Killdozer! (5 page)

Jones pursed his lips and took off his glasses as we came in. He was a dried-up little man, a stickler for detail but a pretty good man to work for. He told us to sit, handed cigarettes around.

“Boys, I want you to help me. I don’t have to tell you how the station is making out. I think we all are satisfied with it, but you know and I know that a small independent broadcasting station can’t make as much or pay as much as a big network outlet. Now, one of the network stations here is shutting down. It needs complete new equipment, and the corporation wouldn’t mind doing it. But since there are too many stations here already, and since we are equipped up to the hilt with all the latest, I rather think they’d like to take us over. They’d boost our power ten thousand watts. We’d run all their releases and therefore share in their income. You boys, as staff announcers, stand to get a twenty-per-cent raise. How’s it sound?”

“Swell,” said Jakie. I nodded.

“I’m sold on it,” said Jones. “If we could get Shanaman, the general manager of the Eastern Network, to feel the same way, we could come to terms. I’ve done all I could think of in a business way. But it’ll take a little more than that. If I can mellow the old boy down a bit with a swell dinner-party, I might get him to sign the papers then and there. I want you two to come and bring your women. It’ll be next Friday night. Shanaman’s bringing his wife. My house. You’ll be there?”

“Formal?” asked Jakie. Jones nodded.

“I’d rather not, Mr. Jones,” I said. “I sort of had an engagement—”

“Break it,” Jones said. “Shanaman’s interested in meeting you. As a matter of fact, your show is a high spot, a real selling point for the station. You’ve got to come. And bring that new wife of yours. I want to meet her.”

Jakie laughed and got up, slapping me on the back. “I’ll persuade him, Mr. Jones. We’ll be there, don’t worry.” He was a big fellow, that Feltnor. He had me rushed out of there before I knew what went
on. Cornering me in the corridor, he said, “Come on Eddie—be a sport. Don’t queer that party. It means a lot to me. Claire has been acting a little peculiar lately and that party ought to fix the trouble. No kidding, Eddie—you’ve got to do it.”

“I’ll see what Maria says,” I muttered, and headed for home.

Maria said she didn’t like the idea. We had a long argument about it. I pointed out that it was formal, that it was a business affair, that the eight people who were there knew each other very little and had nothing but the broadest interests in common, and that anyway I couldn’t avoid it. It was orders. I also mentioned the fact that Jakie wanted me to do it, and I was a good friend of his. Maria’s arguments were all old stuff to me, but for one new one. She was afraid that she wouldn’t be able to stand it. When she had been in more or less constant contact with people, she was conditioned to the influx of possessions. Now it was different. She feared it. It was months since she had been through it; she was afraid of what it might do to her. But I had my way, and Friday night found us walking into Jones’s place in Queens Village.

It was quite a layout. Jones had a nice income and used it. Big house, big rooms, big butler. We were the last to arrive. We got rid of our coats and were shown into the library, where cocktails were being served. I stopped at the door and looked around the room. Over in a corner Jones was talking to a stout old apple who seemed all jowls and boiled shirt. Shanaman, I surmised. Talking uninterestedly with Jones’s slightly washed-out wife, was Claire Feltner. I knew her well; she hung around the studio a lot. A nasty thought occurred to me; I noticed Claire there many a time when Jakie was out. Jones always seemed to be around at the time. I began to see why Jakie had been so anxious to bring Claire and Jones into the same room. He wanted to watch them. That was bad.

I rescued Jakie from the voluminous feminine counterpart of Shanaman. The network manager’s wife had poor Feltner in a corner and was pounding his ear frighteningly with an account of her husband’s metabolism.

Introductions were made all around, and I left Maria with Jakie
while I joined Jones and Shanaman. The talk was general and too loud. Just about then I began to wish I hadn’t come. That went on all the time I was there. I disliked particularly this business of our being in that big room free to wander from person to person for Lord knows how long until dinner was served. In a matter of minutes Maria could stumble across one of her little
poltergeists
, and then—well, in a matter of minutes Maria did.

Shanaman was building up to a terrific climax in an unfunny story, when I saw Maria across the room from me, looking from Shanaman to Mrs. Jones and back again. There was something about her stance, her eyes, that told me she was fighting the thing. I broke away from Shanaman as fast as I could. Not fast enough. Maria got to Mrs. Jones before I did, sat down beside her, began talking swiftly. As I got there, Mrs. Jones rose, glaring at Shanaman, and went over to her husband.

“What goes on?” I asked anxiously.

“Oh, Eddie, it happened again.” She would have cried if I hadn’t caught her hands, squeezed them until they hurt. “Shanaman plans to put a network crew in your station if he takes it over. Everyone will lose his job, except you, Eddie!”

“And you told that to Mrs. Jones?”

“Yes—don’t you see? She suspected it, and Shanaman knew he was going to do it! I couldn’t help myself, Eddie!”

“That’s all right, kid,” I whispered. “No hair off our necks.” I watched the Joneses. It seemed to me that he didn’t believe his wife. She was evidently furious with him for his stupidity and said so into his ear. He turned his back on her and went to Claire Feltner. She went over to see if she couldn’t pump some information out of Shanaman. Jakie stood near them, glumly watching his wife puckering up to Jones.

“Try to keep away from Jakie,” I said, turning back to Maria. But she had slipped away when I was looking at Jones. She was standing by the window behind me, kneading her hands and staring out into the night. I figured it was best to leave her alone as long as she could stand it. Meanwhile, I was going to try to keep the rest
of them away from her. I barged in on Shanaman’s conversation with Mrs. Jones. It was short and sweet. She was just winding up what must have been quite a scintillating piece of vituperation.

“—and don’t think I don’t know what you’re up to, you old wolf,” she was saying. She was hopping mad. Shanaman looked bewilderedly indignant. It was too late to do anything about it.

“My dear lady,” he said pompously, “I regret exceedingly that your suspicions should have reached such a state. Ah—Mr. Jones. Will you come here a minute?” Jones looked up, saw what was happening, came rabbiting over. I saw the studio deal flitting out the window when I saw Jones reach out and clip his wife across the mouth. Shanaman held up his hands in horror, then barged across the room to his wife.

Then everything happened at once. Maria popped up from nowhere, nudged Jakie Feltner, whispered in his ear, nodded toward Claire. Jakie roared, reached out, spun Jones around and smeared him with a terrific right hook. Shanaman, fear of publicity plastered all over his fat face, bolted for the door with his wife.

And that was the wind-up of Jones’s precious little dinner party. Maria filled in the details for me on the way home. It seemed that Jones had been seeing Jakie’s wife, and Maria, possessed, told Jakie how far it had gone, and he punched Jones’s mouth. Mrs. Jones’s hysterical calling of Shanaman’s bluff sprang, I imagine, from jealousy and the desire to hurt Jones. It was an unholy mess, one of those awful things that are awful when they happen and funny afterward. Except for one thing. Jones didn’t get up after Jakie knocked him down. He smashed his silly brains out on the brass andiron in the fireplace.

The rest of it was rough. When the trial was over and poor old Feltner got sent up for thirty years on a second-degree murder charge, there wasn’t much left for me. Unfavorable publicity pulled a lot of advertising contracts, and anyway, as I said, there are too many radio stations in this town. But the notoriety hadn’t finished with me when it took my living away from me. Eddie Gretchen turned out to be the guy with a thousand friends who never heard of him. The radio
game was strictly on the receiving end, for me. Old Shanaman’s bolting for the door the night of the murder hadn’t done him a bit of good; he was subpoenaed and put on the grill with the rest of us. I hadn’t liked the way he cried about it—after all, big shots and little, we were all in the same boat—and he got even with me by passing the word around the studios that I wasn’t to get so much as an audition. That, after seven years in radio! Yeah, it was rough. I’d always had money and I didn’t know how to go about being poor. I learned. Maria had a couple of grand in the cooler but that went quickly, along with what I’d saved, which wasn’t a hell of a lot. I hit the jolly old rock-ribbed bottom the day I tried to get a job as a studio page and got well treated until somebody remembered me and I got handed the rush. The smell even reached into publishing houses, and the feature articles I used to sell brought checks every six months instead of every two weeks. I sold a little stuff under a phony name; but for that Maria and I would have starved. We lost our place and our furniture and the car. Bad. But I couldn’t lose Maria. She almost left me right after the trial, feeling herself guilty of Jones’s murder. I talked her out of that, telling her that he had it coming to him anyway; and then she got morbid and turned on the gas one day. I got there in time, and the police emergency squad brought her around. After that she buckled down like the ace she was, and tried helping instead of hindering. God, when I think of her down on her four bones scrubbing floors, and rubbing her white hands raw on my shirts, I know what they mean when they say “For richer, for poorer”…

I stood out on the sidewalk in front of the radio playhouse and shivered because I had sold my overcoat six weeks before. There was nowhere else to turn to, and I hadn’t the gall to go back to Maria so early in the day. Uptown, downtown, crosstown—all the same to me.

A man walked up, looked me over, handed me a slip of paper. It said, “Could you tell me how to get to South Ferry from here?”

I said, “Sure. Take the Seventh Avenue subway—”

He shook his head, pointed to an ear. Deaf. I took the pencil he
offered, wrote down the directions. He tipped his hat, went his way. I remember wondering how a guy like that got such a nice warm coat. Some agency, I guessed. I got all my faculties and no overcoat. He’s a deaf mute and has an overcoat. I’ll take the overcoat.

Then the great idea hit me. I smacked my hands together, whooped like a drunken Indian, and headed at a dead run for the West Side, where Maria was trying to make a home for me out of an eleven-a-month cold water flat. I reached it, flung myself up three flights of stairs, fell gasping and moaning for breath inside the room. Maria didn’t know what to make of it, and figured even less when I got wind enough to explain. If she was possessed, I wanted to know, could she keep from tipping anybody off about it
if she wrote the information down?

“I don’t know, Eddie. I never tried it.”

“Well, try it, damn it. Try it!”

“H-how?”

I glanced at the ninety-eight cent alarm clock on the stove. “Come on, babe. Get your coat on. We’re going to get some money.”

She was used to me by this time or she never would have done it. I didn’t tell her until we reached the pawnshop that the money was coming from the one thing of value she’d hung onto—the star sapphire I’d given her as an engagement ring the day before we got married. Under the three golden spheres I relieved her of it, shoved an old envelope and a stub of pencil into her hands, and dragged her in.

I knew the broker well by that time. The only Irishman I’d ever seen in a hock shop. “Terry, me lad,” I shouted. “I’m about to do you a favor. Hock me this ring for eighty bucks and you can’t lose a thing.” I gave it to him. He grunted sourly. Maria started forward, about to speak. I shoved her toward a trunk, pointed at the paper and pencil. She grinned and began to write.

“I’ll give ye ten,” said Terence.

“And I’ll take me pathronage ilsewhere,” I mocked him.

“Twinty, an’ ye’re a young thief.”

“Sivinty-foive, ye grave-robber.”

“Twinty-two an’ a half, and be dommed to ye. It’s white gold, not platinum.”

“Platinum’s twenty bucks an ounce on the open market you pernicious old Gael, and gold’s thirty-five. Don’t blind me with your jeweler’s tricks.”

And still not an interruption from Maria.

Terence looked at the ring carefully through his glass. “Thirty dollars.”

“Will you make that thirty-two fifty?”

“I will that, and there I’m done.”

“You’re a good business man, Terence, and I’ll treat you right. You just went up ten dollars and I can afford to come down ten. That’s meeting you halfway at sixty-five dollars.” Maria’s pencil scribbled busily.

“Fifty dollars to get yez out o’ my store,” said the broker with a great effort.

“Fifty-seven fifty.”

We settled at fifty-five; I signed the book and we left. As soon as we were outside I snatched the envelope. Maria had written no less than twelve times, “Don’t be a fool. He only paid sixty for it when it was new.”

I kissed her then and there. “It works,” I breathed. “It works!”

She looked at the envelope. The truth will out,” she grinned. “But Eddie—I didn’t want to pawn that ring. I—”

“You dry up and leave it to me, pal,” I said. “Come home—I want you to dig up that dress of yours—you know, the black-brown one with the truffles on it.”

“Ruffles,” she said. “You eat truffles. But it’s an evening gown, Eddie. Where—”

“—are we going? West five-two street, babe, and we’re going to scrabble up all the dirt from gutter to gutter.” I stopped in front of a “Tuxedos to Hire” joint. “I’m going in here. You beat it home and pretty up.”

She did, under protest. I got myself a fair-enough dinner jacket, and brought it home. In two hours we looked like a million. I tucked the thin little roll into my pocket, and we started. We took the subway to
Fiftieth and caught a cab there to go to Fifty-second. A thirty-cent cab ride looks just as good as a three-dollar one at the far end of the line. I carried a battery of sharp pencils and Maria had my little black book.