“What the hell’s the matter with you, Frankie? You lost your marbles?”
“Okay, okay,” Frankie said. “I ask for information and you give me lip. You going to tell me where Tonty’s anchored, or aren’t you?”
Nick shrugged. “All right, sucker. It’s your lettuce. Over on Third Street. Upstairs over the old Bonfile garage.”
Frankie dropped a skin on the bar and went out. Between Third and Fourth, he navigated a narrow, cluttered alley to the rear of the Bonfile garage and climbed a flight of iron, exterior stairs to a plank door that was locked. He pounded on the door with the meaty heel of his fist and got the response of a crack with an eye and a voice behind it.
The voice said, “Hello, Frankie. What the hell you doing here?”
“This where Tonty’s anchored?”
“That’s right.”
“Then what the hell you think I’m doing here? You want me to spell it out for you?”
The crack widened to reveal a flat face split in a grin between thick ears. “My, my. We’re riding high tonight, ain’t we?”
“You want my money or not?”
The crack spread still wider, and the grinning gorilla shuffled back out of it. “Sure, Frankie, sure. Every little bit helps.”
Frankie went in past the gorilla and down the long cement-floored room to the craps table. It was still early, and the big stuff wasn’t moving yet. Just right for forty bucks. Or thirty-nine, deducting a double shot.
Frankie got his belly against the edge of the table and laid a fast side bet that the point would come.
It came.
He laid three more in a hurry, betting the accumulation and mixing them pro and con without thinking much about it.
The points came or not, just as Frankie bet them.
When the dice came around to him, he was fat, and he laid the bundle. He tossed a seven, made his point twice, and tossed another seven, letting the bundle grow. Then, playing a hunch without benefit of thought, he drew most of the bundle off the table.
He crapped out and passed the dice.
Across the table, Joe Tonty’s face was a slab of gray rock. His eyes flicked over Frankie, and his shoulders twitched in a shrug.
“Your luck’s running, Frankie. You better ride it.”
“Sure,” Frankie said. “I’ll ride.”
It kept running for two hours, and Frankie rode it all the way. When he finally had a sudden flat feeling, a kind of interior collapse, he pulled out. Not that he felt his luck had quit running for keeps. Just resting. Just taking a breather. He descended the iron steps into the alley and crossed over to Market for a nightcap at Nick’s. A little later, in the living room of the apartment, he counted eight grand. It was hard to believe, little Frankie with eight big grand all at once and all his own. Not even any withholding tax.
He was shaken again by the silent delirium that was becoming an integral element of his chronic mood, and he went over to the closet and opened the door, looking up at the old man in his urn.
“Thanks, Pop,” he said. “Thanks.”
* * *
He slept soundly and got up about noon. After a hearty lunch, he went to the track with the eight grand in his pocket. He was in time for the second race, and he checked the entries. But he didn’t feel anything, so he let it go.
Checking the entries in the third, he still didn’t get any nudge. Something seemed to be getting in the way, coming between him and his luck. Maybe, he realized suddenly, it was the warm pressure of a long flank against his.
He turned, looking into brown eyes that were as warm and the touch of flank. Under the eyes there was a flash of white in a margin of red, and above them, a heavy sheen of pale yellow with streaks of off-white running through it. At first, Frankie thought she’d just been sloppy with a dye job, but then he saw that the two-toned effect was natural.
“Crowded, isn’t it?” she said.
Frankie grinned. “I like crowds.”
He was trying to think of what the hair reminded him of when he got the nudge. His eyes popped down to the program in his hands and back up to the dame. Inside, he’d gone breathless and tense, the way a guy does when he’s on the verge of something big.
“What’s your name, baby?”
The red and white smile flashed again. “Call me Taffy. Because of my hair, you see.”
He saw, all right. He saw a hell of a lot more than she thought he did. He saw number four in the third, and the name was Taffy Candy. One would bring ten if Taffy won, and even Frankie, who was no mental giant, could add another cipher to eight thousand and read the result.
Don’t give yourself time to think, that was the trick. If you start thinking, you start figuring odds and consequences, and you’re a dead duck. He stood up and slapped the program against his leg.
“Hold a spot for me, baby. If I’m on the beam, it’ll be a big day for you and me and a horse.”
He hit the window just before closing time and laid the eight grand on Taffy’s nose. At the rail of the track, he watched the horses run, and he wasn’t surprised, not even excited, when Taffy came in by the nose that had his eight grand on it. It was astonishing how quickly he was becoming accustomed to good fortune. He was already anticipating the breaks as if he’d had them forever. As if they were a natural right.
Like that girl in the stands, for instance. The girl who called herself Taffy. Standing there by the rail, he thought with glandular stirrings of the warm pressure of flank, the strangely alluring two-toned pastel hair, the brown eyes and scarlet smile. A few days ago, he wouldn’t have given himself a chance with a dame like that. He’d have taken it out in thinking. But now it was different. Luck and a few grand made a hell of a difference. The difference between thinking and acting.
With eight times ten in his pocket, he went back to the stands. Climbing up to her level with his eyes full of nylon, he grinned and said, “We all came in, baby, you and me and the horse. Let’s move out of here.”
She strained a mocking look through incredible lashes. “I’ve already got a date, honey. I’m supposed to meet a guy here.”
“To hell with him.”
Her eyebrows arched their plucked backs, and a practiced tease showed through the lashes. “What makes you think I’d just walk off with you, mister?”
Frankie dug into his pocket for enough green to make an impression. The bills were crisp. They made small ticking sounds when he flipped them with a thumb nail.
“This, maybe,” he said.
She eyed the persuasion and stood up. “That’s good thinking, honey,” she said.
* * *
A long time and a lot of places later, Frankie awoke to the gray light that filtered into his shabby apartment. It was depressing, he thought, to awake in a dump like this. It was something that had to be changed.
“Look, baby,” he said. “Today we shop for another place. A big place uptown. Carpets up to your knees, foam rubber stuff, the works. How about it, baby?”
Beside him, Taffy pressed closer, her lips moving against his naked shoulder with a sleepy animal purr of contentment.
So that day they rented the uptown place, and moved in, and a couple months later Frankie bought the Circle Club.
The club was a nice little spot tucked into a so-so block just outside the perimeter of the big-time glitter area. It was a good location for a brisk trade with the right guy handling it. The current owner was being pressed for the payment of debts by parties who didn’t like waiting, and Frankie bought him out for a song.
It was a swell break. Just one more in a long line. Frankie shot a wad on fancy trimmings, and booked a combination that could really jump. With the combo there was a sleek canary who had something for the eyes as well as the ears. The food and the liquor were fair, which is all anyone expects in a night spot, and up to the time of Linda Lee, business was good.
After Linda Lee, business was more than good. It was booming. The word always goes out on a gal like Linda. The guys come
in with their dames, and after they’ve had the quota of looking that the tariff buys, they go someplace and turn off the lights and pretend that the dames are Linda.
Linda Lee wasn’t her real name, of course, but it suited her looks and her business. Ostensibly, the business was dancing. Actually, it was taking off her clothes. In Linda’s case, that was sufficient. As for the looks, they were Linda’s, and they were something. Dusky skin and eyes on the slant. Black hair with blue highlights, soft and shining, brushing her shoulders and slashing across her forehead in bangs above perfect unplucked brows. A lithe, vibrant body with an upswept effect that a guy couldn’t believe from seeing and so had to keep coming back for another look to convince himself.
She sent Frankie. At first, the day she came into his office at the Circle Club looking for a job, he didn’t see anything but a looker in a town that was littered with them. That was when she still had her clothes on.
He rocked back in his swivel and stared across his desk at her through the thin, lifting smoke from his cigarette.
“You a dancer, you say?”
“Yes.”
“A good one.”
“Not very.”
That surprised Frankie. He took his cigarette out of his mouth and let his eyes make a brief tour of her points of interest.
“No? What else you got that a guy would pay to see?”
She showed him what she had. Frankie sat there watching her emerge slowly from her clothes, and the small office got steadily smaller, so hot that it was almost suffocating. Frankie’s knitted tie was hemp instead of silk, and the knot was a hangman’s knot, cutting deeply into his throat until he was breathing in labored gasps. The palms of his hands dripped salty water. His whole body was wet with sweat.
When he was able to speak, he said, “Who the hell’s going to care about the dancing? Can you start tonight?”
She could and did. And so did Frankie. For a guy with a temperature as high as his, he played it pretty cool. He kept the pressure on her, all right, but he didn’t force it. Not that he was too good for it. It just wasn’t practical. The threat of being fired doesn’t mean much to a gal with a dozen other places to go. By the time Frankie was desperate enough for threats, he was having to raise her pay every second week to hang on to her.
She liked him, though. He knew damned well she liked him. He could tell by the way the heat came up in her slanted eyes when she looked at him. He could tell by the way her hands sometimes reached out for him, touching him lightly, straying with brief abandon. But she was like mercury. He couldn’t hold her when he reached back.
* * *
The night he decided to try mink, he came into the club late, just as Linda was moving onto the small circular floor in a blue spot. He stood for a minute against the wall, holding the long cardboard box under his arm, watching the emerging dusky body, his pulse matching the tropical tempo of drums in the darkness. Before the act was over, he moved on around the edge of the floor and back to the door of Linda’s room.
Inside, he lay the box on the dressing table and sat down. Waiting, he could hear faintly the crescendo of drums and muted brass that indicated Linda’s exit. The sound of her footsteps in the hall was lost in the surge of applause that continued long after she had left the floor.
She closed the door behind her and stood leaning against it, head back and eyes shining, her breasts rising and falling in deep, rhythmic breathing. Light and shadow stressed the convexities and hollows of her body.
“Hello, Frankie,” she said. “Nice surprise.”
He stood up, pulses hammering. “Nicer than you think, baby. I’ve brought you something.”
She saw the box behind him on the dressing table and moved toward it, flat muscles rippling with silken smoothness beneath dusky skin. Her exclamation was like a delighted child’s.
“Tell me what it is.”
“Open it, baby.”
Her fingers worked deftly at the knot of the cord, lifted the top of the box away. Without speaking, she shook out the luxurious fur coat, slipped into it and hugged it around her body. She stood entranced, her back to Frankie, looking at her reflection in the dim depths of the mirror.
Closing in behind her, he took her shoulders in his hands. Capturing the hands in hers, she pulled them around her body and under the coat. Her head fell back onto his shoulder. Her breath sighed through parted lips. He could feel in his hands the vibrations of her shivering flesh.
She said sleepily, “You’re a sweet guy, Frankie. A lucky guy, too. You’re going places. Too bad I can’t go along.”
“Why not, baby? Why not go along?”
Her head rolled on his shoulder, her lips burning his neck. “Look, Frankie. When I go for a ride, I go first-class. No cheap tourist accommodations for Linda.”
“I don’t get you, baby. You call mink cheap?”
“It’s not the mink. It’s being second. It’s the idea of taking what’s left over.”
“You mean Taffy?”
She closed her eyes and said nothing, and Frankie laughed softly. “Taffy’s expendable, baby. Strictly expendable.”
“Just like that? Maybe she won’t let go.”
“How the hell can she help it?”
“She’s legal. That always helps.”
“Married? You think Taffy and I are married?” He laughed again, his shoulders shaking with it. “Taffy and I are temporary, baby. I never figure it any other way. Nothing on paper. All off the record. We last just as long as I want us to.”
She twisted against him, her arms coming up around his neck. Her breath was in his mouth.
“How long, Frankie? How long do you want?”
His hand moved down the soft curve of her spine, drawing her in. He said hoarsely, “As far as Taffy’s concerned, I quit wanting when I saw you. Tonight I’ll make it official.”
She put her mouth over his, and he felt the hot flicking of her tongue. Then she pushed away violently, staggering back against the dressing table. The mink hung open from her shoulders.
“Afterward, Frankie,” she whispered. “Afterward.”
He stood there blind, everything dissolved in shimmering waves of heat. At last, sight returning, he laughed shakily and moved to the door. Hand on the knob, he looked back at her.
“Like you say, baby—afterward.”
* * *
He went out into the hall and through the rear door into the alley. There was a small area back there in which he kept his convertible Caddy tucked away. Long, sleek, ice-blue and glittering chrome. A long way from the old Plymouth.
Behind the wheel, sending the big machine singing through the streets, he felt the tremendous uplift that comes to a man who approaches a crisis with assurance of triumph. His emotional drive was in harmony with the leashed power of the Caddy’s throbbing engine. Wearing his new personality, he could hardly remember the old Frankie. It was impossible to believe that he had once, not long ago, been driven by shame to a longing for death. Life was good. All it required was luck and guts. With luck and guts, a guy could do anything. A guy could live forever.
At the uptown apartment house, he ascended in the swift, whispering elevator and let himself into his living room with the key he carried. The living room itself was dark, but light sliced into the darkness from the partially open door of the bedroom. Silently, he crossed the carpet that wasn’t actually quite up to his knees and pushed the bedroom door all the way open.
Taffy was reading in bed. Her sheer nylon gown kept nothing hidden, but what it showed was nothing Frankie hadn’t seen before, and he was tired of it. He stood for a moment looking at her, wondering what would be the best way to do it. The direct way, he decided. The tough way. Get it over with, and to hell with it.
From the bed, Taffy said, “Hi, honey. You’re early tonight.”
Without answering, Frankie walked over to the closet and slammed back one of the sliding panels. He dragged a cowhide overnight bag off a shelf and carried it to the bed. Snapping the
locks, he spread the bag open.
Taffy sat up straighter against her silk pillows, two small spots of color burning suddenly over her cheek bones. “What’s up, Frankie? You going someplace?”
He went to a chest of drawers, returned with pajamas and a clean shirt. “That ought to be obvious. As a matter of fact, I’m going to a hotel.”
“Why, Frankie? What’s the idea?”
He looked down at her, feeling the strong emotional drive. “The idea is that we’re through, baby. Finished. I’m moving out.”
Her breath whistled in a sharp sucking inhalation, and she swung out of bed in a fragile nylon mist. Her hands clutched at him.
“No, Frankie! Not like this. Not after all the luck I’ve brought you.”
He laughed brutally, remembering the old man. “It wasn’t you who brought me luck, baby. It was someone else. That’s something you’ll never know anything about.”
He turned, heading for the chest again, and she grabbed his arm, jerking. He spun with the force of the jerk, smashing his backhand across her mouth. She staggered off until the underside of her knees caught on the bed and held her steady. A bright drop of blood formed on her lower lip and dropped onto her chin. A whimper of pain crawled out of her throat.
“Why, Frankie? Just tell me why.”
He shrugged. “A guy grows. A guy goes on to something better. That’s just the way it is, baby.”
“It’s more than that. It’s a lot bigger than that. You think I’ve been two-timing you, Frankie?”
He repeated his brutal laugh. “Two-timing me? I’ll tell you something, baby. I wouldn’t give a damn if you were sleeping with every punk in town. That’s how much I care.” He paused, savoring sadism, finding it pleasant. “You want it straight, baby? It’s just that I’m sick of you. I’m sick to my guts with the sight of you. That clear enough?”
She came back to him, slowly, lifting her arms like a supplicant. He waited until she was close enough, then he hit her across the mouth again.
Turning his back, he returned to the chest and got the rest of the articles he needed. Just a few things. Enough for the night and tomorrow. In the morning he’d send someone around to clean things out.
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