The Golden Gizmo Read online

  “Yes,” said Milt sternly. “The profit. My God. My God, is right. How many such profitable enterprises have you undertaken in the past? What was your profit from them? Heh? Shall I refresh your memory, my oh-so-foolish Toddy?”

  “Oh, now,” said Toddy, coloring a little. “There’s no need to bring those things up. Anyway, this is an entirely different deal.”

  “Now you have your feelings hurt,” Milt nodded. “You have given me your confidence and now I remind you of things you would rather forget. Good. I shall continue to hurt your feelings. I shall continue to remind you of the unpleasant conclusions of your past escapades. Better to do that than see you repeat your errors.”

  “But—” Toddy caught himself. “Oh, well,” he said, “what are we arguing about? I told you I was just thinking out loud.”

  “And I told you it was not good to entertain such thoughts. Why should you dwell on them? At not too great a risk, you are making very good money. You are not known to the police here. Without some deliberate bit of foolishness, you are assured of an excellent income and, more important, your freedom. If, on the other hand, you—”

  “I know,” said Toddy, a trifle impatiently.

  “You do not know. You place too great a store by the fact that you have not been fingerprinted by the police of this, the City of Angels. You are forgetting the brief but telling physical description of you which is on file at the license bureau. You are forgetting the bureau’s reason for having such data—the fact that gold-buyers are always suspect, that it may be necessary to lay hands on them at a moment’s notice. You see? You are safe only as long as you commit no overt act. Once you do, the fingerprinting and the discovery of your record will follow as a matter of course.”

  Toddy took a long slow drink of his beer. “Yeah,” he said slowly. “I know.…But tell me one thing, Milt, just to satisfy my curiosity. Then I’ll shut up.”

  “If I must.”

  “Say that you did—I know you don’t—say that you did want to buy enough scrap of all kinds every week to refine into six or eight pounds of twenty-four karat. Enough to take care of the kind of overhead you’d be bound to have and still make enough of a killing to pay you for the risk. How would you go about it?”

  “For me, it would be impossible, as I told you. Some of the larger refineries might buy that much gold.”

  “But they’re checked, aren’t they? If their shipments to the mint started falling off—”

  “They are checked, yes. There is a check even on such relatively unimportant wholesale buyers as I.”

  “Huh,” Toddy frowned. “How about this, then? Why couldn’t you spread your buying through a group of wholesalers—take a pound or less of scrap from each one?”

  “Because you could not pay them enough for the risk they were taking. And the secret of your enterprise would be dangerously spread with your buying.…So, there is my answer, Toddy. It is an impossibility. It cannot be done.”

  “But it—I mean—”

  “Yes?” said Milt.

  “Nothing. Okay, I’m convinced,” Toddy grinned. “How about another beer?”

  Uncomfortably conscious of Milt’s curious and troubled gaze, Toddy left shortly after he had finished the beer. But he was by no means free of the tantalizing reflections which the watch had inspired. They expanded and multiplied in his mind as he strode back through the hazy streets.

  Dammit, that gold was being bought, regardless of what Milt said. And this was entirely different from anything he had ever touched. He’d have to be careful, certainly. He’d have to do some tall scheming. But just because he’d had a few bad breaks in the past, there wasn’t any reason to—

  Toddy was almost running when he reached the hotel. He ignored the elevator and raced up the steps. He went swiftly down the hall. He shouldn’t have left Elaine alone. He shouldn’t have left the watch in the room.

  His hand trembled on the doorknob. He turned it and went in. The room was dark. He found the light switch and turned it on.

  She lay sprawled backwards on the bed. Naked. Sheets tumbled with her strugglings, damp from her bath. Eyes glazed and bloodshot; pushing whitely, enormously from the contorted face. Veins empurpled and distended.

  One of the stockings was tied around her throat, knotted and reknotted there, and her stiffening fingers still clawed at it. The other stocking had been stuffed into her mouth; the toe of it, chewed, wet from gagging, edged out through the open froth-covered oval of her lips.

  Toddy swayed. How could I know…something I read…she was always asking for trouble…He closed his eyes and opened them again. He put a hand out toward her—toward that hideously soggy fragment of stocking. Hastily he jerked the hand back.

  The room had been ransacked, of course. Every drawer in the dresser had been jerked out and dumped upon the floor. Toddy’s eyes moved from the disarray to the window. He went to it and flung up the shade.

  There was a man down there near the foot of the fire escape. He was a small man with a hat almost as wide as his shoulders. One of his feet had slipped through the steps, and he was struggling frantically to free it.

  7

  Toddy had been sitting on his roll when he met Elaine Ives. He’d built up his wardrobe, had several grand in his kick, and was driving a Cadillac—rented, alas—while he tried to hit upon a line.

  Toddy liked nice things. He liked to live in good places. He found that it paid off. In the swank apartment hotel where he resided, he was believed to be the scion of a Texas oil millionaire. No one would have thought of associating the tanned, exquisitely tailored young man with anything off-color.

  He was sitting in the bar of his hotel the day he met Elaine. Apparently she had followed him in from the street, although he had not seen her. The first he saw of her was when she slid onto the stool next to his and looked up at him with that funny, open-toothed smile.

  “Order yet, darling?” she said. “I believe I’ll have a double rye, water on the side.”

  He looked at the bartender, who was giving Elaine a doubtful but chilly eye. “That sounds good enough for me,” he said. “Two double ryes, water on the side.”

  In the few seemingly casual glances he gave her, while she drank that drink and three others, he checked off her points and added them up to zero. She was scrawny. Her clothes, except for her hat—she was always careful with her hats—looked like they had been thrown on her. The wide-spaced teeth gave her mouth an almost ugly look. When she crinkled her face as she did incessantly, talking, laughing, smiling, she looked astonishingly like a monkey.

  Yet, dammit, and yet there was something about her that got him. Something warm and golden that reached out and enveloped him, and drew him closer and closer, yet never close enough. Something that even infected the bartender, making him solicitous with napkins and ice and matches held for cigarettes—that held him there wanting to do things that were paid for by the doing.

  Toddy glanced at his watch and slid off the stool. “Getting late,” he remarked. “Think we’d better be getting on to dinner, don’t you?”

  “No,” said Elaine promptly, crinkling her face at him. “Not hungry. Gonna stay right here. Jus’ me an’ you an’ nice bartender.”

  The bartender beamed foolishly and frowned at Toddy. Toddy gave him an appraising stare.

  “I think,” he said, “the nice bartender is in danger of losing his nice license. Which is worth a nice twenty-five thousand for a nice place like this. It isn’t considered nice, it seems, to provide liquor to obviously intoxicated people.”

  “Not ’tox-toxshi-conshtipated! Ver’ reg’lar—”

  But now the bartender had become even more urgent than Toddy. And Elaine was holding herself in a little; she wasn’t ready to open all the stops. Toddy got her out of there and into the Cadillac, and she passed out immediately.

  He opened her purse, looking for something that would give him her address. Its sole contents, aside from compact and lipstick, was a wadded-up letter. He read it with a growing feeling of gladness.

  Of course, he’d been sure from the beginning that she wasn’t peddling, another b-girl, but he was glad to see the letter nonetheless. Any girl might blow her top if something like this happened to her—having a studio contract canceled before she ever started to work. Hell, he might have gone out hitting up strangers himself. Now, with the letter in his hand, he saw why he had felt that he had known her.

  He had seen her several years before in a picture. It had been a lousy picture, but one player—a harried, scatter-witted clerk in a dime store—had almost saved it. She had only to fan the straggling hair from her eyes or hitch the skirt about her scrawny hips to set the audience to howling. They roared with laughter—laughter that was with her, not at her. Laughter with tears in it.

  Toddy drove her around until she awakened, and then he drove to a drive-in and fed her tomato soup and coffee. She took these attentions matter-of-factly, trustingly, either not wanting to ask questions or not needing to. He took her to her home, a court apartment in North Hollywood.

  He went in with her, steered her through the disarray of dropped clothes and empty bottles and overturned ashtrays to a daybed. She collapsed on it, and was instantly asleep again.

  Toddy stared at her, perplexed, wondering what to do, feeling a strange obligation to take care of her. The court door opened unceremoniously and a woman stepped in.

  She had a bust on her like a cemetery angel and her face looked just about as stony. But even she looked at Elaine and spoke with a note of regret.

  So this was Mr. Ives—the brother Elaine had insisted would arrive. And just when she was beginning to believe there wasn’t any brother! Well. She knew how perturbed he must be, she was fond of Elaine herself, and—and such a great tale
nt, Mr. Ives! But it just couldn’t go on any longer. She simply could not put up with it. So if Mr. Ives would find her another place immediately, absolutely no later than tomorrow—And since he’d want to get started early, the back rent—six weeks, it was…

  Toddy paid it. He stayed the night there, sprawled out on two chairs. In the morning, he helped Elaine pack. Or, rather, he packed, stopping frequently to hold her over the toilet while she retched, and washing her face afterward.

  He found and paid for another apartment. He put her to bed. Not until then, when she was looking up at him from the pillows—a bottle of whiskey on the reading stand, just as “medicine”—did she seem to take any note of what he had done.

  “Sit down here,” she said, patting the bed. And he sat down. “And maybe you’d better hold my hand,” she said. And he held it. “Now,” she said, her face crinkling into a frown, “what am I going to do about you?”

  “Do?” Toddy grinned.

  “Now, you know what I mean,” she said severely. “I’m broke. I’m not working and I don’t know when I will be. I guess I should ask you to sleep with me, but I’ve never done anything like that, and anyway it probably wouldn’t be much fun for you, would it? I mean I’m so skinny I’d probably stick you with a bone.”

  “Y-yes,” nodded Toddy. He had the goddamnedest feeling that he was going to bawl!

  “Maybe I could wash some clothes for you,” said Elaine. “That’s an awfully pretty suit you have on. I could wash it real nice for you and hang it out the window, and it…would that be worth fifty cents?”

  Toddy shook his head. He couldn’t speak.

  “Well”—her voice was humble—“a quarter, then?”

  “D-don’t,” said Toddy. “Oh, for Christ’s sake…”

  Toddy hadn’t cried since the night he ran away from home. He’d half-killed his stepfather with a two-by-four, bashed him over the head as he came into the barn. He’d tried to make it look like an accident, like one of the rafters had broken. But he was shaking with fear, with that and the bitter coldness of the night. He’d huddled down in a corner of the boxcar, and sometime during the night a tramp had crawled into the car also. Observing the proprieties of the road, the tramp had gone into a corner, that corner, to relieve himself. And Toddy had been soaked, along with his thin parcel of sandwiches. The stuff had frozen on him. He’d cried then, for the last time.

  Up to now.

  He was down on his knees at the side of the bed, and her arms clutched him in an awkward, foolishly sweet embrace, and she was talking to him like a child, as one child to another, and there had never been another moment like this in the history of man and woman. They cried together, two lost children who found comfort and warmth in each other. And then they started to laugh. For somehow in the extravagant and puppyish outpouring of her caresses, she had hooked the armhole of her nightgown around his neck.

  While she shrilled gleefully that he was tickling her, and while her small breast pounded his face with merriment, he lifted and stood her on the bed. Then, since there was no other way, he slid off the other shoulder strap and drew the gown off her body, lowering his head with it.

  He shucked out of it and turned around. She was still standing upright, examining herself in the wall mirror.

  She twisted her neck and gazed at her childish buttocks. She faced the mirror and bowed her back and legs. She raised one leg in the air and looked.

  She turned around, frowning, and nodded to him. “Feel…no, here, honey. That’s where you do it, isn’t it?”

  Toddy felt.

  “Not bad,” he said gravely. “Not bad at all.”

  “Not too skinny?”

  “By no means.”

  Elaine beamed and put her legs back together. Pivoting, arms stiff at her sides, she did a pratfall on the bed. When she stopped bouncing, she lay back and looked at him.

  “Well,” she said, puzzledly. “I mean, after all…hadn’t we better get started?”

  Thus, the story of the meeting of Toddy and Elaine. Funny-sad, bitter-sweet. It put a lump in your throat; at least, it put one in the throat of Toddy, who lived it. Then, they flew to Yuma that night and were married. And the lump moved up from his throat to his head.

  Literally.

  They were in their hotel room, and Elaine was teasing for just one “lul old bottle, just a lul one, honey.” All her charm was turned on. She pantomimed her tremendous thirst, staggered about the room hand shielding her eyes, a desert wanderer in search of an oasis. Then, she broke into an insanely funny dance of joy as the oasis was discovered—right there on the dresser in the form of his wallet.

  Laughing tenderly, Toddy moved in front of her. “Huh-uh, baby. No more tonight.”

  Elaine picked up the empty bottle and hit him over the head with it. “You stupid son-of-a-bitch,” she said, “how long you think I can keep up this clowning?”

  8

  Shake’s headquarters were in a walk-up dump on South Main, a buggy, tottering firetrap tenanted by diseases-of-men doctors, a massage parlor (“cheerful lady attendants”) and companies with uniformly small offices and big names. The sign on his smudged windows read, “Easiest Loans in Town.” It was true in the same sense, say, that death solves all problems is true.

  Without co-signers, collateral or even a job, in the usual meaning of the word, you could borrow from one to a maximum of ten dollars from Shake; and you could—and usually did—take the rest of your lifetime to pay it back. Shake liked to get along with people; he liked to live and let live. He said so himself.

  If you objected to these lenient arrangements, things were still made easy for you; there was a swift and simple alternative. Shake’s pachucos, his young Mexican toughs, would pay you a visit. They would drop around to your one-chair barber shop or your shoeshine stand or the corner where you hustled papers and kick the holy hell out of you. They’d lay you so flat you could crawl under doors. Shake pointed to the expense of these kickings as justification for his whimsical methods of compounding interest.

  When Toddy pushed Donald into the office ahead of him, Shake and two of the pachucos were in the back room. They’d been splitting a half-gallon of four-bit wine while they stamped phony serial numbers into an equally phony batch of Irish sweepstakes tickets. Their minds were a little muggy and they were jammed around a littered table. Before they could snap together, Toddy had dutch-walked Donald inside and kicked the door shut.

  They got to their feet then; they advanced a step in a three-cornered half-circle. But Toddy jerked his head toward the windows and the movement stopped abruptly.

  “Come on,” he invited grimly. “I won’t do a damn thing but toss this bastard out on his skull.”

  “N-now, T-Toddy…” Nervous phlegm burbled in Shake’s throat. “Now, Toddy,” he whined, “is this a way to act? Bustin’ into a office after business hours?”

  He was a swollen dropsical giant with an ague, probably syphilis-inspired, which kept his puffed flesh in faint, almost constant oscillation.

  “I’ve got something to say,” said Toddy. “If you don’t want those punks to hear it, you’d better send ’em out.”

  “Well, now—” Shake made a flabbily deprecating motion. “I don’t know about that. We’re settin’ here having a nice little party, Ramon an’ Juan an’ me. Just settin’ here minding our own business, and then you come along an’—”

  “All right,” said Toddy. “I gave you a chance. I went up to my room tonight and—”

  “Wait! Send ’em out, Shake!”

  “Oh?” Shake looked doubtfully at the little shiv artist. “You been up to somethin’ bad, Donald?”

  “Send ’em out!” Donald gasped, teetering painfully in Toddy’s grip. “Do like he says, Shake!”

  “Well…how far you want ’em to go, Toddy?”

  “How good can they hear?”

  Shake hesitated, then waved his hand. “All the way down, boys. Clear down in front.”

  The pachucos left, duck-tail haircuts gleaming, heel-plates clicking on the ancient marble. When Toddy heard the outer door close, he released Donald with a shove.

  “All right, strip.”

  “Goddammit, I done tole you I—”

  “Take ’em off, Donald.” Shake’s pig eyes gleamed with interest as he sank into a chair.