Glory Boys by Harry Bingham

on death row gets a kick out of a postcard from outside. Even now, drunk as he was, Willard felt his lack of freedom. Willard’s salary, net of Powell’s deduction for interest, left him hardly any better off than Annie. Unlike her, he had the use of a company apartment and the part of his father’s twenty-five thousand he hadn’t already spent. But he wasn’t an Annie, a mouse content with crumbs. With a kind of reckless defiance, Willard had changed his spending habits almost not at all. In the past two weeks alone, he’d spent six hundred dollars on clothes, thirteen hundred dollars on new furniture, another few hundred dollars to have the seats in his Packard re-upholstered in pale calfskin. Before too long, his bank account would be as dry as a busted fuel tank. What he’d do then, he didn’t know – he refused to think about it.
    And that wasn’t all. Six weeks since starting work, he was no further ahead. His loan was not a nickel smaller. His chance of repaying it not a hundredth of a per cent higher. All his life, Willard had known there were two sorts of people: the rich and the not-rich, the free and the unfree. He had always been of the first sort. Had been. He was the second sort now. He and his two colleagues stood in line, under a light July rain, belching and privately regretting their last cocktail.
    ‘I must say,’ said Ronson to Willard, ‘you’re a lot better than our last fellow.’
    ‘Hmm?’
    ‘You know. Martin. Our late-lamented colleague. Esteemed and lamented.’
    Even in his drunken state, Willard pricked up his ears. Arthur Martin had been the fifth member of the Powell Lambert ‘engine room’ before Willard’s arrival. Willard had inherited his desk, his paperwork and even his company-owned apartment. All Willard really knew of the man was that he had been killed in an auto accident shortly before Willard’s arrival at the firm.
    ‘So, when was the auto smash? When did the poor fellow die?’
    ‘Eh? You know,’ said Ronson. ‘You know.’
    ‘Gentlemen, please,’ said Annie, using her chin to point to a gap that had opened in the line ahead of them. The two men frog-marched Annie forwards until they had caught up.
    ‘I don’t know,’ said Willard. ‘If I knew, I wouldn’t ask, would I?’
    ‘Well…’
    ‘It was only…’
    Annie and Ronson both spoke at once, then stopped. Then Annie spoke alone.
    ‘He died the Thursday before you arrived. We thought you knew.’
    Willard felt a tiny prickle of something run through him. Afterwards, he thought maybe it was fear or the first premonition that something was wrong. But perhaps it was only the underbrewed moonshine talking. Perhaps the prickle was nothing more than a simple shudder in the rain. In any case, when Willard answered, he suddenly felt less drunk, less stupid.
    ‘But that couldn’t be. Powell had already told me which apartment I’d be staying in. He couldn’t have done that, if the poor devil Martin was already there.’ He didn’t mention it, but the same was also true about the ‘engine room’. There were five desks there, plus Annie’s. The room couldn’t have fitted another one. If arrangements had been made for Willard’s arrival, wouldn’t someone have thought to introduce an additional desk?
    ‘It was, though,’ said Annie. ‘The Thursday before you came.’
    ‘Powell must have been in a muddle. Good job in a way. You wouldn’t have wanted to arrive with all your boxes and find… I mean, not a good job the fellow died, obviously. What I mean is, good job the place was empty.’
    ‘Powell wasn’t in a muddle,’ said Willard, argumentatively. ‘It wasn’t just him, I mean I had to phone and confirm and collect keys and everything. It wasn’t just a case of turn up, mister.’
    ‘Then Martin must have been moving somewhere else, mustn’t he? Couldn’t have the two of you living on top of each other. Any case, Martin wasn’t a decent sort, like you. Didn’t appreciate the