Blonde on the spot, p.13
Blonde on the Spot, page 13
And just to clinch it, just to show the way Sally was feeling too, she didn’t argue. The arrangement musta suited her fine.
Blondie got back with a suitcase. She’d brought three dresses with her. The girls struggled into the dresses, smoothed them down and thrust their bare feet into high-heeled shoes. I noticed that Victor helped Sally enthusiastically to get her dress on, and I noticed that she didn’t object very strongly.
I said to Victor: ‘Come right back and pick me up.’
‘Okay,’ he said.
‘Goodnight, Sally,’ I said.
She took my outstretched hand. ‘Goodnight, Hank,’ she said. ‘And thanks for everything.’ There was a kinda friendly warmth about the way she took my hand that I liked.
Then me and the three girls walked up the street towards Blondie’s hang-out as Victor nosed the car towards the other end of town.
Blondie lived in an apartment house. It wasn’t exactly a salubrious district. The carpet in the entrance hall and on the stairs was threadbare. As we went in, the janitor raised his eyebrows when he saw that there were four of us. But he didn’t say anything. He turned his attention back to a pulp magazine.
And that showed what kinda dump the place was. It was three o’clock in the morning when this happened!
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Blondie was exaggerating wildly when she said her flat was tiny. Minute was the word I should have used, myself. Her flat consisted of just one square room with a little cupboard attached that served as a kitchen.
When we got inside and two of them sat on the narrow divan and Helga and me sat in two not-very-large armchairs, the flat was crammed to overflowing.
Blondie said: ‘Well, what do we do now?’ Her face was still creased with pain, and as she spoke she unbuttoned the blouse of her dress and slipped it off her shoulders down to her waist so she could examine the ugly bruised blotch on her skin just beneath her ribs.
I got up and probed around with my finger. There weren’t any ribs damaged, as far as I could tell, but the skin was broken and lots of blood vessels had been ruptured. There was no refrigerator in that flat and consequently no ice, but I made a cold-water pack and fastened it around Blondie’s waist with my tie. When I was through, Blondie’s face had stopped being white. It was beginning to look grey. Blondie had been on the receiving end of a lotta trouble this night, and it was beginning to tell on her.
I said: ‘You look lousy.’
‘I feel worse.’ She put one hand to her forehead and closed her eyes like she was gonna faint.
‘Better get into bed,’ I advised, and pulled back the divan cover and the top sheet.
‘Yeah, think I will.’ With an effort, she got to her feet and wriggled so that her frock fell down around her ankles. As she stepped out of it, she said: ‘Hang it up for me, willya fella? I guess my clothes are about all I got left now.’
I took her dress and hung it up behind the door. Blondie worked her legs down inside the sheets. Apparently she was content with her g-string for a nightgown.
Suzy said: ‘I’m feeling whacked, Fairy. Mind if I come in with you?’
Blondie gave a grunt, half of pain and half of assent.
‘Take my dress off first,’ she said. ‘I don’t want that creased up.’
There wasn’t much room on the small divan for both of them. But they were so whacked I guess they didn’t mind a little discomfort. It seemed like they were asleep as soon as their heads touched the pillows.
I looked at Helga. ‘How about you? If I pull these two chairs together, it’ll make up a bed for you.’
‘I ain’t sleepy, fella,’ she said. ‘I’d as soon sit up for a while.’
‘Okay.’ I shrugged my shoulders. ‘Anything you say.’
I reached for an old-fashioned telephone fixed on the wall. I dialled a coupla numbers just to see if there was hotel accommodation. I didn’t get very far. It seemed like the hotels were full around that town.
‘You got a cigarette? ‘asked Helga.
I stuck a cigarette in her mouth and lit it for her. She looked at me with her black eyes, and there was a kinda insolent, challenging look in her eyes.
‘You’re gonna be awful tired in the morning,’ I told her.
She shrugged her shoulders and crossed her legs. She was careless the way she did it, and if she’d been wearing underclothes I’d have seen a lot of them. ‘I just don’t feel tired,’ she said.
The phone rang. I snatched it up quick before it disturbed Blondie and Suzy. But the way they were sleeping, I doubted if anything less than a twenty-five pounder would have awakened them.
Victor said: ‘That you, Hank?’
‘Yeah. Did you get Sally to the hotel okay?’
‘Sure,’ he said. There was a guilty note in his voice that made me smile.
‘You gonna pick me up?’ I asked.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘That’s what I’ve rung about. This car’s broke down. I’m right over the other side of town from you and can’t get the damn thing started.’
I thought that over.
He said: ‘Grab yourself a taxi and come right over. I’ll meet you at my flat.’
‘I’ve got a better idea,’ I told him. ‘Morning ain’t far off now. I’ll stop here tonight and give you a ring in the morning.’
‘Well, if that’s all right with you.’
‘Sure. That’s okay. I’ve got a chair with a cushion on it. I’ve spent nights under conditions lots worse.’
I could sense his awkwardness right the way along the wires. He said: ‘There’s another thing, Hank.’
‘Yeah?’
‘It’s about Sally.’
‘Yeah? ‘
‘I wanna get it straight. She’s your dame, isn’t she?’
‘She’s a friend of mine.’
‘Just a friend ?’ His voice sounded pleasantly surprised.
‘We kinda had an understanding,’ I told him. ‘But it broke down. It wouldn’t have worked out.’
His voice was excited now, like that of a kid of seventeen.
‘You mean I won’t be treading on your toes if … if …’
‘She’s all yours,’ I reassured him. ‘Sally and me are just good pals.’
‘Phew,’ he breathed. ‘I guess I feel a lot better now I got that off my chest. I kinda couldn’t help myself, and I was feeling a bit of a skunk on account of not knowing where you stood.’
‘That’s all right, Victor. You ain’t got a thing worry about. I’ll ring you in the morning.’
‘Thanks a lot, Hank,’ he said. ‘Goodnight.’
‘Hey! Just a minute.’
‘Yeah?’
I said, ‘Best of luck, Victor.’
‘Thanks, fella.’
I put down the phone and found Helga’s black eyes pondering on me. She said: ‘Seems like you went to an awful lotta trouble to hand your girlfriend over to Victor.’
‘I’m crazy that way. Any time I happen to see a dame being recruited for a vice squad, I don’t do anything about it unless she happens to be my dame. Then I do it just so I can pass her over to my pal.’
‘You got a down on Ghost City?’
‘What do you think?’
She flicked ash on to the carpet. ‘Ever think what mighta happened to Sally if you hadn’t breezed along?’
‘Sure. She’d have starved to death.’
Her black eyes pierced into mine. ‘No,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Dames ain’t heroic, they’re materialists. And life’s pretty sweet, mister.’
‘You oughta know. You were in the business.’ I couldn’t help the scorn creeping into my voice. And somehow, the scorn in my voice got home to her. Her eyes dropped. She didn’t blush. She didn’t have it left in her to blush. But I’d got under her skin. She took a quick drag at her cigarette and said, without looking up:
‘Blondie came to Ghost City about three years ago. She came under the same circumstances as Sally. I guess she hated it much about the same as Sally hated it. She went for four whole days without water before she gave in. They kept her tied up that way for two whole months until she was earning three meals a day. And by that time, she was a different girl.’
‘There weren’t no chains holding her down,’ I pointed out. ‘She had the opportunity of scramming outta Ghost City any time.’
Helga said: ‘It was different afterwards. When it’s happened once or twice, I guess you feel a bit mean about yourself, maybe you hate yourself more than a lot. But when it’s happened a lot, it does something to you. You feel different. You feel different from other people, and you are different from other people.’
‘It takes all sorts to make a world.’
‘There’s lots of other things, too,’ Helga went on. ‘Having gone so far, Blondie had a lot to stay on for. She got food and a roof over her head. That’s more than she’d get outside. If she’d left Ghost City, she’d have had maybe a bench in the park and a ticket for a Salvation Army free soup canteen.’
‘She coulda got a job.’
‘With no clothes to wear and no money!’
‘She’d have got along.’
‘Maybe,’ said Helga. ‘Maybe not. But if she stayed in Ghost City for five years, there’d be so much set aside for her every week, and when she left in five years’ time, she’d have a nice little nest-egg to start life again with. If you can take it, it’s not a bad life, and Fairy had learned to take it.’
I said: ‘At the end of five years, she wouldn’t have got her dough and she couldn’t have left, anyway.’
‘There’s honour among thieves, you know. They had to get new girls all the time, and they had to play straight if they were gonna continue to operate. They played straight, too. Lots of girls left at the end of five years with their little nest-egg. It set them up. They got drug-stores for themselves, or road cafés. They even got themselves husbands, sometimes.’
‘And Foster let them walk out after five years?’
Helga grinned. ‘Don’t be old-fashioned. Those dames had to go after five years. You been around Ghost City. They were all young dames, weren’t they? The guys that ran Ghost City thought it bad policy to have dames around who even looked like they wouldn’t be young much longer.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘You made a case for Blondie. But how comes she’s so willing to get other dames into same jam as she was in. How comes she helped Foster with Sally?’
Helga asked for another cigarette. She puffed smoke across towards me. ‘That’s the way dames are,’ she said. ‘She’d been driven along that road. She didn’t like to see other dames getting by. She kinda reckon that what had happened to her should happen to other dames. In some way, it made her feel better.’
‘I don’t get it,’ I said.
‘You wouldn’t,’ she said. ‘But Suzy does. She’s the same way. Any time a snooty dame takes a tumble, she gets a kinda kick out of it.’
‘Suzy got converted same as you and Blondie?’
Helga puffed smoke again. ‘Suzy didn’t take much persuading. She’d been on the grub line for three days when Foster found her. The offer of a square meal was all she wanted.’
‘How long did you hold out?’ I asked.
‘Me?’ her eyes widened and then closed to narrow slits. I could see her black pupils flashing through the slits. ‘I was a walk-over,’ she said. ‘I just walked right up to Foster and asked him to take me on.’
‘A volunteer,’ I said, just a shade bitterly.
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘A volunteer.’ She seemed determined to flaunt the fact as though it gave her a secret pleasure.
‘I guess you had your reasons,’ I said softly.
‘I had a reason,’ she said bitterly, and there was a break in her voice. ‘I had a fella. The finest fella that ever walked. When he got shot down over Germany, Il guess nothing else mattered. I couldn’t stop thinking about him. So I tried to make myself forget. And every time there was a man, I tried to tell myself I was forgetting.’
‘And did you forget?’
‘I forgot,’ she said dully. ‘I forgot so well that it’s impossible now for me to remember him, what he was like, the way he looked at me and smiled, the touch of his hand.’
I could imagine. Sweet memories trampled into insensitivity by the coarse and lustful desires of many men.
‘What are you going to do now?’ I asked.
Her black eyes glittered. ‘What are any of us going to do? We lost our jobs, remember. We lost our homes, too. We ain’t even got a set of clothes to stand up in.’
‘Yeah.’ I thought that over. Blotting out Ghost City might be a good thing for the community as a whole. But it was tough on the folks that had to get their living outta Ghost City. These three dames were an example of what the end of Ghost City was gonna mean to some folks. These three dames were skinned, even down to their clothes, and it was sure gonna be difficult getting themselves a job with Ghost City recorded as their previous employment. The only dames employed in Ghost City were on the vice end of the town.
I put a call through to Police Headquarters. I reported my car had been lifted from Ghost City. The cop there said:
‘Don’t worry too much about your car, fella. There’s too many guys wondering about their scalps.’
‘How bad is it over there now?’
‘Kinda easing down. They just about burnt Ghost City down. There ain’t no point in sending the fire brigade. That old timber burns like matchwood.’
‘That’s the end of Ghost City, eh?’
‘Just about. Them Injuns musta been crazy to bust out that way. Looks like we got another Injun War on our hands.’
‘It’s that big?’
‘Nuts,’ he said. ‘I was just ribbing. Most of them are high-tailing back to the reservation. Somebody musta smuggled hooch into the reservation and gave them an overdose.’
‘Well,’ I said. ‘If someone hands in my car, send it over to my hotel, will you?’ I gave him my address.
‘Okay, fella.’
When I nestled the telephone back on the receiver, Helga had gone to sleep. A lighted cigarette still dangled from her fingers. I reached out and took the cigarette from her and stubbed it in an ashtray that had been an advertisement handout for a tyre manufacturing company.
Dawn wasn’t far off now. But even a cat-nap might be a good idea if I wanted to live through the next day. I took off my jacket and draped it over Helga, eased my aching feet out of the hot leather and tried to get comfortable. It wasn’t easy to get comfortable, but I went to sleep just the same. I guess I musta had a tough day, too, like all the others.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
It was the telephone that awoke me. It kept digging down at me as I slept. I tried to brush it away, tried to shut my ears to it, and then suddenly I was fully awake and the phone was ringing like it would never stop.
I got the phone off the hook and heard Victor’s voice at the other end.
‘It’s eleven o’clock,’ he said. ‘You still sleeping? ‘
I yawned loudly.
‘I’m over at your hotel,’ he said. ‘Your car’s been handed in. A fella and his dame grabbed it last night. The cops told them to turn it in to the hotel.’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘What’s new?’
‘Ghost City’s washed up,’ he said, almost smacking his lips with satisfaction. ‘The Injuns have gone back to the reservation and Ghost City is in ashes.’
‘What’s the toll? ‘I asked.
‘Fourteen Ghost City fellas are cold, five will need new sets of hair and about thirty are being treated for various injuries. That’s according to the Oke Monitor.’
‘Not so bad as it coulda been,’ I said. ‘How did the Indians make out?’
‘That’s not known. They took their dead and wounded back with them. They’ve got all the county cops over at the reservation now trying to sort out what happened. They gotta kinda iron curtain down. Reporters ain’t allowed within a mile of the reservation.’
‘It coulda been a lot worse,’ I said.
‘Sure it could.’ He paused. ‘How about coming over for lunch?’
‘Where?’
‘At the hotel, here. I’m gonna ask Sally to come.’
‘If you’re sure you want a threesome ...?’
‘Sure I’m sure.’
‘Okay. See you about one.’
‘That’s a date.’
I hung up, stretched my face with a yawn that reamed out the creases of my skin, and wandered over to the cupboard that was the kitchen.
I filled the sink full of water and plunged my head in it. I felt a lot better when I’d finished drying my hair on the tea-cloth. There was a cracked mirror, which I used to comb my hair. While I was combing, Helga, who must been half-wakened by the telephone, got up and stretched herself. Then she crowded in the cupboard with me and got a coffee-saucepan stoked up.
‘Anything to eat?’ she asked.
‘Help yourself.’
She dug around, found a bagful of eggs and some Ryvita bread. ‘Scrambled?’ she asked.
‘Suits me.’
I squirmed my way outta the cupboard and found a hinged flap screwed to the wall. When it was propped up, it was about big enough to hold four cups.
Helga poured the coffee and then wakened the other two. In the early morning light, with their make-up smeared and their hair all over their heads, they looked pretty blowsy.
I went over to the window and opened it wide. The window overlooked a dirty back-alley where folks shoved out their garbage cans to be collected. It was littered with rusty tins and bits of paper. Two or three mangy cats scratched at rubbish piles.
There’d been four of us crammed into that tiny room all night. The window had been jammed tight all the time. Maybe that was the reason that when I opened the window over that filthy back-alley, the air that came in seemed fresh and sweet and life-giving.
Blondie and Suzy sat up side by side and sipped their coffee. Blondie’s face looked lined with worry now. Helga slapped a yellow mess on a plate and handed it to me with a fork. I ate with the plate balanced on my lap.
