In the apartment over on 23rd Street, Willy went over the whole thing again for Alice, while Clancy listened for the second time.
The first time, Clancy’d cried like a baby. Three straight shots of whiskey in a bar weren’t enough to straighten him out. The bottle of whiskey on the table around which they were sitting now hadn’t helped Clancy much either. “That bastid don’t trust you and he don’t trust me no more,” Clancy said when Willy stopped talking. “That bastid’s got to feel he owns you a hundred percent or nothin’. It’s nothin’ for us, Willy! All that stuff about you collectin’ and me workin’ for him’s just a lotta crap. We’re through!”
“Clancy’s right,” the woman said, her eyes like stones in her blonde pale face. Clancy’s face was twice the size of hers, big and jowly like an old-fashioned bartender’s. But now they seemed to look strangely alike: the face of the big town itself, the town of the whore’s mouth and the bought-and-paid-for heart, with the waterfront like a gleaming band around its forehead.
“Clancy’s right,” she repeated.
“I guess so,” Willy mumbled. The newspapers called the docks a jungle where there were no rules. But Willy knew better than that now. He was slow but he learned, and he’d learned the big lesson tonight. It was a jungle all right, but a jungle with rules. Rules galore. And all the rules made by Johnny Blue Jaw Gibbons.
“Funny,” he mumbled. “Funny how I was going to steer clear of trouble working in the union. Should’ve gone to work for Al Linn. Should never’ve bucked him.”
“You should never’ve breathed!” the woman shouted. “You make me sick! Clancy, what’re we going to do?”
Clancy shrugged hopelessly. He was an old and broken man, his jowls hanging like balloons with the air out of them. “I might’ve known it,” he groaned. “A third wouldn’t satisfy him. Has to hog it all. This King’s a gentleman and that bastid of a hog—”
“You men make me sick!” she burst out. “Clancy, what’re we going to do? Sit here and have a wake?”
Clancy lifted his head. “What can we do? Nothin’.”
“We can go to the guy who’s taken Nolan’s place, to this Fassetti—”
They stared at Alice as if something extraordinary had happened to her between one breath and the next. As if she’d exploded into light or crumpled into dust before their very eyes.
“What else?” she continued, obsessed. “We might do something with them—”
“Forget them ideas!” Clancy nodded at the whiskey on the table. “They come straight outa that bottle. I’m goin’ home.”
He took his hat and coat and left.
Willy poured himself another shot. His hand was trembling. “You shouldn’t have said that about Nolan.”
“Nolan’s dead, you dope!” she said in a fury.
“You know what I mean.”
“Yeh,” she said dejectedly. “I gave Clancy my head on a silver platter.” She shut her eyes so tight they crinkled at the corners.
“Alice,” he said in alarm.
Her breasts lifted convulsively, her eyelids sprang wide open. “Clancy left in an awful hurry, didn’t he? He on his way, I wonder—”
He guessed her meaning but he had to ask the question anyway. “On his way where?”
“To Johnny!”
“He wouldn’t do that!”
“How do you know?”
“I know!”
“You don’t know Clancy then! Didn’t he leave Mallet out in this stevedore deal, a guy he’s been with for years. He’d leave Jesus Christ out if he had to! Willy, you think Clancy’s going to let Johnny throw him out of his union without trying to save himself — just because you’re the secretary-treasurer and I’m your damn fool wife shooting off her fool mouth about Nolan? Nolan!” she spat out in terror. She stood there paralyzed for a second and then her arm swung and her hand pointed to the telephone. “Willy, call him up before Clancy gets there, Willy!” Willy’s shoulders smacked against the back of the chair where he was sitting as if something’d leaped at him. Something that hadn’t been there a second ago, something wet and bloated and evil like a drowned waterfront rat come alive.
“Willy, don’t waste time.”
He didn’t move. She ran to him. “Willy, we got no time to lose!” Her hands moved feverishly across his slumped shoulders, gripping at his heavy body.
“Lemme alone,” he muttered. “I got enough trouble—”
“Let Clancy have the trouble!” she cried pulling at him. “Willy, c’mon! What do you care about Clancy. Let him have the trouble! Let ’em all have it, the whole damn world!”
It was as if she’d forgotten about Clancy as a person. Was Clancy on his way home or on his way to Johnny Blue Jaw’s hotel? It didn’t matter any more. All that mattered was holding onto what they had. It was dog eat dog, and rat eat rat, down the waterfront. That was all that mattered now or ever.
She walked away from Willy, cursing him, and dialed the phone number of Johnny Blue Jaw’s hotel herself, and when she had it, and Johnny answered, she said. “Here Willy comes!” She clapped her free hand over the mouthpiece. “Willy!” She called him savagely, her teeth like fangs. “Willy! Willy!”
He shambled over, his eyes glazed, as reluctant as any man about to deliver another man to his death. But he came. Because he didn’t want any trouble.
Elmore Leonard
(b. 1925)
The traditional Western story and the hard-boiled crime story are more closely allied than might be apparent at a glance. As is pointed out in the Introduction, hard-boiled fiction can be traced back to the early days of nineteenth-century American life and letters. Viewed in that context, the justice-seeking twentieth-century private eye is a direct descendant not only of James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo, but of the frontier lawman and the hard-nosed Pinkerton detective of the last century. The subject matter of the Western story and the contemporary noir story is similar: murder, murder for hire, bank and other types of robbery, kidnapping, extortion. Even such Western-fiction staples as cattle rustling and range wars have present-day counterparts and have been utilized in hard-boiled fiction.
The fundamental kinship between the two genres is one reason that so many writers have worked in both. Carroll John Daly was one of the first “crossovers”; Two-Gun Gerta (1926), written in collaboration with C. C. Waddell, chronicles the Mexican border adventures of silent-movie cowboy Red Connors. In the 1920s, when Black Mask regularly featured frontier fiction, Erle Stanley Gardner published several short stories about adventurer Bob Larkin that may be classified as Western; and in the 1930s, he wrote a series of Western-style stories set in the deserts of the Southwest. W. T. Ballard, Norbert Davis, John D. MacDonald, Fredric Brown, and Cornell Woolrich are just a few of the early crossover writers. Contemporary crossovers include Ed Gorman, Loren D. Estleman, Robert J. Randisi, Bill Crider, and Bill Pronzini.
No one, however, has been more successful in both genres than Elmore Leonard. Before he turned to the production of such outstanding urban crime thrillers as Fifty-Two Pickup (1974), Unknown Man No. 89 (1977), and City Primeval (1980), Leonard’s fictional output was confined to Westerns. His early pulp stories, which began appearing in the late 1940s in such magazines as Dime Western, Zane Grey’s Western Magazine, and Argosy, are of uniformly high quality. One of his frontier novels, Hombre (1961), can be found on numerous lists of the best traditional Westerns. Almost as fine are The Bounty Hunters (1953) and Valdez Is Coming (1970). Indeed, and despite the critical acclaim and bestseller status that his later crime novels have brought him, a strong case can be made that his most accomplished and memorable works are Westerns.