The girls with whom these fellows soon or late became involved Itchy found to his liking. Their very difference from anything he had ever known made them more plausible to him. The women with whom he had come in contact from time to time certainly hadn’t been very wonderful, even discounting his tribal pose of misogyny. But these were different. More like — the girl in the bookstore was something on their order...
Still, say what you would about these men in the books, — neglecting the most simple precautions, always being surprised at work, showing themselves unnecessarily gullible, and only succeeding through the miraculous favors of chance, — they did have something. They made big hauls, they enjoyed themselves, people wrote stories about them... Take, for example, that one who told the detective: “I’m tired of you. You bore me. You weary me. You exasperate me. Now get out.” That wasn’t a bad line at all. Imagine the look on an “elbow’s” face if you told him that! Naturally, though, you’d want to be sure you were sitting pretty before you made a crack like that.
Of course, you couldn’t go around pulling jobs as these fellows did: they were no good in a practical way. But a man who knew his business through and through might, by copying their manners, their dress, and their talk, not only increase his profits by being able to get into places from which less polish would bar him, but have a lot of fun in the bargain. The newspapers liked that kind of stuff, too. Look what a fuss they raised over those two jobs of his, and he hadn’t even tried to make them fancy.
Another visit to the bookstore exhausted its stock of gentleman crook fiction, but he learned that w hat he wanted could be found on the screen now and then and in the magazines often.
He was in earnest now. His hair was carefully parted and weighted down with a thick gummy substance that he bought in large jars; he spent time in the barber’s chair, and even submitted his hands to a manicure. Nor had he neglected tailor, haberdasher, hatter, and booter.
He read aloud to himself in his room at night, and felt that his language was being improved thereby. Every day or two he visited the bookstore, ostensibly to enquire for new books, but actually for the sake of the saleswoman’s conversation. The books could give him the right words and the correct combinations, but they didn’t give him the right pronunciations. The saleswoman could, however, and not only the pronunciations but the right sort of accent. She formed her words high in the roof of her mouth, and they came out roundly and clearly in what he knew instinctively for the correct form. After he had returned to his room he would repeat everything she had said, painstakingly aping each trick of enunciation.
He was going to stick up the bookstore some day, he decided. There wouldn’t be much money in the damper (he must remember to say cash register if he spoke of it), and, in the center of the shopping district, the store was unfavorably located for a quick get-away. But the saleswoman was the only person he knew whom he thought capable of unerringly judging the false from the true, and by her attitude he would know the degree of his success. But he wouldn’t do it for a while yet; he wasn’t quite ready for so severe a testing, and, besides, she would be getting new books in from time to time, and there was no use closing that source of supply.
Another month passed before Itchy ordered evening clothes. But all the books had insisted upon them, — dinner jackets were indicated also, — so he finally came to it. He didn’t, however, buy a dinner suit. He felt that since he was taking this step forward he might as well make it a decisive one, and waste nothing on the compromise between formality and informality which the dinner suit offered.
He wore the new dress suit every night from the first, which necessitated his remaining indoors for a while, until he became accustomed to the new garments. But he usually kept to his room in the evenings, anyway. He had no desire for the society of his familiars. He knew how they would greet this new Itchy, with his silk shirts and hose, his carefully tended face and hands, his glossy hair, his natty clothes. For those who dressed as he did now — the gaudy city breed — he had lost none of his old Contempt. Thus he spent much time by himself.
He became, at about this time, unpleasantly aware of his nickname. He had grown accustomed to it, had come to think of it more natural a part of him than the baptismal Floyd; but now, considering it in terms of his new development, he found it distasteful. He had acquired it five or six years before, sitting with a group of his fellows around a fire in the “jungles” outside of Fresno one night. He had been digging savagely at the flea-bites with which he was covered at the time, and some old “stiff” had flung the name across the flames at him. He had laughed with the others, and the name had stuck. Itchy Maker. What difference did it make? One name was as good as another. But now one name was not necessarily so good as another. And while the chances were that he would never mingle again with those who knew him by it, still the name might crop up at the most unexpected times to embarrass him. If he found new associates now — as he undoubtedly would before long — he meant to see to it that they knew him as “Debonair” Maker. That was a lot better than Itchy — had a fine sound, in fact.
Another fortnight, and Itchy was wearing his correct evening clothes on the streets and into the lobbies of the better hotels, where he would loiter for hours, gazing condescendingly on those whose more common garb did night and day duty. And, as his familiarity with them increased, the new clothes began to tempt him to wear them on a robbery. But he resisted that, for a while.
Within the next two months he held up a small jewelry store and the office of a laundry company. He was sure of himself in his new role now, and he enlivened both banditries with copious quotations from the books he had read, and even extemporized a trifle. In the laundry office he was fortunate enough to encounter two girls who were addicted to the same sort of literature, and their appreciation of his manner was gratifying. And even more gratifying was the warmth with which the press accepted the girls’ stories, polishing them, gilding them, and setting them out at great length for the world to see. Itchy had column after column of type devoted to him now — even editorials.
IV
The lobby of A theater just before the box office closed one night was the scene of the dress suit’s baptism. The top hat he had, of course, finally left at home; there was no use overdoing the thing. His grammar had improved by now until the double negative was rare, though tenses still puzzled him, and his accents were worth all the imitative labors they had cost him.
His light overcoat drooping to each side, exposing the full chiaroscuro of his immaculate costuming, he smiled at the girl behind the grille and wrought beautifully with what he knew of the graces of speech. And the girl, once she had become relatively accustomed to the sight of the pistol in his hand, enjoyed the robbery perhaps as much as he.
Nevertheless she gave the alarm as soon as he left.
It happened there were only two other men in dress clothes on the streets of San Francisco that night, and one of them was very old and the other was very tall. And thus, though the police went astray once at the corner of Powell and Geary Streets, and again, momentarily, at Mason and Sutter, they still arrived at Itchy’s quarters — he had an apartment now, on California Street — only a few minutes behind him.