Mr whites confession a n.., p.9
Mr. White's Confession: A Novel, page 9
“Just Trent. Welshinger doesn’t deign to talk to the press.”
“Well, I have to give him credit for that. Anyhow, I’d say Trent’s just having fun with you. Not that he’s not a serious guy, a real serious guy, but maybe there’s less to it than you think.”
“I guess I’ll have to find out,” Farrell said.
“Please yourself.”
“I always do,” Farrell said, and left.
Wesley reached for the telephone again and then remembered that he had no one to call, that he had only been trying to get rid of Farrell by pantomiming that he was busy. In fact, he was dead in the water. He had been hoping he might get some breathing space during which to develop some new leads, maybe talk to all the Aragon girls again. Or maybe just figure out some way to convince himself that the murderer was a transient, somebody six states away by now, out of his reach and therefore out of sight, out of mind.
But now the Vice Boys had set Farrell on Wesley’s scent again, just to punish him for getting in their way, for not letting them take down White—who for all Wesley knew was the murderer; who for all White himself knew was the murderer. Except now, after what had happened, Wesley didn’t want him anymore, evidence or no evidence. Welshinger had Wesley pegged: It was like he had a broken heart. Where once he was totally fixed on White, captivated by him, now he didn’t ever want to think about him or see him again. And the truth was, having been stung, he didn’t want anyone else either. He had thought he wanted to do this thing for the dead girl, but he found the urge had left him, that he was too old or something. There was nothing left but weight, gravity pulling him down. Maybe he ought to retire and let Welshinger and Trent and Farrell claim the future, which was surely theirs and not his. He must already be the past, without the wit to see it. Not that he liked the past, but it didn’t harry him like the present or intimidate him like the future. It just lay still, as if resting; retired, emptied out, and a little sad, like Maggie’s Sundays.
Hyman Stein saw the big guy come in Monday night, crossing the room as though in his bedroom slippers. He’d asked the bartender for a ginger ale and sat staring at the counter for a while, churning his drink with the swizzle stick. Then he spoke to the bartender, and the bartender waved Hyman over, and the big guy asked if “Miss Fahey” was “in attendance this evening.” Hyman told him she ought to be in around seven o’clock and mentioned that other girls were already there if he wanted a dance, but the big guy said he’d wait. Hyman went back to the office, and while he was walking through the green glass-bead curtain that led to the office and the girls’ dressing rooms, he wondered if this could be the guy Lieutenant Welshinger had told him to look out for, the one who was supposed to be a regular and who might try to recruit his girls into vice activities.
In fact, the same night—perhaps a week before—Welshinger had spoken to Hyman Stein, he’d also talked to Ruby Fahey. He’d been sitting in the corner booth with Trent, drinking Seagram’s and 7UP, and when the room quieted down, around eleven o’clock, he motioned Ruby over with one hand and waved Trent away with the other. Ruby knew who he was—Hyman pointed out all the cops who came in, saying they must under all circumstances be treated as what he liked to call “VIPs”—and knew that he was to be considered the biggest VIP of all. although for what reason Hyman never said.
So she had gone right over when he signaled her, and she could not even say if he had used his hand at all or perhaps had only set his still, azure-blue eyes on her and she had been drawn over to him like smoke up a chimney. Anyway, he patted the seat next to him. and once she sat down, he was very solicitous about ordering her a drink and listening to her as though he had all the time in the world. That was what she noticed about Welshinger, that and the cool draft she fell on her right shoulder, almost as though it were coming out of his mouth. Every cop she had ever met was in a hurry, itchy and tetchy, but Welshinger sat and smiled and nodded, as patient as your favorite spinster aunt; like he already knew everything you were going to say but since he liked you so much he was pleased as punch to hear it all over again.
So Ruby scarcely noticed that after a little while she was telling Welshinger about regular customers he seemed to be interested in, and she could not even say how the subject had come up or how—after she’d told him about Mr. Reeves, who wanted girls to come to his house and dress up in a nurse’s uniform and give him enemas, and Jimmy, who smoked “tea” and procured abortions and was supposed to be a little arty—she’d begun to talk about Herbert White. Ruby had called Herbert just the other day about photographs he’d taken of her to use when she went to Hollywood, and he had told her some policemen had ransacked his place and threatened him and accused him of having something to do with Char Mortensen’s death, which was the most ridiculous thing she had ever heard in her life seeing how Herbert was meeker than Cream of Wheat, even if he was big as Croesus—no, maybe not Croesus, maybe more like Humpty-Dumpty and. Say, Paul Bunyan.
At that. Welshinger not only nodded, as he had been doing all along, but said yes, he understood, and wasn’t it a shame. There’d been a terrible mix-up down at the department and it was a damn shame, but she ought to tell her friend that she had it on the best authority that he wouldn’t have any further problems. Better not to say exactly on whose authority, if she wouldn’t mind; in fact, if she could keep a secret—and he was sure she could—the whole sorry mess was on account of some bungling in the homicide division. There was a lack of professionalism, of expertise, among the officers there, sadly enough, which officially was none of Welshinger’s business. But maybe if Ruby was willing to keep him apprised of her friend’s movements and activities as best she could. . . well, maybe he could act as a sort of guardian angel for Herbert and at the same time persuade the Homicide people to back off him. seeing as how Welshinger would be keeping an eye on him. It wasn’t much. Welshinger admitted, but would Ruby consider letting him do her that little favor? He put his hand over Ruby’s hand, not touching her, but just sheltering her hand with his own, and he said he could see that Ruby was a nice girl, a very attractive girl, a girl that was going places, and Welshinger liked to do a favor where he could for a girl like that. Would Ruby permit him?
Ruby had agreed without a thought and, on Saturday, informed Herbert of this fortuitous intervention on his behalf , without mentioning the name of his benefactor, as she had promised. Now, on Monday, when she arrived at the Aragon at about seven-fifteen, she was a little surprised to find Herbert waiting for her at the bar, a bit preoccupied, perhaps even agitated, over what she could not imagine.
Monday, October 16. 1939
I write this evening having just returned from the Aragon Ballroom and having had a very exciting visit with Miss Ruby (I dub her thusly, thinking “Miss Fahey” too formal, given the new intimacy of our relation but “Ruby” insufficiently elevated to render justice to the esteem in which I hold her). In fact, it would be fair to say I can scarcely contain myself!
The purpose of my visit was to put a proposition to her, to wit, that I might photograph a further folio of poses of her. I must say I had every expectation of her declining, since she had already posed for me three times. In fact she said she would be delighted; that in fact she would consider it “swell” and that she would look forward to spending more time with me! Needless to say, I could not have been more delighted or surprised. She further allowed, to my even greater chagrin, that she had been meaning to “check up” on me by way of “looking out” for me, as though to say that she thinks of herself as a sort of guardian or protector! It is a curious and wonderful world indeed wherein an orphan such as myself, destitute of all family for well nigh twenty years, is at last in middle age thus befriended by a lovely young woman nearly a generation his junior!
I should, I suppose, explain what impelled me to go to see her in the first place. The thought stole upon me yesterday evening, as I was preparing for bed, that perhaps in Miss Ruby Fahey I had stumbled up on my ideal model: someone with whom I might make not just a few photographs or even a portfolio but, so to speak, an entire oeuvre, as they say in art circles—a series of photographs in which my camera might explore one physiognomy in great detail over time: a face and body in all its states and seasons, one might say, rather than piecemeal.
Now, when this idea struck—and I do mean struck, for it was like a thunderbolt—and I realized Miss Ruby’s perfect suitability to be my model, it was all I could do not to dress myself there and then and seek her consent that very evening. But I was able to restrain myself, albeit with no little tossing and turning last night, for it was as though I had suddenly come to see my life’s purpose, grandiose as perhaps that may sound.
I think some of the credit for this sea change must lie with Miss Ruby herself, for not only is she matchless in her beauty (not, admittedly, perhaps the equal of Miss Veronica Galvin, but this is not, after all, Hollywood) but our relationship is exceedingly companionable. We get on very amiably, and I genuinely believe we are friends: I am utterly in her debt with regard to clearing up the appalling events of the week before last and hope I may find some small way in which I might repay her. When I think of her face, her sweetness and prettiness, and her kindness, and with what cheer and want of self-regard she bestows these virtues on the likes of me, I believe I am the recipient of an utterly unexpected, unwarranted, and seemingly boundless blessing. It is as though I were standing on my doorstep on a winter’s evening with my hat and gloves and scarf, preparing to set off on a journey, holding my hat before me absentmindedly. and into it, with a little sizzle like a firework, fell a shooting star.
The girl was sitting on Wesley’s stoop on Tuesday evening. She had a coat now, a big brown man’s coat, somebody’s castoff.
Wesley said, “It’s news to me if the bus to Moline stops here.”
The girl looked up and smiled at him. “I just eun out of smokes,” she said.
Wesley nodded and took his pack from his pocket and gave her a cigarette. He took out another for himself, sat next to her on the stoop, and lighted their two cigarettes. He inhaled and then looked at her and said, “So you got a crime to report?”
This time she looked a little wounded. She gazed down at her feet or perhaps at the fractures in Wesley’s sidewalk. She finally said, “I just come by to say hello,” and added, “seeing how I was in the neighborhood.”
“Looking for a handout, I suppose.” Wesley had not had a good day.
The girl suddenly faced him, firm-lipped but with her eyes alight as he recalled them the first time he had seen her, with Billy in the steam boiler. “Not looking for nothing. Just come to say how d’y’do.” Her face loosened. “But you’re a sour one, ain’t you. Suspicious too.” She looked away again. “Even what with you being a policeman, there’s no call to be treating everybody that way.”
“Hard habit to break. World starts to seem like a quarry with something under every rock.”
The girl smiled at him and shook her hair. “I ain’t no snake. I thought we was friends. You done me a favor once. Remember?”
“So I did. Must have been feeling peculiar that day.” Wesley stood. “But seeing how that’s the case, I suppose I ought to at least give you a cup of coffee.” He took out his key and motioned toward the door. The girl stood next to him, and the cylinders in the lock rasped and the door clicked open.
“Folks in this neighborhood all lock their doors?”
“Probably just me,” Wesley said. “I’m suspicious, right?”
The girl stood just inside the doorway while Wesley went into the sitting room and opened the blinds. The house seemed to recoil before the light, and the girl thought every surface in the house looked orangy brown, like old newspaper spattered with tobacco juice. Dust spun over the faded rugs.
Wesley was walking back toward the kitchen, talking as he went. “I don’t keep much in the way of groceries here, but I know I got some coffee somewhere, maybe some Uneeda biscuits too.” He disappeared, and Maggie stood alone in the little dining room as though inside a beer bottle, the whole world silent and stale.
Wesley came back out of the kitchen looking chagrined. “Thought I had some. But I don’t,” he said. He shrugged. “I got a bottle of seltzer and a jar of strawberry conserve. And a box of baking soda. Other than that, the cupboard’s kind of bare.”
“That’s okay,” Maggie said, and she stood next to the table, waiting for him to tell her what to do. He was looking at her as though he were remembering something; his eyes swept up the length of her coat, and then he drew in his breath and licked his upper lip quickly and said, “Well, sit down for a minute at least. Take a load off of your feet.” He led her into the sitting room and patted the cushion of a spindly-legged davenport. Maggie sat down without taking her coat off, and Wesley backed himself away from her, half bent, and settled into a chair across the room with an old doily slung over its back.
Maggie cradled her hands in her lap, and then she said. “So what do you eat here, seeing as there’s no groceries.” Her eyes scanned the room, following the hookless picture rail around its perimeter and at last coming to rest on Wesley.
“Well, I kind of told you—you know, how people are always giving me ham sandwiches and coffee and red hots and bags of peanuts and so forth. Chicken legs. Hamburgers. It kind of adds up over the day.”
“Kind of the way I been eating.”
“You been getting enough? You look kind of skinny,” Wesley said.
“I tend that way. From my mama’s people. But I get plenty. Girls at the laundry all share.”
Wesley swallowed and then said. “Where you sleeping?”
“I’m flopping here and there.”
“What? Outside? Up where I found you?”
“No, no,” Maggie said. “Just around. With friends.”
“What kind of friends?”
“Not men friends, if that’s what you’re thinking. Only man friend I ever had, your buddies run out of town, didn’t they?” Maggie pressed her cigarette out in the ashtray on the bare table next to the davenport. “So don’t worry.” She jutted her chin in the direction of the kitchen. “I ought to worry about you. No food. Living in this dark old place like a mole in a hole. You’re the one needs tending.”
Wesley demurred. “Suits me well enough,” he said, but he felt a little ashamed.
“Looky here.” Maggie said. “You done me a favor. Let me do you one back.” She stood and Wesley looked at her in the long coat, at the places where the threadbare hem lapped her ankle socks and where her nail-bitten hands hid in the furrows of the sleeves. She opened the coat and let it fall on the davenport like a veil from her face. It seemed to Wesley that she stood very erect, almost noble in her viscose polka-dot dress, as if she were the statue of Lady Justice or an angel. She said. “Let me at that kitchen of yours,” and in her scuffed and cracked brown shoes strode into the heart of Wesley’s little house.
Maggie found a rusted canister of Bon-Ami and a brush under the sink, and she set to work. She cleaned the stove and the drain board, and then she swept and mopped the floor, removing a huge tangle of dust bunnies from beneath the icebox and a scab of grease and crumbs that underlay the stove. She continued in this manner until seven o’clock, then announced she was going home.
Wesley began to ask where “home” might be, and Maggie interrupted, saying, “With a girlfriend.” He had been standing in the kitchen doorway all this time, half amused but also half humiliated, as though she had been scrubbing the soil from the crotch of his underwear. Then he said quietly, “You know if I could I’d let you stay. But a young girl being seen to board with a police officer, it wouldn’t do, would it?”
Maggie shook her head. “No, I don’t suppose it would. Anyhow, I got somewhere to go, don’t I?” She moved to fetch her coat, took it from the davenport, and turned back to face Wesley. “How about you just say. ‘Thank you very kindly for the washing and scrubbing. Miss,’ and leave it at that? ’Cause you got no cause to worry about me or anybody else. You got your hands full with yourself. Seems to me you can scarcely wash behind your own ears.”
She put on the coat, and now—he could not say through what moment or transformation—Wesley saw that she was a young woman, not so very different from his Rose when they’d first met; from his Louise in the last few years before she left. He could see the weight of her, the shape of her, the shadow she cast back across the davenport and the empty wall. He nodded and said, “Thank you very kindly, miss, for the washing and scrubbing.”
Tuesday, October 17, 1939
Filed all morning, hard-boiled egg inside the station for lunch, straightened supply room and swept in the afternoon. Got off streetcar at the top of the hill and walked back to light a candle for luck. Then home, to begin preparations for tomorrow’s initial session with Miss Ruby.
Have kept this brief, as I am beside myself with anticipation. As Nanna used to say, if I were a cat, I’d have kittens!
Wesley thought he could see Maggie’s hair coming up the street, no longer dull brown but a luminous sienna. She stood when he came up the sidewalk, and Wesley saw she was holding a sack.
“So what you got there, young lady?” He was afraid it might contain her belongings. But then a minute before that, when he rounded the corner into his street, he’d been afraid she wouldn’t be waiting for him, as he had pictured her doing all day—pictured her so many times, with such an ache of hoping, that it was more prayer than picturing.
“Food,” she said. “For your empty larder. Bacon. Eggs. Crisco. Milk. Bisquick. And coffee.”
“Where’d you get the money for all that?”
She smiled at him defiantly. “Had some saved. For a bus ticket.”
