Into the Night

“Finally I made the sort of a contact I’d been looking for. Well, it was slow work. I had to be cagey. He had to be cagey. I had to build him up. He had to build me up. But after three meetings we were finally ready to get down to cases. In the meantime I’d had him checked thoroughly, knew where he was living, knew what his past record was, in fact knew much more than he knew I knew, so that he didn’t stand a chance in the world of taking me.

“Once we understood each other, the rest of it went fast. It was just a matter of agreeing on a price.

“‘I’m doing this for a friend,’ I said.

“‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘so am I.’

“‘I got a friend who’d give anything if she knew somebody who’d let fly at a little twist that goes by a certain place every Sunday morning at six-thirty.’

“‘Anything?’ he said. ‘How much is anything?’

“‘Well, let’s say five hundred.’

“‘That ain’t anything,’ he said. ‘That’s a quarter of anything.’

“‘I’d have to take that up with her,’ I said.

“‘Let fly?’ he said. ‘Let fly what?’

“‘Well, the whole trouble with her is she’s too pretty. Now, a fist or a rock ain’t going to change that. It comes right back again after she heals. It’s got to be something that eats its way in slow. Then she stays like that for good.’

“‘Acid,’ he lip-read knowingly.

“‘Does your friend want to get it, or should my friend get it?’

“‘My friend can get the right stuff. He knows where. No problem there.’

“‘I’ll call and find out about the “anything.”’

“I went into a phone booth, counted out what I had brought with me, and came out to him again.

“‘You get a thousand now, she says,’ I told him. ‘The baptism of fire comes off Sunday. You get five hundred more here, this same joint, this same table, on Monday.’

“‘I’ll check,’ he said. He didn’t even bother pretending the phone bit. He just went into the men’s room, stayed a short while, came out again putting a comb into his pocket, and said, ‘On Monday another thousand, and it’s in the works.’ Well, there was another phone in there (I imagine), if one wanted to be technical about it.

“‘It’s in the works,’ I said. I gave him the first thousand under the table then and there.

“‘What’s this?’ he asked, and read the little piece of paper I’d had on top of it.

“‘That’s the real name and present address of your “friend,”’ I told him. ‘I know he can change his address easy between now and Sunday, but the info about him can also follow him to the new place just as easy. He’s done time in prison in the past. He’s got a two-strike against him.’

“He looked at me a long time. Not sore or frightened, just admiring me, like.

“Then he showed the edges of his teeth a little. ‘Smart,’ he said.

“I agreed with him. ‘Yes, she is. Very.’

“The thing would have come off perfect, without a hitch, only I started celebrating a little too early and a little too hard. I came home right after my Saturday night show and started drinking. My friend, the one I mentioned to you earlier, the one who’d talked me out of pinning something on my husband, was here in the apartment with me. I’d lift my glass each time and say something like, ‘Here’s to somebody I know that’s not going to look so good to somebody else I know, around this same time tomorrow night.’ And I started singing, ‘What a difference a day makes, twen’y-four little hours’ — and looping it up altogether.

“Last thing I remember was him going to use my phone and closing the door after him. But I didn’t think anything of it, he was the kind of guy just as apt to make a phone call at three or four in the morning as at twelve in the afternoon.

“When I woke up, it was early afternoon. He was still around. We were making a long weekend of it. I yawned and stretched enjoyably and said, ‘Well, it’s all over with by now. I wonder how she likes the new face she’s breaking in today? Above all, I wonder how he likes it. I bet he can’t look at it without turning green around the gills himself.’

“‘She’s not breaking in any new face,’ he told me. ‘She’s still wearing the same face she wore yesterday, and the day before, and she’ll keep on wearing it.’

“I sat up sudden and wide awake. ‘What do you know about it?’ I asked sharply. ‘How do you come in it?’

“He jiggled the hand he was holding a glass of tomato juice in, by way of stirring it up. ‘I sent a couple of boys I know over there bright and early, five-thirty, six this morning, to look him up where he was posted waiting for her. They did what I’d told them to; took him with them a considerable distance out of town, beat the living jazz out of him, and told him if he ever showed his face around again they’d finish up on him.’

“‘My good thousand dollars!” I squawked, and clapped my hand over my eyes.

“‘Here’s your thousand dollars,’ he said, and took it out of his pocket and handed it back to me still in the envelope in which I’d originally given it to the guy. ‘They found it still on him. Evidently doesn’t trust banks or mattresses.