by Robert Bloch
Old Willie was horrified when Inger told him where she was working. They were talking in the parlor at the time. Inger had just finished her lesson and had been telling Old Willie about the skating and sledding in Minnesota, and about a boy named Lars who wanted to marry her, and then she said something about the Star Hotel.
“Listen, you get out of that place,” Old Willie said, shaking his head sternly. “Those are bad men, worse than rattlesnakes, and it’s no place for a girl like you.”
Inger was amused by Willie’s anxiety. She was young and very confident, and the thought that she couldn’t look out for herself struck her as funny. After all, she reasoned, she had been at the Star a month and no one had bothered her yet.
About a week after this talk, Inger came home much later than usual and went straight to her room. She didn’t come down to eat, and she didn’t practice her scales that night. Old Willie, vaguely troubled, tried to find out what was wrong, but she wouldn’t open her door, or even talk to him. The next day the landlady brought Inger up some food and talked to her for an hour or so. When she came out her eyes were red, and that night she glared at all the men boarders as if they were particularly repellent species of vermin.
For a month things went on this way. Inger wasn’t working at the Star any more. She stuck close to her room and wouldn’t see anyone, not even Old Willie. Then he learned from the landlady that Inger was leaving. She wasn’t going home. She was just leaving.
That brought him to a decision. He went up and knocked firmly on the door. “You might as well open up,” he said. “I’m sticking here until you do.”
There was a wait, and then, in a tired voice, Inger told him to come in. She was in bed looking pale and ill. Old Willie sat beside her and patted her arm with a thin, long-fingered hand.
“You’re in trouble, aren’t you, Inger?” he said.
She looked away from him, staring out at the bare, black winter trees.
“Who is it?” Old Willie said. Something had changed in his voice; it was curiously hard, insistent.
“I can’t talk about it.”
“You’ve got to, Inger. You got no father or brothers here.”
She moaned softly. “They mustn’t ever know.”
“No need for that. Tell me about it.”
Finally she told him, crying openly, her hand clutching his with desperate strength. It was the one they called Blackie, Blackie Cardina. He had followed her into a room, grinning. She had pleaded with him, begged him, and at last she had fought and screamed. But nothing had made any difference to Blackie. He had taken what he wanted…
When she finished, Old Willie sighed. “I’ll have a talk with him.”
“No, no,” Inger cried. “They—he’ll kill you. You don’t know what they’re like.”
“Now don’t worry about me,” Old Willie said in a soothing voice. “You try to sleep, and don’t be fretting.”
And with that he left her. Old Willie went first to his own room and reappeared in a few minutes wearing a long black frayed overcoat. The landlady met him at the foot of the stairs and asked him where he was going. Old Willie didn’t answer. He walked past her, his eyes fixed straight ahead, a tense, angry frown on his old face.
Old Willie reached the Star Hotel a little after noon. He stopped inside the revolving doors, looking like some country bumpkin who’d got into the wrong pew by mistake. And now, right at this point, is where the drunken reporter, Jake Mackey, enters the story in the role of an eyewitness.
Jake was at the Star that afternoon, sitting on a sofa and talking to one of Capone’s men. Maybe Jake was on a story. Maybe he was just hanging around for a drink. Anyway, he was there, slightly drunker than usual, and he noticed Old Willie immediately, because Old Willie with his drooping mustaches and long black overcoat was a sight to catch and hold the eye.
Old Willie stopped a bellboy and asked him where he might find Blackie Cardina. The bellboy jerked his thumb toward a card game at the far end of the lobby. Blackie was there, sitting behind a high stack of chips, a cigar in his strong teeth, grinning like a wolf because he was winning, and because, at that precise moment of his life, he thought the world was a place that had been kindly provided for him to loot, ravish and otherwise do with as he pleased.
He glanced up a few seconds later and saw the old man with drooping mustaches studying him somberly. Blackie paid no attention to him; he had looked up as he figured the odds against filling a belly straight.
“O.K., I take a card,” Blackie said, and snapped his fingers.
“Hold the deal,” Old Willie said quietly. “Which of you is a rat called Blackie Cardina?”
Blackie looked up again, seeing Old Willie for sure this time, and his little dark eyes narrowed dangerously. “You aren’t funny, old man,” he said.
“ ain’t trying to be,” Old Willie said. “I’m a friend of a girl used to work here. You had your fun with her, you slimy, snake-eating bastard, and now you’re going to pay for it. I want a thousand collars from you. That’ll help her out some. And you can figure the price cheap.”
Blackie got to his feet and it was difficult to judge from his expression whether he would start laughing or cussing. “Look, old man, get out,” he said at last, pointing to the door. “Get out. You hear? I don’t want to kick an old man into the street. I’ll let you walk, understand?” He got madder as he talked, and a flush of color surged up his throat and stained his dark features. “Get out!” he shouted. “Get out, you dirty, rotten old bum. Get out of here!”
“One thousand dollars,” Old Willie said, casually unbuttoning his long black overcoat.
The kill look in Blackie’s eyes deepened. “Who sent you here? Who are you?” he shouted, and reached for the gun in his shoulder holster. “I’ll teach you a lesson, goddamn it!”
Old Willie said something then, something which only Jake Mackey seems to have heard, and he said it in a voice that was proud and hard and confident. After that, although it was all part of one smoothly connected motion. Old Willie yelled, “Draw, you bastard!” and threw himself swiftly to one side in a low, springy crouch.
There was a lot of discussion later as to what exactly happened in the next few seconds. Two facts were incontrovertible: one, Old Willie somehow got a gun into his hand, and two, Blackie Cardina fell across the card table with a black hole burned neatly into his forehead. No one actually saw Old Willie draw a gun. The onlookers decided later it was probably fastened to a spring arrangement in his holster. Anyway, it got into his hand very fast, and the bullet from it got into Blackie’s skull even faster.
Old Willie didn’t let things get out of control. With a little wave of his big, old-fashioned revolver he backed Blackie’s friends away from the table and then coolly plucked a wallet from Blackie’s hip pocket.
He inspected the contents and stuffed the wallet into a pocket of his overcoat. After that he backed toward the doors, moving easily and lightly, the gun in his hand as steady as something carved from rock.
Jake Mackey said there was something about Old Willie then—something in his eye and manner—that made you want to shrink down in your chair and stay very quiet.
At the doors, Old Willie made a short speech. “Sit tight for five minutes. First man don’t think that’s a good idea is going to get himself killed.”
And then he walked out into the street and for five minutes a half-dozen of Al Capone’s hoodlums looked uneasily at Blackie’s body, and occasionally glanced up at the clock above the lobby desk.
They weren’t afraid to go outside, they said later. They weren’t afraid of an old man in a tattered overcoat who’d been lucky enough to plug Blackie between the eyes. Still, they didn’t go out, and they didn’t move.
Jake Mackey got on Old Willie’s trail right after the five minutes were up, and by checking the cab companies he found a hackie who had picked up an old party answering Willie’s description at the intersection of Twelfth Street and Wabash Avenue. This took time, of cou
rse; it was late in the afternoon when Jake cautiously approached the boardinghouse where the cab driver had taken Old Willie and had dropped him.
And by then it was too late. Old Willie had been there, all right, but only long enough to give Inger a roll of money, and then pack up his few things and leave.
He didn’t say good-by to anyone, but simply strolled off down the darkened street, a slender old man with faded blue eyes and a curiously youthful stride. No one watched him leave.
Jake Mackey was fascinated by what he’d seen at the Star Hotel, and he hung around Inger to get all the facts she could recall about Old Willie.
She told him how secretive Old Willie had always been, and how he liked to listen to her sing, and so forth, but she couldn’t tell him very much more.
He and Inger became good friends in the next week or so, and for a while Jake even thought he was falling in love with her. But nothing came of that. Inger had a miscarriage a week later, and after that packed up and went back to Minnesota.
She married the boy named Lars, and Jake carried the wedding announcement in his wallet, but finally lost it in a bar, the way clippings get lost in bars.
He never did pin down his story. He did a lot of checking on it, and spent a good deal of time in the library, but he never could prove it, and so he never wrote it.
Still, he knew that he had missed a great story by a hair’s breadth.
and in the years that followed he told the story around Chicago bars to anyone who would listen to him.
The thing that convinced him his story was true was the way Old Willie had handled that gun, and what Old Willie had said when Blackie asked him who he was—Blackie had asked him who he was, remember, just before digging for the gun in his shoulder holster. Old Willie’s answer had held no significance for the Sicilian immigrants at the card table, but it had raised the hairs on the back of Jake Mackey’s neck.
Old Willie had said, in a proud, hard, confident voice, “When I was a kid, they called me Billy.”
And that’s the way the old-timers tell Jake Mackey’s story. They don’t insist it’s true, of course—but they go on telling it.
Dark Encounter
William F. Nolan
He saw the redhead the moment he entered the hotel lounge. She was sitting alone, at the end of the bar, nursing a drink—and he knew what she was. The revealing, skin-tight black dress told the story. That and the faint, inviting smile she gave him.
Willard Broun met her eyes for a brief instant, then turned away, breathing deeply, controlling the sudden dark hatred that welled up within him.
No, he told himself, not tonight. Not here in this new city. No. No...
“And what’s yours, sir?”
Willard Broun looked up at the smiling face of the bartender. “Well…I’d like a whiskey sour, please.”
The bartender moved away.
Don’t think about her, he told himself. He looked at his carefully manicured hands on the polished bar top, then slowly raised his eyes to the gleaming mirror behind the bar. Yes, she was watching him. She had her lipstick out and pretended to be making up her face, but he could see her knowing eyes, watching him over the thin gold edge of her compact. In another moment she’d be coming over, walking casually, swaying toward him in that tight black dress. Then he’d ask her to sit down; he’d begin to talk to her, and…
“Hey, mister,” the bartender called. “Your change!”
“Keep it,” snapped Willard Broun, moving quickly away from the bar. He did not look at her as he passed, but he could almost feel the thin, cold smile on her face.
Outside, along the quiet pavement of Carondelet Street, the air was moist and heavy, typical of New Orleans in July. Willard Broun drew the warm Gulf air into his lungs.
He liked this town. He’d been here for two days now, had roamed the narrow French Quarter, eaten at the Court of Two Sisters, taken the Algiers Ferry across the brown Mississippi and walked the twisting length of the City Park lagoon under the immense trees, heavy with hanging moss. It had all been fresh and wonderful.
Now he moved toward the heart of the city, toward Canal Street, passing silent, darkened shops and tall, iron-lace balconies, hands in the pockets of his white linen coat.
And as he walked, he remembered a girl called Abbe in Chicago—a slender-bodied smiling girl with a lilt in her voice, a kind of music in the way she spoke. But she’d been like the rest of them; she’d been cheap and easy, and of course, she had to die. They were standing together, late at night, under the dark shadow of the El, when her lilting voice had suddenly stopped, and she had stumbled loosely forward against his chest. He could still feel the warmth of her body and the cold, unyielding handle of the knife. After he’d cleaned the blade, he had given it to a newsboy who thanked him; the boy’s knife was old, and the handle had cracked. He remembered the way the boy had smiled.
And he remembered Irene: loud and vulgar, with stale whiskey on her breath. He’d picked her up in a St. Louis bar and they had gone to his apartment. Irene, with her supple, pink-thighed body and raucous voice demanding payment. But she had been the one who paid. The redhead back at the hotel would be like Irene: nice at first, then not so nice.
A taxi glided by, tail lights fading into the darkness like two red eyes as the car moved toward Canal Street.
It had been nearly two weeks since Linda. She’d been a waitress in a place called Al’s. Near the railroad tracks in one of those little sun- blistered Texas towns. The trains would come bulleting past, on their way across country, rumbling and jolting by in heavy iron thunder, shaking the dusty plate glass windows and jittering the cups and saucers. How he had hated those trains, shattering the night when he was trying to talk to Linda, trying to understand her. The engine would scream for the crossing, and he’d close his eyes tight until it was silent. Then, finally, Linda had screamed like the trains, a long, high scream. And after that she was silent—the way the tracks were silent after the trains had gone…
No, thought Willard Broun, stop it! Don’t keep thinking about them. Not tonight at least. Not tonight.
Canal Street lay before him, wide and bright-lit by many overhead lamps. He could see Bourbon Street a block ahead, with its gaudy neons beckoning the jaded pleasure seeker, promising all manner of dark excitements.
Willard Broun moved toward the yellows and the reds and the greens, his step firm on the night pavement, his mouth dry.
A highball will taste good, he thought; it will taste very fine.
Mingling with the crowds, he moved leisurely down the narrow stone walks of Bourbon Street, past Prima’s 500, the Sho-Bar, and Stormy’s. The hawkers were in front of every club gesturing and winking, holding open swing doors for a tantalizing view of a stripper on the stage. “Here ya are, buddy. Step on inside. Most beautiful girls on Bourbon. Step right in, chum. The show’s continuous.”
He ignored their loud come-ons, passing each door slowly, in no hurry to make up his mind. The street was crowded and noise-filled. Here, jazz was king; a dozen blaring bands sent out their frenzied music into Bourbon Street, and the sharp, sweet cry of horns could be heard above the rolling trap drums, with the pianos, as clean as ice in a pitcher, behind the brass.
He finally entered a club near the end of the street without bothering to notice what it was called. A waitress leaned forward to take his order in the smoke-hazed semi-darkness.
“Ginger high,” said Willard Broun, and she stepped away.
On the stage, a tall blonde in a low-cut red dress was beginning to weave sinuously to the notes of a muted trumpet. Willard Broun did not watch her.
“All alone, honey?” purred a voice at his elbow.
He glanced coldly at the girl who had taken the empty stool next to him. One of the between-acts strippers. The heavy make-up, the hard eyes with their false lashes, the sequined glitter of the tight dress testified to her trade. He shook his head. “I don’t want company.”
“But, look, honey...” She was
pressing his shoulder.
“Get—away—from—me,” said Willard Broun levelly, spacing his words.
“Well, okay!” She slipped off the stool and swayed on down the bar. A sweating fat man in thick horn rims grinned and took her hand.
Fool! raged Willard Broun. Can’t you see what she is? Can’t you see how cheap and rotten they all are, how…
He felt the sweat break out beneath his linen suit, felt the familiar darkness welling up. He downed his drink and left hurriedly.
Outside, the music was piercing and discordant; his mind churned and he felt a slight dizziness. Sleep; that was what he needed. He would return to his hotel and go to bed. Yes, that would be fine; that is what he would do.
And then he saw the girl.
He’d paused at Canal Street, waiting for the light to change, when he saw her sitting alone on the long wooden bench at the bus stop. Young, not more than nineteen or twenty. And pretty. Very pretty and fresh looking in her light summer dress. She wore her hair short; it was dark and lustrous, perfectly complementing her fair-skin. Her breasts were ripe and firm beneath the thin dress, and her slender legs tapered down to delicate ankles.
A beautiful girl, thought Willard Broun, a truly beautiful creature.
Then, speak to her! Ask her something—anything. Her voice must be lovely too. Go ahead . . .