I frowned, not liking all the questions. “Bay State Mutual. Why? Is it important?”
“No. I guess not.”
“Look, Elaine. I’m fine today. A little moody, possibly. Those feelings come and go. Don’t start worrying about me.”
She brushed at her bangs with the back of one hand. Her smile was quick but uncertain. “I’m sorry, darling.”
“I guess it’s time for us to get out of here,” I said.
“Yes.” She turned her head to look at the angle of the sun. “It was a nice day,” she said. “I had fun today.” She held my hand tightly. “I wish... it wouldn’t end.”
“There’ll be other good days,” I said. “Lots of good days.” I wasn’t thinking that. I was thinking that maybe the good days were over for a while. And I was afraid she’d know, so I turned away from her and began to gather up the beach towels.
We walked to the water and I helped Elaine over the side into the boat, shoved off from the beach. Once at the wheel I headed into the sun. Elaine leaned against me, her head on my shoulder. Her eyes were closed. The boat cut a rough path through the darkening water. She hummed to herself, and I could barely hear the sound of it above the noise of the big motor. It was a strange lonesome tune that no one had ever hummed before but everyone had heard it at some time, sounding clear above the low beat of fear in their hearts.
Elaine was in better spirits by the time we arrived at her home. I unloaded the car, carried the beach towels and picnic basket to the big front porch of the Arnell house, overlooking the bay.
“Don’t forget the concert tonight,” she reminded me. “You’ve got only an hour to get ready.”
I kissed her cheek lightly. “I’ll go over to the store now and change. Clean the fish in the morning.”
I drove away from the house and headed crosstown. On the way I passed through the neighborhood where our house had recently been completed. It was dark now, waiting for Mrs. Mallory to bring light and warmth to the rooms. Soon. My breath caught a little at the thought. It had been a damned long time. But she had been worth waiting for.
My store was south on the highway, convenient for both the fresh-water fisherman of the backcountry canals and the angler who favors the tide flats and open sea.
I parked in front of the small building and paused under the pulsing neon sign that identified the place as
Thinking about this, I looked self-consciously down the street, but there were no cars parked nearby. My only company was two teen-age girls in Bermuda shorts standing in front of a theater half a block away. I grimaced at my momentary nervousness and unlocked the door. I put away a couple of lures I had been experimenting with that morning and hunted up an ice chest. While I was getting it from a shelf behind the display case, the door opened. It didn’t close right away, and I had the feeling that someone held it open and watched me. Sweat rolled down my cheek. It was hot in the store without the air conditioner on. There was a loaded .38 revolver in a holster beneath the cash register, but it was ten steps away. I could feel the muscles of my back tightening. I tried not to think about the gun.
“You went fishing today,” he said. “I couldn’t find you.”
I took the ice chest from the shelf, straightened up and turned around, setting the chest carefully on the glass top of the display case. A drop of perspiration fell from my chin, splashing on the glass. I was conscious of my heart beating too fast.
“You ever been shot, Rudy?” I said harshly.
He was a stocky man, with too much weight on his bones now. He wore a wrinkled light-blue cord suit, a tired gray hat pushed back on his head. His hair was graying, oiled, long around the ears, thinning on top. He watched me steadily, wearily, from behind a large pair of glasses, the clear plastic frames yellowed by the sun. There was a crack at the corner of one lens.
His lips stretched wide in a humorless smile. “Lots of times.”
“You know better than to come on me like that. You might have picked up another one.”
A brown insect with buzzing wings whirled in the door, hovered near his ear, soared away. He chewed steadily on the wood end of a match. “You wasn’t nowhere near a gun,” he said, then added defensively, as if he hadn’t considered the possibility before, “and I was as close as my hip pocket.”
“Finish coming in,” I told him, “and shut the door.” I walked around the display case and turned on the air conditioner at the back of the store.
Rudy Mask sat in a chair and looked curiously about the store, sighed as the cold air from the big Carrier unit reached him. “So this is what you bought with Macy’s money,” he said.
I stood watching him. “Money I earned, Rudy,” I said.
He nodded, taking in the stuffed sailfish, the racks of slender rods. He knew nothing about fishing, cared less. He was an old hoodlum, an aging tough guy, his body scarred from knives and an occasional healed bullet wound. Not many. You don’t take many and keep walking around. His face and ears were worn and lined from the back alley poundings, the careless brawls in dives in every kind of town. His eyes had seen too many women, in brothels, in stinking chicken coops when things were bad, in magnificent apartments that smelled of strange flowers and perfume and the sweet flesh of hundred-dollar girls when things were fabulously good. His fingers had held too much whisky, and they weren’t steady.
It had been six and a half years since I had seen him, and he didn’t belong here. I didn’t want to see him now. I had left his kind of life one day when the stink of it had clutched at my stomach and made sleep impossible. In the last months I had gradually forgotten there was always a loaded gun pointed at my head wherever I went. Rudy was a reminder that the trigger could be pulled at any time.
“What are you doing in Orange Bay?” I asked him.
“Macy wants you.” He took the chewed match from his mouth, glanced at it, tossed it on the floor. He looked for another in his coat pocket. “Somebody’s going to kill him,” he said, and coughed. Then it was quiet in the store, except for the air conditioner.
“Is that supposed to make me unhappy?” I said.
“Well, Jesus!” Rudy said, surprised.
“Who’s trying to kill him and why would I be interested?” I said, impatient to know what he was getting at.
He shook his head. “Macy doesn’t know. It’s not a Syndicate order.”
“What
Rudy shifted his weight in the chair. “You remember the old gang, Macy’s first gang, back in the thirties? I started with Macy then, after I drifted out of Kansas City. There were four others besides me, Pete. Clemente and Porter and Tin Ear and Lundquist. Did Macy ever tell you what racket we had then?”
“Shakedown. Protection.”
“It was sweet. We lined up whole neighborhoods. Once in a while a customer wouldn’t buy. We ran into a tailor like that. He had a scrubby little shop and lived upstairs with fat mamma and two-three kiddies. Little old guy with a bent back and thick glasses. I remember him kinda well. He didn’t need the protection. His place burned one night. It was tough. So quick he didn’t have time to get himself and fat mamma and the kiddies out. We lost a client, but the other merchants on the block came through in a hurry.”
“I never heard about it,” I said grimly.
“Macy’s been hearing about it lately — in the last three years. Every time one of the old gang was knocked off, he got a clipping in the mail, an old yellow newspaper clipping about the fire that burned the tailor and his family. Along with another story about how each one of the boys got it. Porter was the first. In an alley in Hammond, Indiana, about three years ago. Ripped apart with a big knife. There was maybe a couple of paragraphs in the local paper. Nobody would have known about it, except Macy got the story a few days later, cut from the paper. And the first clipping about the fire.”
