Built for Trouble Read Online Free PDF Page A

start at the bottom and work like hell and learn a trade, but there was only one trade I cared anything about, and it was being jerked out from under my feet with sickening speed.
     
    The afternoon papers had me on the second page, a three-column spread showing the lie test. The reporters had been kind to me, but a little final, I thought. I was a pure and honest boy, but with a tendency to pass out when the going got rough. It was fortunate that Nola Norton had been there to haul me out. They concluded that she was a rare combination of beauty and aquatic skill while Eddie Baker was an unfortunate victim of some obscure but very real physical ailment.
    The way they leaned on that blackout rap Wahlstrom hung on me, you’d have thought I had bubonic plague. It was plenty clear that if Eddie Baker wanted to make his living around the beach, he’d have to do it frying hamburgers in one of the concessions along the strand.
    In the evening I drove the Ford over to Judy’s place and picked her up, but it turned out to be a hell of a date. We talked some about the rescue and how bad things looked for me and before long we got around to the future.
    “Where do we go from here?” Judy wanted to know. We were sitting in the car and looking toward a bright path of moonlight shimmering across the water.
    “Damn if I know. Any suggestions?”
    “Eddie, you don’t suppose—I mean this business about your being sick. Could that be—well, true?”
    “Not that I know of. Why?”
    “Well, I guess we’re going to have to scrap some of our plans, aren’t we? About the beach. I mean?”
    “Could be. So?”
    “It’s going to be—be difficult.”
    She was getting through to me now, but I rode it a few minutes more just to be sure. And it didn’t take long. She still liked me; it was just that she wondered if she could face being married to a drill-press operator or maybe a bus driver. Without a word I slipped the shift into drive and rolled the car over to her house. I reached across her and opened the car door.
    “You aren’t mad? It was something we couldn’t help, Eddie.”
    “Good night.”
    “Please, Eddie. I didn’t want to hurt you. It’s just that—”
    “Good night,” I said again. “Be seeing you around.”
    I pulled away from the curb. Not fast. I didn’t want to dig out like an enraged kid, but I wasn’t a damn bit happy about getting the dear John routine. I headed for the closest bar and had a couple of fast drinks, then went down to the beach, took off my shoes and socks, and walked barefooted on the wet sand. One way and another it had been a fast two days. And what was the next step?
    It was easy to brew the sour grapes, tell myself that I was better off finding out right away that Judy was just a beach-happy babe and ours wasn’t a romance meant to last. But it was bitter in my mouth just the same. And my job. Demand a hearing? Not Eddie Baker; I wasn’t going to hang around L.A. and fight to make them keep me on a job where they didn’t want me. So?
    So Tuesday morning I wrote my resignation and enclosed a note asking them to send my last paycheck to me, general delivery, San Francisco. Then I cleared my things out of the room, gave my landlady her key, drew out the nine hundred and some odd bucks I had in a Culver City bank, and got into the Ford again.
     
    I shot a week in San Francisco without even looking for work. A little of this and that, a lot of newspaper reading. I kept picking up L.A. papers to follow Nola Norton’s publicity, but on Wednesday they dropped her to casual mention in the movie section. On Friday she wasn’t even in that.
    On Saturday Hank Sawyer was dead.
    It wasn’t much of an item, just a five-inch, one-column piece hidden away on page four. Age forty-six, occupation lifeguard, eleven years with the city. Cause of death—bad booze, a batch of the tax-free bootleg variety available, if you know where to go, for very little money.
    According to the police, Hank had