We had him booked in what I’d been told was Al Capone’s favorite suite in the old days. I don’t know what your average hotel suite is like in Hot Springs, but by any standards I knew Collins’s was opulent to the point of immorality. One of the bedrooms was fully interior with no windows; that was Collins’s room, which locked from the outside. The resort had had plenty of prior experience with dry-outs and water cures and, presumably, narco cases. Park and I had single rooms on either side of the suite, the other two rooms in the suite being reserved for the doctor and his nurse.
Doctor Hargis was recommended by the manager of the resort, Mr. Clyde Furrough, with whom I’d been frank about the reason for our stay. Doctor Hargis, the manager claimed, had gotten any number of prominent hopheads off of dope, including Errol Flynn. “He’s not cheap,” Furrough warned, “but he’s effective and discreet.”
I fell involuntarily asleep on a divan of crushed green velveteen, exhausted from the drive, the second half of which had been mine. I dreamed I was in Collins’s office, choking him as he thrashed savagely, his face ladybug red and his eyes watering, tongue protruding purple and twitching, as Miss Grau and Mrs. Caspian and the rest of the secretarial pool looked on with approval and admiration.
I couldn’t have been more disappointed when a brisk rapping at the door woke me promptly at nine PM. It was Doctor Hargis, accompanied by a white-haired, jowly nurse whose white orthopedic shoes squeaked with the strain every time she took a step. He explained to me my part in the procedure, which consisted entirely of paying his fee, half of it up front. I wrote him a check on Collins’s personal account, which he folded neatly into quarters and put in his vest pocket. He had a pointed van dyke and round glasses that together gave him the air of an old Viennese quack, but which I suspected were intended to foster a slight resemblance to Doc Brinkley, the goat gland man, who’d been a prominent citizen of Hot Springs before he hightailed it for Mexico. I hoped Hargis’s medical credentials were less suspect than Brinkley’s, but then this was just a narcotics cure and not heart surgery.
“By the way,” the doctor said. “You’ll need to get rid of all his medicine. Can’t have any around the suite, not even hidden.”
“You’re not going to taper him off a little at a time?”
“No. This is what we call cold turkey. Cut him off all at once. It’s not pleasant, but it’s the most effective method we have. So take the pills and throw them away.”
The doctor and his nurse went into Collins’s room and I pocketed the rest of the old man’s pills, close to three hundred probably. It sounded as though his bedside manner could stand some improvement; I first heard some muttering from Collins and then some garbled but loud introductions from the doctor, followed by a bellow of outrage from the old man. Anticipating a long evening, I told Park I was going out for some air.
At the Western Union desk I composed a telegram for Sally. I’d told her that Collins was coming down for a delicate medical procedure, that it was a secret, and that if anybody asked where I was she was to say Chicago.
“Is it one of those monkey gland deals?” she’d asked the morning we left. “Or is it goat glands?”
What the hell, it sounded plausible. “That’s right, Doc Brinkley’s coming back up from Mexico in secret to perform the operation. So you can see why he wants it kept quiet. Especially from Mrs. Collins. What would people think if they knew Everett Collins had the testicles of a goat?”
I saw Brinkley once on a gambling trip to Hot Springs before I got married. He hadn’t been indicted yet, I don’t think, and he strode down the sidewalk with the bearing of an archduke in miniature. His radio shows were a staple when I was a kid, promising rejuvenation and renewed virility through the miracle of interspecies ball exchanges. Not exchanges, really, since Doc Brinkley’s operating theatre of horrors offered the poor goats nothing in return for the gift of their gonads. It might be argued that the human recipients of said testes received nothing either, since the most a transplanted pair of billygoat balls would get you was a nasty infection, and the doctor’s death rates were high. The whole business reeked of charlatanism and the carnie sideshow and for years his program was by far the best thing on the radio.
I still listened to the Doc’s radio shows at night sometimes, beamed northward from old Mexico at wattages forbidden to American broadcasters, and sometimes felt tempted to send in a dollar for an autographed photograph of Jesus Christ or a novelty box of jumping beans. Border radio never made me despair for civilization the way “Lum and Abner” or “Baby Snooks” did.
Once I’d sent the telegram I wandered down the street and found a saloon called the Inside Straight. I’d been expecting hillbilly music, but inside a five-piece Negro orchestra was doing a pretty good take on “Pussy Willow,” and a decent looking gal greeted me as I walked in. At the bar I ordered a drink from a dapper bartender in a white tuxedo and took a look around the place. Expensive furniture and fixtures, and a mahogany backbar that looked like a survivor of the last century.
Standing there I fantasized that if I’d thought to bring my cash from the safety deposit box I might just take the company Olds and drive it down to Mexico myself for good, leaving everyone wondering whatever happened to good old Wayne instead of overseeing a drug fiend’s unwilling detoxification and plotting to destroy another man’s reputation or force him into retirement, a man who for all I knew was a decent, hardworking type who’d been careless about an exploitable peccadillo.
And then my bleak mood lifted of its own accord, as though I’d simply dwelt on it sufficiently to clear it out of my mind for a couple of days. I was in one of the most wide-open resorts in the country, surrounded by vice and shameless women. My expression must have changed because the bartender picked up on it and spoke.
“Here for the waters?” he asked in a Brooklyn accent thick as Durante’s. He looked like a boxer, or maybe just someone people decided to punch in the face once in a while.
“Not particularly,” I said.
“Hah. Didn’t think so.”
He didn’t press me for more, a sign of a good bartender. All my visits to Hot Springs in the past had been on a markedly lower budget than this one, and now that Collins was in the care of a medical professional I began thinking about recreational possibilities.
“Where does a guy go to find a gal around here?”
“Depends if he’s looking for a freebie or a paid piece of ass.”
“In a strange place I always prefer to go for the latter.”
“Smart man. Anything free around here is going to be very, very questionable. Where you staying?”
“The Arlington.”
“Class operation, but don’t ask for girls there, you’ll pay too much.” He wrote a number down on a matchbook. “Call this number and tell ’em Herb sent you.”
“Thanks, Herb. How’d you end up down here, anyway?”
“Cousin of mine had some business associates down here. Speaking of which, you like to gamble?”
“Once in a while. I hate to lose.” Having run a floating craps game in Italy I had come to realize that in gambling there wasn’t much reason for the house to cheat, so stacked are the odds against any individual player.
“The place to go is the Hotel England, you ask for the management and tell ’em I sent you, they’ll treat you all right.”
“You’re all right, Herb. Who’s the gal up front?” I asked, nodding at the beauty greeting customers at the door.
“Vera’s her name, I wouldn’t waste time trying to get anywhere with her. Lots of guys have tried around here.”
“Pretty girl.”
“You’re telling me. I’m a married man, but I’d give a year of my life for one night in the sack with her.”
“It’s just that I don’t remember seeing any girls like her down here before the war.”
“Not many like her now. She’s from Little Rock, what passes for a city girl down here.” He laughed. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking the place, it’s been good to me, and I can’t go back to New York anyway. In fact, when I got down here I was knocked out by how swank it was. I was expecting Mammy and Pappy Yokum and donkeys in front yards and booze out of jugs marked XXX, if you know what I mean.”
On my way out I said “Good night, Vera,” and she responded with such familiarity and sweetness I almost stopped right then and there to ask her out for a drink later, but that was the wrong strategy for a girl like her.
AT THE HOTEL England the games were hopping, and a bigger orchestra than the one at the bar was tearing through “Main Stem.” I asked for management and was pointed to a large, dark-haired man in a rumpled tuxedo who was gesticulating with his stogie to an apparently petrified subordinate, whom he then waved away with a delicate gesture of high-strung distaste.
“Herb sent me over,” I told him.
“Herb, huh? How do you know Herb?” he asked.
“Just met him over at the Inside Straight.”
“Oh, that’s great, good old Herb.” He said it with such relief it made me wish I knew why Herb couldn’t go back to New York. “Here’s the Herb special tonight.” He handed me a two dollar chip. “Good luck, pal.”
I decided right then that I was going to bet the two dollars and nothing I’d brought with me. At the roulette table I placed the chip on the red and won, then placed chips new and old on the black and won again. Then I took my winnings and dropped them into my jacket pocket, to the consternation of the dealer, who had plainly read me as a man who would let my bundle ride until it vanished with one wrong spin.
I played two hands of blackjack and won the second. Then I watched the craps table for a while to see if it was clean, since it was the only game I knew enough to judge by. It looked all right, but I’d watched so many craps tossed in the army the prospect of play held no joy for me. I was about to leave and spend my modest winnings on a steak dinner when I thought I saw someone I knew standing in front of a one-armed bandit. He didn’t seem to have noticed me, so I cautiously moved around the silver row of machines and peered from the other end at my old army pal Lou Arnesdale.
He looked like shit stew warmed over the next day. His eyes were sunken and dull and he was thinner than he’d been in the army, so thin the army wouldn’t have taken him back. He was playing one of the nickel machines and looking heartbroken every time the reels clanked once, twice, thrice to their sad resolution.
Lou Arnesdale owed me money, and from the looks of him he wouldn’t be able to pay it back any time soon. We were partners in London selling army tires to civilians via a black marketeer named Syd, one of the sweetest deals I was ever in on, and I’d done Lou a favor letting him partner up with me. It turned out that Lou had a little narcotics habit of his own, and when he got transferred out of London he took over a thousand pounds of my money. That was pounds sterling, not dollars. He hadn’t told me he was being transferred and I wasn’t able to track him down, and I certainly couldn’t report the theft; some operations are off limits even by the standards of the Quartermaster Corps, and selling army rubber is definitely such an operation.
For a second I wondered if he was my poison pen correspondent, but it didn’t seem likely. Lou’d known me in London, not Rome. Approaching him here was a non-starter, so I decided to take a position across the street and wait for him to come out. I didn’t think it would take long, since the supply of nickels in his hand didn’t amount to half a dollar, and his luck certainly wasn’t going to get much better tonight.
I waved at the manager on my way out. “You win some and you lose some, huh?” I said.
“Better luck next time,” he said, delighted to think that I’d dropped some of my own money at his tables.
THERE WAS A newsstand across the street. I browsed until I sensed the attendant getting antsy, then I bought the new
Esquire
and moved a few feet down the block. It was around eleven o’clock when Lou slinked out of the casino, dejected and friendless. He walked up that side of the street and turned a corner. I crossed and peered around it to make sure he wasn’t looking back or waiting for me to catch up. He wasn’t.
He continued up the street to a place called the Stuckey Palace Hotel and Apartments, a rundown brick building advertising weekly rates on the painted tin sign drilled into its facade. I waited until he’d had time to do whatever there was to do in the lobby, which would have differed depending on whether he was a hotel guest or a proper tenant. After five minutes had passed I stepped into a foyer and found no one on duty at the desk. Rows of mailboxes lined either side of the entry, beneath a panel affixed with the names and corresponding apartments of its inhabitants. ARNESDALE, L.P. lived in apartment 5H.
Retribution, whatever it turned out to be, could wait a few days. I’d waited years to find Lou and hadn’t really expected ever to run across him. Now the gods had dumped him wriggling into my jaws, and I wouldn’t waste the opportunity.
WHEN I GOT back to the hotel I called the number Herb had scrawled on the matchbook and had a girl sent up to my room. The service was cheap, as he’d promised, and mentioning his name had gotten me a further reduction in fee. When the girl showed up I let her into the room and she entered it with the élan and self-confidence of a movie star. She had jet-black hair pinned up at the crown of her skull and big black eyes that set off a slightly-too-large nose. Her walk had a nice sashay to it, and the first thing I asked after handing her the fee was for her to walk around the room a few times. When she asked me what I wanted next I told her to just get undressed and we’d think of something. She engaged me in some small talk as she performed her strip-tease, artfully tossing one garment after another over her shoulder or bending over to place it on a chair. I had a pretty good sense of her body before she’d finished and was glad I’d listened to Herb.