John D. MacDonald

Blonde Bait for the Murder Master

Chapter One

“It’s like in a bank,” Brock Sentosa said, smiling at me. “You count this stuff long enough and maybe you could be counting beans, or old movie stubs.”

Maybe Brock had given himself time enough to get casual about the greasy wads of currency that covered the two card tables in what had been a “Play room” in the cellar of the rented house at 1012 Cramer. But I couldn’t be casual about it; I was too new at it.

Anna Garron sat at another card table off to one side, checking the winning ticket returns against the amounts turned in by the retailers. She was blonde and lovely, and if you didn’t think about it, she looked like any pretty and competent secretary working in any office. But then you’d notice that her clothes weren’t quite the sort that would be acceptable in an office; and her makeup was just a shade theatrical, and tiny lines that edged the corners of her mouth gave her a hard look.

Brock had finished counting the twenties, tens and fives, and was putting the ones in stacks of a hundred. The silver was already in a canvas sack. I leaned against the door and watched him and thought of how little I knew about him. Brock Sentosa is a man with a smiling face. Meeting him on the street or in a bar you’d take him for a goodnatured clown. His dark hair is thin and receding and his cheeks are plump, like a squirrel with a hazelnut in each cheek. It’s the eyes that give him away. They are a pale and yellowish brown, and have a dull tarnished look, as though they had been buffed with fine sandpaper. It is although a corpse wore the mask of a living man.

But I had no kick coming. He had picked me up when I was the lowest, and started me in at more money than I had ever seen before.

He could afford it, because the syndicate he works for has the formula for success. It is an old story but none the less effective because it is old. Take a place like Murrisberg, my home town: one hundred and forty thousand people; freight yards; slag heaps; slums and the oily smoke of a dozen factories. A Saturday night town, a brawling, hard-fisted town, where the mills hands and the freight-yard boys look on everything in the world with deep suspicion — with the exception of green money, hard liquor, fast cars and careless women.

Five days a week, the paper carries the figures which show the treasury balance. You get a local, down-at-the-heels, printer to make up a hundred thousand tickets each week; you sell them at two bits apiece. A ticket is good for a whole week, and there are five winning numbers each week. Your odds of hitting a winning number are twenty thousand to one. The payoff is two thousand to one, except the Friday number; that pays four thousand to one. The dream payoff. A thousand dollars for a quarter.

And so I knew that the money on the cardtables was money that should have gone for groceries, or medicines, or interest on the mortgage, or payments on the car. Greasy bills slipped to the vendor with a wise look. “Give me four tickets, George. This week I’m going to hit.”

And George, having learned the patter, says, “You hear about that guy named Baker offer to the tool works? The son-of-a-gun hits a five hundred buck winner two weeks ago, and last week he gets the big one. One thousand bucks.”

“Better make it eight tickets, George. Here’s the two bucks.”

It started in a small way in Murrisberg with a local group of sharpies, and then the syndicate came in and took over. It wasn’t hard. The sharpies were small time. A few mashed faces and broken teeth and they were glad to have the state-wide syndicate take over.

The syndicate, which sent Brock Sentosa to Murrisberg, is not too greedy. They get the tickets printed up and sell them to the local distributor for thirteen cents each; that includes insurance on the big hits, the big winners. In Murrisberg the distributor was Johny Naga. His spread was three cents a ticket. Out of that he had to pay off the consolation prizes. Small winners. A dollar here, five there. The men who worked for Naga, distributing the tickets around at candy stores, bars, cigar counters, made four cents a ticket. That left a nickel a ticket for the cut on over-the-counter sales.

So each week the treasury pool took in roughly $25,000 — took it right out of the pockets of the mill hands. That is why, each week, Brock Sentosa counted up the thirteen thousand dollars. Naga got three thousand, the distributors got four and the candy stores knocked off five.

Each week I stood in the cellar with the automatic in the spring clip making a small bulge in my coat, while two other boys hung around upstairs. Brock Sentosa counted up the thirteen thousand, took out enough to pay the hits that had been made during the week — generally not more than two thousand — took fifteen hundred for himself. Out of which he gave me two hundred, the girls a hundred each and the boys upstairs a hundred each.

The rest was shipped to the syndicate. Taken to the syndicate by Brock, in person, driving the big black sedan one hundred and forty miles, to leave the dough in a very businesslike looking office in a large office building.

Both Anna Garron and Brock Sentosa had been sent in by the syndicate. The other girl, Joyce Kitnik, a heavy-thighed redhead, was a local. While Brock counted the cash, Joyce was over in the other end of the cellar, running the tickets for two weeks ahead through the fancy stitching machines sent in by the syndicate. The tickets are stitched into a double fold, and an end has to be torn off to open them up.

Brock counted out fifteen hundred in one pile, twenty-five hundred for the five winners that week into the second pile and shoved the rest down into a canvas sack along with his code report.

“Pay day,” he sang out. Joyce giggled, as usual, and tucked her hundred down the front of her dress. Anna Garron clicked open her purse and stuffed the hundred inside. Brock gave me four hundred, two for me and one each for the boys upstairs.

While his back was turned, Anna Garron gave me a long, steady look. I knew what it meant. We both knew that our footing was dangerous, and that what we planned to do was unhealthy, though profitable. She was good. Brock would never have guessed, unless he intercepted one of those infrequent looks, that she felt anything other than contempt for me.

Brock picked up the two sacks, grinned at me and said, “Okay, Brian, let’s roll.”

“Look, will Billy be all right for this trip?”

He frowned. “Billy is fine but he’s excitable. I’d rather have you.”

“Okay,” I said. “It’ll be me. But the blonde stenographer is going to be sore.”

He thought it over carefully. Then he smiled and said, “I’ll take Billy. You see what you can find out.”

I wanted to laugh in his face. Maybe if it hadn’t been for those dead brown eyes, I would have risked it. I was surprised to feel a trickle of ice cold sweat run down my ribs. The blonde stenographer was Kit Robinson, and she worked in the D.A.’s Office.

I went up the stairs with him and, as he took the money out to the sedan, I paid off Billy Browne and Oley Gerraine. It was funny, but whenever I had anything to do with those two, I felt like a cop again. I felt like maybe my brother, Quinn, would feel.

Quinn and Brian Gage. Brothers on the Force. Large-sized laugh.

I had seen Quinn just the day before. He had been walking up Baker Street toward his house, Molly, the kids and the mortgage and the frayed easy chair where he could take off his shoes and move his lips as he read the paper.

The crate was new. I had had it three days. So when I saw him, I pulled in at the curb about twenty feet ahead of him and lit a cigarette. When he came alongside, I said, “Hello, Quinn.”

He stopped, turned and walked heavily over to the car, put his big hands on the top of the door and looked at me with that infuriating combination of pity and dull contempt.

“New car, kid?” he asked.

“Yeah. Like it?”

“Well, it goes with those clothes, kid.”

“It’s nice not to hear that old leather harness creak when you take a deep breath, Quinn. How many years is it before they let you retire on ten dollars a week, Quinn? Not over thirty, I hope.”

Quinn is me, with heavier bones, four more years, twenty-five pounds extra. I saw the dull red flush under his weathered skin as the words struck home. I guess he counted to ten. When he spoke he said gently, “I know you got a raw deal, kid, and...”

“Hell, they did me a favor. I’m doing okay.”

“I know who you’re tied in with, kid.”

“So do half the people in town; it’s no secret. If you law boys get upset, you can haul me in and fine me and let me go. I can afford a fine; the maximum the law allows is two hundred and fifty bucks, isn’t it?”

Then, for the first time, he got under my skin. He gave me a long, superior grin. He grinned even though his eyes looked tired. “Everything you’ve ever touched, kid, has turned queer. You figure you’re a pretty bright lad. Well, when you get down to where you need eating money, you know where I live.”

He turned and walked away. I was sorry the crate had fluid drive at that point. I wanted to rip it away from the curb fast enough to scream the tires. Three blocks further on I realized that I had been holding the wheel so tightly that my fingers were cramped.

He was a great one to get holier-than-thou.

The war had snatched me out of the state university after I had worked three years in the freight yards to get the dough to go there. I had to work while I was there, and the grades weren’t too good. The army let me out so late, that I couldn’t get in any place.

And big hearted Quinn, the big brother type person, had gotten me appointed to the force. I couldn’t admit it to him, and I rarely admitted it to myself, but I had liked it. A corny thing to like, I guess — being rigged out in police blues, with a gun on your hip and a badge on your chest and a big glare for overtime parkers. Nearly two years of it. Well enough set so that Kid Robinson and I were beginning, to talk about setting the date.

By then I was riding in a prowl car rather than standing traffic duty. At two A.M. one morning. I was driving and I had dropped Sig Western, my partner, at a drugstore to call his wife about something he had forgotten. While I was waiting for him the motor idling, a car steamed through the intersection ahead, going at least seventy. I pulled out onto his tail, and managed to edge him over and forced him to stop up by the vacant lots near the edge of town. Like a damn fool, I forgot to give communications a buzz and tell him what I was doing.

I came back to the car, wishing I had Sig along, because I wanted to take the guy in. I never got a look at him. He got out and said something in a low voice, and then I leaned on the shoulder of the road. When I got up, I realized I was drunk. I stank of liquor. The wise apples in the car had knocked me out and poured me full.

I weaved and staggered back to the prowl car and tried to send in a call, but I couldn’t make my lips fit around the words. I decided to drive the car back to pick up Sig. Halfway back the world took a big swoop and I slammed against a tree and blacked out.

My story stank as badly as I did. No license to give them. Drunk on duty. Busting up police equipment. And out of the files they dug up the old case about when I was in high-school and another kid and I got into his pop’s liquor and we were booked for busting street lights. That was all, brother. And so the cheery little city of Murrisberg owed Brian Gage a lot. I was out to get mine — all that was coming to me, and a little more for mental anguish.

I knew that I wasn’t any better than Billy and Oley, the kid gunmen, but I still felt like a cop whenever I talked to them. They both had those little rodent faces, that way of keeping their eyes moving, that self-conscious foulness of mouth that they seem to need to feel like men. Yet I knew they couldn’t even be hauled in for lugging weapons. Wallace Rome, attorney at law, had put pressure in the right places to get the licenses.

Billy climbed in beside Brock Sentano, and he backed the big car out into the dusk. I stood on the porch steps and watched it head down the street. Oley squeezed at a pimple on his chin with nails that he wore too long, and said, “How’s chances a lift into town, Brian?”

“Slim,” I said.

He shrugged. “Okay, okay,” he said, and walked off down the street. He wore metal things on his heels, and scuffed as he walked.

I sat on the porch steps and lit a cigarette. The dusk turned slowly to night and pretty soon I heard the heavy tread of Joyce Kitnik coming across the porch as the front door slammed. I knew what she was going to do before she did it, and my mouth twisted in disgust. She came up and stood beside me. Her leg brushed my shoulder and then she leaned the solid meat of her knee heavily against me. “Nice night, hah?” she gave me in husky MGM voice.

Joyce was okay, except that she had some highly exaggerated ideas about her own charms. I didn’t answer; I just moved the glowing end of my cigarette close to her ankle.

She jumped back. “Clown!” she rasped, in her normal voice.

“Oh, sorry!” I said politely. She sniffed and clumped heavily down the steps and walked toward the bus stop. I knew that she was sore and I knew that she would try again.

When she had rounded the corner, I snapped the butt off into the grass in a shower of sparks, stood up and went into the house. I could hear the sound of Anna’s typewriter in the cellar. According to the official records, Brock Sentosa ran a wholesale food business. He had a couple dozen cases of canned goods stacked in one end of the cellar to prove it. Anna kept the books and made out the state and federal forms, withholding and so on. According to the official records, I was paid forty dollars a week and she was paid twenty-five. That eased the tax situation considerably.

I went quietly down the stairs and stood in the shadows for a moment, watching her. I would have felt more at ease about her, if I could have learned more about her past. But Anna did little talking about anything except the future.

When I moved out toward the cone of light made by the hanging lamp, she looked up. It was typical of her that she didn’t jump or look surprised. Her face showed nothing.

As always, I thought about the difference between her and Kit Robinson. Superficially, they were alike. Both tall, blonde, grey-eyed, with a faintly cool manner. But the resemblance stopped right there. Sometimes I felt toward Kit as though she were my kid sister; it was doubtful whether anybody had ever felt like a brother to Anna Garron.

“One more minute,” she said. She turned back to her work, her white fingers flying over the keys, then took the sheet out of the machine, placed it in a notebook, carried the notebook over and locked it in a cheap steel filing case, and, on her way back, covered the typewriter and clicked out the light.

Her foot made one small scuffing noise against the concrete, and then she was in my arms. There was never anything soft or warm or relaxed about her kisses. Her body became like a bundle of steel wires, and her arms tightened.

We stood together in the darkness and she said, “Afraid?”

“Not very.”

“It’s better to be afraid. Then you’re more careful, Brian.”

“We’ll be careful.”

Chapter Two

When you have a complicated plan to doublecross a whole organization, the plan seems to divide itself into two phases. The first phase is when you do the planning, fit all the little cogs into the proper wheels, and rub your hands and tell yourself how good it looks and how well it is going to work. The second part is after the plan begins to roll and then you find that instead of you being the boss, the plan has somehow become the boss and you are carried right along with it with no chance to step aside or step out, even if you wanted to.

And part of it was that neither Anna Garron nor I trusted each other. The physical aspects of our relationship were like play-acting, like a smoke screen thrown up to make the other party feel that there was no chance of anything going wrong.

My angle was that I was tired of being a hired boy. For years I had been a good kid, full of confidence in the future, and it hadn’t paid off. I knew that the kids I had gone to high school with, all the people I knew, were laughing at Brian Gage who couldn’t finish college, who spent four years working up to be a pfc, who couldn’t even stay on the cops, and who ended up as a hired boy for one of the rackets.

I wanted to stop that laughter, but quick. I was in touch with a little deal that was bringing in six hundred thousand a year — a million, when you count everybody’s cut — and I was making ten thousand. With the extra dough I could make, I was going to buy respectability. I was going to invest in local businesses. I was going to marry Kit and buy a big house on the hill over town and they were going to point to me and say, “Brian Gage had a little trouble getting started... but when he did!”

That was the way I wanted it.

And the only trouble with the plan that Anna and I made was that she wouldn’t let me in on all of it; she kept some of it to herself.

When she clicked the light on up in the living room, I glanced at my watch. It was quarter after eight. She brought the bottle in from the kitchen and poured a shot for each of us. I cut mine with water, but Anna liked hers straight. She smiled at me, tosed it of, and made a face. “Now to go out and get rumpled by that big clown,” she said.

The big clown was Homer Windo, Jr. He was the son part of Windo and Son, Printers. They ran a dusty little print shop at the foot of Baker Street near the tracks. The biggest standing order in their shop was the weekly hundred thousand tickets for Brock.

I had seen Homer the son several times when it had been my job to pick up the weekly batch, to take them back to be stitched. He was a big, brown-haired guy with a white face, a huge firm jaw, and a surprisingly weak and petulant little mouth that was always moist and red. His daddy ordered him around the shop as though he were some sort of half-witted puppy. His big white hands were always stained with ink, and he usually had a smear of ink somewhere on his big wide face.

“Are you sure you’ve got him hooked?” I asked.

“Don’t low-rate my charms, darling,” she said. “To him, I am a poor but honest girl who is getting slave wages working in a dishonest business trying to get my weak, embezzling brother off the big hook. He got tears in his eyes when I told him about it.”

“But will he come through?”

“Tonight I get the blank tickets. He’ll have to wait for a chance to swipe the type and ink.”

The tickets are printed on a press which is so arranged that each time it banks down, it prints a new five digit number. Homer Windo, Jr., was fixing it so that instead of printing on the face of the ticket, it would print on a hunk of cardboard, and then he was swiping the blank tickets, so that when the numbers came out, the wining number could be printed on freehand.

“That’s a nice story you gave him, Anna.” I looked into her eyes. “And what’s the real story?”

“The witness refused to incriminate herself.”

I got up and poured us fresh drinks. She knocked hers off before I could even pour mine. “As long as you think he’s hooked...” I said.

“That big clown has been trampled on for years. This is his chance to put one over on the powers that be. Besides, he thinks that as soon as I collect on the tickets, I send some of the money to my brother and he and I run away on what’s left. He wept on my shoulder and said that he’d even dig ditches for me.”

“Let me review the great plan,” I said, sounding more calm than I felt. “One — you heard from Brock that there is internal trouble in the syndicate and they aren’t as strong as they once were. Two — you have found some smart money around town that you won’t tell me about, some person or persons who will back the new pool. Three — you get the fake tickets and print them up; I arrange for a chump to turn them in, for a small cut. Brock has to pay off; the syndicate men come down to investigate, and some blank tickets are planted among Brock’s stuff. That gets rid of him. Four — I turn honest and give the whole deal to Miss Robinson, who feeds the information to the DA, giving him enough to set up a raid and knock over the house, the printers, the stitchers and pick up a lot of the less reliable salesmen. Five — then we get the new tickets printed outside of town and set up our own organization and we are in operation before the syndicate can do anything about it. And once we are operating, we don’t let them scare us out.”

“That in several nutshells, is it.”

“And why don’t you tell me who the smart money is?”

“Because then you would know, and if you were suspected and anything goes wrong, I’m quite sure that Brock could make you talk.”

“You also speak English.”

She stood over me, her hands on her hips. She said softly, “But I am also faster, tougher and more sure of myself than you’ll ever be, Brian.”

“It sounds as if you don’t trust me.”

“And that’s my privilege, darling,” she said.

I reached up and gently pinched her throat with my thumb and forefinger. Her eyes blazed. “And if you get funny baby, I have privileges too,” I said.

But even as I did it, I knew it was to melodramatic a gesture; my bluff was showing. She slapped my hand away and said, “Get a cap-pistol, junior, and we’ll play cops and robbers.”

Half an hour later I dropped her near the small drugstore where she had arranged to meet Homer. As I drove away, I glanced back. She looked slim, young, lovely, under the street light; hate and greed wear fancy clothes sometimes.

I headed for Kit Robinson.

Chapter Three

It is an odd and lonely thing to drive down a quiet, faded street where the houses need paint, and the children, playing in the night shadows, make small hoarse sounds — and see, behind the familiar elms, the house where you grew up.

That room on the second floor on the side: Quinn and I had shared that room. Banners on the wall, and mechano set under the table by the window. And the quiet grey woman is dead; her big husband is dead; there are strangers in the house, and nothing is ever the same.

Except that Kit Robinson still lived diagonally across the street, and her house was still green with white blinds.

When I had still been on the force, I had been a welcome visitor. “Why, hello, Brian! Come right in. Kit’ll be down in a minute. Oh, Kit! Brian’s here, honey.”

But then the papers had a little spread about a cop who got tight on duty; there was a picture of the mess I had made of the prowl car, and they had found me drunk, it seemed only fitting that I should spend a good portion of my time getting to that state again. I went back and worked in the yards for a time, but everything was sour.

Kit’s father had ordered me out of the house, with Kit standing, white-faced, at the foot of the stairs, her heart in her eyes and tears on her pale face. And when I started to get next to the wise money, Mr. Robinson’s mind didn’t change. He had a pretty shrewd idea where the money came from.

I drove slowly down the street, turned in a driveway and parked in the spot we had decided on several months before. I knew that she was up in her room with the door shut, looking out her window toward that spot. Her window was the only one in the house which faced it.

I put my foot on the floor button and clicked the headlight beams up and down three times. I waited a moment, and did it again. Then I turned out the lights, slouched in the seat and lit a cigarette.

I could visualize what was going on in the green house. Kit would grab her jacket, saunter with great nonchalance down the stairs and say, “I’m going down to the corner for a magazine.” Or cigarettes, or a coke, or some fresh air.

Maybe there’s be a shade of suspicion in the air. Maybe not.

In the stillness I heard a door open, and close. High heels on wooden steps. Then her free stride, the heels clicking on the sidewalk. The tree shadows were dense where I parked. I saw her tall figure, and I leaned over and quietly opened the door on her side.

Seconds later she slid in beside me and the door chunked shut, not too loudly. Her warm arms circled my neck and her hair, the color of honey in the sun, and as fragrant, tickled my cheek while she said my name over and over.

“How long can you be out?” I asked.

“Maybe a half hour. Let’s stay right here instead of driving around, Brian.”

“What about the neighbors?”

“I’m getting sick of worrying about the neighbors; I’m getting sick of this whole thing.”

“They making it rough on you, darling?”

“Every chance they get they slip in some sly remark about you, Brian.”

“You know the answer to that one.”

She sighed. “I know your answer. It isn’t that simple. Come marry me, he says; leap right into the wild blue yonder, he says. What kind of a life would it be, Brian? Wondering from one minute to the next how long it will be before we get a call from the police.”

I flushed with annoyance. It was the same old song. “Maybe you’d like it trying to scrimp along on what I would be making as a cop. Look at Quinn.”

“Molly is a happy woman, Brian. She works hard; there aren’t many luxuries, but she’s happy and secure.”

I knew well the stubborn honesty of her, and I knew exactly what I was going to do. I had planned it enough times. What if I was lying to her? As soon as the doublecross had been accomplished, I would be making enough money to buy that respectability she prized so highly.

I made my voice stern and said, “Kit, we can’t go on this way. We’ve got to come to a decision, and soon. Will you marry me?”

“If you get an honest job, yes,” she said with a chill in her voice.

Maybe I hammed up the heavy sigh of resignation. “You win, Kit,” I said.

Her face was a pale oval, her breath warm on my lips, “You mean...”

I pulled the slip of paper out of my pocket. “Here. Take this. It’s a list of addresses showing where a raid can knock off the stitching machines, the printer, the books, the supply of tickets, twenty of the route men and a long batch of over-the-counter outlets. As long as I have to get out of the business, I might as well do a clean job of it.”

That wasn’t too much of a lie. I wouldn’t have the same job in the new setup; I’d have a better job. No hired boy stuff. One of the managers, with a salary to match. Nothing less than five times what I was making. Then I’d make them see my point. Hell, I’d even buy the house next door, set up an amplifier and drum it into them until they cried quits. And Kit would want that big house on the hill.

“Darling!” she breathed, and her lips were fresh and warm. Totally unlike the lips of Anna Garron, totally unlike anything else in the world.

Then she backed away. “But won’t they... get you? Hurt you?”

“The list you got is typed on a machine they can’t trace. Unless you tell, nobody will know. The D.A. won’t make you give away your source. I’ll even let them drag me in and I’ll post my own bail and pay my fine when the case comes up. They’ll never know.”

“And then after it blows over, darling, I’ll marry you right away. I can keep working and that’ll give you a chance to find a really good job.”

“Sure, sure,” I said, and kissed her.

The plan was in motion, and Anna and I were being carried along on it. From then on, the plan was boss. No backing down. “Look, Kit. The right time for the raid is on Thursday at noon. Today is Friday. Tell them to hold off until then, or they won’t get much. Okay?”

A few minutes later she slipped out of the car and I heard her footsteps going back toward the house. They seemed freer, happier footsteps than had been before. For a minute or two, I almost wished that what I had told her had been the truth. Then I remembered Brock stuffing those wads of currency down into the sack. No, my way was the right way; she’d see it, sooner or later.

I clicked the lights on, held my watch down so that the dash lights touched it. Twenty after nine. Plenty of time to line up Gulbie Sherman out by the tracks. I knew Gulbie since before college. He was ideal for our purposes. There was no danger of his getting wise and holding out on us, and there was no danger of his talking.

There are mammoth freight yards at Murrisberg. The yards themselves are enclosed by hurricane fence, and are floodlighted at night. But out on the edge of town, heading east, the number of track decreases. That end of town is pretty grim. The city dumps smoke endlessly, and the narrow asphalt roads are pitted with deep potholes. One road runs on a sort of ledge about ten feet higher than the tracks. From the road you can barely see the edge of the roof of Gulbie’s shack. He built it of stuff he rescued from the city dump. It nestles down under the ledge and his door is about fifteen feet from the nearest tracks. Right across the way is a semaphore.

As I pulled off onto the shoulder, a light rain started, dotting my grey gabardine suit. I cursed, turned the lights and motor off, slipped and slid down the steep narrow path. There was a flickering light in Gulbie’s window I hammered on his door, and pushed it open.

Inside, the shack was just as I remembered it. Ten feet square, with a broken chunk stove propped up on bricks, rags stuffed onto the chinks in the walls; a broken down cot along the far wall, a lantern on a bracket over the cot.

Gulbie sat on the cot and looked up at me, his mouth open. He could have been wearing the same clothes I had last seen him wearing years before. On his bare feet was a pair of discarded overshoes. His once white shirt was greyish and ragged, and his dark trousers were held up with a length of rope. He hadn’t aged a bit. His long knobbly face was like cracked red clay, his eyes a light and surprising blue, candid as the eyes of a child. His big-knuckled hands rested on his bony knees. As I had expected, he was just sitting. There was the smell of cheap gin in the shack, and a bottle, half-ful; rested by his hairy ankles.

There is only one thing wrong with Gulbie he can’t seem to remember. As far as he was concerned, I knew he didn’t remember ever having seen me before. Some little gadget was left out of his brain when he was put together. It had taken him all his life to establish the habit pattern of eating, sleeping and finding his way back to the shack when he leaves it.

But buried underneath the perpetual daze caused by his poor memory, he is keen. He taught himself to read. He trades off things he finds in the dump for eating money and gin money. The dump clothes him and houses him.

“Who are you?” he demanded.

I sat down in the ragged cane chair opposite him and smiled. “You remember me, Gulbie. Jake Shaw. Hell, I haven’t seen you for years.”

“Jake. Jake Shaw. Sounds sort of familiar, at that. What you doing these days, Jake?”

“Making a fast buck here and there. I want to share some of it with my friends.”

“Not buying anything,” he said.

“And I’m not selling anything, Gulbie. Here, have ten dollars.” I handed him a bill. He took it, looked at it suspiciously and tucked it in his shirt pocket.

“Thanks,” he said. “Who do I have to kill?”

I had some unsold, out-of-date tickets in my pocket. I took them out. “Know what these are?”

“Them green things? Wait a minute, now, I think so. Hold on just a minute. Yeah. Those are pool tickets, to win money with.”

“Where can you buy them, Gulbie?”

“Why, down where I get my chow. Haiger’s Market. I seen fellows buying them there.”

“You want to make some more money, Gulbie?”

“Guess I don’t mind if I do.”

“What I want you to do, Gulbie, is buy some of those green tickets next week. Ten dollars worth. Understand?”

He nodded in a bewildered way. “I buy ten dollars worth. How do I make any money?”

“Don’t open them in the store. Bring them back here and save them. I’ll come around and open them for you. Then you cash them in; they’ll give you a lot of money, Gulbie. I’ll be around to remind you of all this. Okay?”

“How much do I make?”

“Maybe as much as fifty dollars. How does that sound?”

He smiled shyly. “Sounds pretty good, Jake. Yes sir.”

I stared hard at him for a few minutes, making up my mind. Yes, Gulbie would do very well indeed. I could control him, and afterwards I could confuse him so badly that he wouldn’t be able to tell anyone a thing about it.

His foot touched the bottle and tipped it over. With incredible speed he caught the neck of the bottle before a drop spilled. I had forgotten that animal quickness of his.

“Want a drink?” he asked politely.

He stood in the doorway as I scrambled up the path. I turned and looked back. The rain made red and green halos around the semaphore, and the tracks shone like silver. I could hear the stolid chuffing of the switch engines down in the yard, the clunk and rattle of the couplings as trains were being made up.

Back inside the car, I sat and smoked for a minute or two before turning and heading back to town. The big plan was beginning to roll, but I didn’t want to be a chump; I didn’t want that smart money Anna had found to ease me out before I was even in. Priority one was to protect myself from a cross within a cross.

I wondered if Johnny Naga could be part of the smart money, changing horses in midstream. Time to check. Johnny Naga collected his three thousand a week and paid off all the consolation winners.

I found him, as usual, behind his own bar, the outside neon flickering redly, repeating, “JOHNNY’S PLACE” over and over and over.

The bar was always packed with the squareheads from the neighborhood, largely a beer type business. In addition to backing the distribution angle of the pool, Johnny runs a baseball and football pool setup on the side.

He is a wide, redfaced man in his fifties, with a broad mouth. His head is the general shape of a pear with the little end of top. His voice is highpitched and when he giggles, which he does a great deal, his big belly jounces. He talks with a faint Slovak accent, as do most of the people in the neighborhood where his bar is.

There is more than enough dough laying around for Johnny to take it very easy indeed, but his favorite indoor sport is tending his own bar and kidding with the men he’s known all his life and pretending that he’s no better off than they are. But they all know that Johnny Naga is rolling in it.

I pushed my way into the bar, and he saw me immediately and gave a little jerk of his head toward the back room. I picked up a beer on the way and carried it back in there with me. The back room was empty. I drank the beer and put the empty glass on the table.

In a few minutes, Johnny came puffing back, wiping his hands on his white apron.

“How you doin’, Brine?” he asked in his high voice. He can’t seem to say Brian.

“Just fair, Johnny. What’s new?”

“Brine, you know this Skippy Jorio?”

“One of the route boys, isn’t he? Used to be a fighter?”

“That’s a one, Brine. This week I got to put in his dough myself. He tell me to go to hell. Seventy-one bucks he owes, Brine. You get it?”

“Oh, fine!” I said in disgust.

“Brock, he says you help, Brine. Your job. Brock, he says one route man goes out of line, maybe all of them do.”

I sighed. “Where is he?”

“Upstairs at 519 Fonda. With a woman. She gets the money I think.”

The opening was as good as any. I said, “Sometimes, Johnny, I think we’d be further ahead if we ran this show ourselves and paid out the big winners and cut out the darn syndicate. Then we could afford to write off a lousy little seventy-one bucks.”

He looked at me and suddenly he wasn’t smiling. “Don’t talk like that, Brine. Bad talk, I know. Don’t mess with those boys. Out of town. Rough. You don’t mean.”

I gave him a close look. Either he was as good as Lynn Fontaine, or he was seriously jarred by my idea. I decided it was the latter. Scratch one prospect.

“I was just kidding, Johnny,” I said.

His smile came back. “Good thing,” he said, slugging me on the shoulder and nearly paralyzing my arm.

Before calling on Skippy Jorio, I made the usual precautions. It took me fifteen minutes to locate our local eagle, Mr. Wallace Rome. Finally I caught him at the Coral Club. Rome is one of those tall, swarthy young men with feline grace, a sunlamp tan, a small black mustache and startling white teeth. He has made a very good thing out of close-to-the-line practices, sucking up to the politicos, and playing the social game.

He answered the phone with liquid charm, and then shifted to bored irritability when he found out who he was talking to. “All right, all right. You don’t have to draw pictures,” he said. “Any trouble and I’ll cover you. You’re working for me while you make the collection.”

“Don’t forget to put all this on the bill,” I said.

He hung up.

Five nineteen Fonda was in the middle of a row of buildings facing the freight yards. They seemed to lean against each other for support. A cheap restaurant, with white tile across the front, looked like a clean bandage on a dirty wound.

The way up was locked, but the wood was rotten and a little steady pressure tore the lock free. I went quietly up the stairs, crouched and listened at the door. A thread of light came from under it, and I heard a woman’s drunken giggle. I backed up three steps, then hit the door with my shoulder. It crashed open and Skippy Jorio, in the act of pouring a drink, whirled, dropping the glass. A plump girl in a rather dull state of undress sat on a couch. She didn’t stop giggling; her eyes were shut.

Skippy threw the bottle at my head, and came in fast. I sidestepped the bottle, yanked my gun free and slammed him in the side of the head as he reached me. Then I had to sidestep him; he tried to knock the side off the building with his skull.

Fatty still giggled insanely, but her eyes were open. I found some loose bills in Skippy’s side pocket, and among them was a fifty and two twenties. Fatty stopped giggling when she saw the cash.

I took all he had and, as he started to moan, I went down the stairs fast, walked quickly to the car and drove away. Object lesson. The news would get around fast enough, thereby discouraging the next citizen who tried to hang onto the funds.

Johnny Naga took his seventy-one with beaming thanks and I tucked the collection fee into my wallet.

An hour later I was full of steak, and streached out on my bed in my room at the Murrisberg House, but sleep wouldn’t come. Somewhere on the road Brock Sentano was headed back toward Murrisberg. Anna Garron was probably back in her room at Sentano’s place, the blank tickets carefully hidden away. And somewhere, some monied citizen was licking his chops in anticipation of the riches to come.

The plan was rolling, and it couldn’t be stopped. There was trouble ahead, but it would be trouble for somebody else — I hoped. I remembered the look on Quinn’s face as he stood with his big hands on my car door. Contempt and pity. I’d show Quinn. I’d show them all. I began to think of myself as the biggest man in Murrisberg.

“See that fellow over there? Brian Gage. Owns a piece of the paper, and a couple of night spots, and a lumber mill and some garages and gas stations. That blonde is his wife. She used to work for the D.A. Wish I had his dough, by God!”

Then I began to make up a floor plan for the big house on the hill that I was going to build.

When I walked through the front door of that house, I was asleep, and the dreams were good. Except that, in my dreams, I seemed to feel someone watching me. Constantly. Every move I made...

Chapter Four

Saturday there was nothing to do. I went over and checked with Brock. He seemed carefree and contented. I didn’t get a chance for a word with Anna. I tried a double-feature, but couldn’t get interested; I tried a few drinks, but they bounced off.

After dark, I went and blinked the lights outside Kit’s house. No response. I guessed that she had had to go someplace with her people. I was bored, restless and jittery.

Sunday was almost as bad, except that for a few minutes, while I drove Anna downtown at Brock’s request, I had a chance to talk to her. She told me that she had gotten eight blank tickets from Homer and that he would steal the type face for the numerals on Monday and get them to her.

I tried to question her again on who was in the picture beside the two of us but she wouldn’t talk. When I came back, Brock had had a call from Johnny Naga, and he complimented me on the way I’d taken care of the situation. Skippy had come around to Naga begging to be permitted to handle the tickets again, but Johnny had turned him down.

I told her about Gulbie, and where he was located. She said that it sounded fine. Then she crossed her fingers and added, “Brother, if this thing goes sour, I might as well move right in with your friend Gulbie.”

I laughed, thinking of how she’d look in Gulbie’s shack.

On Sunday night, the drinks didn’t bounce. I had a few, and then took a bottle up to my room. By the time the level was low, I was ready for sleep. It hit me like a sap behind the ear.

The tension was growing. It was getting more and more difficult to act natural about Brock. I got so bored that I made a gentle play for Joyce, and she fell all over herself trying to back up my play. Billy and Oley got on my nerves.

Monday afternoon, in the kitchen of 1012 Cramer, Brock said suddenly, “Anything chewing on you, Boy?” I gave him my best grin. “Not a thing. There just isn’t much to do the first part of the week, I guess.”

He smiled and his dead brown eyes looked at me carefully. “Maybe it’s something else?”

A small shiver ran down my spine. “What else?”

“Maybe you ought to be nicer to Oley, Brian. He got sore at you last Friday when you wouldn’t give him a lift downtown. So he comes back when you go in the house again and Anna is there. What was that for?” My grin felt wide and vacant. “We... we were just talking.”

“You talk good with all the lights out, hah?”

“Oley’s lying, Brock. You know me better than that!”

There was no humor in his laugh. “I don’t know you so good, Brian, but I know Anna pretty good. Sure, I know Anna very good.”

He turned and walked out of the room. That would be the payoff — to have the whole thing blow up in our faces, just because Oley had come sneaking back like a weasel. We had been careless. Suppose Oley had sneaked into the house, had heard what we had said. When I tried to find Oley, he wasn’t around, and nobody seemed to know or care where he had gone.

To have Brock suspicious made things more difficult. Much more difficult. But not impossible. Once, walking back toward a beach through the surf, I had felt the undertow suck the sand out from under my feet. This was the same sort of feeling. The habitual smile on Brock’s face had been familiar, but also familiar was the dead, dull look of his tan-brown eyes.

I began to wonder if forging winning tickets was as necessary to our plan as we had imagined. We could figure on a profit of around two thousand dollars, which was unimportant compared with the advantage of having the syndicate take care of Brock, their own man, on suspicion of crookedness.

In the late afternoon the paper boy threw the evening paper up on the porch. I went out and picked it up, realizing that all over Murrisberg, eager hands were unfolding the paper, eyes were searching the columns near the back page, looking for the Treasury Report, the five digits immediately preceeding the decimal point in the treasury balance as of that day.

I smiled as I remembered having seen, in Molly’s kitchen, while I was still on the force, a tiny pile of the green tickets. Even Molly was a sucker.

Suddenly the frame house on Cramer street was too small. Without a word to Brock, I went out and got in my car and drove away. I went out onto the open road and opened it up, the high whine of the motor and the roar of the wind doing a little to clean away the fear that had slowly seeped through me, down to the marrow of my bones.

Yes, the plan was rolling, and it didn’t look quite as bright and shining as it had seemed. Anna had said the syndicate was having internal trouble. Maybe then, they would be particularly anxious to keep a firm hold on Murrisberg. The syndicate planned always on being driven out of business for short periods of time when the citizenry became aroused and sicked the law on the local operators. They also planned on opening up again within a very short period of time.

Anna had been right about Billy and Oley. Give them a hundred and a quarter a week, and their dubious loyalty would be shifted to the new organization. But how about the new talent that might come to town to do a little cleaning up?

Somehow that big white house on the hill was a little further away. I slowed, turned, went back to town and phoned Kit. She was guarded over the phone, and I told her to tell her folks that she was going to the movies with a girl friend. I wasn’t afraid to be seen with her. It was Brock who had suggested that I see her often, so that I could possibly get a tipoff on any raid planned in the office of the District Attorney.

I sat in the lobby of the Murrisberg House, and soon I saw her walking across the tiled floor toward me. Tall, clean, young and very lovely. I stood up and I could see in her eyes all the promises of the things to come. I wondered how those eyes would look if she knew what I planned to do. “I’ve been afraid for you,” she whispered, as I steered her out toward the car.

“I’ll be okay, Kit,” I said.

We had dinner at the Inn at Herperville, fifteen miles away. I thought of the few hundred dollars I had in my pocket and wanted to finish dinner and keep right on going, never come back. But such thoughts were weakness.

Over coffee she told me how the D.A. had reacted. He had said that it was a chance they had been waiting for. The chief had been in and she guessed that they had been going over the data, planning the Thursday raid. She said that they had been very difficult about her not disclosing the source of her information, and they had asked her several times if Brian Gage was the informer.

That gave me a serious jar. Of course they would figure that way. I began to wonder who had seen her meet me in the lobby of my hotel.

And I didn’t like the taste of that word... informer.

I took her home and let her off at the corner and watched the proud way she carried her shoulders, the lift of her shining head, as she walked away from the car.

Tuesday afternoon, late, as I passed Anna in the narrow hallway leading to the kitchen in Brock’s house, she slipped something into my hand. I went out and sat in the car and looked at the two tickets. They were good; the alignment was okay. Two tickets, one for Monday’s winner and one for Tuesday’s. One thousand bucks.

I told Brock I was going to eat, and I drove out to Gulbie’s shack. He remembered me after I had mentioned the name Jake Shaw, and the ten bucks. He was dirty and he had a bad smell about him; I winced as he sat on the clean new uphostery in my car. But I drove him down to the store, sent him in for the tickets, ten dollar’s worth. That would make it look better. Forty tickets.

He came shambling back toward the car. Dusk was over the city. I pocketed the forty tickets, gave him the two counterfeit winners, and sent him back into the store, saying. “Now you stay right there and tell the store owner that you want your dough right away. A thousand bucks. Now repeat that.”

“I give him these and stay right there and holler for the money. Right?”

“Right. And when you get the money, you hustle right back to your shack with it. Understand?”

“Okay, Jake. I get it.”

He went off through the dusk, the absurd overshoes slapping the sidewalk. I saw him go inside, and I drove back to Cramer Street as fast as I dared. It was no time to pick up a ticket for speeding, or beating a light.

The tires squealed as I stopped. Brock was sitting on the porch steps in his shirtsleeves, a Martini in his brown hand.

“In a hurry?” he asked.

“No hurry. The crate’s new and it likes to step.”

The phone rang inside the house, and I heard the click of Anna’s heels as she crossed the bare hall floor to answer it. “For you, Brock,” she called.

He sighed and went in. Anna came out onto the porch. I didn’t turn and look up at her. I could hear the murmur of Brock’s voice.

He left the phone, and went back through the house. I guessed that he went to the cellar to get a thousand out of the safe.

Anna’s fingers were chill as she touched the back of my neck. “Planted?” she asked.

“That was the call for the payoff.”

“Good!” she whispered.

“How about your job?” I asked.

“I put three blank tickets in a crack behind a board in the back of his closet. One corner shows.”

She drifted away, and the screen door banged behind her. Brock came out, bent over and picked up his drink. “Some lucky joker hit Monday and Tuesday already,” he said. “Here’s the payoff. You and Billy go on out there.” He gave me the address.

Billy had a smell, too... but his was of shaving lotion, hair oil, and one of those male perfumes, cedar, pine, old leather. In a way it was as distasteful as Gulbie had been.

I pretended to have difficulty finding the place. Then I counted the roll, twenty fifties, handed it to Billy and said, “Go on in and check the numbers and pay the guy off.”

Billy stuck out his chest. I guess it was the first time he had been trusted with a big payoff. He strutted in. I waited and waited and waited. I tapped my fingers on the horn ring and shifted in the seat and smoked most of a cigarette. I was about to risk going in after him when he came swaggering out.

As I gunned the car and drove away, I said, “What took you so long?”

He giggled like a girl, but there was a nervous note in it. “Pull up by a street light,” he said.

I did so. He took the roll out of my pocket and counted off eight fifties, four hundred bucks and handed it to me.

“What the hell is this?” I snapped.

“Don’t get steamed, Gage. The guy who had the winners was sort of dopey. I had a last week’s list with me; I pulled it out and held my thumb over the date and showed him his tickets were no good. Hell, this week's list hasn’t ever been printed yet. Then I give him fifty bucks so he won’t feel too bad. I tore up the tickets and give the guy who owns the store fifty bucks. That leaves four hundred for you and four hundred for me. We just turn the tickets I took away from him into Brock and we both keep our mouths shut. Okay?”

He tried to open the door fast and scramble out, but I got his wrist and yanked him back. As I pulled him back, I drove my fist into his face. He tried to get hold of his gun, but I turned his arm up behind his back until the bones creaked.

“Okay! Okay!” he gasped. I got four hundred and fifty out of his pants, put his gun in my pocket near the door, and drove back.

Gulbie was just leaving the store, a big package in his arms. I caught up with him, jammed on the brakes and stepped out. I made a motion as though I were giving him something, and said in a low tone, “Go on back to the shack and I’ll see you later.”

I was going to get back in the car and tell Billy that in this racket, you always paid off. But I heard running footsteps, and the right hand door of my crate was open. I caught a glimpse of Billy heading off into the darkness and then he was gone. I chased him in the car, but couldn’t catch sight of him. Then I went back, picked up Gulbie, gave him a ride out to his shack, and went back to report to Brock.

When I went in the front hallway, I could hear the mumble of voices in the cellar. I went back through the house and down the stairs. All the lights were on, and the thick curtains were pulled across the windows. The first thing I saw was Joyce, face down on the floor, moaning and twisting.

I stopped dead on the stairs. There were two strangers with Brock. Billy’s gun was heavy in my left hand jacket pocket. I lifted my hand quickly.

“Don’t try it!” a flat voice said.

The voice came from behind me. It was the sort of voice you listen to. I didn’t move a muscle, or turn. A hand snaked the weight out of my left hand pocket, reached around, patted the front of my jacket, slipped inside and pulled out my automatic. The spring made an empty click. “Now go down the rest of the way, and back over against that wall. Keep your arms spread and our palms flat against the wall.”

After I turned, I saw him. He had crisp white hair, and a soft narrow face. His eyes were like deep holes in soft dough. His hair gave him the look of age, but his face was oddly unlined.

Brock sat by one of the cardtables. He smiled and said, “Brian, meet Whitey. He’s... sort of a troubleshooter.”

I forced a smile. “Trouble isn’t my name.”

He ignored me. The other two men were staring at me. One was of the Billy-Oley breed, young, sneering, hard on the outside, soft in the middle. The other was tall, hefty, florid — looking like a bank executive, or a construction equipment salesman.

In a cheery, deep voice, the big man said, “You must be Brian Gage. Brock has told us about you. I’m Mark Fletcher.”

The name meant something to me. I had heard it several times. From Brock. The big gun of the syndicate. The man in control; Mr. Fix with the authorities.

“Hello, Mr. Fletcher.”

Whitey stood and merely looked at me. He was the reverse of the Billy-Oley type. Soft on the outside, and diamond hard under the skin. He had a perpetual look of sadness, quiet grief.

Joyce sat up. Her face was puffed with tears. She looked at Brock and said, “You shouldn’t a let him...”

“She doesn’t know a thing,” Whitey said softly.

“Get up and go home, girl,” Fletcher said, “Forget this little... unpleasantness. I’ll authorize a small bonus for you, say two hundred and fifty?”

The look of naked greed dimmed the hurt and pain on Joyce’s face. “Gosh!” she said.

“Run along now,” Fletcher said in a fatherly manner.

Joyce gave me a quick look of contempt and stumped up the stairs. Seconds later I heard the distant slam of the front door.

I stood with my hands flat against the concrete wall. I thought of all the men I had seen in the police lineup. They let the silence add up.

“You had to get smart,” Brock said wearily. “And I thought you were okay.”

“Smart?” I asked. “How?”

Whitey took two slow steps toward me. Fletcher said sharply, “Hold it!” He circled Whitey and stood a few feet in front of me, his thumbs stuck in the bottom pockets of his vest. “You’re a smart looking boy, Gage,” he said gently. “And I understand you can handle yourself. Both of those things are advantages, you know. We were beginning to trust you, too.”

Inside of me the fear grew like a swollen boil — and then it broke, and when it went away I was once again clear-headed, able to figure angles. “It would help a little,” I said, “if I knew what you were talking about.”

Fletcher sighed in an elephantine manner. “I am talking about a young man who fell under the spell of a vicious woman. I am talking about a young man who is too big for his pants.”

“I still don’t get it.”

“My boy, part of our efficiency as an organization is the result of employing constant checks and balances. In the employ of the syndicate is a humble stenographer in the police department. Through him we learned this noon that a certain Miss Robinson in the District Attorney’s office has turned in a rather complete report on the operations and organizational setup of this Murrisberg branch. They plan a raid for the day after tomorrow.

“I immediately brought Whitey and young Cowlfax down here by private plane to talk the situation over with Mr. Sentano. It is obvious to us that you gave the information to Miss Robinson. Then we wondered why; we could not imagine why you would wish to disrupt your own income for a period of a few weeks until we could get back in operation at some new location. Mr. Sentano remarked on your recent attraction to our Miss Garron.

“He also remarked on your behaviour lately, which, at the very least, has seemed odd. We have discussed this matter, and it seems likely that you and Miss Garron could hope to improve your positions through the setting up of an alternate organization which would replace the syndicate here in Murrisberg.

“I know of no outside organization interested in this city at the moment, so I am assuming that you two have found local backers and... ah... local gunmen to protect you from us during the starting period.”

He paused and smiled fatuously at me.

I didn’t answer, so he said, “Mind you, we are not ones lightly to give up a source of income which nets us around four hundred thousand a year. You were stupid to believe that we would give it up without a fight. A very... ah... dirty fight, I might say. A fight in which we would be glad to... murder someone as an example.”

He turned and beamed at the young punk. “Cowlfax here would be glad to do a job for a price which includes immediate transportation to a pleasant tropical country where they do not practice extradition, wouldn’t you, Jimmy?”

“Sure,” Jimmy mumbled.

“And so you see, my dear Brian, your premise was false from the beginning. However, we are prepared to forgive and forget. Does that surprise you? Yes, forgive and forget. Merely give me the names of your backers, and those in your organization, and we will keep you on, but switch you, of course, to some other part of the state, and, I am afraid, at a reduced income, my boy.”

“Why are you so certain of all this?”

His eyes widened. “Why because of Miss Garron, of course! She is... ah... clever, and we were asleep at the switch, you might say. When she saw my arrival by taxi from the airport, she comprehended immediately and... fled.”

Denial would bring Whitey in on me. There was something rabid and unclean about Whitey, something about the way his fat white fingers worked, and his look of sadness. I needed time more than anything.

I smiled at Fletcher. “Assume for a moment that you are right, Mr. Fletcher. And make the further assumption that I am a hired boy, with Anna Garron bossing the job. Would I know as much as you expect me to know?”

He rubbed his big chin and looked reflective. “You make a point, sir.” Then he smiled broadly. “And would it not be equally wise for you to pretend to be a hired boy, as you call it, so as to prevent Whitey from working on you a bit?”

That angle had failed to pan out. I thought it over. A denial would bring Whitey in on me. I had learned during the war that torture is a great deal more effective than the average man would like to believe; and Whitey had the same look that the fat Jap in charge of the water cure had at the Rangoon Prison.

I gave Fletcher a frank smile. “Okay, Mr. Fletcher. You hold the cards. You’ve read them right, believe me.” I looked beyond him, and said, “Sorry, Brock.”

Fletcher turned around quickly. Brock was pale. “He’s being wise, Fletch.”

“Am I?” I said. “How about those fake tickets to help with financing us, Brock. Hell, you’ve got the blank tickets up there in your closet behind that loose board. You said that we might as well chisel a little out of the syndicate before everything blows up. Remember, Brock?” I tried to look the part of outraged innocence.

Fletcher nodded at Jimmy, said, “Last room on the left at the end of the upstairs hall.”

Jimmy ran up the stairs. The cellar was very quiet. Brock’s face began to glisten in the overhead lights. “He’s lying,” he said. Oley, sitting back in the shadows near the canned goods, shifted restlessly. I hadn’t noticed him before.

Jimmy came back down, a wide grin on his face. He handed the green tickets to Fletcher. Fletcher looked at them curiously.

“I don’t know anything about those!” Brock said loudly. It sounded like the voice of guilt.

Fletcher, his voice odd and husky, said, “I’d give this kid another chance, Brock. You’ve been with us too long to get a second chance. Okay, Jimmy.”

Brock scrambled back, his chair tipping over, his hand flashing inside his coat. Jimmy’s gun had a massive silencer screwed on the end of the barrel. It’s report was halfway between a cough and a grunt. It was a big gun, with a lot of foot pounds of impact. It smashed Brock against the wall. He bounced off the wall in an odd and comic dance and fell awkwardly across the tipped-over chair. He lay with his forehead against the concrete floor.

Fletcher said softly, “You can see, Gage, that you have been on the wrong side.”

“That wasn’t smart,” Whitey said in his half whisper.

“What do you mean!” Fletcher snapped.

“Maybe he knew more than Gage, or the girl.”

For the first time, Fletcher looked uncertain. His eyes were puzzled. He turned to me. “Where is Anna Garron?”

“I wouldn’t know. Brock and Anna were running this show.” While I was talking I was trying desperately to think of a likely backer. Not John Naga. Somebody else.

Oley still sat over by the canned goods. I could hear his rapid breathing.

I said calmly, “Oley over there was to knock off you syndicate people when you arrived; that was the plan.”

Oley gasped as Jimmy whirled at him. He scuttled away toward the darker shadows. Whitey was watching him. “No!” Fletcher roared.

Whitey was half crouched. I took one quick step and kicked him in the face with all my strength, feeling the jaw bone give as he fell heavily. The fuse box was half under the stairs. I put an arm lock on Fletcher and kept him between me and Jimmy. I yanked him back toward the stairs, as Jimmy stood in helpless indecision.

I yanked the black handle down, shoved Fletcher away and broke for the stairs. The gun coughed again, slightly louder this time through the worn packing, but I didn’t hear the slug hit.

I slid on the kitchen linoleum, skidded into the stove, bruising my hip, and then found the back door handle. I vaulted the railing, stinging the soles of my feet on the asphalt of the driveway.

I slid into my car, found the ignition lock, turned the key and roared it up into second before I clicked the lights on. Once around the second corner I slowed down.

The plan was shot, but maybe we could save some of it. If I could find Anna.

Chapter Five

I drove aimlessly through the night streets of Murrisberg. On a hunch, I called my room at the hotel. Where would Anna Garron go?

Maybe she’d hide under the wing of the law. Legal talent. From a diner I phoned Wallace Rome’s apartment. After a long pause, he answered the phone. Charmingly.

“This is Brian Gage.”

“Oh.”

“Has Anna Garron contacted you?”

“Should she have?”

“Don’t fence with me, friend. The whole deal has blown up.”

“Indeed?” he said politely.

“Brock is dead, and the out-of-towners know about the raid, and if they can get Anna, they’ll cut her heart out to find out who’s backing a big doublecross.”

I heard his gasp distinctly.

“Now will you tell me if she’s contacted you?”

“Not yet, Gage. Keep in touch. Let me know if you find her.” He hung up.

A cool article, Wallace Rome. Very cool. He might turn out to be a friend in court. And then again... Well, they hadn’t taken my money. Over a thousand dollars on me; that might buy his services.

Trusting the speed of my car, I went back to the vicinity of Cramer Street, and began to hunt around that area. I parked in the shadows by a neighborhood theater and, on a hunch, paid my way in and made a careful search. No dice.

In a telephone book I found the home address of Homer Windo. I went there. I parked down the street, walked across the soft grass and peering in their windows. The two of them were in the living room. The old man had his eyes shut and Homer, Jr., was reading to him, out of a confession magazine. Anna wasn’t there.

I began to wonder about Billy. Maybe he had an idea. I drove out to the store where Billy had queered the Gulbie payoff, parked and went in. An old guy with a white stubble on his cheeks and chin was nearsightedly checking the cash register tape.

He looked up as I strolled over. I dug out a ten, folded it the long way and perched it, like a little tent, on top of his meat case.

“What you want?” he asked.

“Nothing. That’s a present.”

He reached over and took it, snapped it between his fingers and put it in the cash register. “Been getting free money all day. Got a ten from another fella real early tonight.”

A ten. And Billy had said fifty. “You remember him?”

“Sure. Face like a pantry rat and a little yella bow tie.”

“That’s him. He been back in?”

“Nope. Haven’t seen him since.”

“I thought he might have come in to call a cab or something.”

“Nope. Say, old Gulbie's pretty popular tonight. First that ratty looking one come out to see him and then a woman.”

“What!”

“Sure. Damn fine looking woman too. Got off the bus right across the street there and come in here and asked me how to find him. Told her it was about a mile up the road and she’d have to watch sharp or she’d miss the path.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Hour and a half, maybe two hours. Yes, she made a phone call first and talked so low I couldn’t hear a thing and then she asked me about Gulbie and away she went. Told me not to tell anybody she’d been here. Then she gave me five dollars. You gave me ten.” He chuckled. “Been a good day, all right. I figured you wanted to know about her.”

“What made you think that?”

“Well now, don’t get sore. But you and that ratty fella and that girl. You all got the same look. Kind of shifty look.”

I glanced at my watch. Ten fifteen. I slammed the door as I left. Behind me he pulled down the door shade and clicked out some of the overhead lights.

Looking up the road toward Gulbie’s, I saw headlights which seemed to pull away from the shoulder on his side. They came booming down on me, taking up more than their half of the road. I jolted over onto the shoulder, with a smack of shocks against frame and was so busy that I couldn’t even try to look into the other car. Maybe it had been my imagination that it had seemed to leave Gulbie’s place.

It was then that I seemed to hear Anna’s voice, cool in my ear. “If this thing goes sour, I might as well move right in with your friend Gulbie.”

Of course! That’s what she had said. And things had gone sour, and, hoping I’d remember she’d gone there. A good place to wait for protection — better than going directly to one of the unknown backers — if there were more than one.

Cautiously I drove by Gulbie’s, parked two hundred yards beyond, finding the ground firm enough to get it well off the road and over behind a line of brush.

No cars were coming from either direction.

I got out onto the asphalt and ran. As I neared the shack I saw the first tongues of flame shoot up into the night air. I scrambled down the bank. Spreading from the broken lantern, the flames had crept up one wall and had burst through the flimsy roof.

Gulbie was sprawled awkwardly on the floor, his pebbled red face cradled on one arm. The black rubber overshoes were bubbling near the flames and smoke was rising from them. The room was empty except for Gulbie. Shielding my eyes from the heat with my forearm, I ran in, got hold of Gulbie’s limp wrist and dragged him out. As soon as he was outside the door, I got under the armpits and hauled him a good twenty-five feet from the roaring, crackling flames.

His body felt warm, but I thought that it might be from the flames. I believed him to be dead until he moaned. Then I saw the welt over his ear, the fresh blood on his cheek. I slapped his face and shook him.

He opened his eyes then, squinted at the flames and cursed weakly.

“What the hell happened?” I demanded.

“I don’t know. I can’t remember.”

I shook him again. “Remember, damn you!”

He sat up and moaned. “I came back here... let me see. You brung me back. Then some young fella comes in and talks and he hit me, right here on the chin. I think that’s right. When I come to, the whole inside of the place is tore up and what’s left of the money is gone.” He covered his eyes. “I can’t think. I can’t remember.”

“Try hard, Gulbie.”

“Well I’m cleaning up the mess he made, he comes back and asks me where I hid the money. He has a stick and he’s going to hit me again. He’s a mean one. Then the woman comes, I think.”

“What did she look like?”

“Yellow hair. Black dress, I think. She yelled at the young fellow and he yelled at her. They talk about things I can’t understand. He says something about a double-crossing woman. Then he hits her.”

“What!”

“He hits her a good one, right across the temple. She falls down hard and he laughs and runs out. I sat there and looked at her and all of a sudden it come over me what happen to me if anybody comes and finds her there. You know what they’d think and suppose she should die or something. She doesn’t seem to be breathing so good. I’m remembering it better now, Jake.”

“Keep going.”

“It’s going to be a bad thing if anybody finds a pretty woman like that in my shack, and I don’t know what to do with her. Then I remember a place across the tracks where I can take her and she’ll be hid behind the bushes. The ground is wet, but it ain’t a cold night. So I grabbed her by the arm and started to drag her across the tracks and put her over there. Nobody goes over there; then they won’t connect me up with it if she maybe dies.”

“And then what?”

“I can’t remember any more. Just a noise behind me, I think.”

The whole roof had gone, and the flames jumped high. If Anna was across the way, I had to find her. The tracks were brighter than just the firelight could have made them. I didn’t see the Cyclops eye of the freight engine picking up speed on the far track as it came out of the yard; the noise of the fire had obscured the sound of the engine.

Gulbie’s hard fingers bit into my arm. “Look!” he gasped.

I looked where he pointed. One slim leg across the shining steel rail, the slim body face down, the far rail under her chest.

I pulled loose and started to run. The loose stones of the roadbed turned under my feet and I fell heavily. I got up, dazed, and ran two more steps before I saw that it was too late.

The engineer had seen her. The brakes grabbed and the big steel wheels locked and the sparks showered back.

I screamed with all the power of my lungs, and turned my back. The thundering locomotive went on, interminably. The next half hour was disjointed... unreal. The world was like a room reflected in the broken bits of a mirror, and I walked blindly.

There was the screaming siren... floodlights on the destroyed shack... men in fireman’s hats... a train over on the fourth set of tracks... halted... men standing quietly, shining lights on something wet and horrible midway between the trucks of the third freight car. Gulbie’s twisted red face appeared in front of me, and then seemed to spin away to one side. Rain touched my face as I walked down the road, and then I was sitting in my car, foolishly holding the steering wheel, and I couldn’t think whether it was Kit or Anna who had been out there, sprawled across the hard and shining rails. Kit or Anna. Kit or Anna.

Someone shouted as I went back by the fire engine. They hadn’t bothered wasting chemicals on the insignificant shack.

The tires of my car made a wet and sticky noise on the asphalt, and the lights of the city grew more frequent around me. The fizz and sputter of cheap neon.

DINE AND DANCE

COCKTAIL LOUNGE

LEARN TO DANCE

ALL LEGAL BEVERAGES

Something deep inside of me was sour, old, tired. Something broken and something blue.

Maybe there was a white house on a hill for somebody. Not for me. Brian Gage, the sharpie, the angle-boy, the rough man with the hard fists. Something had happened to him. It had happened in the grind of steel on steel...

Then, without knowing how I had come to be there, I was standing and facing a door that was oddly familiar. I looked numbly at it, and then realized that I would have to ring the bell. I pressed my thumb hard against the bell, heard the distant sound of its ringing.

Alight went on and the door opened. I staggered forward and Quinn’s hand was warm and strong on my arm. “Kid, are you tight?”

“No... I... Let me talk to you.”

The bright kitchen lights stung my eyes, I shook my head slowly. Quinn was wearing the old grey robe that I remembered. My voice sounded like the voice of a stranger, and it told of things that seemed already vague in my mind. I finished and there was nothing more to say.

Quinn looked at me, and his eyes were doubtful, questioning.

“Is this another of your bright angles, kid? Is this another power play?”

I looked him in the eyes and shook my head slowly. “That part is all over, Quinn. All done. I’m... I’m going away, I guess.”

They became cop’s eyes; firm and hard and cold. “You’ll come up and stand where I can watch you while I put my clothes on. Then we’ll go to headquarters.”

His hard hands slapped me, looking for a gun. I leaned against the bedroom wall while he dressed. Molly held the covers up around her chin and looked at me with wide and frightened eyes.

Quinn drove my car. I walked beside him into the familiar building. The lieutenant had grey pouches under his eyes, and he sipped his coffee as Quinn put my disjointed remarks in some sort of formal order.

The lieutenant was brisk. He asked me a few simple questions. Then he clattered the cup into the saucer and said, “Okay. That gives us enough to go on in the case of Sentano. You’ve given us the name and the description.”

“He’ll be gone,” I said.

“Maybe. And maybe Fletcher will be dumb enough to keep him around for another job before sending him on his way. But you heard Fletcher give the order?”

“Yes.”

He pushed down the switch on the communications box on his desk and spoke to the radio room.

“Send everything loose to 1012 Cramer. Homicide. A. and D. Pick up four men.” He gave the names and descriptions. Fletcher, Whitey, Oley, and Jimmy Cowlfax. Then he put Billy on the tape for immediate pickup and asked for another car to pick up Joyce Kitnik.

The call on the death of Anna had already come in, and a detail had been sent out there.

“What’s your angle?” the lieutenant asked me.

Once again, I shook my head. “No angle. It just... made me sick.”

The lieutenant grinned up at Quinn. “I’m surprised more of these boys don’t develop weak stomachs.” Quinn gave me a hard, unreadable look.

“Who killed Anna Garron?” the lieutenant asked.

“I don’t know.”

“And maybe you do know. Maybe you knew she could queer you and you got there in time to see this Sherman character dragging her across the tracks. You sapped him, saw the freight coming, left her on the tracks and dragged Sherman back and set fire to his place and claim to have dragged him out.”

Once again, the lieutenant looked at Quinn. He emptied out my pockets and put all my stuff on the lieutenant’s desk. He poked at the money with a lean finger, yellowed with nicotine, and whistled softly. “That’s enough for a garden variety murder in your league.”

“I didn’t do it,” I said dully.

“Then who did?”

I shook my head to clear it. It was hard to think clearly. Slowly I said, “Maybe Billy.”

“No,” the lieutenant said. “We’ve had him in here plenty of times. I know the kid. He’s rotten all the way through, but without the guts to kill.”

“Anna called somebody from that grocery store.”

The lieutenant smirked. “The mysterious moneyed man who was going to back the pool? I give up. Who is he and why would he knock her off?”

I began to grow excited. “Sure. Can’t you see. Whoever he is, he was afraid that Fletcher would get to Anna and make her talk. Then somebody like Cowlfax would be sent after him. Anna was his only link; if she were killed as soon as the whole plan blew up, nobody would ever be the wiser.”

The lieutenant pursed his lips. “Maybe — and maybe not. Anyway, it gives him a better motive than you, and we can assume he has more killer instinct than Billy.”

A uniformed man I didn’t know with rain on his blue shoulders came to the office door and said, “The Doc says she was alive until the train hit her. He figures it from the way the blood spurted.” He made a grimace. “A hell of a waste of a good-looking woman.”

The lieutenant put his lean fingertips together and looked up at the ceiling and said, “Too bad we can’t paste her together and use her as bait. If this man here is leveling with us, the killer drove off in a car after putting Sherman back in the shack and busting the lantern, Then, until the killer reads the paper in the morning, he can’t be sure she’s dead, although he’s almost sure — that is, if he saw the freight train getting up steam down in the yards on that track.”

Something about his use of words made me feel ill. Bait. Plaster her together. If I had not happened along Gulbie would have been pegged as the murderer...

Half to myself I said, “She looked like Kit.”

“Who’s Kit?” the lieutenant asked, frowning.

Quinn answered for me. “Catherine Robinson, the blonde who works in the D.A.’s office.”

“It might be worth a chance...” he said slowly.

I tried to object, but neither of them would pay any attention to me. I tried to tell them that Kit looked nothing like Anna Garron. The lieutenant got hold of Captain Jameson, and with his approval and his authority, after Kit had agreed by phone, the managing editor of the only morning paper was awakened and persuaded to kill the death story which had already been locked in the press.

Between them, they gave it a new look. Anna Garron had not died; she had been pulled practically from under the wheels of the locomotive; she suffered a superficial head injury and had been taken to Mercy Hospital for treatment and would be probably released early the following day. She was not yet recovered sufficiently to talk about her experience.

I was in “protective custody.”

But the front page space on the morning paper didn’t go to waste. There was another story to fill it. Replace a murder with a murder. Brock Sentano. Dead in an empty house. Gambling ring killing. Principals sought.

I walked back and forth in the small basement room at headquarters and cursed myself for having mentioned Kit’s name. This was nothing for her to be mixed up in, even as blonde bait. Sometimes the bait gets snatched off the hook while the fisherman takes time off to yawn.

It was two o’clock in the morning. The trap wouldn’t be set until the morning papers hit the street at six. Even if the cot in the corner had been the most comfortable bed in the world, I couldn’t have slept.

Quinn had dropped in to tell me the progress. Yes, Kit has agreed. They had checked with the D. A. She hadn’t wanted her family to know, had told them that it was special stenographic work. They had smuggled her into the Mercy Hospital.

“Clothes?” I asked.

A dress had been found which was a close match to the one that had been ripped and cut by the steel shoes. No, a change in hair style wasn’t necessary. The bandage would take care of that. Miss Garron’s face hadn’t been damaged, and the greatest similarity was around the mouth and nose.

So it was intended that the bandage would cover one eye. And then they decided, at least the lieutenant decided that I was needed. Quinn took me out to the black sedan and I was rushed to the side door of the Mercy Hospital taken up to a room on the second floor.

Kit stood there, the bandage covering her fair hair, one of her grey eyes. They had told her about me.

“The plan is this,” the lieutenant said. “The paper hits the street at six. At eight thirty, Miss Robinson leaves by the out patient door. She walks to the curb, stands there a moment, then turns and heads up the street toward the taxi stand. She walks slow. We have the block covered with everything we’ve got.”

She didn’t look at me. The lieutenant had her walk and asked me if it was okay. “No. Kit carried her head too high and her shoulders too straight. Slump a little and take shorter steps.”

Finally she got it right. She held a big red purse similar to the one half-destroyed by the fire in the shack

“Good luck, Kit,” I said.

She didn’t answer me.

I stuck close to the lieutenant and he seemed to forget that I was someone in ‘protective custody’. In his mind I had become a part of the home team, and it made me feel warm and good to be so considered.

Before daylight, the lieutenant, Quinn, Captain Jameson and I entered the small florist shop across the street from the out patient door. We moved some potted ferns into the window which would conceal us. In high windows across from the hospital men from the department checked the bolts of high-powered rifles.

At eight a car stopped near the door and two men leisurely began to change a soft rear tire. At either end of the block, department men loitered.

And at eight thirty on the dot, Kit came out of the door across the street, out into the morning sunshine. At one hundred feet, the illusion was perfect. It was as though Anna Garron walked out toward the street. It gave me a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.

At that moment the plan seemed futile, the trap empty, the whole idea childish and absurd. If Fletcher was still in town, he would try to grab her. Before the unknown backer tried to kill her, to kill the woman he had already killed...

She stood for a moment at the curb. I could see that her face was very white, her lips tight under the dark lipstick in Anna’s shade.

She was a clay pigeon, fragile and yet priceless. She was all the days of my future, standing alone and unprotected.

Suddenly another figure came out of the hospital door. The lieutenant cursed softly. In explanation he said, “Wallace Rome, the legal eagle. He’ll foul things up. He knew Garron and he knows Miss Robinson.”

Suddenly my mind was working with speed and desperation. Wallace Rome. Something was wrong, horribly wrong. What had I said to him over the phone? Something was missing in that conversation. Of course! I had mentioned the raid. He should have immediately said, “What raid?” But he hadn’t said it. He should have said it, but he didn’t.

Kit had not heard him. She turned to walk slowly down the street.

“Maybe he won’t notice her,” the lieutenant whispered.

As I looked, Wallace Rome casually slipped his hand into his jacket pocket. I grabbed a potted fern and threw it through the plate glass window of the shop. Kit turned startled eyes toward the direction of the crash.

As the lieutenant reached for me, I shook his arm off and hurried toward the door. Wallace Rome had crouched; he pulled his hand half out of the pocket and I saw the gleam of metal.

A rifle spoke with an authoritative crack, and Rome staggered back. His white teeth shone. Kit, as she had been instructed, dropped flat. Rome aimed the weapon at her and car brakes screamed as I ran directly across the road.

There was only one thought in my mind, and that was to somehow get between Kit and the muzzle of that gun.

But two rifles spoke together and he coughed, dropped to his knees, and folded slowly over onto his face. Men ran toward us from all directions. Kit got up and I grabbed her in my arms. She was shivering and I was saying silly and sentimental words over and over...

And then she pushed me away.

You can’t live on the wrong side of the fence without paying. And I am paying. Oh, the other deal is all washed up. Fletcher was picked up, along with Cowlfax, in Miami. I turned state’s evidence and saved my own hide.

But the months go by and I keep paying. I live with Quinn and Molly now, and I’m a brakeman in the yards. The big-shot dreams are gone. I’m just an average, beaten-down guy.

Quinn is working to get me back on the cops, but it is an uphill fight. He may never make it.

He keeps telling them that I, in effect, supplied the trap, and I was the only one who caught on fast enough to save Kit. Rome was the money boy, and the one Anna had phoned. Yes, he was going to shoot, and take his chances. Maybe he had some out figured; he didn’t live to tell it.

But Kit distrusts me. She may never forgive me for the way I lied to her. That is my payment. Quinn has lost that expression of contempt, all there is left is pity.

Pity for a guy who got too big for his pants and tried to buy the world. I can keep going because I hope that some day she will forgive and relent. Now I can afford to wait. Some girls have to have hill-crest houses. All Kit has to have is trust and love. And that’s all I’ll have to give her.

Content

John D. MacDonald
Blonde Bait for the Murder Master

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five