The Lime Pit

by Jonathan Valin

  It's not you, ladies, I said to myself. It's just me. Just me and a handful of photographs that I can't get out of my mind. I pressed my coat pocket and felt the little square that the snapshots made under the fabric. When this was just a market town, maybe Cindy Ann could have afforded to come here wide-eyed and unwary. But cities grow up like psychopathic children. They grow up and become delinquents. Even cities as strict and unglamorous as this one. Years pass and what is just a smirk or a piece of conventional wisdom out in the farmlands becomes an industry in the flats.

  I paid my check at the register and walked down Fifth to the bus terminal. The meter was just running out as I got to the car. But that was all right. I had a trip to make anyway. I had a captain of industry to see.

  ******

  From the Ohio side, Newport, Kentucky, seems a small, colorful hamlet nestled in green hills. On the river bank the posh marinas reach baby-white fingers out into the clear run of the Ohio. Speedboats chase up and down the shore, towing an occasional skier in their wakes. Above the water's edge Newport rises in a talus of shale and seems to keep rising gently in a sweep of white and red roofs that have the sleepy look of adobe and sunbaked tile. And everywhere that isn't white or red is green with the maple trees that cascade down from the surrounding hillsides and flood through the hamlet in a wave that stops just short of the river bank. From the Ohio shore, Newport has the look of one of those vacation communities that people like Cox and Meyer plant on the edges of newly dredged lakes and call Sunwood or Lake of the Four Pines. From the Kentucky side, it's a different view entirely.

  For one thing, you're suddenly aware that there is a big city behind you—a clean expanse of bright glass and structured steel and china-red brick. The little one and two-story businesses that dot the main drags of Newport seem very small indeed, by comparison. And the age that shows on them is anything but picturesque. Once you've settled down in the garden streets that criss-cross the town proper, the summery look of vacation quickly fades. The houses are frame and the paint is peeling everywhere and the streets are littered with broken glass and in need of patching. And the men and women who live on the streets have the unmistakable look of the urban poor—so pinched and chalk-white in the face and on the arms and legs that you would think, in Newport, that a suntan was something you had to be able to afford.

  The “poor cousin” look of Newport is deceptive. There is money in the city, but it's concentrated and virtually hidden away in the auto dealerships that proliferate like cement ponds along the riverfront and in the night clubs that seem to occupy whole blocks of the business district. It doesn't take a trained eye to discover where most of the dollars have gone. Not when the City Hall is an old brick firehouse and the Pink Kittycat Club looks like a small Vegas hotel. The men who work that stretch of town never lack a tan, even in the dead of winter. And the clothes they wear have creases in them that could cut bread.

  Every city has a reason for being where it is. And Newport's reason is to service Cincinnati, to provide the gambling, the prostitution, and the sin that the good elders of our town have turned out of the city limits. Newport is an open secret, a dirty little joke that nobody laughs at because there's too much muscle and money in Newport to make it a fun or a funny place. It's a tough, leering border town, with a wide-open police department and a come-hither night life. And every one of those good Cincinnati burghers is very glad it's around. There has to be some place for the convention trade to go. There has to be some place for the businessmen from Elkhart and Louisville and Dayton to blow off a little steam. And Newport is the place. Let the conventioneer dine in Cincinnati, put up in a good Cincinnati hotel. Let him cheer the Reds in the early evening and grab a drink or two downtown. And, then, let him cross the river, with the city's blessing, and find some harder action. Most of the money ends up in Cincinnati's pocket, anyway. Most of it is Cincinnati money to begin with.

  There are two or three people in Newport who are above what little law there is. And one of them is “Porky” Simlab, the man I was going to see. There is a story about Porky that bears repeating. It took place thirty years ago, when Newport was even more of a wide open town than it is today. At the time, Porky and his wife Blanche owned the Golden Deer on Main—a bar and strip joint that had a raucous and highly profitable second floor. It's said that two out-of-towners, independents with loose gangland credentials, moved in on Porky's gold mine, first by trying to buy him out and then by trying to drive him out. There were words and, one afternoon, Blanche Simlab got into her pink Cadillac and came back out through the windshield, in a fiery blast that tore the car and Blanche in two. The next day, Porky sold the Golden Deer to the two men from out of town and went into a different line of work. He bought a motion picture theater on the north side of the city, became a model citizen, and, two or three years later, ran for mayor on a reform ticket. He was elected by a landslide. Everyone loved good ol' Porky, who was and is a tubby country boy with a fat placid face and an odd habit of winking with his mouth instead of with his little brown eyes. Once Porky got into office, in that shed they call “City Hall,” he made a counter-proposal to the two businessmen from out of town who had purchased the Golden Deer. It wasn't a question of the price being wrong—no money was offered. It was more of a case of escheat, of property returning to its rightful owner, with a provision that the new owners leave town. Of course, the two owners didn't think much of the deal. So, one cold February night in 1952, Porky authorized a raid on the Golden Deer and insisted that his police hot-load their revolvers and shotguns, in case of trouble. There wasn't much trouble. The cops came through the door about one hour after closing and killed every man and woman on the first floor of the night club. And a week later Porky Simlab repossessed the Golden Deer.

  He never did let go of the motion picture theater and, about ten years after the night of the Golden Deer raid, he bought another one—a first-run house in Erlanger that specializes in Disney films, wholesome family entertainment. By then, Porky was legend in Boone County. A local character who drove around in a pink El Dorado with bull's horns for a hood ornament and who held daily court on the slat porch of his modest home on Charles Street, with his feet up on the railing, his rear parked in a bentwood rocker, and his mouth winking away in that fat baby face with its unsmiling eyes. He was a soft-spoken, cracker-jack country hood, who dressed in tieless white linen shirts with flat splayed collars and two-piece leisure suits of a loamy brown. I'd first met him in 1968 when I was working for Pinkerton and he'd taken a “shine” to me. He'd invited me “all” out to the house for a nice pork roast and an evening of bourbon and talk, during the course of which he'd let it be known that I'd be better off not messin' in the little, old robbery I'd been assigned to investigate. And, when, in due course, the case petered out and nothing was recovered, Porky let it be known that his house was my house, whenever I saw fit to pay him a visit. He was mighty 'preciative. Mighty.

  I hadn't made a habit of going over to Charles Street. But, the few times I had visited, Porky had come up with the name or the address of the man I was looking for. He was a rotund, seedy old man, with a shock of greasy straw-colored hair and the ragged look of a Kentucky colonel fallen on hard times. But he was a mine of information, and he was always mighty 'preciative to me.

  It was three-thirty when I pulled up across from Porky's house on Charles Street. Mint julep time on the old veranda. I could see ten or twelve of his cronies on the porch and a half-dozen more chatting in groups on the stoop and the lawn. Red Bannion was among them. A compact, strong-armed man with a small town cop's creased and weary face, black horn-rim glasses, and the kind of burr hair cut that makes for a streak of bald flesh down the center of the skull, Red was Porky's right-hand man, his valet, his drinking companion, his chief-of-police during the Golden Deer days, and his bodyguard. He waved to me from the stoop as I walked up the lawn.

  “Long time no see, lad,” he said, shaking my hand vigorously. “Old Porky is going to be migh
ty glad you come.”

  Red guided me by the arm up to the veranda and hollered: “Hey, Porky! Y'all look who's come to see ya!”

  “Harry!” Porky called from his rocker. “Harry Stoner!”

  He made a half-hearted effort to work his enormous body out of the chair and I waved him back.

  “Sit,” he said to me, pointing to a chair beside him.

  I sat.

  He didn't look as if he'd changed a bit since I'd last talked to him, and I told him so. Still the same broad-faced, mop-headed old boy from Berea.

  “No, Harry,” he whined in a husky, whiskey-scented voice. “I'm changing, son. Getting up in years.” Porky had a way of lingering over words, a finicky oratorical style of speaking that he'd probably picked up while politicking and kept up after he'd retired from public life because it mated so well with that country-squire life style. “To what do I owe the pleasure of this heah visit?”

  “Business, Porky,” I said to him.

  “I figured,” he said with a sigh. “When y'all goin' ta come over heah for somethin' other than business?”

  I shrugged. “It can't be helped.”

  “Aw, shoot,” he said. “That ain't so. Someday, boy, you're goin' ta wake up and discover that we ain't so different as you think. You know, we're all nigguhs under the skin, Harry. Some of us are a little fatter than most—” He broke up in hoarse laughter and waved it away with his chubby hands. “Okay,” he said, clapping his knees. “What kin I do for ya?”

  “I need some facts.”

  Porky's flat brown eyes flitted toward the men standing along the railing of the veranda and then back to me. “Red!” he shouted. “Y'all take these fine genl'men ‘round back, will ya? Show 'em the barbecue and where we hide the liquor.”

  The men along the railing chuckled feebly and began to file off the porch. Porky held up a fat hand of farewell and winked with his mouth. “I'll be ‘round directly.”

  When the last of them had disappeared around the corner of the house, Porky's hand dropped to his lap and his mouth winked shut. “All right, Harry. What is it?”

  I reached inside my coat and pulled out the three photographs of Cindy Ann. Porky looked at them for a minute, expressionlessly, and then winked with his mouth. “Hot, ain't it?” he said, fanning himself with the sheaf of snapshots. “Suppose to hit near a hunnert today.” He handed the pictures back to me and folded his hands on his belly. “That ain't exactly in my line,” he said.

  “I know that,” I said to him. “That's some old man's daughter, Porky. And all he wants is to get her back.”

  “An old man, you say?” Porky puckered his lips and plucked one of the photographs from my hand. “What exactly you need to know?”

  “She's disappeared. I'd like to find out where. If she's been working this side of the river, I'd like to know that, too.”

  “What makes you think she's working over here?”

  “A bird by the name of Abel Jones told me.”

  Porky winked twice.

  “You know him?”

  “I heard his name.”

  “Well, he and a pair of high-steppers named Jellicoe are somehow tied into this. They've got that girl. And you've seen the pictures.”

  He looked at the photo again. “Shit. She's just a kid.” He shook his head and tut-tutted with his lips. “Times do change. Don't nobody I know right off-hand go in for this sorta thing.” He tucked the snapshot in his shirt and gaped at the lawn. “Red!” he bellowed.

  Bannion came trundling around the side of the house, one hand pressed against his glasses and the other hovering nervously above the flap of his coat.

  “Is old Willie Keeluh still runnin' the theat-uh over on Main Street?”

  Red passed a hand over his brow and squinted up at the porch. “I think so,” he said. “Yessuh, I think he is.”

  Porky got to his feet with a quickness that just didn't seem possible in a man of his size and years. “Y'all take Harry heah over ta see him. I'll go on back and keep them boys entertained.”

  Porky danced down the steps and out into the yard. “You keep in touch, heah?” he said to me. “I'll work on this for ya and let you know what I find.”

  ******

  Red Bannion drove me over to the theater in Porky's pink Cadillac. Around Porky, Red always seemed a genial man, quick to share in his employer's moods. In the car, he was silent and unfriendly and his weather-beaten face quickly assumed a look of undisguised boredom. I figured he didn't like to be sent on Porky's errands and, since I was the cause, I figured he didn't particularly like me. Red must have been sixty years old that summer, but, like Porky, there was a good deal of mean energy left in him. And I, for one, didn't want to get on the wrong side of it.

  Willie Keeler's theater was located on North Main in a block that was taken up by small retail stores—shoe stores, furniture stores, laundromats. The marquee said that a flick called Young and Restless was playing, and it also said that “proof of age is strictly enforced.” A couple of sad cases were loitering in front of the ticket window. Red shooed them away with a “Git!” and marched through the big glass doors. He was mad, all right. And I decided the quicker I could make this business the better for everyone. I didn't think Keeler would know much about the pictures, anyway. There's a limited market for the sort of thing those photos advertised. What I had to do was find one satisfied customer and then I might be able to work my way back through him to Cindy Ann.

  There was a popcorn machine and a glass candy case in the lobby of the theater, and, to their right, was a wooden door marked “Office.” Red didn't bother to knock. He just barged through the door, and I followed him in.

  Keeler was a gaunt, silver-haired man in his early fifties with a slick sallow complexion that reminded me of a piece of wax fruit. He was sitting behind a small desk when we came through the door. He'd apparently been listening to a baseball game on a little table radio beside the desk. But he flipped it off as soon as we entered the room and stood up with a start, as if we'd caught him in flagrante delicto.

  “Don't you know how to knock?” he snapped at Red. His voice was thin and nasal. Not the kind of voice that was comfortable snapping at a man like Red Bannion. I had the impression from the way Keeler was acting that, once, maybe not so long before, Red had gotten tough with him and had gotten away with it.

  Bannion looked at him once, a cop's look, the kind of glance that's really a form of computation rather than an open-eyed stare. Then, his eyes shut down to slits and he said, “Porky sent us,” in a matter-of-fact voice.

  “Yeah?” Keeler looked at me uncertainly. “You're not the law, are you? Because if you are, I've paid my monthly dues. You can call Phil Tracewell over at C.I.D., if you don't believe me.”

  “I'm not the law. I'm a P.I., and I'm looking for a missing girl.” I handed him one of the photos from my pocket. “This girl.”

  Keeler picked up a pair of bifocals that were laying on his desk and peered down at the picture as if he were reading the ingredients on a soup can label. “No,” he said, shaking his head. He flipped off the glasses and handed the photo back to me. “I've never seen her.”

  “Do you run loops in the lobby?” I asked him.

  “Yeah. We have two quarter machines.”

  “How often do you change the loops?”

  “Every two weeks.”

  “Well, I'd appreciate it if you'd keep an eye out for that face. If you spot her, give me a call.”

  I gave him one of my cards and, after thinking it over for a second, told him to keep the snapshot.

  “We don't get much of the kiddie stuff,” he said. “The cops don't like it.” He glared at Red Bannion and said, “Do they, Red?”

  “I wouldn't know what cops like or don't like,” he said flatly.

  “The hell,” Keeler said. “I'll keep an eye open, Stoner. Sometimes we get local stuff for the machines. If this one pops up, I'll let you know.”

  ******

  Red Bannion's s
pirits improved considerably on the trip back to Charles Street.

  “I don't like that man,” he said cheerfully. “Don't care for that line of work at all.”

  We drove down Main to Seventh Street and past the Golden Deer. Red looked affectionately out the window as we passed by. “Hope you don't mind me comin' this way,” he said. “Sometimes I just gotta remind myself who I am.”

  “No, Red. I don't mind,” I said.

  “Lad,” he said wistfully. “You'd be plumb amazed at how things have changed in this town. When Porky and I started out after the war, there was only one club on Seventh Street. Now, look at it.”

  He waved his arm at the row of rococo night clubs—the Kittycat, the Silver Mule, the Hideaway, the Three-Ring Circus, the Dew Drop Inn.

  “Looks like skid row, now, don't it? It's all gone bad and sneaky. It's all—commercial,” he said with distaste. “No character anymore. Hell, you could line the men that run those joints up against a wall and you'd be hard put to tell one from the next. They're all of them wops in business suits and sunglasses. Not like the old days when it was Porky and Texas Jim McElroy and Hymie Gould. No,” he said mournfully. “It's all changed.”

  There's nothing like a sentimental gangster to put the world in perspective. Red Bannion was working up to something. And, since he was not the kind of man to whom confession came easily, he'd prefaced it—whatever it was—with a short ride and a bit of old times, as if he were working off his inhibitions by reminding himself of who he had been and of who he was now. I thought maybe what he wanted to say had to do with Willie Keeler. The hatred that both men felt for each other had been obvious. I'd even thought of asking him about it when we'd stepped back out onto the sidewalk; but, thank God, some little warning bell went off in my head just as I was about to open my mouth. I suppose one of the hardest things I've had to learn in life is not to ask a detective's questions of my friends, which is damn tough to remember when you're usually getting paid to be nosy. As it turned out, it was a good thing I'd been able to keep my mouth shut, because what Red wanted to say had nothing to do with Keeler.