“I thought so! You ought to have your head examined!” I took the check out of my wallet. “Here, take this back while you’ve still got the chance. I’ll tell him the whole thing’s off.”
“You open your mouth to him, about what I just told you,” he warned in a cold rage, “and I’ll punch your head in. D’you think I’d crawl to him, go begging for leniency? He’d rub it in every time he met me, never let me forget it. I’m going to take that two thousand of his and smear it all over his kisser, to show him what I think of him!”
I saw there was nothing I could do to dissuade him. “That’s sure an expensive way of expressing an opinion,” was all I said to that.
Fredericks came back again with a thousand-dollar bill they’d given him in exchange for ten hundreds.
“Now let’s get the ground-work laid. 42nd Street and Seventh,” he told the driver, “northwest corner.”
He showed it to us in the cab, by the flame of his cigar-lighter. It was new, crisp as lettuce. Notes that big don’t pass from hand to hand much, I guess. “You sure it’s not fake?” I couldn’t help asking. “That’d be a nice ironic twist, bring two people to the verge of murder over a phony bill.”
“It’s as good as though I got it at a bank. Their games may be fixed, but they don’t go in for queer money.”
“How you gonna work it?” Trainor wanted to know coldly.
“I’ll show you. Watch this.” He folded it neatly in half, edge to edge and carefully creased it by running his fingers back and forth over it. He took out a gold cigar-cutter and inserted the blade under the crease. He carefully severed the bill into two equal parts. “It’s valueless this way, isn’t it?” he told us. “There’s your motive right there. Two different people, each one gets half. Neither half’s worth anything without the other. Neither one will give up his half. A deadlock. Whichever one is the more aggressive and daring of the two will do something about it. That spells murder. Maybe both will at once. Tonight we plant the first half, with whoever Trainor here selects. You follow him, Evans, and get his name and address and all about him for the record. Tomorrow night, same time and place, we plant the second half. Then we make known to each party the identity of the other, who is all that is standing between him and a neat little windfall. Then you’ll see Nature take its course. And you say,” he sneered at Trainor, “that you can’t make a murderer out of any chance passerby on a street corner! Well, watch, between now and next Tuesday night — and learn something!”
“It’s a filthy scheme,” I said hotly. “Treating human beings like flies stuck on a pin! You’re going to start something that you won’t be able to stop in time, mark my words! There’ll be blood on both your heads.”
Our driver coasted down past the Rialto Theater entrance, looked around questioningly.
“How long are you allowed to park here?” Fredericks asked him.
“I ain’t allowed to park here at all. I can park around on the 42nd Street side with you, though, just past the corner, if I don’t stay too long.”
“That’ll be all right. We’d better stay in the cab,” he said to us in an undertone. “If we stand out on the sidewalk in full sight, it mayn’t work. Pick someone coming from that direction, 8th Avenue, so we can see them before they get here.”
We braked to a stop alongside the curb. That particular stretch of sidewalk is plenty bright, any time of the night. In addition, there was a street light just far enough ahead to give us a sort of preview of anyone who passed under it coming our way. We all three had good eyes. It was anything but deserted even at this hour, but the passersby were spaced now, not coming along in droves.
Trainor sat peering intently ahead through the partly-opened cab door. “I suppose,” Fredericks observed drily, “you’ll make every effort to pick someone who looks prosperous enough not to need a thousand dollars badly enough to kill for it.”
“Not at all,” snapped Trainor. “I’m not loading the dice. I’m here to pick an average man. And the average man on the street hasn’t very much money — not these days. But neither does he kill for what he hasn’t got.”
“You’ll find out,” was the purring answer.
There was a long wait, while people drifted by, by ones and twos and threes, but mostly by ones. I kept thinking, contemptuously and yet a little admiringly too, “Every cent he’s got in the world, risked on the imponderable reactions of some chance passerby out there. It must be great to have that much confidence in your fellow-men.”
“See any that look average enough yet? You’re hard to please,” mocked Fredericks softly.
Trainor said, “If I’m any good at reading faces, the last few that have gone by would cheerfully cut anyone’s throat for a toothpick, let alone a thousand bucks. I wouldn’t call these flashy Broadway lizards an average type of man, would you?” Then he said suddenly, “Here’s someone now — quick! This fellow walking along near the outer edge of the sidewalk.”
I just had time for a quick, comprehensive glimpse of the candidate, through the windshield, as he passed under the street light. Trainor was a good picker. The guy was so average he would have been invisible in a crowd. Clothes, face, gait, everything were commonplace. You couldn’t feature him killing anyone, or doing anything but just breathing all his life long. Fredericks shied the half-bill out of the cab window.
He came abreast a minute later, missed seeing it, went on his way. That was in character too, the type nothing ever happened to, even when it was thrust right at his feet.
Fredericks snapped his fingers, swore, stepped out and picked it up again. The three of us laughed a little, nervously. We were all under a strain.
Another wait. “All right, this one, then,” Trainor said abruptly. “He looks decent and harmless enough.” Again one of those colorless “supers” of the New York mob-scene.
Fredericks flipped his wrist again, and the bait fell out. Again it missed fire. The pedestrian looked down, saw it, went a step beyond, turned, came back and picked it up. He stood looking at it, turning it over from side to side, while we held our breaths, hidden in the cab, close enough to have reached out and touched him. I could see a skeptical frown on his face. Finally he deliberately threw it away again, brushed his hands, and went on his way.
“Suspicious,” Fredericks catalogued him drily. “Thinks it’s too good to be true, there must be a catch to it. Queer money, or an advertising scheme. Typical New Yorker for you.”
He retrieved it a second time. This human-interest byplay, though, had managed to dull my objections to the scheme, made me overlook its dark implications for awhile. When people acted so naturally, so comically even, as these passersby, there didn’t seem to be much risk of getting them to kill one another, as Fredericks insisted. It was like watching frisky half-grown jungle cats at play with one another inside a zoo, and forgetting they have claws.
Trainor went on scrutinizing everyone that came along singly, eliminating couples and trios. “Here’s some—” he started to say, then checked himself. “No, he’s had a drink, that doesn’t make for normalcy.”
After that, there was a complete cessation of motion on the street for a minute or two, as sometimes happens on even the busiest thoroughfares. As though activity were being fed to it on a belt, and there had been a temporary break in it.
Then a figure came into sight. His isolation gave Trainor a good chance to size him up without distraction. I had a feeling he was going to finger him, even before he did. I think I would have myself. A quick snapshot of him, under the light-rays, showed a fellow of medium height, stocky build, high Celtic cheekbones, dressed in a tidy but not expensive gray suit.