wasn’t sorry in the least; I loathed the old termagant and her pasty husband. “We’ll quiet down.”
“You know perfectly well my Hank goes to work at six-thirty. This is not fair.”
It suddenly struck me as funny that at this late stage of her dismal existence Mrs. Dunphy still expected things to be fair, and I was still laughing after she hung up on me.
THREE
A PALMFUL OF WARM SPIT
A FEW DAYS LATER I was still getting over the shock of having knocked up my wife. Sally had woken up nauseous and pissed off at me for something she couldn’t or wouldn’t put into words, and for the first time since my return in May I was missing the nature of my relations with the gals in my employ in Rome: sexual in several cases but strictly impersonal.
It was Monday morning and my first task of the day was to spring a couple of farmboys at Police Headquarters downtown. The clerk didn’t ask me why I was bailing them out, just gave me the fisheye and breathed in and out with a loud, phlegmy sound while he filled out the forms and stamped the endorsement onto the back of the Collins Aircraft Company check. Considering the amount of time I spent watching and helping Everett Collins break various laws, the clerk and I probably ought to have been on a first name basis, but the great man couldn’t get arrested in Wichita for anything short of manslaughter. The clerk knew who I was, though, and he knew what the farmboys had done.
“Heard they busted his ribs. Heard Billy Clark wasn’t much help to him, either. Some bodyguard.”
“That’s about right.”
“You fixing to bail him out too?”
“I’m going to let Billy-boy cool his heels in the jug until he’s arraigned. Let him do some thinking in there.”
“Heard he told old man Collins he was retired from the force.”
“Isn’t he?”
“Hell, no. Fired, fall of ’44. Pulled his service revolver on a civilian over at Lawrence Stadium, off-duty, before a ball game. Claimed it was a legit arrest, turned out to be a beef over a parking space. We hired a whole bunch of 4-F morons when our men started signing up and getting drafted, and that’s one time it bit us right in the ass. Collins ought to have had him checked him out before he put him on the payroll.”
ONCE THEY GOT out, the farmboys didn’t show much curiosity as to who I was or why I’d posted their bail. A pair of giant brothers by the name of Gertzteig, they seemed to think this was just the way things worked in the big city. “Come on, I’ll buy you breakfast.”
We went across the street to the drugstore and sat down. “Anything you like, boys, it’s on me.”
A couple of uniformed officers were enjoying their complimentary breakfast at the other end of the lunch counter, and glancing at the brothers, they surely pegged them for the recently sprung drunks they were. Back at the pharmacy counter I could see the pale, baldheaded druggist staring daggers at the freeloading cops. He hated giving away those free meals, and locating his drug store across the street from City Hall turned out to be the worst mistake he’d ever made.
The Gertzteigs ordered up t-bones and fried eggs, sunny side up, and hash browns and toast, both of them, and they attacked the meals when they came in exactly the same order: potatoes, eggs, toast, steak. They weren’t twins, as far as I could tell, but they matched each others’ motions pretty well. I wouldn’t have wanted to get into a fight with them, especially with a wobbly drunk like Collins on my side.
“So here’s the deal, boys. You know the old man you hit?” I asked between mouthfuls of corned beef hash.
“Only hit the old guy but the one time,” said the bigger of the two. “In the ribs.”
“Once’t was enough,” said his brother.
“We wasn’t mad at him so much, it was his friend.”
“The old man feels bad you spent the night in jail, and he wants to give you a little something to get home on.” I handed them each an envelope containing a fifty dollar bill. Examining the contents they grew more slackjawed than before.
“Golly damn,” said the bigger one. “That’s purt square of a feller just lost a fight.”
“He doesn’t want you boys to walk away from Wichita thinking that’s the way things usually go in the big city. Now can I give you