Some Came Running (32 page)

He swung the swivel chair away from the telephone, and as he did Edith Barclay came back inside. He looked away from her so that she could not see the redness in his eyes, which felt full of blood.

The first thing he wanted to do was to get that contract fixed up for Dave to sign, but he didn’t know how to go about it yet. Edith had sat down and gone studiously back to work, blank-faced. He looked at the back of her head. She was really quite some girl. If it wasn’t for the absolutely ironbound rule he had made himself about female help, when he began to get into the upper brackets—it had been Edith who had told him this morning about Dave going to Indianapolis last night. Which, if he hadn’t known, would have changed everything. When Geneve called. He wouldn’t even have been able to go. . . .

She had been sitting at her desk working—she always got there first, of course—when he came in. He was still pretty badly hung over from all that drinking last night. God, why did a man do it. So he was a bit later than usual. And he felt lousy. He had stopped at the Rexall for a Bromo, but it hadn’t had time to take effect yet, and his stomach was still fluttering in protest at all the alcohol that had been poured into it last night without its consent. After the hellos, and her customary sympathetic remark about him looking like he felt rotten that she made every time he came in hungover, Edith had gone back to work for several minutes, and then had said suddenly in a half-smothered casual voice: “I met your brother last night.”

“Who?” Frank said. “Dave? Where?”

“At Smitty’s,” she said, in that same strange voice. “He was there with that gambler ’Bama and Dewey Cole.”

“He didn’t get in any trouble?” Frank said.

“Oh no, nothing like that.”

“He didn’t insult you or somethin’?”

“Oh no. He just came over to the booth and introduced himself to me.” She paused. “I guess some of them had told him I worked for you.”

“Then he was all right, then?” Frank said, wanting to feel relieved. “I mean, he didn’t do something?”

“Oh, he’d been drinking a good bit,” Edith said. “And you know that bunch he was with, always up to something or other. But he was perfectly all right. But he said he’d been out to your house, and said something about seeing you tomorrow. But then he and that ’Bama left with two of that bunch of girls from the brassiere factory and were going to Indianapolis.”

“In that snow!” Frank said.

“Oh, I didn’t mean that!” Edith frowned. She shook her head. “I understand from Harold that ’Bama is a really excellent driver. The snow wasn’t bad, out on the highway.”

“Well, what did you mean?” Frank asked.

“Well, they didn’t look like they’d be back today,” Edith said. “That was all. And I thought since he’d said he expected to see you, if you were expecting to, you’d better not look for him.”

For the first time, she turned around and looked him in the eyes, almost belligerently.

Frank merely sat and looked at her in puzzlement.

The truth was, she didn’t know herself why she had told him, it had just popped out of her. And it wasn’t important. It was not her custom to talk to the boss about unimportant things. She turned back to her work, almost angrily, in what she recognized was more of a face-saving gesture than anything else. Why
had
she told him? Had she wanted to
help
him? It was probably all due to the fact that she had recognized in Dave that peculiar something that was so much like Frank—that awkward little-boy-ness—though, of course, in the boss it was so entirely different. He looked terrible today. He shouldn’t try to drink with Dave. And that wife of his, she thought angrily. Agnes was going to have to do something to help him out, some way. Instead of sitting around feeling sorry for herself all the time. Between the two of them—her and Geneve Lowe—they were ruining him. No wonder he drank so much. Couldn’t they see how unhappy he was? She should never have mentioned Dave to him.

“Look!” Frank said, “You’re not gettin interested in that bum, are you!”

“In
that
?” Edith exclaimed. “Good God, no! That’s one thing you’ll never have to worry about!”

“Well, you’d better not,” Frank said. “You’re just a bush leaguer, compared to that guy. He’s a pro.”

“If he’s a pro,” Edith said, trying hard to keep at least some of the contempt out of her voice, “he certainly doesn’t handle women like he’s one.”

“Did he try to proposition you?”

“No, no. Nothing like that.”

“Well you just keep away from him,” Frank said.

“Don’t worry about that, Boss,” Edith said. “But whatever gave you the idea I’d even be interested in him?”

“I don’t know,” Frank said, still looking angry. “I don’t know what. You sounded awful funny. I’m goin back down to the Rexall for another Bromo,” he said, still staring bleakly at the back of her head. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

It had upset him, more than he liked to admit. He meant to speak to Dave about it. Christ, if he couldn’t keep his own office girl safe from him . . .

. . . But then after he got back, Geneve had called and he had realized how important it was that she’d given him the information.

“I’m goin to have to go out of town for a few days, Edith,” he said from behind his desk. “While you were out front, right after that other call, Jeff Miller of Miller’s Jewelry in Terre Haute called me. Seems the Indiana Jewelers is havin some kind of a display-show shindig in Indianapolis, and he wants me to help represent the Wabash Valley at it.”

“Yes, sir,” Edith said, without looking up. She was a good girl. That was a good enough story to tell Agnes, too, he thought with surprise. Sometimes his own versatility amazed him. Only he’d better make it Chicago to Agnes instead of Indianapolis, in case she might try to get hold of him for something. But he’d better make it Hammond, then, instead of Chicago, that was still in Indiana. He could say he was staying in Chicago, and driving over.

“I’ll leave the store in yours and Al’s care,” he said. He felt he could trust this girl with just about anything. He thought for a moment of making a humorous remark about finding himself a little girlfriend for while he was away. But then he thought better of it. She might think it suggestive. “And if that no good half-assed brother of mine comes around looking for me, you have Al tell him I’ll be back in a few days. And
you
stay away from him.”

“Okay, Boss,” Edith grinned. He was such a roly-poly little guy with that round head like a ball, and that pudgy face, and those eyes that were usually so mild but that became so flat whenever he was being a businessman. You wanted to laugh and cry over him at the same time—him with all his transparent little subterfuges he thought he was getting away with. He was comical yes, but he was also heartrendingly tragic. What he really needed was a wife who would really love him—and that was just exactly what he would probably never get.

“And don’t laugh. I mean it,” Frank said; “if you want to keep on workin for me. Somebody’s got to look after you.” Well, he had solved the problem of what to tell Agnes, but there was still the contract and he still didn’t know what to do about it.

There was, actually, a choice of two or three things he
could
do. The whole thing centered around Judge Deacon. The minute the judge heard about the taxi service, he was going to want in on it. It wasn’t much of a thing but that wouldn’t stop the judge. He would want to put in a piece of change and sit back and draw down part of the profits without doing any of the work, and he was going to feel he had a right to do it because of all the things he’d put Frank onto in the last five years. On the other hand, if the judge had got the idea first, he would have gone and started it up himself, and not have let
anybody
in on it.

Besides, Frank didn’t want him in on it. He had been the judge’s satellite just about long enough. And anyway that would mean splitting ownership three ways, which meant that no one party would have control, and any two could gang up on the other one. And he didn’t trust Dave that much. And yet he didn’t want to antagonize the judge. Not yet.

That was the crux of the thing. And the trouble was, the judge was his lawyer. Had been for years.

The more he thought about it the best choice—best? the only—seemed to be to take it right to the judge to draw, and then some way or other talk him out of wanting to invest in it. But how? He cast around. Why couldn’t he say that Dave absolutely refused to go into it if anybody else at all was allowed in? After all, he was only doing this to get Dave’s money out of the Second National where it was embarrassing them, wasn’t he? Heh-heh.

Frank brought the chair back up level and got his cigarettes. The desk clock said eleven-twenty, which meant that he would have to wait till after lunch now. The judge always left his office at eleven and went to Ciro’s where he drank five or six bottles of beer before he ate his lunch—dinner was more the word—at Annie’s Restaurant next door. Why in the name of God the judge with his money wanted to hang out at dumps like Ciro’s and Annie’s, Frank could never understand, but he knew it was because that bunch of girls from the brassiere factory hung out there. The judge was sinking pretty low, he thought smugly. But then he had always been a sort of low-type character. If it hadn’t been for his wife’s father in the state senate—?

Well, he would have time to go down to the Elks and maybe get in a game of fourteen ball or two, have a drink or two for his aching head, eat lunch and catch him back at the office at one o’clock.

“I won’t be back,” he said to Edith, in parting. “If anybody wants me for anything, tell them I’ve already left. Except my wife. Just tell her I plan to leave. But then I’ll probably be home by then. And
you
remember what I told you.”

Outside, the snow was melting off fast under a bright winter sun, as he walked to the Elks. It gave him a deep satisfaction to know he walked this same path every day like this, and that he would continue to do so days without number.

There was almost no trouble with the judge. The old man—he
was
old, Frank thought, by God, looking at him in his office, he’d never noticed it till now—sat behind his desk in the long expanse of the room whose other end was legal library, looking with all his drooping fat Frank suddenly thought rather like one of those less than half-filled hydrogen balloons that they send up into the stratosphere. It was a tall high-ceilinged room, with ornate moldings, and behind the desk the two very tall windows framing the judge who sat like an out of condition and very possessive frog perched emphatically on a toadstool. The far end with its table and chairs in the center was literally lined, from floor to ceiling, with those bookcases with the push-up glass doors, all filled with legal volumes which looked as though they had never been opened but just left to age, but which Frank was sure wasn’t true, not with the legal stunts the Judge had pulled in the past thirty years, no, sir! The whole of it looked like it had been dusted hastily once a day for twenty years by the twenty-year-old secretary, and that was all the cleaning it had had. The year-by-year increasingly stringy secretary had ushered him in from her cubicle outside and gone out and quietly closed the door.

The judge behind his desk did not have just a double chin, he had four of them, all of which ran in curved parallel lines around the outside of his head and faded off together somewhere in the vicinity of his ears as if they were beards. From behind the armor of this fat, he peered forth out of his shrewd little eyes like a man looking out the porthole of a battleship. All his life he had doggedly bucked the vested interests—the Wernzes, the Crowders, the Scotts, Frank Madin, with their Wernz-owned Second National Bank—all of whom had backed his wife’s father as state senator—because of which he hated them implacably—and finally he had become chairman of the board of the competition bank the Cray County, and made some few dents in them, and had become a vested interest in his own right— though never quite of the calibration they had. He belonged to the Country Club and the Elks Lodge they had built, and meticulously kept his dues paid, and never went inside of either. He steadfastly refused to move from his tacky office. He lived silently, and occasionally jovially, in his father-in-law’s, the senator’s—the
state
senator’s—big old three-story frame house, formerly a mansion, but the interior exterior and grounds of which he had systematically allowed to run down into such nearly complete dilapidation that it looked like something out of the Deep South. Here he subsisted in ignored discomfort with his mad wife, some years older than himself, who still insisted that her friends (all dead now) were conspiring against her for having married beneath her, and never set her foot out of the house—just as she had done a number of years ago when her assertion had been absolutely and unequivocally true. The judge never talked about her; and kept on a housekeeper for her, a slatternly former mistress of his. All this in a house which had once been one of the showplaces of Parkman—and still was, historically at least—one of the very oldest houses in town. He dressed almost as sloppily as a bum—which was not difficult for him, with his figure—and spent his time and a small part of his money at Ciro’s and Smitty’s and the Eagles Lodge, jovially buying drinks for the brassiere factory girls whom he often took riding. As he said, as long as you had the money you did not have to worry about people’s feelings, and he continued to direct the estates of his eight married and unmarried sisters, plus the estates of the widows of several of his friends, and two large estates left to minor children of divorces for whom he had contrived to get himself appointed guardian. As he said to Frank on numerous occasions, he handled them well enough to make all of us some money. In addition, he handled the bank and his own investments and enough shrewd legal work to make him a good bit right there.

Yes, and that was all the good it had done him, Frank thought smugly: four chins, a hide that fit like a burlap suit, a mad wife, the right to ruin the senator’s property. He spent almost no money. He enjoyed nothing. Not even the brassiere factory girls, Frank suspected, and his numerous relatives when he died childless would have no time to bury him for fighting over his financial bones. When he, Frank, finally broke him—broke his monopoly, rather, he amended—he, Frank, was going to enjoy his money. He and Agnes. And he knew how he was going to break it, too. And it wouldn’t be long.