Satan’s Angel

Chapter One Assignment From Hell

The Castle Club was a nighttime place. At night it was raw and loud and brazen, with the colored neon painting lurid highlights on the hoods of the big cars that nuzzled up to it. Bare shoulders and smoky music and false bottoms in the shot glasses. At night Sam Losser’s office was as strange as work gloves on a chorine. It could have been the office of a hick lawyer. Golden oak and worn green carpet and a spittoon.

But in the daytime when the Castle Club was gray and dingy, when the tables were stacked, when a man in a dirty shirt checked the bottles on the backbar, and a slow old man knelt in the dirty gray rain and picked slivers of glass out of the parking lot — in the daytime Sam Losser’s office became the only touch of reality.

He had a rolltop desk and an oak table at right angles to it. I sat on the other side of the oak table, my purse and gloves at my elbow. Sam’s chair creaked. He held a slender cigar in his fat, muddy fingers, and huffed out a blue-gray column of smoke. He wore a baggy gray suit that matched his office. His bald head had a high sheen in the gray light from the big window.

With a slow movement, he reached out, spun the cigar in the ash tray, leaving a small neat cone of ash over the red glow.

His eyes were milky gray, almost opaque. He smiled and said, “Now you make like a soap opera, Ellen. Big tears yet.”

“That doesn’t answer the question,” I said flatly, pleased that I could keep the quaver out of my voice.

“The question? Oh, you wanted to know where Johnny is, didn’t you? If you did know, it wouldn’t do you any good. Your brother has got to stay put for a while, Ellen. Johnny James is a name the cops would like to know.”

“Aren’t you supposed to have the cops in your pocket?”

He sighed. “Machines I can fix. A few gas stations knocked off I can fix. Lots of little things I fix. Murder, no. Cops, they get eager about murder. So do all the kids in the D. A.’s office. I go to my people and say that to me it would be a personal favor if they let it slide. They say that I stay out of this one.”

“Johnny didn’t kill anybody,” I said with a note of hysteria.

“Ellen, you are a good girl. You do nice clean secretarial work. Maybe you look at that white paper and black writing too long. Life is not black and white. Life is full of shades of gray.

“What difference whether Johnny did it or not? Johnny is a very excitable boy. Johnny, he like a lot of dough in his pants. He likes nice things. You know how it is. Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t kill anybody this time. Maybe next time he does. He’s nervous.”

I thought of my brother. Johnny with his clear reckless eyes and twisted smile and the ready fists. Johnny, who had worked in some mysterious capacity for Sam Losser ever since the dishonorable discharge he got for beating up his company commander.

On April fourteenth, three nights before, at two in the morning, three men had broken into the Connor Brothers Coal Company, smashed the safe and made off with a little over twenty thousand dollars. The watchman had died the following noon in the hospital from a depressed skull fracture. I had thought nothing of it until I found that Johnny had disappeared. He hadn’t come back to his apartment. It was in the same building as mine. So I went to see Sam Losser.

“Did... those men rob the coal company because you told them to, Mr. Losser?”

He flattened his thick lips against his teeth as he smiled. His eyes were cold. “You got me wrong, Ellen. I got a tough business to run out here. I got to hire rough boys to help me. Sometimes, on their time off, those rough boys do a few things for excitement. Can I help that?”

“You won’t help Johnny?”

He inspected the end of his cigar and rolled the ash off again. “You make it difficult, Ellen. Maybe I can help him. I don’t know. If the pressure goes off the case, maybe I can help him a lot. If it stays on...” He shrugged.

“Maybe the two men who were with Johnny are worth less to you than he is. Maybe if one of them...”

He grinned, almost with delight. “Miss James, you got the same idea I got, but you got it in reverse. The two boys with Johnny are good boys. Steady boys. They been in the business years. Johnny, he’s still a punk. Like I told you, he’s excite-able. If the heat stays on I got to protect my investment by having them find Johnny. Just to make sure Johnny won’t talk, he might be dead when they find him.”

The room spun and I felt my shoulders sag. Through thick mist Sam Losser’s muddy face loomed and his faraway voice said, “You don’t feel so good?”

I clung to consciousness, fought away the mists. I lifted my chin and said, “I feel fine.”

He said softly, “You see, nobody was to get killed. Then it’s okay. But the deal went wrong. So what was a good job is now a bad job. I give it to you straight, Ellen. If they smell around too close to me, I got to throw Johnny to them. In Johnny’s pocket will be a lot of the dough and a sap that will fit the smashed place on the head of that watchman. Then the pressure is off.”

“Did Johnny kill him?”

“I told you before, that doesn’t make any difference.”

He leaned back in his chair. It creaked again. I saw the thin gray threads of smoke rising toward the ceiling. If I could get Johnny, we could go away together. This thing would have driven the madness out of him. A new start. Johnny would become the same fine kid brother he had once been.

I said softly, “Isn’t there anything I can do? Anything at all?”

He didn’t answer. He stared at the rain pelting against his window. I said, “Suppose Johnny was a very good man, very valuable to you, the same as the others. What would you do to take the heat off the three of them?”

He shrugged. “I might do a very dangerous thing. I might find some bum and have him killed and plant the stuff on him.”

“Why don’t you do that this time?”

“Johnny isn’t worth the danger, Ellen. You figure you got a bum and all of sudden he’s got friends who were with him the night he was supposed to be knocking off the watchman. Maybe somebody sees you contacting the bum. You got two murders instead of one.”

I remembered all the things about Johnny. He was a good kid. Somewhere along the line he had gotten twisted. He could be set right.

Sam squashed the butt of the cigar, handling it delicately with his thick fingers. He smiled up at me. “Of course, if you could find us a bum for the part...”

“Me?” I gasped.

“Sure. You get hold of some stew bum off River Street and take him to some room you get under the wrong name and pump him and make sure there won’t be a hitch. Then you let me know, and we arrange a pickup and wrap him up for the cops.”

I remembered the clear look Johnny used to have in his eyes. I remembered him, proud in his first long trousers. I remembered how his thin shoulders shook as I held him tight after our parents were killed at the grade crossing. I said:

“Suppose I do that. Then what?”

“Then you don’t have to worry about Johnny. He can come back to work.”

“But suppose I want to take him away from here? Suppose I think I can straighten him out?”

The rain was still pelting the windows, a shaft of sun shone between the clouds, a thin line of it making a bright spot on the green rug. Sam pointed to it. “You can straighten Johnny out the same way I can pick up that sunbeam and tie knots in it.”

“But you will let him go?”

Sam looked at me. He shrugged. “Phone me here when you got the burn lined up. Phone from a pay station.”

I stood up. He walked me to the door.

He laughed as he closed it. As I went along the narrow hall I could hear the distant sound of his laughter. I walked across the floor, out the side door and climbed into my coupe. The old man had finished picking up the shattered glass.

The rain had stopped and I clicked on the wipers long enough to dash the standing drops from the windshield. My foot was shaking so badly that I fed the gas raggedly, clashing the gears as I drove out of the lot...

From my apartment I phoned the office and told Mr. Hodges that I had seen the doctor and that he had ordered me to stay in bed for two days. Mr. Hodges was very pleasant about it. After I hung up, I went into the kitchenette, mixed myself a stiff drink and downed it. The warmth spread through me, but it didn’t touch the ice chips in my heart.

How do you dress to find a man to be killed? Where do you go? Sam had mentioned River Street. I glanced at my watch. Four in the afternoon. Time to get dressed for death, to find a room, to have just enough to drink so that I could be hard and cold.

I looked over my clothes and picked a skirt that had shrunk during drycleaning. It would fit too tightly. Mesh stockings. Heels that were too high for comfort. A blouse that was frilly and cheap.

I spent a long time over the makeup. In the back of the bureau drawer I found the lipstick that was too deep. With it, I enlarged my lips, smearing it on heavily. Blue eye shadow. Black smeared on my lashes so thick that it left little beads on the end of each eyelash. I put on dangling earrings.

In the back of my closet was a cheap fibre suitcase that I had bought in a Chicago drugstore when my luggage had been stolen. I filled it with underthings that I had meant to throw away, but had forgotten. Another cheap blouse. Junk jewelry.

At five I took the phone off the hook, locked the apartment and caught a taxi at the corner. The driver looked me over appreciatively and said, “Let’s make it a nice long ride, honey.”

“Corner of River and State,” I ordered.

The evening traffic was heavy. The driver was so busy trying to turn his head so that he could see my legs that twice we nearly piled into the back end of the car ahead.

River Street parallels the dock area. It is a street of small dives, missions, eroded hotels. State is the one decent street that cuts across it. It was heavy dusk when the driver let me out in front of the drugstore on the corner. I tipped him a quarter and he wanted me to have a beer with him. I walked off through the evening crowd, heading down River Street. I had to find a hotel where they weren’t too particular.

I found it in the third block. Hotel Barton. Lobby one flight up. Rooms from one dollar.

The dim stairway smelled of dust and disinfectant, disease and poverty, perfume and gin. The small lobby was brilliantly lighted. An old man with a stubbled face sat asleep in a worn leather chair, a frayed newspaper across his chest. A battered table held stacked religious tracts. The rug was worn down through the faded rose pile to the brown strings that held it together.

A very thin, very sallow young man leaned with sharp elbows on the old desk and watched me as I walked across from the head of the stairs. I lifted my chin, smiled at him and walked with an exaggerated sway.

He looked at me with unblinking dark eyes. His white shirt was damp under the armpits and his lean fingers were dirty across the knuckles.

“I want to rent a room,” I told him.

“Room with a shower. Buck seventy-five. In advance.”

I paid him. He opened a book in front of me, handed me a pencil and pointed to a vacant line with a dirty thumb. Lorene Vernon, I wrote.

He slapped a key on the counter. “One eleven, Lorene. Right through that arch over there and down the hall. Next to the last one on your right. Pay every day in advance.”

The key was fastened to a piece of greasy wood almost a foot long. I picked up the suitcase, walked down the hall.

I unlocked my door. The room was about ten by ten. One smeared window looked out across an airwell. There was a cheap maple bureau, chair, bed and bench. The lace curtains were torn and yellow with age. There was a strip of pale blue linoleum instead of a rug. The plaster walls were off-white.

One door opened into a shallow closet. The other opened into a tiny bathroom with stained plumbing, chipped fake tile and a naked overhead bulb. The only light in the bedroom was a bedside lamp in maple with a cardboard parchment shade with a silhouette of a ship in full sail. I sat on the bed and stared with unseeing eyes at the dusty floor beyond the strip of blue linoleum.

I sat in the room until after seven and then went out and ate in a small restaurant. I ate at the counter and realized that I was stalling over the food, dreading the actual moment when I’d have to begin my hunt for the nameless man who would, in the newspapers, become the man who had killed the old watchman at the coal company.

I was the pointing finger of death. The man I found would die. Outside the restaurant the coarse night life of the forty blocks along the river was beginning to roar. The juke boxes blared in the little joints.

After I paid the check, I walked out onto the sidewalk and headed down River Street. The three blocks near State were dotted with places that were large and noisy. I knew that I’d find my quarry in a quieter spot. Further along River the bright lights dimmed, the neon fizzed and crackled, the sidewalks were littered with filth.

Gradually I slowed my steps. Someplace here he would be, the lonesome man I would select for death.

There wasn’t much traffic on River Street. A junk wagon went slowly by, a man hunched on the high seat, the hooves of the swaybacked horse making a clop, clop sound. Across the street from me a harsh bulb illuminated a black and white sign which said, Jesus Saves!

I glanced into the smeared window of a small bar. Four men stood at the bar. They were fairly well dressed. The bartender wore a clean white jacket. I had to walk further down River.

I heard a woman scream and I looked up at the black dead windows over the darkened store fronts. A woman was screaming in the dark. So what? All over the world women screamed.

My heels made a slow rhythmic beat against the dark pavement. I couldn’t spend time worrying about a scream. I was worrying about death. I was an angel of death, and I walked the night streets of a great city looking for a man I would turn chill with my touch; looking for man-eyes that, because of me, would gaze sightless at the stars.