One Endless Hour (11 page)

    I moved behind the counter and sat down on a three-legged stool placed before a mirror with angled wings that showed the sides of the head as well as the front. The well-endowed proprietress sat on another stool slightly behind mine after enveloping me in a barber's apron.

    " 'Course most men who come in here are afraid they're never going to make it with a woman again," she continued in her free-wheeling fashion. "And I can understand that. When I lost my hair, the first thing I thought was that I'd never get to do the split on my back again." In the mirror I could see her bright smile over my shoulder. "It didn't work that way. I even experimented. A few times I took the wig off just to see what would happen. Some guys just shriveled, but it turned on a few Johns like you wouldn't believe."

    While talking, she had arranged a makeup tray beside me. Stubby tubes numbered from one to eleven rested in troughs along with three different kinds of powder in jars. "First the clippers on the back of the neck to blend the hairline," she said. I flinched at the cold touch of the steel, but she clip-clipped away, unheeding. "I recommend not wearing a hat," she went on. "Ninety percent of the trouble in wig wearing comes from hats and the complications they cause."

    Finished with the clipping, her cool fingers trailed lightly across the back of my neck several times. I knew she was doing it on purpose, but I couldn't restrain the shiver that rippled through me. "Suppose it rains?" I addressed myself to her last remark.

    "Unless you're with a gal you're trying to impress, take the hairpiece off and put it in your pocket. Otherwise, carry an umbrella. She'll think you're British and very gallant." I said nothing. "You see the numbers on the tubes? The range of color in them will take care of most facial gradations. The lower numbers are from light pastel pink to beige. The higher numbers are tan, brown, and dark brown. From the skin on your arms, you look as though you should be number six or number seven."

    She picked up the number six tube, squirted a gob of the creamy material onto her palm, then worked it onto her fingertips. "Now watch this," she said, and began rubbing it into her cheeks with a rapid, circular motion of her fingers. Her white skin darkened. "This foundation not only supplies the basic color you need but it also covers the scars." She picked up a tissue and wiped off her face. "You try it."

    I directed the tube at my palm and squeezed it awkwardly. "Too much," she said at once, leaning over my shoulder and halving the dose. I could smell her heady perfume. "There, try that."

    I began spreading it lightly on my face, watching the mirror to make sure there were no gaps in the coverage. It was almost miraculous the way the seams and craters disappeared. In the midst of my efforts, she reached up casually and placed the hairpiece on my head. She attached two tabs in the lace-like foundation just above my ears but underneath the netting. I couldn't believe the difference it made. "How about
that?"
she crooned over my shoulder.

    "I think well of it," I said fervently.

    "I knew you would. It's not cheap, but it's the most natural-looking hairpiece I have in the shop." She reached around me for a jar on the tray, opened it, studied my face in the mirror for a moment, then closed the jar and opened another. "These different shades of powder permit natural blending with your own skin at the jawline and throat-line," she explained, showing me how to use it.

    I examined the completed job in the mirror. The hair looked natural, but the face didn't. It still looked stiff, but it was a huge improvement over the shiny gloss that had called attention to itself before. "Each application is good for twenty-four hours unless you run into a cloudburst or something," she advised me. "Even then it won't run, but it might spot."

    "How much for the works plus an extra makeup kit?" I asked.

    She reached into a partly opened drawer and took out a wig identical to the one on my head except that its color was a deep coppery red. "Wouldn't you like a change-off?" she asked. "Six eighty would cover everything."

    More than most men I could use a change-off. I stared at the burnished bronze of the second hairpiece.

    "You haven't asked me the question usually asked by my men customers," the proprietress said.

    "No? What's the question?"

    "Whether everything will stay put while they're enjoying a roll in the hay."

    "I can see how it would be embarrassing if it didn't. What do you tell them?"

    She smiled sweetly. "I tell them that if they're worried about it we'll lock the front door and go into the back room and try it out."

    "I'll bet you sell more wigs that way."

    "Hairpieces," she corrected me with another smile. "Well? I'll bet you haven't had a piece since the explosion."

    "You're right, but it's that fact that makes me gun-shy about the back room."

    "Nonsense," she said briskly. "You've come to the right place for retraining." She rose from her stool, went to the front of the shop, inserted an "Out to lunch" sign in the window, and locked the door. She came back and took me by the hand. "Come on. You need a little hairpiece therapy."

    "Just a minute." I freed my hand from hers and counted out six hundred and eighty dollars. "You've made a sale regardless."

    She put it in the pocket of her uniform, then took my hand again. She led the way into a back room, which was comfortably fitted out as a bed-sitting room. I was curious, but I was also apprehensive. "This could be a disaster," I warned her as she disappeared behind a screen.

    "Hang your clothes in the closet and relax," her voice floated out to me. "Just leave everything to me."

    I was startled by a full-length view of myself in a pier-glass mirror attached to the closet door. Almost literally, I didn't recognize a single thing about myself. I was still staring when another figure moved into view beside me in the mirror. She wore a single sheer garment, which for lack of a better term might be labeled a short shirt. It half contained the jutting thrust of milky white breasts above while it flirted at mid-thigh with hinted-at shadowy depths beneath. I felt a long-dormant stirring.

    "Relax," she repeated, and took charge of my undressing. She led me to the bed. She was self-assured, bold, eager, and skillful. I had never been physically seduced before. My response was as gratifying to me as I hoped it was to her. For a moment, with what seemed acres of sleek female flesh in my hands, my mind drifted to Hazel

    Andrews and her cabin just outside Hudson. But only for a moment.

    "It didn't hurt a bit, did it?" my companion inquired when I rolled, exhausted, to one side of the bed. She patted my shoulder. I got up finally and went to the mirror. The hairpiece was firmly in place. When I turned, she was smiling at me from the bed. "If you're not completely satisfied, come back anytime for an additional adjustment," she said. With her sexy voice, it was the epitome of a Mae West double entendre.

    I dressed and prepared to leave. Back in uniform, she preceded me to the door and unlocked it. "No need to worry about a thing," she assured me breezily. "You proved that to both of us."

    "Thanks," I said as I departed, and I meant it.

    I was a dozen miles along the road toward Mobile when I realized that I didn't even know her name.

    

    

    I SPENT A WEEK IN MOBILE AND ACCOMPLISHED NOTHing.

    Or almost nothing.

    I had underestimated the difficulty in making meaningful contact on my own terms. With my new face, I came as a total stranger. Still, I had expected to arrive at the Golden Peacock as Earl Drake, establish myself as a member of the breed, acquire some necessary information, and move on.

    It didn't work that way. It wasn't only that no one at the Peacock would have known me as either Chet Arnold or Earl Drake. In my business, names were meaningless anyway. In thirteen years I'd used a lot of names. The major cause of my difficulty was that affairs at the Golden Peacock were in a complete state of flux.

    As I had expected, Rudy Hernandez was in charge. Still, I had to go slow. It was only natural that I begin by asking for Manny Sebastian, even though I was the only one who knew positively that Manny was never going to return to the Golden Peacock. Not surprisingly, my questions about Sebastian's absence were parried by Hernandez' evasive answers. For all Rudy knew, Manny might show up that very night after his unexplained vacation. There was an increasingly proprietary air about Hernandez when I talked to him nights at the bar, though. Each day he was obviously more confident that in some inexplicable manner he had fallen heir to the establishment.

    But he was cautious. I could have come out flatfooted and identified myself. I couldn't see doing it, though. What was the point in so painfully acquiring a new face if the old identity were to be tied to it for everyone to know? I would be giving away a priceless break with the past that I had literally gone through hell to achieve.

    I had expected that in the give-and-take of bar conversations I could establish to Hernandez' satisfaction that I had been in the game for years. If I had had sufficient time, I could have done it eventually, but with motel and restaurant draining my meager resources daily, I had no time.

    It came down to a point where I could either identify myself to Hernandez, or I could forego the information for which I'd come to Mobile. Once or twice I came close to capitulating. I was strongly tempted, but each time I held off. Our little talks went round and round in circles. "Jim Griglun?" Hernandez said one night in response to a query of mine. "I haven't heard his name in years. He's out of the game entirely. Nerve's gone. I don't know what he's doing now."

    "He had nerve enough when he and Slater Holmes and Gig Rosen and Duke Naylor pulled off the Oklahoma City job," I said. "They got over a hundred thousand that day."

    "You don't look old enough to be going back that far," Hernandez replied. "I remember that Rosen and Naylor were burned down on a job the very next year."

    "In Massillon, Ohio," I contributed. "And Clem Powers was killed two days later when the rest of the gang holed up in a barn."

    "Yeah," Rudy agreed. "That was a bad one. OT Barney Pope and some punk kid were rounded up in the barn an' sent over the road. I remember that was one of the few jobs set up by the Schemer that went all wrong."

    I had been the punk kid on that job, but did I want to say so? While I was trying to make up my mind, Hernandez kept on talking. "Hadn't thought of Clem Powers in years. That boy was really a stud. Reminds me of Dick 'Ladykiller' Dahl nowadays."

    A glass rapped sharply on the bar, and Hernandez moved away to serve the customer. His remark about the Schemer turned my thoughts in a new direction. Robert "The Schemer" Frenz was a professional who set up bank jobs for a fee or a percentage of the gross. Frenz would case the entire job, supplying escape routes, local police procedures, and the most detailed information on the bank premises and the bank personnel. He never took part in the actual operation, but he could really lay one out. I'd used the Schemer's prepackaged deals twice, when Big Ed Morris was my partner, before he was killed in a drunken argument in a bucket of blood in Santa Fe. I usually preferred to set up my own jobs, but I knew good workmen who relied upon the Schemer completely.

    It nettled me that I had so badly underestimated how difficult it would be to get through to Hernandez. I could hardly blame him, though. Local cops, the state, and the Feds were always snooping around places like the Peacock hoping to pick up useful information. If I were an FBI plant, I could have been briefed on jobs and names, so I made it a point during the four or five nights I stopped in at the bar to touch upon subjects that couldn't have been known by the law. I named hangouts and hideouts, mistresses' names and wives' names.

    Hernandez was impressed, but he wouldn't open up.

    His own talk referred to the past, never to the present. I decided I was paying the penalty for Hernandez's insecurity in regard to Manny Sebastian's status.

    Once I began to think in terms of Robert "The Schemer" Frenz, though, the prospect opened up. I had been using the name Carl Kessler when I used him before. My changed face would be no problem, because the Schemer had a peculiarity. He met no one face to face. He did all his business by telephone and mail.

    I eased a hundred-dollar bill out of my wallet and laid it on the bar top. When Hernandez returned to where I was sitting alone, I pushed the bill toward him. "I've been out of touch with the Schemer lately," I said. "What's his business phone now?"

    Hernandez supplied it promptly. That's how the nightclub made its real money, acting as a message drop. Rudy was guaranteeing nothing by giving me the number. It would be up to me to satisfy Frenz that I was legitimate.

    It was a Washington, D.C., number as it had always been before. It changed about once a month, though. I sat at the bar for another hour, said goodnight, and left. On the way to my motel I stopped off at a lighted highway phone booth and called the number. I had forgotten how late it was. "Schemer, this is Carl Kessler," I said when his familiar high-pitched voice came on the line. "I got your number in Mobile at the Golden Peacock."

    "Kessler," the voice said tentatively, then continued more alertly. "Oh, yes, you came to me through-"

    "Ed Morris," I supplied when Frenz waited for me to supply the key information. "What have you got on the shelf ready to go?"

    I could all but hear the wheels clicking in the Schemer's computer-like brain. "You've been keeping a low silhouette recently," he countered.

    "It happens," I said. "Sometimes a man's talking when he should have been listening." Let him think I'd taken a fall and been on ice for a while. "Listen, when you call Mobile to verify where I got your number, you might find that Rudy Hernandez doesn't know my name. He stayed so buttoned up with me that I returned the compliment."