Big Money (41 page)

It wasn't until he'd come to from the second operation that they told him that Bill Cermak had died of a fractured skull.

Charley was in the hospital three months with his leg in a Balkan frame. The fractured ribs healed up fast, but he kept on having trouble with his breathing. Gladys handled all the house bills and came every afternoon for a minute. She was always in a hurry and always terribly worried. He had to turn over a power of attorney to Moe Frank his lawyer who used to come to see him a couple of times a week to talk things over. Charley couldn't say much, he couldn't say much to anybody he was in so much pain.

He liked it best when Gladys sent Wheatley to see him. Wheatley was three years old now and thought it was great in the hospital. He liked to see the nurse working all the little weights and pulleys of the frame the leg hung in. “Daddy's living in a airplane,” was what he always said about it. He had tow hair and his nose was beginning to stick up and Charley thought he took after him.

Marguerite was still too little to be much fun. The one time Gladys had the governess bring her, she bawled so at the look of the scary-looking frame she had to be taken home. Gladys wouldn't let her come again. Gladys and Charley had a bitter row about letting Wheatley come as she said she didn't want the child to remember his father in the hospital. “But, Glad, he'll have plenty of time to get over
it, get over it a damn sight sooner than I will.” Gladys pursed her lips together and said nothing. When she'd gone Charley lay there hating her and wondering how they could ever have had children together.

Just about the time he began to see clearly that they all expected him to be a cripple the rest of his life he began to mend, but it was winter before he was able to go home on crutches. He still suffered sometimes from a sort of nervous difficulty in breathing. The house seemed strange as he dragged himself around in it. Gladys had had every room redecorated while he was away and all the servants were different. Charley didn't feel it was his house at all. What he enjoyed best was the massage he had three times a week. He spent his days playing with the kids and talking to Miss Jarvis, their stiff and elderly English governess. After they'd gone to bed he'd sit in his sittingroom drinking scotch and soda and feeling puffy and nervous. God damn it, he was getting too fat. Gladys was always cool as a cucumber these days; even when he went into fits of temper and cursed at her, she'd stand there looking at him with a cold look of disgust on her carefully madeup face. She entertained a great deal but made the servants understand that Mr. Anderson wasn't well enough to come down. He began to feel like a poor relation in his own house. Once when the Farrells were coming he put on his tuxedo and hobbled down to dinner on his crutches. There was no place set for him and everybody looked at him like he was a ghost.

“Thataboy,” shouted Farrell in his yapping voice. “I was expecting to come up and chin with you after dinner.” It turned out that what Farrell wanted to talk about was the suit for five hundred thousand some damn shyster had induced Cermak's widow to bring against the company. Farrell had an idea that if Charley went and saw her he could induce her to be reasonable and settle for a small annuity. Charley said he'd be damned if he'd go. At dinner Charley got tight and upset the afterdinner coffeecups with his crutch and went off to bed in a rage.

What he enjoyed outside of playing with the kids was buying and selling stocks and talking to Nat over the longdistance. Nat kept telling him he was getting the feel of the market. Nat warned him and Charley knew damn well that he was slipping at Tern and that if he didn't do something he'd be frozen out, but he felt too rotten to go to directors' meetings; what he did do was to sell out about half his
stocks in small parcels. Nat kept telling him if he'd only get a move on he could get control of the whole business before Andy Merritt pulled off his new reorganization, but he felt too damn nervous and miserable to make the effort. All he could seem to do was to grumble and call Julius Stauch and raise hell about details. Stauch had taken over his work on the new monoplane and turned out a little ship that had gone through all tests with flying colors. When he'd put down the receiver, Charley would pour himself a little scotch and settle back on the couch in his window and mutter to himself, “Well, you're dished this time.”

One evening Farrell came around and had a long talk and said what Charley needed was a fishing trip, he'd never get well if he kept on this way. He said he'd been talking to Doc Thompson and that he recommended three months off and plenty of exercise if he ever expected to throw away his crutches.

Gladys couldn't go because old Mrs. Wheatley was sick, so Charley got into the back of his Lincoln towncar alone with the chauffeur to drive him, and a lot of blankets to keep him warm, and a flask of whiskey and a thermosbottle of hot coffee, to go down all alone to Miami.

At Cincinnati he felt so bum he spent a whole day in bed in the hotel there. He got the chauffeur to get him booklets about Florida from a travel agency, and finally sent a wire to Nat Benton asking him to spend a week with him down at the Key Largo fishingcamp. Next morning he started off again early. He'd had a good night's sleep and he felt better and began to enjoy the trip. But he felt a damn fool sitting there being driven like an old woman all bundled up in rugs. He was lonely too because the chauffeur wasn't the kind of bird you could talk to. He was a sourlooking Canuck Gladys had hired because she thought it was classy to give her orders in French through the speakingtube; Charley was sure the bastard gypped him on the price of gas and oil and repairs along the road; that damn Lincoln was turning out a bottomless pit for gas and oil.

In Jacksonville the sun was shining. Charley gave himself the satisfaction of firing the chauffeur as soon as they'd driven up to the door of the hotel. Then he went to bed with a pint of bum corn the bellboy sold him and slept like a log.

In the morning he woke up late feeling thirsty but cheerful. After
breakfast he checked out of the hotel and drove around the town a little. It made him feel good to pack his own bag and get into the front seat and drive his own car.

The town had a cheerful rattletrap look in the sunlight under the big white clouds and the blue sky. At the lunchroom next to the busstation he stopped to have a drink. He felt so good that he got out of the car without his crutches and hobbled across the warm pavement. The wind was fluttering the leaves of the magazines and the pink and palegreen sheets of the papers outside the lunchroom window. Charley was out of breath from the effort when he slid onto a stool at the counter. “Give me a limeade and no sweetnin' in it, please,” he said to the ratfaced boy at the fountain.

The sodajerker didn't pay any attention, he was looking down the other way. Charley felt his face get red. His first idea was, I'll get him fired. Then he looked where the boy was looking. There was a blonde eating a sandwich at the other end of the counter. She certainly was pretty. She wore a little black hat and a neat bluegrey suit and a little white lace around her neck and at her wrists. She had an amazed look on her face like she'd just heard something extraordinarily funny. Forgetting to favor his game leg Charley slipped up several seats towards her. “Say, bo, how about that limeade?” he shouted cheerfully at the sodajerker.

The girl was looking at Charley. Her eyes really were a perfectly pure blue. She was speaking to him. “Maybe you know how long the bus takes to Miami, mister. This boy thinks he's a wit so I can't get any data.”

“Suppose we try it out and see,” said Charley.

“They surely come funny in Florida. . . . Another humorist.”

“No, I mean it. If you let me drive you down you'll be doing a sick man a great favor.”

“Sure it won't mean a fate worse than death?”

“You'll be perfectly safe with me, young lady. I'm almost a cripple. I'll show you my crutches in the car.”

“What's the trouble?”

“Cracked up in a plane.”

“You a pilot?”

Charley nodded. “Not quite skinny enough for Lindbergh,” she said, looking him up and down. Charley turned red. “I am a little overweight. It's being cooped up with this lousy leg.”

“Well, I guess I'll try it. If I step into your car and wake up in Buenos Aires it'll be my bad luck.”

Charley tried to pay for her coffee and sandwich but she wouldn't let him. Something about her manner kept him laughing all the time. When he got up and she saw how he limped she pursed her mouth up. “Gee, that's too bad.” When she saw the car she stopped in her tracks. “Zowie,” she said, “we're bloomin' millionaires.”

They were laughing as they got into the car. There was something about the way she said things that made him laugh. She wouldn't say what her name was. “Call me Mme. X,” she said. “Then you'll have to call me Mr. A,” said Charley.

They laughed and giggled all the way to Daytona Beach where they stopped off and went into the surf for a dip. Charley felt ashamed of his pot and his pale skin and his limp as he walked across the beach with her looking brown and trim in her blue bathingsuit. She had a pretty figure although her hips were a little big. “Anyway it's not as if I'd come out of it with one leg shorter than the other. The doc says I'll be absolutely O.K. if I exercise it right.”

“Sure, you'll be great in no time. And me thinkin' you was an elderly sugardaddy in the drugstore there.”

“I think you're a humdinger, Mme X.”

“Be sure you don't put anything in writing, Mr. A.”

Charley's leg ached like blazes when he came out of the water, but it didn't keep him from having a whale of a good appetite for the first time in months. After a big fishdinner they started off again. She went to sleep in the car with her neat little head on his shoulder. He felt very happy driving down the straight smooth concrete highway although he felt tired already. When they got into Miami that night she made him take her to a small hotel back near the railroad tracks and wouldn't let him come in with her. “But gosh, couldn't we see each other again?”

“Sure, you can see me any night at the Palms. I'm an entertainer there.”

“Honest . . . I knew you were an entertainer but I didn't know you were a professional.”

“You sure did me a good turn, Mr. A. Now it can be told . . . I was flat broke with exactly the price of that ham sandwich and if you hadn't brought me down I'd a lost the chance of working here. . . . I'll tell you about it sometime.”

“Tell me your name. I'd like to call you up.”

“You tell me yours.”

“Charles Anderson. I'll be staying bored to death at the MiamiBiltmore.”

“So you really are Mr. A. . . . Well, goodby, Mr. A, and thanks a million times.” She ran into the hotel. Charley was crazy about her already. He was so tired he just barely made his hotel. He went up to his room and tumbled into bed and for the first time in months went to sleep without getting drunk first.

A week later when Nat Benton turned up he was surprised to find Charley in such good shape. “Nothin' like a change,” said Charley, laughing. They drove on down towards the Keys together. Charley had Margo Dowling's photograph in his pocket, a professional photograph of her dressed in Spanish costume for her act. He'd been to the Palms every night, but he hadn't managed to get her to go out with him yet. When he'd suggest anything she'd shake her head and make a face and say, “I'll tell you about it sometime.” But the last night she had given him a number where he could call her up.

Nat kept trying to talk about the market and the big reorganization of Tern and Askew-Merritt that Merritt was engineering but Charley would shut him up with, “Aw, hell, let's talk about somethin' else.” The camp was all right but the mosquitoes were fierce. They spent a good day on the reef fishing for barracuda and grouper. They took a jug of bacardi out in the motorboat and fished and drank and ate sandwiches. Charley told Nat all about the crackup. “Honestly, I don't think it was my fault. It was one of those damn things you can't help. . . . Now I feel as if I'd lost the last friend I had on earth. Honest, I'd a given anythin' I had in the world if that hadn't happened to Bill.” “After all,” said Nat, “he was only a mechanic.”

One day when they got in from fishing, drunk and with their hands and pants fishy, and their faces burned by the sun and glare, and dizzy from the sound and smell of the motor and the choppy motion of the boat, they found waiting for them a wire from Benton's office.

UNKNOWN UNLOADING TERN STOP DROPS FOUR AND A HALF POINTS STOP WIRE INSTRUCTIONS

“Instructions hell,” said Benton, jamming his stuff into his suitcase. “We'll go up and see. Suppose we charter a plane at Miami.” “You take the plane,” said Charley coolly. “I'm going to ride on the train.”

In New York he sat all day in the back room of Nat Benton's office
smoking too many cigars, watching the ticker, fretting and fuming, riding up and down town in taxicabs, getting the lowdown from various sallowfaced friends of Nat's and Moe Frank's. By the end of the week he'd lost four hundred thousand dollars and had let go every airplane stock he had in the world.

All the time he was sitting there putting on a big show of business he was counting the minutes, the way he had when he was a kid in school, for the market to close so that he could go uptown to a speakeasy on Fiftysecond Street to meet a hennahaired girl named Sally Hogan he'd met when he was out with Nat at the Club Dover. She was the first girl he'd picked up when he got to New York. He didn't give a damn about her but he had to have some kind of a girl. They were registered at the hotel as Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

One morning when they were having breakfast in bed there was a light knock on the door. “Come in,” yelled Charley, thinking it was the waiter. Two shabbylooking men rushed into the room, followed by O'Higgins, a shyster lawyer he'd met a couple of times back in Detroit. Sally let out a shriek and covered her head with the pillow.