One afternoon. Mr. Heffelfinger came from the phone and said: “Don, will you run over to Mrs. Oliver’s with this vanilla like a good boy? She’s making a sponge cake for supper and needs it right away.”
“Sure thing. Be back in a jiffy” — for the Olivers lived less than a block away. He stuck the bottle of vanilla in his apron pocket and went out; and it was fun going along the street in his long work-gown with The Arcadia Grocery stencilled on both the front and back.
“Come in, Donnie boy,” Mrs. Oliver sang out nasally from the kitchen as he came up the back steps.
Mrs. Oliver was a florid-faced woman of about forty with a dumpy figure, from eating too much candy, it was said, and she talked through her nose with a whine that grated on the ear; but she was a good soul, the kind that people spoke of as “harmless” and “well-meaning,” and Don had always thought her quite nice.
“Come on into the den a minute, why don’t you?” she said. “I want to show you my new books. You like books, I know.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Oliver, I’d like to.”
They entered the den and she waved her hand toward a series of bookshelves along one wall. “I had it all done over by that man at Sibley, Lindsey & Curr,” she said.
“Very nice.”
“I knew you’d be impressed,” she said.
But he was not looking at the bookshelves. His eye was caught by a pendant hanging from her plump neck, with a large yellow stone that might have been a topaz. He peered at it, and then said: “Gee, that looks like a nice stone, Mrs. Oliver. Pretty, too.”
“This old lavaliere? You like it?” She bent her head to look at the pendant, and the double chins spread upward toward her cheeks. Then she smiled and said: “Tell you a little secret, Donnie. Just between you and I. You know who gave me that lavaliere? Your father.”
Don felt the hot red flush rise upward from his neck to his very ears, but Mrs. Oliver didn’t notice. “And look,” she went on, reaching toward the table for a candy box inlaid with different-colored woods in such a way as to depict the Statue of Liberty, with a tugboat in the foreground. “He gave me this, too; isn’t it cunning? Couple of years ago your father was mighty sweet on me, for a while.”
“I’ve got to go now, Mrs. Oliver,” he said. “I got to get back...”
And as he walked in through the front door of the Arcadia Grocery he saw Mr. Heffelfinger, whose face could get so purple in the cool cellar, bending toward Mrs. Newman with order pad and pencil in hand. You old fool, Don said under his breath, bitterly: You miserable, hypocritical, sweaty, purple old fool...
A Life for a Life
by Robert Turner
Tom was just doing his job. He didn’t understand why Hollenbeck thought he was a killer.
We worked the clock around, four of us at a time, in three shifts, so that it was two to one it wouldn’t happen on my tour. The fact that it did was probably fate or justice or something because, you see, the whole thing was my idea.
I was on the four-to-twelve swing and Hollenbeck was with me. He’s Third-Grade, a boy wonder only on the cops four years and in plain clothes already, but not a bad kid. Only he had a little to learn, of course.
We were in a supply room, off the hospital lobby, to the left of the visitor’s reception desk. We kept the door open and fixed a mirror so we could see out without being seen from the desk. On the other side of the lobby in a small office were the other two. Smitty, another Third Grade but he’d done it the hard way, twelve years and a couple of special commendations. And Weigand. Sergeant Weigand, in charge of this.
For three nights Hollenbeck and I sat it out, smoking too much, talking not enough. It was on our nerves now and there was still two nights to go. The Lieutenant gave it five. They only kept women in the maternity ward five days on an average these times.
We were on a half hour this night when Hollenbeck started on me again. He was cute about it. I guess they get pretty cute, graduating a University before they join the cops, these kids. At some things, anyhow.
“You do much fishing, Tom?” Hollenbeck asked. Hollenbeck is the crew-cut, rosy-cheeked outdoors type. He looked maybe twenty although he was at least six, seven years older. He looked very innocent.
“Why?” I said. I knew what was coming. I just didn’t know in what form this time.
“Well, I was thinking about all the different ways of fishing there are,” he said, his eyes on the mirror, not on me. “Like, there’s seining. You get a bunch of guys and get drunk and whoop it up and drag a big net from bank to bank, along a small creek. You get a lot of fish. It can’t miss. It’s real sport. The fish don’t have a chance. Or you can set fish traps. That’s almost as good.”
“I see.” I felt my neck getting red. The comparison wasn’t too good but it was different.
“Well,” he continued, “me, I like to fish, too. But I like to use a fly-rod. Sometimes I don’t have much luck, but I don’t know, when I do hook something I get a bigger bang out of it. I got a silly notion that even fish deserves at least a fighting chance... And, of course, there’s shooting fish in a barrel. You ever do that, Tom?”
It took awhile to ease the needle out of my arm so I could talk. Then I told him: “All the time. When I’m not doing that, I’m spotlighting deer.”
He looked at me long and blandly and he didn’t say anything else. After awhile I felt some of the red go out of my neck. “You’ve got the wrong man,” I said, then. “Weigand, over there, is the one. He likes to shoot. He’s the sportsman. Ask him to show you his target medals. Or better, ask him about how he shot three unarmed kids in a stolen car, once. And watch his eyes. Me, I don’t consider this like hunting or fishing; it’s a job and I do it the quickest, easiest way I can. You understand that?”
He didn’t. I could tell. He said: “That’s what I mean. He’ll shoot him. Weigand will kill Meade before he can open his mouth, even. You know that. Eventually Meade would have been picked up somewhere in the regular way. It didn’t have to be like this.”
I told Hollenbeck that I didn’t know Weigand would be in on it and I didn’t like that, either, but there was nothing I could do. I’d thought about everything except that, though, when I first got the idea, before I took it to the Lieutenant. I said:
“Meade took a chance on getting killed, himself, breaking out and it didn’t bother him to slug that guard. The guard died, don’t forget. Maybe it wouldn’t bother Meade to kill a few more rather than go back for the rest of that life jolt. The sooner he’s nailed, no matter how, the sooner he’ll stop being even a possible menace.”
Hollenbeck snorted. “He likely won’t even have a gun. Meade wasn’t a gun boy. He never carried one. And they don’t change.”
I got a little sick of all of this, of trying to justify something that maybe couldn’t be justified and one way or the other it wasn’t any skin off Hollenbeck. I started to tell him that fair or unfair, dirty pool or not, if the gimmick worked and we recaptured Meade, it would mean a commendation for me for cooking it up. A commendation would mean points on the next Sergeant’s exam. I wanted that promotion. I had to have it now, with another mouth to feed. But I didn’t tell that to Hollenbeck. I still didn’t think he’d get it.