“Please,” she said. “Please.”
“This time,” he said, “you’re going to have to go through with it. Maybe you’ll learn better next time.”
He took her by the shoulders and heaved her toward the bed. She stumbled for a few steps and sat down heavily. She didn’t move.
Back in his own room Baron felt thoroughly relaxed for the first time in weeks. Sally English—or whatever her name might really be—was more woman than he had had in quite a while. She had one hell of a body and she knew what to do with it.
Baron smiled, remembering and enjoying the memory. At first she had fought, but after a while she quit fighting and started to enjoy what she was doing.
He laughed suddenly, wondering what the poor dope of a partner would think when he came to. The guy had been expecting a mark, not a guy who would knock him cold. It served him right for being such a damned amateur.
Well, maybe they would drop out of the rackets now. The badger game was a short con to begin with and not an especially good one at that, but that pair wasn’t cut out for anything so professional. Maybe the girl would hustle and the guy would pimp for her. He decided that the guy wasn’t much better than a pimp. And the girl would make a fine hustler.
Amateur crooks. They only got in the way, lousing things up for the boys who knew which end was up. They didn’t know who to take and who to pass up.
And they always got caught. And when they got caught they didn’t know what to do, and so they wound up in the tank. Which, Baron reflected, was precisely where they belonged, the whole pack of them.
The professionals got caught too—but they didn’t wind up in jail, not the smart ones. When they hit a town they found out who was the fixer and they established contact with the fixer before they started grifting. That way they stayed out of the jug.
If they got busted they either bought the cop right away or got word to the fixer, who bought whoever had to be bought. Sometimes the fixer would get to the mark and pay him off to get him to drop charges. That was the way most of the cannon mobs operated. If that failed, the fixer bought the judge. Almost any judge would square a small rap for the right price.
But amateurs! If a mark turned in Sally and her partner they would be lost. They might have the brains to get a lawyer, but if they did they’d still wind up doing a year or two apiece. Because the same judge who could be bought would go extra hard on an amateur, just to keep his record looking good.
The hell with them, Baron thought. They deserved whatever happened to them.
Mentally he went over all the ways the pair had played the game wrong. To begin with, Sally’s whole approach was too heavy. She should have sat down a stool or two away from him instead of right next to him. She should have let him offer to buy her a drink—the second drink, not the first. She should have mentioned her husband right away and then left the rest of it up to Baron.
And, of course, she should have caught on to what he was talking about. The first words he spoke were, “I’m working the C out of Philly.” This meant, quite simply, that he was a confidence man who started originally in Philadelphia. But she didn’t even listen to him.
Then, later, he had told her he had just finished pulling off a rag, a phony stock con. Anybody but a damn fool would have caught that.
And her “husband” was just as stupid. He should have knocked first, then used the key. He was supposed to be expecting to find her in, so why in the hell didn’t he knock? And he should have had a gun. Not loaded, of course. Not even a real gun, if he wanted to play extra safe. But as soon as he came in swinging he was making things hard for himself. Hell, even a mark might have gotten lucky and clipped him one.
Well, that was all over. In a day or two he’d get a wire from Lou and head either for Denver or the coast. And he would have happy memories of Tulsa.
There was a knock on the door.
Baron swung himself off the bed, wondering who was at the door. Maybe the telegram, he thought. Or maybe Sally, back for another round.
He walked to the door and opened it.
The “husband” was at the door. There was a gun in his hand.
“Inside,” the man said. “Get inside.”
Baron backed up, puzzled. The man followed him and closed the door behind him.
“Look,” Baron said, “go home. You made me for a mark and you missed. Quit while you’re ahead.”
The man said, “I’m going to kill you.”
“You tried to cop a score and you blew it.”
The man’s eyes were blazing. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “All I know is you were with my wife. I just finished beating the crap out of her. She won’t be able to walk for a month. Now I’m going to kill you.”
Baron just looked at him.
“She told me she was going to the movies,” he went on dully. “I come back and she’s with you. I always knew she was a tramp. I had to knock her silly before she’d tell me your name. And I had to give the clerk five bucks before he’d give me your room number.
“Now I’m going to kill you.”
Baron started to laugh. No wonder their approach was so amateurish!
The man pointed the gun at him. Baron laughed again, thinking that it was really no time to laugh. But what the hell else could he do?
The man pulled the trigger.
Baron sat down heavily on the bed and began laughing once more. He couldn’t help it. In a few seconds he stopped laughing because he was dead.
BARGAIN IN BLOOD
“YOU’VE GOT TO PROVE IT TO ME,” she said.
He puffed nervously on his cigarette before answering her. She was a very beautiful girl, very well put together and very desirable, and it wasn’t often that a girl like this even bothered to talk to him. He had to be very careful; he didn’t want to say the wrong thing and maybe spoil everything before it even got off the ground.
“How do you mean?”
She took the cigarette from his fingers and dragged deeply on it. “You know,” she said, talking through the smoke. “You say you want me, right?”
“Right.”
“That’s important, Benny. A guy’s got to want me or he doesn’t get me. Dig?”
He nodded. He wanted her, all right. He wanted her from the first time he saw her, before he even knew her name. He wanted her so much sometimes that he couldn’t sleep and just lay in bed thinking about her, thinking about the way her blond hair curled around her face and the way her body could twist a sweater out of shape.
All the time he thought about her, but he never expected to get her. Not him. Not Benny Dix, the little kid with the pimples. The little kid with no dough and no car to drive around in, the little kid nobody paid much attention to at all.
She had class and he didn’t; it was that simple. She was the type of chick who went with an important cat, a cat maybe like Moe. But she wasn’t going with Moe now. She and Moe split, and now she was there for Benny. Maybe it didn’t make sense, but it was nice. Real nice. She was so close to him now that he could reach out and touch her, and there was nobody else around the park, nobody to bother them.
“If you want me,” she went on, “you got to show it. I need proof, Benny. You know why I broke with Moe?”
“Why?”
“No proof. Moe wanted me, but not enough to let me know it. You probably thought Moe was making it with me, didn’t you?”
“I—”
“It’s okay. Everybody thought so, but he wasn’t. Not Moe or anybody else in this jerkwater town. Not because I’m cold, because I can be hot as a Nathan’s hot dog for the right cat. But because I need proof. I could be hot for you, Benny.”
He felt his hands starting to shake and struggled to control them. He’d give her the proof, whatever the hell it was. It didn’t matter: he had to have her, and that was all there was to it.
“What kind of proof?” His voice sounded hollow to him, hollow and nervous and tense, like when he was playing chickie and a cop car passed right by the hardware store, and then the cop car slowed down and he didn’t know what to do, whether he should holler chickie or just wait for the cops to take off. Then the cops stepped on the gas and disappeared, and that came out the right way.
She was looking at him now, her eyes drilling holes in his, studying him very carefully. There was something so intense and direct about her gaze that he wanted to turn away, as if she were staring at him the way he did when he undressed a girl with his eyes. But this was deeper—she was undressing his insides, trying to decide about him.
“I want you to kill somebody.”
“What?”
She smiled. “That’s right, Benny. You heard me right. I want you to take a blade and slip it right into a cat’s guts, understand? That’s the kind of proof I want.”
“Why, Rita? I mean—”
“To prove it. I’m nice stuff, Benny. I’m not easy, and I’ll be worth it. Then we can do whatever you want whenever you want to.”
His mind was racing in circles. He knew she was telling the truth. She’d be worth it, worth almost anything. But killing a guy was a big thing. If they caught you, you burned. And it wasn’t like knocking over a candy store—they tried harder to catch you for murder.
Murder.
“Who’s the cat? Anybody special?”
“You mean you’ll do it?”
“Wait a minute. I just want to know who, that’s all.”
She took a breath. “Moe,” she said.
“Moe?”
“That’s right. You slip the shank in Moe and it’s just you and me, Benny, for as long as you want it. What do you say?”
This was big. It was big enough shanking someone he didn’t know, bad enough to slip steel into a cat he never met. But Moe was worse. Hell, he wasn’t tight with Moe and he wouldn’t miss him, not Moe with the short car with wire wheels and a girl in the backseat whenever he wanted one. No, he could see Moe dead without crying about it. But killing him—
“It’ll be easy,” she went on, her voice husky and all excited. “It’s about 9:30 now. I can go to his pad and pick him up. I’ll tell him some lies so he thinks he’s getting something now. Then we’ll come walking over towards the park and you can get him about ten steps inside the North Entrance. Okay?”
He turned a little on the bench, looking off into the distance. He was shook now. Killing—He couldn’t pull a bit like that, not him.
And then he felt her small hand on his thigh.
“Okay,” he said.
He saw them coming a long ways off. He heard them before he saw them, heard Moe’s low, relaxed voice and Rita’s, tense and shrill with anticipation. When they came into view he saw Moe’s arm around her slender waist, his hand gently squeezing her flesh.
It made him mad, and he knew he’d be able to do it. He’d get even with Moe. He’d get even with him for all the girls he never had and the money he was never able to toss around.
They came closer. He took his knife from his dungarees pocket and clicked it open, fearing for a moment that Moe would hear the click of the blade and know what was going to happen. But Moe didn’t notice. It was no wonder—Rita was leaning against him as they walked, and it would be tough for a cat to notice anything with a girl like her doing the leaning.