Golden Throat

by James P. Alsphert

  She looked at me with a stern countenance. “Why, yes, and who are you?”

  “I’m a friend of Ginny’s. Have you seen her yet?”

  She pulled me away from the other people to a far corner of the room. “No…I’m trying to get up the nerve—to—to see my daughter. She ran away from home, you know. But I knew the city life would ruin her. My husband followed her—and now—now—”

  “—Yeah, I know…he’s in the local hoosegow. And yes I am well aware of the story, Mrs. Fullerton.”

  She focused her eyes on me more intensely. “So you…you must be him--the man responsible for poor Ginny’s predicament, then.”

  “Yeah, I guess you could say that.” I wouldn’t have dared to bring the Lei-tao episode into the equation. “Your husband tried to put me away for good, but it wasn’t my time to exit yet, I guess, so I had to subdue him until he gained his senses. He’s gotta watch that religious stuff, you know. Fanatics like him can cause a lot of trouble.”

  She relaxed a bit. “He’s the one who drove me to drink, you know, Mr.—Mr.—”

  “—Denning, Cable Denning, Mrs. Fullerton.”

  “Mr. Denning. He raised Ginny with his Bible thumping hell and damnation and I was too weak to fight him. He was violent, you know.”

  “Well, it doesn’t surprise me. So while you boozed it up, poor Ginny got the dirty end of the stick. And since you were unwilling to sober up or give your husband what he wanted in the bedroom, he zeroed in on Ginny as the object of his affections, didn’t he? And when she came to the city, he went crazy with possessive jealousy—you know, no man can have her except me—type of thing.“

  In a sudden rage Mrs. Fullerton slapped my face. The entire waiting room froze and looked toward us. Then she recoiled. She began to sob. I gave her my handkerchief. She took it. “I’m—I’m so sorry…I didn’t mean to do that, but truth hurts a lot sometimes, Mr. Denning.”

  I ran my fingers over my cheek, which was still burning a bit. “Yeah, sometimes, Mrs. Fullerton.” I took a deep drag, exhaled and then put my cigarette out in an ashtray over by the staring, silent people. “What’s the matter, folks, not used to a little human drama? Well, bone up, you expectant fathers, your time is coming. Happy diaper changing!” I said as I started for the exit.

  Mrs. Fullerton followed me. “Please…will you accept my apology? I haven’t had a drink in three days and I’m a bit on edge.”

  “You need to mend the fences with your beautiful daughter, Mrs. Fullerton. She’s a special little lady—and you’re damn lucky she made it this far with an okay attitude toward life—no thanks to you or your fanatical husband.”

  Tears came rolling down her cheeks. “You’re right…I’ve decided to stop drinking and take Ginny home with me. I don’t know what to do about Jeremy. He’s so bitter. Part of it is my fault—”

  “—you know, Mrs. Fullerton, I’ve found that when things need fixing, you just gotta step-up and tell folks the truth. You know how to do that? It’s simple, just put one syllable in front of the other—and pretty soon you’ll feel yourself having a coming out party, a much needed cleaning up inside. It works every time.”

  She grabbed my arm. “I know you were good to Ginny. I also realize you were the man she looked after in Big Bear a couple of years ago. She fell in love with you, was obsessed with being with you. I never felt like that. In a way I envied her and it made me drink even more. Now I want to make it up to her, be a mother to my daughter, help her grow up—”

  “—she’s already grown up, lady. The best thing you can do now is show her some kindness and good, healthy love…the kind that fits…the kind that gets buried through the years because we’re hurting too much inside with our own selfish, feel-sorry-for-ourselves kinda pain, smarting in that place you used to call your heart. You’ve been into self-pity so long you haven’t noticed you’ve neglected the things you should have loved and cared for all along. Good luck with Ginny, lady.” I took her hand off my arm and walked out into the dirty sunshine of another Los Angeles day.

  “When I Grow Too Old to Die”

  Moving into early October, Honey was about to sign a contract with Samuel Goldwyn to make a movie with Ronald Coleman entitled Condemned. At the moment the lead female role was between Honey and a pretty little gal named Ann Harding. Goldwyn, who was reputed to be feisty and stubborn, apparently liked Honey’s looks and was opting for her, while Coleman preferred to work with someone familiar. He probably didn’t want to be upstaged, either, by a beautiful honey-colored blonde singer who was gaining a lot of popularity on the airwaves of the times.

  Ginny went back to Big Bear to live with her mother and convalesce. I knew the hospital had been ordered to destroy the fetus and so Lei-tao’s story faded into the past for me, somewhere between a beautiful reality experience and something I dreamed last night. As our wedding date approached, Honey and I were doing well and I fought to stay away from Adora, not always winning. My heart hurt when I thought of the day I could no longer feel this exquisite young woman’s body melt into mine, or hear her musical feminine voice in my ear. But I also knew that nothing stays the same and the only permanent thing in the universe was change. So I limped on with memory and regret, like most humans, going through the motions of existing on a strange planet, eking out a living the way successful private dicks plied their trade. Grabbing what I could when I could, to pay the rent and put a few bucks away now and then for that proverbial rainy day people always talk about.

  Even though I began hearing even more rumblings that the financial markets were over extended, I thought little of it. It had been a phenomenal year for economic growth in the good ol’ U.S. of A. I was hard pressed to see how the system would be compromised to where it would affect the general population in a negative way. Money was always made and lost in the world’s biggest gambling casino…Wall Street. In my opinion, the financial markets were where the rich played and speculated. For the little guy like me, it was hardly a dot on the map of everyday life.

  The thing that nagged at my insides most was the fact that I had not heard a peep from my nemesis, the Oculus Pyramis Mandatum. Their silence after Ravna’s death only meant one thing to me: they were regrouping and strengthening a plan to come descending like hordes of locusts at a later date…threatening me in some diabolical way to re-secure the God of Our Fathers for them—on pain of death, or worse, if I happened to fail. I felt I probably had to tell Honey the truth about how serious this shit could go. In a way, it was unfair that she should live under a lie—not realizing she’s loving a man who indeed may not be around to see their first wedding anniversary. So I decided I’d have to confront myself in front of my future wife, spill the whole thing and start with a clean slate.

  Sunday October 6th was the first day Honey and I could sit quietly in the morning and have a pleasant breakfast together. Maybe it didn’t exactly tie in with a rough ‘n tough guy image, but I missed little things like that. You know, that first cup of coffee with someone you love to be with, someone you love to look at and talk to because you know she’s intelligent, witty and cares about you, too.

  As we finished a couple soft-boiled eggs with toast and Honey filled our cups with fresh coffee, I thought it the best time to break the news to her. “Babe…there’s something I need to talk to you about.”

  She looked at me with that intense ‘I-knew-it-all-the-time look. “Yes? Will I need paper tissue, a fire extinguisher or a gun?” she joked.

  “Well, depending on how you take it, maybe all of them.” We laughed. “I mean, some of it you kind of know, but I haven’t told you the rest of what I think you should know.”

  She sipped from the top of her coffee cup. “Here I am, darling…”

  “Well, you sort of know that I was involved in procuring that golden capsule and all. You know about the Red Dragon Lady—and I realize you don’t want to go there. And that’s okay. But what you need to know is that behind all of this crap that’s b
een going on is a maverick organization—a secret order called the Oculus Pyramis Mandatum.”

  “Hmmm…Latin…it already sounds dangerous,” she ribbed me.

  “These guys are the real thing, as far as playing rough, Honey. They threaten and kill people who are in their way and they have no compunctions about removing someone who has something they want. Now…for a short while you know I had the golden capsule, the one I retrieved from Hearst Castle when we were there. I told you I’d keep you posted. But you didn’t seem that interested—”

  “—I wasn’t. And I’m still not.”

  “So, how can I tell you that there will be some big curve balls being hurled at my plate one of these days soon? And when they’re up to bat, they’re big hitters. They play for keeps, Honey.”

  She studied my eyes. “You know, Cable, I’ve seldom seen traces of real concern or fear in your eyes. But right now I do. Who else besides these bad guys and the Red Dragon Lady wanted it?”

  “You remember the three priests who saved my butt that night? Well, the Catholic Church has its own hit squad of pretty rough players…Carlo Tortelli and his flying priests are three of them. And as I saw it, they take no prisoners.”

  Honey turned some thoughts around in her brain. Now I saw the half-alien part of her come onto the playing field. “Okay. So at least three parties want what you say you already gave back to the rightful owner, the Red Dragon Lady—so what’s the problem?”

  “What I didn’t get to yet, was that a phony replica was made and I gave that to the Oculus guys to keep them off my back. When they discovered the ruse, they came after me. A guy named Ravna, who I originally met in San Francisco, visited me in my office and said he’d give me two weeks to get my shit together and deliver the real thing to him. I didn’t have it, nor did I have access to it any longer. Angry and desiring to scare me—which they did—they kidnapped me and took me to some weird underground lab where a very twisted sister named Dr. Schumacher was going to castrate me as ‘punishment’ for having deceived them—”

  “—Cable! You’re not kidding, are you?” Suddenly Honey’s face grew fearful as if she could feel the evil just got sucked under the door when I talked about the Order. “Darling! I had no idea!” Then she returned to her jocular self. “But then again, since we’ve continued to have great sex of late, we can assume they did not succeed in that plot—”

  “—no, it was Carlo Tortelli and his two buddies that killed Ravna and Dr. Schumacher that night, along with a couple of other goons protecting the joint. I tell you I was seconds from being under Schumacher’s knife. Then they brought me here. But it’s only a matter of time before Ravna’s replacement will come hunting me down.”

  Honey got up from the table and went to the little kitchen sink and looked out the window at the sunny California day. “You know, Cable, I’ve discovered that loving someone is a funny thing. Although you know in your heart it’s constant, there are days you wake up wondering why you love that person. Maybe some of it has to do with hormones, I don’t know, my period, how I’ve been received on stage the night before, my frustrations with my movie career, how frustrated I get with you, how our schedules conflict and we catch as catch can late at night, mostly in bed when we’re both tired out from the world. We laugh and make light of it because sex still covers up a lot of what lies beneath. But being in a marriage, I think, is very different. I think it may start with love, being in love with someone—but soon trust has to enter the picture.” She turned to look at me. “And you know, all fooling aside, I’ve never completely trusted you. I know you’re kind of truth—oh, and maybe you do tell a few white lies now and then. But I kept hiding things from myself, fears that you’d come home and give me some venereal disease or smell like another woman’s perfume or something. I hope you understand what I’m saying, Cable.”

  I played with my coffee cup and half smiled up at my beloved Honey Combes. “Yep. Everything you say is true. We play Russian Roulette every day and don’t know it. But I wish I’d heard you say these things before.”

  “Why? It wouldn’t matter. You’re always going to be you, Cable. At the start it was fun and games, we laughed and played. But when we got serious about wanting to be together, it was like all of that slowly drained away out the window. I hoped against hope you’d settle down with me, stop seeing your little Mexican señorita—and God knows who else—I mean, I have no clue what you did with that Rusty Wilson woman in Monterrey, Mexico—before you say she died a terrible death. Did she—really? You have a knack of tucking away little secrets you think won’t matter to me or to the rest of the world. But you know, Cable, it does matter. I love you completely, with my whole heart. Isn’t that ever enough to cement a relationship and loyalty in marriage? You remember that night when I sang Jolson’s Sonny Boy to you? Well, I meant it, every word. You are a boy-man, despite your strengths and the gutsy face you turn to the world out there. But to me you’re the man I love, and the boy who won’t grow up in some very important ways. ”

  I felt very uncomfortable. But she was right. I was a professional philanderer, playing dames against the odds, thinking I could juggle them all as the occasion presented itself as if I were still sixteen chasing down young skirts in the streets of the ghetto I came from. “Maybe there’s a piece missing in me, babe,” I said, looking down at the table, unable to face Honey’s intensely direct blue eyes.

  “Maybe…yeah, maybe there is, Cable. And where does that leave someone like me who can love and can commit? Remember what I said a few weeks ago—what if I went around fucking all the good-looking studs that come into the club and proposition me? Men have a real hard time reversing things. But if I did that, I could never come home to you. I’d hang my shingle out somewhere and say, ‘Five-hundred bucks a fuck, you drooling Johns’. But I don’t do that, do I? Because I’m in love with you and want to share my body only with you, mister. Whores are a type of woman. Are you a type of man who whores around and finds danger as an aphrodisiac so that the variety of women equals the variety of your dangerous escapades?” She stopped, came back to the table and sat down. She took a deep breath and exhaled. “I’m sorry, Cable…these things have been on my mind for a long time. But I didn’t mean to dump them all on you this morning…” She reached her hand across the table and touched mine. “I guess I’ve hurt for a long time. And sometimes it seems I’m facing a glass mountain with you. I can’t climb it because I just keep slipping back down.”

  Her eyes began to tear and I got up and came over to comfort her. I dabbed her tears with my napkin. “Truth is truth, doll…even if it’s uncomfortable, I had it coming…all of it. If I was on trial right now and I was also judge and jury, I’d condemn me on the spot and kick me out of your life.”

  She grabbed my arm. “Oh, God, I could never do that. You’re still magic to me, Cable. Even with all that I just said, you bring me joy, laughter, happiness, incredible intimacy—and you’re a man I can talk to. Most girls can’t talk to their men like I can to you. That’s worth a lot. I’m not throwing the baby out with the bathwater here—I’m just throwing out the babes who’ve been in your bathwater!”

  We both laughed and it broke the tension. “You’d still want me after all that?”

  “I wanted you before I even started saying what I just got through saying. Chalk it up to a hopeless romantic, but I still think we can be the happiest couple in town—won’t you give us a full and fair chance, Mr. Private Eye?”

  I pulled Honey Combes up into my arms and kissed her with everything I had, bad coffee breath and all. She melted into me and I caressed her beautiful blonde hair in my hands. “Yeah, babe. Starting here, starting now—this could be the start of something great!”

  She took my hand a led me into the bedroom. “I just don’t want you to fuck me this morning, Cable…I want you to look at me…and love me when you enter me. I want to feel the connection between down there—and our eyes. After all, lover, it’s my heart I offer here
…do you accept?”

  We stripped naked and lay on the bed in the morning sunlight, caressing each other. I was wondering if I could truly make love to my woman and look into her eyes at the same time without losing my erection. Some guys are like that, you know.

  Te Amo, Querida!

  It took me a week, but I finally broke it to Adora that I seriously couldn’t see her anymore. On the day I told her, it killed something inside of me but I ignored it and went on with my promise to myself and Honey to make a good life with her. It broke Adora’s sweet heart. When I stood there telling her, she went numb and looked into my eyes, unbelieving.

  On Saturday the 19th of October, Honey had to go in to the Bella Notte early for a photo shoot. She had then planned to have an early supper there with me, and just dress and get ready at the club for her performance that night. I was looking forward to seeing her with an extra enthusiasm that afternoon for some reason or other. Maybe my newly pledged commitment to her made me feel good about us, and maybe when a man has only one woman to think about, everything runs smoother. But that wasn’t entirely true, for somewhere deeper inside me I had to fight off the reminders of Adora’s face and smile, her warm gentle voice and soft body knocking at the door to my heart.

  On a sudden wave of appreciation for Honey, I had written a note to her and carried it to the club that late afternoon. I also brought something else. For the first—and what would turn out to be the only time in my life—I put myself in debt and bought my babe a brand spanking new engagement ring. It set me back close to a thousand bucks, so I’m afraid it would also have to serve as our wedding ring. The jewelry store I bought it from agreed to allow me to make small monthly payments. Hell, at ten bucks a month I’d be paying for that ring forever! The owners, a very funny, typical Jewish couple named Abe and Golda Sachs hoped I’d be able to pay it off sooner than the almost ten years it would take to own the damn thing outright. But I wanted to go all out with a babe like Honey.