Sneaky People: A Novel (12 page)

Buddy looked and saw twenties and tens.

“Whatjuh do, rob a bank?”

“Pinochle.”

“Tell you what,” said Buddy. “I’ll take a look. You just give me a minute.”

He returned to the office and opened the lowest drawer in the right-hand pedestal of the desk, intending to put the gun in his pocket, for purposes of protection, not revenge. He believed that in dealing with Ballbacher he was skating on thin ice. He saw him now as a warped individual and not as the straightforward adversary who had dropped him with Saturday’s sucker punch.

But the pistol was not in the drawer. Buddy ransacked the rest of the desk and then searched Leo’s, because he remembered that he had been disarmed by his salesmen and supposed that Leo, either ignorant of its proper home or with an idea of making it unavailable for sudden passionate uses, had stowed the weapon elsewhere. That would be like Leo, the man of reason. But neither was it in Leo’s desk.

Buddy burst into the garage, where Clarence, having poured some sand onto an oil spill, was watching it turn dark before applying his broom. On Monday mornings he always spruced up his shop.

“All right,” Buddy said fearlessly, though he knew Clarence was armed, “you just give me that gun.”

Clarence took his weight off the broom handle. “I ain’t got no gun.”

Buddy decided on diplomacy. “Listen, that deal we got, I don’t want you to use a gun, see. You got the wrong idea.”

The statement caused Clarence to smile enigmatically.

Buddy said: “You just turn it over. It ain’t healthy for you.”

Clarence sighed, dropped the broom, and raised his arms. He had been frisked many times by the police, who often stopped him capriciously in his neighborhood after dark. These searches, which were never explained, invariably proved futile. The cop’s apology generally took the form of slapping Clarence on the rump and saying: “You just keep clean.”

Clarence spread his legs to make his crotch accessible, because a professional frisk went that high, though how there’d be room in there for a gun or knife along with your cock was beyond him.

Buddy at first backed away in the idea that the ex-boxer was threatening him with a bear hug, but he now got the idea.

“I don’t figure you got it on you. You got it hid someplace.” He scanned the garage in an abstract fashion. Already he had abandoned his suspicion. Facing Clarence, seeing his dead eye, he could not seriously believe him capable of guile.

The Negro lowered his arms and spoke in a tone so sympathetic that, if he had not been a moron, it might have been taken as irony: Buddy was always alert to that note. “Somebody done stole your gun?”

“Humh,” Buddy grunted, disposing of the matter. He started away. “You was going to give me some money,” said Clarence.

Buddy stopped and said without turning: “I was gonna stick it in your coat pocket hanging on a nail.” He whirled around. “You got to remember details like that.”

“I remember,” said Clarence, bending to pick up his broom, “but I never saw you do it yet.” Erect again, he pointed to a dark garment hanging in the corner above an oil drum full of sand. “That there is the coat, in case you was looking for it.”

“I wasn’t,” Buddy said tartly. “I was looking for my pistol, and a while back I was looking for Leo, and you couldn’t do me no good with either.” He made a sudden decision. “Listen, I can’t give you that money till just before the job.”

“Shit then,” said Clarence.

Buddy marched up and stuck a finger in his face. “You get your fucking ass out of here.” He was fuming. “You ain’t got a deal, and you ain’t even got a job pushing that broom. I don’t take that kind of talk from anybody I pay.”

Clarence stood his ground, and when Buddy stopped shouting for a moment, he said earnestly but not obsequiously: “I never said shit on
you
. What I says was shit for me if I don’t get no money ahead, for killing ain’t like taking a tire off a wheel, specially when it come to killing somebody you ain’t got nothing against.”

Buddy was arrested by this speech of unprecedented length.

“So,” Clarence concluded, “I will sure go away if that’s what you want, on account of you is the boss and this here is your property and no mistake.” He meant the broom, and handed it at Buddy, who did not take it but stared at him for a while.

Then Buddy made a barking laugh. “Clarence, I never thought you couldn’t take a joke.” He even clapped the ex-boxer on the shoulder, the first time he had ever touched him. It was like striking stone: he felt only the huge cap, large as a baby’s head. “The deal is still on, and you’ll get your cash. Jesus, I forgot my customer.” He turned and trotted to the office.

Through the window he saw that Ballbacher was still standing obediently where he had been left.

Buddy went outside. “It turns out we got just what you’re looking for, my friend. It’s your lucky day.”

“My lucky day,” Ballbacher repeated, but his voice was lugubrious.

“It’s over here.” Buddy started down the nearest aisle between the cars, but stopped when he heard no following footsteps on the blacktop. Ballbacher was still in place.

“Let’s take a look at that phaeton,” said Buddy. “It’s in the back row.”

Ballbacher put his hand to his mouth and pushed the lower lip almost to his nose. He dropped his fingers and looked belligerently at Buddy.

“What am I doing here? My kid needs an operation. My wife’d kill me if I drove up in somepin like that.” He now changed his expression, showing Buddy a vulnerable look of dilated eyes. “I been playing pinochle all night and drinking white lightning from a jug.” He shrugged and walked staunchly away, no suggestion of alcohol in his stride.

“Come again, sir,” said Buddy to the receding back. He felt as if a burden had been lifted from his own.

The pencil factory’s noon whistle sounded from across town. Where the hell was Leo? Buddy went inside and picked up the phone.

Leo answered on the first ring.

“Leo,” said Buddy, “what in the hell are you doing?”

Leo’s voice had a weird energy though what he said was reasonable enough. “I got up real early and took your money to the office. I put the night-deposit key on top the medicine chest in the toilet.”

“You did the right thing,” Buddy said hastily. He was on the defensive. “I made a couple sales I forgot to write up. I ain’t been feeling up to snuff lately. Hey, that crazy sonbitch Ballbacher showed up again this morning and pulled the same stunt again.” Buddy laughed hollowly. “I kept my head this time.”

Leo said: “I been thinking about it ever since the undertaker came, and I—”

“What undertaker?”

“—finally saw through your trick. I don’t know how I was so dumb all along, but when a man is left all alone in the world he sees things he didn’t suspect when he had somebody to take care of.”

“Huh?”

“Yeah,” said Leo.

“Undertaker?”

“All the years I worked for you I never even borrowed a quarter to eat at the Greek’s from the petty cash. So somebody put his mitts in the cashbox, and you don’t suspect the pansy or the coon, no. You set your trap for Leo.”

“Trap?”

“Count those bills, you skunk. You won’t find a dollar missing.”

“Jesus, Leo,” Buddy said. “It’s beginning to dawn on me.” He spoke intensely through pursed lips. “This is the damnedest thing imaginable. I assure you, one, nobody’s got sticky fingers around the lot, so, two, I wasn’t ever laying a trap for anybody, most of all you, who are honest as the day is long, which is why you got the only other key to the box, so nobody can get in there but me ‘n’ you. You handle all Jack’s cash, him being part-time, as you are well aware. But…”

Buddy cleared his throat and began an effort to turn the tide. “All things being equal like the fellow says, I don’t mind telling you you hurt my feelings plenty with your nutty goddam theory, because if a man’s close associates don’t trust him he travels under a cloud in this world of ours. I always took you for a man of integrity, Leo, and I always thought the feeling was mutual.”

Leo was suspiciously silent.

Buddy said: “Leo, are you still there?”

Leo screamed into the phone: “You, of all people, to cast aspersions on my character. You filthy dirty pig with all your whores.” He laughed cruelly. “I know about every one: Mary Wentworth and Plum’s wife and that blonde on Myrtle just off Chandler.”

Buddy was not inclined to panic under this sort of attack, which after all was flattering.

“Now Leo, this ain’t like you,” he said quietly. “You’ve always been a squareshooter.”

“And the Dago woman at the Motor Vehicle Bureau, and that redhead who gives manicures in the barbershop of the Stinson Hotel downtown—and I could name a dozen more but I won’t. You are steeped in evil.”

Buddy said: “I can tell you’re worked up in some kinda mood where you won’t listen to reason, Leo. The facts of the case is you’re acting like a woman driver, wandering all over the road. I don’t mind telling you, I wouldn’t take this from anybody else of the male race, but for the fact I have known you for years, and this is the first time I can recall you have a wild hair in your ass.”

“You make a mockery of womanhood,” said Leo, his voice breaking.

Buddy essayed a wisecrack: he was really getting tired of Leo. “Well sir, being a man, how is it any skin off your rump?”

“Your wife is a mother,” said Leo. Buddy was startled to receive what sounded like a Bronx cheer, blown directly into the phone. For an instant he believed this whole thing was a hoax, though Leo had always been humorless. But, with Leo going on to make the identifiable gasps of weeping, Buddy realized he had heard not a mock salute but a burst of grief.

Putting this together with the cryptic reference to the undertaker, Buddy said gravely: “Leo, tell me if I’m wrong, but has there been a death in your family? I hope and trust it’s not your mom.”

Leo screamed: “Don’t soil her name on your slimy lips!” And hung up.

As to Leo’s knowing about his girls Buddy was unconcerned. He lived comfortably in the truth that a reputation such as his evoked jealousy from men and attracted women. No, what he worried about was his gun. Raving with grief, whatever its cause—he had not answered the question about his mother—Leo might be planning to blow out his brains.

Buddy hastily turned all the locks, got into his car, and accelerated in the direction of Leo’s house, without a word to Clarence, who, not permitted to use the office toilet, was urinating into the drain in the center of the garage floor, his broad back discreetly turned to the open entrance.

B
IGELOW THE GROCER
was a large, bald man in an apron that was smudged from toting cartons from the cellar. He used his big belly a lot, not only as a prop for burdens but also as a kind of threat to smaller customers. He pushed it now at Ralph; it was restrained by the edge of the counter.

“What can I do you for?” He seemed altogether neutral, neither smiling nor projecting any menace but his abdomen, which after all was merely dumb flesh. Ralph was anyway inclined to trust fat people.

Speaking levelly himself, Ralph said: “You know Horace Hauser who delivers for you, well, he can’t come to work any more. I don’t know why, maybe he’s sick or something or his folks won’t let him, but he said I could take his place if it was all right with you. If you don’t believe me, you can call him up.” Ralph flushed and rubbed his head. “Well, no, I guess you can’t do that because they haven’t got a phone. Anyway, I’m not lying.”

Bigelow stared at him for a time, then lowered the bald head and pushed the meaty face across the counter. “He wasn’t worth a good goddam, that little snot. He was always into the loose candy or stinking up the crapper.” He threw his fat hand towards an open door at the rear, through which could be seen the beginning of a flight of descending steps, presumably to the basement. Ralph was happy to hear there was a toilet on the premises; they weren’t easy to find when you were out.

“I don’t mind Number One if nature calls,” said Bigelow. “But I say you oughta take your dumps at home except in unusual circumstances.” He put on a pious expression. “Like if you was sick.”

“I agree with that,” said Ralph.

Bigelow turned mocking. “Oh you do, do you? You think all there is to the job is how you act about the toilet?”

“Well, no, I don’t—” Ralph was talking to himself, Bigelow having left abruptly, and very swiftly for a man of his bulk, at the tinkle of the bell over the entrance. Before the customer, a middle-aged woman wearing a green hat, had closed the door, he was in position at the top of the counter. As she marched along, he kept parallel stride behind the glass candy case, which was neck-high, his face towards her and beaming in expectancy.

When he reached the clearing where the cash register and scales were mounted, he flushed Ralph from the area with a scowl, and the woman entered the gap, spitefully thumping her purse upon the counter.

“Well, Harry,” said she, “here I am again, a glutton for punishment.” She opened her handbag and snatched from it a fragment of paper.

“What can I do you for today, Miz Hugel? Got some fresh eggs just in from the farm, still warm from the hens.”

“I
bet
they are,” said Mrs. Hugel. “And you break ’em in a pan and you’ll have fried chicken. Harry, your eggs wasn’t even fresh last year when they was first put in cold storage, you old horse thief. The only reason I step in here is I’m too lazy to get to the A and P, so I keep making you rich.”

“Show me a fellow at the A and P though who is fresh as me,” said Bigelow. “If I thought the wife wouldn’t catch me, I’d ask you out.” He bunched his lips and simpered at her.

“Why, you old goat!” Mrs. Hugel said, cackled merrily, and with both hands adjusted her hat, which was decorated with artificial cherries. “You’d order one soda and two straws: that’d be your idea of a date, you tinhorn.”

Up to this point Ralph had believed she spoke with genuine ill will, and because he recognized her from church, where she sang contralto in the choir, had continued to back away in embarrassment. Now that he understood the joking nature of the exchange, he stepped forward and said: “Hi, Mrs. Hugel.” Then, in response to her frown, he added: “Ralph Sandifer.”

Her brow cleared. “Oh hi, Ralph. I’m getting blind as a bat these days. My, you’re shooting right up there. Say, are you still in the junior choir?”

“No, ma’am, not since my voice changed.”

She continued to nod amiably at him. “I figured that. Well, what are you doing over in this neck of the woods?” She cocked her head at Bigelow and said: “You sure didn’t come this far for a bargain.”

Bigelow, perhaps jealous at the loss of attention, said quickly: “He’s my delivery boy.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Ralph.

“Your dad’s business going under, so he put you out to work?” asked Mrs. Hugel.

The edge of nastiness probably meant nothing. Ralph was aware that women of her age were often sarcastic for no apparent reason; it seemed to go with their hats and what was called middle-aged spread.

“No, ma’am. I always have some kind of job.”

“It’s good for a boy to make his own spending money, I think,” she said, as if in argument. “My Clyde started his paper route when he was twelve. Some said, my, that’s child labor, but he never suffered for it and by time he was eighteen he had a hundred and eleven dollars in the bank, and that ain’t hay. He learned the value of money, I say.”

“He still bookkeeping at the pencil factory?” Ralph asked politely.

“He
certainly
is,” said Mrs. Hugel, again with the cryptic defiance, which may have been just a personal quirk of style. She turned to Bigelow and said belligerently: “Gimme a bunch of your bananas and try to include a few that ain’t all black.”

Bigelow winked at her. “Sure thing, Toots.”

“And just keep a civil tongue in your head.”

When Mrs. Hugel had left, Bigelow led Ralph to the cellar and directed him to bring certain cartons upstairs. Ralph discreetly looked for and saw the window he had busted Saturday night. It was masked with a piece of cardboard. The broken glass had been taken away.

“Whenever you ain’t got no deliveries to go on,” said the grocer, “you make yourself useful down here. I don’t wanna see you standing around with your finger up your rear end.” He leered at Ralph. “You got muscle enough to handle these babies?” He lifted a carton of Carnation Milk and thrust it at Ralph, who taking a deep breath managed to accept it without plunging to his knees, though it was so heavy that he did not dare speak in answer lest his chin collapse.

Bigelow said, chuckling: “You get ruptured, it ain’t my responsibility.” In a bit of grandstanding he seized two of the cartons for himself and clumped up the stairs. Like so many fat men he was extremely strong, yet Ralph believed that someone as tall and wide, but without the belly, could probably take him.

Had Ralph been alone he might have rested the box against the stair railing about halfway up—he was getting old and out of condition—but knowing that unless he followed hard upon Bigelow’s heels the grocer would needle him, he climbed onward, trying the method of breath control advanced in the pamphlet he had bought by mail on
The Secrets of Oriental Self-Defense
, the only useful technique explained therein (unless you were attacked by an adversary armed with a Samurai sword or a sharpened bamboo stave). Before long he sensed that he was turning purple, but two steps from the top he got a psychological boost from noticing that Bigelow’s pace had slowed considerably.

Emerging into the store, Bigelow coughed and lowered his burdens, really dropped them, in the middle of the floor. In relief Ralph placed his carton atop the other two. He was adjacent to the meat department. Working with a cleaver at the butcher’s block was a much younger man than Bigelow. He had sandy hair and wore a bloodstained apron, also a dirty-white overseas cap.

He gave Ralph a merry grin and said: “Hi, Small Change. Your breath is coming in short pants.” He crashed his cleaver into a hunk of meat, and from the latter fell a clean pork chop, suddenly taking form as it were; a neat thing to see.

Ralph immediately took to this friendly, deft fellow. After he caught his breath he said: “I’m working here now after school.”

“I got eyes,” the butcher said in his jolly-snotty way. “What happened to Horse? He flush himself down the kibo?” He cut two more chops and added them to the first, weighed the trio, tore a length of brown paper from the roll mounted on the counter, wrapped them, and tied the parcel with string from a ball on a spindle, going through this series in what seemed one continuous motion, finally slapping the package down and writing the price upon it with a black crayon.

“Catch,” he cried and tossed the parcel at Ralph, who luckily was far enough away to react efficiently before it reached him. “Miz Slingerland, two twenty-eight Randolph. Know the neighborhood?”

“I can find it,” said Ralph. “Should I go right now?”

“Well, I think so,” the butcher said, winking, “unless you want to go in the icebox and beat your dummy.” He was a real joker.

Before Ralph got to the door Bigelow called to him: “Hey, where you headed? C’mere. You always check, see, if there’s other stuff to go.” He threw some final items in a big bag already quite full and pushed it at Ralph. “Hummel, one ninety-four Constance.” He claimed from behind his ear the pencil that he wore there and handed it over. “Write-um down until you got-um memorized. That Hauser used to get-um all messed up.” He put out his hand. “And gimme that new pencil back. You get yourself a stub from Red.” He pointed to the meat department. Ralph started back the aisle, but Bigelow said: “Not now. When you come back. Get going and step on it. You got a bike I hope.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then you oughta be fast. I don’t pay you to stop and jaw with nobody or watch them put out a fire. Hauser would go around the corner and stay an hour. He wadn’t worth a fart in a windstorm. Keep your nose clean and you’ll do awright.” Bigelow suddenly and for the first time smiled: he wasn’t the world’s worst.

“Sure thing.”

The grocer returned to his habitual ill humor. “Get going then, for Pete’s sake.”

When Ralph returned from these deliveries, which owing to his unfamiliarity with the neighborhood took him longer than he had anticipated, Bigelow, waiting on several customers at once, took time to cock an eye at the wall clock and grumble, then pointed to two big sacks and a cardboard carton. These turned out to be loaded to capacity with cans and clinking bottles and displayed crayoned addresses. They were too much for the front basket on Ralph’s bike, and he had not yet bought the rear one suggested by Hauser, because he had not known whether he would get the job.

Eventually he balanced the carton across the rim of the basket—it was too large to fit within—and straddling the frame of the bicycle, holding a bag in the crook of each elbow, clutching the handlebars, he walked the vehicle to the first address, passing en route two kids he knew, who derided him.

His satisfaction in having dealt successfully with the problem now went out of memory: he realized he must cut a preposterous figure and could only hope he met no attractive girls before he had got rid of his load. His luck held in that respect, though failing him in another. At the next corner he met that Margie, who came along the intersecting street.

She proceeded to exploit her unusual opportunity. “You just let me,” she said triumphantly, and wrested the bag from his left elbow, which was too weary to resist. She hugged it ardently against the flat chest of her mud-brown blouse.

“You’re gonna get it if there’re eggs in there,” Ralph said disagreeably, feeling against his will an enormous easing of the muscles of his free arm. However, he was off center now, and had to correct quickly so as not to favor his right side, on which he held yet another sack. This movement unsettled the so carefully placed carton on the basket: it began to slide leftwards.

“You sap!” he cried at Margie, leaned over the handlebars to arrest the box, and inadvertently turned the front wheel to the wrong side. The heavy carton slid off the tilted basket, past his grasping fingers, and hit the sidewalk with a heart-and bottle-breaking sound. He watched Coke foam on the pavement, and then the slower oleaginous formation of spilled cream. The ketchup bottle was also broken, but its torpid contents did not escape the vessel, remaining an integral mass of red paste and glass.

He assailed the buttinsky. “Goddam, you stupid twerp! Lookit that.”

Margie did as ordered, water appearing behind her lenses, which, Ralph also noticed, were dirty.

Her thin lips quivering in shame, she said: “I’ll pay the damages.” She wept silently but made snuffling noises when the tears reached her nostrils. Actually her nose was well shaped, and its skin was nice too, without blackheads or enlarged pores. The pimples on her cheeks were really the ruins of old ones, pale-violet blemishes. Brushing her hair once in a while would help. It looked clean enough but ratty.

“Here, hold this bike,” Ralph ordered, gave her the remaining bag as well, climbed out of the frame, and knelt to see what he could do about the mess. Only the bottles he had seen from above were smashed. Two other Cokes had survived. A can of tomatoes was dented, a loaf of Taystee Bread bent. Cream covered one end of a package of meat.

“Gimme your handkerchief if you’ve got one.”

Behind the bags she said: “I don’t.” The bike was leaning against her hip and looked unreliable. Ralph rose and took it to a telephone pole; its backstand was broken.

“You can put the sacks down now if you want,” said he. Luckily he kept his eye on her. “No, not in that dog dirt!”

She came away from the curb. “I don’t mind holding them, really.”

He got out his own handkerchief, which had stayed fresh and pressed all day, and cleaned the sheen of cream from the meat parcel. He balled the soiled cloth and returned it to his rear pocket. He put the carton right side up and agitated it so that the contents would settle. Whoever opened those Cokes during the next hour would spatter their ceiling. He carried the box to the bicycle.