April Evil (11 page)

Dil wrote out a check for two thousand, raising Stauch eight hundred. His hand was shaking so badly, the signature didn’t look right. He felt as if he was dreaming it all. Stauch had taken a one-card draw, also. Dil knew that his personal balance was down below three hundred dollars. He kept his thumb over the total on the stub when he wrote out the check. Up until writing the check he had believed that his hand was the best hand. But now the worms of doubt touched the edge of his mind. Stauch seemed to be betting more heavily than a full house would warrant, had he drawn to two pair. And much more heavily than a flush. It was incredible that he could have filled a straight flush. It began to look more and more like fours. But how big? A seven was almost in the middle.

Stauch said, “Whee, this Parks is just as proud as can be. He’s really got himself something. Well, I think this has gone on long enough. I think I’ll just call that eight hundred and maybe give it one more little bump. About another fifteen hundred, and that makes another piece of paper for the pile. Man could run right through his checkbook in this kind of game.”

Dil had felt jubilant when Stauch had indicated his desire to call, but when he added the raise to it, his heart sank. It had to be fours. Maybe good fours.

“I’ll call,” he said huskily. He wrote out a check for fifteen hundred and put it on the table.

Stauch said, “Well that sort of leaves it up to me to show the power and break your heart, Dil. I got me two pair here. Here’s one of them.” He turned over the pair of tens. “And here’s the other pair.” He turned over the second pair of tens. “Got ’em dealt to me cold and took a chance on passing them, seeing as how I was right under the gun, and figured I’d better draw a card I couldn’t use than stand pat on the four tens. What’s that over there, Dil? Four sevens? Now if that isn’t a stick with a dirty end, I never did see one. What was it you folded there, Marty?”

“Full house,” Marty said miserably. “Queens full of threes.”

This was no longer a dream. This was nightmare. As Stauch started to pull the pot in, Dil reached over quickly and took his two checks.

“What’s up?” Stauch asked, his voice much sharper.

“I just thought I’d consolidate these into one,” Dil said. The room which had grown very still became noisy again as Marty started to deal a new hand.

“Sure. You do that,” Stauch said.

Dil made out the check for thirty-five hundred. He made it out all except the date. As casually as he could, he said, “Jim, I’ll have to transfer more cash into this account. You mind if I date this a week ahead?”

Again the room was still. After a few moments Stauch said, “That’ll be okay, Dil.”

Dil wrote another check for two hundred worth of chips. He played automatically. He won about a hundred and fifty dollars. At the end of the evening he cashed up and got his check for two hundred back and found that he was out three hundred and fifty of the five hundred he had started with, plus the thirty-five hundred check. Thirty-eight hundred and fifty dollars loser. In the history of the game others had lost more in one evening, but not a great deal more. Dil had never lost more than four hundred before. When the game broke up the others told him, a little too jovially, that he’d had one of
those nights.

That heavy loss had changed his whole idea of himself. He had always been an optimistic man. Nothing had ever worked out very well for him, but he had never ceased to feel that sooner or later he would hit something that would pay off very well. The optimism was seriously shaken. He could not think beyond the thirty-five hundred dollar check. He knew he could not meet it. He knew he had no way of meeting it. He told himself that good old Jim Stauch would understand, and give him a break. Stauch would tear the check up and say, “You pay me when you get the chance, Dil.”

But it wasn’t going to be that way. He had the uneasy feeling that Jim Stauch knew the exact state of his finances, and had known even as the checks were being written that there was no money behind them.

He phoned Jim the day before the check could be presented for payment. “Jim? Dil Parks. Jim, I want to talk about that check.”

“What check, Dil?”

“The check I gave you when we played poker.”

“Oh, that check. What do you want to say about it?”

“I’d appreciate it, Jim, if you’d give me one more week on that. You know I’m good for it.… Jim, are you still there?”

“I’m still here. You want another week.”

“That’s right, Jim.”

“Then I guess that’s the way it has to be. One more week, Dil. I’ll hold it for another week if that’s the way you want it.”

He had had odd thoughts during the week, thoughts that were not like him. After all, it was a gambling debt. Could Stauch force collection? Maybe it was time to go away. Just get in the car and go. He sat at his desk and he could hear his heart thump. Too much weight. Bad load on the heart. Too much drinking. Things weren’t supposed to end this way. Not a fat man of almost forty sitting at a desk and listening to his own heart. He wished he could stop thinking that it was some kind of end, some sort of finish. Things would go on as always. They had to go on. Things just didn’t stop. A check was a piece of
paper. A piece of paper couldn’t put an end to all the golden dreams. Lennie was no good. She didn’t understand how things could be. She got impatient if you tried to talk about money and cutting down.

He sat at his desk waiting for Jim Stauch. Stauch hadn’t wanted to talk about the check over the phone. He said he’d stop by. Dil wanted to get up and leave. Stauch would wait around and then leave. But that wasn’t the way.

When he looked up, Stauch was standing in the doorway. It wasn’t the genial talkative Jim Stauch of the poker table, of the fish fry, of the Elks Club. This was a Mr. Stauch with an unsmiling face.

“Come right on in and sit down, Jim,” Dil said heartily.

Stauch came in and sat down. He put his hat on the corner of the desk. He bit the end of a cigar and spat the shred of tobacco into a corner in the general direction of the waste basket.

“You can’t cover that check.” It was statement, not question.

“I can, but it’s a matter of time.”

“I put checks in that pot. If you’d won you’d have cleared them the next morning. They were as good as cash. I won them back and tore them up, but they were as good as cash. I guess you know that.”

“Yes, I know that.”

“If you’d had the guts to put an IOU in the pot, it would have been up to me as to whether I wanted to gamble on accepting them. In effect those checks of yours were IOU’s. But I didn’t know that. I thought they were as good as my checks.”

“I’m sorry about that, Jim.”

“I don’t give a damn whether you’re glad or sorry. I don’t like to be taken. I gamble for money. You lied your way into that pot and you lost. If you’d won, I’d never have known the difference. You’re a born liar, Parks. You’re incompetent. You aren’t worth a God damn.”

“Don’t talk to me like that.”

“I’ll talk to you any way I feel like talking to you because
I bought you. I bought you for thirty-five hundred bucks. Until I get that money, I own you. When do I get it?”

“I told you it’s just a matter …”

“Of time. Maybe years. Sure. All right, Parks. How much is the mortgage on your home?”

“Around twenty-two thousand.”

“You can’t borrow any more on it. I checked this automobile agency. You haven’t got much equity in it, and the franchise isn’t worth much. How about jewelry? Your wife got much?”

“No.”

“Then it’s going to have to be the house. It’s on good land. It ought to go for about thirty-five thousand.”

“More than that.”

“If we wait a year, maybe. We’ll ask forty and take thirty-five. After you pay me my thirty-five hundred and pay the real estate cut of seventeen fifty, you’ll have about eight clear. You can put that out as a down payment on a place that’ll fit your income better than the house you have now does. There’s only two of you. If you’re smart you’ll pick out some little place you can pick up for about nine or ten thousand. It’ll cut your living expenses.”

“Are you serious?”

“I’m the most serious man you ever met, Parks.”

“I can’t get rid of the house. What will I tell Lenora?”

“Tell her you lost it in a poker game. You should have told her already. Didn’t you have guts enough to tell her?”

“I don’t think you can force me to sell my house to collect on a gambling debt.”

Stauch leaned back. “I was waiting for that. This isn’t a gambling debt. It’s a bad check. I can sue you and take your house if I have to. But I don’t like suits. I can do a hell of a lot of things to you, Parks. I can get this crummy franchise lifted. I can get the bank to bear down on you. I’ve got weight in this town, and I don’t like to use it unless I have to.”

“But there’s my uncle. He …”

“He’s a rich man. I know that. And he doesn’t think you’re worth a damn.”

“He’s an old man.”

“And he probably won’t leave you a dime. I’m not interested in contingencies. I want cash. Pick up that phone and call any real estate agent you want. I want to hear you list that house, Parks.”

“Now?”

“Right now.”

“Can’t you give me a week?”

“Why? Why should I?”

“Why don’t you let me give you another check? For a little more? It would be just as good as the one you have. I mean, the money would still be there, in the house, for a bigger check. I could make it for thirty-six hundred. Thirty-seven?”

“Make it a nice round four thousand, Parks.”

“Five hundred dollars for another week?”

“I’ll give you a break. I’ll make it two weeks. Two weeks from today.”

“That’s a lot of money.”

“Not as much as thirty-five hundred you don’t have. Write it out. No, damn it. How stupid do you think I am? Don’t write it on the agency account.”

“I wasn’t thinking,” Dil said humbly.

He wrote a check for four thousand on his personal account, dating it two weeks ahead. Stauch gave him the old check. Stauch turned in the doorway and said, “If you didn’t have the money you should have stayed away from that game, Parks.”

Long after he had gone, Dil tore up the old check. Two weeks. What could he do in two weeks? He thought of the old man and the money the old man kept in the big safe. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair at all. What good was that money to the old man? But there wasn’t any way to get the money.

There had been a chance, once. Long ago. That time Uncle Paul had sent him up to New York with cash and with the long list of things to buy. He had met the woman on the train. She had just acquired a Florida divorce. She was going to New York to look for work, she said.

Four days later he had awakened at noon in a third rate hotel room, with a monstrous clattering crashing hangover, soiled, wrinkled clothing, no luggage, and sixty-five cents in his pocket. The fourteen hundred dollars was gone, and the woman was gone, and there was an inch of bourbon left in a bottle. Uncle Paul had wired the money to come home on. But that was the end of it. The end of meager trust.

He remembered the black despair of that hotel room. But he had bounced back. He had forgotten it. The golden years were coming. Soon after that he had found Lenora, the girl to share the golden years. But somehow things had not worked out. Too many years had gone by. Life with the golden girl was an armed truce. He was heavy, and his head ached, and his heart pounded, and the lunch eaten hours before was an indigestible heaviness in his stomach. For the first time in his life he wondered what it would be like to die by your own hand.

Ronnie had retrieved coat, hat and suitcase, and stood on the proper corner at the proper time. There was a light at the corner, and a vacant cab stand. A gray Buick swung in toward the curb and the driver tapped the horn ring lightly, three times. Ronnie had opened the suitcase in the men’s room at the station. The topcoat hung over his arm, covering his hand. He held a short-barreled Colt .38 in the concealed hand, a Detective Special. His other hand gun, a .357 Magnum, was still in the suitcase. Neither gun had ever killed. He had a proper license for both of them.

As with other guns in the past, once they had been used, he would dispose of them. No casual toss into shallow water. No quick throw into heavy brush. He would strip the gun down into its component parts. He would malform the barrel with a heavy sledge. He would bury the parts separately with as much care as though he were disposing of the body itself.

Ace opened the door and Ronnie got into the car and pulled the door shut. “Greetings,” he said.

“You look sharp,” said the Ace.

“I’m a tourist. A nice sharp tourist. How’s Mullin?”

“Jumpy. Wouldn’t you be?”

“I wouldn’t know. Are you jumpy too, Ace?”

“I don’t much like working with him. And I don’t like working with you. But this one smells fat.”

“I have no opinion about working with you. We have different specialties.”

“Thank God for that. You give me the God damn creeps, kid. What are you doing in a deal like this?”

“A change of pace.”

“It better be a change. Just wave the gun. Don’t use it.”

“I was told Mullin was running this.”

“He is. But I want it to be smooth.”

“Where’s the pad? Out of town?”

“Not far from here. Nice place. Mullin brought a woman.”

“Is that bright?”

“She’s all right. Name of Sally Leon. She’ll be no trouble.”

“So you don’t like working with me, Ace.”

“No.”

Ronnie shrugged and left it at that. He had long since gotten accustomed to the attitude of those who had heard rumors about him. They could understand reasons for death. Woman trouble. Or a cross. Or a quick profit. But they couldn’t understand the executioner. Or feel comfortable with him.

“Is this a bank?” Ronnie asked.

“Hell no! Where have you been? Nobody messes with banks any more. It’s too federal. Just punks try it. It doesn’t work any more. It isn’t professional.”

“What is it, then?”

“Mullin can brief you. Here we are, anyhow. There isn’t time to go into it.”