by P. N. Elrod
Mitchell, apparently figuring to have a front row seat, darted clumsily through the door, holding his arm close. Were they working together, or was it just glad coincidence that put them on the same team tonight?
“Outside!” Hoyle repeated. “Or I’ll drill you here, you—”
His gaze abruptly snapped to the side, toward the hall leading to the dressing rooms.
Faustine Petrova stood not ten feet away. She was out of her tango dance costume, wrapped in a blazing scarlet silk kimono, a look of fascination on her exotic face.
“You are hav-ink important beeznuss meet-ink, yesss?” she asked brightly.
My guts swooped. “Faustine! Get out of here!”
But she stood her ground staring intently at Hoyle. He glared back at her, and his gun muzzle wavered in her direction. Then his eyes went wide.
Faustine made a small, elegant shrugging motion, and the kimono suddenly fell from her shoulders. She was completely naked except for her lipstick. “Daunce wit’ me, beeg boy!” she sang out, spreading her arms.
Holy mackerel.
Hoyle’s eyes got even wider, and his jaw sagged. He had to have seen a naked woman before, but Faustine possessed a unique electricity, and it always turned heads.
Including his, for just long enough.
I launched a full-body tackle on him. Being stronger, I could cover more distance in a leap. I slammed into him, and down we went. Hoyle’s reflexes were too good, though. His time in the boxing ring made him quick to recover. He fired, and I felt the sear as the bullet grazed my side. It was a scratch, nothing to sweat over…
But Faustine dropped, giving a little cry.
11
WHILE I tried to take the gun away before it went off again Hoyle got in some double-quick punches. We rolled and grunted and kicked and suddenly he wasn’t there anymore, and I found my feet, but he was outside and racing down the alley where a car waited at the far end. It was Ruzzo at the wheel. Didn’t know which one. Hoyle made the running board, and they took off.
No sign of Mitchell.
Faustine.
I turned and choked, for she seemed to be huddled in a vast pool of blood until the mass of brilliant color resolved into being her kimono. Took a whiff. The only bloodsmell was my own.
Went to her quick. She stirred and cautiously opened an eye. “Es over, yesss?”
“You okay, doll?” At a loss to help I plucked at the kimono.
A smile. “Amer-i-kans, zo shy.” She gracefully found her feet, slipping the silk wrap around her lithe body in one move. She was unhurt and beaming. “Es like Jeemmy Cagney seen-e-ma, yesss?”
About two inches from where her head had been was a bullet pock in the brick. “Oh, yeah.”
“But Jek, you are heet?” She spotted the bloody graze in my side.
“Faustine!” Roland hurtled toward her from the hall and grabbed her up. “I heard shooting! Jack…! My God, what’s going on? Darling, are you all right?”
The last was aimed at his wife, who had a ready explanation, except it was in fast-flowing Russian, which he clearly didn’t understand.
I went to the alley door, looking both ways as I emerged into the cold wind. All clear. No Mitchell, and no bouncers, either. I shoved the door shut, took a chair off a stacked column of spares in a corner, and angled it under the doorknob. Randomly, I thought I’d better get a new lock, the kind that only opens from the inside.
Faustine recovered enough English by then to provide Roland with the beginnings of a highly dramatic episode of how she’d saved my life. He seemed to be getting more upset by the second, so I skipped toward the main room. The second I was out of sight I vanished, not inclined to see anyone on my way to the lobby. I materialized in a blind spot in the curving hall leading to it and kept going.
All four bouncers were gone.
“Where are they?” I roared at Wilton. He looked ready to duck behind the bar, and the hatcheck girl went “yeep!” and did duck under her counter.
“The men’s room,” he said, astonished.
All of them? If they were having a craps game, I’d have their balls on a—
I pushed in, loaded for bear, and found them sprawled or heaped on the floor like so many bodies after a battle. I froze for a second, thinking the worst, but one of them groaned. To a man they’d been coshed. From the way they were lying, they must have been lined up and hit one at a time. Even Ruzzo could have done it with no trouble, one to hold them in place with a gun, the other to swing away like Babe Ruth on a Sunday.
Checked them quick. Alive. Fortunately. The man that groaned opened his eyes and squinted. “Boss? Wha’ happened?”
Went to the door and yelled for Wilton. He came in and gaped. “Boss, what happened?”
“Look after them, make sure nobody dies.”
As I left, the groaning guy made it to a urinal and began throwing up.
I returned to the backstage hall the same way, but going solid more slowly to make sure no one saw. No need to worry. Waiters clogged the place, all looking in the same direction. Faustine was apparently telling her story again, this time with sound effects and gestures. She pointed with finger and thumb, not needing the pistol Mitchell had left behind. That lay forgotten on the floor where it had dropped in my fight with Hoyle. I quietly pocketed it again.
“‘I vill keel you, you dirdy radt!’ Zen beng-beng-beng off goes de gun, but Jek leaps on de bedt guy like de mad tiger! Ah! My heee-rrro!” Faustine beamed at me, parting their ranks as she flew through them to throw her arms around me. Suddenly she was kissing both my cheeks and planting more all over my face. Roland rushed over, too, and grabbed one of my flailing hands, pumping it.
“Grand work, sport!” he yelled, as though I’d gone deaf. “That will teach those rowdies! You saved her life! I can’t thank you enough!”
Teach who? I wondered. What had she been telling them?
“Uh…well…yeah, okay, glad to have been of help.” I managed to get out of Faustine’s grip, firmly guiding her toward Roland’s protective embrace. “C’mon, guys! Show’s over, get back to work!”
“What happened, Boss?”
“Drunk customer. He’s gone. Now, back out there while we still have others. If anyone asks, you don’t know nuthin’.”
“But we don’t know nuthin’,” one of them grumbled as they filed past, disappointed.
I leaned against the wall and rubbed my face. My hands came away red, but it was only Faustine’s lip color. The vivid red spooked me for a second.
Roland gallantly gave me a clean handkerchief. “I’d like to talk when you’re recovered.”
He got a vague nod. Mopping the war paint, I looked past him and saw Escott frowning severely at me. I was everyone’s favorite tonight. He waited until Roland and Faustine went by to get to their dressing rooms.
“That man was with Kroun the other night,” he stated. “His lieutenant?” He said lieutenant like it had an “f” in it.
“Yeah. Mitchell.”
“What has he done to upset Bobbi so much?”
“I donno, but he used to run with Slick Morelli’s mob. He kept saying he and Bobbi were old friends. I warned him to keep clear, but he—”
“Indeed he did, and you nearly gave me heart failure with that vanishing business.”
“It was dark, everyone’s drinking, they’re welcome to prove it. How’s Bobbi?”
He frowned a bit more, which was going some. “She is in a ‘state.’ Extremely distressed.”
I started past him, but he caught my arm. “Jack, make her cry, and I’ll murder you.”
And he knew how to do it, too.
I shot down the hall to the number three dressing room and very softly knocked. The show was still going on, with Teddy doing his best to fill in. Bobbi didn’t reply, so I pushed the door open.
“Bobbi? Honey, you okay?”
From the bathroom came a long exhalation of breath. She emerged, wobbly, clutching a wad of tissue in one hand like a so
ggy bouquet. “No.” Her voice was too high. She stared at the blood on my shirt. “Are you hurt? I heard a shot, but Charles made me stay.”
“It’s nothing, I’m all better, everything’s fine. I took care of the guy. He’s gone. He won’t be back.”
“You know who he is?”
“His name’s Mitchell, and he’s with a guy named Kroun outta New York. I heard he’d been with Morelli before that and didn’t want him bothering you…I’m sorry.”
She sat at her dressing table, back to the mirror. “You knew about Mitch?”
Mitch. She called him Mitch. Why was that? “Only that he left when Gordy took over. Strome told me.”
Bobbi didn’t exactly cry like Adelle, but expressed similar symptoms, subdued, but intense, right on the edge. “Did Strome tell you why Mitch left?”
“What is it? He hurt you?”
She shook her head. “No.” She turned toward the mirror and dabbed her eyes. The damage wasn’t too bad. I realized she could no longer look at me straight, though I could see her fine, front and back. Why wasn’t she looking at me? That crap Mitchell said…“He told me Mitchell wouldn’t play second fiddle under Gordy.”
“Nothing more?”
“Listen, if you don’t want to talk about it…” I wanted to hold her, but something told me not to try. I had the sudden feeling of treading on eggs.
“Oh, it’s nothing horrible. He’s—I’m acting stupidly about the whole thing. He just surprised me showing up so suddenly like that, and then you…” She dumped the wadded tissues in a basket and clawed more from a box on her vanity table. Blew her nose a lot. That seemed the end of it, but tears were leaking out now. She stood and made the limited rounds of the room, fiddling with stuff, trying very, very hard not to lose control. “Anyway, he’s long gone, right? You made him leave, so everything’s fine. You don’t need to be worrying about…oh, don’t LOOK at me like that!”
I backed off. I didn’t know how I was looking at her. “What?”
Bobbi made a strange wailing noise and fled into the bathroom, slamming the door.
I called to her. All I got in return were the big, racking, moaning sobs of a full-blown breakdown. “Honey? What is it? Bobbi? Come on.” I’d never seen her like this before, and it was scaring me. Somehow dealing with Adelle had been so simple, and this…wasn’t.
Well, I’d been assured by Adelle that just holding her had been the right thing to do. This might get worse if I waited.
I vanished, sieved through, and re-formed. Bobbi was on the toilet lid with another bouquet of paper to sop up the outpour. My appearance startled her.
“Not fair!” she yelled. “No! Not fair! You leave! I don’t wanna—”
I did what I did with Adelle, arms holding close and tight. Bobbi hiccuped and sobbed, stuttering, and finally broke into a steady shower and, oh, God, didn’t I hate every minute of it.
After forever went by, she wound down to a slow finish, and was a dandy mess from the effort. Women never look good crying unless they’re on a movie screen. That’s how you can tell it’s acting.
She blew her nose for the umpteenth time, but still sounded stuffy, and her voice was thick. “I’m sorry.”
“Honey…whatever it is…it’s okay.” And I meant that. I didn’t want her going off the deep end again, or I’d wind up in a booby hatch.
“It’s about Mitch.”
“I kinda figured that. Bobbi, whatever it is, it won’t make me hate him any less.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know, but please don’t cry anymore. Say the word, and I’ll make him disappear, but please…”
Sniff. “Okay, Jack.”
“You want him gone?”
“Not the way you’re thinking. I just don’t ever want to see him again. That’s all I want. He j-just brought all the bad stuff back, and I don’t want to go through—”
“Okay! It’s done. He won’t get within a mile of you, I promise.”
“Oooh, now my head hurts.”
“Don’t move, I’ll get you something.”
I backed from the room, watching her as though she might vanish like me. Halfway down the hall was Faustine, still in her kimono. Roland and Escott watched from the far end, hopefully out of earshot. They had worried faces and were smoking. They both knew better than to do that backstage, but it wasn’t the time to play theater cop.
“Jek?” said Faustine, halting me.
“Yeah, not now, I gotta…”
She held a glass of water and a bottle of aspirin. “Heerrre. Take eet. Gif her thrree, make her drink whole glessfool.”
“Uh…”
She arched both eyebrows. “Men! Zo ’fraid ov leetle tears. They are de rain ov lof. Now go beck, feex et. Don’t come out until she lofs you again! Go!”
I went.
Bobbi settled down after the dosing. She apologized some more, and I told her it was all right and unnecessarily held my breath, but she didn’t bust out afresh, so that was good.
“Can you tell me what’s wrong?” I belatedly thought that I should have sent Faustine in to do this. Women were better at it.
“This was a couple years ago,” Bobbi began.
I nodded.
“Back then it was like I knew everything, yet nothing at all. You know how that is?”
“Several times a night.”
“Remember how it was with me and Slick? When we first started it was great, and then it got so he decided he owned me, and I couldn’t get out of it. If I did, he’d mess things up for me in every club in Chicago. In order to sing I had to keep myself available and do what I was told.”
I nodded some more. I also felt rotten to have to hear all this, knowing how much it tore her up.
“M-mitch was one of the boys there, and he liked me. A lot. For a while I thought he could help me. He said he could get me clear of Slick, and we’d go to Hollywood. We were so careful and it seemed safe and he was much nicer than Slick.”
That side of Mitchell I couldn’t begin to imagine.
“We planned out everything. I figured what to pack into two suitcases, and it was hard, because I was leaving so much behind, but it was worth it for being with him. Starting over. No mistakes this time…then Gordy showed up at my hotel flat.
“He knew Mitch and I were going to run away, when we planned to do it, the works; it was like having your mind turned inside out and read like a book. I denied it all, but he went real patient like he does and told me not to be a sap. Slick was beginning to suspect, and if he told Gordy to find out for sure, Gordy would have to tell him.”
“Did Gordy talk to Mitchell?”
“No, not then he didn’t. Only me. Gordy was nice about it, but he scared the hell out of me. He didn’t threaten or anything like that, he just told the truth, very quietly. If I didn’t cool things off with Mitch, I’d disappear. There was another guy there, Sanderson, and he did whatever Slick told him, even killing a woman if that’s what Slick wanted.”
“I remember him.” It would probably be decades before the memory of how Sanderson died faded from my mind. Knowing that suddenly made carrying it a little easier.
“So Gordy broke me, not with threats, but with kindness. He said ‘You’re a good kid in a bad place, an’ I don’t wanna see you hurt.’ He made me hungry for something I didn’t have, and I thought maybe he wanted the same, that that’s why he’d come, because he wanted me, too, but Gordy said no. I was cute, but it wouldn’t work. Then I begged him to help me get out, and he said that wouldn’t work, either. The only way I’d leave was when Slick got bored with me. It would take time, but would happen sooner or later. I’d have to accept that I was Slick Morelli’s girl until he decided different.”
I’d known some of the story. Didn’t make it easier to take, though.
“So I got real busy with my work and rehearsals and couldn’t sneak off with Mitch, and Gordy looked out for me and would come up with ways to keep him busy, sending him out of town to
do stuff. That’s how I finally figured out Mitch was only in it to have the boss’s twist and a laugh on him. If he’d really loved me, he’d have found a way around all that and…” She drew and puffed out a deep breath. “And then…then one night you showed up.”
“Well, we know what happened after that.”
“Glory-hallelujah. When the dust settled and Gordy took over he sent Mitch to New York. He might have left anyway, but Gordy said Mitch had been bragging to the guys that with Morelli gone he’d be ‘inheriting’ me. That was the word he used.”
“Nice guy.”
“That’s why I was thrown so hard when I saw him. The look on his face was so…so damned smug, and I knew what was going through his head. He thinks he can—”
“Not going to happen, lady. You tell me what you want, and it’s there on a silver platter or heading east on the next train. Unless you want to tell him yourself.” It was a genuine question, not a joke. Bobbi was sometimes touchy about her battles and tended to fight them herself.
She shook her head. “No! I don’t want him anywhere near me. I wouldn’t know what to say and he’d go all nasty and then I’d want to belt him and he’d hit back and…”
“Okay! It’s solved. He’s gone.”
Bobbi gave me a look of pure and powerful love and launched up to hug me. It felt good. “Thank you. For this time, anyway. I’ve got to handle stuff like this better. Something else is bound to crop up—”
“No, it’s not. Nothing’s left in that barrel of woe. It’s empty and dry, and we’ll bust it up for kindling and roast hot dogs over the fire.”
A strange light came to her face as she pulled back to look at me. “Oh, Jack, I do love you.”
I almost froze up at that, but miracle of miracles, did not. No shakes, no chill, only warmth. From her and for her. The other night I’d been terrified about getting close. Tonight…not so much. I welcomed the familiar heat of her touch, and soon felt the pressure above my corner teeth that would cause them to descend…
And decisively extricated myself before anything bad happened. I didn’t have the warning symptoms of an approaching seizure, but did recognize the roiling within that proceeded a bout of gluttony in the Stockyards. No matter how tender my feelings toward her, she was…was food.
