The Third Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 25 Classic Mysteries
- Автор: Пауэлл Тэлмидж
- Год: 2020
- Язык: английский
- Год: Wildside Press LLC
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Third Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 25 Classic Mysteries». Краткое содержание книги:
“I understand, Mr. Lagin.”
“I hope so. Get a good night’s sleep, stay off the streets and on the job that’s been arranged for you. It’s up to you, Freddie. It’s your parole.”
I didn’t get a good night’s sleep. Sam Lagin’s face drifted through too many dreams.
It was a day laborer’s job on the construction site of a housing development, the kind where the shortage of bone and flesh makes even a parolee welcome. It was hodding bricks, barrowing loads of cement, and staggering under burdens of lumber. It was a big-mouthed foreman and an hourly wage barely over the minimum.
At night I was too gut-wrung for even the threat of Sam Lagin to bother my sleep, the daytime nightmare being more than enough. Prison began to look good by comparison. In the pokey I’d been the star hitter on the softball team, the chow had been better than greasy spoon slop, and the cell bunk cleaner than the cot in the flophouse room my paycheck could afford.
Worst of all were the tormenting memories of the times with Clemmie and the woman-hungers a guy builds during three years of prison.
I didn’t see hide or mustache of Sam Lagin for three weeks, and I began to relax on that score. I figured out how much time it would take him to chase around after fifty-three of us and decided that no man could move that fast. With seventy-eight percent of fifty-three always in trouble, Lagin needed to divide himself into five parts. It was some pleasure to fancy the old galoot’s headaches.
By the third weekend I couldn’t stand the nothingness any longer. Without admitting to myself that fresh plans for the future were stirring in my mind, I ambled out of the rooming house. Wow! I blinked. There was sunshine on the sidewalk!
I set off with the old blood turning warm and red in flesh that had been too long in cold storage.
Finding Clemmie was easy, although it took a good part of the day. She’d moved half a dozen times since I’d last seen her, changing from one job to another. At each place she’d either left a forwarding, or somebody who’d worked with her knew the location of the next job.
I traced her to a blue-collar bar and grille run by a scrawny, tough little gamecock named O’Leary. I reached the place after dark. It was fairly crowded with guys working their jaws with talk, pastrami, beer, boilermakers, and pickled eggs.
My pulse rate slipped into high gear as I threaded through the talk, juke box noise, and lazy layers of tobacco smoke, craning my neck for the first sight of that center-fold figure, that impish face, that golden tumble of hair.
My knees shivered suddenly. I threw out my arms. “Clemmie!”
She almost dropped the tray of drinks she was carrying. “Freddie!” she squealed.
She plopped the tray on the nearest table. We met in the middle of the room, my hug lifting her feet from the floor. Several of the customers tossed laughing remarks and clapped their hands.
We tugged each other to a small vacant table against the further wall.
“Freddie,” she said, her shining blue eyes dancing all over me, “it really is you!”
She seemed so happy I didn’t tell her I’d been out going on a month. I wondered at my dumb, earlier fears of Sam Lagin.
“Baby,” I said thickly, “you look so good—”
“And you, Freddie.”
“It’s been so long. Say, you haven’t got married or anything?”
“Nothing I can’t break off like kicking off an old shoe, Freddie.”
“That’s great, baby.”
“There’s never been anybody but you, Freddie. Not in my heart, where it counts.”
I laughed, just from the way the world had changed all of a sudden.
“You were so sweet, Freddie,” she said, “the way you protected me when they arrested you.”
I shrugged, feeling like a big man. “I told you a long time ago you were my girl, didn’t I? I take care of what’s mine. Anyway, the fuzz had me dead to rights. The least I could do was stick to my story that you didn’t know I’d been operating with somebody else’s dough, car, and credit cards. No matter what they suspected, they couldn’t build a case against you.”
“Freddie,” she said through moistly parted lips, “you are the bravest, greatest, most loyal man—”
Her sweet music was interrupted by the arrival of her boss at the table. Clemmie introduced us, explaining that I was an old friend of the family and schoolmate she hadn’t seen in years. O’Leary’s ire was somewhat soothed. Reminding me of a twitchy mouse, he shook hands and suggested to Clemmie that she get back to work.
It was great, sitting there and chugging my first cold beer in more than three years and watching Clemmie’s bright movements from table to table.
A beautiful half hour passed, and then I felt like I was being stared at. My eyes cut along the bar. A big, dark-haired man had come in and was being served a shot glass. His gaze caught with mine. He glanced away, as if trying to decide whether or not to admit he’d seen me.
He was Porter Attics, a bricklayer on the construction job. Making up his mind, he tossed his drink down in one swallow, swiped the back of his hand across his mouth, and came over to the table.
“How goes, Freddie?”
“Okay. Sit down, Port.”
He lowered his beef into the chair Clemmie had vacated, sat looking at his knuckles, then lifted his eyes to mine.
“Freddie,” he said with some hesitation, “ain’t neither of us seen the other in a gin mill. Okay?”
I didn’t dig. He saw the frown grow on my face.
“I mean when we have to report to Sam Lagin,” he explained. “He’ll figure we’ve met on the job. You’ll find that he’s always picking, trying to make a stoolie out of you.”
I gawked at him, then laughed. “Well, how about that! Two members of the fifty-three club.”
“Yeah,” Attics said, “and joints serving booze are off-limits to us — with six more months of my parole to go.”
I slapped him on the shoulder. “So forget it, Porter! Sam Lagin, the creep, couldn’t make me stoolie if he ran over me with a bulldozer.”
“Likewise,” Port nodded, relaxing. “I had you pegged as a right guy, first day you reported on the job. How about I buy?”
“To drink to Sam Lagin,” I suggested.
He got a laugh out of that. “I got a feeling you and me is going to get along, Freddie.”
Lovely evening. I’d found a pal with common interests, common lingo, and Clemmie was serving the drinks.
I reported in to Sam Lagin at my appointed hour. He grunted that he was glad to see my punctuality, asked me how I was getting along on the job.
I conned him with some talk about how I wanted to look into this job training deal.
“Don’t want to barrow cement for the rest of my life, Mr. Lagin.”
“Well, that sounds fine, Freddie. Always good to see a man who wants to better himself. We’ll certainly look for an opening in some line of work you’d like to do.”
I halfway listened to him ramble along about various opportunities in the job training programs. I nodded when I was supposed to and asked a question when it seemed proper. But in my mind, I was way ahead of him. Now that I was back with Clemmie, the job was a hole in the head.
There was a big, wide world out there waiting for Clemmie and me. We’d already talked about it some. Sam Lagin would be no problem at all. I was already more than up to here with him, his stinking job, with wrestling piles of lumber all day after a night with Clemmie.
Parole violation had lost its first fears for me. The country was full of parole absconders, as file legal term put it. I’d got caught the first time because I’d played it dumb. I wouldn’t play it that way again.
Question was, what kind of hit? Not a two-bit job like sticking up a filling station? I wanted loot Clemmie and I could really enjoy.