by Day Keene
She cried even harder. Besides, she didn’t want to be Mr. Dix’s girl. When he had finished with her, she’d wind up a facsimile of her mother. She wanted more out of life than that. Not that taking men into the back room had been any chore for Della. In addition to the nightly bait camp trade, Della had had a succession of “husbands,” all big virile men, willing to wink at the way she earned her living as long as there were grits and fried fish and sidemeat on the table and whiskey in the jug. She remembered Della’s last husband well, a red-haired, itinerant sign painter. She had reason to remember him. One day while Della had been sleeping, he’d caught her alone on the pier and the man had been hell determined. For all she fought and clawed him, he’d had her shirt up and her levis almost off when Della heard her screaming and broke an oar over his head. Not that her mother cared what happened to her but because she’d been jealous.
Linda Lou wiped her eyes with the sheet. Not that she was still a virgin. Silk and the salesman from Atlanta and the night clerk in Chicago had taken care of that. Silk was the one who’d gotten her away from Della’s. Distasteful as it was she deliberately forced herself to think of her last night at Della’s to keep from thinking about Mr. Dix and what would happen to her if she couldn’t recover the parcel.
It had begun on a Saturday afternoon, just before dusk-dark. She’d been taking her weekly bath in the river and adding gallons of water to the river in tears because Della had burned her one good dress and her shoes because she wouldn’t help with the back room trade. All she’d owned to cover herself was a pair of levis and an old blue work shirt, and they were in one of the boats. She had been standing in the river naked as a jay bird when she’d looked up and there he was, squatting on the pier and grinning at her.
“Hi, beautiful,” he’d grinned. “What are you blubbering about?”
She’d tried to cover her body and couldn’t. All she had was two hands. “How long you been squatting there?” she’d asked him and he grinned. “Just. I beeped my horn but I guess no one heard it. You do have cabins for rent?”
There’d been nothing else she could do but give up trying to cover herself and wade to the boat where she’d left her levis and shirt and he’d watched her every step of the way. Even now her cheeks burned at the thought. A lot of men had tried to see her but the big youth on the pier had been the first one to succeed.
Nor had she seen anyone quite like him. He was young, not more than twenty-two or three, but he wasn’t a boy. Boys didn’t wear .45 caliber automatics in shoulder holsters under expensive white suits. Whoever he was, he wasn’t local. His suit and broad-brimmed panama hat had cost as much as the new beer coil and secondhand TV set.
“What’s your name?” she’d asked him.
“Just call me Silk,” he’d told her. “Now if you don’t mind, I’d like to see a cabin. One well back from the road, if you have one.”
It was as real two years later as if it had just happened. Finished dressing, she’d dried her feet on an old sack and night had crept out of the swamp. In black silence she led the way across the trash-filled yard of which she’d been so ashamed. Time and time again she’d begged Della to do something about the rotting boats and gear and mounds of rusted tin cans left behind by the former owner of the camp.
“Mind your step,” she cautioned and Silk had taken her elbow as he’d told her, “I make a practice of that.”
Then the neon sign over the door of the bar had come on and Della had come out and stood in the doorway yawning. She hadn’t seen them but they saw her and all she’d on was a wrapper and she’d scratched herself where she’d itched as she looked at the cream-colored Cadillac convertible standing in front of the rusted gas pump.
“In the name of God, who’s that?” Silk had asked and she’d been too ashamed to tell him it was her mother and instead she’d asked him if that was his car standing in front of the pump and Silk had said it was.
Then they were at the cabin and Silk had held the door open for her and it was the first time a man had ever done that and she’d known right then what she was going to do. She could not hold out against Della forever.
Linda Lou beat softly on the bed with her clenched fists. She could close her eyes and still see the cabin. It matched the trash-littered grounds. The beaver board ceiling was streaked with ugly yellow rain stains. There was no carpet on the floor. The only furnishings were a sway-backed double bed, a chair with a mended leg and a battered dresser that no one used. All the cabins were the same. The only time they were ever occupied were when the Elfers girl came over to help Della with a rush of business, or a fisherman got too drunk to drive home or one of the merchants in Osceola drove out with some high school girl.
Silk had been amused as he’d looked from the naked light bulb dangling on its frayed wire to her. Then he’d taken her in his arms and kissed her. “How much?” he’d asked flatly. “And I’m not talking about the cabin.” She’d liked the way he’d kissed her. She’d liked the feel of his arms around her. If it had to happen sometime, it might as well happen with a man like Silk. At least he was young and clean, sober and smooth-shaven.
“Not for money,” she’d told him. “Not for any amount of money. But if you promise to take me out of here, now, tonight, you can have me.”
He’d studied her face for a long time. “You mean that, don’t you?”
“I never meant anything more,” she’d told him.
Then he’d told her he would and she’d let him undress her. And she’d got on the bed with him and he’d made love to her, twice, with the naked bulb shining in her eyes. And when it was all over she’d felt ashamed and she hurt and Della was calling her and she’d had to get dressed again and go tend bar. But Silk had been as good as his word and as soon as the drunks got to milling around that night and Della was busy in the back room, Silk had winked at her and they’d gotten into his big car and driven up to Jacksonville, stopping only in Vero Beach to buy her a dress and some shoes and underthings. And it had been better, much better, the next two nights in the hotel in Jacksonville. No matter what the officers said about him. Silk had been kind and patient with her and she was just beginning to think she was going to like this being almost married when Silk had gone out for cigarettes and she’d heard gunfire in front of the hotel and a few minutes later two detectives had knocked on the door of the room and told her that Silk had been killed trying to hold up a liquor store. And they’d taken her down to the detective bureau and questioned her for hours and then decided she was just a dumb little Cracker kid that Silk had picked up. They let her go and advised her to go home. But she hadn’t. They didn’t know what her home was like. So, after she’d cried herself out and spent the few dollars Silk had given her, she’d gotten a job waiting table in a Greek restaurant. And the Greek who ran it had been nice and had treated her like a father. Long as the hours had been, it had been like heaven compared to working for Della.
Linda Lou wiped her eyes again. She would probably still be waiting tables for Mr. Pulous if Mr. Mayers from Osceola hadn’t come into the restaurant one day and recognized her and she’d been so afraid that when he got home he would tell Della where she was that she’d accepted a ride to Memphis from a middle-aged salesman from Atlanta. But they’d barely got seventy miles out of Jacksonville, not quite all the way to Waycross, before the salesman got so excited from reaching over and feeling her she’d been afraid he would run his car off the road and kill them both and she’d agreed, reluctantly, to check into a motel with him. In broad daylight. And it wasn’t even an hour later when they were back in the car and driving toward Memphis. Then he’d taken another motel room in Memphis and he’d bit and tormented her for an hour. He’d finally become so angry at her crying that he’d hit her in the face and walked out and she’d never seen him again.
Of all the places she’d been in since she’d left Della’s she’d liked Memphis the best. She liked the office where she worked. It had been big and clean and impersonal. None of the men
made passes at her and all the girls had been friendly. They’d taught her what kind of clothes to buy and how to take care of her hair and how to use make-up and advised her to save her money because, with her face and figure, they said she ought to be a model. She’d believed them and when she’d had enough money saved she’d moved to Chicago but all of the larger agencies said she wasn’t quite tall enough and while some of the men in the smaller ones had offered to get her jobs, they’d wanted her to go to bed with them first and she’d had enough of that sort of jazz. Silk and the salesman had been the only two men in her life until she’d spent all the money she’d saved and hadn’t eaten for two days. She’d been about to be put out of her cheap hotel room. The night clerk said it was a shame for a thing like that to happen to a pretty girl like her and he’d bought her a hamburger and paid the night’s rent for her, then spent his night off taking the rent and hamburger out of her body.
Linda Lou closed her eyes tight. Even now, a year later, she didn’t like to think of that night. But it had served a purpose. In the morning she’d been so revolted and disgusted and afraid she would wind up a second Della that she’d decided she would take any job she could get. That was when she’d answered an advertisement in the paper for a twenty-six girl, whatever that was. The manager hadn’t been going to hire her but Mr. Dix had happened to be in the tavern and he’d told the man to give her the job. And from then on no one had bothered her because they all thought she was Mr. Dix’s girl. But she hadn’t been. All the old Italian had ever done was breathe sour wine and garlic and give her a few fatherly pats on the fanny until two days before when he’d called her into his office and tried to put his fat hand on her and told her he wanted her to run an errand for him and when she came back from New York she was going to be his girl.
Linda Lou realized a nurse was shaking her shoulder. “Now, now. We mustn’t cry like that, honey,” the nurse attempted to soothe her. “Nothing can be that bad.”
Linda Lou looked at her with wet eyes. What did she know how bad things could be? She’d never had to catch bait and gut fish and tend bar. She’d come from a nice home with a sweet-smelling mother who loved her. She’d never had to give herself to strangers to keep from becoming a bait camp whore. Or let a pot-gutted salesman torment her to get from Jacksonville to Memphis. No fat old Italian wanted her to be his girl or insisted that she carry a parcel of money from Chicago to New York to keep the Internal Revenue Bureau from learning how much he really made. No one was going to kill her.
The nurse shook her even harder. “Now, now. We’ll have to stop this. If we don’t we’ll have to have another sedative. And we don’t want that, do we?”
Linda Lou stopped crying as suddenly as she’d started. “No,” she said. “We don’t.”
Miss Hart, Ward B supervisor, answered the ringing phone on her desk, then turned back to the two detectives. “The girl is frightened,” she agreed with Sergeant Hooper. “That much of your story I’ll buy. In fact, I’ll go as far as to say she seems to be terrified of something.” She consulted the chart on her desk. “According to the nurse on duty she had a very bad crying spell at five o’clock this morning. But as long as she refuses to talk, I don’t see what you can do about it.”
“Me either,” Manson said.
Sergeant Hooper asked if the psychiatrist had talked to Miss Larson and Miss Hart consulted her chart again. “Yes. He did. For an hour.”
“How does she check out with him?”
“He says she seems to be perfectly normal.”
Manson shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “I tell you we’re wasting the city’s time.”
“Could be,” Hooper admitted. He persisted, “But I still can’t get a clear picture of a good-looking girl like Miss Larson being out in a rain like we had yesterday morning. Not with the city swarming with cabs and her with four bills in her purse. And why did she run across the street and get herself run down while looking back over her shoulder?”
“Who told you that?” the nurse asked.
“A news vendor on Forty-second. He was standing under an awning and happened to look up and there she was, cutting through traffic like Boris Karloff was after her.”
“He’s certain it was Miss Larson he saw?”
“He couldn’t miss that red raincoat. And all this, mind you, less than ten minutes after she arrived from Chicago.”
“You’re positive of that?”
“We checked with the Pullman porters and found one who remembered her. He says she didn’t leave her compartment from the time the train left Chicago until it arrived at Grand Central. Also she kept the door locked every mile of the way.”
“Then why don’t you check with Chicago?”
“We have. That’s one reason we’re still interested in her. Chicago reports have her listed as a model, temporarily earning her living by running a twenty-six game in a near-north-side tavern.”
Miss Hart was interested. “What in the world is a twenty-six game?”
“A game you play with dice.”
“What’s so strange about that?”
“The tavern is owned by Lew Dix.”
“Who’s he?”
Sergeant Hooper examined the initials in his hat. “Well, he’s a pretty rough boy. One of the few big wheels left of the old Capone mob.”
“Then he must be an old man.”
“Sweetheart,” Manson assured the supervisor, “you could never find a nastier old man. Dix should have been dead for thirty years. The way we have it he not only has a finger in every dirty pie in Chicago but he is also a big cog in the international Mafia. The Chicago police, the F.B.I. and Internal Revenue boys have been panting after him since Edgar Hoover took office. He had a record as long as my arm. The only difference from the old days is now he can afford to hire young men to do all his dirty work.”
“And that’s why you’re interested in Miss Larson.”
“Right. We just happened to be on the spot at the right or wrong time, depending how you look at it. We brought the girl here to Bellevue. We went through her purse. We got a little curious. And the girl won’t tell us a thing.”
Miss Hart was puzzled. “But neither of you are detailed to traffic. Both of you are homicide men.”
Sergeant Hopper explained, “That’s why we’re doing this preliminary snooping. If someone is out to knock off the girl we’d like to know it before she winds up in the morgue and we have to put in overtime. After fourteen years, Vi is getting tired of me eating my supper for breakfast. She says it’s almost impossible to keep food warm that long. Then there’s the gas bill to consider.”
Miss Hart laughed. “You’ve been on the force too long, Sergeant. You’re too suspicious. The chances are the girl’s story is true. She saw a cab on the other side of the street and became confused in the rain.”
“So confused she bucked Forty-second Street rush hour traffic? Running like she was crazy and screaming, ‘No, no, please don’t,’ and looking over her shoulder instead of where she was going.”
“Who told you that?”
“The same news vendor.”
It was pleasant talking to the detectives but her work was piling up. Miss Hart asked, “So what are you going to do about her? Outside of a few bumps and contusions, there is nothing the matter with her. She demands to be released and unless you prefer a charge of some sort we’re going to have to let her go.”
The sergeant returned his hat to his head. “That’s the way it seems to stack up. At this late date we can’t very well book her for jaywalking. Has anyone inquired for her? Has anybody been interested in that squib we had the papers print?”
“Why, yes, there was,” Miss Hart said. “When I came on duty this morning the night supervisor told me that two men inquired for Miss Larson last night.”
“They wanted to see her?”
“No. They just wanted to know how she was and when she would be released. You know. The usual.”
Sergeant Hooper removed
his hat and ran his forefinger unsteadily along the sweatband. “This night supervisor. She didn’t by any chance say what these two men looked like?”
“Yes, she did. She said they were young. Pleasantly spoken. Well dressed. You know. Two typical young college men.”
EIGHT
THE RAIN THE MORNING before might never have fallen. The smell of wet wool and plastic raincoats was gone. Grand Central Station was merely crowded as commuters elbowed each other aside to walk to their places of business, to catch a shuttle train to Times Square, to pursue the normal routine of living.
Brady felt lost in the familiar crowds. His gulped breakfast was sour in his stomach. His throat was still raw and the inside of his eyelids still burned. He didn’t want to go to the office. He couldn’t go to the office this morning. He had to decide what he was going to do about the parcel. And before he could make that decision he had to know how much money it contained and if there was any clue to the identity of the loser.
For a change, the train was on time. He had a few minutes to think. He walked up to the street and into the same bar in which he’d had a drink the previous morning. The rye didn’t help him think. All it did was increase the sour feeling in his stomach and the acute physical discomfort the carnal contact with Alice had engendered. It had been close, too close. The child was out of her mind. She’d been hell determined to have him and damn near successful. He couldn’t go through such a scene again and keep his sanity. He had to do something about her before the situation erupted into tragedy.
Boarding school was a possible solution. That would take money but he had plenty of money. He had a newspaper-wrapped parcel filled with money.
Brady picked up a morning paper that somebody had left on the bar. He looked through it carefully. There was no further mention of the girl in the red raincoat. Bellevue might have released her, or she might still better be lying in traction with a broken back and two broken legs.
