by Ron Goulart
“I don’t think so. It’s been my experience that advertising agencies never forget. So it—”
“Ah, what is this vision of beauty I see before me?” Groucho had turned and was looking back toward the partition.
Turning, I saw that Rita Hayworth, a pretty dark-haired young woman, had stepped through the door and was approaching us.
Groucho went bounding over and took her hand. “Margarita, my dear,” he said, kissing the hand with considerable enthusiasm. “It’s a thrill to encounter you again and a distinct honor to be in the same show with you.”
“Thank you, Mr. Marx,” she said in a shy voice.
“Is your dear father lurking about anywhere?”
“He’s out in the audience,” she answered. “The dressing rooms are so small, he couldn’t join me in mine.”
“What a pity. Well, fear not, my child, I’ll look after you like a doting parent,” he promised. “Ah, and here comes Pollyanna now. As soon as we sweep the vegetables off the stage, I’ll introduce you to your adoring audience.”
“That would be nice, Mr. Marx.” She withdrew her hand from his grip.
Polly ran up to Groucho and hugged him. “We were a hit, Groucho,” she said, laughing.
“You were a hit, kiddo. I’m merely a bedraggled mountebank, whatever that is.”
Polly hugged me, then headed for her dressing room.
Groucho spoke close to my ear. “After I introduce this Cansino lass,” he said in a whisper, “I’m going to watch her act. Then I’ll join her and do my famous tango number with her.”
“She may not want you intruding on the act.”
“Nonsense, there hasn’t been a tango dancer like me since Valentino,” he said. “Hang around or come back after the encores and we can chat about your senseless worries concerning our show, Rollo.”
“I’ll wander around the park for a while.”
He nodded, patted Rita Hayworth on her left buttock and went trotting out on the stage to introduce her.
She shook her head, sighing. “There’s nobody else like him.”
“Not on this continent, though they claim to have found one in the wilds of Australia.” I wished her luck and eased my way out through a back flap in the tent.
There was a shutdown peanut wagon sitting on the grass just outside the tent. Two large guys in dark overcoats and gray hats were standing near it. The nearest concessions were closed and there were no other people in this stretch of the amusement park.
The larger of the two men grinned at me. “You’re Frank Denby,” he said.
Since it wasn’t a question, I didn’t feel obliged to answer. “And you?”
“Someone wants to talk with you, Frank,” he informed me.
“Can he wait?” I pointed a thumb at the tent. “I’m supposed to stay close to the entertainment.”
The other man had his right hand in his overcoat pocket. “He wants to see you right now,” he explained. “We’ll take you to him.”
They took me to him.
Twenty-five
He was handsome but short.
“I’m Jack Cortez,” he said and held out his hand.
Since there were two large guys in dark overcoats and gray hats standing near him with their right hands in their coat pockets and since I had a similar escort, being cordial seemed to be the thing to do.
“Pleased to me you.” I shook the gangster’s hand.
“I understand you know Vince Salermo.”
“A little. Visited his gambling ship last year.”
We were gathered in front of the cyclone fence that guarded the entrance to the Devil’s Express Roller Coaster. A crudely lettered sign had been taped to the gate, explaining OUT OF ORDER.
On the other side of the gate, however, a forlorn-looking fat man in coveralls was standing uneasily on the control platform with a large man in a dark overcoat and gray hat close beside him. The string of bright-lit red and gold cars sat on the tracks next to the boarding platform and looked ready to go roaring over the rising and falling course.
Scatterings of the Colonel’s party guests passed a few yards off, but nobody came close enough for me to try to indicate that I was in trouble.
Cortez smiled. “I’ve been wanting to have a nice long talk with you, Frank,” he informed me.
“Tonight, Jack, is not the best time,” I said. “Colonel Mullens expects me to stay close to the tent until—”
“We’ll go for a little ride.”
“A ride?” There I was asking terse questions again.
He pointed at the roller coaster with his thumb. “I’ve loved these damn things ever since I was a kid and went to Coney Island,” he explained. “The gentlemen who run Playland are friends of mine and I arranged to have a special ride tonight. A private trip that I’d like you to join me on, Frank.”
“That’s very thoughtful, Jack.” I glanced up at the trestles that went rising up beyond the platform. “The thing is, I’m not all that fond of roller coasters. For a conversation I’m really at my best on nice solid ground.”
He smiled. “We’ll ride the roller coaster.”
My two men in overcoats guided me to the gate and one of Cortez’s overcoated men opened it wide.
Cortez climbed up to the steps that led to the boarding area. “The third car’s my favorite,” he said over his shoulder. “Is that all right with you, Frank?”
“Could we maybe just sit on the platform here and have our talk?”
My escorts took hold of an arm each and, quite swiftly, got me installed in the front row of seats in the third car.
Cortez settled into the seat beside me. “You’ve got to strap on your safety belt,” he instructed, attaching his. “Otherwise you might go falling out.”
I buckled myself in.
His two bodyguards climbed into the seats behind us. My two remained on the ground.
“Ever ride the Devil’s Express before, Frank?”
“No, Jack. As I mentioned, I don’t much like roller coasters.” I tapped a spot just above my right ear. “It’s a balance thing and—”
“Funny, I thought everybody liked roller coasters.” Leaning back, Cortez gazed up into the night sky. “That wind really cleared things up. Look at all those stars.”
I looked. Already I was, even though the roller coaster cars were sitting still, commencing to feel uneasy in my stomach. “What exactly did you want to talk about?”
“Excuse me a moment.” He waved to the henchman who was overseeing the roller-coaster operator and pointed upward.
The nervous man in coveralls threw a switch, the cars quivered, lurched, and started to climb up the tracks toward the first peak on the route.
Unobtrusively, I caught hold of the edge of the seat on the side away from Cortez. I was already feeling dizzy.
He laughed. “This is just great,” he observed. “Are you a Catholic, Frank?”
“No, but I’d like a Christian burial.”
We were picking up speed, climbing closer to the initial peak. “Relax, Frank, nobody’s going to do you any harm at this time,” he assured me. “I’m a Catholic myself. It may sound strange, considering what you’ve probably heard about me and my reputation, but I was an altar boy in Brooklyn when I was a kid. Celebrated the mass almost every week for three, four years.” He leaned back to study the night sky again.
“I’m not quite getting the drift of this.” I swallowed a few times, trying to get rid of the sour taste that was starting to build up.
“Catholics believe that God gives all of us a vocation soon as we’re born.”
We hit the top with a jolt, hesitated a few seconds, and then went plunging downward.
I had to grit my teeth and concentrate on my inner workings to keep from giving in to a growing impulse to vomit.
Cortez took out a cigarette and lit it with a gold lighter. “For example, what God gifted me with was a vocation to be a businessman. Making a lot of money, that was my calling. I realized that early
and it helped me to follow the right path in life.”
“Um,” I managed to reply without risking opening my mouth.
Cold wind seemed to be pushing at me, trying to yank me clear out of the plummeting car.
He tapped me on the upper arm, causing me to flinch. “You were given a different vocation, Frank.”
We were nearly at the bottom of our first plunge and I became convinced we wouldn’t survive. That instead, all of the bright-painted cars would go flying off into the darkness beyond the lights. Carefully, I closed my eyes and hoped Cortez wouldn’t notice it.
“Your vocation is to be a writer, that’s what God wants you to do. Your calling is to type stories for newspapers and turn out scripts for radio shows.”
My stomach seemed unhappy with its present location and was trying to break clean out of my body. When I opened my eyes again we were rushing up toward the next pinnacle.
“Take Groucho Marx. God wants him to be a funnyman. His mission in life is to make people laugh, at least those people who think he’s funny.”
My digestive system was becoming unhappy about the root beer I’d drunk right before the entertainment started. I opened my mouth, hoping that if I sucked in some gasps of cold air it would calm my stomach.
“It’s everyone’s duty to stick with the assigned vocation. That’s what God expects of us.”
We were at the second peak. The rattling, shrieking drop was even worse than the previous one. I shut my mouth and my eyes.
“What I’m explaining here, Frank, is very simple. We all of us have to stick with what we’re destined to do. You are a writer, Groucho is a comedian.”
Root beer laced with bile came surging up my throat. I closed my mouth again with a biting snap. The stuff collected in my mouth, some of it spilling out over my lower lip.
“Neither one of you is a detective,” said Cortez patiently. “If you keep trying to be detectives, Frank, it’s going against God’s will. Worse, it goes against my wishes. What you have to do, you and Groucho, is to stop messing around with the Benninger kill.”
I intended to reply with, “So you did have something to do with that, huh?”
Instead, which was probably just as well, as soon as I opened my mouth, I vomited. I managed to get my head over the edge of the speeding car just in time.
“Hey, watch that shit,” complained one of the bodyguards behind us.
The other bodyguard just laughed.
My impressions of the rest of the ride, which felt as though it lasted several hours and rushed me up several miles into the cold night and down even deeper below the surface of the Earth, are somewhat hazy. I’m nearly certain I threw up at least once more. Cortez kept lecturing me.
A headache hit me and my bones ceased to feel comfortable inside my flesh.
The ride ended at last, though the roar of it was still strong in my head.
Sometime later I found myself alone, abandoned on the grass by the peanut wagon.
I was eventually able to arrange myself in a standing position. After concentrating, I remembered how to walk and, staggering and swaying some, I went through the rear flap into the tent.
When I reached the back stage area, Polly saw me and came hurrying over to me. “You look awful, Frank,” she said, putting an arm around me.
“That’s the appropriate look,” I told her in a dry, croaky voice. “Could you find Groucho for me?”
She got me arranged on a stool. “You’re going to have to wait a bit,” she said. “He’s back on the stage doing more junk from Gilbert and Sullivan.”
Twenty-six
Groucho pulled his Cadillac up in front of Jane’s beach cottage. The big car shimmied when he hit the brakes, a fender scraped against the curb. “This would certainly be a splendid time for me to exclaim, ‘Aha, I see it all now!’” he said, turning off the engine. “I do see quite a bit and I think we’ve got a fair idea of what really happened to Dr. Benninger and why.”
“Yeah, but we don’t have much in the way of proof.” I reached for the handle of my door. “We can’t go to the Bayside cops with what we suspect, because Sergeant Branner is in charge of that end of things and even the few honest cops I know aren’t exactly willing to cross him.”
“Stir not, young sir,” he cautioned. “I’ll fit around and help extract you from the vehicle.”
“I’m okay,” I told him without much conviction. The headache was hanging on and I still felt somewhere between mildly woozy and mildly dizzy.
Groucho, in his civilian guise now, hopped from the driver’s seat and came trotting around the nose of his car.
I, meantime, had opened the door and swung partway out.
It was a few minutes short of eleven. The wind was still blowing in hard across the dark Pacific.
“One of the Colonel’s loyal underlings, by the way, will drive your car over here later in the evening and leave it in the driveway,” Groucho said. “I believe it’s the same clever lad who invented the sixth flavorful flavor.”
Taking my arm, he helped me onto the sidewalk and up the path to the porch. “Would you like me to tell the lady of the house that you look this way because you got plastered drinking highballs with a gang of tattooed sailors down in San Pedro?” he inquired. “That sounds a mite more rugged than admitting you got giddy riding on a roller coaster.”
“We’ll stick to the truth,” I said. “I seem to be getting fewer and fewer opportunities to do that.”
“I’ll keep mum about the fact that you fraternized with a Mullens Maiden.”
“At least I didn’t climb up a ladder with one.”
“Obviously you have no concept of what’s involved in being a Boy Scout. If I don’t perform at least one good deed each day, they take my knapsack away, break my—”
“Frank, are you okay?” Jane had heard our approach and yanked the door open.
“He got drunk with a gang of tattooed sailors down in San Pedro,” explained Groucho.
“No, he didn’t.” She put an arm around me. “What really happened?”
“I had one of those nausea attacks, this time from riding a roller coaster.” I let her help me across the cottage threshold. “It ought to be gone in a few more hours.”
She guided me to the sofa and arranged me there. “Since you know you have a problem, that was kind of stupid, wasn’t it?”
“He was coerced,” Groucho told her.
“Who did that?”
I answered, “Jack Cortez and some of his goons.”
She inhaled sharply, took a step back. “Jesus, Frank, did they try to throw you off the top of that damn thing?”
“Not this trip, although they didn’t rule it out for some future jaunt.”
“These thugs,” put in Groucho, perching on the arm of the sofa, “are obviously annoyed by our activities.”
“Hell, I’m annoyed by your activities,” she said, scowling at each of us in turn. “I want you to help Frances London out of this mess, but not if you get killed in the process.”
“I didn’t get killed. I got an upset stomach and a headache,” I reminded. “And I don’t think Cortez planned that, since he doesn’t know about my balance problem.”
“Reluctantly, children, I must tear myself away from this cozy domestic scene,” announced Groucho. “I have a rendezvous with fate. That is, if you accept the theorem that you can meet fate in a bawdy house and—”
“You’re still going to try to contact Maggie Barnes?”
“We need something tangible to go to the law with, Rollo,” he said. “Maggie isn’t the most praiseworthy of young ladies, but lord knows she’s tangible.”
“But the gunman who shot at us might be working for the same gang that runs that bordello, Groucho. You better be—”
“Whoa, wait, stop.” Jane held up her hand in a traffic cop gesture. “Who shot at you? Was this on the roller-coaster ride?”
“Could you fix me a Bromo-Seltzer?” I requested.
“Not until
you thoroughly explain the shooting business, Frank.”
Groucho left the chair arm. “A person or persons unknown, Miss Janey, took a few shots at us,” he said. “That occurred in that temple of art known as the Filmland Wax Museum while we were admiring a handsome and awe-inspiring tableau of wax replicas of your humble servant and my not-so-humble siblings. Frank’s fast action in shoving a feeble old man, namely, me, to the floorboards, saved my life and—”
“Shot a few times?” Jane was picking up my habit of asking terse questions.
“We didn’t get hurt,” I said. “This guy, whoever he was—we didn’t get a look at him—was probably only trying to scare us.”
“Yet you just now, Frank, warned Groucho that he might get shot.”
“Shot at,” I corrected. “I’m firmly convinced, Jane, that a Bromo-Seltzer would help.”
“What you actually need to settle your stomach is a cup of peppermint tea.” She rose.
“I wasn’t aware,” observed Groucho, “that tea came in flavorful flavors.”
“It’s something my aunt sends me.”
“The dishtowel aunt,” I added.
“As much as I’d love to stick around and watch you brew tea, Miss Danner, I must be going.” Bowing in her direction, he shuffled over to the door. “I’ll telephone you bright and early in the morning, Rollo—around noon—and we’ll confer.”
“If you survive tonight.”
“I’d hate to tell you how many nights in houses of ill repute that I’ve survived, young feller.” He opened the door. “The correct answer is three, which will be printed upside down in tomorrow’s bulldog edition of The Bayside Shopping News. Should you not have a bulldog, you’re pretty much out of luck.” He stepped outside into a cold gust of wind. The door flapped shut.
Jane stood watching me for a few seconds. “You sure don’t look very good.”
“So I keep hearing.”
“You won’t pass out while I make us each a cup of tea?”
“If I do,” I promised, “I’ll try not to fall on anything breakable.”
Twenty-seven
Groucho said, “Good evening, I’m Otto Heffel.”
