“Well,” the Fat Man had said, trying to think how to put it. “Well, yesterday she put out her hand and tripped Mrs. Oliver. She fell right on the floor. Might have broken her bones.” The Fat Man’s hands twisted together at the thought, anxiously. “Old bones break easily, you know. Especially old ladies’.”
“Mrs. Oliver has done something to Mama,” Fleck said. “I can tell you that right now for dead certain.” But he knew he was wasting his breath when he said it.
“No,” Fat Man said. “Mrs. Oliver is a most gentle person.”
“She did something,” Fleck had insisted.
“Well,” Fat Man said. “Well, I hadn’t meant to say anything about this because old people do funny things and this isn’t serious and it’s easy to deal with. But your mother steals the silverware at the table. Puts the knives and forks and such things up her sleeve, and in her robe, and slips them into her room.” Fat Man smiled a depreciatory smile to tell Fleck this wasn’t serious. “Somebody collects them and brings them back when she’s asleep, so it doesn’t matter. But Mrs. Oliver doesn’t know that. She tells us about it. Maybe that was it.”
“Mama don’t steal,” Fleck had said, thinking that would be it all right. Mama must have heard the old woman telling on her. She would never tolerate anybody snitching on her, or on anybody in the family. Snitching was not to be tolerated. That was something you needed to get even for.
“Mrs. Oliver fell down just yesterday,” Fleck had said. “You called me before then.”
“Well,” Fat Man said. “That was extra. I told you on the phone about her pulling out Mr. Riccobeni’s hair?”
“She never did no such thing,” Fleck had said, wearily, wondering what Mr. Riccobeni had done to warrant such retribution, wondering if pulling out the old man’s hair would be enough to satisfy Mama’s instinct for evening the score.
But there was no use remembering all that now. Now he had to think of what he could do with Mama, because the Fat Man had been stubborn about it. Get Mama out of there by the end of next week or he would lock her out on the porch. The Fat Man had meant it, and he had gotten that much time out of the son of a bitch only by doing a little very quiet, very mean talking. The kind of talk where you don’t say a lot, and you don’t say it loud, but the other fellow knows he’s about to get his balls cut off.
With the phone booth in view ahead, Fleck slowed his brisk walk to a stroll, inspecting everything. He glanced at his watch. A little early, which was the way he liked it. The booth was outside a neighborhood movie theater. There was a single car in the lot, an old Chevy which Fleck had noticed before and presumed was owned by the morning cleanup man. Nothing unusual on the street, either. Fleck went into the booth, felt under the stand, found nothing more sinister than dried chewing gum wads. He checked the telephone itself. Then he sat and waited. He was thinking he would just have to be realistic about Mama. There was simply no way he could keep her with him. He’d have to just give up on that idea. He’d tried it and tried it, and each time Mama had gotten even with somebody or other, things had gone to hell, and he’d had to move her. The last time, the police had come before he’d gotten her out, and if he hadn’t skipped they probably would have committed her.
The phone rang. Fleck picked it up.
“This is me,” he said, and gave The Client his code name. He felt silly doing it—like kids playing with their Little Orphan Annie code rings.
“Stone,” the voice said. It was an accented voice which to Fleck’s ear didn’t match an American name like Stone. A Spanish accent. “What do you have for me today?”
“Nothing much,” Fleck said. “You gotta remember, there’s one of me and seven of them.” He paused, chuckled. “I should say six now.”
“We’re interested in more than just six,” the voice said. “We’re interested in who they’re dealing with. You understand that?”
Fleck didn’t like the tone of voice. It was arrogant. The tone of a man used to giving orders to underlings. Mama would call The Client one of Them.
“Well,” Fleck said. “I’m doing the best I can, just being one man and all. I haven’t seen nothing interesting though. Not that I know of.”
“You’re getting a lot of money, you know. That’s not just to pay for excuses.”
“When we get right down to it,” Fleck said, “you’re owing me some money. There was just two thousand in that package Monday. You owed me another ten.”
“The ten is if the job was done right,” The Client said. “We don’t know that yet.”
“What the hell you mean? It’s been almost a month and not a word about anything in the papers.” Fleck was usually very good at keeping his emotion out of his voice. It was one of the skills he prided himself in, one of the tricks he’d learned in the recreation yards of detention centers and jails and, finally, at Joliet. But now you could hear the anger. “I need that money. And I’m going to get it.”
“You will get it when we decide nothing went wrong with that job,” The Client said. “Now shut up about it. I want to talk to you about Santero. We still don’t know where he went when he left the District. That worries us.”
And so the man who called himself Stone talked about Santero and Fleck half listened, his mouth stiff and set with his anger. Stone outlined a plan. Fleck told him the number of the pay phone where he would be next Tuesday, blurting it out because he had some things to say to this arrogant son of a bitch. Some rules to lay down, and some understanding that Fleck was nobody’s nigger.
“So that’ll be the number and now I want you to listen—” Fleck began, but he heard the line disconnect. He stared at the phone. “You son of a bitch,” he said. “You dirty son of a bitch.” His voice squeaked with the anger. The rage. This was what Mama had told them about. Him and Delmar. About the ruling class. The way they put you down if you let them. Treated you like niggers. Like dogs. And the only way you kept your head up, the only way to keep from being a bum and a wino, was by getting even. Always keeping things even. Always keeping your pride.
He walked back toward his apartment thinking about how he would go about it. Lot of work to be done. They knew who he was, he’d bet a million dollars on that. The shyster pretended otherwise. Elkins pretended that what he called “protective insulation” worked both ways. But lawyers lied. Lawyers were part of Them. Leroy Fleck would be expendable, something to be thrown to the police when he wasn’t useful. Safer for everybody to have Fleck dead, or back in lockup. But The Client was where the money came from, so The Client would know everything he wanted to know.
