by Tom Epperson
I’d gotten up and gone to the door by now. “And the apple,” I said.
“And the apple. And that’s about all I got to say.”
Mrs. Dean looked shocked, while the hobo and I were both grinning.
“Well, all right, Matilda,” said Mrs. Dean finally. “But as soon as he’s finished, please tell him to move along.”
Matilda immediately reverted to her usual servile self. “Yessum,” she said, as she handed the hobo the plate and the glass.
Mrs. Dean fled back across the courtyard to her bungalow, as Matilda went back inside, and the hobo sat down on my little stoop to enjoy his meal.
He took a drink of milk, crunched into the apple, then lifted up the top piece of bread and examined his sandwich.
“My favorite!” he said. “Baloney and cheese!”
Chapter 5
SUNDAY MORNING I was summoned to the Hollywood Y.M.C.A. Bud liked to have meetings in the steamroom there. I took my clothes off in the locker room and wrapped a towel around my middle. Nucky Williams was sitting in a chair outside the steamroom keeping guard and giving his teeth a thorough going-over with a toothpick. “Hello, hero,” he said with a nasty grin. I didn’t say a word, and went into the steamroom.
Bud was sitting with some guy I didn’t recognize. Bud saw me and lifted a finger to indicate he’d be with me in a minute. The guy was balding and practically chinless and had soft flabby breasts. He was talking fast, with passionate gestures, and Bud seemed to be listening intently. Then the guy stood up and stuck out his hand; Bud, though, pretended not to notice it. Now the guy turned and walked past me, dripping with sweat and smiling like things had gone just great.
Bud motioned me over.
“Interesting guy,” he said as I sat down beside him.
“Who is he?”
“Harry Seaburg. He’s an inventor. He invented a machine that electrocutes hot dogs.”
“Why would you want to electrocute a hot dog?”
“It’s a cooking method. Cooks hot dogs faster than you can say Jack Robbins,” he said. “That way you’ll never have to keep a customer waiting while you boil up a new pot of dogs. He says a year from now everybody in America’ll be eating electrocuted hot dogs and he’s giving me a chance to get in on the ground floor. Nice of him, ain’t it?”
“Does his machine have a name?”
“The Electrodog. He’s bringing it over to the club tomorrow to demonstrate. You oughta come by. I wanna get your opinion about it.”
“I’ll be there.”
I’d never seen Bud without a shirt before. Even when we were sitting around by the pool he always wore a shirt and long pants. I was surprised by how puny he looked: skinny arms and a sunken chest and a soft little belly. He had quite a bit of chest hair, but it could have used some Grey Gone. There was a roundish scar about an inch wide on the lower left part of his stomach.
“So how you feeling?” he said, and he looked at my dent. “How’s them headaches?”
“They’re better. I’m feeling good.”
“You been seeing Dr. Bartlestone?”
“Not lately. But last time I saw him he said he was pleased with my progress.”
“Him and me both. You know, I knew it was the right thing, bringing you into the business,” and then he added: “Back into the business. You can write your own ticket now, Danny. After what you done for me. Whatever you wanna do, I’ll help you get set up. Whores. Numbers. You like the fights, don’t you? There’s a lot of dough to be made in fights. Or what about the hot-bond racket?”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a new thing I’m doing. We heist government bonds from post offices and banks back east, and sell ’em out here. We got some dicks in the Bunco Squad working with us. It’s a nice way to make some jack without getting your hands too dirty.”
“Sounds interesting. But I been thinking about it lately. I’m not sure I’m cut out for this.”
“For what?”
“You know—the underworld.”
Bud laughed, and shook his head.
“‘The underworld.’ You been seeing too many of them Edward G. Robertson movies. There ain’t an underworld and an upperworld. There’s just the world. Legit and illegit’s just two sides of the same nickel. We’re businessmen, we’re judges, we’re wheelers, we’re dealers, we’re killers, we’re everything. You think the Chink that runs the Chinese laundry don’t cheat his customers ever chance he gets? And you think if the Chink accidentally gives one of his customers too much change, the customer’s gonna say: ‘Hey, Mr. Chink, you gave me too much change, here’s your money back’? But you want me to set you up in the Chinese laundry business? I’ll do it. You can run a whole fucking chain of Chinese laundries. Like I said. You name it. It’s up to you.”
Then Bud gave me such a long, penetrating look it made me start squirming around a little. Like my toe was hooked up to the Electrodog.
“I need someone near me I can trust. Keep this under your hat, but it ain’t going so good with Schnitter. Not with Hanley neither. And I think the mayor’s mad at me. That little trip up to the lake blew up in my fucking face. And now I think they’re all conspiring together to get rid of me. So I got my guys around me, sure. Like Nucky sitting outside the door right now. But think about it. All my guys are packing. Any one of ’em could knock me off. Who’s gonna guard me from my guards? It’s like that Roman guy, Julius Caesar. It was his best buddy, Brutal, that slipped in the shiv.”
I knew I ought to say something like: “You can trust me, Bud,” but all I did was nod. My eyes drifted down to the scar on his stomach.
“What happened there?”
He took a look at the scar himself, smiling crookedly. “I got shot. That’s where the slug come out.” He twisted around, pointed out another, smaller scar on his back. “That’s where it went in. S.O.B. shot me in the back.”
“Who was it?”
“Night watchman at a warehouse down at the Battery. I was trying to heist about twenty cases of canned anchovies. I thought I’d cased the job out real good. The night watchman was this old redheaded mick that’d spend the first half of every night getting drunk and the second half pounding the pillow. But I didn’t know the mick didn’t show up that night and they had another guy working. This other guy didn’t give me no chance at all. Just plugged me as soon as he seen me walking away with some of them anchovies.”
“How old were you?”
“Sixteen. Just a kid. But I’d been on my own—I’d been part of the underworld—ever since I was eleven. That’s when my mother died.”
“What about your father?”
“I never knew who my old man was. My mother never talked about him.”
“What was your mother like?”
“Why all the questions?”
I shrugged. “I’m just curious about you, I guess.”
He seemed pleased by that. “Yeah? Well, you can ask me any question you wanna. But I ain’t gonna guarantee you I ain’t gonna lie.” He laughed. “You asked me about my mother. She was nice. Pretty. She never laid a hand on me in anger. I didn’t have no brothers and sisters, so it was just her and me. But I didn’t see her much. She was working all the time. She worked in one of them places they had 500 girls sewing on sewing machines sixteen hours a day. But then she got sick. I took care of her. I seen a lot of her then.” He fell silent, and then: “I don’t wanna talk no more about my mother, if you don’t mind.”
“What happened after you got shot?”
“Well, I dropped them anchovies and run on outa the warehouse. Then I was running down the street. Then I guess I musta passed out, and somebody musta found me and drug me off to the hospital, ’cause that’s where I woke up.
“Maybe I’da been better off if I got left on the street. That hospital was a crummy joint. Blood and puke all over the floor. People moaning and screaming. The doctors and nurses didn’t give a shit about you, they just wanted to get you outa there ’cause you didn’t
have any dough.
“Some cops come by and wanted to know how I got shot. I didn’t tell ’em nothing. Then another cop come by, he used to know my mother. He was nice to her and me when she was sick. He told me this gang of wops was looking for me, they knew it was me that done the warehouse job and they figured I was trying to muscle in on their territory. He said I was hotter than a dime-store pistol and I oughta get outa town as soon as I could.
“Well, I knew these wops, they’d already killed a good friend of mine, so I didn’t need no extra encouragement. I told one of them nurses I wanted my clothes, and I just walked outa there. Nobody tried to stop me. They was glad to see me go.
“I had a girlfriend. She was a year younger than me. She was a real smart girl, had a lotta class; tell the truth, I don’t know what she was doing with somebody like me.
“She was still going to high school. So I went over to her school and waited around. Blood was coming through my shirt and it was colder than shit and windy and it was starting to snow. Then she come out, and I told her what happened and how I needed to get outa town, and you know how broads are, she started crying and begging me not to leave her. I told her I didn’t have no choice and I needed some dough. She only had something like two bits on her, but she said she knew where her old man kept some dough stashed away at home.
“I waited around till she come back with the money. It was about forty bucks. She brung a suitcase too. She was planning on going with me. I told her that wasn’t a good idea, but I promised I’d come back for her when the heat was off.
“So I went down to the train station. All the time I was still bleeding and feeling like I was about to pass out. But I was just scared to death of them wops. I wanted to put as much distance as I could between me and them and still be in America, so that’s how I wound up here,” and he laughed. “All ’cause of them anchovies. And I don’t even like fucking anchovies.”
“You ever see her again? Your girlfriend?”
“What do you think?”
There were some guys in the other corner of the steamroom and suddenly they started laughing at something. We looked at them, and they were dim in the steam, faded like an old photograph, and suddenly I had this feeling as though it was a hundred years in the future and everybody in the steamroom was long dead, and Darla was dead too, and Dulwich, and Sophie, and everybody else in the world and every dog and cat and horse and cow and fish and bird, so why did anything we said or did or thought or felt really matter?
“I heard some shit,” said Bud. “About you and Darla. Up at the lake.” I started to say something, but he held up his hands to stop me. “You don’t have to splain nothing to me. I know you and her ain’t up to any monkeyshines, ’cause you never would do that to me. Plus you’re too smart. But you got any idea who mighta started this shit?”
I thought it best to keep my mouth shut. I shrugged.
“Well, I’ll find out. Eventually I always find out everything. But understand something. This ain’t about you and Darla. It’s about politics. Politics ain’t just like when you’re electing a mayor, it’s all the time and everywhere. People see you rising in the organization, so they wanna throw in a banana peel and hope you slip on it. I just thought you oughta know.”
“Okay, Bud. Thanks.”
“I’m leaving town for a couple days. On business. Maybe you could take Darla out someplace. Show her a good time. She’s been hiding out in her room with a bottle ever since Thursday night. That ain’t healthy for her. She’s turning into a regular boozehound.”
“Okay. I’ll see what I can do.”
Chapter 6
THAT NIGHT I dreamed I was pissing my name in the snow. Since I wasn’t sure what my name was, I was paying close attention, but I couldn’t make heads or tails of it, it was like I was able to write my name but not read it.
A dog was barking, but then it stopped. I looked out toward the half-frozen river.
The buildings of the great city across the river rose black and jagged, seeming more like mountains than buildings. The starving dog I had seen on the ice was gone. I realized it must have broken through.
Panic surged through me. I ran out on the ice. It was clear like glass. I looked down and in the dark water I saw Vera Vermillion.
She was naked. She was on her back. She was looking up at me. Her auburn hair was floating around her head in a snaky tangle. The current was carrying her, and her fingernails were clawing at the ice and making white streaks in it. Shouting her name, I ran to keep up. But she was moving along faster and faster, till finally she was borne away. I felt like I was about to burst with grief. I fell facedown on the ice, and began to cry.
After a while I felt a hand on my shoulder. I looked up. It was my mother.
She was young, maybe twenty-five. She had coppery hair and light-blue eyes. She was smiling at me.
I sat up. She was wearing just a thin summer frock that left her arms bare, and I said: “Aren’t you cold?”
“No. Are you?”
“No.”
“Don’t cry about the dog. It’s all right.”
“It didn’t drown?”
She shook her head. Her face was so beautiful, I couldn’t get enough of looking at it. I noticed a faint, crescent-shaped scar on her left cheek. “What happened there?” I asked.
But she just smiled a little, and shook her head again, and laid a finger on my lips. An overpowering drowsiness possessed me. I lay back down, and my eyes closed. I was curled up on the hard ice of a wintry river, but I felt as comfortable as if I were inside on a soft rug in front of a blazing fireplace. I was basking in the warmth of her.
Chapter 7
DARLA DIDN’T LOOK like somebody that had been on a five-day bender. She came down the stairs in a curve-hugging white silk gown with a halter neck and patches of black beads over the left breast and left hip. Three plump pearls dangled from each earlobe, and she was wearing a pearl bracelet on her left wrist.
“New dress?” I said.
“Mm hm. Joan Crawford wore a dress just like this in Letty Lynton.”
Anatoly, Bud’s eight-fingered butler, held the front door open for us. “You are pretty as princess,” he said to her. “On snowy night. In St. Petersburg. Long ago.”
“Why, thank you, Anatoly,” said Darla with a gracious princess-like nod.
Teddy Bump and Tommy were hanging around outside, smoking and passing a pint of Haig & Haig back and forth. Tommy looked pasty-faced and haggard; even though they used to fight all the time, he’d taken the death of Goodlooking Tommy hard. Teddy glared at us from under his crooked eyebrows.
“Now you boys behave yourselves,” said Darla as we walked past.
Teddy looked like he was about to bust he wanted so badly to say something, but all he did was throw his cigarette down and grind it out under his shoe.
I opened the door of my Packard for Darla and she hitched up her gown and got in. We drove down the sloping driveway to the front gate. Willie Cooney was sitting in a chair reading the funnies with a flashlight. Everybody called him Willie the Coon, though not usually to his face, since he heartily hated Negroes. He had a nose that looked like it had been broken about a dozen times and a jutting jaw and shoulders a yard wide. He’d spend all night at the gate, and I knew there was at least one more guy somewhere out there in the dark patrolling the walls; Bud had brought in extra guys to guard the house when he got back from Lake Arrowhead.
Willie gave us a lazy wave and hit a button, and the tall iron gate rattled open.
We drove down the hill and across Franklin and continued south. It was nearly midnight, and there wasn’t much traffic. Los Angeles was mostly a town that went to bed early.
“Ever notice something funny about Teddy’s eyebrows?” I said.
“Sure. They’re pasted on.”
“They’re fake?”
“Yeah. And he wears a wig and false eyelashes too. Bud told me about it. He’s bald as a billiard ball all over his body. He was born
that way. Some kinda rare disease.”
“No hair on his arms, or legs, or—?”
“Nowhere. Not even down around his you-know-what.”
We both had a good laugh about it. Now Darla had me pull into a filling station to buy her some Lucky Strikes. When I returned to the car, my heart jumped as I heard a gunshot. But it was just a backfire from a red Buick moving slowly by on the street.
Darla touched my hand to steady it as I lit a cigarette for her. She didn’t seem to have been drinking, which I was glad of. She was in a good mood, because she was going to sing tonight.
The place we were going was on Adams Boulevard, a little south of downtown. She said it was one of the first joints she sang in after she’d arrived from Aurora. I asked her what it was called but she said it didn’t have a name.
We crossed San Pedro. We were in a neighborhood of once-fine houses that had mostly gone to seed. Now Darla told me to pull over.
“That’s it,” she said, nodding at a gloomy mansion that didn’t seem to have a single light on inside.
“I don’t think anybody’s home,” I said. “Or maybe they’ve already gone to sleep.”
Darla laughed. “They’re in there. And they’re not asleep.”
We were lit up from behind as another car parked. A very dressed-up man and woman got out of a long white Marmon and walked toward the mansion. Darla and I followed.
The couple looked a bit odd, since the woman was about a head and a half taller than the man. We all went up the front steps, and the man knocked on a heavy wooden door. A panel was pulled back, and the stern face of a Negro appeared.
“Open sesame,” said the man in a booming deep voice as the woman giggled.