The Neon Jungle (6 page)

“Do what? Do what?”

“Come in here and try to make a killing without the money to back your losses. Nobody gets away with that. I think, Lockter, you better take your absurd friend over in a corner and tell him the facts of life.”

Rick went over into a corner with Vern. Vern said, “My God, you played stupid! I thought you knew. Hell, I’ll toss in my two-fifty, but that isn’t going to help much. What have you got on you?”

“Fifty-two dollars, Vern. Honest.”

“Don’t you know who that guy is?”

“I forget his name.”

“Karshner. They call him the Judge. He’s never been any judge. He works for a very big guy in this town. The biggest. Karshner snaps his fingers and some boys come take you out and bury you in quick lime, Rick. Get your hands off me and stop blubbering.”

“What am I going to do?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you’ll get a break. Maybe they’ll just put you in the hospital for a long stay.”

“Why? It was a mistake. I didn’t know. Why?”

“Just as a lesson to somebody else who might try the same thing. I told you this was a rough game. If you’d won, you’d have taken the money, wouldn’t you?”

“No. Just what I was playing for.”

“You expect me to believe that?”

“It’s the truth. Honest to God.”

“You stay here. I’ll go try to talk to him. It isn’t going to do any good, but I’ll try.”

“Vern. You got to get me out of this. You got to.”

“Stop sniveling.”

He stood in the dark corner near a billiard table and watched Vern walk back toward the cone of bright white light over the green table and sit down. He couldn’t hear what was said. Suddenly the four men got up and walked out of the room, leaving Vern sitting there. Rick heard their voices, heard one of them laugh as they went down the stairs. Rick went cautiously back to the table.

“What… what did they say?”

“Oh, shut up!”

“Vern, you got to tell me.”

“Sure. I’ll tell you. I brought you here. So whatever you get, I get too, you dumb son. They think I was in on it.”

“But I’ll tell them it was just me.”

“Do you think they’d believe anything we say? Not a chance.”

“What are they going to do?”

“I’ll tell you what they said. They said we should sit tight. They know where to find us. They’ve got an idea. It seems that there’s some friend of theirs needs a little help. If he can use us, then we can work it off that way. If not…” Vern shrugged.

“If not, what?”

“They send some experts around, Rick. Guys who know how to three-quarter kill you, and make the job last a long time.”

“I’ll do anything, Vern. Anything.”

That was a long time ago. Nearly two years ago. He knew he’d never forget the fear of those two days of not knowing. When Vern at last came and told him he’d been contacted, and it was decided they could be used, Rick almost cried with gratitude.

The job was simple. After the first delivery on Monday each week Vern would return to the store with a package he got someplace. He wouldn’t say where or how he got it. It was generally a small box, hardly bigger than a pack of cigarettes. In it was a bunch of little packets in the form of cylinders wrapped tightly in cellophane, fastened with layers of Scotch tape. He had to hide the little box somewhere around his working area. That wasn’t hard. There were lots of places. Inside a carcass in the walk-in cooler. Behind the slicer. Lots of places. What was hard was memorizing the list. Nine names at first. Nine little packets in the box each week. Vern made him say the names over and over until he could say them in his sleep.

It worked like this: A phone order would come in. Walter or Jana or Doris or somebody would take it. There would be a meat item on the order. It was written out, name and all, by whoever took the order over the phone. When he made up the orders on his spindle, whenever he came to one of the nine names, he would have to slice a small pocket in the meat and shove one of the little cylinders in there. Then he’d wrap and tie and weigh the meat and scribble the price and the name on the brown paper. The nine people always phoned in cash orders.

For the first week he was too overcome with relief to question what he was doing. It was enough that he had to keep anybody from seeing what he was doing, and keep remembering the names. But when the week end came he found he had to know.

Vern wouldn’t talk in the house, so they went for a walk on Sunday, went to a park. It was a small park and they found a bench away from other people.

“Now what’s on your mind?”

“These little things in the meat, Vern. What are they for? What are we doing?”

Vern gave him a look of incredulous contempt. “Just how dumb are you, you big slob?”

“I’m sorry, Vern. I just wanted to know.”

“You ever hear of dope? Snow? Junk? Big H? Horse?”

“Dope? Sure. There’s dope fiends. They take dope and commit crimes, I know about that.”

“So what’s in the little packages.”

Rick stared at him. “Don’t you go to jail for giving it to people?”

“You go to jail if they find it in your possession, Buster.”

“Those nine people, then. They’re dope fiends?”

“No. No. My God, there’s enough in each package to… Look. I suppose you ought to know what you’re doing. That’s uncut stuff. Prime stuff. Those nine people are pushers. They handle retail. We’re in the middle, between the wholesaler and the pushers. Now making a meet is dangerous. That’s what they call it when the wholesaler contacts the pusher, gives him the stuff, and gets the money. It’s a cash-on-the-line business, all the way up and down. We’re working a gimmick. I figured it out. I mean, somebody else figured it out, that the most invisible guy in the world is a delivery man. I’ve got a reason for traveling all over the city. I go in a place with a big package of groceries. I’ve got money in my pocket because I collect, too. I’ve got a record. Suppose they shake me down. Are they going to dig around in a piece of raw meat? The cover is perfect. I don’t even take the order when it comes over the phone. The pushers pay me on the line, or I don’t leave the stuff. What they do then is their business. They cut it, cap it, and retail it at about a hundred per cent profit—more, depending on how much they can cut it and get away with it. They use powdered sugar, other stuff. Rice flour. It’s a sweet delivery system, and they’re willing to pay for it. I mean, they’re willing to forget that little trouble we had.”

“Where does it come from?”

“We don’t have to worry about that, do we?”

“But it’s a bad thing to do, isn’t it? I mean that stuff does bad things to people, doesn’t it?”

Vern had clapped him on the shoulder. “You got to think about it this way: If we weren’t doing it, somebody else would be. Isn’t that right?”

“I… I guess so.”

Vern handed him three ten-dollar bills. “What’s this for?” Rick asked.

“Put it in your pocket. They think we’re doing a good job. It’s a little present. I got one too. There’ll be a little every week.”

After that there was fifty dollars every week. He had a sort of superstitious fear about either banking it or spending it, so he put it behind the loose section of baseboard, in against a joist. The names he had to memorize changed. New ones appeared on the list. The number of names changed. Once it was up to twenty. Twice, for no reason given Rick, there was no box, no packets. Those times Vern acted nervous. And when it started up again, it started slowly. Two, then three, then five packets a week. Growing slowly up to more than a dozen while Vern’s good humor improved. Rick got so he could do it without thinking too much about it. He kept a few of the small shiny cylinders in his apron pocket. Some days there would be three names. Or one. Or none. He never played poker again. He did not go out at night with Vern any more. It made him nervous to be out at night. The shadows looked too black. Sometimes he dreamed about the man with the red face. Judge Karshner. The Judge sat on a high bench looking down at him, holding out a black cap, telling him to put it on and it would all be over.

The house and store had changed. Walter was sour and silent. The old man was gray-weary, lifeless, defeated—ever since the death of Henry. No one saw much of Teena any more. She was out late a lot. The new one, Bonny, was nice. Rick liked to look at her. He liked the way her hair looked, and he gave her his best smile. Henry married good, Rick thought. Not like that Doris.

The best part was when he was real busy. Fridays and Saturdays. Today was not good. Sunday. He sat in his room. The little radio made sad music, like water dripping. Gus had said a boy was coming to work tomorrow. A boy to help. That was good. There were things to do that Rick did not like. Cleaning up the trash, sweeping out, washing the big front windows, sorting out the bottle returns, fixing vegetable displays. The boy could go with Gus in the truck to the predawn farmers’ market at the north edge of town, carrying to the truck the things Gus bought after his good-humored haggling. There were always so many little things. Taking care of meat scraps. Cleaning the hamburg machine. Marking cans with the grease pencil. Keeping the paper-sack racks full. Keeping the glass on the front of the meat case clean. He remembered when he had first come there, how gladly he had done all the little things, how glad he had been to feel the warmth of family around him. It was all changed, all different. Now he was not Rick the boy. He was Rick the butcher, living in the small downstairs room behind the kitchen. He was forty years old.

And I am a criminal, he thought. I can go to jail. It would be like that place long ago, and like the Army. Long lines and gray rain and stone.

He sat on his bed on a Sunday afternoon in June. His small pink hands were clasped between his knees. There was a tin-foil quality to the Debussy that the New York Philharmonic served him through the three-inch speaker of the green plastic table radio. He did not know he was wearing his habitual smile. He thought of the baby Doris would have soon. Maybe it would change the house. Maybe it would bring back the warmth. Maybe it would make things like the old days. The big house seemed very quiet. Anna was not in the kitchen.

He looked across at the photograph tacked to the wall. The old store, with all of them standing in front of it. The three kids, Mom, Gus, Rick. All smiling. It seemed like they had all died long ago. The music was a sound like gray rain.

VERN LOCKTER stood in the third-floor bathroom with a bath towel around his shoulders to protect his thin gray shirt. It was a blue-gray shirt made of Egyptian cotton, as fine as silk, tailored in England. It was new, and to wear with it he had selected the pale flannel slacks, so pale a gray they were almost white—the slacks with the small pleats and the side seams stitched in black. He wore a narrow green fabric belt with a small gold slip buckle, and green matching canvas shoes with heavy crepe soles and gold eyelets.

He turned on the water and waited until it ran warm, and then, making small cups of his hands, he ducked his head over the bowl and lifted the water to his hair, worked it in vigorously, making his scalp tingle. He turned off the water and opened the mirrored medicine cabinet and took out the narrow bottle of hair lotion. He poured a bit into his palm, rubbed his hands slickly together, and then worked that into the jet hair. With his comb he combed all the hair straight forward first so that it hung shining before his eyes. And then he worked it back, bobbing his head with each stroke starting from the top and working down to the hair worn long over the ears, using the more delicate strokes for that. He wiped the comb on a corner of the towel, replaced it in the cabinet, hung the towel on his rack. He took a small tube from the medicine cabinet and, using the smallest bit of vaseline on his fingertips, smoothed his eyebrows back. They had a thick gloss and almost met over the bridge of his nose. He took a cleansing tissue and wiped his fingertips dry. He examined his nails. They satisfied him. He inspected himself in the mirror. The fabric of the shirt was so thin that the weight of the fresh pack of cigarettes made the pocket sag. He transferred the cigarettes to the right pocket of the slacks, making a mental note to keep them there while wearing this particular shirt.

His body, under the clothing, felt sleek and hard and competent. Nothing, he thought, like running up and downstairs with a few hundred pounds of groceries every day. He bunched his fist and flexed it and looked at the slide and change of the long muscles of the forearm. The black hair was curled thick on the top of his arm, running down the wrist to a thinner growth on the backs of his hands. There were small black tufts between the knuckles of his fingers. Once upon a time that had bothered him, offended him a bit. Then there was that college girl who had called it a “most intriguing and indicative secondary sex characteristic.” He had made her repeat it and explain it, and he had filed the phrase away in his vast storehouse of memory. Later, following it up, he had brought the four books back from the public library. Freud, Jung, Adler, Stocklon. He had gone through them in a week. He had found them remarkably usable. And he found they repeated many things he had already half learned about people, and how to achieve from them the desired reaction.

His focus for twenty minutes had been upon himself. He stood and let his senses flow out. Bonny was closest, in her room down the hall. Since her coming the third-floor bathroom had held a faint effluvium of female. Cosmetics, racked toothbrush, a different brand of paste than he used. And, rarely, a long glossy dark red hair. He had picked one up, pulled it slowly between his thumb and fingernail, and seen it leap into a tiny coiled copper spring. Having her close had given him a constant awareness of her. She had filtered into his dreams. He had stalked her mentally, the way a man will play the market on paper, and estimated his chance of success. He could get no clear estimate. The factors involved seemed too variable. He suspected that it was because she was out of context. Misplaced. That blurred his vision. She was quite obviously knowing, aware, practiced, and disenchanted. Yet there seemed something hazy about her state of mind.

And so, with reluctance, he had restrained himself from making any trial advance. He sensed in her not only struggle and loneliness, but also that most dangerous thing, a disregard of consequence. It would be stupid to imperil profit for the sake of impulse. And stupidity was the only crime. He had paid for that particular crime once. He did not intend to pay again.

It had taken him a month of steady dedicated thought to discover something about this business that could be marketed. It had taken him a week to make the contact once the idea was clear. He presented it to Karshner as a service he was willing to sell. Karshner told him he was too hot for such games. Wait until he was clear of Paul Darmond, the Preacher. And Karshner said it was a bad base, being in Rowell’s back yard. But Karshner reluctantly took the proposition higher and came back with provisional approval, provided the butcher could be firmly hooked. Vern explained the plan for hooking him. Karshner said it was too complicated. Karshner suggested turning him into a user. Vern said he wouldn’t work with a user any more than he’d try junk himself. It just wasn’t safe. Karshner said he’d only suggested that to test Lockter’s intelligence. Lockter told him that a recorded intelligence quotient of 140 was a pretty good test in itself. Karshner said he was a one-time loser and how bright was that? Vern said it was due to an impulse and he’d given up impulses.

Karshner said he would approve if he liked the hook. Stussen had been almost too easy. The next portion of the agreement was payment for the services to be rendered. That took time. The final agreement, satisfactory to all parties, was a fee of thirty dollars per delivery, with a guaranteed minimum of three hundred a week. The money was not, of course, to be banked or spent freely. That attracted attention. There was to be a weekly payoff to the butcher to make the hook more firm in the jowl.

The most delicate part of it had been the arrangement of the Monday-morning transfer, when Vern turned over the last week’s cash, less his cut, for next week’s box. That was the hottest point, the trouble point. That was where a tail could be operating from either end, ready to close in. There had to be a safe place for transportation of the box back to the store, and a safe place for the cash collections, which in a good week could total ten thousand. The same hiding place could serve for both, and it seemed logical that it should be on the truck. Yet it must be a place that would not be discovered were anyone else to drive the truck, or even work on it at a garage.

They did not like Vern’s ideas, and he did not like theirs. In the end a false back was installed in the glove compartment of the panel delivery truck. It made the compartment shallower, but not noticeably so to anyone reaching in. It was pivoted off center and a firm push on the right end opened it. The transfer was made at a gas station where Vern had been refueling the truck prior to the arrangement. The men’s room was small and rancid, and the door was around at the side. The key, on a piece of wood nearly a foot long, hung by the station door. On the wall of the men’s room, placed high, was a rack for paper towels. It was battered, rusty, ancient. There was a newer rack below it, and that one was in use, taking a smaller-sized towel. It was highly unlikely that the old rack would be taken down. The upper edge was raised, so that on top of the rack was a depressed rectangle that could not be seen from the floor.

Each Monday Vern would remove the collection from the glove compartment while en route, a thick packet of bills from which he had already taken his end. He would shove it in his pocket, park the truck by the pumps, take the key, and go around to the men’s room. He would lock the door behind him, reach high and take the box and replace it with the bills. He would put the box in his pocket, flush the john, run water, and, as an added touch of artistry, come out fixing his belt. As soon as he was en route again he would put the box in the secret compartment. Back at the store after deliveries were over, he would find a chance to slip the box to Rick Stussen.

During the moments of transfer he would feel as though all his nerves were being pulled fine through his skin, and as though he could never again take a breath that was deep enough.

He had simplified the marketing setup when he spoke to Stussen about it, leaving out one link in the chain. They were operating close to the top, close to the main source, the only source in Johnston. The deliveries were to the peddlers, rather than to the pushers. The farther down the line you got toward the ultimate user, the more dangerous it was, and the more careless and dangerous the people were. It was the job of the peddlers to supply the pushers, and they each had their intricate methods of transfer to the pushers. The final exchange, from pusher to user, was a raw blundering business of objects passed from hand to hand in lobbies of cheap theaters, in schoolyards, in broken-down candy stores, at dingy wrestling matches, on city busses. It was dangerous because too many of the pushers were users, and had become pushers in order to guarantee their own supply. They were unpredictable. And having to deal with the pushers made the job of the peddlers unenviable. But such were the profits all the way up and down the line that it was a risk that seemed to the peddlers to be worth taking. Vern had contempt for them. The contempt was proven to be accurate during the two bad times when the Man came to town in force and co-ordinated with the locals, and turned the peddling organization upside down, making a sweep of most peddlers and a lot of pushers but, almost inevitably, coming to a dead end at the level of the peddlers. The peddlers were kept under constant surveillance by the organization. They knew that at the first sign of addiction they would be cut off at the pockets and a new peddler lined up. And they also knew that if they cracked and gave away source and method once they were taken in, they would sooner or later have a bad accident. In prison or out.

It was nice, and it had been nice, and it had gone smoothly, and there had been a few bonuses from time to time. There was a place in the cellar, in one end of the cellar, where the floor had not been concreted. There were three fruit jars buried there, the black dirt tamped hard over them. In them the money was rolled tight, and it was good to think about them. Stained moldy money could mean trouble. He had dripped the wax thick around each lid in addition to the rubber gasket and spring top. All used bills in smaller denominations. A fourth jar, hidden behind cellar trash that hadn’t been touched in years, was slowly filling. By the time it was full there would be close to forty thousand.

He went back over the new problem. That was what caught so many of them. They would sense a factor that could disrupt the whole thing. Yet the thought of the money coming in blinded them. Just a little more. Just a little bit more. Then I’ll quit. That was the blindness that spoiled everything. You had to be alert for the smallest cloud on the horizon. Then forget the money. Predicate the risk. Figure the odds. And if it looked bad, get out and get out fast.

It would be difficult to cut loose right now. The delivery system had made them too happy up there on topside. It had made them feel too safe. So any reason he could give would not be enough—particularly the reason that was in his mind. They would laugh at that one. The ideal situation would be to blow the whole arrangement sky high without imperiling himself. That couldn’t be done by a double cross. Their arms were too long. They could reach too far. And leaving Stussen behind would mean an almost automatic warrant.

The ideal solution would be to have Stussen drop out. Drop all the way out. Drop dead. Then there would be no possibility of carrying on. The time lag of setting it up in the same way again would be too great. The market had to be supplied. So they’d have to go back to the previous, more risky method of supplying the peddlers. And that would be an automatic out for one Vern Lockter.

But Stussen wasn’t going to oblige by dropping dead merely because it was convenient. And killing was a task performed by a fool. So, to eliminate one fool it was necessary to convince a second one that it was a job worth performing. That, in turn, brought the slow wheel back to Jana, where it stalled against the immutable fact of Stussen’s sexlessness.

It was a convoluted problem, and it made him tingle with awareness to consider the aspects of it, to consider potential solutions. He had confidence he would find one.

But first it would be necessary to examine the new problem a bit more closely, to see if perhaps he was exaggerating its importance. He knew that he had been guilty of a minor bit of stupidity. For a time his awareness of every detail of his environment had been faulty.

It was Friday evening, two days ago, that he had gone up the stairs and stopped at the second-floor landing, stopped very still, his nostril widening as he detected, to his astonishment, the faint cloying odor of weed. He had stood there, and known in a matter of seconds. The kid. Teena. Much quieter lately. Out a lot. Thinner. Quite a change since the death of that Henry, Gus’s precious Henry, the oaf in uniform. On Friday he had told himself it was all right. If the kid was on tea, the word could be passed along, topside to peddler to pusher. Cut her off at the pockets. They roped them with tea and built them up to horse. Tea could be dropped without a cure. Horse couldn’t. And throw just enough of a scare into the kid to make it stick. If she got on horse and turned wild, that unfunny man with the unfunny face would lean hard. He might lean hard enough to tip something over.

So, on Saturday, he made a point of getting a good long look at Teena. And he found she was beyond tea, found that she had a habit. Perhaps it was a small one comparatively, but she was starving for it. The signs were there to read in the reddened eyes, the tight movements, the yawning, the rubbing of the nose. She’d been out Saturday night and he hadn’t seen her yet today, but he hoped she’d connected somehow. It would make her easier to talk to.

He walked down the hall from the bathroom to the stairway, and heard, in passing, the muted sound of the music Bonny was forever playing softly on that record-player of hers. He had heard Rowell had leaned on her. That was fine. He could lean that way all he wanted. Vern saved the same look for Rowell that he used on Paul Darmond. Bright young man who has learned his lesson. Direct look and shy smile. Darmond bought it. It couldn’t be sold to Rowell.