Never Say No to a Killer (9 page)

The Calvart Publishing Company was located on the east side, the seamy side of the city, and the building was a sprawling, crumbling red brick affair that was even more rundown than the neighboring brick heaps that leaned against it.

I parked the Lincoln in the alley behind the building, learned from the elevator operator that the publisher's office was on the fourth and top floor; so that is where I went.

Calvart, it turned out, was an easy man to get to, not at all like King. I smiled at the receptionist, told her that my name was O'Connor, and that I represented the fourth school district and that I wanted to talk to Mr. Calvart about a new edition of history texts for the elementary grades.

That was the magic word: “new edition.” In a matter of a few minutes I had progressed all the way to the head man himself. Yes sir, I thought, this is a place that knows how to treat a customer. Walk in and mention a deal and you get the red carpet treatment, no questions asked.

Calvart was on the phone when I came into his office. He waved with a cigar and motioned to a chair. I made myself comfortable and tried to size him up. He was a big man, two hundred pounds at least, and looked more like an ex-hod carrier trying to get used to wearing three hundred dollar suits than a publisher of school textbooks. He didn't look like a man who got where he was by paying scrupulous attention to the rules of the game.

“Now look, Davis,” he was saying into the phone, “you've been using that damn elementary social studies three years now. How do you expect kids to keep up with things in this fast movin' world if you handicap them three years right at the beginnin'? What the hell, those texts are outdated and you know it. Now look, I don't want to tell you-how to run your business, but I think we'd be smart….” He listened for a minute, then said, “Yeah, all right, but you work on the school boards down there, and the PTA bunch. Sure, Dave, I'll take care of you, don't I always?”

He hung up and turned to me with no change of expression or tone of voice. “O'Connor you say. From the fourth district. I thought Paul Schriver was runnin' things down there.”

“Maybe he is,” I said. “I don't even know where the fourth district is.”

He was vaguely surprised but certainly not shocked. He took a few seconds to relight his dead cigar. His eyes were absolutely expressionless and looked hard enough to cut glass. In all that two hundred and more pounds there was not an ounce of imagination. Facts were his stock in trade, not imagination.

After a moment he said, “I see.” And he did see. He had added his facts and knew that I was a man with an angle. “All right, O'Connor, now that you are here, what do you want?”

“Money. Twenty thousand dollars, to be exact, and before you start pushing the button on that intercom box you'd better take a look at what I'm selling.”

I pitched a photostat on his desk and Calvart looked at it quietly, still without expression. It was an affidavit, signed and witnessed, concerning a payoff between Calvart and a member of the state school commission, a man by the name of Longly. There was enough dynamite in that single piece of paper to blow Calvart right out of the publishing business for good, and he knew it.

Its effect on him was exactly the opposite of what I had expected. He actually seemed relieved, now that he had all the facts, now that he knew precisely why I had come and what I wanted. He seemed to relax as he studied the photostat, he even smiled, very faintly.

“Very interesting,” he said, not looking at me. “Very interesting indeed, if you should also have in your possession the original from which this copy was made.”

“I have it, all right, but not in my possession right now.”

“… Your caution is understandable,” he said dryly. He began to look pained as he continued to study the document before him. “Sam Longly,” he said. “Sam has been my friend for a good many years. Why, I was the one who got him a place on the school commission. It is difficult-extremely difficult to believe that Sam would deliberately destroy himself, and me, in such a manner.” Then he looked directly at me. “But the evidence is irrefutable, isn't it, O'Connor?”

“It sure as hell is. Now let's stop this horsing around and get down to business. Is the original of that photostat worth twenty thousand to you or isn't it?”

He closed his eyes for a moment, as though in thought.

“… Yes,” he said. “Yes, I'm afraid it is.”

“You're sure it is. One book contract can make you another twenty grand and a lot more, but if that paper should get into the wrong hands there would be no more contracts, and you know it.”

“Believe me,” he said quietly, “I am quite aware of this document's importance to myself, and I have already told you that it is worth twenty thousand dollars to me. However, I do not carry that kind of money with me… certain arrangements must be made.”

This was almost too easy to be real. It was all I could do to keep from grinning-twenty thousand dollars just for the asking! Jesus, I thought, what a hell of a thing this is that John Venci lined up for me!

Now Calvart was studying the tip of his smoldering cigar. “I am not a man to fight the inevitable,” he said.

Calvart opened his eyes and looked at me for one long moment with his old hardness. “The details,” he said flatly. “I suppose you have them planned.”

“Down to the last split second. You'll have the rest of the day to raise the money. Tonight, at eight o'clock exactly, I'll meet you in the Central bus station and we'll make the swap.”

He nodded.

I felt like a million dollars. I was half drunk with the excitement and the knowledge of my power, and it was all I could do to keep from laughing right in Stephen S. Calvart's fat face. Yes sir, this was one hell of a world!

I started to get up, but Calvart was up before me, surprisingly fast for a man his size. He came around his desk, and then, without a hint of warning, a ham-sized hand snapped out, grabbed the front of my shirt and jerked me half out of the chair.

“You lissen to me!” he rasped. “You lissen to me, you cheap sonofabitch, and you lissen good!”

I was too startled to make a move. I hung there like some ridiculous scarecrow from the end of his huge arm. I felt an angry heat rush to my face, swell my throat, but there wasn't a thing I could do but hang there. Calvart's self-control had vanished in an explosion of rage. That smooth, professor-like speech of his had suddenly reverted to character.

“You lousy gutter rat!” he grated. “I ought to kill you right here, right where you're sittin', and if you say one word, make one sound, I'll do it! You just lissen to me and get one thing straight; I'm not goin' to be your goddamn patsy, O'Connor. You got me by the tenders this time, but don't think you can keep milkin' me; don't think you can gouge me again; I don't care what you dig up against me. You just keep one thing in mind, O'Connor. You try a thing like this again, and you're dead. I don't care if I burn for it, you're dead!”

Then he let go and I fell back in the chair.

I sat there, every muscle in my body quivering. It had been a long time since a man had talked to Roy Surratt like that-the last one had been Gorgan, the prison guard. And Gorgan was dead. I sat there rigid with anger, feeling rage claw at my guts like a tiger. If I had that .38 I would have killed him on the spot, I would have put three hard ones right in the middle of his fat gut.

But I didn't have the .38 with me and there was nothing I could do. Not now. He simply was too big to handle without a gun, so I had to take it, anything he wanted to dish out. Like he had said, I had him by the tenders, I had him where it hurt, but he couldn't afford to get too damn tough about it as long as I held on.

“All right,” he said tightly, in a voice that sounded like it was being squeezed through a needle's eye. “Get out of here.”

“… The bus station. You aren't going to forget our date, are you, Mr. Calvart?”

“I won't forget a thing, not a single, goddamn thing, O'Connor, and that is one thing in this world that you can depend on.” Then he put his foot on the chair, straightened his leg suddenly, with a kick, and the chair shot half across the room with me in it. “Now get out of my sight,” he said hoarsely, “before I really get mad and break your lousy neck!”

I got out. I saw everything through a red haze of rage; my bones felt brittle; my muscles ached; my nerves seemed to lay on the top of my skin. But I got out, somehow. “All right,” I kept thinking, “all right you fat sonofabitch, we'll see who's so tough before this day is over!” I walked out of Calvart's office and through the outer offices and past the pale faces and the curious faces of Calvart's underlings, and then I rode the crawling elevator down to the Lincoln. I sat there for a long time.

All I could do was sit there and try not to be sick, try to sweat it out until the poison rage had done its work. I tried to think of Gorgan and the way he had looked when I killed him, and that helped a little, but not much.

I don't know how much time it took, but finally I felt myself begin to relax, my nerves began to settle back beneath the skin, the red rage began to lift.

Maybe another ten minutes passed. I took out my handkerchief, wiped my face, my hands, then I switched on the Lincoln and got out of there.

Stephen S. Calvart's future was settled.

The first thing I did when I got back to the apartment was get the .38. I cleaned it carefully, checked the firing mechanism, oiled it, took the cartridges and wiped them carefully and replaced them.

Then the phone rang. It was Dorris Venci.

“Look, Dorris,” I said wearily, “I thought we had an understanding. No more phone calls, no more biology lessons. Now what the hell do I have to do to make you realize that we're through?”

“… Roy!” Her voice had that high pitched twang to it, like a violin string ready to snap. “Roy, I can't take it! I simply can't take it any longer!”

“Oh for Christ's sake!” I groaned.

“Roy, I mean it! I simply can't take it!”

I had no answer. What could you say to a crazy dame like that?

“… Roy!”

“What is it?”

“… Roy, won't you… I mean, can't I see you, talk to you….”

“Absolutely not,” I said, beginning to get mad, beginning to be sorry that our trails had ever crossed. “I told you we were through. I meant it.”

There was ringing silence on the line.

“Dorris.”

“… Yes.”

“Dorris, did you hear me?”

“… Yes, I heard you.”

And then she hung up. I stood there with the receiver to my ear, wondering what could be going on in that twisted brain of hers, and finally I shrugged and put the receiver on the hook. She was nuts, just plain nuts, and if I never heard from her again that was going to be fine with me.

The poison of my anger again spread through me like an overflow of adrenalin into my blood stream. I thought:
you better enjoy what's left of this day, Mr. Cohort. You better grab all the throats you want to grab. You better throw all the weight you want to throw, because your time is running out faster than you think.

But not before I got the twenty thousand.

Pretty soon I'd have the world by the tail; I'd crack it like a muleskinner wielding a snakewhip. I'd wriggle my finger and Pat Kelso would jump through hoops.

That last thought pleased me. She was quite a girl, Pat. She was just the girl for me and no other would do.

She would be mine.

I went back to the front room and sat. I held the .38 in my hand and waited. But pretty soon I'd had all the sitting and waiting I could take. There was nothing to do, nowhere to go. Pat was working, and the only other person I knew was Dorris, and I sure didn't want to see her.

At last I did what most lonely and lost people in a strange city do, I went to a movie. It was a double feature and I sat there dumbly, feeling the comfort of the .38 in my waistband and thinking with pleasure how Calvart would look when I pulled it on him.

Maybe this isn't going to be smart, I thought. Maybe I ought to forget my personal feelings and hold the hammer over Calvart for another twenty thousand or so. But the publisher was a tough nut-it would seem that most of Venci's enemies were tough nuts-and there is only one way to handle a tough nut-crack it.

For a while I thought maybe I'd go out and pick Pat up at the factory, but finally I dropped the idea. Don't let it get to be routine, Surratt. Don't let her take you for granted. Let her wonder what's going on for a while, and then knock her eye out with another brand new bankroll. That will bring her around. Yes sir, if I know the first thing about women, that will bring her around, all right.

I killed an hour after the film walking and thumbing through magazines at a news stand, and another hour over dinner, and by that time it was almost eight o'clock. I headed for the bus station.

Calvart was late. I was at the lunch counter having a cup of coffee and the clock over the ticket windows said five after eight; and still Calvart hadn't showed. But I wasn't worried. He would show. As he had said, I had him by the tenders, and he would come around because there was nothing else for him to do.