Donald Westlake - The New Black Mask ( No 3 )

“Good.” Claggett beamed. “I’m sure you mean that, and it wouldn’t be practical to pull you off the job, anyway. Not with so short a time to go.”

“Uh, sir?”

“I mean, we should know how things stand with Miss Aloe very soon. If she’s going to pull anything, she’ll do it within the next week or so, don’t you think?”

“Well…” Kay hesitated doubtfully. “Why do you say that, sir?”

“Because she’s a very pretty girl, too,” Claggett said, “and pretty girls have a way of being jealous of other girls. If she still cares enough for Mr. Rainstar to be mad at him, she’ll try to stop him having fun with you. And she won’t waste time about it.”

Kay said, “Well, yes, sir. Maybe.” But rather doubtfully. Not exactly sure that she had been complimented.

Claggett said he was glad she agreed with him. And he was glad to be glad, he said, because he was really pretty sad when he thought of her imminent resignation from the police department.

“Just as soon as you’ve finished this assignment. Of course,” he went on, “I realize it’s the smart thing for you to do, a girl who’s shown an aptitude for so many things in such a short span of time. Let’s see. You’ve been a nurse, a secretary, an airline stewardess, a — Yes, Officer Nolton?”

“I said, you can have my resignation right now if you want it! And you know what you can do with it, too!”

“Well, sure, sure,” Claggett said heartily. “For that matter, I could have you kicked out on your ass. For stated reasons that would make it hard for you to get a job washing towels in a whorehouse. Well?” He paused. “Do you want me to do that?”

Kay muttered something under her breath.

Claggett leaned forward. “I didn’t hear you! Speak up!”

“I…” Kay wet her lips. “No, sir. I don’t want you to.”

“Don’t want me to do what?”

“Don’t!” I said. “For God’s sake, drop it, Jeff.”

He gestured curtly, ordering me to butt out. To mind my own business and let him mind his. I said I couldn’t do that.

“You’ve made your point, Jeff. So let it go at that. You don’t need to watch her bleed.” I crossed over to Kay, spoke to her gently. “Want to go up to your room? It’ll be all right with the sergeant, won’t it, Jeff?”

“Yeah, hell, dammit!” he said sourly.

“Kay.” I touched her on the shoulder. “Want me to help you?”

She shook off my hand.

She buried her face in her hands, and began to shake with silent weeping.

Claggett and I exchanged a glance. He stood up, jerked his head toward the door, and went out. I took another glance at Kay, saw that her trembling had stopped and followed him.

We shook hands at the front door, and he apologized for coming down hard on Kay. But he seemed considerably less than overwhelmed with regret. The little lady had been under official scrutiny for a long time, he said, and her conduct today had simply triggered an already loaded gun.

“I’m not referring to catching her in the raw with you. I had to bawl her out for it, but that’s as far as it would have gone — if there’d been nothing more than that. It was her attitude about it, her attitude in general, the things she said. If you know what I mean.” He sighed, shook his head. “And if you don’t know, to hell with you.”

“I know,” I said. “But she was pretty upset, Jeff. If you’ll look at things from her viewpoint—”

“I won’t,” said Jeff. “You can be fair without seeing the other fellow’s side of things, Britt. Keep doing that, and you stop having a side of your own. You get so damned broad-minded that you don’t know right from wrong.”

I said that I didn’t always know now, and he said I should ask him whenever I was in doubt. “Incidentally, I spoke to a lawyer about the way you’d been gypped out of your property for that city dump, and he thinks you’ve got a hell of a good case. In fact, he’s willing to take it on a contingency for a third of what he can recover.”

“But I’ve told you,” I said, “I just can’t do it, Jeff. I’m simply not up to a courtroom battle.”

“My lawyer friend thinks they’d go for an out-of-court settlement.”

“Well, maybe,” I said. “But Connie would be sure to find out about it, and I’d still be up the creek. She’d grab any money I got, and give me a good smearing besides.”

“I don’t see that,” Claggett frowned. “You’ve been sending her quite a bit of money, haven’t you?”

“Better than four thousand since I got out of the hospital.”

“Then why should she want to give you a bad time? Why should she throw a wTench in a money machine? She hurts you, she hurts herself.”

I nodded, said he was probably right. But still…

“I’m just afraid to do it, Jeff. I don’t know why I am, but I am.”

He looked at me exasperatedly, and seemed on the point of saying something pointed. Instead, however, he sighed heavily and said he guessed I just couldn’t help it.

“But think it over, anyway, won’t you? You don’t need to commit yourself, but you can at least think about it, can’t you?”

“Oh, well, sure,” I said. “Sure, I’ll think about it.”

“That’s a promise?”

“Of course,” I said.

He left. I returned to Kay, who was well prepared to receive me.

“I could simply kill you!” she exploded. “You made me lose my job, you stupid old boob you!”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “But I’m sure you were much too good for it.”

“I was not! I mean — why didn’t you speak up for me? It was all your fault, anyway, but you didn’t say a word to defend me!”

“I thought I did, but possibly I didn’t say enough,” I said. “I really don’t think it would have changed anything, however, regardless of what I’d said.”

“Oh, you! What do you know, you silly old fool?”

“Very little,” I said. “And at the rate I’m aging, I’m afraid I won’t be able to add much to my store of knowledge.”

She glared at me, her face blotched and ugly like a soiled picture. She said angrily that I hadn’t needed to act like a fool, had I? Well, had I?

“You didn’t even give him time to open his mouth before you were cracking your silly jokes! Saying that I couldn’t wear my gun because it didn’t match my birthday suit, and a lot of other stupid, silly stuff. Well, you weren’t funny, not a doggone bit! Just a plain darned fool, that’s all you were!”

“I know,” I said.

“You know ?”

“It’s a protective device.” I nodded. “The I-ain’t-nothin’-but-a-hound-dawg syndrome. When a dog can’t cope, he flops over on his back, thumps his tail, wiggles his paws, and exposes his balls. Briefly, he demonstrates that he is a harmless and amusing fellow, so why the hell should anyone hurt him? And it works pretty well with other dogs, literal and figurative. The meanest mastiff has never masticated me, but I’ve taken some plumb awful stompings from pussycats.”

“ Huh! You think you’re so smart, don’t you?”

“Meow, sppftt,” I said.

John Ball — the creator of Virgil Tibbs — is a man of parts. He is a lieutenant colonel in the US. Air Force — CAP; he has been on the staffs of the Brooklyn Eagle, the New York World-Telegram, and Fortune. Mr. Ball has written more than thirty books, and he received both the MW A Edgar Allan Poe Award and the CWA Gold Dagger for In the Heat of the Night.

“Appointment with the Governor ” originally appeared in Who Done It? a collection edited by Alice Lawrence and Isaac Asimov in which the contributors ’ identities were coded. This is the first publication of the story under John Balls name.