by Michael Mayo
I figured that sooner or later Peter Wilcox would want to talk to me and he did. It was a damn strange meeting, I can tell you that. Maybe a month went by and on a dead Tuesday night, Summers came in. He didn’t recognize me. There was no reason he should. I was at my table when I saw him go to the bar and talk to Frenchy. Frenchy pointed me out. Summers came over and said Peter Wilcox wanted to talk to me privately. I told him to come up to my office.
A few minutes later, Wilcox and Summers and another big guy who could have been Summers’s brother came in. I was behind my desk. They stood and said no to a drink. After what seemed like a long time, Wilcox said, “I have looked into your background and I believe I understand your role in the unfortunate situation that involved my family. Junior stole one of Mr. Apollinaire’s books and somehow used it to extort money from an actress. You delivered the money.”
“Right.”
“It was a ridiculous thing for him to do. I’m afraid my son inherited many of his mother’s weaknesses. He’s now receiving the care he needs. But I’m still puzzled as to why you came to my father’s house on Sunday night.”
“Hobart told me to follow him when he took your old man out of the soirée on Corlears Street.”
“You were there?”
“Yeah, what’dya think of the picture?”
His face flushed and his ears turned red. “You must understand that my attraction to exotic diversions and Mr. Apollinaire’s productions were because my wife was incapable of enjoying conjugal relations. The doctors told me it was part and parcel of the crippling melancholia that caused her to create those terrible fantasies.”
I shrugged.
“You don’t believe that story.”
“Nobody cares what I believe. It’s your wife and father and son, or maybe your brother, that Hobart was talking about. You know them better than I do.”
Wilcox stared at me for what seemed like, again, a long time before he shook his head like I had disappointed him. They started for the door.
I said, “What about Hobart? What happened to him?”
Without looking at me, he said, “We’re taking care of him.”
But getting back to the night it happened, after I talked to Ellis on the telephone, Arch and I stopped one more time at a sewer grate where I wiped the Banker’s Special clean and ditched it. Arch told me to leave him at the speak. He kept a change of clothes there, and it was too late to go home.
“Thanks for coming along tonight,” I told him. “Couldn’t’ve done this by myself.”
“I wouldn’t have missed it, and if the opportunity should ever present itself, I wouldn’t mind seeing that picture again. It was amateurish in many respects, but she really is something.”
“Ain’t that the truth.”
“And if I’m not out of line, I have to say that I didn’t really know what I was getting into when I asked for a job six months ago. But it has never been boring. Thanks.”
Arch got out. I drove to the garage on Ninth and walked back to the Chelsea. I was still worried about Connie, but I didn’t know what to make of everything else that had happened. I kept seeing moments from that day before, Trodache’s surprised look, the Chinaman I slugged at the market, and the two others backing down the stairs and the kids on the street hanging on to their rope. Bobby in his red ringmaster’s coat, Carlos in the ape suit and codpiece, and Nola falling out of that dress. Damn, that’s what got it all started, her in that dress. As Arch said, she was really something.
By then the sky was getting light in the east and traffic was picking up. The workweek had started. The bank holiday was still in operation and we had nothing to fear but fear itself and it was still cold. As I walked up to the front door, I realized Arch was right. Working for me wasn’t boring. We’d done a lot in six months, and when I had that thought, I understood why Connie was mad at me, and I knew I was a dope.
Her note was stuck in my door. At first, I was afraid to touch it, thinking that it was just to say good-bye, but it didn’t.
Jimmy,
If you’re not stinking drunk from your night out with the boys at the stag movie, come up to see me. I’m either on the roof or in my room.
C
I wanted to charge up the stairs as fast as I could, but if I did that, I’d be out of breath and red in the face and she’d know how crazy I was. So I walked slowly up to the fifth floor and knocked on her door, not too loud. Nothing. Okay, she was on the roof where we went sometimes when we were coming back from a busy night in the summer and it was already light and still cool. I took my time gimping all the way up to the metal door at the top floor. Just so you know, it had a stronger strike plate than the one I kicked open in Chinatown that afternoon. As I was climbing the stairs, I tried to figure out what I was going to say, and all of it seemed wrong.
The door was wedged open with the brick she’d put there. It squeaked against the spring as I pushed it open. She heard that. When I got around to the south side of the building where I knew she’d be, she was turned around in a rocking chair, looking at me. Four of the chairs were set up by a place where the top section of the railing was broken off, so you could sit and see over it to the rooftops and trees.
We spoke at the same time. I said, “I’m sorry I forgot . . .” and she said “I know that you . . .”
We both laughed and I sat down next to her. She was wearing a heavy coat, a scarf, and a wool hat. Her cheeks were flushed pink in the cold. After the little nervous laugh, she wasn’t smiling, and I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. She said, “You first.”
“I forgot our anniversary. If that’s what you call it. It’s been one year since I met you. The exact date was last week sometime. That’s why you’ve been so sore.”
“Thursday,” she said, and I still couldn’t read her mood.
“Thursday when we saw King Kong, when Miss Wray came in and all this got started, but I can’t blame that. I just forgot. I mean, I didn’t forget, I just don’t think about stuff like that.”
“I know you don’t. After we closed up tonight, Marie Therese and I talked about it. While we were waiting for you and Arch to come back.” She stopped, expecting me to explain.
Instead, I said, “Where were you all day? I was worried. So was Marie Therese.”
“I took a walk. I told you I was going to.”
She didn’t say anything about a walk, but I wasn’t about to start another fight about it.
“I think better when I walk,” she said, “and I had a lot to think about. I went up to the park and down to the Battery. I took the ferry to Staten Island because we haven’t done that and I walked back to the bar.”
“That’s a long walk.”
“It is. My legs are tired.”
“What did you and Marie Therese talk about?”
“You. Where were you?”
“I think you know. Arch and I went to Bobby’s version of King Kong.” I stopped, trying to figure how much to tell and decided to keep it as simple as I could. “I was looking for you. The other night, Bobby came close to offering you a job serving drinks there. I thought he might have done it again in the note he left for you last night. I had reason to think there could be trouble. I was right.”
“You’re saying you went there to protect me, not to watch a stag film? Ha! Marie Therese said you’d come up with a good story, but this one takes the cake.”
“It’s the truth,” I said. “There’s a lot more to it, but now’s not the time. What were you thinking about and talking about with Marie Therese? That’s more important.”
She could tell that I was serious and that I didn’t make up the part about being worried about her.
She said, “I’m trying to decide what to do. My mother wants me to come home. When I first decided to leave, I had to fight her to apply for the position with the agency. She never liked the idea of me going back east and working for rich people. I haven’t really told her what Jimmy Quinn’s is, either. She thinks it’s a restaurant. I
f she knew it was a speakeasy, she’d go nuts.”
My first thought was to ask her if she wanted to go back to California, but I remembered what Arch said about her old man, and I saw the hard set of her face and I knew she wasn’t doing that. It was something else. “What did Marie Therese tell you?”
She laughed again but not like it was really funny. “You know what she said. She wants us to get married. For a while I thought I wanted that, too, but now I don’t.”
“What?” I didn’t expect to hear that.
“Don’t look like that. I know what you think. But I’m eighteen years old. I don’t want to be a barmaid for the rest of my life. It’s fine for now, but there’s a lot of things and places that I don’t know anything about. I’ve been here a year, and I’m just beginning to understand how much I don’t know about this city, and there’s a lot more to the world than New York.”
I didn’t understand that last part at all.
“Yeah, that’s a lot to think about all right,” I said. “I’ve been thinking about a lot of things too. Past few days, I’ve heard a lot of stories and seen guys and women using each other and selling themselves and lying, and doing the most terrible things you can imagine, and all I can think now is that I don’t want to be like that with you.”
I stopped because I wasn’t saying what I wanted to say, but she was paying attention to me and maybe she knew what I meant, so I tried again. “I’m sorry that I forgot about when I met you, but I want you to know that every day since then, I’ve looked forward to seeing you and doing things with you, and I want to see you tomorrow and the day after that.”
I guess that was enough because she pushed up out of her chair and climbed onto my lap and gave me the longest, sweetest, most serious kiss I’d had in weeks. Finally, she came up for breath. Then looking worried and sounding a little embarrassed, she said, “There’s a lot you don’t know about me.”
Acknowledgments and Afterword
Like the other novels in this series, Jimmy and Fay is a work of fiction based on fact. It really began when I interviewed Fay Wray. She was one of the most charming women I ever met, and, like Jimmy, I fell a little bit in love with her. In her autobiography, On the Other Hand, she neglects to mention being in New York for the premiere of King Kong. She does write about being in the city a year later to make the film Woman in the Dark. She received an extortion threat then and said, without more explanation, that it was handled by studio executives Howard Hughes and Joseph Schenck. The sad details of her marriage to John Saunders, their 1931 trip to New York, and her appearance in the production of Nikki are in agreement with Jimmy’s version of them. So are his memories of Polly Adler, her various addresses, and her introduction to the business of prostitution. The Projectionists were real and some of their films still exist, at least in stills and clips.
Thanks to my agent, Agnes Birnbaum.
And more thanks to Berenice Abbott, Reginald Marsh, John Sloan, Rian James, Frederick Lewis Allen, and Arthur Leipzig, who paid attention to the city and the people and recorded those times.
Rachel Warren Ratliff gave the book an early test drive and said that it handled pretty well. Editor Charles Perry made valuable suggestions. Copyeditors Lauren Chomiuk, Laurie McGee, and Anna Stevenson tried their best to improve Jimmy’s grammatical lapses and his many insensitivities. More often than not they were unsuccessful, but they made this a better book.
Finally, once again, thanks to publisher Otto Penzler for his belief in crime fiction.
About the Author
Michael Mayo (b. 1948) has written about film for the Washington Post and the Roanoke Times. He hosted the nationally syndicated radio programs Movie Show on Radio and Max and Mike on the Movies. Mayo is the author of American Murder: Criminals, Crime, and the Media and the Jimmy Quinn Mysteries, which include Jimmy the Stick (2012) and Everybody Goes to Jimmy’s (2015). He lives in North Carolina.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2016 by Michael Mayo
Cover art by Mauricio Díaz
978-1-5040-3605-4
Published in 2016 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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