"Thompson, Jim - Criminal, The" - читать интересную книгу автора (Thompson Jim)

"Gosh," he said. "Gol-lee, Dad. Thanks a lot!"
"It wasn't anything," I said. "I should have called the big bluffer a long time ago."
"I didn't mean that. Not just that. I mean the way you stuck up for me."
"I see," I said. "I--it's this way, Bob. I'm probably overly concerned about you, anxious to keep you out of trouble, and maybe it appears sometimes that I think you did something--that I'm accusing you--when I'm just trying to protect you. I never thought for a minute that there was anything wrong going on between you and Josie under that washing machine."
"Well, gosh," he said, scuffing the toe of his shoe against the sidewalk. "Darn that old girl, anyway."
"You don't have anything more to do with her, do you?" I said.
"Huh-uh. Not much of anything, anyway. I see her at school, of course, and sometimes a bunch of us will be over to the soda fountain together or something like that. But . . ."
"I'd be pretty careful around her," I said. "It's not that I don't trust you, but I've seen girls like Josie Eddleman before. They can get a boy into an awful lot of trouble."
"Sure, Dad," he said, kind of embarrassed. "I know."
He went on toward school, running to catch up with some other kids.
I went on to the railroad station, and caught the 8:05 into town.
We'd been neighbors with the Eddlemans for almost eleven years. They live at 2200 Canyon Drive, the far southeast corner overlooking the canyon, and we live at 2208 which is four doors down the street. At the time we moved here, there weren't any houses between theirs and ours, and we got to be pretty good friends. Bob was less than a year older than Josie, so naturally they played together, and Fay Eddleman was always trotting across the vacant lots to see Martha, or vice versa, and Jack and I saw quite a bit of each other.
It went on like that for a couple of years, and then a house went up between us and we weren't quite so thick any more. We couldn't be, you know, and frankly I was just as glad that we couldn't. I was glad when the other two vacant lots were built on, and we hardly ever saw Fay and Jack unless we ran into them on the street. They just weren't the kind of people who wore well. You never felt like you could hardly trust 'em. They were always running someone down--joking in a way that could hurt--and I figured that if they did that with other people they probably did it to us.
Of course, the kids went on seeing each other. Hardly a day passed that Bob wasn't over to Josie's house or Josie wasn't over to our place. After all, they'd practically grown up together, and there weren't any other children in our block.
By the time Bob was twelve or thirteen, he began to lose interest in Josie. He went over to her house less and less, and when she dropped in on us, he was just as likely as not to go off and leave her. He'd go up to the school grounds and play football or maybe he'd wander down to the canyon to play Tarzan with some other boys. Or sometimes he'd just go up to his room and stay until she left.
Martha scolded him about it, not being polite to a guest, and I spoke to him a time or two, but it didn't seem to have much effect. He went right on being indifferent and acting like she wasn't around, and I was pretty pleased that he did. The more he steered clear of Josie Eddleman, the better it suited me. I don't like to sound dirty-minded or suspicious, but that girl worried me. I've seen grown women who weren't nearly as well-developed as she was at twelve.
Well, one Saturday morning about four months ago, Martha and I walked up to the shopping center after groceries and Bob stayed at the house. There was a leak around the drain of the washing machine, and he was going to fix it. He was lying under the machine, fitting a new gasket he'd cut out of an old shoe, when Josie came in.
It was warm weather. She was wearing some kind of short pants called pedal-pushers and a floweredy thing they call a halter--but which is just a brassiere so far as I'm concerned--and that was all aside from some sandals. She hunkered down, watching him work. Pretty soon, almost before he knew what was happening, she'd crawled under the machine with him. He hadn't asked her to and he was getting along very well by himself, but she was going to give him some help.
Well, Martha and I came in on the tag end of the deal, right after Jack had looked in the back door and started raising Cain, and Bob and Josie were on their feet by that time. But I know it must have looked pretty bad, even though, I'm sure, there wasn't anything in the way of monkey business. You take a big boy like Bob and a half-naked girl like Josie and squeeze them together between the legs of a washing machine, and it just doesn't look good.
I was pretty excited, I guess, and I didn't handle the matter very well. I bawled Bob out and sent him to his room, and I suppose I said things to Jack that could be construed as an apology. I guess I acted like there really was something wrong, and it was all Bob's fault.
No, I didn't handle it well. What I should have done was to tell Jack to take that girl home and wallop her backside and see that she stayed at home. At least see that she stayed away from our house. He knew what she was like as well as I did, He didn't want to admit it, but he knew it was a pretty blamed good idea to keep an eye on her. That's why he'd been over slipping around our back yard and looking in our back door. He'd just made up that story about wanting to borrow a hoe.
Well, anyway, I'd told him off this morning, and it wasn't as good doing it now as it would have been at the time, but better late than never. Bob had been pleased as could be. I felt pretty good about it.
It looked like I was going to have a mighty fine day, with the start I'd gotten, and I did have a fine one. Right up until the last of it, that is.
I'd been at work about an hour when a woman phoned in with a complaint. The call went to Henley first. Apparently, she was a little too hot for him to handle, so he switched her to me but stayed in on the line.
A lot of the tiles in her bathroom were turning brown. Since it was our sub-contract, she wanted us to do the job over. In fact, she was darned well going to make us do it over or take us into court.
"A brand-new house," she kept saying. "A brand-new bathroom and already it looks like some old privy!"
Well, naturally, we weren't going to re-tile the place. There just isn't any profit in residential work, as it is. People only have so much money to spend, but they insist on having all kinds of tile. If they were smart, they'd take less and get a better job. But they just won't do that; they just won't understand that you can't get something for nothing.
A tile contractor comes along, say, and he says, Why, yes, lady (or mister), I can give you a five-foot border there on the walls and I'll give you a three-color terrazzo mosaic for the floor, and I'll keep the job under three hundred. Then, you come along and you say, Why, no, I couldn't do that; I'd have to substitute quantity for quality. But I can give you a _first-class_ four-foot border and a _first-class_ plain block floor for three hundred. And you know who will get the job. They'll pick the first man every time.
So you have to cut corners, if you want to stay in business. You use cheaper materials and you push the men as hard as they'll be pushed, and whenever the union will let you get away with it you sneak in apprentices instead of using journeymen. Naturally, the work won't hold up, although some jobs hold up longer than others. It just isn't quality.
I let this woman rave on a while, working the mad out of her system, and finally I cut in on her.
"I wanted to ask you, madam," I said. "Were you out around the job any while the house was being built? Well, did you notice whether any of the plasterers were chewing tobacco?"
"Why . . . well, yes," she said. "What's that got to do with it?"
"Tile is highly absorbent," I explained. "It has a suction action on anything it comes into contact with. If you happen to have one left over from the job you can prove it to yourself. Put the back of it down in some coffee grounds, say. Before long a brown stain will show through the glaze. Now, I imagine one of the plasterers must have spit into his mortar and . . ."
The majority--well, at least a lot--of plasterers do chew tobacco. It's hard for them to smoke in their line of work, so they chew instead. And the way most women feel about chewing tobacco, and the men who chew it, it was easy for this one to believe that her gripe was against the plastering contractor rather than us.
She wouldn't get any satisfaction out of him, of course. No plasterer in his right mind would spit tobacco juice into his mortar, and they aren't paying crazy men thirty dollars a day. But I'd got her off our backs.
I hung up the receiver, turning around to look at Henley as he hung up his.
He grinned and waved his hand at me.
Early that afternoon, as soon as I got the routine stuff out of the way, I unlocked the private file and took out the drawings--the blueprints--on the new city stadium. We weren't supposed to have detail drawings, naturally, until the job was put up for bid. But one of the draftsmen in the architect's office had sneaked us out a set for a hundred and fifty dollars.
I went over them carefully, like I'd been going over them for the past ten days, trying to figure out a way of using the edge they gave us. Finally, along around quitting time, I found it.
I carried the drawings in to Henley's office and spread them out in front of him.
"I've been studying these tunnels," I said, tracing them out with a pencil. "They're going to be subjected to unusually heavy wear. I think they ought to have something unusually durable in the way of tile."
"Yeah?" He shrugged irritably. "The architect don't think so. Wouldn't cut much ice for us if he did."
"Unusually durable," I repeated, giving him a slow wink. "An extra-heavy imported Italian."
"Yeah, but. . ." His eyes widened suddenly, and he let out a grunt. Then he leaned back in his chair, pursing out his lips, "Uh-_huh_," he said. "Were you thinking about a certain tile that a certain contractor named Henley got stuck with, that he's got almost a warehouse full of? Stuff that the government cancelled out on because a lighter tile does the job just as good?"
"That's it," I said. "I was thinking that outside of our supply there probably isn't a hundred square feet of it in the country."
"By George!" He slapped his hand down on the desk. "I doubt like hell that you can get it anywhere. They just don't make it any more. if we could get that written into the specifications . . ."
"I don't think we can," I said. "We'd have to work through the building department. Get them to write a proviso into the code to fit the situation. No one could kick about it. It's an unusual type of building and the code could logically be amended to take care of it."
"Yeah, I guess we could get away with it all right. But that building department! It really costs when you buy something from those boys."
"What's the difference?" I said. "If no one else can bid on the job, we can set our own price."
"Well, by God!" he said. "We can. Al, this calls for a drink!"