JAVA DIX
The Beginning of a Crime Story
When I woke up that morning I was broke. Not even coffee money. Out on the street there was a slow rain falling and I walked along, wondering what to do. I was two days back in town from the Far East and I didn’t know anybody.
Finally I stopped on a corner and was just standing there when this Buick convertible drove by. There was a girl in it with auburn hair. She was lovely…so lovely it made a guy catch his breath and start to hurt down inside. I watched the car until it turned the corner. Then, just as I was starting across the street, the convertible came up again and this girl stopped the car and looked at me.
She was young. Not more than twenty. Only the way she looked at me wasn’t young…she looked me over.
“Want to make some quick money?”
“Sure,” I said, and she opened the car door and I got in.
This babe I didn’t figure. She was no tramp. Every line of her breathed class. Nor could I figure the youth of her along with that wise way in which she examined me. The two things just didn’t go together.
We drove on for a couple of minutes and neither of us said anything. She had good legs, but I tried not to think of that. This babe wasn’t on the make and she wasn’t likely to go for a busted drifter.
“You,” she said, not looking at me, “you haven’t had breakfast, have you?”
“No.” I switched to the far side of the seat where I could look at her. “How’d you figure that?”
“It’s nine o’clock,” she said, “and you just came out on the street. You walked past a diner and you walked past a good restaurant. They wouldn’t let you make coffee in that hotel where you stayed. Then you stopped on the corner looking around. You didn’t know where you were going. I’ll bet you’re broke.”
“You’re a smart kid.”
“And you’re a stranger in town.”
“How’d you figure that one?”
“The way you look at the signs, the way you walked. The way you hesitated on the street like you weren’t sure about the traffic.”
“You do a lot of figuring. What’s the gimmick? What d’you want?”
“I want a man,” she said quietly, “with nerve enough to tackle hell with a bucket of water.”
That about floored me. Somehow it didn’t figure, not this girl needing help, and not the way she asked for it. She swung the car around a corner and pulled up at a small restaurant. “They don’t know me in here,” she said, “and it won’t be busy now. We’ll go to that booth almost to the back. We can talk while you eat.”
We got out of the car and went in. She was wearing a green raincoat and she walked quickly, not minding the rain on her hair. We took a table and she watched me eat. And then over her coffee she started to talk. But not until after she had pumped me for plenty.
Me? I’m a big guy, not heavy. I weigh only one-seventy, but I’m six-two. I can do a lot of things, none of them usual and not many of them legitimate.
Name? They call me Java, and my last name is Dix. Merchant seaman, lumberjack, placer miner in New Guinea, and pearl poacher. I was with the OSS during the war and afterwards a freelance journalist….That’s the quick version. Fights? I’ve won and I’ve lost, but I won more than I lost and got off the floor a few times to win.
I can talk nine languages like I was born to them. I’m proud of that.
“I need a man,” she said, “who has nerve and brains. I’m in trouble, real trouble.”
“Somebody else is in trouble,” I said, “not you.”
She smiled a little, hesitated, then nodded. “Yes, you’re right. It’s my mother.”
“If your mother is in trouble,” I said, “then it would be your father you took after.”
She smiled again, only this time it was not just a mechanical smile, it was warm and beautiful. “You’re right,” she said, “but my father is dead. If he were here I’d never have stopped you. I wouldn’t have been looking for you.”
“He must have been quite a guy.“
“Dad was wonderful,” she said quietly. “He was honest, and he had nerve. You would have liked him,” she said, and suddenly she looked at me, a little surprised, “and he would have liked you.”
“Fathers don’t like seeing drifters with their daughters. Drifters without money.”
“He would understand. He had been a drifter himself. Only he was rich when he died. He made it in the oil fields. He was a big man,” she said, “with red-gray hair, and—”
“Slasher Hannegan,” I said, “he was Slasher Hannegan, of Spindletop, of Seminole, of Tampico and Balikpapan.”
She stared at me, and tears came into her eyes. “You knew him? It…it’s unbelievable!”
“Worked for him, kid. I worked for him in Tampico. I was a tool-dresser. I worked on a tower for him in Borneo. That was ten years ago. And I remember you now, all freckles and knees, living in a house on the bluff above the road that wound around from the port to the Dutch Club.”
It was crazy, but there it was. She had picked up a tough-looking drifter off the street when she needed help, and I had worked for her old man. Only it wasn’t so strange, in some ways. A lot of tough men had worked for her father during the wild days of the oil booms.
We were both quiet then, and after a while she said, “It’s almost like he led me to you. I was desperate. I knew what he would have done, and knew I could not do it, so I started looking for the right sort of man. Yesterday I looked. I went to bar rooms, I rode along the docks, I looked everywhere…and then I saw you.”
She opened her purse and took out five twenties. She handed them across the table. “That’s a stake, Java. That’s for nothing. That’s what Dad would have given any man of his old crew if he was broke. You take it from Dad, and pay it back when you can.”
Once the money was in my pocket she did not waste any more time.
“My mother drinks,” she told me. “She drinks too much. She never drank when Dad was alive, and she never had reason to.” She looked me right in the eye and said quietly, “My mother needs a man. When Dad was around, she was all right. She was happy….Now she isn’t happy anymore and she drinks. And sometimes when she is drinking she goes out.”
This was tough for her. I could see how tough, only this kid was game. She must have been living with this for a long time, and it had not been easy.
“Usually she went out of town, but once it was the wrong man.”
“Blackmail?”
“Yes…but not just a little blackmail. He wants it all…everything.”
“You’ve talked to him?”
“Yes”—she looked up from her coffee—“he includes me.”
Something in me started to get mad then. It was bad enough to take advantage of a woman’s weakness, but to get this girl into it…“He’s got evidence?”
“Yes.”
“You said he wanted all of it? There’s a lot?”
“There’s eleven million, more or less,” she said quietly. “But it isn’t the money. It’s mother, and it’s Dave.”
“Dave?”
“My brother. He’s to be married soon, a girl from—a very prissy family.”
I grinned. “I take it your brother doesn’t take after your dad.”
Little by little the story shaped itself. But there was something about it that did not quite fit. Her mother, I gathered, was just forty, a lush and lovely woman. She had been closemouthed, however, even when drinking, but somehow this one particular man had found out exactly who she was, and he had come to town, looked the situation over, and then moved in with his demands.
“She’s already given him money?”
“Several times…about four thousand dollars.”
She waited while the waitress filled our cups, then she said, “He’s not in it alone. There’s somebody else.”
“What did you want me to do?”
“Find out all who are involved. Get the evidence. Prints, proof, everything.”
COMMENTS: There is a nice reference to some of Louis’s personal travels hiding in this story. When he writes
…a house on the bluff above the road that wound around from the port to the Dutch Club.
Louis Lamoore in Balikpapan, Netherlands’ East Indies.
Louis is talking about Balikpapan, a town on the Borneo coast, now part of Kalimantan, Indonesia. He visited there while working on a tramp freighter in the 1920s. Seeing that it was part of the Netherlands’ East Indies at the time, it was literally a club for the local Dutch residents. Louis claimed that, on certain evenings, they ran movies that, back in the States, would have been considered very out-of-date…seeing that this was still in the period before sound, I have always wondered exactly how old these films were!