David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s and '50s (Library of America) (41 page)

A
S
H
ARBIN
entered the barber shop, a man got up from one of the wire-backed chairs in response to the barber’s beckoning finger. Harbin lowered himself into the wire-backed chair. He leaned back, closed his eyes, saw the mansion in the night and the car parked on the wide clean street north of the mansion, the police car, the aquamarine eyes of the young cop.

Now he had to take it from there. He began to take it, very slowly, considering each item before buying it. He had to check his own moves in ratio with the moves of the young cop, the things they were doing at the same time, the things in the mind behind the aquamarine eyes. That mind had decided to come back alone and have another look at the parked car. Maybe the aquamarine eyes had seen the flashlight signals going across the lawn minutes before Harbin had appeared. Maybe it was something else. Whatever it was, the young cop had decided the older cop was a hindrance, and it was best to come back alone.

And so the blond man, no longer to be considered a policeman, had come back alone and had placed the police car so he could not be seen. He had watched the parked Chevrolet. He had seen them coming from the mansion with their haul. He had watched the Chevrolet as it went into first gear. Maybe he had followed them without using his headlights. That maybe didn’t last long. In Harbin’s brain it became an emphatic yes. He remembered having examined the rear-view mirror and not seeing any headlights.

Without headlights, this blond man had followed the Chevrolet to the Spot. He had watched them entering the Spot with their haul. That was for certain and another thing for certain was the fact that he had gone back to the police station and reported nothing.

Harbin realized it was necessary to check on that, check with himself, his own conception of how certain people react to certain situations. The aquamarine eyes had seen the luxurious mansion,
the token of great wealth, had decided it would be a big haul, had waited calmly for the report to come in. When the report came in, when the house sergeant put it down in the book, and the fact that it amounted to around a hundred thousand dollars in emeralds, the man aimed his eyes and his body and his brain at the hundred thousand dollars.

And now it was all quite clear to Harbin and he could see the rest of it as though he sat at a table and looked at tangible things set neatly before him. He saw the man walking around and thinking it over, deciding to play it carefully and with accuracy. A policeman would have gone after the burglars, but this man was a policeman only when he wore a uniform and moved in the company of other policemen. This man was a rather special sort of operator, loyal only to himself and what he wanted. And what he wanted was the emeralds. This man realized the emeralds were in the shabby Kensington house and the only way to get them out and into his own hands was by using another brain. The other brain was a woman named Della.

The man had made contact with Della. They must have taken turns, keeping their eyes on the Spot, the legs that walked out of the Spot and then returned and walked out again. They must have decided on a time, the initial forward move. And Della had seen him entering the restaurant that night, and that was it, that was the arrangement she needed. If that hadn’t worked, she would have tried something else. But that had worked. It had worked beautifully. It had kept on working until now, but now it was all over.

Harbin saw a thick finger pointing at him. The barber was smiling, inviting him to the chair. He climbed into the chair and the barber gave him a shave and then a haircut and after that a shampoo and scalp massage and then went back to the face and put pink cream on the face and worked it in with the thick fingers and followed with a sunlamp treatment. A folded towel kept the light out of Harbin’s eyes. In the black under the folded towel he could see the Spot, he could see their faces, the three in the organization when it ought to be four in the organization. He was in a great hurry to get back to the Spot.

The barber took the folded towel from Harbin’s eyes and pushed a
button that then lifted the chair electrically to sitting position. Harbin got off the chair and saw Della standing near the door.

They left the barber shop and walked back to the car. They drove out of Lancaster and pulled onto the road going back to the hill. Della worked the radio and got some light-opera music. She pushed the car at medium speed, sat there behind the wheel with a relaxed smile on her face as she listened to the music. Without looking at Harbin she was communicating with him and once she reached out and let her fingers go into the hair at the back of his head. She gave his hair a little pull.

He poked around in his brain and wondered if it was possible to figure her out. He thought of her kisses. In his lifetime he had been kissed by enough women and had experienced a sufficient variety of kisses to know when there was real meaning in a kiss. Her kisses had the real meaning, and not only the fire, but the genuine material beyond the fire. If it hadn’t been genuine he would have sensed it when it happened. This woman had immense feeling for him and he knew clearly it was far above ordinary craving and it was something that couldn’t be put on like a mask is put on. It was pure in itself and it was entirely devoid of pretense or embroidery.

It was the true feeling that made the entire business
a quaking paradox, because the one side of Della was drawn to him, melted into him, and the other side of Della was out to louse him up. Even now, knowing of her purpose, knowing she was out to get the emeralds, fully aware of her scheme, seeing the situation as a sort of arena with her on one side and himself on the other, he felt the magnetic pull, he realized his desire for Della, the depth of the desire and the knowledge it was permanent desire. He knew he wanted Della more than he had ever wanted anything. This was a solid problem, this woman, a thing he had to deal with, a trouble he had to blast apart. Because it was a threat, and since it aimed at the emeralds, it had to aim at the Spot. And the Spot was the organization. The Spot was Dohmer and Baylock and Gladden. And there, right there, the quiver went through him, the edge of the knife sliced everything else away. This thing was aiming at Gladden.

Not knowing it, he had his eyes dulled and heavy with guilt. There
was hammering in the guilt and it sent the heaviness through his veins. Every thread in his body became a wire drawn tight. Gladden needed him and he had deserted Gladden. Here he was, sitting at the very side of this thing that aimed a threat at Gladden. For days he had been with this thing, away from Gladden. Gladden needed him and if he wasn’t there it would be the end of her. This woman sitting beside him was an element that he must quickly erase.

He glanced around at the hills, the woods beyond the hills. There were some narrow hills going to left and right of the concrete highway, and he said, “Let’s try some new scenery.”

She gave him a look. “Where?”

“One of these little roads.” He said it with his eyes going into her, the words nothing more than ripples on the surface.

It worked. She nodded slowly. “All right, we’ll find a quiet place. Where we’ll have a lot of trees around us. Like a curtain.”

They took one of the little roads, followed it up along a hillside, went up and around and down to the other side of the hill, followed the road into the woods where it became a set of tire tracks. They were going far into the woods and the path became dim. Harbin glanced over the side of the car and watched the thick high green grass sliding along, some purple sliding with the green.

He felt the car slowing down and he said, “No, keep going.”

“It’s wonderful here.”

“Keep going.”

“Put your hands on me.”

“Wait,” he said.

“I can’t.”

“Please wait.”

The woods around them was thick and up ahead it seemed to be thicker, very dark because the leaves were mobs of solid green high in the trees and holding the sun away. He knew she would say nothing now until he said something and he remained quiet while they went on through the woods. They went deeper and deeper into the woods and through an hour and through another hour, the car going very slowly because it was bumpy ground and there was considerable climbing and turning.
He felt the immense yet gentle pressure of the woods and he felt the nearness of Della and for moments that choked him he was pulled away from his idea, his purpose, the thing he meant to carry out in these woods. He took hold of the moment and twisted it away from himself.

He said, “All right. Just about here.”

She stopped the car. She turned off the radio.

He said, “Get rid of the lights.”

She switched off the headlights and he opened the door on his side and stepped out of the car. Moonlight came down through the woods. Della was getting out of the car, circling it to come toward him. Her body came toward him through the moonlight. As she reached him he took her hand, he walked her away from the car, off the path, heard the sound of her breathing as he took her into the trees.

He took her on toward the rippling sound of water. Eventually they could see the water, the glimmer of a brook far down below from where they stood on a high mound of wild flowers.

He took her down to the brook and they stood there looking at the moon-glazed water, the points of rocks showing like bits of crystal against the dark. He lowered himself to the ground, felt the smooth flatness of it here on the bank, felt Della as she came against him. He sensed the approach of her lips. He drew his face away from her lips.

“No,” he said. He said it tenderly, almost like a caress, and yet he knew it had the force of a spear going into her.

He waited. He wanted to look at her, he wanted to see the effect, but this was only the start of what he was going to do to her, only an ounce of the full measure aiming at this thing that aimed the threatening aim in a long line going up from the emeralds to the Spot to the organization, and to Gladden. Inside himself he spoke softly to Gladden and told her he was about to make up for what he had done.

Della was quiet for many moments. Finally she said, “What bothers you?”

“Nothing.”

“You don’t seem to be with me.”

“I’m not.” He was smiling at the brook. He knew she could see the smile and he knew what it was doing to her.

There was another long wait and then she said, “I know what this is.”

He went on smiling at the brook.

“You’re drifting,” she said. “I can see you drifting.”

He shrugged. “I imagine so.”

She stood up, had her back to him but he knew what was happening on her face. He could almost see inside her, see the tumult, the piercing shock, the agony she didn’t want him to see. She was trying to hold back but couldn’t hold back because finally it broke away and came out, bursting, hissing, her body twisting to show him her face as she said, “God damn you, you dirty son of a bitch.”

He looked at her only for an instant, then swerved his eyes to the brook and went on smiling at it.

“Why?” She shot it at him. “Why? Why?”

He shrugged.

“You tell me why,” she gasped, her voice almost cracking. “You better tell me why.”

The smile on his face became dim but inside himself he was smiling widely because this was the way he had planned it and it was working just right. He thought of certain people who had it in for other people and went ahead and did their killing. But there was never any real benefit to be derived from killing, and the results, sooner or later, were always bad. So it was always stupid and crazy to kill, and this was so much more effective than killing. This was the worst possible thing he could do to her. It was the worst thing any man could do to any woman. It was the meanest form of torture, because he was rejecting her without qualifying the rejection, throwing her into a gully of dismay, watching her flounder and choke, her brain seething, trying to reach the reason while he held the reason just a trifle out of her reach.

He stood up. “Guess that’s about it.”

“You can’t,” she said. “How can you? How can you do this? It isn’t human. It’s what a devil would do. At least give a person a reason, let me know why—”

“Why?” He made a little gesture with his arms. “Go ask the trees. They know as much about it as I do.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“I’m sorry.”

“
You’re not sorry. If you were, you’d tell me. You’d tell me what goes on in that mind of yours. What thoughts are you having? What are you feeling?”

“I don’t know.” He said it as though she had asked him what time it was. Then, as he began to turn away from her, “I don’t know anything about it except I just don’t want to be around you anymore. I want to get away.”

And as he moved away, as he went up the steep rise going away from the brook and into the woods, he could hear no sound behind him other than the sound of the water against rocks. Moving steadily through the woods, seeing the car, he crossed the moonlit path far in front of the car and followed a stretch of climbing terrain to get up high enough so he could obtain a view of the main highway, and started down in that direction.

On the highway, about an hour later, a truck picked him up and took him into Lancaster. He climbed into a taxi and went to the railroad station and bought a ticket to Philadelphia.

O
PENING THE
door, he saw only darkness. He called Baylock’s name, then he called Dohmer. A weak light came down from upstairs, and he heard their voices. He switched on a lamp, took out a handkerchief and wiped some rain from his face. He waited for them to come down the stairs.

They came down rather slowly, looking at him as though they had never seen him before. They were both dressed, but their trousers were rumpled and he knew they had been sleeping in their clothes. They moved down into the living-room and stood close together, looking at him.

He opened his mouth. Instead of words coming out, a lot of air and worry rushed in. He didn’t know how to begin.

They waited for him to say something.

Finally he said, “Where’s Gladden?”

They let him wait. He asked it again and then Dohmer answered, “Atlantic City.”

He put a cigarette in his mouth. “I guess I figured she’d come back here.”

“She did come back,” Dohmer said. “We told her about you, so she went back to Atlantic City.”

Harbin took off his wet jacket and hung it on a chair. “You talk as though she’s gone for good.”

“You hit it,” Baylock said.

“Don’t lie,” Harbin moved quickly toward them, caught himself and told himself to handle it another way. His voice was calm. “What happened with Gladden?”

“We tell you she’s pulled out,” Baylock said. “She packed her things and pulled out. You want to make sure? Go to Atlantic City.” Baylock dipped a hand in his trousers pocket, took out a folded slip of paper and handed it to Harbin. “Here’s the address she gave us.” Baylock took a deep breath that had grinding in it. “Anything else you want?”

“I want you to listen while I talk.”

He studied their faces for a sign of trust. There was no sign. There was nothing.

He said, “I want to come in again.”

“
You won’t come in,” Baylock told him. “You’re out. You’ll stay out.”

“I’ll come in,” Harbin said. “I’ve got to come in because if I don’t, you stand a good chance of losing the haul and getting yourselves grabbed. Now either show some sense and listen to me or you’ll wind up in a mud puddle.”

Baylock looked at Dohmer. “I like how he walks back in and right away he takes over.”

“I’m not taking over,” Harbin said. “All I can do is tell you the way things are shaped. We’ve got ourselves a package of grief.” He let that come against them, waiting until it went into them, and then giving it to them. “We’re being looked at.”

They moved in no special direction. They stared at each other and then they stared at Harbin. For a moment he was with them, he felt what they felt. He wanted to come out and put the whole thing in front of them, the thing as it had happened and the way it was. But he realized they wouldn’t accept the truth. They hadn’t accepted it the last time and they wouldn’t accept it now. He would have to slice most of it away and give them nothing more than a mouthful to chew on.

He said, “A party’s been trailing me. It took me four days to find out. Another day to shake him. But I’ve added it up and I can see that shaking him won’t do any good. At least not for the time being. Anyway, not until we get out of here.”

Baylock took another deep breath. “Be careful, Nat. We got a lot more brains now than the day you walked out. We been educating ourselves.” He grinned at Dohmer. “Ain’t we?”

“Yeah,” Dohmer said. “We took it serious, what you said, Nat. We made up our minds to get smarter. Now we’re smarter and we’re not nervous like we were.”

“Try to follow it.” Harbin was begging himself to stay away from anger, to hold on, to keep it cool. “At the mansion we had the police. When they went away I thought for sure that was the end of them. But one of them came back. He followed us here. And now, in plain clothes, he’s been following me.”

Baylock held onto the grin and shook his head. “No fit. When they want you, they don’t follow you. They move in and grab you.”

“The point is,” Harbin said, “he doesn’t want me.” Harbin let some quiet come in, let it settle. “All right, if you can’t figure it out, I
’ll tell you. The man stays with me but he doesn’t want me. He wants the emeralds.”

Baylock turned and stopped, turned again, came back to where he had been standing. Dohmer lifted a hand and rubbed a long, heavy jaw. Then Baylock and Dohmer frowned at each other and that was all they could do.

Baylock said, breathing very heavily, “Who is he? Who is this bastard?”

“I don’t know. All I know is, the man is hungry for emeralds. He’s got his police uniform to fall back on and when it lines up like that, the only way to deal with them is stay away from them.”

“But maybe,” Dohmer blurted, “all he wants is a cut.”

Harbin shrugged. “They all want just a little cut. To begin with. Then they come back and say they want another little cut. Then later they’re back again.” He lit a cigarette, took several small puffs at it, blew out the smoke in one big cloud. “What we’ve got to do and do fast is get the hell out of here.”

“Where to?” Dohmer said.

Harbin looked at him as though it was a silly question. “You know where. Atlantic City.”

“For God’s sake,” Dohmer groaned.

Baylock said, “If she’s pulled out, she’s pulled out.”

“No,” Harbin said. “We go there and pick her up.”

“Answer me this,” Baylock shouted. “What do we need her for?”

“We don’t need her,” Harbin admitted. “But she needs us.”

“Why?” Baylock wanted to know.

“We’re an organization.” Harbin knew he shouldn’t have said that, but it was said and all he could do was wait for Baylock’s blast.

“Are we?” Baylock shouted. “Jesus Christ, give us credit for half a brain anyway. You walk out of here and say you’re through and now almost a week later you show up again and once more we’re an organization, just like that. I don’t like it handled that way and I won’t see it handled that way. Either it’s black or it’s white. One or the other.”

“I won’t argue,” Harbin said. “If you want to break it up we can
break it up here and now. On the other hand we can hold it. And if we hold it, I stick. We all stick. That includes Gladden.”

Dohmer hit his hands against his thighs. “I’m with that.”

“You’re with everything.” Baylock looked Dohmer up and down. He turned his face to Harbin. He started to say something and then his mouth tightened up and he walked to the window and looked out at the rain.

The rain was coming down very hard, pouring off the rooftops in solid sheets of silver water against the black. Baylock stood there looking at the rain and hearing the thud of it and saying, “It sure is a fine night to ride down to Atlantic City.”

Harbin made no reply. He started up the stairs, then stopped and looked at Dohmer, “I’ll do the driving. I hope you got the cards printed.”

Dohmer took out his wallet and extracted a few cards, including an operator’s license, a registration card, and a social security card and handed these to Harbin. He examined them, saw that the alias was neither far-fetched nor too common, then he beckoned to Dohmer and Baylock. The three of them went upstairs and packed their bags. They loaded the emeralds into a ragged suitcase, picked up their baggage and moved slowly out of the Spot and walked through the rain.

The Chevrolet was parked in a nearby one-car garage they had rented from an old couple who didn’t have a car and were out of touch with the world. Dohmer had made the necessary changes so that now the Chevrolet was a darkish orange and had different license plates, a different engine number and looked altogether like a different car.

Harbin drove and Baylock sat beside him. Dohmer was in the back and sound asleep before they hit the Delaware Bridge. There were very few cars on the Bridge. When they had driven halfway across the Bridge, Baylock began to worry.

“Why did we have to paint it orange?” Baylock wanted to know. “Of all the colors we could have used, we had to use orange. Some color for a car. Who paints a car orange?”

“You’re worrying about the law,” Harbin said, “and our worry right now is not the law.”

“Another thing,” Baylock said. “Why in Christ’s name did we have to take the car anyway? Why didn’t we grab a train?”

“
And put the emeralds on a train. And being there on a train going eighty miles an hour and not being able to get off if something goes wrong. If you want to make talk, let’s make talk with sense.”

The car reached the New Jersey side of the river and Harbin paid New Jersey twenty cents for the use of the Bridge. In Camden the rain died down a little. Coming onto the Black Horse Pike the rain started again. It grew to become a wide rain with a great deal of Atlantic Ocean wind in it.

Harbin worked the car up to fifty-five and held it there on the wet black road. The rain was seemingly coming straight at the car and he had to bend over a little, getting his eyes closer to the windshield to see where he was going.

Baylock said, “Gladden looked good.”

“What do you mean, she looked good.”

“Her face. She looked good in the face. She had some color.”

“The salt air,” Harbin said. “It’s good for everybody. The salt air and the sun.”

“It wasn’t sunburn,” Baylock sounded emphatic. “And where does salt air affect the eyes? I took one look at her and right away I noticed the eyes.”

“What’s wrong with her eyes?”

“Nothing. Her eyes look great. I never saw her eyes like that before. I guess that’s what happens to the eyes in Atlantic City. They get that real Atlantic
City look. She sure was anxious to get back. As if there was something there that she was lonesome for. Like the salt air. And the sunshine.”

“All right,” Harbin said.

“And so,” Baylock said, “the thing I keep asking myself is why we’re going to all this trouble, going down there to Atlantic City to take her away from what she wants.”

Harbin couldn’t form a reply. He had his mind completely on the road and the fight he had to make against this attack of northeaster wind and rain.

“All this trouble,” Baylock suddenly whined. “And all this risk.”

“Quit harping on the risk.” Harbin was annoyed. “There’s no risk. Why don’t you rest your head back and take a nap?”

“Who can sleep in this weather? Look at this God damn weather.”

“
It’ll let down.” Harbin knew the storm wouldn’t let down. It was getting worse, there was more rain, heavier wind, and now he had to keep the car down to forty, and even at that speed he had difficulty hanging on to it.

“I’ll make book,” Baylock said, “we’re the only car tonight on the Black Horse Pike.”

“That’s a safe bet.”

“Even the cats,” Baylock whined, “stay home on a night like this.”

Harbin was about to say something, but just then the car hit a chughole in the road and there was a nasty sound as the rear springs strained to keep themselves alive. The car went down and up and down again, and Harbin waited for it to fall apart. It went on riding through the northeaster. The headlights found a road sign that said Atlantic City was forty-five miles away. Then the road sign was past them and in front of them was the black and the booming storm. Harbin had an odd feeling they were a thousand miles away from Atlantic City and a thousand miles away from anywhere. He tried to convince himself the Black Horse Pike was a real thing and in daylight it was just another concrete road. But ahead of him now it looked unreal, like a path arranged for unreal travel, its glimmer unreal, black of it unreal with the wet wild thickness all around it.

Baylock’s voice came to him, the whine of it cutting through all the clashing noise of the storm. “I know for sure now,” Baylock said, “we made a big mistake. We were crazy to start this. I can’t tell you how sorry I am we started it. And while we still got the chance we got, we better junk off this road.”

“We’ll get there.” Harbin knew it was a stupid thing to say. It signified he was trying to reassure himself, as well as Baylock.

And Baylock said, “You’re always the brains and we’re always the goats. But now I’m wondering after all how much brains you really got. This party who trailed you, maybe he’s the big brains. So let’s see how his brains would work. Enough brains to find the Spot. Enough to keep checking on us. Here’s a maybe for you. Maybe he trailed Dohmer, too. Maybe he trailed Dohmer to the garage and watched Dohmer painting the car.”

“You sound like you’re from nowhere. Drop it.”

“
It just can’t be dropped. You grab hold of high voltage, you can’t let go. This party, like you claim, is after the emeralds, not us. That fits. But here’s another thing. If he loses us, he loses the emeralds. So now we’ve got to think of it the way he would think of it. Even though he ain’t with the law, he can still give the law enough inside dope to make sure we don’t break away.”

“You tell me how he could manage that.”

“Why should I have to tell you? You ought to know yourself. You’re an expert on everything. And even a dumbbell can figure what the man does. He puts in a call to the station house, and he’s anonymous, and he makes a few statements about an orange Chevrolet. Says it’s a dark orange and has a lot of fancy chrome. Says nothing about the emeralds or the haul, just says it’s a stolen car.”

“Come out of the trees.”

“You’re in the trees. You’re trying to dodge away from it but you know, just like I do.” Baylock’s voice had climbed so that it was no longer a whine, but somewhere near a screech. “You and your brain. You and your obligations. This skinny girl who needs Atlantic City. Who likes the color orange. You and your girl Gladden.”

Harbin took the car up to forty. Then past forty. And then he took it up to fifty, and then to sixty. He felt the tremor of the car as he pushed it to seventy miles an hour through the bedlam of northeaster force and water. He heard every loud noise in the world blending to become one big banging noise, and through it he heard the wail of Baylock,
thought Baylock was begging him to slow down, then listened hard, knew the wail meant something else.

“I told you,” Baylock shrieked and wailed. “You see? I told you.”

Baylock’s fingers tapped the rear-view mirror, Baylock’s hand shaking, his fingers on the mirror showing Harbin the two little spheres of bright yellow in the black mirror.