5
1644 West 54th Place was a dried-out brown house with a dried-out brown lawn in front of it. There was a large bare patch around a tough-looking palm tree. On the porch stood one lonely wooden rocker, and the afternoon breeze made the unpruned shoots of last year’s poinsettias tap-tap against the cracked stucco wall. A line of stiff yellowish half-washed clothes jittered on a rusty wire in the side yard.
I drove on a quarter block, parked my car across the street and walked back.
The bell didn’t work so I rapped on the wooden margin of the screen door. Slow steps shuffled and the door opened and I was looking into dimness at a blowsy woman who was blowing her nose as she opened the door. Her face was gray and puffy. She had weedy hair of that vague color which is neither brown nor blond, that hasn’t enough life in it to be ginger, and isn’t clean enough to be gray. Her body was thick in a shapeless outing flannel bathrobe many moons past color and design. It was just something around her body. Her toes were large and obvious in a pair of man’s slippers of scuffed brown leather.
I said: “Mrs. Florian? Mrs. Jessie Florian?”
“Uh-huh,” the voice dragged itself out of her throat like a sick man getting out of bed.
“You are the Mrs. Florian whose husband once ran a place of entertainment on Central Avenue? Mike Florian?”
She thumbed a wick of hair past her large ear. Her eyes glittered with surprise. Her heavy clogged voice said:
“Wha-what? My goodness sakes alive. Mike’s been gone these five years. Who did you say you was?”
The screen door was still shut and hooked.
“I’m a detective,” I said. “I’d like a little information.”
She stared at me a long dreary minute. Then with effort she unhooked the door and turned away from it.
“Come on in then. I ain’t had time to get cleaned up yet,” she whined. “Cops, huh?”
I stepped through the door and hooked the screen again. A large handsome cabinet radio droned to the left of the door in the corner of the room. It was the only decent piece of furniture the place had. It looked brand new. Everything was junk—dirty overstuffed pieces, a wooden rocker that matched the one on the porch, a square arch into a dining room with a stained table, finger marks all over the swing door to the kitchen beyond. A couple of frayed lamps with once gaudy shades that were now as gay as super-annuated streetwalkers.
The woman sat down in the rocker and flopped her slippers and looked at me. I looked at the radio and sat down at the end of a davenport. She saw me looking at it. A bogus heartiness, as weak as a Chinaman’s tea, moved into her face and voice. “All the comp’ny I got,” she said. Then she tittered. “Mike ain’t done nothing new, has he? I don’t get cops calling on me much.”
Her titter contained a loose alcoholic overtone. I leaned back against something hard, felt for it and brought up an empty quart gin bottle. The woman tittered again.
“A joke that was,” she said. “But I hope to Christ they’s enough cheap blondes where he is. He never got enough of them here.”
“I was thinking more about a redhead,” I said.
“I guess he could use a few of them too.” Her eyes, it seemed to me, were not so vague now. “I don’t call to mind. Any special redhead?”
“Yes. A girl named Velma. I don’t know what last name she used except that it wouldn’t be her real one. I’m trying to trace her for her folks. Your place on Central is a colored place now, although they haven’t changed the name, and of course the people there never heard of her. So I thought of you.”
“Her folks taken their time getting around to it—looking for her,” the woman said thoughtfully.
“There’s a little money involved. Not much. I guess they have to get her in order to touch it. Money sharpens the memory.”
“So does liquor,” the woman said. “Kind of hot today, ain’t it? You said you was a copper though.” Cunning eyes, steady attentive face. The feet in the man’s slippers didn’t move.
I held up the dead soldier and shook it. Then I threw it to one side and reached back on my hip for the pint of bond bourbon the Negro hotel clerk and I had barely tapped. I held it out on my knee. The woman’s eyes became fixed in an incredulous stare. Then suspicion climbed all over her face, like a kitten, but not so playfully.
“You ain’t no copper,” she said softly. “No copper ever bought a drink of that stuff. What’s the gag, mister?”
She blew her nose again, on one of the dirtiest handkerchiefs I ever saw. Her eyes stayed on the bottle. Suspicion fought with thirst, and thirst was winning. It always does.
“This Velma was an entertainer, a singer. You wouldn’t know her? I don’t suppose you went there much.”
Seaweed colored eyes stayed on the bottle. A coated tongue coiled on her lips.
“Man, that’s liquor,” she sighed. “I don’t give a damn who you are. Just hold it careful, mister. This ain’t no time to drop anything.”
She got up and waddled out of the room and come back with two thick smeared glasses.
“No fixin’s. Just what you brought is all,” she said.
I poured her a slug that would have made me float over a wall. She reached for it hungrily and put it down her throat like an aspirin tablet and looked at the bottle. I poured her another and a smaller one for me. She took it over to her rocker. Her eyes had turned two shades browner already.
“Man, this stuff dies painless with me,” she said and sat down. “It never knows what hit it. What was we talkin’ about?”
“A redhaired girl named Velma who used to work in your place on Central Avenue.”
“Yeah.” She used her second drink. I went over and stood the bottle on an end beside her. She reached for it. “Yeah. Who you say you was?”
I took out a card and gave it to her. She read it with her tongue and lips, dropped it on a table beside her and set her empty glass on it.
“Oh, a private guy. You ain’t said that, mister.” She waggled a finger at me with gay reproach. “But your liquor says you’re an all right guy at that. Here’s to crime.” She poured a third drink for herself and drank it down.
I sat down and rolled a cigarette around in my fingers and waited. She either knew something or she didn’t. If the knew something, she either would tell me or she wouldn’t. It was that simple.
“Cute little redhead,” she said slowly and thickly. “Yeah, I remember her. Song and dance. Nice legs and generous with ‘em. She went off somewheres. How would I know what them tramps do?”
“Well, I didn’t really think you would know,” I said. “But it was natural to come and ask you, Mrs. Florian. Help rourseif to the whiskey—I could run out for more when we need it.”
“You ain’t drinkin’,” she said suddenly.
I put my hand around my glass and swallowed what was in it slowly enough to make it seem more than it was.
“Where’s her folks at?” she asked suddenly.
“What does that matter?”
“Okey,” she sneered. “All cops is the same. Okey, handsome. A guy that buys me a drink is a pal.” She reached for the bottle and set up Number 4. “I shouldn’t ought to barber with you. But when I like a guy, the ceiling’s the limit.” She simpered. She was as cute as a washtub. “Hold onto your hair and don’t step on no snakes,” she said. “I got me an idea.”
She got up out of the rocker, sneezed, almost lost the bathrobe, slapped it back against her stomach and stared at me coldly.
“No peekin’,” she said, and went out of the room again, hitting the door frame with her shoulder.
I heard her fumbling steps going into the back part of the house.
The poinsettia shoots tap-tapped dully against the front wall. The clothes line creaked vaguely at the side of the house. The ice cream peddler went by ringing his bell. The big new handsome radio in the corner whispered of dancing and love with a deep soft throbbing note like the catch in a torch singer’s voice.
Then from the back of the house there were various types of crashing sounds. A chair seemed to fall over backwards, a bureau drawer was pulled out too far and crashed to the floor, there was fumbling and thudding and muttered thick language. Then the slow click of a lock and the squeak of a trunk top going up. More fumbling and banging. A tray landed on the floor. I got up from the davenport and sneaked into the dining room and from that into a short hail. I looked around the edge of an open door.
She was in there swaying in front of the trunk, making grabs at what was in it, and then throwing her hair back over her forehead with anger. She was drunker than she thought. She leaned down and steadied herself on the trunk and coughed and sighed. Then she went down on her thick knees and plunged both hands into the trunk and groped.
They came up holding something unsteadily. A thick package tied with faded pink tape. Slowly, clumsily, she undid the tape. She slipped an envelope out of the package and leaned down again to thrust the envelope out of sight into the right-hand side of the trunk. She retied the tape with fumbling fingers.
I sneaked back the way I had come and sat down on the davenport. Breathing stertorous noises, the woman came back into the living room and stood swaying in the doorway with the tape-tied package.
She grinned at me triumphantly, tossed the package and it fell somewhere near my feet. She waddled back to the rocker and sat down and reached for the whiskey.
I picked the package off the floor and untied the faded pink tape.
“Look ‘em over,” the woman grunted. “Photos. Newspaper stills. Not that them tramps ever got in no newspapers except by way of the police blotter. People from the joint they are. They’re all the bastard left me—them and his old clothes.”
I leafed through the bunch of shiny photographs of men and women in professional poses. The men had sharp foxy faces and racetrack clothes or eccentric clownlike makeup. Hoofers and comics from the filling station circuit. Not many of them would ever get west of Main Street. You would find them in tanktown vaudeville acts, cleaned up, or down in the cheap burlesque houses, as dirty as the law allowed and once in a while just enough dirtier for a raid and a noisy police court trial, and then back in their shows again, grinning, sadistically filthy and as rank as the smell of stale sweat. The women had good legs and displayed their inside curves more than Will Hays would have liked. But their faces were as threadbare as a bookkeeper’s office coat. Blondes, brunettes, large cowlike eyes with a peasant dullness in them. Small sharp eyes with urchin greed in them. One or two of the faces obviously vicious. One or two of them might have had red hair. You couldn’t tell from the photographs. I looked them over casually, without interest and tied the tape again.
“I wouldn’t know any of these,” I said. “Why am I looking at them?”
She leered over the bottle her right hand was grappling with unsteadily. “Ain’t you looking for Velma?”
“Is she one of these?”
Thick cunning played on her face, had no fun there and went somewhere else. “Ain’t you got a photo of her—from her folks?”
That troubled her. Every girl has a photo somewhere, if it’s only in short dresses with a bow in her hair. I should have had it.
“I ain’t beginnin’ to like you again,” the woman said almost quietly.
I stood up with my glass and went over and put it down beside hers on the end table.
“Pour me a drink before you kill the bottle.”
She reached for the glass and I turned and walked swiftly through the square arch into the dining room, into the hall, into the cluttered bedroom with the open trunk and the spilled tray. A voice shouted behind me. I plunged ahead down into the right side of the trunk, felt an envelope and brought it up swiftly.
She was out of her chair when I got back to the living room, but she had only taken two or three steps. Her eyes had a peculiar glassiness. A murderous glassiness.
“Sit down,” I snarled at her deliberately. “You’re not dealing with a simple-minded lug like Moose Malloy this time.”
It was a shot more or less in the dark, and it didn’t hit anything. She blinked twice and tried to lift her nose with her upper lip. Some dirty teeth showed in a rabbit leer.
“Moose? The Moose? What about him?” she gulped.
“He’s loose,” I said. “Out of jail. He’s wandering, with a forty-five gun in his hand. He killed a nigger over on Central this morning because he wouldn’t tell him where Velma was. Now he’s looking for the fink that turned him up eight years ago.”
A white look smeared the woman’s face. She pushed the bottle against her lips and gurgled at it. Some of the whiskey ran down her chin.
“And the cops are looking for him,” she said and laughed. “Cops. Yah!”
A lovely old woman. I liked being with her. I liked getting her drunk for my own sordid purposes. I was a swell guy. I enjoyed being me. You find almost anything under your hand in my business, but I was beginning to be a little sick at my stomach.
I opened the envelope my hand was clutching and drew out a glazed still. It was like the others but it was different, much nicer. The girl wore a Pierrot costume from the waist up. Under the white conical hat with a black pompon on the top, her fluffed out hair had a dark tinge that might have been red. The face was in proffle but the visible eye seemed to have gaiety in it. I wouldn’t say the face was lovely and unspoiled. I’m not that good at faces. But it was pretty. People had been nice to that face, or nice enough for their circle. Yet it was a very ordinary face and its prettiness was strictly assembly line. You would see a dozen faces like it on a city block in the noon hour.
Below the waist the photo was mostly legs and very nice legs at that. It was signed across the lower right hand corner: “Always yours—Velma Valento.”
I held it up in front of the Florian woman, out of her reach. She lunged but came short.
“Why hide it?” I asked.
She made no sound except thick breathing. I slipped the photo back into the envelope and the envelope into my pocket.
“Why hide it?” I asked again. “What makes it different from the others? Where is she?”
“She’s dead,” the woman said. “She was a good kid, but she’s dead, copper. Beat it.”
The tawny mangled brows worked up and down. Her hand opened and the whiskey bottle slid to the carpet and began to gurgle. I bent to pick it up. She tried to kick me in the face. I stepped away from her.
“And that still doesn’t say why you hid it,” I told her. “When did she die? How?”
“I am a poor sick old woman,” she grunted. “Get away from me, you son of a bitch.”
I stood there looking at her, not saying anything, not thinking of anything particular to say. I stepped over to her side after a moment and put the flat bottle, now almost empty, on the table at her side.
She was staring down at the carpet. The radio droned pleasantly in the corner. A car went by outside. A fly buzzed in a window. After a long time she moved one lip over the other and spoke to the floor, a meaningless jumble of words from which nothing emerged. Then she laughed and threw her head back and drooled. Then her right hand reached for the bottle and it rattled against her teeth as she drained it. When it was empty she held it up and shook it and threw it at me. It went off in the corner somewhere, skidding along the carpet and bringing up with a thud against the baseboard.
She leered at me once more, then her eyes closed and she began to snore.
It might have been an act, but I didn’t care. Suddenly I had enough of the scene, too much of it, far too much of it.
I picked my hat off the davenport and went over to the door and opened it and went out past the screen. The radio still droned in the corner and the woman still snored gently in her chair. I threw a quick look back at her before I closed the door, then shut it, opened it again silently and looked again.
Her eyes were still shut but something gleamed below the lids. I went down the steps, along the cracked walk to the street.
In the next house a window curtain was drawn aside and a narrow intent face was close to the glass, peering, an old woman’s face with white hair and a sharp nose.
Old Nosey checking up on the neighbors. There’s always at least one like her to the block. I waved a hand at her. The curtain fell.
I went back to my car and got into it and drove back to the 77th Street Division, and climbed upstairs to Nulty’s smelly little cubbyhole of an office on the second floor.