Blonde Bait for the Murder Master

John D. MacDonald Blonde Bait for the Murder Master

Chapter One

“It’s like in a bank,” Brock Sentosa said, smiling at me. “You count this stuff long enough and maybe you could be counting beans, or old movie stubs.”

Maybe Brock had given himself time enough to get casual about the greasy wads of currency that covered the two card tables in what had been a “Play room” in the cellar of the rented house at 1012 Cramer. But I couldn’t be casual about it; I was too new at it.

Anna Garron sat at another card table off to one side, checking the winning ticket returns against the amounts turned in by the retailers. She was blonde and lovely, and if you didn’t think about it, she looked like any pretty and competent secretary working in any office. But then you’d notice that her clothes weren’t quite the sort that would be acceptable in an office; and her makeup was just a shade theatrical, and tiny lines that edged the corners of her mouth gave her a hard look.

Brock had finished counting the twenties, tens and fives, and was putting the ones in stacks of a hundred. The silver was already in a canvas sack. I leaned against the door and watched him and thought of how little I knew about him. Brock Sentosa is a man with a smiling face. Meeting him on the street or in a bar you’d take him for a goodnatured clown. His dark hair is thin and receding and his cheeks are plump, like a squirrel with a hazelnut in each cheek. It’s the eyes that give him away. They are a pale and yellowish brown, and have a dull tarnished look, as though they had been buffed with fine sandpaper. It is although a corpse wore the mask of a living man.

But I had no kick coming. He had picked me up when I was the lowest, and started me in at more money than I had ever seen before.

He could afford it, because the syndicate he works for has the formula for success. It is an old story but none the less effective because it is old. Take a place like Murrisberg, my home town: one hundred and forty thousand people; freight yards; slag heaps; slums and the oily smoke of a dozen factories. A Saturday night town, a brawling, hard-fisted town, where the mills hands and the freight-yard boys look on everything in the world with deep suspicion — with the exception of green money, hard liquor, fast cars and careless women.

Five days a week, the paper carries the figures which show the treasury balance. You get a local, down-at-the-heels, printer to make up a hundred thousand tickets each week; you sell them at two bits apiece. A ticket is good for a whole week, and there are five winning numbers each week. Your odds of hitting a winning number are twenty thousand to one. The payoff is two thousand to one, except the Friday number; that pays four thousand to one. The dream payoff. A thousand dollars for a quarter.

And so I knew that the money on the cardtables was money that should have gone for groceries, or medicines, or interest on the mortgage, or payments on the car. Greasy bills slipped to the vendor with a wise look. “Give me four tickets, George. This week I’m going to hit.”

And George, having learned the patter, says, “You hear about that guy named Baker offer to the tool works? The son-of-a-gun hits a five hundred buck winner two weeks ago, and last week he gets the big one. One thousand bucks.”

“Better make it eight tickets, George. Here’s the two bucks.”

It started in a small way in Murrisberg with a local group of sharpies, and then the syndicate came in and took over. It wasn’t hard. The sharpies were small time. A few mashed faces and broken teeth and they were glad to have the state-wide syndicate take over.

The syndicate, which sent Brock Sentosa to Murrisberg, is not too greedy. They get the tickets printed up and sell them to the local distributor for thirteen cents each; that includes insurance on the big hits, the big winners. In Murrisberg the distributor was Johny Naga. His spread was three cents a ticket. Out of that he had to pay off the consolation prizes. Small winners. A dollar here, five there. The men who worked for Naga, distributing the tickets around at candy stores, bars, cigar counters, made four cents a ticket. That left a nickel a ticket for the cut on over-the-counter sales.

So each week the treasury pool took in roughly $25,000 — took it right out of the pockets of the mill hands. That is why, each week, Brock Sentosa counted up the thirteen thousand dollars. Naga got three thousand, the distributors got four and the candy stores knocked off five.

Each week I stood in the cellar with the automatic in the spring clip making a small bulge in my coat, while two other boys hung around upstairs. Brock Sentosa counted up the thirteen thousand, took out enough to pay the hits that had been made during the week — generally not more than two thousand — took fifteen hundred for himself. Out of which he gave me two hundred, the girls a hundred each and the boys upstairs a hundred each.