Manhunt. Volume 9, Number 2, April 1961

The girl? The blonde who called herself Trudy Miller? She was the best of my few, forlorn hopes, but where could I find her? I didn’t know her name or where she lived or where she worked — even if she worked at all.

But I had to do something. I couldn’t sit there and wait for the cops to pick me up. They would do that soon enough and at least I wanted to be caught while trying to clear myself rather than hiding in a basement somewhere awaiting the inevitable.

And it was a pretty sad situation when my only thin hope of escaping execution lay in the name Palermo Club I remembered from an empty match cover on the floor of my car.

But oddly enough, it gave me hope, which proves that hope, too, is a comparative thing, and I pulled out of my hiding place wondering just where Largo had set up the switch of cars — just where had he replaced my cream convertible with Gloria Dane’s cream convertible. At the restaurant lot in Danvers? Possibly, but more likely the night before, at my bungalow when I was sleeping. Not that it mattered. It was just something to think about — something to keep my mind off chairs wired to high-voltage generators for the purpose of execution...

One tricky little point lay in my favor. They had to look for me, not my car. They would have no reason to associate me with Connie’s gay little foreign job and the odds were that the hunt would center in the wooded, suburban areas, not in Central City itself where I headed after stopping at a lonely phone booth to check the address of the Palermo Club. 621 River Street, the book said; an entirely logical address.

River Street was a five-block strip across lower Central City — a vast neon blaze when I got there because this was honkytown, thrillville, the street of girlie shows, clip joints, and catch-penny museums; a gaudy belt below which lay the city’s rail yards, the oil-streaked river and — at this hour — the sinister night streets of the skid-row slums.

I found a dark nook in a nearby alley where I parked the car and I decided that if I was going to get anywhere there was no point in slinking around with my hat over my face looking for back doors. So I stepped out into the carnival glare and moved down the street.

I’d been in the dark a long time with my nerves pulled as tight as violin strings and the pressure was telling a little in that suddenly none of it seemed real — the raucous color, the tinny music, the hoarse voices of the barkers — and I seemed to be walking in a dream — a big neon nightmare — with the girl I searched for nothing but a blonde phantom dancing in and out among the reds and the blues and the greens until they formed into a sign reading Palermo Club — 20 Blonde Sirens and I walked in through the wide-open door knowing I wouldn’t find her because it couldn’t possibly be this easy.

And I didn’t find her. But I found somebody else.

It was after my eyes had adjusted to the comparative dimness and I’d walked to the bar and ordered a scotch. Then I turned and saw him, alone, at a small table on the far side.

I paid for my drink and went over and sat down at the table facing him. I said, “Well, so this is Canada. And I suppose the blondes up there on the stage are deer and elk. How’s the hunting been, Jim?”

Jim Palos seemed to be debating his reaction. Should he be embarrassed, apologetic, or belligerent? He decided against all three and smiled lazily as new facets of Largo’s frame became crystal clear in my mind.

Jim said, “Hello, Larry. What are you doing down here?”

“Looking for a blonde. The name she gave me was Trudy Miller but it was probably phoney and the chances are slim that she even works here but you no doubt know more about that than I do.”

He was being wary, careful, calculating. “Why should I?”

I turned the scotch glass slowly in my fingers. “If you’re worried about my reaching over and knocking your teeth out, forget it. I’m not the explosive type. I’m just going to sit here like a law-abiding citizen and ask you a few questions.”

“Then I won’t start running. I’ll just sit here too.”

Jim Palos was a slim-waisted, broad-shouldered college athlete type and my trying to knock his teeth out was ridiculous. He could have unscrewed both my ears and made me eat them while I was trying to get one punch in.

I said, “It’s funny, Jim, how I didn’t figure you in when you were a natural. I knew that to make this frame work Largo needed someone close enough to me to get his hands on my car keys long enough to duplicate them and make a new lock for the other car. He needed someone who knew my habits, my routine; someone who could give him a pattern for the frame.”

“I didn’t know anything about the frame, Larry.”

“What did he offer you — my coin machine route?”

“That’s what I’m getting. In return I gave him certain information he needed. But I didn’t know how he was going to use it.”

“Maybe you did and maybe you didn’t but you certainly knew he meant me no good fortune.”

“I suspected as much.”