Hard Case Crime: Baby Moll (3 page)

The letter would tell Elaine what I had never told her: about a wife named Jean, whose home for five years had been an institution in New York State until in a lucid moment some time ago she had slashed herself and bled to death. It would be the beginning of ruin. Maybe Elaine could take it. But if her mother and father found out... They weren’t sure of me, anyway. And if they should start looking into my past, I was through.

Rudy stood near the front window watching the cars go by in the street, jingling change in his pocket. I heard the telephone and picked up the receiver without thinking about it.

“Pete?” Elaine said cheerfully. “You break your leg or something?”

“I was just leaving,” I said thickly. “Be right over.”

“Nothing wrong, is there?”

“No. Of course not. See you in a little while.”

I put the receiver down. Rudy yawned. “We’ll have to get moving. Macy was expecting us today.”

“You bastard,” I said.

“I’m sorry, Pete,” he said, sounding as if he really meant it.

Elaine answered the door when I rang the bell. She was wearing a pastry-pink semiformal dress and the edges of her short black hair sparkled. A welcoming smile faded when she saw me.

“Pete, you’re not dressed!”

I went on inside. “Anyone else home?”

She frowned as if she were beginning to get angry with me. “No. Mother and Dad left ten minutes ago. Why—”

I couldn’t look at her. “I’m going away for a few days, Elaine. I have to leave tonight.”

She didn’t get it right away. She stood silently looking at me as if I were out of my mind.

“What are you talking about, Pete?” Her voice was high.

It was getting worse by the second. I tried not to yell at her because of the hurt I was feeling. “I just said I have to go away. That’s all. I’ll be back in a few days.”

“Oh.” Her hands brushed at the crisp ruffles on her dress. “It’s kind of sudden, isn’t it? Where are you going that you have to leave in such a hurry?”

“To the south. It’s — business. I didn’t know about it until a few minutes ago.”

She put a hand to her cheek. Her mouth turned down at the corners. “Nice of you to come by and tell me about it.”

“Damn it, Elaine, don’t—”

She took two quick steps and put her arms around
me. Her eyes were frightened. “Pete, what is it? You’re acting — I never saw you like this. Are you in some kind of trouble? Is that — Oh, Pete, what’s the matter?”

“Does anything have to be the matter? I’m just going to Castile for a few days.”

“Tell me why,” she whispered. “You can do that.”

I held her. “No. I — It’s not imp—”

She broke away from me, looked at me, her eyes full of rage and hurt. “You don’t really love me so much after all, do you?”

“There are some things it’s better for you not to—”

“
What
things? What are you talking about? This morning that car — now you suddenly have to leave town — ” Her voice broke. “All right, leave. Go ahead and leave, Pete. But don’t come back. Ever. Not until you think I’m important enough in your life to help you when you need help.”

I walked to the door. It wasn’t doing any good to stay there.

“I love you, Elaine,” I said quietly. “I’m not really in trouble. A long time ago I worked for a man. A big and important man. I guess you’d call him a gangster. I owe my life to him. Now I’m going to pay an installment on it. The last payment, I hope.”

I opened the door. She tried to stop me. “No, Pete! Whatever it is, don’t go!”

I kept walking, out to the car. She followed me, caught my arm. “Please, Pete. It’s all right, I’m not angry with you, just don’t go, stay with me, please!”

“I’ll come back,” I said.

She was crying now. “What are you going to do?”

“This man I worked for, his name is Macy Barr. Somebody’s
trying to kill him. I’ve got to find out who. It’s the only chance we’ve got, Elaine. This time I’ll make sure the past stays dead. Believe me.”

I held her suddenly and kissed her, then got into the car quickly. She watched me silently, holding both arms across her stomach, hurting too much to speak. I saw her image in the mirror as I drove away, then the drive twisted and I couldn’t see her any more. Once I thought I heard her call me, but maybe it was just a sound I made myself.

Rudy and I drove south fast. I discouraged conversation. I was thinking of how Macy had always had his way, even though it seemed for a while that I might make it stick when I went to him that day and told him I was quitting.

He had looked up at me irritably when I said it, as if I were trying to be funny in a way he didn’t appreciate.

“You’re what?”

I told him again. “I’m leaving,” I said.

He looked at me with his eyes narrowing but spoke calmly. “Oh? Where do you think you’re going?”

“I’m not sure. Upstate somewhere. Where I can lie in the sun and fish if I feel like.”

He was playing along with me now, not sure how serious I was. “Then what?”

“Get a job. Work with my hands. A construction job, maybe. Something useful. I’d like that.”

His mouth opened and closed. He couldn’t cope with this right away. Nobody had ever tried to talk to him like that. I should have been scared but I wasn’t. I was perfectly calm. Maybe that helped put it over. That and the fact that he knew me well and liked me.

“What’s the matter? Don’t I pay you enough?” He was
looking for a reason he could understand, and so was defeated already.

“You pay me enough.”

He picked up a pencil and turned it over rapidly in his big fingers. His eyes were hard and chill, like ice on marble. “I’ll be damned,” he said, somewhat awed. “Five years, and then you turn up in here one morning and tell me you’re through.” His lips formed a stubborn, dangerous line. “You know more about me than any man alive. You don’t just quit. What’s the matter with you?”

“I quit,” I said.

He looked at me steadily for over a minute, then I could see the doubt in his eyes, and the lines of his mouth soften. “You... kid,” he said. “You... punk kid. College boy. Trouble with you is, you got too much education. Too many ideas crammed into your brain. Like your dad.” He spread his hands. “Why? Just tell me why. Tell me something reasonable. You’re not happy?”

“No. I’m not happy. I don’t know if I ever will be. Maybe it’s not important. Maybe I just want a change. My side of life has always been the side with its face in the gutter. I’m tired of neon sunsets and living at night. Maybe I want a woman who’s never been rented out like a lending library book.”

He lit a cigarette and watched the match burn, the charred wood curling slowly like a dying thing. “You nut. A regular nut. That’s what I got. I kept you from drinking yourself to death once, didn’t I, boy?”

I nodded. He seemed about to go on, then caught his breath. “Oh, what the hell. I can’t say nothin’ to you. You might as well go. Feeling the way you do you wouldn’t be no good to me. I never understood you. You’re the
biggest screwball I ever knew. Sometimes I think you could tell me to spit and make me like it. You shouldn’t have any trouble. They don’t even have your phone number downtown you’re so clean.”

When I hesitated he told me to get out. He stopped me with a word when I reached the door.

“You know Lollipop, Pete?”

There was a hard surge of fear to smother the rising happiness and relief I was feeling. “I know what it stands for.”

“I’m soft in the head for letting you walk out on me alive,” he said tonelessly. “Maybe I got to know you too well. Maybe I’m soft because of your old man, remembering what a hell of a good lawyer he was—”

“Don’t talk to me about the bastard.”

“Don’t ever give me reason to call somebody like Lollipop,” he finished. “I can’t help how much you know. But I can do something about it. Remember that!”

“I’ll remember,” I said.

I flipped a cigarette stub into the cool air streaming outside the car window, put my face into my hands, trying to press the ache from my eyes with my fingertips. For many months I had slept with a revolver tied to my wrist, always careful of the strangers around me, of the shadows at my back. No one ever came. Gradually I learned how to forget the way it had been: the tense crowded nights, living at the edge of a scream, nerves straining and alert for a look, a footstep, a gleam of light on knife or gun; trusting nothing, not the secretive men who gave information in whispers, nor the whisky drunk in locked bedrooms in a vain hope for relaxation, nor the silken flesh and long hot touch of many women.

“What’s it like down there now?” I asked Rudy.

“There’s a squeeze on,” he said, glancing at me. “Stan Maxine’s behind it. You remember Stan?”

“I remember him,” I said dryly.

“Stan’s a big boy now. Got a taste for big money. He has an idea that Macy runs too much. Maxine’s got important friends upstairs. Guys who believe in taking care of their own. Macy’s owned South Florida for years but he doesn’t come from north of the Mediterranean and some of the wheels resent that. They wouldn’t try to move one of their own boys into Macy’s territory but if Maxine cut in they’d look the other way.”

“Why doesn’t Macy slap him down?”

Rudy shook his head slowly. “Who knows?” He paused, hunting for the right way to tell me what was on his mind. “You know how it was when you were with him, Pete. Macy owned everything then. He got his cut on every drop of bootleg, every deck of morph and stick of tea, every policy slip. There wasn’t any two-bit gambler or waterfront loan shark who wasn’t under Macy’s thumb. He told everybody what to do. From the crummiest cat house to police headquarters to the union halls. Macy musta owned a thousand people in five or six counties.”

“You trying to say Macy doesn’t run the show any more?”

“Not like he used to. I just run errands nowadays, I’m not on the inside like you used to be. But I can tell Macy’s slipping. He had a couple of props knocked out from under him. When you got as much territory as Macy does, you got to work hard and have some smart boys to keep the organization clicking. But he never found anybody as good as you to check on the boys up the line and
finger the ones who were pocketing more than their share of the gravy, cheating Macy on the cut. Then there was a shakeup in coptown and some of Macy’s pals got kicked out. Macy had to sweat out a local crime commission probe and close down gambling here and there until things cooled some. All those guys were interested in was gambling and a couple of murders and they didn’t touch anything else. But it threw Macy off stride and it seems like he never caught up. Sometimes I think he don’t care. He stopped working so hard. Took trips. Stayed down at his place on the island a lot instead of in town.

“Then word got around that he wasn’t so tough any more and the boys started cheating him blind.

“Anyhow that’s what I’ve heard. The cuts aren’t so fat these days. Hard times, the boys say. But I hear the bootleg and dope shipments haven’t slowed down none. Maxine’s watched this going on and now he’s starting to feel his muscle.”

“And Macy’s not doing anything about it?”

“Right now he and Maxine are sort of watching each other. Smiles with a gun in the pocket. See?”

“Cold war, huh?”

“Like that.”

I sat back, thinking about Macy Barr. Things were going bad for him. Once he had been absolute, a ruthless tyrant in a tiny rich empire, who would roll up his sleeves and use his own hands on those it was necessary to impress with his power. Now he was beginning to feel his years. Maybe Maxine would get him. Maybe it would be the Treasury boys finding chinks in the legitimate front constructed over the years by a squad of expensive lawyers. At any rate, somebody would get him, because
once his kind of luck began to sour he was finished.

I had a different life now. I didn’t want to step back into his. I didn’t want to die along with him. But it wasn’t my choice to make. I felt helpless. Resentment heated my throat. Each passing mile shoved me deeper into the web from which I might not escape. After this job there would be others. Macy would find a reason to keep me around. I swallowed grimly. I’d kill him myself before I’d let that happen.

Rudy pushed the big Pontiac hard along the wide highway, hitting better than ninety, slowing as little as possible for the clusters of towns that were little more than winking traffic lights, darkened buildings, bright angles of neon. Outside of Port Wentworth the highway widened by two lanes illuminated by tall curved posts tipped with dazzling bluish lights. We were in an industrial suburb. Long blocks of warehouses with small windows stretched along the roadway behind chain-link fencing. Half a mile ahead red warning beacons winked atop huge silver globes in a chemical storage yard.

My eyelids were heavy and I thought about closing my eyes to rest them. Instead I reached for a cigarette. If I had closed my eyes, my face would have been shot off in another minute.

A hundred yards ahead a car spurted onto the highway and stopped directly in the path of the speeding Pontiac. In the second it took Rudy to whip out a curse and put his foot to the brake we had traveled a third of that distance. I glanced at the speedometer. We were going 105 miles an hour. Try to stop a car going that fast in two hundred feet. Rudy knew it, too, and I heard him groan helplessly as we skidded toward the other car. It was a black Ford,
I saw now. I saw something else, too, as Rudy wrestled with the wheel, trying to ease the Pontiac to the other side of the highway. The tires were screaming. I ducked below the dash an instant before the right side of the windshield was blasted out with a shotgun aimed from the Ford.

Rudy yelled and I felt the car lurch as it shot across the corrugated safety zone. I barely straightened up, and had no time to grab the wheel, as the heavy car plunged down an embankment. In the space of a heartbeat, the Pontiac hit, throwing me against the dash. I saw one of the concrete lamp posts rush toward us, then veer to one side. We hadn’t slowed down much. There was a hideous shrieking sound of torn metal as the post was sideswiped. The car rocked, the back end starting to swing around as we slammed through a board fence. Something hit my head. The seat seemed to tip sharply and throw me out. I had no sensation of hitting the concrete pavement inside the fence.