“Why are you talking about the investment in me?”
“Because this is a different kind of deal, Wally. This one is what you could call maybe a permanent fix.”
“Then you should send somebody too dumb to care what happens later. I have this aversion to electric furniture.”
He ignored me. “This one comes from the very top. Up until six months ago the company was grossing fifteen thousand a week out of Bruerton. That’s in upstate New York. Our local guy is Sid Marion. You met him at the meeting. The gross is from machines, books and grass.”
I waited patiently. “So when the gross sagged off to eight a week, the big man called Sid in and found out that a couple of years ago they put the cops on a merit basis, and six months ago the old Chief of Police died, and a younger man, this James Fosting, was put in. He can’t be bought. We can buy the number two in line, but that doesn’t do us any good while Fosting is there. The loss comes to a total of three hundred and fifty big ones a year, so the big man asked Sid to go to work on the new chief. Smear him. Buy him. Whatever. What happened was that even more of the action got closed down. There are a hundred and forty thousand people in that town up there. It should turn twenty thousand a week, not six. The front office has confidence in you, Wally. He’s yours.”
“Isn’t it work for a button man? Like you can borrow one from St. Louis or someplace.”
“No, because then the locals get very upset, and maybe our number two man won’t get in after all. This has to be accidental, Wally. Very smooth and very cool. You are coming along nice. You are very bright. I keep telling them that.”
“Thanks. I’m bright enough so I know that five hundred a week doesn’t buy that kind of work.”
“There’s a bonus authorized if you make out okay.”
“Like how much?”
“Like twenty.”
I thought it over and did some mental arithmetic. “Twenty is fine, plus ten percent of the total gross for the first year after he’s gone.”
Chowder shook his head sadly. “Wally, you should know I can’t go back to the front office with a crazy idea like that.”
At the door to the bedroom I turned and said, “While I’m dressing, maybe you should contact somebody and get an okay — or go get somebody else.”
“Will you drop down just a little?”
“Let’s get their offer first. Okay?”
I showered, shaved, put on a white shirt, the new cord suit, knotting the pale blue tie just the way I like it. I looked over the finished product in the full-length bedroom mirror. When I was eighteen, a lady told me that I reminded her of a big sleepy blond cat. She told me my eyes had a cold look.
I always think of her when I look in the mirror.
When I came back out, Chowder said, “He’ll go along at seven and a half percent.”
I walked to the door. “Okay. A deal.”
“Where are you going?” he asked.
I grinned at him. “First, I’m going downstairs and get my girl out of the bar. Then I’m coming back here and draw five thousand bucks advance. Then she’s going to pack my stuff, and I’m leaving for Bruerton. Okay with you?”
Gloria was at a corner table, and a slicker type had moved in on her. Gloria likes games. When she saw me coming, she unwrapped her fingers from the glass, and slapped her palm across the dummy’s mouth. He was one startled guy.
He looked up at me and Gloria pouted and said, “Honey, this man has been annoying me.”
I just looked at him. He knew his cards had come off the bottom of the deck. For three seconds he thought it over. Then he got up and slid away fast. I realized I was getting weary of Gloria’s little tricks.
“Why didn’t you hit him?” she demanded.
“Come on,” I said. “Time to pack.”
The eager light came into her eyes. Gloria likes far places. She likes to be on the move.
But she was disappointed. I checked her packing job on my stuff, folded the crisp bills Chowder gave me out of the safe, went in to where Gloria was packing her own rags and said, “Snap it up, baby.”
She smiled up at me. I told Chowder what I planned for Gloria and tipped the doorman off too. She was to wait in front for me while I got the car. I stacked her bags on the sidewalk and carried mine around to the car. I grinned to myself as I waited for a light six blocks away, thinking of the expression on Gloria’s face when she finally realized I wasn’t picking her up and she couldn’t get back into the building. The doorman would have a hard time scaring her off. In a week she’d cool off and be back at her job as dice girl in one of the bars.
It’s kid stuff to barrel along in a car like a big shot. I kept the needle right on fifty-five.
The bad thing about driving is that it gives you too much time to think. I had hoped to inch my way up in the organization without ever having the pressure on too hard. This was a horse of a new color. It gave me the trembles. It had been a long time since I had killed a man. The last one was in a Hamburg alley two weeks before I was picked up in the big raid. And that hadn’t been a pretty one. We couldn’t risk a shot, and I had to whip him to death with the gun barrel. He had been softening up and we were afraid he was going to the MPs, to clear himself by turning us in.
But that had been sort of a spur-of-the-moment deal. I remembered how sick to my stomach I had been after it was over. This was worse. This was more cold-blooded. I had the idea that it had been Chowder who recommended me for the job, hoping that I would foul up. I knew that Chowder was afraid of me.
The difference was in the background, I guess. When Chowder was a kid, he had been brought up in comfortable middle-class surroundings. While his mother was tucking him in bed, I had been sneaking out over the orphanage wall with Mick and Chucky, heading through the dark streets down to the waterfront, rolling the drunks we hauled into the alleys.
When I was fifteen, I drove for two crazy guys who specialized in gas stations. They chiseled me on my cut and I quit them the week before they stepped into a trap. It hadn’t been pretty. Their new driver caught one over the ear and sheared off a gas pump and they went up in flame and black smoke.
Rufe Ventano was the guy who smartened me up. During the three years I worked for him, making book, he taught me how to dress and act. He taught me the right line of chatter and the proper fork to use. The week he was dying in bed of pneumonia, I was picked up on a breaking and entering, and the court gave me a choice of state prison or the U.S. Army. I enlisted the day they buried Rufe.
After Basic I had another long training session at Benning for the Airborne. I found out I was not crazy wild about jumping out of airplanes and wangled a transfer to the MPs. I took their training and got sent to Germany. After a month of watching the clumsy crooks making big dough, I moved in. During the seven months I was AWOL, I made two hundred thousand dollars. I had it in hundred-dollar bills. When they closed in, I buried the fat stacks behind a rock in the subcellar we used as a headquarters.
As I drove toward Bruerton, I realized that if I could carry off the job they had given me, I could ask for a month off. The dough I would get, if properly placed, would get me legitimately to Germany. I wanted to dig behind that rock.
With the two hundred thousand, I could buy myself a little talent among the syndicate personnel, enough to move Chowder out of my way and take over his job.
So it all depended on how I worked it out with James Fosting, Chief of Police of Bruerton.
I left the car in a storage garage and took a cab to the hotel. I signed in as Thomas Quinn, giving a Chicago address.
My room with bath in the Stanley Hotel in Bruerton was that size where you can’t open the room door and the bureau drawer at the same time. The bed was narrow and hard. But it was a respectable hotel. That was important.