***Doll’s Story-With The Asphalt Jungle In Mind

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Doll never had a guy who could go the whole distance, never once, never a guy who could think one step ahead, one step ahead of that next dollar, never a guy who could figure the percentages to his advantage, never. Not even her last man, Bix, the straightest guy she ever knew. The man she was crazy for from first day when he came into the club, the Kit Kat Club where she was warbling for cheap change, and just kind of country boy stared at her while she was singing, singing some torch number, Billie’s Am I Blue that she had done a thousand times but reached some high white note while he was staring and so she was hooked, hooked bad. Yah, Doll had it bad for Bix, yah, real bad, and so the tensions between them, her loving him no matter what and he kind of casting her aside, didn’t matter as she played her hand out right to the end, right to the end of hope. Doll though never figured out the ABCs of hard guys-that hanging around wrong gees, even stand-up wrong gees, was anything but heartbreak hotel. But sometimes that is the way dames are, thankfully.

Yah, Bix and his childhood dreams, his simple-minded dreams, his dream of recovering some bluegrass dirt farm his father lost in the Great Depression like you could bring that back, or want to. That was the hard edge county boy about him, mixed in, mixed in with wrong gee, and with some sense of honor. A funny mix. All Doll wanted was for him to do was pay her a little more attention, maybe set up housekeeping together, not married, not if he didn’t want to, not if it would crowd him too much But Bix couldn’t see it the way she wanted him to see it, he had to go and face his own music his own way and now he was down in some good earth Kentucky hay field face down to the wind pushing up flowers. Yah, he had to do it his way. Get involved way over his head with a bunch of guys looking for easy street and coming up empty. Damn.

Damn Doc and his big complicated plans, the heist of the century is the way he tried to sell it. That wizened, harden old con trying for one last chance at “easy street” with a big caper and Bix as, well, the “hooligan,” the “muscle”, the guy who has to clean up after, but see Bix as she knew from his talk was also looking for his own version of that easy street. So that was the lay.

Doll knew from the beginning the thing was a “no go,” was way too complicated with too many moving parts the way he explained it, and Bix just a mug who might have robbed grocery stores or did some strong arm work was in way over his head and she tried to kind of telegraph the problem to Bix from the start; crime doesn’t pay, okay. But that“wisdom” has never stopped a million "from hunger" guys (and not a few dames) from taking the quick plunge to easy street since way back, way back in pharaoh’s times probably.

See Doc, old time con that he was, had just got released from stir for some previous big plan crime around the time that Doll fell for Bix, had had plenty of time on his hands up at the pen to work through his latest plan for easy street. A big plan involving knocking over a big jewelry store, hard rocks not cheap jack wedding rings but serious Mayfair swell jewelry, having the merchandise “fenced,” and then off he goes to sun and senoritas, young senoritas by the way, the dirty old man, down in Mexico. Mexico before the drug cartels blasted everything down there to hell and back.

But such an effort needed upfront cash for tool, plans and reliable men, and some major backing, to procure the master safe cracker, an expert wheelman and, just in case things get rough, the hooligan, her Bix, the guy who takes all the pot-shots for short money and also to secure a conduit to fence this high roller stuff after the heist. And that is where things started to go awry.

See, one of reasons Doll figured that crime doesn’t pay, pay in the long or short haul, was that not everybody is on the level. Sure the safe cracker, the wheel man, and the hooligan, the “proles”were on the level. Especially her farm boy Bix turned loose in the ugly, asphalt jungle city just looking for a stake to get back home to Kentucky and out of the city soils. The problem was the up-front dough guys, one way or the other, were not on the level.

One guy, Emmett, Doll thought his name was, Bix wouldn’t say, has no dough (although later when she put the pieces together it was easy to see why that was so since he was, well let’s just call it “keeping time” with a young honey, Angela, and even Doll could see where keeping her "happy” from the way Bix described her would eat up a guy’s wallet), and the other guy wilted under the slightest pressure, police pressure. He couldn’t stand up to the grilling and spilled his guts out. All it took was a few slap arounds and he sang like a bird, the rat. But who had time to check with the Better Business Bureau when you are in the rackets to check the “fence’s” references (and bank book). Needless to say that while the jewel heist was pulled off, although not without complications, deadly complications, a couple of coppers or security guards, same thing, went down in a hail of gun fire, some of it Bix’s , and that is the point where everyone got a share of the very painful message already telegraphed above. Bix took some gunfire too and was bleeding like a pig when he got to Doll’s place after the coppers cracked the case wide open.

So she could have told him a thing or two about that thin line between the bad guys and the good guys, and the good guys are not always the cops and respectable folks. Doc, for instance, was cool customer, even if he was nothing but a has-been moth-eaten old con; although he makes a few serious mistakes of judgment in whom to, and who not to, trust he was a likeable enough crook. If he could have kept his talk away from Bix. Bix, ditto, because he was a stand-up guy, gave one hundred per cent for what he is paid to do, and did not leave his buddies in the lurch. But that policy left Doll just one more time with a guy, the straightest guy she ever knew, who couldn’t go the distance. Damn.