The Kind One (12 page)

Darla gave me a sad smile. “You’re so sweet.”

I went in by myself to the Big Boulder Dining Room, and had what Daddy had, the trout and scrambled eggs, called “world-famous” on the menu. On my way out I was walking through the hallway that led to the lobby when I saw Nucky and Goodlooking Tommy sitting at the shoeshine stand. The shoeshine boy was this old colored man named Timothy; he was the only Negro I’d seen at Lake Arrowhead.

Goodlooking Tommy was reading
The Racing Form
while he waited for Timothy to finish up Nucky’s shoes. He saw me and motioned me over.

“So what’s the word?”

“What’s the word on what?”

“On how it’s looking from Bud’s corner.”

“What do you mean?”

“I hear Max and Loy ain’t getting along. And Bud’s been like a referee in a prize fight.”

“You’ve heard more than me then.”

“I thought you was always in the know with Bud.”

“He hasn’t said ten words to me since we been up here.”

Goodlooking Tommy looked at me skeptically.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Now Nucky was inspecting Timothy’s handiwork. “Looks real good, boy. A hell of a shine.”

“Thank you, suh,” said Timothy. He had white curly hair like a lamb, and skin the color of milky coffee.

Nucky dug in his pocket, and pulled out a silver dollar.

“Here’s a nice shiny silver dollar. I think you deserve it. Don’t you?”

Timothy smiled, revealing three or four snaggly teeth. “If you think so, suh.”

“Well, I think so.”

Nucky held out the silver dollar, and Timothy put out his palm; then Nucky gave Goodlooking Tommy and me a quick wink and moved his hand half a foot and dropped the coin. It clanged on the rim of a brass spittoon then vanished inside.

Goodlooking Tommy laughed, then said low in my ear: “Nucky hates niggers.”

“Yeah, I can see.”

Timothy was staring at the spittoon; dripping brown spittle glistened around the rim.

“Well ain’t you gonna get your dollar, boy?” said Nucky. “You don’t wanna hurt my feelings, do you?”

Timothy looked into Nucky’s chicken eyes, then: “No suh,” he said slowly. He reached in the spittoon. His hand was just small enough to get in there. He fished around a minute, then pulled out the dollar.

It, and his hand, were covered with a slime made of spit and tobacco juice and cigar and cigarette ashes. I watched Timothy reach for one of his red shoeshine rags to clean off the slime as Nucky and Goodlooking Tommy laughed. And then I walked away.

   “I’LL BET YOU think my name’s not really Vera Vermillion.”

I shrugged. I held no opinion on the subject. She pulled a business card out of her purse and handed it to me.

   It seemed like every girl came with some sort of motto or slogan up here. One in a Million. The Girl You Wont Forget. Best All-Around Woman.

I started to hand the card back but she said: “Keep it. You never know when you might need an et cetera.”

It was the middle of the afternoon. I was killing time till tonight when there was going to be a birthday dinner for Max Schnitter. I’d gone in the hotel bar looking for some company, but it’d been empty except for the elderly couple I’d encountered on the terrace last night. They smiled and nodded at me, and I smiled back and took a seat at the bar. I was drinking a beer, and hoping Bud wouldn’t catch me at it, when Vera Vermillion came in.

She was a big girl, nearly as tall as me, with a little begirdled waist separating big shoulders and breasts from wide lush hips. She was wearing a clingy reddish-orange dress with matching high heels. An extravagantly colored feather boa was wrapped around her neck, and a little hat with more feathers was perched atop her thick auburn hair.

She flounced across the room looking flustered and exasperated. She plopped herself down on a barstool and ordered something called a blue moon. It looked like a glowing blue martini. She slurped some down, and it seemed to hit the spot as she sighed and relaxed a little; then she noticed me.

“I nearly killed a fucking deer,” she said.

“Really? Why?”

“Jesus, it wasn’t on purpose. I was driving up here and three deers ran across the road and I nearly hit one of ’em. Jumped right over the hood of my car, I nearly had a heart attack. I hate to drive in the first place. Usually Mel, my agent, he drives me. But we were driving down Melrose yesterday and a bee flew in the window and stung him right in the eyeball. Poor Mel, that kinda shit only happens to him. So he’s back in Hollywood in bed with an ice bag over his eye and I gotta drive up here by myself. Up in the goddamn mountains with deers jumping over my car like the cow jumped over the fucking moon. Whew! At least I made it.” Then she took another drink, and said: “Hi, I’m Vera Vermillion.”

And I told her my name and that’s when she gave me her card.

“So what did you come up here for?” I said.

“I’m doing a show tonight.”

“What kind of show?”

“Well, it’s for this guy’s birthday party.”

“Max Schnitter?”

“Yeah. You know him?”

“A little.”

“You gonna be there?”

“Yeah.”

She smiled at me and primped her hair a little. “I guess you’ll be seeing more of me then.”

“I guess so.”

“You must be in the mob, huh?”

She seemed impressed. I shrugged.

“Your name’s not really Vera Vermillion, is it?”

She laughed. “Nah. Susie. Susie Pulaski. I’m from Chicago.”

“Why’d you come to Los Angeles?”

“Why do you think? To be in the movies, like every other girl. So I’m living downtown near Pershing Square, and I’m taking a trolley car out to the beach, and there’s this little guy in a bowtie looking at me. I think he’s trying to pick me up, and I’m ignoring him, then he says, Mae West has only got one thing that you don’t have. An agent. And I says, are you an agent, and he says yeah. And I says how do you know I don’t have an agent, and he says if you had an agent you wouldn’t be riding in some dumpy trolley car. And I says you’re riding in a trolley car, what kinda lousy agent does that make you, and he says it makes me a very good agent, ’cause I’ve just discovered the next Mae West.”

I looked again at the business card. “Was that Mel Goldberg?”

“Sure was.”

“So how’s it going?”

“You know, Danny, it’s tough. They say only one in a million make it to the top in Hollywood, but that’s why I chose my name. Vera Vermillion, ‘One in a Million.’ But you wanna hear something interesting?”

“Sure.”

“Mel became not only my agent, but also my husband.”

She held up her hand to proudly show off a big diamond or something pretending to be a big diamond. “That’s great, Vera. Congratulations.”

“That little guy’ll do anything for me, it nearly killed him not being able to bring me up here, I nearly had to tie him down to the bed. And the last thing he said to me when I was walking out the door was, Susie, you’re the only thing I’ve ever loved. He’s always saying that to me, you’re the only thing I’ve ever loved.” She frowned. “And sometimes I treat him like shit too.”

Her glass was empty now, so I bought her another blue moon, which she seemed very happy to get.

“Don’t get the wrong idea, Danny, I ain’t some kinda lush. I don’t usually drink like this, but them fucking deers nearly scared me to death. I can’t get ’em out of my head. Jumping over my car like that.” She sighed. “The things a girl does to get ahead. It’s just I hear that clock ticking all the time. I’m not as young as I look, you know.”

“No?”

“How old do you think I look?”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“Go ahead. Guess.”

“Thirty?”

Vera looked disappointed. “I’m twenty-eight.”

“Oh.”

“I’m scared time’s running out on me. I don’t wanna wind up some flea-bitten old floozy living downtown in some crummy room.”

“That’s not gonna happen.”

She eyed me over her beautiful blue drink.

“You’re nice.”

“Thanks. So are you.”

“When we get back in town, if you ever wanna call me, that’s okay. You got my number.”

I looked at the card again. “That’s Mel’s number.”

“Just call it and ask for me. Mel won’t mind.”

“He won’t?”

“We got this understanding. Mel and me, we love each other, but all that bedroom stuff, that ain’t part of the deal. See, when he was thirteen, he had the mumps, and it caused his tetiscules to stop growing.”

“His what?”

“Tetiscules. You know, his manly parts.”

“Oh.”

“They’re like little peanuts. So he’s not much good to a girl, in that department. But I’m not complaining. ’Cause like I said. We got this understanding.”

I felt like changing the subject.

“So I don’t know anything about agents. How does Mel go about getting you a job?”

“Well in this case, Mr. Seitz called up and asked for me personally. He saw me perform once. I do this thing with peacock feathers.” She looked uncomfortable. “Look, Danny, the only reason I’m doing this thing tonight is ’cause it’s a hell of a lot of dough for Mel and me. Just remember, I really do act and stuff. Like it says on the card.”

“What are you gonna be doing?”

“I’ll be wrapped up like a present, then Mr. Schnitter’s gonna unwrap me, then I’ll sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to him, and then—well, you get the picture.”

“Mm.”

“Is he a nice guy? Mr. Schnitter?”

“You know, I don’t really know him that well.”

Teddy Bump came in, with Tommy. They took a table in the corner. The waitress went over, and they ordered coffee.

Teddy had a funny kind of a face; his eyelashes were unnaturally long, and he had bushy eyebrows that seemed to be growing too far up on his forehead. Right now he was giving me one of those if-looks-could-kill looks. Vera looked over and saw it too.

“What did you ever do to him?”

“Saw him.”

“Saw him what?”

“I better not say.”

“Ain’t you the mysterious one.”

   THE HOTEL SHUT down the Moonlight Room that night so we could have Schnitter’s birthday dinner there. Everybody sat at a long table and ate big pink slabs of prime rib. Bud was hosting the dinner, so he sat at the head. The important guys, Schnitter, Loy Hanley, Joe Shaw, Jack Otay, and Nuffer, were clustered up around him, and then came the rest, us Seitz guys, and some Schnitter guys and Hanley guys. There were about twenty of us all told. No Darla or Violet or any other girl.

We were all in tuxedoes. I’d rented mine in a store downtown on Broadway. The clerk that helped me was this pissed-off little Russian who spent the whole time cursing out Roosevelt as a tool of the Bolsheviks and Jews. I asked him if he happened to know a Russian count named Anatoly who’d got two fingers shot off in the Revolution. He said it didn’t ring no bell.

Waiters moved in and out keeping the food and booze coming. It was loud and there was lots of laughing and if there was any tension between anybody I didn’t see it.

A guy in a powder-blue tux with curly golden hair and a sissy kind of a face sat at a baby grand playing soft swoony tunes that nobody seemed to be listening to but me.

Doc Travis was being reminisced about.

“You know how ugly Doc was,” said Loy Hanley. “But I ’member a time I thought he was the prettiest sight this side of heaven.”

“What happened?” said Bud, already beginning to grin.

“Well Doc was living in a tent in the desert out east of Yermo. There was a natural spring the Indians used to use, so he had all the water he needed for his operation. He kept his still hid in a old abandoned copper mine. So I drove out there in this big old Chevrolet truck with a load of sugar. It was more like a trail than a road, and by the time I got out there it was nearly sundown. Doc said he’d just finished up a new batch of turtle juice; that’s what he called moon. He said I oughta just stay out there tonight and him and me could sample the new stuff and I could drive back with my load of moon in the morning.

“Well we sat there in his tent that night, drinking by the light of a kerosene lamp—and by God that goddamn turtle juice nearly took the top of my head off. After a hour or two all of a sudden Doc let loose with this big long scream, like he’d just been pushed off the top of a mountain, then he keeled over sideways and his head hit the ground so hard it bounced, and then he started to snore. But I stayed awake and kept drinking that dadgum turtle juice.”

Loy knew how to tell a story, already he had everybody laughing; now he leaned in a little and lowered his voice a notch.

“And then I commence to hearing things. First I hear a coyote yipping, then a wind kicks up and starts the tent to flapping and snapping, then I think I hear people whispering to one another, like they’s out there in the dark creeping up on us. I get it in my head that the Dry Squad has done found us and they’re fixing to lower the boom.

“Doc always kept a loaded thirty-thirty handy, so I took one more swig of turtle juice, then I grab up the rifle and go charging outa the tent. And the wind’s blowing sand in my eyes, but I think I can see people, some of ’em kinda hunkered down and others running away, so I go running through the greasewood bushes hollering my head off and shooting off the rifle, then that’s the last thing I remember for a while.

“When I come to, I’m laying on the ground. I think it must still be nighttime, ’cause my eyes are open but I ain’t seeing nothing. But the funny thing is, it’s hotter’n hell. The sand’s burning my skin, and I’m thinking there has to be a fire, but how could there be a fire if I can’t see it, and then it comes to me: Loy Hanley, you are one dead son of a bitch, and your mama was right, you’ve done gone to hell. ’Cause I was remembering what I heard the preacher say when I was a kid, that hell’s a place of utter darkness, that the fires of hell burn without no light.