Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (7 page)

‘Is
that
what’s the matter at Hartford’s?’ he asked.

‘It’s one of the things that’s the matter,’ I replied. ‘What’s more important, probably, is a body in the milk truck behind the market. It’s the driver’s body. I had to slug him a few times. He was an old man. I think maybe I killed him.’

Mason didn’t say anything; he was in too much of a state already to react to this; he just raked his upper lip with his lower teeth. But Nelse was instantly concerned, and looked through the door of the office at the Zephyr.

‘You got nothing to be alarmed about,’ I said. ‘This one was right off page seven.’

‘So now it’s murder,’ Mason said slowly.

‘It could very easily be,’ I said.

Jinx turned, holding a stack of currency in each hand. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘settle your back debts out of this.’

I counted off a thousand dollars and offered it to Mason, but he made no move to take it. ‘Go on. Take it.’ I said.

‘In another hour every dick on the force’ll be swarming in here,’ he said in a slow, vexed, almost pitiable tone. ‘They’ll turn this place upside down.’

I held the money almost against his chin. ‘The rest of it’s on the desk,’ I said. ‘Take this …’

He finally took it.

‘There’re a couple of other trifling details to worry about,’ I said. ‘In the back of the Zephyr you’ll find the milkman’s coat and cap and two Hallowe’en masks. You’d better put the torch on ’em. And I’d get rid of those cheques too, if I were you.…’

‘… Jesus,’ he moaned.

I nodded to Jinx and we went out, pausing for a moment on the sidewalk, looking up the street at the widening confusion in front of Hartford’s Market. People were converging from every direction, and the scream of another siren rounded the corner a few blocks away and soon it dragged into view an ambulance.

‘You think you really killed that guy?’ Jinx asked.

‘Probably,’ I said. ‘An old man’s skull is a pretty soft thing.’

When I got back to the apartment Holiday was still in bed. She was still in bed but she was not asleep. She was on her back, her hands clasped behind her head and as I approached the open door of the bedroom I saw her raise herself slightly and wiggle her body, shaking down the sheet, exposing her breasts, and when I got closer I saw that her face had been freshly made-up. She smiled, saying nothing, looking at me from under eyelids she tried to make very lazy.

‘You damn well ought to make yourself alluring,’ I said. ‘I just paid a thousand dollars for you.’

‘Then I’m out of hock?’ she said.

‘Temporarily,’ I said. I unbuttoned my shirt, taking out the bills I had left there, that I had held out on Jinx and Mason. It was around twenty dollars, no more.

‘Is that all we got left?’ she asked.

‘Are you kidding?’ I said, taking the rest of the currency out of my pocket, showing it to her. ‘I’m a hard-working man. And it seems to me that the very least a man’s woman can do when he comes home all tired out is to have some hot coffee for him.’

She laughed, kicking off the sheet with both feet and turning her naked body towards me. ‘What were you saying about hot coffee?’ she asked.

One of these days I hope I can look at that thing and not hear wonderful music, I thought, cramming the money back into my coat pockets. ‘Why, you must be having hallucinations,’ I said, taking off my coat and getting into bed with the rest of my clothes on. ‘I didn’t say anything about hot coffee.…’

I
WAS SITTING AT
the table in the kitchen sipping a cup of hot coffee, listening to the liquidy whooshwhooshwhoosh of the steam shovel down the street and telling Holiday what a panicky old woman Mason was, wondering how anybody as nervous and gutless as that ever started doing business with criminals in the first place, when there came a knocking at the hall door, sharp, impatient knocking. Holiday looked at me, startled, and my own heart skipped a beat or two, so unexpected it was.

‘You stay here,’ I said, going out of the kitchen into the living-room. The knocking came again, loud; loud as hell. I took a few more steps towards the door, easing the automatic out of my hip pocket. ‘Who is it?’ I asked.

‘It’s Mason, Ralph,’ the voice said. ‘Lemme in.…’

It was Mason’s voice, all right. Puzzling as to what he wanted here, I put the automatic back into my pocket and unlocked the door, opening it and getting a fast flash of two men moving at me. I tried to slam the door and get the automatic out of my pocket, but before I could do either they had hit me with their shoulders, knocking me back into the room, piling in after me. They were stocky, medium-sized guys, one a little larger than the other, but both with guns in their hands. They had copper written all over them.

‘Reach,’ the little one said.

I straightened up and raised my hands. The second cop, the larger one, stepped behind me and took the automatic out of my hip pocket and then Mason, who evidently had been watching all this through the door from the hall, came into the room, just inside the room and leaned against the door-facing.

‘You son-of-a-bitch,’ I said.

‘Quiet,’ the little one said to me. ‘As long as you’re in, close the door,’ he said to Mason. ‘Reece,’ he said to the other guy, ‘get the dame.’

‘There’s no dame here,’ I said quickly.

‘Nix …’ he said, waving his gun for Reece to go ahead. ‘We know this layout. By now, we got that other punk picked up, too.’

‘You son-of-a-bitch,’ I said to Mason.

‘We had ’im by the short hair,’ the little one said.

‘I know who had who,’ I said.

‘Quiet,’ he said.

‘You faggot son-of-a-bitch,’ I said to Mason.

‘Shut up!’ the little one said.

There was some noise in the kitchen and the sounds of a slight scuffle and the rising angry whine of Holiday’s voice saying something I could not make out and then Reece led her in, holding her by the arm. She was still barefooted and wearing only the kimono and her face was furious.

‘This babe’s full of vinegar,’ Reece said.

Holiday suddenly jerked loose from him and crossed to Mason and swiped at his face with her hand, the fingers arched like claws.

‘I told you she was full of vinegar,’ Reece said.

‘Stop it…’ the little one growled at Holiday. ‘Behave yourself,’ he said.

‘I’ll cut her goddamn heart out,’ Mason said.

Holiday clawed at him again, and this time she scraped his cheek and three short welts sprung into sight, and Mason whipped out a knife and I heard the spring click as the blade flew open, shiny and sinister, and he drew back his arm to slash at her and the little one hit him under the chin with the barrel of the gun, a quick sharp backhand lick, not vicious, just petulant. Mason blinked his eyes, patting his chin with the palm of his left hand, inspecting it, looking for blood.

‘Make this dame sit down,’ the little one said to Reece.

‘I told you she was full of vinegar,’ Reece said.

I was thinking how nice it would be to stick that acetylene torch down Mason’s throat and burn a hole in the back of his head big enough to push my foot through.

‘Put that knife away and get outta here,’ the little one said. ‘Go on beat it.’

Mason flipped the knife shut, wiping his face with his coat sleeve, and turned and opened the door going out. The little one leaned over and pushed on the door, making sure the latch was caught, and then came back to me.

‘He ain’t one of my pet people either,’ he said; ‘but I’ll say one thing for him he’s got a heart as big as a Mack truck. You know what he did just before he came here? He took that whole twenty-seven hundred dollars you paid him and pitched it in the pot…’

‘I don’t think he knows about the old lady,’ Reece said.

‘Is that a fact? You don’t know about the old lady?’ the little one said to me. ‘She’s got t.b.’

‘What old lady?’ I said.

‘The one whose husband you beat to death in that milk truck,’ he said in a mild tone. ‘She’s got t.b. We’re sending her to Arizona.…’

‘You mean Mason’s sending her,’ Reece put in.

‘Oh, he’s not doing the whole thing,’ the little one said. ‘We’re putting in something, too. After all, how far will his twenty-seven hundred dollars go? She needs doctors and nurses and a place to live and something to eat for maybe years. Take six or seven gees for that…’

All the fuzziness around the edges of my brain faded and the questions I had been asking myself about how they knew this and could start a collection for an old lady who had been a widow less than an hour, were answered – this was a shakedown, slick and workmanlike, the way things come out when they get done by professionals; and a tremor hit me in the middle of the stomach, red and twisting, because any cop who’ll shake you down is a cop who’ll kill you after he gets the money. Killed while resisting arrest, their reports read: it is a pattern that never varies and the reason it never varies is because it is perfect to begin with, absolutely fool-proof.

‘Well, I guess we better get on downtown,’ the little one was saying. ‘You think we better put the cuffs on ’em, Reece?’

‘I don’t think so. He ain’t packing nothing…’

‘Neither am I,’ Holiday said, suddenly standing up, opening the kimono with both hands, holding it open, showing him she had nothing on under it. The Seven Cities of Cibola hit him in the face and he grunted softly, almost like a baby’s grunt, and he stood there looking in fascination, utterly unselfconscious.…

‘You can take your hands down now,’ the little one said to me, putting his gun in the hip-pocket holster, making a ceremony of this, holding it in the palm of his hand, looking at it, then at me, pursing his lips thoughtfully as if weighing the risk, and then finally sliding it in the holster.

I lowered my hands.

‘If we’re going downtown,’ Reece finally said to Holiday, ‘I better help you get your things on …’

‘Maybe you had, at that,’ she said, turning loose her kimono but not tying it shut, leaving it open, the belt dangling, striding off, winking slyly at me, followed by this thickheaded hog.

‘Maybe I better get my things on, too,’ I said to the little one. I was not jealous; I only wanted to get my coat. It was on the foot of the bed. All the money was in the pockets. This is what I wanted; the money. I did not want this pithecanthropus erectus to find it. I was not jealous.

‘… one at a time, one at a time,’ he was saying.

‘I’m sorry about the old lady,’ I said. The minute he sees the coat he’ll feel it for a gun and find the money, I was thinking, and that’ll make everything very simple for them; they’ll stash the money away and turn us in and I can accuse them till I’m blue in the face but nobody’ll believe me.…

‘She’s got t.b.’

‘I know. She’s got to go to Arizona,’ I said, trying to remember if Holiday had kicked the sheet down far enough on the bed to cover the coat.…

‘… hell of a place, Arizona. Even if you ain’t got t.b. Like to go there myself someday. No trip at all now. Two or three buses pull outta here every day headed for Arizona.’

‘I know,’ I said. If the sheet is covering only part of the coat maybe he won’t notice it. The last thing in the world he should be interested in now is a coat. But I’ve got to hurry up; I’ve got to get that coat first. If he finds the money and they turn us in we’re doomed, nothing can keep the ropes from around our necks. If I can get the coat first and pay them off maybe they’ll kill us anyway, but there’s a chance that all this talk about buses to Arizona is on the level, and even if it isn’t a lot more things can happen in this room where only two cops have guns than can happen in a steel-barred jail or a steel-barred death-house where a hundred cops have a hundred guns …

‘Any objection to me pitching something in the pot for the old lady?’ I asked.

‘You don’t have to do that,’ he said. ‘We’ll manage.…’

‘But I’d like to. I know what a person with t.b. goes through. My old lady had t.b. I’ve got to give up the money anyway. I’d rather the old lady got it than have it go back to the market. She needs it a lot more than the market does …’

‘No argument about that. Well,’ he said, ‘I suppose it’d be all right How much did you have in mind?’

‘I can raise about fourteen hundred.…’

That shocked him. He looked up at that, the right side of his mouth turned down. ‘You got a goddamn nerve!’ he said. ‘You got six gees, didn’t you? Fourteen hundred dollars.…’

‘That’s all that was left,’ I said. ‘Mason got twenty-seven hundred and the other guy got two gees. That’s four gees right there. I got fourteen hundred left. This is the first job we pulled here; we were just passing through on our way to Arizona. Jesus,’ I said. ‘Do you think I’d screw this thing up for a few hundred dollars? I know what a break we’re getting and I’m grateful. But that’s all we got fourteen hundred dollars.’

‘All right, all right,’ he said. ‘Where’s the dough?’

‘In my coat pocket, in there,’ I said.

‘Where in there is your coat?’

‘On the foot of the bed. It may be covered up by the sheet. I’ll get it,’ I said. He moved a few steps toward the bedroom door, keeping his eyes on me all the while. ‘Hey, Reece. Reece…’

‘Yeah?’

‘Get this guy’s coat, will you? It’s on the foot of the bed.’

He drifted his eyes at me, his face vacuous, and in a moment my coat sailed through the door and landed at his feet, the gun in the pocket banging against the floor. He glared through the door and picked up the coat, taking out the gun and dropping it into his own pocket. Then he found the money and let the coat fall to the floor, kicking it against the davenport.

‘We’ll need a hundred to get to Arizona,’ I said.

He paid no attention to me. He put the money in his other pocket, looking at the bedroom door again. ‘Hey, Reece,’ he called. ‘Bring that dame out.…’

That scared me. That little red tremor started twisting again in the pit of my stomach. If he was going to let us get away with this why have Holiday brought out? He was going to turn us in, the bastard, that’s what he was going to do. All right, you son-of-a-bitch, I was thinking, I’ll scream my head off about that dough even if nobody will listen, even if you do work me over …