The Cutie (13 page)

That one surprised me. “A few weeks,” I said.

“You figuring to drop her?”

“No.” What the hell was he leading up to?

Grimes took over again. “Who was living with you before her?” he asked.

“Why?”

“I asked first,” he said.

I was confused as hell, and it took me a minute to think of the broad’s name. She was one of those big-breasted blondes, she looked like a million dollars and she was worth maybe fifteen cents in the rack. What the hell was her name? Then I thought of it. “Anita Merriwell,” I said. “A dancer at La Copla.”

“Before her?”

“How the hell do I know? Do you think I keep a goddam record?” This line of questioning didn’t make any sense at all. It didn’t seem to be going anywhere. I couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on, and when I can’t figure out what’s going on I get nervous. Unconsciously, I reached into my pocket for my cigarettes. I no sooner got them out than Grimes reached out and took the pack away from me. “Mind if I have a cigarette?” he asked me.

“Yes.”

“I know you’re kidding,” he said. He took a cigarette out of the pack, then took three more. “For later,” he explained. “You don’t mind, do you?”

“Yes,” I said.

One of the other cops came over. “I’d like to bum a smoke, too,” he said.

“Sure,” said Grimes. “Clay doesn’t mind.” He handed him the pack, and the guy took four and then carried it over to cop number three, who also took four cigarettes and then crumpled the pack and threw it into a corner.

Grimes grinned at me. “Sorry, Clay,” he said. “I guess they’re all gone. None left for you.”

“That’s okay,” I told him. “I’ve been trying to give them up for weeks.”

He lit one of my cigarettes and blew smoke in my face. The other two were also smoking, and none of them seemed to be inhaling. The room was a small one, and the windows were closed. It wouldn’t take long for the place to fill up with smoke.

“Let’s go back,” said Grimes. “You were telling me who you went with before Anita Merriwell.”

“I forget,” I said. “I forget them all, every goddam one of them.”

“That’s a pity,” said Grimes. “All those golden memories, all gone.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s sure rough.”

“Okay,” said Grimes. “Then let’s work our way forward. Who do you figure will be next? After—what did you say that girl’s name was?”

“Anita Merriwell.”

“No, no. I mean the new one.”

“I didn’t say.”

“Well, say now.”

“Ella.”

“Ella what?”

“Ella Cinders.”

“You’re cute,” said one of the other cops.

“I do my part,” I told him.

“Anyway,” said Grimes. “Who do you think will be next? After Ella?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t thought about it yet.”

“What about Betty?” he asked me. “Is she next? Or is she one of the old ones?”

I just sat there and looked at him. Betty? Who the hell was Betty? “I don’t know any Betty,” I said.

“Sure you do.”

I tried to think. Betty—Betty Benson? Mavis St. Paul’s old roommate? He couldn’t mean her, there wasn’t anything there that would interest a cop, and if I asked him about her we’d go off onto another line of questioning, one I wouldn’t particularly like.

Unless Betty Benson had called the cops on me, for some reason. Got suspicious after I left, called the cops, described me, told them I’d mentioned Grimes. It was a possibility, and not a very pleasant one. “What’s this Betty’s last name?” I asked.

“How many Bettys do you know?”

“None.”

“Come on, Clay,” said one of the other cops. “Quit playing around. We know you went to see her today. You left fingerprints all over the place. The coffee cup you used, everything.”

So it
was
Betty Benson. “I thought you said this didn’t have anything to do with Billy-Billy Cantell,” I said.

Now it was their turn to look surprised, and I knew I’d opened my mouth once too often. If I hadn’t been so damn tired, it never would have happened. They hadn’t made the connection before, and now the surprise on their faces was changing to pleasure. They thought they had me, and I still didn’t know what they thought they had me on.

One of the other cops snapped his fingers. “Betty Benson!” he said. “That was the St. Paul woman’s old roommate!”

“Well, well,” said Grimes. He looked at me and smiled. “So you wouldn’t cover for Billy-Billy Cantell, is that right? You don’t know where he is, is that right? If you see him, you’ll turn him over to the law, is that right?”

“She knew something,” said one of the other cops. He was getting excited. “She knew something, maybe saw Cantell, and he went to buy her off.” He looked at me. “Isn’t that right? She could make things rough for Cantell, so you went to pay her to keep her mouth shut, didn’t you?”

“You’re sick in the head,” I told him. “How could things be rougher for him than they already are? You don’t need anything more than you’ve got. You could convict him six times over without getting any more evidence than you have right now.”

“So what were you doing there?” Grimes asked me.

“I forget,” I said. I spent a second wondering when Clancy would get on the stick and spring me out of here. And then I took a second to wonder when Clancy would find me. Grimes wanted to hang something on me, but he must figure he wasn’t ready yet, he didn’t know enough yet, and he’d keep me in here, out of Clancy’s grip, until he did know enough. And since I was a hell of a lot cleaner than I usually am, that meant I just might be in there forever.

“Come on, Clay,” said Grimes. “You’ll tell us about it sooner or later. Why not make it easier on all of us, and tell us sooner?”

“I still don’t know what you want me to talk about,” I said. “I still don’t know what you dragged me in here for.”

“Why not just tell us about Betty Benson? Maybe the reason will suddenly occur to you.”

One of the other cops went behind me and got himself a drink of water. The water cooler went
gurgle-gurgle
again, and I thought about the fact that this room was small and hot and filling up with used cigarette smoke, and there wasn’t any air conditioning. I licked my lips. I was thirsty already. Why the hell couldn’t this have all happened in December instead of in August?

“Well, Clay?” said Grimes.

“Well what?”

“You went to see Betty Benson today, didn’t you?”

“Apparently she already told you I did,” I said. “So what?”

“What did you go there for?”

“I forget.”

“What time did you get there?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere around three-thirty.”

“And when did you leave?”

“Around four sometime.”

“So you were there for half an hour, is that right?”

“Something like that. Twenty minutes, half an hour.”

“You left at four o’clock, is that right?”

“Around there somewhere.”

“Okay,” he said. “That’ll do instead of a confession. Unless you’d like to give us a confession, too? We don’t really need it, but it would make things a lot simpler.”

“A confession to what? What the hell am I supposed to have done?” I was thinking back, trying to figure out what had happened. Betty Benson had threatened to call the police when I first showed up, but she’d seemed all right after that. And this didn’t seem to be any simple complaint of the he-forced-his-way-into-my-apartment variety.

“Let’s go sign you in,” said Grimes. “You’re going to be staying here for a while.”

“Listen, do you mind telling me just what the hell this is all about? What’s the goddam charge?”

“You can read over my shoulder,” he said. “Come along, little man. Your roaming days are through.”

So we walked back out to the desk, the four of us, where I was booked on suspicion of murder. The victim, Betty Benson. Time of death, approximately four o’clock this afternoon. And while I was still thinking that one over, I was led away to a little cell of my very own.

You’d expect a jail in the largest and most modern city in the world to be something just a little bit special. You know, chrome-plated bars and Hollywood beds and color TV in every cell and guards wearing space helmets. But I’m sorry to say I have to report that the New York City clink has not kept stride with civic pride. The bars are the same old things, heavy and black and rough on the hands, and everything else is made of metal plates, like the hull of a battleship, painted bright yellow. Metal floor, metal ceiling, metal walls, metal slab suspended from chains, this last some city administration joker’s idea of a bed. And everything clangs. They open a door way down at the other end of the corridor, and the clang runs through all the metal, sounding like somebody just hit a J. Arthur Rank gong right next to your ear.

Oh, it’s a lovely place.

And I spent nineteen hours in it. I was booked at six
P.M
., and the little blue men took me away to my own private cell, with no Hollywood bed and no TV. But there was plumbing, over in the corner next to the metal slab bed, and my first task as a ward of the city was to clean this plumbing, which needed it in a bad way. That isn’t my idea of a wild evening, believe me.

I signed in too late for supper (jugs are on the American Plan, meals included), so I didn’t get fed anything until the next morning. And I didn’t have a cellmate, of course. Most municipal clinks are one-man-cell operations, with a communal drunk tank off on another floor. Nor could I see any of my fellow boarders, since the cell across the corridor from me, the only one I could see into, was empty at the moment.

But there was a guy in the cell to my left, and we talked for a while, about this and that. He was old and stubbly, to judge from his wheezy voice, and we didn’t have a hell of a lot to talk about, since we both carefully avoided mention of what we were in for. So after a while we played checkers. The way you play checkers in the jug, when you can’t see your opponent, is simple. You take a piece of paper and mark out a checkerboard on it. The other guy does the same thing. Then you take twelve book matches and rip them in half. The halves with the head are your checkers and the other halves are the other guy’s checkers. You number all the squares on the board, starting with the top left and working across each row, and then you call out the moves to each other, from number such-and-such to number so-and-so.

This old boy must have spent his whole life in one-man-cells, because he played this blind checkers like a champion, and I only beat him once in the two hours we played. Of course, part of that was the fact that I was too tired to see by then. I should have gone to sleep right away, since this was the first time in a hell of a while that I’d had some time to myself, but I kept expecting Clancy to ride to the rescue, and I wasn’t looking forward to stretching out on that metal slab bed. But by eight o’clock, I just couldn’t keep my eyes open any more, so I said good night to the guy next door, and went beddy-bye.

Did you ever try to sleep on a metal slab covered with a thin Army blanket? For a man who’s used to the better things in life, like foam-rubber pillows and thick mattresses and female companionship in the rack, it’s one hell of a come-down. Not that I had any trouble sleeping. I was out the second I lay down.

Actually, I never expected to be asleep for very long. I assumed Clancy would be along to spring me any minute. It shouldn’t have been so very difficult to do. Clancy is an old pro at taking people out of jails, and I had now been booked all nice and legal, so there wasn’t any problem about his finding me. Under normal circumstances, I should have been out by ten o’clock at the latest.

So I went to sleep at eight, expecting to sleep for two hours at the most, and the next thing I knew it was six-thirty in the morning, and I was awake.

And
how
I was awake. They’ve got a great little system for waking the boarders up in jail. At six-thirty
A.M
., they simultaneously clang every door they can find. The resulting racket can be heard for miles. I came up off that metal mattress of mine like an acrobat off a trampoline. That is one hell of a way to wake up, and is enough to make anybody antisocial forever. No wonder so many cons are repeaters. That morning clang, the first time they’d been jailed, made them malcontents for life.

I stood shaking in the middle of the cell for a minute or two, trying to orient myself. All the yellow lights went on, and all the yellow metal walls and ceiling were bright and painful, and reverberations of that clang were still going through my head.

Six-thirty in the goddam morning, and I was still here. My ears were trembling, my eyes were blinking, my hands were shaking, and my stomach was practicing judo holds with my liver. Besides that, my back hurt, my head ached, and my mouth had been filled with green mold from last week’s bread.

And, to top it all off, a guard who’ll get his in the afterlife brought me something he claimed was breakfast. It came in a metal tray, and the tray was cold. Things in metal trays are always the same temperature as the tray. The things in this tray were three soggy pancakes floating in some watered imitation maple syrup, and a scrawny apple. An apple!

It’s an indication of how low I’d fallen in only twelve and a half hours that I ate the whole trayful, including the apple. Then I sat down on the plumbing to listen to my stomach bitch at me for a while, and I cursed Clancy Marshall up, down, and sideways.

The geezer next door wanted to play some more checkers, but I wasn’t in the mood. I spent the morning thinking nasty thoughts.

I won’t tell you what lunch was like. But I will tell you I ate every bite of it, every scurvy bite of it. And then I thought some more nasty thoughts.

When the guard came at one o’clock and unlocked my cell door (clang!), I had to restrain myself from hugging the bastard. I walked down that shiny yellow corridor in that people-zoo, and through a couple of doors, and I was a more or less free man, with my wallet back and everything.

Clancy was waiting for me out by the desk, but I wasn’t ready to talk to Clancy yet. Clancy or anybody else.

“Ed wants to see you, keed,” he said, smiling that hit-me smile of his.