Benny nodded again. "All right, I'll go round."
"Be sure you do, and don't forget." He shook his head a third time. "Benny, you didn't kill them dames—we checked you out on it, long ago. You and a lot of other people. But just the same don't you forget to go to the station. If you don't go there right after you quit we'll have to come to the rooming house to get you."
"I won't forget, Mr. Hoff. I'll go there."
Benny sadly watched Officer Hoff get back into the squad car and watched the squad car drive off.
Officer Hoff hadn't believed him either. But the policeman with the red hair would believe him, when Benny told him all about it.
9:00 P.M.
A clock somewhere was striking nine as Ray Fleck got out of the taxi in front of Dolly Mason's apartment, and he knew that he was on time. He'd had trouble finding a cab and had thought he was going to be late—not that a few minutes late would have mattered but if he was very late Dolly would be annoyed; Dolly got annoyed easily if you were late for a date with her. Then just at the right moment a cab had pulled in to the curb right near him to discharge passengers, and he'd caught it.
A turn in his luck? God, he hoped so. Everything had been going wrong today and tonight, up till then. What had got into him to pop off about Connolly's thirty-dollar bet when it had been Sam's that Amico had been talking about! A lousy six bucks, and he had forgotten about it by then. Connolly's thirty had been the one on his mind. Hell, he thought disgustedly, he really couldn't blame Amico for not believing that he'd not been covering bets and dragging down right along, when he'd come up with a boner like that.
But Jesus, did Joe have to get so tough about it? Twenty-four hours to raise four hundred and eighty bucks, or else. His face was still sore from the two flat-handed slaps Monahan had given him and his stomach still ached from the blow there. But those things would pass, the pain of them and the humiliation of them. But if he lost his job he was sunk, really sunk. If he lost his job the way Joe would make him lose it, under a cloud with the J. & B. Distributors and on the outs with most of his customers to boot, he'd never get a reference and never get another job, here or anywhere else, selling liquor.
Many people thought Ray Fleck was a good all-around salesman who could do well selling almost anything to almost anybody, but Ray knew better; he'd tried. His first foray into selling had been just after he'd quit high school about three-fourths of the way through his senior year—he was failing in several subjects and wasn't going to be graduated anyway—and it had been a try at selling brushes door to door. He'd hated it, especially the long hours the company had expected him to work, and he'd stuck it out less than a week, during which time he'd earned seven dollars and some odd cents. He'd tried to stay home and loaf around for a while but finally became fed up with his father calling him a no-good and with not having any spending money, and he started to look for work again. During the next seven years he held a lot of jobs but none of them for very long. All in all he worked about half of the time, but he got by because his father, a certified public accountant, had a fairly good income and, after a while, gave up trying to collect anything from his son in the way of room and board, so all the money Ray did make went for clothes and entertainment.