by Jeff Povey
Betty Grable stamps the book of a nerdy-looking fifteen-year-old, watches him blush as their eyes meet for a moment, and then almost collapses in a heap when I walk up to her with a copy of a book entitled Paddle Steamers—The Proud Years. Betty’s jaw drops, and she takes an involuntary and nervous step backward. I say nothing, just offer a smile, present my book, and watch as she swipes my library card through her machine. I then walk off to wait for closing time.
I catch up with Betty as she crosses the street to board a bus and jump on in near perfect synchronization with her. Although she is flustered at the sight of me, I have the feeling she knew I’d be waiting for her.
Her eyes blink up at me from behind her large pink glasses. For a second, I remember her wiping away tears of laughter with part of a tablecloth, and I know I have chosen to speak to her purely on account of that. I am also experiencing an undeniable feeling of excitement whenever I see her, and this is the first time I have felt this way about anyone in years.
Betty speaks first, looking at me shyly from beneath hooded eyes.
“Douglas.”
I smile, trying my best to look warm and approachable.
“Betty.”
“Did you, uh . . . Did you come in the library by accident?”
Betty is wary but also reveals an alertness that I didn’t know she possessed. She’s just been too shy to make much of an impact at the Club.
“Yeah. An accident. Pure and simple.” I have to lie because I don’t want her panicking. If she does, then I’m not going to get through to her.
“Knew it must’ve been that. You live round here, then?”
“Pretty close.”
We fall silent for a moment, and I want Betty to think that this meeting is definitely an accident by stretching it out to an embarrassed and altogether stupefying silence. Like I haven’t got a thought in my head or any talent for conversation. Just a stupid weak grin.
I smile stupidly at her for what seems like hours, and I can see she is uncomfortable with this. It forces her to break the cloying muteness.
“I had to ask . . . just to make sure.”
I nod but keep on grinning—playing the “stupid grin ruse” to perfection.
“I’m just a little jumpy right now. Especially since William Holden died. Plus there’s still no word on Tallulah.” Betty keeps talking, through sheer nerves more than anything else. “I know I’m still new to the Club, but it’s kinda scary.”
“It’s a scary world.” I remember the television psychiatrist saying this once, and uttering it works like a magic spell; suddenly I am back in the land of the supreme conversationalist. “Though I’ll be the first to admit I never liked her. Do you know, she never paid her full share of the check at the end of the night?” By my calculations, Tallulah owes the Club nearly $90 all told.
Betty seems a little stunned by this, and I quickly try to make up for it by pretending it was a joke and breaking into the sort of laughter you hear in operas. Loud, deep, and tuneful. Ho-ho-ho.
“Joke!”
Though I have to admit, if there’s one thing I don’t like, it’s a tightwad.
I watch Betty smile weakly, and I notice her dimples, big gouges running through what would be a perfect complexion if she bothered to sign up for an intensive facial every second month or so. She looks up at me with timid eyes.
“Tell me if you think I’m crazy, but do you think we’re in danger, Douglas?”
I try to look confused, as if I don’t follow her. “Danger?”
“Well, it’s just that I know a few things. . . .” Betty gets a slight blush in her cheeks.
My veins freeze inside me.
Betty starts to say more but loses her nerve and turns away with a small tut. “Forget it. I’m just being paranoid.”
I have to keep her on track.
I play it casual, cool. “Know what things?” My predicament with Agent Wade is suddenly becoming a thing of the past. It’s looking as though I might have to kill Betty before I can kill Richard.
She shrugs, thinks things over, then lowers her eyes as she speaks. “It’s actually Tony’s theory. He said not to tell anyone . . . but God, Douglas, I am so spooked.”
I stop.
Tony?
Did she just say Tony?
I don’t want to ask, but I have to.
“Tony as in . . . ?”
“Yeah. Tony Curtis. The Club chairman. My brother.”
I could easily fall out of my seat at this point and can’t hide my stunned look. Betty offers another nervy little shrug. “We both had the same mother.” And I guess that explains what needs to be explained. “You won’t tell anyone, will you?”
“Of course not.” I know what Tony does, and I am not going to tell anyone a single thing. “What, uh . . . what’s his theory?”
“There’s a rat in the Club.” The phrase doesn’t belong to Betty, but I can see it erupting from belching Tony Curtis’s big fat mouth.
“A rat?” If Betty can’t hear my now thudding heart, or see my stomach flipping over, then she must be both deaf and blind.
“He thinks someone at the Club is out to get us.” The words smash against my temples, fall back, then crash again at my now throbbing head. “He’s been investigating, and uh . . . well. He told me not to tell a soul, but he’s been doing a lot of backtracking and managed to get hold of some details.”
I’m being attacked by wave upon wave of nausea. I grip the handrail as tight as I can, hanging on for sweet dear life as the world does backflips in front of me. My voice has become a miserable little William Holden whisper.
“Details? What details?”
“I can’t say. Really I can’t. Tony was very adamant about keeping it a secret for now.”
I’m pretty positive I haven’t lost my voice altogether, but the sudden pressure on my larynx is making it a real struggle to get my words out. “Please. I’d like to hear it.” I clear my throat, cough up phlegm, and spit it quickly out of the window. I hit a workman. “After all, I am Club secretary . . . and hell, Tony does think an awful lot of me.”
Betty gives me a big frown. “Really?”
I decide to let it go; there are more important things to deal with here. “These, uh, details . . . ?”
Betty thinks it over for a long moment, and if she doesn’t start talking soon, I’m going to have to take her somewhere quiet and beat the truth out of her. Finally she gives a vague shrug. “I guess it should be okay to tell you. Tony said the killer had to be someone really very clever, so . . .”
Betty smiles awkwardly rather than finish her sentence, and I have this sudden and overwhelming desire to smear her grin all over the sidewalk.
“He contacted a lot of police departments across the country, managed to get a few photos faxed over from morgues, and, uh . . . well. It seems like a lot of the members who supposedly quit the Club, uh . . .” My heart is now going like a jackhammer. “Well . . . they were murdered.”
There is a huge pause, and then for some reason my machine-gun laugh fires out and I only just refrain from slapping my thigh like an old-time vaudevillian.
“Is this some kind of sick joke?” I say this sarcastically and without a hint of integrity. “Jesus, what’s your brother on? Jeez . . . that’s funny. Sick but funny.”
I know I am overdoing this, and I truly hope to God Betty doesn’t tell Tony about this conversation. But I can’t seem to help myself.
Now I do slap my thigh like an old-time vaudevillian. “That’s the funniest thing I’ve ever heard . . . the absolute funniest thing.” Another slap. Another big opera ho-ho-ho.
“I think he’s on to something.” She says this calmly, as if my laughing and thigh slapping hadn’t happened. She cuts right through me with her simplicity. I look at her, swallow, straighten up, assume a more serious tone.
“You do?”
Betty looks at me with pale and ominous features. “Someone’s out to kill us, Douglas. All of us.”
&nbs
p; I fall silent, try to gather my thoughts, but Betty’s simple argument is grabbing and twisting at my insides. Reaching in and yanking handfuls of intestines this way and that.
I have to force my words past the rising bile smothering the back of my throat. “Does he . . . uh, have anyone particular in mind?”
Betty and I are seated in a little cafeteria; it’s quiet and we are over by the window, life dragging its weary, rain-sodden self past us outside. I am feeling only slightly less anxious, but as the moments tick by I realize that I’m going to need to find a really clever way out of this. What I have to do for now is just bide my time and go with the flow. I get a little distracted by the smell of a dog and wonder if the cafeteria serves animals as well. I look around for a sign of one but don’t see any dog bowls or poop-a-scoops.
I look back at Betty, try to collect my thoughts, and give her the most earnest look I can muster. “I love Tony.”
Betty looks up, surprised.
I try to beat her to her next obvious conclusion. “Well, not love in the strict valentine sense, but he really is a helluva guy.”
Betty doesn’t bother replying, and I feel I have to fill the gaping silence that is stretching out between us. “I think he is the best chairman we have ever had. The absolute best. And you can tell him that from me.”
Betty watches the raindrops snaking down the window for a long moment, lost in thought, and then finally looks round at me.
“Is it a medical thing? Your height?”
I am not sure how to respond to this. Betty must see that I look a little on the crestfallen side, and she offers what she thinks is a warm look. “Working in a library means you get to read about these things.”
I nod slowly and find that my lips feel tight and bloodless for some reason.
“There was a fourteen-year-old at the Club. Shirley Temple. And she was real small. Tiny compared to me. That was definitely a medical thing.”
“Fourteen? Really? How frightening.”
“It was. She couldn’t get served.”
“What happened to her?” Betty gives me a fearful look. “You don’t think she got killed, do you?”
“She got herself arrested.” The spoiled little brat used to irritate the hell out of me until she stupidly went and got caught. “She’s incarcerated and kept sedated somewhere. Won’t be seen again till she’s like eighty years old. Sure like to see her try and kill someone then.”
A pretty waitress who isn’t deaf brings over a large cappuccino for Betty and a double espresso for me. Earlier, I had jokingly asked for a quadruple espresso, and the waitress thought about it for a second before telling me they didn’t stock cups that big. I know it was a silly joke, and probably one she hears every day of her life, but she could have at least smiled. After all, I was trying hard to put Betty at ease.
Betty sips at her cappuccino and gets a small, browny white foam mustache for her trouble. I want to reach over and wipe it off but instead spend the next minute trying not to look at it.
“So Tony Curtis is your brother. I can’t see much of a resemblance.”
“He’s a half-brother.”
“And half-bastard.” I leap in like there’s no tomorrow with this one. I find it hysterically funny but swallow my laughter when I see Betty frowning at me. “Sorry. It’s an old joke. I didn’t make it up, I was just repeating it.” I am now hoping that Betty likes nervous, edgy men because this is definitely what I have turned into. I grab a napkin and dab her top lip with it before either of us knows where we are. She arches her neck and head back, trying to escape the napkin, but I am determined to wipe her mouth clean and clamp the back of her neck tightly with one hand while I rub her top lip.
“You’ve got foam . . . cappuccino foam . . . Look. See it? There. Look.” I thrust the napkin under her nose, and she peers down at the napkin, starts nodding, offering a weak smile.
“Uh, yeah . . . I see it. Thanks. Thank you.”
I’m hyped up, and the espresso isn’t helping. I pop a raw cane sugar cube into my mouth, start crunching it loudly.
“You know, I never said this earlier, and maybe I should have, and then again maybe I was right to hold back—but can I trust you, Betty?”
“Trust me?” I’m now trying to look at Betty with big doglike eyes, as I think this might be the thing that she likes in a man. She likes him to look at her like a dog. This is just a wild guess on my part, but I am sure I can smell dog on her.
“You told me all that stuff about Tony, so I guess I can.”
Betty starts to look alarmed. “What is it, Douglas?”
“I’m in real big trouble. Really big stuff. You know it’s, uh . . . it’s total shit that I’m in. Total and utter shit.” I reach for another sugar cube, crunch hard on it.
“What sort of trouble?”
I continue crunching loudly. “There’s this guy. He’s making my life hell.”
“What guy’s this?” Betty’s voice is soft, warm.
“He’s just this . . . this guy. He won’t leave me alone.”
“Why not?”
“He just won’t.”
Some people crumble under pressure; me, I guess I just rise to the occasion. All of my previous anxiety is dropping off me like leaves from a dying tree. I’ve got the plan to end all plans.
I am a genius.
“Douglas . . .” I find that I am looking straight into Betty’s warm, sparkling eyes and figure I could sit here forever if she asked me to. “Tell me why he won’t leave you alone.”
“Uh . . . I can’t.”
“Douglas, please. Just tell me.”
I pause, feel the sweet residue of the sugar lumps eating into my teeth. Maybe I will need dentures one day—and I know that when I do, I won’t be fooled into buying that obnoxious brand of denture paste that Carole Lombard used.
“This, uh, guy—he knows.”
“Knows what?”
“He knows what I do.”
Betty knows what I do, or at least what I lie to the Club about doing.
“Can’t you just, uh . . . You know . . .”
I shake my head, slowly, painfully. A heavy head on a weak neck.
“Why not?”
“He’s got pictures.”
“Of you?” I nod. “Doing . . . ?” I nod again. Then she nods. Slowly. My big dog eyes peer out at her from under heavy dog eyelids. “This, uh . . . this explains a lot. About your, uh, odd behavior. . . .” I nod again, secretly pleased that my “act” is working so well.
“Have you told anyone else about this?”
“Only you. And I don’t even know why, to tell the truth.”
“This is awful, Douglas. As if we haven’t got enough problems. Is there anything I can do to help?”
Yeah, you can kill Agent Wade for me.
“This is my problem. I should sort it out.”
“I take it he’s after money?”
“Yeah. Money. That’s it. Money that I don’t have.”
“Let me think about this. . . .”
“Please. I don’t want to involve anyone else.”
“Look, Douglas, there’s a way around this, there always is. Right now you’re too worked up, too emotional. Me? I’ve got a clear run on it. I could help you.”
“But why would you want to?”
“Because . . . because I just do. I don’t know why, but I happen to find this sort of thing to be totally unfair. You shouldn’t be subjected to this. Not someone in your state.” What state? What’s she saying here? “You’re probably a very nice guy underneath it all.”
I look at Betty and can’t believe I’m talking to a serial killer. All I can see sitting before me is a good woman with soft white skin and big glasses. The sort of girl I would be proud to take as my wife.
“You’re a very kind woman, Betty. An angel.”
“I don’t know about that, Douglas. . . .”
“You are, though, Betty. The kindest woman I’ve ever met.”
Betty blushe
s, shifts in her seat, looks away for a moment. I take this opportunity to lean forward and give Betty a surreptitious sniff, which I don’t think she spots.
“Labrador, am I right?”
“Sorry?”
“You own a dog. I’m guessing Labrador.” I breathe in as if I’m inhaling the very best scent money can buy.
Betty looks uncomfortable. “I don’t own a dog.”
“You don’t?”
“Are you saying I smell of dog?”
I hesitate a moment, then quickly turn to a pretty but very thin woman drinking an espresso behind me. “Labrador, right?”
I turn back to Betty before the thin woman can respond.
“Let’s get out of here. It’s like being in a kennel.”
WADING IN
AGENT WADE flicks cigarette ash onto my living room carpet and doesn’t seem to care. He’s watching an afternoon matinee with John Wayne heroically killing men in wide-brimmed hats. He is only half concentrating on the movie because every now and then he hits a typewriter key hard with his right index finger, as if punctuating his anger.
“Why did you go and see Betsy Grable?”
“Betty.”
“Whatever. Why did you go and see her, Douglas?” He bangs a couple of keys. I hadn’t for a moment thought that Agent Wade would be following my every move. The revelation has made me feel very vulnerable—and horribly invaded.
It reminds me of when he first squeezed my shoulder at the urinal, and a shiver runs through me.
“I didn’t go and see her. It was just a coincidence. I wanted a book.”
Agent Wade doesn’t believe a word of it. “You wanted a book?” He mockingly repeats the words in a slow, southern-style drawl. I don’t know why because I don’t speak like that. “I thought I told you Richard was next?”
“You did?”
“Look at the list. He’s next.”
“Yeah . . . I know that.”
I can’t shake Agent Wade’s unblinking eyes as he stares straight into me. “So what were you and Betsy talking about? You looked pretty cozy in that little café.”
