You had to be logical about it. Juvenile hall, a state foster home, an orphanage, still better than anywhere with that pock-marked hood, the kind of woman he'd… Ten thousand. The car wouldn't bring five hundred.
They still owed four thousand on the house, a second mortgage wouldn't-Sue's engagement ring, the little odds and ends of jewelry they had, maybe another five hundred if they were lucky.
He'd sat still to be kicked in the teeth for the last time. If he could get from under this by forgetting every righteous standard he had- But it wasn't so easy, it never was. So, go and rob a bank, hold up a liquor store, sure, get the ten thousand. It wouldn't cancel out: the threat would be just as potent, and in a month, six months, a year, there'd be another demand.
He straightened up after a while and took a couple of long breaths. It wasn't any good agonizing round and round in the same circle, they'd gone over all this a hundred times last night. He'd just have to play it by ear. Meanwhile he had a day's work to do-conscientious, methodical Morgan, he thought tiredly.
He got out of the car, slipping the ignition key in his pocket. See the Williamses and try to put the fear of God into them. The county wouldn't prosecute this time, on a first offense involving a relatively small amount: the courts were working overtime as it was. Morgan looked up Commerce Street to the corner of Humboldt, where something seemed to be going on-he could see the tall end of a black-and white police car, its roof light flashing, and the fat Italian grocer had come out of his corner shop with a few early customers. Whatever it was, a drunk or a fight or an accident, it was round the corner on Humboldt. He started up the worn steps of the apartment. After he'd dealt with the Williamses he might as well drop in on Mrs. Kling, and that new one was somewhere around here too, if he remembered the address-he got out his case-notebook to look. Yes, Mrs. Marion Lindstrom 273 Graham Court.
TWO
There were worse streets than Commerce, but it wasn't a neighborhood where anyone would choose to live, except those who didn't think or care much about their surroundings, or those who couldn't afford anything better. Ironically, only a few blocks away rose the clean modern forest of civic buildings, shining with glass and newness and surrounded by neat squares of asphalt-paved parking lots. Like many cities, this one sprouted its civic and business center in its oldest section, inevitably bordered with slums. It might look easy to change matters with the power of condemnation, the expenditure of public money, but it wouldn't work out that way if the city fathers tried it. There'd grow up other such streets elsewhere if not here; there were always the people who did not care, the landlords who wouldn't spend on repairs. Every city always has its Commerce Streets.
Commerce started ten or twelve blocks up, at the big freight yards, and dead-ended two blocks down from Humboldt. It was a dreary length of ancient macadam lined mostly with single houses-narrow, one-storey, ramshackle clapboard houses as old as the century or older, and never lovingly cared for: here and there was one with a fresh coat of paint, or a greener strip of grass in front, or cleaner-looking curtains showing, but most were a uniform dun color with old paint cracked, brown devil grass high around the front steps. About halfway down its length, the street grew some bigger houses of two storeys, square frame houses not much younger and no neater: most of those were rooming houses by the signs over their porches. Interspersed with these were a few dingy apartment buildings, a gas station or two, neighborhood stores-a delicatessen, a family grocery; and in windows along nearly every block were little signs-SEWING DONE CHEAP, CANARIES FOR SALE, FIX-IT SHOP, HAND-TMLORING.
Agnes Browne lived behind one of the signs, that said primly, SEAMSTRESS, in the ground-floor right window of the house at the corner of Commerce and Wade, two blocks up from Humboldt. She worked as a waitress at a dime-store lunch counter; the sewing added to her wages some, and anyway she liked to sew and figured she might as well get paid for it. She didn't care much for going out and around; it still made her kind of nervous. She couldn't help but be afraid people were looking at her and thinking, Huh, kind of dark even for Spanish, wonder if- When the landlady said Browne didn't sound very Spanish, Agnes had told her it was her married name and she was a widow. But she was kind of sorry she'd ever started it now; it was like what the minister said for sure, about the guilty fleeing where no man pursueth. It hadn't been the money, she could earn as much anyway, maybe even more, at a dozen jobs colored girls got hired for; but there were other things besides money. Only she felt guilty at making friends under false pretenses, and as for Joe, well, she just couldn't. Joe was a nice boy, he had a good job at a garage, he was ambitious; he'd asked her for a date half a dozen times, but it wouldn't be right she should take up with him. Not without telling him. A lot of girls would have, but Agnes didn't figure it'd be fair. All the same, she liked Joe and it was hard. She was thinking about it this morning as she started for work; seemed like she couldn't think of anything else these days. She was a little late, it was ten past eight already, and she hurried; she could walk to work, it was only two blocks down to Main and four more to the store.
As usual she cut across the empty lot at the corner of Humboldt. There'd been a house on the lot once, but it had been so badly damaged by fire a few years back that what was left of it was pulled down. Now there was just the outline of the foundation left, all overgrown with weed-devil grass and wild mustard. Agnes had tripped over the hidden ledge of the concrete foundation before, and skirted it automatically now; but in the middle of the lot she tripped over something else.
When she saw what it was she clapped a hand to her mouth and backed away without picking up the purse she'd dropped. Then she ran across to Mr. Fratelli's store where there was a telephone. Agnes knew her duty as a citizen, but that didn't say she liked the idea of getting mixed up in such a thing.
Huddling her coat around her, listening to Mr. Fratelli's excited Italian incoherence, she wondered miserably if the cops would ask many questions about herself. Probably so, and go on asking, and find out everything-maybe it served her right for being deceitful, the Bible said that never did anybody no good in the long run, and wasn't it the truth….
"I figured you'd like to take a look before they move it," said Hackett on the phone. "The boys just got here. If you want I'll put a hold on the stiff until you've seen it."
"Do that." Lieutenant Mendoza put down the phone and rose from his desk.
Hackett was the one man under him who fully respected his feeling in such matters, though it was to be feared that Hackett put it down to conscientiousness. The truth was less flattering: Mendoza always found it hard to delegate authority, never felt a job well done unless he saw to it himself-which of course was simply egotism, he acknowledged it. He could not do everything. But Hackett, who knew him so well, had a feeling for the nuances; if Hackett thought he should see this, he was probably right.
When he parked behind the patrol car twenty minutes later and picked his way across the weed-grown corner toward the little knot of men, one of the patrol officers there remarked sotto voce, "That your Mex lieutenant? He don't like to get his nice new shoes all dusty, does he?"
Detective-Sergeant Arthur Hackett said, "That's enough about Mexes, boy. For my money he's the best we got." He watched Mendoza stepping delicately as a cat through the tall growth: a shin, dark man, inevitably impeccable in silver gray, his topcoat just a shade darker than his suit, his Hamburg the exact charcoal of the coat and with the new narrow brim, tilted at the correct angle and no more. Mendoza's tie this morning was a subtle foulard harmony of charcoal and silver with the discreetest of scarlet flecks, and the shoes he was carefully guarding from scratches were probably the custom-made gray pigskin pair.