“Open up, Liddie,” I said.
“What the hell do you want?”
I pulled the door all the way open and stepped inside. Liddie slammed it shut behind me, and then leaned against it, staring at me. “What the hell do you want?” she said again. She was a very pretty woman, Liddie was, even when her gray eyes were angry and the uncombed auburn hair splayed loosely across her back and shoulders. Her body, beneath the thin material of her housecoat, was lush, and she had the smallest waist I’d ever seen.
“Don’t you go out any more, Liddie?” I asked.
“Look, copper. I’ve been a real good girl. You got no right to come barging in here like this.”
“I didn’t barge in,” I said. “You invited me in. You insisted on it. Remember?”
“You’re just like all the others.
You haven’t even got a warrant.”
I smiled at her. “That’s right, Liddie. No warrant. You could probably get me in a lot of trouble.”
She glared at me. “Damn you. You know I can’t get anybody in trouble.”
I nodded. “Just so we understand each other, Liddie.”
“If you’re looking for Horse, you’re wasting your time. There isn’t any here.”
“It’s here,” I said. “It has to be. We’ve had a tail on you for almost two weeks. You haven’t made a buy in all that time. And with a big habit like yours, Liddie, that means you’ve got a supply right here.”
“Since when are cops interested in users? What’ll it get you to hang a beef on me? You think the commissioner will give you a gold star?”
“I’m not interested in you, Liddie. I want your pusher.”
“You crazy? You think I’d cut off my supply?”
“You can always get another. Who’s the guy, Liddie?”
She took a slow step toward me, and there was fear in her eyes now. “Give me a break, for God’s sake.”
“I’m giving you one. I know you’ve got heroin here. I’m not even going to look for it. All I want is the name of your pusher, and an idea of where to find him.”
She bit at her lower lip a moment. “What’ll I do when the pile’s gone?”
“You’ll find another pusher. You junkies always do.” I paused. “This is the last time around, Liddie. Tell me who and where.”
She told me who and where.
I let myself in with one of my skeleton keys. There was no one home. I went through the pusher’s apartment until I found the stuff. I’d expected more, but there were only seven packets of it. I stuffed them into my pocket, darkened the room, and sat down in an easy chair to wait.
An hour crawled by, and then another, and finally the door opened. I got up silently, slid my hand down into my trenchcoat pocket, and worked my fingers around the butt of my short-barreled .38. The guy was fumbling for the light switch, a very tall guy with outsize shoulders.
When the light came on, I said, “Easy, Carter. Keep your hands in sight.”
He closed the door slowly, and if there was any expression at all on his face, it was only a very mild surprise.
“You a cop?” he asked.
“That’s right. Come over here.”
He stayed where he was. “You been here long?”
“Long enough to find the stuff.”
“Yeah. Well, that’s not so good, is it?” His right hand came up to one of the buttons on his coat and he began to toy with it.
“I told you to come over here,” I said.
“Can we make a deal?” he asked. “I’ll make it pretty good.”
“No deal,” I said.
He nodded slowly, as if thinking it over, and then suddenly his hand was inside his coat.
I could have shot him then, but I didn’t want to ruin a good trench-coat. I jerked the .38 out and shot him twice, once in the stomach and once in the face.
When I got home, the first thing I noticed was the ash tray. It was loaded with butts. I closed the door and took off my coat.
Barbara came in from the kitchen. I tried not to look at her face. I knew what I’d see there.
“Any luck?” she asked. “I... I’ve been going crazy, Walt.”
“In my trenchcoat pocket,” I said.
She grabbed up my coat and shoved her hand into one of the pockets.
She was so jittery she dropped the coat. She picked it up and clawed through the other pocket, whimpering a little. I had to look away from her.
“Is this all?” she asked. “Just two?”
“There were only seven packets to begin with,” I told her. “I had to take five of them to the station house, to book as evidence.”
“You turned over Jive of them? Why? Damn you, Walt!”
“There’s a man dead because of this,” I said. “I had to make it look good.”
But she wasn’t even listening. She was too busy tearing open one of the packets of heroin.
A Bachelor in the Making
by Charles Jackson
It was so nice, being treated like an adult. Knowing everything — about everybody...
When, at fourteen, Don began to work at the Arcadia Grocery, a whole new wonderful word opened up to him; and not the least of its delights was the sense of worldliness he rapidly acquired, a sophistication beyond his years, with its attendant pleasurable notion that he had already seen enough of life to disillusion him with a certain well-known institution.
He came to work as soon as school was out at three-thirty, and worked until the store closed at six; but on Saturday it was all day, from seven-thirty in the morning till ten-thirty at night. He loved it. He liked his two employers very much, the partners Mr. Heffelfinger and Mr. Kunkel; they were awfully good to him, and treated him as an equal. He loved, too, the importance of being behind a counter to so many people he had known all his life, and who had, till now, regarded him as a kid. And he loved all the gossip; the secret lives of friend and stranger alike were openly discussed in his presence as though he wasn’t fourteen at all, and he soon learned to join in the general, ribald amusement that seemed to be universal in the grown-up world and occupy the greater part of their conversation. It was quite different from the veiled allusions he often overheard at home, when his mother uttered half a sentence and then cut herself off with a sigh and a headshake over the carryings-on of one of their neighbors; or when his father laughed outright over some tidbit he had brought home but which he only fully disclosed to Don’s mother when he himself was out of hearing. At the Arcadia Grocery gossip was not only openly rife but there was something even better: if you kept your eyes and ears open, actual evidences were all around you of the choice scandals from which that gossip sprang. Like Mrs. Corbin, for instance, and the telephone.
Mrs. Corbin was an attractive, neat woman, married to Joe Corbin who repaired watches at Platt the Jeweler’s. She had a pleasant open smile, impersonal eyes, and wonderful eyebrows, plucked and pencilled, that rose in twin symmetrical arcs almost to the brim of her close-fitting felt hat, giving her a provocative, surprised look. Every afternoon about four, Mrs. Corbin came into the store and bought her two pounds of sugar; it was during the war with the Kaiser, and the sale of sugar was strictly kept to two pounds per day per customer. Then she would linger at the counter for a while, chatting amiably as if she had all the time in the world; but it was clear to Don’s fast-maturing perceptions that Mrs. Corbin had other things on her mind besides the small talk; that her thoughts were elsewhere.
Don had got so used to measuring out the regulation two pounds of sugar that he could do it accurately, almost every time, without weighing it. He took the aluminum scoop, dug into the big sugar barrel that swung from below the counter on a squeaking arm-like arrangement, held the scoop high in the air, and let the sugar fall beautifully into the paper sack, which he had already whipped open with a professional flip of his left hand; then he plunked the bag onto the scales, watched the needle wag to and fro for a second, and there it was: two pounds even. He folded the flap doubly over the top, wound the white string twice around the sack, and breaking the string with a smart quick yank, he handed the sugar over to Mrs. Corbin. And then she would say, every darned afternoon — the arched eyebrows rippling higher and the cool impersonal eyes gazing directly into his: “Oh, I just remembered! May I use the phone a minute, please...”