Victoria’s appetite was healthy and she managed an entire plate of corned beef hash and three fried eggs, and I settled for Cream of Wheat with a side of bacon. Afterwards we walked down Broadway to where my car was parked and I kissed her goodbye. I was about to pull away from the curb when she knocked on the window, opened the door, and slid in beside me.
“When are you coming back next?”
“Don’t know,” I said. “Hard to know when I’ll be free for a couple days.”
“Let me know in advance next time. I’ll take some time off.” She kissed me again, the taste of her mouth a pleasant mix of coffee and corned beef and Doublemint, and then she slid out of the car and walked carefully back up the icy pavement to her building.
DOCTOR BECK OWNED an apartment building on Troost off of Van Brunt, one of those places with a big staircase up the middle and three floors of apartments on either side. He kept one apartment on the first floor for his own use, and I wondered what the other tenants made of their occasional short-term neighbors, sad young women moving in for a week or so and then moving on to their other distant lives. I suppose in between those brief tenancies the doctor must have entertained women there himself.
The girl I was picking up today was a stranger to me, the first I’d chauffeured back to Wichita under similar circumstances since before the war. She was skinny and sniffly and peaked, and she didn’t say anything when Beck gave her last-minute instructions for the coming few days. She didn’t speak until we got down to Emporia, about halfway to Wichita, and that was just to express a desire to go to the bathroom.
“You want something to eat?”
“I don’t have any cash on me,” she said as I pulled off onto Telegraph Street.
“You don’t need cash,” I said.
SHE NIBBLED AT a grilled cheese sandwich and wouldn’t meet my eyes. The waitress gave me a nasty look, though, like I was the one who’d made the girl miserable. She had mousy brown hair and acne, and I sat wondering what the hell old man Collins had been thinking.
“What’s your name?” I asked her, finally.
“Emily,” she said.
“You have a job, Emily?”
“I was in the steno pool at Collins.” She sneaked a quick glance at my face.
“You were?”
“I was fired after . . . ” She took a long time swallowing a bite of her sandwich. “They let me go when I got in trouble.”
“Is that so.”
She looked me square in the face now, puzzled. “Uh-huh.”
“Girly, they can’t fire you.”
“Sure they can.” Her eyes were wet and her voice quavering but she wasn’t giving in to it yet. “It’s in the employee manual, about moral turpitude.”
“Doesn’t mean a damned thing. You’ve got the great man over a barrel.”
So I laid it out for poor Emily: in a couple of days she was to call Mr. Collins’s personal secretary, Miss Grau, and tell her that a man named Hiram Fish has been pestering her, trying to find out where she’d been and why she wasn’t employed by the company any more.
“Who’s this man Fish?”
“Someone Mrs. Collins uses to keep up on Mr. Collins’s comings and goings.”
“And what does Miss Grau do after I tell her this?”
“Miss Grau gets you your job back, with a raise if you look like you’re not sure you want it back.”
“I’m not sure I do,” she said, but I noticed she was eating the second half of her grilled cheese with gusto.
“A job at Beechcraft or Cessna, then. Listen, you think all he owes you is a trip to KC and a grilled cheese sandwich? Take it from me, a lot of girls have been in your situation, and some of them ended up better off than others.”
I didn’t give two shits about the dim bulb across the booth from me, but I got a hell of a kick out of fucking with my employer and her impregnator, Everett Collins. Aviation pioneer, friend to Wiley Post and Lucky Lindy, founder of one of the nation’s biggest aircraft plants, a bigger man himself than anyone in Wichita had ever thought about being. He’d been my childhood hero, which may go some way to explaining the depth of my current contempt for the man.
TWO
RUTH SNYDER’S PRETTY ANKLES
I
F YOU ARE a reasonably competent and ambitious individual with a bit of initiative and creativity, and a willingness to look at strict regulations as loose guidelines to be skirted when necessary or convenient, there is no better job for you than Master Sergeant in the United States Army Quartermaster Corps.
I volunteered in December of ’41, and like everybody else my motives at that time were strictly patriotic, although a certain desire to escape the wife and hometown for a while did play a minor role. My wife Sally was all for it, and proud as hell of me. The objection came from Everett Collins; back then Collins was less of a lunatic, and I was actually touched at his concern for me, though I see it in retrospect as petulance at the loss of a useful subordinate.
Getting assigned to the QM Corps was the single best stroke of luck in my life. At first I objected to it because of the fact that the Corps kept its men behind the lines; I wanted to kill Nazis with my bare hands or, failing that, a rifle. But before long I started getting reports back from the front, and I realized that my job as Quartermaster was probably going to keep me alive for the duration.
By the time I was reassigned to Rome from London I was an old hand at thievery and black marketeering, and I had some small experience as a pimp as well, though the possibilities there far exceeded what I could accomplish in old Blighty, where the systems of local vice remained more or less intact during the conflict; Rome’s had been shattered by the war and the fall of the fascists.
And now I was back in my hometown, with a wife who looked like a movie star and a job that entailed more boozing and carousing than actual work. What the hell was the matter with me that I was missing the excitement and danger of the war? Granted, the dangers I’d faced were nothing compared to those experienced by the troops at the front, but I did have that scar from being stabbed, and I was shot at more than once by unsatisfied johns and once was threatened by a purchaser of black market gasoline who wanted the stuff for free. A colleague of mine made sure he didn’t come around any more, and I never knew exactly what happened, but I have a suspicion that the answer lies at the bottom of the Tiber.
IT WAS A Thursday, and I was looking at the
Evening Beacon
in Red’s, a roadhouse five miles east of the Wichita city limit on 54. You could do a fair number of theoretically illegal things at Red’s, as long as you knew how to ask and didn’t make a spectacle of yourself. Kansas was a dry state, and if you wanted anything stronger than 3.2 percent beer, you had to go across state lines or to a blind pig or to a roadhouse like Red’s, whose owner paid the authorities well to look the other way. There was an interesting article in the
Beacon
about a foot somebody found underneath a bridge in Riverside. It was a man’s right foot, the article said, size eleven, and there was a pretty good quote from the elderly fisherman who found it: “I hate to think of somebody gimping around missing a foot.”
The
Beacon
was a better read than the rival
Eagle
if you were looking for sex and mayhem. When a car hit a train, the
Eagle
would report the casualties but the
Beacon
would be there with a photographer to record the blood and guts and tortured metal, and I felt sure the
Beacon
’s editors were bitterly disappointed at their failure to get a picture of the foot.
“How’s that pretty wife of yours,” Everett Collins asked me, one elbow on the bar, annoyed that I was reading the paper instead of listening to him.
“Same as ever,” I said. The fact that he wanted so badly to screw my dear Sally was one of several things that kept me employed and relatively free of actual day-to-day responsibility. “How’s yours?”
He stared at me for a second like he was going to lose his temper, then he laughed, just drunk enough to find my impertinence funny. I couldn’t have imagined needling the boss before the war, but I wasn’t scared of him any more. He slapped his palm down on the bar. One of his ears was missing its lobe, having been sliced off in some long-ago cutting scrape he never elaborated on, and that ear always got redder than the other when he got mad or drunk.
“Thinks she’s going to outlive me. When I croak, you make sure the cops take a real good look at her. I got it in my will if I die before she does I want a full autopsy.”
“I’ll see that she gets the chair whether she’s guilty or not.”
He laughed again. “I like that. Maybe I should just have her framed for something while I’m still kicking, then I’d get to watch her burn. You ever see that picture of Ruth Snyder in the chair?”
“No.”
“Some reporter snuck a camera into the witnesses’ gallery, strapped it to his shin, snapped one right when they turned on the juice. Kind of blurry. Strapped into that chair with a hood over her head, body all tensed up with the current running through her.”
“Never saw that.”
“January ’28. I was in New York talking to the bankers the day it ran, took up the whole the front page of the
Daily News
and I tell you what boy, I had to have a call girl sent up to my room so I didn’t walk into those bankers’ offices with a goddamn hard-on.”
At times like these I almost liked him. Hung over, which was as close as he got to sober any more, he was a surly mean son of a bitch, and much drunker than this he’d be pissing his pants and throwing wild punches, protected by his money and his power in these parts as much as by the presence of Billy Clark, the ex-cop who followed him around most nights to make sure he got home in one piece.
It was only seven o’clock, and I guessed Billy had another seven or eight hours to go. The bartender, an old-before-his-time hillbilly named Jake Bearden with eyebrows like blond sagebrush and deep furrows running from his nose alongside his mouth, looked like he wanted to say something but he kept his counsel.
“I think I’d like to get me some strange tonight, Wayne,” the old man said.
What he meant was I should pick up some girls and he’d decide which one he wanted to screw. Looking around the roadhouse I saw only two unaccompanied women, both of them worn-out b-girls the old man had tired of months before. “Pickings are slim around here,” I said as one of the girls, thinking herself unnoticed, delicately stuck her little finger up a nostril and, upon extraction, examined the nail with a curiosity as dull as her blonde permanent.
“Why don’t you call one of your friends and get some fresh gals out here.”
“Management doesn’t like that.” Red Garnett, the roadhouse’s owner, had warned Collins not to bring any more whores around, at least not in the numbers the old man liked. Last time the unpicked extra girls went around propositioning the other customers and while this wasn’t necessarily bad for business, it wasn’t covered under the terms of his deal with the county. Liquor and gambling were all old Red could afford to pay off, and he’d warned me more than once that the slack he’d been cutting the old man was not unlimited.
“Let’s head out to the Eaton and get you a suite, and we can have some girls sent up,” I said.
He scowled like a disappointed five-year-old. “All right.” He picked his bottle up off the bar and headed for the door with me close behind. I waved at Billy Clark, and he climbed out of his booth, shaking his head.
On the way to the Eaton he pontificated about the natural states of men and women, and men’s physical needs versus women’s. It was one of his standard lectures, and I marveled that before the war I used to take his shit seriously, listening to his lame-brained theories and thinking how lucky I was to be able to bask in the presence of the Great Man. He had been good at one thing in his youth, putting airplanes together, back in the days when they were much simpler craft than they are now. Sure, he had to improvise and invent in those days, and I’ll give him that much. But on any subject outside the mechanics of flying machines he was a fool and a blowhard.
BY THE TIME I got back to the apartment that night I’d paid off four girls, only two of whom ended up getting screwed in Collins’s Packard. One of the others made a play for Billy, who turned her down flat, and I screwed the fourth in the parlor of the suite we’d rented. It was close to three when I opened the door and heard Sally’s voice from the bedroom.
“Honey?”
“It’s me.”
“Want to come to bed?”
Having had the foresight to take a shower back at the suite, I was reasonably sure no traces of the whore’s smell remained, but I’d still hoped to come home and find my wife asleep. When I pushed the bedroom door open I found her lying on the bed wearing nothing but her high heeled shoes and enough makeup to caulk a small bathroom, one long leg stretched out and the other raised up at the knee.
“I been awful lonesome tonight,” she said.
I WAS A little sorry about the whore at the Eaton, because it took me a good half an hour to get to the point of ejaculation. Afterward we lay there staring at the ceiling and she started talking, babbling the way she did sometimes about babies and the meaning of life and marriage and church and all that kind of crap.