Love's lovely counterfeit - James M. Cain [5]
The place was fairly full and fairly noisy, with the crash of pinball shattering the beat of juke music. In the murk at one end of the bar a couple was dancing. Waiters in gray jackets with brass buttons hurried about, serving drinks; they were addressed by name, mostly, and treated the customers as old friends. When Ben came in he waved at Caspar, who was sitting at a table with Lefty, Bugs Lenhardt, another guard named Goose Groner, and two girls. Then he sat down at the bar, ordered a drink, and scanned a paper devoting its front page to the Castleton robbery, which had gone even worse than Lefty had expected. The four wild kids had got $22,000 but killed a cashier doing it.
Presently Groner was beside Ben, mumbling that Caspar wanted to see him. The girls moved over so Ben could sit down, but Caspar didn't invite him. Instead he demanded savagely to know where he had been. Ben, evidently deciding that an offense was the only defense against a stupid inquiry, stuck out his chin and said: "Me? I been working. I been carrying out orders, some kind of hop dreams that were thought up by a jerk named Solly Caspar—no relation, I hope. I been tailing a Swede all over town, and copying down the car numbers of his friends, and making a sap out of myself—wasn't that a way to spend a spring night! And for what? Because they been taking this lug, this fathead named Caspar, for a ride the whole town is laughing at."
"Ride? What ride?"
"Come on, get wise to yourself. The ride Maddux is taking you for. Filling you up with that hooey about Delany—"
"Oh, so you think it's hooey?"
"Listen, I've seen this Swede's friends, and they wouldn't know Delany if they met him on the street. It's a gyp and you fell for it, that's all."
Ben got this off with quite a show of truculence, and it left Caspar blinking, and would probably have settled the argument if he hadn't slightly overplayed it. He took up the previous question, which was where he had been all night, reminding Caspar it had been clearly stipulated that he was not to report until tomorrow; and when Caspar weakly tapped his watch and said it was tomorrow, he said that as far as he was concerned it was not tomorrow until the sun came up. At this one of the girls, who had been eyeing Ben's curls with more than casual interest, let out an appreciative laugh. Caspar's eyes flickered. Lefty jumped up and began telling him a story, a meaningless thing about a couple of Irishmen that went into a hotel. Groner began whispering to him, patting his back and leaning close to his ear. The girl, frightened, poked him with her finger, and said hey, quit scaring her to death.
This went on for five minutes, and the place froze like a cinematic stop-camera shot. Ike, the proprietor, caught the eye of the bartender, who stood with a shaker in his hand, checking the position of the waiters. These came to a stop in the aisles, and stood staring at Caspar. He began to pant, and when Groner touched his arm, shook it as though something had stung him. Then, his seizure passing, he screamed: "O.K., you took the car number! Why don't you pass it over? What you waiting for?"
Ben, who had turned green, stared at him. He stared a long time, his eyes becoming small, cold, and hard. Then he took out his little red book, copied a number on the back of a beer mat, and rolled it to Caspar. Before returning the book to his pocket he creased the page with his thumbnail. But this page was not captioned May 7.
It was captioned April 29.
Chapter 2
Next afternoon, when Ben reported to work, Sol was in high good humor. He indulged in a little heavy-handed kidding,