William Haggard - The New Black Mask (No 5)

“First aid. First aid. Sick man. Require help.”

Finally, at the sixth repetition, several in the group of four turn and observe him. He continues to jump, shout, wave. They converse with each other. They come to a decision. They walk toward Mr. Ito and Sugar Man. With a sense of accomplishment, Mr. Ito turns back to the little man who is looking extremely weary. And now the group of four joins him. A man, a woman, a teenaged boy, a girl who might be classified as an emergent adolescent. Mr. Ito points to the man on the ground.

With a sharp moan, worthy of Miss V. Mayo noting an expiring J. Cagney, the woman kneels beside Sugar. The man also kneels. He seems knowledgeable, for he feels for a pulse and checks his wristwatch. The preteen girl stares upriver. The boy bounces his racquet against the heel of his hand and says, “We'll miss our turn.”

The woman, to Mr. Ito’s great satisfaction, ignores the lad. The man, having finished with Sugar's pulse, such as it is, unwraps his belt and straps it tightly about the bleeding leg above the knee, noting that “This may hurt, old man.”

Sugar nods as if he understands, and the V. Mayo woman smiles at him. Much of her hair, Mr. Ito notices, could pass for a shade quite close to gold. He steps back, for the two of them seem to be in competent control. At that moment Sugar glances up at him and surely mouths “Vic.” Mr. Ito smiles; he nods. Very well, a change in plan, but a necessary one. Tomorrow he will board a bus and travel south. To Orchard Knob, to Lookout Mountain. To The Wilderness. To Vicksburg. And if he encounters the likes of Messrs. J. Blue Eyes, C. Lucky, or M. Dimples, he will invoke the code of omerta. Looking down, he guarantees that the canary has never been a favored bird of the Ito family. He nods again, crisply. Sugar rests his reassured eyes.

The man turns to the boy. “Go back, tell Carlos to phone the police for an ambulance.”

“Are you serious?” the boy replies. “We’ll never get a court.”

The woman is about to round on him when the man shouts, “Don't argue with me, Chip.”

Chip clearly takes the same vitamins as Mr. Ito’s son. He remains in place and shouts back with equal vigor.

Mr. Ito sighs and looks away from the group. His eyes follow the curving staircase. At the top, looking around while others stream past, is a brightly shirted figure with a straining gut. His left hand reaches across his chest and holds onto a dangling arm. Now the man takes a halting step down, as if testing the firmness of the stone. Quickly, deftly, Mr. Ito removes his Pentax from the case and reloads. He removes the telephoto lens that has performed so faithfully and screws in a wide-angle replacement. He snaps the man, who, like his namesake in the blood-soaked Palace Chophouse in Newark, New Jersey, refuses to throw in his towel, even though his companions, Mr. L. Rosenkrantz and Mr. A. Berman, have kicked a vicious bucket. The mug may not be admirable, but he is tenacious.

Someone else is tenacious. He is lying there in his green pasture. The all-important question is: Are the angels shouting “Gangway! Gangway for de Lawd God Jehovah!” Wait. His hand moves, his eyes twitch. He may be communing with de Lawd; he has not yet joined him. Mr. Ito feels quite elated; if the great Puzo himself were to pump him for information, he would come away with a pail of clams.

In the meanwhile, the group of four do their specific things: The second Miss Mayo dabs at the shoulder of Sugar with her hat. The man shouts at the boy, the boy shouts at the man. The blossoming girl gazes raptly at the George Washington Bridge.

At the same time, the tennis players, with varying degrees of skill, are swarming and lunging about the courts. Joggers skim by, in particular, a blade-thin female who is making for the steps down which the Dutchman is wobbling as he clutches the dripping arm.

Mr. Ito circles to a point at the lip of the drop-off that leads to the highway and thence the river. He sinks easily to one knee and aims his wide-angle lens at “An Urban Landscape, with Incident.”

He replaces the camera. Carefully he zips up the case. With calm strides he walks to the foot of the steps. He stops. So has the Dutchman stopped. Dutch has, by far, seen palmier days. The intent female jogger brushes past him and continues up the stairway. Others veer around the two of them; they are like an island in the sun. They look at each other. The Dutchman is swaying, as if he were listening to the Savoy in his head. His eyes are not quite focused. But a wounded lion is a twice-dangerous lion. It is absolutely essential to stall for time if Sugar’s chances are to be thicker than urine on a rock. Mr. Ito is prepared. He rifles through the research cards in his mindfile. He swiftly decides: Like the venom of a snake, he will use the Dutchman to counteract the Dutchman.

Reaching back to the mortally wounded Flegenheimer, mewling on his hospital bed, Mr. Ito firmly proclaims, “A boy has never wept nor dashed a thousand kim.”

Aha, the man before him focuses. He stares.

“Mother,” Mr. Ito assures him, “is the best bet, and do not let Satan draw you too fast.”

Well, now, he is blinking. Mr. Ito notes with pleasure that he no longer carries any heat. Mr. Ito glances past him and up. At the top of the stone steps blue uniforms are gathering, and their heat is at the ready. Obviously the heartlanders have replaced their starch; when the going got tough, their toughness got going! The blue uniforms start down.

Mr. Ito looks back over his shoulder. The wide-angle tableau remains more or less the same, except that now Miss V. Mayo is dabbing with her sock and Sugar is sporting the semblance of a smile; he may be punching with powder puffs, but he is still punching. Mr. Ito turns back to his adversary who is swaying in a long, thin circle. The Little Caesar, at such a moment, said, “Mother of God, is this the end of Rico?” Dutch merely keeps swaying and staring.

Mr. Ito grants the flash card in his mind a silent thank you. Thank you, Arthur Flegenheimer, you have been of enormous help, but you are free now to cash your own ticket. As for Mr. Dewey and Senator Kefauver, one trusts that you are not too displeased with this day’s work. However, Nagoya Ito would prefer to take it from here.

The Dutchman is beginning to sag at the knees. His eyes are fanning quite rapidly, but he is paying very careful attention as Mr. Ito thrusts out his hand and says with brusque animation.

“Well, twirl my turban, man alive, can this be Mister Five by Five?”

James Lee Snyder has been writing for fifteen years, but "Shopping Cart Howard ” is the first story he has sent out for publication because, as he puts it, “I wanted to refine my work first… Now, on good days, I feel like I have complete control of my writing.”

“Shopping Cart Howard' is an amalgam of two or three people Mr. Snyder knows. “Living in New Orleans, you are exposed to a broad range of people and experiences," he observed. Though a private detective has a prominent role in the story, it is not about crime and thus would not normally be included in NBM. But we felt the rules should be stretched in this case.

Dick Tracy’s been following me for days. I know if s him because of those awful, baggy suits he wears and the way he acts, a real funny-paper hero, this one. He slides in and out of doorways and window-shops enough for ten country wives come to town. Brother. So what I do is I take him down to the Quarter, down on Bourbon Street and him always a block behind, and I park him in front of one of those male strip joints down there. Then I'm rearranging my cart for an hour or so while the tourist jerkers slither out and work him over. It’s pitiful what those leech bastards can do to you with that much time. Once, Dick just up and left. They all started calling him Peeping Tom and a couple of the boys came out in their wigs and nighties, running their fingers beneath that official Dick Tracy hat, and he vamoosed. Now the last couple of days he doesn’t follow me in. He waits on Canal, has a Coke at Woolworth’s lunch counter, and I pick him up on my way out. I’ve about decided he’s actually with the Internal Revenue. They must have heard about all that money I was making, not paying taxes on, and sent him down. Duke and Reese might have tipped them off. They’re convinced I have a buried treasure somewhere, and it would be just like those fools to ask the government for help, if they thought it would do any good.