Nothing to Lose But My Life

Chapter I

WHEN THE SIX P.M. local plane that flew the California coast between L.A. and San Francisco made its stop at Puerto Bello, I got off, clutching my bag tightly as I had all the way from Mexico. It was a nice piece of luggage, the kind that went with the two-hundred-dollar suit and the forty-dollar shoes I was wearing. I didn’t want to tempt anyone by taking my hands off it.

For that matter, I could as easily have afforded to have my life taken as lose the bag. I knew that if anything happened to it now, I might as well go back to Torreon in Mexico and forget the whole thing. And it was nothing I could forget—not and live with myself. I wasn’t tough enough to go through again what I had gone through in the five years since I’d left Puerto Bello. I kept a death grip on that bag, sweating out every inch of the ride in the airport limousine just as I had sweated during the long flight behind me.

The limousine took me to the Portview. It was a new place, a combination hotel-motel sprawled on the beach at the south entrance to the town. It had all the accoutrements—a ballroom, dining room, coffee shop, two bars, a fancy lobby, shaded walks between individual guest cottages, and a view of Puerto Bello’s harbor which was often called the most exclusive public harbor in the country.

I registered as Lowry Curtis, was given a sea-view cottage and followed the bellhop along a walk garnished with palms and mimosa practically to the edge of the beach. The bellhop was sore because I wouldn’t let him carry my bag, but a five-dollar bill and an order for a bottle of rye mollified him. He went away, leaving me in peace.

When he came back with the rye, I gave him an extra dollar and told him I didn’t want to be disturbed. Putting the night lock on the door, I stripped and showered, taking the bag into the bath with me. I ran the razor over my face carefully because six hours between shaves was too much for a beard as dark as mine when I wanted to look sharp. And I had an idea that tonight people would get a good look at me. That was what I wanted—a lot of people to stare at me. If things were as I hoped, there would be no recognition from any of them. Not right away.

Back in the bedroom, I laid the bag on the bed and opened it. I got into a pair of shorts and then mixed myself a drink, using cool tap water. Now that I was actually here, the sharp edge of my impatience was gone. I couldn’t force myself to get started. I went to the window and slatted the Venetian blinds so I could see through them. It was a dark, clear night, cool as November nights usually were but somehow soft with the light breeze off the Pacific.

The harbor lay before me. A few lighted buoys showed and one small boat, looking like something at a carnival with its colored string of running lights, was plowing out toward the open ocean. Off to my left, southward, were the massed lights of Millionaires’ Hill, the swank section just out of the city limits. It was the place where the retired rich had once lived but which, since before I went away, had housed stock brokers and part-time bankers and others who could live here and carry on their business by flying to L.A. or San Francisco now and then. It looked much the same as I remembered it except that there were more lights now.

I finished my drink and returned to the bed. I went back and checked the window. It was down. I gave the blinds a tug, making sure that they were slanted well up. I went to the door and tested the night lock. I was nervous. I didn’t want to begin, to get things under way. Yet I knew that I had to. If I delayed much longer, I would miss the party—my reason for having arrived on this particular day at this particular time.

I reached to the inside top of the bag and slipped aside the little tabs I had devised to hold the lining in place. My hand was shaking.

Does this really mean so much to you, Lowry? I said it aloud because I wanted to hear my own voice. It shook too.

The answer was obvious. It did mean a lot to me. It meant all that it could possibly mean. Five years of work lay here. And it represented an investment in money as well as time. I expected it to pay me well. To pay me in cash—heavy cash—but, more important, to give me back myself, my name and the respect from others I had once had. I expected it to pay me by giving me the right to my own name and the right to hold my head up in public once again.

I kept telling myself that because it sounded good. It sounded better than bringing up the one ugly word that lay down deep inside my mind—revenge.

I drew aside the lining and looked at the money that lay there. Four thousand dollars. Not a great deal, perhaps—no more than a good tip nowadays to men like Nikke and Colonel Hoop. But it wasn’t the money that counted. It was only to prime the pump, to make my way easier, just as having the expensive clothes and staying at the Portview would make it easier. It was what lay beneath the money that counted.

I laid the packets of bills aside and lifted out the two large brown envelopes. Now that I had actually started, I felt the impatience again. I sat on the edge of the bed and ran my fingers over those envelopes. There was one for Nikke and one for Colonel Hoop. And each one represented thousands of dollars in cash and two and a half years of my life. They were personal dossiers, as complete as I could get them.

Once Nikke had been my friend. After the war and law school, I had come back to Puerto Bello, my home town, and started practice. Nikke had come well before the war but not until after it did he start to grow big. He was smart and smooth, a well-heeled gambler who catered only to a trade that could afford to lose or could afford to win. Like his clientele, Nikke lived on the Hill. He was almost one of them; he was a cultured man with an obviously first-rate background. Most important, he was honest.

When I started practice, he found an occasional job for me. We always got along well—we had a lot of things in common, reading and chess and music and just talk—and he never asked me to do anything even faintly illegal. Nikke never played it illegally except insofar as gambling itself was beyond the law.

And I went up. I met Hill people at Nikke’s place. I met Jen and we were married. Jen came from the Hill and she had friends like the Proctors who were practically the founders of the district, friends like Colonel John Hoop who knew stocks and bonds and the right investments to make a man become well to do in a hurry. I told myself that knowing such people was really living and I emulated them.

My investments with Hoop began to pay off. I wasn’t up to living on the Hill yet, but Jen and I achieved the Slope, the hill within the city limits where it took only a five-figure income to live well. We had two nice cars, nice furniture, a comfortable routine of life. I dressed conservatively, grew pink and plump and prosperous-looking. Sometimes I was bored, but I was too busy making money for that to last long. And I was too much in love with Jen for anything else but satisfying her to matter.

And then it happened. Nikke asked me to defend a new man he had hired. The man was accused of going off on his own, starting a crap game in a city hotel, getting caught with heavy dice, and killing his way out. Nikke swore that it was a frame. It happened in the city and Nikke had no influence in the city; he had always left it strictly alone. I didn’t like the case but I took it because Nikke said his man was innocent.

Then I tried to drop the whole thing. Because no matter which way I turned, only one kind of evidence faced me—guilt. I went to Nikke. He had been changing rapidly the past months and now the change was almost painfully visible. I told him I was through, that he had lied to me. He lost the gentleness that had always been so much a part of him. He told me flatly that not only would I defend his man but I would secure his release. I refused even to try. We broke apart on that.

Then it happened to Jen. Coming down the Hill one night from a party, her car went out of control. Supposedly the brakes had failed. It was hard to prove anything by what was left of the car. Jen was accused of being drunk and of manslaughter because the driver of the old, rickety car she had hit died. The charge didn’t matter; Jen was near death herself. That hadn’t been part of the plan, I was sure. They had only intended to put her in a bad spot. But she got hurt and hurt badly.

My cash drained away like snow under a California sun. I turned to Colonel Hoop for more money, asking him to realize all he could on my investments and give me the cash. I wanted enough to fly Jen to one last specialist. And I found that I was broke. Hoop claimed he was going under. He had reinvested my profits and his own and those of half a dozen others and the investments had gone bad. He had figures to prove it to me. He had nothing else but his home and cars and yacht and probably a few hundred thousand dollars. He refused me.

I went back onto the case because I got the money I needed from Nikke. It did no good; I had spent too much time waiting for Hoop. Jen died on the way to the specialist. I got a postponement on the case for a while but when I went back to it, things were no better. I kept on now because I owed a debt to Nikke. And because a witness showed up, one who made it look as if Nikke had not lied after all. I didn’t really check him closely; I didn’t care enough.

Then in the middle of the trial I awoke to the fact that the witness was completely phony. I could see that the prosecution knew it too and were just waiting for the right moment to break things wide open. I made an effort to salvage what I could, breaking my own witness and having him committed for perjury. But the finger went down on me anyway. It took all the legal footwork I was capable of to keep me out of jail. I saved myself from that but got a disbarment.

And I left town—broken by Nikke because I had tried to untie the knot that held us together, broken by Hoop because I wanted money rightfully mine. I went to Mexico and waited and planned and worked. And now I was back.

In Nikke’s dossier were the accumulated efforts of half a dozen detective agencies. Each one had been given little jobs, apparently unrelated jobs. But their results totalled up told me almost all anyone could know about the new Nikke.

Just before my own trouble had started, Nikke had gone in with a syndicate that had formed in the County. And he had grown big and in some ways mean and dirty. His place on the Hill was the same. But there were other places, mostly on the highway south, where a poorer man than the Hill people could lose his money or buy a one-night stand or almost anything he wanted. And now Nikke had a real organization, American style, staffed with men whose faces and prints were in every major Rogues’ Gallery. That was what Nikke had become. That, and rich.

It had cost me even more to learn about the Colonel because on the surface he was still all respectability. He was still John Hoop, investment banker. Five years ago, at the time he was crying broke to me, he had just received a fat loan that allowed him to more than recoup any losses. Ultimately, he paid back those profits he was forced to pay. But two of his clients hadn’t been able to wait and had taken the easy way out, and a third—me—had apparently disappeared. He juggled the books and wiped off the debts. He paid back the loan and that money went to Nikke. My dossier here hinted that the Colonel might be connected with the Syndicate.

I knew a good deal about Hoop and the people connected with him. His business partner was a man named Charles Conklin who had come up from L.A. six months before my troubles began. He had married Sofia Proctor, the elder of two sisters, and it was his money that kept her on the Hill. Her parents had died, leaving the Hill equivalent of peanuts. I knew that Sofia’s younger sister, Enid, the harum-scarum college kid of five years before, was still single, that she drank too much and was seen almost nightly at Nikke’s biggest new club, a place on the highway south. My last reports on her indicated that she had started to work for Nikke, shilling the fat and bald boys from out of town to the roulette tables and setting them up for the kill.

And I knew about Tanya Mace. She was a widow and had come to Puerto Bello two years ago. She was engaged to marry Hoop. She was thirty-one and he was going onto sixty. He had loaded her with jewels and was remodelling his house to suit her. He had fallen hard and I suspected that she was showing her affection by giving him the full sucker treatment.

I also knew that her husband had been William Mace, one of the smoother boys who worked in the background for an L.A. syndicate. Something had gone wrong and he found himself up on a manslaughter charge. He had jumped bail and gone to Central America. Tanya followed him and came back alone. She tried to resume her exclusive dress-designing business in Beverly Hills but gave it up and moved to Puerto Bello. Mace was never heard from again. His death was not legally proved but she was planning to marry again anyway.

These were the things I knew about Nikke and Hoop and their associates, and I was going to use the information to get myself back. I was going to see Nikke sweat and