Crime Stories Page 5

  He smiled and nodded politely. A sub-harlot, he decided, holding out false promises of her monstrous body to bring about that stimulation of traffic in liquor for which she was employed: a paradox, a sort of burlesque perhaps on a more familiar feminine attitude. The liquor he had drunk had fuddled him pleasantly, had clouded his never keen sight—though his eyes glowed brighter than usual—and had softened his speech. He bought several more drinks, amused by the keenness with which she watched the waiter, making sure that she received her metal tokens—upon which her commission was computed—for each order of drinks, and the naked greed with which she seized whatever change the waiter laid on the table.

  He wondered after a while how much money he had left; it couldn’t be much, and he must save from this enormity sufficient to buy a drink or two for the girl with the amazing red hair at the Palace. He motioned the waiter away.

  “I’m flat,” he told the woman. “They took me down the line at the track.”

  “Tough luck,” she said, with facial sympathy, and began to grow restless.

  “Run along and let me finish my drink,” he suggested.

  She grew confidential. “I’d like to, but once we girls start drinking with a man the boss makes us stay with him until he leaves.”

  He chuckled with joyful appreciation—he called that a neat arrangement—and got just a little unsteadily to his feet. She went to the door with him. “Be sure and come see me next time.” He chuckled again at that, and then he felt an obscure shame: not at having squandered his few remaining dollars upon her, but at letting her think him so easily taken in.

  “You’ve got me all wrong,” he assured her, seriously. “I don’t mind letting you take me for a ten or so when it’s all I’ve got. Ten isn’t much money one way or the other. But don’t think I’m coming down here with a roll to let you—”

  Suddenly he saw himself standing in the doorway trying to justify himself to this monstrosity. He broke off with a clear, ringing laugh and walked away.

  The girl with the red hair was dancing with a fat youth in tweeds to the achievements of a ferocious three-man orchestra when Paul entered the Palace. He waited, buying a drink for himself and one for a girl in soiled brown silk who had come over to his side and who kept saying over and over: “This is too good to be true! I been here a week and I can’t believe it yet. Think of all this!” Her arm took in all the bottles behind which one wall was hidden.

  The fat youth in tweeds disappeared presently and the girl with the red hair saw Paul, waited for his beckoning nod, and joined him.

  “Hello.”

  “Hello.”

  They drank and he motioned toward the change the bartender had put before him. She took it with a casual thanks.

  “How’s the game go?” he asked.

  “Pretty soft! And with you?”

  “Not so good,” he cheerfully complained. “The track knocked me over for most of what I had this afternoon.”

  She smiled sympathetically and they stood drinking slowly, close together but not touching, not talking very much, but smiling now and then with a certain definite delight each into the other’s face. The clamor of the place, its garishness, were softened, nearly shut off from him by the pinkish alcoholic haze through which he regarded the world. But the girl’s face, hair, figure, were clear enough to him.

  He was filled with a strange affection for her: an affection that, though it was personal enough, had nothing of desire in it. Drunk as he undoubtedly was he did not want her physically. For all her beauty and pull upon his heart she was a girl who “hustled drinks” in a border town. That she might be a virgin—there wasn’t anything impossible about that unlikely hypothesis: her profession didn’t preclude it, even compelled continence during working hours—made no difference. It wasn’t even so much that she was tainted by the pawing of strange hands—she had a freshness that had withstood that—as that in some obscure way the desires of too many men had rendered her no longer quite desirable. If he ever turned to a woman of this particularly sordid world it would be to some such monster as the one down the street. Given a certain turn of temper, there would be a savage, ghoulish joy in her.

  He signaled the bartender again. They emptied their glasses, and he told her, “Well, I’m going to run along. I’ve got just about the price of a meal left.”

  “Won’t you dance with me before you go?”

  “No,” he said, a warm feeling of renunciation flooding him, “you run along and get a live one.”

  “I don’t care whether you’ve got any money or not,” she said gravely. And then, resting one hand lightly on his sleeve, “Let me lend—”

  He backed away shaking his head. “So long!” He turned toward the door.

  The girl in soiled brown silk called out to him as he passed the end of the bar where she stood drinking with two men, “It’s too good to be true!” He smiled courteous agreement and went out into the street.

  He stood for a moment beside the door, leaning against the wall, looking at the hazy figures around him—servicemen from San Diego in the uniforms of three branches, tourists, thieves, people who defied classification, the Mexicans (special policemen, all of them, rumor said) standing along the curb, the dogs—tasting a melancholy disgust at the tawdriness of this place which he thought could so easily be a gay play-spot.

  From the doorway of the saloon he had just left, a pale girl spoke listlessly: “Come on in and get happy.”

  He raised an arm in a doubtful gesture. “Look at ’em,” he ordered sadly, “a flock of—” He thrust his hands into his trouser pockets and walked down the street grinning. He’d make a damned fool of himself yet!

  A rack of picture post cards in the window of a curio shop caught his eye. He went in and bought half a dozen. Five of them he sent to friends in Philadelphia and New York. Over the sixth he pondered for some time: he could think of lots of people to send it to but he couldn’t remember their addresses. Finally he sent it to a former casual acquaintance whom he hadn’t seen since before the war but whose address he remembered because it was 444 Fourth Avenue. He penciled the same message on all six cards. “They tell me the States have gone dry.”

  In the street again he searched his pockets and counted his resources: eighty-five cents in silver and two return tickets: one from Tijuana to San Diego and the other from there to the hospital.

  A husky voice whined at his elbow: “Say, buddy, can you give me the price of a cup of coffee?”

  Paul laughed. “Fifty-fifty,” he cried. “I got eighty-five cents. You get forty and we match for the odd nickel.” He spun a coin in the air and was elated to find he had won. In an alley entrance across the street a San Diego stage was loading; he went over to it and sat beside the driver. He slumped down in the seat, half dozing through the ride back to the city, while behind him a girl with an undeveloped body and too-finely-drawn features sang a popular song in a thin, plaintive voice, and her companions—two sailors from the Pacific fleet—argued loudly some question having to do with gun-pointing.

  Leaving the stage at its terminus, Paul walked up the side of the plaza to Broadway and turned toward a lunchroom where his forty-five cents would buy him a meal of sorts. Passing the entrance of the Grant Hotel he found himself in the center of a cluster of people and looking into the most beautiful face he had ever seen. He did not know he was staring until the beautiful face’s escort in the uniform of a petty officer whispered to him, with peculiar, threatening emphasis: “Like her looks?”

  Paul went on down the street slowly, turning the query over in his mind, wondering just what would be the mental processes of a man who under those conditions would ask that question in just that tone. He thought of turning around, finding the couple, and staring at the woman again to see what the petty officer would say then. But, looking back, he could not see them, so he went on to the lunch-room.

  He found a cigar in his pocket after he had eaten, and smoked it during the ride back to the hospital. The fog-l
aden air rushing into the automobile chilled him and kept him coughing almost continuously. He wished he had brought an overcoat.

  THE CRUSADER

  Bert Pirtle fidgeted impatiently with his newspaper until the last loose thread had been severed by his wife’s little sharp teeth, and with a gesture of finality she had taken off her thimble; then he bore the robe off to the bedroom.

  Drawing it down over his head and shoulders before the bureau glass, he perceived that a miracle had taken place: suddenly, as the folds of the garment had settled, Bert Pirtle had been whisked away, was gone from this room wherein every night for seven years he had slept with his wife. In the place where he had been stood a stranger, though perhaps not a strange man, for the newcomer seemed rather a spirit, a symbol, than a thing of frail bone and flesh. The figure within the white robe—if figure it really was—loomed larger and taller than the vanished Bert Pirtle had ever been, and was for all its shapelessness more pronouncedly existent. Out of twin holes—neatly finished with button-hole stitching—in the peaked hood eyes burned with an almost ineffable glow of holy purpose. It was not a man that stood before the mirror now, but a spirit: the spirit of a nation, even a race.

  As he stood there, not moving, Bert Pirtle saw a vision. In one of his old school-books had been a picture of a Crusader, a white surcoat bearing a large cross worn over his armor. He remembered the picture now, not only remembered it but faced it across the oak top of the bureau. For the first time he visualized that Crusader, realized the wonderful pageantry of the Crusades, really saw the flower of Christendom—separate identities lost within iron helms even as his own selfness was lost behind white sheeting—moving in a strangely clear white light toward Jerusalem.

  Beyond the lone figure in the foreground the glass held long marching columns, massive phalanxes of men who were iron under their snowy robes with emblazoned scarlet crosses going out to meet the Saracen; sunlight glinting on weapons and trappings of gold and silver and on plumes and banners of green and crimson and purple; dust swirling behind and overhead. And somewhere in one of those sacred regiments was he who had once been Bert Pirtle but who now was simply—with an almost divine simplicity—a knight.

  He was unused to dreams of such intensity—the Bert Pirtle who stood in front of the bureau mirror—his body quivered, he breathed gulpingly, perspiration started from his pores. Never had he known such exaltation, not even at the initiation the night before, when he had stood on Nigger Hill among a white-shrouded throng, grotesque in the light of a gigantic bonfire, listening to and repeating a long, strange, inspiring, and not easily comprehensible oath.

  Presently the swirling dust blotted out the files of men in the mirror and then out of the saffron cloud came a single rider all in white upon a white charger—another who rode in a Cause. A second school-day memory came to the man who dreamed; under the white hood his mouth muttered a name. “Galahad!”

  The bedroom door opened. A baby tripped over the sill, thudded in a heap on the floor, rolled into the room, and bounced to its feet with awkward lightness. The child’s eyes widened at the sight of the figure before the bureau, two pink palms beat the air, a shriek of pure ecstasy came from its mouth. It tottered across the floor toward the man, gurgling joyously: “Peekaboo! Papa play peekaboo!”

  THE GREEN ELEPHANT

  I

  Joe Shupe stood in the doorway of the square-faced office I building—his body tilted slantwise so that one thin shoulder, lodged against the gray stone, helped his crossed legs hold him up—looking without interest into the street.

  He had stepped into the vestibule to roll a cigarette out of reach of the boisterous wind that romped along Riverside avenue, and he had remained there because he had nothing better to do. In fact, he had nothing else to do just now. Tomorrow he would revisit the employment offices—a matter of a few blocks’ walk along Main and Trent avenues, with brief digressions into one or two of the intersecting streets—for the fifth consecutive day; perhaps to be rewarded by a job, perhaps to hear reiterations of the now familiar “nothing in your line today.” But the time for that next pilgrimage to the shrines of Industry, through which he might reach the comparative paradise of employment, was still some twenty hours away; so Joe Shupe loitered in the doorway, and dull thoughts began to crawl around in his little round head.

  He thought of the Swede first, with distaste. The Swede—he was a Dane, but the distinction was too subtle for Joe—had come down to the city from a Lost Creek lumber camp with money in his pockets and faith in his fellows. When the men came together and formed their brief friendship only fifty dollars remained of the Swede’s tangible wealth. Joe got that by a crude and hoary subterfuge with which even a timber-beast from Lost Creek should have been familiar. What became of the swindled Swede’s faith is not a matter of record. Joe had not given that a thought; and had his attention been called to it he probably would have been unable to see in it anything but further evidence of the Swede’s unfitness for the possession of money.

  But what was vital to Joe Shupe was that, inspired by the ease with which he had gained the fifty dollars, he had deserted the polished counter over which for eight hours each day he had shoved pies and sandwiches and coffee, and had set out to live by his wits. But the fifty dollars had soon dribbled away, the Swede had had no successors; and now Joe Shupe was beset with the necessity of finding employment again.

  Joe’s fault, as Doc Haire had once pointed out, was that he was an unskilled laborer in the world of crime, and therefore had to content himself with stealing whatever came to hand—a slipshod and generally unsatisfactory method. As the same authority had often declared: “Making a living on the mace ain’t duck soup! Take half these guys you hear telling the world what wonders they are at puffing boxes, knocking over joints, and the rest of the lays—not a half of ’em makes three meals a day at it! Then what chance has a guy that ain’t got no regular racket, hut’s got to trust to luck, got? Huh?”

  But Joe Shupe had disregarded this advice, and even the oracle’s own example. For Doc Haire, although priding himself upon being the most altogether efficient house-burglar in the Northwest, was not above shipping out into the Coeur d’Alenes now and then to repair his finances by a few weeks’ work in the mines. Joe realized that Doc had been right; that he himself was not equipped to dig through the protecting surfaces with which mankind armored its wealth; that the Swede’s advent had been a fortuitous episode, and a recurrence could not be expected. He blamed the Swede now . . .

  A commotion in the street interrupted Joe Shupe’s unaccustomed introspection.

  Across the street two automobiles were twisting and turning, backing and halting, in clumsy dance figures. Men began to run back and forth between them. A tall man in a black overcoat stood up in one of the cars and began shooting with a small-caliber pistol at indeterminate targets. Weapons appeared in the other automobiles, and in the hands of men in the street between the two machines. Spectators scrambled into doorways. From down the street a policeman was running heavily, tugging at his hip, and trying to free his wrist from an entangling coat-tail. A man was running across the street toward Joe’s doorway, a black gladstone bag swinging at his side. As the man’s foot touched the curb he fell forward, sprawling half in the gutter half on the sidewalk. The bag left his hand and slid across the pavement—balancing itself as nicely as a boy on skates—to Joe’s feet.

  The wisdom of Doc Haire went for nothing. With no thought for the economics of thievery, the amenities of specialization, Joe Shupe followed his bent. He picked up the bag, passed through the revolving door into the lobby of the building, turned a corner, followed a corridor, and at length came to a smaller door, through which he reached an alley. The alley gave to another street and a street-car that had paused to avoid a truck. Joe climbed into the car and found a seat.

  Thus far Joe Shupe had been guided by pure instinct, and—granting that to touch the bag at all were judicious—had acted deftly and with beautiful preci
sion. But now his conscious brain caught up with him as it were, and resumed its dominion over him. He began to wonder what he had let himself in for, whether his prize were worth the risk its possession had entailed, just how great that risk might be. He became excited, his pulse throbbed, singing in his temples, and his mouth went dry. He had a vision of innumerable policemen, packed in taxicabs like pullets in crates, racing dizzily to intercept him.

  He got to the street four blocks from where he had boarded the street car, and only a suspicion that the conductor was watching him persuaded him to cling to the bag. He would have preferred leaving it inconspicuously between the seats, to be found in the car barn. He walked rapidly away from the car line, turning thankfully each corner the city put in his path, until he came to another row of car tracks. He stayed on the second car for six blocks, and then wound circuitously through the streets again, finally coming to the hotel in which he had his room.

  A towel covering the keyhole, the blind down over the one narrow window, Joe Shupe put the bag on his bed and set about opening it. It was securely locked, but with his knife he attacked a leather side, making a ragged slit through which he looked into depths of green paper.

  “Holy hell!” his gasping mouth exclaimed. “All the money in the world!”

  II

  He straightened abruptly, listening, while his small brown eyes looked suspiciously around the room. Tiptoeing to the door, he listened again; unlocked the door quickly and flung it open; searched the dark hall. Then he returned to the black bag. Enlarging the opening, he dumped and raked his spoils out on the bed: a mound of gray-green paper—a bushel of it—neatly divided into little soft, paper-gartered bricks. Thousands, hundreds, tens, twenties, fifties! For a long minute he stood open-mouthed, spellbound, panting; then he hastily covered the pile of currency with one of the shabby gray blankets on the bed, and dropped weakly down beside it.