The Moth (38 page)

The door was still open, where the turnkey had gone out again, and through it came the station-house cat, a big black thing with yellow eyes and a red ribbon around his neck. I didn’t overplay it. I didn’t make a corny dive for him and grab him up in a hurry. I made motions at him with my fingers, and grinned at him, and whispered at him, and picked him up. Then I rolled him out on my knee and began scratching his chin.

“I couldn’t be sure. It’s been some time ago. But I’d say it was him. This one here, with no coat on.”

I looked up, kind of like I didn’t know what was going on, then went back to the cat. The turnkey had come back again, and with him was a little guy, around fifty maybe, that I’d never even known by name, but that had taken care of night calls at the motel where Hosey and Buck and I had stayed before pulling our job, and robbed the fellow of his gun. I didn’t pay the least attention. I kept my head up while I was whispering to the cat. My heart skipped a beat when they brought in the guy in the filling station, the one that had sold us gas. But he didn’t point to anybody at all. The Chief said O.K., the detectives went, all but the one in the blue suit, and the turnkey motioned Hosey and the prisoners and the two guys from Las Vegas, and took them out and closed the door. The Chief turned to me. “Mr. Dillon, what do you know about this?”

“Nothing.”

“Just nothing at all?”

“Just nothing, period, new paragraph.”

“You never been to Las Vegas?”

“No.”

“O.K.”

The guy in the blue suit got up, and it turned out he was a Las Vegas detective. He said: “Well, Chief, it looked to me like a phony, but you got to do something about it, even if you think it’s a bum trying to promote a free ride. He saw the job, I’m sure of that, and probably traveled with a pair of yeggs a week or two, though not regular. One or two of those jobs, like the one he talked about in Yuma, were never pulled. But he never once mentioned that the one who got away in Las Vegas was a dark gimpy guy, and he never had the right name of the man that was killed. Of course, he could have called himself Buck, and maybe he used the name Mitchell. But the papers we took off him said Horace Burns, and if he doesn’t know that, then we’re chasing our tail to listen to him. Release this gentleman, I’d say.”

“I’m going to. Sorry, Mr. Dillon.”

“It’s O.K. Cute cat.”

“I found that gentleman in an alley when he was two days old and didn’t have his eyes open yet. I raised him with an eye dropper and milk warmed on that electric heater beside your chair, and he’s never known any home but this one. To him a cell is a front parlor.”

“Pretty eyes.”

“And fight his weight in wild ones.”

“Nice seeing you again.”

Outside, Mulligan went off to scare up a cab and I stood there waiting for him to come back. Then back of me I heard something, and turned. Hosey came running, and ducked across the street, to the park. After him came the guy from the motel and the guy from the filling station. When they caught up with him, the guy from the motel hit him and he staggered and then the guy from the filling station hit him and he went down. I turned my back, and when a cab came with Mulligan alongside, I got in quick and closed my eyes. “What’s the matter, Mr. Dillon?”

“Not a thing.”

“You sick?”

“Just tired.”

He gave my apartment address and we started up. Ahead of us, walking along, were the two guys from Las Vegas, the one from the filling station and the one from the motel. In the park was something lying on the grass. I felt big and cruel and cold, a thick, heavy-shouldered bunch of whatever it takes to be a success. As we turned into the ocean front it flashed through my mind I was going to do the one last thing, or try to, that I would have to do to hold what I had, so I could never be pried loose. Branch, at last, had decided to give her a divorce, and I meant, as soon as she was free, at the end of this interlocutory year they’ve got in California, to marry her and stay married to her. At least, even if I was a little shy on love, I could breathe easy, and if any more Hoseys came along, they might dent me but they couldn’t break me.

A
LL THAT TIME, THAT
is since I consolidated the company and began getting my picture in the paper now and then, I’d been hearing from Denny. Every six months or so he’d write me, catching me up on the news back in Baltimore, and winding up with a gag P.S. that propositioned me for a job in the big oil empire, as he called Seven-Star. It was from him I found out my father was failing, that the Leggs were living on University Parkway, “snug enough on what they got when they sold the hotel”; that Sheila and Nancy were in mourning for my mother, “though just exactly why, considering the status quo ante, deponent saith not, not knowing.” He acted like most of the things, like my father’s health and the sale of the hotel and the death of my mother, I already knew about, and he was just putting in his two bits’ worth. But I’d heard nothing, or next to nothing, in seven years, and most of what he told me, except now and then something like Byrd getting made president of the university, depressed the hell out of me. The death of my mother, and specially hearing it on top of a gag, knocked me for a loop. It was one more break with what I might have been. Denny seemed to think I knew about his marriage too, and had quite a lot to say about the heat being on from his better, “oh distinctly better half if we may rely on her view of it,” to get out and get busy, to earn baby some shoes, now that his father had left him nothing but a lot of worthless stock in the way of an inheritance. But who he was married to, and when it had happened, were things I knew nothing about.

I never thought of him, though, when this question of astrology first came up, and in fact I had puzzled over it a week before it occurred to me he was the one guy on earth to take it over and do something with it. I had dropped in, on a routine visit, to one of our Seven-Star filling stations, the one on 101, just above Long Beach, where she and I had parked the stuff the morning I saved the shack. And out back of the pumps, over near the tire shop, I noticed a transit, the same one, as I could see from marks on the tripod, as I had parked there three years before. When Ed Moore, the manager, got through gassing a car, I apologized to him for leaving it, but said I’d forgotten it and would send for it the next day. “Well, fact of the matter, Mr. Dillon, I’d forgotten it too. It was put with the rest of the stuff you left here, but then when the files were taken out it was shoved in a corner with a stack of exhaust pipes in front of it, and I didn’t even know it was there until one day, when I was moving things around and happened to notice it. And then I got to wondering if that glass was a telescope, and whether it would work on the moon. So I got it out and set it up, and come to find out it worked fine. Always been interested in the moon. Read a lot about it. Always wanted to study it with a nice glass, but till now never had the chance.”

“O.K., but if it’s in your way—”

“Not at all, not at all.”

He looked a little funny, then went on: “And fact of the matter, I’ve been intending to call you up about it, because
I
think it’s helping business.”

“... In what way?”

“People come in, just to look through it.”

“At the moon?”

“At the moon, and then they buy gas. And at the North Star and Evening Star and whatever else we’ve got, too. And some of them fool around telling fortunes. That’s what I was going to call up about. Somehow, I can’t shake out of my mind there’s a merchandising angle there. I don’t know how much telescopes cost, but I know this much: Once you got ’em, they don’t eat, and they don’t burn any gas.”

I thought about it, or went through the motions of thinking about it, for two or three weeks. At the end of that time, I knew I wasn’t doing well. Putting telescopes in each of our stations, mounting them on tripods, and hanging a sign on them, “See the Moon,” was about all I could think of in the way of promotion, and that didn’t seem very good. Pretty soon I laid it down in front of her, and we took a ride to Ed’s station, watched kids peeping through the glass and listened to couples arguing about the zodiac. She asked me what I thought we ought to do, but when I told her what I’d been thinking up she shook her head. “If you don’t mind my saying so, it’s not your racket. Putting down wells, pumping oil, cutting it up to sell—on that you’re fine. But this is retail. This is one-hundred-per-cent bunk, but it has to make sense, like Jack Benny. It takes a special kind of intellect. It takes some-body that can make a scientific study of bunk.”

That’s when I thought of Denny.

“But of course, Jack! I may have laughed at your stories about him, but I may as well tell you
I
always thought there was something in him—that his ‘initiative’ was something a business could use. Bring him out on a tentative basis, and if it doesn’t work out you’re not hooked, but at the same time you haven’t got yourself involved with one of these Los Angeles high-pressure boys who wants a mortgage on everything I’ve got.”

He got off the plane at Burbank with an Eastern suit, an Eastern topcoat, an Eastern hat, and an Eastern color. But, except for some gray over the ears and a little more weight, he was the same old Denny, with that country-club good looks, and the quick, warm smile that really did things to you. I had reserved an apartment for him next to mine, and while we were running down he caught me up a little bit on himself, how he’d been driven, since the death of his father, trying to settle an estate that wasn’t worth settling, how his aunt was taking care of his mother, how he’d had three jobs in the last five years, each of them in businesses that folded before he’d been with them a month. Then he asked me what it was I had waiting for him and when I told him he lit up. By that time we were within a mile of Ed’s station and I asked him how he’d like to stop by and look things over. He wanted to, so I pulled in there and Ed gave him the works, everything he’d noticed, since the glass had been set up there. He asked how many of the customers were daytimers that switched to night on account of the glass, how many were people that had been buying some opposition gas, then switched, how many had a real interest in astronomy, how many were astrology bugs, how many were just peepers, on their way to the rest room, trying to get something free. He saw angles I hadn’t thought of, and what he didn’t see, Ed did. When we left he had a big stack of sales sheets Ed gave him, so he could tot day sales separate from night sales, and maybe get more angles. When we finally got to the apartment it was time to go out to lunch, so we did, and from lunch to the Jergins Trust Building and from there to the hill. I introduced him to everybody, and they all fell for him, which you would expect, anyway the secretaries. But when Rohrer fell for him, that was different. Rohrer knew a little of what he’d been brought out for, and between the looking around and explaining, he said to me: “He’s going to be a wonderful help, that young fellow is. He
asks! He’s not ashamed to let on he don’t
know!
”

So when we changed into black ties, and I drove him up to Beverly and he made a hit there, I wasn’t surprised, but I was relieved. With her, he made his hit when she was stirring Martinis before dinner, with a couple of fast gags he kind of shook off the end of his cigarette. She knew he was her kind then, and played him up big when the picture people began dropping in around ten. They fell for the gags too, but one of the girls fell for something else, and began propositioning him to play tennis on her court. He sideslipped it, and Hannah liked how he did it. “He’s done plenty of chasing, that one has. But when a guy knows all the answers and then keeps still, just because he’s married and decent and in love with his wife, what do you do then?”

“Well, what do you do?”

“You hand it to him.”

Considering Denny’s broad-minded ideas on what he owed himself in the way of leisure when we were kids, it was surprising the way he bore down on this little problem of the telescope. He was at it morning, noon, and night, going over Ed’s sheets, taking a job in the filling station, putting on coveralls, and studying every man, woman, and child that went near the damned transit. He moved it to this place and that place, to check which was transit trade and which was rest-room trade. He tried it with a sign and without a sign. He took it away and checked how many people asked about it. At the end of a week, one Sunday morning when he, she, and I had just finished breakfast in Beverly, he said: “Well, chilluns, I guess you’re getting a little impatient, but I’m on the trail of something, and I want time. For just a pretty good job, I could begin now. The main point about this, as I suppose you know, is that it prolongs your period of activity from daytime into the night. It can add—it doesn’t now, but we’re talking about the future and promotion possibilities—it
could
add at least ten per cent to your sales, which is terrific. On top of that, for a daytime bulge and general sales angle that has a potential I haven’t been able to calculate, there’s the astrology. That lets in a radio show, a cheap one, that we can put on with just an astrologer and some records—fifteen minutes a day, on the coast network, or better still, one of the local stations that’ll cost next to nothing but give us city coverage. So far, fine, it’s cheap and it’s good, and the telescopes don’t, as you say, eat anything. But—it lacks something. I know what I’m doing here. After all, we’re talking about stars, and I want something with some reach to it. Something good.”

She said: “What do you think, Jack?”

“Let him meditate.”

“Think, pretty creature, think.”

I found a note under my door, at the apartment, one Thursday afternoon, two or three weeks after that, that said he was going off by himself a few days, and to count him out over the week end. I didn’t pay much attention, except that by then I kind of looked forward to him, and she did. But I’d turned the utility car over to him, and if he wanted to drive off somewhere it was O.K. by me. But Sunday morning, around eight, when I was taking a few turns up and down her pool, I felt somebody around and when I looked, there he was, on the other side of the wall. When I waved he came over on a vault, in a sweat shirt, Western slacks he’d got for himself, and no shave. Then he began walking up and down. “Well, you big ape, I’ve got it,
I’ve got it!”