Blonde Bait for the Murder Master

“See that fellow over there? Brian Gage. Owns a piece of the paper, and a couple of night spots, and a lumber mill and some garages and gas stations. That blonde is his wife. She used to work for the D.A. Wish I had his dough, by God!”

Then I began to make up a floor plan for the big house on the hill that I was going to build.

When I walked through the front door of that house, I was asleep, and the dreams were good. Except that, in my dreams, I seemed to feel someone watching me. Constantly. Every move I made...

Chapter Four

Saturday there was nothing to do. I went over and checked with Brock. He seemed carefree and contented. I didn’t get a chance for a word with Anna. I tried a double-feature, but couldn’t get interested; I tried a few drinks, but they bounced off.

After dark, I went and blinked the lights outside Kit’s house. No response. I guessed that she had had to go someplace with her people. I was bored, restless and jittery.

Sunday was almost as bad, except that for a few minutes, while I drove Anna downtown at Brock’s request, I had a chance to talk to her. She told me that she had gotten eight blank tickets from Homer and that he would steal the type face for the numerals on Monday and get them to her.

I tried to question her again on who was in the picture beside the two of us but she wouldn’t talk. When I came back, Brock had had a call from Johnny Naga, and he complimented me on the way I’d taken care of the situation. Skippy had come around to Naga begging to be permitted to handle the tickets again, but Johnny had turned him down.

I told her about Gulbie, and where he was located. She said that it sounded fine. Then she crossed her fingers and added, “Brother, if this thing goes sour, I might as well move right in with your friend Gulbie.”

I laughed, thinking of how she’d look in Gulbie’s shack.

On Sunday night, the drinks didn’t bounce. I had a few, and then took a bottle up to my room. By the time the level was low, I was ready for sleep. It hit me like a sap behind the ear.

The tension was growing. It was getting more and more difficult to act natural about Brock. I got so bored that I made a gentle play for Joyce, and she fell all over herself trying to back up my play. Billy and Oley got on my nerves.

Monday afternoon, in the kitchen of 1012 Cramer, Brock said suddenly, “Anything chewing on you, Boy?” I gave him my best grin. “Not a thing. There just isn’t much to do the first part of the week, I guess.”

He smiled and his dead brown eyes looked at me carefully. “Maybe it’s something else?”

A small shiver ran down my spine. “What else?”

“Maybe you ought to be nicer to Oley, Brian. He got sore at you last Friday when you wouldn’t give him a lift downtown. So he comes back when you go in the house again and Anna is there. What was that for?” My grin felt wide and vacant. “We... we were just talking.”

“You talk good with all the lights out, hah?”

“Oley’s lying, Brock. You know me better than that!”

There was no humor in his laugh. “I don’t know you so good, Brian, but I know Anna pretty good. Sure, I know Anna very good.”

He turned and walked out of the room. That would be the payoff — to have the whole thing blow up in our faces, just because Oley had come sneaking back like a weasel. We had been careless. Suppose Oley had sneaked into the house, had heard what we had said. When I tried to find Oley, he wasn’t around, and nobody seemed to know or care where he had gone.

To have Brock suspicious made things more difficult. Much more difficult. But not impossible. Once, walking back toward a beach through the surf, I had felt the undertow suck the sand out from under my feet. This was the same sort of feeling. The habitual smile on Brock’s face had been familiar, but also familiar was the dead, dull look of his tan-brown eyes.

I began to wonder if forging winning tickets was as necessary to our plan as we had imagined. We could figure on a profit of around two thousand dollars, which was unimportant compared with the advantage of having the syndicate take care of Brock, their own man, on suspicion of crookedness.

In the late afternoon the paper boy threw the evening paper up on the porch. I went out and picked it up, realizing that all over Murrisberg, eager hands were unfolding the paper, eyes were searching the columns near the back page, looking for the Treasury Report, the five digits immediately preceeding the decimal point in the treasury balance as of that day.

I smiled as I remembered having seen, in Molly’s kitchen, while I was still on the force, a tiny pile of the green tickets. Even Molly was a sucker.

Suddenly the frame house on Cramer street was too small. Without a word to Brock, I went out and got in my car and drove away. I went out onto the open road and opened it up, the high whine of the motor and the roar of the wind doing a little to clean away the fear that had slowly seeped through me, down to the marrow of my bones.