman. “You been paid, sunburnt?”
“Nossuh! I’se got five dolluhs a night coming at me—”
“Forty-five for you,” said Smitty.
Pastemack suddenly blew up and advanced menacingly upon his partner. “That’s what I get for hstening to you, know-it-all! So New York was a sucker town, was it? So there was easy pickings here, was there? Yah!”
“Boys, boys,” remonstrated Smitty, elbowing them apart.
“Throw them a piece of cheese, the rats,” remarked the girl in shorts. There was a scuffling sound in the doorway and Smitty turned in time to see the lamed girl and the washroom matron each trying to get in ahead of the other.
“You don’t leave me in there!”
“Well, I’m not staying in there alone with her. It ain’t my job! I resign!”
The one with the limp got to him first. “Listen, mister, you better go in there yourself,” she panted. “We can’t do an5rthing with her. I think she’s dead.”
“She’s cold as ice and all stiff-like,” corroborated the old woman.
“Oh my Grod, I’ve killed her!” someone groaned. Number 14 sagged to his knees and went out like a light. Those on either side of him eased him down to the floor by his arms, too weak themselves to support him.
“Hold everything!” barked Smitty. He gripped the pop-eyed doorman by the shoulder. “Scram out front and get a cop. Tell him to put in a call for an ambulance, and then have him report in here to me. And if you try lighting out, you lose your forty-five bucks and get the electric chair.”
“I’se pracktilly back inside again,” sobbed the terrified darky as he fled.
“The rest of you stay right where you are. I’ll hold you responsible, Pastemack, if anybody ducks.”
“As though we could move an inch on these howling dogs,” muttered the girl in shorts.
Smitty pushed the girl with one shoe ahead of him. “You come and show me,” he grunted. He was what might be termed a moral coward at the moment; he was going where he’d never gone before.
“Straight ahead of you,” she scowled, halting outside the door. “Do you need a road-map?”
“C’mon, I’m not going in there alone,” he said, and gave her a shove through the forbidden portal.
She was stretched out on the floor where they’d left her, a bottle of rubbing alcohol that hadn’t worked uncorked beside her. His face was flaming as he squatted down and examined her. She was gone all right. She was as cold as they’d said and getting more rigid by the minute. “Overtaxed her heart most likely,” he growled. “That guy Pastemack ought to be hauled up for this. He’s morally responsible.”
The cop, less well-brought-up than Smitty, stuck his head in the door without compunction.
“Stay by the entrance,” Smitty instructed him. “Nobody leaves.” Then, “This was the McGuire kid, wasn’t it?” he asked his feminine companion.
“Can’t prove it by me,” she said sulkily. “Pastemack kept calling her Rose Lamont all through the contest. Why don’t-cha ask the guy that was dancing
with her? Maybe they got around to swapping names after nine days. Personally,” she said as she moved toward the door, “I don’t know who she was and I don’t give a damn!”
“You’ll make a swell mother for some guy’s children,” commented Smitty following her out. “In there,” he said to the ambulance doctor who had just arrived, “but it’s the morgue now, and not first-aid. Take a look.”
Number 14, when he got back to where they all were, was taking it hard and self-accusing. “I didn’t mean to do it, I didn’t mean to!” he kept moaning.
“Shut up, you sap, you’re making it tough for yourself,” someone hissed.
“Lemme see a list of your entries,” Smitty told Pastemack.
The impresario fished a ledger out of the desk drawer and held it out to him. “All I got out of this enterprise was kicks in the pants! Why didn’t I stick to the sticks where they don’t drop dead from a little dancing? Ask me, why didn’t I?”
“Fourteen,” read Smitty. “Rose Lamont and Gene Monahan. That your real name, guy? Back it up.” 14 jerked off the coat that someone had slipped around his shoulders and turned the inner pocket inside out. The name was inked onto the label. The address checked too. “What about her, was that her real tag?”
“McGuire was her real name,” admitted Monahan, “Toodles
McGuire. She was going to change it anyway, pretty soon, if we’dda won that thousand”—he hung his head—“so it didn’t matter.”
“Why’d you say you did it? Why do you keep saying you didn’t mean to?”
“Because I could feel there was something the matter with her in my arms. I knew she oughtta quit, and I wouldn’t let her. I kept begging her to stick it out a little longer, even when she didn’t answer me. I went crazy, I guess, thinking of that thousand dollars. We needed it to get married on. I kept expecting the others to drop out any minute, there were only two other couples left, and no one was watching us any more. When the rest-periods came, I carried her in my arms to the washroom door, so no one would notice she couldn’t make it herself, and turned her over to the old lady in there. She couldn’t do anything with her either, but I begged her not to let on, and each time the whistle blew I picked her up and started out from there with her—”
Darkness at dawn : early suspense classics Page 27