Now she was saying something that required a response, and having no idea what the subject at hand was, I let out a long, thoughtful sigh.
“I just think a child ought to have a yard to play in,” she said.
“That’s true.” Jesus, what was she saying? That snapped me right back to attention.
“And a neighborhood where there are other children to play with.”
Something vaguely electrical ran from the top of my head to the base of my spine. “Wait a second. What were you just saying a minute ago?”
She hit me with her pillow and started for the bathroom.
“You son of a bitch, you’re not even listening to me!” She slammed the bathroom door shut behind her and started running a bath.
I knocked on the door. “I’m sure as hell listening now,” I yelled, at which point the phone rang.
“Mr. Ogden? It’s Mrs. Dunphy downstairs.”
“Sorry, Mrs. Dunphy,” I said, though I wasn’t sorry in the least; I loathed the old termagant and her pasty husband. “We’ll quiet down.”
“You know perfectly well my Hank goes to work at six-thirty. This is not fair.”
It suddenly struck me as funny that at this late stage of her dismal existence Mrs. Dunphy still expected things to be fair, and I was still laughing after she hung up on me.
THREE
A PALMFUL OF WARM SPIT
A
FEW DAYS LATER I was still getting over the shock of having knocked up my wife. Sally had woken up nauseous and pissed off at me for something she couldn’t or wouldn’t put into words, and for the first time since my return in May I was missing the nature of my relations with the gals in my employ in Rome: sexual in several cases but strictly impersonal.
It was Monday morning and my first task of the day was to spring a couple of farmboys at Police Headquarters downtown. The clerk didn’t ask me why I was bailing them out, just gave me the fisheye and breathed in and out with a loud, phlegmy sound while he filled out the forms and stamped the endorsement onto the back of the Collins Aircraft Company check. Considering the amount of time I spent watching and helping Everett Collins break various laws, the clerk and I probably ought to have been on a first name basis, but the great man couldn’t get arrested in Wichita for anything short of manslaughter. The clerk knew who I was, though, and he knew what the farmboys had done.
“Heard they busted his ribs. Heard Billy Clark wasn’t much help to him, either. Some bodyguard.”
“That’s about right.”
“You fixing to bail him out too?”
“I’m going to let Billy-boy cool his heels in the jug until he’s arraigned. Let him do some thinking in there.”
“Heard he told old man Collins he was retired from the force.”
“Isn’t he?”
“Hell, no. Fired, fall of ’44. Pulled his service revolver on a civilian over at Lawrence Stadium, off-duty, before a ball game. Claimed it was a legit arrest, turned out to be a beef over a parking space. We hired a whole bunch of 4-F morons when our men started signing up and getting drafted, and that’s one time it bit us right in the ass. Collins ought to have had him checked him out before he put him on the payroll.”
ONCE THEY GOT out, the farmboys didn’t show much curiosity as to who I was or why I’d posted their bail. A pair of giant brothers by the name of Gertzteig, they seemed to think this was just the way things worked in the big city. “Come on, I’ll buy you breakfast.”
We went across the street to the drugstore and sat down. “Anything you like, boys, it’s on me.”
A couple of uniformed officers were enjoying their complimentary breakfast at the other end of the lunch counter, and glancing at the brothers, they surely pegged them for the recently sprung drunks they were. Back at the pharmacy counter I could see the pale, baldheaded druggist staring daggers at the freeloading cops. He hated giving away those free meals, and locating his drug store across the street from City Hall turned out to be the worst mistake he’d ever made.
The Gertzteigs ordered up t-bones and fried eggs, sunny side up, and hash browns and toast, both of them, and they attacked the meals when they came in exactly the same order: potatoes, eggs, toast, steak. They weren’t twins, as far as I could tell, but they matched each others’ motions pretty well. I wouldn’t have wanted to get into a fight with them, especially with a wobbly drunk like Collins on my side.
“So here’s the deal, boys. You know the old man you hit?” I asked between mouthfuls of corned beef hash.
“Only hit the old guy but the one time,” said the bigger of the two. “In the ribs.”
“Once’t was enough,” said his brother.
“We wasn’t mad at him so much, it was his friend.”
“The old man feels bad you spent the night in jail, and he wants to give you a little something to get home on.” I handed them each an envelope containing a fifty dollar bill. Examining the contents they grew more slackjawed than before.
“Golly damn,” said the bigger one. “That’s purt square of a feller just lost a fight.”
“He doesn’t want you boys to walk away from Wichita thinking that’s the way things usually go in the big city. Now can I give you boys a ride to wherever your car is so you can get on back to Butler County?”
I DIDN’T BOTHER phoning Collins to tell him about it. He’d grouse about the expense and indignity of having to pay off the cretins who’d broken two of his ribs, but in a day or two he’d see the logic of it, and he’d be as grateful as I was for the knowledge that the Gertzteig brothers had no idea of the identity of their assailant-turned-benefactor. And my next task was unpleasant enough without Collins making it worse. By ten AM Billy Clark had already been before the judge and released, and I called him on the phone and told him to meet me at Red’s.
I WAS STASHING the receipt for the boys’ bail in my inside overcoat pocket when I noticed an envelope I’d almost forgotten. It was addressed to WAYNE OGDON COLLINS AIRPLANE CO. WITCHATA KAS, and it had nonetheless managed to make its way to my desk a mere two weeks after someone mailed it from Salem, Massachusetts, a town I had never visited and from which no acquaintance of mine had, to my knowledge, ever sprung. I guess I’d had it sitting there in the pocket for a week or more, some irrational sense of dread having stopped me from opening it when I saw it laying there on top of some reports I didn’t intend to read.
Inside was a penciled note, crudely printed in block letters:
YOU SON OF A BITCH THIEF THERES’ BLOOD ON YOUR HANDS. ERUOPEAN LADYS ARE DELICATE AS FLOWERS.
Something went sour in my stomach, and I tried to put it down to the corned beef.
THAT NIGHT WE sat in Billy Clark’s usual booth. It was another quiet night at Red’s, but we were familiar enough from our visits with the old man that the b-girls didn’t bother us, though one of them kept giving us cold, appraising looks that gave me the fantods. “What are we going to do about this?” I asked him.
“Don’t know,” he said. He had two black eyes and a split lower lip, and his right index finger was in a little metal splint wrapped with surgical tape.
“You should have told Mr. Collins when he hired you that you couldn’t fight worth a damn.”
“You didn’t see them two farmboys that jumped us,” he said.
“I sure did, I made their bail and paid ’em off and sent ’em back to Butler County. Now what the hell were you thinking starting a fight yourself? And don’t try telling me anything different because I talked to three people who watched it.”
“I don’t know, Wayne. Something about them just set me off.”
“Another thing. Mr. Collins knows about the incident that lost you your badge.”
He reared back and craned his neck to look at the ceiling, a gesture meant to convey exasperation at the unfairness of the thing that instead suggested an inability to meet my eyes. “That business was a bunch of lies from start to finish.”
“Nonetheless Mr. Collins feels it would be best if you sought employment elsewhere.”
His mouth hung open and his eyes watered as if I’d just slapped him. All he’d expected was a reprimand. I was tired of looking at Billy, though, and I didn’t like his lying, and he’d proved that as a bodyguard he was useless. I handed him a check on Collins’s personal account. “Two weeks severance and you’re lucky to get it.”
COLLINS HAD TAKEN to phoning me at home, a familiarity I was beginning to resent but hadn’t yet figured out how to stymie. That night when he called I told him I’d fired Billy. Might as well take the hit now if he was going to react badly.
There was a long pause on the other end of the line, complete with tightly controlled breathing. “Son of a bitch had some balls calling himself a bodyguard. Put an ad in the paper for somebody new.”
“Already set for tomorrow’s
Beacon
.”
“Shit. That Jew rag? Put one in the
Eagle
instead. Nobody reads the
Beacon
but left-wing degenerates.”
This I would ignore. I liked the busty girl who ran the
Beacon
’s classified desk. “Anything else?”
“Yeah. Come on over and see if you can’t sneak some booze in. Bring a flask or two. Make it three. I can hide ’em; we’ll tell the old bitch you’re here to discuss advertising strategy.”
THE AD IN the
Beacon
read as follows:
Man with police or military experience wanted for bodyguard work. Familiarity with firearms essential.
References. Box 397, Beacon.
The day after the notice first appeared I had half a dozen responses. One was a woman whose husband had taught her to use a rifle. Two were from ex-convicts who at least had the honesty to admit it. One was from Billy Clark, admirably already on the lookout for new opportunities. The two who remained were ex-servicemen, and I made arrangements to meet them both at Stanley’s diner at Kellogg and Oliver.
The first was a barrel-chested ex-marine who sat across from me, seething over some unspecified grievance.
“How’s civilian life agreeing with you?” I asked him.
“Bitch don’t know when to quit.”
“Yeah, ain’t that the way.”
“I swear to Christ, Mister, I know she was fucking my brother while I was gone.”
A hell of a thing to say to a stranger in the context of a job interview, I thought; this guy needed his head shrunk more than he needed a job. “That’s pretty rotten,” I said, as blandly as I could.
“I’m going to prove it, and then I’m going to kill them both.”
His name was Rackey, and though I knew he wasn’t going to work as a bodyguard, I had an idea I might find a use later on for that barely contained violent impulse of his. “Listen, Mr. Rackey, it looks like the bodyguard position’s already filled, but I have another proposition for you until a similar position opens up again. How would you like a job on the line at Collins aircraft?”
“I already been told they won’t take me, on account of my dishonorable discharge.”
“That’s all right, pal.” I sent him over to the plant with a strongly worded note of recommendation, complete with the suggestion that the order was coming from the old man himself. Whatever it was I figured Rackey could keep out of trouble on the floor until I figured out some better use for him.
The next candidate fit the bill better. Herman Park’s history of violence was all within societally approved norms: the army (1931–37, 1942–46), Golden Gloves, and a stint with the Emporia Police Department in between. Somewhere along the line he’d had his nose broken, probably more than once.
“Why didn’t you go back to Emporia after you mustered out?” I asked him.
“Wife moved down here for war work in ’43. Wants me to get a job in an office or on an assembly line. I’d rather get my teeth pulled.”
“How about the Wichita PD?”
“Not hiring. Too many ex-cops coming back, so many of them they’re letting go some of the 4-Fs they hired during the fighting.”
“Yeah, I heard about that. Some of those guys were walking around with a chip on their shoulder.”
“Sure, everybody thought they were yellow. Tell you what, there were days in Germany I’d have traded places with any one of those guys, though.”
I told Park he was hired and said I’d introduce him to Collins as soon as he was ready to carouse again.
“That’s swell, Mr. Ogden.”
I WAS FEELING like a good citizen, having found jobs for two returning vets, and I headed back to the plant to notify the personnel department, the head of which hated me. He had reason, since I regularly forced him to hire people he didn’t want to on Everett Collins’s say so. He was all right with Park, understanding as he did the need for a bodyguard for the boss, but he tried to put his foot down regarding Rackey.