The Richer, the Poorer Page 12

  The old woman lay at his feet. She was dead as a doornail. A kid could see that. Gingerly Porky skirted the body. His shoe struck something. He leaped a foot away. Cautiously he came forward again. Jeez, it was a wad of dough bulging inside a rubber band. He stooped, scrabbled up his find, and fled.

  Reaching the street, Porky slowed down and tried to look nonchalant. The money weighed down his pocket. He was rich! He could tell his old lady where to get off. He could kick his old man where it would hurt most. He had the nerve, and now he had the money. He hitched his pants and spat triumphantly.

  The money burned his fingers. He wished he knew how much it was. He paled. Maybe it was a dummy roll, a bill on top and nothing but paper underneath. He had to know now. He stared around wildly. Where could he go? His eye fell on the movie house. He could go in the gents room and see how he stood.

  Porky reached the theater, averted his face, slipped his dime inside the cage, and scuttled through the lobby. The ticket seller and the ticket taker showed no signs of recognition. There was nothing about Porky’s unprepossessing person to remember.

  Porky went upstairs to the empty gents room and counted the money. He was dizzy when he finished. There was five thousand dollars in one-hundred-dollar bills. He flopped in a sagging lounge chair and lit a cigarette with trembling hands. He was really in the money! He could hire a dozen henchmen and dope out a racket that would make him a million.

  A million. He frowned and leaned forward, thinking hard. That screwy old dame, packing five grand. What kind of monkey business … His eyes grew crafty. She was one of them misers. There were always pieces in the paper about people like that, living in dumps, walking around in rags, and hiding their money in a hundred places.

  He stood straight up with shock and chagrin. Maybe there was more where this lettuce came from. What kind of way was this to start being a big shot? Losing his head and running like a rabbit over a few lousy dollars. He should have stayed and searched the room. He cursed himself for a fool.

  That old dame had played him for a sucker, all right. Giving him a dime and hugging five grand. The lousy dirty nerve of her. He was boiling mad. Little flecks of foam stood in the corners of his mouth. He crushed the cigarette under his heel.

  He began to walk restlessly up and down. What to do now? He was too agitated to go past the ticket taker again. The guy might figure there was something up and call the cops. Someday he’d have a lot of fun drawing the bead on a rotten cop. Right now he’d better go sit through the show until he cooled off, and just keep his fingers crossed that nobody would find the old dame and beat him to the pickings.

  Hunger attacked him as soon as he sat down. He should have brought a hot pup in with him. Or maybe he should go downstairs and get some candy out of the machine. No, the ticket taker might get wise to him. Someday he’d draw a bead on that guy, too. Minding other people’s business. And that ticket seller. He’d get her up a dark alley some night and give her a reason to remember him.

  The feature picture came on. Porky forgot his hunger and hunched forward, licking his lips a little. Yeh, this was the biz, all right. This was the way the big shots did it. Self-identification made him shiver with joy. He emitted a mouthful of lewd approval, and sneered at the bums who turned to stare at him. There wasn’t a one in the lot he would use for a third-rate henchman.

  The picture ended, and Porky went downstairs. The ticket taker had his back to him, but Porky cringed as he passed. You could never tell when a guy was going to turn and jump you. Or maybe the louse had turned his back as a signal to the cops. Porky ran through the lobby and did not stop until he was halfway down the block.

  He stood puffing and panting outside of a lunchroom. The scent of frying food came through the ventilator. He felt faint with hunger. He ought to have a good feed. A couple of pork chops, and mashed with gravy, and some kind of gooey cake. You couldn’t feel weak and faint for the kind of job he was going to pull. It took nerve to go fooling around a dead dame. Jeez, why did she have to die in the middle of the floor? He’d have to keep walking around her. Maybe he’d have to touch her! Maybe there was money in her shoe or in her stocking. The dirty rotten miser, hiding her money in places like that.

  He had to have something solid under his belt. His stomach felt sick like it always did when he was hungry. Like when he was a kid and sneaked off to bed before supper, so he wouldn’t be around when that parole rat came to squawk to his father. There were a dozen guys in this world he was going to put the finger on. He had the nerve, and now he had the money to hire a triggerman.

  Porky started into the lunchroom, and his feet froze on the door-sill. What was he going to use for dough? It was crazy to pull out a wad of bills and peel off a century in a cheap joint like this. That lamebrain behind the counter wasn’t used to big-money guys. He might get suspicious and call the cops.

  Porky turned and went down the street. His shoulders drooped. He didn’t want a hot dog. He wanted a meal in a restaurant. What a lousy world to live in. Guys minding other guys’ business and calling the cops. He’d have to do the job on an empty stomach. But maybe it was better that way. That old dame didn’t smell like no rose before. By now … Porky spat salt water. Well, afterwards he’d go where the swells lived and eat in a ritzy restaurant. Nobody there would blink an eye if he tipped the waiter the whole five G’s.

  The cellar stairs seemed endless as Porky slowly descended them. His mouth twitched, and his eyes were deep in his head with strain. Nobody was hanging around. They couldn’t have discovered the body. If they had, the stoop would be full of gabby dames. Jeez, women gave him a pain. Just wait till he drove past his mother’s door in a long shiny car. He’d buy a big horn and toot it in her face.

  Porky looked toward the dead woman’s window. The shade was still drawn. There wasn’t a sound. He opened the outer door and slipped inside. The darkness terrified him again, and the dead silence. He leaned against the door for support and whimpered like a puppy.

  He had to have a cigarette. He had to do something to steady his nerve. It might be a fool thing to strike a match, there might be a janitor somewhere in back, but he couldn’t stand this creepiness closing in on him.

  In panic he felt for a cigarette. It was pulp when it reached his mouth, but he did not know that. He took out his match safe, opened it, tore off a match, and felt the safe slip through the nerveless fingers of his left hand at the moment his shaky right hand stabbed at it.

  With one wild lunge he reached the dead woman’s door. There was daylight behind it. She was behind it, too, but there were a million more of her swirling around him in the dark.

  He put his hand on the knob, and his heart stopped. What was the door doing closed? He couldn’t remember closing it. Maybe he had, but he couldn’t swear to it. As fast as he had gotten out of there, it didn’t make sense he would shut a door.

  Suppose the old skirt wasn’t really dead? Suppose she screamed when she saw him? He hitched his pants with his free arm. He could take care of that. He had the nerve, and he had the muscle to croak a double-crossing old dame. He kicked the door open violently.

  She lay as he had left her, now dimly outlined in the waning afternoon light. The dark outside was swarming with her, but this motionless thing he would have to pass, and touch, and put his back to made him want to yell for his mother, made him want to hide his head in her skirts.

  “It ain’t going to bite you, buddy. Come on in.”

  The sound of a gruff male voice was like a shot in Porky’s arm. Someone alive had made it. Porky was so humbly grateful that he wanted to cry. He stumbled across the threshold.

  A man materialized from behind the door. He was a big man with gimlet eyes. One of his pockets bulged.

  “I been praying for company. She ain’t said ’boo!’ since I come.”

  Porky eyed the man admiringly. Who was this tough-talking guy? He looked hard as nails. Jeez, what a triggerman he’d make. Maybe they could make a deal.

  Pork
y hitched his pants. “What’s your racket, feller?”

  The man smiled dourly and flipped back his lapel.

  A dick, a dirty lousy dick. Porky was wild with frustration and fear.

  “You got nothing on me,” he shouted. “I don’t know this old dame from a hole in the wall.”

  “Believe it or not, you was waiting for a streetcar, huh?”

  “No,” said Porky in a harried voice. “It was like this, see. I see this old dame on the street, and she looks kind of sick, so I ast could I bring her home. So I bring her home, and she offers me a dime, see, but I don’t take no money from no old dames. So I leave her, but she still looks awful sick, and I get to thinking about her, and I got a mother of my own, see, so I came back here. And that’s how it was, so help me.”

  “Talk sense,” said the detective wearily. “Ain’t you the one she went to meet?”

  “I already told you,” said Porky shrilly. “Why would I be meeting a crumbly old dame?”

  Without answering the detective searched Porky and drew out the wad of bills.

  “Quit stalling, kid. You come here to see why she didn’t show up.” He nodded toward the floor. “That’s why. I was trailing her and she give me the slip. Run like a deer. She was too old to kick up her heels like that. Her ticker stopped.”

  “That’s what I said,” Porky argued frantically. “I see this old dame on the street, see, she looks awful sick, and she ast me to bring her home. She offers me a dime, and I don’t take it. I don’t take money from poor old dames. So, see, a guy that wouldn’t take a dime that’s give him wouldn’t rob no poor old lady of a bunch of lettuce as big as that. I work for a big corporation, see, and I’m on my way to bank their dough. You’re holding me up.”

  “The banks close at three,” the detective said drily. “And they ain’t got no place to keep counterfeit money.”

  Porky’s jaw dropped. For a long second he tried to take it in. Then his whole body shook with helpless rage. “Ain’t it real?”

  “Listen, squirt, I’m the one that asks the questions. Playing dumb ain’t going to save your yellow hide. Come clean. I been trying to round up you guys for six months, but you been too slippery. I knew this old dame was the go-between, but she wasn’t the fish I was trying to catch. I wanted the eels who been making this phony dough. I caught one or two, but I had to throw ’em back. You give me a break and walk in with the goods. Thanks, sucker. Now let’s go see the chief. We can leave her. She ain’t lonesome.”

  The handcuffs snapped on Porky’s wrist.

  Porky collapsed against the detective. “You got to believe me,” he wailed. “It’s all like I said. I ain’t mixed up in no racket. I’m a good citizen, see. I been out looking for work all day. You can ast my mother. I wouldn’t pull nothing crooked. I believe in guys obeying the law. A guy that wouldn’t take a dime from a poor old dame ain’t going to cheat the government.”

  The detective jerked Porky from his knees. “I been waiting two hours for this show, but I’m tired of the act already. Come on, big shot, let’s go.”

  Porky took one wavering step. Then the floor rose up and knocked him down.

  The detective dragged him along like a sack of mail.

  ABOUT A WOMAN NAMED NANCY

  There was a woman named Nancy who lived in a house which was her whole life, or so it was said. It was a fine square house, noble beside the modest houses surrounding it. She kept it immaculate, polished, shining, not a smidgen of dust or dirt anywhere. Her lawn and flower beds looked as if they had come to life out of a garden catalog. There was not a weed showing, nor anywhere a tuft of grass that needed cutting, nor a fading bloom spoiling the beauty and symmetry of a flowering bush.

  There was no birdbath on the lawn. Unwitting visitors had sometimes mentioned it. And Nancy’s reply was firm. A birdbath would attract birds which would come to drink and linger and leave unpleasant droppings. The birds would attract cats who would streak across the lawn to do them mayhem. The cats would leave even more unpleasant droppings, adding the final injury of scuffing up a flower bed to conceal them.

  On this Island where birds abound, where bird-watchers are uncountable, where birdseed is a household staple, she did not know one bird from another.

  She had never owned a house until she came across this jewel and found herself able to finance it. Though to some the responsibility of owning a house is a nightmare, an albatross, a burden from dawn to dark, its bills more binding than a marriage contract, its upkeep everlasting, to Nancy a house of her own gave her the feeling of security that a long-gone husband never had.

  I knew her, but not with any degree of intimacy. She was a year-round person as was I. That is a bond, and in time of need we know we were here for each other. Her neighbors admired her industrious ways. She had a steady job. And for an hour or more before she left home, she worked in her yard. When she came home, tired though she must have been, she worked in her yard as long as there was light.

  The neighbor women with babies almost always on the way and their husbands forever trying to stretch their pay to feed another mouth could not afford to have the concern for appearance that motivated her days. But instead of envy they felt secure in her solidity. However their fortunes shifted, hers remained unchanged.

  She was a cook by profession and well paid, but she enjoyed most cooking for those who had nothing to give her but their thanks. She had stocked her kitchen with family-size pots and pans, and she regularly called some mother or older child to come and get some dish hot out of her oven. There was rarely a day that someone or more than one did not benefit from her bounty.

  She had, of course, no time to visit people, and no inclination to waste time with idle callers. She was always doing something, and a knock on her door, or a hoot and holler from a car screeching to a halt when she was busy in her yard, interrupted her rigorous schedule that had every moment filled with her job, her house chores, and her yard chores from waking time to bedtime.

  One day I was driving past, without, of course, honking my horn, when Nancy’s door opened and a child, standing respectfully outside her door, held out her hands to receive the sizable dish that Nancy placed in them.

  Nancy saw me, we exchanged greetings, and on some impulse she asked me if I would like to take home a piece of apple pie fresh out of her oven. I was pleased to accept. Apple pie is my favorite. She invited me in and we walked back to the immaculate kitchen through that beautifully kept house. On the table was a great oblong pan. I was totally bemused to see an oblong apple pie. I thought there was a standing rule that pies should be round. I took a piece home, ate it with pleasure, and would, in time, have forgotten it. But that day will remain in my mind forever. It was the last day I was to see Nancy whole and strong.

  I began to hear that Nancy had come down with a cold that she couldn’t shake off. She had tried everything that everybody recommended but nothing seemed to work. She finally tried a doctor who gave her some prescription to relieve her aches and pains, but they didn’t. She had never had a cold that made her feel so bad.

  I am terrified of the common cold. If you have a cold I won’t go near you. When I was a child I had colds frequently and coughed all night. I thought maybe I was going to lose my breath and die. My mother said that people didn’t die from coughing unless they were choking on a bone. The doctor said I would stop having colds when I was fifteen. When you are six or seven that seems light-years away. But he was right. Ever since my fifteenth birthday I’ve never had a cold of my own. That is to say, if you have a cold and cough in my face, I get sprayed with your germs, and your cold gets a grip on me.

  I stayed away from Nancy. And it got to be very embarrassing because everybody was asking everybody, which, of course, included me, for an opinion about her condition. Was it one of those colds that had to wait on spring for a cure? When had I seen her last? How did she look to me? I deliberately made incoherent replies, and began to have the most awful feeling of guilt. A human being was my
species, and I had turned my back.

  One day I was so deep in thought about some personal concern that, in driving home, I took the shortcut through Nancy’s street, a way that, for obvious reasons, I had been carefully avoiding. Suddenly, and then remorsefully, I was aware that I had driven past Nancy’s house without a glance, and that she, for all I knew, might have been sitting by the window wishing for a visitor. Clearly I had no choice but to risk exposure to whatever might befall me than do her the unkindness of sailing past her door as if she could live or die for all it mattered to me.

  I shifted gears, backed to her door, got out of my car and braced myself to stay for the obligatory twenty minutes at least, and not get the fidgets. I walked toward the porch stairs, and as soon as my foot touched the bottom step, I froze, the feeling, the knowing overwhelming me, that presence that grips me and will not let go, forcing me to face the hard fact of death in the offing.

  I reached the top stair, walked across the porch, and in the Island way, knocked on the door, opened, called out my name, and waited for its approval. When Nancy called back “Come on in,” the nature of her illness was now clear to me in the sound of her voice that seemed to well up from some limitless depth of pain.

  I stayed some two or three hours or more, and I was full of breezy talk as if Nancy’s world was the same as when I last saw it. It is my style in such situations. She was in bed in a downstairs room, and I said with mock reproach. “I thought you’d be up and baking an apple pie. That’s why I stopped by. I’ll never forget the piece you gave me out of that long pan. It was the best I ever tasted. Whenever you feel up to it, call me, and I’ll jump in my car and go get the makings.”

  I asked her where she was hurting and she touched an area of her body where she supposed the cold had settled in some joint.