The Promoter

by Orrie Hitt

“Just give me a chance to fix my face,” she said.

  She walked toward the dresser and I noticed that she lacked nearly all of the usually amplified attributes of the female body. Her legs were long enough, but unshapely, her hips were those of a hungry young boy. Her only truly feminine appeal was confined to her ponderous bosom. She bent over the dresser, staring into the mirror.

  With a groan of revulsion I fell back on the bed, staring blankly at the ceiling. I heard the girl talking to the man but I paid no attention to what was said. My guts were twisting, turning, heaving, and I wanted to hurl myself through the door and become lost in the night. But I could make no worthwhile effort to do so. The capsule had made the moment tolerable, if not acceptable, and I lay there waiting, feeling disgusted with myself, but unable to do anything about it.

  There is no need to relate all that this girl did to me that night, even if I could remember. She had altered the appearance of her face with liberal amounts of eyebrow pencil which gave her the look of a vicious young vampire sprung from the roots of hell.

  “Don’t be afraid,” she whispered. “I won’t hurt you.”

  A long agonized sob ripped up out of my throat and I closed my eyes tightly against the blinding light from the exploding flash bulbs.

  “Just a couple more,” the fat man said. “You know what I mean.”

  I cursed savagely as she pressed her ugly body to my face, almost smothering me. I brought up my right fist, summoning all of the power that I could find, and slammed it into her. A flash bulb went off, and she was lying upon the floor, moaning and cursing.

  “That’s all,” the fat man said wearily. “Let him sleep it off.”

  They left the room, turning off the light and closing the door behind them. I tried to sit up, to get to my feet, but an inexorable lassitude possessed my body, freezing every nerve, every muscle, turning my belly into a hollow void of defeat. I fell back on the bed, grateful for the darkness and for being left alone. From somewhere within the house I again heard music playing. It sounded like one of the Beethoven concertos, wonderfully peaceful and soothing. I believe I was crying when I fell asleep.

  I awoke, later, and the music was still playing but this time it was something modern with a fast, rhythmic beat. I got up from the bed, found the light and snapped it on. I dressed hurriedly.

  Much of what had taken place in the room was only a misty, unreal recollection but I remembered enough of it to cause me to feel ill as, straightening my tie, I glanced at myself in the mirror. My face was white. I turned away from the mirror, searching for a cigarette, my hand trembling. I was in the grip of a wild, mounting fury. And I couldn’t afford the extravagance of blowing apart now. I couldn’t rip the brownstone down with my bare hands and strangle everybody in it. I had gone fishing, deliberately, and I would have to fish according to the rules of the stream.

  I recovered my overcoat from the waiting room and departed, unnoticed, from the brownstone on Tenth Street. It was not an easy thing for me to do. It is never easy for a man to turn his back upon something he knows he must some day destroy.

  I walked, slowly, toward the river. It had stopped snowing and the stars overhead were bright and clean in the sky. A neon-lit clock in a tailor shop informed me that it was just a few minutes past ten o’clock. In the front window of a furniture store two young girls moved about, barefooted, decorating a Christmas tree. They smiled at me and I smiled in return. But I think, as I walked along the docks that night, that I hated my own guts. It was a feeling I had not experienced since that hot July afternoon when I had turned, unable to see because of the tears, and walked unsteadily from the brink of Sandy’s grave.

  Sandy. I thought of her now. If she were alive, would she be able to understand what I was doing? Would she believe, as I believed, that the only way to crack this ring was to follow the path which I had elected to pursue? Or would she regard me, as I knew she had so many times, as being an uncouth young man, a little too fond of direct, violent action.

  I suppose that is why I had loved Sandy so much — she had been soft and gentle and she had believed, fully, in the good and the peaceful ways of living. It had been her simple mildness, I understood now, which had dominated me from the very start, changing me from an unsure, impetuous, temper-ridden man into one who tried to carefully and honestly consider the people and the world around him.

  At the corner of Washington and Eighth I stepped from the curb and hailed a cab. The driver, when I gave him the address on Panther Ridge, smiled and observed, rather pleased, that it was a fine night for business.

  I thought again of Sandy as we crossed the Twin Cities Bridge and headed toward the mountains. I thought of her nice ways and how she had been so sweet and tender and how none of it had a place in this thing that I was doing. My job now was not one of understanding the motives of other people or of attempting to sway them with pretty words. The task which confronted me dealt with the debauchery of human life, of human minds and bodies, which only swift and calculated violence would ever settle. I wondered, as we pulled up and stopped before the white colonial house on Westminister Drive, if I could possibly hope to meet the high standards for brains and courage which would be required of me.

  “Good night,” the driver said happily, fingering my tip.

  I walked through the loose snow to the house. She was waiting for me at the door.

  “Come in, Bill,” she said, her eyes bright.

  She wore a gray satin dressing gown that hugged every curve of her voluptuous figure and, as I passed her, I could smell her perfume, obviously expensive and tremendously exciting.

  “Well, I did what you wanted me to do,” I said. I threw my hat on a chair. “It was hell. Believe me, I don’t know why you asked me to go there.”

  “Poor Bill.” She helped me off with my coat. I thought I detected a note of amusement in her voice. “They tell me you got a little ornery.”

  “Who wouldn’t?” I demanded. It wasn’t necessary for me to pretend anger. “You didn’t have to do something like that just to — ”

  “No,” she admitted, leading me into the living room. “I didn’t have to, Bill. But the others would have insisted. I told you there wasn’t any other way.”

  I walked over to the fireplace and turned, my back to the flames. I noticed that one of the davenports had been converted into a bed. The sheets looked crisp and clean.

  “Well, I can see the point,” I said. “As long as those pictures of me with that girl are around I’m not likely to get any ideas.”

  She fixed a couple of drinks and brought one over to me.

  “It’s our only insurance,” she said. “There are similar pictures of all of us. It is the only way we have of guaranteeing mutual trust.”

  I looked at her across my glass and grinned.

  “And here I thought your friends were a lot of class,” I said. “How silly can you get?”

  This seemed to worry her and her eyes became deep and anxious.

  “You’re not mad at me, Bill?”

  “Oh, hell, no.”

  “Some of them are nice people. You’ll see.”

  I finished the drink and began to relax. I had passed the first test and I could look forward to meeting the others who worked with her. After that, I assumed, I would be making real progress.

  She asked me if I wanted another drink and I said, sure, go ahead and fill it up.

  “I’ll bet you’re wondering what the bed is made up for.”

  I gave her an evil grin.

  “There may be other ideas on the subject,” I stated, “but for me a bed is good for only one thing.” She never brought me that drink. Instead, she came over and crawled into my arms, pushing her body in close as I fastened my mouth over her lips.

  “Bill,” she whispered, “I’m one hell of a woman.”

  “I can tell you better later,” I said.

  I turned out the lights so that only the flames from the fireplace illuminated the room.

  �
��I deal in sex morning, noon and night,” she confided, stretching out on the bed. I could see her face, dimly, and she smiled up at me. “But I like to pick my own men and in my own way.”

  I sat down beside her. I lit two cigarettes, gave her one, and we smoked for quite a while, not saying anything.

  “Bill, I believe in sex.”

  “Tell me somebody who doesn’t.”

  “I mean real sex. Beautiful. Like this, the way we are.”

  She turned, coming into my arms. Her body was warm and soft and throbbing.

  “Those other things are for animals, Bill. Human animals. Aren’t they, Bill?”

  Her lips moved against my mouth, teasingly at first, then driving in harder.

  “I want you, Bill Gordon,” she said huskily.

  She was no good, a tramp, but she was there in my arms and there wasn’t very much I could do about it. It was all part of the game I was playing. And, in a way, I suppose she was right about one thing.

  Eudora Channing was one hell of a woman.

  11

  MY first assignment for the syndicate, which had been presented to me following a night in bed with Eudora Channing, was to furnish a relaxed young lady for the forthcoming week-end rumpus. Or, if I could, two young ladies. The lady or ladies, were to be provided through my Allentown connections and, she had cautioned me, were to be the type who enjoyed parties. Wild parties. I had committed myself to bringing at least one girl. Just where she was coming from I didn’t have the vaguest idea. I had already wasted one day and night running around the city and I had been pitched out of two questionable establishments for attempting to make off with some of their personnel.

  On Thursday, as I rode a cab uptown to see Jack Helms in his office in the Empire building, I felt about as low as a thermometer dead center in the Arctic Circle. I had built up a good front, I’d put myself across with Eudora Channing — but now that I had to deliver I couldn’t seem to come up with an angle.

  I had to find a girl! Somebody. Somewhere. Somehow.

  “This isn’t an outside party,” Eudora Channing had told me. “I mean, it’s just for us in the business who like to have a little private fun.”

  She hadn’t told me very much about the operation but enough so that I had a fairly good idea how it worked. A girl, if she weren’t a professional when she got caught in the toils of the ring, became one in very short order. Some of the girls worked in apartments scattered throughout the city while a few with more expensive merchandise delivered their wares on a call-girl basis. Not all of the girls specialized in assorted blackmail and shake-down rackets but many who were fortunate enough to contact wealthy or influential customers had no compunctions about driving the knife in to the hilt. In addition to this steady and lucrative revenue from commercialized vice, many of the girls were used in the filming of movies and still shots. A steady stream of new feminine faces was required for this phase of the business.

  Eudora, who had explained much of this while she lay in my arms, had not mentioned specific names, though she had assured me that I would meet most of the members of the syndicate when I attended the party.

  “You can’t be part of a business like this and not have some of it rub off on you,” she had explained. “You see so much of the things that seem uncommon to most people that they become commonplace with you. It’s just the way it is, Bill, and you can’t do anything about it.”

  She had told me that about forty people usually attended the parties which were generally held in the basement of her home.

  “We don’t have any near neighbors,” she had told me. “And sometimes we get a girl who screams.”

  The rich prize, I had learned during my conversation with her, was the appearance and the eventual conquest of a young girl without much experience. While she had not told me this in so many words, she had indicated it strongly.

  “In a way,” she had confided, “it’s a little bit like taking dope. At the start, a small amount is enough but as time goes on you have to have more and more.”

  I had asked her, pointedly, if that’s the way it was with her.

  “I’m fortunate,” she’d said, kissing me on the mouth. “All I need is a normal man to give me satisfaction. A man like you, Bill.”

  Upon my return to my room the next day I had discarded my clothes and scrubbed thoroughly in the shower. I had washed my body until it had turned red, trying to rub off the filth and let it slip quietly down the drain. But I had given up finally, knowing that the dirt was deep inside, rather than on the surface.

  Sex for the sake of money and sex for the sake of sex; one even more horrible than the other. I wondered, without trying to guess the answer, what Sandy would think of me if she knew what I was facing.

  I found Jack Helms in his office, smoking one of his huge cigars. He looked away from the window, nodding, as I came in.

  “Got any more deals for me, Morgan?”

  I told him I hadn’t and I wanted to know what he had uncovered.

  “You could have told me about that Miller,” he complained. “He’s a cop. And I seldom bother around with the law.”

  “Don’t annoy me with your troubles,” I said, impatiently. “Just tell me what you know.”

  “Here,” he said, handing me some papers. “Read about it.” He sighed heavily and stared out of the window again. “It’s going to make a very interesting article, if you use those characters. I think you wasted your money.”

  He was wrong. I hadn’t. But, of course, Jack didn’t know what I was looking for.

  Miller was married, the father of a girl who was nineteen, and he had been on the city police force for four and one-half years.

  “Hell,” I said. “You don’t get promoted that fast in grade school. Four and a half years and he’s been a detective most of that time. How does a man rise so fast?”

  “Read on.”

  Miller, the account stated, had been born in Wilmington, Delaware, and he was forty-seven years old. He had served with the Wilmington police department until April 12, 1941, when he had been drafted into the Army. He had not seen service outside the continental United States. In October, 1945, he had been honorably discharged and in November of that year he had joined the Baltimore, Maryland, police department as a patrolman. Two years later, because of his work in breaking up a white slave ring, he had been promoted to the morals squad with the rank of detective. His work, the history continued, had been outsanding in every respect until, without apparent reason, he resigned to accept another position here in the city. I noted, with interest, that his starting salary had been four hundred dollars per year less than he had been receiving in Baltimore.

  Helms had uncovered very little about Miller’s wife and daughter. The wife, whose name was Dorothy, had been born in the District of Columbia and, as far as anybody knew, led an uneventful life. The daughter, Lucy, had been graduated from public high school, was now employed as a secretary by Federson and Federson, an advertising agency, and for several weeks during the previous year had attended a well-known modeling school in the city.

  “I don’t know what you’re looking for,” Helms said. “But the cop’s finances are clean. The only things maybe unusual are the place where he lives and that big car he drives. That don’t mean that he’s off, though. A lot of people, including cops, live it up over their heads.”

  There wasn’t much on Gladys Lord, either. She had been born in Biloxi, Mississippi, thirty-nine years before. Once, at the age of eighteen, she had appeared in police court, charged with committing an act of prostitution in a hotel in Evansville, Illinois. She had been released when her companion failed to appear. Nothing further was known about her until she had appeared in the city, five years previously, and had set herself up in the model agency business. Her credit rating vouched for the fact that she had been successful — no one had any outstanding bills against her. Her association with Andy Willis who, by the way, was from Billings, Montana, had been a routine thing. Helms had be
en unable to unearth anything about Willis.

  Diana Sanderson seemed to be just about what she had claimed, an innocent country kid lost in a great big city. She lived in a walk-up apartment on Jackson Street, which she shared with another girl, and she paid her bills promptly. I remember, with a sense of regret, that I had forgotten to give Helms Diana’s actual last name.

  Elsa Lang’s life appeared to be typical of that of an ambitious young girl on her way up. Her list of creditors was a yard wide and it extended all the way from the city to New Rockford where, the information stated, she had been in and out of trouble ever since the age of fourteen. Nothing serious, and there hadn’t been any convictions, but it was obvious she had been a problem child. Remembering her mother and the neighborhood where she had been brought up, I was able to forgive her at least a fair share of her misadventures.

  Helms removed the cigar from his mouth.

  I asked him if I owed anything further and he said, no, everything was fine and he wished all of his clients paid as well for his work. I departed, hoping that those who hired his talents were luckier than I had been.

  Back on the street I stood near the corner and watched the late afternoon shoppers and workers claw and shove their way toward the bus stops. The wind from the bay was raw and cold and a lot of the men had their coat collars turned up. The women, however, seemed unaware of the frigid weather as they moved along the street, their stockinged legs sleek and exciting, and even their heavy coats seemed unable to hide the jounce of breasts or buttocks. I found myself staring at each one individually, meditating about whether this one would or this one wouldn’t go to that party with me if I just had the guts to offer enough money. In disgust with myself I quit the corner and walked down to a parked cab.

  “You slip me a five and you don’t wanta go noplace?” the driver inquired incredulously. “What kind of a pitch is this, anyway?”

  I told him again, as I handed him the key, what I wanted him to do.

  “I have to meet a friend here for dinner,” I explained. “And I have to have my mail. Just go down to the address I gave you, get my mail out of the box and come back. There’s another five in it for you after you do it.”