Cover-Up Story

by Marian Babson

  I was aware, as I went out, that Uncle No’ccount had moved forward to start folding some of the garments on the bed and lay them gently in the suitcase . . .

  Sam opened the door. He hadn’t regained any colour, and he didn’t seem very pleased to see me. ‘I thought you were the doctor,’ he said, stepping back to let me in.

  The Client was lounging against the window, looking down, but his heart wasn’t in it. Lou-Ann was nowhere in sight.

  ‘Where is she?’ I asked.

  ‘I put her to bed.’ The Client moved away from his vantage point. ‘She was pretty cut-up – and she’s got a show to do tonight. Sam, here, phoned down for a doctor for her. I suppose it can’t do her any harm. You want to see her? Reckon that can’t do no harm, neither.’

  ‘No, I won’t disturb her,’ I said. ‘I just came along to see if there was anything I could do.’

  ‘Not much nobody can do – time like this.’ The Client moved restlessly towards the window again, but abandoned the idea after a brief glance out.

  ‘You’ll be able to help me,’ Sam said. There’ll be all kinds of red tape over this. You’ll know what to do.’

  I refrained from pointing out that Perkins & Tate clients weren’t in the habit of dying on them. ‘You’ll probably have to do something about the American Embassy, for a start,’ I suggested helpfully. ‘I think they’re supposed to be notified in cases like this.’

  ‘Cases like what?’ The Client whirled on me, looking ready to fight.

  ‘Sudden death,’ I said. ‘One of their Nationals dying in a foreign country. I think it comes under their jurisdiction. They might be able to help with the red tape, too.’

  ‘Oh, yuh.’ Losing interest, he turned away. His restless pacing carried him past the window again and again, the view failed to hold him.

  There was a knock at the door. Casually, while Sam was leading the doctor through to see Lou-Ann, I strolled over to the window myself and checked. It was a lot more interesting for me than it was for Bart. So far as he was concerned, there were just a couple of middle-aged ladies waiting at the bus stop – they must have been getting on for twenty-two.

  ‘She hasn’t been able to sleep, she can’t even stop crying.’ Sam came back into the room with the bulletin, as though it might be of interest to someone. It left Bart even more indifferent than the scene beneath the window. Then he seemed to notice that Sam was expecting some reaction.

  ‘That’s sure too bad.’ Almost visibly, he pulled himself together. ‘Poor kid.’

  ‘I can see it’s just breaking your heart.’ Sam eyed him with distaste.

  A nasty light flared in Bart’s eyes, then dimmed as the doctor came out of Lou-Ann’s room. The doctor was heading towards Sam, but Bart intercepted him.

  ‘How is she, Doc?’ He did it well. He was humble, anxious, unmistakably the worried husband.

  I wondered if the act would have impressed me if I hadn’t disliked him so thoroughly. His shoulders were slumped forward, his mouth drooped, pulling his face into the proper lines of unhappiness, but his eyes were watchful and calculating. Even so, it would have registered with the right impact in a photo.

  The doctor responded to it immediately. Bart took his arm and drew him over to a corner as he started to answer. We were left outside the consultation. But we weren’t going to let him get away with that. Sam and I exchanged glances, then bore down on them. Sam wanted to hear about Lou-Ann – and I had my own reasons for wanting to know what was being said in that corner.

  ‘...great shock, naturally,’ the doctor was saying.

  Bart nodded, the impatience only visible to those who knew him. ‘But you’ve given her something?’ he insisted.

  ‘Yes, you needn’t worry. She’ll sleep –’

  ‘Sleep!’ Bart interrupted. ‘She can’t go to sleep now! Didn’t nobody tell you who we are? We’ve got a show to give tonight. If’n you want her to sleep, then you give her some pills to take later on. But she’s got to be awake for the performance. We got a Public to think of. Don’t you know “The Show Must Go On”?’

  The doctor backed away from the vehemence of Bart’s protest. A certain reserve shuttered his face as he began to get the picture. ‘I think –’

  ‘It’s all right, Bart,’ Lou-Ann stood in the doorway. ‘I remembered about the show. I didn’t take the pills he gave me. I can go on tonight.’

  ‘Good girl!’ Bart crossed to put his arms around her, a split second before Sam could reach her. She clung to him shakily. ‘I knowed you was a Trouper. But –’ he glared at Sam – ‘that doc shoulda been briefed not to give you nothing that might slow you down.’

  ‘She shouldn’t go on,’ Sam said stubbornly. ‘She should take those pills and go to bed. The show can go on without her for a couple of nights.’

  ‘Is that so?’ Bart grinned wolfishly. ‘I thought you was the one who figured she was so good the show could go on without anybody but her. You’re sure changing your tune fast.’

  ‘These are special circumstances, and she shouldn’t –’

  ‘I’ll go on, Bart.’ Lou-Ann seemed in a daze, but she was still fighting. ‘I’ll make them laugh tonight, Bart. Honest, I will.’

  ‘Sure, you will, kid.’ He hugged her, enjoying Sam’s face as he did so. ‘You’ll be great.’

  She was terrible, of course. She flung herself around like a demented rag doll – except that she was flesh-and-blood, and her timing was off. She seemed likely to do herself a permanent injury, rather than make the audience laugh.

  The audience felt it, too. They heard the heavy thud as she hit the floor without breaking her fall properly. It upset them, without their knowing why, and they resented it. There had been no publicity yet – so they didn’t know they were seeing a Gallant Little Trouper. They just thought it was a bad performance. And the feeling was getting through to Lou-Ann on stage, driving her to more drastic mugging, more frantic gymnastics.

  Sam was suffering with – and for – her. ‘She ought to take it easier.’ He clutched my arm during a particularly dicey pratfall. ‘She’ll never make it through the week, if she goes on at this rate. I don’t give a damn what Bart says – after tonight, she’s out of the show until she pulls herself together.’

  ‘Okay, but who’ll bell the cat?’ I murmured. Bart had come onstage now, standing in the background like a great black panther, brooding on the scene. As the amplifiers throbbed out the familiar beat, he stepped into the spotlight.

  ‘Homesteader, Homesteader,

  ‘Ridin’ alone ...’

  The audience went wild. Wilder than usual. After the embarrassment of the always corny, but now inept, comedy routine, the dark magnetic figure singing the hit song of the moment provided release and exhilaration. I doubted that he would allow Lou-Ann to take any time off, now that she was so bad. The worse the others were, the better he looked by comparison – and he knew it. You could call the Client a lot of things – but not one of them was fool’.

  ‘She’s got to knock off and go home now.’ Sam leaned forward in his seat, straining to look into the wings, where Lou-Ann’s small slight figure slumped against the wall in dejection. ‘Come on, I’m going to take her home.’

  We were in aisle seats, but we had to fight our way through a crowd of standees to get to the door leading backstage. I was aware of the Client’s cold eyes following our progress from the stage. People didn’t walk out when he was singing – especially not his Road Manager and his PRO. We’d pay for this defection later.

  We hadn’t quite reached Lou-Ann when the Client ended his number and held up his hand to quell the audience. ‘Now, folks,’ he said, ‘I’d like a big hand for a real little Trouper. Y’all don’t know what it cost her to come out here tonight and give you a show.’ He gestured to Lou-Ann and she moved forward on to the stage.

  Sam tried to stop her, but she brushed past him. Any time, anywhere, any actress will climb over a mountain of corpses to take an extra bow – and Lou-Ann wasn’t goin
g to be done out of this one.

  ‘Yessir.’ Bart put his arm around her, displaying her to the audience like a prize specimen. ‘This brave little lady came here tonight, even though her heart was sure-enough breaking, just so as not to disappoint all you lovely people. You see, her poor darling mother – beloved of us all, I might add – died today. In a traffic accident.’

  There it was again – one of the things I had learned to dread in the States. The appalling American habit – elevated into a virtue by the ‘jest plain folks, hell, jest plain honest folks’ type – of hauling out their bleeding guts and holding them aloft for attention and admiration.

  By rights, the audience should have shrunk from it.

  But your reticent Englishman feels that reticence should apply only to himself – he doesn’t worry overmuch about what you want to give away. And it was certainly adding something to the show tonight. Just ask any typical member of an audience about the most memorable performance he ever saw. Some of them will choose Olivier or Gielgud, but nine out of ten – being jest plain honest folks – will plump for the night the juvenile lead fell into the orchestra pit, fracturing his femur, dislocating three vertebrae, lacerating his skull, and had to be carried off, streaming with blood.

  They applauded with wild enthusiasm, and Lou-Ann took her bows proudly. Bart still had his arm around her, as though he were never going to let her go again. Certainly he wasn’t going to let her back out of any performance while he could get this reaction from an audience. They milked the applause for all it was worth, then Bart held up his hand again.

  ‘I’d like all of you to know that I’m working on a new song now that’s going to be a tribute to Maw, and tell all about how she cheered us on through the dark days we’ve had, and how much she meant to us all. But until I get that finished, I’d like to sort of “make do” with somebody else’s song, which kinda fits the occasion.’

  The Cousins had evidently been briefed ahead. They picked up the downbeat and gave him an intro. Perhaps I was the only one offstage who noticed that Uncle No’ccount had lowered his harmonica, bowed his head, and dissociated himself from the proceedings. For a moment, I wondered whether he might not know the tune, then I realized that even I knew the tune. In that case, Uncle No’ccount had more taste than I had ever given him credit for.

  The song was that great old tearjerker, ‘In The Baggage Car Ahead’. All about the grave litte girl who is sitting all alone in the train steaming southwards towards her home and, when a kindly stranger asks her where her mother is, the child replies, ‘In The Baggage Car Ahead’.

  I had never seen anyone do it before, but Sam was actually gnashing his teeth. He snarled out several words, any one of which his own dear mother would have flattened him with the back of her hand for. ‘I’ll kill that bastard,’ he grated. ‘I’ll kill him.’

  But the Client wasn’t the type to be killed. He was a predator, not a victim. Sam must know that. Just as he must know that, with a solid English success under Bart’s belt, he must go on building Bart for the Agency. His personal feelings didn’t come under any heading on the Agency’s Balance Sheet, so they weren’t worth considering. Not even by Sam. That was the worst of it – the bright New American Dream held no place for emotions. It measured success by the bankroll, the ratings, the wall-to-wall broads and broadloom. The golden eggs were beginning to roll now, so the Goose was sacrosanct. Nobody would kill him – they’d kill themselves first, trying to quash indictments, wall-papering over murky stains from the past, and turning a blind eye to the future. Our Boy Bart had it made now.

  The song ended, and Bart took his bow. Lou-Ann, tears streaming down her face, took a bow, too. I felt sick. But what else could you expect? Maw Cooney had brought her up to curry favour with an audience at any price. All Lou-Ann knew was that applause said that they were loving her. For the wrong reasons – but they were loving her. She bowed again.

  ‘Come on,’ I said to Sam. ‘I’ll buy you a drink.’

  CHAPTER X

  GERRY HAD been there when I got back to the flat, and I had filled him in on everything except my private suspicions. He had promised to turn his hand to the wheel, and take the early morning tour of duty at the hotel, leaving me to cope with some of the office routine for a change of pace – and peace and quiet.

  When I woke, he had already left. By the time I’d dressed, eaten and shaved, Penny had arrived for work. ‘Feeling better?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, thank you.’ She didn’t look at me. At least she had come back. I was grateful for that.

  She settled down with a pair of scissors and began going through the pile of morning papers. Her composure slipped away. ‘How awful,’ she said. ‘Oh, that poor girl.’

  I nodded, without telling her that she didn’t know the half of it. When the Client had chosen to make his announcement to a crowded house from the stage, the resultant coverage wasn’t too surprising.

  The earliest editions just had it as a Stop Press item. Some of the later editions had pulled out the first publicity shots we had sent them, and were running totally unsuitable pictures of Lou-Ann in ‘comedy costume’ along with the bare outlines of the story. All of them were obviously set to give the story the fullest coverage in later editions. Unless we were exceptionally lucky and some political figure got assassinated, or war broke out, we were doomed to have the full glare of a publicity spotlight on the Troupe – with all the nasty ramifications that that might entail.

  In a way, it was almost poetic justice. After all, The Client had brought it on himself.

  Unfortunately, it was Perkins & Tate’s job to stop it. And we couldn’t rely on luck. I cursed Gerry for not ringing me immediately to liaise and plan action, then wondered just what he was doing. Perhaps he was already in The Street, trying to pick up the pieces.

  ‘Run down and get the very latest editions,’ I ordered Penny. ‘All you can find. Try Charing Cross Station.’

  I tossed her a pound note and she turned and ran. She was a nice kid, if a little literal-minded. Then I sat back and destroyed a couple of fingernails with a thoroughness that would have done credit to Sam, while I waited for her to return with the papers.

  When she did, Bart was with her. He carried the pile of newspapers, crowding on her heels, leering down at her. She looked pale and frightened. I felt a bit pale myself.

  ‘Y’oughta take better care of this little gal than sending her out alone.’ He tossed the papers down on the desk in front of me. ‘I don’t like the way some of them characters around the station was staring at her.’

  ‘I don’t like it myself,’ I said pointedly.

  Then you shouldn’t send her over there. It was just a good thing I happened to come along and find her.’ He tried to toss an arm around her shoulders, but she eluded him, moving to the file and taking out a folder we hadn’t used in months, busying herself with it.

  ‘Ain’t she cute?’ Bart chuckled at me. ‘Honey,’ he leaned over her, as though to study the file, ‘you jest pay attention to your Uncle Bart, now, when he tells you –’

  ‘How’s your wife?’ I interrupted.

  He straightened up. ‘Huh?’ he said blankly.

  ‘Your wife,’ I said. ‘You remember – Lou-Ann?’

  ‘Oh, yuh,’ his face fell into the smooth unctuous lines of concern. ‘Poor kid, poor kid. I’m really worried about her, you know. She ain’t taking this at all well –’

  ‘How well should you take it when your mother dies?’

  ‘Well, sure, I understand that. Why, Maw –’ he reached up and swept off his sombrero, holding it over his heart and bowing his head – ‘Maw, she was like a mother to us all. It’s plumb broke me up, too. You jest don’t know how much Maw meant to me.’

  About a fifteen-year stretch in the Federal Penitentiary, I’d have said. But he didn’t know I knew that. It seemed to me that there was something else I knew, but it was lost among the other niggling worries at the back of my mind.

  ‘Of course,
she meant even more to Lou-Ann,’ he went on. ‘They was as close as could be. That’s why I’m so worried about Lou-Ann now –’

  A paper fluttered from the file to the floor, and Penny bent to pick it up. Bart watched her, losing his train of thought for a moment, then recovered.

  ‘Lou-Ann, she really depended on her Maw for everything. And it don’t seem like she’s never going to stop crying no more. I sure wish there was something I could do to help her.’

  ‘Why don’t you try cutting the sob stuff out of the show,’ I suggested. ‘Drop “In The Baggage Car Ahead”, and forget about putting in any tribute stuff. Just carry on with the show as you’ve been doing it.’

  ‘No tribute to Maw?’ He looked genuinely shocked. ‘Why, that wouldn’t hardly be seemly. What do you think we are?’

  I could have told him, but it would only have led to bloodshed. ‘It wouldn’t do any harm to forget it.’

  ‘Why don’t we go out to lunch and talk it over, like?’ He was staring at Penny hungrily. ‘All of us. I’d sure be interested to know the opinions of the President of the Black Bart Fan Club on this subject.’

  Penny’s mouth tightened grimly and I suspected that, like mine, her opinions could lead to bloodshed, too.

  ‘I’m afraid we’re going to be busy for lunch,’ I said hastily. ‘All this publicity you got with your announcement last night.’ Penny shot me a grateful glance. ‘We’ve got to get busy on the follow-ups for it.’

  It was the one subject which could have diverted him. He looked at the pile of newspapers complacently. ‘Sure did set the cat among the pigeons, didn’t I? You reckon I oughta follow it up with something dramatic – like a reward offered for catching the reckless driver?’

  ‘It wasn’t exactly hit-and-run,’ I reminded him coldly. ‘The driver stopped. The police have all his particulars. If you try a stunt like that, you could find yourself in the middle of the biggest libel suit of the century.’

  ‘Oh.’ He deflated slowly. ‘Hell, it was jest a thought.’

  ‘Think again,’ I said. There was no one I’d rather see up to his neck in hot water but, unfortunately, he was still the Client. And it would reflect back on Perkins & Tate. For that reason only, he had to be protected from himself.