“This is against the law?” Lew said.
“No,” McGoldrich said, he touched me under the left shoulder where I wear my clip. “I see you’re dressed for the theater, Willie,” he said.
“I got a license for it,” I said.
“I’m aware of that,” McGoldrich said. “My predecessor in office was rather lenient, wasn’t he? This resulted in him becoming a much richer man than I ever will be. I could have your gun license if it was worth the effort.” He turned a smile to Lew that was full of teeth and said, “I’m after much bigger game than a mere henchman.”
By this time we were all at the end of the aisle. We went one way and McGoldrich the other way. And I remember how Esther Hunt looked after him. Her eyes were the best thing about her, great big brown eyes, and now they were twice as big.
I don’t mean she didn’t know till then what Lew’s line of business was. Everybody in town knows, even kindergarten school teachers. But I think this was when she started seeing something she hadn’t seen before.
From the theater we went for a drink. Not the kind you think. She had no use for the hard stuff. So help me, we had to go to an ice cream parlor.
As we were lapping up ice cream sodas, which I’m not crazy for, she looked at me across the table with her big brown eyes. “Willie,” she said, “have you really got a gun?”
“Just kind of insurance, Miss Hunt,” I said.
She shivered and said to Lew, “Must we always have him along with us?”
“Don’t you like him, honey?” he said.
“I go out with you, not with both of you,” she said.
Lew sipped his soda through the straw and didn’t say anything. So I said, “I see your point, Miss Hunt, but a guy in his position is like the kings in the play we just saw. Everybody is looking to knock them off. You don’t want it to happen to Lew here, do you?”
“Of course not,” she said.
“So that makes the both of us,” I said.
“I hate having it to be like this,” she said. And looked like she was going to bust out crying.
Lew took the straw out of his mouth and said, “Scram, Willie.”
“But—”
“Leave the car,” he said. “Take a taxi home. Now beat it.”
He was the boss. I finished the soda and left them there at the table sitting practically on top of each other. But I didn’t go home. I had my responsibilities. For one thing, Augie Pitcher was getting ideas about moving into slot machines, and he’d have no trouble at all if all of a sudden Lew Angel stopped living. I got me a cab and sat in it down the street from the ice cream parlor. When they came out and drove off, I was right behind them.
They went to her place. I paid off the cabbie and leaned against the faded brick wall of the building. After a while I got tired and sat in his car. Waited better than two hours. It was maybe two-thirty when he came out, and her having to get up early to teach school. On his face he had a look like a little league kid who had just hit a home run.
I figured this time he’d gotten a lot more off Esther Hunt than a lousy good-night kiss and I was glad he was no longer wasting his time. The way he was feeling he wasn’t sore I hadn’t gone home like he’d told me to. Got in the car like it was a cloud and I drove him home to his swank apartment house.
“Come up for a nightcap, Willie,” he said, speaking to me for the first time.
“You bet,” I said, this being my first chance to get the taste of the ice cream soda out of my mouth.
Lew Angel doesn’t pour it out of a bottle and give it to you. He has to mix it up first. He was standing at his bar in his living room, putting God knows what in the shaker, when I said, “I think maybe I ought to sleep here nights for a while.”
“What’s the matter with your cottage?” he said.
“Nothing’s the matter with it. But what with Augie Pitcher...”
“We can forget about that,” he said, shaking the shaker. “I’m getting out of the rackets.”
“You’re kidding!”
“I’m dead serious, Willie. This week I start pulling out.” And turned around and poured into a couple of glasses.
I looked at his back that’s not more than half as wide as mine. I said very slowly, “If I didn’t know you, Lew, I’d think you were scared of Augie Pitcher.”
“That lightweight!”
“Then it’s the new D.A., McGoldrich.”
“That do-gooder! He can’t touch me.” He handed me a glass, and a sappy look was on his face. “Drink to Esther and me, Willie. We’re getting married.”
“I didn’t raise the glass.” I said bitterly, “So she talked you into it?”
“Well, we discussed it tonight in her apartment,” he admitted. “Willie, she’s a wonderful girl. Nothing like the cheap broads I’ve been messing with all my life. She’s the first girl I’ve wanted to marry. She’s got class, Willie. Brains. Refinement. And she loves me.”
“No dame is worth giving up all you have,” I said.
“What have I got?” he said. “This isn’t a real home. There’s no loving little woman in it and no kids. Willie, I’m a man without dignity. I’m merely a glorified hoodlum.”
“That’s not you talking,” I said. “That’s the kindergarten school teacher.”
“And I’m not getting any younger,” he went on. “I’ve made my pile. Enough for us to live on the rest of our lives. Though, as Esther says, a man should do useful work, so I’ll look around for some kind of business. Strictly legitimate. In Florida or California. We’ll buy a nice house in the country with a swimming pool and have four kids. Two boys and two girls.” He was still way up on that cloud. “I’m thirty-six years old,” he said, “and it’s getting pretty late in life. Like Macbeth said in the play tonight: ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day.’ ”
When a guy like Lew Angel not only goes to see Shakespeare but starts reciting him, you know there’s no hope for him. So at last I raised my glass and drank to their happiness, his and Esther Hunt’s. But there was no taste in it for me.
I got a good look at all four of the guys among the trees, bug. Know ’em all real good. Lew’s boys of course. Like I am — I mean was. Maybe one reason they’re waiting is for Lew himself to show.
Bug, are you bringing help?
This set-up is perfect for them, this cottage in the hollow without another house very close. Guess you think it’s a funny place for a couple of bachelors and all like Floyd and me to live instead of right in the city. But me, I like to fool around growing flowers, and Floyd can’t stand the noise of traffic and kids yelling and other people’s televisions blaring. Besides, there’s all the privacy you want for bringing dames to.
But this isn’t about any of our dames, Floyd’s or mine. It’s a dame I wouldn’t give two cents for, but was wrecking our lives. Esther Hunt.
I came home Tuesday night and Floyd was right here in this living room working on the books. I mean Wednesday morning on account of by then it was close to four o’clock. Lew is a guy never leaves a loophole in his tax returns to give the government a chance to put the hook on him, and it being close to income tax time Floyd is working day and night on the books and tax forms and all those headaches.
I mean was. Floyd has kind of lost interest in his precious books. Right this minute he’s in the kitchen crying like a baby. What can you expect from a bookkeeper?
Well, I came home around four A.M. and told Floyd about Lew going to marry this Esther Hunt and retire. He was hit as hard as I was.
He took off his glasses and blinked his watery eyes and said in that whinny voice of his, “What’ll become of me?”
“The same thing as will become of me,” I said. “We’ll become a couple of unemployed bums. How much dough have you in the sock?”