Only Make Believe
A Novel
Elliott Mackle
Lethe Press
Maple Shade NJ
© 2012 by Elliott Mackle. All rights reserved.
All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to real individuals—either living or dead—is strictly coincidental.
This Lethe Press edition published August, 2012
Lethe Press, 118 Heritage Ave, Maple Shade, NJ 08052
lethepressbooks.com
[email protected]
Cover by Niki Smith
Book Design by Toby Johnson
ISBN-13 978-1-59021-292-9
ISBN-10 1-59021-292-4
eISBN 978-1-59021-428-2
______________________________________________________
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mackle, Elliott J. (Elliott James), 1940-
Only make believe : a novel / Elliott Mackle.
p. cm.
A sequel to It takes two.
ISBN 978-1-59021-292-9 -- ISBN 1-59021-292-4
1. Female impersonators--Crimes against--Fiction. 2. Private clubs--Fiction. 3. Gay men--Fiction. 4. Murder--Investigation--Fiction. 5. Fort Myers (Fla.)--Fiction. I. Title.
PS3613.A273O55 2012
813’.6--dc22
2012030561
Also by Elliott Mackle
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This book is for
Ensan Case
Who created a genre with
Wingmen
And then the fat lady got up to sing. She was visibly nervous. Her gloved hands shook when Caloosa Club pianist Tommy Carpenter struck a series of dissonant chords, flipped a switch and bathed her face and form in golden light.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Tommy announced, master-of-ceremonies style. “Direct from the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City, exclusively for your listening pleasure, the brightest star in our Southwest Florida galaxy, please welcome … Miss Diva Capri!”
Clearly the lady knew how to manage stage fright. She glued one hand to the gleaming case of Tommy’s white baby grand. The other traveled gracefully back and forth between her corseted hip and the blue velvet curve of her ample bosom.
She began with two Jerome Kern standards, “Why Do I Love You” and “Make Believe,” from
Show Boat
. Her sandpaper contralto was pleasant enough. She knew each intricate phrase of every voluptuous lyric. She’d clearly had voice training. But she missed half the high notes.
Tommy, cool as Bacardi on ice, treated the performance as if equal to Sophie Tucker at the Copacabana. He sight-read the Diva’s sheet music and followed her erratic beat like a bloodhound. He filled empty spaces between phrases with lush, complimentary harmonies. He made the fat lady—let’s be polite and say statuesque brunette—look and sound better than she was. That was his job. Sunday was amateur night at the Caloosa Club. Tommy was a pro.
And, frankly, the Diva was far more engaging than the previous week’s tap-dancing magician. Or any number of whiskey tenors yodeling “Danny Boy.”
Going up-tempo, the Diva ripped into “I Get a Kick Out of You,” drawing appreciative laughs with Cole Porter’s witty list of tedious pleasures—champagne, cocaine, a guy in a plane and so on. Even the poker players in the corner applauded.
Finally, touching her heart with one gloved hand, she began an aria by Puccini, “Vissi d’arte,” from
Tosca
. Though I still don’t know much about opera, I did know that show. I’d seen it earlier while stationed in Occupied Japan. At the time, April of 1948, I was managing the New Victory, a club-hotel for allied officers in Tokyo. I happened to be sleeping with one of the guests, a Royal Australian Air Force pilot. He’d been handed free tickets for the touring Sydney Opera production and took me along. After he left the military, we kept in touch. The following year, he wrote a long letter asking me to come live with him on a cattle station a hundred miles south of Alice Springs. I thought about it.
No doubt about the Diva’s intentions. She was costumed as Floria Tosca, Puccini’s singer who lives for art and dies for love. Here’s the picture: Empire-style gown, classically coiffed black hair, long false eyelashes, rhinestone tiara, matching earrings and sparkle-plenty bracelets over elbow-length kid gloves.
When she finished the aria, barking rather than singing the cry to heaven that ends Tosca’s plea for life and honor, the applause was generous. Tosca waved, blew kisses and dropped a deep curtsey. Her cheeks were wet with tears.
Tommy milked the applause. But he knew better than to let her risk an encore. At just the point when the whistling and clapping reached its peak, he struck a series of staccato, ascending chords, waved the Diva back to her seat at the bar and launched into one of his own compositions, a risqué Billie Holiday-style song about learnin’ how to be bad, and who to be bad with, on sultry Sundays in the sinful, soul-ful South.
I signaled the bartender for another beer. Although I was on duty that night, I wasn’t working very hard. The private clubroom at the riverside Caloosa Hotel was packed with merrymaking snowbirds and flush, adventurous locals. The 1951 winter season was heating up nicely. On that warm January evening, the sleepy town of Fort Myers seemed like the safest sort of haven in an increasingly unsafe world.
There was another war on, Korea. The Red Chinese and their North Korean puppets were firmly established in Seoul and preparing to move further south. In six months of fighting, United Nations forces had done little but retreat, retreat, retreat. The conflict, in turn, was only the latest incident in the ongoing Cold War—communism versus democracy, Russia and China threatening the West, socialist atheism’s dark forces attacking the children of light. Pundits, priests and politicians openly speculated that Chinese soldiers would march on Tokyo by summer and that Soviet nukes might vaporize Manhattan even sooner. Some said World War Three had already begun.
Still, I felt like the luckiest man alive. I’m Dan Ewing, Tampa native, former swimming star at the University of Florida, ex-Navy lieutenant. I’d resigned my commission two years earlier to become general manager of the Caloosa Hotel and Club, billed as Fort Myers’ Finest Riverfront Resort. The Caloosa, a discreet hideaway on the edge of downtown, catered to open-minded, sophisticated people who preferred to pursue their pleasures out of the sight of prying eyes. About half our members were ex-government officials, former military officers and their friends. Others simply had enough money—and the right connections—to pass the screening committee’s review process.
We did good business, with good reason. We served alcohol twenty-four hours a day. We set up card tables and charged a modest fee for new, unmarked decks. Women were on call, as were blue movies and stud waiters. Bets on sports events, horse races and Cuban
boleto
lottery numbers could be called in through a Miami dealer. Tommy engaged a drummer, base fiddler and horn player three nights a week for big-band-style dance music.
Like perhaps a third of the staff, Tommy was black. Waiters and porters aside, integrated front-of-the-house staff was a rarity in Florida in the postwar decade. The Ku Klux Klan didn’t like it. But by the beginning of the nineteen-fifties, the Klan and the politics it represented were beginning to lose their chokehold on Southern society.
City and county officials had been bribed to keep us invisible, of course. The publisher of the local paper was also in on the game. Nothing unusual about that. Historically, the Sunshine State is a place where money not only talks but says
Let’s Do It My Way
. Still, in case of trouble, the windowless clubroom was protected by metal doors and guarded by Brian Murphy, a blue-eyed, Irish bulldog who served as both locker-room masseur and clubroom bouncer. Brian was South Boston rough toughened by two years’ convoy duty in the Merchant Marine. Not much got by him.
The war was never far from my thoughts. It had changed my life forever and brought me to this place.
Tommy finished the bittersweet blues number, cut back to his signature staccato progression, then hit the spotlight and introduced his next guest, John Woodworth, a balding, bone-thin codger dressed in dark suit and gray-striped necktie. Tommy vamped into “The Caissons Go Rolling Along” and Colonel Woodworth stood up to take the Diva’s place. A West Point graduate, Woodworth had commanded a company of Philippine rifles in 1941, survived the Bataan Death March, spent two years rotting in a Japanese prison camp and been jumped three grades to full bird at the end of the war. Woodworth and his wife were regular winter visitors.
The colonel belted out “Mairzy Doats” in a strong, Roy Rogers tenor. He followed with “Don’t Fence Me In”—clearly a wink at his wartime captivity—and ended on a more romantic note with “You’d be So Nice to Come Home To.”
At the end of the set, he blew a kiss to his wife. His buddies in the audience cheered. He cut them a sharp salute, waved, bowed to Tommy, and returned to his table, grinning like Eisenhower.
I should have seen trouble coming that night. As a navy supply officer during World War Two, I’d survived the loss of my ship, the cruiser
Indianapolis
, four days on a life raft and the death of my cabin-mate lover. Statistically, I was lucky to be alive. Stateside again, and without military discipline to direct me, I stuck to routine as much as possible. In other words, I tried to keep my powder dry, my hatches battened down and my eyes wide open.
So I should have paid more attention to business. I damn sure should have cracked open the weekend’s special requests file on Friday morning. If I’d been thinking with my brain instead of my balls, I might have guessed what could happen. But it was Sunday, like I said. Amateur night. I let down my guard. And the outside world rushed in.
To be honest, reading memos, listening to news reports and worrying about the future took up little of my time. Like I say, I was lucky. I had a good job in a glamorous tropical setting, assisted by a colorful staff. I got paid to provide the conventional distractions preferred by conventional men—drinking, gambling and whoring. In the words of another of Tommy’s favorite tunes, who could ask for anything more?