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As I noted in my introduction to this book, “It’s a Tough World” and “I Don’t want No Trouble” pretty much encapsulate my philosophy of life. Of course, a lot of other people feel the same way, quietly going about their business and hoping the world will leave them alone. But I do know a good many of the opposite type: pugnacious, aggressive sorts who constantly feel the necessity to stick their necks out in defense of some principle or other that they regard as essential to defend.
Well, so be it. People vary, and that’s what makes the world interesting. I am who I am; the characters in my stories are who they are, and most of them do all kinds of things that I would never dream of doing myself. That’s what makes it fiction, not autobiography. I would, for example, never hold up a liquor store, because, as the first line of this story explicitly states, “I don’t want no trouble.” A bungled holdup leading to an arrest would be very embarrassing: how would I explain it to my wife, my friends my neighbors, my cats? On the other hand, as my narrator goes on to say in the very next sentence, “A guy’s got to eat.” So here we have somebody doing something that the author of his narrative would never have done, but, since he don’t want no trouble, he handles the situation with something of the same caution that I myself would have used if circumstances had impelled me to take up a career of robbery instead of one of writing.
This was nearly the last of the long string of crime stories I did for Trapped and Guilty. I wrote it in April, 1961, and Scottie used it in the September, 1961 issue of Guilty, under the byline of Ed Chase. The same issue included two others of mine, one as Dan Malcolm, one as Ray McKensie. About the time I turned them in, Scottie told me that the magazines were in a last-gasp situation, and he was going to experiment with running book-length novels in each issue in the hope of competing with the paperback books that were putting most fiction magazines out of business. So I did no more short stories for him, and my final contribution to Guilty was the 40,000-word novel, “The Mystery of the Judge’s Mistress,” published as by Dan Malcolm. About that story I can tell you nothing at all aside from the title, because it lies more than half a century in my past and I don’t even remember writing it, let alone what it’s about. It appeared in the March, 1962 issue of Guilty, and three more quarterly issues followed, with novel-length pieces by other writers. The March, 1963 issue was its last.
Trapped had expired even sooner. (Though the two magazines were identical in all but their names, Guilty always outsold its companion, and no one knew why.) My last short story for Trapped was published in the February, 1962 issue—a minor item by Dan Malcolm, called “The Stag Movie Murder”. Then came the conversion to novel-length work, and the long items in the May and August, 1962 issues were done by other hands. The November, 1962 issue offered Ray McKensie’s “Too Much Blood on the Mink,” which I had actually written a few years earlier, in October, 1959, for a short-lived crime-fiction magazine that went out of business without publishing it. (Though I did get paid!) I have no record of what I had originally called it, so it remained for Scottie to hang the grand “Too Much Blood...” name on it. And with that November, 1962 issue, Trapped vanished from publishing history.
My story, having killed two magazines, one of them even before publication, might reasonably be considered to have been box-office poison. But in fact it was a pretty good novel, as I discovered fifty years later, when Charles Ardai, the enterprising publisher of a fine series of noir paperbacks called Hard Case Books, came upon that old issue of Trapped in some second-hand bookstore, read my novel (how did he know that “Ray McKensie” was me?) and asked me if I’d like him to republish it. I read it post-haste and was startled to find how lively it was, non-stop action all the way and an ingenious plot involving counterfeiting U.S. currency, none of which I remembered in the slightest. It’s an interesting experience for a writer to read his own work with great excitement, turning pages as fast as he can and wondering what’s going to happen next. I gave the project my blessing, though I toned Scottie’s flamboyant title down a bit to “Blood on the Mink,” and it was published in 2012, receiving enthusiastic reviews and, Charles tells me, selling quite well.
My career as a crime-fiction writer was long over by then, of course. With the demise of Trapped and Guilty, I gave up crime for good, so far as my ancient records indicate, with the lone exception of the futuristic murder story “The Dead Man’ s Eyes” that I wrote for Playboy in 1988. But it had been fun while it lasted, a walk on the wild side that took me far from my basic vocation in science-fiction, and it has been fun now, all these many decades later, to dig the old stories out and offer them again to a readership that probably had no idea that I was one of the most prolific writers of crime-fiction stories in the middle years of the last century.
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I DON’T WANT NO TROUBLE
I had my hands on big money, but I just couldn’t take it.
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I don’t want no trouble. But a guy’s got to eat, he’s got to have a bottle now and then, he wants a woman from time to time. And when you’re out of work and can’t find , and when those government checks finally run out, you got to go out and find yourself some money. It don’t grow on trees.
It grows in cash registers, though.
I was starting to feel like I was up against the thin edge. Here it was November, and I hadn’t worked two days in a row since some time last February. The government gives you checks and the state gives you checks too, but neither of them go on giving checks forever. My checks had run out. I was up against it.
Not that I didn’t want to work I ain’t a drifter, get me? But you can’t just walk into a place and say, “Gimme a job.” You got to have skills. Well, I got a few skills, I guess, but what I don’t have is a union card, so even if I know how to drive a truck it don’t do me any good to go around asking for a job. They got plenty of paid-up Teamsters to do that kind of work.
And another thing. I ain’t married. That automatically puts me down at the bottom of the list when they hand out the jobs. If two guys are out of work, and one of them has three hungry kids at home and the other guy’s just got himself, who do you think they’re going to give the job to? Right. So I was up against it, but hard.
I pulled this grocery store job in August and got me ninety bucks. Not bad. Enough to keep the rent paid for a while, enough to buy a few plates of baked beans and hot dogs, enough to pay for beer.
I did another grocery store in September. Sixty-eight bucks. Okay, I didn’t starve in September.
Don’t get the idea I’m a crook. I’m just an ordinary un-employed citizen. A goddam statistic. Free, white, twenty-seven years old, never convicted of a major crime. And hungry. A guy’s got to eat, don’t he?
In October I did this liquor store job. A hundred forty bucks. Okay, pretty damn good. But I owed this guy sixty bucks, and he came first, and the rest didn’t last too long. So now it was November, the cold weather closing in, and jobs about as easy to find as left-handed unicorns, and all the papers I find in the park full of big talk about how an upturn is coming any month now.
Yeah. Prosperity was just around the corner.
Meantime I was down to six bucks, and nobody I knew had any dough I could scrounge. So I was going to have to pull another job. That was all there was to it.
–
It isn’t hard to get money out of shopkeepers. You pick out the right neighborhood, you pick out the right time of day, and you make sure you jam your gun in their face before they get the chance to start trouble. I had this .45, it looked like a goddam cannon.
I hadn’t ever fired it, not once, and I had but one box of bullets and when those were gone I wouldn’t have any more. A shabby guy buying bullets can get looked at funny, so I didn’t want to have to replenish my ammunition if I didn’t have to.
I picked out this neighborhood one dark night in the middle of November. There was a liquor store down the block. Liquor stores are better than grocery stores. They take in more money in the cheap neighborhoods than grocery stores do and they sometimes get a little careless.
There wasn’t a cop in sight. There wasn’t anybody in sight. I walked up to this liquor store. Big stack of wine bottles in the window, a nice bright display. Trouble was, there was so much of a display in the window that a cop wandering by couldn’t really look into the store through the window to see what was what. Which was fine.
I went in.
There were two guys in the store. They looked like brothers. One was almost fifty, the other one around forty, and they both had this tired washed-out look. They both had glasses. They both had grayish-purple shop-coats on. It wasn’t cold in the liquor store. It was warm and nice in there.
They looked at me like I was the first customer who had come into the place in the last three days.
“Can I help you?” the older one said. The younger one was busy arranging some bottles on a shelf behind the cash register.
I nodded. “What do you have in the way of a good brandy at about three bucks a fifth?”
“Something for a cold night, huh?”
“That’s right,” I said. “Something for a cold night, you bet.”
He turned around to point to some bottles on the shelf behind him. Now both brothers had their backs to me. That was just fine. I reached into my inside pocket and took out the .45.
The sound of the safety slipping was awfully loud. Two washed-out faces turned around in a hurry.
I moved the gun on a long, slow arc from one brother to the other. They were standing about twelve or fifteen feet away from each other.
“Keep your hands where I can see them,” I said. “Just keep them up here and nobody’ll get hurt. Start walking toward each other. I want to be able to cover both of you at the same time.
They wet their lips with the same expression. “Listen, mister, we don’t want any trouble,” the younger one said.
I smiled. “That’s my motto too, friend. I don’t want no trouble. Now let’s make this quick, and suppose you open up the register and get the dough out.”
They were so scared they were shivering. The younger one punched the NO SALE key on the cash register and the drawer shot open. I leaned way across the counter to make sure he wasn’t going to pull any guns out of there, all the while keeping my eye on the other one also, and watching the door with quick little glances.
No gun in the register.
Just money.
He started hauling it out. His hands were shaking like he had all of a sudden caught a bad case of palsy. I watched the bills piling up on the counter. It came to about a hundred twenty bucks. Not bad, not bad at all.
I leaned forward again to make sure he had cleaned the drawer out. Then I looked down the counter toward the side, and there was a little curtain half-parted in front of a smaller room.
I saw something that looked mighty like a safe in that other room.
–
I pointed to the curtain as I pocketed the hundred twenty bucks. “What’s in there?”
“The back room.”
“I know that. What’s in it?”
“N-nothing much.”
“There’s a safe in there, isn’t there?” I said.
Neither of them answered. They looked like a couple of ghosts. I gestured with the gun. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s go see what you’ve got back there. Both of you. Move it.”
They went on ahead of me into the back room. Sure enough, it was a safe, a square green one, with a bit dial on it.
“What’s inside?” I asked.
“J-just our record books and ledgers,” the older one said. “Nothing you’d be interested in.”
“Maybe I would be,” I said. “Open it up.”
“But—”
“Open it!”
They were turning fifty different shades of green, and I began to see that I was on to something big. But I didn’t dream just how big. I prodded the younger brother with the gun, and I thought for a second he was going to puke just out of sheer funk. Then he got down on his knees and started twiddling the dials of the safe.
“You’ll be sorry you messed with this,” the older brother told me.
“Shut up.” I was getting pretty fidgety. I had already been in the store almost five minutes, and there was no telling when a customer might come in. Or a cop. But I wasn’t going to make a panicky exit, not with a safe here.
The big door swung open.
I looked in and damn near flipped my lid. The safe was full of money. Stacks and stacks of it. I pulled one package out and riffled through it. There were about a hundred five-dollar bills in the package, with a paper band holding them together.
I tried to stay calm. “How much you got here altogether?” I asked.
“J-just over fourteen thousand.”
I was wigged. Fourteen grand! Jeez, with that kind of dough I wouldn’t have to worry about government checks for a long time to come. I could go to Florida for the winter, if I felt like. It would take a hell of a long time to spend fourteen thou. It was more money than I’d ever seen in one place in my life.
But I had to keep cool. I wanted to dive into that safe and grab all that money in my arms and hug it, but that wasn’t smart.
I said, “Get a carton, and some twine, and a carrying handle. Pack all this stuff up for me, and make it fast.”
“You better not fool, buddy,” the younger one said. “You don’t want to touch that dough.”
“Keep your trap shut. I—”
Just then there was a tinkling sound, the sound of the bell hung over the door. Somebody had come in. A cop or a customer. I sneaked a peep through the curtain and saw that it was a big guy in a dark coat, with his hat pulled pretty far down.
I pointed at the younger brother. “Go out there and take care of him,” I said, “and get rid of him fast. If I hear you say one thing that’s out of line, I’ll blow a hole in your brother’s head big enough to stick that safe through. You got me?”
He nodded nervously. He slipped through the curtain and went outside.
I was starting to get the shakes. But I thought of all that dough, I kept my gun pointed at the older brother’s green face and waited for the younger brother to get rid of the customer.
–
“Hello Tommy,” I heard the customer say. His voice was deep and tough.
“H-hello, Mike.”
“Slow night, huh?”
“Pretty slow.”
“Got the package ready yet?” Mike said.
“N-not yet, Mike. We—we had something come up. Something a little out of the ordinary. That’s why we didn’t get it ready in time.”
“The car’s waiting, Tommy.”
“I’m sorry. We couldn’t get it ready in time. Maybe if you came back in around half an hour or so, Mike—”
“What kind of crap is this?” I heard Mike say. “It’s nine o’clock, second Monday of the month. You’re supposed to have it ready. You aren’t supposed to give me crap about not having it.”
“Can you make it back here in half an hour? It’s—it’s something out of the ordinary tonight.”
“Like what?”
“I—can’t tell you, Mike.”
“Hey, what’s going on here? You sick or something? You look goddamm peculiar.”
“Please, Mike. I’m not trying to cheat the Syndicate, anything like that. But you got to come back later. I can’t get the collection ready for you now.”
A long silence.
Then Mike said, “Well, we got this pickup at the laundry on St. Martin Avenue at half past nine. I’ll go over there and come back here by ten. And God help you if that collection ain’t ready, Tommy. You hear me? We don’t fool around in this operation.”
“He gone?” I asked.
“Till ten.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I heard.” I looked at the safe. The older brother had gotten out a carton, and he had stacked about five inches of bills into it.
There was a lump in my throat the size of a golf ball. I patted the hundred twenty bucks in my pocket, and then I looked down at the stack of money in the safe and at the layer of green that was rapidly filling up the carton. All I had to do was stand around till they filled up the carton, and then pick it up like I was picking up a case of beer, and walk out.
Fourteen grand.
Enough to buy a new Cadillac and have plenty left over. Enough to stand me a year of eating steaks at the best places in town. And the women! I ached all over when I thought of the dames I could buy for that kind of money. The slick blondes with the Marilyn Monroe figures. The sharp operators who knew how to give a man a thrill he’d never forget—for a price.
And I would have the price.
I said, “Was that guy who was just here who I think he was?”
“That all depends,” the younger brother said warily. “Who do you think he was?”
“This is a numbers drop,” I said. “You two run a real big business here. A real big business. And he was a Syndicate man, coming around to make the monthly pickup of your collections. Right?”
“You hit it pal,” the younger one said.
“And he’ll be back in an hour.” I said. “What’s he gonna do to you when he comes back here and finds the safe’s cleaned out?”
“It isn’t what he’ll do to us,” the older one said in a hoarse voice. “It’s what he’ll do to you. That’s what you ought to be thinking of.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m thinking of it.”
I looked at the safe again, then at the carton. At the stacks and stacks of bills.
I ached for that money.
Even for some of the money. Two hundred, three hundred—that was my idea of a real fortune. More than that got unwieldy.
I let my breath out slowly.
“Okay,” I said. “You can put the money back in the safe.”
“All of it?”
“All of it,” I said.
I felt like somebody had sewed some lead weights into my stomach. I don’t remember when I ever felt so sad before, so completely miserable.
The younger one looked up at me. “You’re a smart guy. Smarter than you look.”
“Yeah,” I said, hating myself for chickening out. “A real Einstein.”
I watched them unloading the carton’s contents back into the safe. About a thousand bucks flashed under my nose, and then it started to make me sick.
“So long,” I said.
I turned and headed out into the street. It was cold and empty out there. There was a hundred twenty bucks in my pocket that I hadn’t had fifteen minutes ago. So tomorrow I’d have a good meal. Not steak, but at least I’d be eating.
I wanted to sit down somewhere and cry.
Fourteen thousand bucks.
But I wouldn’t be robbing a couple of shopkeepers. I’d be robbing the Syndicate. And the Syndicate don’t put up with stuff like that. The cops wouldn’t catch me, but the Syndicate would. And I knew what they did to guys who tried to cut themselves in. Hot wax dripped into their eyes, and a lot worse. They didn’t kill you. Not the Syndicate. When they caught a guy who had crossed them, they did a job on him, and then they turned what was left of him loose to hobble around and beg for nickels.
I turned up my collar. Fourteen grand. And I didn’t have the guts to touch a penny of it. Not a goddam penny. I let them put it all back.
I walked into a bar on the next block over.
“Beer,” I said.
The barkeep drew one for me, and I gave him one of the liquor store’s bills, and he gave the change. And I told myself that I could have been drinking champagne now instead of beer.
Fourteen grand.
But it wasn’t worth it. Not heisting the Syndicate dough, it wasn’t worth it. Like I said, I’m no crook. I’m just an ordinary unemployed citizen. A goddam statistic.
I thought of all that money in that safe.
All the money that could have been mine.
Then I started to forget all about it. Dough like that wasn’t for the likes of me. I’m small-time.
So now you know how I held up a liquor store for fourteen grand and then didn’t take it. Maybe you think I was dumb. Maybe I was. But I still think I did the smart thing.
Like I said, I don’t want no trouble.