“What do you want to make waves for, Fortune?”
“Looking for Weiss is making waves?” I said.
“Big waves,” he said.
“You’re Paul Baron?”
He had an odd way of looking at some point on a far wall. He looked at a wall and nodded. “I’m Paul Baron. You’re getting in my way, Fortune.”
“Enough to be pushed under a train?”
Baron considered the ceiling. “That was a bad play. Spur-of-the-moment, you know how it is. It seemed like an idea at the time.”
“What is it?” I said, and stepped toward Baron. “You want to silence Sammy before he can finger you for killing Radford?”
I suppose I stepped toward him to show him that I wasn’t afraid of him. If I did, it worked fine, but not with exactly the result I had had in mind.
Baron said, “Leo.”
A second man appeared in the open doorway. A short, broad man with enormous, dangling hands, and massive shoulders like the hump of a bull buffalo. He shambled into the room on short, stiff legs that seemed to have no knees, and watched me with blank-faced concentration.
Baron studied a stain on the far wall. “Now listen good, Danny boy, and then forget what you heard. A man owed me money. I’m an easy-going man, but I like to be paid. This man couldn’t pay me, but he had an uncle who could. I sent Sammy Weiss to collect my money. Weiss got my money, but I didn’t get it. I still don’t have my money. I want it.”
Baron let a silence hover in the room as if to give his point time to sink in. I could hear the rasping breathing of Leo the buffalo.
I said, “You know, it’s strange, but I’m having trouble seeing Sammy Weiss with the nerve to cross you.”
Baron sighed. “Let’s try it once more, okay? I sent Weiss for my money. Something went wrong, I guess, and Sammy panicked. He killed Radford. I don’t care about that. But it seems like Sammy figured if he had to run he could use $25,000 to pay his way. That I care about. Now you go ahead and help Weiss on the murder rap, but after I get my money. Right now I don’t need you nosing around. Check?”
“The money is evidence in a murder, Baron.”
“Sure. That’s why I need it before anyone finds Weiss. I’m doing Sammy a favor. They won’t find the money on him.”
“You’re sure they’d find it on him now?”
He looked straight at me for the first time. His eyes were pale gray like the rest of him. Barbarian eyes under the veneer.
“You’re a bug, Fortune. A hard-head bug. Leo!”
The buffalo-man was on me before I could even start to think of moving. He was behind me with my arm in one hand and the back of my neck in the other. My neck isn’t thin, but Leo’s hand held it like a clamp on a pipe. Baron stepped to me.
He took a hypodermic syringe from his pocket. Leo held me as immobile as a strait jacket. And Leo had more than muscle; he knew what he was doing. He held me so that if I moved hard my arm would break, and maybe my neck.
I looked at the syringe and wondered if this was my last day. I didn’t want it to be my last day. Not now, not ever. But there was nothing I could do. I had no chance at all to fight. None. Like a Jew going to the gas chamber. That is a terrible moment.
“Just relax, Danny boy,” Baron said.
He rolled up my sleeve and shot me in the vein. He grinned into my face and massaged my arm. I waited. Leo’s grip did not relax. After a time I felt the sleep coming. I hoped it was sleep.
When my knees sagged, Leo picked me up and laid me on the bed. I raised up and swung at a shadow. I hit empty air. Something pushed me back flat on the bed. I breathed.
Leo leaned close. A hand slapped my face, hard. Leo went away. He had not spoken once. Maybe he didn’t know how.
I hoped it was sleep.
I lay in dim light on something flat. I saw a window high in a gray wall. There was darkness beyond the window. A barred window. I saw a washbasin and a toilet. Only three walls. The fourth wall was vertical bars.
I sat up. I stood up. My legs were shaky. I wondered what Baron had fed me. It had the feel of morphine. I didn’t want to think about why it had been morphine. I sat down again to let my legs steady and my head clear. The cell looked like a precinct cell. I reached for a cigarette. I had none. The men in the other cells heard me moving.
“Hey, junkie, you gonna get hung.”
I had the urge to get up and pace. I resisted. The one thing you never do in a cell is pace. Every minute would become an hour. What you do is lie flat and think about something with many, many small parts-like a walking trip across the city, step by step.
“Sweat, junkie!”
Everyone has to hate something. But the shouts told me that I had been found on Weiss’s bed with the syringe and makings. In another cell a man began to whistle flat and off key. Voices echoed:
“Shut up!.. For Chrissake shut it off!..”
Somewhere someone began to cry. I wondered how good a fix Baron had hung on me. I guessed that he had not wanted to kill me because of the risk. A push under a train is one thing, a killing in a room where Baron could be placed is another. The whistler down the corridor didn’t stop. Detective Freedman was at my cell door before I heard him.
“You got real trouble now, Fortune.”
“I’m no junkie. You know it’s a frame.”
“We found you with all the equipment and knocked out on M. It’s good enough. Where’s Sammy Weiss?”
“I don’t know.”
“Hiding a fugitive is a bad charge.”
“Trying to find one isn’t.”
“Don’t try to be a hard guy. Tell me about Weiss.”
“I haven’t seen him since Monday night. I turned him away, told him to give himself up. I guess he had his own ideas.”
“You turned down his money?”
“He didn’t have money. He was broke.”
“He told you that?”
“Yes. Weiss is always broke.”
“You believe he’s broke now?”
What did I say? I didn’t know if I believed Weiss was broke or not. It looked like he was far from broke.
“Where is he, Fortune?”
“I still don’t know. And in here I’m not going to find out.”
Freedman watched me for a time before he turned and vanished. He hadn’t used his fists. That made me wonder. I could think of only two reasons why Bert Freedman would hold back on his fists: he was sure the drug charge would hold up, and I would tell all soon; or he had orders from higher up that they were interested in me.
I thought about both possibilities for a long time. I didn’t sleep much. No one came near me. The off-key whistling went on. Other men complained. Men coughed. It was a long night.
They got us up early, let us scratch and dab water in our eyes, fed us, and marched us to the paddy wagon. The wagon drove us through a gray dawn city in bitter cold. We hunched, and hawked, and spat, and coughed. (Even one night in jail and you begin to think not as “I” but as “we.”)
At Centre Street we were herded into Headquarters fast as if they were afraid that our collection of drunks, bums, and petty crooks was planning a daring escape with the aid of gunmen hidden behind every parked car. We
