Collection 1999 - Beyond The Great Snow Mountains (v5.0) (18 page)

“Did Weber come in late? I haven’t seen him.”

“Not yet. Say, wouldn’t it be funny if he took it? He’s just dopey enough to try something like that!”

They paid their checks and walked out. Cruzon stared blindly at his coffee. Something was wrong! What did they mean by saying it was a good joke? He remembered all they had previously said, about not giving out the name of the driver or the route until the last minute, but had there been other precautions? Had…could he have been duped?

His spoon rattled on his cup and the man beside him grinned. “You’d better take on a lot of that, friend. You’re in no shape to be driving.”

“Mind your own business, will you?” His irritation, fear, and doubt broke out, his tone made ugly by it.

The fat man’s eyes hardened. “It is my business, chum.” The man got to his feet and flipped open a leather case, displaying a detective’s badge. The name, Cruzon noted, was Gallagher. “We’ve enough trouble without you morning-after drivers.”

“Oh…I’m sorry, officer.” Get hold of yourself, get a grip, his subconscious was saying. “I’ll be careful. Thanks for the warning.”

Hastily, he paid his check and left. When he got into the truck, he saw the fat man standing by the building, watching him.

Watching
him
? But why should he? How could they be suspicious of him?

For the remainder of the day he drove so carefully he was almost an hour late in finishing deliveries. He checked in his truck, then hurried to his car and got in. Even more carefully, he drove home.

He saw it as soon as he entered the hallway. Restraining an impulse to seize the envelope and run, he picked it up and walked to his room. The key rattled in the lock, and he was trembling when he put the envelope down on the table and ripped open the flap. He thrust in his hand, fumbling feverishly for the first packet. He jerked it out.

Newspapers…just newspapers cut in the size and shape of bills!

Desperately, his heart pounding, he dumped the envelope out on the table and pawed over the packets. More newspapers.

That was what they meant, then, and the joke was on him.

On him? Or on Weber?

Only Weber was out of it; Weber was beyond shame or punishment. Weber was dead, and he had been killed for a packet of trimmed paper.

But they did not know, they could not know. Weber could not talk, and that crime, at least, was covered. Covered completely.

Cruzon dropped into a chair, fighting for sanity and reason. He must get rid of the envelope and the paper. That was the first thing. It might be months before they found Weber’s body, and he could be far away by then.

Frightened as he was, he gathered up the papers and, returning them to the envelope, slipped out to the incinerator and dumped them in.

Back in his room, he left the light off, then hastily stripped off his clothes and got into bed. He lay sleepless for a long, long time, staring out into the shadowed dark.

He was dressing the following morning when he first noticed his hands. They were red.

Red?
Blood on his hands!
The blood of…! He came to his feet, gasping as if ducked in cold water. But no! That was impossible! There had been no blood on his hands but his own, that scratch.

The scratch? He opened his hand and stared at it feverishly; he pawed at it. There was no scratch.

The blood had been Weber’s.

And this? But this was not the red of blood, it was brighter, a flatter red.

Leaving the house, he pulled on his gloves. A good deal of it had washed away, and there were parts of his hands it hadn’t touched. Most of it was on the palms and fingers.

All morning he worked hard, moving swiftly, crisply, efficiently. Anything to keep his mind off Weber, off the newspapers, off the strange red tinge that stained his hands. Then, at last, it was lunchtime, and he escaped his work and went to Barnaby’s almost with relief. Even removing his gloves did not disturb him, and nobody seemed aware of the red in between his fingers. A thought crept into his mind.
Was it visible only to him?

Cruzon was over his coffee when the two men came in again. Eddie sipped his coffee and listened feverishly to the men beside him.

This time they discussed a movie they had seen, and he fought back his anxiety to leave, and waited, listening.

The red on his hands, he thought suddenly, might have come from a package he handled. Something must have broken inside, and in his preoccupied state, he had not noticed.

Then Gallagher walked in and dropped onto a stool beside him. He smiled at Cruzon. “Not so bad this morning,” he said. “You must have slept well?”

“Sure,” he agreed, trying to be affable. “Why not?”

“You’re lucky. In my business, a man misses plenty of sleep. Like yesterday evening. We found a body.”

“A body?” There was no way they could connect him with it, even if it was Weber.

“Yeah. Man found a gun alongside the road.” Gallagher pulled a cheap, nickel-plated revolver from his pocket. “Not much account, these guns, but they could kill a man. Lots of ’em have. The fellow who found this gun, he brought it to us. We made a routine check, an’ what d’you think? Belongs to a fellow named John Weber. He bought it a couple of days ago.”

“John Weber?” So his name had been John? He had not known. “Has it been in the papers?”

“No, not yet. Well, anyway, that made us curious. A man buys a gun, then loses it right away, so we called this Weber, an’ you know what? He’d disappeared! That’s right! Landlady said his room hadn’t been slept in, and he hadn’t been to work. So we drove out to where this gun was lost and we scouted around.

There was an old, washed-out dirt track up a hill away from the surfaced road. Nobody seemed to have been up there in a long time, but right up there on the track, we found the body.”

“Where?”
Even as the incredulous word escaped him, he realized his mistake. He took a slow, deep breath before speaking again. “But you said nobody had been there? How could he—”

“That’s what we wondered. His head was battered, but he managed to crawl that far before he died. The killer had slugged him and dropped him over the rim of the pit.”

Cruzon was frightened. Inside, he was deathly cold, and when he moved his tongue, it felt stiff and clumsy. He wanted to get away; he wanted to be anywhere but here, listening to that casual, easy voice and feeling those mild, friendly blue eyes. He glanced hastily at his watch. “Gosh! I’ve got to go! I’ll be late with my deliveries!”

The detective dismissed his worry with a wave of the hand. “No need to rush. I feel like talking, so I’ll fix it with your boss. I’ll tell him you were helping me.”

Eddie had a feeling he was being smothered, stifled. Something…everything was wrong.

The gun, for instance. He had never given it a thought, having been anxious to get away without being seen. And Weber not dead, but crawling halfway to the road!

“I won’t take much longer,” Gallagher said, “it wasn’t much of a case.”

“But I should think it would be hard to solve a case like that. How could you find out who killed him? Or how he got there?”

“That isn’t hard. Folks figure the cops are dumb, but nobody is smart all the time. I ball things up, occasionally, and sometimes other cops do, but we’ve got something that beats them all. We’ve got an organization, a system.

“Now take this Weber. It didn’t take us long to get the dope on him. He’d only been in town a year, no outdoor fellow, he just bowled a little and went to movies. So what do we figure from that? That it must have been the killer who knew about the gravel pit. It was an abandoned pit, unused in years. Not likely Weber would know about it.

“Meanwhile, we find there’s an attempted payroll robbery where this Weber works. We figure Weber either did it or knew who did and was killed because of it. That adds up. So while some of the boys checked on him, others checked on the gravel pit.”

Gallagher flipped open a notebook. “It hadn’t been used in eight years. The company found a better source for gravel, but one of the guys in the department knew about kids who used to play there. So we started a check on truck drivers who hauled from there, oil field workers who knew about it, and the kids.

“The guy who’s in the department, he gave us a list. His name is Ernie Russell.”

Skinny Russell!

“He remembered them all. One was killed on Okinawa. One’s an intern in New York. A girl works down the street in a coffee shop, and you drive a parcel delivery truck. Funny, isn’t it? How things work out? All of you scattered, an’ now this brings it all back.”

“You…you mean that was the same pit where we used to play?”

“Sure, Eddie. An’ you know? You’re the only one who might have known Weber. You delivered to that office, sometimes.”

“I deliver to a lot of offices.” They had nothing on him. They were surmising, that was all. “I know few people in any of them.”

“That’s right, but suppose one of them called you?” The placid blue eyes were friendly. “Suppose one of them thought he saw you pick up the payroll envelope? Suppose he wanted a piece of it?”

The detective sipped coffee. “So it begins to add up. Suppose you were called by Weber? Weber was planning something because he bought that gun Saturday afternoon. He wanted to be on the safe side. And you knew about the gravel pit.”

“So what? That isn’t even a good circumstantial case. You can’t prove I ever saw Weber.”

“You’ve got something there. That’s going to be tough unless you admit it.”

He got to his feet. “I’ve got to go now. I’ve done nothing. I don’t want to talk to you.”

“Look, kid.” Gallagher was patient. “You can tell me about it now or later. You muffed it, you know, from beginning to end. We know you met him somewhere, an’ we can find it. Maybe it will take us a week, maybe two weeks or a month, but we’ll find it. We’ve got you on the payroll job, an’ we’ll get you on the killing, too, kid.”

“What do you mean, you’ve got me on the payroll job? I had nothing to do with it!”

Gallagher remained patient. “You’ve been trying to keep your hands out of sight. One of my boys was watching the house when you came out this morning. He was watching your hands, and he saw the red on them before you got your gloves on. He called me about it this morning. We checked your incinerator…closely packed papers have to be stirred around or they won’t burn. Only the edges a little, and they’ll brown over.

“That red on your hands? That guy in the payroll office, he’s a funny one. He handles three payrolls a week for eight years, an’ never lost one. He’s always got an angle. The day you stole that envelope, he took the real payroll over in a taxi, all alone. But the papers you handled, they had red dye on them…hard to wash off.”

Eddie Cruzon sat down on the stool again and stared blindly down at his coffee. He blinked his eyes, trying to think. Where was he now? What could he do?

“Another thing. Weber, he lives out in Westwood, an’ he called you from home. It was a toll call, see? We got a record of it.”

The fool! The miserable fool!

Gallagher got to his feet. “What do you say, kid? You haven’t a chance. Want to tell us about it? My wife, she’s havin’ some friends over, an’ I want to get home early.”

Cruzon stared at his coffee and his jaw trembled. He was cold, so awfully cold, all the way through. And he was finished…finished because he’d thought…

“I’ll talk.” His voice was no more than a whisper. “I’ll talk.”

THE MONEY PUNCH

I

T
HE GIRL IN the trench coat and sand-colored beret was on the sidelines again. She was standing beside a white-haired man, and as Darby McGraw crawled through the ropes, she was watching him.

Darby grinned at his second and trainer, Beano Brown. “That babe’s here again,” he said. “She must think I’m okay.”

“She prob’ly comes to see somebody else,” Beano said without interest. “Lots of fighters work out here.”

“No, she always looks at me. And why is that, you ask me? It’s because I’m the class of this crowd, that’s why.”

“You sure hate yourself,” Beano said. “These people seen plenty of fighters.” Beano leaned on the top rope and looked at Darby with casual eyes. The boy was built. He had the shoulders, a slim waist and narrow hips, and he had good hands. A good-looking boy.

“Wait until I get in there with Mink Delano. I’ll show ’em all something then. When I hit ’em with my right and they don’t go down, they do some sure funny things standing up!”

“You come from an awful small town,” Beano said. “I can tell that.”

Darby moved in, feeling for the distance with his left. He felt good. Sammy Need, the boy he was working with, slipped inside of Darby’s left and landed lightly to the ribs. Darby kept his right hand cocked. He would like to throw that right, just once, just to show this girl what he could do.

He liked Sammy, though, and didn’t want to hurt him. Sammy was fast, and Darby wasn’t hitting him very often, but that meant nothing. He rarely turned loose his right in workouts, and it was the right that was his money punch. That right had won his fights out in Jerome, and those fights had gotten him recommended to Fats Lakey in L.A.

Fats was his manager. Fats had been a pool hustler who dropped into Jerome one time and met some of the guys in the local fight scene. He’d been looking for new talent, and so the locals had talked McGraw into going to the coast and looking him up. With nine knockouts under his belt, Darby was willing.

He felt good today. He liked to train and was in rare shape. He moved in, and as he worked, he wondered what that girl would say if she knew he had knocked out nine men in a row. And no less than six of these in the first round. Neither Dempsey nor Louis had that many kayoes in their first nine fights.

When he had worked six rounds, he climbed down from the ring, scarcely breathing hard. He started for the table to take some body-bending exercise and deliberately passed close to the girl. He was within ten feet of her when he heard her say distinctly, “Delano will win. This one can’t fight for sour apples.”

Darby stopped, flat-footed, his face flushing red with sudden anger. Who did she think she was, anyway, talking him down like that! He started to turn, then noticed they were paying no attention to him, hadn’t noticed him, in fact, so he wheeled angrily and went on to the table.

I’ll show ’em! he told himself. He was seething inside. Why, just for that, he’d murder Delano; knock him out, like the others, in the very first round!

Darby McGraw’s anger had settled to a grim, bitter determination by the night he climbed into the ring with Mink Delano. Fats Lakey was standing behind his corner, swelling with importance, a long cigar thrust in his fat, red cheek. He kept talking about “my boy McGraw” in a loud voice.

Beano Brown crawled into Darby’s corner as second. He was not excited. Beano had seen too many of them come and go. He had been seconding fighters for twenty-two years, and it meant just another sawbuck to him, or whatever he could get. He was a short black man with one cauliflowered ear. Tonight he was bored and tired.

Darby glanced down at the ringside and saw the girl in the beret. She glanced at him, then looked away without interest.

“The special event was a better fight than this semifinal will be,” he heard her say. “I can’t see why they put this boy in that spot.”

Darby stood up. He was mad clear through. I’ll show her! he told himself viciously. I’ll show her! He wouldn’t have minded so much if she hadn’t had wide gray eyes and lovely, soft brown hair. She was, he knew, almost beautiful.

They went to the center of the ring for their instructions. The crowd didn’t bother him. He was impatient, anxious to get started and to feel his right fist smashing against Mink’s chin. He’d show this crowd something, and quick! Why, it took them four hours to bring Al Baker back to his senses after Baker stopped that right with his chin!

The bell clanged and he wheeled and went out fast. Delano was a slim, white, muscled youngster who fought high on his toes. Darby moved in, feinted swiftly, and threw his right.

Something smashed him in the body, and then a light hook clipped him on the chin. He piled in, throwing the right again, but a fast left made him taste blood and another snapped home on his temple. Neither punch hurt, but he was confused. He steadied down and looked at Mink. The other boy was calm, unruffled.

Darby pawed with his left, but his left wasn’t good for much, he knew. Then he threw his right. Again a gloved fist smashed him in the ribs. Darby bored in, landing a light left, but taking a fast one to the mouth. He threw his right and Mink beat him to it with a beautiful inside cross that jolted him to his heels. The bell sounded and he trotted back to his corner.

“Take your time, boy,” Beano said. “Just take your time. No hurry.”

Darby McGraw was on his feet before the bell sounded. He pulled up his trunks and pawed at the resin. This guy had lasted a whole round with him, and this after he’d sworn to get him in the first, too. The bell rang and he lunged from his corner and threw his right, high and hard.

A fist smashed into his middle, then another one. He was hit three times before he could get set after the missed punch. Darby drew back and circled Mink. Somehow he wasn’t hitting Delano. He was suddenly vastly impatient. Talk about luck! This guy had it. Darby pawed with his left, then unleashed his right. Mink moved in and the right curled around his neck. He smiled at Darby, then smashed two wicked punches to the body.

Darby was shaken. His anger still burning within him, he pawed Delano’s left out of the way and slammed a right to the body, but Mink took it going away and the glove barely touched him.

Darby stepped around, set himself to throw his right, but Mink sidestepped neatly, taking himself out of line. Before Darby could change position, a left stabbed him in the mouth. Darby ducked his head and furrowed his brow. He’d have to watch this guy. He would have to be careful.

Delano moved in now, landing three fast left jabs. Darby fired his right suddenly, but it slid off a slashing left glove that smashed his lips back into his teeth and set him back on his heels. He took another step back and suddenly Delano was all over him. Before Darby could clinch, Mink hit him seven times.

Three times in the following round he tried with his right. Each time he missed. When the bell ended the round, he walked wearily back to his corner. He slumped on the stool. “Use your left,” Beano told him. “This boy, he don’t like no lefts. Use a left hook!”

Darby tried, but he had no confidence in that left of his. It had always been his right that won fights for him. All he had to do was land that right. One punch and he could win. Just one. He feinted with his right and threw his left. It was a poorly executed hook, more of a swing, but it caught Mink high on the head and knocked him sprawling on the canvas.

Darby was wild. He ran to a corner and waited, hands weaving. Delano scrambled to his feet at the count of nine and Darby went after him with a rush and threw a roundhouse right. Mink ducked inside of it and grabbed Darby with both hands.

Wildly, McGraw tore him loose and threw his right again. But Mink was crafty and slid inside and clinched once more. Darby could hear someone yelling to use his left. He tried. He pushed Delano away and cocked his left, but caught a left and right in the mouth before he could throw it.

In the last round of the fight he was outboxed completely. He was tired, but he kept pushing in, kept throwing his right. He didn’t need to look at the referee. He kept his eyes away from the girl in the trench coat. He did not want to hear the decision. He knew he had lost every round.

Fats Lakey was waiting in the dressing room, his fat face flushed and ugly. “You bum!” he snarled. “You poor, country bum! I thought you were a fighter! Why, this Delano is only a preliminary boy, a punk, and he made a monkey out of you! Nine knockouts, but you can’t fight! Not for sour apples, you can’t fight!”

That did it. All the rage and frustration and disappointment boiled over. Darby swung his right. Fats, seeing his mistake too late, took a quick step back, enough to break the force of the blow but not enough to save him. The right smashed against his fat cheek and Lakey hit the floor on the seat of his pants, blood streaming from a cut below his eye.

“I’ll have you pinched for this!” he screamed. He got up and backed toward the door. “I’ll get you thrown in the cooler so fast!”

“No, you won’t!” It was the white-haired man who had sat with the girl in the beret. They were both there. “I heard it all, Lakey, and if he hadn’t clipped you, I would have. Now beat it!”

Fats Lakey backed away, his eyes ugly. The white-haired man had twisted a handkerchief around his fist and was watching him coolly.

II

W
hen Fats was gone, the girl walked over to Darby. “Hurt much?”

“No,” he said sullenly, keeping his eyes down. “I ain’t hurt. That Delano couldn’t break an egg!”

“Lucky for you he couldn’t,” she said coolly. “He hit you with everything but the stool.”

Darby’s eyes flashed angrily. He was bitter and ashamed. He wanted no girl such as this to see him beaten. He had wanted her to see him win.

“He was lucky,” he muttered. “I had an off night.”

“Oh?” Her voice was contemptuous. “So you’re one of those?”

His head came up sharply. “One of what?” he demanded. “What do you mean?”

“One of those fighters who alibi themselves out of every beating,” she said. “A fighter who is afraid to admit he was whipped. You were beaten tonight—you should be man enough to admit it.”

He pulled his shoelace tighter and pressed his lips into a thin line. He glanced at her feet. She had nice feet and good legs. Suddenly, memory of the fight flooded over him. He recalled those wild rights he had thrown into empty air, the stabbing lefts he had taken in the mouth, the rights that had battered his ribs. He got to his feet.

“All right,” he said. “If you want me to admit it, he punched my head off. I couldn’t hit him. But next time I’ll hit him. Next time I’ll knock him out!”

“Not if you fight the way you did tonight,” she said matter-of-factly. “Fighting the way you do, you wouldn’t hit him with that right in fifty fights. Whoever told you you were a fighter?”

He glared. “I won nine fights by knockouts,” he said defiantly. “Six in the first round!”

“Against country boys who knew even less about it than you did, probably. You might make a fighter,” she admitted, “but you aren’t one now. You can’t win fights with nothing but a right hand.”

“You know all about it,” he sneered. “What does a girl know about fighting, anyway?”

“My father was Paddy McFadden,” she replied quietly, “if you know who he was. My uncle was lightweight champion of the world. I grew up around better fighters than you’ve ever seen.”

He picked up his coat. “So what?” He started for the door, but feeling a hand on his sleeve, he stopped. The white-haired man was holding out some money to him.

“I was afraid Lakey might forget to pay you, so I collected your part of this.”

“Thanks,” Darby snapped. He took the money and stuffed it into his pocket. He was out the door when he heard Beano.

“Mr. McGraw?”

“Yeah?” He was impatient, anxious to be gone.

“Fats, he forgot to give me my sawbuck.”

The Negro’s calm face quieted Darby. “Oh?” he said. “I’m sorry. Here.” He reached for the money. It wasn’t very much. He took a twenty from the thin packet of bills and handed it to Beano. “Here you are, and thanks. If I’d won, I’d have given you more.”

He ducked out through the door and turned into the damp street, wet from a light drizzle of rain. Suddenly, he was ashamed of himself. He shouldn’t have talked to the girl that way. It was only that he had wanted so much to make a good showing, to impress her, and then he had lost. It would have been better if he had been knocked out. It would have been less humiliating than to take the boxing lesson he’d taken.

With sudden clarity he saw the fight as it must have looked to others. A husky country boy, wading in and wasting punches on the air, while a faster, smarter fighter stepped around him and stuck left hands in his face.

What would they be saying back home now? He had told them all he would be back, welterweight champion of the world. His nine victories had made him sure that all he needed was a chance at the champion and he could win. And he’d been beaten by a comparatively unknown preliminary boxer!

Hours later he stopped at a cheap hotel and got a room for the night. What was it she had said?

“You can’t win fights with nothing but a right hand.”

She had been right, of course, and he’d been a fool. His few victories had swollen his head until he was too cocky, too sure of himself. Suddenly, he realized how long and hard the climb would be, how much he had to learn.

F
OR A LONG time he lay awake that night, recalling those stabbing lefts and the girl’s scorn. Yet she’d come to his dressing room. Why? She had bothered enough to talk to him. Darby McGraw shook his head. Girls had always puzzled him. But this one seemed particularly puzzling.

In the morning he recovered his few possessions at the hotel where he and Fats had stayed. Fats was gone, leaving the bill for him to pay. He paid it and had twelve dollars left.

He found Beano Brown leaning against the wall at Higherman’s Gym. “Beano,” he said hesitantly, “what was wrong with my fight last night?”