There was nothing he could do but wait. He couldn’t get in touch with the Syndicate and say, “Come get them.” He didn’t even know the address, just the box number. So he paced around. At six o’clock nobody had shown up, and he went out to the cafeteria, returning around quarter to seven.
At five minutes to seven somebody knocked on Eddie’s door.
He jumped up, stubbing his cigarette out. He looked at his watch and frowned. If it was the Syndicate man, he was five minutes early. And Syndicate men never came when they weren’t supposed to.
He said, “Who is it?”
“Me. Joan.”
It was the girl from down the hall. Cautiously, Eddie opened the door. She grinned up at him. She was still wearing the shirt and pedal-pushers, but she had the waist of the shirt out and tied in a knot just below her breasts, leaving her middle bare and emphasizing the contour of her figure.
She held up an unopened bottle of wine and said, “Hope I’m not disturbing you. I bought this bottle of wine and now I can’t find my corkscrew. I was wondering if you had one.”
Eddie smiled. “Happens I do,” he said. “Little one, attached to my penknife.” He couldn’t keep his eyes off her body. Those big pointed breasts, those flaring hips, the thighs tightly encased in red cloth...
“That’s swell,” she said. “Say, are you doing anything for the next couple of hours?”
“Me? No, not much.”
“I figure, as long as I’ve got the bottle and you’ve got the corkscrew, we could have a share-the-wealth arrangement. We can split the bottle and have a little party right up here.”
His smile became broader, “That’s a swell idea. Let’s go down to your room and—”
“Oh, no,” she said quickly. “My room’s a mess. And it’s much smaller than yours. We could stay here.”
He frowned. He didn’t like the idea of having a stranger in the same room as the plates. But what the hell: The plates were hidden away. And the girl was practically throwing herself at him. It was too good a bit to miss.
If the Syndicate man showed up, Eddie would stall him somehow. Chances were that nobody would come for the plates tonight. The Syndicate usually liked to make pickups of that sort in the daytime, for some reason.
“Okay,” he said. “Go get a glass, and we’ll have a little party.”
*
She hustled down the hall, returning with a drinking glass. Eddie let her in and locked the door behind her. She handed him the bottle of wine, and he took out his penknife, which had half a dozen gadgets on it including a small corkscrew. It was a big knife, and he was proud of it. He stuck the screw into the cork, braced the bottle between his feet, and pulled.
The cork popped free.
“Bravo!” the girl said.
He poured out a glassful of the wine for her, and one for him. They drank.
Eddie sized her up. He had an idea about her, now; she was either a starlet or an heiress, but she was also a wino. She had a compulsion to live in cheap hotels and drink cheap wine and sleep with strange men. Eddie had heard of girls like that. Rich girls who wanted to sink into the slums. Well, he was willing to take all the fun he could from her.
Midway in the second glass of wine, she came over and sat down next to him on the bed. He put his arms around her and they kissed, and he set his glass down and cupped her full breasts, and ran the hand all over her body until he was tingling with desire. He prayed that no Syndicate man would show up now. The way it looked, this girl was good for all the way and back again.
But she wiggled away again when the caress started to get too passionate. Eddie looked a little hurt, and she said, “We don’t want to rush things. We’ve got all night, Eddie-boy.”
“Yeah. All night.”
He drank some more wine. She picked up the knife, still lying on the night-table with the cork stuck in the corkscrew, and hefted it.
“Whew. This thing must weigh a pound.”
“It’s a good knife. Got all the gadgets. I picked it up in Germany right after the war.”
Deftly she pulled the cork free and snapped the corkscrew back into hiding. Eddie watched her, smiling, as her delicate fingers tugged the biggest blade out. She wrapped her hand around the butt.
Then, suddenly, she put the blade to his belly.
He laughed. “Don’t play games like that. It’s dangerous.”
“It’s not a game, Eddie-boy.” Her voice sounded different all of a sudden. She looked him straight in the eye and said, “Where are the plates, Eddie?”
The unexpected question hit him like a sledgehammer between the eyes. He tried to bluff out of it. “What you talking about, huh? Plates?”
“You know damn well what I mean. Plates for ten-dollar bills. You brought them all the way from Chicago to deliver them to the Syndicate.”
“Are you from the Syndicate?”
She smiled. Evil flashed in her eyes. “The Los Angeles branch of the Syndicate has been taken over, Eddie. Different people are running the show now. They sent me to get the plates.”
“I gotta have identification.”
She nudged him with the knife. “Here’s your identification, Eddie.”
His mind struggled to fathom what was happening. The Syndicate taken over? How could that be? The Syndicate was too powerful for that.
Yet here was this girl who knew all about it, and she was holding his own knife in his ribs.
He said slowly, “Suppose I don’t tell you where the plates are?”
“You’ll tell me, Eddie.”
He shrugged. “Suppose I don’t. What then? It ain’t gonna do you any good to stick me with that knife, is it? I won’t tell you when I’m dead.”
“You’ve got them right here in this room.”
“You can’t be sure of that. Maybe I’ve got them in a safety box somewhere. Maybe I’ve got them hidden so deep you’ll never find them. Take the knife out of my ribs, girlie. You won’t get the plates that way.”
The pressure of the blade eased. She said, “We got ways of making you tell us where the plates are. We don’t have to kill you all at once.”
He shook his head. “You don’t scare me.” Then a crafty gleam came into his eyes. “There’s only one quick easy way you can get the plates from me.”
“What’s that?”
“Buy them,” he said.
The idea had sprung into his mind instantly. If someone could take over the Los Angeles branch of the Syndicate, that meant the Syndicate was sure to crumble everywhere else also. Which would leave him out of a job. So the smart thing to do was to get out right now. If he could get a nice price for the plates, he could duck across into Mexico and live a good life there. He had some money saved already, on deposit in a Mexican bank. He hadn’t figured to quit the Syndicate for another ten years, but it looked like the smart thing to do was to get out right here and now with as much dough as he could salvage. Anyway, if he didn’t give this girl the plates he was likely to get messed up but good.
She grinned coldly. “All right. Eddie. We won’t torture you. Name your price for the plates.”
“Ten thousand dollars,” he said.
It was the first figure that leaped into his mind. He didn’t have any idea how much the plates were really worth, but he figured ten g’s was a good place to start the bargaining.
Only the girl didn’t bargain. She nodded her head and said, “Okay, Eddie. You give us the plates and we’ll give you ten grand. Then you clear out and forget you ever came to Los Angeles.”
“When do I get the money?”
“Right now,” she said. “You wait here. I’ll go out into the hall and tell them to come over with it. Just sit tight.”
Eddie sat. He heard the girl go out into the hall and drop a dime in the payphone out there. She dialed a number and someone answered and she said, “Yeah, he’s got them. He’s willing to sell out for ten grand and no questions asked. Bring the cash over here right away.” She hung up.
When
she came back in, Eddie said, “When did this takeover bit happen?”
“Last week. A couple of the guys near the bottom dumped the guys at the top and reorganized. We’re not taking orders from Chi anymore, and we’re not giving them a cut. But we have to have the plates. There’s no engraver out here that can do the job.”
Eddie nodded. “Okay. How about finishing what we started before?”
He reached out for her, but she stepped back and shook her head. “Not now. The guys will be here with the money in fifteen minutes.”
“Fifteen minutes is plenty of time.”
“Wait till they leave. Then we’ll have all the time in the world,” she promised.
Eddie smiled. This was turning out great. Ten thousand bucks in cash for the plates, and a spin in bed with this eye-popper too. And then tomorrow he’d pull out and head for Tijuana with his loot. The Chicago people would never be able to find him. Hell, they could get themselves a new courier. He’d been working this job long enough.
The minutes passed slowly. Finally a long black car pulled up in front of the house. Two men got out and went inside.
“There they are,” the girl said.
A moment later, they were knocking on the door. Eddie let them in. They were big and ugly-looking.
“This the guy?” one of them asked.
“That’s him,” the girl said.
“Okay. Where’s the plates?”
Eddie grinned and said, “Let’s see the money. You give me the money and I’ll give you the plates.”
The smaller of the two men pulled a bulging black wallet out of his pocket and started to count out bills. Eddie got a close look and saw that they were hundred-dollar bills. He counted out ten, tidied them up, and started a new stack. By the time he was finished, there were ten neat little thousand-dollar stacks arranged on the table.
Eddie’s mouth was watering. He picked up one of the bills and looked at it. It looked okay. They didn’t print queer hundred-dollar bills, because it was too hard to pass them. Ten thousand bucks. He pushed the ten little stacks together with quivering hands and started to straighten the bills out.
“The plates,” they reminded him.
“Oh. Yeah. Sure, the plates.” Eddie gathered the money up and put the wine bottle on it as a paperweight. Then he went to his dresser drawer, reached under the shirts, pulled out the box. “It’s locked,” he said. “I don’t have the key—the Syndicate men always had the key. But you can break it open to make sure it’s the right stuff.”
“We have the key,” one of them told him. They opened the box and looked in. Eddie saw the gleaming copper plates. The box was closed.
He folded his arms. Now, as soon as the two goons cleared out, he and the girl could get down to some serious necking—
He realized suddenly that he was staring into the snouts of two silenced .38s.
“Hey,” he said thinly. “What’s the stunt? How come the guns?”
The girl laughed richly. “The joke’s on you, Eddie. We are from the Syndicate. There hasn’t been any change around here.” She reached into the pocket of her pedal-pushers and took out a torn ten-dollar bill. She waved it at him. Eddie knew it matched the one he had in his wallet.
“I don’t get it,” he muttered. “Why—”
“It was all a little game, Eddie,” she said, still smiling. “We wanted to see how loyal you were to the Syndicate. But you weren’t very loyal, were you? You were in an awful hurry to sell out, it seems. So you aren’t much good to us. The Chicago people said to test you, to make sure you were loyal.” She shook her head. “Looks like you flunked the test, Eddie.”
“No—wait—it was all a mistake!” he yelled. “I didn’t really mean to sell the plates! I—”
One of the guns made a whining sound. Then the other one fired. Eddie felt the red-hot slugs rip into his body. He toppled forward, reaching out to the pile of hundred-dollar bills. The Syndicate mobsters fired again. Eddie’s clutching hand pulled away from the bills, and he went sprawling forward onto the cheap rug, still trying to explain that it was all a mistake as Death took him.
ONE NIGHT OF VIOLENCE
It was past six in the evening when Mike Keller finished up the last stop of the day. By that time the sun was long since down, because it was a cold, chilly October day in central Wisconsin. Time to knock off for the day, Keller thought. He was a salesman, making the rounds for a furnace company. This was the first day of his regular three-day sales trip through the middle of the state.
He had covered a lot of ground that day, since he had started out bright and early in Fond du Lac. He was well into Columbia County, and the day had been pretty successful. Keller felt good about things, all factors considered. He enjoyed traveling around, talking to new people and getting to know them, getting them to like him and buy from him. And the job paid well. The only part about it that he didn’t like was that he had to spend too much time away from Beth and the kids, making these long jaunts across Wisconsin and sleeping alone in cold, drafty motels instead of home with his wife.
But it was a good job, and after a few more years on the road they would give him a post in the home office, paying maybe ten or twelve thousand a year, and from then on everything would be swell.
Keller finished saying goodbye to his last customer of the day and climbed into his Oldsmobile. He hit the road, steaming along the flat, straight highway at an effortless 75 mph. His traveling schedule called for him to spend the night at a place called Wofford’s Motel, on Route 16 near Wyocena. In the morning, he’d continue along Route 16, making some stops in Portage and Wisconsin Dells, then cutting south through Sauk County.
He stopped off at a roadhouse a few miles from the motel and ate a light supper, just some bean soup, frankfurters and beans, and coffee. When he was on the road, he usually ate his big meal at noontime. That gave him the extra energy to get through the day. When he was finished eating, he drove along the highway till he reached the turnoff that led to Wofford’s Motel.
Usually, when he was on this route, he stopped at a place called Hickman’s, two or three miles further along the road. But Hickman’s tended to be a little stingy with the steam heat, and the rent was high. So a friend had suggested this other motel, Wofford’s, and Keller decided to give it a try.
It looked just like a million other motels, when he drove up to it about quarter to eight that evening. It was one story high, a long rambling place spread out in the shape of a big letter “L,” with a concrete motor-court filling in the middle. A dozen or so cars were parked in the motor-court, but the place didn’t look anywhere near full.
Keller turned off the roadway, pulled his car into a vacant parking spot, and doused the motor. He took his small traveling suitcase from the back seat and trudged over to the neon-decorated doorway that said “office.”
A tired-looking middle-aged man was sitting back of the desk reading a Milwaukee paper. He looked up at Keller without expression. “Yes?”
“I sent you a postcard last week, making a reservation for tonight. The name’s Michael Keller.”
Slowly, the desk man unlimbered himself and riffled through a reservation book. While he looked for Keller’s card he said, “You sure didn’t need to bother with a reservation tonight, fella. Damn if we have more than fifteen rooms full outa sixty.”
Keller shrugged. “Guess I’m a cautious type, that’s all. This time of year I like to know I got a room. I wouldn’t want to have to go cruising around looking for one, late at night.”
“Here we are,” the clerk muttered, pulling Keller’s card out of the book. “Okay. Room 23. Nine bucks for the night. That okay?”
Grinning, Keller said, “Nine bucks will have to be okay, won’t it?” He took the key, picked up his suitcase, and headed across the paved walkway to the door numbered 23. He let himself in.
It wasn’t a bad room at all—on the small side, but he didn’t mind that. A single bed with a blue coverlet, a couple of chairs, a dresser, a ne
at little bathroom. There was a radio, but no television set. The room was nice and warm. Keller made a mental note to add this place to his list of good motels, for use whenever he happened to come through this section.
He unpacked and went through the little ritual of taking the framed photos of his wife and kids out and setting them up on the dresser. He did this wherever he went. He put his wife Beth’s photo in the middle, surrounding it with the snaps of six-year-old Jeanie, four-year-old Tom, and Dannie, the baby.
Next thing he did was to take some motel stationery out of the dresser drawer. He wrote, as always, a postcard to Beth. He would mail it first thing in the morning at the next town he stopped at and she would get it the day after. He would be home late the night on which she received the postcard, but she always looked forward to the card anyway. He wrote simply that he had had a good day, hoped for equal good luck tomorrow, and that he sent his love to her and to the kids. He stuck a stamp on the postcard and set it aside.
He unpacked the book he was reading, took off his shoes, and sprawled in the armchair to read. One good thing about this job, he thought, was that he got time to do plenty of reading. For the first time in his life he could read some good books and improve himself. On this trip he was carrying a book by Zola. The last time out, it had been a book about the Revolutionary War.
The time was half past eight. Keller planned to read till about eleven, maybe eleven-thirty if he got really wrapped up in what he was reading. Then lights out, with the little alarm clock set for six-thirty ayem. Breakfast at seven, after a shower and a shave, and then, by eight, the first stop of the second day’s route. He would make a big curving swing south through the Sac Prairie country, then start heading around on the homeward leg along Route 151 through Madison and back to Fond du Lac.
He started to get involved in the book, and time passed rapidly. Soon it was quarter after nine. Feeling thirsty, Keller laid the book aside and poured a drink of water for himself.
He heard the sound of a door slamming nearby. Then, footsteps and voices. The walls weren’t very thick at this motel, apparently. He could hear the muffled sound of people speaking.