April Evil by John D. MacDonald Page B

that there was no money behind them.
    He phoned Jim the day before the check could be presented for payment. “Jim? Dil Parks. Jim, I want to talk about that check.”
    “What check, Dil?”
    “The check I gave you when we played poker.”
    “Oh, that check. What do you want to say about it?”
    “I’d appreciate it, Jim, if you’d give me one more week on that. You know I’m good for it.… Jim, are you still there?”
    “I’m still here. You want another week.”
    “That’s right, Jim.”
    “Then I guess that’s the way it has to be. One more week, Dil. I’ll hold it for another week if that’s the way you want it.”
    He had had odd thoughts during the week, thoughts that were not like him. After all, it was a gambling debt. Could Stauch force collection? Maybe it was time to go away. Just get in the car and go. He sat at his desk and he could hear his heart thump. Too much weight. Bad load on the heart. Too much drinking. Things weren’t supposed to end this way. Not a fat man of almost forty sitting at a desk and listening to his own heart. He wished he could stop thinking that it was some kind of end, some sort of finish. Things would go on as always. They had to go on. Things just didn’t stop. A check was a piece ofpaper. A piece of paper couldn’t put an end to all the golden dreams. Lennie was no good. She didn’t understand how things could be. She got impatient if you tried to talk about money and cutting down.
    He sat at his desk waiting for Jim Stauch. Stauch hadn’t wanted to talk about the check over the phone. He said he’d stop by. Dil wanted to get up and leave. Stauch would wait around and then leave. But that wasn’t the way.
    When he looked up, Stauch was standing in the doorway. It wasn’t the genial talkative Jim Stauch of the poker table, of the fish fry, of the Elks Club. This was a Mr. Stauch with an unsmiling face.
    “Come right on in and sit down, Jim,” Dil said heartily.
    Stauch came in and sat down. He put his hat on the corner of the desk. He bit the end of a cigar and spat the shred of tobacco into a corner in the general direction of the waste basket.
    “You can’t cover that check.” It was statement, not question.
    “I can, but it’s a matter of time.”
    “I put checks in that pot. If you’d won you’d have cleared them the next morning. They were as good as cash. I won them back and tore them up, but they were as good as cash. I guess you know that.”
    “Yes, I know that.”
    “If you’d had the guts to put an IOU in the pot, it would have been up to me as to whether I wanted to gamble on accepting them. In effect those checks of yours were IOU’s. But I didn’t know that. I thought they were as good as my checks.”
    “I’m sorry about that, Jim.”
    “I don’t give a damn whether you’re glad or sorry. I don’t like to be taken. I gamble for money. You lied your way into that pot and you lost. If you’d won, I’d never have known the difference. You’re a born liar, Parks. You’re incompetent. You aren’t worth a God damn.”
    “Don’t talk to me like that.”
    “I’ll talk to you any way I feel like talking to you becauseI bought you. I bought you for thirty-five hundred bucks. Until I get that money, I own you. When do I get it?”
    “I told you it’s just a matter …”
    “Of time. Maybe years. Sure. All right, Parks. How much is the mortgage on your home?”
    “Around twenty-two thousand.”
    “You can’t borrow any more on it. I checked this automobile agency. You haven’t got much equity in it, and the franchise isn’t worth much. How about jewelry? Your wife got much?”
    “No.”
    “Then it’s going to have to be the house. It’s on good land. It ought to go for about thirty-five thousand.”
    “More than that.”
    “If we wait a year, maybe. We’ll ask forty and take thirty-five. After you pay me my thirty-five hundred and pay the real estate cut of seventeen fifty, you’ll have about eight clear. You can