The Good Old Stuff (43 page)

“But why? I should think it would please you.”

“Just say that I don’t like to bowl with people. Maybe I blow up under pressure. Put it any way you want, but don’t go talking up my game. Understand?”

I almost said, Yes, sir.

He walked off into the night. I shrugged and went back to the books.

All of that should have been a tip-off. I should have gotten wise, maybe, the night Billy Carr came in. Billy has the sort of reputation that makes me wish I had the nerve to tell him not to come back. He’s young and tall and sleek, somehow like a big cat. He had two of his boys with him. He’s considered locally to be a pretty heavy stud. Anyway, the three of them came in, got shoes, shucked off their coats, and changed shoes down at the semicircular bench, ready to do some bowling.

Johnson was walking down the alley pushing the wide brush, wearing the lamb’s wool mitts over his shoes.

I was too far away to stop it. Billy Carr grabbed a ball off the rack and rolled it down at Johnson. Johnson heard it coming. He looked around and sidestepped it, but it hit the brush and knocked it out of his hands.

He turned and walked slowly back up the middle of the alley toward where Billy stood laughing.

Between laughs, Billy said, “Did I scare you, pop?”

“You scared me plenty,” Johnson said mildly. He grabbed the front of Billy’s shirt and tossed him into the rack. Billy tumbled over it and landed on his shoulders. One of the hired boys reached for a sap as he moved in on Johnson. Johnson caught his wrist, ripped the sap out of his hand, and belted him flush across the mouth with it. The hired boy sat down and began to spit out teeth.

The other hired boy was reaching. “I wouldn’t!” Johnson said in a low voice. And the boy didn’t.

Their sole remaining gesture of defiance was to throw the shoes at me as they went out.

I said to Johnson, “That wasn’t smart. They might give you a bad time outside.”

He gave me a look of surprise. “Those three? Grow up, ki—Mr. Desmon.”

They didn’t bother Johnson, and they didn’t come back.

Last week I woke up and there was a man sitting on a chair beside my bed. I shut my eyes hard, and when I opened them again he was still there.

“Good morning, Joe,” he said.

“How did you get in here? What do you want? Is this a gag?”

He handed me a picture. A double picture. Full face and profile. With numbers. “Know this man?”

“Johnson. He works for me.”

“Not exactly Johnson. Dan Brankel is a better name. Wanted in five western states for armed robbery and murder. Rumored to be a one-time associate and business partner of Al Nussbaum. Did some work with the King gang. That was a long time ago. He skipped the country with a fat bankroll. He’s been where
we couldn’t touch him. By we, I mean the FBI. A while back we got a tip that he had moved. Since then we’ve been waiting for him to show up. We’ve been checking bowling alleys. That was his passion in the old days. So with your help, Joe …”

I was a wreck all day. I tried to charge people for more games than they’d rolled. I cussed out the waitresses, and one of my best ones quit on me. I even broke down and drank some of my own beer during business hours.

While the leagues were on, I was worse. No matter how tightly I held onto the edge of the desk, my hands still shook.

But I couldn’t hold the clock back. The diehards finally pulled out, the last of them, at quarter to two. I said to Johnson, “Game tonight?” I barely managed to keep the quiver out of my voice.

He nodded and went to get his ball and shoes. Somehow he’d managed to buy them out of his pay. When he came back, I said, “Back in a minute. Got to check the doors.”

Just the two of us were left in the place. I went to the side door, slammed it hard, then opened it silently and put the little wedge in it to hold it open.

The light controls were near my desk. I killed everything except the small light over the desk and the lights on the one alley we would use. My heart was swinging from my tonsils.

Johnson popped his thumb out of the hole on the ball, lined his sights, and swung a sweet ball down the alley. It made a low drone as it rolled. Then it hooked into the pocket, and the pins went down with a single smash.

The rack crashed down and I took my first ball. Even though I had used a lot of chalk, my hands were still greasy with sweat. The ball slipped, hung on the edge all the way down, and plinked off the ten pm.

Johnson said mildly, “Getting the hard one first?”

I laughed too loud and too long and stopped too abruptly. I got eight more on my second ball and Johnson marked the miss.

A nightmare game. I didn’t dare turn around. I was afraid I’d see one of the men slipping silently in, and my face would give me away. Johnson was bowling like a machine. I piled up misses and splits, and I even threw one gutter ball. Each
ball he rolled was just right. Once in the sixth frame one pin wavered and threatened to stay up, but finally it went down.

We had never talked much while bowling. I had to bite my tongue to keep from babbling to him. It might have made him suspicious.

It didn’t hit me between the eyes until he marked up his eighth straight strike. And suddenly I realized, that if he kept on, I might see the first perfect game I have ever seen. It was a little bit easier then to forget the figures silently closing in.

He put in the ninth strike and the tenth. I had a miss on the ninth, for a score to that point of one-twenty-one. Worst game of the past three years.

After the tenth strike he said softly, “You know, this might be it. I never had one of those fat three-hundred games before. I’ve always wanted one.”

“Don’t jinx yourself talking about it,” I said.

He put the eleventh ball in the pocket for a clean strike. “One more,” he said. The ball was trundling back up the rails when I saw the little flurry of movement down near the pin setter. That was my signal.

I said, as nonchalantly as I could, “Wait a second. Got to get cigarettes.”

As I turned and walked up the stairs he took his ball off the rack, walked slowly back, and chalked his fingers, pulling the towel through them.

I ran the last few steps to the desk, wiped my hand across the light panel, turning on every light in the place.

They had crept up in the darkness. They were in a half circle around him. He looked very small and old and tired standing down there.

“Okay, Dan,” one of them said. “End of the line. All out. Put the ball down slowly and lie on the floor, your arms spread.”

A dozen weapons were pointed at him.

In a weary voice he said, “You win. Let me heave this last ball down the alley.”

Before he could get an answer, he moved over and turned to face the pins. From the angle where I stood, higher than the others, I saw his left hand flick from his belt up to his mouth. He swallowed something.

He stood for a long second, then started his stride. Half-way to the foul line his smooth stride wavered. The ball thumped hard, bounced, and he went down on his face across the foul line.

He was a dead man when he hit the floor. Even I knew that. I dimly heard the hoarse shout of anger and disappointment.

But I had my eyes on the ball. It rolled with pathetic slowness. It wavered in toward the head pin, hit the head pin on the left side. The pins toppled slowly, all but the six pin. It stood without a waver. A pin rolled slowly across the alley, nudged the rebel, and tumbled it off into the pit.

As though I was walking in my sleep, I went back down the stairs, took the black crayon, marked in the last strike, and drew the 300, making the zeros fat and bold.

I knew he was a crook. I knew he was cruel and lawless. They told me about the way he shot the Nevada bank clerk in the stomach. But I also know that he was a homesick guy who came back to the only thing he liked to do and scrubbed out lavatories for the privilege of doing it.

Maybe there’s something wrong with me.

Because I don’t think I’m ever going to like the game as much as I used to.

T
his James Garver
drove out to Sharan Point with his problem on the afternoon of the fifth day of badminton, all set to lay it in Shay Pritchard’s lap. The court was set up in the lower garden about fifty feet from the pool. I saw Krimbow coming slowly down the steps, favoring his rheumatism, his mouth set in the perpetual lemon-taste, the sun gleaming on his bristling white Prussian haircut.

It was my serve and I was at the point where the bat weighed forty-nine pounds, my mouth was full of cotton, and the pain in my side felt as though it had always been there.

I held onto the bird and Shay glared at me. “Come on, Robby!”

There are a few Shay Pritchards in every generation. They are seldom happy. The fates give them a triple portion of energy, a restless mind, an enormous capacity for boredom, a measure of personal charm, and a hint of savagery. Three years ago I went to Sharan Point to write Shay up for a national magazine. By now the editors have written me off. I’ve wanted to leave a dozen times. But somehow …

Physically he is a big slope-shouldered character with a round, guileless face, baby-blue eyes, curly blond hair, and a shade more weight below the belt than above it. Dressed in his best he looks like an overgrown kid being sent off to a church social. Stripped down, his thighs are like beer kegs, and restless slabs of muscle crawl on his shoulders and arms with every movement. Through some alchemy of personality he can look one moment like a bashful farm boy on his first date, and
seconds later like a demon avenger, a conscienceless tool of doom.

I have seen him kill. And I have seen women look at him.

Either I hate him or he is a combination best friend and employer. Someday I will have to make up my mind.

Shay Pritchard: fullback, Rhodes scholar, infantryman, sculptor. Man of colossal hungers, of gargantuan appetites—with the instincts of a crook, and of a cop.

A sweet son of a bitch.

Krimbow spat with precision into a circular flower bed and said, “He’s one of those people keeps cracking his knuckles.”

Shay sighed. “Who, Krimbow?”

“Drives an eight-year-old sedan and wears a ten-year-old suit and says he’s got to see you. Says that a Lieutenant Ryan sent him out here.”

“Ryan knows I don’t work for love.”

“I told this fella the usual fee for just talking to you, Shay, and unless he’s got the inside of that roll packed with ones, it ought to be enough for two–three new cars. Calls himself James P. Garver.”

At the mention of the roll the annoyed expression slid off Shay’s round face. He beamed. “Help all those who can pay,” he said. “Where’d you put him?”

“I was going to leave him in the hall, until I saw he was loaded, and then I moved him into the small study.”

“Go tell him to wait fifteen minutes,” Shay said.

Krimbow went back up toward the house. “Ryan is missing persons,” I said.

When we went into the small study, James P. Garver jumped up, smiled nervously. He was a weedy little man close to fifty with a farmer’s cross-hatched neck and hands thickened and permanently curved into the shape for grasping tool handles. He had a dried, unmemorable face, colorless gray eyes, rusty hair, and an air of tension. His teeth were cheap, glassy and too even.

He looked at me, licked his lips, and said, “Mr. Pritchard, I—”

“Sit down, please,” Shay said in irritation. “I’m Pritchard. This is Mr. Moran, my assistant.”

Garver bobbed his head in acknowledgment, sat down on the edge of one of the deep leather chairs, and rested his hard hands on his thighs.

Shay strolled over to the cabinet. “Drink?” he asked.

“I don’t much, but right now …”

With the glasses distributed, Shay perched one massive hip on the corner of the desk, towering over Garver, and said, “My man told you that for three hundred dollars I’ll listen to you. If I want to take on the problem I’ll state a fee commensurate with the difficulties involved. That fee will not include expenses, and I cannot, of course, guarantee results. Then it will be your decision to tell me whether or not to go ahead.”

“Lieutenant Ryan seemed to think—”

“Forgive me, Garver, but I can’t think of anything I’m less interested in than the opinions of Lieutenant Ryan. State your problem.”

“Well, it’s about Allie, Mr. Pritchard. It’s only Thursday, but it seems like she’s been gone for longer than just since Tuesday afternoon. She’s my wife. I’ve been just about crazy. I went to a cattle auction in Randolph on Tuesday and when I came back she just wasn’t there. I’ve got a picture of her here.…”

It was an eight-by-ten glossy print, and he had folded it once lengthwise and shoved it into the inside breast pocket of his suit. He handed it over to Shay almost reverently.

Shay had a look on his face of pronounced disinterest. The farmer’s wife had grown weary of the farm. He looked at the picture. His eyes narrowed and he sucked at his lower lip. He handed it to me.

It was a professional job by a man who knew how. She was reclining on some sort of chaise longue, and the picture was of head, throat, and shoulders, stopping just at the verge of becoming too intimate. Eyes too deep and too wise for her age, and a soft, wide mouth that was not wise at all—only willing. The blond hair was spread out around her head. We both stared at Garver.

Suddenly there was something indescribably goaty about him, and his cackling laugh was that of the eternal Pan. “Guess you fellas didn’t expect my wife to be a pin-up girl. The rest
of her is just as nice as that face, too. Surprised everybody, I did, coming back with her that day. She’s only twenty.” Then anxiety overcame the sudden wet-lipped look and he said dully, “Can’t imagine what happened to her.”

“Where did you meet her?”

Surprisingly, Garver flushed. “I haven’t told anybody else this, but I guess you ought to know. About six months ago I got a crazy notion to go away by myself. Working too hard, I guess. I went down to Endor City, about a two-hundred-mile drive, and got myself a hotel room. Went to a lot of movies, and then I got tired of the movies and I had a few drinks. Asked the cab driver to take me somewhere where I could have some fun. Drove me way outside Endor City and I didn’t like that place, so he brought me back to a place right in town. You’d never find it if you didn’t know where to look. They call it Roger’s Place. There’s friendly girls there that’ll talk to you right at the bar. I met Allie there. She was unhappy. She said she was tired of young kids that weren’t serious and she said she liked older men. We went to a few other places, I disremember where, and then we went to her place and—well, I guess we kind of forgot ourselves. Anyway, she was a-crying, and a-carrying on and saying she wasn’t that kind of girl at all and I could see she wasn’t and we got married two days later.”