“Oh, I’ll treat you real well, Mr. Private Detective. Some special part of my anatomy has been pulsing for you since that night in my place. It’s new to me, Cable, please be patient. I’m a bit nervous about Edie. I haven’t told her yet. But I promise I will…soon. Good night, my prince.”
We hung up and I sat back on my chair. It’s the shits, you know, that nothing in life quite works out the way you planned. It seems a glitch always appears in the works somewhere. With Misty I already had two glitches—and we hadn’t even made love yet! I knew I’d have to deal with the Edie Clason thing, plus Misty’s insecurities. Oh, well, tomorrow would be another day…
Saturday morning, May 22, 1932, dawned with a warm, yellowish sun filtering into my bedroom. I got up around nine or so, showered and shaved. By the time I put my clothes on and wound my watch it was after ten. The phone rang a couple of times, but I wasn’t ready to answer it yet. My brain needed a shot of gin with a little orange juice. That was always a nice breakfast before I had my first cup of coffee. It seemed the whole country was addicted to something or other. Maybe the world, for all I knew. I had opened all my windows and the front office door to air things out. As I was sitting at my desk toying with a pencil, trying hard to focus enough to get the day started, when a small boy stood at the threshold of my office. “What is it, kid? Can I help you?”
He seemed like the Fisk Tire Boy, sleepy-eyed but present. Only he wasn’t carrying a tire. He had a paper bag in one hand. He didn’t say a word, but cautiously walked in and came to sit in the client’s chair opposite me. “So…what’s your story, kid—everyone has one. You need some dough for breakfast?” He looked forlorn, his clothes were rumpled as if he’d been sleeping in them and he was very thin.
“I—I’m lost, Mister.” He began to cry. “They left me on the highway. They just left me there.”
“Who left you where?”
“My—my Mommy and Daddy—because there’s seven of us and they don’t have no money to feed us anymore. They said if I walk on the sidewalks people would give me money. But nobody has. And now I’m just lost!”
“You mean your folks deserted all of you kids to fend for yourselves? I know times are rough, but you don’t throw your own child to the wolves out here on the streets—”
“—they kept Laurie and Lorna, my sisters. But Joey, Frankie, Butch, Buster and me—well, they wanted us to make our own money and stuff.”
“I see.” It was hard for me to conceive that parents could ever go that far. The Depression had spawned many such stories, so I was told. But this was my first encounter with one of its casualties. “So what’s your name?”
“Dickie—Dickie Overton. I live—used to live—in Bakersfield, California. Mommy and Daddy picked stuff—in the fields. But now there’s no work for them. I was born in Arkansas.”
“So, here you are…so what do you think we should do with you? There are authorities who take care of runaways and abandoned kids. Should I contact them? Maybe your brothers are already there.”
“No…thanks. I don’t like my brothers.”
“Oh. So how old are you, Dickie?”
“I’m eight going on nine. I’ll be nine in September.”
“Oh, yeah? That’s my birthday month, too. What day?”
“The 13th—my Mom told me I was born on Saturday night.”
I was floored. The kid had the exact same birth date as me! Different year, that’s all. “That’s kind of spooky, young man, because I was born on the same day you were, too.”
“But how could you be? You look a lot older than me.”
“Same month and date—different year, that’s all.”
“Oh.”
I got up and went into my icebox and got out some bread I’d been chilling. I handed the boy the whole loaf. “Here, if you’re hungry…I’ll get you some water.” I filled him a glass with tap water and handed it to the kid. He had consumed half of the bread and crumbs lay all over my office floor. “You’re hungry alright, kid. I’ll say that for you. I don’t have much here in the office, even though I live here.”
“You don’t have a house to go to?” he asked, his mouth stuffed with bread.
“Naw…I did, but the lady I shared it with, died. So now I live here. It ain’t much, but it’s better than nothing—and nothing is what you’ve got just about now. That should never have happened.”
“My Mom and Dad didn’t mean for it to happen. They live out of the car now. They have the front seat and Lorie and Lorna live in the back seat.”
I was thinking how a life filled with misery can come from a few minutes of pleasure in the sack. There had to be something perverse about human desire and breeding cycles, not to mention being accountable to your children. But I knew that wasn’t the way the world worked. There is little forethought in parenthood, for the most part. Screw and someone gets born. That’s about the gist of it.
So…what do we do with you? Is it the street or an orphanage?”
“What’s that?”
“I told you, a place where they take in young kids if there’s no one to take care of them.”
“Well, I guess. Can I stay here with you?”
“Sorry, kid, but I’m not the Daddy type—plus this is an office and I have a dirty and sometimes violent job.”
“What do you do—are you a bank robber—or gangster?”
I snickered. “Well, not quite—you see, I’m at the other end of that. I go after bank robbers and gangsters and bring them to justice.”
“What’s that mean—kill ‘em? My brothers and me play gangsters and cops a lot. I have this neat wooden gun my Dad carved out of an old box and—”
“—what’s it gonna be, kid? I have a busy day ahead of me. The street or an orphanage?”
“Can I think about it?” he asked with such an innocence I couldn’t refuse the lad.
“Yeah, I guess you can stay here tonight and think it over. But by tomorrow you need to decide, okay?”
He made a meek gesture, as if someone had just put a small blade in his ribs and it hurt. “Okay…”
By nine p.m. Dickie Overton was sitting next to me on the streetcar on our way downtown to see and hear one Edie Clason. I couldn’t very well leave the lad in my office. Lord knows what he might get into—or was he totally honest and not part of some theft ring? You never knew these days.
The Chateau Briand Club turned out to be on the edge of Hell’s Half Acre, the dumpiest part of the city, near San Pedro. Crazy Jack’s not-too-fancy Panama Hotel was just a few blocks down on 5th Street. The place turned out to be a real dive that you could smell long before you reached the walk-down entrance. The odors of booze, cigarettes, saw dust saturated with beer and mixed drinks, urine and God knows what else permeated my nostrils as Dickie and I walked into the dump. As soon as we entered some dyke with very short black hair spotted us, and I realized we were the only men in the joint! She told us I couldn’t take the boy past the little corridor leading to the bathroom. So I asked him to sit while I was escorted to a table. The place was crowded with women of every size and dimension. It seemed like everyone smoked and a dirty blue spotlight shone on a piano. Little candles flickered at each of the twenty or so tables, giving the place an eerie, surrealistic look.
Soon I saw Edie Clason approaching me. “Ah…I am most glad zat you came, Mr. Denning. Who is ze boy?” she asked, looking out to Dickie Overton sitting quietly on the cement floor in the tiny hallway.
“Oh, some kid who wandered into my office this morning. Says he’s lost. I’ve given him overnight to make his mind up—the street or an orphanage.”
“’Ow cruel!” Edie complained. “‘as ‘e not ze right to live a decent quality life, Mr. Denning—ze same as you or me …no?”
“Call me Cable…it’s easier that way.”
“Per’aps for you, not for me. If you don’t mind, I shall address you by your surname.”
“As you wish. Not all of us are gonna have a decent life, Mademoiselle.
I came up on the rough side of the tracks, and I know what poverty does to kids. Most of ‘em never make it out of kindergarten—in their brains as well as in the circumstances they have to live.”
“I do know. Ze world is ‘orrible—a horrible place to live.” She glanced down the hall. The boy had fallen asleep leaning against the wall. “Especially a fine young boy like zat needs an opportunity—to—to live and grow up into someone special. Like my Misty. Which is why you are ‘ere, Mr. Denning.”
“I was wondering when you’d get around to that.”“I cannot permit you to abuse ‘er, take ‘er for your sex playzing of ze moment. Look around…many of my audience are women who one way or anozer ‘ave been abused by ze treacherous male animal. Certainly, some women are born wis a predisposition of homosexuality. But not most. I know zese women. I ‘ave watched zem writhe and wiggle in zeir roles with zeir own sex. I, too, would be a man’s woman ‘ad I been treated right when I was young and beautiful. But I was deflowered by an older bastard of a man, one who took and picked ze flower but once—and zen left her zere, bleeding.”
I winced. I knew of such stories, had heard them before. Police work taught me a lot about the lesbian community. They expressed the same traits as heterosexual couples do: loving, fighting, feuding, fussing and making up. That was about it. “I’m sorry those scars remained with you. I was a cop once upon a time. I attended many a knock-down-drag-out battle between women over women.”
“Zen you know…so back to Misty. Per’aps I can show you what I mean—illustrate her world from ze eyes of my world, Mr. Denning.”
She motioned for a piano player to come up out of the audience and with a cigarette on her lips and a drink in her hand, Edie Clason began to croak out an incredible performance. The song had a fragmented melody that haunted me from the first forlorn notes. Then she climaxed the song, higher and higher until a tear born from the highest note filled the room! Then the singer was at peace again, ending as she had begun, in a growling, guttural sound that came gurgling from her worn throat. I’m sure there was not a dry eye in the house when she had finished. I had had a truly moving experience. And you know, even better than the big clubs I usually hung out in. The absence of shouting, yelling, swearing, drinking, smoking and competing for space was a welcome relief. Everyone was reverently silent during Edie’s moving delivery. But my little boy in the hallway slept on, oblivious that a life had just declared itself, took all its pain, all its sorrow, its past joy, ecstasies and hopes, declared the twisted irony of romantic love and shoved it into a song, sixty-four measures long.
Edie Clason returned to the table at which I sat. I was wiping my own eyes. “I’ve heard a lot of songs and a lot of dames sing them, lady, but I never heard anyone live out their song as you just did. Thank you.”
She cracked as much smile as she could muster. “I ‘ope, Mr. Denning, you ‘eard my many years of punishment for choosing to be an artist…and my ten years of joyful reward in loving Misty.”
“Yeah, somehow I did. But you know, neither of us can decide for Misty. She has to know when to turn that page in her book. The cold reality is either or both of us may lose Misty. Nothing lasts forever, lady. Truth is, I could get killed at any minute. I’ve got some pretty serious players wanting to take me out.”
“All ze more reason, Mr. Denning, for letting Misty be. If you set ‘er up for tragedy, it will affect ‘er rise…‘er performance.”
“Life is a tragedy for humans, Mademoiselle Clason. I respect you for surviving this long. You’re French, you ought to know, from cradle to grave, life is one emotional roller coaster after another. Yet, what is it you say, ‘C’est la vie’?”
“Yes. Very good, Mr. Denning. Under different circumstances…I may even ‘ave liked you. You are a good man and fearless.”
“Well, thanks, but I wouldn’t go that far. But since we’re playing ‘to tell the truth’ just about now, are you interested in my truth?”
“I suppose I must…or else I shall not be reasonable to myself.”
“I think you’re gonna lose Misty, if not to me, someday soon to some other bloke. You see, I’ve been around a lot of dames in my thirty-odd years and a guy like me can spot a man’s woman a long way off. A couple of years back when I first met her, I was knocked back when she told me she had no interest in men. At the time my plate was full, so I didn’t think much of it. But as the tragedy of my own life crashed me into a cement wall, I began to see things in Misty and hear things in her songs that made me believe that whoever was keeping her, had kept her beyond her graduation day. The rest of the story is simple…we talked, went out for a sandwich, felt the magnetic attraction intensify—well, I don’t want to hurt you anymore than you will be—”
“—you are right!” Edie Clason interrupted. “But I will fight you every moment. What if she becomes wis child from a careless liaison wis you? What if you two-time her wis someone—like the buxomly young tsing you were wis at ze La Monica?”
“That’s life, lady, it kind of gets under your skin after a while, leaves you with a restless itch that something isn’t quite right. So you spend the rest of it trying to fit together pieces of dreams, things you want to make right. But it never works out quite the way you planned. So you grab what happiness you can along the way. Isn’t that what you did? Didn’t you take a gorgeous young doll like Misty and groom her for yourself—and then break her in as your lover so no man could ever have her?”
She had tears in her eyes. “You are gauche, vulgaire—and cruel! What gave you ze right to break up a happy couple? Why did you not leave well enough alone? Fate would come in its time…not you—”
“—I am Fate, Mademoiselle, the catalyst in the mix, the guy who came along and disturbed the status quo. That’s part of who I am in this world. You can’t stop the world from turning, lady.”
She took out a cigarette from a side pocket. I lit it for her. “No, we cannot stop ze world from turning. So…at fifty we realize we cannot compete any longer wis twenty-seven.” Then she looked up into my eyes, not with malice, but a pleading silent voice that begged me, ‘Please don’t take my happiness away!’ “But I must hear ze intention from Misty’s lips. So far she has said nozing.”
“That’s between the two of you.”
She glanced down the hallway to the sleeping boy. “What do you intend to do wis him?”
“Bring him down to the orphanage in a couple of days. What the hell else can a restless, short-lived gumshoe do?”
“You can give him to me. Let me take him home. I ‘ave no children. When I was very young, I wanted a boy and a girl. I promise I will take ‘im to ze authorities. But if I truly like ze boy, I will ask to be his surrogate Mama. Zat would be nice in my older age…”
“That’s swell of you, Edie Clason. Okay, it’s a deal. I’ll tell him. I’m sure you have a better place for him to sleep than my dirty, cold floor.”
“Mon Dieu! Considerably, Mr. Denning. He will sleep in a nice bed and eat some of my French bread and onion soup.”
It felt awkward getting up. I wanted to reach across the table and shake her hand. But I didn’t. Neither did she. Instead, I thanked her and left Dickie Overton fast asleep on the floor of the Chateau Briand Club…to face his new fate.
It was getting on to midnight when I walked into the La Monica Ballroom. Misty had just begun singing. She looked so great on that stage bathed in the warm spotlight that I wanted to kidnap her off the platform, shove her in back of the curtain and take her right there! I don’t know what it was about the babe, but she got feelings going on in my male member that I hadn’t experienced in a while.
When she finished to tumultuous applause, she smiled, bowed to the audience and came off the stage, looking for me. She found me at the bar nursing a honeyed whiskey in a snifter of boiling water. I loved to smell the aromatic essence steam out of the glass. I could tell she was nervous. “There you are!” she pronounced, coming right to my lips and planting a warm, wet kiss on them. “I w
as worried. You’re late—but you said you’d be. So…how was it with Edie?”
“Hiya, babe. She just became a proud mother,” I laughed.
“What?” she asked in a perplexed tone.
“A young boy came meandering into my office today—the kid had been abandoned. I was stuck with him so I took him to Edie’s smoky den where he proceeded to fall asleep in the hallway. Well, she took a shine to him and wanted to take him home and care for him before she went to the authorities.”
Misty nodded her head in a knowing way. “That’s just like Edie. She always wanted children. A boy, you say? Hmmm…I think that’s a good thing for her, Cable, maybe even healing for her.”
“That’s kind of how I saw it.”
“So? What did she have to say?”
“You didn’t tell me she sang with her heart and soul. Her rendition of something called Marée Basse La Mer made me cry, along with everyone else in the damn joint.”
“Oh, yes…that song is her life signature. I’m glad you heard her. No one I ever listened to has even a finger-full of the emotion she’s capable of.”
“I’ll second that. Anyway, she’s convinced I’m not good for you. That you might get pregnant in a careless moment with me or that someday I might leave you—”
“—will you? And if I carried your child? Would you still leave me when the next woman lures you back into your old life style?”
“I don’t know. I can’t answer that, doll. Who can? Can you?”
“No, I guess. For all I know, someone else could walk into the club and sweep me off my feet. Maybe someone who isn’t as carefree with his life on the edge of danger all the time might come along. I don’t know if I could live with that terrible sense of danger hanging around us all the time.”
“Well, you’d better make up your mind pronto, kid. Time’s a ticking away for both of us.”
She looked into my eyes and kissed my nose. “My womanhood is still panting for you, Mister—so I guess that’s a ‘yes.’ What can I lose except you and my heart?”
I laughed. “Now you’re being realistic. Good…that’s life on the other side of the eight-to-six grind of nothingness and boredom.”
Love Me or Kill Me Page 32
