“I’d like steak or a piece of beef, if you have any,” she said, and they laughed again. They always did this, knowing how far they could go without causing trouble. They knew about her and Mike and never did or said anything that would cause trouble with him. She had tried to tell him about it once, but there was no one thing she could tell him that they did that was wrong, and he had even laughed at one of their jokes and told her that they were just playing around and not to worry, that you couldn’t expect party manners from meatleggers.
“Look at this, Shirl.” Schmidt clanked open the box door on the wall behind him and took out a small flayed carcass. “Good leg of dog, nicely hung, good and fat too.”
It did look good, but it was not for her so there was just no point in looking. “It’s very nice, but you know Mr. O’Brien likes beef.”
“Harder to get these days, Shirl.” He moved deeper into the box. “Trouble with suppliers, jacking up the price, you know how it is. But Mr. O’Brien has been trading here with me for ten years and as long as I can get it I’m going to see he gets his share. How’s that?” He came out and kicked the door shut, holding up a small piece of meat with a thin edging of white fat.
“It looks very good.”
“Little over a half pound, big enough?”
“Just right.” He took it from the scale and began to wrap it in pliofilm. “That’ll set you back just twenty-seven ninety.”
“Isn’t that… I mean more expensive than last time?” Mike always blamed her when she spent too much on food, as if she were responsible for the prices, yet he still insisted on eating meat.
“That’s how it is, Shirl. Tell you what I’ll do though, give me a kiss and I’ll knock off the ninety cents. Maybe even give you a piece of meat myself.” He and the guard laughed uproariously at this. It was just a joke, like Mike said, there was nothing she could say; she took the money from her purse.
“Here you are, Mr. Schmidt, twenty… twenty-five… twenty-eight.” She took the tiny slate from her purse and wrote the price on it and placed it next to the money. Schmidt looked at it, then scratched an initial S under it with a piece of blue chalk he always used. When Mike complained about the price of meat she would show this to him, not that it ever helped.
“Dime back,” he smiled and slid the coin across the counter. “See you again soon, Shirl,” he called out as she took up the package and started for the door.
“Yeah, soon,” the guard said as he opened the door just wide enough for her to slide through. As she passed him he ran his hand across the tight rear of her dress and the closing of the door cut off their laughter.
“Home now?” Tab asked, taking the package from her.
“Yes — I guess so, a cab too, I guess.”
He looked at her face and started to say something, then changed his mind. “Cab it is.” He led the way to the street.
After the cab ride she felt better, they were slobs but no worse than usual and she wouldn’t have to go back there until next week. And, as Mike said, you didn’t expect party manners from meatleggers. They and their little-boy dirty jokes from grammar school! You almost had to laugh at them, the way they acted. And they did have good meat, not like some of the others. After she cooked the steak for Mike she would fry some oatmeal in the fat, it would be good. Tab helped her out of the cab and picked up the shopping bag.
“Want me to bring this up?”
“You better — and you could put the empty milk bottles in it. Is there any place you could leave them in the guardroom so we wouldn’t forget them tomorrow?”
“Nothing to it, Charlie has a locked cabinet that we use, I can leave them there.”
Charlie had the door open for them and the lobby felt cooler after the heat of the street. They didn’t talk while they rode up in the elevator; Shirl rummaged through her purse for the key. Tab went down the hall ahead of her and opened the outer door but stopped so suddenly that she almost bumped into him.
“Will you wait here a second, please, Miss Shirl?” he said in a low voice, placing the shopping bag silently against the wall.
“What is it…?” she started, but he touched his finger to his lips and pointed to the inner door. It was open about an inch and there was a deep gouge in the wood. She didn’t know what it meant but it was trouble of some kind, because Tab was in sort of a crouch with his fist with the knucks raised before him and he opened the door and entered the apartment that way.
He wasn’t gone long and there were no sounds, but when he came back he was standing up straight and his face was empty of all expression. “Miss Shirl,” he said, “I don’t want you to come in but I think it would be for the best if you just took a look in the bedroom.”
She was afraid now, knowing something was terribly wrong, but she followed him obediently, through the living room and into the bedroom.
It was strange, she thought that she was just standing there, doing nothing when she heard the scream, until she realized that it was her own voice, that she was the one who was screaming.
4
As long as it had been dark, Billy Chung found the waiting bearable. He had huddled in a corner against the cool cellar wall and had almost dozed at times. But when he noticed the first grayness of approaching dawn at the window he felt a sudden sharp spasm of fear that steadily grew worse. Would they find him hiding here? It had seemed so easy last night and everything had worked out so well. Just the way it had been when the Tigers had pulled those jobs. He had known just where to go to buy an old tire iron, and no questions asked, and just a dime more to have the end sharpened. Getting into the moat around the apartment buildings had been the only tricky part, but he hadn’t been seen when he had dropped over the edge and he was sure no one had been looking when he had jimmied open the cellar window with the tire iron. No, if he had been seen they would have grabbed him by now. But maybe in the daylight they would be able to spot the jimmy marks on the window? He shivered at the thought and was suddenly conscious of the loud thudding of his heart. He had to force himself to leave the shadowed corner and to work his way slowly along the wall until he was next to the window, trying to see through the dust-filmed glass. Before he had closed the window behind him he had rubbed spit, and soot from the ledge, into the marks the tire iron had made; but had it worked well enough? The only clear spot on the window was the heart he had drawn in the dust and by moving his head around he looked through it and saw that the splintered grooves were obscured. Greatly relieved, he hurried back to his corner, but within a few minutes his fears returned, stronger than ever.
Full daylight was streaming through the window now — how long would it be before he was discovered? If anyone came in through the door all they had to do was look his way and they would see him; the small pile of old and cob-webbed boards behind which he cowered could not hide him completely. Shivering with fear, he pushed back against the concrete wall so hard that its rough surface bit through the thin fabric of his shirt.
There was no way to measure this kind of time. For Billy each moment seemed endless — yet he also felt that he had spent a lifetime in this room. Once footsteps approached, then passed the door, and during those few seconds he found out that his earlier fear had been only a small thing. Lying there, shaking and sweating at the same time, he hated himself for his weakness, yet could do nothing about it. His nervous fingers picked at an old scab on his shinbone until it tore away and the wound began to bleed. He pressed his rag of a handkerchief over it and the seconds crept slowly by.
Getting himself to leave the cellar proved to be even harder than staying. He had to wait until the people in the apartment upstairs went out for the day — or did they go out? Another stab of fear. He had to wait but he could only estimate the time by looking at the angle of the sun through the clouded window and by listening to the sound of traffic in the street outside. By waiting as long as he could, then putting it off a little longer at the thought of the corridors outside, he reached the point when he felt that it was safe to leave. The jimmy went inside the waistband of his shorts where it couldn’t be seen, and he brushed off as much dust as he could before turning the handle on the door.