He faced me, shook his head stubbornly, began, "I"ll be d.a.m.ned if I"ll let -"
I hit him. The knockdown was fair enough, because I hit him hard, but I think he could have got up again if he had wanted to. I gave him a little time, then asked the fellow in the sedan, "All right with you?" I still could not see him.
"He"ll be all right," he replied quickly. "I"ll take care of of him all right."
"Thanks." I climbed into my car beside the girl. The rain I had been trying to get to town ahead of was beginning to fall. A coupe with a man and a woman in it pa.s.sed us going toward town. We followed the coupe across the bridge.
The girl said, "This is awfully kind of you. I wasn"t in any danger back there, but it was - nasty."
"They wouldn"t be dangerous," I said, "but they would be - nasty."
"You know them?"
"No."
"But they knew you. Tony Forrest and Fred Barnes." When I did not say anything, she added, "They were afraid of you."
"I"m a desperate character."
She laughed. "And pretty nice of you, too, tonight. I wouldn"t"ve gone with either of them alone, but I thought with two of them ..." She turned up the collar of her coat. "It"s raining in on me."
I stopped the roadster again and hunted for the curtain that belonged on her side of the car. "So your name"s Jack Bye," she said while I was snapping it on.
"And yours is Helen Warner."
"How"d you know?" She had straightened her hat.
"I"ve seen you around." I finished attaching the curtain and got back in.
"Did you know who I was when I called to you?" she asked when we were moving again.
"Yes."
"It was silly of me to go out with them like that."
"You"re shivering."
"It"s chilly."
I said I was sorry my flask was empty.
We had turned into the western end of h.e.l.lman Avenue. It was four minutes past ten by the clock in front of the jewelry store on the corner of Laurel Street. A policeman in a black rubber coat was leaning against the clock. I did not know enough about perfumes to know the name of hers.
She said, "I"m chilly. Can"t we stop somewhere and get a drink?"
"Do you really want to?" My voice must have puzzled her; she turned her head quickly to peer at me in the dim light.
"I"d like to," she said, "unless you"re in a hurry."
"No. We could go to Mack"s. It"s only three or four blocks from here, but - it"s a n.i.g.g.e.r joint."
She laughed. "All I ask is that I don"t get poisoned." "You won"t, but you"re sure you want to go?" "Certainly." She exaggerated her shivering. "I"m cold.
It"s early."
Toots Mack opened his door for us. I could tell by the politeness with which he bowed his round bald black head and said, "Good evening, sir; good evening, madam," that he wished we had gone some place else, but I was not especially interested in how he felt about it. I said, "h.e.l.lo, Toots; how are you this evening?" too cheerfully.
There were only a few customers in the place. We went to the table in the corner farthest from the piano. Suddenly she was staring at me, her eyes, already very blue, becoming very round.
"I thought you could see in the car," I began.
"How"d you get that scar?" she asked, interrupting me.
She sat down.
"That." I put a hand to my cheek. "Fight - couple of years ago. You ought to see the one on my chest."
"We"ll have to go swimming some time," she said gayly.
"Please sit down and don"t keep me waiting for my drink."
"Are you sure you -"
She began to chant, keeping time with her fingers on the table, "I want a drink, I want a drink, I want a drink." Her mouth was small with full lips and it curved up without growing wider when she smiled.
We ordered drinks. We talked too fast. We made jokes and laughed too readily at them. We asked questions - about the name of the perfume she used was one -and paid too much or no attention to the answers. And Toots looked glumly at us from behind the bar when he thought we were hot looking at him. It was all pretty bad.
We had another drink and I said, "Well, let"s slide along."
She was nice about seeming neither too anxious to go nor to stay. The ends of her pale blonde hair curled up over the edge of her hat in back.
At the door I said, "Listen, there"s a taxi-stand around the corner. You won"t mind if I don"t take you home?"
She put a hand on my arm. "I do mind. Please -" The street was badly lighted. Her face was like a child"s. She took her.hand off my arm. "But if you"d rather . . ."
"I think I"d rather."
She said slowly, "I like you, Jack Bye, and I"m awfully grateful for -"
I said, "Aw, that"s all right," and we shook hands and I went back into the speakeasy.
Toots was still behind the bar. He came up to where I stood. "You oughtn"t to do that to me," he said, shaking his head mournfully.
"I know. I"m sorry."
"You oughtn"t to do it to yourself," he went on just as sadly. "This ain"t Harlem, boy, and if old Judge Warner finds out his daughter"s running around with you and coming in here he can make it plenty tough for both of us. I like you, boy, but you got to remember it don"t make no difference how light your skin is or how many colleges you went to, you"re still n.i.g.g.e.r."
I said, "Well, what do you suppose I want to be? A Chinaman?"
THE JUDGE LAUGHED LAST.
"THE TROUBLE with this country," Old Man Covey unexpectedly exploded, emphasizing his words with repeated beats of a gnarled forefinger on the newspaper he had been reading, "is that the courts have got a stranglehold on it! Law? There ain"t no law! There"s courts and there"s judges, and this thing you call the law is a weapon they use to choke human enterprise - to discourage originality and progress!"
The portion of the morning paper upon which the old man"s a.s.sault was concentrated, I saw with difficulty, held the report of a decision of the Supreme Court in connec- tion with some labor difficulties in the West. Old Man Covey, I knew, couldn"t be personally interested in either side of the dispute. He had as little to do with capital as with labor, which was very little. For eight years now - since the day when a street preacher had turned "Big-dog" Covey from the ways of crime, to become plain John Covey and, later, Old Man Covey - he had subsisted upon the benevolence of a son-in-law.
His interest in this case was, then, purely academic. But his att.i.tude was undoubtedly tinged by his earlier experience with the criminal courts, which had been more than superficial, and I suspected that some especially bitter memory had engendered this outburst.
So I rolled another cigarette and led him gently along the road of argumentation - the most direct path, I had learned, to the interior of his contrary old mind.
"Being a beak," I said, using the vernacular term for judge in an attempt to do all I could to stir up the portions of his remembrance that had to do with his days of youth and lawlessness, "is a tough job. Laws are complicated and puzzling, and it isn"t easy to straighten them out so that they fit particular cases. Most of the beaks do very well, I think."
"You think so, do you?" the old scoundrel snarled at me. "Well, let me tell you, sonny, you don"t know a d.a.m.ned thing about it! I could tell you stories about beaks and their ways that would knock your eye out!"
I put all the skepticism I could summon into a smile, confident now that I had him.
"You look at things from your own side," I replied, "and in those days you were on the wrong side. Now I don"t say that judges don"t make mistakes now and then. They do. They"re only human. But I never heard of a case where you could say that a judge had positively twisted the law around to -"
That turned the trick. He cursed and snorted and glared at me, and I grinned my insincere doubts, and the story finally came out.
"Me and "Flogger" Rork was on the road together some years ago, with a gun apiece and a couple big handkerchiefs to hide our mugs behind when we needed to. All-night grease-joints was our meat, and we done ourselves pretty well. We"d knock over a couple a night some nights. We"d drift into them separate at three or four in the morning, not letting on we knew each other, and stall over coffee and sinkers until we was alone with the guy behind the counter. Then we"d flash the rods on him, take what was in the damper, and slide on. No big hauls, you understand, but a steady, reliable income.
"We work that way for a few months, and then I get an idea for a new racket -and it"s a darb! Flogger -he"s an unimaginative sort of jobbie - can"t see it at first. But I keep jawing at him until he gives in and agrees to take a whirl at it.
"You never seen Flogger Rork, did you? I thought not. Well, he"s a good guy - what "Limey" Pine used to call a "bene cove"- but he ain"t no flower to look at. I seen a cartoon of a burglar once in a newspaper during one of these crime waves, and that"s the only time I ever seen a face like Flogger"s. A good guy - but we had to be careful how we moved around, because bulls had a habit of picking us up just on account of his face. Me - n.o.body hadn"t ever took me for a lamb, myself; though alongside of Flogger I look pretty sweet.
"These mugs of ours had been handicaps to us so far, but now under my new scheme we"re going to cash in on them.
"We was in the Middle West at the time. We blow into the next burg on our list, look the main drag over, and go to work. Our guns are ditched down under a pile of rocks near the jungle.
"We make a drug-store. There"s two nice little boys in it. I plant myself in front of one of them, with one hand in my coat pocket, and Flogger does the same with the other.
" "Come through," we tells "em.
"Without a squawk, one of "em pushes down the "No Sale" key of the damper, scoops out every nickel that"s in it, and pa.s.ses it over to Flogger.
" "Lay down behind the counter and don"t be too much in a hurry about getting up," we tell them next.
"They do as they"re told, and me and Flogger go on out and about our business.
"The next day we push over two more stores and move on to the next town. Every town we hit we give our new racket a couple of whirls, and it goes nice. Having an ace up our sleeves, we can take chances that otherwise would have been foolish -we can pull a couple or even three jobs a day without waiting for the rumpus from the first one to die down.
"Pickings were pretty them days!
"Then, one afternoon in a fresh burg, we push over a garage, a p.a.w.nshop and a shoe store, and we get picked up.
"The bulls that nabbed us was loaded for bear, but - outside of running until we saw it was no use - we went along with them as nice as you please. When they frisked us they found the money from that day"s jobs, but that was all. The rest was cached where we knew it would be when we wanted it. And our guns was still under that pile of stones three. States away. We didn"t have no use for them any more.
"The guys we had stuck up that afternoon came in to look us over, and they all identified us right away. As one of "em said there was no forgettin" our faces. But we sat tight and said nothing. We knew where we stood and we were satisfied.
"After a couple days they let us have a mouthpiece. We picked out a kid whose diploma hadn"t been with him long enough to collect any dust yet, but he looked like he wouldn"t throw us down; and he didn"t have to know much law for us. Then we laid around and took jail life easy.
"A few days of that, and they yank us into court. We let things run along for a while without fightin" back, until the right time came. Then our kid mouthpiece gets up and springs our little joker on them.
"His clients, he says, meaning me and Flogger, are per- fectly willing to plead guilty to begging. But there is nothing to hold them for robbery on. They were in need of funds, and they went into three business establishments and asked for money. They had no weapons. The evidence doesn"t show that they made any threats. Whatever mo-1 tives may have prompted the persons in the stores to hand over the contents of the various cash registers to oblige them - the kid says - has no bearing on the matter. The evidence is plain. His clients asked for money and it was given to them. Begging, certainly - and so his clients are liable to sentences of 30 days or so in the county jail for vagrancy. But robbery - no!
"Well, son, it was a riot! I thought the beak was going to bust something. He"s a big bloated hick with a red face and a pair of nose-pinchers. His face turns purple now, and the cheaters slide down his nose three times in five minutes. The district attorney does a proper war dance with the whoops and all. But we had "em!"
The old man stopped with an air of finality. I waited a while, but he didn"t resume the story, if there were, indeed, any more to it; so I prodded him.
"I don"t see where that proves your contention," I said. "There"s no using of the law as a weapon there."
"Wait, sonny, wait," he promised. * "You"ll see before I"m through . . . They put their witnesses back on the stand again, then. But there was nothing to it. None of "em had seen any weapons, and none of "em couldn"t say we had threatened "em. They said things about our looks, but it ain"t a crime to be ugly.
"They shut up shop for the day, then, and chased me and Flogger back to the jail. And we went back as happy a pair as you ever seen. We had the world by the tail with a downhill pull, and we liked it. Thirty days, or even sixty, in the county jail on a vag charge didn"t mean nothing to us. We"d had that happen to us before, and got over it.
"We were happy - but that came from the ignorance of our trustin" natures. We thought maybe a court was a place where justice was done after all; where right was right; and where things went accordin" to the law. We"d been in trouble with the law before, plenty, but this was different - we had the law on our side this time; and we counted on it stickin" with us. But -"
"Well, anyway, they take us back over to court after a few more days. And as soon as I get a slant at the beak and the district attorney I get sort of a chill up my back. They got mean lights in their eyes, like a coupla kids that had put tacks on a chair and was a-waiting for somebody to sit on them. Maybe, I think, they"ve rigged things up so"s they can slip us two or three, or even six, months on vag charges. But I didn"t suspect half of it!
"Say, you"ve heard this chatter about how slow the courts are, haven"t you? Well, let me tell you, nothing in the world ever moved any faster than that court that morning. Before we had got fixed in our chairs, almost, things was humming.
"Our kid mouthpiece is bouncing up and down continuj ous, trying to get a word in. But not a chance! Every time he opens his mouth the beak cracks down on him and shuts him up; even threatening to throw him out and fine him in the bargain if he don"t keep quiet.
"The man we"d gone up against in the garage was the proprietor, but the ones in the hock shop and the shoe store were just hirelings. So they leave the garage man out of the game. But they put the other two in the dock, charged with grand larceny, have "em plead guilty, sentence "em to five years apiece, and suspend the sentences before you could shift a chew from one cheek to the other. " "If," the beak says in answer to our mouthpiece"s squawk, "your clients simply asked for the money and these men gave it to them, then these two men are guilty of theft, since the money belonged to their employers. There is nothing for the court to do, therefore but to find them guilty of grand larceny and sentence them to five years each in the state prison. But the evidence tends to show that these men were actuated simply by an overwhelming desire to help two of their fellow men; that they were induced to steal the money simply by an ungovernable impulse to charity. And the court, therefore, feels that it is justified in exercising its legal privilege of leniency, and suspending their sentences."
"Me and Flogger don"t understand what"s being done to us right away, but our mouthpiece does, and as soon as I get a look at him I know it"s pretty bad. He"s sort of gasping.
"The rest of the dirty work takes longer, but there"s no stopping it. This old buzzard of a judge has our charges changed to "receiving stolen property"-a felony in that state; we are convicted on two counts, and he slips us ten years in the big house on each, the hitches to run end to end.
"And does that old buzzard feel that the court should exercise its legal privilege of leniency and suspend our sentences? Fat chance! Me and Flogger goes over!"
HIS BROTHER"S KEEPER.
I KNEW what a lot of people said about Loney but he was always swell to me. Ever since I remember he was swell to me and I guess I would have liked him just as much even if he had been just somebody else instead of my brother; but I was glad he was not just somebody else.
He was not like me. He was slim and would have looked swell in any kind of clothes you put on him, only he always dressed cla.s.sy and looked like he had stepped right out of the bandbox even when he was just loafing around the house, and he had slick hair and the whitest teeth you ever saw and long, thin, clean-looking fingers. He looked like the way I remembered my father, only better-looking. I took more after Ma"s folks, the Malones, which was funny because Loney was the one that was named after them. Malone Bolan. He was smart as they make them, too. It was no use trying to put anything over on him and maybe that was what some people had against him, only that was kind of hard to fit in with Pete Gonzalez.
Pete Gonzalez not liking Loney used to bother me sometimes because he was a swell guy, too, and he was never trying to put anything over on anybody. He had two fighters and a wrestler named Kilchak and he always sent them in to do the best they could, just like Loney sent me in. He was the topnotch manager in our part of the country and a lot of people said there was no better anywhere, so I felt pretty good about him wanting to handle me, even if I did say no.
It was in the hall leaving Tubby White"s gym that I ran into him that afternoon and he said, "h.e.l.lo, Kid, how"s it?" moving his cigar further over in a corner of his mouth so he could talk.
"h.e.l.lo. All right."
He looked me up and down, squinting on account of the smoke from his cigar. "Going to take this guy Sat.u.r.day?"
"I guess so."
He looked me up and down again like he was weighing me in. His eyes were little enough anyhow and when he squinted like that you could hardly see them at all. "How old are you, Kid?"