Ed Lacy - The Best That Ever Did It
“Danny, the blind man, said the twang in Brown's voice reminded him of the way people speak upstate, around Ithaca or Elmira.”
“Good. We'll look into it. Guess Swan checked you out on what we know. Stay in touch, Mr. Harris. I realize you have to show some... uh... work, so I don't mind you looking about, only kind of keep out of my way. I don't like tripping over private dicks. Get me, Mr. Harris?”
“Sure. Don't worry, I never overwork myself.”
I drove uptown and over to Audubon Avenue and parked outside the private school that was keeping me broke, but with the overcrowding in the public schools it was worth the strain. It wasn't four-thirty yet and I lit a cigarette, thought about the case, about the blind muscleman, and mostly about Betsy Turner. There was something phony about her, something I couldn't quite put my finger on.
Finally the kids came out and Ruthie came skipping over to me, looking good in the dress I'd bought last month. She was all long legs and arms as I opened the door and she climbed in, kissed me twice, said between kisses, “Hello, Daddy.” Then she drew back and rubbed her lips. “You smell of beer.”
“That a way to talk to the poppa?” I said, starting the car.
“How many beers did you have?”
“A million, Miss Nosey.”
“Are we going to take a ride?”
“Maybe a very short one. Want chopped meat for supper?”
“Why aren't we going for a ride?”
“I have to go out this evening.”
“Daddy, I don't like it when you go out. Where you going?”
“Have to work. Get May Weiss to stay with you.”
“I don't like May, she's stuck-up. Always doing her homework, never wants to play. Why can't you stay home and read to me, or I'll watch you exercise?”
“Told you why, have to work,” I said, running my right hand over her silky brown pigtail. Her hair was due for a washing.
“Not sneaking off to a movie, Daddy?”
“No, honey, you're the only girl I take to the movies. And what I'm working on sounds crazier than any movie.”
We drove up to Yonkers and back, cutting over to Broadway to escape the toll bridge. Ruthie talked all the time as usual. She said she'd seen my cousin Jake Winston, the mailman, on the street. He'd stopped at the school to tell her he wanted us to come out to his place in Ridgewood on Sunday. Way all my relations kept after me, got me a little sore—I could take care of the kid okay.
I stopped at a super market and Ruthie went in with me, asked, “Can we make a Jello pie tonight?”
“Guess we have time for that. But I have to feed you, start your bath, take a shower and shave myself, and be out of the house by seven-thirty.”
“Maybe you really aren't going to the movies... taking a shave at night. Here's the chopped meat.”
“We'll get a thick steak. We're eating high on the hog tonight.”
She looked up at me with big questioning eyes. “What does that mean, Daddy?”
“Means a person is eating real meat, instead of the pig's feet, the insides, or the tail.”
Ruthie screwed up her pug nose. “But why do people eat the feet of pigs and the insides, Daddy?”
“Usually because they're too poor to buy the other parts,” I said, knowing I'd started something.
THE MORNING of April eleventh was the start of a pleasantly cool spring day, but the man rushing into a fourth-rate hotel off lower Eighth Avenue was sweating. His name was Martin Pearson and he was thirty-two years old, stocky, and of average height. He had a very ordinary face, except for his thick bushy hair, which at the moment was dyed a sandy blond. His worn tweed suit had been purchased in a Times Square store some six years before, the clean white shirt came from Amsterdam, the brown knit tie had been bought on the Rue de la Paix, and the shoes in Genoa. The old leather camera-gadget case hanging from his left shoulder had been ordered from a Sears Roebuck catalog many years ago.
Pearson was rushing and sweating because some twenty minutes before, while sipping his morning coffee and reading a paper in a Seventy-third Street cafeteria, he had decided to murder a man.
Nodding at the desk clerk who was still half asleep, Pearson ran up the single flight of wooden steps, turned into a dim hallway, knocked sharply on a door with a dirty metal eight nailed to it. There wasn't any answer and he knocked again, harder. After a moment a man's voice cautiously asked, “Yes? Who is it?”
“Me. Got to see you in a hurry, Harold.” Martin was talking to his partner, Sam Lund, who was registered at the hotel under the name of Harold Bender.
“What's the rush, Marty? I'm... uh... busy.”
“Damn it, open the door!”
Lund stalled some more because he had a girl in his room. Pearson kept pounding on the door and finally Sam climbed out of bed, after telling the girl not to worry, and partly opened the door, to explain the situation. But Pearson pushed the door open as the girl sat up in bed and tried to cover her meaty breasts with her hands.
For a second the room looked like a blackout tableau in a burlesque show: the dingy room, the nude girl on the bed, Pearson staring at her like an angry husband, and Sam Lund-wearing shorts—calmly walking over to the dresser and lighting a cigarette. Lund was a large man in his early thirties and if his body was flabby it still showed signs of having been muscular at one time. His thin-featured face was overhand-some, but except for a fringe of hair above his ears, he was completely bald. His head had that hard polished look as though hair had never grown there.
The girl, in a statement she made at police headquarters several weeks later, said, “They both had the manners of a couple of bums, not even the decency to turn their backs while I dressed.”
Q: You met Lund in a bar near the hotel the night before and agreed to spend the night with him for fifteen dollars. Is that correct?
A: Yes, sir. And I was surprised at the way Harold—that's the name he gave me—acted, because he seemed like a smart guy, a good talker. I loved the way he talked, his voice was so clear and smooth, like a ...
Q: Let's get on with this—what happened after Pearson came into the room?
A: I admit I'm a hustler, but I still ask for some respect as a lady. I bawled them out and finally the smaller one, Pearson you say he is, turned his back and told me, “Look, sister, get dressed and take a walk. We have things to do.”
I remember, I told him I sure was glad I wasn't his sister. He was getting steamed and then Harold said to me, “Sorry to rush you, honey, but we're salesmen and Marty is anxious to hit the road with our new line.” I got my bra and stuff and...
Q: When you met Lund the night before, did he say what he did for a living?
A: No, sir. I never got around to asking. But I figured he was a salesman—had the voice to sell and liked to gab. And he didn't have much dough, I could tell. Yes sir, I remember, I thought he was a small-time salesman.
Q: Did you see any guns in Lund's room?
A: No, sir. And if I had I would have called the cops at once. I know better than to fool with hoods. Although I sure would never have suspected Harold—or the other one—for any rough stuff. No, sir.
When the girl had gone and Lund had locked the door, Pearson cursed him, asking, “Are you crazy? This is the one thing that can foul us up! Bet you were drunk, too.”
“Relax, I wasn't drunk, merely in the mood for a girl,” Lund said, yawning. “Anyway I'm checking out of this dump today. 'Mr. Bender' got his registered letter yesterday. Why all the ...?”
“You dummy, she heard you call me Marty!”
“So what? That was a slip on my part but you got me rattled, barging in like... Cool off, Marty, our luck's been riding high all these months and...”
“Has it? Remember this one?” Pearson took a neatly folded but hastily torn part of a newspaper out of his pocket, flung it on the bed. Lund walked over and raised the shade, read the paper, while Pearson saw a heel of a whiskey pint on the dresser, finished it with a single gulp. Sam sat on the bed, his face going pale, as he looked up from the short news item and said softly, “Damn! Damn! Of all the miserable breaks! How could we possibly foresee a thing like this, the dumb jerk winning the money?”
“We couldn't,” Martin said. “One of those things, a break we have to meet.”
“Throw me that pack of butts on the dresser. What do we do now, chuck the whole deal?”
Pearson, who had been studying the empty pint bottle, put it down and threw the cigarettes at his partner, watched as Lund lit one and began puffing on it nervously. After an awkward silence Lund asked again, “Now what—we chuck the deal?”
“We can't chuck it. Once they start investigating, in time everything will point to us. And I don't see why we should give up anything. There's another out, if we act quickly. Before this guy gets his passport application in.”
“I don't get it.”
“Yes you do, you know exactly what I'm talking about, Sam.”
Lund jumped off the bed and said fiercely, “If you're talking about what I think you are—forget it. For Christsakes, that's murder!”
Pearson nodded. “Yes, that's what it will most certainly be.
I've tried to rationalize it, call it other names. It's plain murder.”
“Marty, talk sense! We've pulled a lot of... of... angles, but I never thought of myself, of us, as real criminals. My God, Marty, we can't murder a man!”
“Don't talk so loudly. I don't see what choice we have. These things build up, grow. A petty crime, then a bigger one, and finally the big leagues—the biggest of them all. We have a ...”
“No! I don't even want to discuss that!”
“Sam, you've had a big night, you don't understand our situation. We never thought of ourselves as criminals because a criminal is one who gets caught, just as a murderer is one convicted of killing. We've been very good, the perfect... criminals, and we still will be the...”
“Damn it, Marty, stop talking! I won't go for murder and that's final!”
“Cut the acting and keep your voice down. And listen to me. Sam, besides our boat tickets we have a little over two hundred bucks left. If we try to ditch the whole business, we're flat broke. Also, as I tried to tell you, if we let him go through with his trip, our game is exposed whether we chuck it or not, and we'll never know when they'll catch up with us—even in Europe. Once he makes out that application, we're finished. I don't have to remind you that we've broken several Federal laws, that the least we'll get is five to ten years. Is that what you want, to be broke and running the rest of our lives? To finally end up in the pen?”
Sam stood up, staring at the wall and seemingly so deep in thought he didn't answer.
Martin pointed to a lipstick smear on the pillow. “You want to be sleeping with cheap whores in a stinking room or sunning yourself at Juan-les-Pins with Gabby? Would you rather be hustling for small change here as a handy man/ or a famous actor with your own motion-picture company?”
“Don't paint no pictures for me—you know damn well what I want. But murder—no!”
“These aren't pictures, Sam, these are facts.” Martin pointed around the room. “It's a fact that a flea bag like this, or worse, will be your home from now on—if you can afford a room. It's also a fact we can still wake up at ten and have a swim and a big breakfast and before it gets too hot, ride over to Nice or Cape Ferrat or San Remo. You always liked San Remo the best. Sam, the main fact is this: we have over forty thousand dollars waiting for us if we continue to use our heads.”
“Think we'll be the richest jokers to ever sit in the electric chair!”
Martin smiled bitterly. “Your stupid jokes. Sam, killing was never a part of our plans, and we're not a couple of goons, we won't be caught.”
Sam crushed his cigarette against the wall. “We have been smart, the best ever. But using a gun is where we start being dumb.”
“Killing is a last resort, but can you think of any other way? We could try robbing him of the money, but that might not work, and it's too risky.”
“And murder isn't?” Sam snapped.
“Look, Sam, the police are efficient because most killings fit one of several patterns. But this—be no motive anybody but us could possibly know about and... Look, I once read where some police authority said the perfect murder would have to be an insane act where a man suddenly shoots a total stranger on the street—no motive, no connection, no possible clues. That's the first thing came to me when I read the paper—we're shooting a stranger.”
“He saw us—you—before,” Sam said, lighting another cigarette. “Marty, there's things a man can do and can't do. I can't go through with a murder. That's all!”
“Merely saying 'That's all' doesn't solve anything for us. I'll do the actual trigger pulling, if that will make you feel any better. Yes, he saw us. He spoke to me once, a casual conversation in a bar some three months ago—and I was using a phony name. Who can remember that except him, and he'll be dead? For all practical purposes we're walking up to a total stranger and shooting him without rhyme or reason. Unless we're nabbed at the scene of the killing—and that we'll work out carefully, of course—the police will have to be lucky, downright stupid fumbling lucky, to even get on our trail.”
“Murder is out.”
Pearson walked over and shook his partner. “Stop talking like a goddamn parrot! If we get rid of him we're safe, have money, the good life. I'm back with Therese, you're a big actor. If he lives we're bums the rest of our lives and end up serving a lot of time. Killing is our only out. As you said, we couldn't foresee this, but we're in it and getting in deeper is our only escape.”
“But... Marty, you talk so calmly about... murder!” Sam said, pushing the smaller man away.
“I'm not calm. I'm scared crazy, but not that frightened I've stopped thinking, can't realize what has to be done. Be simple, we come upon him alone in the street today—it has to be today —best tonight. One quick shot and we're gone before anybody finds the body. Then we keep on with the cases we have cooking. Another month or two, we leave the country.”
“Why not leave at once after, I mean... if... we do it?”
“Because we haven't got enough and what difference will it make? If they're on to us, they can extradite us from Europe. No, we keep on going as usual, like nothing happened. Sam, I've thought this out, racked my head till it hurts. How can they ever connect us with it? How can the police possibly stumble upon us? What can go wrong?”
