Роберт Беллем - Pulp Frictions

The street looked innocent enough. It was then about eight-thirteen of an ordinary weekday morning, and Dorchester Avenue was an ordinary weekday street if ever there was one. A milk truck was parked ahead of the taxicab, and an express delivery van across the street. Protruding from a nearby delivery lane was the rear end of an Eclipse Laundry truck, and its driver was nowhere in sight. Apparently he had taken his little collapsible cart and vanished within the nearest building, where no doubt he was gathering loads of soiled linen or distributing the unsoiled variety. From behind the flimsy, opaque curtains of an opposite apartment, Inspector Bourse looked down at all these things and called them good.

He knew, as well, that behind 1441 Dorchester Avenue a junkman was driving through the main alley and was just about to have an altercation with a city garbage truck which blocked his way. He knew that not all the tenants of 1441 were still asleep or sitting over early breakfasts. No, at least a dozen of those tenants had taken occupancy during the previous day and night — slyly, carefully, silently — and just now they would have firearms ready to hand.

In the stupid four-and-a-half storey building which was numbered 1441, a young man sat in the tiny sun parlour of Apartment 327. He would have been exceedingly interested had he known that Inspector Bourse was watching his windows. He was not a nice young man. His face was the colour of the paper in which your butcher wraps meat, and his mouth had come down directly from a remote ancestor who served as a torturer for a Louis.

He was twenty-seven years old; he had killed men in Chicago, Dallas, Saginaw, Fort Wayne, Kansas City, Tulsa and in the town where he now sat. Mail trucks and banks had been levied upon, women had been forced to bestow their caresses upon him, and strangely enough some of them didn’t have to be forced. The man’s name was Chester Hemingway, and he had a personal cash estate of three hundred and fifteen thousand dollars.

The young man was chewing something. His thin jaws worked knowingly, cruelly, and not with the comfortable carelessness of the habitual gum-chewer. They went crunching up and down, pulverising some mysterious food between their gleaming white teeth. It was horrible, but forever fascinating, to watch Chet Hemingway chew. He was always chewing.

‘Chet,’ came a voice from the next room.

Without turning his head, Hemingway said, ‘Yeah?’ There was a scowl upon his face whenever he spoke.

‘What’s down there?’

‘Cab. Couple of broads with two college boys in coon coats.’

‘They were making a lot of noise. I just wondered—’

Chet Hemingway told his companion, ‘Well, I’ll do all the wondering that’s done around here. Sure they’re making a lot of noise. Anybody’s making a lot of noise that’s fried. These folks are fried — especially the two broads.’ He leaned an inch closer to the window and his icy green eyes stared down at the gay party advancing towards the court entrance directly below. ‘And broad is the word,’ he muttered to himself. ‘I like mine thinner than that.’

He thought of Lily.

‘Tomsk,’ he called, ‘where’s Lil?’

‘Still asleep, I guess.’

‘I wish to hell she’d get up and get us some breakfast. Tell her to get up.’

He heard Tomsk mutter to Heras, and Heras went padding down the short hall to knock at a bedroom door. ‘Hey, Lil. Get up. Chet says for you to get up.’ Lil’s fretful voice came back after a moment: ‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ She yawned. ‘Oh, all right,’ she said, ‘I’m comin’, tell him.’

Hemingway smiled. If one of those monkeys ever made a pass at Lily, he’d shoot his teeth out of his ears. Really, he must be getting fond of Lil — fonder than he’d ever been of anybody. That wouldn’t do, to get fond of her. One of these days he’d have to get rid of her, one way or another. But for the present—

He heard the party of four — coonskin college boys and fat, painted women, come lumbering up the stairway. His hand went to his belly-gun, then away from it. Drunks. Hell-raising punks with a couple of alley-cats they’d picked up during a night of revelry. Nobody to be alarmed about... Two Railway Express deliverymen came across the street, carrying a heavy box between them. Far down the hallway, a milkman clinked his bottles. There was the mutter of rubber tyres close at hand — that laundryman was coming down the hall, knocking on doors as he came.

The radio mourned: ‘Laaaast Round-Up ...’

Chet chewed and swallowed, swallowed and chewed. To the next room he called, ‘Hey, Tomsk. I hear the laundry guy coming. Tell Lil to get ready to go to the door. You scram, you and Heras.’ With sullen boredom, he lifted his eyes to the ceiling above his head. How long, how long would they have to stay in this damn building, this damn town? But it was too hot to try for South America, yet. Maybe another month—

At that moment, he had the first notion that it might be a good idea to take Lil along with him when he went. He had meant to ditch her in New Orleans — give her a roll, if he felt she was safe, but ditch her. If he felt she wasn’t safe, he could always put a hole through her and drop her off a bridge with an old steam radiator wired to her neck and legs. That had happened before, too. But not to Lil. That was Jenny. Jenny had never turned up again, either — the quicksands down deep in the river took care of that. It was one rap they’d never have against him.

Actually, Chet Hemingway was falling in love with Lil, and didn’t realise it. It was funny: after all these weeks, and on this day when she was to be killed, that he should fall in love with her.

‘Git along, little dogies, git along, little dogies—’

In the short stairway between the second and third floors, Detective Nick Glennan said to Detective Pete Ricardi, ‘Okay. Dave will be opposite that little service door in the side hall. Horn will go down there as soon as we pick up the Tom-gun.’

One of the women, whose name was Cohen, gave a shrill and alcoholic laugh. He shone in the annual police vaudeville, did Benny Cohen. The other woman, whose name was Detective Barney Flynn, laughed even louder. But it was a coarse bellow; Flynn didn’t make as good a woman as Cohen.

‘You’ll be bringing them out here, armed to the teeth,’ muttered Nick Glennan. ‘You sound like a hippopotamus, Barney. Okay,’ he said again, as they reached the third floor. Nick wasn’t a sergeant yet, but he was commanding this squad, and if nothing went wrong he might very soon be a sergeant.

Detective Horn came trundling his laundry cart down the hallway. He bestowed one solemn wink on the inebriated college boys and their blowsy companions; his face was rather pale. Ricardi leaned forward and lifted a Thompson submachine gun from under the pile of soft blue bags in the little cart. His coonskin coat slid from his shoulders; his slim hands moved capably from drum to trigger and back again; Ricardi was the best machine gunner in the department.

The women were doing things to themselves. Their coats and henna wigs vanished — the dresses were brief and sketchy and wouldn’t bother them much, though they lost their rhinestone-buckled shoes in a hurry. They emerged from their disguises looking like nothing on land or sea, but they had .38s in their hands.

All this conversation, whispered as it was, and all this hasty disrobing and assembling of armature, took about three jerks. Horn ambled ahead, laundry cart and all, and vanished around the turn into the side hall where Sergeant Dave Glennan, Nick’s fat brother, would be waiting inside the door of the opposite kitchen.

It didn’t look like Hemingway and Tomsk and Scummy Heras had much of a chance. Across the street, Inspector Bourse and Chief of Detectives Moore were having a severe case of the jitters. Another minute, another two minutes—