Sinner Man, Page 3

  Crowley’s life wouldn’t be dull. He wouldn’t waste his days selling insurance and he wouldn’t come home each night to a boring wife who, when she bothered to talk to him at all, would babble on and on about slip covers for the living-room chairs and similar stimulating domestic topics.

  Halfway to Rochester I stood up and walked to the john. While I was there I locked myself in the can and went through my wallet. There were a few traces of Barshter along with all that money and I wanted to get rid of them. I tore up a slew of membership cards in a variety of organizations, a driver’s license, a Social Security card, a withholding statement, a batch of business cards—mine and others’—a fishing license, somebody’s telephone number and similar trivia. I tore up all my credit cards, wishing I had had the time to run up some bills I would never have to pay. But you can’t have everything.

  I flushed all this garbage down the toilet and left it on the tracks for the gandy dancers to puzzle over. I took a long look at myself in the mirror, first with my glasses on, then without them. I’d picked up the glasses years ago for reading; somewhere in the course of time I’d started wearing them permanently. Now it was a slight strain without them. I figured I could get used to it.

  The window gave me a hard time. You’d think they’d leave the john windows open full-time. They don’t. This one was stuck and I had to wrestle to get it open. I pitched the glasses into the middle of New York State and closed the window again. A face looks different without glasses. But that wasn’t the only reason I gave them the heave.

  You see, Nat Crowley wouldn’t wear glasses. He’d squint first.

  * * *

  We were only a few minutes behind schedule getting into Buffalo, which was better than I had expected. I wrestled my suitcase from the rack overhead, put on my hat and left my newspaper on the train. I went into the terminal, looked up hotels in the Yellow Pages and decided that the Malmsly seemed about right. As far as I could figure it, it was the city’s second-best hotel. I found a taxi and rode to it. I tipped the cabby, surrendered my suitcase to a bellhop and signed the register as Nat Crowley, Miami. The bellhop took me upstairs to a large and comfortable room. I gave him a dollar and got rid of him.

  I turned on the TV set, saw a comedy show strictly for squares and then watched a newscast. There was nothing very significant on the news. A stock I owned had gone up quite a few points but this didn’t do me any good now. I turned off the TV, undressed and washed off the smell of the train in the shower. Then I called the desk and had them send up a kid to take care of my suit. The same bellhop appeared a few minutes later, took my suit and a second dollar and told me it would be cleaned and pressed by morning. That was good, because it was the only suit I had.

  3

  I was awakened the next morning by a discreet knocking on my door. I rolled over and looked at the ceiling for a minute or two, finding my bearings and reminding myself just who I was and where I was. Then I wrapped myself up in a towel and opened the door. It was the bellhop—a different one this time—with my suit, cleaned and pressed and much better to look at than it had been after so many hours on the train. I gave the bellhop a dollar and closed the door again.

  Bellhops were becoming expensive. They’d cost me three dollars so far and ordinarily I would have given them a quarter each. But Nat Crowley had to be a big tipper. His personality was costing me money.

  I dressed and floated downstairs in the elevator. I had corned-beef hash with a poached egg on it in the wood-paneled Men’s Grill. Then I walked outside to have a look at downtown Buffalo. A fairly stiff wind blew smoke and soot at me. A scattering of morning shoppers crossed Main Street against the light and looked generally unhappy.

  I walked along Main Street. I passed what seemed to be the main department stores. I passed half a dozen movie houses, none of them open yet. I passed a shop that sold ties for fifty cents each, a shop offering souvenirs of Niagara Falls and exploding cigars and magic tricks and Japanese transistor radios, a shop where any suit in the store was twenty dollars and any jacket fifteen. I passed bars, some with music and some without, some expensive and some cheap, all of them rather empty now. I smoked a cigarette all the way down and pitched the butt into the gutter. There were plenty of others there to keep it company.

  But I had no complaints. While there was little to see, I wasn’t a sightseer.

  I went into a bank and talked to a clerical type about opening a regular checking account. I handed him four thousand dollars and a trio of phony Miami business references. I was fairly certain he wouldn’t bother checking them out—hell, I was opening an account, not applying for a loan. When a man hands you cash you don’t ask him his religion.

  I left with a dead-fish handshake and a bright little checkbook, something temporary until they had time to run off some imprinted checks for me. Then I stopped off at the five-and-dime and picked up a few packs of cheap stationery. I dashed off a batch of idiot letters, addressed them to Nat Crowley at the Hotel Malmsly and sent them scuttling off to a half-dozen mailing services throughout the country. In return for two bits a letter, these outfits would mail my letters back to me. It was a cheap and happily simple way to establish a background.

  In a drab building a few blocks from the hotel I applied for a Social Security card. I didn’t need any identification for that since the card itself isn’t supposed to be used for identification. A girl with thick eyeglasses gave me the card and I stuck it into my wallet. The next stop was the Bureau of Motor Vehicles where I picked up a blank for a driver’s license. The license section was part of the application, so I took the whole business to the library where I rented a typewriter and filled out the license part. Then, back in my hotel room, I forged the stamp with a ballpoint pen. This wouldn’t do for driving but I wasn’t planning on driving anywhere. The license made fine identification.

  Other things could come later. Like the Diners Club, library card—all the little pasteboard certificates that tell the world who you are. I’d pick them up when the time came.

  * * *

  That afternoon I stopped in a men’s shop and bought a wardrobe. I bought two suits—a pearl-gray sharkskin and a black mohair. I bought shirts and socks and shoes. I bought ties—they didn’t exactly glow in the dark but they said hello firmly. I paid the clerk in cash and told him to send everything to me at the Malmsly when he had a chance.

  Dinner was a plate of spaghetti and meatballs washed down with a couple glasses of sour red wine in a small Italian restaurant a block off the main stem. I followed it up with two cups of strong black coffee and went through the evening paper. I skipped the national and international tripe and tried to get impressions of the city from the local news. I found out what I wanted to know. There was a good amount of petty crime and plenty of organized gambling. It looked as though I wouldn’t have much trouble finding the fellows I was looking for. They had a lot of things going.

  I left the restaurant, wandered back to Main Street and dropped into an innocuous bar where I had a rye and soda. I was beginning to develop a taste for the drink. And I was also beginning to develop a feel for the sort of part I was playing. After a day of being Crowley I didn’t have to ask myself quite so often how Nat Crowley would react to a situation. I simply reacted that way.

  Still, it was hard to tell whether my new personality was working. So far there had been no test.

  I walked around for a while but there wasn’t a hell of a lot to look at. It was Tuesday night in downtown Buffalo and the shoppers had all gone home. The strip joints weren’t ready for action yet and the whores wouldn’t start whoring for another three or four hours. I went to a movie and killed time watching cowboys chase Indians. By the time I left the theater things had changed. The strippers were stripping and the whores were getting ready to whore.

  I took another long walk along Main Street. I headed uptown, gave a wino a quarter to get rid of him, shook my head no at a streetwalker before she had a chance to ask. I turned west and stepped i
nto another bar. I felt it was time for a test. The first test.

  It was an ordinary bar. It wasn’t the mob’s fine and private place—I hadn’t come across that bar yet—nor was it a neighborhood affair where you went to grab a beer and watch television and get away from your wife. It was a run-of-the-mill downtown ginnery. Two ancient hustlers held up one end of the bar and two equally ancient lushes weighted down the other end. The bartender was fat and ugly. The jukebox blared forth rock-’n’-roll. A Canadian, judging by his accent as he called for a drink, stood alone at the bar with a few men on either side of him. I managed to get next to the Canadian and order rye and soda. I paid for the drink with a twenty and let my change stay on top of the bar.

  I studied the Canadian. He was about my age but he wasn’t wearing it too well. He looked just about drunk enough and miserable enough to be belligerent. I hoped he was.

  I poured the rye into the soda and sloshed them around with a swizzle stick. I took an exploratory sip and then put the drink back on the bar. I took out a pack of cigarettes, shook one loose, put it in my mouth and set it on fire.

  Then I spilled the drink all over the Canadian.

  He was one unhappy Canadian. He took a quick step back, then took a sad look downward at the damage. His jacket was wet, his pants were wet, his shirt was wet. His tie was ready for the ashcan. He studied all this and then raised his eyes to meet mine.

  “Sorry,” I said. I motioned to the bartender and told him to bring us each a fresh drink.

  “Spilled your goddamned drink all over me,” the Canadian said.

  “An accident. They happen.”

  “All over me. Soaked to the skin. I ought to punch you in the nose, you son of a bitch.”

  I gave him a hard look. “I said it was an accident, baby. Don’t lean on your luck.”

  “Dirty bastard.”

  I told him to shut up.

  The bartender came over and set fresh drinks in front of both of us. I mixed mine again and wondered where the Canadian would take it from here. It was his move. He could push it or leave it alone. I hoped he would push it.

  He did. “Dirty son of a bitch,” he said again. And when I turned around to look at him he tried to slug me.

  It was a mistake. He sent me a telegram first, then wound up and threw what was supposed to be his Sunday punch. It was Tuesday and he missed. I brushed the fist aside with my left hand and swatted him with the right. He gagged and stepped back. Then he lowered his head and came in again.

  I hit him in the chest, over the heart, hard. I chopped a short right to the underside of his jaw and he straightened up. I kicked him in the pit of the stomach and he fell forward on his face.

  He lay there and made little noises without moving. I walked over next to him, looked at him for a moment and gave him a very short and very hard kick in the side of the head. It was hard enough to knock him out but not hard enough to kill him. His eyes closed and he stopped making his little noises.

  The jukebox was the only noise in the bar. It went on making bad music while everybody else clammed up and tried not to look at me. They didn’t manage it.

  I picked up the bills, leaving the change for the barkeep. I motioned him over and he came to me, his eyes wary.

  “I don’t want trouble, Mac.”

  My eyes smiled gently. “No trouble,” I said. I peeled a single off the top of the roll of bills and handed it to him. “For him,” I said, pointing to the Canadian on the floor. “I spilled a drink on him. This is so he can get his suit cleaned.”

  I turned and walked out of the bar.

  I had been in a combat unit in Korea. It all happened years ago but parts of the experience had been sharp, raw, vital. Those parts were still clear now. Some of them came back to me now and then, sometimes in dreams, sometimes when I was lost in thought.

  Now I remembered the first time I’d seen combat. Most of Korea was nothing much more than too much cold and too much mud and too many corpses. The first day of fighting was memorable.

  Not the action itself. The action had something to do with a hill—we were trying to hold it, or to take it, or something. But what was really memorable were the feelings. There had been the anticipation. There had been the worry that I would crack up or run screaming or that some bastard of a Chinese would kill me. Then there had been the tension of the scene—the bullets overhead and men dying and the gun in my hand chattering like a woman on a telephone. And afterward, the gunfire dying down and stopping, there had been the calmness and a chance to relax. And there had been the sudden sure knowledge that I had been good, that I had held up, that I hadn’t gone to pieces and wouldn’t go to pieces. And that I was alive and had lived through the battle and would live through the war.

  The same feelings were back again as I headed back toward the Malmsly. The night air was clean and cold in my lungs and I walked easily, confidently. I had set the first test up all by myself. I had staged a little incident for Crowley and I had brought it off properly. I felt sorry for the Canadian—he’d played a bit part in a private play without knowing what was coming off—but I wasn’t going to waste tears on him. He was a means to an end and nothing more.

  Maybe I had accomplished something. Maybe someone had noticed me and would want to know who I was. Because the person who chopped down the Canadian and kicked him in the head and left a dollar to clean his suit wasn’t a slob with a chip on his shoulder. He was a heavyweight, a hotster, a definite mob type. He was Nat Crowley.

  So maybe somebody noticed and would want to know more. If so, fine—that made everything that much easier. If not, also fine. Because the bit in the bar had still served a purpose. The incident had given me a crisis situation and let me play Crowley against it. I had learned new mannerisms and new manners. New pictures and new words.

  I slowed down, stopped in a haberdashery doorway and got a fresh cigarette going. While I was lighting it, I managed to look around behind me. I learned something that way.

  I had a tail.

  He was around twenty-five years old. I had seen him before in the bar. Now he was following me.

  It would have been easy enough to shake him but shaking him was the last thing I wanted to do. He was sizing me up, shadowing me to find out where I was staying and who I was. He would find these things out and tell somebody. Fine.

  I shook out the match and dropped it to the pavement. I led my tail to the Malmsly. I got my key from the desk and took the elevator upstairs to my room. I washed up and went to bed, wondering how much the tail would have to bribe the desk clerk to find out who I was.

  4

  Wednesday and Thursday were waiting days, walking days, wandering days. Wednesday morning I took a rambling walk along the downtown east side. I watched the winos drink muscatel in broken-down bars. I passed through the fringe district, the borderland between Skid Row and Buffalo’s version of Harlem. I looked at fag joints and porno bookshops and dubious nightclubs, all of them sad and slightly soiled in the daylight.

  I stopped at a pawnshop and bought a gold signet ring that fitted nicely on the fourth finger of my right hand. I stopped at a cigar store and bet five dollars on a horse.

  When I got back to the hotel the morning was mostly gone. The maid was making up my room.

  “I’ll come back later,” she said.

  “Go ahead and finish,” I told her. “I’ll stay out of your way.”

  I closed the door. She had already made the bed and was busying herself with a dustcloth, straightening up the dresser. I stretched out on the bed and watched her. She was a Negro girl, maybe twenty-five, maybe thirty. The contrast of her starched white uniform and her soft brown skin was dramatic. There’s something about girls in uniforms that has always turned me on, Barshter or Crowley. Airline stewardesses, nurses—they always get to me. Maybe it’s the lure of the forbidden or the idea that they’re around to be of service.

  So I watched the lines of her body, the taut muscles in her calves when she bent over to pick up
something from the floor, the way her breasts pushed out against the front of the neat uniform.

  The rush of desire surprised me. It was more than the lazy wouldn’t-it-be-nice-to-get-into-that feeling that any man gets when he looks at a pretty girl. My feeling was hunger, raw and intense.

  Don Barshter had never believed in the sanctity of the marriage vows. But Don Barshter had somehow never got around to cheating. He never started affairs because he was afraid they would be messy. And he didn’t go to prostitutes because he was afraid of making his pitch to the wrong girl. If a girl had come along with the word whore tattooed in blue upon her forehead, square old Barshter would have taken her up on it. But he could go to a bar and sit next to a painted lady and never have the nerve to approach her.

  But I wasn’t Don Barshter anymore.

  So I said, “You’re a real pretty girl, honey. You know that?”

  She looked at me. It was a look that would have scared hell out of Barshter but Crowley knew how to handle it.

  “There’s a fifty-dollar bill in my wallet,” I said lazily. “Wouldn’t take you more than ten or fifteen minutes to earn it.”

  Her eyes narrowed as she thought it over. She said, “Fifty?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Anybody finds out, my butt is in a sling.”

  “Lock the door and close the drapes.”

  She locked the door and closed the drapes. She turned to me, her eyes uncertain, and said her name was Brenda. I grinned at her.

  “Now let’s see what’s under that uniform, Brenda.”

  There was a lot of pretty brown skin under that uniform. She undressed quickly and I lay there watching her, enjoying the show. She wasn’t wearing a bra, which I had suspected from the happy way she had bounced as she moved around. She didn’t need a bra. Her breasts were young and upstanding examples of the form, coral at their tips. They were just a shade lighter than the rest of her, as if she’d lain out in the sun on her day off with the top of a bikini swimsuit covering them.