The War Against Miss Winter (16 page)

“I do, I truly do.” Her sincerity was so thin you could be arrested for wearing it in public.

I smiled. “I get a favor from you in the future—any favor I want.”

“Within reason,” she said. “Anything else?”

“Yeah, forget about your brown dress.”

R
UBY DEPARTED FOR HER SHOW
at WEAF with a muttered assurance that my price (her dress and a future favor) would be met. I spent another ten minutes on the lobby bench before I was ready to face the world.

I was exhausted and opted to nix lunch and head back to the Shaw House for a nice long nap. I boarded a standing-room-only subway at West Fourteenth Street and Seventh Avenue and spent the entire ride glaring at a man who was too busy reading
The Song of Bernadette
to offer me his seat.

When I arrived home, Tony B. was sitting on the Shaw House steps smoking down the remains of a cigar. “Hey, Rosie! Can I have a word with you?” He toed a pile of ashes dotted with his telltale Cuban butts. He’d been waiting for me for a while.

I attempted to pass him on the stairs. “I don’t want to talk to you.”

“Jayne around?”

“She doesn’t want to talk to you either.” I shoved past him with my pocketbook clenched in my hand. If he so much as looked at me wrong, I’d slam it into his groin.

“Can you at least give her these?” He offered me a bouquet of red roses, which had been lying on the ground beside him.

I took his gift, smiled sweetly, and chucked it into the street. “I’ll have her open the window and give them a looksy. Good-bye, Tony.” I showed him my back and attempted to climb the remaining stairs. Before I could reach the door, he grabbed my elbow. “You’ve got five seconds to take your mitt off my arm or I start screaming.”

He released his grip. “I’ve got to know if she’s all right. That’s all.”

I whirled around and was pleased to find him two steps beneath me. At this level his eyes barely made it to my chin. “You want to know if
she’s all right? Isn’t that sweet of you. As a matter of fact, she’s not. She’s got a goose egg above her eye, a split in her lip, and enough dark marks on her body that she could pass for a Dalmatian in the right light. Proud of yourself?”

He stumbled backward and took hold of the railing to steady himself. “What the hell happened to her?”

“Is that your game? She’s supposed to forgive you because you don’t remember what you did?”

Tony licked his lips and his tone softened into that of a remorseful boozehound the morning after another ruined family outing. “What did I do?”

I lowered my gaze until a perfect forty-five-degree angle could be drawn from my eyes to his. I wished I were one of the villains from
Astounding Stories
who could level her enemies with an infrared light that flashed red and burned like fire. “You beat her up.”

All hint of machismo dripped out of his body and onto the pavement. “I swear to God, I didn’t lay a hand on her.”

“She might fall for your act, but I don’t have time for it. Good-bye, Tony.” Again I turned to go, and again his hand grasped my arm. “The same threat applies as before. Only this time, it’s four seconds before I sing.”

“Look at me, Rosie. Please.” His voice was wet and desperate. Despite my better judgment, I turned toward him. His stature was more diminished than the step alone could account for. “Look at my hands.” He released me and held up his manicured paws as though he were a cosmetic girl at Gimbel’s who wanted to demonstrate how effective a new hand cream was. “You see anything? Anything at all?” I moved closer and examined his flesh. There wasn’t a mark to be found. “Does it look like I beat someone up?”

“Maybe you were wearing gloves, or maybe one of your palookas did it for you. You’ve hit her before.” Tony blanched. His mouth rippled with a fib I wasn’t about to let find sound. “I’m wise to you. I see the way she is when you’re around.”

His head descended toward the sidewalk. “Once.” His finger rose in
the air to better connect me with the number of lapses. “It happened once.”

“Once is enough.”

His head lifted, his hands met in prayer. “I swear to you and God and anyone who’ll listen that I ain’t laid a hand on her since. She made it clear to me—that one night—she made it clear what I’d done could never be done again. I promised her and I meant it.”

“And then you bought her a ring to cement the pledge.”

Amazement flickered past his eyes. He didn’t bank on my being able to put two and two together.

“A few weeks is hardly a marathon, Tony. You can understand why I consider you a suspect when my girl comes home black and blue.”

He nodded again, so deeply his chin hit his chest.

“What happened on Friday?”

“She was mad at me and blew out of Ali Baba’s not long after you did. I tried calling her the next day, but I was told she wasn’t there.” It was possible he was on the square. As scarce as I was in my efforts to avoid Ruby, there was no way I would’ve known if he’d called. “I decided to give her time, let her cool down, so I called here this morning to apologize and now I’m being told she won’t talk to me. I came all the way over here and your den mother wouldn’t let me past the front door.”

God bless Belle; she may have forced me into taking a rotten job, but she knew when to say no and mean it. “Why was she mad at you?”

Tony scratched his ear and kicked an expensive wingtip into the step above his. It left an ugly ding in the leather. “There was this old girlfriend of mine, see? Jayne saw us talking and jumped to conclusions.”

“You were just talking, Tony?”

He removed his fedora and studied its rim. “Maybe she gave me a little sugar when we were saying good-bye. It was nothing.”

“Not to Jayne.”

He kicked the step again. “In her shoes, I would’ve thought something was going on, too. I wouldn’t have gotten mad at her for it, though. Would that make sense?”

Of course it wouldn’t, but then logic and Tony B. weren’t fast friends.
Still, even if he wasn’t a man familiar with sincerity, his concern for Jayne felt real.

“If she left you at Ali Baba’s, how did she get home?”

“She waited until my driver got back from dropping you and Al, then he took her home.”

“When the car dropped her off, did the driver wait for her to go inside?”

“Knowing Joe? Probably not. He’s not up on the finer social graces.” Tony returned his hat to his head and stuck his hands deep in his pockets. “You believe me—right, Rosie?”

“The jury’s still out.” Damn if there weren’t tears in his eyes. They may have smelled like booze and burned at the touch, but they were tears all the same. I gently punched his arm. “I believe you, Tony.”

“That one time, I was off my nut. I never would’ve done that in my right mind. I know you don’t like me, but I love Jayne.” I wasn’t listening to him anymore. Instead, I was crabbing who the culprit could be. If Jayne had left not long after we did, she would’ve made it home less than an hour after me, so there was no way I could’ve missed her return. Whoever the hood was, he must have been waiting for her in front of the building.

But that still didn’t explain why she didn’t return right after it happened and why she was claiming Tony was the one who did it.

“How bad was she hurt?” asked Tony.

My fingers were growing numb from the cold. I squeezed my hands into fists until blood rushed back into my extremities. “She’ll live, but somebody was trying to tell her something.”

He turned and landed a roundhouse on the stone banister. Instantly his puss reflected regret at his bravado. “You find out who did this, Rosie.” He shook his bloodied fist and a dribble of red splattered on the ground. “I swear to God I’ll take down whoever touched her.”

“I’ll do what I can.”

His uninjured hand parted his jacket lapels and ducked into a hidden breast pocket. He pulled out a pen and paper and hurriedly scribbled an exchange. “You need anything, call me.” He handed me the page
and backed down the remaining stairs, his eyes combing the street for the man who’d tangled with his girl. “And tell her I was here and I’m sorry.”

Jayne was sitting on her bed, propped up by pillows, and flipping through
Life
magazine too quickly to be reading it. Churchill lounged in her lap and batted at the glossy pages more, it seemed, for the pleasure of the noise than to irritate Jayne. Two kids in military uniforms grinned from the slick’s cover, both of their legs raised as they half-skipped, half-marched toward a war they couldn’t possibly understand.

“You been in here all day?” I asked. Churchill shot me a look that urged me to leave his mistress alone.

“I didn’t want to have to explain what happened to anyone. It’s been nice. I took a long nap.” In the daylight her bruises were shocking motoroil drips on white taffeta. While the deeper blacks had faded to grays and yellows, there wasn’t a spot on her face that hadn’t suffered damage.

“You hungry?” I asked. “I could get you something.”

She shook her head and turned yet another unread page. “Maybe later.”

I dumped my script and pocketbook on my bed. Jayne registered where I’d come from and opened her mouth to utter the unasked question. I stopped her with my hand. “Before you speak, let me forewarn you that you’ll receive an earful. Proceed with caution if you choose to proceed at all.”

She plowed forward as only one still groggy with sleep could do. “How was rehearsal?”

I sat on my bed and piled my hands in my lap like a schoolchild preparing for a recitation. “Not only did they change the play, Ruby Priest got the lead and I’m an understudy.”

Jayne shook off the remnants of her nap. “You’re a what?”

“You know: an understudy—all the work, none of the billing.”

She slammed the magazine on the bed. Churchill yowled and shot to the floor. “They can’t do that!”

“They can and they have.”

“But you were invited to the audition.”

“Not to hear Peter Sherwood tell it.” With Jayne outraged on my behalf, I no longer found it necessary to be angry. Instead, I plastered an amused smile on my face and pretended I was recounting someone else’s misfortune. “I haven’t told you the best part. The lousy Polish play has become red, white, and blue. You’ll never guess who I think the author is.”

Her brow wrinkled as she thought hard on the question. “Lawrence Bentley?”

I shook my head. “Oh no—even better. Raymond Fielding.”

Jayne’s mouth opened and closed, but no sound came out.

I fell backward onto my pillows. “Don’t worry: if it is by him, it’s not the play we’re looking for, just a rotten coincidence. It’s all hush hush, so don’t breathe a word about it.” I moaned and my moan threatened to become a scream. “My life is being ruined by Ruby Priest and Raymond Fielding.”

Jayne winced. “What are you going to do?”

“What can I do? It’s still a credit and a paycheck. If I drop out, there’s no guarantee I’ll find either of those before the week’s out. I’m stuck.”

Jayne twisted her fingers. Tony’s ring caught the light and echoed his promise across the walls. “I think you should quit.”

I started at the decidedly un-Jayne-like advice. “What?”

“You were dreading working with them anyway. You’ll get another job.”

“Didn’t you hear me? I can’t depend on getting another gig fast enough to please Belle.”

“So you move out for a while. Would that be the worst thing?”

“In case you haven’t heard, there’s a war on. I’m as likely to find an apartment as Hitler is to surrender.” I closed my eyes, hoping when I reopened them Jayne would be back from her mental vacation. Instead,
Life
magazine’s mini-cadets continued their motionless struts, hinting that war was so much child’s play. “Are you trying to get rid of me or something?”

“No…it just seems if things are so bad, maybe somebody’s trying to tell you something.”

I couldn’t argue with her logic; nor was it fair to nitpick when we had more important things to deal with. “I don’t have to decide right now. You should’ve seen the big act Ruby put on when I confronted her about it. She had the nerve to imply I was being paranoid when I suggested she was behind this. I’m telling you, she’s got it in for me.”

Jayne shrugged and slumped onto her pillows. As she landed against the cotton cases, she winced. Churchill climbed back onto the bed and offered her a hesitant paw to see if it was safe for him to return.

I rose and went behind the screen to change. “By the way—you had a visitor.”

Her voice became piano wire. “Who?”

“Who do you think?” I shimmied out of my blouse and skirt.

“Oh.” She paused a moment too long. I peeked between the screen’s seams and watched her exchange longing for irritation. “What did
he
want?”

I pulled on a sweater and a pair of trousers and went back into the room. “To see if you were all right, for starters.”

Jayne batted Churchill’s paw away. “I hope you gave him a piece of your mind.”

“Two pieces, and I hurled the roses he brought you into the street.”

She froze. “He brought me roses?”

“Yeah. Expensive ones. If you look out the window, you can probably still see them.”

She eased out of her nest and grimaced as bruises on her chest and ribs resisted movement. She kneeled on the radiator and peered at the street below, where afternoon travelers had turned Tony’s roses into vivid red splotches.

“You didn’t have to throw them away,” said Jayne.

“And you didn’t have to lie to me.”

Her spine grew taut. “I didn’t lie.”

I joined her on the radiator and set my hand atop hers. “Tony didn’t do this to you. He may be a no good rat bastard with a history of putting his hands where they don’t belong, but he didn’t do this.”

She turned to me as her eyes overflowed with tears. “But he did. He hit me.”

“Over Christmas? Sure, I know that. But he didn’t touch you Friday night.”

She squeezed my hand until I started from the pain. “He’s lying to you, Rosie. Who’re you going to believe, me or him?”

I pulled my mitt free and tested the fingers to make sure they weren’t broken. “If you want to sit here and blame him, be my guest, but I have to tell you something for your own good: when you’re not onstage, you’re a terrible actress. I can tell you’re lying and, more important, I can tell he’s not.” I again touched my skin to hers as though this would allow for the transfer of truth. “Who did this to you?”