I felt his brow. He sure was.
I went over to where Oscar and Georgie and Tiny were changing their clothes beside the Nash. This would be an important part of our protective coloration – completely different and respectable clothes.
The alarm was out for five men in a Buick, at least four of whom had been seen wearing caps and T-shirts and denim pants. I felt kind of sorry for anybody within a hundred miles who would be in T-shirts and denim pants. But we wouldn’t be. We’d be wearing conservative business suits and shirts and neckties, and we’d be driving two in a Ford Georgie owned legally and three in a Nash Oscar owned legally, and why would any cop at a roadblock or toll gate waste time on such honest-looking citizens?
Except that in one of the cars there would be a wounded man. This was one contingency Oscar hadn’t foreseen.
I said to Tiny who was standing in his underwear, “Give me a hand with the kid. He’ll be more comfortable on the ground.”
Oscar stopped buttoning a freshly laundered white shirt. “Leave him where he is.”
“For how long?” I said.
There was a silence. I’d put our plight into words. This was as good a time as any to face it.
Oscar tossed me a smile. About the worst thing he did was smile. It was twisted and almost never mirthful.
“Until,” he said, “somebody blunders into these woods and finds him.” He tucked his shirt-tail into his pants and added hopefully, “It might take days.”
Wally was nobody to me. But I said, “We can’t do that.”
“Have you a better idea, Johnny?” Oscar said.
“You’re the big brain,” I said.
“Very well then.” Oscar, standing among us tall and slightly stooped, took off his horn-rimmed glasses. “Gentlemen, let us consider the situation.”
This was his professorial manner. He could put it on like a coat, and when he did you knew he was either going to show how bright he was or pull something dirty.
“The odds are highly favorable,” he drawled, “that before midnight we four will be out of New Jersey and in New York and each safe and snug at home. But not if we’re burdened by a wounded and probably dying man. We’ll never make it. If by chance we do make it, what do we do with him? At the least he needs a doctor. A doctor finds the bullet wound and calls in the police. Perhaps Wally wouldn’t talk. Perhaps he will. He may be delirious and not know he’s talking.” Oscar’s smile broadened. “There’s no question, gentlemen, that we’d deserve to have our heads chopped off if we stuck our necks out so far.”
Tiny said uneasily, “Yeah, but we can’t just leave him here to die.”
“Certainly not.” Oscar’s eyeglasses swung gently from his fingers. “He might die too slowly or scream and attract a passing car. There is, I’m afraid, only one alternative.”
All right, but why did he have to say it in that mocking, lecturing manner, and why did he have to keep smiling all the time?
Georgie was down on one knee lacing his shoes so he wouldn’t have to look at anybody. Tiny was scratching his hairy chest unhappily. I was a little sick to my stomach. And Oscar Trotter smiled.
“Tiny, your knife, please,” Oscar drawled. “A gun would be too noisy.”
Tiny dug his switchblade knife out of a pair of pants draped over the hood of the Nash. Oscar took it from him and moved to the Buick as if taking a stroll through the woods.
I turned away. I couldn’t stop him, and if I could I wouldn’t have. I’d seen that kid only twice in my life before today, the first time less than a week ago. I didn’t know a thing about him except his name. He was nobody at all to me. But I turned away and my hands shook as I set fire to a cigarette.
Then Oscar was coming back.
“Well, Johnny,” he taunted me, “from the first you wanted less men to cut in on the loot, didn’t you?”
I had an impulse to take a swing at him. But of course I didn’t.
Much of the next three days I watched Stella jiggle about Oscar’s apartment. She was a bit on the buxom side, but in a cozy-looking, cuddly-looking way. She went in for sheer, tight sweaters and little else, and she had what to jiggle with. She belonged to Oscar.
I didn’t know what the dames saw in him. He was no longer young and you couldn’t call him handsome by a long shot, but he always had a woman around who had both youth and looks. Like Stella, who was merely the current one. She was also a fine cook.
I was staying with them in Oscar’s two-bedroom apartment on Riverside Drive. I’d come down from Boston for that New Jersey caper, and afterward there was nothing to take me back to Boston. Oscar was letting me use the spare room while I was making up my mind whether to stay in New York or push on to wherever the spirit moved me.
On that third day Oscar and I went up to the Polo Grounds to take in a ball game. When Stella heard us at the door, she came out to meet us in the foyer.
“There’s a friend of yours in the living room,” she told Oscar. “A Mr Brant. He’s been waiting over an hour.”
I stepped to the end of the foyer and looked into the living room. The meaty man sitting on the sofa and sucking a pipe was definitely no friend of Oscar’s. Or of mine. He was Bill Brant, a city detective attached to the DA’s office, which meant he was a kind of free-wheeling copper.
Oscar touched my arm. “I expected this. Merely the MO. I’ll do the talking.” He turned to Stella. “Go do your work in the kitchen.”
“I haven’t any. Dinner’s cooking.”
“Go find something to do in the kitchen,” he snapped.
She flounced away, wiggling almost as much as she jiggled. But the thing is that she obeyed.
Oscar trained his women right. She was used to being sent out of the room or sometimes clear out of the apartment when business was being discussed. She was no innocent, of course, but in his book the less any woman knew the better. It might be all right to trust Stella today, but who knew what the situation would be tomorrow? So she went into the kitchen and we went into the living room.
“Well, what d’you know!” Bill Brant beamed at me. “Johnny Worth too! Another piece fits into the picture. I guess you came to town for the Jersey stickup.”
“I did?” I said and went over to the portable bar for a drink. I didn’t offer the cop any.
“What’s this about New Jersey?” Oscar was asking.
“We’re cooperating with the police over there. You’re a local resident. So was Wallace Garden who was found dead in the Buick.”
“You misunderstood my question.” Oscar was using his mocking drawl. “I’m not interested in the jurisdictional problems of the police. I’m simply curious as to the reason for your visit.”
“Come off it,” Brant said. “That payroll stickup has all your earmarks.”
I helped myself to another drink. I hadn’t been very much worried, but now I felt better. That, as Oscar had guessed, was all they seemed to have – the MO, the modus operandi, the well-planned, perfectly timed and executed armed robbery that cops identified with Oscar.
“Earmarks!” Oscar snorted. “Do they arrest citizens for that these days?”
“No, but it helps us look in the right direction.” Brant sucked on his pipe. “That killing too. It’s like you not to leave loose ends, even if it means sticking a knife into one of your own boys.” He twisted his head around to me. “Or did he have you do the dirty work, Johnny?”
That was one thing about Oscar, I thought – he did his own dirty work. Maybe because he enjoyed it.
Aloud I said, “What the hell are you talking about?”
Brant sighed. What had he expected, that we’d up and confess all as soon as he told us he had a suspicion? We knew as well as he did that he didn’t even have enough to take us to headquarters and sweat us, and likely never would have. But he was paid to try, and he hung around another ten minutes, trying. That got him nothing, not even a drink.