The Amazing Adventures of Aaron Broom

by A. E. Hotchner

  “Of course you are, but you could be my assistant and hand me the camera, something like that. She’s married to the actor Roy Delray so I guess she likes publicity.”

  “The Globe-Democrat is second fiddle to the Post-Dispatch but I agree, beautiful people who wear beautiful things like to have their picture taken.”

  Ella said she’d phone her in the morning from the nickel phone on the corner and set a time for us to interview her.

  I asked her to look as grown up as possible. “Your hair, maybe one of your mom’s dresses, and beads, no lipstick.”

  “Why, Aaron! You know a lot about women, don’t you?”

  I blushed.

  Happening 24

  When Augie said we were going to the Post-Dispatch morgue to find out about Catfish Kuger I expected something spooky, but the morgue was just a bright-lit room in the Post-Dispatch building with long tables and chairs and rows upon rows of files all around the room with moving ladders on rollers to reach the files on top.

  Augie filled out a paper for the woman at the desk and she brought the Catfish Kuger file to the desk where we were sitting. The file was chock-full of clippings and photos. We skipped through the early stuff about the event—Catfish and his men machine-gunning the eight guys of the Chicago Collazo gang that was trying to move in on him. And then came the bundle of photos. Augie had brought his father’s magnifying glass and that was a big help since some of the photos were kind of grainy. We both let out a whoop when a clear photo of Catfish turned up: A dapper guy he was with a pencil mustache and classy clothes, holding on to the arm of Matt J. Pringle, but his name under the photo wasn’t Pringle, it was Anthony Aravista, a lawyer, the article said, who’d been disbarred, which was a word I didn’t know but I guessed it meant he’d been busted. His face was a little different—probably he’d had it monkeyed with—but it was Pringle all right. There was a woman on the other side of Catfish who was holding his hand. Her face looked a little familiar but it was half hidden and not clear enough to really see it.

  “What do you think?” Augie said.

  “I think Catfish is all over J & J,” I said. “Ella and I are going to interview Bonnie, so maybe you and I ought to have a talk with Grace Dorso.”

  “Are you sure about the watch-repair guy?”

  “Shucks no, not now. One thing I am sure of—my poor father’s been caught up in something that has nothing to do with Bulova watches. I keep remembering what we heard the J & J brothers saying that time at Pete’s. And Justin being tossed in the gutter. I sure have learned not to make up my mind about people and things I haven’t seen and heard with my own two eyes and ears. Things that you think are real are really make-believe that can hide something that can kill you. That’s how it was with Mr. Sherlock Holmes—he could sniff out the true from the false. I guess if he were here by now he’d know who killed Dempsey and my pop would be out of jail. I just gotta do what Sherlock would do and it’ll happen as long as I can stay clear of Freda Muller.”

  Augie said he would do his part with Pringle, follow him and try to find out his connection with the Catfish people. The newspaper articles we were reading said Catfish was still able to control dockworkers on the Mississippi, gambling boats, and protection for businesses. Neither Augie nor I knew what “protection” meant but we could tell it wasn’t a good thing that he was able to do all this while serving a life sentence in Dannemora prison!

  The more I thought about this, the more I feared I’d never be able to get my father out of the trap he was in. And that I’d be able to spring him with my brilliant detectifying was just the babble of a kid who had read a couple of Sherlock Holmes books. So far, all I was doing was stirring the pot but not producing anything to chew on. And maybe the Catfish people or Freda Muller were going to get me long before I could get them.

  We were out on the sidewalk now and I said, “Augie, would you please give me a swift kick in the butt?”

  “What?”

  “I’m coming apart and I need a jolt.”

  “And you’re giving up on your pop?”

  “No, on me.”

  “You don’t need a kick in the butt. You’re starving that’s all. It’s time we divvy up the big reward I got when I gave Justin his wallet—a pat on my head and ‘Thanks kid’ as he handed me a dollar from his pile of money. Come on, you don’t need a kick, you need a hamburger.”

  We were passing a White Castle and we both had a hamburger with all the works and a Nehi soda. Grape. That’s the first and only time I was on the verge of giving up.

  Augie raised his Nehi and I raised mine.

  “E pluribus unum,” he said.

  “What?”

  “E pluribus unum.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know. My pop says it and it sounds good.”

  “All right. E pluribus…”

  “Unum.”

  We clicked our Nehis.

  Happening 25

  Ella was waiting outside her shack when I came to get her for our meeting with Bonnie Porter. At first I didn’t recognize Ella the way she had fixed herself up to look like a grown-up reporter for the Globe. She sure looked the part. She handed me an empty box camera that belonged to her mother that I was to carry and hand to her as her assistant. She had a red notepad and a pen in a bag she carried over her shoulder.

  Bonnie lived with her husband, Roy Delray, in a small neat house on Carondelet Avenue. Ella said that when she phoned her Bonnie seemed eager to be interviewed by the Globe. Like most beautiful women, Ella said, Bonnie wants to be noticed.

  She certainly was all smiles and welcome when she opened the door to our ring. She was spiffed up for the interview, her long blond hair curly around her beautiful face, a blue silk dress with matching shoes.

  She seated us in the living room facing the fireplace where there was an oil painting of her on the wall above it and a large photo of a fierce-looking Veiled Prophet on the mantel. Next to the fireplace there was a piano with many more photos on it. The one that caught my eye showed a Veiled Prophet armed with jeweled daggers and golden pistols attached to his silky robe that billowed to the ground. His getup was topped by a high conical decorated hood and a long heavy veil you could not see through. He was dancing with a gorgeous Queen of Love and Beauty, who was Bonnie. She saw me fixated on the photo.

  “That’s when I was Queen of Love and Beauty at the Veiled Prophet Ball,” she said. “That was the year I was a debutante and I was chosen by the Veiled Prophet from among all the debutantes to be the Queen. My picture was everywhere.”

  “Who was the Veiled Prophet that year?” Ella asked, her pad and pencil ready.

  “No one knows. All those Veiled Prophets since the very beginning in 1870-something, not one of their names has ever been revealed.”

  “You mean you didn’t know who selected you? Who you were dancing with?” Ella asked. She made notes in her pad.

  “No idea. The Veiled Prophet’s makeup has always been so spectacular, well, I could have been dancing with my own father and I wouldn’t have known it.”

  I knew about the Veiled Prophet, the Queen, and all that. I had been going with my mother to the Veiled Prophet parades on the riverfront since I was four or five years old, the fancy floats and marching bands and candies thrown to us kids by the people on the floats. There was also the fun some peashooters had, pelting those hoity-toities on the floats.

  My mother told me the whole Veiled Prophet thing was started by a St. Louis gentleman of high society who had copied it from a Mardi Gras celebration he had witnessed in New Orleans. My mother knew a lot about the Veiled Prophet Society and the Veiled Prophet Ball that was St. Louis’s big social event every year. She told me the name came from the Irish poet Thomas Moore and his Veiled Prophet of Khorassan. It was a secret society of the rich.

  “Although n
o one has ever revealed the name of a Veiled Prophet,” Bonnie was saying, “I do know one and I can reveal it to you if you keep it strictly off the record. Promise?”

  “Of course,” Ella said. She was absolutely being a really good reporter. She closed her notepad and put her pen down.

  “My father,” Bonnie said. “Benjamin Quincy Porter. He was Veiled Prophet ten years or so before I was Queen.”

  “Is he the Porter of Porter Chemicals?” Ella asked.

  “He is,” Bonnie said.

  “And the Porter Chemical Building?”

  “Yes.”

  “So tell me, being who you are why are you a salesperson behind the counter at J & J?”

  “Well that’s a sad story. In a nutshell, I fell in love with the actor Roy Delray. You know of him?”

  “Yes,” Ella said, “he does the Mississippi Music Program on KMOX.”

  “And the Muny in the park. My father was very opposed to my marrying him, threatening to disown me. Bringing an actor into our family was like a scourge, an incurable disease that would poison the pure Porter name, said he would positively disown me…and he did—that was four years ago, he pitched me out of our beautiful house in Clayton and I haven’t heard from him or seen him since. Not even a Christmas card. The Depression hasn’t touched him or his big chemical business but it sure touched us. You ask why this Queen of Love and Beauty is working at J & J, it’s for Roy and me to keep afloat. He doesn’t make much singing and acting on KMOX and the Muny, which is owned by the city. It pays little but added to my puny salary we get by. We eat out and go to movies and we like to dance on the Mississippi steamboat River Princess, where Roy gets a booking once in a while to sing in the gambling lounge.”

  “Do you regret your fall-out with your father?” Ella asked.

  “And lose Roy? No, of course not, no, no, no.”

  “Is there anyone at J & J or any little thing that happened that you think might lead to finding out who was in cahoots with the shooter? Any little suspicion?”

  “I’ve thought about it a lot—I really and truly liked Dempsey, the nicest, kindest man—but I haven’t come up with a thing. I don’t socialize with anyone there.”

  “Well, thank you for your time,” Ella said, putting her pad and pencil away.

  “Before you go may I offer you tea and a slice of my very own pound cake? It’s the one really positive thing about getting booted from the family—I have discovered I’m quite a good baker. Roy says I should open a bakery.”

  Her pound cake certainly was delicious. She kept putting slices on my plate and I kept devouring them.

  “I agree with Roy,” I said, my mouth full.

  “He’s performing at the Muny in Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor. Would you two like to go see him? I have some house seats.”

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “Could we have one more? We have a friend at the Globe who I’m sure would like to come with us.”

  “Oh, of course,” she said, handing me three tickets. “When will this article appear?”

  “Never can tell,” Ella said. “It’s up to the editor.”

  I handed her the camera and she clicked Bonnie posing all over the room, at the piano and so forth, Ella clicking away like she knew what she was doing.

  “You need any more pictures, especially with Roy,” Bonnie said, “I’d be happy to oblige.”

  Happening 26

  Ella and I took the trolley to the Eads Bridge stop and parted company at the door of her shack. She hugged me goodbye and I complimented her on being such a good actress.

  I was halfway to my hammock when my arm was grabbed. “Hey, kid, looka me, I got a message for you.” He was a short, wide man with a heavy mustache and huge muscley arms with tattooed serpents sticking out of his shirt with the sleeves cut off.

  “You been sticking your nose where it don’t belong and there are people don’t like it, so the message is…back off. We don’t wanna see you hanging around anymore or your skinny little ass is going to be busted. You got that?” He shifted his muscley grip from my arm to the shirt around my throat, pulling me up off the ground, and I started to choke. I tried to talk but only a smothered squeak came out. I tried to breathe but I couldn’t draw any air into me. I wanted to bite his hand but it wasn’t close enough to my mouth. I pulled at his hand but it was like trying to move a cement sidewalk. I began to feel dizzy, maybe collapse when he suddenly let go. He put his face right up against mine.

  “Don’t let me see you again.”

  I nodded.

  “Understand?”

  I nodded.

  He left.

  I sat down on the ground, massaged my throat, tested my voice, which was still kind of squeaky. I tried to unscramble what he said to figure out who could have sicced him on me.

  After a few minutes resting on the ground I began to feel better. I managed to force myself up and test my shaky legs. They seemed to be in working order and able to take me to the hammock. But the prospect of a soothing swing in the hammock was undone by the sight of a body occupying it.

  My first panicked reaction was that Captain Arnold had returned and was geared to finish what mighty muscles had started. My instinct was to turn tail and get out of there, but I just kept going toward the hammock and when I got there Captain Arnold turned out to be Augie.

  “Augie! What the devil are you doing here? How’d you find me?”

  “You’re the only hammock in all of Hooverville, that’s how.”

  He swung himself out of the hammock and I staggered into his place.

  “Geez, Aaron, you look like a ghost got hold of you.”

  “Yeah a muscley ghost with serpents on his arms tried to get rid of me.”

  “One of Catfish’s thugs, you think?”

  “Yeah. Why you here?”

  “I was tailing Pringle from work and guess who he went to visit?”

  “The Marmon flapper.”

  “Nope. Grace Dorso.”

  “Chubby Grace? Are they all in cahoots?”

  “She lives in a swell ground-floor apartment at Lindell Towers. I got under an open window and I heard them talking. They certainly know each other pretty good. He had something to give her—don’t know what—I couldn’t stay there long, there were people coming and going, but I did see them come out and from what I heard he was taking her to dinner.”

  “We know Pringle is all wound up with Catfish, but what about Grace?”

  “I think we should get on over there and take a look in her apartment.”

  “You mean break in?”

  “The window’s open so we wouldn’t break in, just step in—couldn’t be easier. Zip in, zip out.”

  What suddenly zipped into me was that terrible pain of the thug’s grip on my arm and it began to be hard to breathe. I swung out of the hammock, not wanting Augie to see me sprouting fear. Of course I’ll go! You bet I’ll go! I said to myself. So what if we get caught. So what? Are you some kind of wimp, weasel, worm, afraid of your own shadow?

  “What the hell’s wrong with you?” Augie said.

  “Whatcha mean? Nothing’s wrong.”

  “Then why are you punching the air and swinging your arms?”

  “Come on! Let’s go and get it over with!” I said.

  I was breathing better but my neck felt like one of those serpents was wound around it, squeezing.

  Happening 27

  Lindell Towers was a large apartment building close to a busy entrance to Forest Park. Grace Dorso’s ground-floor apartment was in the rear where there was less Forest Park people traffic. We waited for a lull until we boosted ourselves into the apartment. In addition to my neck hurting, I was feeling bad because I mostly lived by the rules and although I take chances not big ones like this. Of course everything I do right now is to help my father but
if I get into trouble, who’s there to replace me looking after him?

  It was a small apartment but the furniture and curtains and rugs and pictures looked expensive. Augie led the way into the living room. I looked around, no idea what I was looking for. Augie began to open the drawers of a mirrored desk and I went over to a table where there was a clutch of framed photographs, mostly people at parties and faded photos of what must have been family.

  Augie held up an account book he had found in one of the desk drawers. “It’s for that gambling boat, the River Princess, all these names and dollar amounts and look at this—Roy Delray with a big number.”

  “Bonnie said he sometimes worked the floor show. Maybe that’s what he got paid.”

  “But what’s it doing in Grace’s desk? Maybe it’s for something else.”

  “I’ll be darned! Look at this photo,” I said.

  It was a young couple in wedding dress and tuxedo. The woman looked vaguely familiar but the man was definitely the Catfish we saw at the Post-Dispatch morgue.

  “The woman,” Augie said, “why would Grace have the photo in this super-fancy frame?”

  “Looks to me…maybe a sister?”

  “Yeah, skinny, pretty sister or…”

  I was studying the photo, holding it in the window light, turning it this way and that.

  “You know something,” I said. “Tell you what. She’s beefed herself up, and done a ton to her face, but you know something—that’s Grace back then.”

  “Naw I don’t see it. Maybe a sister, yes, but…”

  I turned the photo around, took off the backing, and there was a folded marriage certificate with two names: Gaetano Cugavelo and Graciella Borsolini, Gaetano to become Catfish and after being put in Dannemora for life, Graciella changes her name and her face and fattens up to become pudgy Grace Dorso.