Red Harvest (10 page)

They were introduced, went to the center of the ring for the usual instructions, returned to their corners, shed bathrobes, stretched on the ropes, the gong rang, and the scrap was on.

Cooper was a clumsy bum. He had a pair of wide swings that might have hurt when they landed, but anybody with two feet could have kept away from them. Bush had class—nimble legs, a smooth fast left hand, and a right that got away quick. It would have been murder to put Cooper in the ring with the slim boy if he had been trying. But he wasn’t. That is, he wasn’t trying to win. He was trying not to, and had his hands full doing it.

Cooper waddled flat-footed around the ring, throwing his wide swings at everything from the lights to the corner posts. His system was simply to turn them loose and let them take their chances. Bush moved in and out, putting a glove on the ruddy boy whenever he wanted to, but not putting anything in the glove.

The customers were booing before the first round was over. The second round was just as sour. I didn’t feel so good. Bush didn’t seem to have been much influenced by our little conversation. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Dinah Brand trying
to catch my attention. She looked hot. I took care not to have my attention caught.

The room-mate act in the ring was continued in the third round to the tune of yelled Throw-em-outs, Why-don’t-you-kiss-hims and Make-em-fights from the seats. The pugs’ waltz brought them around to the corner nearest me just as the booing broke off for a moment.

I made a megaphone of my hands and bawled:

“Back to Philly, Al.”

Bush’s back was to me. He wrestled Cooper around, shoving him into the ropes, so he—Bush—faced my way.

From somewhere far back in another part of the house another yelling voice came:

“Back to Philly, Al.”

MacSwain, I supposed.

A drunk off to one side lifted his puffy face and bawled the same thing, laughing as if it were a swell joke. Others took up the cry for no reason at all except that it seemed to disturb Bush.

His eyes jerked from side to side under the black bar of his eyebrows.

One of Cooper’s wild mitts clouted the slim boy on the side of the jaw.

Ike Bush piled down at the referee’s feet.

The referee counted five in two seconds, but the gong cut him off.

I looked over at Dinah Brand and laughed. There wasn’t anything else to do. She looked at me and didn’t laugh. Her face was sick as Dan Rolff’s, but angrier.

Bush’s handlers dragged him into his corner and rubbed him up, not working very hard at it. He opened his eyes and watched his feet. The gong was tapped.

Kid Cooper paddled out hitching up his trunks. Bush waited until the bum was in the center of the ring, and then came to him, fast.

Bush’s left glove went down, out—practically out of sight in Cooper’s belly. Cooper said, “Ugh,” and backed away, folding up.

Bush straightened him with a right-hand poke in the mouth, and sank the left again. Cooper said, “Ugh,” again and had trouble with his knees.

Bush cuffed him once on each side of the head, cocked his right, carefully pushed Cooper’s face into position with a long left, and threw his right hand straight from under his jaw to Cooper’s.

Everybody in the house felt the punch.

Cooper hit the floor, bounced, and settled there. It took the referee half a minute to count ten seconds. It would have been just the same if he had taken half an hour. Kid Cooper was out.

When the referee had finally stalled through the count, he raised Bush’s hand. Neither of them looked happy.

A high twinkle of light caught my eye. A short silvery streak slanted down from one of the small balconies.

A woman screamed.

The silvery streak ended its flashing slant in the ring, with a sound that was partly a thud, partly a snap.

Ike Bush took his arm out of the referee’s hand and pitched down on top of Kid Cooper. A black knife-handle stuck out of the nape of Bush’s neck.

Half an hour later, when I left the building, Dinah Brand was sitting at the wheel of a pale blue little Marmon, talking to Max Thaler, who stood in the road.

The girl’s square chin was tilted up. Her big red mouth was brutal around the words it shaped, and the lines crossing its ends were deep, hard.

The gambler looked as unpleasant as she. His pretty face was yellow and tough as oak. When he talked his lips were paper-thin.

It seemed to be a nice family party. I wouldn’t have joined it if the girl hadn’t seen me and called:

“My God, I thought you were never coming.”

I went over to the car. Thaler looked across the hood at me with no friendliness at all.

“Last night I advised you to go back to Frisco.” His whisper was harsher than anybody’s shout could have been. “Now I’m telling you.”

“Thanks just the same,” I said as I got in beside the girl.

While she was stirring the engine up he said to her:

“This isn’t the first time you’ve sold me out. It’s the last.”

She put the car in motion, turned her head back over her shoulder, and sang to him:

“To hell, my love, with you!”

We rode into town rapidly.

“Is Bush dead?” she asked as she twisted the car into Broadway.

“Decidedly. When they turned him over the point of the knife was sticking out in front.”

“He ought to have known better than to double-cross them. Let’s get something to eat. I’m almost eleven hundred ahead on the night’s doings, so if the boy friend doesn’t like it, it’s just too bad. How’d you come out?”

“Didn’t bet. So your Max doesn’t like it?”

“Didn’t bet?” she cried. “What kind of an ass are you? Whoever heard of anybody not betting when they had a thing like that sewed up?”

“I wasn’t sure it was sewed up. So Max didn’t like the way things turned out?”

“You guessed it. He dropped plenty. And then he gets sore with me because I had sense enough to switch over and get in on the win.” She stopped the car violently in front of a Chinese restaurant. “The hell with him, the little tin-horn runt!”

Her eyes were shiny because they were wet. She jabbed a handkerchief into them as we got out of the car.

“My God, I’m hungry,” she said, dragging me across the sidewalk. “Will you buy me a ton of
chow mein?”

She didn’t eat a ton of it, but she did pretty well, putting away a piled-up dish of her own and half of mine. Then we got back into the Marmon and rode out to her house.

Dan Rolff was in the dining room. A water glass and a brown bottle with no label stood on the table in front of him. He sat straight up in his chair, staring at the bottle. The room smelled of laudanum.

Dinah Brand slid her fur coat off, letting it fall half on a chair
and half on the floor, and snapped her fingers at the lunger, saying impatiently:

“Did you collect?”

Without looking up from the bottle, he took a pad of paper money out of his inside pocket and dropped it on the table. The girl grabbed it, counted the bills twice, smacked her lips, and stuffed the money in her bag.

She went out to the kitchen and began chopping ice. I sat down and lit a cigarette. Rolff stared at his bottle. He and I never seemed to have much to say to one another. Presently the girl brought in some gin, lemon juice, seltzer and ice.

We drank and she told Rolff:

“Max is sore as hell. He heard you’d been running around putting last-minute money on Bush, and the little monkey thinks I double-crossed him. What did I have to do with it? All I did was what any sensible person would have done—get in on the win. I didn’t have any more to do with it than a baby, did I?” she asked me.

“No.”

“Of course not. What’s the matter with Max is he’s afraid the others will think he was in on it too, that Dan was putting his dough down as well as mine. Well, that’s his hard luck. He can go climb trees for all I care, the lousy little runt. Another drink would go good.”

She poured another for herself and for me. Rolff hadn’t touched his first one. He said, still staring at the brown bottle:

“You can hardly expect him to be hilarious about it.”

The girl scowled and said disagreeably:

“I can expect anything I want. And he’s got no right to talk to me that way. He doesn’t own me. Maybe he thinks he does, but I’ll show him different.” She emptied her glass, banged it on the table, and twisted around in her chair to face me. “Is that on the level about your having ten thousand dollars of Elihu Willsson’s money to use cleaning up the city?”

“Yeah.”

Her bloodshot eyes glistened hungrily.

“And if I help you will I get some of the ten—?”

“You can’t do that, Dinah.” Rolff’s voice was thick, but gently firm, as if he were talking to a child. “That would be utterly filthy.”

The girl turned her face slowly toward him. Her mouth took on the look it had worn while talking to Thaler.

“I am going to do it,” she said. “That makes me utterly filthy, does it?”

He didn’t say anything, didn’t look up from the bottle. Her face got red, hard, cruel. Her voice was soft, cooing:

“It’s just too bad that a gentleman of your purity, even if he is a bit consumptive, has to associate with a filthy bum like me.”

“That can be remedied,” he said slowly, getting up. He was laudanumed to the scalp.

Dinah Brand jumped out of her chair and ran around the table to him. He looked at her with blank dopey eyes. She put her face close to his and demanded:

“So I’m too utterly filthy for you now, am I?”

He said evenly:

“I said to betray your friends to this chap would be utterly filthy, and it would.”

She caught one of his thin wrists and twisted it until he was on his knees. Her other hand, open, beat his hollow-cheeked face, half a dozen times on each side, rocking his head from side to side. He could have put his free arm up to protect his face, but didn’t.

She let go his wrist, turned her back to him, and reached for gin and seltzer. She was smiling. I didn’t like the smile.

He got up, blinking. His wrist was red where she had held it, his face bruised. He steadied himself upright and looked at me with dull eyes.

With no change in the blankness of his face and eyes, he put
a hand under his coat, brought out a black automatic pistol, and fired at me.

But he was too shaky for either speed or accuracy. I had time to toss a glass at him. The glass hit his shoulder. His bullet went somewhere overhead.

I jumped before he got the next one out—jumped at him—was close enough to knock the gun down. The second slug went into the floor.

I socked his jaw. He fell away from me and lay where he fell.

I turned around.

Dinah Brand was getting ready to bat me over the head with the seltzer bottle, a heavy glass siphon that would have made pulp of my skull.

“Don’t,” I yelped.

“You didn’t have to bust him like that,” she snarled.

“Well, it’s done. You’d better get him straightened out.”

She put down the siphon and I helped her carry him up to his bedroom. When he began moving his eyes, I left her to finish the work and went down to the dining room again. She joined me there fifteen minutes later.

“He’s all right,” she said. “But you could have handled him without that.”

“Yeah, but I did that for him. Know why he took the shot at me?”

“So I’d have nobody to sell Max out to?”

“No. Because I’d seen you maul him around.”

“That doesn’t make sense to me,” she said. “I was the one who did it.”

“He’s in love with you, and this isn’t the first time you’ve done it. He acted like he had learned there was no use matching muscle with you. But you can’t expect him to enjoy having another man see you slap his face.”

“I used to think I knew men,” she complained, “but, by God! I don’t. They’re lunatics, all of them.”

“So I poked him to give him back some of his self-respect. You know, treated him as I would a man instead of a down-and-outer who could be slapped around by girls.”

“Anything you say,” she sighed. “I give up. We ought to have a drink.”

We had the drink, and I said:

“You were saying you’d work with me if there was a cut of the Willsson money in it for you. There is.”

“How much?”

“Whatever you earn. Whatever what you do is worth.”

“That’s uncertain.”

“So’s your help, so far as I know.”

“Is it? I can give you the stuff, brother, loads of it, and don’t think I can’t. I’m a girl who knows her Poisonville.” She looked down at her gray-stockinged knees, waved one leg at me, and exclaimed indignantly: “Look at that. Another run. Did you ever see anything to beat it? Honest to God! I’m going barefoot.”

“Your legs are too big,” I told her. “They put too much strain on the material.”

“That’ll do out of you. What’s your idea of how to go about purifying our village?”

“If I haven’t been lied to, Thaler, Pete the Finn, Lew Yard and Noonan are the men who’ve made Poisonville the sweet-smelling mess it is. Old Elihu comes in for his share of the blame, too, but it’s not all his fault, maybe. Besides, he’s my client, even if he doesn’t want to be, so I’d like to go easy on him.