The Neon Jungle (3 page)

She could not look at him or speak.

“What’s on the books out there is between you and me, honey. All I say is this: stay off my streets at night. Stay out of my joints.”

In the silence she heard Pop chunk the cleaver deeply into the chopping block. He came out around the end of the long meat counter, saying, “Lieutenant, you know you talk to my daughter.”

You build carefully, and something behind that clown face can tear it all down. His streets. His joints. Some people from the neighborhood had been in there. It would spread fast. Walter Varaki had been on one knee in an aisle, marking cans and stacking them on a low shelf. Rick Stussen, the fat blond butcher, had been behind the meat counter with Gus, running the slicer.

She sat in the small third-floor room by the gabled window, and knew it was time to go back down. To wait longer would make it more difficult. The record was finished again. She lifted the arm back and placed it at rest and turned the switch. The turntable stopped. It had been a gift from Gus and Jana at Christmas. Another bus hissed at the corner. It was headed downtown. Down to where the lights were, down to places of quick forgetting. There was a tide that ran strongly, and for a time she had been in an eddy near a lee shore, caught in a purposeless circling. One gentle push and the tide would catch her again and take her on, away from this quietness, away from these people who trusted her merely because one of them had married her.

She got up from the chair and stretched the stiffness out of her long legs, cramped from sitting so long in one position. She went down the hall to the third-floor bathroom, turned on the light, and examined her face in the mirror. She looked at herself and saw what Rowell had seen. A guilty furtiveness in the gray eyes. The cast of weakness across the mouth, with its sullen swollen lips. The look of the chippy. Chippy in a white cardigan, in black corduroy slacks. She made an ugly face at herself, dug lipstick out of the pocket of the slacks, and painted on a bold mouth, bolder than the mouth she had worn these last months.

She went down and found Jana swamped at the checkout, five people waiting with loaded baskets. Jana gave her a strained smile and moved gratefully over. They worked together, unloading the baskets onto the counter. Bonny’s fingers were staccato on the register keys, while Jana packed the groceries in bags and cartons. Bonny was curt and unsmiling with the customers.

Soon there was no one waiting. She straightened the stacks of bills in the register drawer, took the machine total for the day, and, using the register as an adding machine, quickly totaled the checks that had been taken in.

Gus came over wiping his hands on his apron, saying too cheerfully, “You don’t get upset about him with the funny face.”

“It’s all right.”

“Let’s see a smile.”

“It’s right,” she said, unsmiling. Another customer wheeled a loaded basket up. Gus walked away. Bonny worked the keys so hard that her fingers stung.

PAUL DARMOND finished his pencil draft of his bimonthly report to the Parole Board and tossed the yellow pencil onto the rickety card table. In the morning he’d take it down to his small office in the county courthouse and get one of the girls in Welfare to type it up. At least there’d be no kickbacks on this report. No skips. No incidents. He stood up and stretched and scuffed at his head with his knuckles. He was a tall lean man with a tired young-old face, a slow way of moving. He felt the empty cigarette pack and crumpled it and tossed it into the littered fireplace.

It was nine o’clock and he felt both tired and restless. He had been so intent on the report that an unconscious warm awareness of Betty had crept into the back of his mind. That awareness had changed his environment back to the apartment, that other apartment of over a year ago. And when he had finished the report and looked up, there had been a physical shock in the readjustment. It’s funny, he thought, the way it keeps happening to you. Relax for a few minutes, and she sneaks back into your life. And it’s like it never happened—the sudden midnight convulsions, the frantic phone calls, the clanging ambulance ride, Dr. Weidemann walking slowly into the waiting room, mask pulled down, peeling the rubber gloves from his small clever hands.

“I’m sorry, Paul. Damn sorry. Pregnancy put an extra load on her kidneys. There was some functional weakness there we didn’t catch. They quit completely. Poisoned her. Blood pressure went sky high. Her heart quit, Paul. She’s dead. I’m damn sorry, Paul.”

But the mind kept playing that same vicious trick of bringing her back, as though nothing had happened, as though she sat over there in the corner of the room, reading, while he finished his report.

Then she would say in her mocking way, in which there was no malice. “Have all your little people been good this time, darling?”

“Like gold.”

She understood how it was. She had understood how a graduate sociologist working on his doctorate could take this poorly paid job just to gain field experience in his major area of interest, and then find himself cleverly trapped by that very interest, trapped by the people who were depending on him to fight for them. It had been a rather wry joke between them.

“I don’t mind, Paul,” she had said. “I honestly don’t. Please don’t worry about it. We can manage. We’ll always manage.”

“The pay will be spread pretty thin after you have the kid.”

“We’ll put him to work and make him pay for the next one.”

“That’s easy to say.”

“Stop it, Paul. You love what you’re doing. You’re rebuilding lives. That’s worth a little scrimping and pinching.”

“I could teach at the university and make more than this, for God’s sake.”

Now, of course, the pay didn’t make much difference. It went for rent for the one-room apartment down in the neighborhood where most of his parolees were, for hasty meals at odd hours, for gas for the battered coupe. There was nothing left now but the work.

He decided to walk down to the corner for some cigarettes. As he was going down the front steps a police car pulled up in front, on the wrong side of the street, and Rowell stuck his clown face out the window. “How you doing, Preacher Paul?”

Paul felt the familiar regret and anger that always nagged at him when one of his people slipped. He went over to the car. “Who is it, Rowell?”

“You mean you think it’s possible for one of those little darlings of yours to go off the tracks? And them all looking so holy.”

“Have your fun. Then tell me.”

Rowell’s tone hardened. “My fun, Darmond? You give me a got of fun with those jokers of yours.”

“If you’d get off their backs, they’d make it easier.”

“If I get off their backs they’ll walk off with the whole district.”

Paul knew that it was an old pointless argument. Nothing could change Rowell. Paul had followed closely the results of the experimental plastic surgery performed on habitual criminals to determine the effect of physiognomy on criminal behavior. He suspected that Andrew Rowell had, throughout adolescence, suffered the tortures of hell because of his ludicrous face. It had made him a vicious, deadly fighter. At some point in adolescence the road had forked, and Rowell had taken the path that made him a successful police officer, rather then the criminal he could have been. Once when they had both been relaxed after discussing a particular case, Paul had tried to explain his theory to Andy Rowell. He knew he would never forget how white the man’s face had turned, how clear was the look of murder in those owl eyes.

Rowell had said then, in a labored rusty voice, “There are two kinds of people. The hell with all your theories. Just two kinds, Preacher. The straight and the crooked. The straight ones don’t go bad. The bad ones can pretend to go straight. They can fool you. But they don’t ever kid me. Ever.”

And Paul had asked gently, “I suppose you think they’re born crooked?”

“I know they are. And I can spot ’em on the street. I can smell ’em. All the way from the punks to the big dealers.”

“What do you want to talk to me about?” Paul asked gently now, forgetting his own anger, remembering how astonishingly sensitive and helpful Rowell had been after Betty’s death.

“I want to talk about that Varaki outfit.”

“Here? Or do you want to come in? I was on my way down to the corner to get cigarettes.”

“Hop in. I’ll drive you down.”

Paul walked around the car and got in. Rowell parked on the corner and he went in and came back with cigarettes and got in beside him. Rowell drove back to the house and turned off the motor and turned in the seat, one arm along the seat back.

“We can talk here. O.K., Preach.”

“Go ahead.”

“I don’t like the setup. You shilled Pop Varaki into taking on that punk who makes deliveries for him. Lockter.”

“Vern Lockter is a good kid. He had some trouble. He hasn’t been in trouble for two years. He doesn’t have to report to me any more. Pop says he’s a good worker.”

“When he isn’t working he dresses pretty sharp, Preach.”

“So what? He lives there, eats there. So he saves his money and spends it on clothes.”

“He wears his sharp clothes to bowling alleys, the fights, the beer joints. He knows all the local sharpies.”

“But he hadn’t been in trouble for over two years.”

“O.K., O.K. We’ll drop him for a minute. I understand you’re wishing off another punk on Pop Varaki.”

“That’s right. I went to bat. Gus needs a new kid around. There are more orders to deliver. Vern Lockter can’t do the odd jobs around the place. There’s just Gus and Stussen and Walter Varaki and Vern. So this kid is coming down from the industrial school. His name is Jimmy Dover.”

“I know his name. I know the record. He lived with an aunt. He and two of his pals lifted a heap and busted into a gas station. They got caught and one of his friends made a break and got shot through the head and this Dover was carrying a switch-blade knife when they brought him in. Juvenile Court put him in the school. He did two years. He’s eighteen. While he was up there, the aunt disappeared. They couldn’t trace her. What kind of a hold you got over Gus, anyway?”

“He’s a good man, that’s all. And Jimmy is O.K. I talked it over with him a month ago. I drove Gus up and we both talked to him. Old Gus likes to help straighten a kid out.”

“O.K. Lockter and Dover. That makes two of them. And the redhead makes three.”

“What do you mean?” Paul asked sharply.

“Just what I say. I can smell ’em. So I checked back on her. San Francisco police. Twice they rapped her on a D and D. Henry must have inherited it from his old man. He must have had reformer blood, like you got, Preach.”

“I suppose you went over and let her know about it?” Paul said softly.

“It keeps them in line if they know you know the score. Sure I did. She couldn’t look me in the eye. Pop sent her into the house and raised hell with me.”

“You’ve got a hell of a lot of tact. Don’t you understand she’s Gus’s daughter-in-law?”

“I’m doing Gus a favor, for God’s sake. I still haven’t got to what’s on my mind. You got the Fletcher girl, Dover, and Lockter. You got ’em all living in that barn of a place with Stussen and the Varaki family. The three of them are going to get their heads together and figure some way of making a dime. Maybe they’ll take it off the Varaki family. I wish they would. It would cure Gus of being noble. Maybe they’ll try it some other way. When they do, it’s my business. I’m letting you know, I don’t like the setup, and I’m letting you know that I’m going to lean on all of them.”

“Until they
do
make some kind of slip. Until you pressure them into it.”

“Don’t get hot, Preach. They all slip. I’m keeping my area clean. But it’s getting tougher all the time. Somebody is pushing horse and tea again. Headquarters is riding me, and so is the Man. I just don’t want any new kind of trouble on top of what I got already. And I’m damn sick of you feeding new ones into my back yard.”

“I want you to do me a favor. Don’t lean on Jimmy until he’s had a chance to get his feet on the ground.”

“I’ll give him a week.”

“That’s big of you, Andy. Very generous.”

“Sure. I remember Lerritti and Mendez and Conlon.”

“Three, Andy, out of how many in the last four years? Eighty? Ninety?”

“Three so far. Isn’t that what you mean?”

“Someday you’ll see what I mean, Andy.”

“I’m too stupid. I haven’t had the education. I’m just a cop, Preacher.”

Paul got out. “Good night. Andy.”

“Two will get you five there’ll be a capias out on this Dover in six months. And the next one won’t go through Juvenile Court.”

Rowell drove away. Paul stood and watched the tail-lights turn the next corner at cruising speed. He knew that Lieutenant Andy Rowell would cruise his district until it began to quiet down at two or three in the morning. He would sleep a few hours and be back at the precinct early in the morning. He had no life aside from the force. He drove his men and drove himself. Several times he had been in trouble because of too much damage inflicted on someone who “resisted arrest,” but it had blown over. It was admitted that he ran the toughest area of a rough, gutty industrial city, and kept it as clean as any man could who had to work with a force on which there were too many political appointees, too many cousins of cousins. Through the night hours he would roam the district like a tough, homeless little bull terrier, showing his clown face in the rough joints, grimly amused at the silence that would last until he left. Once three citizens decided to prove to Rowell that it was bad practice to roam around the area alone. They whispered him into an alley mouth and worked him over. He pretended unconsciousness until he had a chance to wrench his right arm free. They had taken his detective special from its holster and tossed it back down the alley but the sap was in his right hip pocket, the thong dangling. Half blind with his own blood, dazed by the blows, he had instinctively hit the right one first. He left one dead in the alley. An ambulance took a second one. The third one was relatively unharmed. Rowell took him in, booked him, threw him in a cell, and then went himself to the hospital to have his gashed face stitched, his broken left wrist set. He put himself back on duty the next night, and methodically visited every dive in his district, with a hard gay grin on his bandaged clown face. He made his men travel in pairs. He always went alone.

Paul stood in the night long after the prowl car was out of sight. Two young girls came by, arm in arm, whispering and giggling. Red neon winked in the next block. Two soldiers stood on the corner, scuffling and laughing. A new convertible, glinting in the street light, cruised slowly down the narrow street, and there was a girl in it, singing nasally, sitting between two men. Paul felt the odd restlessness that had been gnawing at him for the past few months. An odd feeling that life was moving on to some bright, gay place, while he stood and watched it go by.

He went up the steps and through the unlocked door and turned left into his small ground-floor-front apartment with its old-fashioned bay windows, golden oak window seat, tan lace curtains, dark walls, dull furniture.

He thought about Vern Lockter. To Rowell, he had sounded more confident than he had felt. Lockter was a tall, powerful young man with a long narrow head, a quick flashing smile. He had an air of shrewd intelligence. Paul had the feeling that he had never got close to Vern Lockter. Lockter had said, almost too often, the usual things. Learned my lesson. Crime is for suckers. Look any man in the eye. And he had a habit of looking you so directly in the eye that it seemed contrived. There was an essential coldness about him. It had bothered Paul often enough for him to go and look Vern up. Vern, in work clothes, making up the orders, loading the truck, sweeping the store, had given Paul the strong impression that this was a part he was playing. Yet there was nothing you could put your finger on. The Varakis seemed to like him well enough, yet there was that same constraint that he had noticed in himself. Paul knew that the criminal for which there is no hope is the psychopathic personality, the man or woman born without the ability to give an emotional evaluation to right and wrong. To them there is only an intellectual distinction, and thus any violent act is permissible provided there is little or no chance of punishment. They are usually brighter than the norm, with a more pleasing personality. Just underneath the shell of personality, barely out of sight, is the cruel, unthinking violence of an animal.

He had been suspicious of Vern Lockter ever since their first meeting. His prison record had been excellent, as are the prison records of most psychopaths. Paul sensed his own inability to penetrate the mask of personality. He could not help thinking that Lockter was playing a part. And it did not seem logical that Lockter could be contented, over so long a period, to deliver grocery orders all over the city in the battered panel delivery truck with the faded letters on the side that spelled out Varaki’s Quality Market. Though a lot of Gus’s trade was local neighborhood customers, he carried fine meats and fancy groceries and had, over the years, built up a large delivery trade, on both a cash and a credit basis.