Kiss Me Once

by Thomas Gifford

  Chapter Twelve

  SOMETIMES HE THOUGHT IT WOULD eat him up. Sometimes, rarely, he gave in to a momentarily appealing girl, but he never gave her a thought the next day. There was only one he wanted. The desire never left him, but … but …

  Cassidy let 1943 pass without trying to reach Cindy Squires. He thought he saw her once sitting on a bench in Washington Square but he was a long way off and decided he’d be better off not making sure. Terry kept asking him if he’d seen her and Cassidy kept telling him no, he hadn’t. Cassidy didn’t know if Terry believed him. But he didn’t have the stomach for seeking her out, not when he thought of Bennie. Or what was left of Bennie. When his mind turned to Cindy, Bennie was always there in the shadows. None of it seemed right.

  Neither did he ever go back to the team for a job. The past was past. He did shuttle back and forth to Washington for a few months when his father got him onto his civilian staff as a consultant, which meant he spent a lot of tedious hours in overheated smoke-filled rooms watching incomprehensibly boring German movies. A couple months of that and he gave in to Terry’s nagging. His name went up on the door of the Dependable Detective Agency right next to Terry’s. Dependable Detective. Sounded like one of the pulp magazines he sometimes read while soaking in the tub. It was summertime, the living was easy, and Cassidy was a gumshoe. Terry saw to it that he got a license, a gun permit, and a gun, which Cassidy put in his desk drawer, safely locked away so he couldn’t do himself any harm.

  He didn’t do any real detective work, God forbid. He sort of managed the office. Elmo Andretti and Herb Contreras were the two operatives Terry had hired. There was a secretary, Olive Naismith, who typed, filed, and billed. Cassidy interviewed prospective clients, set up the open files, made sure Elmo and Herb were attending to business, and sat around watching Terry put his Bostonians on his desk while he smoked cigars. Terry was working his way through a variety of girlfriends, none of whom Cassidy ever actually met. He kept urging Cassidy to enjoy some feminine companionship himself, even if it wasn’t Cindy Squires. Cassidy couldn’t bring himself to explain how he felt, stretched so tight between the longing for Cindy and the haunting memory, the ghost of Karin. One day Elmo was listening to Terry chiding Cassidy about being too reclusive, and said, “Listen, Terry, old Lew here’s got the right idea. Sugar’s sweet and so is honey, fuck your hand and save your money.” Elmo was not only Dependable’s poet but its wit, as well.

  How did ’43 creep past? Ah, he could count the ways.

  He read Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. That took quite a while but absolutely everyone was doing it. Amos ’n’ Andy went off the air when it was still the most popular show on the air. Campbell’s couldn’t afford to keep it going because they couldn’t sell enough soup because all the tin for the cans was going to the war effort. Exeunt Amos ’n’ Andy, which only went to show you there was indeed a war on. He read somewhere that World War I had cost America thirty-five billion dollars. The price tag on WWII was running eight billion a month. An old pal of his father’s was killed in February when the Pan Am Clipper taking performers to entertain GIs crashed near Lisbon. He saw the play about the little Nazi kid raising hell in the American family, Tomorrow the World, at the Ethel Barrymore, and The Voice of the Turtle at the Morosco and Oklahoma! at the St. James. J. P. Morgan died at seventy-five and Edsel Ford fell to cancer at forty-nine, which brought old Henry himself back to run the family business. He read Wendell Willkie’s One World, which broke every sales record everywhere. Everybody read Ernie Pyle’s accounts of the foot soldiers’ war, everybody saw Casablanca, and up at Heliotrope Cindy Squires made quite a name for herself singing “As Time Goes By” and “Speak Low When You Speak Love” and “I’ll Be Seeing You” and “Comin’ in on a Wing and a Prayer.” The Russians stopped the Wehrmacht and began the long counterattack, which just about bled the Nazis dry in the East. FDR called in federal troops to put down the race riots in Detroit. He met with Stalin and Churchill at Teheran; he and Churchill and De Gaulle got together in Casablanca—the town, not the movie. Mussolini and the Fascisti called it a day in Italy and by October the new government in Rome had declared war on the Germans. Fats Waller sold more records than either Crosby or Sinatra, and Terry and Cassidy kept catching a young singer who’d graduated from the chorus of Ethel Waters’s Cotton Club show, one Lena Horne. Of course Terry’s favorite song of the year was Al Dexter’s recording of “Pistol Packin’ Mama.” The pistol packin’ general, George S. Patton, was in the news a good deal, but General Eisenhower got the call to be the commander-in-chief for the invasion of Europe. Terry and Cassidy were there, too, on a freezing January night when Duke Ellington took the top right off Carnegie Hall for a good cause—Russian relief. The band wore long gray coats with jet-black carnations in their buttonholes.

  A year after his one night with Cindy Squires, a year after he’d just about put Bennie down for the big sleep, a year after Tom Dewey was elected governor of New York, a year after all that, Cassidy ran into Harry Madrid drinking quietly and alone at Costello’s. It was a raw night with the wind blowing sheets of cold rain along the deserted streets. Harry Madrid stood at the end of the bar staring into his beer; the joint smelled of cherry tobacco.

  Cassidy shook the rain off his trench coat and went to stand next to the big, fatherly-looking cop. It just went to show you about deceiving appearances.

  Cassidy ordered a beer and Harry Madrid looked up.

  “Well, if it ain’t Mr. Touchdown,” he muttered.

  “How are you, Harry?”

  “You don’t wanna know, Lew …”

  “Aw, hell. What’s the matter?”

  “D’ja ever notice,” Harry said, as if he were continuing aloud what he’d been contemplating in solitude, “that things never turn out the way you expect?”

  “I’ve noticed that, Harry.”

  “The man’s noticed that,” Harry said deliberately. “You prolly figured you had some more years playin’ football—then, wham, it’s all over. You figured you had a wife—then, blam, that’s all over. You just never know.” He banked the pipe into an ashtray, dug the last bit of dottle from the bottom of the Kaywoodie with a penknife. “Nothin’ ever works out. Like me and the wife, gonna get that sheriff’s job upstate, live to a ripe old age … funny how nothin’ ever works out the way you think …”

  Cassidy drank his beer, staring down the almost deserted bar.

  “I just left the hospital, see.”

  “You sick, Harry?”

  “Well, tell the truth, I ain’t feelin’ so hot—”

  “Come on, Harry, what’s the matter?”

  “It’s the wife, Lew.”

  “She sick?”

  “Oh, no. Ethel ain’t sick. Not no more. She’s dead now. She was sick right up until a couple hours ago.”

  “I’m sorry, Harry. I had no idea—”

  “Cancer of the stomach. Worse ’n bein’ gut shot, Lew, lot worse. I been takin’ care of her, y’know, for months. Six, eight months. Takes a long time, cancer of the stomach. Long time Ethel spent dyin’. Wasn’t much left of her, little wisp of a thing, ended up about seventy pounds or so … Anyway, she’s gone now.” He sighed. His face was stony and impassive as ever. “She’s better off dead, but it sure fucks up our plans, y’know?”

  “Harry, I don’t know what to say.”

  “Not much to say. I wouldn’t of recognized her, I went out for a hamburger and a piece of pie, I come back … nothin’. She’s dead. Nobody even knew it. Not ’til I told ’em. Ethel just went and died on us.” He blew his nose loudly and stuffed the handkerchief up his sleeve. “Nothin’ ever works out, Lew. Ya know all them goddamn phony gas stamps we laid off on Max? Remember that?” A ghostly smile. He shook his head.

  “I remember.”

  “Big fuckin’ FBI operation, war effort, gonna get those goddamn war profiteers like Maxie … well, shit!”

  “Whatever happened with that? It was like I dropped ’em down a rathole, never
heard another word … now Dewey’s governor and what’s happening with Luciano? Is he in or out? What about the parole?”

  “Fuckin’ Hoover backed out, that’s what the fuck happened! Tells me to forget it … just forget it, Harry old shithead, just forget it!” He blew himself out and his whole body sank lower. He signaled for another beer and a shot. He downed the whiskey in a quick, practiced motion. “Somebody up there put the fix in for Max. That or Hoover just couldn’t make it stick to Max. Or they had somebody else to go after … and I’m left holding my pecker like the last guy in line at the cathouse. I can’t figure it out, Lew, and nobody’s gonna tell me. What was the point, I ask you? All that trouble for nothin’.” He wiped the head of beer off his upper lip. He was wearing his specs and looked older, tireder. Cassidy couldn’t look at him, though, without seeing those shapes rising out of the fog with the tommy guns rattling and the gangsters dying.

  “What about Luciano?”

  “Dewey’s gonna drag his feet. Willkie just beat him out of the Republican nomination in ’40. Dewey wants it in ’44 and he’ll probably get it. I figure he don’t want some smart-ass pointing out he paroled Luciano between ’42 and ’44. Just my guess … and what the hell’s Lucky gonna do? He’s gotta stay on Dewey’s good side if he ever wants to get out. Anyways, I hear they moved Lucky to Great Meadows Prison in Comstock, just to keep him calm. Great Meadows is a lot like freedom, Lew. The cons call it the Country Club, for the chrissakes. He can have his meals sent in from good restaurants, all the visitors he wants. Hell, they’ll let him spend evenings out on the town, get him laid.” He frowned into his beer. “He’ll be fine. But you can bet on one thing, Lew … I’m gonna get that bastard Max, one way or another … I’m gonna get everybody, get ’em all … I got nothin’ to live for anymore but I can still raise some real hell. Believe me, Lew, I can do that …”

  A few days before Christmas Terry and Cassidy left the Dalmane Building about one o’clock in search of lunch. The thermometer was in the twenties and the wind was working its way across town and up the canyons like something with a personal grudge against Gotham. Snow eddied across the sidewalk, snapping at their ankles. It was nasty enough to stop the clocks on Cassidy’s socks. The crowds out rounding up the last Christmas presents leaned into the gale, held on to their hats and shopping bags. Taxis and buses snarled at staggering, wind-driven pedestrians. Newspapers blew apart, whipped along the gutters.

  They were standing at 42nd and Fifth waiting for a traffic light when Cassidy saw a guy, a well-dressed bumly sort, who reminded him of the bankers and stockbrokers you used to see a few years ago selling apples on the same corners, when they weren’t landing on them from great heights. This was a big guy, stooped, with rounded shoulders, wearing an expensive black herringbone overcoat from Brooks. He wore a stocking cap. He was partly sheltered in a doorway, demonstrating a toy he was selling from a grocery sack.

  It wasn’t much of a toy and he made a sad, yet comical figure. It consisted of a cardboard tube he held in his mouth and blew into, like a New Year’s Eve noisemaker. When he blew into this thing, the air traveled through the tubes which arced upward around his face to a point on either side of his head where two rolled paper horns would then unfurl, leaping wildly outward from his forehead. Each time he blew, zap, the horns shot outward. It was driving two kids in sailor suits and coats into spasms of hysteria. They were pulling at their mother until she finally came up with the necessary quarter and bought a couple. When the man took the quarter, he looked up and Cassidy saw his eyes, huge and watery behind his round spectacles.

  It was Bennie the Brute.

  Cassidy poked Terry, who looked over and nodded. “Yeah, I saw him yesterday. I didn’t have the heart to tell you.”

  Bennie saw them and walked over, smiling like a man who was hearing jokes everybody else was missing. The horns kept shooting out and recoiling until he stood beside them and the tube dropped from his mouth. “Merry C-C-Christmas, you guys,” he said.

  “Come on,” Cassidy said, “let’s go have a sandwich, Bennie. You look cold as hell.”

  “Pretty n-n-nippy out here,” he said. “Lemme get my inventory there.” He went back to grab his sack and they all went to a little bar on a cross street a block away.

  He ate two hamburgers, a bowl of chili, fries, cole slaw, and two glasses of milk. Then he had a piece of mince pie with ice cream melting on it. Finally he looked up shyly like a big friendly creature from a child’s storybook. “Get hungry standing out there. Job’s not as easy as it l-l-looks.”

  As they talked, Cassidy kept trying to catch his eye but it was always slipping away. He wore a small white bandage taped across his left temple but Cassidy didn’t ask why. He’d asked once before and Bennie had said he sometimes picked at the scar tissue. Oh, boy.

  It turned out that he’d told Max Bauman he couldn’t take his money anymore, couldn’t take it for doing nothing. “Heck, I’m no damn good anymore,” he said. “Nothing I c-c-can do for Max amounts to a damn. I can’t even remember things so good, sometimes he tells me to go get the early editions of the papers for him and I’d find myself standing there alone on the street … and I wouldn’t know why the dickens I was there. It’s gettin’ worse, too.” He seemed to be taking it all pretty philosophically. “Max, he didn’t want me to go but I figured mainly I was sitting around listening to Ma Perkins and Helen Trent and playing gin with Miss Squires. Who needs a guy like that? So I got my own little place and I sell these toys—”

  “Wise up, Bennie,” Terry interrupted. “Go back to Max. Take a lifetime pension. The guy loves ya, for chrissakes, Bennie. Does Bennie the Brute belong on the goddamn corner selling the dumb crap in those sacks?”

  “I don’t know, Terry,” he said slowly. “I think they’re sort of c-c-cute. Bennie the Brute ain’t so tough anymore, he gets these headaches—”

  “Bullshit!” Terry was scowling with anger. “I hate to hear you talk like this. You’re giving in, you’re going soft. Pull yourself together, you’re okay—”

  “Oh, I’m not so sure of that, Terry, I think maybe you’re wrong there. The doctors, they say my b-b-brain isn’t all there anymore. They say I’m real passive now and, y’know, I think they’re right. Fight’s all gone outa B-B-Bennie.” He smiled, a look of something like surprise on his face. “Some ways, y’know, it’s a l-l-lot easier this way. But I miss Max and Miss Squires and some of the guys. Look, nothin’ I can do about it, I am what I am.”

  Terry laughed and punched him on the arm. “All you need is, go out and ice a couple guys for Max, pretty soon you’re the old Bennie.”

  Bennie’s face grew very somber. “I didn’t like doing that stuff, icin’ guys, Terry. Never. But I had my job to do. You won’t believe this, but I used to get to w-w-worryin’ at night about going to Heaven! I used to think I’d never get into Heaven ’cause I iced a lotta guys, mostly bad guys but still they was alive and well before they met me. Now, y’know, maybe God, He’ll forgive me my trespasses. You think?” His watery eyes settled on Cassidy, questioning all the verities.

  “I don’t think you got a thing to worry about, Ben,” Cassidy said. “It’s all gonna be okay. There’s a spot for you in Heaven, kid.”

  They drank another cup of coffee. Over the bar there were individual letters strung on a sagging string against the mirror. M-E-R-R-Y C-H-R-I-S-T-M-A-S. They were very old and somebody had glued dangling strings of tinsel to each red letter. Bennie rattled his cup back into the saucer. “Look, it’s great seeing you guys,” he said, wrapping his muffler around his throat and chin, pulling his cap down hard but leaving enough room for the toy to work. “But I gotta get back out to work. Thanks for lunch and everything.” He stood up and shook hands.

  “Take my advice,” Terry said. “Go back to Max, Bennie. He’ll welcome you with open arms, the return of the prodigal.”

  But Bennie was already heading toward the street, carrying his ratty old sack of toys.

  “Let’s g
o back another way,” Terry said. “I don’t want to see him doing that. Jesus. Bennie …”

  Cassidy nodded and together they went back into the cold.

  Another New Year’s Eve. Cassidy was measuring out his life in sips of champagne, to the strains of “Auld Lang Syne,” and glimpses of Cindy Squires, who never changed much, never seemed to adopt new hairstyles or funny clothes, always sang the best songs. The party this time was out in Oyster Bay, at Max Bauman’s mansion.

  About one o’clock on the first morning of 1944 Cassidy was getting into his velvet-collared chesterfield and fondling his new homburg, about to get into the 1938 Ford convertible he’d bought from an old guy in Princeton whose son had bought it new and then been killed in North Africa. The hallway was very dark and it seemed that the party was very far away. Max was playing billiards with Terry and Bryce Huntoon a cab ride from the front hall. Cassidy figured he was alone, making a quiet getaway.

  She had come up very quietly. When she spoke he practically fell over.

  “Nerves,” she cautioned. “Where’s the tough private eye?”

  “I left him in my other suit.”

  “It’s been fifteen months,” she said. “I didn’t think I could stay away from you so long, not after that night. Somebody should turn our story into an opera—”

  “A very short opera.”

  “But, then, I didn’t think you could stay away this long, either. You’re a tower of restraint, Lew.”

  “That’s what everybody says. I grieve over my restraint on long winter nights. Besides, you told me not to—”

  “I know what I told you. I’m sorry … but I had to. I thought Max might have Bennie do something awful to you if he found out.”

  “How good of you, how good, how kind …”

  “But Bennie isn’t so tough nowadays … please, don’t be cold to me, Lew. I was thinking—hoping—maybe we could … you know—”