Giroux nodded.
The chubby fellow called out, “Gentlemen, gentlemen, your attention please. We have a very special treat for you, flown all the way from the British Isles—and boy are her arms tired—this little butterfly of a beauty, this dazzling dame, this wild Irish rose….”
One of the men at the poker tables hollered, “Make up your mind, Pozzo. Is she English or Irish?”
The men wandered over from the bar, fresh martinis in hand. Wilma watched them as they watched Pozzo. The other thing Giroux hadn’t prepared her for was the makeup of the party. These fellows weren’t your everyday stags. They were Hollywood folk. Some of them Republic contract players. Wilma recognized a few actors who’d taken front stage on films she’d been in the background of.
Pozzo carried on. “This lovely limey lass, this magnificent mick maiden is here to woo you with her voodoo. Gather round, don’t be shy, put your pud in your hand and your mud in your eye and get ready for the mind-blowing, fine-glowing, time-slowing lady of the hour. The one. The only. The world’s greatest ukuleleist. The irrefutable. The inscrutable. The unshootable. Gee Gee Gillicuddy and her magical ukulele!”
Pozzo windmilled his arms and pointed to Wilma. One or two men set down a martini glass and clapped. Wilma figured that was enough of a round of applause to warrant her, “Thanks, fellas.” She kicked into a version of Benny Bell’s “Everybody Loves My Fanny.”
The eyes of the audience bore into her. If they had any appreciation for Wilma’s ability to run through the finger-tangling e-flat key, nothing in their faces betrayed it. If the song’s double-entendres tickled them anywhere inside, they kept that feeling from slipping outside. Before the last verse, she gave her pipes a rest and treated the men to a Formby-style split stroke. It was met with yawns and one rake calling, “Take it off, already!”
Well, Wilma reckoned, these folks know entertainment. If they felt this act needed to kick up its tempo, she’d oblige. She skipped the last verse of the song, stopped strumming when she hit the home chord, and segued into her best Gypsy Rose Lee impersonation. She didn’t have the poetry or grace of Gypsy. It was Wilma’s first strip show. What did she know? She said, “I see all you fellas with your little ukuleles in your hands. The friction is making the room warm. I hope you don’t mind if I make myself more comfortable.” She rolled the skirt of her dress up her leg.
Pozzo raced over to the baby grand and pounded through an out-of-tune Tin Pan Alley number. Wilma unhooked her garters in time with the song. She gradually slid off one stocking and tossed it to a yawning character actor—a pock-faced gink who typically played the rat in gangster pictures. He sniffed it and tossed it over his shoulder. Wilma repeated the scene with the other stocking, tossing this one into the pot of the poker game. She picked up her ukulele, said, “Cut it, Pozzo,” and launched into “O’Brien Is Trying to Learn to Talk Hawaiian.” It was the longest song she knew. She’d play the shorter numbers when she had less clothing on.
As promised, Wilma accompanied her set with a gradually diminishing outfit. The men took a bit more interest when she was completely bare. Their leering eyes made her understand for the first time that she wasn’t nude—she was naked. A room full of horny men stood between her and the door. Giroux stood to the corner, holding her dress. She had little confidence in his willingness to return it to her. Wrong color for her skin or not, she wanted that awkward indigo rag back in her possession.
The men did call for an encore. With her final number, she played, “Ain’t She Sweet.” The story behind the song, Wilma knew, was that the songwriter wrote it for his daughter. It was supposed to be innocent, paternal, lovely. She played it as such. She smiled through it like a little girl and danced along as a kid might.
The men didn’t seem to get the hint. Their stares grew in intensity.
Wilma finished the song, bowed to a smattering of applause, and turned directly to Giroux. Giroux handed her a martini instead of her clothes. “Drink this,” he said.
What the hell? Two months at the nuthouse and thirty minutes of a stag party left her with a thirst like she’d never known. She tossed the drink down her throat so fast she couldn’t taste the gin. That warm feeling settled into her empty stomach. That old gin flame set fire to her throat.
“Can I have my clothes now?” she asked Giroux.
Giroux hugged the dress like a child with a teddy bear. “You’re a wonderful musician,” he said.
“Thank you.” Wilma reached for the dress. Giroux stepped back. The combination threw her off balance. She caught herself on Giroux’s shoulder before she fell. “Wow,” she said. “I used to be able to handle this stuff better.”
“You’re a natural at the striptease,” Giroux said.
Wilma nodded. Something about Giroux seemed off. He was doing a trick with his face, making it drift in and out of focus. He kept talking, and in English, too, but Wilma could only catch every third word. She squinted her eyes to concentrate. Her ukulele slipped out of her hand and landed on the hardwood floor with a clunk. “Say,” she said. “What’s going on here?”
“You should pick up your ukulele,” Giroux said.
Wilma wasn’t falling for it. Something was beyond her comprehension. She didn’t need to figure it out. She just needed to get out of the room. Giroux could keep the dress. It didn’t matter. She needed air. A little air would prop her back up. She stumbled as well as she could toward the door, reaching for the backs of loveseats and chairs for support, sometimes falling into the arms of men who steered her in the wrong direction. I have to get outside, she told herself. If I can make it outside, I’ll be all right. She focused on the door. It was right there. Seven, eight steps away. She could make it. She counted the steps. One. Two. The door swelled and shrunk. She kept walking. Three. Four. The director screamed cut. The film faded out. Wilma flopped.
She woke in the back room who knows how many hours later. Whatever they’d slipped into the drink, it was too much. Near enough to kill her. Even so, she didn’t feel exactly lucky to be alive.
She was still naked. She lay on top of the sheets. The night had grown cold. She wanted to crawl under a blanket but wasn’t sure she could move. Whatever had happened while she was passed out, it left her feeling like she’d been thrown from a train. A little warmth came from the man passed out next to her. In the faint light of the room, she recognized him. He’d been a Hollywood heartthrob back when lollipops were still innocent to her. He, too, lay atop the sheets. He still wore his slacks and dress shirt. His tie had been loosened. His shriveled member hung from the zipper hole of his pants.
Surely, he’d done something to her when she was passed out. Of all the sore parts screaming for attention in her brain, none were more sore than the parts between her legs. She felt raw and sticky and didn’t want to try to figure out what had happened.
And of all the thoughts racing through her head, one took center stage: Get out!
Wilma collected whatever strength was left in her leaden muscles. She pulled herself to her feet, felt around the floor for the heartthrob’s sportcoat, and put it on. Luckily, he’d worn a high-buttoned number. It was enough to keep her breasts inside and to cover her ass. This coat would do if she couldn’t find more clothes on the way out.
No sounds but snores drifted through the place. The poker and stag flicks and martinis and rape had all finished for the night. Wilma tiptoed into the main room. Men slept on floors and loveseats and armchairs. She stepped carefully over and between them. She cut a path as direct to the door as she could. No one stirred.
Quiet as a mouse, Wilma opened the door and stepped into the grass courtyard. A full moon cast a bit of light down on her. The rest of the motor court seemed to be asleep. Wilma had no way of knowing what time it was. Judging from the slight glow far to the east, she pegged it as closer to early morning than late night.
Her bare feet crunched across the dry grass of the courtyard. Cool, damp air coated her bare legs. She could smell the ocean som
ewhere not too far away.
She walked past the office to the motor court. No one stirred inside. She kept going, out to the sidewalk, checking the road north and south, weighing her options. Hitchhiking seemed a bad idea. She didn’t want to climb into a stranger’s car smelling of sex and wearing nothing but a sportcoat. A faint light glowed from the kitchen of a nearby diner. She decided to take her chances there.
She banged on the back door for nearly a minute before the cook finally opened. He was a tall man with thin shoulders and beefy forearms. His skinny legs held up a prodigious belly. He looked at Wilma through dark, deep-set eyes. “Oh, Jesus,” he said. He scratched the thick black stubble on his face and took a step back. “Come in.”
The cook walked away from Wilma. He rooted through the metal shelves filled with sacks of potatoes and cans of lard until he found a small pair of checked cook’s pants. He tossed them to Wilma. “You can wear these,” he said. “I have some T-shirts in the cabinet over the sink. Take one. Phone’s next to the cash register out front. Reverse the charges.”
Wilma stepped into to the pants. “Thank you,” she said. He waved a hand in the air and set to cutting up vegetables and storing them in metal containers.
Wilma found a shirt, turned her back to the cook—who wasn’t looking anyway—pulled it on, and put the coat on over it. She looked ridiculous, sure, but she was fully clothed again.
As instructed, Wilma called collect. Gertie picked up on the ninth ring. She accepted the charges and got right down to business. For what this call would cost by the minute, Wilma couldn’t blame her sister for being brusque. “Where are you?” Gertie asked.
“I’m at a diner on Ventura Boulevard. Somewhere north of Camarillo, next door to a clip joint called the Hitching Post.”
The cook called out from the kitchen, “It’s the Golden Egg. North end of Oxnard.”
Wilma told Gertie the same thing.
Gertie said, “Did you bust out of the nuthouse?”
Wilma wasn’t ready to explain anything. The last thing she wanted to do was break down crying in this greasy spoon. “Don’t ask.”
Thankfully, Gertie didn’t. She said, “Give me a couple hours. It may take a bit to find a car.”
“The Golden Egg on Ventura Boulevard,” Wilma repeated. “North end of Oxnard.”
The cook invited Wilma to help herself to coffee. She poured a mug and sat at the far end of the counter. The cook didn’t seem to be in a talking mood. Wilma appreciated that. He worked through his setup. She sipped coffee. The day gradually broke around them. The two opening waitresses came in, chatting with each other, ignoring Wilma, getting dressed in their uniforms, wiping down the tables, and laying out silverware. A cashier came next. She opened the safe in back and set up the register. A bus boy was next. He put ice under the cook’s vegetable bins and moved the evening’s dishes from the drying rack to above the cook’s line. Wilma haunted the far end of the counter. The staff treated her like a ghost.
At some point, just before the first customers came in, the cook pushed a plate in front of Wilma: two eggs up, two slices of bacon, and two pieces of sourdough toast. He said, “Eat something.”
If pressed, Wilma would’ve said she had no appetite. But after two months of barely enough food at the mental hospital and no dinner the night before, she was hungry. She put the eggs and bacon between the pieces of toast and ate it like a sandwich. A waitress silently refilled her mug while Wilma chewed. She nodded her thanks.
When she was finished, Wilma felt around her clothes out of habit, checking to see if she had any money. She felt a lump on the inside pocket of the sportcoat. She’d accidentally stolen the heartthrob’s wallet. It was full of cash, too. Three or four large, easy. She peeled out a twenty to stick under her mug just before she left. That ought to cover the food and clothes and hospitality.
The diner was nearly full and bustling by the time Gertie arrived. Seeing her sister walk through those diner doors so much like a better version of herself, Wilma started to well up behind the eyes. It was all she could do to stuff the twenty under the coffee mug and cross the restaurant to meet Gertie.
The floodgates opened as soon as Wilma was safe inside the old, battered Packard that Gertie had borrowed. She cried all the way back to Highland Park. A time or two, Gertie rested a hand on her leg or rubbed her shoulder. Mostly, she left Wilma to work through her pain.
Gertie took care of things back at the bungalow. She explained something satisfactory to the Van Meters. It was enough to get them to open the door to the bungalow. Gertie opened the windows and let the stale air drift out. She ran a bath and helped Wilma into it. She started cleaning up around the place when Wilma finally came to her senses and said, “Please, God, Gertie. Quit fussing around here and go to work. I want to be alone.”
Gertie fought. Wilma insisted. Finally, Gertie left.
Wilma spent the next hour scrubbing her skin until it felt like a complete layer had been removed.
JACK, 1946
MAYBE HAMMOND’S warnings were hanging too heavy in Jack’s head when he got home. Maybe they were just right. Jack noticed something was off. A few clumps of mud lingered on the porch steps he’d swept that morning. They could’ve come from a mailman or salesman or anyone. They didn’t lead to the front door, though. They drifted left and faded away by the dining room window. Jack didn’t approach the window. If someone had gone in that way, they might be sitting right by it, looking out at him.
Jack reached inside his coat, unlatched the shoulder holster, and slid out his Springfield 1911: the same type of pistol that kept him alive in Germany during those months between bailing out of his plane and winding up in a prison camp. With the little automatic in his right hand and the house key in his left, he tried the lock. Still locked. He turned the key and the knob, pushed the door open, and sprung himself to the side of the doorway. He crouched low on the porch, shoulder tight to the siding of his house. A gunshot rang out into the Highland Park afternoon. A bullet whizzed out of Jack’s open doorway.
He leaped from his crouch, over the porch rail, and hit the grass beyond the thorny hedges. He stayed low. With his belly flat against his front steps, both hands on the Springfield, and his head peeking just above the porch floor, he stared into his open doorway. A faint light came in through the window in the kitchen door, way in the back of the house. It wasn’t enough to light up the dark hallway. Jack checked the archway leading into the dining room. No one seemed to be casting a shadow from that side. Other than that, Jack just saw his parents’ house: the bare walls and old furniture and fraying area rugs, the crown molding on the edge of the ceiling leading down into wavy plaster. Nothing overturned. Nothing out of place.
Jack listened. A faint clicking emerged from the living room: hard shoes on pine floorboards. The shooter approached the back of the open door. Jack could see the shooter’s eye through the door crack, just below a hinge. Without enough time to really aim, he pointed his Springfield at the eye and shot. Blood splattered through the crack between the door and the frame. Jack leapt to his feet and ran into the house. He found a body flopped in the foyer. It was missing an eye and part of the back of its head, but still twitching and gurgling, coughing blood and trying to claw its way back up. Jack stuck the Springfield into the gaping mouth, angled the barrel into the palate, and shot again. That put a quick end to this guy.
Jack didn’t take it for granted that the shooter was alone. He ran throughout the house, kicking doors, knocking over chairs and couches, checking under beds and inside closets. When no one else turned up, he checked the yard, behind trees, in the tool shed, under the house, everywhere. If the shooter hadn’t been alone, he was now.
Jack walked across his front yard. He checked his neighbors’ houses. No one seemed to be peeking through cracks in drapes or dips in Venetian blinds. He seemed to have Meridian Street to himself.
Three gunshots will do that to a neighborhood.
Back inside, Jack checked ou
t the shooter. Even with the bullet holes and mush, enough of his face remained for Jack to know he didn’t know the guy. Nothing was familiar about him. He was short. Even sprawled out like that on the floor, the shooter couldn’t have been five and a half feet long. He wore a sharp green worsted wool suit, double-breasted with baggy, pleated pants. Nice as it was, it played second fiddle to the shooter’s silk, pinstriped shirt and wide silk tie. This was a getup to be buried in. If not for the small size and the blood soaking into the back of it, Jack may have considered stealing it. He didn’t want to live his life in corduroy.
Jack set his little automatic down on the floor. He dug through the shooter’s pockets. A claim ticket to Clark’s Camera Shop on Fountain. A fresh pack of Chesterfields. A box of kitchen matches. Two quarters and four dimes. A Cadillac key. A pocket watch. Jack dragged a match across the hardwood floor and used it to light a Chesterfield. Even with the knowledge that he was smoking a dead man’s cigarette—and not just a dead man, but a dead man whom he killed, who tried to kill him—the ritual calmed him. He dove into the moment of taking that long inhale, swishing the smoke through his lungs, and letting it creep back out. The pause gave him enough sense to pocket the claim ticket and put everything else back.
Last, Jack reached under the corpse and dug a wallet out from its right hip pocket. He found seventy-four dollars and a driver’s license that said the guy’s name was Herbert Parker. The name didn’t ring a bell.
He righted an armchair next to the telephone. He sat down and asked the operator to connect him with the Hitching Post. When someone at the front desk answered, Jack said, “This is John Chesley, Jr. I want to talk to the broad in charge.”
The guy at the desk told him to hang on. A little rumbling came through the line, something like a drawer opening, a receiver being set inside, and a drawer closing. After that, there were no sounds. Jack had enough time to smoke his Chesterfield and drum a Dixieland song on the end table and take off his hat and jacket and comb his hair. Finally, the gravelly voice of a tough older woman came on. “What’s shaking, Johnny Boy?” she said. “Are you looking to buy a film from me?”
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