Тэлмидж Пауэлл - The Third Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™ - 25 Classic Mysteries

“My goodness!” Miss Meffort said. She’d have questions later, but she’d await them until the completion of business.

In the moment before I started dictating the letter that would put a hundred thousand back in our vaults, ready for usage by deserving customers, I experienced a strange flicker of fondness for Mr. Fogarty. Alive, he’d been a smooth con man, his front covering the dirtiest of crooks. Dead, he was surely the most honest man I knew, repaying to the final penny his indebtedness to Comfort Savings and Loan Association.

Originally appeared in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine , May 1973.

The parole supervisor’s office fitted the man. It was gloomy, a little seedy, with a feeling of dusty untidiness.

The big cop who’d escorted me in said, “Here he is, Sam. Fred Davis. Another nose to wipe.”

A cop of the old school, he shoved me another step toward Sam Lagin’s desk and then turned around and went out.

“Pull up a chair and sit down, Freddie,” Lagin said.

He stood behind his desk, a moth-eaten, bullish figure. Baggy gray suit, rumpled shirt, necktie with a wrinkled knot. Big, fleshy face with a drab, brown, old-uncle mustache that matched his hair and mean little eyes that were almost colorless.

With the power of the state to back him, Sam Lagin was the parole officer who’d run my life for the next two years, and I wondered if the pokey may not turn out to be just the frying pan...

As I eased onto a scuffed wooden chair, Lagin settled behind his desk. He pawed through the litter until he found the file he wanted.

He let me sweat while he read, grunting now and then while he did so. He looked at me at last, the loose lips below the unkempt mustache tightening into a smile that was more sly and secret than happy.

“Fred B. Davis, age twenty-five, fair education, better than average I.Q.,” he recited. “What’s your trouble, Freddie? Can’t stand the routine of punching a time clock?”

I let it hang there, and after a few seconds his heavy face darkened a shade.

“Boy, you answer when I speak to you!”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

His eyes drifted back to the folder. “Bought yourself some real trouble, didn’t you? Mugged a well-heeled citizen one dark night and took his cash, watch, ring, credit cards and car. Picked up your chick Clemmie and partied through three states before the law put the arm on you.”

“I’ve learned my lesson, Mr. Lagin,” I said earnestly.

“Have you, Freddie? I’m betting you’re a natural born criminal, easily bored, lacking in self-discipline, itching for excitement, and always looking for the easy way out. You’re a good looking kid, Freddie, even if it’s on the tall, skinny side. That boyish face and wide brown eyes might fool a lot of people — But not me. I’m pegging you as lazy, self-centered, with no stomach for the responsibilities acceptable to most members of society.”

His words brought a pink anger to my face, but I pressed my elbows hard on the wooden arms of the chair and kept my mouth shut.

Lagin spotted my reaction, and the first glint of pleasure came to his smile.

“Well,” he said, “we’ll see. Seventy-eight percent of your kind return to crime almost the minute you’re back on the streets. It’s my job to whittle away at that figure, Freddie, and I do the best I can. I’ve fifty-three of you to wet-nurse at the, moment, and despite the gloomy prospects I’m pulling for you, Freddie.”

“Thank you, Mr. Lagin,” I said, because it seemed the thing to say.

He dropped the folder carelessly on the desk. “You know the rules. You entered a contract when you applied for parole.”

“You’ll have no trouble from me, Mr. Lagin.”

“Thus spake seventy-eight percent,” he muttered dourly. “But in prison or out, you won’t make much difference in the crime rate, Freddie. It always rises, no matter how hard Mrs. Lagin’s boy Sam tries.”

He pushed back his chair, ending the interview. “Even with fifty-three, I always try to keep an extra close eye on new members of the club for awhile.”

“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.