Your friend,
Johnny on the Spot
by Cornell Woolrich
Copyright, 1936, by Cornell Woolrich
Announcement: With the help of Cornell Woolrich himself and the unselfish assistance of aficionados the length and breadth of these United States, we have just completed building a remarkable inventory of Woolrich-Irish stories — no less than thirteen (lucky number!) — and not a single one of them has ever been reprinted before or previously published in any book (including anthologies). For years we have been digging in old (and forgotten) magazines, especially in those private-eye periodicals which are no longer readily available even from the dusty stocks of secondhand specialists. These magazines take long hunting and longer patience to find, and even when found yield only a small percentage of high-assay nuggets. But those nuggets are worth the time, the effort, and the eye-strain. Indeed, the thirteen Woolrich stories are literally hand-picked. They include suck fine, but unknown, Woolrichiana as “The Humming Bird Comes Home,” “Cinderella and the Home Mob,” and “Charlie Won’t Be Tonight.” We plan to bring you these “finds” quite regularly from now on, beginning in this issue with a typically Woolrichian thriller, “Johnny on the Spot.”
The clock on the wall of the cafeteria said quarter to four in the morning when he came in from the street. He wasn’t even twenty-eight yet, Johnny Donovan. Any doctor in town would have given him fifty more years. Only he himself knew better than that. He didn’t even have fifty days left; maybe only fifty hours, or maybe fifty minutes, depending on how good he was.
There hadn’t been anyone in sight on the street when he came in just now, he’d made sure of that, and this place was half the island away from where anyone would expect to find him; that was why he’d started coming here for his food the past few nights. And that was why he’d told Jean to meet him here tonight, after her last show at the club, if she couldn’t hold out any more; if she had to see him so bad. Poor kid, he sure felt sorry for her! Married at seventeen, and a widow at eighteen — any minute now. There was one thing he was glad of, that he’d managed to keep her out of it. She knew about it, of course, but they didn’t know about her; didn’t even know she existed. And dancing twice nightly right at one of Beefy Borden’s own clubs, the prettiest girl on the floor! Taking fifty every Saturday from Beefy’s “front” down there, while Beefy had guys out looking for him all over town, and would have given ten times that much just to connect with him! It made him laugh every time he thought of it — almost, not quite.
But it wasn’t so surprising at that. Beefy was one of those rare, domesticated big-shots who, outside of killing-hours, thought there was no one like that silver-blond wife and those two daughters of his. Johnny, when he used to drop in their Ocean Avenue apartment on business in the old prohibition days, plenty of times found him there helping his kids with their homework or playing with them on the floor, maybe a couple of hours after he’d had some poor devil buried alive in quicklime out in the wilds of Jamaica or dumped overboard from one of his runners with a pail of cement for shoes. That being the case, even a lovely number like Jean couldn’t be expected to make a dent in him, often as he must have seen her trucking around on the hardwood down at the Wicked Nineties. Otherwise he would have asked questions, tried to find out something about her, But to him she was just a Jean Marvel — her own idea of a stage-tag at sixteen — just a name on one of the dozen payrolls he checked once a month with his various fronts. Not even that. She just wasn’t. She was: “No. 9 — @ 50 = $200.” She’d told Johnny that she’d said “Good evening” to Beefy one night leaving the club — after all, he was her bread-and-butter — and he’d turned around and asked someone, “Who the hell wazzat?”
He was sick of dodging them; had a bellyful of trying to save his precious hide. He had it up to his neck, this business of sleeping all day in movie houses and bolting meals at four in the morning and keeping just one jump ahead of them the whole time. The way he felt tonight he almost wished they’d catch up with him and get it over with! What was so awful about choking yourself to death in a gunny-sack anyway? You couldn’t do it more than once.
But there was Jean. Outside of wanting him straight, which had started the whole mess, she also wanted him alive — for some wacky reason or other. He could hear her now, like she had been the last time they’d stolen a brief get-together riding hidden on the back platform of the Shuttle. That was last Sunday. She had laced it into him, eyes flinty, voice husky with scorn:
“Yellow. No, not even yellow, orange! A quitter. And that’s what I married! Ready to take it on the chin, aren’t you?” And then pointing to her own lovely dimpled one: “Well, this is your chin!” And pounding herself furiously: “And this is the chest that gets the bullets when you stand up to ’em! Don’t I count? No, I get left behind — without my music, without my rhythm, without my guy, for all you care! Not while I know it! Who is this Beefy Borden — God?” Then suddenly nearly breaking in two: “See it through for me, Johnny. Stay alive. Don’t welsh on me now. Just a few days longer! The dough will come through by the end of this week — then we can both lam out of this hellhole together!” And after the train had carried her back to the Times Square end and he’d lost himself in the Grand Central crowd, hat down over his mouth, he could still hear it ringing in his ears: “Stay alive for me, Johnny. Stay alive!” Well, he’d done his best, but it couldn’t keep up forever.
There was a taxi driver dozing in the back of the place. He was the only other one in there. Have to quit coming here after tonight; he’d been here three nights in a row now; time to change to another place. He loosened the knot of his necktie and undid the top button of his shirt. Hadn’t changed it in ten days and it was fixing to walk off his back of its own accord.
He picked up a greasy aluminum tray and slid it along the triple rails that banked the counter. He hooked a bowl of shredded wheat, a dwarf pitcher of milk, and some other junk as he went along. When he got to the end where the counterman was, he said, “Two, sunnyside up.” He hadn’t eaten since four the night before. He’d just gotten through collecting a meal in a place on Sixth Avenue around two when he’d spotted someone over in a corner that looked familiar from the back. He had had to get up and blow — couldn’t risk it.
The counterman yapped through a hole in the wall behind him, “Two — on their backs!” and something began spitting. Johnny picked a table all the way in the rear and sat down with his back to the street. He couldn’t see who was coming in that way, without turning, but it made him harder to recognize from outside through the plate-glass front. He turned his collar up in back to hide the shape of his neck.
He took out a much-folded newspaper, fished for a pencil, and while crunching shredded wheat began to fill in the blank squares of a crossword puzzle. He could do that and mean it! You go arm-in-arm with death for ten days or a couple of weeks, and it loses most of its sting. Even the answer to what is “a sap-giving tree” can be more interesting for the time being — help you forget.
He didn’t see the maroon car that drew up outside, and he didn’t hear it. It came up very soft, coasting to a stop. He didn’t see the two well-dressed individuals that got out of it without cracking the door behind them, edged up closer to the lighted window-front and peered in. They exchanged a triumphant look that might have meant, “We’ll eat in here, this is our dish.”