Francis Nevins - Night and Fear

The wear and tear was pretty bad at my end, because of the quantities of rancid beer I had to keep drinking to “pay my rent.” The place was fairly well-filled up to about midnight, then the customers thinned until there finally remained only Casey and myself. He had been in there from eight on. I was obsessed with the slot machine again.

It was the barkeep who brought up the subject, after maneuvering his barcloth around for awhile. “Still got that thousand-dollar scrap ye found?” he asked, sleepy-lidded.

“Yeah, but not on me, don’t worry,” was the shrewd answer.

“What’d you do, put it in the bank?” asked the barman, scornfully.

“I tried to turn it in there, but they wouldn’t take it,” Casey admitted.

“What’d I tell ye! Why don’t you listen to reason? I’ll give you two bottles of rye for it, you pick the brand.”

“If it’s no good, what do you want it so bad for?” Casey asked, not unreasonably.

The white-aproned one tripped slightly over the answer. “I want it for a curayosity. Sure, what else would I be wanting it for?”

“Well, I’m hanging onto it, now more than ever! Take a look at this. This was in my mailbox when I left the house this morning.” I recognized the note Fredericks had sent him, in the mirror.

The barman bent over the counter, laboriously read it through with lip motions. “Hunh,” he said, “this must be meant for someone else. It’s got your own name down. What would they be telling you found it for? You know that already.”

“It got in the wrong envelope,” Casey said angrily, like a man who’s been cheated. “They must have sent one to somebody else, and I got his by mistake, worse luck! Anyway, it shows there’s another half to the bill, somebody picked it up just like I did, so I’m keeping mine.”

The barkeeper scratched his chin. He was doing lots and lots of mental double-crossing, I could see that in the mirror. “I’d be careful, Casey,” he said with friendly concern. “Have you got it in a good place? Somebody might try to take it away from you.”

“Let ’em try!” said Casey belligerently. “I’ve got it stuck away good, no fear. They’ll not get their hands on it in a hurry!”

The barman swatted a fly with his cloth. “I wouldn’t carry it around with me or anything like that, if I was you,” he advised by way of finding out.

“Don’t worry, I’ve got it hidden in my room, where no one’ll find it.”

“Have ye, now?” The barman scratched his sandpapery jaw some more. “Have another, Casey,” he offered amiably. “This is on the house.” I made a point of carefully watching his hands as he drew the suds, but he didn’t try anything, just filled the glass, knocked its head off, set it up. Then he sort of drifted to the back, by easy stages. There was a telephone on the wall, just outside the washroom door. I watched him fiddling around with it, dusting off the dial slots. Who ever heard of anyone dusting off a telephone at that hour of the morning? He looked around to see if either of us was looking. Casey was squatting down playing with the tavern cat. I’d just put my fiftieth coin into the spiked machine.

A bell jingled back there, and then the barman fiddled around some more with the dial slots. You couldn’t hear what he said, through his funneled hand. Then he came back again up the bar by easy stages. Nice pleasant tarantula, he was.

Three beers later a couple of hard-looking customers came in. “Now, isn’t that a coincidence!” I jeered to myself. The barman didn’t make any further attempts to detain Casey after that. The latter had been saying for the past ten minutes or more that he was full as a pig and had to work tomorrow. He floundered out, and the two hard-looking customers went after him as promptly as a tail following a kite. I seemed to feel like leaving, myself, right around then. Who could object? That was my privilege.

There was beer coming out of Casey’s ears, so he wouldn’t have known it if a regiment had been at his heels. For my part, however, I overlooked the fact that the other two had only just about wet their whistles, and had all their faculties about them. Not that they glanced back or seemed to be aware of me or anything like that.

They turned in after Casey, at the dismal-looking 99th Street tenement entrance, and I did likewise. There was a spark of green gas flickering in a bowl at the back of the ground floor hall, and a cautious creaking coming from somewhere above on the stairs. I put my foot on the bottom step, and suddenly a shadow detached itself from the wall. The side of my face exploded into atoms, and it felt like the whole roof had fallen down on top of me. I grabbed at a leg, going down, folded it over my chest, and brought him down after me. A lot of noisy kicking, threshing and grunting went on all over the dirty hallway. It served its purpose. Even on 99th Street sounds of combat don’t belong inside houses. Doors began to open here and there on the floors above.

Somebody came down off the stairs in a hurry, jumped over the two of us, and made for the street, with a grunted admonition, “Beat it, Patsy, the whole house is awake!” Patsy tore himself from my embrace, stood up, kicked out viciously in the direction of my head just on general principle, then scampered out. Upstairs on one of the landings Casey was howling belligerently: “Come back and fight like a man, ye dirty snaik-thief, whoever ye are!”

It sounded like he still had his thousand-dollar bill which was all that really interested me. I picked myself up, then slipped away to avoid meeting the riot squad. So much for Friday night.

Saturday, at cocktail time, Fredericks was already acting a little less sure of himself. Even slightly worried, you might say. I told them what had happened, with just a slight distortion of the facts. I let them think I’d watched Casey put the two thugs to rout from across the street, instead of actually entering the building and taking a hand in it myself, so to speak.

Fredericks said, “That’s all right, but what I can’t understand is why neither Casey nor Dreyer have made a move toward one another. They’ve had nearly forty-eight hours now to think it over. We know that they both got the notes I sent. Dreyer’s a spineless jellyfish, he’ll dream and plan with his wife, but he won’t do anything about it. And she’s one of these goody-goodies herself — which is your luck, Trainor. I’ve really been counting on this Casey fellow, but he seems to be more inclined to passive resistance than aggression. Maybe,” he said hopefully, “he’s got the idea already, and it’s taking time to cook. If he doesn’t do something about it before Tuesday night, I’m out two grand!”

“Attaboy, Shylock!” I couldn’t help remarking.

Saturday night was a big night at the tavern. I took a chance and went back, even after what had happened the night before in Casey’s hallway. I felt pretty sure the two footpads wouldn’t show their faces there, and they didn’t. I stayed fairly close to the door, however, to reduce the risk of being ganged up on.

Casey however, did show up as though too dense to connect the attempt on him with his friend the bartender. Or maybe not so dense as he let on to be. When the crowd thinned out and he had the latter’s undivided attention, he related what had happened.

The barkeep was all innocent surprise. “And ye think ’twas that they were after, the thing ye found?”

“Think? I know damn well it was! I don’t mind telling you I’ve got myself a gun, and the next party that tries to break in my room like that is going to be a sorry man!” And he turned around and went out again, without saying good-night.

I didn’t linger myself. I didn’t want to be handed any mickey Finns for my timely interference the night before.