by Orrie Hitt
“Did you, Bill? Really?”
“I lost interest in the car,” I said. I favored her with a long, suggestive glance and grinned. “Even those foreign jobs aren’t as attractive as a pretty girl,” I added. “Anybody will tell you that.”
“But how did you happen to come here, Bill?”
“It was an accident. I was riding around in that car and I just stopped in at the gas stations and asked if they knew anybody who had a yen for sports cars. Somebody mentioned that you used to drive a Sunbeam and a Jag, so I decided to run up and talk to you. That’s how it came about. Funny, isn’t it?”
We finished our drinks and she asked if I cared for more.
“You make them this time,” she told me, laughingly.
When I returned from the bar I noticed that she had moved over to the center of the davenport and when I sat down I was right next to her.
“Like my house, Bill?” She wanted to know.
“It’s beautiful. And expensive.”
“I make a lot of money.”
“You must.”
“Some of it could be yours, Bill.” Her eyes, intense in the wavering light from the fire, regarded me with candid doubt. “If I could trust you. That’s the big question. I have to be able to trust you. And I don’t know how I can be sure.”
Her attitude was not totally unexpected. It was too much to believe that I could walk into her home, give her a pitch about the car and my hazy past, and have her invite me into the fold. If she was involved in the sex syndicate in any way — and everything I had learned indicated that she was — she would be much too smart for that.
“Well, the hell with it,” I said, acting hurt and placing my glass on the floor. I stood up, pushing her hand away. “I haven’t got any quarrel with you and I don’t see any reason to hang around and let you insult me. We’ve had a couple of friendly talks, a few drinks, so why don’t we let it go at that?”
I started for the hall, hoping that she wouldn’t let me get into my coat and walk out of the door.
“Bill!”
I stopped beneath the archway, slowly swinging around. “What?”
“Don’t be mad at me, Bill.” She had risen from the davenport and now she came toward me. The smooth material of the dress caressed every curve of her body. “You don’t understand. You don’t know what this is all about.”
“I know you don’t trust me.” I went out into the hall. “I don’t need a bigger hint.”
“I was only questioning you, Bill. I had a right to do that.”
“Well, okay.” I jerked my coat from the hanger and put it on. “So you questioned me. So what? So let’s forget it, why don’t we?”
I started for the door. I wasn’t kidding myself. Her concern, if any, wouldn’t be for Bill Morgan or Bill Gordon. It would be for those girls I had mentioned and the possibilities which they represented. If I had put the thing across she wouldn’t let me go even if she had to knock me down. But if I had failed to impress or convince her I didn’t have a chance.
“Please, Bill.” She wasn’t going to let me go. “Let me tell you a few things.”
I stood with my hand on the door knob, waiting.
“You can make an awful lot of money, if you’ll only be reasonable. But not sellings cars. You’ll never make a dime that way. I can show you how, Bill. Honestly I can.”
“I’m listening.” I took my hand away from the door and smiled. I had pushed the gimmick to the limit; now I had to slow it down. “I’m the last guy in the world to argue with success.”
I began to take off my coat but she told me not to do that. She said she was expecting somebody in a few minutes and she didn’t want us to meet until after everything was arranged.
“You must do exactly as I tell you to do, Bill. You have to do that before I can go into the details further. There just isn’t any other way.” She grabbed the lapels of my coat and pulled my head down, brushing my mouth with her lips. “I wish there was, Bill. Believe me. But there isn’t.”
The taste of her lips tarried on my mouth and I could smell her breath, fresh and clean. I wondered, absently, about the kind of a woman Eudora Channing really was. Some day, perhaps, I would find out.
“Just tell me,” I said. “And I’ll do it.”
Her eyes, gazing up at me, seemed to be worried and considerate. This time, when she brought my head down, she held it there. Her lips moved against my mouth.
“I don’t want you to hate me, Bill.”
“Nothing could make me hate you.”
“But you have to do it if you’re going to work with us. There are certain rules and everybody has to live up to them.”
I kissed her, holding the embrace until her arms crept up around my neck. “I’ll do it,” I said.
“You’ll never be sorry, Bill.” She trembled and clung to me. “I promise you you’ll never be sorry.”
She gave me the address of the brownstone on Tenth Street and she told me to be there at five-thirty that afternoon.
“You’ll be met by an elderly man who wears glasses, something like the ones you’re wearing. Don’t ask him his name and don’t tell him yours. Just do everything he tells you to do. And — Bill — when it’s all through, when you’re all finished, you come back here.”
“No matter what time it is?”
She sealed my lips with a fierce kiss.
“No matter what time it is,” she told me, kissing me again. “I’ll be waiting for you, Bill.”
When I went outside, into the cold air, I felt myself tremble. But it wasn’t due to the cold. It was caused by something inside, something deep and angry, that revolted against whatever it was that I would be forced to do. I didn’t stop shaking until I reached the Twin Cities Bridge.
The first thing I did, upon reaching the city, was to return the car to Hymie. He was plainly unhappy about my absence of luck but he sympathized with me about having wasted so much of my time.
“Maybe you should try a Ford agency,” he suggested.
“They go pretty good.”
I told him that I’d think about it, that I might be back, and departed.
I had slightly more than three hundred dollars in my wallet — I had returned the fifty to Elsa by mail, though I hadn’t called her since that time — so I took the subway to Seventy-fourth Street and left a hundred with the undertaker. Every time I went there the little marble-faced man behind the desk beamed brightly as he recovered the bill from a creaking, wooden file.
“Only two hundred and fifty left, Mr. Morgan,” he announced, writing out a receipt. “You’re doing fine.”
“Don’t be so optimistic,” I cautioned him. “You might have a job for me pretty soon and I doubt if there will be a dollar in it.”
After I left the undertaker, I caught a cab and told the driver to take me to Thirty-third and Wyandot. I reflected, as we rode downtown, that I really ought to do something about my GI insurance. I had, more than a year before, named Sandy as my beneficiary but now, since she was dead, there wasn’t anyone. And there still wasn’t anyone, except an aunt, and I didn’t know where she lived. It gave me a hell of a funny sensation to realize that there wasn’t a single person who gave much of a damn whether I lived or died. And I could die long before the mortality tables claimed I should. I was living, as they say, dangerously.
I got off at the corner of Thirty-third and walked down to the Empire Building. I found Jack Helms in his office, smoking a long black cigar and staring moodily out of the window.
“You back in the insurance business, Morgan?” He’d asked me the same thing when I’d dropped in to see him about running an inspection report on Eudora Channing. “How’d you ever happen to quit the racket, anyway? You were doing all right, weren’t you?”
I told him, yes, I’d sold a few policies here and there but that I hadn’t liked the collecting part. I said I was doing a little writing and that I had a hot lead from one of the blabber magazines. I needed, I explained, a careful report on
a fellow by the name of Frank Miller — I’d gotten his first name from the telephone book — who lived at Pershing Square. I didn’t tell Helms that Miller was a cop.
“And get me a report on his family, too,” I continued, laying a twenty on the desk. “His daughter, his wife-anybody close.”
Jack lifted the twenty to his big nose and smelled of it. He smiled and put the bill in his pocket.
“Can do. Anything else?”
“Yes.” This time I gave him a ten. “There are three others.”
“Whyn’t you just have me investigate the whole damned city?”
He wrote down the names I gave him. Andy Willis and Gladys Lord, both of the Montana Model Agency. And Diana Sanderson, who was employed by the agency.
“You can travel light on the girl,” I informed him. “She isn’t too important.” I halted at the door. “Oh, say, and another one. An Elsa Lang. She also works at the agency. Give her a quick look-see, will you?”
“It’ll take a week,” he said.
“Make it three days.”
“I’ll try.”
It was still early in the afternoon so I took the subway down to the George Street terminal and walked the six blocks crosstown to my room on the South Side. Slush covered the streets and the sidewalks. The air that blew in from the bay was heavy with chill. It was a dismal day and I failed to appreciate the colorful holiday lights which burned in many home and store windows.
When I reached my room I set the alarm for five o’clock and stretched out on the iron frame bed. I felt, in every sense of the word, most miserable.
I had no way of knowing, of course, what would be required of me when I went to the brownstone on Tenth Street. But I suspected that it would be something so degrading that even a writer’s fluid imagination would be unable to visualize it. Something so degenerate in character that I would be bound to Eudora Channing for a long time to come.
To be frank with you, I felt like quitting. I twisted and turned on the bed and I thought how easy it would be to walk out of that door and return to the almost normal life which I had been leading. It was, without exaggerating, a great temptation. But I couldn’t do it. I would never be able to turn my back upon the job which I had promised to do. Not only would it be unfair to Reverend Call and the business people who were supporting the venture, but it would be unfair to his daughter, Judith, and all of the other Judiths throughout the city. And it would be an injustice to me, Bill Morgan, as an individual. I might lose some of my self-respect by doing the things that would be required of me but, surely, I would lose all of it if I lacked the courage to do what had to be done.
A man, in my opinion, who loses all self-respect ceases to live. I did not want that to happen to me.
10
I WALKED up the front steps of the brownstone on Tenth Street and pushed the buzzer to the right of the door. A set of chimes, far back in the house ran up and down the scales and echoed away into the silence. In spite of the cold I could feel sweat gathering on my forehead. I puffed nervously on my cigarette, flinging it down into the snow only when the door opened.
“Come in.” A gray-haired woman, who was in her late fifties, stared at me without feeling. “Follow me, please.”
I went in and the door closed automatically. As I pursued the woman down a thick-carpeted, dimly lit hall, I heard the lock on the door engage itself. The sound had all the effects on me of a pistol shot. I felt the sweat sliding down my ribs, spreading out and turning cold as it reached my belt line.
“In here,” she said.
I entered a small waiting room equipped with a tiny desk and two maple chairs. A yellow light glowed from the desk lamp. There was no one else in the room.
“Have a seat,” the woman said. “He’ll be here in a few moments.”
She went out, closing the door behind her. From somewhere within the house I could hear music playing. I didn’t know the correct name of the tune but it was a long-hair version of Tonight We Love. I sat back in one of the chairs and lit another cigarette. I didn’t look at my hands. I didn’t want to see them shaking.
It was hot in the room and I stood up to remove my overcoat. Just as I was placing the coat on the top of the desk a narrow door to the right opened soundlessly and a man wearing heavy-rimmed glasses came in.
“That’s right. Make yourself comfortable,” he said.
“Thanks.”
The newcomer was elderly, slightly bald, red-faced, and very fat. I marveled that he had been able to negotiate his huge hulk through the limited space of the doorway.
“I guess you know why you’re here?”
“I was told to see you.”
“But you don’t know what we’re going to do?”
“No. I haven’t the slightest idea.”
He sat down on the chair behind the desk. Opening the middle drawer he rummaged through a collection of boxes and bottles for a moment. Finally, he located one which seemed to please him.
“Take this,” he said, sliding a small yellow capsule across the top of the desk. “I’ll get you some water if you want.”
The sweat was running down my legs now, soaking me.
“What is it?”
He laughed, amused at my concern, and stood up. “Don’t worry,” he said. “It isn’t poison. We aren’t quite that crude.”
I picked up the capsule, holding it in the palm of my hand. My throat was tight, burning.
“I just wanted to know,” I said. “It isn’t every day that somebody hands you one of these things.”
He shrugged his massive shoulders and left the room, going out into the hall. Presently he returned carrying a glass of water.
“Take the capsule,” he instructed somewhat impatiently. “There isn’t anything in it that will harm you; I assure you of that. It’s similar to the type that doctors use before going ahead with an operation. A little codeine and a couple of other things, I guess. It simply makes you more willing, shall we say, to accept some of the things you may see.”
I held the glass of water in one hand, the capsule in the other. I had forgotten about the cigarette in my mouth and I closed my eyes against the curling smoke. I could still turn back. I could still stop. I didn’t have to go on with it. Nobody could force me to do what I didn’t want to do. I opened my eyes, staring through the smoke at the fat man. Perhaps, I concluded, I was entirely wrong. It would be most difficult to change my mind at this point.
“Sure,” I said, grinning weakly. I removed the cigarette from my mouth and popped the capsule inside. “Thanks for the pill, doc,” I said, drinking all of the water.
He told me that he wasn’t a doctor, just a photographer, but that he used the medicine all the time and there had never been any bad effects from it.
“Sit down,” he suggested, wiping his face with a large lavender handkerchief. “And I wouldn’t smoke any more, if I were you. Not for a while, anyway.”
It was easy not to smoke. It was equally easy to sit there and listen to him, though I’m not at all sure what he talked about. In fact, everything was incredibly easy to take — my being there in this room with the fat man; Eudora Channing and her lavish home on Panther Hill; the man who had met me in the cafeteria and who had had me slugged afterward. Nothing was worth worrying about any more. There was no such thing as love or hate or deceit or violence. It was all the same. Everything was the same. The world was a big happy place with millions of contented people in it.
“How are you feeling?” The voice, I knew, spoke to me from within the room but it sounded far away, different, without significance. “Slightly high?”
“Great. Just great!”
Had I said that? I couldn’t remember having done so. I shook my head, trying to clear it. A pleasant, unconcerned feeling swept through me.
“Jesus Christ, that’s some pill,” I told him.
He nodded understandingly and opened the narrow door. I guess he told me to come along but, whether he did or not, I found myself doing so, anyway
.
We went through another hall, a smaller one, and I checked myself as we went along. I wasn’t, I discovered, staggering. My steps were light but certain and, while the floor was covered with gray tile, I had the sensation of walking on carpet four inches thick.
“Pretty good, isn’t it?”
“Wonderful.”
We were in a bedroom. The walls were jet black, blacker than the night itself, and the blonde double bed, dresser and chairs stood out in sharp, startling contrast.
“Take off your clothes,” the fat man told me.
I gazed uncertainly at the rose-colored bed lamp and then back at the small eyes behind the huge glasses.
“Well, hell,” I said.
I crossed to the bed and sat down. I was tired. I wanted to lie down and sleep the hands off the nearest clock.
“I said, take off your clothes! You think I got all night to fool around here?”
I leaned forward, my elbows on my knees, holding my head in my hands. Somewhere in this huge brownstone house, in one of its many rooms, a pretty young girl by the name of Judith Call cringed in shock and fear. I shook my head. But, perhaps, she wasn’t afraid. Perhaps she didn’t care. I shook my head again. Maybe she wasn’t even in this house.
“You’ll have to help me,” the fat man was saying.
He wasn’t speaking to me, of that I was sure, so I took my hands away from my face and looked around the room. A girl stood near the foot of the bed, smiling down at me.
“A new one,” she said.
The fat man didn’t answer her but, again, told me to remove my clothes. Without giving the matter a great deal of consideration I took off my coat and began to unbutton my shirt.
“Give him a hand,” the fat man said.
The girl, a henna-rinse blonde, was neither pretty nor not pretty. She was wearing a white wrapper. A nurse I figured. I protested a few times — rather feebly, I’m afraid — but in a few moments I was completely disrobed except for my shoes and socks.
“To hell with them,” the fat man said as she untied one of my shoes. “Get yourself ready.”
This, it developed, was no real problem.