It Takes Two (21 page)

Tommy snapped his fingers, swayed, grimaced like a tormented Louis Armstrong and plowed into an impudent parody of “Saints”:

Up where the sun

Refuse to shine,

Up where the sun

Don’t never shine,

I cou-ou-ount up my numbers

With a son-of-a-gun

Who ain’t mine.

Asdeck waved from the dance floor. He was clearly paying more attention to Betty and her tight dress than to the lyrics.
I must be Nervous Nellie Forbush
, I thought.
The whole town’s talking about the killings and the funeral today. Tommy, Carmen, Asdeck and maybe half the rest of the people here tonight know Bud’s involved in the case. Maybe I ought to just relax
.

I didn’t like it. But, for the moment, I kept my mouth shut. Ten minutes later, the club room doors opened again and two men entered, both dressed in business suits. Choosing a small table at the far end of the room, they ordered mixed drinks and settled into what looked like a confidential conversation. The younger man, thin and pink faced with dirty-blond hair, kept crossing and uncrossing his legs, touching his knee to make a point. His companion, a broad-shouldered, older, more athletic-looking figure, did most of the talking. He looked entirely relaxed. The younger one nodded a lot and extended his pinkie every time he lifted his glass.

Bud glanced at them several times before asking me if I knew whether the finger-waving guy was queer.

“No idea,” I answered. “None of my business what he is.”

“Bull-puppies, Lieutenant, I’m damn sure you got some idea. Just look at him. He don’t ever stop moving. And he moves like a sissy.”

I shrugged, looked at the couple again, and said, “None of your business either. Unless you’re interested in him.”

I knew who the men were, all right. Or, at least, I’d read their membership applications. I knew their names and where they came from. I knew that they were repeat customers, that their credit was good and that they’d asked for rooms on the same floor.

I didn’t tell Bud any of this. Instead, I described the men’s situation in the way Admiral Asdeck might have described it to me back in the beginning of my education at the New Victory Club. I told Bud the two men were both traveling salesmen, both married and both out-of-town members of the Caloosa Club. I said they’d rented single rooms and were therefore entitled to a little privacy. More than that, I didn’t know, and didn’t want to know. “It isn’t fair or safe for me to spill other people’s secrets,” I told Bud. “Not even to you. Any more than you’d want me telling your landlady about the way we mix it up sometimes.”

Startled by what must have sounded like a threat, Bud blinked, then looked around. Nobody was within five feet of us, so he asked another question. “You figure they do mix it up? Can’t see the string-beanpole putting it to the older gent. You figure the old guy’s hoping to get his cock sucked?”

“Why don’t you go ask them yourself, if you’re so curious? Maybe they’re looking for a three-way orgy. Maybe a nosy detective would be right up their alley.”

At that, he got my drift, and backed off.

Another man in a business suit entered the club a few minutes later. After pausing at the bar to order a drink, he joined the poker game in progress.

“You might want to aim your curiosity over there instead,” I said with a nod. “That’s Ridley Boldt, one of Hillard Norris’s pall-bearers. My guess is that his wife knows plenty about her cousin Willene’s personal business.”

“You figure she’ll talk to me?”

“Crack reporter from the
News-Press
tried to quiz her this afternoon and got nowhere. You’re better looking, though. And more polite. But you know, to a lawyer’s wife, a flatfoot cop’s probably no different than a reporter.”

Bud picked up his beer bottle and drained it. “She might not have any choice,” he said. “Once the grand jury gets going.”

We were both ready for refills. I looked around for Carmen and finally spotted him across the room. The flamboyant club manager was taking orders from the table of poker players. Bending down to collect empty glasses, balancing a cocktail tray in his left hand, Carmen steadied himself on a chair back with his right. Laughing at something Ridley Boldt must have said, he cocked his right foot behind his left knee, revealing a very high-heeled Texas boot.

As Carmen turned away, one of the other card players reached over and pinched his butt cheek—not sexily, or seductively, or even good-naturedly, but hard enough to leave a bruise.

The man was Bobby Jim Carter, a former Army sergeant and currently the assistant manager of a Bradenton moving-van office. Bobby Jim had been playing cards and drinking, Carmen reported later, since mid afternoon.

Every inch a professional, Carmen righted himself, took a step back and quietly asked Bobby Jim to observe the rules of an honest card game and keep his hands above the table. But Bobby Jim threw down his cards and stood up angrily.

“Some men try to bite off more candy than they can chew,” Carmen said, dropping a shoulder. “We gonna have to put you on a diet, sir.”

Tommy Carpenter stopped playing. Everybody stopped talking. And so everybody in the room heard what Bobby Jim said next. “Fuck your poontang candy, you spick ass. When I’m in a high-class club I wanna be served by real female waitresses—white women, not wetback she-male pogie.”

“Ah, hell,” Bud muttered. “I knew we should of gone to the Legion Hall.”

“I gotta go to work,” I answered. “You want to watch my back?” Glancing toward the door, I saw Brian Rooney and Lou Salmi moving forward into position. Brian’s shirtsleeves were rolled up. His elbows and hands flexed and relaxed as he crossed the room. Lou was right behind him, gripping an empty champagne bottle, prepared to bop the daylights out of the offending drunk if his language got any rougher.

“The gentleman is on his way out,” I called to Brian. “He’s wanted in the lobby. He has a phone call from his office, a wire from President Truman. Tell him anything as long as he moves.”

“He’ll move, boss. That I do believe,” Brian said. “Or else we wash his dirty mouth out with carbolic soap right here.”

Faced with Brian’s heavily muscled arms, Lou’s bottle, my squared shoulders, Bud’s shadow and no apparent support from his buddies at the card table, Bobby Jim didn’t put up a fight. Hustling him into my office and dumping him in the easy chair was a snap.

When I came around to face him, he was breathing hard and working his jaw like an overweight bulldog.

“Here’s the message,” I said. “The Caloosa Club is no kindergarten. We like a little variety. We want everybody to have a good time. And that means all parties keep decent tongues in their heads when they’re with us. You read me? Sir?”

He stared back, an overmatched boxer dreading round two. The confused low-level shifting inside his hooded bully’s eyes was unmistakable, though. He was trying to psychologize me and hoping it would work.

“What’s more,” I continued, “gentlemen keep their hands to themselves around here. Guests either treat the staff with respect or lose their privileges. You read me there? Sir?”

“Look, kid,” he answered. “I don’t know where you come from. Around here, decent white men don’t put up with spicks, niggers, queers and other trash in no social situation. What kind of club is this?”

Brian flexed his oversize biceps in a bored sort of way. Bud raised his arm, letting just the suggestion of the holstered pistol under his jacket register on Bobby Jim’s addled brain. Standing in the doorway, Asdeck, Carmen and Ridley Boldt wore neutral, seen-it-all-before expressions.

“Well, sir,” I answered, leaning forward. “It’s a private club. And one you don’t happen to belong to. You do happen to have had a little too much to drink. Since your host seems to have departed the premises, I’d like to have Mr. Rooney find you a ride home.”

Bobby Jim looked around, evidently seeking support, and tried to stand up. “Fucking Navy faggots,” he muttered, wobbling and leaning on the arm of the chair. “Fucking pansy. Drive my own fucking car. Don’t you touch me.”

I motioned for Brian, Lou and Bud to step back.

“Lemme tell you something, kid,” Bobby Jim said over his shoulder as he lurched toward the door. “You’ll be sorry for this. Mark it down. You’ll be real sorry.”

After he left, Asdeck cracked a grin, nodded and said, admiral-like, “Nice work, men. Carry on.”

I almost saluted.

Carmen fanned his face with his hand. “I sure hope you know what you’re doing, Dan.”

“Relax,” I told him. “I mean to keep this place clean. That was just a little trash detail.”

“Well, I’d have handled it with a Mickey Finn cocktail,” Carmen said archly. “On the house. A Mickey just weak enough so his card-playing pals could clean him out of every cent he owns.” Here he winked at Ridley as he began dealing an imaginary deck of cards. “Then, when the mark finally went night-night, I’d ask Mr. Rooney and Mr. Salmi to deposit him out on the freight dock. And I’m afraid his trousers and BVDs—oh, my goodness, so shocking—would be mysteriously disappeared. That way, the tramps and garbage truck drivers could fuck his dead ass from here to breakfast.”

Asdeck and Brian laughed appreciatively. When I said that I was shocked at such language, we all laughed—all except Bud.

Bud took the threat at face value. That was plain from the expression on his face. But I could also see something else—that he was deeply impressed by the scene he’d just witnessed, and not only by my part in it but by Carmen’s as well.

I was about to say, “Back to work, all you fucking Navy faggots and pansies,” when the night bellboy knocked on the open office door.

“Special delivery for you, Mr. Ewing,” he called. “Them two couples from Louisiana just arrived. Say their train was late getting in.”

“Couple of matched pairs,” Asdeck explained to Bud as we walked up the hall to the reception desk. “Mrs. Rosamonde Peek and Captain Newton Slidel, Mrs. Dewey Broussard and Ray Bonner Flambeaux. Mrs. Peek is a Navy widow and a very handsome woman. The captain was a year behind me at the Academy. He was Lieutenant Peek’s wartime buddy from right before Pearl Harbor. Peek lost his life during the battle of Midway. Newt and Mr. Bonner go back to high school in the Delta. All four were here last winter.”

When we reached the lobby, Asdeck and the Louisiana delegation broke into a torrent of satisfied shouts, laughs, handshakes and back pounding. Captain Slidel—tall, lean and leathery, dressed in a Stetson hat, boots and a Western-style gabardine suit—looked like a well-to-do rancher, not a career officer on liberty. He sounded Navy enough, however. “Didn’t have a club car on the train once we left Tampa,” he explained, shaking my hand. “Damnedest situation.”

His companion, Rosamonde Peek, greeted me with an excited shriek. “Oh! Lieutenant
Ewing!
I’ve so looked
forward
to this!”

“Indeed a pleasure!” her friend Mrs. Broussard put in. “I told the boy to take the bags right on upstairs. He’s going to find some ice and then unpack the gentlemen’s bags.” The widow of a Baton Rouge grain dealer, she resembled Mamie Eisenhower with more money—bangs, short hair, pie face, diamond bracelets and bouffant skirts. Having trained as a nurse at Charity Hospital before her marriage, she was now second in command of the Baton Rouge Red Cross chapter. She was used to giving orders and having them obeyed.

Ray Bonner Flambeaux, a jockey-sized man with a red face and twinkling eyes, winked and grinned as we shook hands. “Drinks in the room, hell, my dear. We’re ready for a party,” he said, glancing up at the woman beside him and then at Asdeck and Slidel. “Big party, loosen things up around here. That right, boys and girls?”

A yellow diamond the size of a postage stamp flashed on and off as Flambeaux’s right hand swept back and forth. He’d grown up dirt poor, gotten an early start as an oil-field wildcatter and struck it moderately rich with an oil lease in his home parish. I was holding his personal blank check to cover all expenses for both couples.

Captain Slidel loosened his collar and bolo tie. “Getting relaxed already,” he answered, patting his mistress on the velvet curve of her mink-lined shoulder.

“I want to go fishing tomorrow,” Mrs. Broussard put in. “Nobody at home has a boat of any size. I want to try for tarpon again. Remember, Admiral, you swore we’d have pretty weather this year.”

Asdeck laughed and began herding them toward the club room. “Can’t promise weather that will be as pretty as you are, my dear. But if it rains, well, we’ll just stay inside and watch home movies. I’ve got some Cuban films that come highly recommended.”

Starting to move off, the Louisiana men put on dour, interested smiles. Mrs. Peek fanned her brow with a delicate lace handkerchief. “My, my…films?”

“Not easy to find,” Asdeck added. “Lucky to put my hands on them down in Miami. Just last week.”

Glancing over at me, Bud cocked an eyebrow and dropped his voice. “Why’s he gonna show home movies? There’s a movie theater two blocks away.”

“These aren’t Hollywood movies,” I answered. “And our popcorn is free.”