King Dave sat on the couch in his underwear, sagging with relief. “Long story. Listen, buddy, come down to the piston room and let me out. I, uh, came down for a break and got locked in somehow.”
That wasn’t going to explain the loss of his pants, but hey, one disaster at a time. No need to burden Bobbyjay with news that he might let slip to someone on the trip to the basement.
Silence. King Dave realized Bobbyjay had hung up when he saw the phone was dead.
Four minutes later by his watch, Bobbyjay opened the door. “Hey, man, your pants are out here.” He handed the jeans to King Dave. “Found ’em folded up nice and neat outside the door. Got your wallet and your keys and everything.”
Under Bobbyjay’s curious eyes, King Dave dressed himself, hot, furious, and humiliated. Again.
“Who was it? That waitress?” When King Dave glared a hole through him, Bobbyjay raised his eyebrows. “Wow.”
“What do you mean, wow?” King Dave demanded furiously.
Bobbyjay grinned.
Here came the razz. Oh, Christ. At least it’s only Bobbyjay.
“I mean, wow, man. She’s really got you going.”
“She’s in fucking league with my fucking ex and I’m going to have to kill her,” King Dave said through his teeth.
Bobbyjay threw his hands in the air. “Lemme buy you a beer.”
Nadine staggered up the stairs, pressing her hand to a stitch in her side, all the while fearing to hear an outraged roar behind her. She didn’t hear it. What if he had another key? What if there was a way out of that room that she could have found if she hadn’t panicked, hadn’t assumed the worst? She scrambled up the last flight and paused at the top with her hand on the stage door. Best not run if she could avoid it. Everyone would know what had been going on.
When she cracked open the door, a burst of caterwauling sent her reeling back.
They must have been watching Phantom of the Opera when they built this place. She padded down long white corridors and peeked into dirty lounges full of bored-looking opera singers with half their clothes off, reading magazines. Twice she almost found herself opening a door onto the stage, but the howling alerted her. In the dressing room area, she spotted a mirror.
Lordy, she looked like the Rape of the Sabines. Her hair was all over her shoulders, her cheeks were red, her lips looked bruised, and she was missing a button on her uniform.
Luckily she was in a good spot for tidying up. She found some more hairpins in the bottom of her purse and french-braided the mess off her neck and out of her eyes. Some cold water for her heated face. A safety pin for the gaposis at her bosom.
This did nothing for her nerves. Her pulse still raced, her lips tingled, and her hands twitched for the feel of King Dave’s denim-clad behind. She could taste his mouth, smell the coffee on his breath.
And Lordy, he was better at it than Bub Smith ever was.
For the first time in her life, Nadine Fisher felt susceptible. Vulnerable. Because this time she wanted it.
That shook her down to her Stride-Rites.
“Lead me not into temptation,” she prayed. “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of King Dave.”
Some big breaths, a little more cold water splashed around, and she felt ready to face Burg.
He loomed like his namesake behind the doorman’s peep-through window. Without exactly making a vulgar remark, Burg managed to convey the fact that he remembered her coming past him with King Dave two hours ago, only her hair wasn’t messy then. She smoothed her hair away from her face.
“Don’t tell anyone you saw me,” she pleaded. “I’ll get in trouble if my boss finds out I snuck over to listen to opera.”
Burg smiled knowingly. “Didja like it?”
She peered over her shoulder. “Honestly? I hate opera. Don’t tell. I wouldn’t want to hurt...anyone’s feelings.”
Burg grinned. “I won’t tell him nothing.”
This wasn’t exactly how she wanted the conversation to go, but she was in no position to be picky. And the guys would be coming out soon—the audience began applauding.
“Thanks, Burg,” she said fairly gratefully, and escaped.
Three hours later King Dave was in Corbett’s, having finished his follow-spot gig across the street and taken the mild scold the head electrician was permitted to administer to the son of FX Flaherty. He’d also stood through a far-from-mild hissy fit from that stupid out-of-town stage manager who didn’t know who he was. Then he’d worked the changeover, which meant clearing the stage for a socialite party the following night.
Pinocchio weighed a ton. His back hurt. His pride hurt worse. He had a residual erection that made heavy lifting a misery. Maybe he could drink it down.
Bobbyjay sat across from him, drinking one beer to his three. He’d finally stopped razzing, once King Dave made it clear the state he was in. “Man, you can’t take it like this,” Bobbyjay said for the fourth time.
“Why the fuck can’t I? My ex-wife’s putting the screws on me. This fucking waitress has me over a fucking barrel. My own mother won’t let me see my kid. Tomorrow I’ve got to work the Auditorium put-in again and when I go next door for lunch the bitch’ll be wearing fucking orange pantyhose. Orange hairpins.” He drank. “Hairpins,” he said again, and snorted.
Bobbyjay looked worried. “First the waitress, now orange pantyhose? Man, you’re getting fixated.”
King Dave met his look impatiently. “You read too much, Bobbyjay.”
“Seriously, bro, I’m concerned. You never drink like this. She’s just a waitress.”
“It’s not the waitress, it’s the principle of the thing,” King Dave said, knowing it was a lie. She’d got to him on that couch. That was unforgivable.
“You’re gonna get into trouble,” Bobbyjay said.
King Dave looked at his buddy and felt a stab of remorse. He and Bobbyjay had been through daycare together, grade school, junior high, high school. They’d survived the nuns together. As apprentices, they’d made trouble together. They’d made trouble together most of their twenty-four years, mostly trouble that King Dave started and Bobbyjay got them out of.
King Dave was FX Flaherty’s kid. King Dave didn’t take heat.
“You won’t take the heat this time,” he assured Bobbyjay.
His buddy didn’t look comforted. “What are you going to do?”
“Drink myself to sleep, crash in the car, go to work.”
“Man, you’ve got it bad,” Bobbyjay said. “I thought you were too, like, Mister Athlete to drink like this.”
King Dave ignored him. “Drink myself to sleep, crash at your house, go to work. Work all day and all night for a week, go smelt fishing, fall in the lake, drink myself warm again, crash. Go to fucking work,” he said savagely, thinking of that ratty cardboard box full of condoms. “Does it ever occur to you, we need to get a life?”
Bobbyjay blinked. “Yeah.”
King Dave’s voice rose. “Yeah? We’re throwing our youth away on show business and all you have to say is yeah?” He could hear himself getting belligerent. Because he couldn’t hold his beer. And to hell with you, too, Bobbyjay.
“Do you realize you are the fourth generation stagehand in your family? Do you realize I’m the fifth? No wonder my Mom doesn’t want me to see Davy Junior. She’s scared to death I’ll turn him into another fucking stagehand.”
That wasn’t an experience he would willingly repeat. Seeing his kid get dragged away from him so he couldn’t be contaminated.
He swilled beer. “This isn’t living. This is fucking slavery.” The cocktail waitress came by with another round and he stared after her barely-covered butt without seeing it or giving a hoot. He said with contempt, “We’re sheep.”
“Well, what are you gonna do about it?” Bobbyjay said, sounding annoyed.
King Dave looked up at him and let his eyes glitter. “Get into trouble?”
Bobbyjay heaved a sigh. “C’mon, buddy.” He stood up and h
auled King Dave to his feet. “Time to crash.”
Back in her apartment, shades down, doors locked, Nadine lay awake half the night. She might as well have gone all the way with King Dave for all the peace she had now. Her body burned.
He’d groped her on top of her clothes so hard, she wondered if she might get pregnant from how his hands felt. She flopped over on her side, trying to find a place on the sheet that wasn’t scorching hot, trying not to think about sex, sex, sex, sex, sex.
This was miserable.
“I don’t even like him!” she yelled into the empty room.
Now she was lying to herself. A fool, a slut, and a liar.
He wasn’t a bad person. He was an idiot, and he didn’t have a life, but none of the guys did. She was in Chicago because he was a stagehand, because stagehands were so whatever-they-were. Salty. Funny. Worldly. In their working man’s blue jeans, roomy enough to move in, snug enough to show it off. Sexy.
She groaned.
What am I? Who am I? She’d worn white lace gloves and lived the part of preacher’s daughter for nineteen years. Nine months wearing a white uniform and Stride-Rites had made her into a waitress. Stagehand fodder. She was doomed.
This had happened to other girls she’d heard of. Virgin to whore, no waiting.
Surely there was some middle ground.
If only her head wouldn’t spin. Her pelvis tilted up toward the dark ceiling.
Chapter Twelve
Next day King Dave didn’t bother going into Liz Otter’s at break time. Why watch her smirk? Besides, he had a hangover.
She’d got him. Fine, terrific. Round two to Nadine. Round three or four, if you counted his last couple tries at her.
This time he hadn’t even been thinking about Tammy and the pictures. All he’d thought was, What a good-looking woman, and his brain went south and the little head took over. She’d looked him straight in the eye. She totally sucked him in.
He shoved quarters into the Auditorium’s crappy vending machine and his sense of injury increased. If it weren’t for Tammy he’d be next door, letting Nadine bring him a burger.
Bobbyjay hurried by on his way to break. “I’m going next door, want anything?”
“No,” King Dave growled. “Yeah, I do. Bacon cheeseburger with extra pickle. No, skip that,” he said, realizing Nadine would recognize his usual order. He didn’t trust her not to douse it with lighter fluid. “Just coffee. Decaf and cream.”
Bobbyjay looked at him.
“What?” King Dave said defensively. He dug a buck out of his jeans. “Here’s for the coffee.”
Bobbyjay sighed in an irritating way and took the buck.
King Dave’s phone rang.
“Yeah?”
“I mean business.” It was Tammy. “Pay up.”
With a furtive look around, King Dave ducked into the corner beside the vending machine. He lowered his voice. “I paid. I gave my mother the check two nights ago. Didn’t you call her?”
There was a silence. Tammy said, “Not yet.”
“Well, Jesus.” King Dave bit his lip. “I mean, cripes, you blackmail me and you don’t bother to get the money?” Nadine was rubbing off on him. Pretty soon he’d be saying poot and darn.
“I don’t trust you.”
He ground his teeth. “What’s to trust? You got me over a barrel, goddammit,” he said, sotto voce. “I paid. You sent me that s-stuff in the mail.” He wouldn’t even speak aloud what she’d sent. That picture was burned into his brain. “Now you’re threatening me. What do you want?”
“You might waylay me at your Mom’s house.”
“Well, I won’t.”
“I don’t trust you.” Tammy was the original broken record.
He sighed. “So give her the account number over the phone, and she can go to the bank with the check and deposit it.”
Another long silence. In the wait, it occurred to him that wasn’t a bad idea. Waylay her at Mom’s. She would have the camera on her, Tammy was like that, wore all her good jewelry all the time because then burglars couldn’t get it while she was out.
Search her car. Go through her purse.
Yeah, and have her scream bloody murder. King Dave was squeamish about stuff like that. No woman had ever got so much as a slap from him, and he wouldn’t start now.
“I want you to stay away from your Mom’s,” Tammy said.
“Hey,” he said. “She’s my Mom. My kid is there.”
“Hey,” she said, “your dick is orange in these pictures.”
“You can’t deny me visitation. ’Specially if you blow town and dump him with my Mom.”
“Take me to court,” she jeered, and hung up.
Great. He slumped back against the warmth of the Coke machine with the phone dead in his hand. She called to threaten him and then didn’t make a demand. She didn’t want to take care of his kid but she told his mother—his own mother—to keep him away. Now he wasn’t allowed to go near his mother either. Mental.
He ripped open a Mars bar and ate it. Bobbyjay turned up with two sealed styrofoam cups.
“Here’s your change,” he said, giving King Dave a nickel and a sealed cup.
King Dave ripped the lid off.
The cup was full of orange juice.
At the lunch break King Dave marched one block over to Ronny’s Steak House on Wabash and recruited the loudest, skinniest, cheapest-looking girl in tight pants he could find.
“What’s the deal?” she said as she stuck his twenty in her dangly little purse.
“Come with me into this restaurant. Make it obvious how much you like me.” He smiled and stuck out his elbow, trying not to flinch as she clasped her painted fingernails around his arm.
He’d wanted obvious and he got it. “No problemo, macho man,” she said and guffawed in his face.
I have to do this. Man’s got his pride.
“I can be any guy’s friend for twenty,” she brayed. “You’re cute, know that?”
They walked over to Michigan Avenue.
King Dave wondered how low he would have to go before he had sufficiently stuck it to this waitress. He felt conspicuous with Miss Big Hair Sleazypants on his arm. He made conversation and she exclaimed loudly at his wit and he sauntered into Liz Otter’s like it was perfectly normal and his God-given right as King Dave, son of FX Flaherty, to take cheap bitches into a regular stagehand’s joint.
He swaggered to one of Nadine’s booths. “Hey, can we get some coffee over here?” he demanded, rapping on the table with a knife. He made his new friend sit on his knee.
Nadine came over with the pot. She had a pair of kid’s sunglasses with bright orange frames stuck on top of her head. She smiled at King Dave’s rented date, and King Dave couldn’t detect any malice or fakeness in that smile.
“Decaf or regular, honey?” she said to his date.
King Dave pinched the butt on his knee, and his date shrieked and giggled in Nadine’s face.
“She likes it hot,” King Dave said to Nadine.
“Ooo, I sure do!” caterwauled his date. She laughed as if King Dave were the funniest asshole in town.
Nadine poured coffee. “What else can I get for you?” she said in that same friendly way.
“Nothing,” King Dave said. “There’s not a thing you got here that I want.” He looked at Nadine with hot, insolent eyes.
Her white uniform was spotless. Her chest stuck out like a continental shelf, armored in a dumb little apron that made his palms sweat. Her legs went down forever to her health shoes. He took his time looking her up and down and all it did was make him hard. She looked cool as cream. God damn it.
She met his eyes with patience and the tiniest hint of something else. Disappointment? Pity? He felt his face go red. It occurred to him in this most inconvenient moment that she had found that drawer full of condoms, too. She probably thought it was just as pathetic as he did.
“I don’t want anything from here,” he repeated, trying to mean it.
>
“Perhaps your lady friend is hungry,” Nadine said in a tone that reminded him he ought to consider someone else’s feelings. She smiled at his date again. “We’ve got some nice apple pie. Would you like some?”
King Dave cut in before Miss Big Hair could speak. “She has to watch her figure.”
Nadine looked pleasant and patient.
“I gotta look good for my macho, macho man!” his date said, reaching up and twining her arms around his face.
And still Nadine didn’t go away. “I love your outfit,” she told his date.
His date simpered.
King Dave looked down at the squirming girl in his arms. All he could see from this viewpoint was big hair, and cleavage trapped in a leopard-print stretchy thingy. He thought the tight pants might be red.
“But you need shades with that,” Nadine added. She pulled her orange sunglasses off and stuck them on his date’s face. “There.” She smiled. “Pretty as a picture.”
His date whooped with pleasure. “Aren’t you nice! Isn’t she nice, macho man?” she howled, twisting in his arms to fawn.
“Coffee’s on the house,” Nadine said, and walked away. As she passed she patted King Dave on the arm. As if to say, Nice try, fella, but kinda lame.
Once she was out of sight, he noticed the guys from the put-in crew staring at him.
Providentially, Weasel came in. King Dave made him sit in his booth. Weasel smiled nervously at the Big Hair. King Dave told her to shut up and made her sit next to him, but he couldn’t stop her from snuggling up against him and feeling his crotch in public and feeding him some of Weasel’s french fries.
The guys watched them from their own tables, and spent a lot of time talking to Nadine when she came around with the coffeepots.
After about a hundred years, lunch break was over. King Dave led his date outside, past the sightline of Liz Otter’s big front windows, and tipped her another twenty.
“Hey, thanks,” she said, startled.
“Gimme the fucking sunglasses,” he added.
“But she gave ’em to me,” Big Hair said. She met his glare and handed over the sunglasses. “Sheesh. Whatever.”
King of Hearts Page 9