Angel in black nh-11 Page 6

  Beth hadn’t wanted a drink: her lips touched neither liquor nor tobacco, she informed me rather proudly. She felt both activities were unladylike and “could make a girl look hard before her time.”

  She had no such reservations about banana splits, however, and admitted to being “addicted to ice cream,” though her slender if busty figure didn’t betray that.

  Already I was mildly smitten with this girl who so resembled Peggy. Dipping my spoon into her dish, sharing the sundae with her, was at once innocent and sensual.

  “Am I the only one here impressed by all these famous people?” she asked, as she sipped tea and I stirred cream and sugar into my coffee, our empty sundae dish cleared away. “Nobody’s asking them for autographs, or even looking at them…”

  I shrugged. “That would be gauche. You can see celebrities and would-be celebrities in here any time of day and night, show-biz types and newspapermen and big-time politicians… Joint never closes.”

  She made a cute face. Those luscious full red lips in the Kabuki mask of her face were startling-would even have been clownish, if she weren’t so beautiful. “I guess I don’t know much about Chicago.”

  “Your first time here?”

  “I stopped over, a few times before. This is the first I’ve stayed for any real length of time. I came because I had an opportunity to do some modeling.”

  “Not surprising, with your looks and grace. What kind?”

  “For newspaper ads-hats, gloves, coats.”

  I sipped my coffee. “With what agency?”

  “Sawyer Agency.”

  “ Duffy Sawyer?”

  She nodded, seeming vaguely embarrassed.

  “Let me guess why you quit-Duffy expected you to entertain his male clients.”

  With a tiny humorless smirk, she said, “He put me up in a hotel-the Croyden-and had me go to dinner with him and various… business prospects. He said he wanted me to ‘lay the charm’ on these businessmen.”

  Emphasis on “lay,” I thought.

  She was saying, “It wasn’t so bad, at first; we went to a lot of hep jazz clubs. But, uh… Duffy got mad at me, because-”

  “You weren’t charming enough.”

  “Something like that. So I quit, and moved out of the Croyden-I’m bunking in with some girls at the St. Clair Hotel… know where that is?”

  “Sure.” It was over on East Ohio; both hotels she’d mentioned were home to a good share of showgirls and models. “You still interested in modeling?”

  “Oh yes-legitimate modeling, and acting. I sing, too.”

  “Well, honey, Chicago isn’t what it used to be. Vaudeville’s dead, most of the radio shows have moved east or west, and not much national advertising’s done here, anymore.”

  “I can also dance.”

  I smiled, shook my head. “Afraid there’s only one chorus line in town, and that’s the Chez Paree-measly six girls, and those positions are golden. Oh, sometimes the Palmer House and the Sherman put on productions, but… pretty slim pickings, unless you’re willing to work burlesque.”

  “Stripteasing.”

  “Yeah. Lots of that in this burg… but I don’t think you’d like that any better than dispensing ‘charm’ to businessmen.”

  The aquamarines widened. “You are so right… though I do have the figure for it, don’t you think?”

  “No argument there, and I’m not judgmental about the profession. Some of my best friends are strippers.”

  That news didn’t seem to put her off. “Well, anyway, I’d never stoop to… stripping.”

  “Good. It’s a hard life-and if you aren’t Sally Rand or Gypsy Rose Lee or Ann Corio, you’re lucky to make fifty bucks a week.”

  “I’m better off waiting tables.”

  “Yeah, and it’s warmer.”

  She lifted her chin as if offended-but maybe kidding on the square. “Is that what you think I should stick to? Waiting tables?”

  “Hey, I’m not trying to discourage you-that’s just the reality of it. Tough as that town is, Hollywood’s a better bet for you.”

  She nodded, saying, “I’ve been there-several times.”

  “Any luck?”

  “I’ve done some extra work, and a little radio.”

  “It’s a start.” I waved a waitress over for more tea and coffee. “Look, there is some modeling to be had in Chicago-I know people at the agencies. Plenty of local advertising, and the big mail-order companies do their catalogue work here…”

  “I might take you up on that. But I probably will head back to Southern Cal. I only came to Chicago for the modeling job, and…”

  “And what?”

  She shrugged. “A serviceman I know had a stopover scheduled here. An Army Air Corps lieutenant.”

  “Boy friend?”

  “Nothing serious. I met him last year, at the Hollywood Canteen. I was a junior hostess, there. Met a lot of stars-Franchot Tone, Arthur Lake, all kinds of celebrities.”

  “What about that Air Corps lieutenant?”

  “What about him?”

  “If you and he weren’t serious, why did you come to Chicago to see him?”

  Another shrug. “Like I said, I came for the modeling job, and just took the opportunity to connect with Gordon again. I’d been writing him letters… I have a lot of servicemen friends. I write to several, I like to build their morale…”

  “Sure. Guys you met at the Hollywood Canteen.”

  Was that her story? I wondered. Was she one of those “Victory Girls,” who had a thing for servicemen?

  “Yes,” she said, as if answering my unspoken question. “I’ve kind of bounced around back and forth from Florida to California, and I met quite a few nice boys both places.”

  “California to Florida is quite a commute. Where are you from?”

  She sipped her tea, looking out at the Lindy’s clientele, probably seeking celebrity faces. “I’m not really from anywhere.”

  “Everybody’s from somewhere. I’d almost swear I heard a little New England in your voice… Or maybe I’m imagining that, ’cause we met at the Boston Oyster House.”

  She laughed lightly; I had her attention again. “You are a detective… I grew up in Medford, Massachusetts. But I never really felt like I lived there.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know, exactly. For a long time, even in high school days, I wintered someplace warm, because of my health-asthma…”

  That explained the cough.

  “… and maybe that’s why I’ve never felt like I belonged anywhere, except maybe-don’t laugh-Hollywood.”

  “I’m not laughing, Beth. You look like a movie star.”

  Beaming, she said, “Everybody says I look like-”

  “Deanna Durbin.”

  “That’s right.” She was obviously proud of that. “And I sing like her, too, only my voice is lower.”

  I didn’t suppose it had ever occurred to her that Hollywood already had a Deanna Durbin, name of Deanna Durbin.

  Beth was saying, dreamily, “I’ve always known, deep down inside of me, that I was different… special… that I was going to be famous someday.”

  How many pretty, ambitious, restless girls had thought that same thing? Every day of every month of every year, buxom babes like Beth left farms and small towns, forsaking family and friends and sweethearts for the lure of bright lights, boarding a bus or hitching, diamonds in their eyes and cardboard suitcases in their hands. It was one of the most standard, enduring, and little-realized American dreams.

  And yet I said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if you did become famous, Beth. You’re a lovely young woman, with a nice speaking voice, and a refined demeanor.”

  “You really think so?”

  “I really think so.”

  She spent the night with me in my suite at the Morrison. We sat on my couch and talked and talked into the night, and I heard all about her hopes and dreams and enthusiasms. She went on and on about how much she loved music-Benny Goodma
n, the Andrews Sisters, Kate Smith, Glenn Miller, Jo Stafford, both Bing and Frankie-and when I told her I knew Sinatra personally and that maybe I could introduce her someday, she had given me a great big kiss.

  And then we necked, like schoolkids, and for a change I was drunk not with rum but with a girl’s beauty and her perfume and those clear blue-green eyes that you wanted to dive into and splash around. We petted, and I caressed her perfect breasts-they were full and firm and more than a handful-and finally she let me undo the back of her dress and it folded down around her waist like flower petals and her skin was a remarkable alabaster, smooth and flawless, with a beauty mark on one shoulder. I kissed the buds of her breasts and she moaned with pleasure and I kissed them some more, buried my face in their soft firmness, but when my hand, stroking the suppleness of her thighs, tried to edge up between them, she took me by the wrist and drew my hand back, shaking her head, her expression almost sad, as she said, “No, no, not yet, it’s too early,” and I could understand that, since this was only our first night, so when her hand undid my zipper and her head dipped into my lap, that pile of curls bobbing up and down, working expertly, I was stunned, I was shocked, I was delighted…

  I saw her three more times. Whether I picked her up at the hotel where she was freeloading off model friends, or simply met her at the Morrison, she would be dolled up in expensive clothes-either that leopard fur coat or a white fur, and black outfits with dark nylons, her white-powdered face glowing angelically in the night, red lips like a lovely scarlet wound-looking like a movie star, not a would-be actress waiting tables. She borrowed money from me every time we were together-as little as twenty, as much as a hundred-but she was not a hooker, at least she didn’t see herself that way, and I refused to see her that way.

  We would talk about each other. She described herself as Black Irish-“lace curtain, not shanty!”-and wondered why a man with a Jewish last name looked so Irish, and I explained that my father had been an apostate Jew, a leftist bookseller on the West Side, and my Irish mother, who died when I was born, had given me my red hair and Mick mug. She said she barely knew her father, that he had been an entrepreneur who had had a small chain of miniature golf courses that failed in the early years of the Depression, and disappeared, only to turn up years later in California, where she had tried to get to know him, and failed.

  Because she was so soft on servicemen, I found myself telling her how I’d been in the Marines and on Guadalcanal, since after all I had to compete with these kids in uniform she was writing her letters to; and she even wormed it out of me that I’d been awarded a Silver Star-something I never mentioned to anybody; I never talked about the war-but, what the hell, she could know anything, she could take anything, considering what she was giving.

  And I told her about Peggy, and she told me about her late fiance, Matt, a major in the Flying Tigers who had been killed on his way home from India, in a plane crash, earlier that year.

  “That’s why I haven’t… you know, gone all the way with you,” she explained on my couch, the second night we were together. “I didn’t date while Matt was away, keeping true to him… and now that he’s gone, I’m having to start all over again, just taking little tiny baby steps.”

  No, she wasn’t going “all the way” with me; she was just putting her head in my lap-some little baby steps! Yet for some reason, I didn’t feel like pointing out this glaring, illogical inconsistency.

  Anyway, there was more to her reluctance to perform intercourse than the memory of her dead pilot: on the third evening, she had requested a loan of one hundred dollars because she needed to see a “female-trouble doctor” in Gary.

  “You’re not pregnant, are you?” I asked.

  “No! It’s… something personal. Please don’t ask.”

  Maybe it was V.D. of some kind, in which case I really wasn’t anxious to change our pattern of sexual activity.

  Still, female trouble or not, I was becoming quite taken with Beth Short. She was filling the Peggy void quite nicely, and her enthusiasm for orally servicing me was-I am neither proud, nor particularly ashamed to say-intoxicating.

  On the fourth and final night we were together (she had the evening off from the Oyster House), we dined out at Henrici’s and came back to my Morrison suite, where she announced that she had indeed decided to return to California.

  “Why don’t you try staying on in Chicago, awhile?” I asked her, fixing her a Coke on ice and myself a rum and Coke on ice. “I talked to Patricia Stevens this morning-I can get you an interview.”

  That was the number-one modeling agency in town.

  “No, Nate, I appreciate it. I appreciate everything you’ve done… but just this morning, I spoke on the phone to a famous movie director, and he wants me to come to Hollywood, right away, to take a screen test.”

  This sounded like a pipe dream if I ever heard one. I handed her the Coke and sat next to her on the couch. “What famous director?”

  “I can’t say. He asked me not to.”

  “That’s bullshit, Beth-he’s just another asshole who wants to get in your pants.”

  “Don’t be crude, Nate-don’t be mean.”

  I was a little owly at that, at the thought of having those exquisite “baby steps” vanish from my life. “I was kind of hoping… I mean, I thought we were getting along pretty well…”

  “We are, we are,” she said, and she put her arms around me and we began kissing, and petting, and then her head was in my lap and I was giddy, I was in heaven.

  Which made it a hell of thing to have to accept her leaving. So, as the evening progressed, I did my best to talk her into giving Chicago a go of it, and along the way I had another rum and Coke, and another, and another…

  I don’t remember much more of the evening except Beth saying, “Let’s just forget our problems and enjoy this last night together… Live for today, I always say…”

  At some point in the night I woke up, needing to use the bathroom, and noticed Beth in bed next to me. So-we had finally made it from the couch to the bed. A light was still on in the outer room, filtering in enough that I could lift the covers and have a peek at her busty little frame. She was nude, slumbering peacefully, though snoring a little, something bronchial stirring in her chest. She had washed the lipstick and white pancake away and her high-cheekboned beauty, framed by the mane of black, was even more striking unadorned.

  I remember wondering-as I staggered in to take a pee-if I had finally fucked her, only to have forgotten in my drunkenness; and I remember thinking, if she did have the clap or something, I probably caught it-and deserved to.

  Then, class act that I am, I stumbled back to bed and fell asleep next to her.

  When I awoke, she was gone; and the next time I heard from her was in January, on the telephone, from a pay phone at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles.

  And the next time I saw her, she was nude, just as she’d been in my bed, only this time she was in two pieces, in a vacant lot on South Norton Avenue.

  5

  Fowley parked his blue Ford in the lot across from the gloomy-looking, five-story cream-colored stucco building at 11th and Broadway. The sun had finally banished the clouds and burned off the smog, making a reflective blur of the Examiner building, a huge American flag flapping above the main entrance, adding a splash of color and just the proper hint of hypocrisy.

  Feeling shaky and sick and trying to hide it, I had suggested-as we’d rolled along Olympic Boulevard, heading to the Examiner — that we postpone our meeting with Fowley’s city editor, Richardson, since this hot new story had dropped in their laps.

  “Not a chance in hell,” Fowley had said, grinning, cigarette bobbing. “Richardson says he’s more anxious than ever to talk to you. Hell, you’re our star photographer!”

  Now we were crossing Broadway, on foot, navigating traffic, stepping over trolley tracks, the newspaper’s massive black printing presses looming through the big plate-glass windows that took up much of the Examiner
’ s ground floor. Those presses, silent now, would soon roar to life with an extra edition, newsprint threading through at sixty miles an hour, headlines screaming of the “werewolf” killing.

  I had made this appointment with the Examiner in hopes of getting myself some ink; but WEREWOLF SUSPECT IN CUSTODY — PRIVATE EYE KNEW VICTIM wasn’t what I had in mind.

  Lavishly corniced brown-marble columns did their best to dominate the impressive lobby, competing with a vaulted ceiling across which strode gilded centuries-ago heroic figures-nobody ever accused publisher William Randolph Hearst of a light touch. After all that ostentation, a single, comically insufficient wrought-iron cage elevator awaited us. The two of us and the operator made a crowd.

  “Why aren’t you out in Leimert Park,” I asked Fowley, the elevator grinding its way up to the third floor, “knocking on doors, looking for leads?”

  “Richardson already sent out his foot soldiers,” Fowley said. “I think he’s got something else in mind for us.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that: by “us” did Fowley mean himself and the rest of the city-room crew? Or did he mean… us?

  Not anxious for the answer, I just followed the little reporter through a low-slung swinging gate across a nominal reception area, where he went in a door whose opaque glass window bore the black block letters CITY ROOM. The world beyond was a big, bustling one: thirty or more plastered-over steel bearing beams kept things open, despite the countless desks (often paired up and facing each other) where reporters and (with phone receivers cradled at their necks) rewrite men banged away at ancient machines that looked more like coffee grinders than typewriters. Against one wall, a pair of telephone operators spoke into horns sprouting from their chests, as they fielded constant incoming and outgoing calls at a red-light-flashing switchboard; teletypes machine-gunned out wire-service copy, only to be ripped free by attentive copy boys, while-in the midst of all this controlled chaos-blue-pencil-wielding proofreaders sat engrossed at their copy, like monks doing calligraphy. Cutting straight down the center was an aisle, a copy boy’s gauntlet (“Boy! Copy boy!”) from the news desk to the city desk which sat in front of a big window, on either side of which were wainscoted, glassed-in offices.