The Kind One (2 page)

“Danny, even if I was nuts enough to risk my life for a fucking monkey, how far do you think we’d get? You don’t just drive away from Bud Seitz and that’s the end of it. And another thing. Where’s your sense of fucking gratitude? Bud’s took real good care of you ever since you got hit in the head. You’d be selling apples on a street corner if it wasn’t for him. And you know I ain’t saying that to hurt your feelings.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I know.”

I stood there a minute and thought about things; then I started walking toward the door.

“Danny, where you going?” Dick sounded worried.

“I’m coming back.”

I went in the party room, went over to the table where the cupcakes were. I took one and wrapped it in a napkin and put it in the side pocket of my coat.

I went back in the billiard room. Doc was still playing around with the balls.

“You were bad, Doc,” I said. “Real bad.”

Doc looked over at me. He whimpered and twisted his lips around on his teeth. I held my hand out and then he leapt into my arms.

“Let’s go for a little walk, Doc.”

I walked out of the house carrying Doc, with Dick walking behind us. I said softly into Doc’s ear: “Did Goodlooking Tommy kick you? One of these day’s I’m gonna kick Goodlooking Tommy.” Doc had this strong musky smell I liked; I always liked the way animals smelled even when it was kind of bad like a dirty dog that had been rained on but I didn’t always like the way people smelled.

When we got outside I put Doc down. Bud had a big two-story Spanish house with tall palm trees all around it. It was set on a lot of property; there was a swimming pool and a pool house and a tennis court and then a garden with all sorts of plants and flowers and thick green grass and everything was surrounded by a tall stone wall that had barbed wire spiraling along the top of it.

I held Doc’s hand and we walked out into the night. It was cold enough that our breath was making clouds. I could hear Dick behind us coughing every now and then; he coughed a lot because he smoked one cigarette after another. The swimming pool had lights under the water and was blue and still and frozen-looking. Bud had had sand hauled in to make a beach around the pool. The beach had its own seagull, tethered to a big rock by a ten-foot length of cord tied to its leg. The seagull seemed asleep.

We walked on past the tennis court and then out on the grass and among the flowers.

“Let’s stop here,” said Dick.

I looked back at the house. On a second-floor balcony, silhouetted against the light from his bedroom, Bud Seitz was standing. He was like a shape cut out of a sheet of black paper. I could see the burning tip of his cigar.

“I’ll do it,” Dick said.

A breeze was blowing in the tops of the palm trees and they were making rustling sounds and moving against the clear, brightly starred sky. Doc was looking up at me, waiting patiently, on his best behavior now, wondering what I was up to.

I squatted down beside him and said: “Look what I got for
you
.” He watched me as I took the cupcake out of my pocket and unwrapped it from the napkin then he took it from me eagerly and started to eat it. He was making little happy grunts. He had a real sweet tooth.

I looked up at Dick, standing a step or two behind Doc. He looked like he was about to be sick. He took out his .32 revolver from under his coat. I stood up and took a step back. Dick leaned over and put the barrel of the gun a few inches from the back of Doc’s head. Then the gun spurted orange light and Doc pitched forward facedown onto the grass.

He wasn’t quite dead yet. I saw his hands pulling at the grass. And then Dick leaned down and finished him off.

   “Quit blubbering,” said Dick. “If the guys seen you carrying on like this…” He shook his head darkly.

We were in Dick’s car. He was taking me to my hotel. After we’d buried Doc, we went back in the house and I grabbed a bottle of Johnny Black and guzzled about half of it. Then I went kind of nuts and started stumbling around and yelling that we shouldn’t have done it and it was pure murder and Dick had hustled me out of there and into his car. We went down La Brea then left on Hollywood Boulevard.

It was the middle of the night, and Hollywood seemed unpopulated, except for a few shivering whores and some bums sleeping under Hoover blankets. Pretty soon we pulled up in front of the Rutherford Hotel.

The lobby was empty. The elevator boy was some old geezer that looked about ninety. “What floor?” he said.

He was wearing a too-small blue uniform, and he had a huge red and yellow boil on his forehead that looked like it was about ready to pop. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. He knew what I was looking at, and he started getting mad.
“What floor?”
he nearly yelled.

“Eight,” I said. “I live on the eighth floor.”

He scowled at me and spat some tobacco juice into a spattered Chase & Sanborn coffee can then took us up.

We went in room 807 and I went in the bathroom and pissed and puked then came back and flopped on the bed. Dick was standing with his hands in his pockets looking bleakly out the window.

“This is a crummy hotel,” he said. “In a crummy town. On a crummy night.”

“I’m moving as soon as I can find something. Bud gave me a raise.”

“Yeah? Great.
You
get a raise. That’s rich.”

He walked over to the bed and untied my shoes and took them off. They made clunking noises as he dropped them on the floor.

“I’m leaving now, kid. Sleep it off. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Don’t leave yet. Tell me something.”

“Like what?”

“Tell me about why they call me Two Gun Danny.”

Dick sighed. “Ah, Danny…it’s three o’clock in the fucking morning.”

“Come on, Dick. Please.”

Dick shook his head but at the same time he lit up a cigarette so I knew he wasn’t going.

“You, me, and a couple other of the boys—one night we drove down to Long Beach. We took a water taxi out to the
Monfalcone
. It was one of them gambling boats. It was out past the three-mile limit, so it was all strictly legit.”

“But what we were gonna do—that wasn’t legit.”

“That’s right. We was on a heist job. We was gonna heist the dealers and the customers and we heard there was a safe with a hundred fifty G’s in it and we was gonna heist that too. But that wasn’t all.”

“We were gonna sink it. Sink the
Monfalcone
.”

“You wanna tell the fucking story? Yeah, that’s right. We was gonna set it on fire and sink it ’cause Bud had a beef with the owner. And we didn’t care if everybody on it drowned like rats.

“The main gambling room was the greatest place in the world. It had green carpet and chandeliers, and roulette wheels and dice tables and slot machines, and all the customers was dressed up like a million bucks. And the dames was all gorgeous, all of ’em looked like Ginger Rogers. Dozens and dozens of Ginger Rogers.”

“Too bad we had to burn it up,” I mumbled. “Too bad we had to sink it.”

“Yeah, too bad. But orders is orders. So we was taking a little look-see at things when you got recognized by some muscle that worked for the boat and he started to take his piece out. But you slugged him in the jaw and knocked him colder than a mackerel and grabbed his piece and pulled out your own piece and jumped up on a blackjack table and yelled: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this here’s a heist!’”

I was lying flat on my back, with my eyes closed. The room was spinning around me like a roulette wheel. Dick’s voice seemed to be coming from further and further away.

“Then all these guys come running in the room, some of ’em had sawed-offs and some of ’em had pistols and you was screaming that they was dirty sons of bitches and blazing away at ’em with a gun in each hand.”

Two Gun Danny. Then I couldn’t hear Dick anymore. I was in endless night, floating on a raft on an infinite sea. And the water was filled with floundering Ginger Rogerses in golden gowns. And they were in danger of drowning, but I welcomed them on my raft, one and all.

   I DROVE THROUGH Hollywood in my yellow ’33 Packard Club sedan on a sunny Monday morning. I passed a church with a sign in front that said: “The eyes of the Lord are everywhere.” I had to slow down when a baseball bounced out on the street in front of me; a kid ran out after it and as he bent down to pick it up he looked up at me and I felt this sort of shiver like I’d lived through this before, except the kid with the tousled hair chasing the brownish battered ball was me, and the guy behind the wheel of the Packard was…
who
? Then the kid ran off and I felt like me again and drove on.

I turned down La Vista Lane. It was a little street of modest pale houses and skinny palm trees south of Melrose and east of Vine. I parked in front of the Orange Blossom Bungalow Court. A sprinkler was going and made a rainbow over the sloping lawn. I climbed seven steps to a sidewalk that ran straight back from the street between identical tan tiny stucco houses, four on each side, facing each other across a courtyard. The courtyard had a couple of dwarf orange trees loaded with green half-grown oranges.

I knocked on the door of the first bungalow on the left. Edna Dean opened the door. She was the Orange Blossom Bungalow Court manager. She had a long face with a sharp chin and she wore glasses with wire frames. She smiled and showed a set of teeth that were way too bright and perfect to be real.

“Oh hi, Danny. I got the place all ready for you. Let me get the key.”

A sour smell wafted out the door. I assumed Mr. Dean was in there somewhere. When I was here before, he never said a word, but just sat in a chair with a filthy blanket over his lap. A fly was buzzing around the room, and Mr. Dean followed it with his watery blue eyes. He needed a shave, and he smelled like he hadn’t had a bath in weeks. Mrs. Dean explained that he’d been laid up for the last few years after an accident at a mackerel cannery in San Pedro. He looked baffled as he watched the fly, like he couldn’t figure out how his life had come to such a pass that he didn’t have anything better to do than watch a fly buzzing around.

Mrs. Dean came back out. She was wearing a drab dress that hung on her like a gunnysack and she had booze on her breath. “Nice day, isn’t it? I hope you like it here. It’s a pretty nice group of people, I guess, but they come and they go. You’ve come. You’ll go. Just don’t have any wild parties or play your radio too loud and we’ll get along just fine.”

We headed up the sidewalk.

“Did you hear about Dillinger?” she said. “It was just on the radio. They had him and his gang cornered in Wisconsin, but they all escaped in a blaze of gunfire. They killed one federal agent and an innocent bystander. I’m just scared to death of gangsters. Nobody’s safe these days.”

A little girl, maybe ten or eleven, was squatting on the sidewalk, drawing hopscotch squares with a piece of chalk.

“Hi, Sophie,” said Mrs. Dean. “Meet your new neighbor, Mr. Landon. Danny, this is Sophie Gubler.”

The girl winced. “You
said
it.”

“Said what?”

“My
last name
. You know I hate it.”

“Oh Sophie, there’s not a thing wrong with your last name. Gubler’s a perfectly fine name.”

The girl winced again.

“What would you like your last name to be?” I asked.

She liked that question. “Well in school we studied this French queen, she told her people to eat cake so they cut off her head. Her name was Marie Antoinette.”

“You’d like to be Sophie Antoinette?”

She shrugged. Her knees were poking up from under her cheap print dress and were scraped up pretty good and blotched red with Mercurochrome. I said: “What happened to your knees?”

“I was skating down the street and this dope opened his car door right in front of me. What happened to your leg?”

“My leg?”

“Yeah. I saw you limping on your leg. You hurt it or something?”

“Sophie,” frowned Mrs. Dean, “that’s a personal question.”

“My
knees
are personal. He asked me about my
knees
.”

“I got hit in the head. With a lead pipe. See?”

I took my hat off and inclined my head. Sophie stood up to get a better look at my dent. “Gosh. And you got hit in the leg too?”

“Nah. But it mashed my brain, and it made it so’s my left leg and my left arm don’t work so hot anymore. But they’re getting better.”

Sophie nodded, looking me over, not feeling sorry for me, just interested. But Mrs. Dean looked embarrassed. “Let’s go, Danny,” she said quietly.

We walked on toward my bungalow, the last one on the right. In front of the third on the right a guy was kneeling and weeding in front of a carefully tended flower bed. He was wearing brown trousers, a loose white shirt, a big sombrero, and gardening gloves. A black and white cat was keeping him company. He gave us a friendly, gap-toothed grin over his shoulder as we walked by.

“That’s Mr. Dulwich,” said Mrs. Dean as she nodded at him genteelly. “An Englishman. A real gentleman, too. I’ve had nary a lick of trouble from Mr. Dulwich.”

Mrs. Dean unlocked the door of my bungalow and we went in. She looked around the living room with a pleased expression. “I had a nigger named Matilda spend the whole day cleaning in here. You could eat off the floor if you wanted to. Because nobody cleans like Matilda.” Then she gave me the key. “Well this is yours now. If you need anything you know where to find me. Do you play checkers by any chance?”

“Checkers?”

“My husband loves checkers with a passion. If you ever feel like a game, just come on over. And I’ll pour you a cup of jackass brandy to boot.”

“Okay, Mrs. Dean. Thanks.”

She left. The key was cool in my hand. I was all alone in my little bungalow. I thought it not bad for forty bucks a month.

One reason I took it was, it was furnished, with some battered mismatched odds and ends. I sat down on a tattered black davenport. I took my hat off and placed it down beside me, then sat there with my hands on my knees trying to remember if I knew how to play checkers. Red and black squares. Take your jump. Crown me. Yes. I knew how to play checkers.