What's Better Than Money (2 page)

“Take her to her hotel.”

Rima walked out into the rain, the cop following her. I watched her go. I was a little surprised she didn’t even look at me. I had saved her life, hadn’t I?

Hammond waved me to a chair.

“Sit down,” he said. “What’s your name?”

“Jeff Gordon.”

It wasn’t my real name, but a name I had been using while out in Hollywood.

“Address?”

I told him. I had a room in a rooming-house at the back of Rusty’s bar.

“Let’s have your version of the shindig.”

I gave it to him.

“Do you think he meant business?”

“If you mean was he going to kill her, I think he was.”

He blew out his cheeks.

“Well, okay. We’ll want you in court tomorrow at eleven sharp.” He stared at me. “You’d better take care of that face of yours. Have you ever seen her in here before?”

“No.”

“It beats me how a good looking girl like her could think of living with a rat like him.” He grimaced. “Girls. . . thank God, I’ve got a boy.”

He jerked his head at the remaining cop, and together they went out into the rain.

II

All this I’m telling you about took place a year after Hitler’s war. Pearl Harbour seems a long way in the past now, but at that time I was twenty-one and at college, working hard to qualify as a Consulting Engineer. I was in grabbing distance of my degree when the pace of war hotted up and I couldn’t resist the call to arms. My father nearly hit the ceiling when I told him I was going to volunteer. He tried to persuade me to get my degree before joining up but the thought of another six months in college while there was fighting to be done was something I couldn’t face up to.

Four months later at the age of twenty-two I was one of the first to land on the beaches of Okinawa. I got an inch of red hot shrapnel in my face as I started towards the swaying palm trees that hid the Japanese guns, and that was the end of the war so far as I was concerned.

For the next six months I lay in a hospital bed while the plastic experts remodelled my face.

They made a reasonably good job of it except they left me with a slight droop in my right eyelid and a scar like a silver thread along the right side of my jaw. They told me they could fix that if I cared to stay with them for another three months, but I had had enough. The horrors I had seen in that hospital ward remain with me even now. I couldn’t get out fast enough.

I went home.

My father was a manager of a bank. He hadn’t much money, but he was more than ready to finance me until I had completed my studies as a consulting engineer.

To please him I went back to college, but those months in the battle unit and the months in hospital had done something to me. I found I hadn’t any more interest in Engineering. I just couldn’t concentrate. After a week’s work, I quit. I told my father how it was. He listened, and he was sympathetic.

“So what will you do?”

I said I didn’t know, but I did know I couldn’t settle to book work anyway for some time.

His eyes moved from my drooping right eyelid to the scar on my jaw and then he smiled at me.

“All right, Jeff. You’re still young. Why don’t you go off somewhere and take a look around? I can spare you two hundred dollars. Take a vacation, then come back and settle to work.”

I took the money. I wasn’t proud of taking it because I knew he couldn’t spare it, but right then I was in such a rotten mental state I felt I had to get away or I would crack up.

I arrived in Los Angeles with the vague idea that I might get a job on the movies. That came unstuck pretty fast.

I didn’t care. I didn’t want to work anyway. I hung around the waterfront for a month doing nothing and drinking too much. At that time there were a lot of guys in reserved occupations with uneasy consciences because they hadn’t done any fighting, who were ready to buy drinks for guys in return for battle stories, but this didn’t last long. Pretty soon my money began to run out and I began to wonder what I was going to do for the next meal.

I had got into the habit of going every night to Rusty Mac-Gowan’s bar. It was a bar with a certain amount of character and it faced the bay where the gambling ships are moored. Rusty had got the place up to look like a ship’s cabin with port holes for windows and a lot of brasswork that drove Sam, the negro waiter, crazy to keep polished.

Rusty had been a top sergeant and he had fought the Japs. He knew what I had been up against, and he took an interest in me. He was a very good guy. He was tough and as hard as teak, but there was nothing he wouldn’t have done for me. When he heard I was out of a job, he said he was planning to buy a piano if he could find someone to play it, then he grinned at me.

He had come to the right man. The only thing I could do reasonably well was to play the piano. I told him to go ahead and buy the piano and he bought it.

I played the piano in his bar from eight o’clock in the evening to midnight for thirty bucks a week. It suited me all right. The money paid for my room, my cigarettes and my food. Rusty kept me in liquor.

Every so often he would ask me how much longer I was going to stay with him. He said with my education I should be doing something a lot better than thumping a piano night after night. I told him if it suited me, it was none of his business what I did. Every so often he would ask me again, and I would give him the same answer.

Well, that was the setup when Rima walked in out of the storm. That’s the background. I was twenty-three and no good to anyone. When she walked in, trouble for me walked in with her. I didn’t know it then, but I found out fast enough.

A little after ten o’clock the following morning, Mrs. Millard who ran the rooming-house where I lived, yelled up the stairs that I was wanted on the telephone.

I was trying to shave around the claw marks on my face which had puffed up in the night and now looked terrible. I cursed under my breath as I wiped off the soap.

I went down the three flights of stairs to the booth in the hall and picked up the receiver.

It was Sergeant Hammond.

“We won’t be wanting you in court, Gordon,” he said. “We’re not going ahead with the assault rap against Wilbur.”

I was surprised.

“You’re not?”

“No. That silver wig is certainly the kiss of death. She’s fingered him into a twenty year rap.”

“What was that?”

“A fact. We contacted the New York police. They welcomed the news that we had him like a mother finding her long lost child. They have enough on him to put him away for twenty years.”

I whistled.

“That’s quite a stretch.”

“Isn’t it?” He paused. I could hear his heavy slow breathing over the line. “She wanted your address.”

“She did? Well, it’s no secret. Did you give it to her?”

“No, in spite of the fact she said she just wanted to thank you for saving her life. Take my tip, Gordon, keep out of her way. I have an idea she would be poison to any man.”

That annoyed me. I didn’t take any advice easily.

“I’ll judge that,” I said.

“I expect you will. So long,” and he hung up.

That evening, around nine o’clock, Rima came into the bar. She was wearing a black sweater and a grey skirt. The black sweater set off her silver hair pretty well.

The bar was crowded. Rusty was so busy he didn’t notice her come in.

She sat at a table right by my side. I was playing an
étude
by Chopin. No one was listening. I was playing to please myself.

“Hello,” I said. “How’s the arm?”

“It’s all right.” She opened her shabby little bag and took out a pack of cigarettes. “Thanks for the rescue act last night.”

“Think nothing of it. I’ve always been a hero.” I slid my hands off the keys and turned so I faced her. “I know I look terrible, but it won’t last long.”

She cocked her head on one side as she stared at me.

“From the look of you, you seem to make a habit of getting your face into trouble.”

“That’s a fact.” I turned and began to pick out the melody of
It Had To Be You.
Remarks about my face embarrassed me. “I hear Wilbur is going away for twenty years.”

“Good riddance!” She wrinkled her nose, grimacing. “I hope I’ve lost him for good now. He stabbed two policemen in New York. He was lucky they didn’t die. He’s a great little stabber.”

“He certainly must be.”

Sam, the waiter, came up and looked enquiringly at her.

“You’d better order something,” I said to her, “or you’ll get thrown out.”

“Is that an invitation?” she asked, lifting her eyebrows at me.

“No. If you can’t buy your own drinks you shouldn’t come in here.”

She told Sam to bring her a coke.

“While we are on the subject,” I said to her, “I don’t reckon to have attachments. I can’t afford them.”

She stared at me blankly.

“Well, you’re frank even if you are stingy.”

“That’s the idea. Frank Stingy, that’s the name, baby.”

I began to play
Body and Soul.

Since I had got that lump of shrapnel in my face, I had lost interest in women the way I had lost interest in work. There had been a time when I went for the girls the way most college boys go for them, but I couldn’t be bothered now. Those six months in the plastic surgery ward had drained everything out of me: I was a sexless zombie, and I liked it.

Suddenly I became aware that Rima was singing softly to my playing, and after five or six bars, I felt a creepy sensation crawl up my spine.

This was no ordinary voice. It was dead on pitch, slightly off-beat on the rhythm as it should be, and as clear as a silver bell. It was the clearness that got me after listening for so long to the husky torch singers who moan at you from the discs.

I played on and listened to her. She stopped abruptly when Sam came with the coke. When he had gone I swung around and stared at her.

“Who taught you to sing like that?”

“Sing? Why, nobody. Do you call that singing?”

“Yes, I call it singing. What are you like with the throttle wide open?”

“You mean loud?”

“That’s what I mean.”

She hunched her shoulders.

“I can be loud.”

“Then go ahead and be loud.
Body and Soul
. As loud as you damn well like.”

She looked startled.

“I’ll be thrown out.”

“You go ahead and be loud. I’ll take care of it if it’s any good. If it isn’t, I don’t care if you are thrown out.”

I began to play.

I had told her to be loud, but what came out of her throat shook me. I expected it to be something, but not this volume of silver sound, with a knife edge that cut through the uproar around the bar like a razor slicing through silk.

The first three bars killed the uproar. Even the drunks stopped yammering. They turned to stare. Rusty, his eyes popping, leaned across the bar, his ham-like hands knotted into fists.

She didn’t even have to stand up. Leaning back, and slightly swelling her deep chest, she let it come out of her as effortlessly as water out of a tap. The sound moved into the room and filled it. It hit everyone between the eyes: it snagged them the way a hook snags a fish. It was on pitch; it was swing; it was blues; it was magnificent!

We did a verse and a chorus, then I signalled to her to cut it. The last note came out of her and rolled up my spine and up the spines of the drunks right into their hair. It hung for a moment filling the room before she cut it off and let the glasses on the bar shelf settle down and stop rattling.

I sat motionless, my hands resting on the keys and waited.

It was as I imagined it would be. It was too much for them. No one clapped or cheered. No one looked her way. Rusty picked up a glass and began to polish it, his face embarrassed. Three or four of the regulars drifted to the door and went out. The conversation started to buzz again, although on an uneasy note. It had been too good for them; they just couldn’t take it.

I looked at Rima and she wrinkled her nose at me. I got to know that expression of hers: it meant: “So what? Do you think I care?”

“Pearls before swine,” I said. “With a voice like that you can’t fail to go places. You could sing yourself into a fortune. You could be a major sensation!”

“Do you think so?” She lifted her shoulders. “Tell me something: where can I find a cheap room to live in? I’m nearly out of money.”

I laughed at her.

“You should worry about money. Don’t you realise your voice is pure gold?”

“One thing at the time,” she said. “I’ve got to economise.”

“Come to my place,” I said. “There’s nothing cheaper, and nothing more horrible. 25 Lexon Avenue: first turning on the right as you leave here.”

She stubbed out her cigarette and stood up.

“Thanks. I’ll go and fix it.”

She walked out of the bar, her hips swaying slightly, her silver head held high.

All the lushes up the bar stared after her. One of them was stupid enough to whistle after her.

It wasn’t until Sam nudged me that I realised she had gone without paying for the coke.

I paid for it.

I felt it was the least I could do after listening to that wonderful voice.

CHAPTER TWO

I

I got back to my room just after midnight. As I unlocked my door, the door opposite opened and Rima looked at me.

“Hello,” she said. “You see: I’ve moved in.”

“I warned you it wasn’t much,” I said, opening my door and turning on the light, “but at least it’s cheap.”

“Did you really mean that about my singing?”

I went into my room, leaving the door wide open and I sat on the bed.

“I meant it. You could make money with that voice.”

“There are thousands of singers out here starving to death.” She crossed the passage and leaned against my door post. “I hadn’t thought of competing. I think it would be easier to make money as a movie extra.”

I hadn’t been able to work up any enthusiasm about anything since I had come out of the Army, but I was enthusiastic about her voice.

I had already talked to Rusty about her. I had suggested she should sing in the joint, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He had agreed she could sing, but he was emphatic that he wasn’t having any woman singing in his bar. He said it was certain to lead to trouble sooner or later. He had enough trouble now running the bar without looking for more.