She left the light on in the hallway and checked to see that the door was locked and then she went into the bedroom and closed the door. There was no telling what time Vince would be getting in. Vince slept on a pulled-out couch in the living room of the small apartment and he was always quiet when he came in.
That was one of the things she worried about with Vince. He was too quiet.
She took a warm shower after undressing and then climbed into a pair of men’s pajamas and went to the window and raised it wide. For several moments she stood there, looking out over the fire escape at the long row of silhouetted apartment houses which lay to the west. At last she sighed and turned and went to the bed. Before pulling the sheet over her, she reached up and set the alarm clock on the side table. She wanted to be up early, before Vince had a chance to leave the house. She’d made up her mind; she would just have to talk to him in the morning. He wouldn’t like it, but she was going to talk to him anyway.
It seemed incredible to her that Vince, who was himself nineteen years old, could be such a baby, such a complete child. You’d think, after the trouble he’d already been in, that he would have learned something. That he’d know enough to stay away from bad companions.
Sue had met Dommie and Jack Riddle and one or two others whom Vince had been running around with. Dommie was bad enough, but at least he was only a boy himself. But Riddle. That was hard to understand. She didn’t actually know anything about the older man, but she didn’t have to. What was a man of his age hanging around with a kid like Vince for anyway. It couldn’t be for anything good.
Riddle was one of the men who hung around the cafeteria in the late evenings. He and a half a dozen others. Bookies and loan sharks. She knew the type all right. You can’t be a cashier in an all-night restaurant for a year without picking up a lot of stray information about the types who hang around such places.
Slaughter himself had told her about Riddle and some of the others who patronized the place. He knew them all. He’d warned her not to have anything to do with them.
“No good bums,” he had told her. “Operators. Stay clear of them.”
The odd thing was that in spite of his advice, Slaughter himself hung around with the very worst of them. In fact, he held a sort of court each night at one of the back tables and they would drift in and sit down and then there would be the whispered conversations, the occasional exchange of money.
Fred Slaughter owned the cafeteria, as well as the bar next door and Lord only knows what else. He was a man of many and varied interests.
Well, it was probably one of the reasons he was able to warn her about men like Riddle. He knew them and did some sort of business with them.
At first she had thought that it was only because Slaughter liked her and had a sort of fatherly interest in her. He’d been nice about giving her the job, had seemed to take an interest in both her and Vince, whom he knew all about. But she’d soon learned that his interest was anything but fatherly.
Not that he’d been insistent or anything. Just made his pass, the way most men did sooner or later. Tried to take her out and when she had made her position very clear to him, had been a little nasty. But he hadn’t tired her and after a while he’d left her alone.
Slaughter had plenty of women and she guessed that he just hadn’t wanted to bother. She was a good cashier, so he left her alone and had gone on about his business.
By this time she had begun to realize that whatever Slaughter’s business was, it involved a lot more than just owning a bar and cafeteria.
Thinking about it. her mind once more went back to Vince. It had been very tough after their mother died. She and Vince were seventeen at the time and Vince was in reform school. They’d picked him up in a stolen car and sent him away, and Sue was living alone with her mother at the time. She’d already had to leave school herself and was working.
The authorities had investigated, after the funeral, but when they found that she had a job and was able to support herself they had lost interest and had left her alone.
That job had ended after a year when a new boss came in and made things difficult. She’d quit and that was when she got the job in the cafeteria. Slaughter had learned about Vince and he must have had excellent connections because he’d been able to get him out on parole.
Vince was supposed to go to work as a bus boy in Slaughter’s place, but he hadn’t lasted long. He’d had a fight with a waiter and the manager had fired him. Slaughter heard about it, but he’d merely shrugged his shoulders.
“The kid will get another job,” he said. “In the meantime, don’t worry about it. I’ll tell the parole officer he’s still working here, until “he finds something else.”
The trouble was, Vince hadn’t found anything else. It had been a couple of months now, and Sue slowly began to realize that Vince wasn’t even looking. Instead, he was hanging around with Jake and with Dommie and some of the others.
Sue leaned up on her elbow and snapped on the table light. She found a pack of cigarettes and hunched a pillow under her shoulders so that she was half sitting up in bed.
Yes, she would have to talk with Vince in the morning. Vince wasn’t the brightest boy in the world, but Sue knew that he wasn’t really bad. He had sworn he hadn’t known the car was stolen, but the judge hadn’t believed him and they’d sent him away. In a sense, it was a tragedy. He’d been a different boy when he’d come back.
She finished the cigarette and stubbed it out and once more turned off the light and settled down in the bed. She was determined to get some sleep. She wanted to talk with Vince the first thing in the morning and she had a date at eleven o’clock at the television station for a commercial tryout. She wanted to be fresh and rested when she got there.
She’d just stop thinking about Vince and worrying about him-at least for the time being. He’d listen to her. There was no use worrying about it now. She just wished, though, that he’d get home. It was dangerous for him to be running around this late at night. If the parole board should find out…
By one-thirty, Sue Dunne had fallen into a restless, fretful sleep. Several times during the night she turned on the narrow bed, moaning slightly. Once she woke up for a moment or two, her eyes wide and frightened and her pretty, heart-shaped face bathed in perspiration. She half sat up, her slender body tense, and then slowly sank back on the bed.
She realized that she’d been having a nightmare and forced herself to again close her eyes. She slept then, the deep, quiet sleep of exhaustion, until sometime after daybreak.
When Gerald Hanna made his decision as he sat there in the front seat of the Chevvie on that lonesome stretch of deserted road out on Long Island in the early hours of Saturday morning, it was a sharp and a sudden thing.
It was seeing the fortune in stolen jewels glittering on the floor mat of the car in the dim rays cast by the dash light which triggered that decision. What brought it about, however, was a long series of events and circumstances which actually bore no relationship to the jewels or the method by which they had arrived at their present destination.
To understand this decision, it is necessary to know something about and to understand Gerald Hanna himself. Gerald belonged to that class which is loosely and incorrectly referred to as the great middle class. A white collar worker, employed by an insurance firm as an actuary, his background and upbringing was as normal, as routine, as mediocre, as it would be possible to imagine. He’d graduated from high school, taken two years at a Midwestern state university, and come East. He’d had to find a job but had also wanted to finish his education. The job, as a mechanic in a garage, had enabled him to complete a second two-year course at a business school. Then he had gone to work for the insurance firm which had hired him directly upon his graduation.