Blonde Bait for the Murder Master

As always, I thought about the difference between her and Kit Robinson. Superficially, they were alike. Both tall, blonde, grey-eyed, with a faintly cool manner. But the resemblance stopped right there. Sometimes I felt toward Kit as though she were my kid sister; it was doubtful whether anybody had ever felt like a brother to Anna Garron.

“One more minute,” she said. She turned back to her work, her white fingers flying over the keys, then took the sheet out of the machine, placed it in a notebook, carried the notebook over and locked it in a cheap steel filing case, and, on her way back, covered the typewriter and clicked out the light.

Her foot made one small scuffing noise against the concrete, and then she was in my arms. There was never anything soft or warm or relaxed about her kisses. Her body became like a bundle of steel wires, and her arms tightened.

We stood together in the darkness and she said, “Afraid?”

“Not very.”

“It’s better to be afraid. Then you’re more careful, Brian.”

“We’ll be careful.”

Chapter Two

When you have a complicated plan to doublecross a whole organization, the plan seems to divide itself into two phases. The first phase is when you do the planning, fit all the little cogs into the proper wheels, and rub your hands and tell yourself how good it looks and how well it is going to work. The second part is after the plan begins to roll and then you find that instead of you being the boss, the plan has somehow become the boss and you are carried right along with it with no chance to step aside or step out, even if you wanted to.

And part of it was that neither Anna Garron nor I trusted each other. The physical aspects of our relationship were like play-acting, like a smoke screen thrown up to make the other party feel that there was no chance of anything going wrong.

My angle was that I was tired of being a hired boy. For years I had been a good kid, full of confidence in the future, and it hadn’t paid off. I knew that the kids I had gone to high school with, all the people I knew, were laughing at Brian Gage who couldn’t finish college, who spent four years working up to be a pfc, who couldn’t even stay on the cops, and who ended up as a hired boy for one of the rackets.

I wanted to stop that laughter, but quick. I was in touch with a little deal that was bringing in six hundred thousand a year — a million, when you count everybody’s cut — and I was making ten thousand. With the extra dough I could make, I was going to buy respectability. I was going to invest in local businesses. I was going to marry Kit and buy a big house on the hill over town and they were going to point to me and say, “Brian Gage had a little trouble getting started... but when he did!”

That was the way I wanted it.

And the only trouble with the plan that Anna and I made was that she wouldn’t let me in on all of it; she kept some of it to herself.

When she clicked the light on up in the living room, I glanced at my watch. It was quarter after eight. She brought the bottle in from the kitchen and poured a shot for each of us. I cut mine with water, but Anna liked hers straight. She smiled at me, tosed it of, and made a face. “Now to go out and get rumpled by that big clown,” she said.

The big clown was Homer Windo, Jr. He was the son part of Windo and Son, Printers. They ran a dusty little print shop at the foot of Baker Street near the tracks. The biggest standing order in their shop was the weekly hundred thousand tickets for Brock.

I had seen Homer the son several times when it had been my job to pick up the weekly batch, to take them back to be stitched. He was a big, brown-haired guy with a white face, a huge firm jaw, and a surprisingly weak and petulant little mouth that was always moist and red. His daddy ordered him around the shop as though he were some sort of half-witted puppy. His big white hands were always stained with ink, and he usually had a smear of ink somewhere on his big wide face.

“Are you sure you’ve got him hooked?” I asked.

“Don’t low-rate my charms, darling,” she said. “To him, I am a poor but honest girl who is getting slave wages working in a dishonest business trying to get my weak, embezzling brother off the big hook. He got tears in his eyes when I told him about it.”

“But will he come through?”

“Tonight I get the blank tickets. He’ll have to wait for a chance to swipe the type and ink.”

The tickets are printed on a press which is so arranged that each time it banks down, it prints a new five digit number. Homer Windo, Jr., was fixing it so that instead of printing on the face of the ticket, it would print on a hunk of cardboard, and then he was swiping the blank tickets, so that when the numbers came out, the wining number could be printed on freehand.

“That’s a nice story you gave him, Anna.” I looked into her eyes. “And what’s the real story?”

“The witness refused to incriminate herself.”