man. His reasons for things were hard to figure. In my business there’s a time to ask questions and a time to let your man simmer until he boils over. Every good cop knows that. It’s a good deal like chess or boxing: Some people you have to crowd and keep off balance. Some you just box and they will end up beating themselves.
He would have told me the story of his life if I had asked him. But I never even asked him how he got his face smashed. If I had and he told me, it just possibly might have saved a couple of lives. Just possibly, no more.
4
The last time we had a drink in a bar was in May and it was earlier than usual, just after four o’clock. He looked tired and thinner but he looked around with a slow smile of pleasure.
“I like bars just after they open for the evening. When the air inside is still cool and clean and everything is shiny and the barkeep is giving himself that last look in the mirror to see if his tie is straight and his hair is smooth. I like the neat bottles on the bar back and the lovely shining glasses and the anticipation. I like to watch the man mix the first one of the evening and put it down on a crisp mat and put the little folded napkin beside it. I like to taste it slowly. The first quiet drink of the evening in a quiet bar—that’s wonderful,” I agreed with him.
“Alcohol is like love,” he said. “The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl’s clothes off.”
“Is that bad?” I asked him.
“It’s excitement of a high order, but it’s an impure emotion—impure in the aesthetic sense. I’m not sneering at sex. It’s necessary and it doesn’t have to be ugly. But it always has to be managed. Making it glamorous is a billion-dollar industry and it costs every cent of it.”
He looked around and yawned. “I haven’t been sleeping well. It’s nice in here. But after a while the lushes will fill the place up and talk loud and laugh and the goddamn women will start waving their hands and screwing up their faces and tinkling their goddamn bracelets and making with the packaged charm which will later on in the evening have a slight but unmistakable odor of sweat.”
“Take it easy,” I said. “So they’re human, they sweat, they get dirty, they have to go to the bathroom. What did you expect—golden butterflies hovering in a rosy mist?”
He emptied his glass and held it upside down and watched a slow drop form on the rim and then tremble and fall.
“I’m sorry for her,” he said slowly. “She’s such an absolute bitch. Could be I’m fond of her too in a remote sort of way. Some day she’ll need me and I’ll be the only guy around not holding a chisel. Likely enough then I’ll flunk out.”
I just looked at him. “You do a great job of selling yourself,” I said after a moment.
“Yeah, I know. I’m a weak character, without guts or ambition. I caught the brass ring and it shocked me to find out it wasn’t gold. A guy like me has one big moment in his life, one perfect swing on the high trapeze. Then he spends the rest of his time trying not to fall off the sidewalk into the gutter.”
“What’s this in favor of?” I got out a pipe and started to fill it.
“She’s scared. She’s scared stiff.”
“What of?”
“I don’t know. We don’t talk much any more. Maybe of the old man. Harlan Potter is a coldhearted son of a bitch. All Victorian dignity on the outside. Inside he’s as ruthless as a Gestapo thug. Sylvia is a tramp. He knows it and he hates it and there’s nothing he can do about it. But he waits and he watches and if Sylvia ever gets into a big mess of scandal he’ll break her in half and bury the two halves a thousand miles apart.”
“You’re her husband.”
He lifted the empty glass and brought it down hard on the edge of the table. It smashed with a sharp ping. The barman stared, but didn’t say anything.
“Like that, chum. Like that. Oh sure, I’m her husband. That’s what the record says. I’m the three white steps and the big green front door and the brass knocker you rap one long and two short and the maid lets you into the hundred-dollar whorehouse.”
I stood up and dropped some money on the table. “You talk too damn much,” I said, “and it’s too damn much about you. See you later.”
I walked out leaving him sitting there shocked and white-faced as well as I could tell by the kind of light they have in bars. He called something after me, but I kept going.
Ten minutes later I was sorry. But ten minutes later I was somewhere else. He didn’t come to the office any more. Not at all, not once. I had got to him where it hurt.
I didn’t see him again for a month. When I did it was five o’clock in the morning and just beginning to get light. The persistent ringing of the doorbell yanked me out of bed. I plowed down the hall and across the living room and opened up. He stood there looking as if he hadn’t slept for a week. He had a light topcoat on with the collar turned up and he seemed to be shivering. A dark felt hat was pulled down over his eyes.
He had a gun in his hand.
5
The gun wasn’t pointed at me, he was just holding it. It was a medium-caliber automatic, foreign made, certainly not a Colt or a Savage. With the white tired face and the scars and the turned-up collar and the pulled- down hat and the gun he could have stepped right out of an old fashioned kick-em-in-the-teeth gangster movie.
“You’re driving me to Tijuana to get a plane at ten-fifteen,” he said. “I have a passport and visa and I’m all set except for transportation. For certain reasons I can’t take a train or a bus or a plane from L. A. Would five hundred bucks be a reasonable taxi fare?”
I stood in the doorway and didn’t move to let him in. “Five hundred plus the gat?” I asked.
He looked down at it rather absently. Then he dropped it into his pocket.
