by Orrie Hitt
Parsons Boulevard wasn’t quite as exclusive as the name might imply. It was located near the waterfront, not far from the fruit and vegetable docks. The names on the huge trailer trucks which were parked in the shadows of darkened buildings indicated far-away home bases such as Memphis and Mobile and Sarasota. A few warehouse hands, mostly colored, roamed narrow streets that were lined with closely arranged piles of boxes, crates and bags of outgoing merchandise.
Sibyl’s Cafeteria was located on the corner of Percy and Chain Streets and not, as I had been told, on the Boulevard itself.
“Watch yourself around here,” the cab driver told me as I got out. “It’s a rough neighborhood.”
I don’t know why it was called a cafeteria, unless it was to comply with some minor provision of the alcoholic beverage law. As I entered, I noticed that the interior was mostly all bar, a horseshoe type affair that, at the moment, accommodated a couple of dozen men. Four girls, quite young, worked behind the bar. Their uniforms, pink and white, were identical: cut low in front and tight-fitting.
I saw the man with the silver box right away.
“Harry sent me,” I said as I pulled out a chair and sat down. “I guess you know Harry.”
The man at the table was rather large and dark-complexioned.
A long, irregular sear swept down the right side of his face and disappeared beneath his chin. He stared at me for several moments, his dark eyes steady and unblinking.
“Wanta buy a book?” he inquired casually, lifting the top away from the silver box. “Best damned book in the world.”
I looked at the book and felt a sense of shock. It was a beautiful white Bible.
“You can’t go very wrong with something like that,” I acknowledged. “That’s for sure.”
One of the girls from the bar approached our table but my companion told her to go to hell, that we didn’t want anything to drink and that she should leave us alone.
“A cheap hustler,” he said. His glance, dark and hard, lingered momentarily upon her retreating hips. “The whole bunch. They’d fall on their backs for any one of those guys who’d buy them a glass of wine.”
I placed my briefcase on the floor and lit a cigarette. I wondered, idly, if any of the girls behind the bar had posed for some of the pictures. I decided, almost as quickly, that if they had it had been some time ago. The way they acted, leaning across the bar, letting the men fool with them, was evidence that they had long since passed the point of selling merely views of their bodies.
“Harry tells me that you’re starting out on your own. How come?”
I leaned forward, my elbows on the table.
“It looks like a good chance to make a dollar,” I replied. “Easier than trying to write for a living.”
“You a writer?”
“Of sorts. But I don’t make much money at it. This kind of thing seems to be all the go now. I thought I might, later, be able to work into the books. You know, do some of my own.”
“It ain’t easy.” He looked at the bar, as one of the girls giggled, and then back at me. “You have to have a printer who’ll work with you. And you have to get distribution. It ain’t easy.”
“That’s why I wanted Harry to speak to you about me. I thought we might be able to work together.”
He seemed to consider that with some seriousness.
“Maybe,” he admitted. “But there’s some risk in it. You know that, don’t you?”
“Yes, I’m aware of that.”
“Fancy talker, ain’t you?”
“Not intentionally. I guess it comes from my writing.”
“You’d have to work on forty percent. I couldn’t afford to give you more.”
“That would be all right. This way, with the stuff I’m peddling, I make hardly anything.”
We discussed my suggestion at length but I was able to gain very little information from him. I would be working on my own, he said, and in the event of any trouble he was not to become implicated in any way. It occurred to me then that I still didn’t know his name and when I inquired about it he simply shrugged it off and said that it didn’t matter. He eventually suggested that I accompany him to an address on Mercer Drive where I would be able to view a wide variety of material he had available.
Unfortunately, I never had an opportunity to visit the place on Mercer Drive if, indeed, there actually was one. In fact, after we went out into the street we had barely walked more than a third of the way along the block before I felt a terrible pain, accompanied by a roaring, hurtling blackness that sent me plunging forward into a pile of banana crates.
“A do-gooder,” a faint voice said from a distance. “A lousy damn do-gooder.”
Something else struck me on the head, this time higher up, and the blackness became thicker as a feeling of helpless nausea and blind terror swept through me.
When I came to, I was in a car. The car was bumping along over uneven pavement, tires thudding underneath. I shook my head and tried to sit up.
“Well, he’s going to live,” somebody said.
It was a cop. There were two cops in the car. One in front, driving, and the other in back with me.
“Christ,” I said. I put my hand to my head. There was a lump on top, the size of a small lemon. “How’d I get here?”
“We picked you up,” the one beside me said.
“Thanks.” I found the package of Winstons in my coat pocket but changed my mind about lighting one. “I guess I feel pretty good,” I told them. “I’ll get out anywhere you want to stop.”
The cop who was driving turned his head part way around and laughed.
“You hear him, Oscar? He wants me to stop so we should let him out. How funny can a guy get, anyway?”
Nothing that I told them about myself, who I was or what I had been trying to do, impressed them in the least.
“Save it for the magistrate,” advised the cop who was driving.
But I didn’t have any better luck with the magistrate who was sitting in night court. The briefcase was mine, wasn’t it? The pictures belonged to me, didn’t they? Well, then, what could I expect?
“I ought to throw you in the can for sixty days,” the magistrate told me. He glanced at one of the cops, the big fellow who had sat beside me on the way uptown. “He was trying to push his trash on some kids, wasn’t he?”
“A fellow called up and said so. Somebody must’ve laid him out before we got there. He was all tangled up in a lot of bananas.”
“Look,” I protested. Several people stood around the chambers, gawking at me. They made me nervous. “I can tell you what happened. I had an appointment with this man downtown and — ”
“What man?”
“I don’t know his name.” It sounded ridiculous. “All I know is — ”
“Fifty bucks or sixty days,” the magistrate informed me. “Take your pick.”
I told him I would take the fifty dollars. There was no point in arguing the matter further. I had been neatly framed and I might as well accept it.
“I’ll have to give you a check,” I told him.
“Cash.”
“I’ll have to phone out for it.”
“Go ahead. Use the one at the end of the hall.”
I tried calling Sam Terry first but his wife said he had gone out to a meeting and she didn’t know when to expect him. I thought of several other people I knew quite well — a doctor, a lawyer and an engineer who lived in my apartment building — but I rejected the idea of dragging them out at ten o’clock at night on such an errand. Finally, and in a moment of sheer desperation, I dialed Elsa Lang’s number. Luckily she was at home and, while she did not have the money in the apartment, she could cash a check for fifty dollars and bring it down in a few minutes. She asked me what kind of trouble I’d gotten myself into but I told her that the matter was urgent and that I would explain when I saw her.
While I was waiting for Elsa, a plainclothes detective asked me a number of questions about myself, where I lived and things of
that sort. He seemed reluctant to believe anything I told him and I, therefore, confined my replies to words of one syllable.
“I’d get out of town,” he told me at last. “There’s no place around here for you, Morgan.”
Elsa arrived with the money a few minutes after he had completed his interrogation and it wasn’t long before I was free to depart. My request, however, for the return of my briefcase — less the contents, of course — was promptly refused.
“How can they do a thing like that?” Elsa demanded, as we reached the sidewalk.
“I don’t know. But they did.”
We caught a cab and on the way over to her apartment she asked me why I had been arrested and all about it. I told her that I had been delivering some risqué material for a disabled friend and that I had, during the trip, suffered an accident. My arrest, I explained, had been purely a matter of bad luck.
“Your friend ought to pay you for your trouble,” she said.
“Maybe he will.”
I don’t know why I didn’t confide in her. Perhaps it was because she had made arrangements for me to visit the model agency where she worked and I didn’t want her to think that she had betrayed them in any way. I didn’t believe there could have been any other reason. From the outset, she had appeared to be on the level with me.
“It’s funny about Judith Call,” I said, switching the subject. “You’d have thought she’d have called you by this time.”
Elsa said that she would have thought so, too; but the girl hadn’t and what could we do about that?
“Mr. Willis is giving a party Friday night,” she said. “At the Oxford Hotel. I think I could arrange for you to go if you’d care to, Bill. The man who spoke to me about Judith might be there.”
I told her I’d be happy if she could and, magnanimously, I felt like crushing her in my arms and kissing her bright red lips. She was, I told myself, in spite of all of her faults, a pretty good girl. I considered, as I told the cab driver to halt in front of a liquor store while I ran in and got a bottle, just what Sandy’s attitude might be if she were alive and she knew I had been arrested for possessing indecent photos or that I was contemplating a few frolicsome moments with a girl who was willing to sell her body for money. There wasn’t, I was forced to admit, much room for doubt about what she would have either said or thought.
My experience this time was considerably different from the first. To begin with, neither one of us had been drinking. And, secondly, we had, to a slight degree, come to know each other.
“It seems good to want a man just bcause he’s a man,” she confided, her lips moving against my mouth. “Unless you’re a woman, you can’t imagine the difference.”
Her eyes completely unashamed.
“Am I pretty, Bill?”
For a reply I seized her in my arms. Her warm body melted against mine, sending the fire of her flesh deep down into my belly. My mouth found her lips, crushing and bruising them. A long, shuddering moan escaped her….
Later, I fell asleep in her arms.
7
WE ARRIVED at the party shortly after eight o’clock. This was rather late, however, for the thing had been under way since before two and almost everybody was having a pretty gay ball of it by the time we got there.
Elsa, who knew most of the people, introduced me around. There were several prosperous-appearing manufacturers, a diamond-studded woman who controlled a popular brand lipstick, a few fashion designers and a radio disc jockey whose evening programs Sandy and I had been in the habit of listening to during her long illness. And, of course, there were girls. Lots of girls, all of them pretty, all of them alternately drinking and laughing as the situation might require.
“It just goes on and on until everybody passes out,” Elsa told me.
The affair was in a five-room suite on the third floor of the Oxford Hotel. The Oxford, I might point out, is strictly upper bracket sleeping grounds and five rooms on any one of the floors would cost at least two hundred dollars a day. I asked Elsa if our host, Andy Willis, lived in the hotel.
“Oh, no,” she assured me. “This is just a front.”
Everything, I later decided, was a front. No one was being honest in either their conversations or their actions. The men discussed vague deals that “run way up into the t’ousands,” while the girls criticized Dior for his negative approach to the bustline. It was all, to my way of thinking, quite boring. The buyers and manufacturers present were, in reality, only interested in the girls and what they could get from them. And the girls, aware of this, were playing it very coy, hoping, I assumed, that the eventual rewards for their favors would mount in proportion to their resistance.
Hardly anybody paid any attention to me. Andy Willis, who was quite drunk, shook my hand and, I thought, failed to recognize me. And Gladys Lord merely shrugged my presence aside, as though I were nothing more than a bellhop who had gotten off at the wrong floor. While, to be sure, this attitude was not at all flattering it had, from my point of view, certain advantages. No one seemed to care much about who I was or why I had put in an appearance. At least, I felt quite certain, I would not end this evening with a lump on my skull and an embarrassing trip to night court.
“Have you had a look at those Mother Nature bras, Harriet? God, but they’re something! You pump air into the cups and away you go — straight up.”
“Dior simply doesn’t have it any more, darling. Everybody knows that.”
“No, I certainly don’t need to go on a diet, Mabel. It’s this horrible dress. You wouldn’t think they’d …”
“I’ll tell you, Charley. Frankly, I’ll say it. You put anything on a rack for seven ninety-eight and it’ll go. What can they expect for a lousy …”
“You’re kidding me, doll. Nobody ever hedges with old Morton Seeley. Why, when I fasten my eyes on something I like …”
Bantering, idle, unnecessary words. Words that were completely empty.
“Hell,” I said to Elsa, about nine-thirty. “What am I hanging around here for, anyway?”
Several men had displayed more than a passing interest in Elsa’s obvious charms and, while the probable result was annoying to me, I saw no reason for further jeopardizing her position with the agency. She, on the other hand, was quite insistent that I remain.
“I’ve just recently found out that I can live on seventy-five a week,” she confided between cocktails. “Why should I keep on selling my soul for something that I can do without?”
It was a good question and one which had, off and on, bothered me. I wasn’t, I was quite positive, in love with Elsa. After Sandy, I don’t believe that love for Elsa’s type would have been at all possible. I enjoyed her company. And, I must admit, I also enjoyed the charms of her body which she gave to me so freely. But that was as far as it went. There wasn’t anything more.
At a few minutes before ten he came in. Elsa and I were at the portable bar, having a drink with a buyer from St. Louis, when Elsa suddenly took me by one arm and pulled me aside.
“There he is, Bill. The one in the dark gray suit.”
He was of medium height and he had a rather conspicuous red-cheeked, schoolboy-appearing face. I noticed that his hair was black and wavy and that his shoulders, although padded, seemed extremely narrow.
“When you get a chance,” I said to Elsa, “ask him if he knows where you can locate Judith.”
“All right, Bill.” Her eyes were questioning. “But you could ask him yourself.”
“No,” I said. “Just see what he says.”
I remained at the bar, drinking and talking with the buyer from St. Louis. I found him to be a tiresome individual and I was more than pleased when he switched his attention to a tall, leggy blonde in a yellow dress.
“He says he hasn’t heard from her,” Elsa said upon her return. Her eyes were worried. “Gee, Bill, what do you think could have happened to her?”
This information wasn’t totally unexpected.
“I don’t know. As
k him for another card.”
“I did. But he said he wasn’t interested any more.”
“I see.” I took a long drink of my highball. “Well, thanks.”
I hung around with Elsa for a while, having a few more drinks and talking to some people. When I noticed that she had become involved in a long discussion with a maker of suits and coats I interrupted to say that I didn’t feel well and that I was leaving. She appeared to be surprised and unhappy at this development but I assured her that it was nothing serious, just a minor weakness left over from my army career, and that I would be all right in the morning. When I left the suite I noted that the man in the gray suit was busily engaged in a conversation with an invited model from the Towne Agency. I lingered at the door for a moment, long enough to see him hand the smiling girl a small white card.
I hailed a cab as soon as I reached the street, but told the driver that I didn’t want to go anywhere just then, that I was waiting for somebody to emerge from the hotel. I had him park at the curb.
“It’s going to cost you,” he said after half an hour. “Plenty.”
I gave him ten dollars, as a token of good faith, and he became more friendly. We talked about baseball, football and the Thursday night wrestling matches which were televised from Capitol Arena in Washington. We were deep in a heated debate as to the respective merits of Verne Gagne and Argentina Rocco when the man I was waiting for came out into the street and climbed into a year-old Caddy convertible parked halfway down the block.
It was quite easy for my driver to follow him. The Caddy moved crosstown to the Parkway and then turned right, heading north. Four or five miles upriver we crossed the Twin Cities Bridge and about a mile past that we swung down off the three lanes of concrete and continued along a narrow macadam road that curled like a snake’s track up into the hills.
“Nothing but rich people up in this Panther Ridge section,” the driver told me. “You know many of them?”
“No.”
“What are we following this guy for, then?”
“I just want to see where he goes.”
A couple of miles further on, I found out. The Caddy, which had been traveling at a moderate rate of speed, stopped in front of a very large colonial type house. The driver got out and hurried up the walk toward the front door. I noticed, as we passed, that much of the adjoining yard was concealed by a high, split-pole fence.