Built for Trouble (2 page)

“When were you examined last?” He stuck the ends of his stethoscope into his ears and the blanket fell away as I sat up on the cot.

“Beginning of summer. When I went to work as a lifeguard.”

“And before that?”

“When I got out of the Navy. I was in four years and most of it with a crew teaching swimming. At the naval base, that was, back in Norfolk.”

“Oh?” He listened to my pump a while. He checked my blood pressure; he made a lot of other routine examinations and a nurse came in with the needle. They gave me a shot and I flopped back down on the pad.

“Damn it, this is silly as hell,” I protested. “It was just one of those things. I’d paddled more than a hundred yards at top speed. I was out of wind as who wouldn’t be and I had to dive for her right away. Deep. Maybe twenty-five feet down and I had to stay long enough to try to find her in that churned up sand and—”

“Sure, sure. Now rest a while and we’ll talk later. You’re in a slight shock; your lungs are probably a little inflamed. So take it easy a while and when Sawyer comes back you can tell him all about how it was.”

They closed the door and a few minutes later my eyes began to blur. I relaxed; the tension drained away. The sounds of the street outside the window faded, the smell of medicine grew less sharp, and I drifted into a peaceful sleep.

I could hear voices in the hall outside my room as I lay in the darkness. A bright neon sign flickered on and off just beyond the window and there were antiseptic odors and the freshness of white bedding. I sat up and listened. Hank Sawyer was there, and the doctor. I recognized Ted Hogan’s voice and remembered that he’d helped them bring me around back on the beach.

“Eddie isn’t going to like it,” I heard Ted say.

“No? So what the hell else can the personnel commission do except ease Baker out?” Hank asked. “Hell’s bells, if a guy’s got a bad heart he’s got a bad heart. The same for blackout spells. They’re not about to cure him with a couple of quick treatments. Ain’t that right, Doc?”

If the doctor answered, I didn’t hear him.
Ease Baker out!
What was Sawyer talking about? I’d worked like hell to get on with the lifeguard crew. This wasn’t a piddling summer job to me; I was a career man. I rolled off of the bed, took three quick steps, and jerked the door open.

“Your pants, friend,” Ted said, grinning. He tossed a bundle to me—my sweatshirt, denims, and white sneakers. “I came by your station and picked them up for you when we ran the flag down this evening.”

“Thanks, Ted,” I said. The three of them came into the room and I looked toward the doc. “Okay to get into my clothes?”

“Any time, Baker,” the doc said, and then he excused himself and went out. I dressed, then turned toward Hank.

“How about a fast playback on all this personnel commission business? Where do I stand? The last I remember was when I made that dive.”

“We’re gonna start with you giving it to me once more, Baker. I want to see if it sounds the same the second time around.”

“All right,” I said. “There was this girl. Two girls, right beside my station, and then the dark-haired one decided to go for a swim, but while she was way out there past the breakers, she…” I went through the details slowly, all the way to where I lost track of things down in twenty-five feet of water, and it was beginning to be very real once again. I finished with: “So after that I don’t know a thing. Her name is Nola; her friend was a redhead with freckles. More than that I can’t tell you.”

“Her name’s Nola Norton,” Hank said. “She’s a bit player in pictures, a free-lance, and before that she was a lifeguard herself at some playground pool back in the Middle West. Or so she says.”

“You know her?”

“Hell, no! I got it second hand; the newspapers are sticking their beaks into this and smelling around for something phony. They’ve called me for a statement. And they must be raising hell with our personnel commission too because Wahlstrom, who heads the commission, is already riding my tail.”

“But it was just one of those things,” I said.

“Maybe. At any rate, the first anyone on the beach knew of it was when Ted here saw the girl bringing you in on the paddleboard; only with
her
shoving
you
along, Ted figured you two were playing games out there.”

“That’s right,” Ted said, and scratched his chin, “but when you got as far as the surf she motioned to a couple of fellows in the water nearby. They helped drag you out, and she went right to work at artificial respiration. By then I’d phoned in and was sprinting across the sand. I relieved her, and then Hank came in the jeep.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“We had reporters there thicker than beach parties on the Fourth of July, Eddie,” Ted went on. “They missed the ambulance but they sure took plenty of shots of the girl. They got her story too, and the way she tells it she wasn’t having any trouble at all until you got there.”

“What?”

“That’s right, Eddie. Then one of these reporters, he bought the film right out of the camera of a guy who claimed to have some action pictures of Nola bringing you through the surf. Bought the film sight unseen, Eddie, but if those exposures are any good they’re going to have a ball with this scoop. They seemed pretty interested.”

“A ball,” I echoed. Then Hank Sawyer took over.

“You got me in a hell of a spot, Baker.”

“You’re
in a spot!”

“Yeah, me. The commission wanted to know what kind of men we’re hiring and how the hell you, a first-year man, happened to have a tower alone instead of being with one of the bigger stations where there’s more than one guy. I wiggled out of it. I gave Commissioner Wahlstrom the big pitch about how you were four years in a Navy outfit teaching swimming and how you came through our two-week training course better than any candidate in a hell of a long time. I laid it on thick about that twenty-two minute mile you swam to qualify and how it was good enough time for an Olympic swimmer and so on paper you’re nothing but great. So now I want to know how you managed to louse up today.”

“Damn it, that dame was thrashing around out there like a three-year-old in the bathtub. Sure she’s a swimmer. I saw that right away when she went into the water, but when she started back toward the beach, she couldn’t make it, and—”

“She made it all right,” Hank said sourly. “And with you on the board.”

“I know, but—”

“So how were you so damn sure she needed help?”

“She was running up the ladder. That girl was trying to climb right out of the water; I’ve seen enough of them to know when it’s for real.”

“Your personnel folder says you got plenty of experience before you came to us, so maybe you should,” Hank admitted. “I went through it before I came down here and by the looks of it you’ve been an aquatic all your life.”

“Well, most of it,” I said, a little embarrassed. “From about the last two years in high school, I guess.” I hoped he’d let it go there; I didn’t want to dig into those earlier years any more than I had to.

“Uh huh. Now there’s another thing that struck me, Baker, and that’s this fighting you’ve done. Been in the ring, your record says.”

“A little,” I admitted.

“And on the canvas some too,” Sawyer said, eyeing me closely. There wasn’t any use hashing it over; he had it in the personnel file. I’d boxed a lot in the Navy and then had six pro bouts. There is a difference. I lost the last two in a row and it wasn’t hard to figure that I’d never make the top.

“So maybe,” Sawyer said, “one of those pros got to you a little. Maybe he loosened something in your head, something the doctors can’t see but which gives you an occasional blackout. It sure as hell ain’t impossible, Baker.”

“I have never,” I said firmly, “had a blackout.”

“You had one today, Baker, and it picked a hell of a time to pop up.”

I didn’t answer but I knew what he meant, and it was all trouble. I knew what I wanted out of life and it wasn’t a million dollars or my name in lights. There are half a dozen full-time jobs on the beach—the permanent, year-around force—and I wanted one of those spots. It doesn’t pay a fortune but there’s security and a good life. Judy and I would love it, a hell of a nice place to raise a couple of kids in a relaxed atmosphere. One of the boys was dropping out this fall and I wanted his job. I was right in line; plenty of them had more seniority but they were all college kids who could only work summers. So things had looked pretty good, but now…

Ted drove me back to my place at the beach. A little later I smoked in the darkness and tried to figure some answers.

Where had I seen Nola Norton before? And a swimmer like that—how did she manage to keep away from a tan all the way into July? All right, say she’s a bit player, like Hank said; so maybe I’ve seen her in a show, but what’s she doing at the beach in all that sunlight if she’s so worried about her fair white skin?

I lit a fresh smoke, put my feet up on the window sill and tackled the publicity angle. Sure this thing, if it broke in the papers, would be great for her. Bad for Eddie Baker but wonderful for Nola Norton. But damn it, the thing just didn’t add up. For a gamble on publicity she had to put her pretty little neck too far out. Twenty-five feet of water at least, and she had to be right down there on the bottom with me all the while. Out of breath, just like Eddie Baker.

No, somebody could easily have died down there, and she knew that. A lifeguard herself at one time, Nola must have realized the risk she was—Lifeguard? Again I shook my head. She swam like one, all right, but I’ve pulled a hell of a lot of people out of the water—kids, husky sailors, elderly women, exhausted men—and I’ve never yet started a rescue by locking my arms around anyone’s stomach from behind.

ON MONDAY I was out of the sack at the crack of dawn. I wasn’t a subscriber to any Los Angeles papers and Playa Del Rey was just a small beach town, so our only drugstore wouldn’t be open yet. But the cafe was already doing business, so I pulled on a T-shirt and blue denims, slipped my feet into a pair of loose moccasins, walked over, and sat down at the counter. By the time I had my hand on a Sunday paper, Cora was pouring the coffee.

“You shoulda stood in bed yesterday, Baker boy,” she said, shaking her head as she put the coffee in front of me. A bouncy blonde and only recently transplanted from Brooklyn, Cora had quickly learned that her home-town accent was often good for the long tip. I forced a grin and opened the paper. My grin faded.

They had me all over the thing. I fumbled for the steaming cup as my eyes went over the sheet, and then I was aware that Cora was back.

“Them bums—they crucified you,” she said, leaning over the counter to point. She had her finger on a picture in the center, a six-column spread about eight inches high. Nola Norton was giving me artificial respiration in the approved Back-Pressure Arm-Lift Method. The shot had been taken from a spot about three yards from my heels as I lay belly down on the blanket, my face resting on my forearm and her white knee near my chin. Her technique was damn good but no one was going to worry about that. They were going to judge this as art. She’d even managed to get her bathing cap off and, no question, she looked fetching as all hell.

It was strictly a cheesecake job. She was full-busted and bent over for maximum effect, and the camera was looking right down her bra top. Cleavage? A grand canyon’s worth—a damn sight more than movie queens are usually permitted in publicity shots. But this was news. Something real. That’s the way the pic turned out and that’s the way they could print the thing.

There were other pictures. One shot caught us as Nola brought me through the surf; another was a posed picture and showed Nola standing on the crest of sand just above the water line. My eye caught on that for a few seconds and I bent to study the thing more closely. Something was wrong with that picture. Not the workmanship—that was tops; in fact it was a little too good. A few drops of water glistened on her white skin. I looked at the hair caught in the breeze and drifting out behind her. If a bathing cap fits tight enough, her hair could have been kept dry—that part was legit. But somehow there was an inconsistency in that picture. That boy with the camera—he’d been Johnny on the spot all right. And he knew his business; he hadn’t missed a trick.

Once again I swung around to the possibility that this whole thing had been rigged. An accomplice with an aqualung? I ruled that out at once; I would have felt the heavy rubber tubes as he caught me from behind. There had only been the girl, and she baited me out there and waited for me down in that roil of dirty water—waited, and when I was all but spent, she closed in, caught me desperate for air. I was pooped and she still…

But it wouldn’t make sense. Nola had lost her air too; I’d seen the bubbles shooting toward the surface. And lifeguard or no, she just couldn’t be that good. I was quite a way off when she went under that last time. I’d covered the distance, put my head under for a look around, bobbed up for a fresh breath, and then made my dive. She was under a hell of a lot longer than I was. Sure I was winded from the fast run out there, but even so—a dame, and that long without air and still strong enough to do what she’d have to have done? It just couldn’t be. And yet I was damn sure that I’d never had a blackout. What the hell really happened I couldn’t figure, but I knew…

“You the guy whose picture is in the paper this morning?”

I looked up to see a man in a white cap grinning down at me. He pushed the morning milk delivery across the counter toward Cora, then parked on the stool next to me and nodded his head toward the newspaper. “Bet it felt like hell, you being fished out by a dame.”

“It felt like hell,” I agreed.

“I read all about it this morning and I’ve been wondering how come you—”

“If you read it, you know more than I do about what happened,” I cut in shortly. “How about peddling your milk while I catch up?”

This was a fair sample of how things were going to go for the next few days, and I didn’t want to start out by letting anyone shove it down my neck. When he let his eyes fall and began to make out the bill, I tossed a coin on the counter, picked up the paper, and went back to my rented room to work my way through the details.

They were really giving this one a play. There were three separate treatments—the rescue itself, an interview with Nola Norton, and a provocative little tidbit pointing out that a city the size of L.A. should be able to screen lifeguard applicants well enough to eliminate those with a tendency to black out.

And that was the peg they were going to hang this on. The sudden blackout! The reporters had obviously gotten to Commissioner Wahlstrom and that was all he had to give them. The heat was on, and in a way I didn’t blame him.

When I went through the interview with Nola, one item I thought I’d settled washed back into prominence. She still maintained she’d been a lifeguard back East a few years earlier. I put that down to so much publicity pull, but the paper also mentioned that she’d had bit parts in a couple of movies, and the titles were listed. I hadn’t seen either one of them. So now I had to begin wondering again where I’d seen Nola before and how I could forget a doll like that. I puzzled over it for ten minutes longer, then went to the rescue itself.

The guy had style. He led off with a crack about never having been lucky enough to run onto a case of man biting dog, but until one came along this would do. From there he launched into a thrilling account of the lovely Miss Norton who, while diving for a beer tin just to keep herself in trim, suddenly saw the dim outline of a drowning man almost at her feet. He went through her mighty effort to save me and how I fought her and almost drowned both of us but she finally managed to bring me to the surface, get me on the paddleboard, push me ashore. When the reporter got to the place where she worked me through a “raging surf,” I threw the paper down in disgust and got up to pace the small room.

It would have been nice to phone my girl, but it was still pretty early and I didn’t want to look like I was asking her to pour out a bucket of sympathy. Instead I chain-smoked and tried to figure some answers. About eight I slipped into a sports shirt, slacks, and some shoes and ran over to Hank Sawyer’s place. The garage door was open and the sounds of a power saw cutting through wood arose as I got out of my Ford. When I went into his cluttered shop, Hank turned off the saw and shook his head. “Man, Baker, you seen a morning paper?”

“I’ve seen it. I’m in trouble up to here. Maybe I’d better call Mr. Wahlstrom. Do you have his number?”

“Sure,” Hank said, and nodded toward the door. I followed him through the mess. He had a wide variety of tools—drill press, small band saw, a home welding outfit, and about everything else, but it was all old and well rusted from the sea air. The bench was piled a foot deep in wrenches, hammers, hand tools, and such. How he ever managed in this disorganized fashion I couldn’t figure, but some of the boys said he was fairly clever with his hands.

At the garage door, Hank reached overhead and brought down a key. We went up the outside stairs to his apartment and that too was a boar’s nest. He rummaged in a box of papers for Wahlstrom’s phone number while I glanced around. When my eye caught the wall where Hank kept his torrid pin-ups, I noticed that some of them had fallen off the wall, leaving glue spots and bare rectangles, and I wondered idly how long it would be before he got around to putting them back. Then he grunted and held out a square of paper.

“Found it, Baker,” Hank said. He nodded toward the phone, but when I followed him over. Hank scooped up the receiver and began to dial. “Better if I talk to him. Wahlstrom holds me responsible for the lifeguard crew and he’s plenty touchy right now.”

“Okay,” I mumbled.

When Hank finished talking to Wahlstrom, he said, “Brace yourself, Baker. There’s a fastball coming down the line.”

“Like what?”

“The men on the commission have been working with the reporters and the way they see it there are only three possibilities. You’re subject to spells where you pass out, or you got together with Nola Norton and rigged some phony publicity, or she put this through without any help from you for the newspaper space it would bring. You still maintain that the first is impossible?

“Damn right!”

“Well, sure as hell they aren’t going to buy the last. There are too many risks; she couldn’t possibly hope to get the breaks all down the line and she would have needed
every one.
Even so, how the hell did she stay under so long and still manage to fight a winning battle with a healthy lifeguard who she had to figure was in reasonable physical condition and—hell, it’s ridiculous. That leaves the second choice, the planned publicity with your cooperation.”

“Damn it, now
you’re
being ridiculous. I wouldn’t be idiot enough to get into a deal like that. I’m making a full-time job out of the beach, remember? Big plans! Judy Turner and I are getting married one of these days and we’ll be living down at the beach and raising a couple of healthy kids. It’s the life we’re counting on; it’s the future we’ve planned for ourselves. Would any sane man risk all that to please some damned starlet? Hell, no!”

“Slow down. Baker. All they’re trying to do is get the jump on a lot of readers who will be saying that this looks like a put-up job. Far’s I know, the commission doesn’t believe you took a dive and neither do the reporters. But to block it off ahead of time, they want to let you answer a few questions downtown. They’re arranging for a lab to give you a lie-detector test, Baker.”

“So all right,” I barked. “I’m for it! When?”

“Now. I’ll wash up and we’ll drive down.”

But two hours later I was more depressed than ever. Not that the lie-detection test had been a problem. It was easy. The only time the guy running it got to me at all was when he started asking questions that had nothing to do with this rescue. He slipped in a fast one about had I ever been in trouble with the law and I gave him a quick no. His eyebrows raised a fraction of an inch and I had to backtrack. I admitted a couple of minor scrapes when I was a kid; we’d lived in a tough neighborhood and I didn’t have any halo around my head. More than seven years ago, that was, and I didn’t see any point in his dragging it all out in front of a member of the commission, but he did. He even got a little personal—said that a lot of people consider reform to be a thin veneer that hoodlums wear for short periods of time. That crack almost won him a punch in his long nose, but Sawyer calmed me down and one of the reporters told him to get back to the affair at the beach, and everything was easy again. He had to give me a clean bill of health on the question of did I or didn’t I get together with Nola Norton in advance.

After the test was over, there were two more short conversations I had and neither of them did anything to make me feel any better. One was with Wahlstrom. What he said boiled down to the fact that, since I was clear on any question of taking the dive, the commission would have to assume I really had blacked out. He went on to say that I had Civil Service rights and could fight the case if I wanted to, but I didn’t have a chance. Continued employment is based on ability to perform the job and the beaches are a mighty important part of the tourist attraction in Southern California. This was an accident and we were lucky; next time someone might drown. They couldn’t afford that risk. He was pretty final about it.

The other nasty fact was pointed out by one of the reporters, an old guy with a tired grin.

“You’re front page, sonny boy,” he told me, when I asked why he didn’t go dig up some juicy Hollywood gossip to fill the afternoon editions and leave me out of it. “If you had gone down after some guy with a bald head, skinny legs, and knee-length swimming trunks and he wound up pulling you in, this thing might be just filler. But that picture yesterday went out coast to coast on the news service wires. Today it’s splashed across papers from—”

“What! But this was just a local thing!”

“Put it this way,” he said. “Suppose
you
were a newspaper editor and had to fill up space with a picture of the kids splashing in the creek and some tired copy about the heat and humidity and then a thing like this came in on the wire, which would
you
run? You’d take one peek at the top half of that two-piece bathing suit with the round, firm, fully packed look and you’d do exactly what they’ve done from Los Angeles to New York. It’s just one of those things.”

Driving back to my place at Playa Del Rey, it really hit me. I was through as a lifeguard, and not just on L.A. beaches. This coast-to-coast publicity was going to finish Eddie Baker all the way. No public park pool, no lake resort job. Lifeguards are pretty easy to come by and no employer has to settle for anyone not in A-1 shape.

Feeling lower than an earthworm’s bellybutton, I dialed Judy’s number, but her mother said Judy was at the beach. I put on swim trunks and went over, but it was a mistake. Ted was holding down my station and he was a little embarrassed about it. When I sat down with the gang watching volleyball someone asked me to tell them all about the Norton girl and had I seen her and was she really as good a swimmer as the papers claimed. I turned it into a feeble joke and asked where Judy was, but she’d gone down to Hermosa Beach.

When one of the gang called me aside and said he’d heard they were looking for help in one of the meat markets over in Inglewood, I knew I’d had it. I forced a grin and thanked him and a few minutes later I trekked across the sand toward Culver Boulevard.

What did I know about cutting meat? Not a damn thing! And what did I know about any other kind of work? All I’d ever done was hang around the beach. My hitch in the Navy? They’d sent me to duty as a swimming instructor the day I left boot camp. It hadn’t taken
them
long to see where Eddie Baker would fit best, and although I had worn Uncle Sam’s blue for the full four years, I wasn’t even qualified to go to sea on a freighter.