Brain Guy: A gang killer meets his match in a TNT blonde (29 page)

He caught the tag end of a sentence. “Reform school. Nex’ stop for me and whatta hell. Too smart for them lunkheads and they knew it, an’ hiding us done no good. I hacked, was in odd jobs for ginks like Paddy, a lil pimpin’, boozerunnin’, but nothin’ much — ”

“Your parents dead like mine?” asked Bill, patriotically sad.

“What the hell you got ‘gainst my parents?”

“Not a damn thing.”

“Shut up. The ole lady wasn’t a bad un.”

Bill wanted him to speak about his folk for no reason at all. What’d he care? Far behind the haze of drink in which his body was etherized, he felt he didn’t trust McMann, McMann had no parents, had been born like a devil without them, a devil sent to lead him into hell. Drugged, inert as he was, this flicker of thought was shocking him, his conscience laboring against the red McMann who wasn’t a human, whose thoughts were hidden, whom he distrusted. What was he thinking of, what did he mean to do, and who but a fool could trust this gab of childhood and old ladies?

“April first isn’t far off and we need dough to fix the clubhouse proper.” McMann stated they ought to see Spat and give the bozo a chance, Spat was a numberbook with connections. And they needed dough. Sure. Wasn’t he figuring on a joint in Harlem and figuring bigger jobs, like ferinstance, how about a kidnapping of some big shot’s kid, sure, why not? Lots of mugs in booze and numbers with kids they could grab for ransom, sure, why not, big dough in one lump…. Bill was dazed with a sense of I-told-you-so, as if one astute segment of him were boasting to another, more naïve Bill. Double damn right. Always McMann led further on, further into hell. Even now with the cursed devil sentimental about childhood he had but to say the word of God, the word
dough,
and the devil was ready for something else. McMann was leaning on his elbows. He declared what they needed was a ransom job. They had the kids, and it was easy. Bill filled the glasses. Kidnapping paid well if you got away with it. He wouldn’t put a thing past McMann. “I bet you got the details ready.”

“You have,” said McMann; “ain’t you the brain?” He laughed for a long time at this perpetually funny joke.

“You plastered it on me for good?”

“Why not?”

“Anything goes twisty and I’ll be the goat.”

“If you know the answers, why ask ‘em?” He was staring at Bill’s face every other second, glancing away amused, as if the joke were still there.

“That’s it,” cried Bill, infuriated. “Just careful: I’m goat for the slip-up. I don’t blame you.” Life taught the lesson, the survival of the most cunning. What a damn fool he was to speak so seriously! He smiled. “Hell with it. Tomorrow’s another day.”

“Down the hatch.” McMann grinned, his bony head nodding from side to side, the high skull-cap coming straight down to the eye-ridge, where, deeply sunk, the reddish eyes glinted, the only live things in his face. Just like Duffy’s, thought Bill. And Duffy had to go. It was them or Duffy…. McMann’s cheekbones, jaw, slitted mouth, were impassive and brutal, not from choice, but from creation. What could such a man think? So had life cut him forth from the womb, made him what he was, a civilized beast obeying the principles of a jungle society. Climb the ladder. The drink was strong and amiable in Bill, pounding him on the shoulder, drawing the men together as if it were the mutual crony. He was sorry for McMann, his head tumblesaulting so that it was impossible to say whether he, Bill Trent, was being sorry or some other groggy Bill. “Life runs on like a river,” he orated, boozily philosophic. “You follow the river. Looka me. Good family. Education. A good job. And I’m a wolf. Looka me. Terrible. A crook, a murderer. Don’t you think I’m not spoiling my brother. I see it. Bad enough I ruin myself, but I’m taking him with me. I see it. I’m not a fool altogether. He should never have come to me. Getting him a job, I shouldn’t have caused him to lose it. He spends my dirty money and he’ll come to no good with me. What can I do? I can’t back out. I don’t want to back out. I’m not a bad fellow, but I got to have dough.”

“Tha’s the way it goes,” said McMann with profound acquiescence. “Two killin’s on me hands. What’d the priest say, huh? I don’ go to priests even if they’re clams. I trust nobody, not one livin’ guy.” He smiled, asking approval for his code. The city in which they sat had never been built. They needed one another that second in the softening of their souls, using one another as priest, holding this mutual confessional in a strange place. Beyond the window the city gripped the earth with a fist of stone, the squared pyramided city of the millions. They were lonely.

“Looka me,” cried Bill, driving nail after nail into his cross. “Months since I’ve been with respectable people. This what I live for? Living and eating with gangsters and whores?”

“Everybody’s a lousy whiner,” said McMann. “What’s the use? So what? You oughta be glad you’d a fat time of it for so many years. Hell, you had a fat time, so what you bitchin’ for?”

Bill hated him, happy his face was fiery, his eyes turning on drunken orbits. McMann couldn’t see his hate. He was afraid of him. Even now he might be reading the hate behind his eyes. If it’d suit him, I’d be the next after Duffy. He was sorry. It would’ve been better if they’d been real friends. Now suppose he grabbed a knife and stabbed it into McMann as one would into a wild beast. Why wait to be slashed? That’d be a real brain guy. You let the head decide what was best. He glanced up as if he’d been away a week. The tempter, satanic, formidable. Oh, McMann. McMann wasn’t human. He was so gifted. He could destroy him when he was utterly lost. McMann had compelled him to be an accessory to murder. What next? Kidnapper, pimp, dope-peddler? How low? Forgive me, not my fault. McMann’s, the bastard devil. He’ll make a murderer out of me yet … knife. He drank and his heart plotted. If he killed him, there’d be an end to everything. He’d be able to quit. Not too late. He thought murder, concealing his devil’s blood lust. It was a lie. He wouldn’t quit. Quitting didn’t put dough in your pocket. He needed dough. “Sometimes I’d like to kill you, Red.”

“Me, too.” His eyes glared as if he were happy to confess his mind. They smiled at the truth spoken, like brothers united by a single ambition. “Have a drink. You’re a good guy even as I says to Paddy when we hooked up.”

“It’s a long time. Every day the future shows bigger.”

“Dog eat dog. They don’t eat us, we eat them. I don’t eat you, you eat me. The way it goes. A dinner party, a big feed, tha’s all.”

“The big feed.” He laughed. “That’s funny.”

“An’ it tastes good.”

“But some dogs are buddies like you’n me.” He heeled McMann, lounging in the easy chair near the window, mapping out his relation to McMann like a mathematician. He allowed for time, McMann was unarmed. But he could drop hand in pocket and snap out a five-inch blade by pressing a little button. He’d be on Mac in a jiffy. Not ten feet separated them. There was no convenient chair for McMann to swing. He had the knife, he’d get the first punch in. He casually brushed his hand against his pocket. The knife filled the pocket. The button on top of the bone sheath faced the rear of the room. It wasn’t murder in his thought but the exhilarated acting-out of a simple equation involving length and time, McMann the completion of all formulas. He wasn’t even surprised he should finally come to murder. It had to come. You accepted life as it was. Better for him to be armed at the showdown than McMann. McMann hadn’t needed him for a long time. McMann destroyed what was of no use. What was the use being a brain guy if you didn’t act on it?

Glass in hand, McMann staggered towards the table where the bottles of whisky and ginger ale stood. Bill thought: I’m going to kill a drunk. It didn’t occur to him he was drunk, too, his mind finishing up the last decisions and moves in a chess game begun long ago. He allowed for the glass McMann’d heave at him. Getting up with his glass, he circled the table which had become a possible barricade, a pawn obstructing his victory. His hand dived in his pocket. The knife was out, the button clicking, five inches springing from his fist. He lunged it forward deep into McMann’s side. The glassful of whisky into which McMann had been pouring ginger ale dropped to the carpet. McMann silently grabbed one of the bottles, his red eyes amazed, angry. Blood gushed. The knife was out. “You coke,” cried McMann. Bill felt it freed from the sheath of flesh, tightening his fingers into McMann’s neck so no more words could come. Face to face almost, their drunken bitter breaths mingling, he plunged the knife with a continuation of motion and the first attack, remorseless, ultimately successful, into McMann’s heart, who, choking, fell forward upon his attacker like a lover, a drunk surrendering himself to the care of a bosom pal. The bottle, gripped, eddied from his slack fingers, rolling across the table. Stopped by the whisky bottle, the ginger ale ran out from the narrow neck as if it too had been murdered.

Bill lowered the body to the floor. McMann lay as Duffy. It was strange to see in the one day the
killer
equal to the victim. Bill thought: I can’t make it look like suicide, not with that extra stab in the side. He took McMann’s gloves out of his overcoat, wiping the blade and throwing it into the basket. With another handkerchief he rubbed the glasses and bottles free from fingerprints. The ginger-ale bottle he set up on its bottom as one assists a drunk to his feet. No sitting up for Mac. There were no clues. Even a fingerprint’d mean nothing. He wasn’t fingerprinted, even though he might be. There were no clues. Still wearing McMann’s gloves, he hung on the outer door-knob: “Not To Be Disturbed.” Hotels these days provided for everything. The corridor was empty. He’d grown to expect emptiness and a lack of witnesses whenever he pulled a job off. He was lucky.

He was elated. It was a joyous thing to consider that so tough a bird could be wiped out in a second. Showed how equal people were after all. His heaving breath stank of whisky. He walked downstairs. It was all over. He hadn’t stepped into McMann’s shoes, but he wore his gloves. There were things to be done. He stripped the gloves from his hands, holding them stylishly in one fist, then dropping them in the gutter. He boarded the Broadway subway, soothed by the yellow gross files of faces. In that light, in that mutual linkage of lives for an indifferent second, he felt at home. It was more transient than a railroad trip. Nobody took the slightest interest in anyone else, not even a pair of legs to magnetize the males, nothing but a drab group in a long swaying car traveling through a dank diseased smell, which held blue and white lights and sudden stops where they got off and came on with no significance or nope. It was the ideal sanctuary for a murderer. When the train stopped at Times Square, he hurried off. In a cafeteria he ordered a sandwich and a cup of coffee. The cafeteria was almost as lonely as the subway. Again the colossal anonymous face of the city leered over his shoulder, vague, questing. In this white gleam of tiled walls with people eating in hats and coats as if come in by accident, as if deliberately refusing to enjoy what they ate, one was a hermit among the other solitaries, monks worshipping the city’s face, which was really the composite of its worshippers. It was self-idolatry and hideous. But here he was free and alone.

He had to get started. He had an idea. He was the brain guy. Let the brain help him. McMann was away, gone somewhere, anywhere, say to Yonkers to plan a stickup. He’d be there a few days. The brain was in charge. He was in charge. Sure. Right. No kick there. He’d see to everything. What of Duffy? What of Duffy dead? He and McMann had complete control of the kids. McMann was dead. Who was to know? He was boss. Must rivet himself as boss. Strike when the iron’s hot. He needed help. McMann said to give Spat a chance. Spat must be won over. He must solve these problems or scram the hell out. Go where and do what? He smiled. Hell, he’d stick. He was proud of his loyalty to something vague and idealistic, sipping his coffee, knowing where McMann had slipped. Knowing where with such an autocracy of knowledge he loved himself. McMann’d been too careful. Too careful. If he hadn’t invented the brain-guy dodge, he’d still be alive. McMann had been so careful he had to thrash Spat. Didn’t pay to be too careful. Look at McMann the fool. Forget the fool. He had to clinch control, to work Spat. Boss.

The cashier, a Jew with glasses, eased his surgical hands in the drawer of the cash register. There was a lot of money in the drawer. Bill’s mind moved indolently as if only lesser matters occupied it. A coke’d been killed. Duffy. McMann. How remote these things were. Out of sight, out of mind. Like hell. Maybe he was drunk, but he walked straight. His watch said it was ten after eleven. God knew where Spat was. He’d have to see him in the morning. If anyone got rough he knew how to fix them. No use sleeping home. Let Joe worry. He took a room at a hotel and slept immediately. He was absolutely worn out. His mind knew he had to find Spat. Where was Spat? He knew where Duffy and McMann were to the exact inch. He was sorry for Duffy. Maybe it hadn’t been really necessary to kill Duffy.

Come to think of it, Hanrahan might be curious about McMann being killed.

Awaking, he stared at the sun’s shafts as if to comment: Here you are again, right on the dot. He used his finger as a toothbrush, rubbing it across his teeth, careful not to scratch his gums. McMann’d gone away. That’s how he thought of yesterday. McMann’d gone away. It was sad. Who did he have left in the cursed city? He was lonely, no friends, no nobody. His brother and maybe Madge, that was all among the multitudes. If Hanrahan bothered him about McMann, well, he didn’t know a damn….

He thought simply as if it were a bright idea, an inspiration: Do you know you’re a murderer? No, he thought, grinning foolishly. Yes, he answered, laughing at the repartee. Where was remorse? He wouldn’t kill a fly. He thought with superb justification: I wouldn’t kill a little fly. McMann’s death was business. Business didn’t have a damn to do with extra-business hours when even the flies were safe. All murderers looked in mirrors and he might as well. It was an old trick. Was that him? He was shocked as if someone were fooling around. It was him, the same Bill. He was disgusted, beating it out for coffee, whistling in a melancholy way like a jilted fellow.