Jimmy and Fay

by Michael Mayo

  I interrupted then and asked if this character had anything to do with Nola, both of them being Polacks.

  She said, “No. Oscar went for girls who were younger and thinner than me and Nola, and I never saw them together. In fact, now that I think of it, I guess I haven’t seen Oscar since that day we saw you, or the next time, I guess, before Nola came to Polly’s.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “Tell me about that day.”

  She was about to have another drink of wine but stopped and said, “What’s it worth to you?”

  She already had the first five I gave her, and most of the wine, but I thought she was about to get to the important part, so I put another five on the coffee table. She smiled and scratched the cat.

  After months of having nothing to do with her, Apollinaire gave her his card and made an appointment. He arranged to meet her for lunch at Rudolf’s, a Midtown speak that was too high hat for my taste. He told her to dress like a secretary and to tone down the makeup. He said he wanted her “inner beauty” to show through.

  “Yeah, ‘inner beauty,’” she said, “When a guy starts talking like that, you’re in trouble.”

  But it didn’t happen like that, at least not at lunch. They were in a private booth, and he had a bottle of bubbles waiting when she showed up. As she was tucking into her lobster Newburg, he went into his delivery and asked if she’d ever thought about being in pictures.

  She laughed and said no, she’d never had any acting lessons and wouldn’t know what to do. He said, “The hell you haven’t. Don’t you act every night at Polly’s when you’re jollying them up in the parlor and later when you’re telling them how great they were and it’s never been better? You don’t call that acting?”

  That’s when she began to suspect that maybe he’d seen more of her and her work than she knew. After all, Polly didn’t tell the girls everything, and she catered to some demanding tastes. Word was that Polly could make arrangements for guys—and women—who liked to watch. But before Daphne could think about it too much, Apollinaire said she was just the girl he wanted, and he was willing to pay her three hundred dollars for an afternoon’s work. That was more than she made in two months at Polly’s.

  “Keep talking,” she said.

  He told her that he had a small studio where he made special films, silent one-reelers “of the highest quality for only the most discerning clientele.” Daphne said that Apollinaire always used words like clientele instead of customers if he could. That’s the way he talked. The films were never shown in theaters, he said, only at exclusive, very private screenings. Some prints were available for sale to collectors, but he controlled distribution. The new film, his greatest, would be her entrée into the world of entertainment. She probably didn’t know it, but the truth was that a lot of the stars got their start in the picture business that way.

  Daphne put down her fork and said, “Thanks for lunch and drop dead.”

  She had seen Polly’s dirty movies and knew just how crappy they were. He agreed with her and then lowered his voice and said, “Take a look at these,” and handed her a book of pictures. It was about five by seven inches, bound with heavy copper staples. The title on the cover was The Real “It” Girl.

  “I tell you,” she said to me, “at first I thought I was really looking at Clara Bow. The girl in those pictures looked exactly like her, the round face, the little nose, the cute black wig, the middy blouse she wore in It, even those eyes, my God, those eyes.”

  Daphne thought the first shots of the girl standing and showing a lot of leg might have been from the moving picture, but things got racier as she turned the pages. The fake Clara shed the blouse, and in the last one, she was about to take on two guys.

  Apollinaire said that she could see from those that he wasn’t making the shit they showed at Polly’s. He was making “real” moving pictures just like they did in Hollywood. Then he got really warmed up, Daphne said, and claimed that his pictures were actually better than the studios’. His costumes, his lighting, his cameras and lenses were as good as theirs and his treatment of his subjects was much more daring. He showed his clientele what they really wanted to see and took them where they’d never gone before.

  Now, he wanted her to join him in his next project, The Eighth Wonder.

  His enthusiasm sounded real enough, but she was more interested in the three hundred. He smiled and said the next step was for her to meet his silent partner, and they set off for the Grand Central Building, which was not what she expected. Even though he bragged on his high-class production, she figured this would lead to a nasty little hotel room with a nasty little partner who’d try to get her into the sack. But, no, they went up to a nice office on the sixth floor.

  At first, she thought the office was empty because there was no light coming through the frosted glass door, and there wasn’t a secretary or anybody else in the outer office where Apollinaire told her to wait. He hurried through another door and closed it. A few minutes later, just long enough for her to start getting nervous about the nasty little partner again, he came back and told her to come with him. They went down a dim hall past other doors to a big conference room. The curtains were drawn and it was dark except for a green banker’s light on a long table. She could tell there was a man at the far end of the table, but she couldn’t see his face.

  Apollinaire said this was the girl he’d told him about, and she could tell from the quality of his voice that the guy at the other end of the table was in charge. He controlled the money. The guy hit a switch and another light came on beside her.

  “Take off your blouse,” he said.

  She shook her head and said, “Not until I’m paid.”

  Now, there are some girls, given that situation in a fancy room with a man of considerable means who sounded like he was used to being obeyed, I wouldn’t believe them if they said they refused to doff their duds. But not Daphne. Daphne was one of the most popular girls in the city. She could set her terms.

  Apollinaire sucked in his breath but didn’t say anything. After a moment, the man at the other end of the table said, “Very well, then. She’ll do. You may go.”

  “Oscar hurried me right out,” Daphne said, “before the guy had a chance to change his mind, I guess. And everything changed about him. He was walking faster and almost bouncing. When he saw there was a crowd at the elevator, he was too impatient to wait and said we’d take the stairs. That’s when you saw us.”

  I remembered that part.

  She said, “And you know what’s funny, he said—”

  I interrupted, “Wait a minute. Go back to the office and the guy at the other end of the table. Do you remember anything else about him?”

  She thought a few seconds. “The office wasn’t far from the stairs, almost right across the hall. That’s all. The guy was kind of short, I think, not as short as you, and stocky, and he wore round glasses. I could see the reflection.”

  “Did you get the job?” I asked, though I figured he found his girl in Nola.

  “No.” She waved her hand like she was brushing him off. “Oscar set up another meeting and wanted me to go with him to take some test pictures and try on costumes at his studio, but I told him I wasn’t doing nothing until I saw some real money, not just promises. He started backtracking, saying I didn’t understand how the business worked. First he needed to make sure that ‘the camera adored me.’ Yeah, that’s what he said, ‘the camera adored me,’ can you believe it?

  “But anyway,” she went on, “maybe I was being a chump, but I agreed to go down to his studio. But I’m not that big of a chump. I took a gun and I made sure he never got me where I didn’t have a way out. His place was in a loft down in the middle of Chinatown, and that’s where it really hit the fan.”

  She said that she’d never be able to find the place again. They took a cab to Chinatown and then walked down those streets that are too narrow for a car, and finally into a building and up some stairs to a door with three locks. Apollinaire�
��s “studio” turned out to be one big square loft with a skylight. Most of the place was filled with carpenters’ equipment, paint, and canvas for making sets. There were a lot of electric lights and a camera on a tripod near the skylight.

  He had a dozen or so pencil sketches tacked up on a wall. They were wild jungle scenes with dinosaurs and a giant ape, and he showed her one drawing with a tiny woman up in a tree. He told her that was what she’d be doing. Daphne didn’t understand what it was, because nobody had seen King Kong. Hell, I guess they had just started making the real movie. To her, the stuff about the dinosaurs and the giant ape was completely nuts. She didn’t see how that could have anything to do with what Apollinaire was talking about. How was he going to get dinosaurs into that loft? So he explained that he wasn’t going to try to have a giant ape because the ape wasn’t really that important, the girl was important. That’s what his clientele wanted to see. Actually, he thought the whole idea of a giant ape was just plain screwy and he didn’t know how they were going to do it in Hollywood, so he was going to use a guy in a gorilla suit.

  When he explained exactly how that part of the picture was going to work, she told him no deal and walked out.

  She said, “Oscar could spin out a good line. The guy was a hell of a salesman, and even though I had a feeling he’d string me along with promises of that three hundred as long as he could, that didn’t bother me. I knew I wouldn’t take my clothes off or spread my legs until I had the money in the bank. I mean, I wasn’t born yesterday. But then he told me about the guy I’d be with and there was no getting around it.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “He tried to tap-dance by telling me this guy is just perfect for the part. He’s really a great actor in Cuba. Yeah . . . Cuba. They all say that, don’t they, but hell, I know what it means. I may be a whore, but I’ve got my standards. I don’t care what you pay me, I’m not going to fuck a spade.”

  I never heard her sound so offended. But I wasn’t surprised. A lot of Polly’s girls came from the South, and the truth is, from what I heard, most of the girls felt the same way about colored guys. Not that the problem came up much at Polly’s. At least, I never heard about it.

  Daphne said that afternoon was the last time she saw Apollinaire. I considered telling her about Nola taking the part, but first I needed to know something else.

  “You said this joker Apollinaire showed you a book of pictures of a girl who looked like Clara Bow, and he said they came from a one-reeler he made. That day when you went to his studio, did you see that movie or any movie? Were there cans of film sitting around?”

  “No, I asked about that, and he said he kept his pictures in another workshop. The camera on the tripod looked like a movie camera, but what do I know from movie cameras?”

  I figured that the guy really did make movies, but I still couldn’t be sure. “You said that this Apollinaire gave you his card. Still have it?”

  She said she thought so and opened a drawer in the round telephone table beside the love seat and found a cigar box. She took out a stack of business and personal cards and went through them. She pulled one out and handed it to me.

  “Now, here’s the funny thing I’ve been trying to tell you,” Daphne said. “That day in the Grand Central Building . . .”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, we opened the door and there you were, and I said ‘Hello, Jimmy’ and you said ‘Hello, Daphne. Take the elevator’ and Oscar closed the door. Remember?”

  “Yeah,” I said again, wondering what she was getting at.

  “Well, right after you left, Oscar said ‘I know that guy. That’s Jimmy Quinn.’ So you must know him, too, right? What? You don’t?”

  She must have seen the confusion on my face. Sitting there in her place, I didn’t know what the hell to say. It felt almost like the chair was moving under me, and the hair on my arms and the back of my neck was standing up. Yesterday, Miss Wray said that I wasn’t what she expected, and now this guy who somehow stole her movie claims that he knows me. That’s not something that happens to a guy every day and it spooked me.

  Daphne said, “It must be because you’re neighbors,” and that brought me back around.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look at the card,” she said. I did and I got even more spooked, a hell of a lot more.

  The name Oscar Apollinaire was printed in the same blue ink as the words in the picture book. On the back, handwritten in pencil was “222 w.23/rm.624.”

  It looked like an address, and if it was, Oscar Apollinaire lived in the Chelsea.

  Chapter Eleven

  Still chewing over what Daphne said, I hailed a cab and told him to take me to the Grand Central Building. It was about quarter past three.

  So this Oscar Apollinaire was behind the book, and the book must be meant to promote a stag picture, just like they used lobby cards to advertise the next pictures they’d be playing in real theaters. But why the hell would he be trying to put the squeeze on RKO, and what was this movie? I decided I didn’t know enough yet even to ask the right questions, so I quit thinking about it.

  As we drove uptown, I realized how many cabs I’d taken since last night. Give me somebody else’s money to spend and I was Diamond Jim Brady. That’s when I noticed all the guys on the street who were out of work. I hadn’t seen them at night, but in the middle of the afternoon, they were hard to miss. Shuffling along the sidewalk or sitting on park benches staring at nothing or waiting in soup lines, there were a lot of them. Working nights, it was easy for me to forget what it was like for those guys. I was lucky. The speak wasn’t going to make me a millionaire, but I never missed a payroll. And as much as I didn’t like that goddamn Roosevelt was ending Prohibition, somebody had to do something.

  I hadn’t been inside the Grand Central Building for two years. For the first few days after the Maranzano business, I didn’t want to be around any investigation, but the truth is I just didn’t have a reason to visit such a high-rent neighborhood.

  I took the elevator to the sixth floor and walked down the corridor. The building was quiet and there weren’t many people around. Maybe it was because that was the day before the inauguration. In my line of work, Friday afternoon was usually jumping. The place had been a lot livelier when I cased it for Meyer and Charlie. The office across the hall from the stairs had a frosted glass door with the mary wilcox foundation for wayward girls written in gold leaf. I couldn’t see any lights on the other side, but I tried the door anyway. It was unlocked. The first thing you saw when you came in was a big portrait of Mary Wilcox on one wall with black ribbon around the frame.

  The outer office was bigger and tonier than Maranzano’s, with chairs in a waiting area separated from a couple of secretary desks by a waist-high railing. There were three doors behind the desks, one of them open double doors leading to a hallway. I was the only person in the place, but a man’s overcoat had been tossed over the divider, and there was a small suitcase on the floor next to it.

  The Wilcox Foundation was one of those antivice, good deeds groups that popped up every few years or so to make the city a better place to live. As far as I knew, it was one of the few that most normal people didn’t hate. While the Committee of Fourteen and the Citizens Union and those guys were trying to stamp out sin wherever they could find it, the Wilcox Foundation was meant to help the women and girls who got caught up in the Magistrate’s Court business, no questions asked. After the Seabury Commission got that settled, you didn’t see the foundation mentioned in the papers anymore, but it still had a couple of places downtown where dames who were in a bad way could get three hots and a cot.

  That Friday, the office had an unused empty feeling and I wondered if anybody was still working there. Wondered why the door was unlocked, too. I stood there without doing anything for a full minute or so, long enough to decide that I was probably alone in the place. Or if there was anybody else there, he wasn’t making any noise. I didn’t either.
r />   Moving quietly, I went past the desks and into the hallway. It had been cool in the outer office, and it got colder the farther I went from it. There were unmarked offices on either side. I tried each door and found them locked until I got to the end. The door on the right was open. It was labeled peter wilcox. I pushed it the rest of the way open and went inside. It was too dark to see anything until I found the lights. The office was nothing special: an average-size wooden desk and nice big rolling leather chair, telephone, shelves partway filled with notebooks and manila folders, a few framed photographs on the wall of Peter Wilcox and city officials. I recognized him from the papers. He looked a lot like Theodore Roosevelt with a thick neck, lantern jaw, bulky upper body and bottlebrush mustache. He didn’t smile much in the pictures in the paper, or on his wall.

  He was one of those guys, you saw his name in the papers all the time in stories about reforming city government and eliminating corruption, but never in the headlines. He’d be down a few paragraphs.

  I turned to the doors on the other side of the hall. That was the conference room where Daphne and Apollinaire met his partner, who figured to be Peter Wilcox. It was a long carpeted walnut-paneled room with four tall narrow windows on one side and a table in the center with two rows of green shaded banker’s lights. There were chairs on both sides and a high-backed chair at the end where I guessed the big cheese would sit when they conferred.

  I was trying out the high-backed chair when I heard a door open and voices in the outer office. I guess I should’ve thought about making myself scarce but, hell, I hadn’t done anything. Just to be safe, I took out the Banker’s Special and put it on my lap and slipped the knucks on my right hand. All I could see at first was the light I’d left on in Wilcox’s office across the hall.