Beware of the dog! That was a laugh, now. He handed it a piece of meat through the fence, patted its head while it ate, and then he vaulted over the fence and went up toward the house.
His crowbar opened a window, easily.
Silently he crept up the stairs to the bedroom of the old man, and there he did what it was necessary for him to do in order to be able to open the safe without danger of being heard.
The murder was really necessary, he told himself.
Stunned — even tied up — the old man might possibly have managed to raise an alarm. Or might have recognized his assailant, even in the darkness.
The safe offered a bit more difficulty than he had anticipated, but not too much. Well before three o’clock —with an hour’s factor of safety — he had it open and had the money.
It was only on his way out through the yard, after everything had gone perfectly, that Wiley Hughes began to worry and to wonder whether he had made any possible mistake. There was a brief instant of panic.
But then he was safely home, and he thought over every step he had taken, and there was no possible clue that would lead the police to suspect Wiley Hughes.
Inside the house, in sanctuary, he counted the money under a light that wouldn’t show outside. Monday he would put it in a safe deposit box he had already rented under an assumed name.
Meanwhile, any hiding place would serve. But he was taking no chances; he had prepared a good one. That afternoon he had spaded the big flower bed in the back yard.
Now, keeping close under cover of the fence, so he could not be seen in the remotely possible case of a neighbor looking from a window, lie scooped a hollow in the freshly spaded earth.
No need to bury it deep; a shallow hole, refilled, in the freshly turned soil would be best, and could never on earth be detected by human eyes. He wrapped the money in oiled paper, buried it, and covered the hole carefully, leaving no trace whatsoever.
By four o’clock he was in bed, and lay there thinking pleasantly of all the things that he could do with the money once it would be safe for him to begin spending it.
It was almost nine when he awakened the next morning.
And again, for a moment, there was reaction and panic. For seconds that seemed hours he lay rigidly, trying to recall everything he had done. Step by step he went over it and gradually confidence returned.
He had been seen by no one; he had left no possible clue.
His cleverness in getting past the dog without killing it would certainly throw suspicion elsewhere.
It had been easy, so easy, for a clever man to commit a crime without leaving a single lead. Ridiculously easy. There was no possible—
Through the open window of his bedroom he heard voices that seemed excited about something. One of them sounded like the voice of the policeman on the day shift.
Probably, then, the crime had been discovered. But why—?
He ran to the window and looked out.
A little knot of people were gathered in the alley behind his house, looking into the yard.
His gaze turned more directly downward and he knew then that he was lost. Across the freshly turned earth of the flower bed, strewn in wild profusion, was a disorderly array of banknotes, like flat green plants that had sprouted too soon.
And asleep on the grass, his nose beside the torn oiled paper in which Wiley had brought him the meat and which Wiley had used later to wrap the banknotes, was the black dog.
The dangerous, vicious, beware-of-the-dog, the hound of hell, whose friendship he had won so thoroughly that it had dug its way under the fence and followed him home.
Little Boy Lost
THERE WAS a knock on the door. Gram put the sock she was mending back into the work basket in her lap and then moved the work basket to the table, ready to get up.
But by that time Ma had come out of the kitchen and, wiping her hands on her apron, opened the door. Her eyes went hard.
The smile of the sleek young man in the hallway outside the door showed two gold teeth. He shoved his hat back from his forehead and said: “How ya, Mrs. Murdock? Tell Eddie I’m-”
“Eddie ain’t here.” Ma’s voice was hard like her eyes.
“Ain’t, huh? Said he’d be at the Gem. Wasn’t there so I thought—”
“Eddie ain’t here.” There was finality in Ma’s repetition.
A tense finality that the man in the hallway couldn’t pretend to overlook.
His smile faded. “If he comes in, you remind him. Tell him I said nine-thirty’s the time.”
“The time for what.” There wasn’t any rising inflection in Ma Murdock’s voice to stamp those four words as a question.
There was a sudden narrowing of the eyes that looked at Ma. The man with the gold teeth said: “Eddie’ll know that.”
He turned and walked to the stairs.
Ma closed the door slowly.
Gram was working on the sock again. Her high voice asked: “Was that Johnny Everard, Elsie? Sounded a bit like Johnny’s voice.”
Ma still faced that closed door. She answered without turning around. “That was Butch Everard, Gram. No one calls him Johnny any more.”
Gram’s needle didn’t pause.
“Johnny Everard,” she said. “He had curls, Elsie, a foot long. I ‘member when his dad took him down to the barber shop, had ‘em cut off. His ma cried. He had the first scooter in the neighborhood, made with roller-skate wheels. He went away for a while, didn’t he?”
“He did,” said Ma. “For five years. I wish—”
“Used to be crazy about chocolate cake,” said Gram.
“When he’d leave our paper, I’d give him a slice every time I’d baked one. But, my, he was in eighth grade when Eddie was just starting in first. Isn’t he a bit old to want to play with Eddie? I used to say your father—”
The querulous voice trailed off into silence. Ma glanced at her. Poor Gram, living in a world that was neither past nor present, but a hodgepodge of them both. Eddie was a man now — almost. Eddie was seventeen. And sliding away from her. She couldn’t seem to hold him any longer.
Butch Everard and Larry and Slim. Yes, and the crooked streets that ran straight, and the dark pool halls that were brightly lighted, and the things that Eddie hid from her but that she read in his eyes. There were things you didn’t know how to fight against.
Ma walked to the window and looked down on the street three floors below. A few doors down, at the opposite curb, stood Eddie’s recently acquired jalopy. He’d told her he’d bought it for ten bucks, but she knew better than that. It wasn’t much of a car, as cars go, but it had cost him at least fifty.
And where had that money come from?
Steady creak-creak of Gram’s rocker. Ma almost wished she were like Gram, so she wouldn’t lie awake nights worrying herself sick until she had to take a sleeping powder to get some sleep. If there was only some way she could make Eddie want to settle down and get a steady job and not run around with men like—
Gram’s voice cut across her thoughts. “You ain’t lookin’ so well, Elsie. Guess none of us are, though. It’s the spring, the damp air and all. I made up some sulphur and molasses for us. Your pa, he used to swear by it, and he never had a sick day until just the week before he died.”
Ma’s tone was lifeless. “I’m all right, Gram. I — I guess I worry about Eddie. He—”
Gram nodded her gray head without looking up. “Has a cold coming on. He don’t get outdoors enough daytimes. Boy ought to play out more. But you look downright peaked, Elsie.
Used to be the purtiest girl on Seventieth Street. You worry about Eddie. He’s a good boy.”
Ma whirled. “Gram, I never said I thought he wasn’t—”