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By Root 14455 0

a glass between both hands, the way a child holds a glass. Out of the glass he would take little finicking sips, after each sip lifting his head up the way a chicken does when it drinks. Sugar-Boy wasn’t a drinker. He was afraid, he said, it might make him “n-n-n-n-ner-ner-vous.” It would have been awful if Sugar-Boy got so nervous he couldn’t bust jelly glasses every shot when you threw them up in the air for him or couldn’t wipe a mule’s nose with the rear fender of the black Cadillac. Duffy, of course, was a drinker, but he wasn’t drinking that night. He obviously was not in any mood for drinking, even if in fleeting glimpses one caught a glimmer of triumph mixed with the acute discomfort he was experiencing as he stood in the open space in front of the big leather couch. The discomfort was due, in part at least, to the fact that the Boss was, very definitely, drinking. For when the Boss really drank, what tender inhibitions ordinarily shackled up his tongue were absolutely removed. And now he was drinking all right. It looked like the first fine flush of a three-day blow and the barometer falling. He was cocked back on the leather couch with a pitcher of water, a bottle, and a bowl of ice on the floor beside his crumpled coat and empty shoes. When the Boss really got the works, he usually took off his shoes. He was sock-feet drunk now. The bottle was a long way down.

Mr. Larson stood back from the foot of the couch, a middle-sized, middle-aged, compact, gray-faced, gray-suited, unimaginative-looking man. He did not drink. He had once been a gambling-house operator and had found that it did not pay to drink. Gummy was strictly business and he didn’t do anything unless it paid.

As I entered and took in the layout, the Boss put his already red-rimmed gaze on me, but didn’t say a word until I approached the open space in front of the couch. Then he flung out an arm to indicate Tiny, who stood in the middle of that unprotected open space, with a wan smile on his tallow. “Look!” the Boss said to me, pointing. “He was the one going to fix it up with Larson, and what did I tell him? I told him, hell, no. Hell, no, I told him, I’d be damned first. And what happened?”

I took that as rhetorical question and said nothing. I could see that the tax bill was out for the evening, and started sidling back the way I had come.

“And what happened?” the Boss bellowed at me.

“How do I know?” I asked, but with that cast present I had begun to have a fair notion of the nature of the drama.

The Boss swung his head toward Tiny. “Tell him,” he commanded, “tell him, and tell him how puking smart you feel!”

Tiny didn’t manage it. All he managed was the wan smile like a winter dawn above the expanse of expensive black tailoring and the white-pipe waistcoat and diamond pin.

“Tell him!”

Tiny licked his lips and glanced shyly as a bride at the impassive, gray-faced Gummy, but he didn’t manage it.

“Well, I’ll tell you,” the Boss said, “Gummy Larson is going to build my hospital and Tiny fixed it up like he has been trying to do and everything is happy.”

“That’s fine,” I said.

“Yeah, everybody is happy,” the Boss said. “Except me. Except me,” he repeated, and struck himself heavily on the chest. “For I’m the one said to Tiny, Hell, no, I won’t deal with Larson. For I’m the one wouldn’t let Larson come in this room when Tiny got him here. For I’m the one ought to driven him out of this state long ago. And where is he now? Where is he now?”

I looked over at Gummy Larson, whose gray face didn’t show a thing. Way back in the old days, when I had first known Gummy and he had been a gambling-house operator, the police had beat him up one time. Probably because he got behind in his protection money. They had worked over his face until it looked like uncooked hamburger. But that had healed up now. He had known it would heal up and had taken the beating without opening his trap because it always paid to keep your trap shut. It had paid him in the end. Eventually he was a rich contractor and not a gambling-house operator. He was a rich contractor because