The figure threw something from it as it ran, and there was a metallic impact from an ashcan. A cop took a jump off the prowl car running-board, fired warningly into the air, yelled something. The second shot wasn’t into the air. The figure went on scampering, leaned over too far, finally slumped down flat and rolled over on its back. It was Casey.
An ambulance showed up with wailing siren and screeched to a stop. Casey was shoved into it with a busted kneecap. But the other figure that was carried out to it under a sheet didn’t have a move left in it. I tried to edge it, tilt the sheet, and get a look, and I was nearly knocked down for my pains.
“He’s dead — wanner make something of it?” I was told.
I backed out.
Well, if he was, that was all that mattered. I’d done my best, but Trainor’s thousand had gone up the flue and he was behind the eight ball now. At least nothing had happened to that poor cuss with the wife and baby.
“How’d it happen?” I asked one of the neighbors, standing next to me.
“He came home and caught somebody in his room. I passed two suspicious-looking characters on the stairs meself when I came home earlier. The other one must’ve got away over the roof.”
I’d figured that that slimy bartender had been at the bottom of it all along. This proved it. It must have been the same two hoods as the first time.
I was the first one to get to 22 the next night. I had the check and Fredericks’ cash with me, to turn over to him. I got there about ten to twelve, and wondered how Trainor was going to take it. He came in alone about five minutes later. I could tell by his face he didn’t know yet, thought he was coming into two thousand bucks. I decided not to tell him until Fredericks had showed up; spare him the ax until the last minute.
“Well,” he said, “Mr. Wise Guy is going to be twice as sick at having to eat crow.”
The barman had a good memory. He parked the three Collinses ordered the week before in a row on the bar before us.
“Whaddye mean, twice as sick?” I asked.
“Oh, he got a cramp or something last night, went home to bed about eleven and left me holding down the sidewalk there in front of Dreyer’s.”
The minute-hand of the clock hit twelve. I said, “I’m going to call his club, find out what’s holding him up.”
Trainor said maliciously, “Ask him if he’s afraid to face the music.”
I was at the phone a long time. When I came back he could read on my face that I had bad news for him. I took out the check and the twenty hundreds and laid them on the bar. “Well,” I said, “it looks like he won the bet after all. He did cause someone to be murdered by someone else, like he said he could.”
His mouth just dropped open, and his face went kind of white and sick.
I picked up his check and started to tear it up into small pieces. “But there doesn’t seem to be anyone to collect it for him. That was him that was shot dead in Casey’s room on 99th Street last night. They couldn’t identify him until late this afternoon. He went there to double-cross us. Maybe to make sure Casey learned who had the other half, or maybe even to take it away from him because he wasn’t getting results, give it to someone else. It must have been already missing, the bartender’s two side-kicks got there first and swiped it, and Casey shot him down in cold blood believing he took it.”
Trainor picked up the third Collins and spilled it slowly out on the floor. Then he turned the glass upside-down on the bar with a knell-like sound. He said, without any bitterness now, “They always said he’d only bet on a sure thing. Well he lived up to his name, all right!”
Afterword to “You Bet Your Life”
“You Bet Your Life” (Detective Fiction Weekly, September 25,1937) is one of Woolrich’s most off-trail stories. The bizarre wager between the ruthless cynic Fredericks and the idealist Trainor harks back to the bet between the Lord and Satan in the book of Job, although what happens next as the three godlike principals invisibly spy on the two mortals and wait to see which will first set out to kill the other has no counterpart in the biblical tale. The point of this cockeyed philosophic parable, as usual in Woolrich, is that the most powerful god of all is Chance.
Death in the Yoshiwara
I
Jack Hollinger, U. S. N., up from Yokohama on a forty-eight-hour liberty junket, said, “Shoo!” he swung his arms wildly in a mosquito-squatting gesture. He was squatting cross-legged on the floor in a little paper-walled compartment of the House of Stolen Hours, which was situated in one of the more pungent alleys of the Yoshiwara, Tokyo’s tenderloin. Before him were an array of thimble-sized saki cups. All of them were empty, but Hollinger hadn’t worked up much of a glow over them. A warm spot that felt no bigger than a dime floated pleasantly but without any particular zest behind the waistband of his bell-bottomed white ducks.
He tipped his Bob Davis cap down over one eye and wigwagged his arms some more.
“Outside,” he said. “Party no good. Party plenty terrible.” He made a face.
The geisha ceased her stylized posturing, bowed low and. edging back the paper slide, retreated through it. The geisha who had been kneeling, to twang shrill discords on her samisen let her hands fall from the strings. “Me, too?” she inquired. And giggled. Geishas, he had discovered, giggled at nearly everything.
“Yeah, you too,” said the ungallant Hollinger. “Music very bad, capish? Send the girl back with some more saki. And try to find something bigger I can drink it out of!”
The slide eased back into place after her. Hollinger, left alone with his saki-cups and the dancer’s discarded outer kimono neatly roiled up in the corner they seemed to wear layers of them — scowled at the paper walls. Presently he lit a cigarette and blew a thick blue smoke-spiral into the air. It hung there heavily as if it was too tired to move against the heavy staleness of the room’s atmosphere. Hollinger frowned.
“Twenty-four hours shore-leave left and not a laugh on the horizon.” he complained. “What a town! I shoulda stayed on the of battle-wagon and boned up on my course on how to be a detective. Wonder if I passed the exam I sent in from Manila?”
The racket in the public rooms up front, where they had been playing billiards all evening, seemed to have grown louder. He could hear excited shouts, jabbering voices that topped the raucous blend of phonograph-music, clicking roulette-wheels, rattling dice-cups, and clinking beer-glasses. Somebody had started a fight, he guessed. Those Japs sure lost their heads easy. Still a good fight might take some of the boredom out of his bones. Maybe he’d just— Nix. He’d been warned to stay out of trouble this trip.
They were taking a long time with that saki. He picked up a little gong-mallet, and began to swing it against the round bronze disk dangling between two crosspieces. He liked the low sweet noise.
There was a sound of feet hurrying across the wooden flooring now, as though a lot of people were running from one place to another. But it remained a considerable distance away, at the front of the big sprawling establishment.