Anatomy of a Killer by Peter Rabe Page A

he thought, and that’s good.
    “You want plain or powdered?” she said.
    Jordan felt the draft on the back of his neck when the door opened, and if that’s Kemp I won’t have to talk to the girl at all….
    “Sugar,” said the man, “two black and two all the way.”
    He wasn’t Kemp either. He had a shorn head and a big waist which might have been all muscle. He grinned with gold in his teeth and smelled of grease.
    “Stop it,” said the girl.
    The man laughed and straightened up again after having tried who knows what, thought Jordan, because I wasn’t looking. I wasn’t looking when she put the cup in front of me, because here it is with the brown coffee smell lifting up to my face and I’m sweating. Naturally. It’s hot in here. Naturally.
    The girl put the four containers on the counter and said, “That all you want, Davy?”
    “Well, mam, if you really want to know, chicken, I could think….”
    “Don’t talk like that, Davy.” Her face didn’t change at all when she said it, and it seemed she just looked at the man because he was there. Then she said, “You want plain or powdered?” and looked at Jordan.
    “If you really want to know, chicken….”
    “Stop talking like that, Davy.”
    “Plain,” said Jordan.
    “And yours is forty-eight cents,” she said to the trucker.
    “How you been, chicken?” He worked change out of his pocket and grinned at her.
    She put two doughnuts in front of Jordan and said, “Fine, Davy.”
    The trucker put half a dollar on the counter and said because she was such a sweet chicken all around she could keep the change. He felt that was very funny, allowing two cents for a tip, and left it that way till she had picked up all the cups. Then he reached over, when it looked as if he was going to leave, and poked a quarter into the kerchief pocket on her uniform. This, he felt, was even funnier, and the only thing spoiling it for him a little bit was that she didn’t slap his hand away or move back or say anything he could use for a comeback.
    “Thank you,” she said. He went out with his cups balanced on top of each other and laughing, to make the exit fit the rest of the act.
    The girl leaned against the service board behind her and folded her arms. “Him and his manners,” she said.
    Jordan moved his face to show he was listening but the girl wasn’t looking. She was stooping down a little to catch her reflection in the black window opposite, and with one hand she patted a wave in her hair. Then she fluffed it up again because of the heat. She could have been alone there. She sighed and folded her arms again. Where her uniform went over the round of her breast she had written Betty on the white cotton. She must have written it looking down at herself, thought Jordan. The script was that uneven.
    “He must come in often,” said Jordan.
    “What?”
    “Your friend.”
    “Him. Huh,” she said.
    Then he did not know how to go on. He put his head down over the coffee and drank some. Do you have many steady customers coming in here? Like Tom, maybe, my friend old Tom Kemp…. The questions felt wrong and stiff. He would say them stiff. Even hello and good-by if he had to say it now.
    “I never seen you here before,” said the girl. “You just coming through?”
    “Yes.”
    He watched the light make patterns on top of the coffee. The light slid. He watched it and hated not having said anything else.
    “Most of the time all the same people come in here,” she said. “That’s why I was remarking.”
    But Jordan did not pick it up. He thought of the plain matter of fact in this, how much simpler the other part of the job would be….
    “But they’re not all like Davy,” she was saying.
    “You don’t like him?”
    “He stinks.”
    Jordan had no idea how to react to that, so he said nothing. He had not expected she could be this definite.
    “You know the kind that thinks they own everything? Well, he’s like that. And I don’t like it.”
    “I