“I did?” Henry said cautiously.
“Certainly, man! Don’t you remember? As you went down under the gunman’s bullet, you were yelling it at the top of your lungs. Overby, the heroic words you uttered were, precisely. ‘You can’t nave the treasure out of my vault... my vault... my vault...’ ”
The Sucker
by David Mutch
No one is more aware than a child of the “annoyance of a good example,” yet on a rare occasion a patient teacher may be accidentally rewarded.
It was a day that started bad and got worse.
It started bad before I’d gone on duty. In fact, I was just getting out of bed and into my uniform when the phone call came from the head of our minor baseball league. He told me that my appeal had been turned down flat, that we hadn’t turned up with enough players to field a team last Friday night so the game went to the other team by default. He was nice about it. He said he was real sorry, and that he admired a cop like me devoting so much time to boys’ work; he understood the problems I must have in the Water Street area with those underprivileged kids.
But he didn’t understand. It wasn’t, if you got right down to it, the underprivileged kids of Water Street who were the problem. It was Mart Erie, who had this whole city in his paws, paws soft and white, but very dirty, too. I wondered how many kids would have turned up for the game if the team had been Erie’s. My guess was every last kid.
Strange, maybe, but bitterly disappointed in those kids though I was, I could see how it looked to them. I was just the cop on the beat, a square. Erie showed those kids three-hundred-dollar suits, expensive women and expensive cars. He showed them the rackets paid. I showed them what being a cop paid — not very much.
The day started bad and got worse, like I said. Marg, my wife, said sympathetic things about the baseball situation, but then she said, “I saw George and Ann yesterday.”
When you’ve been married for ten years, lots of things you say to your wife, and the other way around, have some sort of special meaning. That did. It meant that she had seen George Bell, who had quit the force for a job that paid more money, and why didn’t I get smart and do the same.
I said, “That’s nice.” Which meant, maybe I am crazy to stay on the force, but I’m staying.
Conversations between you and your wife take big jumps, I guess because you’ve been over and over the same subjects so often.
Marg said, “I guess it’s a healthy thing for you to do boys work, seeing we can’t have kids of our own. But why pick those junior gangsters down there? There are kids who’d appreciate having a coach who has played as much ball as you.”
“Those kids down there need it most, Marg. It’s a bad area.”
She nodded stiffly over her coffee cup. “It is a bad area. It’s a shame somebody doesn’t do something for it — like drop a couple of atomic bombs on it.” And then it came out, something I realized right away she’d kept bottled up inside for a long time. “I’m fed up. I’m fed up sitting home here night after night while you waste your time down in that human jungle with those ungrateful little gangsters, or risk your life with their big brothers. Water Street is rotten to the core. This whole city is rotten. Mart Erie owns this town — most of the cops, most of the politicians, everything. I want you to get off the force. Or if you must be a cop, let’s move to some decent city where they appreciate an honest cop.”
She put her cup down. It rattled against its saucer and her coffee spilled. What made it worse was that she’d never been this mad before. In fact, Marg seldom got mad at all. And she wasn’t finished.
“I hate to say this,” she said, “but you’re a sucker. Only a sucker would be an honest cop in this city. Only a sucker would start a baseball team for a bunch of little gangsters who couldn’t care less.”
I tried to argue with her, though my heart wasn’t exactly in it. “Well, maybe things will get better. There’s the Reform League.”
“The Reform League! Ha, ha, ha. It’ll take a lot more than the Reform League to stop Mart Erie.”
I took that conversation with me as I drove to work. I convinced myself that I felt for the Water Street kids because my childhood had been nothing to write home about. Some guys like to talk about the bad things they went through, but not me, I’d rather forget. Let’s just say the home I was brought up in, it you’d call it a home, was plain lousy, and let it go at that.
So I felt for those kids. But was I doing them any good? Was the competition, Mart Erie, too much? Was I being a sucker?
And the day that had started bad, like I said, kept getting worse.
The newspapers called Erie “the king of crime,” and things like that, and it wasn’t as phoney as it sounds, because when he came down to Water Street he strutted around like a king.
He had a thing in his head about Water Street. He lived miles away in this town’s best suburb, hut he had been born in one of the tenements on the street, and it was awful important to him for some reason or other to visit the street and show off, particularly to the kids.
He was on the street this day. and I had a run-in with him, and it happened with a kid named Billy White having a ringside seat.
White, so “Whitey”, naturally, was a born leader. Nothing special about his looks, just another skinny fifteen-year-old, but where Whitey led, the other kids followed. Right from the start of the baseball season I had known that Whitey would be the key to success or failure. And there were periods he didn’t miss so much as a practice. But there were other periods when I never laid eyes on him. He hadn’t cared enough to turn out for the first playoff game.
Whitey was slouched in the doorway of the greasy spoon in front of which Erie had parked his expensive imported car. The car was black. It gleamed in the sunlight like a freshly shined shoe.
I didn’t ask Whitey why he hadn’t turned out for the game. I figured if he had a reason — and I was sure he didn’t — he shouldn’t have to be asked for it. And I didn’t ignore him. Kids like him only laugh at you if they think they’ve got your goat.
So I played it real cool. “Hi, Whitey.”
He played it cool, too. “Hi, cop.”
I turned back to the car. It was parked in front of a hydrant, faced the wrong way. It was two feet from the kerb. This was one the kids of Water Street what a of Erie’s little ways of showing Dig joke laws were.
I put my foot on the bumper of Erie’s car and got out my book of tickets. I could feel Whitey’s eyes on me. I knew that he knew as well as I did there was no more chance of the ticket ever being paid than of the ragman’s horse winning the Kentucky Derby.
I had the ticket half made out when Erie came up the sidewalk. There was a muscle guy with him — a lot of hair, a low forehead and a loud idiotic laugh. Lots of times Erie handed out quarters to the kids of Water Street, and there was a bunch of them trailing along behind him now like peasants following a king. Erie liked it; there was a smug grin on his face.
Erie matched his car, flashy and slick and expensive looking. He had eyes as black as the car and just as cold, eyes that would make a rattlesnake’s look like a puppy’s.
Erie and I knew what we were fighting for; I saw his cold eyes cast a swift glance at Whitey.
Erie gave me a big phoney grin. “Good morning, officer.” He knew my name, but it was part of the little show he was putting on for the kids’ benefit, particularly Whitey’s, to pretend he didn’t.
He turned to his muscle guy and gave out with some more phoniness. “Tut, tut, Higgenbottom, look where you’ve parked the car. And now this nice police officer is giving us a ticket. Higgenbottom, you know how I dread trouble with the police.”