The Bandit

You will forgive me if I tell you — with a little admiration — about some criminals I once knew. They were part of my youth which, by itself, makes them admirable. But they were also brave, courteous and fond of us newspaper Neds. They never told lies, except to the police; never robbed any fellow man of his good name, only of his life if the situation called for it. And I remember no crook who was greedy, or no crook who thought that money made a man.

And how harmless these crooks seem alongside today's honorables who are nobly determined to blow up our planet so that the ideals of freedom shall not perish. Let us hope the surviving insects will be smart enough to admire our aspirations. This way, ants and glowworms — crawl up for a look at the highfalutin print and paper records left behind by humanity!

My apologies for sneaking this end-of-the-world epitaph into my gay story. Let the politicians wrestle with their grand finale. I'll hang on to yesterday — and my criminals.

An ideal spot for consorting with criminals was Big Jim Colosimo's Café, after three A.M. Mossy Enright, Gene Geary, Tommy O'Connor, Blackie Weed — a bevy of well-barbered knaves beckons, masticating their porterhouse steaks and listening moodily to Big Jim's orchestra play The Chocolate Soldier, Madame Sari, The Red Mill. But I'll pass them over for Big Jim himself, the most deserving for recall. And he is, too, sort of backstop for my story.

Big Jim Colosimo had begun his career, Horatio Alger fashion, as a street sweeper in a white suit, with a long-handled brush and a garbage can on wheels. One summer morning, Madame Victoria, lolling in her brothel window, noted the eye-flashing, six-foot-three sweeper tidying the street in front of her doorstep. She whistled at him. Big Jim dropped his long-handled brush and strode into Victoria's house, and Chicago history.

They married and within 10 years Jim put 22 affiliated whorehouses into action, all stocked with evening-gowned lassies, hopheaded pimps and pale piano players. In his rise as brothel king of Chicago, Colosimo's name "had been linked" (as the libel-ducking newspapers gingerly put it) with 12 murders and 91 near-lethal sluggings. The road to success is ever a bumpy one. But there were no unpleasant legal consequences for this carnage. This was because Big Jim had unselfishly declared the town's police and judiciary in on his whorehouse harvest. He raised "the fix" in the U.S.A. from furtive bribery to big business. Indeed, all our public guardians of today swanking around on their underworld takes must pay homage to Jim Colosimo as the founding father of their corruption.

With his 23 sex centers booming, and his dope peddling and crooked gambling activities in high, Colosimo divorced the impressionable Victoria who had whistled at him one summer morning. He opened his tony café on the Near South Side. A commanding figure in tuxedo, diamond studs and well-greased hair, he presided here nightly, respected and admired by Chicago's flossiest citizens. Bigwigs of industry, politics and the arts felt enhanced by his handshake. Next to Mayor William Hale Thompson, who was stealing the city blind, Colosimo was our ranking celebrity.

After Big Jim was gunned down one dawn in a phone booth (by "parties unknown" — whom every reporter in town could name), I covered his funeral — a cavalcade of éclat and officialdom worthy a hero of the land. Nearly every whiskey-nosed magistrate who owned a silk hat, and more dignitaries of every stripe than had been assembled since the Chicago Fire, rode in the grieving procession. Several hundred thousand humbler citizens crowded the line of march and filled the air with lamentation as Big Jim moved by in his $10,000 brass coffin, with a 50-piece band tooting him softly to his resting place. Tagging after his hearse were 30 open automobiles stuffed with flowers. Not a blossom was left on sale in Chicago that day.

Vale, Jim Colosimo. But back to his café on a night of his reign, when he still gloried and drank deep. By three A.M. the higher types of café society, full of wine, food and preparatory necking, had teetered off to their priapic chambers. And the people of the night started to eat, drink and discourse at the always snowy-linened tables provided by Mr. Colosimo. The four-piece orchestra — a piano, cello and two violins — dozed between offerings. But the waiters (continued on page 52)Bandit(continued from page 49) were on their toes like a football line, for it was now boom time for tips. Who were these night people? Killers, burglars, pimps, stickup men called "on the muscle" boys, and an aristocracy of con men who could speak like London fops and order their food with French phrases. All these with their ladies fair.

A varied-looking run of wenches: a few beauties with explosive bosoms and foot-high Spanish combs stuck in their hair. But most of them were more sparrow than macaw. For they were seldom pickups or brothel loan-outs, but ladies who had earned the trust of their lawbreaking males. Beauty and lechery were of minor importance in their females. Sex was seldom a vital diversion to crooks. Danger and violence preoccupied their nerve centers, and sensuality was an also-ran. Young, old, voluptuous or stringy, their women had one quality in common — they were voiceless.

I sat this night with a new friend waiting for dawn while listening to stories from some of our fellow drinkers. What stories they were! Not even our crack newspaper raconteurs could uncork gaudier, merrier tales than these villains of the town. All the cockeyed plot turns I was to use in a spate of movie scripts were given me by these night-people talkers.

My new friend was Lionel Moisse. He had come to town in the spring from the Kansas City Star and landed on Hearst's Examiner.

Moisse was tall, with warrior muscles. His bony face offered a broken nose as a signature of trouble. A tangle of blondish hair gave him a windblown look. He had iron fists and a homicidal temper to go with them. When unprovoked, however, his head was abuzz with Byron, Keats and Walt Whitman. He brooded about writing fine novels as soon as he found time. He had brought a disciple with him from Kansas — a hard-muscled, pretty boy named Ernest Hemingway. After a month, the disciple disappeared.

"Poor Ernie," Moisse explained, "had to take a job with a house organ for a furniture factory. He's writing dithyrambs about mahogany bureaus. God help him."

Moisse's distinction among us was not his barroom knockouts or his mooning over literature. It was his prowess as a lover. Within five months of his arrival in town, a Lionel Moisse Suicide Club had been formed by a number of young women who had unsuccessfully sought death after the tumultous Lionel had rid himself of their company. One of the members, a poetess in high standing at Jack Jones' Dill Pickle Club, said to me:

"I'll know better after this than to love a man with a poet's soul. It's like loving the west wind."

Oddly, it was Moisse who was full of lover's woes this night in Colosimo's. His girl, an ex—Spanish dancer named Conchita, had flown their love nest.

Moisse met the señorita after her recovery from a railroad accident. She had suffered an amputation and been fitted with a wooden leg. Shortly after her hospital release, Moisse met, courted and won her love. But triumph made him wary. It was Moisse's credo that any woman who loved him was merely rehearsing for her next amour.

To insure Conchita's fidelity, Moisse removed the dancer's wooden leg every evening and toted it to the Examiner where he stored the detached limb in a locker. His work done, he returned happily to his beloved's side and clamped the leg back in place.

He had returned, thus burdened, a few days ago and found his nest empty. Conchita, presumably with the aid of a new flame, had acquired a second wooden leg and run off.

Moisse removed a note from his pocket and read it aloud at our table — "Dear Lionel, you can keep my leg as a souvenir. I've got a nicer one with much better knee action. Yours truly, Conchita."

He burned the note in a saucer and spoke over the ashes, "There's only one thing you can detach from a woman to keep her faithful. But who wants to carry that around all day?" He looked up and added, "Our little pal is knocking at the gate."

We had picked up an odd admirer in our tour of the night spots — an undersized dude in a light-gray suit and a blue polka-dot tie. Although Moisse and I were not moochers (by profession), we had no objection to a host staking us to filet mignon and Château Yquem.

Our patron was always alone. He had joined up with us several times and sat listening to us talk shop. He sat smiling at our stories of murders, suicides, infidelities, con games and other deviltries of the town. He had pale eyes, whitish blond hair and his skimpy physique in its pastel clothing had a doll-like look. His wallet bulged with greenbacks which I sensed were not honestly acquired. But our tales never lured him into any anecdote of his own.

Aware that this lonely little dude who sought our company was a crook of some sort, Moisse and I asked questions. But the only information we pried out of him was that he had no friends or relatives and that he had quitted the Division Street High School in his sophomore year because everybody, including the teachers, took turns at beating him up.

Beyond this, we knew only his name, Teddy Webb.

Newspaper headlines in a few weeks would end the silence of this night-spot dandy. Murderous Bandit Webb Kills Again, Police Double Hunt for Killer-Fiend Webb. And one I remember nostalgically, Police Chief Scheuttler Fumes Over Postcard from Hunted Killer — "Dear Wooden Shoes, Go Catch Fish — Teddy Webb."

But on this night in Colosimo's we saw only a dapper hanger-on. He was having some trouble getting admitted. Obviously, this was his first time at Big Jim's door. Seeing us, he waved, pointed, and the hefty headwaiter let him in. He headed for our table, greeted us deferentially, sat down and ordered food and wine for three. He had an unusual voice for so slight a body — a baritone that might have come out of a beer-bellied wrestler.

No sooner had Teddy Webb finished his ordering than Moisse started the tale-telling. That was the way of the newspaper man in that day — to start up a story for no other reason than that a listener had appeared.

Lionel's topic this evening was the exotic death of the Reverend Henry Blossom. We had both covered the story a few weeks before.

The Reverend Blossom, Moisse related fondly, had been found asphyxiated in the basement of his West Side church. He lay dead on the cement floor with his trousers off, beside the half-nude body of a lady parishioner, also dead from asphyxiation. A few soft pillows buoyed up her corpse.

"In the ardor of his lovemaking," Moisse related, "the busy parson unknowingly kicked open a gas jet with his foot. The happy couple remained locked in each other's arms until death interrupted their love rites. Tell me a more pleasing way to perish. It reminds me of the vengeful taxidermist in Kansas City whose pretty wife succumbed to a prominent roué. I wrote the lead after the police found her body, "The stuffing that dreams are made of ——"

A man tapped my shoulder and said, "The boss wants to see you." It was a flattering summons.

He handed me a U.S. Army discharge card signed by a colonel. Its two typed lines read:

"Name — Capone, Alphonse, Character — Excellent."

Colosimo's office looked like a mandarin's lair. It was crowded with elaborately carved Chinese furniture and ivory inlaid screens. The walls were covered to the ceiling with inscribed photographs from the world's notables.

"Sit down, kid," Big Jim said. "Why 1 called you in is to tell you that that (continued on page 106)Bandit(continued from page 52) blondie who pushed in here tonight and is sitting at your table is a wrong guy. Tell your friend, Mr. Moisse, not to get into any action with that fella."

• • •

Four of us sat at a table in Ike Bloom's joint the next Saturday night. Bloom's Midnight Frolics Café was the flashiest drop in town. Here the high-toned Camilles came to parade their feathers and their loot. Bedizened bedroom queens turkey-trotted on the dance floor with their paunchy, peasant-faced keepers, all shined up as if ready for interment. The whinny and roar of a 30-piece orchestra poked at their feet.

At the tables wine gushed out of iced bottles, monkey-suited waiters curtsied, and diamonds sparkled from a swamp of female flesh in flaglike evening gowns. The splurge of silken-squeezed breasts, buttocks and boiling pelvises filled the gilt chairs with a motionless lewdness.

Moisse, beside me, had shaken his last week's love woes out of his soul. He was scouting for Conchita's successor.

"I've always made the mistake," he said, "of hunting for loyalty and honor in the female. No more. That's like hunting the unicorn, whose existence is still debatable." Looking off, he added, "Holy Ike, have a look at our little pal! He seems to have struck gold."

Dude Teddy, in a satin-lapeled tuxedo, stood in the noisy, milling entrance. Holding his arm was a tall, redheaded girl whom I knew. She was called Swan, with no other name. A lean, undulant Lorelei with a delicate boy face, she was to be seen always in the same getup — a clinging sheath of black velvet out of which her slim neck provided its own ornament. The tousled hair was Pompeian red. Oiled eyelids were kept down like window blinds. Slitted, pallid eyes glinted out of an egg-white face.

I had interviewed Swan after the suicide of a jockey who had been her lover. I had also questioned the bellhops in her hotel — a lewd oasis in an area of pious residents. My findings were: she was the daughter of a socially glamorous family in New York City; she had graduated from Vassar College; she could recite reams of Shakespeare in a genteel, broad-A'd voice; she was addicted to hashish in liquid form; and she had bedded with a score of lovers, all grubby underworld characters. But grubby lovers weren't enough. She liked to wallow in private dope parties where sex and hallucination cakewalked in the night.

I had come away from a three-hour interview somewhat singed but unseduced. And I had thereafter shunned the thrill-greedy, dirt-hungry beauty with the sweet boy face.

"Do you know her?" Moisse asked.

I told him what I knew of Swan.

"You talk like a Lutheran," he grinned. "Since when are nymphomania and a knowledge of Shakespeare drawbacks in a lady? Not to mention drugs and a talent for debauchery. They all add up to a shark-belly hunger for life. I've always wanted to love one of those creamy-skinned man-eaters."

Moisse stood up, his face young with jollity. But he remained at the table. Teddy and his Swan had joined the couples on the dance floor.

"I'll wait till the hammerhead and her prey finish their gyrations," Moisse said.

Dance followed dance. Couples started deserting the dimly lit floor. But our dude, Teddy, a head shorter than his flame-topped lady, hopped, skipped and swiveled on the dance floor with no more sign of quitting than if he were a goldfish circling in a bowl. Swan seemed equally dance-nutty.

Around three A.M. Moisse's eyes acquired a bourbon fog. The jam of bosom-bouncing mares and feet-twirling stallions had thinned out. But Swan and Teddy were still capering without letup.

Moisse glared at our frisky dude.

"That waltzing mouse will keep the lady rotating until dawn," Moisse said. "I shall postpone my rescue of the poor girl until tomorrow. I assure you, on the navel of Salome, that I'll have the lovely Swan in my cornfield by tomorrow. Tomorrow I'll wrap her around me like a tourniquet."

Moisse slid down in his chair and fell asleep.

• • •

But my friend had to shelve his plans for courtship. A new bandit saga hit the newsstands, blazoning the activities of an "albino slayer" soon identified as Teddy Webb.

The press whooped with robbery and murder headlines. Chicago sat up as if a carnival had come to town. What fun headlines used to be when the disasters they shouted had nothing to do with us.

Unbelievably even for that bandit heyday, the Teddy Webb saga kept growing, kept piling up robberies and shootings week after week, as if not a "lone bandit" was loose on the city but an invading army. The editorial writers began to take note and to sound warnings. "Not any man can deny that the spectacle of 4000 armed police officers unable to apprehend one murderous criminal is an ominous challenge to our very civilization. The question arises — is Chicago's police department too corrupt or, possibly, too inefficient to remove this single menace to society — Bandit Teddy Webb?"

What a fellow our little dude was during his saga days. Identified as a heretofore small-time stickup man, Teddy Webb raced through the town in a commandeered taxicab, descending on fur stores, dress shops and jewelry marts, and wounding or killing whoever tried to thwart him. He blasted his way into a number of these places with dynamite sticks. The casualty list included two policemen. Teddy usually "struck alone." But once a "beautiful red-haired siren was glimpsed in his bandit cab."

I covered the story from dawn to midnight, and did most of my sleeping in the lobby of Swan's hotel, beside a stakeout of four detectives. It was more than a lust for news that kept me glued to the story. I was not only its reporter but its phantom participant.

I knew what Teddy and Swan were feeling and saying in their secret, blood-spattered world of hashish and passion. I understood Teddy Webb as if he were the simplest of Punch-and-Judy figures. I could feel the joy in the soul of the lonely little dude who had been nobody, peering out of nowhere. Victory had come to him. Anonymous as a June bug since childhood, this friendless fop had landed feet first in the headline halls of fame, or infamy — a distinction seldom made by the successful.

I also knew the happiness of Swan, though I understood it less. Female emotions need an anthropologist for deciphering. They are closer to the zoo than the male's. If women had written the Old Testament instead of men, they would have put down a more credible Garden of Eden, one in which Eve antedated Adam by several eons. How else could her daughters have come by their more primitive howls?

I didn't understand Swan any more than I have many other women on whom I have turned a searching eye. But I could sense her. Half asleep beside the detectives in the lobby of the hotel, I could sense her slitted eyes smiling at the loot brought by her bandit lover. I could see it piled on the bed of some frowsy room, and see her posturing in the bloodstained furs and dresses like a slim Medusa trying on new hairdos. And I could see her lying nude and sexual in some shabby bed, with stolen diamonds twinkling on her skin, and with the shouts of "Extra Paper — New Murder Extra!" drifting into the hideaway room like a burst of applause. I had read of such things in Dostoievsky, De Quincey and the Marquis de Sade, but now I was their neighbor in life. The ecstasy of evil, sex full of Roman candles; the angelic float of drugs, the honey taste of crime, the glee of murder, and each day lived like a leap from a high roof — I peered through a door crack into this other world.

I moved on to the office of Assistant Superintendent of Chicago's Police, Herman Scheuttler, called "Wooden Shoes" by his admirers. I was interviewing him about the derisive postcard he had received from the hunted bandit.

Reporter Bartlett Cormack of the American was also on hand, to write of that afternoon later in his play, The Racket, and in numerous magazine tales. Cormack was a pale, bespectacled, wizen-faced young journalist. His future talents were not yet perceptible in his naive clucks of wonder at the world.

I pause in my story to tell a bit of Chief Scheuttler who looms like a hundred melodramas in my memory. Chief Scheuttler was a law enforcer as unbelievable as any to be seen on our television screens today. He was a tall, bulky, implacable enemy of crime, honest as the day and courageous as the lion. In his youth as a police lieutenant, Scheuttler had made a spectacular capture of the anarchist Louis Lingg — leader of the Haymarket Riots bomb throwers.

Anarchist Lingg had been tracked down in a three-story house. Lieutenant Scheuttler and a dozen cops entered the building with drawn guns. Louis Lingg shouted down from the third floor that he held a bomb in his hand, and that if the cops started up the stairs he would explode it and kill everybody on the premises, including himself.

Lieutenant Scheuttler said to his men, "Wait here." He handed one of them his gun and then called out, "I'm coming after you alone, Louis, without a gun. If you lick me you can get away."

Six-foot-three Herman Scheuttler, famed for his powerhouse fists, walked up to where iron-muscled six-foot-two Louis Lingg stood waiting with his bomb. Anarchist Louis was as "fictional" a character as hero Herman. He put his bomb away, removed his coat and took on the barrel-chested nemesis in fair battle. No television Western today offers a more Homeric fracas than was fought by big Herman and big Louis on those West Side stairs.

Scheuttler won. Battered and bleeding, he lugged the unconscious Lingg to the cops waiting below. Louis Lingg, however, won his second bout with the law. He outwitted the hangman by chewing a nitroglycerin bomb and blowing his head off.

That was many years ago, but it was the same stalwart crime hater who spoke out of his chief's chair about Teddy.

"I'm going to get Teddy Webb," Chief Scheuttler said, "and I promise you this. That murdering little squirt will go to trial with a broken jaw and an ear missing. I'm going to take the little bastard apart before I bring him in. You can quote me for that, and I don't care if it costs me my job. He killed two policemen."

The phone rang. Scheuttler answered. His face lighted. His bulk came out of the chair.

"We've got Teddy Webb's address," the chief said. "A woman just phoned it in to Captain Strassneider."

"Can we have her name?" I asked.

"Who in hell knows her name?" Scheuttler answered and strode out of the room. Cormack and I trotted after him.

A few years later I would have known instantly who the betrayer was—Swan. Who else betrays a man as surely as the woman who loves him? But at 19 my information of womankind was skimpy and roseate. I had not yet learned that love and hate were twins, that love can betray and kill as well as serve and delight. I had not yet seen a half-dozen paramours sobbing over lovers they had just slain, "Oh, I loved him so, I loved him so!" Nor had I discovered the disturbing fact that sex was no merry exercise only, but a diversion full of devilish problems. Not till my sagelike 20s did I become aware that love-smitten ladies have kept the police as busy as have gangsters.

Yes, it was Swan who called Captain Strassneider. She betrayed her Teddy for a reason more startling than any I was ever to hear from a soured Isolde.

Cormack and I arrived at the tipped-off address 10 minutes after the cops. An excited policeman in front of the house told us Teddy Webb had been captured on the top floor. Bart and I skittered up the stairs and popped into an attic bedroom, with a skylight in its ceiling.

Chief Scheuttler and four policemen were standing around Teddy Webb as he put on his shirt and trousers. No one spoke. The cops were motionless. I stared at Teddy as he carefully fixed his polka-dot tic. It seemed incredible that this blondish little dude, silent and wistful, had terrorized a city. I noted an opened trunk overflowing with furs and colorful dresses. The sweet, theatric odor of female powder and perfumes drifted ghostlike in the air. But there was no Swan. Then I noted a fifth uniformed cop. He lay dead on the floor, dead on his back with arms stretched out and stony eyes rolled up in a blue-skinned face.

I stared at the body. There was no wound visible, or drop of blood. As I knelt beside the dead man for a closer look, I saw Scheuttler head for me. He lifted me from the floor and flung me out of the room. An owl-eyed Cormack came stumbling out after me. A cop towed us efficiently down the stairs.

Ten minutes later a cop came out of the house and said the chief wanted us upstairs again.

The dead policeman was still on the floor but with his coat off. There was a hole in his bloodstained shirt.

"He was shot in the armpit," Scheuttler said. "That's why you didn't notice the bullet wound before. You can see for yourself, now."

I saw the blood-covered wound, and I saw also that Scheuttler's left hand was in his coat pocket. I knew part of the story then. Later, Teddy Webb told me the whole of it.

"I was having a nap," Teddy reminisced in his death cell, "when I heard a noise. I knew it was the cops. I jumped for the skylight, like I'd always planned, and this cop came busting into the room. I didn't have my gun handy and was in my underpants. The cop had his gun in his hand. I thought I was a goner, hanging from the skylight in my underpants. But the cop didn't shoot. He just looked at me with his mouth open and turned blue and flopped to the floor, dead with heart failure. I was so surprised I hung there a few seconds. Then all the boys came in. After Chief Scheuttler kicked you out of the room, he pulled off the dead cop's coat and shot him under the arm. Then he sliced his own hand with a pocket knife and smeared his blood on the cop, because guys don't bleed after they're dead. He was saving the honor of the police force, he said. He didn't want it on record that a police officer had been frightened to death by just looking at me. And while he was giving the dead cop an honorable wound, he made a deal with me. He promised not to rough me up if I kept my mouth shut about the dead cop. So, why not? I was going to be tried for killing two other cops. There was no harm in making it three. Just a little more publicity before my good-bye party."

On the sidewalk in front of the house Scheuttler asked me nervously, "What are you going to write about the dead officer?"

I remembered Scheuttler and Louis Lingg and many other old Wooden Shoes stories.

"I'll write he was shot down while bravely performing his duty," I said.

• • •

I remember Teddy Webb's trial vaguely, and his hanging is also without detail in my memory, hardly more than the sound of the gallows' trap banging down. The wildness of that sound that punctuated my youth every month or so has never left my ears.

But there is one Teddy Webb scene that replays itself vividly in my head, with all its original look and sound. Swan in Teddy Webb's death cell. Swan come to bid him farewell two nights before his hanging. Swan in her black-velvet sheath of a dress, slim-footed, slim-necked, eyes almost shut in a genteel boy face topped by claws of red hair. Swan as unchanged as a clock tick.

Chief Scheuttler. grateful for my lies about his dead cop, had sent me a tip about this lovers' last tryst.

It was after midnight. I had been playing casino with Teddy in his cell. It was the only card game he knew.

"You're just wasting your time, kid," Teddy said, "I don't own a quarter to pay up with." I mentioned his last "bank job."

"She got it all," Teddy said. "Show me those card tricks again. I like to watch."

I started palming cards and tumbling them down my coat sleeve. I had spent much time as a boy practicing to be a magician. Teddy watched, and listened for the sound of a visitor. I listened with him. It came — heels clicking — a crescendo in the silent corridor. Gus Plotka, the deathwatch guard, unlocked the cell.

A tang of perfume freshened the air and Swan came in, like a debutante gone slumming.

"I thought you would be alone, Teddy," she said.

I said I'd step outside.

"It doesn't really matter," Swan's lah-de-dah voice stopped me. "Which paper do you write for?"

"The Journal."

"Oh, those stories," Swan smiled, "quite Baudelairian."

"How are you, Swan?" Teddy Webb's baritone asked.

"Very sad," said Swan. "May I sit down here?"

"Sure, always room in my bed for you," said Teddy. Swan sat beside him on the hard cell bed.

They were silent, and I noticed that Teddy wasn't looking at her. He was looking out of the cell door, his face grim, his lips rigid. I became aware of Teddy Webb as if I had stepped into his head. His thoughts swirled around me. "You turned me in to the cops, you bitch. You put me here to be hanged, you bitch." His silence was like a sputtering fuse. And I knew what I should have known in Scheuttler's office. It was Swan.

Swan's slitted eyes opened. They were green, large and full of sadness. But I thought of snakes' heads.

"I loved you very much, Teddy," she whispered.

"You gave me a good run for my money," said Teddy, and smiled.

"It wasn't for money," Swan said, "you mustn't ever think that."

The green eyes under the claws of red hair looked tenderly on the doomed man.

"I'll never love anybody as much as I did you," Swan said, "as long as I live."

"Me, either," Teddy said, and grinned over his little joke.

How could he talk to her, smile at her, listen to her lies? He knew. Or maybe he didn't. Maybe I had guessed it out of my own head, not out of his.

"I'm glad you're not afraid of Friday," Swan said.

"I'm kind of looking forward to it," said Teddy. "I've had all I want — y'know what I mean?"

"You're not at all afraid?" she asked. I heard mockery in her voice.

"Everybody has to die," said Teddy.

"But walking to the gallows," Swan said. Excitement sharpened her voice and pulsed in her neck. "And having to stand still while they do all those things to you. The rope — and things. They should give you some drug to make it easier for you."

"They would if I asked," said Teddy.

"You won't ask?" Swan whispered.

"No, I'll keep my eyes open till they finish," Teddy said.

And still no accusation, no cry of rage at her betrayal. I watched them stand up, and I knew the game they were playing. She had come to the cell to enjoy Teddy's terror. And he was intent on thwarting her.

"I think I had better go," Swan said.

"Yes," said Teddy, "there's no fun here."

"Friday morning," Swan whispered.

Teddy nodded, "At six A.M."

"Would you mind if I kissed you?" Swan asked.

"What a question," Teddy grinned.

I watched a curious embrace; a cool little man in the arms of a passion-glowing woman. Nothing secret, now. She let him see her gloat of pleasure as her hands caressed his neck and clutched at his back. Her slim body fitted itself against him. Her lips and teeth ate at his mouth.

The shameless embrace ended. Swan's eyes opened. A green, watery light was in them. She spoke in a hoarsened voice, "Goodbye, Teddy."

"So long, honey," Teddy said. And he was still smiling.

Swan walked out of the death cell. Plotka locked the door and the heel clicks moved away.

"The little bitch, the little bitch," Teddy said. "Goddamn her soul to hell!" He sat down, and looked at me with shivering shoulders.

"Did I do all right?" he asked. "I didn't let on, did I?"

"No, you didn't."

"Scheuttler told me, right off," Teddy said, "that she turned me in. She came here hoping I'd holler at her. But I wouldn't give her the satisfaction. She had to give it to herself, grabbing me and enjoying a dead man in her arms. That's what she was kissing — a dead man. I wanted to stick my hand down her throat and rip her tongue out. But I took it easy, didn't I? And she knew all the time I knew about her turning me in. I spoiled some of her fun, smiling at her. And I'll tell you something else. She never fooled me while we were hooked up in that room. I knew all the time she'd do it. She was excited over my killing those cops. She wanted to do some killing herself. For kicks. So she picked me. I could feel it when I was holding her, and she'd start shivering. She'll get her big kick out of Friday morning."

"Why did you stay with her after you knew what she'd do?" I asked.

"I don't know," Teddy said. "It was like gambling. Yeh, I kept betting my neck against another kiss. Just for kicks. Like her. Yeh, we had a ball for a time, us two. And I'll tell you something about that redhead. I wouldn't trade places with her right now."

He yawned.

"I'm sleepy," he said. "See you Friday morning. Write me up good, will you?"

That was Teddy Webb, the little nobody who had found a brief identity as "a menace to our civilization"; and who was ready to go back to being a nobody at the end of a rope.

I saw Swan once again on the Saturday night after the hanging. She was sitting velveted, poised and smiling at a table in Ike Bloom's café. Sitting beside her, tenderly massaging her hand and telling her a story, was Lionel Moisse. His rumpled hair was slicked down.

I said a hello to the happy couple and walked on.