Mr. Vertigo (30 page)

“I can’t. Before I get to the good times, I remember what it was like when he told me to remember them. I can’t get around that last day. I can’t go back far enough to remember anything before it.”

“Forget the gun, Walt. Get rid of the damn thing and wipe the slate clean.”

“I can’t. If I do that, he’ll be gone forever.”

That was when she stood up from her chair and left the table. She didn’t say where she was going, and I didn’t ask. The conversation had turned so heavy, so awful for both of us, we couldn’t say another word and not go crazy. I put the gun back in the holster and looked at my watch. One o’clock. I had plenty of time until my appointment with Dixie. Maybe Mrs. Witherspoon would be back, and maybe she wouldn’t. One way or the other, I was going to sit there and eat my lunch, and afterward I was going to prance over to the Royal Park Hotel and spend an hour with my new flame, bouncing on the bed with her silky gams wrapped around my waist.

But Mrs. W. hadn’t flown the coop. She’d merely gone to the ladies’ to dry her tears and freshen up, and when she returned about ten minutes later, she was wearing a new coat of lipstick and had redone her lashes. Her eyes were still red around the rims, but she shot me a little smile when she sat down, and I could see that she was determined to push the conversation onto a different subject.

“So, my friend,” she said, taking a bite of her shrimp cocktail, “how’s the flying business these days?”

“Packed away in mothballs,” I said. “The fleet’s been grounded, and one by one I’ve been selling off the wings for scrap.”

“And you don’t feel tempted to give it another whirl?”

“Not for all the crackers in Kalamazoo.”

“The headaches were that bad, huh?”

“You don’t know the meaning of bad, toots. We’re talking high-voltage trauma here, life-threatening toaster burns.”

“It’s funny. I sometimes hear conversations. You know, sitting in a train or walking down the street, little snatches of things. People remember, Walt. The Wonder Boy made quite a stir, and a lot of people still think about you.”

“Yeah, I know. I’m a fucking legend. The problem is, nobody believes it anymore. They stopped believing when the act folded, and by now there’s nobody left. I know the kind of talk you mean. I used to hear it, too. It always ended up in an argument. One guy would say it was a fake, the other guy would say maybe it wasn’t, and pretty soon they’d be so pissed off at each other they’d stop talking. But that was a while ago. You don’t hear so much of it anymore. It’s like the whole thing never happened.”

“About two years ago they ran an article about you somewhere, I forget which paper. Walt the Wonder Boy, the little lad who fired the imagination of millions. Whatever happened to him, and where is he now? That kind of article.”

“He fell off the face of the earth, that’s what happened to him. The angels carried him back to where he came from, and no one’s ever going to see him again.”

“Except me.”

“Except you. But that’s our little secret, isn’t it?”

“Mum’s the word, Walt. What kind of person do you take me for anyway?”

Things loosened up quite a bit after that. The busboy came in
to haul off the appetizer plates, and by the time the waiter returned with the main course, we’d drunk enough to be ready for a second bottle.

“I see you haven’t lost your taste for the stuff,” I said.

“Booze, money, and sex. Those are the eternal verities.”

“In that order?”

“In any order you like. Without them the world would be a sad and dismal place.”

“Speaking of sad places, what’s new in Wichita?”

“Wichita?” She put down her glass and gave me a gorgeous shit-eating grin. “Where’s that?”

“I don’t know. You tell me.”

“I can’t remember. I packed my bags five years ago and haven’t set foot in that town since.”

“Who bought the house?”

“I didn’t sell it. Billy Bigelow lives there with his chatterbox wife and two little girls. I thought the rent would give me some nice pin money, but the poor sap lost his job at the bank a month after they moved in, and I’ve been letting him have it for a dollar a year.”

“You must be doing okay if you can afford that.”

“I pulled out of the market the summer before the crash. Something to do with ransom notes, cash deliveries, drop-off points—it’s all a bit blurry now. It turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me. Your little misadventure saved my life, Walt. Whatever I was worth then, I’m worth ten times that now.”

“Why stay in Wichita with that kind of dough, right? How long since you moved to Chicago?”

“I’m just here on business. I go back to New York tomorrow morning.”

“Fifth Avenue, I’ll bet.”

“You bet right, Mr. Rawley.”

“I knew it the second I saw you. You look like big money now. It gives off a special smell, and I like sitting here breathing in the vapors.”

“Most of it comes from oil. That stuff stinks in the ground, but once you convert it into cash, it does release a lovely perfume, doesn’t it?”

She was the same old Mrs. Witherspoon. She still liked to drink, and she still liked to talk about money, and once you uncorked a bottle and steered her onto her favorite subject, she could hold her own with any cigar-chomping capitalist this side of Daddy Warbucks. She spent the rest of the main course telling me about her deals and investments, and when the plates were carted off again and the waiter slid back in with the dessert menus, something went click, and I could see the lightbulb go on in her head. It was a quarter to two by my watch. Come fire or flood, I aimed to be out of there in half an hour.

“If you want in, Walt,” she said, “I’ll be happy to make a place for you.”

“Place? What kind of place?”

“Texas. I’ve got some new wildcat rigs down there, and I need someone to watch over the drilling for me.”

“I don’t know the first thing about oil.”

“You’re smart. You’ll catch on fast. Look at the progress you’ve made already. Nice clothes, fancy restaurants, money in your pocket. You’ve come a long way, sport. And don’t think I haven’t noticed how you’ve cleaned up your grammar. Not one ‘ain’t’ the whole time we’ve been together.”

“Yeah, I worked hard on that. I didn’t want to sound like an ignoramus anymore, so I read some books and retooled my word-box. I figured it was time to step out of the gutter.”

“That’s my point. You can do anything you want to do. As
long as you put your mind to it, there’s no telling where you might go. You watch, Walt. Come in with me, and two or three years from now we’ll be partners.”

It was a hell of an endorsement, but once I’d soaked up her praise I snubbed out my Camel and shook my head. “I like what I’m doing now. Why go to Texas when I’ve got everything I want in Chicago?”

“Because you’re in the wrong business, that’s why. There’s no future in this cops-and-robbers stuff. You keep it up, and you’ll either be dead or serving time before your twenty-fifth birthday.”

“What cops-and-robbers stuff? I’m clean as a surgeon’s fingernails.”

“Sure. And the pope’s a Hindu snake charmer in disguise.”

Dessert was wheeled in after that, and we nibbled at our eclairs in silence. It was a bad way to end the meal, but we were both too stubborn to back down. Eventually, we made small talk about the weather, threw out some inconsequential remarks about the upcoming election, but the juice was gone and there was no getting it back. Mrs. Witherspoon wasn’t just peeved at me for turning down her offer. Chance had thrown us together again, and only a bungler would pass up the call of fate as blithely as I had. She wasn’t wrong to feel disgusted with me, but I had my own path to follow, and I was too full of myself to understand that my path was the same as hers. If I hadn’t been so hot to run off and plant my pecker in Dixie Sinclair, I might have listened to her more carefully, but I was in a rush, and I couldn’t be bothered with any soul-searching that day. So it goes. Once your groin gets the upper hand, you lose the ability to reason.

We skipped coffee, and when the waiter delivered the check to the table at ten past two, I snatched it out of his fingers before Mrs. Witherspoon could grab hold of it.

“My treat,” I said.

“Okay, Mr. Big Time. Show off if it makes you happy. But if you ever wise up, don’t forget where I am. Maybe you’ll come to your senses before it’s too late.” And with that she reached into her purse, pulled out her business card, and laid it gently in my palm. “Don’t worry about the cost,” she added. “If you’re belly-up by the time you remember me, just tell the operator to reverse the charges.”

But I never called. I stuck the card in my pocket, fully intending to save it, but when I looked for it before going to bed that night, it was nowhere to be found. Given the tussling and tugging those trousers were subjected to immediately following lunch, it wasn’t hard to guess what had happened. The card had fallen out, and if it hadn’t already been tossed into the trash by a chambermaid, it was lying on the floor in suite 409 of the Royal Park Hotel.

I
was an unstoppable force in those days, a comer to beat all comers, and I was riding the express train with a one-way ticket to Fat City. Less than a year after my lunch with Mrs. Witherspoon, I landed my next big break when I went out to Arlington one sultry August afternoon and put a thousand dollars on a long shot to win the third race. If I add that the horse was dubbed Wonder Boy, and if I further add that I was still in the thrall of my old superstitions, it won’t take a mind reader to understand why I bit on such a hopeless gamble. I did crazy things as a matter of routine back then, and when the colt came in by half a length at forty to one, I knew there was a God in heaven and that he was smiling down on my craziness.

The winnings provided me with the clout to do the thing I most wanted to do, and I promptly set about to turn my dream into reality. I requested a private counsel with Bingo in his penthouse apartment overlooking Lake Michigan, and once I laid out the plan to him and he got over his initial shock, he grudgingly gave me the green light. It wasn’t that he thought the proposition was unworthy, but I think he was disappointed in me for setting my sights so low. He was grooming me for a place in the inner circle, and here I was telling him that I wanted to go my own way and open a nightclub that would occupy my energies to the exclusion of all else. I could see how he might interpret it as an act of betrayal, and I had to tread carefully around that trap with
some fancy footwork. Luckily, my mouth was in good form that evening, and by showing how many advantages would accrue to him in terms of both profit and pleasure, I eventually brought him around.

“My forty grand can cover the whole deal,” I said. “Another guy in my shoes would tip his hat and say so long, but that’s not how I conduct business. You’re my pal, Bingo, and I want you to have a piece of the action. No money down, no work to fuss with, no liabilities, but for every dollar I earn, I’ll give you twenty-five cents. Fair is fair, right? You gave me my chance, and now I’m in a position to return the favor. Loyalty has to count for something in this world, and I’m not about to forget where my luck came from. This won’t be any two-bit cheese joint for the hoi polloi. I’m talking Gold Coast with all the trimmings. A full-scale restaurant with a Frog chef, top-notch floor shows, beautiful girls slithering out of the woodwork in skin-tight gowns. It’ll give you a hard-on just to walk in there, Bingo. You’ll have the best seat in the house, and on nights when you don’t show up, your table will sit there empty—no matter how many people are waiting outside the door.”

He haggled me up to fifty percent, but I was expecting some give-and-take and didn’t make an issue of it. The important thing was to win his blessing, and I did that by jollying him along, steadily wearing down his defenses with my friendly, accommodating attitude, and in the end, just to show how classy he was, he offered to kick in an extra ten thousand to see that I did up the place right. I didn’t care. All I wanted was my nightclub, and with Bingo’s fifty percent subtracted from the take, I was still going to come out ahead. There were numerous benefits in having him as a partner, and I would have been kidding myself to think I could get along without him. His half would guarantee me protection from O’Malley (who ipso facto became the third
partner) and help keep the cops from breaking down the door. When you threw in his connections with the Chicago liquor board, the commercial laundry companies, and the local talent agents, losing that fifty percent didn’t seem like such a shabby compromise after all.

I called the place Mr. Vertigo’s. It was smack in the heart of the city at West Division and North LaSalle, and its flashing neon sign went from pink to blue to pink as a dancing girl took turns with a cocktail shaker against the night sky. The rhumba rhythm of those lights made your heart beat faster and your blood grow warm, and once you caught the little stutter-step syncopation in your pulse, you didn’t want to be anywhere except where the music was. Inside, the decor was a blend of high and low, a swank sort of big town comfort mixed with naughty innuendos and an easy, roadhouse charm. I worked hard on creating that atmosphere, and every nuance and effect was planned to the smallest detail: from the lip rouge on the hat-check girl to the color of the dinner plates, from the design of the menus to the socks on the bartender’s feet. There was room for fifty tables, a good-size dance floor, an elevated stage, and a long mahogany bar along a side wall. It cost me every cent of the fifty thousand to do it up the way I wanted, but when the place finally opened on December 31, 1937, it was a thing of sumptuous perfection. I launched it with one of the great New Year’s Eve parties in Chicago history, and by the following morning Mr. Vertigo’s was on the map. For the next three and a half
years I was there every night, strolling among the customers in my white dinner jacket and patent leather shoes, spreading good cheer with my cocky smiles and quick-tongued patter. It was a terrific spot for me, and I loved every minute I spent in that raucous emporium. If I hadn’t messed up and blown my life apart, I’d probably still be there today. As it was, I only got to have those three and a half years. I was one-hundred-percent responsible for my own downfall, but knowing that doesn’t make it any less painful to remember. I was all the way at the top when I stumbled, and it ended in a real Humpty Dumpty for me, a spectacular swan-dive into oblivion.