Free Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara Page A

hated to go in, but he thought he ought to…. It was Joe, all right. Mrs. Steinmetz was alone and hadn’t been able to leave the house except to have a neighbor get a doctor. Joe had died of heart disease and was good and dead by the time the doctor had sent the undertaker.
    Joe left everything to his wife. She wanted Al to work for her, keep the poolroom going, and at first he thought it would be a good idea. But a few days of taking the day’s receipts all the way out to her house showed him he didn’t want to work for her. She offered to sell the good will and fixtures for five thousand dollars, but Al never had had that much money all at once in his life and there were only two ways he could borrow it: from the banks or from Ed Charney. He didn’t like banks or the people who worked in them, and he didn’t want to ask Ed. He didn’t think he knew Ed well enough to ask him for money. Anyhow, not that kind of money; five grand. So the poolroom went to Mike Minas, a Greek friend of George Poppas’s, and Al went to work for Ed Charney. He just went up to Ed and said: “Yiz have any kind of a job for me, Ed?” and Ed said yes, come to think of it, he had been thinking of offering him a job for a long time. They agreed on a fifty-dollar-a-week salary, and Al went to work. At first he merely drove Ed around on business and pleasure trips; then he was given a job of some importance, that of convoy to the booze trucks. He would follow two or three Reo Speedwagons, in which the stuff was transported. If a state policeman or a Federal dick stopped the trucks, it was Al’s business to stop too. It was an important job, because he took a chance of being sent to prison. When he stopped, it was his job to try to bribe the cops. It was an important job, because he carried up to tenthousand dollars cash of Ed’s money in the Nash roadster which he used on these trips. It was up to him to use his head about bribing the cops; one or two of them wouldn’t be bribed, but most of them would listen to reason unless they had been sent out to pinch a truck or two to make a showing. He had to be smooth in his bribery offers to some of them. Some of them would take anything from a gold tooth to ten thousand dollars, but hated to be approached in the wrong way. On the few occasions when the cops refused to be bribed, it was Al’s job to get to the nearest telephone, tell Ed, and get Jerome M. Montgomery, Ed’s lawyer, working on the case. Al never was arrested for attempted bribery. In fact he was so successful generally that Ed took him off the convoy job and made him a collector. Ed trusted him and liked him, and made a lot of money for him, or gave him a lot of money. Sitting there at breakfast on this Christmas morning Al Grecco could write a check for more than four thousand dollars, and he had thirty-two one-thousand-dollar bills in his safety deposit box. For a kid of twenty-six he was doing all right.
    Now Loving Cup suddenly was standing at his table. “On the phone, you,” said Loving Cup.
    “Who is it? Some dame?” said Al.
    “Don’t try and bluff me,” said Loving Cup. “I know you’re queer. No, it’s a party I think they said the name was Jarney or Charney. That was it. Charney.”
    “Wise guy,” said Al, getting up. “I’ll cut your ears off. Is it Ed?”
    “Yeah,” said Loving Cup, “and he don’t sound like Christmas to me.”
    “Sore, eh?” Al hurried to the telephone. “Merry Christmas, boss,” he said.
    “Yeah. Same to you,” said Ed, in a dull voice. “Listen, Al, my kid got his arm broke—”
    “Jesus, tough! How’d he do that?”
    “Oh, he fell off some God damn wagon I bought him. So anyhow I’m staying here till he gets the arm set and all, and I won’t be down till I don’t know when. Annie is all hysterical and yelling her head off—shut up, for Christ’s sake, can’t yousee I’m phoning. So I’m staying here. Now listen, Al. Do you have a date for tonight?”
    “Nothing