Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (9 page)

‘Sure,’ he said. Then he took a couple of steps towards me. ‘Look, Ralph, why can’t we stay together? Why do we have to split up?’

‘She’s doing the splitting up,’ I said. ‘I’m not doing it; she’s doing it. Give her a hundred dollars and let her split. Give her a hundred dollars and let her haul herself out of here. Let her go back to Chicago. She’ll be happy in Chicago. In Chicago she’s got a lot of influential friends. In Chicago she hasn’t got a single enemy.’

‘Oh, God …’ she said.

The least you could do would be to listen to what I’ve got to say,’ I said. ‘That’s the very least you could do.’

‘Oh, God …’ she moaned, putting down the coat and purse.

Early that afternoon the men from the music and appliance company delivered the portable recording set, a small phonograph, a dozen twelve-inch acetates, some extra cutting needles and a microphone with fifty feet of cable. Jinx paid them and from one of the men he bought a kit of used tools, and after they had left Holiday came out of the bedroom where I had been keeping her temporarily out of sight.

‘It’s a hell of a gamble,’ she said. ‘It’s a hell of a gamble.’

‘I don’t see how you can say that,’ I said patiently. ‘You’ve just had a graphic example of the average cop’s behavior when he locates easy money. If he hasn’t changed in four or five lifetimes what makes you think he’ll change in four or five hours?’

‘Just the same …’

‘Will you please not stand around dripping that awful doubt all over the rug? I like this idea. There’s nothing elaborate or involved about it. It has the simplicity of a punk’s, an amateur’s brain. Please go lay down. Take a nap or something.’

‘How do you expect to get ’em back here to make the recording? You’ve got to have ’em here to make the recording. How’re you going to manage that?’

‘By rustling, and very lightly at that, the remaining eighteen hundred dollars of Jinx’s money,’ I said. She frowned dumbly. Is this eternally to be my fate, I wondered, to always be over their heads, to always have to use diagrams to explain myself? ‘The noise that eighteen hundred dollars makes when you rub it together is very faint,’ I said. ‘You hardly can hear it across the room – but a cop can hear it for miles and miles. It comes in on a wave-length to which only his ears are attuned.’

She shook her head dubiously, looking away from me to Jinx, who by now had taken the recorder out of the carton and was untying the recording and playback arms, paying no attention to us.

‘Please go lay down,’ I said to her. Take a nap or something. Is that the set you wanted?’ I asked Jinx.

‘Yeah. It’s the best,’ he said. He opened the back and took out the microphone. ‘Got to find a place for this,’ he said. He sat down on the davenport and dragged a small radio off the end-table into his lap, inspecting it. He turned the microphone sideways, holding it against the back of the radio, measuring. ‘It’ll fit in here,’ he said. ‘I’ll take the speaker out of here and put in the mike.’ He traced the radio cable with his eyes, leaning over the back of the davenport and following it to the base plug. ‘I think that’ll do it,’ he said.

‘That’s what I thought too. There’s a clothes closet directly behind this wall. You can put the set in the closet. You can drill a hole in the baseboard behind the davenport. That way they can’t see it. It’ll be behind the davenport. The davenport’ll hide it.’

‘Look…’ he said. ‘Don’t try to think for me. Think for her, but don’t try to think for me.’

Once this is done, once this is in the bag, I’ll show you who’ll do the thinking, I thought. ‘I was only trying to help,’ I said.

‘Well, this is one thing I don’t need help with,’ he said. ‘Go lay down. Take a nap somewhere.’

He got up and went in to the bedroom, turning on the light and going into the closet. In a minute he was back.

‘This’ll do it,’ he said. ‘This’ll work all right.’

I looked at Holiday.

‘You heard him.’ I said. ‘Cheer up …’

I
GOT OFF THE
bus at the corner, feeling a small curious pleasure that I was able to do this in the easy habitual manner of a man who had been getting off the same bus at the same corner for years, a veteran; for there is nothing more inconspicuous than an expert, in any thing, even getting off a bus. The average stranger, riding in a bus to somewhere for only the second time, would not have been concerned with trying to act like an expert, it probably never would have occurred to him; if he had not known where to get off and from which end, he would have asked questions, the average stranger who is normal about such things. But I was not normal about such things. These were the minutiae I was so painstaking about, that I performed so perfectly, the very performances of which, since they are never mirrorized for the average man, convinced me that destiny had me by the tail. I walked down the street towards the produce market, towards Mason’s garage, rising and falling on the swell of the noon-day crowd; girls and women with as many different shades of red gashes in their faces, through which teeth occasionally showed, as you have fingers and toes; and guys in linen coats and seersucker coats and shirt sleeves, all fetishists too, lip fetishes – cigars and cigarettes and pipes and toothpicks, these the fetishes that could be seen and God knows how many that couldn’t, the most sinful of which was probably mediocrity: cheap, common, appalling people, the kind a war, happily, destroys. What is your immediate destiny, you loud little unweaned people? A two-dollar raise? A hamburger and a hump?

There was no excitement now in front of Hartford’s. The boy tending the vegetable stalls was washing a bunch of chicory and a porter was sweeping the sidewalk with a long-handled pushbroom. The big blasting gap in the market’s quiet casual day had been filled in with the heavy weight of routine.

And this is the way it looked at Mason’s Garage too, but this I knew could not be true, and that is why I had come. The police had missed Jinx and by now the stake-outs had been set and one of the stake-outs had to be the garage, in case he tried, for any reason, to get to Mason. There probably would be a plainclothes man in the office by the phone and another lounging around the back door – and sure enough there was. Police procedure is as rigidly fixed as a geometrical problem – and the answer is always in the back of the book.

I paused in the doorway of the office and the plainclothes man standing beside the desk, by the telephone, looked at me stolidly. He was fifty or more and he had been a cop for a long time, for in his face was the flowered viciousness that only many years of petty police authority can properly mature.

‘Yeah?’ he said.

‘Mason around?’

‘What’s it about?’

‘It’s about a car.’

‘Yeah? What kind of car?’

‘Any kind just so it’s transportation.’

‘Where do you wanna go?’

Subtlety and caution now come to you in a brand-new handy-size package – a pot-belly and twelve triple-A shoe. When following the spoor of game in the open country be sure you move up-wind; and in heavily wooded sections exercise extreme caution, being careful not to step on twigs or rattle the leaves or bushes. Bear in mind that animals entrust their lives to sight, smell and hearing; and since the hunter cannot possibly conceive to what degree these instincts are developed, he must constantly be on the alert not to frighten the quarry. ‘Mason around?’ ‘What’s it about?’ ‘It’s about a car.’ ‘Yeah? What kind of car?’ ‘Any kind just so it’s transportation.’ ‘Where do you wanno go?’ Mr. Big-foot was doing a beautiful job of moving up-wind, through the bush.

‘I don’t want to go anywhere,’ I said. ‘I really don’t. I was planning to stay right here until Mason and Inspector Webber broke in on me. The Inspector wants me to get out of town. Maybe you better call Mason …’

He stared at me stupidly, frowning, and the frown twitched, vibrated by the ponderous machinery that was slowly turning over inside his capacious skull. He did not seem at all surprised that I had recognized him for a cop. A fact was trying to get through to his brain and its progress could be followed by the struggle on his face. It finally got through. The twitching of the frown stopped and the skin beside the lobes of his ears rose like the hackles of a suspicious dog.

‘So the Inspector found you …’ he said slowly.

‘Yes,’ I said.

The other plainclothes man, the one who had been lounging by the rear door, came in. He was about thirty, too young for his face to have flowered yet, but the bud was beginning to open.

‘What’s going on, Ray?’ he asked.

‘The same thing that’s been going on for years. We’re still sucking the hind tit. Inspector Webber wants this guy to get out of town,’ he said, crossing to the doorway, beside me. He yelled into the garage: ‘Mason!’

All this time the other cop kept his eyes on me. But both seemed disconsolate, discouraged.

‘Where’s Jinx Raynor?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

‘Maybe,’ Ray said, turning back into the office, ‘he’s saving him for the Inspector, too.’

‘If I knew where Raynor was, I’d tell you,’ I said. ‘You think I want to see the Inspector make a hog of himself?’

‘What do you want?’ Mason said, behind me.

‘I want a car,’ I said.

‘A black Ford sedan with a Mercury motor, too, no doubt…’

I turned around and looked at him. There was a bold sneer on his face. The presence of the two cops had done wonders for his morale.

‘I’m afraid I was too ambitious,’ I said, with some penitence. ‘The black Ford sedan with the Mercury motor’ll have to wait. Just any kind’ll have to do now. I thought maybe you or Nelse could drive Holiday and me out of town.’

‘You oughta heard him this morning,’ he said to the cops. ‘He’s changed his tune some. Sorry as hell I can’t help you, Ralph, old pal, sorry as hell,’ he said to me. ‘Nothing I’d like better’n to drive you and the dame somewhere and have one of you put a bullet in my back.’

‘You got me all wrong,’ I said. ‘I don’t hold a grudge. I’m not sore at you …’

‘Take your business somewhere else …’

‘But where?’ I said. ‘There’s no time for that. I got to get out of town. Look,’ I said pulling out Jinx’s eighteen hundred dollars, folded neatly, ‘I can pay. Eighteen hundred dollars.’ All of them were surprised. ‘You don’t think I’d let the Inspector clean me, do you?’

‘I don’t care if you got eighteen thousand dollars,’ Mason said. ‘I don’t care if you got eighteen million dollars. Now, get out of here…’

Ray looked fraternally at his younger partner, sniffing, trying to locate the wind. The hippopotamus was getting ready to move through the bush again.

‘Ben,’ he said, ‘We ought to follow through on that other tip on Jinx Raynor. I know it’s the hell and gone out on Highway Four, almost to the state line. We could give this fellow a lift that far…’

‘No,’ Ben said.

‘Now, wait a minute,’ Ray went on patiently. ‘That’s no way to co-operate. The Inspector wants this fellow to scram. Why don’t we give a hand? We scratch the Inspector’s back, he scratches ours…’

‘No,’ Ben said. ‘This thing’s off the track some place.’ You can bet it’s off the track some place, I wanted to tell him. Have a piece of cake Ben. It’s not a big cake, not big enough for the whole department, but have a piece while it lasts. ‘I’ll not be getting gummed up with the Inspector …’

‘That goddamn Inspector…’ Ray muttered.

‘Get out,’ Ben said to me.

I got out. At the street entrance I turned and looked back over my shoulder. Mason was moving to the rear of the garage, bouncing up and down on his club foot. I knew where he was going. He was going to the other telephone. He was going to call the goddamn Inspector.

… the goddamn Inspector. He’s so big he can get away with it. He’s also so big that he can’t get away with it. Well, all right
Lex talionis.
The big fish gobbles the little fish and the little fish gobbles the fingerling and the fingerling gobbles the mollusk and so on, R.I.P. Hello, there, Mother. The inauguration is all over and I am calling from the White House. Hello, there, Inspector. I’ll need two or three plainclothes men tonight to help me knock over a joint.

If
…

But there mustn’t be any ifs. It’s up to me to see that there are no ifs …

I rapped on the door of the apartment but there was no answer. Thinking that maybe I had rapped too softly, I rapped again, harder. There was still no answer, no movement, no sound at all from the inside. Sure. The minute I turn my back … I knocked on the door two or three times with my knuckles, and in a moment it slowly opened. I was surprised. I hadn’t heard any footsteps crossing the floor. I went in. Jinx stepped from behind the door, closing it. No wonder I hadn’t heard any footsteps. He was barefooted.

‘I see that you belong to what we call the civilized school,’ I said.

‘What?’ he said blankly.

‘You have to take off your shoes and socks to do it,’ I said. ‘You disillusion me. I thought you were a catch-as-catch can man.’

‘Oh …’ he said awkwardly. ‘I was just fixing to wash my feet.’

‘Button up,’ I said, but not too angrily; where Holiday was concerned you couldn’t ever get too angry with the man.

She came out of the bedroom then, with not a wrinkle in her clothes, with not even a hair out of place, a gracious smile on her face, the vicar’s wife coming in to pour. I could have cut her throat, but strangling this impulse, wrapped tightly around it in precise spacings as if it had been spun by a machine, was a strong cord of admiration, too. She had an armour-plated conscience. She knew that I knew that she’d just gotten out of bed with this poor stupid bastard but there was not the slightest suggestion of guilt or shame or even self-consciousness about her. She moved on into the room, bearing herself with a kind of necrophilic dignity, the vicar’s wife now about to pour, and I told myself that she was tremendous, really tremendous, and my navel started fluttering again …

‘You didn’t take long,’ she said pleasantly.

‘An expert never takes long,’ I said, also meaning it for a dig at Jinx, telling myself that I had to stop thinking how tremendous she was and get down to business; any minute now that goddamn Inspector would be showing up, and that there would be plenty of time later to think about how tremendous she was, plenty of time later to let my navel flutter, when I could enjoy it, when I could let it jump right through my belt buckle if…