Ed Lacy - The Big Fix

As he glanced around for a phone, he could feel the cold sweat racing down his sides. Then he thought, No, be silly to phone from here. Well, I've thrown the damn dice, see what my luck turns up when they hit the wall.

WALT STEINER

Walt and his partner, an older and rather fat man named Jim, were investigating a burglary. It was a routine affair— except to the victim. An apartment had been entered by breaking the kitchen window on the fire escape, sometime during the morning, while the woman of the house was out shopping. It was obviously the work of a punk. The house was an ancient walk-up to start with, and a couple of suits, a piggy bank, a worn fur jacket, a table radio, and an old table lighter had been taken. If the thief was very lucky he might get ten dollars for everything, and a few bucks from the piggy bank.

Despite the rundown appearance of the place, the woman carried theft insurance, so Jim had made a list of the missing items while Walt had been arguing with, and gently kidding, the angry housewife who thought they should be busy taking footprints and fingerprints off the busted window. The flat was on the top floor and they had already walked the six flights twice—once to see the super—and explored the roof. Walt was telling her, “Lady, prints only work in the movies. We'll make the rounds of the pawn shops, that's the best way. The department has a special detail on the lookout for stolen things. I'd also advise you to have an iron gate put on the inside of the window. Since you're in the rear and... Well, yes, I suppose having bars on the window might make the kitchen look a little like a jail, but then, people in jail don't get robbed. What? No, lady, I'm really not being facetious, merely practical. Or get a dog. Now we'll let you know if any of your items turn up in the hock shops. If you find anything else missing, please call me at this number. You have our names and badge numbers, be sure you give them to your insurance agent. They may have somebody up here today. That's all.”

Walking down the six flights of the old apartment house, Jim said, “They all act the same. Think we got time to make a case out of every two-bit forced entry. Bet we have a couple more squeals before our tour is over. I'm surprised she didn't ante up the amount of her loss. Some women are dumb. Even if the insurance won't pay it all, she can put it down as a loss on her old man's income tax.”

“Still, we should have had time to look into it thoroughly. Might have found prints and collared this punk before he pulls a dozen more jobs,” Walt said half aloud, his mind really not in it.

Jim glanced at him and shook his head. Walt said the same thing at every robbery. They had been partners for several years. Neither particularly liked the other. Walt thought Jim was too sloppy in his job while Jim considered Walt far too serious. As Jim would say, and often did, “We can only do so much as police officers. We put in our crazy eight hours, get indigestion from changing tours and eating habits so often, and that's it for us. So we can't reform the whole world; it ain't our job and the hell with it.”

Walt didn't approve of Jim's drinking and running around, or his loud clothes, while Jim privately considered Walt a humorless “drag.” But they each respected and fairly understood the other, and both were capable when they had to be.

As they sat in the squad car, Jim lit a cigarette and Walt yawned. Jim asked, “What's come over you today, Walt? Tie one on last night? First time I've ever seen you look like you been up all night. And you were almost jovial, or what passes for humor with you, with that crying mama up there.”

“I didn't get hardly any sleep last night. I was helping a friend... eh... move,” Walt said, yawning again.

Actually his brain was far from sleepy; it was working like mad. Walt didn't understand exactly what had happened last night. First he had been surprised when Ruth had readily agreed to help find May. When he and Tommy had been standing in the cold outside the crummy rooming-house for so long, Walt had wondered what Ruth could possibly be doing up there all the time. Tommy kept muttering he wanted to go up and see his wife, and suddenly Walt knew what Ruth was up to and he wanted to laugh. It was crazy how one simple thing could reflect so many different angles to different people. Tommy worried about a wife he'd rarely seen; May Cork beaten and frightened because she turned greedy; Walt himself annoyed at working on his own time, standing in the cold like a fool; and Ruth working an entirely different tack, figuring how all this could add up to a story for her.

When she'd come down and Tommy had gone for food, Walt had wanted to impress upon her this wasn't a game of charades, that a woman had nearly been beaten to death. But he hadn't and when Ruth took the food up and there was another long wait in the raw cold, Walt had really become angry. A silly waitress gets involved with the numbers syndicate over a lousy buck, and he, Walt Steiner, suddenly found himself way out on a limb. There were certain things a cop had to shut his eyes to. Just as you never gave a ticket to a politician, so a cop didn't fool with the numbers boys. It was plain common sense—all that was taken care of by “downtown.” Whether “downtown” was holding out a fat palm or not wasn't his business.

So, last night Walt had felt a double chill on the street. Then when Ruth had finally come down and sent Tommy up, there had been the business of waking a friend in the middle of the night, explaining and trying not to explain why he wanted to borrow a car. (Neither Ruth nor Walt ever had a desire to own a car.) Finally, there had been the job of driving May up to her old room, watching the place while she and Ruth quickly packed all her things—the “all” being one thin suitcase full—and the fairly long drive over to Ruth's sister's place—after dropping Tommy off at his hotel. It was well after three o'clock when Walt at last returned the car, took a cab to the apartment with Ruth. He was not only grouchy from lack of sleep, worried over butting in on the numbers syndicate, but he also felt like a damn taxi driver, carting people all over the place. He had gone to bed at once while Ruth fooled around in the bathroom.

As he was dozing off, he was awakened to find Ruth standing nude beside the bed. Then she had asked some silly questions about, “Walt, do you see any difference between Mrs. Rockefeller and myself? Am I as pretty, now, as Mrs. Hemingway?”

“What?” he'd asked, coming out of his fog of sleep.

“Do you think I'm getting fat? Starting to spread?” Ruth ran her hands over her strong hips.

“I'm sleepy. Get something on before you catch cold.”

“Do I look 'cold' to you?”

“What is this? You look... okay,” Walt had granted, now wide awake, his eyes greedily racing over her big body. Then Ruth had pulled back the covers and carefully taken off his pajamas. She'd said, in a whisper, “Your body is still so... hard and powerful. You're a fine built man, Walt. Hundreds of girls dream of a guy like you.”

There was a faint smile on her face when she finished talking and he lay there, full of suspicion. Then he wondered if, after all the weeks of not touching her, Ruth had seen his need and was being charitable. The thought gave him the same kind of chill he'd felt outside the rooming-house. He tried to turn his back on her but Ruth's hands began to caress his body. He'd asked, “What's brought this sudden change about?”

“My husband has a delightful body. I want...”

“My body was the same yesterday, and the night before. What is this?”

“Do I need a special reason for admiring your body? Oh, I suppose it's May Cork. I relearned something from her, something so terribly basic I'd forgotten it—that everything is comparative.”