Now you take Laverne: he sensed a potential ferocity in her, which perhaps she herself was not aware of. He believed she might kill him if he ever rejected her. In the throes of her passion he often felt as if she might tear his dick out at the roots. Afterwards he was sometimes strangely disappointed to find it still in place, though having in his late frenzy been obsessed with its imminent disappearance. Buddy had looked all his life, without realizing it, for a woman who overwhelmed, even terrified him when fucking and then climbed out of bed, hunger satiated, to display an equable temperament.
When he reached the lot and parked behind the office he saw Clarence in the garage. He waved the envelope at him, but the one-eyed Negro did not seem to get the significance of the gesture. Around front, Buddy had to unlock the door. Leo was rarely known to be late, but his tardiness now served Buddy’s ends.
Buddy opened the envelope and shook its contents out upon his desk. He saw immediately that the murder fund was not included, but took a while to accept that fact, counting and recounting and examining the deposit slip. Then he went to the safe and took out and unlocked the cashbox, though he knew the effort would be fruitless.
But there, secured by a rubber band, were the bills. Buddy thumbed their edges reflectively, but did not count them. Were it not for the rubber band, he might have assumed that somehow he had overlooked the money the day before when he had searched the box. But he understood immediately that, having no matching sales slips for this sum, Leo had brought it back. But when?
Leaving the money where it was, he locked the box and replaced it in the safe. He unlocked the door to the garage and saw Clarence, who was prying at the thread of his rubber boot with a screwdriver.
“Leo been in here?”
“No,” said Clarence.
Buddy closed the door and went to look out front. It was rare to see a customer this early on a Monday morning. He and Leo generally used the time to reconsider prices on cars that had been around for a while without attracting much interest. Then after Clarence cleaned the old figures off the windshields, Leo would whitewash the new ones on, making certain flourishes, such as long tails on the digits that permitted and underlining special bargain prices or following them with one or more exclamation marks.
As it happened, the morning proved more profitable than most Mondays before noon. A Methodist minister, who had been given a hundred dollars to purchase a replacement for his ’29 Ford, bought a ’31 LaSalle that had been on the lot for months, did not try to jew Buddy down, accepted the offer of twenty-five dollars for his old car, and drove off oblivious to the blue smoke pouring from the tailpipe.
Buddy was about to get into the old A-model and drive it back for Clarence’s cleanup when he heard footsteps behind him. He turned and saw Ballbacher.
Before he had time to react, the young man spoke: “I want to buy a Ford phaeton if you got one.”
He showed no recognition of Buddy whatever. He was some kind of nut.
Buddy stared at him for a moment and then said: “Well, we ain’t got one.”
Ballbacher’s square face was suddenly segmented by a grin. He pulled a handful of greenbacks from his pants pocket. “I got the cash right here.”
Buddy looked and saw twenties and tens.
“Whatjuh do, rob a bank?”
“Pinochle.”
“Tell you what,” said Buddy. “I’ll take a look. You just give me a minute.”
He returned to the office and opened the lowest drawer in the right-hand pedestal of the desk, intending to put the gun in his pocket, for purposes of protection, not revenge. He believed that in dealing with Ballbacher he was skating on thin ice. He saw him now as a warped individual and not as the straightforward adversary who had dropped him with Saturday’s sucker punch.
But the pistol was not in the drawer. Buddy ransacked the rest of the desk and then searched Leo’s, because he remembered that he had been disarmed by his salesmen and supposed that Leo, either ignorant of its proper home or with an idea of making it unavailable for sudden passionate uses, had stowed the weapon elsewhere. That would be like Leo, the man of reason. But neither was it in Leo’s desk.
Buddy burst into the garage, where Clarence, having poured some sand onto an oil spill, was watching it turn dark before applying his broom. On Monday mornings he always spruced up his shop.
“All right,” Buddy said fearlessly, though he knew Clarence was armed, “you just give me that gun.”
Clarence took his weight off the broom handle. “I ain’t got no gun.”
Buddy decided on diplomacy. “Listen, that deal we got, I don’t want you to use a gun, see. You got the wrong idea.”
The statement caused Clarence to smile enigmatically.
Buddy said: “You just turn it over. It ain’t healthy for you.”
Clarence sighed, dropped the broom, and raised his arms. He had been frisked many times by the police, who often stopped him capriciously in his neighborhood after dark. These searches, which were never explained, invariably proved futile. The cop’s apology generally took the form of slapping Clarence on the rump and saying: “You just keep clean.”
Clarence spread his legs to make his crotch accessible, because a professional frisk went that high, though how there’d be room in there for a gun or knife along with your cock was beyond him.
Buddy at first backed away in the idea that the ex-boxer was threatening him with a bear hug, but he now got the idea.
“I don’t figure you got it on you. You got it hid someplace.” He scanned the garage in an abstract fashion. Already he had abandoned his suspicion. Facing Clarence, seeing his dead eye, he could not seriously believe him capable of guile.
The Negro lowered his arms and spoke in a tone so sympathetic that, if he had not been a moron, it might have been taken as irony: Buddy was always alert to that note. “Somebody done stole your gun?”
“Humh,” Buddy grunted, disposing of the matter. He started away. “You was going to give me some money,” said Clarence.
Buddy stopped and said without turning: “I was gonna stick it in your coat pocket hanging on a nail.” He whirled around. “You got to remember details like that.”
“I remember,” said Clarence, bending to pick up his broom, “but I never saw you do it yet.” Erect again, he pointed to a dark garment hanging in the corner above an oil drum full of sand. “That there is the coat, in case you was looking for it.”
“I wasn’t,” Buddy said tartly. “I was looking for my pistol, and a while back I was looking for Leo, and you couldn’t do me no good with either.” He made a sudden decision. “Listen, I can’t give you that money till just before the job.”
“Shit then,” said Clarence.
Buddy marched up and stuck a finger in his face. “You get your fucking ass out of here.” He was fuming. “You ain’t got a deal, and you ain’t even got a job pushing that broom. I don’t take that kind of talk from anybody I pay.”
Clarence stood his ground, and when Buddy stopped shouting for a moment, he said earnestly but not obsequiously: “I never said shit on you. What I says was shit for me if I don’t get no money ahead, for killing ain’t like taking a tire off a wheel, specially when it come to killing somebody you ain’t got nothing against.”
Buddy was arrested by this speech of unprecedented length.
“So,” Clarence concluded, “I will sure go away if that’s what you want, on account of you is the boss and this here is your property and no mistake.” He meant the broom, and handed it at Buddy, who did not take it but stared at him for a while.
Then Buddy made a barking laugh. “Clarence, I never thought you couldn’t take a joke.” He even clapped the ex-boxer on the shoulder, the first time he had ever touched him. It was like striking stone: he felt only the huge cap, large as a baby’s head. “The deal is still on, and you’ll get your cash. Jesus, I forgot my customer.” He turned and trotted to the office.
Through the window he saw that Ballbacher was stil
l standing obediently where he had been left.
Buddy went outside. “It turns out we got just what you’re looking for, my friend. It’s your lucky day.”
“My lucky day,” Ballbacher repeated, but his voice was lugubrious.
“It’s over here.” Buddy started down the nearest aisle between the cars, but stopped when he heard no following footsteps on the blacktop. Ballbacher was still in place.
“Let’s take a look at that phaeton,” said Buddy. “It’s in the back row.”
Ballbacher put his hand to his mouth and pushed the lower lip almost to his nose. He dropped his fingers and looked belligerently at Buddy.
“What am I doing here? My kid needs an operation. My wife’d kill me if I drove up in somepin like that.” He now changed his expression, showing Buddy a vulnerable look of dilated eyes. “I been playing pinochle all night and drinking white lightning from a jug.” He shrugged and walked staunchly away, no suggestion of alcohol in his stride.
“Come again, sir,” said Buddy to the receding back. He felt as if a burden had been lifted from his own.
The pencil factory’s noon whistle sounded from across town. Where the hell was Leo? Buddy went inside and picked up the phone.
Leo answered on the first ring.
“Leo,” said Buddy, “what in the hell are you doing?”
Leo’s voice had a weird energy though what he said was reasonable enough. “I got up real early and took your money to the office. I put the night-deposit key on top the medicine chest in the toilet.”
“You did the right thing,” Buddy said hastily. He was on the defensive. “I made a couple sales I forgot to write up. I ain’t been feeling up to snuff lately. Hey, that crazy sonbitch Ballbacher showed up again this morning and pulled the same stunt again.” Buddy laughed hollowly. “I kept my head this time.”
Leo said: “I been thinking about it ever since the undertaker came, and I—”
“What undertaker?”
“—finally saw through your trick. I don’t know how I was so dumb all along, but when a man is left all alone in the world he sees things he didn’t suspect when he had somebody to take care of.”
“Huh?”
“Yeah,” said Leo.
“Undertaker?”
“All the years I worked for you I never even borrowed a quarter to eat at the Greek’s from the petty cash. So somebody put his mitts in the cashbox, and you don’t suspect the pansy or the coon, no. You set your trap for Leo.”
“Trap?”
“Count those bills, you skunk. You won’t find a dollar missing.”
“Jesus, Leo,” Buddy said. “It’s beginning to dawn on me.” He spoke intensely through pursed lips. “This is the damnedest thing imaginable. I assure you, one, nobody’s got sticky fingers around the lot, so, two, I wasn’t ever laying a trap for anybody, most of all you, who are honest as the day is long, which is why you got the only other key to the box, so nobody can get in there but me ‘n’ you. You handle all Jack’s cash, him being part-time, as you are well aware. But…”
Buddy cleared his throat and began an effort to turn the tide. “All things being equal like the fellow says, I don’t mind telling you you hurt my feelings plenty with your nutty goddam theory, because if a man’s close associates don’t trust him he travels under a cloud in this world of ours. I always took you for a man of integrity, Leo, and I always thought the feeling was mutual.”
Leo was suspiciously silent.
Buddy said: “Leo, are you still there?”
Leo screamed into the phone: “You, of all people, to cast aspersions on my character. You filthy dirty pig with all your whores.” He laughed cruelly. “I know about every one: Mary Wentworth and Plum’s wife and that blonde on Myrtle just off Chandler.”
Buddy was not inclined to panic under this sort of attack, which after all was flattering.
“Now Leo, this ain’t like you,” he said quietly. “You’ve always been a squareshooter.”
“And the Dago woman at the Motor Vehicle Bureau, and that redhead who gives manicures in the barbershop of the Stinson Hotel downtown—and I could name a dozen more but I won’t. You are steeped in evil.”
Buddy said: “I can tell you’re worked up in some kinda mood where you won’t listen to reason, Leo. The facts of the case is you’re acting like a woman driver, wandering all over the road. I don’t mind telling you, I wouldn’t take this from anybody else of the male race, but for the fact I have known you for years, and this is the first time I can recall you have a wild hair in your ass.”
“You make a mockery of womanhood,” said Leo, his voice breaking.
Buddy essayed a wisecrack: he was really getting tired of Leo. “Well sir, being a man, how is it any skin off your rump?”
“Your wife is a mother,” said Leo. Buddy was startled to receive what sounded like a Bronx cheer, blown directly into the phone. For an instant he believed this whole thing was a hoax, though Leo had always been humorless. But, with Leo going on to make the identifiable gasps of weeping, Buddy realized he had heard not a mock salute but a burst of grief.
Putting this together with the cryptic reference to the undertaker, Buddy said gravely: “Leo, tell me if I’m wrong, but has there been a death in your family? I hope and trust it’s not your mom.”
Leo screamed: “Don’t soil her name on your slimy lips!” And hung up.
As to Leo’s knowing about his girls Buddy was unconcerned. He lived comfortably in the truth that a reputation such as his evoked jealousy from men and attracted women. No, what he worried about was his gun. Raving with grief, whatever its cause—he had not answered the question about his mother—Leo might be planning to blow out his brains.
Buddy hastily turned all the locks, got into his car, and accelerated in the direction of Leo’s house, without a word to Clarence, who, not permitted to use the office toilet, was urinating into the drain in the center of the garage floor, his broad back discreetly turned to the open entrance.
chapter 8
BIGELOW THE GROCER was a large, bald man in an apron that was smudged from toting cartons from the cellar. He used his big belly a lot, not only as a prop for burdens but also as a kind of threat to smaller customers. He pushed it now at Ralph; it was restrained by the edge of the counter.
“What can I do you for?” He seemed altogether neutral, neither smiling nor projecting any menace but his abdomen, which after all was merely dumb flesh. Ralph was anyway inclined to trust fat people.
Speaking levelly himself, Ralph said: “You know Horace Hauser who delivers for you, well, he can’t come to work any more. I don’t know why, maybe he’s sick or something or his folks won’t let him, but he said I could take his place if it was all right with you. If you don’t believe me, you can call him up.” Ralph flushed and rubbed his head. “Well, no, I guess you can’t do that because they haven’t got a phone. Anyway, I’m not lying.”
Bigelow stared at him for a time, then lowered the bald head and pushed the meaty face across the counter. “He wasn’t worth a good goddam, that little snot. He was always into the loose candy or stinking up the crapper.” He threw his fat hand towards an open door at the rear, through which could be seen the beginning of a flight of descending steps, presumably to the basement. Ralph was happy to hear there was a toilet on the premises; they weren’t easy to find when you were out.
“I don’t mind Number One if nature calls,” said Bigelow. “But I say you oughta take your dumps at home except in unusual circumstances.” He put on a pious expression. “Like if you was sick.”
“I agree with that,” said Ralph.
Bigelow turned mocking. “Oh you do, do you? You think all there is to the job is how you act about the toilet?”
“Well, no, I don’t—” Ralph was talking to himself, Bigelow having left abruptly, and very swiftly for a man of his bulk, at the tinkle of the bell over the entrance. Before the customer, a middle-aged woman wearing a green hat, had closed the door, he was in po
sition at the top of the counter. As she marched along, he kept parallel stride behind the glass candy case, which was neck-high, his face towards her and beaming in expectancy.
When he reached the clearing where the cash register and scales were mounted, he flushed Ralph from the area with a scowl, and the woman entered the gap, spitefully thumping her purse upon the counter.
“Well, Harry,” said she, “here I am again, a glutton for punishment.” She opened her handbag and snatched from it a fragment of paper.
“What can I do you for today, Miz Hugel? Got some fresh eggs just in from the farm, still warm from the hens.”
“I bet they are,” said Mrs. Hugel. “And you break ’em in a pan and you’ll have fried chicken. Harry, your eggs wasn’t even fresh last year when they was first put in cold storage, you old horse thief. The only reason I step in here is I’m too lazy to get to the A and P, so I keep making you rich.”
“Show me a fellow at the A and P though who is fresh as me,” said Bigelow. “If I thought the wife wouldn’t catch me, I’d ask you out.” He bunched his lips and simpered at her.
“Why, you old goat!” Mrs. Hugel said, cackled merrily, and with both hands adjusted her hat, which was decorated with artificial cherries. “You’d order one soda and two straws: that’d be your idea of a date, you tinhorn.”
Up to this point Ralph had believed she spoke with genuine ill will, and because he recognized her from church, where she sang contralto in the choir, had continued to back away in embarrassment. Now that he understood the joking nature of the exchange, he stepped forward and said: “Hi, Mrs. Hugel.” Then, in response to her frown, he added: “Ralph Sandifer.”
Her brow cleared. “Oh hi, Ralph. I’m getting blind as a bat these days. My, you’re shooting right up there. Say, are you still in the junior choir?”