The Neon Jungle Read online

  Rowell had said then, in a labored rusty voice, “There are two kinds of people. The hell with all your theories. Just two kinds, Preacher. The straight and the crooked. The straight ones don’t go bad. The bad ones can pretend to go straight. They can fool you. But they don’t ever kid me. Ever.”

  And Paul had asked gently, “I suppose you think they’re born crooked?”

  “I know they are. And I can spot ’em on the street. I can smell ’em. All the way from the punks to the big dealers.”

  “What do you want to talk to me about?” Paul asked gently now, forgetting his own anger, remembering how astonishingly sensitive and helpful Rowell had been after Betty’s death.

  “I want to talk about that Varaki outfit.”

  “Here? Or do you want to come in? I was on my way down to the corner to get cigarettes.”

  “Hop in. I’ll drive you down.”

  Paul walked around the car and got in. Rowell parked on the corner and he went in and came back with cigarettes and got in beside him. Rowell drove back to the house and turned off the motor and turned in the seat, one arm along the seat back.

  “We can talk here. O.K., Preach?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I don’t like the setup. You shilled Pop Varaki into taking on that punk who makes deliveries for him. Lockter.”

  “Vern Lockter is a good kid. He had some trouble. He hasn’t been in trouble for two years. He doesn’t have to report to me any more. Pop says he’s a good worker.”

  “When he isn’t working he dresses pretty sharp, Preach.”

  “So what? He lives there, eats there. So he saves his money and spends it on clothes.”

  “He wears his sharp clothes to bowling alleys, the fights, the beer joints. He knows all the local sharpies.”

  “But he hadn’t been in trouble for over two years.”

  “O.K., O.K. We’ll drop him for a minute. I understand you’re wishing off another punk on Pop Varaki.”

  “That’s right. I went to bat. Gus needs a new kid around. There are more orders to deliver. Vern Lockter can’t do the odd jobs around the place. There’s just Gus and Stussen and Walter Varaki and Vern. So this kid is coming down from the industrial school. His name is Jimmy Dover.”

  “I know his name. I know the record. He lived with an aunt. He and two of his pals lifted a heap and busted into a gas station. They got caught and one of his friends made a break and got shot through the head and this Dover was carrying a switchblade knife when they brought him in. Juvenile Court put him in the school. He did two years. He’s eighteen. While he was up there, the aunt disappeared. They couldn’t trace her. What kind of a hold you got over Gus, anyway?”

  “He’s a good man, that’s all. And Jimmy is O.K. I talked it over with him a month ago. I drove Gus up and we both talked to him. Old Gus likes to help straighten a kid out.”

  “O.K. Lockter and Dover. That makes two of them. And the redhead makes three.”

  “What do you mean?” Paul asked sharply.

  “Just what I say. I can smell ’em. So I checked back on her. San Francisco police. Twice they rapped her on a D and D. Henry must have inherited it from his old man. He must have had reformer blood, like you got, Preach.”

  “I suppose you went over and let her know about it?” Paul said softly.

  “It keeps them in line if they know you know the score. Sure I did. She couldn’t look me in the eye. Pop sent her into the house and raised hell with me.”

  “You’ve got a hell of a lot of tact. Don’t you understand she’s Gus’s daughter-in-law?”

  “I’m doing Gus a favor, for God’s sake. I still haven’t got to what’s on my mind. You got the Fletcher girl, Dover, and Lockter. You got ’em all living in that barn of a place with Stussen and the Varaki family. The three of them are going to get their heads together and figure some way of making a dime. Maybe they’ll take it off the Varaki family. I wish they would. It would cure Gus of being noble. Maybe they’ll try it some other way. When they do, it’s my business. I’m letting you know, I don’t like the setup, and I’m letting you know that I’m going to lean on all of them.”

  “Until they do make some kind of slip. Until you pressure them into it.”

  “Don’t get hot, Preach. They all slip. I’m keeping my area clean. But it’s getting tougher all the time. Somebody is pushing horse and tea again. Headquarters is riding me, and so is the Man. I just don’t want any new kind of trouble on top of what I got already. And I’m damn sick of you feeding new ones into my backyard.”

  “I want you to do me a favor. Don’t lean on Jimmy until he’s had a chance to get his feet on the ground.”

  “I’ll give him a week.”

  “That’s big of you, Andy. Very generous.”

  “Sure. I remember Lerritti and Mendez and Conlon.”

  “Three, Andy, out of how many in the last four years? Eighty? Ninety?”

  “Three so far. Isn’t that what you mean?”

  “Someday you’ll see what I mean, Andy.”

  “I’m too stupid. I haven’t had the education. I’m just a cop, Preacher.”

  Paul got out. “Good night, Andy.”

  “Two will get you five there’ll be a capias out on this Dover in six months. And the next one won’t go through Juvenile Court.”

  Rowell drove away. Paul stood and watched the taillights turn the next corner at cruising speed. He knew that Lieutenant Andy Rowell would cruise his district until it began to quiet down at two or three in the morning. He would sleep a few hours and be back at the precinct early in the morning. He had no life aside from the force. He drove his men and drove himself. Several times he had been in trouble because of too much damage inflicted on someone who “resisted arrest,” but it had blown over. It was admitted that he ran the toughest area of a rough, gutty industrial city, and kept it as clean as any man could who had to work with a force on which there were too many political appointees, too many cousins of cousins. Through the night hours he would roam the district like a tough, homeless little bull terrier, showing his clown face in the rough joints, grimly amused at the silence that would last until he left. Once three citizens decided to prove to Rowell that it was bad practice to roam around the area alone. They whispered him into an alley mouth and worked him over. He pretended unconsciousness until he had a chance to wrench his right arm free. They had taken his detective special from its holster and tossed it back down the alley but the sap was in his right hip pocket, the thong dangling. Half blind with his own blood, dazed by the blows, he had instinctively hit the right one first. He left one dead in the alley. An ambulance took a second one. The third one was relatively unharmed. Rowell took him in, booked him, threw him in a cell, and then went himself to the hospital to have his gashed face stitched, his broken left wrist set. He put himself back on duty the next night, and methodically visited every dive in his district, with a hard gay grin on his bandaged clown face. He made his men travel in pairs. He always went alone.

  Paul stood in the night long after the prowl car was out of sight. Two young girls came by, arm in arm, whispering and giggling. Red neon winked in the next block. Two soldiers stood on the corner, scuffling and laughing. A new convertible, glinting in the streetlight, cruised slowly down the narrow street, and there was a girl in it, singing nasally, sitting between two men. Paul felt the odd restlessness that had been gnawing at him for the past few months. An odd feeling that life was moving on to some bright, gay place, while he stood and watched it go by.

  He went up the steps and through the unlocked door and turned left into his small ground-floor-front apartment with its old-fashioned bay windows, golden oak window seat, tan lace curtains, dark walls, dull furniture.

  He thought about Vern Lockter. To Rowell, he had sounded more confident than he had felt. Lockter was a tall, powerful young man with a long narrow head, a quick flashing smile. He had an air of shrewd intelligence. Paul had the feeling that he had never got close to Vern Lockter
. Lockter had said, almost too often, the usual things. Learned my lesson. Crime is for suckers. Look any man in the eye. And he had a habit of looking you so directly in the eye that it seemed contrived. There was an essential coldness about him. It had bothered Paul often enough for him to go and look Vern up. Vern, in work clothes, making up the orders, loading the truck, sweeping the store, had given Paul the strong impression that this was a part he was playing. Yet there was nothing you could put your finger on. The Varakis seemed to like him well enough, yet there was that same constraint that he had noticed in himself. Paul knew that the criminal for which there is no hope is the psychopathic personality, the man or woman born without the ability to give an emotional evaluation to right and wrong. To them there is only an intellectual distinction, and thus any violent act is permissible provided there is little or no chance of punishment. They are usually brighter than the norm, with a more pleasing personality. Just underneath the shell of personality, barely out of sight, is the cruel, unthinking violence of an animal.

  He had been suspicious of Vern Lockter ever since their first meeting. His prison record had been excellent, as are the prison records of most psychopaths. Paul sensed his own inability to penetrate the mask of personality. He could not help thinking that Lockter was playing a part. And it did not seem logical that Lockter could be contented, over so long a period, to deliver grocery orders all over the city in the battered panel delivery truck with the faded letters on the side that spelled out Varaki’s Quality Market. Though a lot of Gus’s trade was local neighborhood customers, he carried fine meats and fancy groceries and had, over the years, built up a large delivery trade, on both a cash and a credit basis.

  And Lockter had been imprisoned for aggravated assault.

  Paul slipped his report in a manila envelope. He folded up the card table and prepared for bed. Somebody was playing a radio too loudly. Neon winked faintly against the tan lace curtains. He decided he would try to see Mrs. Henry Varaki on Monday when he went to the store with Jimmy Dover. He remembered seeing her. A tallish girl, quite pretty, with a quiet voice and a sulky mouth.

  Four

  WALTER VARAKI LAY on the bed with the pillows bunched under his head. The bed lamp made a bright light on the book he was reading. He had a cigar in the exact center of his mouth. He was vaguely conscious of Doris moving about the room, preparing for bed. It was the second time he had read the book. He was reading faster than usual, so he would get to the place where Mike Hammer takes the big blonde up to his apartment. That Hammer! There was a guy knew how to live. They didn’t mess with him. Not twice, anyway. He had what it took with the women. He wasn’t stuck in any two-bit grocery business.

  “You know those damn cigars make me sick. I told you enough times. They make me sick!”

  He took the cigar butt slowly from his lips and turned his head and gave her a look, the way Mike Hammer would have looked at her.

  “That’s a damn shame,” he said, making his voice gravelly.

  “A lot you care.”

  “Look, you’re sleeping in the next room because you want more room in the bed now. Why don’t you move your clothes in there and let me alone?”

  “You know I don’t feel good, and you got to try to make me sick with those stinking cigars. Everything around here smells like food or cigars.”

  He looked at the cigar. It had gone out of its own accord. He put it carefully in the glass ashtray. “It’s out.”

  “Thank you so much,” Doris said viciously.

  “Boy, you have a happy disposition.”

  “Would you be happy, looking like this?”

  She looked as if she were going to have the baby in the next ten minutes, but according to the doc it was still nearly a month off. That was a lot of yak about pregnancy making them bloom. Her black hair was stringy and sticky-looking and her complexion was all over pimples. He looked at her and wondered how the hell he’s ever been able to think he was in love with her. Talk about her being sick. It turned his stomach to look at her. She’d always had a sharp tongue. These days she couldn’t say anything pleasant to anybody. Sat around all day feeling sorry for herself.

  “There’s another jailbird coming on Monday,” she said.

  He turned back to his book. “Yeah.”

  “I told you to tell him not to have any more of them coming here. I got to raise a kid in this house. It looks like I’m going to spend the rest of my life raising kids in this crummy old house. I should have known you were giving me a big line with all that talk of getting out of here and going in some other line of work. You’ll never get out. And I’ll never get out. The least you can do is keep him from filling the place up with crooks and tramps. I don’t want that Bonny touching my baby.”

  “Settle down, for God’s sake they’ll hear you all the way downstairs.”

  “I don’t give a damn if they do. Nobody ever asks me for my opinion about anything around here.”

  “They don’t have to ask you, baby.”

  “You didn’t ever have that Vern Lockter looking at you the way he looked at me that day.”

  “You come prancing down the hall half naked, what you expect?”

  “You just don’t give a damn, do you?”

  “Doris, for God’s sake!”

  “Go ahead. Curse at me. The old man won’t let you go. You’re the only son he’s got left. One son and a man-crazy kid staying out half the night all the time. He won’t let you go. Not him. He’ll never pay us enough money so you can save enough to get out of here. We’re both stuck. We might as well face it.”

  “Why don’t you go to bed?”

  “So you can enjoy your book. So you don’t have to listen to me. So you don’t have to pretend … Oh, hell!”

  “Good night, for God’s sake! Good night!”

  She stared at him, then snatched her pajamas from the back of the closet door and went into the adjoining room and slammed the door. He gave a long sigh of relief and tried to get back into the book. But he needed a few minutes to quiet down. He tossed it aside and relit the cigar end, sucked the smoke deep into his lungs.

  It seemed like there was a plot against him, the way everything worked out. God knew he’d never wanted to work in the store. Take Henry. He’d loved it. It was funny to think of never seeing Henry again. Way back there somewhere were the good days, when Mom had been around, when the store had been in the downstairs part of the house, when Teena had been too little to walk. Back when he and Henry had made raids on the store, with Pop and the help cussing them out.

  No, he’d never wanted to work in the store. He’d taken those business courses in high school so he’d be able to get away from the grocery business. Everything seemed to go to hell for you when you weren’t looking. Twenty-seven already, with twenty-eight coming up too soon. Too damn soon. Doris had raised a lot of hell when he’d given up four years’ seniority at the post office to come back here and help out while Henry was in the Army. Now Henry was gone for keeps and it looked like he was stuck forever. And it looked like Doris would go on nagging for the rest of her life. Having the kid just made it worse, made it more impossible to get away.

  He thought of her in the next room, lying heavily in the bed, and it was hard to think that she was the same Doris of way back when. He remembered that he first started watching her in typing class that next to last year of high school. She sat diagonally ahead of him. Doris Antonelli. All the little things about her made his heart go fast. The way she sat so straight, and the way the yellow pencil looked shoved into her black hair, and the way her eyes were so quick, and the trick she had of flicking at her lower lip with the very tip of her tongue.

  They’d started talking in the halls first, and it was a long time before she’d go out with him. Her people were real strict with her. They lived way the hell and gone out, and he remembered how it was, the incredible shocking softness of her lips that winter night inside that storm-door arrangement on her front porch, and then missing the late bus an
d walking all the way back through the snow, not even minding the cold, thinking of how she had felt in his arms.

  The next year was the last year for both of them, and they dated three and four nights a week, sometimes the movies, sometimes just walking together, sometimes just sitting in her living room until her old man would stick his head out of the kitchen and clear his throat a couple of times and he had to leave. Funny how, now, he remembered that they had talked and talked and talked, but now he couldn’t remember what it was they talked about. Maybe they should have saved some of that talk until after marriage. It would have given them something to do.

  He hadn’t been thinking of marriage then. He’d been wanting to have her without that. And the way she acted, he thought he could, but somehow there didn’t ever seem to be the right place or time. Without seeming to think about it or try, she always managed it so they weren’t in the right place at the right time, but in the places where she was safe.

  Even after he asked her to marry him, and she said yes, if it was O.K. with her folks, he couldn’t get any further with her, and it got so he couldn’t sleep right at night. Her folks said he had to have a job and have money saved. Pop and Henry kidded him about his Eyetalian girl, but they seemed to like her well enough. He told Doris you’d never catch him dead in the grocery business. There were the two jobs that weren’t any good, and she was working too, and they both saved, and then he got the post-office appointment.

  Even after the day was all set, she wouldn’t let him. In fact, after the day was all set, she wouldn’t let him do more than just kiss her. It was a great big wedding. Her folks spent a lot on it. There was a lot to drink, and a couple of the usual fist fights, and afterward they went on the train to Montreal. They had to sit up on the train, and they got to the hotel at eleven in the morning, and she said it was daylight and she wouldn’t until night.