The Peddler (14 page)

She smiled, pleased. “Quit pullin’ my leg. Say, I don’t even know your name.”

“Tony.”

“Tony what?”

“Just Tony. How about you?”

“Ruth.”

He walked to the dresser and picked up a pack of cigarettes next to a bottle of whiskey. He gave her a cigarette, lit it and asked, “Want a drink while I finish getting dressed?”

“I don’t care.”

He walked to the dresser. “I got nothing but bourbon,” he said. “Some Coke. Want Coke with it?” She said O.K. and he mixed two drinks with stiff slugs of bourbon, put in ice cubes he’d got from the bellhop, and gave her the tall glass. There was enough whiskey in the long glass for four ordinary drinks.

While he put on his shirt, they talked, a little stiffly at first, but by the time Tony had his tie on and was ready to leave, the conversation was freer. She had apparently been ill at ease in his room, but the conversation and half the drink made her seem more comfortable.

Tony sat down by her on the couch. “We got a little time to kill. Let’s have one more highball and take off.” He grinned. “We ought to be real peppy by the time we get to the shindig.”

“O.K., I don’t mind.” Tony tilted his glass, finished the drink, and she did the same. He made the next ones a little weaker. Didn’t want the doll getting sick.

Finally he said, “Ruth, how old are you, anyway? Makes no difference to me if you’re nine or twenty-nine. I’m curious.”

Her eyes were a trifle dulled. “You really wanna know, Tony?” He nodded. “Well, I’m sixteen.”

“No kidding? You look lots older than that, Ruth. I thought you were around twenty-one.”

She liked that. “You’re nice, Tony. I’m glad you come in today.”

“Me too. We’ve got to see a lot of each other.” He put his arm around her shoulder, moved toward her on the couch and pulled her gently against him. She moistened her lips.

They got to the dance at ten o’clock. Ruth danced close to him, insinuating her body against his, her previous reserve vanished now. A guy asked her for a dance and she said to Tony, “Do you mind?”

“Don’t be silly, Ruth.” He grinned. “Why would I mind?” They’d been at the dance about half an hour then, and he and Ruth had talked to several of her friends, briefly. In a small town like Napa, Tony, a good-looking, sharply-dressed guy from out of town, was something out of the ordinary, interesting. He spotted one of Ruth’s girl friends, a slim thing almost as tall as Tony himself, and asked her to dance. They chatted casually for one number and, when they talked, she leaned away from him to look at his face while keeping her hips pressed close against him. Tony was to learn that many of the girls here—and in a number of other small towns—danced the same way, or with variations which amounted to the same thing. There were a number of stag girls and guys present.

It was a fair six-piece orchestra, and the floor was good. Most of the girls were in their teens, but some of them were really attractive. And there was the inevitable sprinkling of pure horrors. Tony was having a pretty good time. He took the slim girl back to her seat, spent a short intermission drinking a Coke with Ruth, then the music started again and a character danced off with her. Tony looked around. Three girls were standing at the end of the Coke bar, talking. They were all danm nice looking, he thought. Two of them especially. The third one was a kind of half-pretty gal, a couple inches over five feet tall and with soot-black hair that hung down to her shoulders. Tony walked over to the three of them. No sense sitting out the dance. Either one of those two sharp ones would do fine.

But Tony surprised himself by stopping by the three girls anji asking the black-haired one, “Dance, honey?”

She looked up at him, and he saw her full face for the first time. She was a sweet-looking tomato. He wondered how she’d dance. Close and cozy like the last one? She didn’t look like the type, somehow. She had the shape for it, but it didn’t fit the face. She’d probably want to waltz two feet apart. What the hell had he asked this pig for?

She smiled sweetly. “No, thank you.”

“Huh?” Tony hadn’t even considered the possibility of her refusing. “You already got this dance, honey?”

She frowned slightly, then smiled again. “No. Do you call everybody honey?”

He blinked. Here was another one of these characters that talked screwy. “Not everybody,” he said finally. And for some perverse reason he added, “Just the sexy ones.”

She turned her head slightly and looked at him from the corner of her eyes, no amusement in them. All of a sudden he wished he hadn’t said that. It sounded crude and out of place. She began talking to the other girls, paying no attention to Tony. Why, the little bitch, he thought. Who the hell did she think she was?

“Hey,” he said suddenly. The word popped out and as she turned toward him he didn’t yet know what else he was going to say. She looked at him coolly, from blue eyes. He said, “What’s your name?”

She sighed. “Betty. Now will you go away?” “Well I’ll be goddamned.”

She laughed suddenly, merrily, obviously amused by his discomfort. “Look,” she said in more friendly fashion, “there’s a hundred girls to dance with here. If you must dance, maybe June or Vi would like to. Or anybody.”

June and Vi were apparently the two with her. One of them, a striking blonde about nineteen, looked at Tony, smiling broadly.

Tony said, “Hell, I’m scared to ask anybody else now.”

The blonde said, “Don’t be.”

He shrugged. “O.K., a man don’t live but once. You think maybe, possibly, perhaps, we might dance? Together, I mean.”

She chuckled. “Why, I’d love to.”

“You June or Vi?”

“I’m June.”

“O.K., come on,” he said. “Come on, honey. Where you work?”

“Westbums. Little record and bookstore. Come in and I’ll sell you a book.”

“O.K. Save me one with pictures.”

She smiled slowly. “What kind of pictures?”

He grinned. “Pictures of animals,” he said. “I’m crazy about animals.”

“I’ll bet.”

“This Betty chill works there too, huh?”

“Yes. What’s the matter, you interested in her? She’s kind of cute, isn’t she?”

“Nah, she’s a plain Jane. Looks like if you patted her fanny she’d think she needed an abortion.”

June shook her head. “You sure have a blunt way of talking.”

“I’m a blunt guy.”

When the dance was over Tony took her back to the Coke bar. Vi was still there, sitting in a wooden chair against the wall, but Tony didn’t see Betty. He felt oddly disappointed. He thanked June and she sat down by Vi. “We’ll have to try that again after a while,” he said.

Later on, he left her. About time he found Ruth. For all be knew she was out in the hay somewhere, squealing like a stuck pig. Christ, she was some squealer. He walked around until he spotted her on the dance floor.

The next morning they had breakfast in the room. Tony had learned that Ruth lived with an older, married sister. Her parents were dead. It wouldn’t be too bad if she stayed all night with him; she’d been away all night before. She’d just get a bawling out, is all. Tony had told her she might as well live here with him for a while. Hell, they’d have a great time. He’d buy her some new clothes; she could get rid of those old rags. Well, she’d said, gee, maybe.

He left her in the rooms in the afternoon.

“Where you going, Tony?”

“Just look around a little.”

“You hurry back and bring me a kiss.”

“Yeah, sure.”

He went out. She made him sick. And she was too easy. She was like a machine. That had been some deal last night. The start with Ruth. Then the dance. Vi and June. And that Betty. What an icicle she was. Imagine her not dancing with me, he thought. Too good for the common man, I suppose. I sljould of kicked her in the butt.

He needed a drink. And he’d had enough of that Ruth. He ought to just put it to her straight and let her take it or leave it. Get out of this town; hit Fresno or Sacramento, someplace where there was some life. Hell, he’d only been here a little over a day. What was the matter with him? He wondered what was going on in Frisco, what the cops were doing.

He didn’t really expect to find a San Francisco paper, but in a little cigar store a block from the main drag he found what he wanted. The gray-haired attendant dug into a stack of papers under the counter and pulled out today’s and yesterday’s Frisco papers. Behind the cigar stand was a pool hall and small, crummy bar. Tony took the papers to the bar and ordered a scotch and water.

“We got nothing but wine and beer,” the bartender said.

“Gimme a beer then.”

He looked at yesterday’s paper first. They’d given it the works, the full treatment. The panic was really on for sure. Big black headlines blared: POLICEMAN MURDERED. The sub leads might have been written by Angelo himself; he’d called the turn. The story stated that Sergeant Jorgensen, vice-squad officer with a long and honorable record of brilliant and faithful service, had been murdered during an investigation of alleged prostitution and narcotics smuggling. He was known to have been in possession of important information damaging to many of the top racketeers of the city. Careful references were made to the Mafia, and a national Crime Syndicate. The killer was a local hoodlum and the police were aware of his identity. They expected an arrest within 48 hours.

The later paper had headlines about the sad state of the world at large, but the murder of Jorgensen still occupied much of the front page and pages inside. More photographs today, too, of the houses Jorgensen had been investigating. Yesterday there’d been a nice picture of the body.

Tony drank his beer, left the papers on the bar and went out. It was funny, he thought, but he didn’t feel much one way or another about the kill. It was almost as if it hadn’t involved him personally, as if it were merely something he’d read about. Two months away from the home town; that was a hell of a time. He found himself wishing the cops would hurry up and pin the job on somebody.

He stood in the sunlight outside the cigar store, wondering what to do with himself. Recruit some whores. He grinned wryly. He’d started out in the racket pretty high up, worked his way almost to the top. Here he was now, practically a male streetwalker, working on the babes. He’d worked his way up to pimp.

He stood on the sidewalk for a moment, then swore, turned and went back in.

“Hey, pop,” he said to the gray-haired guy. “Where’s a place called Westbums? Some kind of book store.”

The man gave him directions and Tony started walking. Maybe that blonde, June, had been thinking about the big dough he’d mentioned.

Westburns was a small place on the main drag. Betty stood behind the counter, and she glanced up at him as he came in. He’d been thinking about her, rather than June, as he walked down the street. All he could remember about her— except for that last look as he and Ruth left the dance hall — was her black, long hair, and her blue eyes. He saw her even more clearly now than he had last night. Her nose was straight, narrow. Her lips were full and red, the mouth wide. She had high, prominent cheekbones, and maybe, thought Tony, that was what gave her the haughty air she had, that snooty look. There wasn’t a damn thing sensual about her face except maybe the generous lips and mouth. Her face, he decided, wasn’t pretty. But maybe you could call it striking. Her skin was so white and smooth that it made her black hair look blacker, her mouth more vivid. She wasn’t smiling as she looked at him.

Tony walked over to the counter, feeling an inexplicable nervousness that was foreign to him. “Hello, Betty.”

He couldn’t think of anything to say for a moment. Then, “Uh, is June around?”

“Uh-huh. She’s in the booth. Sometimes when it’s slow like this we take turns listening to records.”

He wished she’d quit looking at him so solemn like that; it was making him feel funny, exposed, as if he were standing there naked, casually passing the time of day. You couldn’t tell what she was thinking from her face.

They stood facing each other on opposite sides of the counter for half a minute, then Tony said, “Well, I just came in to say hello to June. She’s in back, huh?”

Betty nodded.

He walked toward the rear of the store and up to the booth. He could hear the music softly, a jazzy number with plenty of hot, brassy trumpet. That June was a pretty brassy number herself. He looked in the glass window of the door. June was sitting in the cushioned seat, her legs apart and her dress up over her knees, the cloth sagging down between her legs. A hand rested on each thigh and she was keeping time to the music with an index finger of each hand. Her head rested on the cushion behind her, eyes closed, bright blonde hair bunched on her shoulders, half smile on her face.

He tapped on the glass.

She jerked her head around, eyes opening wide. He saw her Ups form “Tony!” but he couldn’t hear the words. She smiled. Then she crooked her finger at him, motioning him inside. He opened the door and stepped into the small booth, clicked the door shut behind him.

“Hi, Tony. I didn’t think you’d be around.”

“Said I would. Turn that thing down.”

She turned a dial and the music became soft instead of the raucous blaring it had been. “Sit down.” She patted the seat at her side. There was barely room for two people, and sitting there June’s thigh was pressed tightly against his own.

“I’m glad you came,” she said. “It’s sure dead today.”

“Still dead?”

“Not now it isn’t.” She grinned. “Kind of close in here, isn’t it, Tony?”

“Not too close.”

“Tony, I’ll tell you something. I sit in here and listen to these hot records, these hot licks, and it makes me hot. It makes me hotter than hell. You ever get like that?”

“Not from records.”

“I wouldn’t talk like this, but—well, last night. We’re sort of like old friends, aren’t we?”

“Sure, June.”

“Oh, man, I’m hot.”

“Maybe I should have had a trumpet with me last night.”

“You didn’t need one, Tony. But—this is different. Funny different. There’s a dozen kids in town the same way; once in a while we get together and put on some hot records and really go. It gets right down inside you.”