Brain Guy: A gang killer meets his match in a TNT blonde Page 23

“Let’s go for a long walk,” he said to Cathy at three o’clock.

  “It’s a beautiful day.”

  “And I know somebody beautiful, too,” he said, his voice humorless. In silence they strolled away from the multitudes of girls, green and dapper as frogs. “Getting on to April. The hell with it. I’m not stalling around. I got a room today at a hotel so we can go up there and talk. To talk,” he repeated swiftly, as if the trees in Gramercy Park were a forest about him. He stepped gingerly. Her hip touched his own. He listened to the song of these things. Hip and arm spoke grandly.

  “We can’t go up,” said Cathy. She didn’t blush, but her words seemed to be all red and white.

  For God’s sake, he preached, didn’t she love him? He wanted her alone. It was natural. They came out on Fifth and Twenty-third, winding through Madison Square, and their way that morning was all parked and green to the eye. Northwards to Forty-second, and the sense of brown trees accompanied them. What they said was forgotten and they were hearkening to the voices in their bodies, the city voice muted down to one inconsolate cry of longing. The tremendous phallic gleam of the Empire State caught their visions and they glanced skywards saying how big it was, jostled by people pausing for the traffic lights. At Fifty-ninth, north again was the endless country of Central Park. Their conversation had a summer hum. “I love you,” he said; “do you love me?” “I love you,” she said, “but it isn’t right.” He’d make it right. Why, how could he? He knew how. Let her wait and see. (St. Patrick’s Cathedral had given him an idea — not a nice idea, but he meant it right.)

  “How can you make it right?” she said.

  “Gee, you’re set. Don’t you love me? If you do you’ll see. Just hold your horses.” Then, excited he led her up the cathedral steps, under the central doorway into an immense hush of darkness, folding and draping their bodies so that they were part of the hush. “I brought you here for a reason. You’re Cath’lic. This is a Cath’lic church. I want to say I love you and will you marry me? I want you to.” They hadn’t been inside a minute, and yet the hush followed them. Breathing deep of cool air didn’t help that funny feeling of God spying down and saying: O.K., Joe, it’s a go, you’re man and wife. This feeling wasn’t part of his idea. On Fifth the whole idea seemed plain dopey. Her face was averted, but he swaggered, stepping briskly like a man fetching a slave home from market. He loved her. That was plenty. If he loved her he wouldn’t harm her, would he? The world flashed before him in hard gleaming color, enameled by his emotion. The avenue was thick yellow sun. Diamond points of light glittered from autos. The sky waved down between the rows of buildings like a blue flag. Thank God the loneliness was over, the crucifixion of the time before three o’clock. The long walk uptown belonged to another period, to the emptiness before the cathedral. He owned a new mind and body that hadn’t existed ten minutes ago.

  When they were alone in the room, they were shy as newly weds, standing far apart, smiling down at the city. She wore her hat and coat, waiting for him to act, to do, to be the man. He knew it, idling, hearing time ticking into agony. Now that he had her here, the warm visions and lusts he’d counted on had stayed behind, not entering the room. He was solitary, a young fellow with no merry sensual company urging him on. Love? Hugging? Why was she silent? Her yellow hair, silky above her pale forehead, had no prettiness for him. Looking into her eyes he was more helpless than ever. They were just eyes. Animals had eyes. Men had eyes. He fastened his glance on her listless virginal arms, her pink lips, and it seemed strange that he had dreamed with such a dream of this thin girl with the narrow hips and the silence of a hunted rabbit. His words and her answers were both stupid. Was this how lovers talked? It couldn’t be. They were two suspicious animals, contemplating each other because they were in one cage. This wasn’t love. This wasn’t anything.

  Seeing him this way, his arms strapped to his body, his mouth gagged, she felt pity. “Why you so goofy, Joe?”

  “Hell, you’re goofy yourself.” Her eyes were softer. He hated her pity, remembering something at Metz’s … all these slum girls were the same, all of them were, the same, the same, ready to flop over soon they got outa diapers, diapers, and a guy outa pants, pants, outa pants. He thought this memory, but without believing it. Pity. It was pity in her, and nothing else.

  “I want you to know,” he began tediously, “that I love you and will marry you some day like I said back in the church.” And after speaking to his conscience, reassuring God it was on the up-and-up, he hugged her with the formality of a kid with his number one official sweetheart, his neck twisted, his head stiff as if repelled by her nearness.

  “Not so hard,” she said. “You’re strong.”

  He smiled like an idiot, relaxing his grip, sitting down and pulling her onto his lap. What a sap he was! His insides broke free from tautness. He was himself again. “I’m crazy and you’re the reason.” He was masterful, home again with the knowledge gained from piling on sluttish maids. He kissed all the area of her face, for this lingered in his mind as part of the ritual. Inside of him the deep flame of quiet, gentle, intense, overwhelmed the tricks. He forgot all he’d learned of the art and the way, holding her tight to him on the chair as one would a valuable possession. They were two children in the first greenest gladtime of love. They had no harm for each other.

  She was so sweet and vague, so little the woman or piece of tail, he remembered she was virgin. He said seriously: “You’re just a kid. You can guess what I mean. I can’t love you the way I want. We must wait or else. Gee, it’s hard to say. I’ve got to love you slowly, by degrees. I don’t want to hurt you all at once.” She was blushing, helpless as if he’d beaten her. He had sounded brutal and now asked if she understood. He wouldn’t hurt her. He loved her too much, but he had to love her. He had to.

  The blood receded in her, she seemed sick from blushing, diseased with the irregular burstings of blood in her head, but when she answered, she was practical as a woman in love or a woman in passion. “Where’ll we go? I love you, Joe. I do.”

  “I’ll take a room by the week.”

  “What of the money?”

  “You do love me.” They kissed in a tense second that broke down in its duration the churchly scruples of all her childhood and youth.

  Later in the afternoon McMann and Bill, stewed to the gills, hopped a cab for McMann’s new diggings, stopping en route for ginger ale and a carton of ice. McMann dug the booze from one of the valises. They were alone in a strange room, their faces flaming, their hands trembling. McMann’s eyes were so bloodshot they seemed wounded. He was very confidential. “Tha’s how it goes. Yesterday’n today I bops two guys. Me. I kilt two guys. Can ya beat it? That steppin’ or ain’t it? Naw’n I don’ like it. But them or us. Think I liked that Duffy rat’s mug, the yeller bastard. Your fault when ya gets down to’t.”

  “My fault!” yelled Bill; “how’n hell you get that way?”

  McMann peered drunkenly above the rim of his glass, the low square brow of forehead beneath his red hair wrinkling. “I was nothin’ till you blowed round with your dope.”

  “Then what you bitching?”

  “I ain’t bitchin’.”

  “What the hell you call bitching if you ain’t?”

  “Paddy usta say to me you’re a smart sonufabitch.” He grinned fondly, inveigled towards a feeling of auld lang syne. “The first time I saw ya. At Paddy’s.”

  “And you fetched down a guy in a trunk.” They laughed like two old men recalling a childhood memory, pleased that they both remembered, sighing, their whisky breaths filling the room.

  “Jeez, yeh. It’s plain no-good.” He complained so dully Bill was sorry. “It ain’t fair. N.G. What a lousy life! Two ginks dead. Not my fault, it ain’t. Faulta lousy life. Looka,” he exclaimed. “My ole man ain’t worse’n the rest, nor me old lady, but they’re plain stinkin’ Irish, sockin’ me when they had nothin’ on. Out in the gutter with the other kids, that’s me, learnin’ to drive by hockin’ c
ars, jumpin’ into one after ‘nother. Lotsa saps never shut off their motors. When we got jammed up I run away. I learn every damn thing that way. Myself. Myself. Not one bastard to help me.” He refilled his glass, his small clever head perched on his neck, swaying gently as he talked. “Tha’s too bad,” said Bill. Injustice in the world, you could bet on it. A lot of injustice directed against them. It wasn’t fair, with the world ganging against their drunkenness. His insides were heated. The room was humid as if summer were outside, yet his cool mind held guard. He didn’t trust McMann even when he spoke of his kid days, never done before even under liquor. Why now? McMann could drink a barrel and not feel it. Why was he blabbing all the bunko about kid days. He thought: I’m sitting here with a murderer, he’s killed two men in a day and a half. He is feeling me out. He is pulling a fast one. Maybe I am to be killed.

  Bill consoled himself drunkenly. Why, he was an accessory to Duffy’s murder. He’d handed over the gat. (Why in hell had he done it?) And as McMann mumbled about his kid days, Bill’s streak of sanity like a lightning fought itself clear of the thundery cloudy darkness of the booze. The few months, the few yesterdays. All in a life. He was in dutch with guys wanting him. Hanrahan, Duffy, McMann, sat morbidly at his funeral, the death of his former life, staring at his new life sweeping along. Murder. Oh, Christ, Hanrahan the bull, the kids, the stickups, Metz, Joe and Cathy, the clubhouse. This compacted past was creating a future even while he breathed and sprawled in a strange room.

  He caught the tag end of a sentence. “Reform school. Nex’ stop for me and whatta hell. Too smart for them lunkheads and they knew it, an’ hiding us done no good. I hacked, was in odd jobs for ginks like Paddy, a lil pimpin’, boozerunnin’, but nothin’ much — ”

  “Your parents dead like mine?” asked Bill, patriotically sad.

  “What the hell you got ‘gainst my parents?”

  “Not a damn thing.”

  “Shut up. The ole lady wasn’t a bad un.”

  Bill wanted him to speak about his folk for no reason at all. What’d he care? Far behind the haze of drink in which his body was etherized, he felt he didn’t trust McMann, McMann had no parents, had been born like a devil without them, a devil sent to lead him into hell. Drugged, inert as he was, this flicker of thought was shocking him, his conscience laboring against the red McMann who wasn’t a human, whose thoughts were hidden, whom he distrusted. What was he thinking of, what did he mean to do, and who but a fool could trust this gab of childhood and old ladies?

  “April first isn’t far off and we need dough to fix the clubhouse proper.” McMann stated they ought to see Spat and give the bozo a chance, Spat was a numberbook with connections. And they needed dough. Sure. Wasn’t he figuring on a joint in Harlem and figuring bigger jobs, like ferinstance, how about a kidnapping of some big shot’s kid, sure, why not? Lots of mugs in booze and numbers with kids they could grab for ransom, sure, why not, big dough in one lump…. Bill was dazed with a sense of I-told-you-so, as if one astute segment of him were boasting to another, more naïve Bill. Double damn right. Always McMann led further on, further into hell. Even now with the cursed devil sentimental about childhood he had but to say the word of God, the word dough, and the devil was ready for something else. McMann was leaning on his elbows. He declared what they needed was a ransom job. They had the kids, and it was easy. Bill filled the glasses. Kidnapping paid well if you got away with it. He wouldn’t put a thing past McMann. “I bet you got the details ready.”

  “You have,” said McMann; “ain’t you the brain?” He laughed for a long time at this perpetually funny joke.

  “You plastered it on me for good?”

  “Why not?”

  “Anything goes twisty and I’ll be the goat.”

  “If you know the answers, why ask ‘em?” He was staring at Bill’s face every other second, glancing away amused, as if the joke were still there.

  “That’s it,” cried Bill, infuriated. “Just careful: I’m goat for the slip-up. I don’t blame you.” Life taught the lesson, the survival of the most cunning. What a damn fool he was to speak so seriously! He smiled. “Hell with it. Tomorrow’s another day.”

  “Down the hatch.” McMann grinned, his bony head nodding from side to side, the high skull-cap coming straight down to the eye-ridge, where, deeply sunk, the reddish eyes glinted, the only live things in his face. Just like Duffy’s, thought Bill. And Duffy had to go. It was them or Duffy…. McMann’s cheekbones, jaw, slitted mouth, were impassive and brutal, not from choice, but from creation. What could such a man think? So had life cut him forth from the womb, made him what he was, a civilized beast obeying the principles of a jungle society. Climb the ladder. The drink was strong and amiable in Bill, pounding him on the shoulder, drawing the men together as if it were the mutual crony. He was sorry for McMann, his head tumblesaulting so that it was impossible to say whether he, Bill Trent, was being sorry or some other groggy Bill. “Life runs on like a river,” he orated, boozily philosophic. “You follow the river. Looka me. Good family. Education. A good job. And I’m a wolf. Looka me. Terrible. A crook, a murderer. Don’t you think I’m not spoiling my brother. I see it. Bad enough I ruin myself, but I’m taking him with me. I see it. I’m not a fool altogether. He should never have come to me. Getting him a job, I shouldn’t have caused him to lose it. He spends my dirty money and he’ll come to no good with me. What can I do? I can’t back out. I don’t want to back out. I’m not a bad fellow, but I got to have dough.”

  “Tha’s the way it goes,” said McMann with profound acquiescence. “Two killin’s on me hands. What’d the priest say, huh? I don’ go to priests even if they’re clams. I trust nobody, not one livin’ guy.” He smiled, asking approval for his code. The city in which they sat had never been built. They needed one another that second in the softening of their souls, using one another as priest, holding this mutual confessional in a strange place. Beyond the window the city gripped the earth with a fist of stone, the squared pyramided city of the millions. They were lonely.

  “Looka me,” cried Bill, driving nail after nail into his cross. “Months since I’ve been with respectable people. This what I live for? Living and eating with gangsters and whores?”

  “Everybody’s a lousy whiner,” said McMann. “What’s the use? So what? You oughta be glad you’d a fat time of it for so many years. Hell, you had a fat time, so what you bitchin’ for?”

  Bill hated him, happy his face was fiery, his eyes turning on drunken orbits. McMann couldn’t see his hate. He was afraid of him. Even now he might be reading the hate behind his eyes. If it’d suit him, I’d be the next after Duffy. He was sorry. It would’ve been better if they’d been real friends. Now suppose he grabbed a knife and stabbed it into McMann as one would into a wild beast. Why wait to be slashed? That’d be a real brain guy. You let the head decide what was best. He glanced up as if he’d been away a week. The tempter, satanic, formidable. Oh, McMann. McMann wasn’t human. He was so gifted. He could destroy him when he was utterly lost. McMann had compelled him to be an accessory to murder. What next? Kidnapper, pimp, dope-peddler? How low? Forgive me, not my fault. McMann’s, the bastard devil. He’ll make a murderer out of me yet … knife. He drank and his heart plotted. If he killed him, there’d be an end to everything. He’d be able to quit. Not too late. He thought murder, concealing his devil’s blood lust. It was a lie. He wouldn’t quit. Quitting didn’t put dough in your pocket. He needed dough. “Sometimes I’d like to kill you, Red.”

  “Me, too.” His eyes glared as if he were happy to confess his mind. They smiled at the truth spoken, like brothers united by a single ambition. “Have a drink. You’re a good guy even as I says to Paddy when we hooked up.”

  “It’s a long time. Every day the future shows bigger.”

  “Dog eat dog. They don’t eat us, we eat them. I don’t eat you, you eat me. The way it goes. A dinner party, a big feed, tha’s all.”

  “The big feed.” He laughed. “That’s fun
ny.”

  “An’ it tastes good.”

  “But some dogs are buddies like you’n me.” He heeled McMann, lounging in the easy chair near the window, mapping out his relation to McMann like a mathematician. He allowed for time, McMann was unarmed. But he could drop hand in pocket and snap out a five-inch blade by pressing a little button. He’d be on Mac in a jiffy. Not ten feet separated them. There was no convenient chair for McMann to swing. He had the knife, he’d get the first punch in. He casually brushed his hand against his pocket. The knife filled the pocket. The button on top of the bone sheath faced the rear of the room. It wasn’t murder in his thought but the exhilarated acting-out of a simple equation involving length and time, McMann the completion of all formulas. He wasn’t even surprised he should finally come to murder. It had to come. You accepted life as it was. Better for him to be armed at the showdown than McMann. McMann hadn’t needed him for a long time. McMann destroyed what was of no use. What was the use being a brain guy if you didn’t act on it?

  Glass in hand, McMann staggered towards the table where the bottles of whisky and ginger ale stood. Bill thought: I’m going to kill a drunk. It didn’t occur to him he was drunk, too, his mind finishing up the last decisions and moves in a chess game begun long ago. He allowed for the glass McMann’d heave at him. Getting up with his glass, he circled the table which had become a possible barricade, a pawn obstructing his victory. His hand dived in his pocket. The knife was out, the button clicking, five inches springing from his fist. He lunged it forward deep into McMann’s side. The glassful of whisky into which McMann had been pouring ginger ale dropped to the carpet. McMann silently grabbed one of the bottles, his red eyes amazed, angry. Blood gushed. The knife was out. “You coke,” cried McMann. Bill felt it freed from the sheath of flesh, tightening his fingers into McMann’s neck so no more words could come. Face to face almost, their drunken bitter breaths mingling, he plunged the knife with a continuation of motion and the first attack, remorseless, ultimately successful, into McMann’s heart, who, choking, fell forward upon his attacker like a lover, a drunk surrendering himself to the care of a bosom pal. The bottle, gripped, eddied from his slack fingers, rolling across the table. Stopped by the whisky bottle, the ginger ale ran out from the narrow neck as if it too had been murdered.