Manhunt. Volume 14, Number 1, February/March, 1966

“What’s it all about, Stan?” I said. “I haven’t heard a thing about it. Was there a holdup in the city today?”

Stan tilted his chauffer’s cap back on his head and wiped his lips on a paper napkin. “Well, Sam, it seems like this here fellow walks into the office of a big wheel... Great Lakes Supermarket Building. He sticks up the bigshot and his secretary and walks off with the payroll. Something like twelve thousand dollars.”

“Not a bad day’s work!” Gilley horned in.

“That’s not all,” Stan went on. “The big wheel makes for the burglar alarm. And the crook plugs him right through the head. Killed him too.” Someone whistled and Stan paused for a minute.

“Then the crook walks right through that crowded building with all that loot, stops a guy right on Woodward Avenue who was driving this here ’58 Caddy... boots him out and makes off with his car! All this in broad daylight, just before lunch hour! There’s only a little gas in the car, but the crook drives until it gives out. Then he ditches the car up near Flat Rock. Cops all over the place. Floodlights and all. They got roadblocks all along 25... clear down to Toledo!”

I thought of the well-dressed slicker with the cold eyes and my stomach did a flip-flop. “What’d he look like, Stan, this gunman?”

“Hard to say, Sam. The secretary was scared stiff. The elevator guy told the police the heister was a big, hulking brute in a rainhat and a plastic raincoat. The starter claims the crook was a little guy, wearing glasses. You know how kooked up these I.D. things are.”

“More’n likely it’s a Chinaman wearing Bermuda shorts!” Gilley roared, but no one laughed.

“One thing the cops are sure of, Sam. The leather bag...”

My heart skipped a couple beats. “Leather bag, Stan?” My voice must have sounded thin and far away. Like somebody else’s.

“Yeah. He was carrying this tan leather bag. The secretary said he put the payroll money in it before he lammed out of the office.”

I thought of the phoney named “Coffee.” The way he acted when Mary Ellen reached for his bag. It was a leather bag, too. A tan leather bag!

My brain was racing like a bad clock. I reached in my pocket for a kerchief and touched the fifty dollar bill. My lips seemed parched, but my forehead was suddenly wet with sweat. “Stan...” I started to say. He looked at me with that funny, puzzled look of his. I balled the fifty into my fist. Held it hard. How many fifties in twelve thousand? How many hamburgers add up to fifty bucks? How many hunks of pie? Gross minus outlay equals net. And what the hell is my net! Thank God I don’t have a salary to pay! I’d have gone under a long time ago. And how long could I go on paying Mary Ellen with board, room, and pin money? Scatterbrained Mary Ellen with show business pulling at her like a magnet! Twelve thousand bucks in a tan bag not a hundred yards away! What couldn’t I do with twelve thousand dollars!

Right there at that battered ruin of a counter I’d varnished a dozen times... halfway between the broken grill and the rusty sink... I got the Big Idea. But Stan’s face came swimming into the Big Idea like bright yellow noodles in a thick goulash.

“Hey, get with it, Sam,” Stan was saying. Then as my mind stopped spinning with dollar signs, he said, “Anything wrong, Sam?”

I recovered fast. “No, nothing’s wrong, Stan boy. Just thinking, that’s all. Wondering what the hell this world is coming to, that’s all. All this robbing and killing. It’s not safe to get out of bed anymore, is it?”

But still that puzzled, screwed-up look on Stan’s face and those china-blue eyes of his boring into me. “How’s about some pie, Stan? Cherry’s fresh this morning.” He said O.K., and I cut him a fat wedge. But my mind went sailing again after I shoved the platter in front of him.

“How many cherry pies could I buy with twelve thousand dollars...?”

I had to work the supper rush all alone, but I’m only kidding when I say “rush.” There wasn’t a dozen customers all told from five to six o’clock, and that’s counting those factory hands and Gilley. Stan was just killing time waiting for Mary Ellen. But I didn’t tell him anything until he fired pointblank, “What the blazes is taking her so long?” I told him she was cleaning up for weekend business. I was worried stiff but would not let it show. We listened to the Detroit news out of WJR at 6 o’clock... it was full of the holdup and murder. The killer had been identified by the owner of the Cadillac from photographs in the police files. A Chicago hoodlum named Marty Klegman.

Stan left about 6:20 promising to double back about 7. He lived over in the village about a mile off the highway at a rooming house run by an old widow named Markwitch.