Charles knew Pol Taylor’s place was somewhere here—and here was Jake’s.
It was here he saw Beau Bailey.
Chuck Conner did not know the precise location of Jake’s, any more than he knew which of the many grimed brick houses contained Pol Taylor’s high-class bordello. He knew only that some businessmen of the Sister Cities referred to this area as “The Block” and that it contained numerous centers of diversion frowned on by churches and right-thinking people. He saw Beau because Beau stumbled down three steps to the sidewalk, nearly fell—a man in conspicuous trouble.
Charles hurried. Beau, looking wildly up and down the street, rushed away, not recognizing Charles. He went totteringly, and the younger man stopped. Several things had become plain to him in that instant. Beau’s eye was cut and bleeding and his nose was bloody.
But he had not been looking for help. His face, in the arc light, had been tormented by fear; he had been furtive. The chance that the man he noted, in the shadows, but near enough to recognize him, would be somebody able to identify him did not even enter Beau’s head: most people he knew didn’t frequent The Block. Beau rushed on, lurching a little, toward Market Street, and Charles decided he had better not follow: Beau had probably been in a fight; the less said about which, the better.
When Charles reached the river he walked across the bridge slowly. But he was not thinking, this time, of his boyhood. He was thinking of a young woman whose father got in fights in River City hellholes. He was wondering if such a girl, after all, would make a mother for half a dozen kids like his nieces and nephews. Then he began wondering if their mother was any better for them than Lenore would be. Lenore, after all, was a realist. Even a Geigerman.
And not guiltily scared of any weapons—Russian, male, human or animal. A not-scarable girl.
He caught an Edgeplains bus, which meant he’d have to let himself out while a red light somewhere up toward Walnut Street stopped it. The company franchise didn’t allow conductors to drop passengers short of Windmere Parkway, except in rush hour—which showed, he thought, nodding into a half-sleep, that everybody was nuts.
He came over Walnut Street and saw a Jaguar parked in front of the Bailey house. He slowed to admire the red-leather upholstery, the complex controls panel. He wondered whose it was and saw the monogram: KLS.
Kit Sloan.
When Charles entered his house and his mother called, “You’re back pretty early!” he concealed an emptiness. “Yeah. Got in a bicker with Ruth about the world situation. Jim politely threw me out. Remind me to phone and make up in the morning.”
He started upstairs.
His mother, in the second-floor sitting room, spread a gingham dress on the sofa. “Poor Ruth! As if she didn’t have worries enough, with six kids and only thirty-two hundred!”
“Guess I’ll turn in.” But not to dream, he thought; not even to sleep. Kit Sloan.
Across the lawns, on the second floor of the Bailey house, Beau was daubing cotton soaked in ice water on his cuts and talking to his wife, who sat fully dressed, as if she expected a cocktail party to begin any minute, on the toilet seat, holding a basin.
“That’s what happened,” Beau repeated shakily. “I asked Jake for thirty days more and he told Toledo to ‘impress’ me with the situation.” He didn’t seem even aggrieved, merely resigned.
“I-I don’t understand, Beau.” She did—only too well.
“Look at me, then you will. Toledo slugged me. I tried to hold myself together, Netta, I really did. I told him nobody could assault an officer of the Sloan Bank and get away with it—”
“What’d he say?” Netta had to know every detail.
“He said he only wanted his five thousand. He said I wouldn’t be a bank officer—any day he wanted to lift a finger!”
“Don’t talk so loud, Beau! Kit might hear you.”
“I feel like going down and telling him—and be damned.”
“Telling Kit!” The horror of that overpowered Netta for a moment. “Don’t you realize…?”
“Oh, sure! Sure,” Beau said, spitting a little blood. “I also realize 1 can’t go on being beaten up by hoods forever.” “I thought you had plans, Beau. I thought you were going to speak to Henry Conner—”
“I did.” Beau spat more scarlet in the porcelain wash bowl. “Yesterday. That’s why I saw Jake tonight. I thought old Hank would come through.”
“What happened?”
Beau’s face, pale save where blood reddened it, turned toward her piteously. “He offered me five hundred. Said, with taxes the way they are, it was all he could spare.”
“Skinflint!”
“Maybe it was the truth.”
“Henry Conner,” Netta said, with more rage than veracity, “probably still has the first dollar he ever made! Look at the cheap way they live. I bet he has a tidy sum stashed away.”
“Well—we haven’t. And Hank’s not parting with it. And I went to ask Jake for more time-and—” He shuddered. “Look at me! What’ll I say at the bank?”
Netta was bitter. “Oh, heavens. Say you fell down the cellar stairs. Say a mouse pushed you. We’ve got to plan, Beau!”
“How in hell can planning materialize five thousand?”
“Shhhh!” she whispered. “He’ll hear you!” She changed moods briefly. Her eyes became exultant. “They’re together on the big divan looking at TV—and necking. I peeked.” Her mood shifted back. “Go lie down in your bed. Take a towel, so you won’t stain anything. I’ll get you a drink. Thank God, you had the sense to sneak home the back way! If Kit Sloan had caught sight of the mess you’ve made of yourself—”
“I’ve made—of myself?”
“You lost the money, didn’t you?”
It was not that he had bet.
It was that he had lost.
When she entered the beige and scarlet bedroom, the moderne creation of the best interior decorator in both cities, she carried a strong highball and a weak one. Beau was handed the latter.
He at once noticed the marked difference in color and, as his wife had anticipated, was too broken to protest. He flopped back on the pillow, spattering a little new blood on the leather bed-head.
“Now look!” Netta began, and he knew it was the peroration of something that would go on half the night, “we’re at the point where everything depends on playing our cards right. I couldn’t believe our luck when I learned Kit was interested in Lenore again.”
“He’s just interested in pretty girls. Some of the guys at the bank that play around with him tell tales that’d make your eyes stick out.”
She waved that fact away. “Lenore won’t be able to accomplish anything fast enough to help you in this Jake business—”
“She doesn’t even much like the guy.”
“That’s neither here nor there!” Mrs. Bailey talked on, persuasively. “A woman learns to like a man, Beau. Most women at first hate the men they marry, for a while. Though for a girl with all her looks and education to remain so innocent is something I don’t get!”
“You shouldn’t judge everybody by—”
“My background,” she cut in, “is something we do not discuss. Now, Beau—you’ve got—you’ve absolutely got to do something yourself about this gambling debt. We can’t possibly afford to have Lenore’s chances—with Kit Sloan, for Lord’s sake— ruined, because some petty racketeer disgraces you! All you need to do is something temporary. Something that would hold the fort, until Lenore could get—”