Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (26 page)

‘You’re a tornado,’ he said. ‘You’re a cyclone. You’re a ball of fire. How in the name of the good and holy God did you ever get yourself into a bloody mess like this? With a whole town full of girls how’d you happen to pick on this one?’

‘I’ve wondered about that myself,’ I said. ‘I’ve wondered about it a lot.’

‘Well,’ he said gruffly, ‘go on and get it over with and put it out of your mind and let’s settle down to business. What’s the matter with you?’ he said suddenly. ‘What are you shaking about?’

‘Shaking?’

I was. I hadn’t been aware of it, but I was. I was shaking all over.

‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘You
must
be scared of the Old Man.’ The Old Man?

How could I tell him, how could I put it into words that he would understand … ?’

There was a private switchboard in the big reception room of Golightly and Gackel’s office. The girl announced me to somebody, and a heavy glass door popped open and a prim woman came out, a woman of about forty-five, and led me down a narrow sacred corridor to Mr. Golightly’s office.

The office looked more like a library than an office. Mr. Golightly was tall and slender and wore a high linen collar and looked very antiseptic. ‘Come in, Mister Murphy,’ he said crisply. ‘Mister Dobson and his daughter will join us in a moment. Smoke?’

He picked up a crystal humidor on his desk and held it open.

‘Thank you,’ I said, taking a cigarette.

He picked up a crystal lighter and flicked it several times, but the sparks wouldn’t ignite the wick, and he laughed a little nervously and put it down and took a gold Dunhill lighter from his pocket and lighted my cigarette with that. Then an inner door opened and Ezra Dobson and Margaret came in.

Ezra Dobson looked very stern. He wore a gray suit and a blue bow tie, Margaret wore a tailored suit and brogue walking shoes. He said nothing. She said, ‘Good morning, Paul. …’

‘Good morning,’ I said, holding myself steady, telling myself it would all be over in a minute, the sepulchre would be sealed again and I would be finally free.

‘Smoke?’ Mr. Golightly said to them. Neither of them took a cigarette. Mr. Golightly put down the crystal humidor and looked at me. ‘I understand, Mister Murphy, that you have expressed a desire to rectify this unfortunate situation?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘You have agreed to sign a petition to have this marriage annulled?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘You are – er – willing to swear’ he cleared his throat – ‘that you and Miss Dobson have not lived together as man and wife?’

I glanced at her. She was looking straight at me, making no effort to avoid my eyes. ‘Yes,’ I said.

He nodded and pressed a button. Another inner door opened and the prim secretary came in, holding something in her hand.

‘You will please sign here,’ he said to me.

He moved a sheet of paper on the desk and handed me a pen. There…’ he said, indicating the line. I signed it. The prim secretary put the thing on the desk that she had been holding in her hand and I now saw that it was a notary’s seal. ‘Now you, Margaret. …’ he said.

Margaret came over and signed it, and Mr. Golightly handed it to the secretary, and she moved around to the other edge of the desk, out of the way, and stamped it with a rubber stamp and started signing it too. Mr. Golightly picked up a check from the desk and handed it to me. ‘I believe that was the sum agreed on,’ he said.

It was Ezra Dobson’s personal check for $35,000.00. I unfolded it. The detachable voucher read:

Remittance from EZRA DOBSON

Detach statement before depositing

Mr. Golightly now handed me a neat-looking legal paper in a light blue backing. This is a waiver,’ he said. ‘It merely states that from now and henceforth you renounce all further claims to the estates of Ezra and Margaret Dobson. Would you like for
me
to read it?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Before you sign it you have a legal right to know exactly what the instrument contains,’ he said.

I looked from Mr. Golightly to Ezra Dobson. His face was dark with the ordeal. I looked at Margaret. Her face was impassive.

‘I’ll sign it,’ I said.

I signed it.

‘Is that all I have to sign?’ I asked.

‘Yes.…’ Mr. Golightly said.

I put the check on the desk and looked at Ezra Dobson. ‘I don’t want this money, Mister Dobson,’ I said. ‘I regret this just as much as you do, just as much as Margaret does. It was thoughtless and childish of both of us. For my part, I’m very sorry – as I know Margaret is. Good day, sir, good-bye, Margaret. …’

I took the marriage certificate out of my pocket and put it on top of the check and walked out.

O
NE GUY WAS LITTLE
and the other two were medium-sized, built like middleweights. They came out of the beauty parlor, the little one carrying the satchel, and got into a black Buick sedan that was parked in a loading zone five buildings away, the little one seating himself in front with the driver, who had been waiting under the wheel, and the two middleweights getting into the back. They pulled out and leisurely moved away down the street.

One, two, three, four, five, six times this was repeated in different parts of town in one tobacco shop, one beer joint and four more beauty parlors and the procedure was the same: the entrance, the length of time they stayed in each place, the exit, with the little one always carrying the satchel. The only things that varied were the satchels. Some were black and some were tan; he made seven stops and he evidently had seven satchels.

Down the street, in Mandon’s car, we waited until the Buick was half a block ahead and then I told Jinx to keep on tailing it.

‘We been tailing for two hours already,’ Jinx said, starting the car. ‘We keep this up much longer we’re a cinch to give ’em the office…’

‘You heard Cherokee, didn’t you?’ I said. ‘They been doing this so long and with such safety that they’re fat, cocky and careless. They’re not concentrating any more. We couldn’t give ’em the office even if we moved right in behind ’em. They got this sewed up. Fat, cocky and careless …’

‘… Seven satchels, all filled with money,’ Mandon said.

‘What’s your guess on how much money?’ I asked.

‘Plenty. Roamer’ll take a bet on any track in the country and pay track odds. You know how people bet on the horses …’

‘Make a guess …’

‘It’s hard to say. Fifteen thousand, maybe fifty. He’s got the bookie business cornered.’

‘He’s got you cornered too, hasn’t he?’ I asked. ‘How much you in to him for?’

‘Not a dime, not a thin dime. Nobody gets into Roamer. That’s why those satchels are stuffed with money.’

I knew he was a goddamn liar. He was in to him for a hunk. That’s what that telephone call in his office yesterday was about. When he saw this guy’s name, Roamer, on that telephone message he got worried. He was worried all the time he was talking to him too, for the simple reason that Roamer was putting the squeeze on him. Then I remembered how he had all of a sudden brightened – that would be when he thought of this. But I didn’t say anything. I was keeping my eyes on the black Buick, trying to figure a way to take it in all this traffic. There didn’t seem to be any way – not without attracting too much attention. Every stop it made was on a busy street and it never once got off a busy street.

‘What do you think, Jinx?’ I asked.

‘Looks like murder,’ he said.

‘That’s what I think too,’ I said. ‘You see that, don’t you?’ I said to Mandon. ‘You see how hopeless this is – why don’t we have a look at the guy’s headquarters, the place where this dough winds up. Maybe that’s where the trigger is.’

‘It’s not there,’ Mandon said. ‘There’re more people there than there are around here. … Of course,’ he said, ‘if you’d done what I suggested earlier this morning …’

‘But I didn’t…’ I said.

‘What was it?’ Jinx asked.

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘It was a worse idea than this one.’

Three cars ahead of us, getting into heavier traffic all the time, approaching the shopping district, the Buick turned a corner.

‘Want me to hang on?’ Jinx asked.

‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘We’ve wasted damn near the whole day now – I’m tired. I want to get to bed.’

Jinx went on, straight across the intersection, pulling up behind a police cruiser, a traffic-control car, that was parked double, the rear bumper almost in the pedestrian lane, blocking us. A coupe was parked in a red zone and one of the cops was writing out a ticket.

Mandon and I saw this at the same time and from the smile on his face I knew that he was thinking the same thing I was. But I beat him to it.

‘There’s no sense in having a gimmick if you don’t use it,’ I said. ‘I keep forgetting that the cops’re on our side.’

‘That’s the answer, right there,’ he said.

‘That’s the answer,’ I said. ‘Call Webber…’

‘Let’s go back to my place, Jinx,’ he said.

‘Why your place?’ I asked. ‘There’s a drug store over there. Jinx, stick this thing in the first lot you can find and meet us in the drug store. At the soda fountain.’

I opened the door. ‘Come on,’ I said to Mandon.

He got out and we crossed the street.

‘Webber won’t like this,’ Mandon said.

‘The hell with what he likes,’ I said.

‘Too much chance for a kickback …’

‘Call him,’ I said. ‘Make it right away…’

He went into a telephone booth and I went to the soda fountain. A soda jerk was mixing a drink as I sat down in front of the pumps. It looked familiar. ‘What’s that?’ I asked.

‘Cherry phosphate…’ he said.

‘I’ll have one,’ I said. My God, cherry phosphate! The first soft drink I ever had was a cherry phosphate. It was in Knoxville. I had gone with my grandfather to the East Tennessee Fair. He had five hogs entered. Cherry phosphate …

‘He’s not there,’ Mandon said.

‘When’s he expected?’

‘They don’t know. I left word for him to call me at the office.’

‘We can’t budge till we see him,’ I said.

‘Well, he’ll call sometime …’

The soda jerk put down my cherry phosphate. ‘Want a drink?’ I asked Mandon.

‘What’s that you’re having?’

‘Just some slop. I’m a sentimentalist.…’

‘Coke…’ Mandon said to the soda jerk.

Jinx came up to us.

‘He’s not in,’ I told him. ‘Cherokee left a call.’

‘You think he’ll call back?’ Jinx asked.

‘You tell him,’ I said to Mandon.

‘He’ll call,’ Mandon said.

‘Want a drink?’ I asked Jinx.

‘What’s that you’re having?’

‘Just some slop. I’m a sentimentalist. …’

‘Coke …’ Jinx said to the soda jerk.

I finished my cherry phosphate. My God, cherry phosphate … ‘I’m going to run a few errands,’ I said to them. ‘I’ll be back at the apartment in an hour. I got to explain why I didn’t show last night. I got to think up a cute story about what you and I did last night, Cherokee. …’

‘Holiday’s got to think up one too,’ Jinx said. ‘She didn’t show either. …’

‘What?’ I said.

‘I had the whole place to myself last night,’ he said.

‘Where was she?’

‘I dunno. She left around eleven and didn’t come back.’

‘Who was she with?’

‘Reece, I think …’

‘Reece, the cop?’

‘I think so. She told me she was only going for a walk. I slipped out the back door and saw her get into a car at the corner. It looked like Reece.’

‘I’ll be a son-of-a-bitch,’ I said.

‘Fine thing,’ Mandon said. ‘You beating your brains out all last night trying to turn an honest dollar for her and she’s off cheating on you. Fine thing…’

So who gives a damn, I kept asking myself all the time I was buying the stuff, who cares? I knew by now that she was the kind of a dame you couldn’t turn your back on for five minutes without her having a body scissors on somebody, I knew that; I expected that and why pretend to be surprised? Who really gave a damn? Oh, sure, I had thought at one time that she was very valuable to me, but when a guy had been on a diet of saltpetre for as long as I had, and finally broke it, he was likely to think that the first woman he had was the woman to end all women, and that his life would be unlivable if she was ever more than a soft whisper away, if ever another man’s eyes even strayed at her. A guy had a right to get emotional about that. But then gradually his own blood stream does to that narcotic what the Mississippi does to the Missouri; and he discovers that every other woman is possessed of the same fascinating equipment, all of them, so who gives a damn about any one of them?

I had to put the bundles on the floor of the hall so I could open the apartment door. I opened it and heard her voice coming from the bathroom, calling: ‘Jinx?’

‘It’s I…’ I said.

Scrub yourself hard, I wanted to say, scrub yourself very hard, that police stink is a tenacious stink. ‘Good afternoon,’ I said.

‘What’ve you got there?’ she asked.

‘Just some crap…’ I said.

‘Something for me?’

‘Next time …’ I said.

I moved over to the bed and dumped the packages and was opening them when she came out of the bathroom, drying herself. Little beads of water clung to her body like drops of spring dew to a sugar-maple leaf. The body was beautiful and I looked at it full and frankly, waiting for the quiver within me, listening for the moaning of the strings of the corpora cavernosa; but no quiver came and no moaning was heard.

‘I see you got that haircut you’ve been wanting,’ she said.

‘I got a shampoo too, but you can’t see that,’ I said.

‘I can smell it,’ she said. ‘What’s in the bundles?’

‘Just some crap …’

‘Must’ve cost a lot of money all that,’ she said. She was very friendly. Everything about her was very friendly. …

‘This is only the beginning,’ I said.

‘Where’d the dough come from. Pull a job by yourself?’

‘Nope.’

She sat down on the bed and picked up a box of shirts.