Francis Nevins - Night and Fear

“I ain’t allowed to park here at all. I can park around on the 42nd Street side with you, though, just past the corner, if I don’t stay too long.”

“That’ll be all right. We’d better stay in the cab,” he said to us in an undertone. “If we stand out on the sidewalk in full sight, it mayn’t work. Pick someone coming from that direction, 8th Avenue, so we can see them before they get here.”

We braked to a stop alongside the curb. That particular stretch of sidewalk is plenty bright, any time of the night. In addition, there was a street light just far enough ahead to give us a sort of preview of anyone who passed under it coming our way. We all three had good eyes. It was anything but deserted even at this hour, but the passersby were spaced now, not coming along in droves.

Trainor sat peering intently ahead through the partly-opened cab door. “I suppose,” Fredericks observed drily, “you’ll make every effort to pick someone who looks prosperous enough not to need a thousand dollars badly enough to kill for it.”

“Not at all,” snapped Trainor. “I’m not loading the dice. I’m here to pick an average man. And the average man on the street hasn’t very much money — not these days. But neither does he kill for what he hasn’t got.”

“You’ll find out,” was the purring answer.

There was a long wait, while people drifted by, by ones and twos and threes, but mostly by ones. I kept thinking, contemptuously and yet a little admiringly too, “Every cent he’s got in the world, risked on the imponderable reactions of some chance passerby out there. It must be great to have that much confidence in your fellow-men.”

“See any that look average enough yet? You’re hard to please,” mocked Fredericks softly.

Trainor said, “If I’m any good at reading faces, the last few that have gone by would cheerfully cut anyone’s throat for a toothpick, let alone a thousand bucks. I wouldn’t call these flashy Broadway lizards an average type of man, would you?” Then he said suddenly, “Here’s someone now — quick! This fellow walking along near the outer edge of the sidewalk.”

I just had time for a quick, comprehensive glimpse of the candidate, through the windshield, as he passed under the street light. Trainor was a good picker. The guy was so average he would have been invisible in a crowd. Clothes, face, gait, everything were commonplace. You couldn’t feature him killing anyone, or doing anything but just breathing all his life long. Fredericks shied the half-bill out of the cab window.

He came abreast a minute later, missed seeing it, went on his way. That was in character too, the type nothing ever happened to, even when it was thrust right at his feet.

Fredericks snapped his fingers, swore, stepped out and picked it up again. The three of us laughed a little, nervously. We were all under a strain.

Another wait. “All right, this one, then,” Trainor said abruptly. “He looks decent and harmless enough.” Again one of those colorless “supers” of the New York mob-scene.

Fredericks flipped his wrist again, and the bait fell out. Again it missed fire. The pedestrian looked down, saw it, went a step beyond, turned, came back and picked it up. He stood looking at it, turning it over from side to side, while we held our breaths, hidden in the cab, close enough to have reached out and touched him. I could see a skeptical frown on his face. Finally he deliberately threw it away again, brushed his hands, and went on his way.

“Suspicious,” Fredericks catalogued him drily. “Thinks it’s too good to be true, there must be a catch to it. Queer money, or an advertising scheme. Typical New Yorker for you.”

He retrieved it a second time. This human-interest byplay, though, had managed to dull my objections to the scheme, made me overlook its dark implications for awhile. When people acted so naturally, so comically even, as these passersby, there didn’t seem to be much risk of getting them to kill one another, as Fredericks insisted. It was like watching frisky half-grown jungle cats at play with one another inside a zoo, and forgetting they have claws.

Trainor went on scrutinizing everyone that came along singly, eliminating couples and trios. “Here’s some—” he started to say, then checked himself. “No, he’s had a drink, that doesn’t make for normalcy.”

After that, there was a complete cessation of motion on the street for a minute or two, as sometimes happens on even the busiest thoroughfares. As though activity were being fed to it on a belt, and there had been a temporary break in it.

Then a figure came into sight. His isolation gave Trainor a good chance to size him up without distraction. I had a feeling he was going to finger him, even before he did. I think I would have myself. A quick snapshot of him, under the light-rays, showed a fellow of medium height, stocky build, high Celtic cheekbones, dressed in a tidy but not expensive gray suit.

“This is the ticket,” Trainor said decisively.

Fredericks skimmed the bait out and a ghost of a breeze carried it a little further away from the cab than before.

He picked it up, scratched the back of his neck. Then he looked all around him, as though wondering how it could have gotten there. He glanced once at the cab, searchingly, but we were flattened back out of sight in the dark interior of it. He evidently took it for an empty one standing waiting for fares, didn’t look a second time.

It took him a good four, five minutes to decide the second half of the bill wasn’t lying around anywhere. What made him desist, chiefly, was an unwelcome offer of help from a second passerby.

“Lose something, bud?”

“Mind ya business!” was the retort.

Fredericks breathed in the direction of my ear: “Trainor’s average man is pugnacious. You mean he won’t kill for the other half of that?”

“That’s just Manhattan manners, not a bad sign at all, shows he’s completely average,” Trainor contradicted.

Our man moved away with what he’d found, receding toward the 7th Avenue corner. Watching through the back window of the cab, we saw him stop at the curb, glance back at where he’d found the unlikely token, as though he still couldn’t get over it. Then he crossed to the Times Building “island,” skirted that, and crossed Broadway.

“There’s one half of our murder team,” Fredericks said. “Whether he turns out to be the murderer or the victim, depends on how aggressive the party of the second part is. All right, Evans, go after him, keep him in sight. Find out his name, where he lives, all about him — only don’t accost him yourself, of course. It may make him leery.”

I opened the cab door, stepped out, and started briskly out after our unsuspecting guinea pig. “Fine thing to turn into,” I thought. “A private detective!”

It was easy to keep him in sight, because of the sparsity of other pedestrians. In the day time he’d have been swallowed up in a minute in this teeming part of town. He kept going straight east along 42nd and made for the 6th Avenue El. When I saw him start up the stairs to the platform I had to close in on him, as a train might have come along and separated us before I could get there.

I passed through the turnstile right behind him, and when the train came in, got in the same car he did. He sat on one of the side seats, giving me the opportunity of keeping him in sight from behind without his being aware of it. At one point, I could tell by the downward tilt of his head that he had taken the severed bill out again and was studying it under the car lights. He evidently couldn’t quite make up his mind whether it was genuine or not. He looked around to see if anyone had been watching, put it away again.