A woman suddenly appeared in the street-doorway, distracted, dazed, staggering, clad only in her night-dress, blood down the front of it. “Johnny!” she was groaning, hands pressed to her forehead. “Johnny! What’ve they done to you?”
O’Dare took a step toward her. A steely-grip suddenly shot out, held him fast by the upper arm. “I wanna talk to you!” All the suavity was gone from Benuto. He meant business.
The woman had sat down on the top doorstep just as she was, huddled there clasping her knees, rocking back and forth like some lost soul. “Johnny! I knew this would happen to you! You wouldn’t listen to me! Johnny!”
Benuto’s voice was a harsh whisper in his ear. “Now, before you get any ideas in your head, listen to me, brother! Use the old bean. We heard some trouble going on in one of the flats up there — somebody getting his from somebody. That’s why we got out in a hurry. We didn’t want to get mixed up in it. I still don’t — do you get me? And here’s how much I don’t — step down this way.” He led O’Dare a step or two to the rear of the car, just out of the line of vision of his two henchmen. “Tact” is what Benny Benuto would have called that if asked for a definition.
Danny O’Dare had never seen a thousand-dollar bill before. He saw five of them now, as they went into his uniform-pocket one by one. Benuto took good care that he should, let each one focus without blurring, yet without being too blatant about it. “Just a token of good-will,” he said. “You know where you can find me, drop around tomorrow or next day, and I’ll match them for you. All you gotta do is just forget I happened to drop around here at the same time this was happening. Everybody else is getting theirs. Get yours, brother. Be up-to-date. Your looey is a pretty good pal of mine. Maybe I can do you some good, 4432.”
He thought of Molly and the kid they were expecting, for the second time that night. What a lot of difference ten-grand can make in this world! Get his, everybody else was— Through the blur of his thoughts he heard himself saying: “There’s blood on your shirtfront, Benuto. There’s blood on that other guy’s hand too, I saw it when he lit a butt—”
“That’s from hitting my driver in the nose,” Benuto said softly, “You saw me do it.” He flicked the back of his hand familiarly against the pocket that held the five-thousand. “You saw me do it,” he repeated slowly. “Ask the jane. Call her over here and ask her — and then let me get out of this mess.”
O’Dare had to drag her forward bodily. She kept trying to dig her naked feet into the sidewalk intersection-lines, resisting, holding back in mortal terror. “What happened upstairs? Who got hurt?”
She was almost incoherent with grief — and something else besides. “My Johnny! They came after him! He went to the door, I stayed in bed. They locked me in there. I heard them, I heard them doing it! Right in my arms he—” She spread out her nightdress like a pitiful child showing a mud-stain. “Look.”
“Who?” O’Dare said.
“Somebody. I don’t know.”
“Look at these two men. Was it either of these two men?” Benuto and the other one just stood there, smiling slightly.
She went nearly wild with fear, began to thresh about trying to free herself, swung all the way around O’Dare backwards until she faced the other way, straining away from him like something on a leash. “Lemme go! Lemme go, oh please! No, I never saw them before! I don’t know who it was! I tell you I don’t know!”
Benuto said “See?” You could hardly hear the word, just a lisp on his tongue. He turned, took an abrupt step; the other man went with him. The car-door cracked smartly. The tuned-up engine bellowed out. Benuto’s voice topped it. “Be seeing you, brother!” The Isotta-Fraschini telescoped itself into a swirling red tail-light that seemed to spin concentrically as it receded.
O’Dare half-raised his gun at it; held it that way at a forty-five-degree angle from the ground. One foot stamped forward a pace. The other wouldn’t follow. $10,000. Three and a third weary years of pounding pavements, trying door-latches, that represented. Forty solid months of it, twelve-hundred days. In rain and snow and slush; in below-zero numbness and blistering dog-days. And the accrued earnings of all that plodding drudgery were his in the space of five minutes, without lifting a finger. Just by forgetting a name. A name that it wouldn’t do him any good to remember, a name that counted for more than the numerals 4432 in high places. A name that could send him to a worse beat than this one even, out by the river shore where the ash heaps were. A wife home that he didn’t want to watch grow ugly and old, wrestling with pots all her life. A kid coming that he wanted to be someone, to send to college some day. Who gave a rap about them, but him? Who gave a rap about him, but himself? Others were getting theirs, why shouldn’t he get his? The modern way, the up-to-date way.
He ground the heel of his left hand in, above his eyes, letting go of the woman. She slumped down like a clawing, groveling animal, around the leg that hadn’t moved forward. The red tail elongated into a comet, turned the corner. A prowl car passed it, going slowly the other way, ebbed from sight.
O’Dare yanked out his whistle, gave it a blast. He put his gun away and picked the woman up with both arms. “You do know who did it, don’t you?” he asked without looking down into her face. “You’re afraid to tell!”
“Johnny!” she moaned. “Johnny!” Her head was hanging downwards over his elbow. “What’s the difference who did it? He’s gone now! You can’t bring him back, you guy with the badge!”
The prowl-car backed up, turned in, shot down toward them, stopped on a dime. The one on O’Hare’s side leaned out. “There’s a guy just been beaten to death in that building,” O’Dare said with a jerk of his head. He carried her in without waiting, up the stairs. “Which door is it?” he panted.
The house was unnaturally still from top to bottom; light threading from under every door, floor-boards creaking under tiptoed footsteps, but not a face showing outside. Self-preservation working overtime.
He set her down on her feet and she groped along the wall, wavering toward the right door. It was open, anyway.
“Those guys did it, didn’t they?” he said a second time.
“Why should I tell you?” she shuddered. “Who can help me? Who? Everyone in the house must have heard him groaning, must have heard me pleading for him through that locked door. Nobody would come near us to help us. What a world this is!”
“Why didn’t you scream for help?”
“I was afraid that would kill him even quicker.”
He turned and went in. The lights were on, from when the dead man had answered the door. It was pretty fierce. The assistant medical examiner’s full report, later, was to be something unique in the municipal records: there was not an unfractured bone or group of bones in the man’s entire body! All the legs were off four otherwise undamaged chairs, and all sixteen of those, in turn, were broken — some of them three or four times. They must have stayed in there quite some time.
The woman kept trying to come in and he wouldn’t let her, kept her out in the hall. Finally one of the neighbors got up enough courage to show up outside, took her in with them, gave her some whiskey or something. Her sobs, when she finally thawed, came thinly through the door — a little bit like that cat must have sounded Keefer said he’d rescued from a flue. O’Dare thought: “I got someone loves me like that too.” He touched his pocket; paper crackled.
One of the prowl-car men’s name was Anderson, the other was Josephs. O’Dare knew them both. “Some job,” Anderson remarked. O’Dare kept looking down at what was left of the guy. Maybe it was that. The woman’s mewing kept coming in. Maybe it was that. Or maybe it was that he hadn’t thought quickly, clearly enough down below on the street when that red tail spurted for the corner. Just before the detecks got there he blurted out: “Benny Benuto and one of his hoods were leaving just as I got to the door.”