Bandbox

by Thomas Mallon

  Even more bored than he’d been the day Max visited, Waldo testified with a blank, straight face that Mr. Roma had tried to sell him illegal narcotics and caused him even greater shock by asking that payment be made through the performance of “certain unnatural and unlawful acts with my person,” a term Waldo had learned from the district attorney several minutes before.

  Cross-examination was conducted not by the legal stumblebum Gianni had hired the morning after his arrest, but by Lawrence Goodheart, the lawyer Oldcastle used to keep on hand when they were closing Jimmy Gordon’s riskier pieces at Bandbox. Harris had gotten hold of him and was paying his fees—further reason, he hoped, for Gianni to keep his mouth closed.

  Mr. Goodheart began by inquiring about whether the prosecution had offered the witness a deal in exchange for his testimony here today.

  Waldo merely shrugged. Judge Gilfoyle instructed him, almost apologetically, to answer with an audible yes or no, if only for the sake of the court reporter.

  Once Waldo uttered in the affirmative, Mr. Goodheart continued: “How is it, Mr. Lindstrom, that on the morning of February third you were found with narcotics on, as you might put it, your ‘person’?”

  “Gianni put them into the pocket of my overcoat. He said I could try them and see if I liked them before I had to give him what he asked for.”

  “A sort of no-obligation-for-thirty-days arrangement? The kind one might make with Montgomery Ward?”

  The prosecutor objected; Mr. Goodheart went on to other matters.

  “And is it your testimony, Mr. Lindstrom, that you never sampled any of these narcotics?”

  “Of course not,” said Waldo.

  “Of course not,” repeated Mr. Goodheart. “Wouldn’t it, however, be true that you showed no such hesitation some years back, in the state of Kansas, about experimenting with public drunkenness, shoplifting, and animal abuse of a kind more unnatural than anything Mr. Roma allegedly proposed for your precious ‘person’?”

  Waldo shrugged again; Mr. Goodheart asked the court reporter to make a note of the gesture.

  “Mr. Lindstrom, did you not, in the summer of 1925, escape from the Kansas State Penitentiary in Lansing?”

  Waldo paused briefly before answering: “It was my understanding that I’d been paroled.”

  General laughter followed, even from the man wearing dark glasses and a hat.

  “Did the Manhattan district attorney’s office, as part of the arrangement for your appearance here today, promise to help straighten things out with the Kansas authorities?”

  “Oh, termites and Topeka!” Waldo, exasperated only by the idea that he was expected to keep all these things straight, sighed loudly before Mr. Goodheart permitted him to step down.

  He was followed on the stand by the defendant’s brother-in-law, Benjamin Harrison Gattopardi, at whom Gianni appeared to mouth the words Et tu, brutto? before Mr. Goodheart put a restraining hand on his forearm.

  Yes, this new witness testified, he would occasionally supply Mr. Roma with wine for his restaurant. But he worked full-time in the electrical-supplies business, and when his brother-in-law urged him to procure narcotics, he had been stunned and disappointed. He’d introduced him to the man who’d provided them—no, he actually couldn’t recall the gentleman’s name—only because of family pressure. (Mr. Gattopardi, too, had received what he called “consideration” from the prosecutors.)

  A few others, including a hopped-up police chemist, took the stand in quick succession, but Gianni himself never testified, a fact from which the jury was supposed to draw no inference, according to both Mr. Goodheart, during his summation, and Judge Gilfoyle in the course of his charge. Throughout these last phases of the proceedings, David Fine sat by Gianni at the defense table, and Daisy sent the judge supportive nods. Between encouragements she spared a wave of greeting to Cuddles, who she suspected was missing Becky. Once the jury had retired to deliberate, she went over to ask if he’d like to join her and the judge for lunch at Go-Lo’s, on Lafayette Street. He accepted.

  At the restaurant Gilfoyle took obvious pleasure in Daisy’s chatter—much of it about the insights she’d been acquiring from Dr. Horne’s philosophy program on the radio—but he still appeared mighty nervous to Cuddles, who tried to keep things light: “Well, Judge, I see the Irish Vigilance Committee’s approved Mother Machree. Guess you won’t have to worry about any rioting Hibernian filmgoers being brought up before you.”

  Gilfoyle smiled, and as the three of them waited for their food, he remained a model of jurisprudence, keeping conversation well away from Gianni’s case. He asked instead about “how your remarkable Mr. Stanwick is coming with his investigation of that boy’s disappearance. I enjoyed meeting him—not only Stanwick, as it happens, but the boy, too. A bright lad, eager to take everything in.” The judge seemed to be trying to concentrate on the happier portions of the occasion he was recalling. But his face soon turned grave. “That was quite an evening,” he said, nearly in a whisper.

  “I missed a lot of it myself,” said Cuddles. “Huddled away in Oldcastle’s library.”

  “Romance?” asked the countess, batting her eyes and imagining him on a leather sofa with Becky.

  “Protection, mostly. From threatening presences.” He remembered how Becky had hustled him away from ’Phat.

  “We were surprised by some unappetizing company ourselves,” Daisy told Cuddles.

  “And who was that?”

  Suddenly cautious, Daisy only let herself add: “People who do business with a friend of ours.” The judge restrained her with a gentle tap on her wrist. “There, there, dear.”

  Cuddles figured they were talking about Rothstein. But he was only now realizing, from what the judge had said about Shep—Jesus, thought Cuddles, even I’m using the name now—that the kid might have been around the judge at the same time this “unappetizing company,” probably Rothstein’s goons, had shown up at the penthouse. Did the kid do something inconvenient in their presence?

  Cuddles made a note to ask Max what tactics The Brain was inclined to employ in such a situation. (A few aspects of Rothstein’s behavior had been prudentially soft-pedaled in the Bandbox profile.)

  Meanwhile, Cuddles tucked into his moo goo gai pan, a dish he’d had many times at Manking but only now realized was supposed to be made with chicken.

  By 2:30, he and the judge and Daisy were back in court for the guilty verdict on Gianni, whose only real crime, most of the spectators thought, had been developing a case on a miscreant like Waldo.

  45

  Through the door, open a couple of inches, he could hear the radio reporting the last stretch of the six-day bicycle race at Madison Square Garden. The action was being relayed minute-by-minute over the Teletype. Except for the local announcer’s twangy accent, and in spite of the static, which indicated that listeners like himself were in some remote, blocked place, probably a valley, it was almost possible for John Shepard to entertain the fantasy that it was still January and he was right there in New York.

  He could hear the cowboys on the other side of the door. Half a dozen were always out there, playing cards and singing songs and not paying much mind to whatever got broadcast. With them, always, were men in suits—three of them tonight—who gave more attention to the radio, especially when the announcer read the news. John had heard them talking a little earlier about Hoover, who’d said he’d stick with Prohibition if he got elected president this year, a promise that made one of them joke how the Commerce secretary was “always good for business—even our business.”

  Once in a while John was allowed to go out and join them, but most evenings, even at dinner, he was kept in here by himself. The remains of tonight’s barbecued beef still sat on the desk a few feet from his bunk. Through the small chicken-wired window, in the evening’s first moonlight, he could see the leaves of the sycamores; and it was just late enough for him to hear the first distant cry of some coyote or mountain lion. The nightly noise had scared him
at first, but by now he was used to it.

  He felt as if he’d been here forever, though he knew it still wouldn’t even be midterms week at IU.

  He’d had a lot of time to think about how he got here. During the first, short ride, the one he’d made in the trunk, he hadn’t really been too terrified—thanks to the near-beer. He had worried more about getting to a bathroom than whether he’d suffocate. When they stopped at a garage and let him out, he knew they were somewhere outside Manhattan; he had felt the car going over a long stretch of different surface that had to be a bridge.

  Inside the windowless garage he’d gotten knocked around a little bit, until somebody with more authority told Eddie Diamond and the other guy who’d rushed him out of Mr. Oldcastle’s penthouse that they were jerks. “Tell me exactly what you heard, kid,” this man then asked him. Confused by the beer, he’d been scared not to tell them, though he soon realized that keeping quiet would have been the wiser course. As it happened, with an almost word-for-word fidelity that Max Stanwick would have admired, he repeated everything he’d heard Eddie say to the judge about the killing at the Juniper development.

  They’d kept him locked up in the garage for two nights, until another two men, different from any he’d yet seen, drove him out of the city on the first leg of a long, long trip. Before it was over, he’d felt as if he’d crossed the whole country. By now, so many weeks after, he realized that he had. The journey had included stretches inside private train compartments and hundreds of miles, usually at night, in the backseats of cars. He’d been able to follow where they were going from the license plates outside the window. The guys transporting him gave him plenty to read, and that was a good thing, since their conversation was worse than anything he could remember hearing back in January from those salesmen on the train between Indianapolis and Cleveland.

  He came to understand that all the men minding and chauffeuring him—the dozen shifts and relays that took over from one another at small-town intersections or the end of dirt roads—had at least one thing in common: none of them seemed to know who he was or why they were moving him around in the first place. You could see some of them trying to figure out whether he’d done something wrong or was maybe someone important. Since it might be the latter, they tended to treat him pretty well. He’d felt a gun at his back only once or twice, though a couple of times he had heard one fellow in the front seat ask the other if it seemed likely they’d be asked, at some point, to kill their cargo. This speculation occurred when the drivers were leaning to the theory that he’d done something wrong. They would also wonder out loud—as if he were cargo instead of a passenger—why no one had killed him before now, or just let him go after they’d scared him silly. This last possibility would have been swell by John, but his minders clearly lacked the standing to implement any alternative plan. And so, even now, he remained like a product they couldn’t sell and couldn’t quite afford to discontinue.

  After all these weeks, he still couldn’t say for sure where he was, except that it looked like a real ranch, overseen by the men in suits and worked by the cowboys. He’d long since settled into a daily routine: mornings began with huevos rancheros and buttermilk pancakes, followed by a long hike through the groves of sycamores and cottonwoods, under the eyes of the cowboys, who sometimes allowed him to ride along with them and the cattle. Animals were everywhere: not just the horses and bulls, but deer and bobcats and even bears. Whoever actually owned the ranch had set up a wild-animal preserve, a sort of open-air zoo, on the other side of its highest ridge. John hadn’t been there but he’d heard the men in suits joking about it.

  He had never been more brown and fit in his life, but he felt like one of the horses—not exactly ill-treated, but not recognized as having any needs of his own. When he asked if he could write to his mother and father and sister, without a return address, he’d been refused. He’d begun to wonder if he’d grow old here, and sometimes, out of anyone’s sight, he cried. He remembered reading, years ago, “The Ransom of Red Chief,” but he knew it wasn’t in him—he was too scared and too well-mannered—to secure his release through sheer obnoxiousness.

  The noise beyond the door was dying down. The card game had broken up and somebody was switching off the radio. John pulled the Navajo blanket up to his chin and looked at the designs painted on the ceiling. Lately he needed to convince himself that he hadn’t just dreamed those thirty hours he’d spent in Manhattan. In fact, most nights now he did dream them, like a wonderful movie he was seeing for the thirtieth or fortieth time. It would probably happen again tonight, but in the event he couldn’t sleep, he decided he would reread, once more, an eight-month-old Bandbox that he’d found, his first week here, in the main room of the ranch house.

  46

  “Miss LaRoche?”

  “Am-scray,” said the movie star from behind her giant menu in the Roosevelt’s dining room. “Keep bothering me and I’ll have you put out on your caboose.”

  “Miss LaRoche,” Becky persisted, “I believe I’m the person you came here to see.”

  “Well, I believe—and believe you me—that you’re nothing like what I came to see.” She raised her fingers over the menu and snapped them for the maître d’.

  “You’re hoping to see Stuart Newman, aren’t you?”

  Rosemary lowered the menu a tentative two inches. “And how the hell would you know that?”

  “Because I sent that note to the set,” said Becky. “I mean his note, about you.”

  “Siddown,” said Rosemary, closing the menu at last, but refusing to look her new lunch partner in the face.

  “I’m his colleague,” said Becky.

  Rosemary guffawed. “Is that what they’re callin’ it these days?” More encouragingly, she waved off the just-summoned maître d’.

  Becky pressed forward. “I’m hoping that you’ll accept me in his place.”

  Rosemary hated being puzzled. In his place? As in “alongside” him? Had ’Phat Harris so misunderstood the nature of her hint about a “third party” that he’d sent this moist little frail out here instead of Newman and another gentleman?

  “Listen, honey, you’re a little confused. If you’re lookin’ to play field hockey with the girls, I can give you Miss Garbo’s phone number. Now where’s Mr. Newman?”

  “He’s in New York,” said Becky, who nervously munched a roll while trying to explain just how she came to be here.

  Rosemary waited for her to finish the story before saying, quietly, “You took all this upon yourself?”

  Becky nodded, hoping the star would admire her moxie, maybe see her as the kind of girl Dorothy Gish often played.

  “Of all the goddamned stupid nerve! Take your mitts off that roll! You’re not gettin’ so much as a cup of coffee here!” Only when she saw that other diners were turning around did the star replace the roar with a hiss. “Exactly what did you expect to accomplish?”

  It was a question Becky almost hadn’t dared ask herself, so new was the thrill of ambition—and accomplishment—that had been filling her. Over the past two weeks she had played the Ouija board with Blanche Sweet, gone for drives in the desert with Dorothy Gish, and pried several damning admissions about the actresses’ censorship problems from a man in Will Hays’s office. The article she was trying to write needed to be a grand slam if she didn’t want to get knocked back to doing squibs on Nelson’s Loose-Leaf Encyclopaedia. Her confidence had been rising with each longhand draft composed in her room upstairs; she reminded herself that even the Spirit of St. Louis had bumped the runway three times before lifting off.

  But right now, face-to-face with this implacable siren, she could feel her propeller starting to sputter. Her hopes of turning a little miracle for Harris were headed into the drink, and she had no maneuvers left to execute. She had even considered calling Howard Kenyon, but Dorothy had assured her that the star’s ex had “no more pull than he used to have push” with Rosemary.

  Looking into the actress’s eyes, Bec
ky knew she’d better give up. Back in New York she’d simply have to take a deep breath and tell Harris she’d done her best; then she’d go shopping for an Easter dress, something less jeune fille than the Pinafore loaner she had on now.

  Rosemary was back behind her menu, snarling once again. “I’ll count to three and you’d better be lost.”

  Becky could feel her right foot lifting, getting ready to beat the first step of a retreat. “You know,” she said, “Stuart’s job depends on your doing this story.”

  “Four, five, six,” said Rosemary.

  “He’s more handsome than ever,” Becky added, as she finally stood up.

  Rosemary’s knuckles tightened to an extreme whiteness against the menu—out of desire or impatience, Becky couldn’t tell. But when nothing further happened, she had no choice other than to leave the dining room.

  Back up in her room, she began to pack, laying a program from Grauman’s Chinese beneath several writing tablets and a straw hat. Tomorrow she would start the long journey home aboard the Chief to Chicago, passing through all that western territory she still had trouble imagining as the scene of Cuddles’ boyhood. On the trip out she’d tried to picture his younger self as a merry little fossil, not so much petrified as suspended, awaiting reanimation, inside one of the rocky canyons’ geologic layers. She had written him twice and cabled once from out here, all to no response. Daniel, by contrast, had written every other day. She now put the rubber-banded stash of his letters under the straw hat, remembering as she did how one of them contained a list of things she should be sure to see at the Huntington Library. Between all her outings with Blanche and Dorothy, she’d never got around to going.

  The Roosevelt kept a big Kelvinator at the end of each hall. At 3:00 P.M. Becky was taking some fresh pineapple from it and thinking about how hard she’d find going back to her leaky icebox on Seventeenth Street. It was then she heard the telephone ringing in her room. She hurried back down the hall, assuming the front desk had just received her tickets from the Oldcastle travel agent.