Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (19 page)

‘You crummy lying son-of-a-bitch!’ she said, whirling, stepping over and pushing the coffee pot off the stove. It clattered to the floor, spilling over the linoleum, and she slapped off the burner, putting out the flame, but unaware of the sexual symbolism of this act. When she faced me, her lips were still sneering and her eyes were still bulging with poison. ‘You out lumped up with some dame and me sitting here worrying myself sick about you, you crummy swell-headed son-of-a-bitch…’ She picked up the tin can of coffee from the table and flung it at me, and it struck me in the chest, showering me with coffee. I leaped at her, grabbing her by the shoulders, and the impetus carried her against the drainboard of the sink. She fell back across it and her wrapper jumped open and her breasts popped out. I put my hands around her throat, with a thumb on either side of her Adam’s apple, pressing hard.

‘I went to a movie, you hear that, I went to a movie,’ I said. She gurgled and tried to struggle, but I had her legs wedged between mine and her Adam’s apple locked under my thumbs, and she could barely move. ‘I went to a movie. Say it. Tell me I went to a movie. …’ I released a little of the pressure on her Adam’s apple so she could speak.

‘You went to a movie. …’ she spoke.

‘That’s better,’ I said. Then I turned her loose and stepped back, and she straightened up, closing her wrapper, the sneer gone from her lips, but the poison still in her eyes, and I walked out. …

Jinx was emerging from the bathroom.

‘From now on, keep that big mouth of yours shut,’ I said. ‘You told Holiday I was having a date with that dame last night.’

‘No such goddamn thing,’ he said.

‘How’d she know about the Cadillac then?’

‘I told her that, but nothing else. Mandon’s the one who figured out the date business. …’

‘Mandon?’ I said, surprised.

‘It was his idea, not mine.’

‘Where’d you see Mandon?’

‘Here. Right here.’

‘What was he doing here?’

‘She called him. …’

‘Why?’

‘She was worried. She thought maybe you’d been picked up…’

That shows how stupid she is,’ I said. The cops wouldn’t dare to pick me up now.’

‘Well, Mandon was worried too. We went out to get something to eat around twelve o’clock and he said if you didn’t show up by the time we got back, he’d start looking around. But you showed up. …’

‘Sure, I showed up,’ I said. ‘What else did they expect? I’ll be a son-of-a-bitch! Every time I turn my back you all get panicky. I know what I’m doing. Jesus!’

‘Sure, you do,’ he said, walking out.

I turned on the cold-water spigot in the wash basin and then in the mirror I saw Holiday come in and motion to Jinx. She was holding my coat that she had taken from the back of a chair in the living-room, where I had draped it last night; and was indicating something to Jinx, not realizing that I could see the pantomime in the mirror. I shut off the spigot and went in.

‘Look…’ she said to me, turning the coat so I could see, pointing to some fox-tails and bits of dried grass that still clung in to the back. ‘Some movie…’ she said.

I went back into the bathroom, slamming the door. … I turned on the two spigots in the tub, full on, and the two spigots in the wash basin, full on, and pushed the flusher of the toilet, but not even all this noise inside the tiny, closed room could drown out her laughter faint but triumphant.

W
HEN
I
SAID THAT
I had come to see Mr. Mandon, the younger of the two blondes asked me what my name was, not if I had an appointment, not what my business was, just what my name was, and she entered it in a ledger, and beside it the time which she got from a clock on the wall. ‘He’s expecting you, Mister Murphy,’ she said, then, ‘Right through the door there. …’

She held open the gate in the wooden railing and I walked over to the door and went into Mandon’s private office.

It seemed that everything in here, as in his apartment, had been arranged to create the impression of eccentricity too. In the middle of the floor there was a big circular bench, the kind they sometimes build around a post or column in a museum or a public place, only this had no post, in the center was the hole. Against the wall that formed the outside hall was a mahogany commode with a flowered china bowl and a big, flowered china pitcher, and towels on a rack at the side. Back where I had come from this was called a close-stool; and it was strictly utilitarian, no sleeping room was complete without one, and I remembered what a nuisance my grandfather had always thought they were. Next to this was a glass bookcase, filled with indiscriminate junk, and a few law books. The opposite wall was covered with photographs, framed and unframed, all of them forming an edging for a large print in the middle – a colored reproduction of Anneheuser-Busch’s celebrated ‘Custer’s Last Stand.’ These covered the whole top half of the wall. The bottom half was covered by a long, slanting, old-fashioned book-keeper’s desk, in front of which, on a high stool, his feet hooked into the rungs by his insteps, sat Mandon. ‘Well…’ he said, unhooking his feet, twisting around on the stool, leaning backwards with his elbows on the desk, crossing his legs, making the whole operation seem as perilous as a high-wire act in a circus. The last time I saw you you were sleeping like a baby.’

‘If I’d known you were with ’em, I’d’ve waited up for you.’ I said.

‘Don’t be snotty,’ he said.

‘What’d you expect – bluebirds? You got me in a hell of a jam last night. How’d you know I was having a date with some other girl?’

‘Were you.’

‘Yes.’

He nodded vigorously. ‘After hearing the facts, it was a logical deduction. …’

‘Hereafter, if you don’t mind,’ I said, ‘make your deductions for me instead of against me.’

He unfolded his legs and got down off the stool. ‘I was only trying to reassure Holiday that nothing harmful had happened to you,’ he said. ‘She thought that maybe the police had picked you up. I felt it was safer that she be mad at you than worried and frightened. Don’t you agree?’

‘I agree,’ I said. I had to agree. There was just enough logic in his argument to make it sound legitimate. But he wasn’t fooling me. Make ’em squabble, make ’em fight, make ’em jealous, keep the dasher turning, keep it going up and down, be patient, be perservering, and pretty soon the butter’ll be so thick that even a paralytic hand can scoop it up … He was looking at me, a sly smile on his face. Did he know what I was thinking? Probably, probably. He was a cunning son-of-a-bitch, all right.

‘… However, I didn’t come for that. I came because this is later.’

‘Later?’ he said, frowning.

‘Webber’s got thirty-two hundred dollars of my money. I tried to get it from him yesterday, but you said later. Well, this is later. …’

‘Won’t you please let me handle this?’ he asked in a faintly grieved tone.

‘Go ahead and handle it. All I want’s the money. I need it to carry us over until I can lay out another job.’

‘I asked you to please let me handle this,’ he said again, but this time his tone contained a flavour of affability. He lifted his bushy eyebrows as high as he could, looking at me, his head angled. ‘Please …’ he said.

‘I told you – go ahead and handle it,’ I said, wondering why he was so suddenly coy.

He straightened his head, still looking at me, and pursed his lips, making little thoughtful sounds with them, wanting me to know that he was trying to make up his mind about something. Then he turned to the desk, lifting the lid with one hand and reaching inside with the other, bringing out a wide manila envelope. ‘To a young man in your position there are some things more important than money,’ he said, ‘even if you don’t realize it. This is one of them.’ He handed me the envelope.

It felt empty and there was no writing on it, no marking of any kind. What could this contain that was so important it felt like nothing at all? I pressed up the flimsy metal catch that held the flap closed – and then I saw, before I even took it out, I saw. It was a fingerprint card, my fingerprint card, with the ugly but traditional profile and full-face photographs, my head measurements, and the location of my scars and all the other trifling physical imperfections which mug departments adore to amass. This was the master card from the files of the police in town from which I had been sent up. I was very surprised. How did this get here? I wondered. ‘How did this get here?’ I asked.

‘You see what happens when you let me handle things,’ he said gravely.

‘You’re a wizard. I take off my hat to you,’ I said, and I meant it. Without this card the police had nothing to go on. My past was wiped clean. I had no past. Well, not quite; there was a copy of this card buried with five million other copies in the F.B.I. files in Washington, but now they couldn’t dig that out without original fingerprints and I was very sure that I wouldn’t be leaving them around again. That card in Washington I’d recover one of these days too, when I got bigger, much much bigger. ‘I still don’t know how this card got here,’ I said. That town’s a thousand miles from here. This is fast work.’

‘As a matter of fact,’ he said, ‘Inspector Webber got it last night. I took the liberty of telling him to forget the thirty-two hundred dollars you mentioned, and suggested that he might get this card for us instead. It was no trouble for him all he did was to pick up the phone. Just an exchange of professional courtesies. Shall we conclude the ritual?’

He took a cheap tin lighter out of his pocket and slashed at it, setting fire to the wick, which burned and smoked like a night-traffic construction torch. He held the flame out and I turned the fingerprint card over it. The heavy card curled and sooted and finally ignited, and the fire crept slowly upwards, over ‘if apprehended, please notify,’ over ‘… who was received at state’s prison,’ over ‘Ralph Cotter,’ over the profile photograph, over the index prints, over the classification, ‘9M 3U 000 12,’ and I turned the card, catching the burned part in the palm of my left hand, guiding the flame over the physical description and when it was consumed all but the corner I had been holding in my fingers, I rubbed the ashes briskly together between my hands and then swept them into a brass cuspidor. Mandon said nothing. I went to the commode and poured water into the basin and started washing my hands.

‘I think you ought to forget about that thirty-two hundred dollars,’ Mandon said.

‘I think so too,’ I said. I finished washing my hands and took a towel from the rack, and he came over and reached down, opening the little doors of the commode, and dragged out a lidded slop-jar, flowered to match the other pieces, knocking a roll of toilet paper to the floor, that rolled and unwound; and by God, looking at that slop-jar and the toilet paper like this, I suddenly remembered that it wasn’t the commode or close-stool that my grandfather had called a nuisance. I was mistaken about that. This was what he objected to, the jar; devilish tortures he had called it, and he had said that he’d rather go outside in the weather and ease his buttocks into a bank of freshly-fallen snow than use one. He never did either. The whole thing came back to me now. … Mandon was lifting the lid and put the jar back into the commode. He retrieved the toilet paper and tore the length from it that was unrolled, and with the torn tissue he wiped the basin clean, the way you wipe a salad bowl. This was a careful procedure done with extreme fastidiousness. He put the pitcher back in the bowl and took the towel from me and hung it on the rack.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘Now, how do you feel?’

‘Fine. I feel fine,’ I said.

‘You ought to. It is not every man’s privilege to be reborn. From this point on, you have nothing to worry about so long as you let me handle things.’

‘Cherokee,’ I said, ‘the Homeric contempt which this frail body generates encompasses everybody in the world but you. I salute you as one who has proved himself worthy to share my frenetic genius. From now on, I shall respectfully and everlovingly let you manage things.’

‘Of course,’ he said, and smiled, ‘you know that’s a lot of crap.’

‘Of course...’ I said.

The City Hall was in the old town, three blocks from Mandon’s office, but I didn’t know that until we had started for lunch. They were three noisy blocks, filled with pawn-shops, second-hand stores, pool-rooms, bail-bond brokers, beer joints, sidewalk hamburger stands, flop-houses, oil stations and narrow, messy parking lots; ugly dirty buildings filled with ugly dirty people, the kind you have come to associate with the fringe of any City Hall that has jail attached. But this City Hall was neither ugly nor dirty. Dazzling white, covering an entire block, it leaped in symmetrical grandiosity thirty storys above the stink and squalor and obscenity of its vicinage, impressive and righteous, a mighty symbol, a shaft of thunder, mightier far than the world of the Lord God Jehovah which whined sing-song from the open doors of a nearby miasmatic mission. ‘Nervous?’ Mandon asked. ‘Nervous? Why?’ ‘Take a look …’ I looked and discovered that we were now approaching heavy pedestrian traffic police in uniform, deputies in uniform, khaki, and coatless office workers wearing badges of various sizes and shapes pinned to their shirts, all of them with pistols swinging gaudily at their hips – a gamey dish of symbols themselves, seasoned with a few plain civilians. This was what he had meant. What did the little bastard think I had to be nervous about? I said, smiling at him. ‘I’ve just been reborn. Remember?’ ‘Maybe nervous was the wrong word. A man’s reflexes get conditioned to certain things – like the sight of police officers. There’ll be quite a few cops where we’re going.’ ‘I got a reborn set of reflexes too,’ I said. ‘That’s what comes of letting you manage things.’ ‘You may be only half-kidding about that,’ he said. ‘I’m not even half-kidding,’ I said.

We stopped, waiting for the light to finish changing. He looked at me prudently and laughed quietly and then the light was green.

He took my arm, crossing the street. This was the block directly opposite the City Hall, where most of the cops had gathered, standing in little groups, moving in and out of a sandwich parlour and a café which were next door to each other. Mandon knew a lot of the cops and they knew him, but of the eight or nine he spoke to, not one called him by either of his names, Keith or Mandon, and only one called him Cherokee. The others called him ‘Shice’. I was curious about that ‘What’s this “Shice”? What is that?’ I asked. ‘It’s just a nickname,’ he said, but I still did not understand and I looked at him and he saw from the frown on my face that I did not understand, and said, ‘It’s short for shyster,’ and smiled a wan smile, plainly intended to imply that they meant nothing derogatory or even disrespectful. But that I knew from their tones. ‘You certainly know a lot of cops,’ I remarked. ‘Well, I’ve been around this neighborhood a good many years now,’ he said. ‘I remember when there was a livery stable right where the City Hall is standing. God, that goes back to oh-two, oh-three.’ He shook his head as if he couldn’t quite believe it had been that long ago, and still holding my arm he steered me around a knot of cops and into a delicatessen. Walking into the dimness of the delicatessen from the fierce brightness of the outside, stepping directly in from the street, I was blinded, but I heard a whirlpool of voices and smelled the smells of food, fresh food, spiced food, and they were wonderful. …