The Promoter

by Orrie Hitt

  Eudora and Nelson came down the hall, the girl wavering between them. They had torn off her sweater. Upon her face was a mixed look of terror and resignation. I noticed, without paying much attention to it, that she possessed a delightfully proportioned body.

  “Up the stairs,” Nelson told me.

  I moved ahead of them, lifting my feet slowly, trying to think about how I was going to handle this. Once the moment arrived, I would have only one chance, perhaps not even a good one, but one which I would be forced to take. I had gotten the girl into this and it was up to me to get her out of it. If they were going to kill me, anyway, it would be better if it happened in the brownstone rather than on a lonely country lane. Not that it would make a great deal of difference to me, one way or the other, but if I had to die I might as well try to make it count for something.

  I turned right at the top of the stairs, as directed, and entered a huge room. Even as I paused momentarily, surveying the faces of the men and women in there, I found myself incapable of experiencing the feeling of fear. My fright, it would seem, had died the moment I realized Lucy Miller was in grave danger.

  “Hurry it along,” Eudora told me impatiently. “We haven’t got all night.”

  I pushed my way further into the room. They were all there, every one of them. They had formed a large semi-circle. A bald-headed man fussed nervously with a large movie camera. Four huge floodlights, not yet turned on, hung overhead.

  I kept my voice low, unemotional, and my face blank as I spoke to Eudora Channing.

  “Mind if I talk to Miller?” I wanted to know. My glance moved to Elsa Lang; the gun in her hand looked bigger than ever. “My bodyguard can trail along, if you wish.”

  The high priestess of sex smiled cruelly. “He’s waiting to see you,” she said. “The rest is up to him.”

  I hurried across the room. Elsa’s high heels clattered on the floor behind me. I had to get to Miller before they brought in the girl.

  “It would seem as though I took your warning too lightly,” I told him as I came up. “I think I’ll know better the next time.”

  I stood so that he had to turn his back to the doorway to face me. No one, I noticed, seemed greatly concerned over the fact that Elsa kept me covered with the gun.

  “There won’t be any next time,” Miller said. His face was gray and impassive, his eyes narrow and deadly. “We don’t go for slobs sticking their noses into our business, punk.”

  “That’s too bad,” I said. “By tomorrow, the Morning Star will be in receipt of a complete history of what you people have been doing. It’ll make interesting reading, don’t you think?”

  The expression on his face or in his eyes never changed.

  “You can’t worry me,” he said, his voice flat. “We had the same trouble before, when one of their reporters got ideas. But they couldn’t distribute their papers — we’ve got a tie-up there, too, you know. How can a newspaper make any money if it can’t get distribution?”

  “You’re pretty smart,” I said wearily. “You’ve thought of everything.”

  “And more.”

  The lights had been turned on, flooding the room in a glaring white, virginal brilliance.

  “Please, everybody,” Eudora Charming pleaded. “Please be quiet. This is to be a sound movie and we don’t want it ruined.”

  Miller gave me a look of utter contempt and began to swing away.

  “You’re a lousy, rotten, filthy cop,” I told him.

  He hit me across the face with his open hand, once, twice, both times very hard.

  “Scum,” I said, feeling the nose of the gun come alive against my back. “Pig. Scum.”

  His eyes narrowed, his face became livid with anger, and he struck me again, several times. I took everything he had, keeping my hands at my sides, my lips frozen in a sneer. After a few blows my face became numb and all I could feel was the salty taste of blood as it clogged in my throat.

  “You no-good bastard,” he kept saying. “I’ll kill you!”

  I forced my puffy lips open and laughed at him.

  “You haven’t got the guts,” I said.

  He hit me again and again and the gun dug deeper into my back. A red, distorted haze cut off my vision and I blinked my eyes, trying to watch the room. Slowly, as though walking in her sleep, the wonderful, voluptuous girl came into the room. As the onlookers gasped in pleasure, Nelson pushed her toward the center. She stumbled and fell. With a great effort she rolled over and sat up. The burning lights from above washed across the delicate pink of her skin.

  “You ought to be proud of yourself,” I said to Miller. I spoke with effort because the blood filled my mouth and nostrils. “Proud,” I repeated as every muscle in my body gathered itself, got ready. “Look at her. Look at her! Watch your own daughter being fed to the machine!”

  His hand halted in mid-air, his eyes uncertain. And then, with a snarl, he whirled and stared into the brightness of the lights. Lucy Miller held her head high but the expression on her face was one of scorn.

  “Stop it!” Miller screamed and hurled himself across the room. “Stop it!”

  I moved quickly, spinning around, grabbing for the girl behind me. My groping hands found her gun arm and she let out a shriek as I brought the arm down over one of my knees, paralyzing it. The gun spun out of her hand and skidded across the floor. I hit her once in the face, hating her, and she fell down, moaning.

  I don’t know who I hit next, or how many after that, but I kept boring in, driving my fists and my feet at anybody in my way. Some of the numbness had left my face and I could feel the blood gurgling out of my mouth and sliding down over my chin.

  “Don’t! Oh, God, don’t!”

  I struck him full in the face, a man I didn’t know, and I drove him out of my sight.

  I guess, during those frantic moments, I wasn’t a human being at all but an animal, a vengeful animal. My fists were swollen from countless blows and my hands ached from the force of judo chops. All around me were wailing women and cursing men and the floor, as I stormed my way toward the door, became slippery with blood from all of us.

  Miller was at the door, trying to get his daughter outside. He was sobbing and pushing against her and he never offered to put up a defense as I hit him time and time again. The blood spurted from his nose and mouth. One more blow, and he fell.

  I found Eudora Channing in the hall, waiting for me, a long kitchen knife clutched in her hand.

  “I’ll kill you,” she promised.

  But she wasn’t quite so lucky. I sidestepped abruptly as I went in and the knife only caught me in the thigh, ripping it from hip to knee. I gasped as the searing pain shot through me, but I had captured her wrist. I forced her arm back, twisting her wrist in the same motion, and she let out a terrified scream as the bone snapped. The knife fell soundlessly to the carpet.

  I had her on the floor, my hands locked around her throat, when somebody started kicking me in the head. I tried to escape, dragging her with me, but I couldn’t get away from the pain that kept hammering against my skull.

  “Let go, you crazy fool! Let go!”

  I told whoever it was to go to hell and tried to overcome the growing weakness that had crept into my hands. She was getting away from me and I couldn’t let her do that. I had to destroy her.

  “Let go!”

  Blood filled my mouth, choking me. The words of the speaker became fainter and fainter and my head seemed to be absorbing pain in the way a sponge sops up water. In a final, desperate attempt I let out a long, tortured yell and groped for her.

  Quickly and peacefully, blackness possessed me.

  18

  MILLIONS of people have read accounts of the smashing of the sex syndicate in countless newspapers, but it is generally agreed that the stories in the Mornng Star were the most authentic. I do not, in any sense, begrudge George Castle whatever national fame he may have achieved. It is true that his success has been due, in large part, to the material I sent him thro
ugh the mail; but it is also true that I might not be alive today had he not gotten the letter from the post office that same night and, convinced of its authenticity, enlisted the aid of the police commissioner in staging the raid.

  “We almost marked it off as a farce,” Castle told me. “We couldn’t find anybody at the Westminister Drive address. The Tenth Street address, which you had mentioned, was an afterthought. It’s a good thing we had it.”

  I have been in the hospital almost two months and, during this time, the police have been more than kind to me. Perhaps they regret having fractured my skull that night but, to be truthful, I think it was a stroke of good fortune. Had they not arrived when they did I am sure I would have killed Eudora Channing. Her death at my hands would have been just one more thing on my conscience. And, as you can imagine, I have enough to feel badly about without adding to my problems.

  The trials are scheduled for the immediate future and no one has any doubts about how they will develop. Miller has made a thirty-thousand word statement, hoping to gain the mercy of the court, but even if he should go free, which he won’t, he’ll have to return to Maryland to stand trial for the murder of Eudora Channing’s first husband. She has denied all, of course, preferring to take her chances with a jury. But she will find testimony directed at her other than that supplied by Miller. At least a half a dozen call girls are willing to appear against her. One of these is Judith Call. Judith’s father, during one of his frequent visits to the hospital, has confided to me that he feels he can bear the shame of notoriety if justice is served. He has said, also, that he is changing his methods of dealing with the problems of youth.

  “The girls need someone who can direct them wisely,” he has told me. “If both Judith and I can grow above this terrible thing that has happened, and if she can be accepted in New Rockford for the fine girl she is, I believe she can fill the bill.”

  It is not my job to quarrel with Dr. Call or to point out how small-minded some people can be, but I feel more than certain that both the girl and her father have a tough assignment ahead of them. Yet, as I say, it is none of my business. The Reverend hired me to do a job and now that it is done, and I have been paid a fifteen hundred dollar bonus, I fail to see that I am entitled to express any opinion about the matter.

  The only annoyance I have suffered since being confined to the hospital — aside from the usual discomforts of a patient with a fractured skull, forty-two stitches in one leg, and assorted cuts, bruises and cracked ribs — has been directed at me by Sam Terry from his office in the Central Building. I am, it would seem, delinquent three articles for Car Skill. I have tried to get the fellow who is customizing my Ford to send along some pictures but, so far, he has not been very cooperative. I’ve tried to make Sam understand this and I trust that I have. A free-lance writer, you know, can’t afford to lose a market and the sensational promises of big money from several other magazines may be only a passing thing. Once the trials are over and the sentences are passed I believe that most people will forget about the sex syndicate. They will forget about it, that is, until a new one comes along, destroying other lives, imposing upon a thoughtless society its legacy of sin and filth.

  Perhaps you do not believe this is so. Perhaps you like to think that a ring such as the one with which I became involved cannot grow as a cancer grows in the breast of an unsuspecting patient. If you believe this, you are wrong.

  The psychologists who were assigned to examine those arrested by the police arrived at varying conclusions. Only upon one point were they in agreement. They said that the human mind, once exposed to good or bad, can either accept or resist within certain limits. The limits of acceptance or rejection are not the same in all people, nor are they the same in both sexes. It is, they pointed out, somewhat similar to the fine line that is drawn between sanity and insanity. The person who over-feeds upon sex is not unlike the person who cannot leave the dinner table following a reasonably balanced meal. His normal mental processes are disturbed — often destroyed — by a constant, yearning hunger that never knows complete satisfaction.

  I have thought about these things a great deal and I believe that I know what the doctors meant. Many people who sell lurid sex for a living are no different from the rest of us — at first. But, slowly or rapidly, their moral senses blunt; they brutalize themselves and others.

  Murder and suicide have already followed in the wake of the arrests. The same day of their release on bail, Andy Willis shot and killed Gladys Lord. Moments later he placed the snout of the gun in his mouth and took his own life. The double deaths made newspaper headlines since the twin tragedy took place near a crowded street corner in the downtown section. Not so spectacular was the overdose of sleeping pills taken by Elsa Lang or her death, hours later in City Hospital, while a stomach pump struggled to save her.

  There have been many other repercussions, too. Several divorces have been filed by prominent men and women, directed at spouses who were trapped in the raid, among these an official of a newspaper distributing company, a radio disc jockey, a member of the district attorney’s staff and a few well-known business people.

  The state legislature, which immediately unleashed a full scale investigation into the scandal, has closed four model agencies and two placement bureaus specializing in models, and has called before the committee several sales managers of large corporations, charging them with having used attractive call girls to solicit orders from out-of-town buyers. The state attorney’s office, riding herd over the city district attorney, has uncovered evidence of white-slave traffic across state lines and the FBI has been brought in. Of particular interest to Federal authorities is the disappearance of more than thirty young girls, among them Diana Sanderson’s sister. While identification of the remains of the bodies discovered buried in the back yard on Westminister Drive is almost impossible, the police have predicted that they will, after exhaustive laboratory tests, be able to put a name on most of them.

  Diana Sanderson was, of course, released from custody — with a severe warning I am told — and I suppose she has returned to her home in Pine Island. Some day, after I am released from the hospital, I may visit her. On the other hand, I may not. The past dies quicker if it is neglected.

  Everybody is nice to me here in the hospital but I am not happy. I want to get out, to slip away for a while before the trials start. I am to be a witness for the state and I have been informed that I will be questioned severely by the defense. There is nothing I can tell but the truth but when I am forced to relate my own participation I know I will not find it easy. Looking back, I wonder how I could have done some of the things required of me. However, my course got results. I am told the police have confiscated more than two tons of pornographic material, which is scheduled to be destroyed as soon as the trials are concluded.

  I am also told that I shall be discharged from the hospital in two weeks. The doctors inform me that my skull fracture has healed nicely but they have warned me that I may walk with a limp for quite a while. In anticipation of my release, I have written to the mechanic working on my car, insisting that the job be finished as quickly as possible.

  I no longer think much about the injured girl on the ski slope or the minister’s daughter who so closely resembled her. Frankly, I have been kept rather busy during my stay in the hospital and I have had very little time for memories. At the start, the police and newspapermen bombarded me with questions and requests for statements, but as soon as all of this stopped I had a typewriter sent in and I began writing this book.

  Lucy Miller, who did the typing, agrees with me that the story I have put down on paper is one which should be told over and over again. And she ought to know. Her own father may have to pay with his life for his weakness and folly. I hope, however, that it doesn’t come to that. I would not wish to see her suffer further. After all, she is now my wife and I love her very much.

  The End

  If you liked The Promoter check out:

  I’ll C
all Every Monday

  CHAPTER I

  MONDAY IS A BIG DAY ON AN INSURANCE debit. Monday is the day when the housewives hang out their wash, lie to every bill collector in town — and are thankful that they didn’t get themselves higher than a kite over the week-end.

  “Come back tonight,” she says, not bothering to hold the robe close around her big belly. “You’re too early. My husband doesn’t get paid until tonight.”

  So you go back at seven that evening and she’s got her face on and half a snoot-full.

  “Geeze, I’m sorry!” she says. You get the quick impression that she must have a hell of a good foundation up there, because you couldn’t see those things that morning. “You’re too late. You’ll have to come back next Monday.”

  You give her a big smile, call her a bitch under your breath and wander off down the street.

  “Your company should be like the Metropolitan,” another character tells you, shouting over the screams of her sick kid. “They’ve got nurses that go around — for nothin’. You guys ain’t got nothin’.”

  You crawl up a pair of rickety stairs and wear your knuckles out on a door. Pretty soon an old guy in a flannel shirt decides to come out and talk to you.

  “Gilson?” he asks. “Naw. Gilson lives next door — the other place just like this one. Me, I got my insurance with the Rock of Gibralter.”

  Those first few weeks on a debit are tough for a new man. You wonder how in Christ’s name you’ll ever get four hundred people, and where they live, all straightened out.

  “We’ve been trying for two years to have a baby,” a good-looking red-headed number tells you very confidentially. “Does your company have any service for something like that?”

  Who wouldn’t be able to take care of a request for that kind of policyholder service? You could do it, without any trouble at all, and her old man wouldn’t have to know. But you’re real polite and you let it slide by. You’re satisfied to get out of there with a twenty-five-cent-a-week application.