“Sit down,” I said. “Joe Robard will be free in a little while.”
He glanced at his wrist watch and slid into a chair uneasily.
“Not long,” I said, watching him. More than ever I was struck by his boyishness, by the deceptive quality of seeming helplessness, the quality that got the women. The voice was just so much velvet.
The waiter eased over.
“Another old-fashioned,” I told him. “What’ll you have, kid?”
“Nothing,” he said in an icy tone, inspecting the room so that he wouldn’t have to look at me. The chill was on, all right.
“Susan told me the good news,” I said.
He looked at me in surprise.
“About tomorrow,” I said. “Congratulations.”
He didn’t know what to say. I helped him along.
“I want you to know how happy I am, kid. If there’s anything I can do …”
The ice began to melt as he examined my face in bewilderment. “Gee, Falco, I don’t know what—”
“I know there’s been a lot of misunderstanding on the part of a lot of people. Everybody makes mistakes. You do. Irv Spahn does. Hunsecker does. Who knows, maybe even I do.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“But everything worthwhile always works out all right in the end,” I continued. “The Panamanian could very well be the start of real big things for you, Steve.”
He ran a hand through his crew cut. “Lord, how I hope so.”
“And if you don’t mind, I’d like you to regard it as a wedding present from me.”
His face broke into an awkward smile. “You’re making me feel like an awful louse, Falco.”
“The present is not just for you. It’s for Susan too.”
He laughed. “On behalf of both of us, I thank you.”
“Forget it,” I said.
“Y’know”—he fumbled for words—“maybe I’ve been a little too harsh in some of the things I’ve said.”
“Gimme a cigarette and shut up,” I said, smiling.
He brought out a pack. We both took one and lighted up.
I blew smoke at him. “I suppose you’re planning on going away for a few days. A Broadway-type honeymoon.”
“Well, as a matter of fact, that’s the first thing I thought about when Irv told me about this Panamanian deal.” He looked at me, and there was the kind of worry in his soft blue eyes that was the worry of a boy in love. “If Robard should want me to start right away well, gee, I wouldn’t know what to say.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Joe is a slow man to make up his mind. And when he does, he usually likes a week or two for me to blow the bugles to herald the event.”
“That would be wonderful,” Dallas said. “I’d be a real heel if I didn’t take Susie away for a while. I almost feel like I’ve never been alone with her. Gee, she’s a great kid, isn’t she?” His eyes were aglow.
“The best,” I said, looking away. “Wait here. I’ll go find the boss man.”
I left him there at the table and went through the archway to the foyer.
“Lord Tarletons,” I said to Selena Green. “Get rid of the others.”
She shivered. She didn’t have enough clothes on, and the club was overdoing the air conditioning. “Mr. Falco … I … I’m afraid.”
“I didn’t hear you,” I said. “Hurry.” I poked my head in Joe Robard’s office and said, “Five minutes okay with you?”
“You’re the boss, Sidney.”
“In five minutes, then.”
I had to stop at the bar. I poured a double whisky down fast, and my hand shook when I signed the tab.
Steve Dallas was watching the floor show when I returned to the table. He was far off somewhere, lost in his own private dream.
“Well, what do you think?” I asked him. “You think you’re going to like working in this room?”
He turned to me. “I’m walking on air already.”
“You call this air? This is atmosphere.” I mocked a choking cough. “And I don’t help it one bit.” I reached over and took the cigarettes, struggling to draw one out as I watched Selena working her way toward us past the crowded tables. My hands were shaking, and the pack fell right into my old-fashioned.
“Damn!” I held up the soggy, dripping mess.
“That’s all right.” Dallas laughed.
“Oh, honey—” I signaled Selena. “You got Lord Tarletons?”
“For you, anything, Mr. Falco.”
Her hand, as I took the pack from her, was icy.
“Mmmm, you smell good, honey.” I gave her a dollar bill. “Keep the change, and buy yourself another quart of the same perfume.”
“Oh, you—” She pouted a nervous smile and walked away.
I worked open the left side of the pack. “I spoke to Robard,” I said, drawing out a cigarette and tossing the pack to the kid. He put it away. “He’ll see you in a couple of minutes.”
“Swell.” He glanced at his wrist watch. “I think I better make a call first.”
“Ah-hah! Guess who.” I laughed.
“Yeah.” He got up smiling. “She’s waiting for me. Talk about eager brides.”
I went with him to the phone booth. “Does she know?”
“Know what?”
“About this? About the Panamanian?”
He smiled at me, eyes twinkling. “I tell Susie every thing. She demands it.”
“What did she say to the idea?” I asked, looking away.
He didn’t answer for a moment. He didn’t seem to want to.
“What did she say?” I asked him again.
“Oh, you know how women are,” he shrugged. “She said she’ll believe it when it happens.” He stepped into the booth.
“Make it a quickie, kid. I’ll wait here.”
I watched him through the glass door as he talked with her, his face eager and alive with the future. Occasionally I could hear the peaks of enthusiasm in his voice. It was a voice that might have carried him to a kind of greatness in show business someday, if he hadn’t made the mistake of crossing J. J. Hunsecker against the lights.
When he came out of the booth, beaming foolishly, I took him to Robard’s office.
“Joe, this is Steve Dallas. Take good care of him now.”
“It’s my specialty,” Robard chuckled.
“So long, kid.” I held out my hand, and Dallas steadied it with his. “I guess I ought to say the best of everything.”
“And I guess I ought to say thanks for everything.”
“For nothing.” I punched his arm and went out fast.
That was a picture I didn’t want to have to remember for long—a slim, honey-haired boy with a soft voice and big, open eyes, standing there in the office saying thanks to me for nothing at all.
I blurred it as much as I could at the bar. Then I stopped at the telephone switchboard on my way out. “I may be back,” I said to the girl, “if Mr. Hunsecker calls. I’m gone for the night to anyone else.”
“Certainly.”
Selena Green was in the foyer, shivering. I patted her bare arm.
“You’re wonderful,” I said.
“I’ve never been in any trouble, Mr. Falco.” Her teeth chattered. “There won’t be any trouble, will there? I need this job.”
“You need the fifty bucks, too, don’t you?”
“Yes, but.”
“Then stop worrying. I told you, it’s a practical joke. There won’t be a thing to worry about. Now go on back in and get your mind off all this.”
I went through the revolving door and gasped in the blast of hot clammy air that hit me. Harry Kello was already there, talking to the doorman at the curb. His two hundred-and-fifty-pound body was a terrible burden on a night like this, and the sweat was pouring down his face. He walked over to me.
“Hello, Harry,” I said.
“Sidney.”
“Hot.”
“Oh, boy.”
I saw the other two
men standing across the street, reading newspapers under the street light.
“How’s the wife?” I asked.
“Fine,” he said.
“The kids?”
“They’re fine, too.”
“Good,” I said.
“How’s J. J.?” he asked.
“So-so.
“Give him my regards.”
“I sure will.”
“Where you going?” he asked.
“An air-conditioned movie. It’s too cold inside the club.”
“It’s plenty hot out here,” he said.
“You won’t have to stand it long,” I said.
“How long?”
“Oh, not, more than twenty minutes, I’d say.”
“That’s good,” he said. “This is murder, this heat.”
“Why don’t you wait down the block a little?”
“What makes you think it’s any cooler down the block?” He wiped his forehead with a massive paw.
“It isn’t,” I said, “but it might not look good in the papers. It’s a little close right here, right in front of the place.”
“Sure.” He shrugged his huge shoulders and moved away. The men across the street looked up, saw him, and moved with him.,
“So long, Harry.”
“Give my regards to J. J.,” he called back.
“I sure will.”
“And thanks for the tip.”
“Nothing at all.”
“Maybe someday I can do you a favor.”
“You never can tell,” I said.
I walked away fast, like a man trying to run from his shadow. And when I got to the Broadway sector, I went into the Criterion Theater. I took a seat in the orchestra. I wanted to be downstairs. I wanted to be away from the smell of cigarette smoke.
V
I sat there for a couple of hours trying to lose myself in the picture. But it wasn’t easy. The movie was about a boy and a girl in love. And when they clinched in the final fade-out, I stepped on other people’s shoes in my haste to get up the aisle.
Outside, the passing hours had drained the streets of people, and I blinked in the brightness of the spectaculars that were still illuminating the hot sidewalks. In front of the theater, a newsboy was hawking the morning papers. I didn’t bother with The News or The Mirror. I bought The Globe and scanned Hunsecker’s column, just as though I hadn’t seen it all in the proof. Then I tossed it away.
Broadway is one of those streets where it’s light enough to read the morning papers in the miracle of the night before, and there’s a trash can on every corner to remind you to do so. As I walked uptown, I kept seeing the trash cans on the corners. I kept seeing the newspapers in those trash cans and the Broadway columns in those news papers and the lives that revolved around those columns. As I walked uptown, I kept seeing trash cans filled with people. And it didn’t make me feel any better to know that I had filled more trash cans than any press agent in town.
I went to Babe Scanlon’s and sat at the bar—drinking without tasting the liquor, listening, but trying not to hear the drifts of conversation that floated by. It was almost one o’clock, but the place was crowded with people like myself, who never went home if there was still some place else to go. Home is where the music stops, the floor-show ends, the lights go on, and you are only you again.
I gulped down the whisky, and the man in the seersucker suit and the loud voice at the other end of the bar kept on shaking a thick tongue at the bartender.
“—and I said to my secretary, Emily—tha’s her name, Emily. Lovely girl, Emily—lousy secretary, lovely girl. I said to her, ‘Betcha I know who they mean.’ And when I told her, the tears come to her eyes. ‘I don’t believe it,’ she said, ‘I don’t believe it.’ So I said, ‘You wait and see. Never wrong. Read the columns every day. Know ‘em like a book.’ So I said, ‘You wait and see,’ and I called it. Howdaya like that, Frankie? Called it on the button. Right on the schnozzola. … Lemme have this one on the rocks, with a li’l twist o’ lemon peel. …”
“The missus, she’ll be surprised,” the bartender said. “She used to listen to him on the radio and make a big fuss. Me, I don’t go for the crooners. A ball game, or the weather reports. That’s all. I’m not much for listenin’ to the radio.”
“Northwes’ Mounted P’lice, tha’s what it is.” The man waved a finger. “Harry Kello always gets his man.”
The bartender shook his head in awe. “Remember what he did to Tony Faye that night over on Third Avenue when Faye tried to pull a knife on him?”
“Oooh!” The man in the seersucker jacket winced.
I drained my glass and threw some money down. “Doesn’t he ever shut up?” I muttered to Frank.
“How do you mean?”
“Him.” I motioned down the bar. “The one with the mouth.”
“Oh. He was telling me about—”
“I know what he was telling you about.”
“About this singer, this Steve Dallas fellow—”
“I said I know.”
“Harry Kello and his boys picked him up a couple of hours ago. Everybody’s talking about—”
“You’re as bad as he is.”
“Northwes’ Mounted P’lice …,” the guy said.
I slid off the stool and walked into the dining room, feeling sick. Herbie Temple was at the corner table with a whole crowd. He spotted me, and his face lighted up.
“Hey, Crosby! Bing Crosby! C’mere!” He must have seen the column already I went over to the table with careful steps. “The store is closed now,” I said. “Tomorrow.”
“Word for word,” Temple said, holding up a circle of thumb and index finger. “ I just want to bow humbly and eat every word I said today. How do you do it, sweetheart?”
“ I fill trash cans with people,” I said, and he blinked trying to make something of the bitterness in my voice.
The other people at the table looked at me blankly and went back to their conversations.
“Listen to this one,” Temple said. “Maybe you can clean it up and give it to Hunsecker.”
He went into a long one I had given Otis Elwell three months ago, and I stopped listening to him. I was listening to the vultures at the table working over the new carrion. They were all talking at the same time, and I was the only one who was really listening.
“… and they weren’t even his, at least not all of them. Marty saw some bridgework lying on the sidewalk. …”
“Jesus, three gorillas. Did they have to—?”
“Well, who told him to try putting up a fight?”
“Three of them …”
“Listen, you oughta be happy the police in this town …”
“ I got three parking tickets last week. For my dough, I wish the kid would of killed them.”
“ I don’t know. Frankly, I never had him tagged as the type.”
“What—to try to outslug Harry Kello?”
“No, smoke reefers. But I guess you never can—”
“What does he have to try to get away for?”
“Maybe he had a late date. Ha ha.”
“Don’t be so—”
“The thing that kills me …”
“Sixty days, that’s all he would of got.”
“The thing that kills me …”
“When they take out the stitches, he’ll look like embroidery.”
“Will you listen to me for a minute!”
“ I could’ve sworn butter would melt—”
“The thing that kills me is that he dares to holler ‘frame.’”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Two years if he gets a day, I guarantee you.”
“I’m telling you Marty Flynn was right there. He saw the whole thing. Right in the boy’s pocket.”
“Who says don’t ever believe what you read in the columns?”
“Half of the pack was okay and the other half—marijuana. Yeah!”
“Did you ever try one?”
&nb
sp; “Get away!”
“Wheee!”
“Well, what do you think, Falco?”
“What?” I turned to Temple. He was tugging on my sleeve.
“You think it’s a yock? You think he’ll like it?”
I stared at him with unseeing eyes. “He’ll love it,” I said.
“I got more. Listen—”
I was walking away. “He’ll eat it up.”
“Falco—”
“Give me another double,” I said to the bartender. “Hurry.”
I fished in my pocket for change. Suddenly, I had to talk to someone. I don’t know why. I had to talk to someone. I downed the whisky in one searing gulp and went to the phone booth. I dropped a dime in, and then I was dialing her number. What if I did wake her? She had always awakened me, hadn’t she? Hadn’t she always come into the room and turned on the lights just to see if her little Michael was all right? What’s the difference if it woke me, as long as the little one was all right?
Her phone came off the hook slowly and she groaned, “Yes?”
“Hello, Ma, this is Sidney.”
“What—what is it?”
“Nothing, I just wanted to …”
“To what?”
To what? Yes, to what?
“I woke you, didn’t I? I’m sorry, Ma.”
“Of course you woke me. Decent people are in bed hours ago. I never heard of such—”
“Mike was right, Ma.”
“Mike? What about Mike? My God, something’s happened to Mike! Sidney, please!”
“No, no, nothing at all. I was only saying …”
“Oh, my God, for a moment—”
“Mike was right. He was right—”
“You’re drunk, Sidney, aren’t you?”
“Never get drunk.”
“You’ve been drinking again, and you wake me out of a sound sleep to say nothing at all. You have absolutely no consideration—”
“Ma, listen—”
“I should think you would want to hide it from me in shame instead of calling me at this hour just to—”
I hung up quietly. Whatever had made me think—?
I had another dime. She answered on the first ring.
“Mary, honey.”
“Who is—? Sidney! Good heavens!”
“I didn’t wake you, baby, did I?”
She laughed. “Oh, no, don’t be silly, sweetie. I’m doing my nails. And what if you had? There’s no one I’d rather—”
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