Golden Throat

by James P. Alsphert

  1928 saw the economy soar to new heights. Some warned there might be trouble ahead if the actual value couldn’t meet the pumped up speculation numbers. But few paid much attention. Humans don’t learn easily, and the hard times of 1907 and 1921 were just old newspaper clippings by now in 1928. Good-time Charlie was here to stay! Jobs were good, inflation minimal, food was cheap, cigarettes, booze and flappers were easily available. Why complain, as long as you were sitting on top of the bandwagon?

  Honey’s job at the Bella Notte was going great and she was attracting bigger and better audiences. I got her a screen test and the big muckety- mugs liked her. She was an up and coming starlet, being professionally courted by none other than Charlie Chaplin. He had just completed a film entitled The Circus and was beginning work on his next film, City Lights, and thought Honey (her screen name now changed to Lana Loren) a possible contender for a part in which she would play a blind girl. The film would be made with United Artists. A company that Chaplin himself—together with heavyweights of the time Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, William S. Hart and D. W. Griffith—formed in 1919 to retain better control, by the artists, of the qualities of good film making and the fair distribution of revenues. There was even rumor of a possible contract with United Artists for her. We saw less and less of each other and the down side of her singing at the Bella Notte was that those creeps from the dark side of the tracks frequented the place—I learned later, they owned it. Dragna’s right-hand restaurant “business” associate, Frank Laggore, was not only hot to get into Honey’s panties, but he did backroom deals at the restaurant. And that was no good.

  Mario and I continued to have our differences as I got more and more fed up with the way the police department did things. Some cops were naturally honest, a lot weren’t. But all that was going to change one fateful night. Mario had finally married Rosalie Elena and she was pregnant within a few weeks of cutting the damn cake. But Mario was happy and that made me feel good, because he was a true friend. In earlier years I toyed with Francesca, Mario’s sister, but those days you didn’t play inside the panties of a staunchly Roman Catholic girl without consequences. Pre-marital sex was akin to facing a firing squad with the family as chief executioner!

  There was a secretive character known as Crazy Jack. Maybe a little borderline nuts…hence the name. No one knew exactly who or what he was connected with, but he was a legend down in Skid Row for knowing almost everything about anything. He would always begin answering your question by saying “I don’t know! I don’t know!” and then proceed to know everything there was to know about what you just asked him. I had consulted Jack a couple of times earlier in my rookie days. He told me then that I wouldn’t last in the force, and my life would be a constant walk on the edge of danger, not all of it being local in origin, or however he put it. Mario and I had drawn dayshifts again and our lives were a bit more normal. But it was hard on Honey and me because she worked into the late hours and came home tired and needed alone time. So, we saw each other when it fit into both of our lives, which usually meant days off for either of us or Sundays and Mondays when she wasn’t working. But despite all that, we grew together like peas in a pod and that little woman made me very happy. We could talk about anything, we took hikes, she cooked great food, darned my socks, introduced me to great new songs she was singing at the club, and continued to be the hottest little pistol I ever experienced in the bedroom. She still pressed me for marriage, and I still came up with the same excuses. So, after a while she gave up and just let us settle in to a space we could both live with.

  I left Mario in the car listening to the newly installed one-way radio. We could now receive short-wave transmissions within a few miles of the station house and squad car announcements kept us in the know about what car was doing what and where. I walked down a dirty alley to the Panama Hotel on 5th Street. The area was known as Hell’s Half Acre and spanned roughly from San Pedro Street to Los Angeles Street. The four-story Panama Hotel had been built around 1908 and wasn’t really that old, as buildings go, but for whatever reasons, it looked beat-up and neglected by 1928. I walked the four flights to Room #405. I knocked.

  “Crazy Jack, it’s me, you’re ol’ cop friend, Cable Denning,” I said in a positive, penetrating voice. “Are ya in?”

  There was a rustling behind the door. “I don’t know! I don’t know!” replied Crazy Jack’s nervous voice. “I don’t know—but ya can’t come in, Denning…I’d be lookin’ for Jack…down on the levy, down on the levy, down on the levy—but I don’t know!”

  None of what he said made sense to me. “Uh, Crazy Jack, I’m going to slip some dough under the door. I want you to take a streetcar tonight out to Wilshire near La Cienega—the Bella Notte, a nightclub—and size up it up for me, okay? I’m gonna be there about ten-thirty tonight. Can you make it a little later?”

  “I don’t know! I don’t know!” he said in that wild voice of his.

  “Well, if you can, I’ll meet you out in the alley two doors down about eleven thirty. I’ll look for you then, buddy. And, Crazy Jack…thanks…”

  The voice behind the door kept repeating, “I don’t know! I don’t know!” but I had a hunch it was like a machine in his head, and while he was rattling off his stock and trade comeback, he was processing what he needed to know to answer the question asked him.

  I re-joined Mario in the patrol car. He had just pulled off two or three guys attacking an old woman in the alley. He looked disgusted.

  “How can humans be so inhuman?” he asked as I got in. “See that poor old woman lying there next to the wooden boxes? Three younger guys just started beating up on her because she had a nice new-looking pink scarf around her neck—and they wanted it.”

  “And they saw the patrol car with you in it?”

  “Yep. Thugs just don’t give a damn anymore…about anything. Let alone respect for other peoples’ property…or the elderly…or the law for that matter.”

  “What can I say, Mario? Years before you married Rosalie, I told you your kids are gonna have to face the impossible enigma known as human kind. We all get thrown out there in the trenches. God, man, you remember the neighborhood we were raised in…shit, how much did your life count then? So what’s changed, compadre?”

  He started up the car and we pulled out into traffic. “So, did you find Crazy Jack?”

  “Yep. Well, sort of. He didn’t open the door for me but I slipped a few bucks under it and told him I’d meet him tonight at the Bella Notte.”

  “Why in the hell the Bella Notte? Can’t you just see Crazy Jack pounding his fist on a lounge table saying, ‘I donno! I donno! Now that is nuts, Cable.”

  “Not inside, but outside. I wanted him to size the place up with what he calls the vibration….that’s whether or not a place is okay and what energies might be hanging in it, around it, over it.”

  “You don’t believe in that horseshit now, do you? C’mon, you’ve got more common sense than that.”

  “Is it any less difficult to believe in a God who punishes us all the time, sends dudes with fiery tablets to control other people, put camels through the eye of a needle—or sacrifices His son because He loved the world?”

  “The Bible’s symbolical—”

  “—and mythological—not to mention illogical,” I said, a little steamed under my collar. “At least Crazy Jack says he’s crazy and doesn’t know anything. But somehow he knows everything I’ve ever asked him about.”

  “Hold on there! I think you’ve been reading far too many of those Adventure magazines…all that fiction and fantasy. We were unlucky for a while, finding all those gangland stiffs.”

  “You think we were? Well, Mario, old chum, I see it differently. I see it as signs of things to come, just like the Great War will most likely be the precursor of another world event which, I predict, will come in due time. War makes money and money is what people are all about.”

  “Geez….how cynical can you be! The wor
ld isn’t like that, Cable. We’re into the twentieth century here where civilized people are learning to do civilized things. Even the great minds said the Great War was the war to end all wars. I believe that.”

  I lit up a Lucky Strike. “Open your eyes, Mario. If you’re gonna have kids, you gotta open your eyes and see how the millionaires run us peasants—and one of the best ways to grab you by the shorthairs is through war and manipulation of stock market prices.”

  “I don’t know how Honey puts up with your negative take on everything. Put some faith in humanity, man. After all, you’re one of us.”

  “Am I?” I laughed. “Someday remind me to prove it to myself, will you? A lot of the time I think I’d rather be something else.”

  Mario laughed back at me. “You’re impossible buddy. But I love ya, and you’re stuck with me.”

  I knocked him one on the shoulder. “Yeah, me too, pal.”

  The Bella Notte was jammed and Honey was hard at work with a jumping version of Rodgers and Hart’s My Heart Stood Still. She saw me come in and had reserved a little table up front. When she started the song the second time around, she motioned to the band to slow it down and she milked the tune for everything it had as she made love to me front and center. In the dark shadows I could see Frank Laggore standing there, probably burning up inside with the fever I knew he felt for Honey. I was uncomfortable with that man’s presence, as was my little golden-throated singer. But it had just this very evening occurred to me that Affonso Amadore didn’t own the club, but Dragna and his thugs did. And that worried me.

  During a fifteen-minute break, Honey came to my table and kissed me gently on the lips. She was wearing a dark-blue sequined hip-tight gown with those marvelous breasts tucked tastefully in the upper deck. “Lipstick, you know,” she said with a big smile. “Don’t I know you, Mister?”

  “Uh…what day is this? If this is Friday, I’m Rubio Genovese—if it’s still Thursday, then I’m some old gumshoe you probably wouldn’t be too interested in.”

  She took my hand. “It’s Thursday, and I’m mad about the guy. I almost can’t wait until he takes me home and pounds me into my pillow.”

  “Pillow pounding is extra, toots. Whereas just plain old pressing your head against the pillow while kissing is free of charge.”

  She giggled lightly. “Would you happen to have a two-for-one bargain hanging around in your bedtime repertoire?”

  “Hmmm….let me see…Thursdays…I donno…you see, the pillow pounder has to get up to go to work at five a.m. Are rain checks in season?”

  “Not if it’s cloudy in the girl’s heart, buddy. How about a compromise? I do you, you do me—and we do it together?”

  I laughed. “Now you’re talkin’, doll. What time are you off?”

  “Ugly over there has a party of twenty guys coming in at eleven.” She motioned toward Frank Laggore. “The band and I have been asked to hang around and do a few songs for them while they’re getting drunk enough to talk business.”

  “Do you know who these apes are?”

  “Yeah, strictly Mafia. I think they own the club—and several more like it.”

  “You know, I just got that tonight. It’s a pisser, Honey. I get you the job here, you’re doin’ great and all of a sudden it’s a major meeting hall for the rank and file of organized crime.”

  “Will you wait at home for me? I think I’ll need you after tonight, especially fighting my way out to the streetcar as Laggore stands in my way.”“I’ll tell you what, babe. I’m gonna see this guy called Crazy Jack a couple of doors down for a while. Then I’ll be back and we’ll go home together. I’ll keep my eye on this Laggore character.”

  “Damn, Cable…I love you so damned much I think I’ll die of heart failure over it,” she said as she took my arm and squeezed it.”

  Just then a well-groomed inebriated man approached us. “May…may I ask the lady to…to…sing?…my wife and I….are celebrating our twelfth anniversary tonight…do you know…”I Can’t Believe That You’re in Love with Me? I sang that…hic! to her…when I courted her…”

  “I think I know it, Mister—but I need to check in with the band. If they know it, I’ll do it next for you and your wife.”

  “Bless you—bless you, beautiful lady.” He bowed. “I stand…indebted.” Then he turned and left, making his way to a table where a smiling middle-aged woman greeted him with an embarrassed look.

  “Anyway, I’ll be back, babe.” I got up and kissed her on the forehead. “Yeah, I know…the lipstick…” As I left, I glanced at Frank Laggore, who threw me a quasi-smile and a hand salute. I guessed he thought I was gone for the night and he could continue to chip away at Honey with his suggestive and amorous intentions.

  Two doors down from the club I cautiously walked into an alley. It was dark, so I stopped and lit up a Lucky Strike. The match light partially lit up a face against a brick wall down and opposite me. “Is that you, Jack?”

  “I don’t know! I don’t know!” he intoned, his voice lower than when I had last encountered the odd man. “Not good—Bella Notte! Bella Notte! Not good!…but I don’t know! I don’t know!”

  I was trying to interpret Crazy Jack’s lingo. “You mean you sense some danger—or bad fortune for Honey hanging out in there? She’s my girl…”

  “I don’t know! I don’t know! Jack checked out…Jack checked out. You should do the same! But I don’t know!”

  “Yeah, I know the place is mafia owned and operated. I just found out, Jack. Should I take her outta there? It just seemed a perfect fit for my classy dame.”

  “I don’t know! I don’t know! Go back downtown…safer, better times—but I don’t know!”

  “I’ve got one more question. My partner and I came across a corpse at the county morgue some months ago. There was this golden capsule found in the corpse’s throat… a thing called God of Our Fathers, supposedly containing priceless content. Knowing about it got me into some deep trouble, and I’m kinda interested in what happened to it since it got stolen from the morgue.”

  Crazy Jack remained silent for a short time. Then he approached me. “Cigarette! Cigarette!” I took one out, lit it for him and stuffed the pack into his coat pocket. He shook his head and looked at me. I knew he liked me—or maybe simply trusted me. “I don’t know! I don’t know” he exclaimed, his eyes widening there in the dark until the whites of them showed. “Wonder Woman knows. Wonder Woman! But I don’t know! I don’t know! Danger everywhere you go! Ask her question—tell her no lie…she will tell you…how goes the pie!”

  “So who in the hell is this ‘Wonder Woman?’ Never heard of her.”

  “I don’t know! I don’t know! Clever as a cleaver—ha! ha! Very keeno can be Palladino. But...I don’t know! The danger grows stranger…when you travel…travel by train…but I don’t know! I don’t know!”

  I thanked Jack and noted the names Palladino and Wonder Woman in my head. I had no idea what ‘travel by train’ might have meant. I returned to the club just in time to catch Honey start up a very naughty version of Makin’ Whoopee and knew instantly why every man in the joint wanted to undress her and take her on the spot. It was no wonder her popularity was soaring. She was a hell of a looker with a great body, intelligence and genuine charisma. That’s what I had seen in her the first night we met at Gregorio’s. Watching her there in the dark, I was thinking what a lucky bloke I was that she loved me and desired me. It could’ve been any Joe Blow, but it wasn’t. What she saw in a discontented, on-the-fence cop with not much future for the big bucks was beyond me. But women are weird that way. You never know what they see in you that you don’t even see yourself.

  Thanks to the right and proper Signor Affonso Amadore, when Honey was through and the band began packing up and the goon squad retired to a private banquet room, the kindly manager escorted Honey over to me. “It’s a good-a thing…Signor Cable…you wait-a now for our bella signorina. Dose-a guys-a, dey drinka too much—anda th
en—you know what I mean?”

  “Yep, I sure do, Affonso…thanks.” Just then Frank Laggore came out and approached us. “Mr. Laggore, haven’t seen you since Ardizzone’s funeral.”

  “That’s right, Denning.” Then he looked directly at Honey. “There’s a piano in the banquet room, and we were hoping you’d sing a couple more songs, Honey.”

  She took a deep breath. “I don’t get paid past midnight, Mr. Laggore. And frankly, you know, I’ve…I’ve been singing since nine.”

  He looked at me. “Too bad. Then may I take you home?” He said that to spite me, full well knowing Honey and I were lovers.

  “Thanks, no. Cable will see to those…needs,” she said, easing the knife into him a little more.

  The streetcar ride home was simply a matter of holding hands and me ruminating on what Crazy Jack had said. One, the Bella Notte may not be good for Honey in the long run—two, the God of Our Fathers may be somehow connected to some gal named Palladino and a train trip would be dangerous.

  “Have you ever heard of a gal called Palladino—or someone with that name mixed up with someone called Wonder Woman?” I asked the rather quiet and unusually sullen Honey Combes.

  “Yeah, Cable—Eusapia Palladino, she’s a famous Italian psychic. Some of the girls down at Gregorio’s used to go to her for fortune telling and séances. In fact, she is called ‘The Clairvoyant Wonder Woman’.”