Dan Marlowe - Shake a Crooked Town

“Oh. That. Yeah.” Johnny's interest died. He found it replaced at once by a flicker of something else. His hand closed lightly on the roll of bills in his pocket. He glanced at his wrist watch. Why not sit in for a couple of hours? The game was a soft touch. “Maybe I'll take a look.”

“You're a gambler, among other things?”

He looked at Mrs. Peterson's disapproving face. “You know Rudy?”

“Everyone knows Rudy and all the rest like him.” She said it with distaste. 'That's what's the matter with this town. It was bad enough when Girl Thompson was running it like a business. A dirty business, but a business. Now it's an out-and-out racket and someone's going to get hurt. Dick Lowell should be ashamed of himself.”

“What can he do about it?” Johnny asked her.

“If he slept in his own bed nights Daddario never would have been able to undermine him on the council and get control.” Mrs. Peterson's voice was sharp. “He's not a Lowell. He's a weakling.”

“Yeah,” Johnny said vaguely. “Well, maybe he's got a problem or two of his own.” He started for the front door. “I'll clear out tomorrow. Sorry to have bothered you.”

He thought she was going to speak again, but she stood and watched him silently as he let himself out.

Johnny awoke in the first rays of the sunrise with his stomach rumbling with hunger pains. He had been too disgusted to eat anything before going to bed five hours before.

He rolled over and lay on his back with his hands folded beneath his head. The trip to Rudy's had been a disaster. The corners of his mouthy turned down at the remembrance. The sour taste was almost literal.

He had stepped into the game brash with confidence. In the first dozen hands he had run second three times and had pulled in his horns a little. He had won a small pot with three sevens and almost at once saw a full house top his smaller full. That had been painful, but not nearly so bad as the hand shortly after on which he had wagered briskly on a pat flush against a two-card draw. After two return raises Johnny had called and watched his opponent cheerfully lay down the ace, king, queen, nine, and five of spades. He always liked to draw to an ace, king, queen flush possibility, his opponent explained.

Johnny salvaged his few remaining chips and backed out of the game hurriedly. When they started filling flushes on two-card draws it obviously wasn't his night. It had only taken him twenty-five minutes and fourteen hundred dollars to find it out.

“Murder,” Rudy said at the door, letting him out.

“First degree,” Johnny affirmed.

“You happen to know this Tolliver boy up in Emergency Hospital?” Rudy asked.

“Seems to me I've heard the name,” Johnny said carefully. “What happened to him?”

“I heard he run into a fence,” Rudy said dryly. He spat on the floor and scrubbed it out with his heel. So far as he was concerned, the conversation seemed to have ended.

Johnny tried to keep it moving. “You have to choose up sides in this town to get your umbrella for this game?” he asked.

“Never used to have to,” Rudy said heavily. He cleared his throat. “Never used to,” he repeated. “It'd better stay that way. I pay my dues to the lodge an' all I ask is to be left alone.”

“They been comin' at you lately from more'n one direction?”

“I pay my dues,” Rudy reiterated.

And that had been all. Rudy had refused to say another word, leaving Johnny to wonder why the subject of Tolliver had been brought up. Unless it was Rudy's way of making the point that he knew what was going on around town.

Johnny had stopped at the Western Union office and wired Mickey Tallant for fresh funds and had trudged back to Mrs. Peterson's wishing he had never left it.

He stretched lazily in bed, threw back the covers and sprang out. He dressed hurriedly in the room's chill. Autumn was coming with a vengeance. In the bathroom across the hall, he splashed water noisily and chopped at his wet-down hair with his comb. Three or four eggs and a like number cups of coffee should put a brighter aspect on things. It usually did. He remembered mornings after nights at the card table-Back in his room he tossed the comb at the bureau and reached for Mickey Tallant's leather jacket on the back of a chair. His hand became paralyzed in mid-movement. Jingle Peterson lay on her back in his bed, her red hair flying over the pillow, the covers demurely up to her chin.

Just for a second Johnny thought it was a put-up job, the presence of this decidedly under-age female. Just for a second. Until he saw the guileless face on the pillow. “You're dressed!” she accused him.

He loomed up over her at the bedside. “Your mother will skin you alive,” he told her. “Your mother will-”

“My mother is sound asleep,” she informed him. “Aren't you coming back to bed?”

He could never explain this to Mrs. Peterson, Johnny decided. He disposed of the covers in one tearing yank. “Hey!” Jingle protested, sitting up, her arms wrapped about herself. Her nightgown was plainly not her own, being six or eight inches too large in all dimensions. Johnny grabbed an ankle and hauled and she hit the floor rump first. “Oww!” she squealed. Shocked surprise was in the face. “What kind of a square are you, anyway?”

“Out,” Johnny said grimly. “On your feet and out.” She sat up straight in the middle of the floor, the picture of outraged indignation. “You unadulterated square,” she said bitterly. “I should have known you-”

He reached down for an arm and lifted her to her feet. She tried to hit him with her free hand and stumbled as she stepped on the trailing edge of the nightgown. A bare shoulder and a strawberry-tipped, pear-shaped little breast popped into view as the top portion sagged. Jingle grabbed at the billowing material.

“Out,” Johnny insisted. With her left arm in his grip he boosted her toward the door with a knee behind her, fending off her wild swings with his other hand. He heard her gasp as she went limp in his clutch and he looked over her shoulder at Valerie Peterson in the doorway.

“Look, Val,” the girl said immediately in a rapid recovery. “I can explain everything. I was just-”

Her mother didn't even look at her. “Thanks,” she said to Johnny. “I'll take over from here.” She reached for Jingle with her left hand. In her right was a hairbrush.

“No, no, no!” the girl exclaimed. She darted around behind Johnny who discreetly stepped out of the way. With the skill born of long practice, Valerie Peterson stepped in behind her daughter and took a firm grip on her left ear. “You've got to listen to me, Val! Val!”

“March!” Mrs. Peterson commanded, and the hairbrush spatted sharply against the fullest part of the nightgown. Jingle yelped and bounded into the air only to be hauled down by the grip on her ear. At the doorway there was another crisp smack, another yip, and another troutlike leap. The ballet was repeated at the head of the stairs and on every third step on the way down. Jingle and her mother disappeared from sight through the living-room door. But not from sound.

In seconds shrill, piercing yells drifted upward with metronomic regularity. Johnny snatched up his jacket and ran down the stairs. In the lower hall the girl's howls were intensified; if he hadn't seen the flatbacked brush in her mother's hand he would have suspected something far more lethal.

Outside on the stone steps with the front door closed he could still hear her, although not as plainly. Miss Jingle Peterson left the neighborhood in small doubt as to her immediate circumstances.

Johnny shook his head in mute admiration for the audible testimony to Mrs. Peterson's undiminished vigor, grinned slightly and set off up the street.