The Steel Hit p-2 Read online

  Wallerbaugh looked around and saw that money at the bottom was loose. He saw what the money was being spent on, and he thought the situation over, and then he became one of the first of the really big-scale Florida land speculators. He had two-colour brochures made up, and he sent them out by the bale. There are companies that supply mailing lists of any desired kind — people who own foreign cars; people who belong to correspondence schools; people who have subscriptions to a particular magazine; people who have sent for pornography through the mail — and from one of these Wallerbaugh got a list of ex-servicemen who were married and going to college. Thousands of these got the two-colour brochure.

  It was a good brochure. It told the ex-serviceman of the unlimited potential of Growing Florida. It told him about the new aeroplane plants, the industrial boom, the fact that Florida was becoming a First-Rate employment market in practically every field. It also told him just how cheaply he could own his own plot of land on Florida’s west coast, and how little more it would cost to build a brand new house on that land. The ex-serviceman could start paying for that lot and house right now, then it would be ready for him when he graduated from college and he and the Missus were ready for the Big Move.

  Wallerbaugh took a lot of servicemen. He sold land that was totally inaccessible by car. He sold land that was eight feet under water. He sold land to which he didn’t hold clear title. He sold land that washed back out into the Gulf of Mexico before the ink was dry on the cheque.

  The Land Grab was bad in Florida for a while, with the speculators all trying to grab from each other, so in 1947 Wallerbaugh took on a partner, a man named Grantz. Grantz had just served a rap for income tax evasion. He’d lived off the black market during the war, which wasn’t as easy or as profitable as liquor had once been, and he was happy to bring his know-how into the corporation.

  The bubble lasted three years. Wallerbaugh had thought it would last for ever, just as the stock game should have lasted for ever, but he was wrong. At the top they could afford to ignore him. But now he was working at the bottom, and at the bottom they couldn’t afford to ignore him. It was government money, passed by the GI Bill through the hands of servicemen and then into Wallerbaugh’s hands, and he was being careless. Grease kept the deal alive for a while, but in 1949 the warrants came out. They arrested Grantz, but Wallerbaugh made it out of the country. His profits were safe in a Swiss bank, and his new home was in Lomas de Zamora, a suburb of Buenos Aires.

  But after more than a decade, Wallerbaugh hungered for home again, to be able to move freely in the States once more. Passport and other papers proving him to be Charles F. Wells, retired stockbroker, were expensive to come by but certainly not impossible. But Charles F. Wells had the same face as C. Frederick Wallerbaugh, and that face had been plastered all over the newspapers of the nation in 1949. And for all Wallerbaugh knew that face was still featured on the walls of post offices. The face was a problem; it kept him in Lomas de Zamora a while longer.

  Finally he couldn’t stand it. Grantz had died of a bad heart in a Federal prison, but some of Grantz’s friends were still around, and Wallerbaugh got in touch with them. A plastic surgeon, somebody good and absolutely trustworthy. The answer came back: Dr Adler, near Lincoln, Nebraska.

  Money made it possible for him to get back into the States, via the Mexican border, without having to test the passport or other papers. Money got him to Nebraska, and more money, to Dr Adler, got him a new face. After the operation, Charles F. Wells went into Lincoln and bought a new Cadillac and drove it all the way to New York, just for the pure pleasure of being able to look at all that American countryside again.

  He had avoided the friends of Grantz, so no one knew that Wallerbaugh was back in the States. The friends of Grantz. knew, but they didn’t know what he looked like or where he was or what he was calling himself these days. Only one man in the whole world knew enough about Charles F. Wells to be able to call him C. Frederick Wallerbaugh.

  After six months, he began to worry. After one month of worry, he decided to act. He had a newer Cadillac by now, and he drove it back to Nebraska. He didn’t drive this tune for the pleasure, he drove so his name would not appear in the files of any commercial transportation. He drove to Nebraska and shot Dr Adler and then he drove back to New York. He was safe now, absolutely safe. There was no one left in all the world who could pose any sort of threat to him.

  Chapter 3

  UNTIL he got to the car, Stubbs had thought he would just keep going forward; he would get the car and then go find the man named Wells and find out if he had killed the doctor, and if it hadn’t been Wells then he’d go on and find the other man, Courtney. But in any case, all in a straight line, with nothing else in the way. That was because his thinking was muffled and hazy with only one clear spot in the centre, able to concentrate on just one train of thought at a time.

  But when he got to the car, the impossibility of the straight line forced itself upon his attention. He first began to notice when he had trouble driving the car. His hands seemed thicker and slower on the wheel and one foot was heavy and only partially controlled the accelerator and his other foot was totally out of sympathy with the brake. He kept hitting the brake too hard, and making the hood of the Lincoln dip, and knocking his chest against the steering wheel. And he kept pulling away from traffic lights too fast, nearly stalling the car.

  After that, because now he kept looking at his hands, he noticed how filthy they were — covered with small scars and ragged places. And his clothing was a mess. Also his stomach was upset and his nerves seemed bad.

  So finally he began to realize that it was impossible, that after two weeks of living like an animal he couldn’t just go straight ahead but would have to stop and rest a while. So he stopped. He didn’t know about motels, but he knew how to find a hotel in any city. You find the railroad station.

  He’d never gone far from the tracks, so he kept on paralleling them, and after a while he found a third-rate hotel. Since it was a third-rate hotel, it didn’t have a garage, but the man at the desk told him the car would be safe out in front. Stubbs took his word for it, paid for one night, and got his two suitcases from the trunk.

  There was no shower in his private bath, but there was a tub. He sat for an hour in water nearly too hot to stand, adding more hot water every time the water in the tub started to cool. After that he went directly to bed, though it wasn’t even seven o’clock yet.

  He woke at eight-thirty the next morning, and his head was buzzing. His nerves were far worse than yesterday, so bad that his arms and legs were shaking. He lay on his back on the bed, and his forehead was burning up. He felt a dull anger at the symptoms, because they were keeping him from the straight line, and he tried to ignore them. He pushed the covers away and got out of bed, but he immediately became dizzy and fell, hitting his face on the floor.

  After a while, he got to the telephone and told the man at the desk that he needed a doctor. The man at the desk was irritated, and showed it, but he did send a doctor. He was a paunchy man with grey hair and a no-nonsense scowl, and when he came in, using the key the desk man had given him, Stubbs was back in bed, not wholly conscious.

  The doctor examined him, and asked him questions he had a difficult time answering. Then he closed his black bag with a snap. “You have to stop drinking. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I haven’t been drinking,” Stubbs told him. “I never drink.” It was true. Alcohol, even when he was at his best, hurt his head.

  The doctor frowned, not sure whether or not to believe him. It being this particular hotel, this particular kind of hotel, the doctor had been prepared to diagnose even before seeing Stubbs. He stood looking down at him, and now he saw that the symptoms were not exactly right. Some of the symptoms that should have been there weren’t, like a craving for water and a special soreness in the joints of the arms. “Then you’ve been working too hard. Some sort of heavy physical labour without proper nutrition. You haven’t bee
n getting enough sleep or enough rest or enough of the right kinds of food. Am I right?”

  It was close enough. Stubbs nodded.

  The doctor nodded, too, satisfied. “I don’t suppose you want to go to a clinic?”

  “No.”

  “I thought not. Can you pay for a nurse? You need someone to bring you food, at least for a day or two. You can’t leave that bed.”

  “In my wallet,” Stubbs said. He motioned at his pants folded on the chair. “Take some for yourself and a nurse.”

  The doctor was surprised at how much money there was in the wallet, and it made him curious as to what this man had been doing to get so rundown and have so much money, but he kept his curiosity to himself. He was a doctor with a small practice in a poor neighbourhood, plus work at a clinic, plus being house doctor for this hotel and two others very much like it. He had the constant feeling that violence and evil were all around him, kept just out of sight because these people needed him as a doctor, but if he were ever to turn his head fast and see the evil they would have to kill him, whether they needed him or not. Because of this, he had trained his curiosity to be a small and private thing.

  He took some money from Stubbs’s wallet, showed him how much he had taken, and explained what each dollar of it was for. “The man downstairs said you’d only paid for one night. I think you’ll be here four more days at the very least.”

  “Pay him for two,” said Stubbs.

  The doctor argued with him, but Stubbs ignored him. He concentrated on the straight line and lay quiet in the bed so he’d be well sooner, and after a while the doctor stopped arguing. He shrugged, and took some more money from Stubbs’s wallet, and left.

  The nurse was bitter Irish, thin-bodied and sharp-faced, and a rosary rustled in her starched pocket. She fed him, when her watch said it was time and not when he was hungry, and she took good care of him without ever talking to him. It embarrassed him to use the bedpan, but she insisted. She came for two days, because that was how much she’d been paid for. The second day he didn’t really need her, but she came anyway and wouldn’t let him out of the bed. He decided to get up as soon as she left, but he didn’t.

  The third day he was on his own again. He got up and stood beside the bed, and he wasn’t dizzy. He felt weak, and very hungry, but that was all, and the trembling in his arms and legs had stopped. He got clean clothing from his suitcase and went out to a restaurant for breakfast.

  He walked around a little afterwards, but then the dizziness started to come back, so he went back to the room and lay down on the bed and slept some more. When he woke up it was afternoon, and he went out again for another meal. On the way out the desk clerk stopped him, and he paid for another day.

  The fourth day, Friday, he was himself again. He’d nearly forgotten the two weeks at the farmhouse. It was only a dim memory, soft with lost details. In the clear spot in the middle of his brain, the straight line was back.

  He packed the two suitcases, stowed the automatic under his coat, and went out to the car. Charles F. Wells lived somewhere in New York.

  Chapter 4

  STUBBS closed the phone book and put away his ballpoint pen and the old piece of envelope and walked back out of the drugstore on to 10th Avenue. He stood bunking in the sunshine, not knowing where to go next, where to start. Then he thought of maps, so he went back into the drugstore. “Do you have a map of New York?”

  “Manhattan?”

  Stubbs frowned. “New York,” he said again, because he didn’t know what else to say.

  Manhattan, decided the druggist. He reached behind him and got a small red book. The book was full of the locations of streets and information about subways and places of interest, and pasted in the back of the book was a street map of Manhattan.

  Stubbs paid his quarter and took the little red book and started out of the store. Then he stopped again, struck by a sudden suspicion, and went back. “What about the rest?”

  The druggist just looked at him. “The rest?”

  Stubbs concentrated, and came up with a name. “Brooklyn.”

  He was remembering now that New York was in parts. Manhattan was one part, and Brooklyn another. And there were other parts.

  “Oh. You want a map of Brooklyn, too?” The druggist started to reach behind him again.

  “No,” Stubbs pointed towards the phone booth. “About the phone book,” he said. “Is it just Manhattan?”

  “Of course.”

  “You don’t have the others?”

  Ill The druggist shook his head. “Why don’t you try Grand Central. They’ve got books from all the boroughs of Greater New York and the suburbs there.”

  Stubbs nodded. “Grand Central,” he repeated. “Where’s Grand Central?”

  The druggist opened his mouth, then hesitated. “Look, let me show you. Give me that map.”

  Stubbs handed over the little red book. The druggist opened the map in the back, and showed him. He was here, 10th Avenue and 39th Street. Grand Central was over here, 42nd Street, the other side of 5th Avenue.

  Stubbs nodded. “Thank you.”

  “Not at all.” The druggist folded the map up for him and handed him back the little book. Stubbs went out to the sidewalk.

  In his mind, it had seemed simple. He would come to New York and look in the phone book and it would say Charles Wells and give an address, and he would go to that address. So when he came through the Lincoln Tunnel he parked as soon as he saw a drugstore, and he looked in the phone book. There was a “Wells, C.” and a “Wells, C.F.” and two “Wells, Charles”. Four people in New York that might be the man he wanted.

  And then at the last minute he’d been reminded that New York had other parts, like Brooklyn. Charles F. Wells might not be any one of these four, he might be somebody else entirely, in Brooklyn or one of the other parts.

  He stood on the sidewalk, and he didn’t know what to do next. He could go look up the four people he already had, or he could go to Grand Central and maybe make the list longer. He thought about it and decided it would be better to try these four people first, and only go to Grand Central if none of the four was the man he wanted. But then he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to find Grand Central once he’d left this spot, this spot was the only place he knew how to find Grand Central from. So while he still remembered where it was, he got down on his knees on the sidewalk and opened the map up and made a mark with his ballpoint pen where the druggist had said he could find Grand Central. A woman going by looked at him in surprise and then, seeing the map, she smiled.

  After he made the mark, Stubbs got to his feet again, put the pen away, folded up the map, and walked back to where he’d parked the car. He sat in it and took out his list of four names, and with the help of the book he found out where each of them lived.

  C. Wells lived on Grove Street. That was downtown, in a section called Greenwich Village, which was not separate like Brooklyn but was really a part of Manhattan. It bothered Stubbs that the city had parts, and even the parts had parts. He put the map away and started the car.

  He went the wrong way at first, but then he asked directions of a cop giving out parking tickets, and after that he went the right way. When he got to Greenwich Village he had to stop at the curb almost every block and look at the map, but finally he found Grove Street, and even a parking space.

  The building he wanted had a narrow foyer with mailboxes and doorbells, and next to one of the doorbells was the name C. Wells. It was kind of a rundown house for a man as rich as Charles F. Wells had seemed, but you never knew if a rich appearance was just front. Stubbs rang the bell, and a buzzer sounded, releasing the door lock.

  It was a walk-up. A door was open on the second floor, and a sharp-featured girl in her twenties was standing in the doorway. She had long black hair hanging straight down her back, and she was wearing a flannel shirt and dungarees. Her face looked dirty the way a face looks when you eat too much fried food. She watched Stubbs coming up the stairs.
/>   Stubbs came up to the top step. “I’m looking for C. Wells.”

  “I’m C. Wells,” she said.

  “The C. Wells in the phone book?”

  “What is this?” she asked. Her voice and face were both getting sharper.

  Stubbs persisted. “Are you the C. Wells in the phone book?”

  “Yes, I am,” she said, “and what the hell business is it of yours?”

  “All right.” He turned around and started back down the stairs.

  She came to the head of the stairs, frowning, and looked down. “What the hell do you want, anyway?”

  “Nothing,” he said, not looking back. “It isn’t nothing.”

  “Hey, just a goddam second!”

  Stubbs went on down the stairs.

  “I’m calling the cops!” she shouted, and stormed back into her apartment.

  Stubbs went out to the street and back to the car, and looked at his list and the map again. C.F. Wells lived on West 73rd Street, and when Stubbs looked at the map he saw that that was a long way uptown. He sighed and started the car. Once he got above 14th Street, the going was easy, because all the streets were numbered, and as long as the numbers kept getting higher he knew he was going the right way.

  It was another apartment house, but a better one, bigger and cleaner and not converted from a brownstone dwelling. But it still wasn’t any place where a rich man would live. Stubbs pressed the button beside the name C.F. Wells, and when the buzzer sounded he went into a quiet foyer with a rug. There was an elevator, self-service, and he rode it up to the fourth floor and then knocked on the door of apartment 4-A.