Underdog Read online

  W. R. Burnett

  Underdog

  ***

  This is the story of a big-city political boss, a murder, a double man-hunt, and a fall guy-the perennial underdog who tries too hard to avoid trouble…

  Jerry Clinch is the pigeon, who never had a break until Big Dan, boss of the 17th Ward Political Club, helped spring him from prison and hired him as his chauffeur. Big Dan has hidden enemies-and a beautiful wife, Rhea: and one day Clinch is on his own-the pigeon-with both the cops and the hoods of the town after him, while he is engaged in a desperate search for one man!

  In the tough, realistic vein of Little Caesar, Vanity Raw, and The Asphalt Jungle, W. R. Burnett has written another tense yarn of underworld intrigue and suspense-shift, unsentimental, exciting to the last page.

  ***

  "W. R. Burnett… his sure, tough touch… W. R. Burnett's characters-tough and mean but with a strong urge of loyalty to their twisted code-always ring true. UNDERDOG is a solid and exciting book!"

  -San Francisco Call Bulletin

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  B. (scanning and OCR) and P. (formatting and proofing) edition.

  ***

  ONE

  CLINCH did not get to know Big Dan until they were put into the infirmary together. He'd heard all about him, of course, as Dan was the talk of the prison. He'd even heard that Dan had been asking about him. Clinch was a loner and during rec in the big yard he always kept to himself, never talked to the other prisoners, and usually just stared contemptuously when spoken to. A little hunchback, Humpy, Clinch's cellmate, was practically the only con that Clinch ever talked with. In the machine shop one day, Humpy said: "Big Dan was asking about you in the yard yesterday."

  Clinch made no comment.

  "This is a big man," said Humpy. "Head Screw says 'Yes, sir' to him. No kidding."

  "Looks like a big windbag to me," said Clinch.

  Humpy seemed shocked. "Dan Moford? You're crazy, Clinch. He's one big man."

  "They brought him down, didn't they?" said Clinch. "He's no bigger than us now."

  Humpy shook his head and laughed sadly. "Income tax violation. Is that a rap? He runs a whole city, that man. Big political boss. He was asking about you, Clinch. Why was you always over in that corner by yourself. That's what he wanted to know."

  "Screw him," said Clinch, and turned back to his machine.

  ***

  A prison never sleeps. Even in the middle of the night there is a faint buzzing, a pulsating, a distant clinking and ringing of bells, a sinister aliveness as of a great factory being operated secretly in enemy country.

  Clinch was as quietly restless as the prison itself. He seldom slept more than an hour at a stretch and then he'd awake and lie with his hands under his head, thinking, thinking… while below him Humpy snored, turned, twisted, and sometimes whimpered. Humpy had knifed a man in a bar brawl. The man, drunk, had been taunting him about his hump, the little hunchback had insisted. All the same, narcotics had been mixed up in it some way, Clinch knew, or Humpy would not now be doing a stretch in a Federal prison. Humpy always denied any connection with narcotics. In a prison men always denied everything. They was all robbed, as they insisted. That was one reason why Clinch kept his mouth shut about his own affairs, went his own way. He had been robbed, too. He really had. A bum rap had sent him up. It was funny when you thought about it, as he'd beaten many a true rap.

  Another reason he kept his mouth shut was that he did not want some detective waiting for him outside the gate when he was finally released. Let sleeping dogs lie! But the main reason for his withdrawal was temperamental, personal-he was a loner by nature.

  But even in prison men do not like to be rejected and avoided by their fellows, so Clinch was very unpopular. The weaklings wanted to band with him; the tough guys-a minority-resented his self-sufficiency and his imperturbability; they wanted to take him down, bend him to their will. But Clinch pursued his own course without a single deviation. In all his time in prison there was not one black mark against him of any kind. He was what is known as a model prisoner. He said, "Yes, sir" to the guards and was very respectful to higher authority in the persons of the chaplain, the doctors, and the head guards. The warden he never saw. He was uncooperative with only one person-the prison psychiatrist, Dr. Gerem-but politely uncooperative.

  Sometimes at night, he'd lie laughing sardonically to himself. "If they only knew what I really think of them-the bastards," he'd tell himself. It was a great satisfaction to Clinch to talk one way and think another; to act one way and reserve his own manner of acting till later, when it wouldn't bring immediate penalties. "The goddamned fools," he'd think, laughing, remembering how pleased the ordinary guards always were at his marked respectfulness, unusual in the prison; how the chaplain always smiled at him and stopped for a little chat; how even Dr. Gerem seemed to be affected by his attitude.

  Actually Clinch disliked and distrusted everybody, and for very good reason.

  He'd been an undersized and spindly kid, loved and wanted by nobody. When Clinch was five, his father ran off and left the family. When Clinch was six, his mother married again and went away with her new husband, leaving Clinch with relatives who did not want him and resented his presence among their own children. At ten, he'd been sent to an orphanage. At sixteen, he was in reform school for petty thievery. He was now twenty-nine and had only one really pleasant memory. It was of an old woman. He was eighteen at the time and had no overcoat. It was a cold winter night, snowing. "And Detroit can be goddamn cold," Clinch would always tell himself, thinking about the episode. Well, the old woman had taken him home with her, fed him, and given him a big old-fashioned overcoat. Why? Clinch could not figure it out. At the time he kept thinking that the ugly fat old woman wanted him to do something for her. But what? If so, she never cracked. He'd had a big meal and warm overcoat for nothing. Just for nothing. It didn't figure. Often at night Clinch thought about that anonymous old woman. "Hell, she must be dead by now," he'd think, and he'd remember the cold wind off the lake, the snow falling slantwise, and the old lady talking to him and asking him why he didn't go home. Home? Where was that?

  ***

  One night when they were getting ready for bed, Humpy hemmed and hawed for a while, then he said: "Clinch, you know me. I'm no fink. But I got to talk to you."

  "Okay. Talk," said Clinch, as he climbed into the upper.

  Humpy glanced up at him, grimacing slightly with embarrassment. Humpy was embarrassed about two things, one new, one old. The new one was that he was going to talk intimately with Clinch about Clinch's welfare. The old one was that Clinch was in the upper. Clinch rated the lower. He was somebody, Humpy was nobody. In the prison, the toughest or the most important con grabbed the lower and defied his cellmate to take it. Humpy was an "upper" type. He felt uncomfortable in a privileged spot because he knew in his heart that he did not rate it. Clinch was much tougher, much more important. But that first day Clinch had just walked in and thrown his gear on the upper. "I bunk here," he'd said.

  "Why?" Humpy had asked.

  "Because I say so," Clinch had replied.

  A damned strange way to go about taking the upper. What Humpy did not know was that Clinch really preferred the upper, and for two reasons. The guys in the lowers were marked men, usually troublemakers in the prison, with the guards keeping a wary eye on them. But the main reason was that Clinch liked the upper best and to hell with what the other prisoners thought about it. He did not like to have somebody sleeping over him; it gave him a feeling of being trapped.

  So Humpy was doubly embarrassed as he spoke to Clinch, who was now stretched out in the upper, ready for sleep.

  "It's about Whitey."

  Clinch snorted contemptuously, but made no comment.

  "Lo
ok, Clinch," said Humpy, "I keep my nose clean. I don't butt in nobody's business. But what you got against Whitey? Hell, he runs the whole cell block."

  "He don't run me," said Clinch.

  "He says you won't even talk to him."

  "Why should I talk to that bastard?"

  "He's big."

  "First it's Dan Moford, now Whitey. What is this?"

  Humpy seemed shocked. "Oh, he ain't big like Mr. Moford, nothing like that. But he's big with us here in this block. Hell, just yes him a little."

  "Screw him," said Clinch.

  "Hell, he could help us out, do us favors. Our guard depends on him, see? Whitey bosses this block more than the guard does. You get Whitey down on you…"

  "I get him down on me quicker if I talk to him," said Clinch. "He thinks he's so big, he thinks he's so tough-all the cons yessing him. I don't yes other cons. No con is any better than I am. Let him keep to himself, I'll keep to myself."

  "Okay," said Humpy, wearily. "I spoke."

  "He braced me once," said Clinch. "I didn't even say 'Hi' to the bastard."

  Clinch brushed it off, but it was a problem and he was well aware of it. You could only deal with guys like Whitey two ways; kick hell out of them or knuckle under. Neither way was any good for Clinch. If he kicked hell out of Whitey, he might go to the hole for it-and there would be a black mark on his record. On the other hand, knuckling under to a bigmouth like that might turn out even worse. Clinch could take it, and even enjoy it, in a sense, from constituted authority, but not from a low-down M'Gimp and junky like Whitey. The explosion would be inevitable. And then… the hole, and the black mark.

  So far he had managed to avoid trouble with Whitey by avoiding Whitey in the flesh. Maybe he could keep it up.

  Clinch leaned over and looked at Humpy, who was just crawling into his bunk. "Do what you like, Humpy," he said. "It's okay with me. Suck around after him like the rest of the cons in this block. No hard feelings."

  He drew back his head and there was a long silence. Finally Humpy said: "I been sucking around. He got me back the letter privilege they took away from me. Though who the hell I'm going to write to…" He broke off. "It's not me I'm worrying about. It's you."

  Clinch leaned over and looked down at him again. "Who you kidding, Humpy? You figure he might get sore at you if he gets sore at me."

  After a long pause, Humpy said: "Yeah. That, too."

  Clinch lay back, laughing. Always the pitch, the angle. Goddamned hypocrites-all alike!

  ***

  Dr. Frank Gerem, the prison psychiatrist, was smoking an after-dinner pipe and staring out the window into the big prison yard when Dr. Planck, the head physician, came in. They nodded to each other, then Planck sat down and lit a cigar.

  "I understand you sent Moford to the infirmary," said Gerem. "What is it, the usual big-wheel malingering?"

  "No," said Planck. "He's got some kind of poison in his system and he ought to stay off his feet for a while. It's probably gout, high living. Can't tell yet. Might be arthritis, though I doubt it. One thing I'm sure of: his feet are killing him."

  Gerem laughed shortly, then his face sobered and he said: "That man doesn't belong in prison at all."

  Planck glanced up in surprise. "He broke the law, didn't he?"

  Gerem shrugged. "That's a technicality. What is prison for? Rehabilitation? He doesn't need it. Punishment? In your opinion, is he being punished?"

  "Oh, let's not go into all that. There are laws; you break them, you get sent to prison."

  "If you're caught."

  Planck sighed wearily. "Naturally." Gerem irritated him excessively at times; always splitting hairs. Right and wrong were very simple things to Dr. Planck; to Gerem they hardly seemed to exist.

  "Did you ever study his case?" asked Gerem, after a long silence.

  "My God!" Planck exploded, "I don't have time to study cases. My business is patching up these lame ducks and keeping them going."

  "I think his CPA made an error in accounting. Things were hot politically in the town. The opposition newspapers got hold of it and harried the U.S. Attorney. So… Moford was tried and convicted, on one count. He was clean otherwise. Naturally they combed him back as far as possible." There was a pause. "Well, he's not bitter about it. He's not bitter about anything. And he'll talk your arm off if you give him a chance. My easiest subject, so normal he seems abnormal to me at times. There is only one strange thing: his IQ is not nearly as high as it should be, considering his achievement. It makes me question if we know what intelligence is, whether or not we know what we are trying to measure. Moford is far and away the most successful man that's been in this prison in my time; and there are many petty thieves and grifters with much higher IQ's."

  "Always did wonder whether it was a science or not," said Planck, smiling faintly. "Or just a superior type of fakery."

  "Now, let's not go that far," said Gerem, laughing.

  There was a long pause and they both sat smoking thoughtfully and staring out into the prison yard, where night was falling and the lights were coming on in the guard towers along the top of the wall.

  Just as Planck was rising to go to his quarters for the night, the door opened and a male nurse in a white coat stepped in, a trusty known as Bog.

  "Excuse me, Dr. Planck," he said, "but a man got knifed in the corridor at the north end of the mess hall and they just brung him up. Dr. Macey wants to know if…"

  "I'll be right there. Who was it?"

  "Clinch, sir. You remember him?"

  Gerem got up at once. "Mind if I go along?"

  Planck turned and gave him a sardonic look. "One of your pets, Frank?"

  "Well, in a way," Gerem admitted. "With reverse English, you might say."

  "One of your problems, then."

  They started out and walked down the corridor, followed by Bog, who made an elaborate pretense of not listening, though his ears were quivering like a rabbit's.

  "No, not even that," said Gerem. "He just won't respond, won't talk, but very polite about it."

  "Can't recall him," said Planck, then he turned to Bog, who, still elaborately pretending, had to be spoken to several times before his attention was caught. "Who is this Clinch? What's he in for?"

  "Doing time for transporting a car," said Bog. "Quiet type. Never had no trouble with him."

  "Who knifed him?"

  "He don't know," said Bog innocently. "It was dark back in that corridor. They just had the dimmers on. Mess was over."

  "He knows, all right," said Gerem.

  Planck ignored Gerem's remark. "Has he had any trouble lately? Trouble of record?"

  "No," said Bog. "Never no trouble with him. He keeps to himself."

  Gerem turned quickly and stared at Bog, catching a look of deep satisfaction on the trusty's face. The look was immediately wiped off and replaced by the usual one of slavish obsequiousness.

  "I take it you don't care much for Clinch," said Gerem.

  Bog appeared astonished. "Like I said, Doc, he don't trouble nobody. We never passed a word, one way or the other."

  "Never mind," said Gerem, shrugging.

  Most of these men were as transparent to him as five-year-old children, and yet they all had defenses that were almost impossible to break through. The habitual criminals were, in a sense, cultists, with rules, bylaws, and taboos that had nothing whatever to do with organized society-a group of savages living secretly among the civilized. They interested Gerem intensely. But they also irritated him. And this irritation worried him, because he considered it a puerile emotional manifestation, highly unprofessional.

  ***

  Clinch was lying on the examination table in a little room just off the infirmary corridor. He was naked except for his shorts, and his thin body looked hard as iron in the bleak overhead light. His forearms, hairy and much too big for the rest of his body, were tattooed on the undersides, as follows: "USN" on the right forearm, and "GC" in a wreath and a naked woman on the left. The
tattooing had been done in bluish-red ink and looked very ugly and barbaric against his prison-bleached skin.

  Dr. Macey was working on the long cut low down on Clinch's right side, and a male nurse-a trusty called Willy-was helping him.

  "That's quite a slash," Macey was saying. "What kind of knife was it, Clinch?"

  "Prison shiv, I guess," said Clinch. "I don't know. I didn't see anything." Now he grimaced in pain and gritted his teeth to keep from crying out.

  Above him, Macey and the trusty exchanged a significant look.

  "You didn't see anything?" asked Macey.

  "Not a thing," said Clinch.

  Beyond them, the door opened and Haswell, the deputy warden, stepped in, followed almost immediately by Gerem, Planck, and Bog.

  Haswell stopped near the door and stood looking on in silence. He was a big, broad-shouldered, heavy man, with a fat immobile face and a peering look, owing to his nearsightedness.

  Dr. Planck went over to examine the wound before it was bandaged. The two trusties kept exchanging ambiguous glances. Macey stepped back in deference to his superior. Finally Planck said: "All right, Macey. Bandage him. I think he'll live."

  "How bad is he, Doc?" asked Haswell in his low, gruff voice.

  "Well, he's not a basket case," said Planck. "Maybe a week in bed will do it, providing it heals okay, and why not?"

  "All right to talk to him now?"

  "Sure. As soon as he's bandaged."

  Macey and Willy went to work. There was a long silence in the little room. Finally Planck said: "Well, there's a TV program I want to see. I'll run along. Coming, Frank?"

  "Maybe Dr. Gerem ought to stay," said Haswell. "Might give me a little help with this man."