Booked to Die

by John Dunning

  Most people would say that didn’t matter now. Tom Rooney was at the bottom of Pearl Harbor, but even after his death she was still, in Dulaney’s mind, Tom’s woman. He would not come slithering upon her like some carpetbagger, wearing the shoes of a summer soldier. Tom would come calling, like Marley in chains.

  But she was always on his mind as he worked his way across the land, and he’d thought about little else since yesterday noon. It had begun with the clang of the jailhouse door, the deputy waking him from a light sleep. “You got comp’ny, Dulaney. Fella says he’s your lawyer.”

  Dulaney didn’t have a lawyer. It had to be Kendall: nobody else would know or care where he might possibly be. The deputy opened the cell and motioned Dulaney ahead of him, along a dimly lit hallway to a little room at the end. The window was barred and the room was empty except for a battered wooden table and two rickety chairs.

  Kendall was sitting in one of the chairs. He didn’t look like a lawyer. His clothes, like Dulaney’s, were those of a workingman. His shoes were scuffed and coming out at the toes. He looked like what he was, an out-of-work radio actor who had seen better days.

  They shook hands and Dulaney sat at the table. The deputy stayed in the room, at the edge of earshot.

  “How’d you find me, Marty?”

  Kendall smiled sadly. “You weren’t at the hotel, so I tried the café. I got there just as the paddy wagon was pulling out.”

  “I’m a little amazed they let you in here.”

  Kendall lowered his voice, cutting his eyes at the deputy. “I keep telling you, Jack, I was a damn good actor in my day. So what happened?”

  Dulaney smiled. “Just a little mayhem. Resisting arrest. Assault on a police officer. Kid stuff.”

  Kendall stifled the urge to laugh. Dulaney noticed streaks of gray in his mustache and in the curly hair around his ears. He had always thought of Kendall as around forty but now he thought fifty was closer.

  He told Kendall how the trouble had started. He had gone out to get something to eat. Some sailors and some girls started razzing him about being in the home guard. “I guess I was the only fellow in the place out of uniform. This is nothing new. In the Civil War women would see a man out of uniform and they’d shame him in public.”

  Kendall said nothing. “They probably don’t bother you,” Dulaney said. “You’re a bit older than me. And most of the time I don’t let it bother me. But this one gal wouldn’t leave it alone. She had the waiter bring me some squash. That’s supposed to be the last word in insults. You feed squash to the home guard so the color’ll stay bright in their backbones.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “Hell, I like squash. Figured I might as well eat it.” Dulaney leaned forward. “I’ve been hungry enough times that I’m not about to let good food get chucked just because some silly female wasn’t raised right. What happened next is probably in the arrest report.”

  “They say you took on the whole cafe.”

  “One thing led to another. I finally told those boys they’d end up in the clap shack if they didn’t quit messing with whores. I didn’t have to say that, but there we were. The sailors had to stand up and they came up short. If those are the best fighting men we’ve got in this war, we may be in trouble.”

  The deputy cleared his throat. “You boys start winding it up.”

  “It didn’t last long. The gendarmes came, four big cops with their billies out.” Dulaney touched his head, a tender place the size of a peach.

  “I wish you hadn’t taken on the cops, Jack.”

  “I’ve got nothing against cops as a rule, but the sight of a billy club gets my back up. I’ve known too many good people who got their heads busted open just because they were down on their luck. So here I am.”

  “I hear judges get real mean when you start fighting with cops.”

  “The guard says he’ll give me six months, unless I’ve got the money for the fine. That seems to be automatic for a first offense. If I volunteer to go to the work camp he’ll cut my time in half.”

  “What are you talking about, a chain gang?”

  “They don’t call it that and they don’t chain you together. I get the feeling it’s not official and maybe that’s why we get to choose. The word comes back to the prisoners through the guards—if you work, they’ll cut your time; if you don’t, you go to jail and serve it all.”

  “Man, that stinks. Goddamn judge is probably getting paid off.”

  “Maybe so, but I’m going to take it. I’ll use it in a book.”

  Kendall didn’t say anything but again Dulaney felt a strain in the room between them. He couldn’t put his finger on it, what it was about Kendall that had bothered him from the start. He thought there was a lie somewhere, that some part of Kendall’s old life had been omitted or fabricated, and Kendall couldn’t lie without turning away. Kendall had been an accomplished radio actor who could live a dozen lies a week on the air, but in real life he was like Dulaney: he couldn’t lie to a friend.

  “What’s the matter with you, Marty? Something’s been eating you since the day we met.”

  The deputy’s voice cut across the room. “You boys about done?”

  “Give us one more minute,” Dulaney said.

  He leaned over, and softly, so the guard wouldn’t hear, said, “Are you in trouble with the law?”

  “Hell no. I’ve never even been inside a jail before today. Christ, why would you even think of something like that?”

  “I’ve been around enough men on the lam to know another one when I see him. Something’s been on your mind, right from the start.”

  Kendall shook his head, a slight movement, barely perceptible. “That doesn’t make any sense. How could I be running from the law and still trying to get back into radio?”

  Dulaney waited but Kendall did not enlighten him. The guard made a time’s-up motion with his hands. Dulaney said, “Look, I’d appreciate it if you’d check me out of that hotel. Pick up my papers and my notes. There’s a half-finished story I’m working on: make sure you get that. Put it in a box and stash it in the trunk of the car.”

  “Consider it done.”

  “You’ve been a good friend, Marty. Even if I’m not always sure I know you.”

  “Let’s go, boys,” the deputy said.

  But then at the last moment Kendall said, “Just one more thing. Do you know a woman named Holly Carnahan?”

  Dulaney tensed. “Yes, I know Holly.”

  “There’s a letter for you at the hotel. It just came today. It’s three months old.”

  “Go back to the hotel right now,” Dulaney said. “Open it and read it, then come here tomorrow and tell me what it says.”

  3

  He thought about Holly all afternoon and occasionally he thought about Kendall. He still thought Kendall had done something somewhere. Maybe it hadn’t been illegal but it had shamed him and kept him looking over his shoulder. Kendall had suddenly appeared at Santa Anita last November, a fellow down on his luck who’d drifted into racetrack life hoping to find some contentment there. It was a lean life. A man could walk horses six hours and make $3. He could sleep free on an army cot in the tack room, and $3 was good money when all he needed was food and an occasional pair of dungarees. Dulaney knew men who had done this all their lives.

  A camaraderie forms between men who cook for one another on tack room hot plates and take their suppers together in racetrack kitchens: who pick up one another’s mail, sleep in the same small room, and shower in the same open bathhouse. But the race meet never got under way that winter. Pearl Harbor got bombed and the whole West Coast was a military zone, the racetrack put under control of the Army. “There’s a rumor that we’re closed for the duration,” Kendall said one night. “They’re going to turn it into a camp for American Japs.”

  Until they did, the horses had to be walked. In one sense it didn’t matter: Kendall and Dulaney each had a greater purpose in life. Dulaney had a book to write and Kendall kept
talking about returning to big-time radio. Kendall had been one of New York’s busiest radio actors. In his best year, 1938, he had worked fifteen shows a week, hopping across networks and using the full range of his talent on the soap serials of Frank and Anne Hummert. He was an elderly shopkeeper on John’s Other Wife and a high-strung concert pianist on Just Plain Bill. He carried a torch for Young Widder Brown, helped Stella Dallas find her lost daughter, Laurel, and plotted against Lord Henry Brinthrope on Our Gal Sunday. Kendall spoke of these melodramas so often that Dulaney could almost hear them in his mind, though he seldom listened to the radio. To Kendall it was part of a glorious past, lost to alcohol. The Hummerts gave no second chances: Kendall had missed a rehearsal and was fired from six continuing daytime roles. Word spread through the trade: Kendall was on the bottle. Within a year he was finished.

  Dulaney had told Kendall little of his life. Kendall knew he was writing a book, but Dulaney had not revealed what he wrote or how long it might take him to finish it. Dulaney had made himself a promise: he would finally get serious about his new novel, which would be dedicated to his dead friend Tom. He rented a room offtrack, where he worked from noon, when the last horse was walked cool and put away, until the creative spark burned out, around seven o’clock at night. Then he’d walk back to the track, across the endless parking lot to the stable area, where he’d eat supper with Kendall and turn in by nine. In the morning it would begin again. They divvied up the chores and Kendall always picked up the mail for both of them. Kendall had a thing about the mail: he was always there when the mail room opened in the morning, and his pursuit of the mail now struck Dulaney as curious. Dulaney never got any mail. He had drifted after Tom’s death, moving from one racetrack to another, seldom bothering with changes of address until Kendall met him at Santa Anita.

  On days when his novel bogged down he wrote short stories about racetrackers. His agent had begun placing them in magazines, and one day Kendall saw one of the magazines and asked if he might read what Dulaney had written. It was a sad tale about a man who had bought a cheap and gimpy claiming horse, saving it from the killers: how he’d done this with money he’d put away for his daughter’s education, how he’d nursed the horse back to health, but an unscrupulous trainer, posing as a friend, had stolen the horse through the claiming process just as it was ready to win again. Kendall chased him down with a wild, excited look in his eyes. He followed Dulaney around the tow ring, gushing over the lyrical truth of what Dulaney had written.

  Dulaney had published six of the racetracker stories and now Kendall read them all. And in Dulaney’s small success Kendall saw the chance of his own salvation. “Jack, these would make fantastic radio plays. If you can put ’em in script, I know I could get a national client interested. Once you’ve got a client, the networks fight over you.”

  Dulaney was intrigued in spite of himself and Kendall was on fire with it. “Man, I’m talking about real radio, not the junk I did for the Hummerts. I’m talking about something so new and exciting that nobody knows how good it can be.”

  Dulaney led his horse off under the trees for a roll in the sand. Kendall persisted, following at his heels. “You’ve got a gift, Jack, and I’m gonna be your calling card straight to the big time. I know everybody in New York radio. I’ll be your agent.”

  “I’ve got an agent, Marty. His name’s Harold Ober.”

  “Get rid of him. He can’t do what I can do for you.”

  “I was a long time getting this agent. He represents William Faulkner and some other writers I admire.” Dulaney didn’t like saying this. It made him feel like a cheap name-dropper. But when Kendall still wasn’t impressed, he said, “Maybe you’ve heard of Scott Fitzgerald. Ober was his agent, so if I seem a little too proud of myself, that’s the reason why.”

  Kendall smiled sadly, like a man losing an argument he should by all rights be winning. “Goddammit, Dulaney, you could be another Norman Corwin. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

  Even Dulaney had heard of Corwin, resident genius on the Columbia Network, who was said to be producing the first real literature of the air. Dulaney had always wanted to hear one of Corwin’s programs but had never been next to a radio when they came on.

  They stood in the Santa Anita mail room filling out change-of-address forms, and he told Kendall he’d think about it. Maybe he’d write and ask Ober about it when they got up to Tanforan.

  The next night Kendall had a radio playing in the tack room. On Monday they heard A Tale of Two Cities with Ronald Colman playing his role from the movie. Dulaney knew Dickens well and he figured they’d caught the heart of it, dressed it up with music and sound, and made it play in his mind, all in sixty minutes, less gab time for Lux soap. He stood in the shedrow and filled his water cup as the guillotine fell, and he looked off to the Hollywood hills, fifteen miles away, where they were doing it at that exact moment, and he was touched by the miracle of it.

  They pooled their money, $75, and bought a car: a bright red Essex twelve years old with a radio that played. On a warm Sunday night they drove north looking for work. They listened to a mangy love drama, then an all-girl orchestra that reached across the country from Cincinnati. It was WLW, Kendall said: “Greatest signal in the universe. You can’t flush your crapper in Dayton without WLW comes out of the pipes.”

  What amazed Dulaney was the versatility, the scope. You heard something great, then something so bad it almost hurt your ears to listen. Bad or good, it never stopped. Radio consumed material like a runaway fire. It burned words like tinder.

  They arrived at Tanforan, just south of Frisco, but again the horses had been moved out and Japanese families were living in the stalls. A cop had replaced the guard at the stable gate and the place had the air of a concentration camp. Dulaney walked around the compound and watched the processing through the high wire fence. New arrivals were unloaded from a truck while a fat man in uniform called their names. “Mr. Ben Doi,” the man said, and Mr. Doi stepped forward and his eyes found Dulaney’s through the wire. The woman who was probably his wife looked at no one. Their children faced the terrors of the camp with brave, dry eyes. The little girl saw Dulaney watching and waved shyly, and suddenly he felt a streak of indignation. What had these Japs done to be yanked out of their homes and locked in a barn still reeking of horse turds? I will write about this, he thought.

  It looked like racing was finished on the coast. They heard that Bay Meadows might still have a meet, and Longacres might open if a man wanted to go to Seattle on the chance of it. But there was plenty of work; the depression was over and they had no trouble finding jobs. Kendall had their mail routed to general delivery and they slipped into new lives away from the horses. They were working half days in a labor pool, giving Dulaney five good hours to write. At night Kendall would come and dole out what mail there was; they’d eat supper together and perhaps later they’d listen to the radio and talk about heading east. Soon there’d be a summer lull on the air as the big-time comedians and the established crime shows took their eight-week vacations. This was the time to try something new.

  It was a daunting prospect to a high school dropout who had never seen the inside of a broadcast station. He put off writing to Ober and started another racetracker story. Then he got arrested, and now it would be a while before Ober heard from him about anything.

  4

  In the morning he was taken to the same room, where Kendall was already waiting at the same table. Kendall looked pale, like a man who’d slept with a goblin. Or a bottle. Dulaney felt heartsick in the face of news that was sure to be bad, but when Kendall spoke, it was not about Holly at all. “What’s going on with you, Jack?”

  “What’s going on how? What are you talkin’ about?”

  “Yesterday you asked me what’s going on with me. Now I’m asking you the same question. There’s something you haven’t told me about.”

  Dulaney fought back his impatience. “That could be anything. There’s a lot two fellows
won’t know about each other when they haven’t been together six months yet. Hell, Marty, you know I’m not the confessor type.”

  “I’m not talking about your love life.” Kendall’s eyes were red and watery.

  Again Dulaney wondered if he’d dropped off the wagon and he decided to ask straight-out. “Are you drinking again?”

  “Not a drop, Jack. I swear, I haven’t had a drink the whole year.”

  “Then what’s wrong with you?”

  “I just need to tell you something. I’ve been thinking about it for some time now, but I don’t know how to get at it.”

  Kendall was sitting half turned in the chair, looking at Dulaney in profile. He’s in pain, Dulaney thought: somebody worked him over.

  “What happened to you, Marty? You look like you can barely sit up.”

  “I took a fall, that’s all.” But as their eyes met, the truth came out: Kendall shrugged and said, “I got mugged last night.”

  Dulaney started to speak but Kendall cut him off. “That guard’s not gonna give us all day.” But again as Dulaney waited the seconds ticked away.

  Finally Kendall said, “The road does funny things to two guys. After a while you grow on each other. You know what I’m saying?”

  Dulaney nodded, but warily.

  “So what do you think, Jack? Am I your friend, or just some goombah you’re killing time with?”

  Kendall was looking straight into his eyes now and Dulaney understood what he wanted. Acquaintances came and went; a friend was for life, and Dulaney had never made friends easily. You never knew about each other until you had passed some test of fire together.

  The question hung in the air and now Dulaney had to grope for an answer. What he said was half-assed but the best he could do. “I think we’ve got the start of a good friendship. There’s no telling where something like that can go.”