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“
You're
making a mistake,” I said.

“
I
haven't any idea what's in the bag.”

“
Then
why didn't you take five C's for it, like you was offered?”

“
You
wouldn't understand.”

“
We
aim to understand a lot more. You're the guy who can tell us.”

“
You'll
be wasting your time.”

“
I've
got plenty of time.” He grinned. “All I need is a knife
and a couple hours with you. There'll be nothing you won't tell me
then.”

I
wet my lips. “Tell you what.?”

He
shot a .glance behind him and brought his gaze quickly back to me.
“Let's start with Tilly's. What's the

setup
there?”

“
I
never heard of Tilly.”

“
Don't
give me that. We know they're working out of the Badmont place. We’ve
never been there because he kept us south. He thinks he’s too
much big-shot. Never told us much. Only let us do the dirty work and
paid off in peanuts. Well, we’re here now and we got the bag.
What d’you say, Breen?”

“
I
don’t understand gibberish.”

“
You
don’t understand what?”

“
Never
mind,” I said emptily: “You won’t believe me.”

“
I’ll
believe what you say after I get a little knife-work in on you.”

There
was nothing I could say that would make any difference, so I said
nothing. I turned left on Ocean Parkway. A light stopped us. Larry
gave another quick glance through the rear window. That was the only
sign of tension he showed.

After
a few minutes he said: “Hey, you’re going too fast.”

The
speedometer needle was at forty and rising. I passed a couple of
dawdling cars. I hunched over, the wheel and gunned the motor.

The
gun poked into my ribs. His other hand turned off the ignition.
Rapidly the car lost speed. There was nowhere to wreck the car unless
I wrecked another car with it. We rolled to a stop.

“
Not
so smart,” Larry said disgustedly. “You figured a copper
would pick you up for speeding. Next you’d try passing a red
light.”

I
sat gripping the wheel, wanting to break it with my hands.

“
Or
maybe wreck the car,” he went on. “You seen that in the
movies. You kill or cripple yourself as likely as me, or I put a slug
in you before you hit anything, so where’s the percentage?
Start her up!”

I
obeyed. Keeping the gun pressed against my side, he reached his other
hand up and tilted the mirror toward the right. Then he sat back
against the door.

“
Turn
off on Bay Parkway,” he ordered, “and don’t do more
than fifteen if you don’t like to eat lead.”

At
McDonald Avenue he told me to 1 turn left. I drove between pillars of
the Culver Line Elevated. Gravesend Avenue it used to be called
before its name was changed. That was a terrific joke for anybody who
could appreciate it. I couldn’t.

It
was a good street for a murder. There were unwholesome looking
fields. There were small decaying vegetable gardens which in spring
and summer were cultivated by Italians who came to them evenings and
weekends from distant homes. There were trains rumbling overhead. A
body could be dumped out of a car and not found till morning, or
dragged a few feet into a field and not found for a week. But it
wouldn’t happen here. Larry was anxious to get in some
knife-work first. Gravesend Avenue, and my grave at the end of it
would be somewhere in Coney Island.

We
were almost there. Ahead I could see the orange lights of Belt
Parkway and on my left was the massive bulk of Coney Island Hospital.
It had to be now, within the next minute or two. I was going too
slowly to wreck the car,

“
Yeah,
we’re being tailed,” Larry said suddenly. He turned his
body squarely , to me, “What d'you know

about
it, sport?”

I
looked back. A pair of headlights were a couple of hundred feet
behind us. They didn't come closer.

“
You
keep asking about things I don't know,” I said.

“
Listen,
sport. When we stopped on Ocean Parkway, that heap behind us stopped.
When we turned off, it turned off, and turned off again to this
street. We're going slow and it's going slow. What d'you make of
it.?”

“
It's
your show,” I said.

“
Yeah,
my show. We'll have a look. Pull over.”

I
slipped the car between two elevated pillars and stopped it at the
curb.

Larry's
flicking eyes divided their attention between me and the mirror. I
turned. The car behind us seemed to hesitate. Suddenly it gathered
speed. I looked at Larry. He was leaning toward me, looking at me and
at the same time through the left window, waiting for a glimpse of
whoever was in that other car. “Remember, you get the first
slug,” he told me tightly.

The
headlights of the other car came through the convertible's rear
window. I didn't care who was in it. My hands were light on the
wheel, just resting there. Then the car was even with us. I didn't
see it. I felt it, sensed.it, and I saw Larry raise his gun in
preparation for anything that might happen. It was the moment when
his attention was off me as much as it would ever be.

My
hands fell off the wheel. My right hand shoved the gun out of line
with my body. My shoulders turned with the motion., I drove a short
left uppercut to his jaw. It missed, but landed flush on the broad
nose. His head fell away from me. I hit him again. My right hand was
frantically groping for his gunwrist as I kept jabbing my left into
his face. I couldn't find that wrist. The gun didn't go off. He sat
huddled in the corner of the seat, just taking it with his head
bobbing loosely every time I hit him.

I
stopped hitting him. He sagged at the angle of door and seat, and his
head fell loosely against the window. His eyes were closed. He was
breathing raggedly through his mouth and blood ran from its corners
and trickled from his nostrils. There was blood on my knuckles. Not
all of it his. I rubbed it off with my handkerchief and saw that the
knuckles were split. He had known all the tricks, but had overlooked
one — that I could hit a man hard enough to make it count.

I
sucked my knuckles and took a cigarette out of my pocket and drew
smoke into my lungs. Then, I turned back to him. My fist hadn't
improved his appearance. I reached past him and pushed the door open
and his head fell out, followed by his torso. His legs remained
inside.

I
bent over and saw his gun on the floor beside his ankle. I put it on
the seat, bent over again, pushed his legs and feet out, closed the
door, straightened up. And looked into headlights facing me.

The
car was parked on the left side of the road, no more than thirty feet
away. A man was getting out. He moved rapidly in the brightness of
headlights glaring on his crooked nose and doublepointed chin. He
held a gun against his hip.

I
jammed in the gears, yanked my foot off the clutch pedal, swung the
wheel hard. It leaped by Crooked Nose's car, scraping a fender, and
was away. I glanced back and got a picture of Larry lying in the glow
of the other car's lights and of Crooked Nose looking after me. Then
I let the car have its head.

The
street was wide enough to swing around in a single turn, but I didn't
dare go back that way. I drove past Avenue X before I realized what I
was doing. I turned left on a murderously rutted side street and then
decided that I would have made better time going on to Belt Parkway,
and turned right, and when I reached the Parkway I couldn't find an
entrance. I blundered around for a couple of minutes until suddenly I
saw Ocean Parkway on my left and headed for it. On Ocean Parkway I
caught the lights wrong. I stopped at three or four corners until the
staggered lights changed and then I laughed crazily and went through
two red lights. Let a cop stop me and I'd take him along.

There
was no cop anywhere.

I
was almost home when I remembered the gun. I picked it up from the
seat. The safety catch was off. Larry had been ready for action. I
dropped it into my pocket. Sweat pasted my underwear to my body.

There
was nothing different about my block. I didn't know why I expected
anything to be. There were people walking and cars parked at
intervals and cozy lights in windows. I stopped the car with a jolt
and started to run down the driveway. At the second living room
window I checked myself.

Esther
hadn't moved, or she was back in the precise position I had last seen
her, reading in the club chair and at the same time listening to the
radio. The same comedian with the strident giggle was telling another
joke, or the same joke. Within the space of a half-hour program I had
gone and returned. Again all I could see of Esther was her dark hair
and a braid and the curve of one cheek. It was as if I hadn't been
gone at all, I laughed soundlessly with relief and continued down the
driveway. I took the gun out of my pocket. The garage door was
closed, the light out. I went around the demonstration coupe and
opened the garage door. There was no sound except my own breathing. I
snapped on the light. The trunk door of the sedan was raised. The
pigskin bag was gone.

I
didn't care. It wasn't mine. It had meant nothing to me but trouble.
I went to the rear of the sedan and

reached
up to pull the trunk down; My hand froze. A pair of legs protruded
from the side of the right rear tire. Handsome lay on his side. He
was no longer handsome. His face looked worse than Larry's after my
fist had got through with it, and the top of his head wasn't nice to
look at. His pearl-gray hat lay near the wall, its crown bashed in.
And near the hat was the tire iron.

I
squatted and touched the nearest hand. Work it smart and careful, he
had said — and he was dead.

I
twisted on the balls of my feet and looked at the tire iron. There
was blood on half its length and bits of hair. Probably it was my
tire iron, the one that had been in the trunk. I didn't care to look
at it closely. I stood up and skirted around the dead man and put out
the light and went into the house through the back door.

Esther
heard me come up the hall. “Is that you, darling?” she
asked.

“
Yes.”

Sucking
my split knuckles, I dialed the operator and asked for the police.

CHAPTER
FIVE

Detective-Lieutenant
Woodfinch didn’t rise from behind his desk when I came in. He
didn’t shake hands or say hello or smile. He waved his pipe in
a vague arc ending in the general direction of the ceiling and said:
“Sit down, Mr.' Breen.”

There
were five or six desks in the office and plain wooden chairs
scattered about. I pulled a chair up to the other side of his desk
and sat. I tried not to feel like a schoolboy who had been sent for
by the principal.

Nothing
happened for a while. Lieutenant Woodfinch believed in doing one
thing at a time, and at the moment he was loading his curved, pipe
from an oilskin tobacco pouch which unfolded to the length of a small
apron. Not a grain of tobacco spilled. I would have been startled if
it had. An unhurried, methodical man, and he looked it. His clothes
were without. dash; they were precisely cut and carefully subdued.
His face, so close-shaven at three in the afternoon that it looked as
if it never needed a razor, appeared in repose. His thinning hair was
calculatedly combed at the exact angle to cover most of the scalp.
Last night at my house I had decided that it would be tough selling
him a car, or anything, even if he needed it.

There
were two other detectives in the office, and they also had been at my
house last night. The beefy man with the stub of cigar in the corner
of his mouth and the black hat glued to his head was named Scavuzzo.
The third man was just somebody in a blue suit who sat at a desk with
a notebook and pencil. Last night he had sat at my living room table
with a notebook and a pencil.

Lieutenant
Woodfinch drew on his pipe, critically studied the glowing bowl, then
at last looked at me, “So you’d never seen Jasper Vital
before last night or heard of him?” he said as if taking up a
conversation that had been interrupted a moment before.

“
Who?”
After I replied, I realized that I had been supposed to say yes or no
and give myself away.

“
Jasper
Vital, the man who was murdered in your garage. He had his name in
his wallet, along with around seventeen hundred dollars in cash. It’s
his own name. Has a police record in Brooklyn. Six years ago he was
picked up for running a phoney numbers racket. Didn’t like to
pay off even the small percentage the winners were entitled to. Not
even an honest crook. He got a ten-month rap. After he got out of
jail, there was no trace of him in Brooklyn till his cadaver turned
up last night.”

“
He
was down south,” I said. Woodfinch cupped his pipe between his
palms. “How do you know if you didn’t know him?”

“
I
told you last night that during the ride Larry mentioned that they’d
come from the south, and his car had a Florida license plate. Unless
it’s a stolen car.”