Blonde Bait for the Murder Master

Inside, the shack was just as I remembered it. Ten feet square, with a broken chunk stove propped up on bricks, rags stuffed onto the chinks in the walls; a broken down cot along the far wall, a lantern on a bracket over the cot.

Gulbie sat on the cot and looked up at me, his mouth open. He could have been wearing the same clothes I had last seen him wearing years before. On his bare feet was a pair of discarded overshoes. His once white shirt was greyish and ragged, and his dark trousers were held up with a length of rope. He hadn’t aged a bit. His long knobbly face was like cracked red clay, his eyes a light and surprising blue, candid as the eyes of a child. His big-knuckled hands rested on his bony knees. As I had expected, he was just sitting. There was the smell of cheap gin in the shack, and a bottle, half-ful; rested by his hairy ankles.

There is only one thing wrong with Gulbie he can’t seem to remember. As far as he was concerned, I knew he didn’t remember ever having seen me before. Some little gadget was left out of his brain when he was put together. It had taken him all his life to establish the habit pattern of eating, sleeping and finding his way back to the shack when he leaves it.

But buried underneath the perpetual daze caused by his poor memory, he is keen. He taught himself to read. He trades off things he finds in the dump for eating money and gin money. The dump clothes him and houses him.

“Who are you?” he demanded.

I sat down in the ragged cane chair opposite him and smiled. “You remember me, Gulbie. Jake Shaw. Hell, I haven’t seen you for years.”

“Jake. Jake Shaw. Sounds sort of familiar, at that. What you doing these days, Jake?”

“Making a fast buck here and there. I want to share some of it with my friends.”

“Not buying anything,” he said.

“And I’m not selling anything, Gulbie. Here, have ten dollars.” I handed him a bill. He took it, looked at it suspiciously and tucked it in his shirt pocket.

“Thanks,” he said. “Who do I have to kill?”

I had some unsold, out-of-date tickets in my pocket. I took them out. “Know what these are?”

“Them green things? Wait a minute, now, I think so. Hold on just a minute. Yeah. Those are pool tickets, to win money with.”

“Where can you buy them, Gulbie?”

“Why, down where I get my chow. Haiger’s Market. I seen fellows buying them there.”

“You want to make some more money, Gulbie?”

“Guess I don’t mind if I do.”

“What I want you to do, Gulbie, is buy some of those green tickets next week. Ten dollars worth. Understand?”

He nodded in a bewildered way. “I buy ten dollars worth. How do I make any money?”

“Don’t open them in the store. Bring them back here and save them. I’ll come around and open them for you. Then you cash them in; they’ll give you a lot of money, Gulbie. I’ll be around to remind you of all this. Okay?”

“How much do I make?”

“Maybe as much as fifty dollars. How does that sound?”

He smiled shyly. “Sounds pretty good, Jake. Yes sir.”

I stared hard at him for a few minutes, making up my mind. Yes, Gulbie would do very well indeed. I could control him, and afterwards I could confuse him so badly that he wouldn’t be able to tell anyone a thing about it.

His foot touched the bottle and tipped it over. With incredible speed he caught the neck of the bottle before a drop spilled. I had forgotten that animal quickness of his.

“Want a drink?” he asked politely.

He stood in the doorway as I scrambled up the path. I turned and looked back. The rain made red and green halos around the semaphore, and the tracks shone like silver. I could hear the stolid chuffing of the switch engines down in the yard, the clunk and rattle of the couplings as trains were being made up.

Back inside the car, I sat and smoked for a minute or two before turning and heading back to town. The big plan was beginning to roll, but I didn’t want to be a chump; I didn’t want that smart money Anna had found to ease me out before I was even in. Priority one was to protect myself from a cross within a cross.

I wondered if Johnny Naga could be part of the smart money, changing horses in midstream. Time to check. Johnny Naga collected his three thousand a week and paid off all the consolation winners.

I found him, as usual, behind his own bar, the outside neon flickering redly, repeating, “JOHNNY’S PLACE” over and over and over.

The bar was always packed with the squareheads from the neighborhood, largely a beer type business. In addition to backing the distribution angle of the pool, Johnny runs a baseball and football pool setup on the side.

He is a wide, redfaced man in his fifties, with a broad mouth. His head is the general shape of a pear with the little end of top. His voice is highpitched and when he giggles, which he does a great deal, his big belly jounces. He talks with a faint Slovak accent, as do most of the people in the neighborhood where his bar is.