1965 - The Way the Cookie Crumbles (5 page)

‘She’s pretty bad, Norena,’ Algir said. ‘You mustn’t worry. There’s nothing either of us can do right now.’

‘It was a car, wasn’t it?’

‘That’s right. She stepped off the pavement and the driver didn’t have a chance of stopping.’

‘Was - was she drunk?’

Algir stiffened. He glanced quickly at the girl at his side. She was staring through the windshield, her face pale and set.

‘Drunk? What do you mean? That’s not a nice thing to say about your mother, Norena.’

‘Mummy means more to me than any other person alive,’ the girl said with such fierce passion that Algir winced. ‘I understand her. I know what she has been through. I know she did everything for me. She sacrificed herself for me. I know she drinks. Was she drunk?’

Algir moved uneasily.

‘No,’ he said finally. ‘Now look, Norena, I’ve got some thinking to do. I’m working on a case. You sit quiet, will you? Just don’t worry. I’ll get you to your mother as quickly as I can, alright?’

‘Yes. I’m sorry to be a nuisance.’

Again Algir winced. His big suntanned hands gripped the steering wheel tightly. He didn’t want to know this girl. He wanted her to remain a complete stranger to him as Johnnie Williams had been a complete stranger to him. It had been simple enough for him to walk into Williams’ bedroom and shoot him five times through the heart. He hadn’t known the guy. It was like shooting at a stuffed dummy. If he allowed this girl to talk, to make mental contact with him, how could he bring himself to kill her?

Even now, those few words she had spoken had upset him. He could feel a film of cold sweat on his face and a sick feeling of horror building up inside him.

He was through the congested motorway out of Miami now and was on the first broad stretch of highway 4A. Leaning forward, his eyes intent on the road ahead, he sent the big car surging forward.

* * *

The aircraft on the night flight from New York touched down at the Miami airport exactly on schedule. As the passengers crowded into the reception lobby, the hands of the wall clock stood at 07.30 hours.

Among the passengers was a slimly built girl of seventeen years of age. There was something elfin-like in her attractive, sharp-featured face. She wore a white headscarf, bottle green suede jacket, tight black pants that fastened under her flat-heeled shoes and a white scarf knotted at her throat. Her bra lifted her breasts to a provocative angle, and her neat, small buttocks had a cultivated ducktail swish that caught the eye of every man in the lobby.

She was very sure of herself. A cigarette drooped from her full red lips, her blue eyes had a flinty hardness, and when the men stared, she stared back with hostile, challenging contempt.

Ira Marsh, Muriel Marsh Devon’s youngest sister, had been brought up in a Brooklyn slum. Her sister, twenty-two years her senior, had left home and had disappeared out of the lives of the Marsh family before Ira was born.

Her mother had produced eleven children and Ira was the last of the brood. Four of the boys had been killed in a drunken car crash. Two others were serving life sentences for armed robbery. Four of the girls, including Muriel, had simply walked out of the slum that had served them as a home and hadn’t been seen nor heard of since. If it hadn’t been for Ticky Edris, Ira would never have learned that her eldest sister lived as a prostitute and a drug addict. Not that she would have cared one way or the other. Her sisters and her brothers meant as much to her as her father, a drunken old lecher, against whom she had to lock her bedroom door.

One evening, some four months ago, a smiling dwarf had been waiting outside her tenement block in a red Mini Cooper. Ira was returning from the Public Baths where she had spent a luxurious hour soaking her beautiful little body in hot water, washing her hair and generally preparing herself for the jive session she always attended on a Sunday night.

At the sight of her, the dwarf slid out of the car and planted himself in front of her. He was wearing a brown sports jacket with patch pockets, grey flannel slacks and a brown baseball cap worn at a jaunty angle over his right eye.

‘If you’re Ira Marsh,’ he said, his smile bright, his eyes watchful, ‘I want to talk to you.’

She stared down at the little man, frowning.

‘Out of my way, Tom Thumb,’ she said sharply. ‘I’m fussy who I talk to.’

Edris giggled.

‘It’s about your sister Muriel. Don’t be snooty, baby. Muriel is a special pal of mine.’

Already the women sitting on the iron balconies of the tenement block were staring down at these two. The kids had stopped playing their street games and were converging on them, hooting and pointing at Edris.

Ira swiftly made up her mind. She knew her sister only by name. She found herself suddenly curious to know more about her. She stepped to the car and slid into the passenger’s seat. Edris trotted around to the driver’s seat and drove down the street, followed by a screaming bunch of kids who were quickly left behind.

‘My name’s Ticky Edris,’ he said as he drove. ‘I’m putting together a little job that could make you and me some money.’

‘Why me?’ Ira said. ‘You know nothing about me. Why me?’

‘There’s nothing I don’t know about you,’ Edris returned. He slowed by a vacant building lot and pulled up.

A month ago in one of her blue moods, Muriel had mentioned her youngest sister. ‘I’ve never even seen her! If I hadn’t run into one of the old crowd living near my home, I wouldn’t have known she was born. Think of it! A sister as old as my daughter, and I’ve never even seen her!’

It was this random remark that had given Edris the key to a problem he had thought up to now insoluble. He had got in touch with an Inquiry Agency in New York and had instructed them to find out everything that was to be found out about a seventeen-year old girl named Ira Marsh. For two hundred dollars, the Agency came up with a five-page report that had given Edris the information he needed and the firm conviction that with this girl, handled right, his problem was practically solved.

From a number of less important details, he learned from the report that Ira Marsh was a wild one. She had a J.D. rating with the local police, but had been smart enough never to have come up before a judge. She was known as an expert shoplifter and store detectives never let her out of their sight when they saw her come in. She was associated with the Moccasin gang, a leading mob of teenage terrorists who were continually clashing with the police and rival gangs in the district. The leader of the Moccasins was Jess Farr, an eighteen-year old thug who had hacked, coshed and cut his way to his present indisputable position. Six months ago, the report stated, Farr had been going round regularly with a girl named Leya Felcher. She was the same age as Farr, a tough, handsome virago who had imagined her position as Farr’s mistress was unassailable. Ira had decided she wanted Farr and she wanted Leya’s position. In a crowded cellar under a warehouse, watched by the male members of the gang with Farr as the prize, the two girls, stripped to the waist, fought nail-tooth-and-fist in the longest and bloodiest battle the Moccasins had ever seen.

Ira had known that she would have to fight for Farr and she had taken the precaution of training for the battle. For three weeks, she had lived like a Spartan and had paid regular visits to Mulligan’s Gym run by an old pugilist who, let into the secret, had trained her as he used to train himself with the gleeful certainty that she couldn’t fail to win.

As Farr’s girl, Ira had become more and more involved with the gang’s activities. She was always on the spot to cheer them into battle. Often she was used as bait to break the uneasy peace that from time to time was arranged between the gangs.

The report concluded with these words: ‘This young girl is shrewd, intelligent, vicious, selfish and amoral. It is the opinion of our investigator that there is nothing she would shrink from to gain her own ends. On the small credit side, she has courage, determination and an aptitude for figures. Whenever she is without funds, which appears to be seldom, she does part-time work for Joe Slesser, a bookmaker, who speaks highly of her. From him she has learned to handle a variety of adding machines and computers.’

On paper, Ira Marsh seemed the ideal candidate for the difficult job Edris had for her. As he sat in the Mini, examining her attractive little face, he became even more confident that she would do.

‘I’ve been making inquiries about you, baby,’ he said. ‘I like what I’ve learned. Do you want to make some money?’

All the time Edris had been driving and now as he talked, Ira had been studying him as narrowly as he studied her. Her instincts told her this little freak was to be taken seriously.

‘It depends on two things: how much and what I have to do for it,’ she said.

Edris patted the steering wheel with his stumpy hands and smiled.

‘Are you a gambler, baby?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘How much money do you want?’

‘As much as I can get.’

‘I don’t mean that. Do you ever dream about money? I do.’ Edris crossed one short leg over the other. ‘I’m always dreaming about having money. Don’t you?’

‘I guess so.’

‘How much money do you dream about having?’

‘Much more than you could give me.’

‘But how much?’

‘A million dollars.’

‘Why stop there?’ Edris said and giggled. ‘Why not ten million - twenty million?’

She glanced at her cheap wristwatch.

‘Let’s stop playing games. I have to be home in another ten minutes. I have a date tonight.’

‘Suppose I showed you how to make fifty thousand dollars,’ Edris said softly, ‘would you be ready to take a risk?’

She looked at him and she could tell by the expression in his eyes he was serious and she felt a sudden quickening of her blood.

‘What have I to risk? I don’t own anything.’

‘Yes, you do. You have the same possession I have and which I am going to risk. It depends on the value you set on it. Fifty thousand dollars is a nice sum of money. The risk isn’t very great, but it does exist. You will be risking your freedom, baby, as I’ll be risking mine.’

‘What makes you think my freedom is worth fifty thousand dollars? My freedom?’ She laughed. ‘There is nothing I wouldn’t do to have that kind of money.’

He studied the bitter, hard smile that remained after the laughter, and he nodded, satisfied.

‘You’ll have to earn it, baby, make no mistake about it. I have a very special job for you, but you’ll have to earn it.’

‘How?’

‘Before I tell you that, let me tell you the background of this thing.’

It was then she learned about her sister and her marriage, and how her sister had run away with the baby and had finally become a streetwalker.

‘Your sister is a heroin addict,’ Edris said. ‘There’s nothing anyone can do for her. I give her four months. not more. She’s dying on her feet.’

Ira sat forward, her face in her hands, her elbows on her knees, her blue eyes cloudy with concentration, so absorbed that she forgot her date with Jess, forgot the Sunday night jive session, forgot everything except the piping, whispering voice that dripped its poison into her ears.

Finally, Edris got around to explaining what he wanted her to do. It sounded like a plot from some movie, and at first, she decided without telling him, that he was crazy: a freak with a hole in his head, but as he talked on and on, she began to see that such a plan might work and if it did, the money was there.

‘He’s never seen his daughter,’ Edris concluded. ‘He’s heard nothing of her for sixteen years. There is a family resemblance. I can see it. You look uncommonly like Muriel. He’ll see it too. From that angle, there is nothing to worry about. He’ll accept you as his daughter without question. You can see that, can’t you?’

Yes, she could see it. She knew from what her mother had said that she did look like Muriel when Muriel was her age.

‘But what about the daughter? The one I am to impersonate?’ she asked. ‘What about her? Suppose she hears about me?’

‘She won’t,’ Edris said and rubbed his hands together. ‘She’s dead. She died last week. That’s why I’m here. If she was alive, we couldn’t do it. It was only when Muriel told me she was dead that I dreamed up this idea.’ He looked searchingly at her face to see if she accepted these lies. ‘Even now we can’t do anything until Muriel dies. But that won’t be long . . . three or four months.’

Ira moved uneasily.

‘How did the daughter die?’

‘She was swimming, got cramped and drowned,’ Edris lied glibly.

‘Can’t something be done about Muriel?’

‘No. She’s as good as dead now.’

Ira sat silent, staring through the windshield of the car.

‘Well?’ Edris asked impatiently. ‘Will you do it? There’s little risk.’

‘I’ll think about it. It wants a lot of thinking about. Be here this time next Sunday and I’ll tell you one way or the other.’

‘I can’t come up from Paradise City again, baby,’ Edris said. ‘This is part of my yearly vacation. I have to earn a living.’ He took a card from his wallet. ‘Here’s my address. Send me a telegram when you have thought it over. Keep it short: yes or no. There’s no great hurry. We can’t do anything until Muriel dies. Plenty of time to get things right, baby, and they certainly have to be right.’

She thought of this first meeting with Edris as she walked through the reception lobby of the airport and made her way to the bus terminal. She had seen him twice since then. He had put a lot of polish on his plan during the four months’ wait. She couldn’t see now how it could go wrong. She had taken leave of her father, telling him she had a job outside New York and wouldn’t be coming back.

He was too drunk to care. Her one regret was leaving Jess Farr. She didn’t tell him what she was going to do. He would have asked too many questions. She told herself there must be many better and more exciting men to be had when you owned fifty thousand dollars. She told herself that, but she didn’t believe it. She discovered to her irritation that she was more in love with Jess than she realized. She would miss him.

Watched by male eyes, she moved out of the shadows of the airport, crossed into a patch of early morning sun and got aboard the bus for Seacombe.