The Transgressors by Jim Thompson

just because you were hungry?”
    Carrington hesitated, puzzling out the translation of bread and hungry. He laughed his polite little laugh. “Think I may have, old man. Quite understandable, you know.”
    “ Understandable, Georgie?”
    “Understandable to me. Sort of thing I’d ’ve done myself if our positions had been reversed. Say I had scads of the old gilt, and I see some nice chap struggling against terrific odds and sinking in the sea of life, et cetera et cetera. Must give him a hand-up, what? Can’t just sit on the jolly life preserver when it’s so simple to toss it to him.”
    He smiled brightly, palm extended in a so-there-you-are gesture. Pellino came slowly to his feet, his body trembling with sudden unreasoning fury.
    “You dumb son of a bitch,” he snarled. “You scram out of here, get me? Beat it, and don’t you ever come back! You show your stupid pan out here again, and—”
    “Oh, I won’t,” Carrington promised. “Scout’s oath, honor bright, and all that rot.”
     
    Taxiing back into the city, Carrington looked out into the gathering night and was completely relaxed and content for the first time in a long, long time. It had been a truly wonderful day, he thought. A truly jolly day. Mrs. McBride had proved to be a terrifically nice person—amazingly understanding and considerate. And how could anyone have been more pleasant than Mr. Pellino? Yet he had actually rather dreaded seeing both!
    It just went to show how wrong a chap could be about people. Not too pure in heart himself, p’raps—that must be it, mustn’t it?—so he suspected them. Whereas, on the other hand, if one’s own auricles and ventricles were properly scrubbed, then he had nothing to fear and so on or something.
    “My soul it has the strength of ten,” he murmured, “because my—my, uh—hands are clean.” Or was that right? Never could remember those jolly old rhymes. Maybe it was, uh—
    A ND J UDAS WEPT, SAYING, YEAH, VERILY I ABOMINATE ONIONS YET I CAN NEVER WITHSTAND THEM.
    Silly. That wasn’t it, of course. How did those silly things pop into a chap’s mind?
    The cab drew up at the entrance of a downtown office building. Carrington got out, pressed a five-dollar bill into the driver’s hand, and curled his fingers around it.
    “You’re a wonderful man,” he said warmly, “I can see it in your eyes. A truly beautiful and wonderful man.”
    “Yeah?” The driver jerked his hand away. “Well, you better line yourself up something else, buddy. I’m workin’ tonight.”
    “Oh, right,” said Carrington. “Going to be rather busy myself.”
    The cigar-stand clerk, a new man on the job, was locking up for the night. Carrington took a package of mints from the carton on the counter, and refused the change from a ten-dollar bill. “You deserve it,” he said. “You deserve the best of everything.”
    The clerk examined the bill suspiciously, saw that it was good, and quickly palmed it. “Look, mister,” he said, “take it kind of easy, huh? I don’t know how you got away from your keeper, but—”
    “Oh, I didn’t get away from him,” Carrington said. “Have him with me all the time.”
    He rode up to the nineteenth floor, one-half of which was now occupied by Highlands. As he stepped off the elevator, he gave the operator a twenty-dollar bill, the last of his money. The boy accepted it reluctantly, along with Carrington’s assurances of his goodness.
    “Let me get you some coffee out of it, anyway, Mr. Carrington. A big carton of black coffee, and maybe a sandwich. That’ll snap you out of it.”
    Carrington declined with thanks. “Not at all hungry, laddie. Hardly decent to gorge at such a time, anyway.”
    The biggest and best of Highlands’ offices were devoted to the legal and accounting departments. Carrington’s was in the rear, facing the alley; a cubbyhole similar to the one he had occupied in his pre-Pellino days.
    Carrington entered it, flung open the French windows,