The Kind One (17 page)

“Hello, Dulwich,” I said.

“Hello, Danny. Nice night, isn’t it?”

I nodded. I didn’t stop to chat. Dulwich, for his part, was careful not to let his face register the least bit of surprise as he watched me and my hat pass by.

   I SAW THE postman walk by outside, with Sophie skipping along beside him. She was shouting: “I’m a hit, Abner, I’m a hit!”

“Aw, lemme alone, you crazy kid,” said the postman. “And my name ain’t Abner!”

I was sitting on my tattered davenport in an undershirt with the
Times.
Matilda, the colored woman that worked for Mrs. Dean, was in the kitchen scrubbing the sink. I’d hired her to come in once a week to clean house and do my laundry.

We’d had several days of very hot weather and I’d gone out and bought a box fan, which was cooling me off but wreaking havoc with reading the paper.

The story I was reading was headlined: “MURDER AND SUICIDE ON SUNSET STRIP,” with two smaller headlines: “PEACOCK CLUB SCENE OF HORROR,” and “SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT BELIEVES LOVE TRIANGLE TO BLAME.” It was written by John Hobbs.

“A crazed gunman entered a popular nightspot on the Sunset Strip Thursday night, shot to death one of the customers, then, as hundreds of people looked on in horror, turned the gun on himself. The victim was Thomas McPartland, a 32-year-old life insurance salesman, who was having dinner at the Peacock Club with several friends. Witnesses say the club was packed with patrons when, a little after eight, Mel Goldberg entered the premises, walked up to McPartland’s table, screamed ‘She was the only one I ever loved!’ and shot McPartland through the head with a revolver, killing him instantly. Goldberg then put the gun into his mouth and took his own life.

“Goldberg, 53, was reportedly despondent over the recent death of his wife, Susie, who worked as a strip dancer under the name Vera Vermillion. Goldberg was a self-styled ‘talent agent,’ though the voluptuous and much younger Vera Vermillion was thought to be his only client. Vera, or Susie, had been ill for many years with a heart damaged by a childhood case of rheumatic fever, and passed away last week.

“‘It looks like the oldest story in the world,’ said homicide detective Roy Foster of the Sheriff’s Department sadly. ‘Mr. McPartland evidently met Vera recently when she tried to buy a life insurance policy from him because she was concerned about her health. It appears that she and the handsome young McPartland then struck up a relationship of an amorous nature. Goldberg found out about it. He went crazy because of jealousy and grief, and the unfortunate young McPartland had to pay the piper.’”

It was the bee’s fault. If the bee hadn’t flown in the car window and stung Mel Goldberg in the eye, he would have gone up to Lake Arrowhead with Vera, and been able to look after her, and she’d probably still be alive. Him, too. And Goodlooking Tommy. The bee killed all three of them.

Somebody knocked. I looked up from the newspaper flapping in the fan and saw a guy on the other side of the screen door.

“Sorry to bother you, mister, but you think you can spare something to eat?”

He was holding his hat in a humble way by the brim with both hands, and looked tired and scruffy.

“Matilda?” I called, and she stuck her head out of the kitchen.

“Yes suh?”

“Would you make this fella something to eat, please?”

“Yes suh.”

“Thank you kindly,” said the hobo.

He put his hat back on and moved away from the door as Matilda got his food. In a minute or two I heard a sharp female voice: “What are you doing there? You get a move-on or I’m going to call the police!”

Now I saw through the window Mrs. Dean’s pinched features and her eyeglasses glinting savagely in the sun. The hobo was attempting to stammer out a reply when Matilda came out of the kitchen holding a plate with a sandwich and an apple on it and a glass of milk. “Tell Mrs. Dean it’s all right,” I said.

Matilda went to the door and said: “Miz Dean, it’s all right. Mr. Landon he tell me to fix him some food.”

“Well, Matilda, I’m sure Mr. Landon’s not aware that when you start feeding one tramp you only encourage others to come around. They have a way to secretly mark houses to let each other know which ones are hospitable to them and which aren’t,” and now she addressed the hobo. “And I can assure you the Orange Blossom Bungalow Court is not hospitable.”

“Okay, okay, lady, keep your shirt on, I’m going,” said the hobo, and he started to walk away, but Matilda had pushed through the screen door and it banged shut behind her and she said: “You ain’t going no place!”

The hobo and Mrs. Dean both stared at Matilda. She was maybe forty or forty-five, with a pretty but worn-out face, bloodshot brown eyes, and a big behind. She always wore a faded dress and falling-apart men’s shoes and a white apron and a green scarf over her hair. I’d seldom ever seen her open her mouth except to mumble some version of yes or no and so I could hardly believe it now when I heard her say: “My grandma that raised me she told me never to turn away nobody that come to your door a-wanting food ’cause it might be a angel in disguise or even Jesus hisself, and even if it ain’t, even if it’s just a old hobo, you still gotta feed ’im ’cause that’s what the Good Book tell us to do. And Miz Dean, you can fire me if you want to but I’m still giving him this here sandwich and this glass of milk.”

I’d gotten up and gone to the door by now. “And the apple,” I said.

“And the apple. And that’s about all I got to say.”

Mrs. Dean looked shocked, while the hobo and I were both grinning.

“Well, all right, Matilda,” said Mrs. Dean finally. “But as soon as he’s finished, please tell him to move along.”

Matilda immediately reverted to her usual servile self. “Yessum,” she said, as she handed the hobo the plate and the glass.

Mrs. Dean fled back across the courtyard to her bungalow, as Matilda went back inside, and the hobo sat down on my little stoop to enjoy his meal.

He took a drink of milk, crunched into the apple, then lifted up the top piece of bread and examined his sandwich.

“My favorite!” he said. “Baloney and cheese!”

   SUNDAY MORNING I was summoned to the Hollywood Y.M.C.A. Bud liked to have meetings in the steamroom there. I took my clothes off in the locker room and wrapped a towel around my middle. Nucky Williams was sitting in a chair outside the steamroom keeping guard and giving his teeth a thorough going-over with a toothpick. “Hello, hero,” he said with a nasty grin. I didn’t say a word, and went into the steamroom.

Bud was sitting with some guy I didn’t recognize. Bud saw me and lifted a finger to indicate he’d be with me in a minute. The guy was balding and practically chinless and had soft flabby breasts. He was talking fast, with passionate gestures, and Bud seemed to be listening intently. Then the guy stood up and stuck out his hand; Bud, though, pretended not to notice it. Now the guy turned and walked past me, dripping with sweat and smiling like things had gone just great.

Bud motioned me over.

“Interesting guy,” he said as I sat down beside him.

“Who is he?”

“Harry Seaburg. He’s an inventor. He invented a machine that electrocutes hot dogs.”

“Why would you want to electrocute a hot dog?”

“It’s a cooking method. Cooks hot dogs faster than you can say Jack Robbins,” he said. “That way you’ll never have to keep a customer waiting while you boil up a new pot of dogs. He says a year from now everybody in America’ll be eating electrocuted hot dogs and he’s giving me a chance to get in on the ground floor. Nice of him, ain’t it?”

“Does his machine have a name?”

“The Electrodog. He’s bringing it over to the club tomorrow to demonstrate. You oughta come by. I wanna get your opinion about it.”

“I’ll be there.”

I’d never seen Bud without a shirt before. Even when we were sitting around by the pool he always wore a shirt and long pants. I was surprised by how puny he looked: skinny arms and a sunken chest and a soft little belly. He had quite a bit of chest hair, but it could have used some Grey Gone. There was a roundish scar about an inch wide on the lower left part of his stomach.

“So how you feeling?” he said, and he looked at my dent. “How’s them headaches?”

“They’re better. I’m feeling good.”

“You been seeing Dr. Bartlestone?”

“Not lately. But last time I saw him he said he was pleased with my progress.”

“Him and me both. You know, I knew it was the right thing, bringing you into the business,” and then he added: “
Back
into the business. You can write your own ticket now, Danny. After what you done for me. Whatever you wanna do, I’ll help you get set up. Whores. Numbers. You like the fights, don’t you? There’s a lot of dough to be made in fights. Or what about the hot-bond racket?”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a new thing I’m doing. We heist government bonds from post offices and banks back east, and sell ’em out here. We got some dicks in the Bunco Squad working with us. It’s a nice way to make some jack without getting your hands too dirty.”

“Sounds interesting. But I been thinking about it lately. I’m not sure I’m cut out for this.”

“For what?”

“You know—the underworld.”

Bud laughed, and shook his head.

“‘The underworld.’ You been seeing too many of them Edward G. Robertson movies. There ain’t an underworld and an upperworld. There’s just the world. Legit and illegit’s just two sides of the same nickel. We’re businessmen, we’re judges, we’re wheelers, we’re dealers, we’re killers, we’re everything. You think the Chink that runs the Chinese laundry don’t cheat his customers ever chance he gets? And you think if the Chink accidentally gives one of his customers too much change, the customer’s gonna say: ‘Hey, Mr. Chink, you gave me too much change, here’s your money back’? But you want me to set you up in the Chinese laundry business? I’ll do it. You can run a whole fucking chain of Chinese laundries. Like I said. You name it. It’s up to you.”

Then Bud gave me such a long, penetrating look it made me start squirming around a little. Like my toe was hooked up to the Electrodog.

“I need someone near me I can trust. Keep this under your hat, but it ain’t going so good with Schnitter. Not with Hanley neither. And I think the mayor’s mad at me. That little trip up to the lake blew up in my fucking face. And now I think they’re all conspiring together to get rid of me. So I got my guys around me, sure. Like Nucky sitting outside the door right now. But think about it. All my guys are packing. Any one of ’em could knock me off. Who’s gonna guard me from my guards? It’s like that Roman guy, Julius Caesar. It was his best buddy, Brutal, that slipped in the shiv.”

I knew I ought to say something like: “You can trust
me,
Bud,” but all I did was nod. My eyes drifted down to the scar on his stomach.

“What happened there?”

He took a look at the scar himself, smiling crookedly. “I got shot. That’s where the slug come out.” He twisted around, pointed out another, smaller scar on his back. “That’s where it went in. S.O.B. shot me in the back.”

“Who was it?”

“Night watchman at a warehouse down at the Battery. I was trying to heist about twenty cases of canned anchovies. I thought I’d cased the job out real good. The night watchman was this old redheaded mick that’d spend the first half of every night getting drunk and the second half pounding the pillow. But I didn’t know the mick didn’t show up that night and they had another guy working. This other guy didn’t give me no chance at all. Just plugged me as soon as he seen me walking away with some of them anchovies.”

“How old were you?”

“Sixteen. Just a kid. But I’d been on my own—I’d been part of the
underworld
—ever since I was eleven. That’s when my mother died.”

“What about your father?”

“I never knew who my old man was. My mother never talked about him.”

“What was your mother like?”

“Why all the questions?”

I shrugged. “I’m just curious about you, I guess.”

He seemed pleased by that. “Yeah? Well, you can ask me any question you wanna. But I ain’t gonna guarantee you I ain’t gonna lie.” He laughed. “You asked me about my mother. She was nice. Pretty. She never laid a hand on me in anger. I didn’t have no brothers and sisters, so it was just her and me. But I didn’t see her much. She was working all the time. She worked in one of them places they had 500 girls sewing on sewing machines sixteen hours a day. But then she got sick. I took care of her. I seen a lot of her then.” He fell silent, and then: “I don’t wanna talk no more about my mother, if you don’t mind.”

“What happened after you got shot?”

“Well, I dropped them anchovies and run on outa the warehouse. Then I was running down the street. Then I guess I musta passed out, and somebody musta found me and drug me off to the hospital, ’cause that’s where I woke up.

“Maybe I’da been better off if I got left on the street. That hospital was a crummy joint. Blood and puke all over the floor. People moaning and screaming. The doctors and nurses didn’t give a shit about you, they just wanted to get you outa there ’cause you didn’t have any dough.

“Some cops come by and wanted to know how I got shot. I didn’t tell ’em nothing. Then another cop come by, he used to know my mother. He was nice to her and me when she was sick. He told me this gang of wops was looking for me, they knew it was me that done the warehouse job and they figured I was trying to muscle in on their territory. He said I was hotter than a dime-store pistol and I oughta get outa town as soon as I could.

“Well, I knew these wops, they’d already killed a good friend of mine, so I didn’t need no extra encouragement. I told one of them nurses I wanted my clothes, and I just walked outa there. Nobody tried to stop me. They was glad to see me go.

“I had a girlfriend. She was a year younger than me. She was a real smart girl, had a lotta class; tell the truth, I don’t know what she was doing with somebody like me.