Do they contract the hit with a GAT?
I’m watching this Humphrey Bogart movie, The Enforcer. Bogart’s a detective on the police force, who’s trying to pin down a mob boss. His key witness, a certain Rico, has cleverly decided to leap off a building in order to save his life from the cops who were protecting him.
That’ll show ’em. There’s no protecting him anymore!
So, anyway: Bogart’s in a sticky flavour of a jam. If he doesn’t do something quickly, this crimelord fellow will get off free. As he’s moping about the predicament, Bogart recalls something hazy. He can’t quite finger it, but there’s some detail about the case that he feels lodged in his mind. Cue the first of several layers of flashback.
A guy wanders into a police station, mumbling about how he killed his girl. They forced him to. There was a contract out on her. He was supposed to do the hit. Who were they? They were his troupe.
The police were baffled. Contract? What kind of a contract? What’s a hit? What was this guy, a boy scout? What kind of a troupe did he mean? They couldn’t make earth from sky of it. Bogart got involved with the puzzle. Contract? Hit? What a mystery!
Over ten or fifteen minutes, Bogart followed a string of leads. After a little work, he pulled in another member of the “troupe”. The guy didn’t want to talk at first, but Bogart threatened to send his kid to a private school. So the cat spilled the beans.
Cue another layer of flashback. Through a mutual contact, this fellow fell in with a mean-looking bunch who met in the back room of a store. “It was just like the back of a store,” he observed.
“I’ll do whatever you say,” he chirped to a swarthy fellow — apparently the leader. “I’ll even murder if you like.”
The oily man slapped him. “Don’t ever say that! When you’re going to kill someone, you say you’ve got a contract out on him. The person you kill is a hit. That way even if the police hear you, they won’t know what you’re talking about. You got it?!”
Back in the shallower level of flashback, the police were astonished. A contract was a murder! A hit was the victim! Good gosh!
“Killing for profit,” Bogart scoffed. What was this world coming to?
They couldn’t learn anything else from the man, but at least they had a starting place. A contract was a murder. A hit was a victim.
It… goes on like this.