David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s and '50s (Library of America) (39 page)

A
LL THE
rest of the day Harbin stayed at the Spot. It suddenly became evident that with Gladden absent there was no housekeeper, and Harbin put himself to work straightening things out, dusting around in a more or less spiritless way. Dohmer sprawled in a dingy sofa and supervised Harbin’s work between gulps of beer. Baylock stood in a doorway and suggested Harbin should put on an apron. Harbin suggested it might be a damn good idea if they shook their legs and helped out. For a couple of hours the three of them swept and dusted. Gradually the momentum of the work became an attraction in itself, they began to scour and scrub, and the Spot was considerably cleaner except for the places where Dohmer worked. Dohmer succeeded in upsetting a bucket of soapy water. Harbin told him to clean up the mess and he opened a window and said the sun would dry it out. He then flopped on the sofa and claimed he was completely exhausted.

Toward seven o’clock, Harbin left for the phone booth to receive the scheduled call from Gladden. The drugstore was on Allegheny Avenue, going away north from Kensington. They had chosen the second booth from the left in a row of four. He entered the booth at two minutes to seven, sat there smoking a cigarette and deliberately calling a wrong number. At seven o’clock the phone rang in the booth.

Gladden’s voice from Atlantic City was low and he told her to talk louder. She said her hotel room was very nice, looking out on the ocean, and she was going to buy herself a good dinner and then take in a movie and get to bed early.

Then she said, “What are you doing?”

“Nothing in particular. I’m sort of tired.” He wasn’t the least bit tired. He couldn’t understand why he had said it.

She said, “Tired from what?”

“We cleaned up the Spot today. Now it’s almost fit to live in.”

She said, “Tell Dohmer not to start with cooking. Once he begins in that kitchen we’ll have a regiment of cockroaches. You know what I’m seeing tonight? A
Betty Grable picture.”

“
She’s good.”

“It’s with Dick Haymes.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s all in color. With a lot of music.”

“Well,” he said, “enjoy the picture.”

“Nat?”

He waited.

She said, “Nat, I want to ask you something. Look, Nat. I want to ask you this. I want to know if it’s all right if I go out.”

“What do you mean, if you go out? Sure you can go out. Aren’t you going out tonight?”

“Tonight I’m going out alone. And tomorrow night I guess I’ll be going out alone. But maybe one of these nights I’ll go out with somebody.”

“So?”

“So is it all right?”

“Fine,” he said. “If you’re asked out, you’ll go out. What’s wrong with that?”

“I just wanted to make sure.”

“Don’t be sappy. You don’t have to ask me these things. Just use your own judgment. Now look,” he added quickly, “you won’t have enough change to pay this phone bill. Hang up and call me same time tomorrow night.”

He put the receiver on the hook. Walking from the drugstore he picked up an
Evening Bulletin
and his eyes were on the headline as he dropped a nickel in the slotted cigar box. The headline said it was a hundred-thousand-dollar burglary and there was a picture of the mansion. He tucked the paper under his arm. A few minutes later, in a small restaurant, he began reading the story while telling a waitress to bring him a steak and some french fries and a cup of coffee. The story said it was one of the slickest jobs ever pulled on the Main Line and there were absolutely no clues. They didn’t mention the two policemen and the parked car near the mansion, and this of course was understandable because mentioning it would make the police look like idiots.

He finished the paper and worked on his steak, and watched the other customers. His eyes worked their way toward two middle-aged pudding-eaters, and across the room to a lonely young
man, then toward the woman who sat at a nearby table, then toward three girls who were sitting together, then quickly back to the woman, because the woman was looking at him.

He couldn’t be sure whether she was smiling. Her lips were relaxed and so were her eyes. He sensed there was something intentional in the way she sat there, looking at him. It wasn’t bold, it wasn’t what he would call cheap. But it was a direct look, coming right at him. For a moment he figured perhaps the woman was deep in her own thought and had no idea of what she was looking at. He turned his head away, tried that for a few seconds, then brought his eyes back to hers. She was still looking at him. He noticed now she was something out of the ordinary.

It began with the color of her hair. Her hair was a pale tan, not blonde, and he would swear it wasn’t dyed. It was glistening tan hair. She wore it tight and flat on her head, parted far on one side, then brushed back to her neck where he saw the edge of a little brown ribbon. The eyes were the same color as the hair, the special tan, and the skin was perhaps a shade lighter. He told himself either she was an expert with a sun-lamp or her beautician was a wizard. The nose was thin yet not stingy, taking up just about the right amount of room on her face, a graceful oval of a face unlike any face he had ever seen. He could see her body was slender, and there was something sleek about it even though her attire made no effort at sleekness. The longer he looked at her, the more certain he was that he ought to stop looking at her.

He knew if he kept on looking at her he would start getting fascinated, and it was almost a religion with him, his refusal to allow himself to be fascinated by any of them. He pulled his eyes away from her and just to do something he began toying with the strap of his wristwatch.

Across the room, someone put a nickel in the music machine and a weak, whispery baritone begged the world to show pity because a girl in an organdie dress had gone away and would never come back. Harbin finished the steak and lit a cigarette while he creamed his coffee. He found himself becoming quite restless. He decided to go downtown and shoot some pool at one of the large, respectable places. Then he changed his mind, sensing there might be something better to do. Maybe he ought
to visit the public library. For several weeks now he hadn’t been to the library. He liked it in
the library, the big one on the Parkway, where it was an endless flow of quiet and calm and he could sit there reading the thick volumes dealing with precious stones. It was a very interesting subject. Many times he had imitated the people he saw there in the library with their notebooks, doing research. He had brought a small notebook to the library and made notes from the books on precious stones. Tonight, he told himself, would be a good night to go to the library. He started to get up from the table, keeping his eyes on the door but knowing he would turn his head just for one more look. He turned his head. He looked at her and her eyes were on him.

She was only a few feet away, but her voice seemed to be coming from a distant area. “Enjoy your meal?”

He nodded very slowly.

“I don’t think so. You didn’t seem to be enjoying it.”

Without moving from where he stood, he said, “You do this all the time? Visit restaurants to see if people enjoy their food?”

The woman said, “Maybe I’ve been rude.”

“You’re not rude,” Harbin said. “You’re just interested.” He moved toward her. “What makes you interested?”

“You’re a type.”

“Special?”

“Special for me.”

“That’s too bad.” Harbin smiled. He smiled as kindly as he could.

He had a feeling she had been married at least twice, and he was ready to bet she had a man now and at least three more on the string. He asked himself, what did he need this for? He had always avoided this and why was he allowing it to grab at him now? The answer came, rapid and keen. Never before had he seen anything that even approached this.

“If you’re looking for company,” he said, “you can come along with me.”

“Where?”

“All right,” he said. “Forget it.”

He turned his back on her, moved to the cashier’s stand. He paid his check, left the restaurant and stood on the corner waiting for a cab. The night air had a thick softness and the smell of
stale smoke from factories that had been busy in the day, and the smell of cheap whiskey and dead cigarettes and Philadelphia springtime. Then something else came into it and he breathed it in, and he knew the color of this perfume was tan.

She stood behind him. “Usually I don’t gamble like this.”

He faced her. “Where would you like to go?”

“Maybe someplace for a drink.”

“I don’t feel like a drink.”

“Tell me,” she said. “Are you hard to get along with?”

“No.”

“You think we can get along?”

“No.” A cab rolled through the middle of the street, and he beckoned to it. Entering the cab, Harbin told himself he had handled it the way it should have been handled, and any other way would have been a mistake, and as it was, he had made enough of a mistake in even beginning to talk with her. He started to close the door, but she was already climbing into the cab, and he found himself sliding across the seat to make room for her.

The driver leaned back. “Where we going?”

“The Free Library,” Harbin said. “On the Parkway.” He studied her and for a few moments she gazed frontward, then slowly turned her head and looked at him. She smiled and her mouth opened just a little. He could see her teeth.

She said, “My name is Della.”

“Nathaniel.”

“Nat,” she said. “That’s an all right name for you. It’s soft but it has a snap to it. A soft snap. It’s a patent leather name.” She pulled in some smoke and let it out. “What do you do for a living?”

“Do you really want to know, or are you just trying to make talk?”

“I really want to know. When I’m interested in a man, I want to know all about him.”

He nodded a bit dubiously, “That’s either a good policy or a very bad one. You let yourself in for a flock of disappointments. Suppose I told you I was a shoe salesman and I made forty a week?”

“You’d be lying.”

“Certainly,” he said. “I’m much too smart to sell shoes for a living.
I have that snap quality, that soft snap. Tell me all about it. Tell me the story of my life so far and what I should do with the rest of it.” He frowned at her with nothing in the frown but honest curiosity. “What is it you want? What are you out for?”

“Basically?” She was no longer smiling. She held the cigarette close to her mouth but she had forgotten it. Her eyes were slightly wide, as though she was surprised at the reply she was about to give. “Basically,” she said, “I’m out to find myself a lover.”

The impact of it was like the initial touch of an oncoming steamroller. He told himself to get back on balance. The presence of women in his life had never represented much of a problem, although the potential was always there, and he could always see the potential. He had always found it not at all difficult to sidestep and maneuver himself away from annoying involvement. The thing was purely a matter of timing. To know just when to walk out. And he knew as sure as he was sitting here, this was the time to walk out. Right now. To tell the driver to stop the cab. To open the door and slide out, and walk away, and keep walking.

She held him there. He didn’t know how she was doing it, but she held him there as though she had him tied hand and foot. She had him trapped there in the cab, and he looked at her with hate.

“Why?” she said. “Why the look?”

He couldn’t answer.

She said, “You frightened?” Without moving, she seemed to lean toward him. “Do I frighten you, Nat?”

“You antagonize me.”

“Listen, Nat—”

“Shut up,” he said. “Let me think about this.”

She nodded slowly, exaggerating the nod. He saw her profile, the quiet line of her brow and nose and chin, the semi-delicate line of her jaw, the cigarette an inch or two away from her lips, and the smoke of the cigarette. Then he took his eyes and pulled them away from Della, and then without looking at Della, he was seeing her. The ride to the library took up a little more than twenty minutes, and they weren’t saying a word to each other, yet it was as though they talked to each other constantly
through the ride. The cab pulled up in front of the library and neither of them moved. The driver said they were at the library, and neither of them moved. The driver shrugged and let the motor idle and sat there, waiting.

After a while, the driver said, “Well, what’s it gonna be?”

“The way it’s got to be,” she said. As she floated her body toward Harbin, she gave the driver an address.

I
T WAS
up in the north of the city, in a section known as Germantown. To get there, the cab had to follow the Schuylkill River, following the night sheen of the river up along the smooth river-drive and curving away and following Wissahickon Creek and then past the rows of little houses of working people who lived on the outskirts of Germantown. The cab went deep into Germantown and finally pulled up in front of a small house in the middle of a badly lighted block.

The inside of the house was a combination of creamy green and dark grey, the green predominating, the furniture green, the wallpaper the same green, the rugs dark grey. It was an old house that had been done over. Above the fireplace, within a wide tan frame, there was a line drawing of Della’s face, and it was done in tan tempera on very pale tan boardpaper. The artist’s name was on the Spanish side.

Harbin said, “You have a lot of money, don’t you?”

“A fair amount.”

He turned away from the line drawing. “Where’d you get it?”

“My husband died a year ago. Left me an income. Fifteen thousand a year.”

She had seated herself in a deep sofa that looked like it was fashioned from pistachio ice cream and would melt away any minute. He started toward the sofa, then moved to one side, kept moving in that direction, stopped when he reached a wall. “How do you spend your time?”

“Miserably,” she said. “I sleep too much. I’m sick and tired of sleeping all the time. One of these days I’ll open a shop or something. Come over here.”

“Later.”

“Now.”

“Later.” He remained there facing the wall. “Got many friends?”

“None. No real friends. Just a few people I know. I go out with them and the evening starts to drag and it gets to a point where I feel like lighting firecrackers. I can’t stand people who aren’t exciting.”

“
You find me exciting?”

“Come over here and we’ll find out.”

He gave her a little smile and then he looked at the rug. “Aside from that,” he said, “what do you figure we can offer each other?”

“Each other.”

“Entirely?”

“Everything,” she said. “I wouldn’t have it any other way. This you’ve got to know about me. The first time I was married I was fifteen. The boy was a couple years older and we lived on neighboring farms in South Dakota. We were married a few months and then he got run over by a tractor. I went out to look for another man. It wasn’t the idea of marriage, exactly, it was just that I needed a man. So I found me a man. And then another. And another. One after another. And each had something to offer, but it wasn’t what I wanted. I’ve always known what I wanted. Six years ago when I was twenty-two, I got married for the second time. That was in Dallas and I was selling cigarettes in a night club. The man was married and he was down there with his wife for their first real vacation in ten years. He was forty and worth a fortune. Copper mines in Colorado. He started running around with me and finally his wife went back to Colorado and got a divorce. The man married me. After four years of it he began getting on my nerves. He started with the jealousy. That’s all right, the jealousy, when it’s carried out with finesse. You know, the soft snap. It’s attractive that way. But with him it was all red hot temper. He threatened to tear my head off. One night he hit me in the face. With his fist. That was just a little more than a year ago. I told him to pack up and go to the other side of the world. He went out and a few days later he threw himself off a fishing boat. I started looking for another man. All my life I’ve been looking for a certain man. You think I should keep on looking?”

He didn’t say anything.

“I want it now. I want an answer.”

“It takes time.”

“Don’t bore me,” she said. “Don’t stand there thinking it over.” A certain rigidity came into her voice. She behaved as though they were in the midst of a crisis. “I’ve waited for tonight. I’ve waited a long time. I sat there tonight and watched you
at that table. I watched you eating your dinner. And I knew. Not the trace of a doubt.”

He glanced at his wristwatch. “We’ve known each other exactly two hours and sixteen minutes.”

She was up and away from the sofa and coming toward him. “You letting that wristwatch make your decisions? I’ve never been guided by time. I won’t let myself be guided by it. Jesus Christ in Heaven, I know, I know, I’m standing here and telling you I know. And you know, too. And if you deny that, if you doubt it, if you can’t make up your mind right now, I swear I’ll throw you out of here—”

Closing in on her, he smothered her mouth.

The liquid of her lips poured into his veins. There was a bursting in his brain as everything went out of his brain and Della came in, filling his brain so that his brain was crammed with Della. For a single vicious moment he tried to break away from her and come back to himself, and in that moment they were helping him, Dohmer and Baylock. They were helping him as he tried to pull away. But Gladden wasn’t helping. Gladden was nowhere around. Gladden ought to be here, helping. Gladden was letting him down. If Gladden hadn’t gone away, this wouldn’t be happening. It was all Gladden’s fault. He took it that far and he couldn’t take it any farther, because from there on it was all Della. It was very distant from the earth and there was nothing but Della.

A little past six in the morning he stood under a shower and let the water run as cold as it cared to. He heard her voice beyond the bathroom door, asking him what he wanted for breakfast. He told her to go back to sleep, he would get something outside. She said he would eat breakfast here. When he came downstairs, the orange juice was already fixed and she was busy in the kitchen with eggs and bacon.

They sipped orange juice. She said, “Soon we’ll do this in the country.”

“You like the country?”

“Far out,” she said. “I already have a place. Midway between here and Harrisburg. It’s a farm, but we won’t farm. We’ll just live there. It’s a marvelous place. My car’s being fixed but maybe it’ll be ready by noon. We’ll drive out today and I’ll show it to you.”

“
I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I have a couple of people to see.”

“You mean you have to work?”

“In a way.”

“How long will you be away?”

“I don’t know. Talk to me. Tell me more about this place in the country.”

“It’s about thirty miles the other side of Lancaster. The famous rolling hills of Pennsylvania. This is a very high hill. We’re not at the top, but on the side of the hill where it has a gradual slant, then levels off for awhile before it goes down again. What you see from here is all the other hills going out, the greenest hills you ever saw in your life. Then away, far away, but somehow so close that it seems right next door, we have mountains. Lavender mountains. You see the river but before that you see the brook. It runs coming up toward you in a lot of soft easy jumps, curving up to the pond that’s where you can reach in and get your hand wet if you lean out the bedroom window. It’s deep enough, this pond, so in the morning if you feel in the mood, you can roll yourself out the window and go into the water.”

“What do we do there?”

“We just stay there. Up there together in that place on that hill. Not a soul anywhere near. We’ll be together there.”

He nodded. Inside himself he repeated the nod.

They finished breakfast, had an extra coffee and a few cigarettes and then she walked him to the door. He put his hands on her face.

“You stay here,” he said. “Wait for my call. I’ll come back a little past noon and we’ll drive out to see our estate.”

Her eyes were closed. “I know this is permanent. I know it—”

As he left the house, it seemed to him that he had no weight at all.

The cab let him out at Kensington and Allegheny and he decided to walk the seven blocks back to the Spot. He didn’t feel like returning to the Spot. He had no desire to see the Spot, wishing there was some other place he could go. What he really wanted to do was hail another cab and drive back to Della. He
moved toward the Spot with a drag in his legs, a frown that became deeper as he came closer to the emeralds and Dohmer and Baylock.

He walked into the Spot to hear Dohmer cursing the kitchen. “Mice,” Dohmer was shouting. “These damn mice.” Then Dohmer appeared from the kitchen and stared at him. “Where you been all night?”

“With a woman. Baylock sleeping?”

“Dead,” Dohmer said. “We played cards until four-thirty. I took him for near a hundred. We got a flock of mice in the kitchen.”

“Go upstairs and wake him up.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Do I look wrong?”

“You bet your life you do,” Dohmer said. “You look from the clouds. Someone stick a needle in you?”

Harbin didn’t answer. He watched Dohmer climbing the stairs, and put a cigarette in his mouth and began to chew on it, then pulled it from between his teeth and shredded the tobacco onto the floor. From upstairs, Baylock protested whiningly that all he wanted from life was to be let alone, to be allowed to sleep and die.

They came down and Baylock took one look at him and said, quickly, anxiously, with a bit of a hiss, “What happened? I bet something happened.”

“Stop it,” Harbin started to light the cigarette but it was a mess. He took another one. “I’m out.”

Dohmer looked at Baylock and Baylock gazed at a wall. Baylock’s head turned like the head of a puppet. His eyes came back to Harbin and he said, “I knew right away.” His head went on turning, aiming toward Dohmer. “I knew something happened.”

“Nothing except that I’m walking out,” Harbin said. “Listen to it and take it or don’t take it. But I found myself a woman last night. I’m going away with her. Today.”

“He’s away,” Dohmer gasped. “He’s all away.”

Harbin nodded slowly. “That’s the only way, the only way to put it.”

Baylock scratched the side of his face. He looked at Harbin, looked away. “I don’t see how you can do it.”

“
Easy,” Harbin said. “With the legs. Right foot, left foot and you’re walking out.”

“No,” Baylock shook his head quickly. “No, you can’t do it.”

“You can’t do it,” Dohmer told Harbin. “For God’s sake.”

“The woman,” Baylock asked. “Who’s this woman?”

“Just a woman,” Harbin said. “That’s all you get.”

“You hear this?” Baylock posed Dohmer. “You hear it? He says that’s all we get. No rundown, no listing, no nothing. Just a woman, and he’s going away. Like that,” and Baylock snapped his fingers. And then turned to Harbin, “How well do you think you know me? How well do you think you know him?” and he pointed toward Dohmer. “You really believe we’ll stand here and watch you walk out?” Then he started to laugh, sliced it hard, peered at Harbin as though his eyes looked through slits in a wall. “You’re so wrong, Nat. You’re so wrong it’s almost comical. We can’t let you walk out.”

Harbin felt the floor under his feet. It began to sag just a little. He waited for it to get firm again. He said, “Keep the thing technical.”

Baylock held his arms wide. “It’s a hundred per cent technical. If you walk out, there’s a crack in the dam. The dam gets wider. The water starts coming in. Your own words, Nat. We’re an organization. We’re hot as a furnace in seven big cities and you know how many small towns. If they get Dohmer, it’s ten to twenty. Same with Gladden. If I get caught, goodbye everybody. Makes me a three-time loser and that’s twenty to forty at a minimum. Listen, Nat,” and Baylock crouched, his eyes almost closed. “When I die, I want to die in the sunshine.”

Harbin waited a moment. Then he shook his head slowly. “You haven’t made your point.”

“My point is,” Baylock’s voice held a slight tremor, “the minute you walk out of here, you’re on the debit side.”

“You think,” Harbin said, “I’d play it filthy? You think I’d ever open my mouth?”

“I don’t think so,” Dohmer spoke huskily. “I’d bet a million to one against it. But all the same it remains a bet.” He resumed shaking his head. “I don’t want to make this kind of a bet.”

“Another thing,” Baylock said. “What about your split of the haul?”

“I’ll want that.” Harbin was taking his mind ahead of them. He
felt no interest in his split of the haul but now the thing was becoming stud poker and he saw the need for maneuvering himself out of the wedge they had created around him.

Baylock moved in. “He wants his split of the haul. That’s real nice.”

“What’s not nice about it?” Harbin made his voice a little louder. “When you say my split, you mean my split. Don’t I get it?”

“No,” Baylock was testing him, weighing him. It wasn’t good testing. It wasn’t sufficiently hidden. Baylock’s face showed the testing and gave Harbin the formula for the next move.

Harbin walked across the room and sat down on a chair that looked sick. He gazed thoughtfully at the floor. “You’re a dog, Joe. You know that? You realize what a dog you are?”

“Look at me,” Baylock shouted. “You see me trying to walk out?” Baylock worked his way toward Harbin, seeming to be pulled along on tracks. “I’m willing to talk it over but you won’t talk.” Baylock waited for talk and Harbin offered nothing, and eventually Baylock said, “All we want is the reason. Something we can believe.” Then Baylock was away from the poker table. “Give it to us, will you? If you give it to us, maybe we’ll understand. We can’t believe this thing with the woman, we want to know what it really is.”

Harbin had it now, seeing the closed card Baylock had displayed, and knowing fully that he sat alone at the table with all the winnings, because actually they weren’t in a class with him, they couldn’t begin to compete with him when it came to manipulating a situation. It was definite. Yet, underneath his expressionless face he was angry with them. They were forcing him into an area of deceit, actually urging him to lie. And he hated to lie. Even in the line of business with outsiders he felt unsanitary when he was lying. And now they had so arranged it that he had to give them a lie.

He said, “If you really want it, I’ll give it to you. I’d hoped you wouldn’t make me say it, but the way it is, I guess I’ll just have to tell you.” He figured it was time for a sigh, and then, while they stared and didn’t breathe, “There’s big jobs I want to do, and you just don’t fit in. You don’t have what I need. You don’t have it, that’s all.”