Crime Stories Page 18

  ITCHY

  I

  DEBONAIR BANDIT ROBS OAKLAND BANK

  LOCKS OFFICIALS IN VAULT

  ESCAPES WITH $2500

  Shortly after the Bay City State Bank of Oakland opened its doors for business this morning, an unmasked bandit, locking officials and employees in the vault, fled with the contents of the money drawer.

  No depositors were in the bank at the time, the front door having been unlocked but a few minutes before. The robber came in quietly from the street, whipped out a revolver, and drove Milton Beecroft, president, James K. Kirkbride, cashier, and Miss Marcella Redgray, stenographer, into the vault, politely assuring them that they would not be harmed if they did as they were told. After locking the door upon them the bandit walked out of the bank with about $2500 in bills of various denominations. $300 in silver in the same drawer was not taken, and a large amount of money in the vault at the time was overlooked.

  Half an hour later Beecroft released himself and his employees by removing the inside combination plate with a screwdriver kept in the vault for that purpose, and notified the police. It is believed that the bandit left in an automobile seen standing in the neighborhood at the time of the robbery.

  He is described as about 30 years of age, short and muscular, and dressed in a dark rough suit, dark cap, and khaki shirt. Police inspectors assigned to the case are of the opinion that this clothing may have been worn to lead suspicion astray, as the bandit’s manner was that of a man of culture and refinement.

  “What the hell, Itchy?” Pete Judge demanded. “You must of put on the high hat for them guys! What’s a debonair?”

  “That’s a lot of bunk!” Itchy protested with warmth. “I didn’t make no cracks that that kind of stuff could be got out of. I went in there and flashed the rod, and said, ‘Get in there, all of you,’ pointing to the box. The stenog—one of them goofy kids—has me worried for a minute. I’m afraid she’s going to try to be funny, or let out a squawk, or something: she’s got that kind of look in her eye. So I tell her, sharp, ‘Now you run along with ’em, sister, I don’t want to have to hurt you.’ She goes, I slam the door on them, make the till, and duck out to you. That’s all there was to it. It’s these newspapers! Like making it twenty-five centuries, when eighteen hundred was all we got.”

  Pete’s mouth widened in a grin at the earnestness of this defense, a grin which, for all its breadth, did not tighten his lips appreciably, or give them the least semblance of resilience.

  “You ought to get yourself some spats and one of these here monocles. Ain’t no use of doing things half-way. Funny I never rapped to it that I was throwing in with a dude!”

  Itchy scowled at his partner and picked up another paper. In this one also the robbery held a place of honor on an outside sheet that was a shade paler pink than the one he had just read aloud, but nothing was said here of the bandit’s comity. So Itchy read it to Pete, and then the third version,—against a background of green, this one,—likewise devoid of objectionable adjectives.

  But Pete was not to be denied his humor.

  “I guess I better shake up the scoffings, Mister Maker,” he said as he carried the packages he had brought in with the afternoon papers over to the gas stove in a corner of the room. “You oughtn’t to spoil your lily-white hands with cooking. It ain’t debonair.”

  Itchy returned his stockinged feet to the window sill, leaning back in his chair and lighting a cigarette with a pretense of vast indifference to the witticisms that came over his partner’s shoulder between the rattling of pans. He was sorry he hadn’t laughed with Pete at first. No use giving Pete a chance to ride him: Pete would make a song of it. But it was too late now.

  Those damn reporters, twisting things around, trying to be funny! “Debonair,” whatever that was, “politely,” “culture,” “refinement.” He’d show them! Next time he’d dent somebody’s skull, and let them see what they could make out of that. And as for Pete,—who had by now discarded “Mister” Maker in favor of “Debonair” Maker,—if Pete kept this up he was going to get smacked. That was all!

  II

  In a touring car stolen that morning, Itchy and Pete caught up with the automobile they had trailed from broom factory, to bank, and now half-way back to factory. They drew abreast of it, slackened their own to its pace, and edged over toward it, forcing it against the curb. There was a moment of hesitancy on the part of the three men in the factory car, then obedience, and a bag of money, meant until now to cover a payroll, changed cars. Nothing remained to the robbery except the escape.

  Itchy, however, did not immediately give the word for Pete to drive on. He remembered his self-given promise to slug somebody next time, that his reputation might be redeemed from the calumny of gentility. He could easily swing the weapon in his left hand into the scared fat face of the nearest factory employee—maybe knock some of his teeth out.

  He screwed around in his seat a little, for better leverage, and Pete’s breath rasped in his ear. Pete was a partner to be trusted without stint: no matter how badly frightened Pete might be he would hold up his end, wouldn’t dog it in a pinch. But Pete was always scared. He was without joy in his vocation. He knew nothing of exaltation in the power of a crooked forefinger to take what it wanted from the world. Robbery was to him—exclusive of the money involved, and even that was powerless to stimulate him during the actual operation—no more pleasant than to his prey. And to Pete this lingering to no purpose when the work was done was agony.

  Itchy, in the pride of his own imperturbable subnormality, found inspiration in the hoarse panting beside him. Pete had ridden him ragged about the Oakland job, had he? Had called him a dude, had he? Called him “Itchy the debonair”? He’d give Pete a bellyful this time!

  “I regret exceedingly,” Itchy told the factory employees, “the necessity of having to do this”—hazy remembrance of a letter he had once received from a collecting agency carried him this far—“and I hope—I trust you boys won’t do nothing you’ll be sorry for.”

  Pete had enough. He bent over the wheel, and they shot up Mission Street, Itchy leaning out to call back: “I bid you good-day!”

  How did Pete like that?

  But Pete didn’t say whether he liked it or no. He said nothing about it, even when they were safely at home again. Toward evening he went out for groceries, and did not come back. He had his share of the loot. He and Itchy had been together for nearly a year: seven or eight months on the road, and the last few “jungling up” in this housekeeping room on Ellis Street. Pete liked Itchy, and in association with him had prospered as never before. But Pete had had experience with partners who became swollen with success, and he did not intend being involved in the ensuing wreckage this time.

  Itchy waited an hour, and then went down to the corner for food and the afternoon papers. He understood now why Pete hadn’t raised a row over the hold-up. Well, if Pete didn’t like his style, all right. He could find another partner, or perhaps he’d be better off working alone. He had done all the real work anyway,—the actual going up against the gun,—though Pete had been handy with a car.

  Itchy read the afternoon papers before he cooked his meal. They were unanimous now: the paler pink and the green anxious to make up for their oversight of the previous month, and the deeper pink secure in the confirmation of its original stand. The bandit, they agreed, was the same who had robbed the Oakland bank, and he was a gentleman crook, a brother to those suave dandies of fiction who so easily confound the best policing brains of the several continents.

  Fiction, Itchy knew, meant stories, books. He had never thought of stories having any connection with actuality, any relation with life; but it seemed that they did, and not only with life but with him personally. Books had been written about men like him; that was what the newspapers were getting at.

  III

  There is a stratum of American criminal society whose constituents—almost without exception either bandits or burglars; the latter, once predom
inant, now a dwindling minority—are primarily hoboes. They have all the caste consciousness of those wanderers, all their contempt for the niceties of gentler modes of life. You will find them in the cities often, but they bring with them all their pride in their hardness, in their independence, in their ability to do for themselves whatever needs to be done.

  The tawdry resort of the town criminal seldom sees them: even before Prohibition came they preferred to buy their liquor in the form of pure alcohol, which they could dilute to their taste; they affect a fine disesteem for women, and their contacts with them are infrequent and brief. Their ideal abode in a city is a house in some shoddy suburban quarter, or, if that is not practicable, a flat, or a room with a stove, where they may live free of traffic with cooks and other devices of civilization. In short, they are outcasts and that is their pride. And they like to treat a city as if it were not a city at all, but merely another sort of countryside.

  Itchy—idling now most of the days in his room, rereading the three colored clippings and mulling over the phrase, “gentlemen crooks of fiction”—was of this tribe. And his place among them, he boasted, was second to none. He was as tough as any, as independent of the comforts of less hardy existences, as able to take care of himself.

  But it wasn’t as if he had been born to that life. If you came right down to it, his people were as good as the best. Hadn’t his old man been a letter carrier for twenty-five years? No, his people weren’t riff-raff by any means. And he had been given a good education before he slipped away on his own account: he had gone through the seventh grade of grammar school. So if he was a “stiff” it was from choice, not because—like Pete, for instance—he wasn’t fit for anything else. He could do other things if he wanted to. And maybe he would want to. There might be something in this gentleman crook stuff. People had written books about them . . .

  In a downtown bookstore a saleswoman told Itchy that she did have gentleman crook stories, and she sold him five of them.

  At the outset he found them disappointing, meaningless. They hadn’t anything to do with life after all. Four of them he put aside with their initial chapters only partly read, but on the fifth he got the swing of the thing, read it through, went back to the others, read them, and returned to the bookstore for more.

  The books weren’t on the whole satisfactory. In the first place, most of them had to do with house-burglars. And, although these fellows were undoubtedly a very superior breed, with their elegant clothes and manners, their brilliant repartee, and their daring audacity, Itchy couldn’t spare them a large measure of the contempt he felt for house-burglars. Then, in many of the stories, the thief was revealed, toward the end, as a detective going deviously, foolishly, and with much trouble to himself, about his hunt for the missing jewels, or one thing or another. And, if really a crook, he was more than likely to reform in the last few chapters; but as he usually bettered his financial condition by this “going queer,” he wasn’t to be blamed so much for that.

  The girls with whom these fellows soon or late became involved Itchy found to his liking. Their very difference from anything he had ever known made them more plausible to him. The women with whom he had come in contact from time to time certainly hadn’t been very wonderful, even discounting his tribal pose of misogyny. But these were different. More like—the girl in the bookstore was something on their order . . .

  Still, say what you would about these men in the books,—neglecting the most simple precautions, always being surprised at work, showing themselves unnecessarily gullible, and only succeeding through the miraculous favors of chance—they did have something. They made big hauls, they enjoyed themselves, people wrote stories about them . . . Take, for example, that one who told the detective: “I’m tired of you. You bore me. You weary me. You exasperate me. Now get out.” That wasn’t a bad line at all. Imagine the look on an “elbow’s” face if you told him that! Naturally, though, you’d want to be sure you were sitting pretty before you made a crack like that.

  Of course, you couldn’t go around pulling jobs as these fellows did: they were no good in a practical way. But a man who knew his business through and through might, by copying their manners, their dress, and their talk, not only increase his profits by being able to get into places from which less polish would bar him, but have a lot of fun in the bargain. The newspapers liked that kind of stuff, too. Look what a fuss they raised over those two jobs of his, and he hadn’t even tried to make them fancy.

  Another visit to the bookstore exhausted its stock of gentleman crook fiction, but he learned that what he wanted could be found on the screen now and then and in the magazines often.

  He was in earnest now. His hair was carefully parted and weighted down with a thick gummy substance that he bought in large jars; he spent time in the barber’s chair, and even submitted his hands to a manicure. Nor had he neglected tailor, haberdasher, hatter, and booter.

  He read aloud to himself in his room at night, and felt that his language was being improved thereby. Every day or two he visited the bookstore, ostensibly to enquire for new books, but actually for the sake of the saleswoman’s conversation. The books could give him the right words and the correct combinations, but they didn’t give him the right pronunciations. The saleswoman could, however, and not only the pronunciations but the right sort of accent. She formed her words high in the roof of her mouth, and they came out roundly and clearly in what he knew instinctively for the correct form. After he had returned to his room he would repeat everything she had said, painstakingly aping each trick of enunciation.

  He was going to stick up the bookstore some day, he decided. There wouldn’t be much money in the damper (he must remember to say cash register if he spoke of it), and, in the center of the shopping district, the store was unfavorably located for a quick get-away. But the saleswoman was the only person he knew whom he thought capable of unerringly judging the false from the true, and by her attitude he would know the degree of his success. But he wouldn’t do it for a while yet; he wasn’t quite ready for so severe a testing, and, besides, she would be getting new books in from time to time, and there was no use closing that source of supply.

  Another month passed before Itchy ordered evening clothes. But all the books had insisted upon them,—dinner jackets were indicated also,—so he finally came to it. He didn’t, however, buy a dinner suit. He felt that since he was taking this step forward he might as well make it a decisive one, and waste nothing on the compromise between formality and informality which the dinner suit offered.

  He wore the new dress suit every night from the first, which necessitated his remaining indoors for a while, until he became accustomed to the new garments. But he usually kept to his room in the evenings, anyway. He had no desire for the society of his familiars. He knew how they would greet this new Itchy, with his silk shirts and hose, his carefully tended face and hands, his glossy hair, his natty clothes. For those who dressed as he did now—the gaudy city breed—he had lost none of his old contempt. Thus he spent much time by himself.

  He became, at about this time, unpleasantly aware of his nickname. He had grown accustomed to it, had come to think of it more natural a part of him than the baptismal Floyd; but now, considering it in terms of his new development, he found it distasteful. He had acquired it five or six years before, sitting with a group of his fellows around a fire in the “jungles” outside of Fresno one night. He had been digging savagely at the flea-bites with which he was covered at the time, and some old “stiff” had flung the name across the flames at him. He had laughed with the others, and the name had stuck. Itchy Maker. What difference did it make? One name was as good as another. But now one name was not necessarily so good as another. And while the chances were that he would never mingle again with those who knew him by it, still the name might crop up at the most unexpected times to embarrass him. If he found new associates now—as he undoubtedly would before long—he meant to see to it that they knew him as “Debonair” M
aker. That was a lot better than Itchy—had a fine sound, in fact.

  Another fortnight, and Itchy was wearing his correct evening clothes on the streets and into the lobbies of the better hotels, where he would loiter for hours, gazing condescendingly on those whose more common garb did night and day duty. And, as his familiarity with them increased, the new clothes began to tempt him to wear them on a robbery. But he resisted that, for a while.

  Within the next two months he held up a small jewelry store and the office of a laundry company. He was sure of himself in his new role now, and he enlivened both banditries with copious quotations from the books he had read, and even extemporized a trifle. In the laundry office he was fortunate enough to encounter two girls who were addicted to the same sort of literature, and their appreciation of his manner was gratifying. And even more gratifying was the warmth with which the press accepted the girls’ stories, polishing them, gilding them, and setting them out at great length for the world to see. Itchy had column after column of type devoted to him now—even editorials.

  IV

  The lobby of A theater just before the box office closed one night was the scene of the dress suit’s baptism. The top hat he had, of course, finally left at home; there was no use overdoing the thing. His grammar had improved by now until the double negative was rare, though tenses still puzzled him, and his accents were worth all the imitative labors they had cost him.

  His light overcoat drooping to each side, exposing the full chiaroscuro of his immaculate costuming, he smiled at the girl behind the grille and wrought beautifully with what he knew of the graces of speech. And the girl, once she had become relatively accustomed to the sight of the pistol in his hand, enjoyed the robbery perhaps as much as he.

  Nevertheless she gave the alarm as soon as he left.