Buster Midnight's Cafe

by Dallas, Sandra

“Tell me what?” The first thing that came into my mind was that Toney had been killed.

  “It’s Buster.”

  Buster wasn’t in the war. That didn’t make sense. I thought, Pull yourself together, Effa Commander, and let your mind catch up.

  “Buster’s in jail,” she said.

  “Jail?”

  “For murder.”

  “Murder?” I asked. Moon stopped drinking his Ovaltine. “Who?”

  “May Anna—” Then somebody interrupted Whippy Bird before she could finish what she was saying. As long as I live, I’ll never forget the pain that went through me when she said Buster killed May Anna. It was like a hot poker sizzling through ice. I started to shake.

  Moon jumped up from the table and grabbed my hand. “Telegram?” That poor boy. Once he thought a telegram meant happy times. But after he saw the telegrams about Pink and Chick, he knew they meant death, too. Looking at my face, he thought we had gotten another one. And looking at his, I could tell he was afraid. I wiped off his Ovaltine mustache with the hem of my apron then put my arm around him.

  “Whippy Bird, what happened?” I yelled into the phone trying to get her back. Buster loved May Anna. He had been protecting her since she was five years old. He wouldn’t hurt her. Never in his life. I wouldn’t believe that Buster would murder May Anna. Not on purpose and not by accident, either. “Whippy Bird!” I yelled.

  “Sorry, Effa Commander,” she said. “It’s right here in the Standard. I bought it on the street and had to call you as soon as I got to the office. I still have my coat on. The headline says: ‘Butte Boxer Charged with Murder.’“

  “Why would he kill May Anna?”

  “Kill May Anna? He didn’t kill May Anna! Buster wouldn’t kill May Anna! It was at May Anna’s house. He killed that John Reide. Remember him? May Anna had him on her string.”

  I heaved such a big sigh of relief I had to sit down on the kitchen chair we kept by the phone. “It’s all right,” I whispered to Moon. “Go finish your breakfast.” He didn’t move.

  “Did Buster beat him up?” I asked Whippy Bird.

  “He shot him.”

  “With a gun?”

  “It’s the best way to shoot people, Effa Commander.”

  “Buster never used a gun. Why would he do that? With fists like he’s got he doesn’t need a gun.”

  “It was May Anna’s gun. It says right here that Buster and John Reide got into a fight at May Anna’s house. They were struggling over the gun, and it went off,” Whippy Bird said.

  “That’s not murder,” I told her.

  “Well, hell, Effa Commander, all I know is what’s right here. It says: ‘Murder charges were filed against the boxer.’ That’s Buster.”

  “What did May Anna say?”

  “Nothing. The paper says she’s in seclusion.”

  “Seclusion? What the hell is seclusion? Why isn’t she there helping Buster?”

  “How would I know. Maybe she’s in jail. Maybe she and Buster had a fight. It doesn’t say. Now what are we going to do?”

  I knew what we were going to do. “Whippy Bird, I’ll call May Anna. We have to get to the bottom of this.”

  When I hung up the phone, little Moon looked up at me with his head cocked to one side and said, “Troubles?”

  He was such a smart little boy—already in third grade—and me and Whippy Bird always treated him like a man. “Like nobody’s business,” I told him.

  “Did Uncle Buster shoot Aunt May Anna?” It hurt me just to look at Moon’s sorry little face.

  “No such a thing. Your Uncle Buster’s fine, and Aunt May Anna’s fine. Now you pick up Charlie McCarthy and eat those Cheerios before they get soggy.”

  Moon sat down at the table again, stirring his cereal around and listening while I placed a long-distance call to May Anna. Calling her was strange because we always wrote to her. She was the one who did the telephoning except for the time Whippy Bird called her about Maybird. We sent her telegrams when Pink and Chick died. I’d never called her long-distance before so it took me ten minutes to find where we’d written down her phone number.

  Once the operator came on the line, I told her it was an emergency. Still, it took twenty minutes before I got a connection. Even at that, it wasn’t May Anna. It was her maid.

  “Hazel, where’s May Anna?” I asked. I didn’t want to pay for a long-distance phone call to talk to any maid.

  “She’s not taking calls,” Hazel said.

  “This is Effa Commander. You remember, me and Whippy Bird visited last year. Tell May Anna I’m on the phone.”

  “I’m sorry. She’s asleep. We’ve had some trouble here.”

  “I know that. Why else would I be calling? How come she’s in bed when Buster’s in trouble?”

  “The doctor gave her a sedative. She’s exhausted. She can’t talk now.”

  “Then you tell me what happened,” I told the maid.

  “I’m not allowed.”

  “That’s crap.” I looked to see if Moon heard, but his attention was all on Charlie McCarthy, pushing the cereal to the side of the bowl and mashing it up. “May Anna would want you to tell me.”

  There was a long pause while Hazel thought that over. Then she said, “I don’t know anything. I wasn’t here when it happened. None of us was. It was our day off. When we came in, they were taking away Mr. Reide’s body, and the police had handcuffs on Mr. Midnight, and Miss Street was hysterical. She was hurt.”

  “Shot?” I was so mad at May Anna for not calling, I hadn’t thought about her not being all right.

  “No. It looked like she was beat up. You won’t tell anybody I said that, will you? We don’t want the fan magazines to know. Louella Parsons called here three times already. And that other one with the ugly hats, she yelled at me. You won’t talk to them, will you?”

  No I wouldn’t, I told her. I was glad May Anna had Hazel to protect her, but she didn’t have to protect her from me and Whippy Bird. “I’m May Anna’s friend, remember? Is she all right?”

  “I think so. Mostly, she just acted crazy. I like Buster Midnight. I hope nothing happens to him.” She sniffed. I told her not to worry, that it most likely was an accident. Buster wouldn’t hurt anybody outside of a boxing ring, I told her, though I knew that wasn’t true. He would have killed Pig Face if he’d had the chance. Then I wondered what if he felt that way about Mr. Reide? After all, May Anna went out with him on dates. Maybe Buster was jealous. I tried to think was Buster jealous. He never seemed to be jealous of May Anna’s Johns when she worked in Venus Alley. “You tell May Anna to call Effa Commander in Butte, Montana, when she wakes up,” I told the maid and hung up.

  I sat by the phone all day so I could answer it on the first ring. It was always Whippy Bird on the other end, though, asking if May Anna had telephoned. May Anna didn’t call until late in the after-noon. Her voice was so quiet and sad, you wouldn’t have known it was May Anna. “Oh, Effa Commander. I wish you were here.”

  “Are you all right, May Anna?”

  “He beat me up. That’s not right. Even when I was a hooker, I never got beat up.”

  “Buster beat you up?” I asked. “Buster wouldn’t beat you up,” I added, answering my own question.

  “No, of course not. It was John. He was drunk. He slapped me. He tried to take advantage of me,” May Anna said, which was some statement because May Anna once earned her living letting men take advantage of her. Still, just because she used to work in a cathouse didn’t mean she had to sleep with anybody who wanted her, no matter how famous he was. “Then Buster … showed up,” May Anna continued. “I didn’t even know he was there. I forgot he has a key. He came in and heard all the noise, and“—May Anna had to stop for a minute to blow her nose—”he shot John.” Then she covered up the telephone receiver with her hand and said something to someone I couldn’t hear. I knew she wasn’t alone.

  “May Anna!” I yelled into the phone. “The paper said it was your gun. Why did Buster get your
gun? Why didn’t he just pop that man?”

  “Oh, I didn’t tell you. When John hit me, I got out my revolver and told him I’d shoot him if he didn’t leave. He laughed and said I wouldn’t do it. He was right. I wouldn’t have shot him. I’d never shoot anybody. You know that, don’t you, Effa Commander? Then when Buster came in, John took the gun away from me and pointed it at Buster.” Her voice faded away, then came back. “Buster grabbed his arm, and they fought, and the gun went off. Buster didn’t mean to do anything. It was an accident.” May Anna sounded far away, but maybe that was the connection. You didn’t get good phone connections back then like you do now.

  “Are you all right now, May Anna?”

  “I think so. The doctor gave me something. My face is bruised, but I think I can cover it with makeup.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t,” I told her. “If people see you looking beat up, they’ll know Buster was defending you.”

  “Oh, but I couldn’t let anybody see me like this. I look so awful.”

  “May Anna, you listen to me. You’re still hysterical. Buster’s in jail, and you have to get him out. Who the hell cares what you look like,” I told her. There was a long silence, and I thought we’d been cut off. “Hello? Hello?” I yelled.

  “Effa Commander, it’s going to be all right, isn’t it?” May Anna said at last.

  Maybe I’d been too hard on her. “I think so, honey. It sounds like self-defense to me,” I said. “I wish Toney was here. He’d know what to do.” He wasn’t though. He was fighting overseas. So I had to step in. “Does Buster have a lawyer?”

  “The studio got him one. I didn’t know who else to call. They’re used to dealing with scandals. They’ll know how to hush this up.”

  “Hush it up?” I asked. “Hush it up? What’s there to hush up?”

  “Oh, you know what it could do to my career.”

  That didn’t make any sense to me. This wasn’t about May Anna’s career. It was about getting Buster out of jail, but what did I know?

  “Do you think there’ll be a trial?” May Anna asked.

  “Don’t ask me,” I said.

  “I’ll be the best witness there ever was. I’ll wear black and cry, and they’ll never find Buster guilty. Never.”

  May Anna was only partly right. There was a trial, and she cried, and she wore black. But they found Buster guilty anyway. The whole thing went on for a long time, and the papers were filled with it every day. Walter Winchell wrote about it, and Louella Parsons had it in her column. She always called May Anna “Poor Marion Street” like “poor” was her first name. It seemed for six months you couldn’t open the paper without reading about the Buster Midnight-John Reide-Marion Street Hollywood Love Triangle Murder, which is what they called it. Or the Tinsel Town Crime of Passion.

  As it turned out there was more to it than May Anna told me over the phone that day. She’d been going out with John Reide for a long time, even before me and Whippy Bird went to Hollywood. He even wanted to marry her, though, of course, May Anna never said yes. In fact, she was tired of him because he made a drunken nuisance of himself. Sometimes he yelled at her, calling her whore and bitch so loud that the neighbors threatened to call the police, and May Anna had to let him in the house until he shut up.

  Of course, none of that was ever in the newspapers. If you’re a Hollywood celebrity, you can do all kinds of things and get away with it. You can have loud parties and drive drunk and sleep with anybody you want to and still play the Virgin Mary in the movies, May Anna told us. And if you die, the reporters out there turn you into a saint. But if they make up their minds they don’t like you, they print everything you ever did in your whole life. Or make it up.

  That’s what happened to Buster. The newspapers wrote that Buster was jealous of John Reide. They said Mr. Reide and May Anna were having a quiet dinner at her house, a nice romantic candlelight dinner that May Anna cooked herself, which we knew was a lie unless Mr. Reide thought pork and beans or tuna from a can was a romantic dinner. Then they wrote that Buster broke into the house. May Anna ran to get her gun, they said, then Buster grabbed it and shot Mr. Reide.

  Of course, if that was all true, why would they troop up to May Anna’s bedroom so Buster could shoot Mr. Reide there?

  May Anna said the papers had it all wrong. She held a press conference to say that Buster was only protecting her since Mr. Reide had beat her up. Nobody except me and Whippy Bird believed her, though. That’s because the papers printed that Buster was a slacker.

  Now, we knew Buster was not a war slacker, and so do you. Nobody else did though since even after the murder, he never told anyone he’d been turned down by the armed services for physical reasons. So the papers never printed the truth about why he wasn’t in the war. If Toney had been around, he would have made Buster speak up or maybe leaked the story to the press, as the fellow says. But the navy wouldn’t let Toney out to help Buster. May Anna tried hard, but she couldn’t convince Buster to tell people why he wasn’t in the war. So people just naturally assumed that story about Buster was true.

  What made it worse was the papers printed that John Reide was said to be an English war hero and a friend of Princess Elizabeth. They said he was a British pilot who got shot down and injured and couldn’t fight anymore even though he tried and tried to join the army in England. That was why he came to America, the papers said. He didn’t come here to get in the movies. He wanted to join the United States Army, and they wouldn’t take him because of his war wounds.

  May Anna told us that was hogwash. Mr. Reide was a crummy English actor who got hurt in a bombing raid when he fell off a bar stool. He came to America so he wouldn’t have to fight in the war because he was chicken. Not only that, she said he was also a queer, so he wouldn’t dare join the United States Army either.

  Whippy Bird said how come he wanted to marry May Anna and how come he tried to take advantage of her if he was a fruit. May Anna told us sometimes they were like that. Besides, he had to keep up appearances since there were rumors going around about him. If his fans found out he was a homo, he’d be dead in that town, May Anna said. She told us that some of your most famous leading men were homosexuals, and they were even married and had kids. When Whippy Bird said that was a rotten thing to do to your wife, May Anna explained that some of the wives were homosexuals, too, so it didn’t matter. Whippy Bird told her two wrongs don’t make a right.

  Mr. Reide beat up May Anna because she told him she wouldn’t go out with him anymore. She threatened to tell people about him if he didn’t leave her alone. May Anna couldn’t tell all that to the reporters, because how would it look if she was dating a homosexual? Besides, people might not believe her, and feel sorry for John Reide instead of Buster.

  By the time the trial date was set, May Anna wasn’t talking to the reporters any longer, so they interviewed other people about her, like the preacher who marched back and forth in front of the courthouse with a sign saying THE WAGES OF SIN IS DEATH. When I told Whippy Bird about him, she said she thought the wages of sin in Hollywood was a big white house with naked statues.

  The odd thing was with all that snooping around, those reporters never found out May Anna had been a hooker. One newspaper man called me and Whippy Bird, though, and asked wasn’t it true that May Anna and Buster had a baby named Moon that we were raising. He’d found out May Anna had pictures of a little boy all over her house.

  Whippy Bird wasn’t mad. She just laughed and laughed and invited the man to come to Butte and she’d show him Moon’s birth certificate. Besides, she said, May Anna was already in Hollywood when Moon was born.

  Just before the trial started, May Anna called and begged us to come and stay with her. She was hysterical because studio people were telling her different things she should do and she didn’t know which way to turn. Unless we were with her, she said, she couldn’t get through the trial.

  Whippy Bird asked, but the Anaconda Company wouldn’t let her take any vacation, so I had t
o go by myself. May Anna said she’d send me a ticket, but I told her no. I owed Buster plenty, and I would spend my own money.

  I took a Pullman instead of getting a private room, and I couldn’t help thinking that I surely had a much better time when me and Whippy Bird went to see May Anna than I had by myself. I didn’t even enjoy the food, though I ordered meat loaf, which I usually like, and a baked potato, which came in a separate dish with a little flag on it. I couldn’t eat it, which is a switch for me. Even when Pink died, I kept my good appetite.

  Thomas, the chauffeur, met me again, but we didn’t talk about any Grauman’s Chinese Theatre or tar pits. I wanted to sit up front with him so he could tell me what was going on, but he said that wasn’t proper, that May Anna wouldn’t like it. So I sat in the back and leaned forward, but he still didn’t say much that me and Whippy Bird didn’t know already. He told me May Anna was still upset, which I knew, and that they were all surprised that the newspapers were against Buster, which we knew, too. Thomas called Mr. Reide a faggot worm because whenever he borrowed the limo, he never tipped.

  That was the first time I knew you were supposed to tip the limo driver, and I surely was embarrassed. I said me and Whippy Bird were a pair of nincompoops from Butte, Montana, and I owed him money. He told me it was a pure pleasure to drive us around, and he didn’t want any tip from us because he had such a nice time. He must have meant it because when he drove me back to the depot after the trial, I tried to give him some money, but he told me to save it to buy a drink in the club car.

  He warned me not to talk to any of the reporters, who were always hanging around May Anna’s house, but I knew about dealing with them from the days of Buster’s training camp. Two of them were standing in May Anna’s driveway. “No comment,” I said when I got out of the car before they could even ask me a question. Thomas said I didn’t have to worry about them since they were guards the studio sent over.

  “I’m glad you’re here, Effa Commander,” he said when he carried my suitcases up to the front door. “So many people are telling Miss Street what to do, it’s good she’s got somebody around who loves her.”