Chapter 8
JOE ARRIVED AT MIQUE'S AT ten-thirty, a bit early for him. He spotted Cal Royce at a corner table, sauntered over and joined him. There was something wrong with Cal. He could see it in his eyes which were slyer, more shifty than usual. There was sweat on his forehead, and the long skinny fingers tipped with bitten, grubby nails trembled slightly as they reached for and replaced the cigarette that hung on his lip.
"Sit there, Joe." He nodded to the seat across from him. Then he leaned close and whispered, "I'm in trouble. You gonna run or stick?"
Joe thought it over before he said, "It's all according. What's it about?"
Cal continued to lean forward and whispered. "Don't look now. Whatever you do, don't turn around! They're behind you at the far end of the bar.
I been sittin' here, hopin', prayin' someone would come in that I know, a guy that'd stick. You're the answer to my prayers."
Joe did not stir. "Who's behind me?"
"Three guys-three of 'em. They'll kill me Joe, they'll kill me! You got to save me!" Panic flared in the whispered entreaty. "I been sittin' here-tryiri" to get up the guts to bolt for the door. Rut I'm scared.
II I get up they'll spot me. They're sure to!"
"What did you do to them? Why have they got it in for you?"
"Nothin'-I din do nothin'. They just got it in for me, that's all."
"Why?" Joe persisted.
Cal's eyes narrowed, shifted, tried to look around Joe. "I owe 'em some dough-that's all. But they're tough-real tough babies. I know 'em."
"Why don't you just pay up, then?"
Cal shook his head. "It's too much. More'n I got-more'n I could hope to lay my hands on."
"All right," said Joe, "I'm with you." He felt the fool, saying it; he knew that Cal would not have done the same for him if the situation had been reversed. "Now, can you see them? Cot your eyes on them?"
"Yeah-?"
"They looking this way? Any one of them?"
"No, not exactly. One of 'em keeps lookin' over-he's been doin' it all along. He sees me but don't recognize me. Not yet, anyway."
"Is he looking over now, right now? If he's not, bolt for it."
"The door?"
"Yeah."
Cal bit his lower lip to keep it from trembling. Tears shone in his eyes, which had suddenly popped wide. "Too late,"-the words bubbled in his throat. "Oh, my Gawd-it's too late! Recognizes me-talkin'-pointin'! So long-Joe-everyone for hisself!" He pushed himself up and made for the door.
From the rear of the cafe, an angry exclamation followed by a snarled oath. Then-just as Joe turned-the clatter of footsteps, running, tripping, sliding toward him. He saw them, three of them, dashing across the room in an effort to head off Cal, jostling and bumping one another in their haste. But Cal was running for his life and knew it. He got through the door before they reached it. His footsteps sounded on the cement outside, then faded away. They followed him out the door and gave chase.
They must have chased him quite a distance, because they were gone about fifteen minutes. Joe had plenty of time to get out. He might have had another beer and said, "Be seeing you," to someone or other of his acquaintances. But he chose to remain. He went to the bar, ordered a beer, and sipped it slowly. He surely could not have guessed what would happen.
The trio returned.
Joe, at the bar, raised his glass and watched them in the mirror. They were young, hard-looking punks about his own age, dressed in bright-colored polo shirts. Their eyes scanned the crowd, searching for someone; he knew that someone was himself. Then they spotted him, whispered to each other, started toward him. He turned to face them.
One of them appeared to be the leader, a dark lantern-jawed youth with jagged broken teeth, which he tried to keep hidden when he spoke. He came up close, and with a grin that was both evil and self-conscious, said, "Your buddy got away-the double-crossing stool!"
"So?"
"So nothing! Only you ain't-!"
The crowd had made an opening around them; when the lantern-jawed youth swung, Joe was able to duck and drive his fist into the other's gut. Then waiters and bartenders converged on the four of them, grabbed them by the scruff of their neck and the seat of their trousers and shoved them out the double-doors.
Joe picked himself off the cement and started to run, having decided somewhere between the bar and the cement that he was done playing the hero. One of the trio drived at him, caught his legs, and brought him down. They swarmed on him, kicking his ribs, punching viciously at his head. He tried to fight back, but knew it was a lost cause. Brightness exploded in his brain, showering fragments into the darkness. Then darkness, he was alone and felt no pain.
Earlier in the evening Fran Mullins had gone out for some air.
Charley Grant had left the hotel room at nine, promising to be back within the hour.
"Don't hurry," she remarked casually. She was reading the movie column of the local newspaper and did not bother to look up.
But when the hour passed and Charley did not return, she was bored. She had thrown the paper aside long ago, the soft-cover novel she tried to read afterwards proved dull.
She walked all the way to Lincoln Road, spent an hour strolling with the vacationing stenographers and salesmen, eyeing and being eyed, pausing here and there to window-shop, lighting cigarette after cigarette. Her boredom unrelieved, she turned south on Collins and started back to the hotel. On the way a bald-headed young man tried to pick her up. She didn't go for his approach, or for his sport jacket either, which was much too loud, and she sent him on his way.
It was nearly one and the streets were deserted, but she wasn't scared. She was used to being alone, taking care of herself-she had been doing it all her life. Yet the loneliness got her after a while. She began to wish that she would see a cab. When one finally did pass, however, she did not had it. At the last moment a picture of the room flashed through her mind: all cluttered with cigar butts, and newspapers and big Charley Grant on his stomach in bed-he would be back by now-snoring, stinking up the tight little place with his sweat and exhalations; the ashtrays and racing forms on the floor, clothes strewn over the chairs and couch. No, she didn't want to be home any faster than she had to!
She turned into a side-street, for no other reason perhaps than that it was new to her. It was a dark, narrow little street. Halfway in she came to a bar, the name printed in huge gold letters on the window was Mique's. As she passed it she heard within a cacophony of drunken laughter and shouting, interwoven with some weird sort of music-a man singing off key, to the accompaniment of a guitar.
She walked on a few steps and suddenly paused. It seemed to her that she heard a sound, like someone moaning. "A drunk probably," was her first thought-."Serves him right!" Drunks disgusted her, and yet they stirred pity in her. She noticed a pair of legs projecting from an alley, assumed that she had guessed right the first time. A drunk all right, sleeping it off next to the garbage cans.
The man in the alley moaned again. The sound touched a chord somewheres in her subconscious. She hesitated, entered the alley, and bending over the figure, struck a match. She recognized Joe Brody not by his face, which was cut, bruised and swollen, but by the shape of his head. She sat him up, using all her strength, and propped him against a wall. When several sharp slaps failed to bring him to, she let him sag to the cement, emerged from the alley, walked the several steps back to Mique's, entered, and pushed through the noise and confusion to the phone booth in the far wall. She called a cab company and asked to have a taxi sent to Mique's.
Then she returned to the alley and stood over him, watching him.
When the taxi arrived she was waiting for it. She had the cabby follow her into the alley, and together they managed to drag Joe across the curb.
"Hold him up, sister-I'll open the door."
When the cab pulled up at her hotel she asked the driver if he would help her get Joe into the lobby, explaining that from there the desk clerk and she would somehow manage to get him upsirs.
In the lobby she tipped the driver and let him go. She had intended registering Joe in a room of his own, paying for him; but when, in answer to her query, the desk clerk told her that ('barley Grant hadn't returned yet, she decided to take him up to her own room. Till he came out of it, anyway. The clerk didn't like the idea. He was a bit afraid of Charley. She flattered and cajoled him, boasted that she could handle Charley-he was putty in her hands. And she promised that should anything go wrong she would take all the blame on herself. At last he came from behind his desk and helped her get Joe to the elevator. Together they dragged him into the room and 'laid him on the couch.
When the desk clerk was gone she set about washing the blood from Joe's face, cleaning the wounds, putting cold compresses on the swellings. She knew how to care for drunks and badly beaten men, for as a child she had often enough found her own father lying unconscious in an alley and-there being no one else-had to care for him herself.
Finally Joe started to come to. He moaned, stirred, made an effort to sit up. She helped him, leaned back on a cushion. He stared about him, dzed, then looked back to her slowly.
"Where am I? What happened?"
She told him where he was and also how he had got here and where she had found him. She suggested he answer his second question,-"Since you're the only one who can."
Then it must have come back to him, for he grimaced in disgust and muttered that he had it coming. " ... I was playing the hero."
He looked at her suddenly and said, "You're the ballet dancer, aren't you?-Frances, I believe you said."
"Frances to strangers." But, softening at once, and smiling, "Fran to you. Why didn't you look me up when you arrived?"
He admitted that in the excitement of a town like this he had let her slip from his thoughts. " ... Glad you remembered me, though, when you found me next to those garbage cans."
He told her briefly as possible how it had happened, then lit a cigarette and got to his feet. He stood a bit unsteady, shook his head in an effort to clear it.
"Sit a while," she suggested. "There's no hurry." He did as she said, but asked, "What about your friend?"
"He probably won't be home tonight. He gets into these all-night poker games."
She offered him a beer, "-If you can drink it warm. It might help to clear your head."
"No thanks. I'll just finish this cigarette and push off."
She heard the sound of heavy footsteps in the corridor, had time to warn him, "Sit tight! Let me handle this!"
Charley opened the door and stood in the doorway, his flinty eyes taking in the situation. He shut the door softly behind him, walked to the center of the room, and muttered, "Start explaining."
She quickly decided that the truth would be best, and said, "This is Joe, a friend of mine. I found him hurt, and-"
"Can it! Get him out of here!"
She got up angrily and approached him. She wasn't afraid of him. "Joe's my guest-d'you hear! You're not shoving him out!"
He slapped her hard, knocking her back.
Joe leapt to his feet but Charley pulled out a gun and barked, "Stay there, boyfriend! I ain't dirtying my hands on you."
She had known of the gun, but hadn't thought him stupid enough to pull it in a situation of this sort. "Do as he says, Joe," she warned. She was afraid of Charley now, very much so.
Charley's lips curled, baring yellow teeth in a grin of hatred. "Get going, boyfriend. There's the door."
Joe moved in the direction indicated. He was at the door when Frances shouted, "I'm going too!" and started after him.
"You stay!" Charley ordered But she paid no attention to him, because Joe was out of the room by then and she knew that he would not use the gun on her.
They did not wait for the elevator but descended the stairs. When they were out-of-doors he suggested she return to Charley.
"I'm through with him," she said. "I'll never go back."
He shrugged and said, "Suit yourself."
A cab cruised by and he hailed it.
"Where are you going?" she asked.
"Come on, I'll buy you some coffee," he said. lie gave the driver the name of an all-night cafeteria.
When they got out of the cab he asked her how bad his face was.
"It's cut and swollen and you've got an awful shiner."
"Yeah. Well, let's go in anyway."
Except for a handful of seedy-looking people, the cafeteria was empty. The hands of the huge clock over the door pointed to two-thirty. Joe went to the counter, got two cups of coffee. They sat across from each other, sipping the coffee. He suddenly looked bored, almost angry with her. Sensing that he wished to be rid of her now, she felt bitterness rise in her. They finished the coffee in silence, walked out, stood on the neon-lit patch of curb in front of the entrance.
"Beat it back to Charley," he snapped irritably.
Hatred lashed through her. She clenched her fist and swung at him with all her might, but he caught her arm in mid-air and held it there.
"You dirty pimp!" she spat. "You're no good at all!"
He laughed into her face, and lowering her arms to her side, kept diem imprisoned there. His expression changed; he frowned at her and muttered, "You don't get it, Fran. I don't want to think you're out in the cold because of-"
"Not because of you!" she cut in. "D'you think I'd walk out on a guy who meant two-bits to me for a pimp like you? I was bored-looking for a way out!" It was her turn to laugh: she despised him at that moment.
"You'll have no one to take care of you-keep you in style," he reminded her.
"I can take care of myself," she retorted. "I've been doing it all my life."
A cab passed just then and he whistled it down.
"Get in," he said, and opened the door.
"No," she said-"No, I'm done with you!" Yet she offered surprisingly little resistance when he grabbed her arm and shoved her toward the interior. She hated him, but she was afraid of losing him again. lie told the cabby to start driving, he'd tell him the destination in a minute or two. "Where do you want me to drop you?" he asked her.
She shrugged and said, "Any hotel, as long as it's not too expensive."
"A hotel room can be lonely if you're by yourself."
"I've been lonely before."
"You got money?"
"Enough."
He thought a moment and said, "It's too damn late to go shopping around for hotel rooms. Tell you what, we'll go to my place."
The idea appealed to her, but she hesitated, remembering. "Will your aunty be there?"
"Helen?-yeah. But don't worry your head about her, she obeys me."
"Nothing doing."
"Look, you bitch, I've just had a beating and I'm all aches and bruises! And on top of that I'm so tired I can't keep my eyes open. Don't argue with me! Either I stop this cab right here and let you out, or we do as I saw."
She knew that he meant it, realized in a flash that if they were separated now she might lose him and never find him again. She decided she would go with him, if only to find out where he lived.
She shrugged her shoulders.
He gave the cabby an address on Alton Road.
She would go there with him, but when she got there she would leave him. She had never yet shared a man with another woman and didn't intend to start now. Maybe she was just a tramp, but she did have her self-respect!