Sam grabbed her wrist, making the bracelets jingle. She tried to jerk away but he held her arm so tightly that his knuckles were white. “You ever see Baker behind my back and I’ll kill you both!” He almost spit the words out.
“Hey, now,” Billy said gently, “don’t talk like that, folks!” He placed his hand on Sam Daniels’ arm and felt the muscles relax as Sam released his wife. She bent over silently on her stool and held the wrist as if it were broken. “Have one on the house,” Billy said, taking up their almost empty glasses. “One to make up by.”
“Make mine straight,” Sam said. He was breathing hard and his face was red.
“Damn you!” Rita moaned. She half fell off the stool and walked quickly but staggeringly to the powder room again.
Billy began to mix the drinks deftly, speedily, as if there were a dozen people at the bar and they all demanded service. In the faint red glow from the beer-ad electric clock, he looked like an ancient alchemist before his rows of multicolored bottles. “You shouldn’t be so hard on her,” he said absently as he mixed. “Can’t believe all the rumors you hear about a woman as pretty as Rita, and a harmless kiss in fun never hurt nobody.”
“Rumors?” Sam leaned over the bar. “Kiss? What kiss? Did she kiss Baker last night?”
“Take it easy,” Billy said. “I told you Baker came in late.” The phone rang, as it always did during the fifteen minutes before the Hulton Plant let out, with wives leaving messages and asking for errant husbands. When Billy returned, Rita was back at the bar.
“Let’s get out of here,” she said. There were tear streaks in her makeup.
“Finish your drinks and go home happy, folks.” Billy shot a glance at the door and set the glasses on the bar.
Rita drank hers slowly, but Sam tossed his drink down and stared straight ahead. Quietly, Billy put another full glass in front of him.
“I hear you were in here with Baker last night,” Sam said in a low voice: “Somebody even saw you kissing him.”
“You’re crazy!” Rita’s thickened voice was outraged.
Billy moved quickly toward them. “I didn’t say that.”
“I knew you were covering up!” Sam glared pure hate at him. “We’ll see what Baker says, because I’m going to drive over to his place right now and bash his brains out!”
“But I didn’t even see Baker last night!” Rita took a pull on her drink, trying to calm herself. Sam swung sharply around with his forearm, hitting Rita’s chin and the highball glass at the same time. There was a clink as the glass hit her teeth and she fell backward off the stool.
Billy reached under the bar and his hand came up with a glinting chrome automatic that seemed to catch every ray of light in the place. It was a gentleman’s gun, and standing there in his white shirt and red vest Billy looked like a gentleman holding it.
“Now, don’t move folks.” He aimed the gun directly at Sam’s stomach. “You know we don’t go for that kind of trouble in here.” He looked down and saw blood seeping between Rita’s fingers as she held her hand over her mouth. Billy wet a clean towel and tossed it to her, and she held it to her face and scooted backward to sit sobbing in the farthest booth.
Billy leaned close to Sam. “Listen,” he said, his voice a sincere whisper, “I don’t want to bring trouble on Baker, or on you for that matter, so I can’t stand by and let you go over there and kill him and throw your own life away. It wasn’t him she was in here with. He came in later.”
“Wasn’t him?” Sam asked in bewildered fury. “Who was it then?”
“I don’t know,” Billy said, still in a whisper so Rita couldn’t hear. “He had a badge on, so he worked at the plant, but I don’t know who he is and that’s the truth.”
“Oh, no!”
“Take it easy, Sam. She only kissed him in that booth there. And I’m not even sure I saw that. The booth was dark.”
Sam tossed down the drink that was on the bar and moaned. He was staring at the automatic and Billy could see he wanted desperately to move.
A warm silence filled the bar, and then the phone rang shrilly, turning the silence to icicles.
“Now take it easy,” Billy said, backing slowly down the bar toward the phone hung on the wall. “A kiss isn’t anything.” As the phone rang again he could almost see the shrill sound grate through Sam’s tense body. Billy placed the automatic on the bar and took the last five steps to the phone. He let it ring once more before answering it.
“Naw,” Billy said into the receiver, standing with his back to Sam and Rita, “he’s not here.” He stood for a long moment instead of hanging up, as if someone were still on the other end of the line.
The shot was a sudden angry bark.
Billy put the receiver on the hook and turned. Sam was standing slumped with a supporting hand on a bar stool. Rita was crumpled on the floor beneath the table of the booth she’d been sitting in, her eyes open, her blonde hair bright with blood.
His head still bowed, Sam began to shake.
Within minutes the police were there, led by a young plainclothes detective named Parks.
“You say they were arguing and he just up and shot her?” Parks was asking as his men led Sam outside.
“He accused her of running around,” Billy said. “They were arguing, he hit her, and I was going to throw them out when the phone rang. I set the gun down for a moment when I went to answer the phone, and he grabbed it and shot.”
“Uh-hm,” Parks said efficiently, flashing a look toward where Rita’s body had lain before they’d photographed it and taken it away. “Pretty simple, I guess. Daniels confessed as soon as we got here. In fact, we couldn’t shut him up. Pretty broken.”
“Who wouldn’t be?” Billy said.
“Save some sympathy for the girl.” Parks looked around. “Seems like a nice place. I don’t know why there’s so much trouble in here.”
Billy shrugged. “In a dive, a class joint or a place like this, people are mostly the same.”
Parks grinned. “You’re probably right,” he said, and started toward the door. Before pushing it open, he paused and turned. “If you see anything like this developing again, give us a call, huh?”
“Sure,” Billy said, polishing a glass and holding it up to the fading afternoon light. “You know we don’t like trouble in here.”
99
Not the Running Type
Henry Slesar
“How dumb can you get!” Captain Ernest Fisher said, and slapped the desk blotter so hard that the calendar pad danced. Hogan, the bright-faced lieutenant of police, looked up from the standing files and asked a question with his eyebrows.
Fisher rattled the sheet in his hand. “I just got a look at this memo that came in last week — the one giving the names of parolees in the vicinity. It’s got Milt Potter listed.”
“Who’s Milt Potter?”
“You mean I never told you about him?”
“No, sir.”
“Take a look at the ’46 file while you’re there — under embezzlement. That’s Milton Potter, spelled the way it sounds. Bring it over and I’ll tell you the story.”
Hogan slid shut the drawer he was investigating and obeyed the order. He brought the manila folder to the Captain’s desk and flipped the cover to the first entry.
“Milton Potter,” he read. “Age thirty-four; single; employment, Metro Investment Services, Inc. ...”
“That’s the man,” Fisher nodded. He leaned back in the swivel chair and put his feet on the desk. “Tamest criminal you ever met in your life, or maybe the coolest. Walked off with two hundred thousand dollars of investors’ money, easy as stealing fruit from a pushcart. But now he’s a free man.”