SPECIAL FEATURE: Novel Excerpt
THE TATTLETALES
Jesse Hilson
Chapter One:
BROTHEL RAIDERS
Winter's office was in a side storeroom attached to the pool hall and he was used to hearing the sharp crack of tightly packed breaks and listening to the rustle of pocketed balls that followed. Murmurs of players in discussions rose and fell like ocean swells. Cigar smoke hung in the air like a stubborn ghost that will never stop its haunting.
He was reading in the paper about Joe Stalin and Korea when a silence overtook the hall. All shots ceased. The floors stopped squeaking and complaining under shifted feet. Only one set of footsteps could be heard.
“Is Winter here?” A woman's voice.
Made him nervous.
Charlie Craps spoke up. “In there.”
Darryl Winter folded up the newspaper on his desk blotter and put it to the side. This woman must have been very important or very beautiful to silence the entire pool hall like that.
When she came through the door, Winter felt fear climb up his throat because of the two options, she turned out to be very important. The woman was uglier than a Calaveras toad. She was squat and dressed in black Great Depression clothing, old timey for 1951. She had on jewelry and feathers, clothes that were uncalled-for in the summer heat.
The woman looked around Winter's office.
“You don't know me?” the woman said
with a smirk. Her voice sounded like a church lady who just had a bad bite of potato salad.
Winter shook his head no.
“They all know me,” she said, gesturing to the pool tables where the sounds of play had returned. “They're my customers.”
“You're the grocer’s wife?” Winter said. “Leave the comedy routine for the Fibber
McGee Hour. They come to my establishment on a Friday night. You've never been to Missouri Irene's rooms?”
“Can't say that I have.”
“Well I must be talking to the wrong private dick. I need somebody who knows this town, all the finer places as well as the dives.”
Winter turned on the fan on the file cabinet next to his desk. After that he went to the bottle of whiskey on the side table and poured two tumblers. He offered Missouri Irene one.
“Just because I don't know whorehouses doesn't mean I don't know Helena,” Winter said. “Maybe your establishment is below my radar.” She shot the hooch to the back of her throat.
“Real estate is an issue,” she said. “Do you know how much legitimate property in this city is owned by proprietors of houses of easy leisure?”
“No,” Winter said. “I guess I don't know much about anything.”
“Maybe I'm talking to the wrong guy. Thanks for the drink.”
She turned to leave and he said, “What do you need?”
She slowly turned back to face him. “I need a discreet inquiry. Into a competitor. Sunshine Maddy. You probably haven't heard of her either. We're competing for the same clientele. I want to know if she's expanding her operations. I suspect she bought a new joint but I don't know where. If she's moving up in the world, well, I need to know that 'cause I may need to move up too.”
“Where can I find Sunshine Maddy?”
“I want discretion. I don't want her or anyone else knowing I'm onto her.”
“Ok, where?”
“Next to the Sand Dollar Hotel, on Last Chance Gulch. You have to give a password at the door. It's Jack Rabbit.”
“You know the password but you don't know about what's inside?”
“I got more than one spy.”
“Ok, let's talk what it'll cost you.”
“You'll need expenses. Sunshine Maddy's girls don't come cheap.”
“Just to be clear, I'm not bedding down with any of them,” Winter said. “I've been dodging the clap my whole life and I aim to continue.”
“You have to make the subterfuge believable. I'll give you $300 dollars, one now, two on completion. You can collect at my office downtown.”
Winter paused. “For that much money I'll go romancing in a leper colony.”
“I thought so.”
* * *
Winter woke up in an alley later that night. His mouth tasted like a sasquatch’s armpit. He didn’t know where he was. He had celebrated with some of the first $100 of Missouri Irene’s money. He felt to make sure his wallet was still on him. It was, but when he opened it to see where he stood, there was only $30 left.
Had he already gone to Sunshine Maddy’s? If he did, he didn’t remember a damn thing. Some investigator.
He staggered out of the alley into the street. It was quiet, no traffic. It took him a minute to figure out he was on Sixth. Nowhere near the targeted brothel. That was a good sign.
Where was his Dodge? Not parked on the street. If it had gotten stolen he’d be fit to be tied. Winter lurched down the street in the direction of Last Chance. His watch told him it was 1:35 in the morning. He could be picked up for vagrancy if he didn’t get somewhere indoors quickly. He pulled his hat down shadowing his eyes and hoped he didn’t look too screwy. His relations with the Helena police were not warm, he would say. He’d been a bother to the cops, fluttering around them like a gnat while they were doing their job, on enough occasions that he wanted to avoid getting swatted in the future.
He stopped for a cup of coffee at an all- night diner he knew. The waitresses, instead of treating him like family and listening to his woes, could smell the hard luck on him and stayed clear. That good cheer had all gone out the window months ago.
Another man who looked like a ranch hand recently converted to city slicker ways sat in the corner smoking. Winter had a stray notion to ask the guy if he knew who Sunshine Maddy was, if he was a customer, and whether she was moving her camp anywhere. But that was bad news. If he didn’t know, what good was that, and if he did know it might be taken as an insult.
He decided he would go there tonight. The night’s prior social engagements were coming back to him: he had spent a few hours at
the Prospect buying everybody drinks and listening to Hoppy Andrews play his steel guitar with the Galveston Dreamers. He sure did love that quaver. He didn’t know what was wrong with himself that he hadn’t gotten to work right away. But that $100 had made him do what he did as sure as buttons on an elevator made it go up and down.
Steadier on his feet than before, he went in search of the Sand Dollar Hotel. When he got there he could see why the madam would want to move out. The door was green and when he knocked and it opened it was more like a barn door, uneasy on its hinges.
A man in a mustache and red vest answered the door. He looked like the devil’s butler.
“What do you want?” the man in the vest said. He didn’t appear to recognize Winter from earlier, another good sign.
“I’m looking for some company.”
“Can’t help you. I got enough friends as it is.”
Just then Winter’s mind went blank on the password. He dangled there like an actor on stage on premiere night forgetting his lines.
“Jackknife? Jack something.”
The doorman in the vest looked Winter up and down. “The cops hiring dinguses these days, eh?”
“Do I look like a cop?” He gestured to his rumpled clothes and crooked hat.
The doorman shook his head at the sight of Winter, as if grieved at what had happened to such a promising young lad. Then he looked up and down the street to see if they were being watched. “Well, come on.”
Winter followed the man up a narrow, dark staircase. He heard a woman laugh up ahead as well as country western music played on a Victrola. The door opened to reveal a parlor with dark red patterned wallpaper with several couples chatting away in the corners. The women were all dressed in fancy evening wear and seemed to be genuinely paying close attention to what the men were saying. The chatter and laughter sounded like it could have been at an actual party. Nothing sleazy, whether appearance or behavior, was on display. Heads turned to look at Winter and the doorman when they came in. The onlookers gauged whether or not they knew Winter, and he feared being recognized but no one seemed to say so.
The doorman led Winter to a woman seated on a sofa. She was younger than Missouri Irene but seemed to exhibit some of the same airs. She wore the same historic clothing and she had blonde hair that might have been a wig. She smiled at Winter in an appraising way.
“I’m Maddy,” she said. “This is my place. You’ve met Todd.” She gestured to the doorman. “If you play nice, you get the nice guy treatment. If you don’t play nice, you get the Todd treatment. You don’t want that. Todd broke a guy’s jaw the other night.”
Winter nodded.
“You see the quality we have here,” Maddy went on, indicating the girls with a sweep of her arm. “You go on and talk to them. These girls will surprise you. They’ve had quite an education. Some of them will even discuss Mozart with you while you get your rocks off, or Shakespeare.”
“I could use some brushing up,” Winter said.
“They’ll tell you their prices. $10 and up.” Winter looked around, acting the part.
“Quite a place you’ve got here,” he said. “How long you been here?”
Maddy gazed at him before saying, “Since before the war. How long have you been here?”
Winter pointed at the floor. “In town? Just after the war.” It wasn’t true, he got to Helena in 1949, just drifting on the wind.
“What took you so long? How’d you hear about this place?”
“A fine fellow at the Prospect.” He was trying to think of ways to ask Sunshine Maddy more about the location and whether they were moving. But he hesitated and all was lost.
A lean young woman with Gene Tierney hair approached Winter, stood next to him, and conspicuously produced a cigarette. Winter lit it. “Feel like a little danger tonight?” she said.
“That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”
“Most of the time.” The hooker had a speaking voice that was world-weary while not being weary of her occupation.
Maddy receded and Winter guided the hooker toward the bar.
“So you like a little talky-talky beforehand,” she said.
“I’m supposed to find out how cultured you are. So are you Mozart or Shakespeare?”
The hooker rolled her eyes. “That old trick. Maddy tells people that. I’ll tell you like this, there’s Juliet, that’s the light touch for $10. Then it’s Desdemona, medium treatment with a kiss, $25. Then Lady Macbeth, $35, the full treatment. Two girls is $50.”
Winter thought for a second, weighing his wallet and his willingness to go all the way with the ruse. He was technically still married although his wife was in Boise and he hadn’t seen her or his son in eight months. But you couldn’t just stand still in a brothel, people might get suspicious.
“What light through yonder window breaks?” Winter said. “I reckon.”
“Follow me. My name is Lula Bird.”
She led him away from the parlor and the music down a long hallway with many doors. At the very end was a small bedroom with an ornate bed and Chinese art on the walls. Lula Bird closed the door and proceeded to push him onto the bed. He wondered if Missouri Irene would want to know how many such bedrooms there were, how much space the place took up, and what they would want out of a new location. Lula Bird undid his belt and then went on to give him what seemed like the best handjob of his life, except that she seemed distracted toward the end, grabbing something from the bedside table. When he was nearing the point of climax, Lula Bird produced from behind her a block of wood the size of a science textbook and without permission or warning, started smacking his johnson hard against the wood like you would smack a trout on a rock to try to kill it. He couldn’t stop, and next was a piece of what felt like the coarsest burlap that she made him shoot into. The awful way she held it tight and moved it over his nerve endings made him yelp and jerk. “Poor old Uncle Wiggily,” Lula Bird said.
“So that was the light touch?” he gasped when it was all over.
“Did you like it?” Her expression was bright and happy.
“Do men ask for that all the time?” “That’ll be $10.”
He gave her the sawbuck and she tucked it inside the neckline of her dress.
“So, you like it here, Lula Bird?” “It’s alright.”
“What if I want to come back to see you again?” He buckled his belt.
“You can.” She lit up another cigarette. “You want more of that?”
“Sure. It was a wild time. But I might not be in the neighborhood again for quite a while. If I came back in a year, would I find you?”
“Well there’s nothing certain in this world. But no, you might not, we’re not going to be here.”
“Where else would you be, Lula Bird?” “We’re moving to a bigger place. It’s above the photo shop on Boulder.”
Winter could feel the $200 in his hands already. “And you think that’ll be a nicer place?” he asked.
“I don’t know, I haven’t been there yet. There’s kind of a high turnaround in this profession. I honestly can’t say where I’ll be in a year.”
“Well, I’ll be sure to look you up.”
Out in the parlor, amongst all the people, Maddy stopped Winter, smiling. “Your eyes rolled back in place yet?”
“You should have warned me,” Winter said. Maddy smiled at Lula Bird.
As if by a magic spell, heads began to turn to the door. Footsteps, an army of them, thundered up the staircase. One fat man in a grey-green suit and a straw cowboy hat turned to Maddy saying, “Is there another way out of here?”
“It's a raid!” someone yelled.
Some of the women broke for the hallway to the bedrooms to hide. Winter watched the fat man thrust Lula Bird behind him and try to open up a window to dodge out of.
Police burst through the door like wasps from a shook nest. Whistles screeched, splitting Winter's hungover eardrums like banshees. Winter sat down on the sofa, knowing there was no way out. The whistles let up for a second and a hand pulled the needle off the country and western record with an awful popping scratch.
Winter didn't recognize any of the cops. He was trying to decide whether that was good for him or bad, when through the door came a wolf of a man, Dale Summons, the plainclothes detective that had made such trouble for Winter last year when he'd been following newspapermen around. Summons had zealously arrested Winter twice, both times released for a lack of evidence, but not before Summons battered Winter, bloodying his eye.
Chatter and chaos broke out all around Winter as he tried to focus on the money Missouri Irene would be handing him soon. He got out a cigarette.
Summons came right over to Winter and slapped the butt out of his mouth. Winter looked up at him.
“Looky here,” Summons said. He was a grimacing young man with a lot of teeth showing all the time. He had circles under his eyes like the lead in a horror picture and a dollop of mayo on his tie. He had just eaten before coming to knock heads. “If it isn't Winter. Getting your knob polished of an evening?”
“I was just here checking on something,” Winter said.
“I just bet you were, you were measuring the cathouse mattresses, you old demoralized rake! Stand up!”
Winter stood.
“Checking on what?” Summons said.
Sunshine Maddy was in the room a few feet away, being harassed, so Winter didn't want to describe his mission from Missouri Irene.
“I'll tell you later.”
“No later for you, just a jail cell.”
“I'm here on an assignment.” Winter kept his voice low.
Summons punched him in the belly button, hard as you would hit a railroad switch lever you wanted to send to Santa Fe. Winter doubled over, gasping, then Summons pushed him back down onto the sofa.
“I think I like you sitting down better actually.”
A woman was dragged out of the hallway by a boy in blue.
“By God, I'm exhausted,” Summons said, looking around. He put his hands on his hips as if surveying a large archaeological dig at Giza.
Winter had his hands on his gut, but the pain wasn't leaving him. He wondered if Summons hit his wife or kid that hard. If only he had left five minutes earlier.
The hookers, with a few exceptions, weren't afraid of the cops. One redhead who was built like a Spanish galleon's figurehead was giving the law such sass that the guy made her sit on the floor in handcuffs. They let Sunshine Maddy get her white fur shawl before they took her down the stairs.
Two of the johns, out-of-towners, were talking in hushed tones to a young cop by the Victrola. One rustled a folded up bill in his hand, full of suggestion.
“Hey, Summons,” the cop called across the room. “This one wants to buy my wife a present. Or wants to finance me doing it at least.” “Why don't you get a cap gun for Junior?” Summons said, rapid fire, channeling Bogie. He walked over to where the men stood. He slapped the bill out of the tourist's hand then knelt to pick it up. “This'll buy fifty cap guns. Don't you know it's illegal to bribe an officer of the law?” He shoved the bill into his inner jacket pocket.
Winter thought about his PI license from the state of Montana. It was history. A soliciting charge, moral turpitude, in this city, in this state. He might be able to convince his lawyer Harrow to help him beat it but who knew for sure.
He asked himself if it was almost a sense of relief at being kicked out of the game on such a low technicality. Not that working as a clerk at the pool hall was keeping his schooner afloat. Still, the game had gotten too rich for his blood.
* * *
Summons' desk at the station was metal and looked more like a display case for the man's dubious accomplishments. A target shooting medal sat next to a framed photo with J. Edgar Hoover’s secretary. It was pretty desperate.
“You ought to get some walls to hang all this on,” Winter said, nodding at the contents of the desk. “You're all alone on your island here.” He was handcuffed and sitting in the chair across from Summons. The bureau was dark, the only light from a lamp on Summons' desk.
“Never mind me,” Summons said, staring at Winter like he wanted to carve him up for dinner. “You're in a lot of trouble.”
“Everybody's in a lot of trouble with you around,” Winter said.
“A moral turpitude charge? You want some more hell, I'll give you hell.”
“Say, do you think you could tell some of your boys to look for my car? I seem to have mislaid it last night.”
“You souse. Everybody's gotta clean up your mess, is that it? You're so all-fired important? Well I wouldn't use you to scrape off my shoe after a parade of German Shepherds went through.”
“Don't you want to hear my side of the story?”
“What story? You got a tug job! That's the story.”
“Exactly, teenage stuff, practically petting.”
“Ok. What's your story?”
“Like I said, I was there on an assignment and I was under cover.”
“Here we go.” Summons sat back. “You know Missouri Irene?”
Summons’ face lost some of its vulpine intensity. “I might.”
“She came to me wanting to know about Maddy. She wanted me to collect information about where they were moving her operations to.”
Summons tapped a cigarette on his desk, real thoughtful. “And?” he finally said.
“So that girl told me.”
“Lula Bird? After she made you spend in her hand.”
“Well, yes.”
Summons looked grave, like it had all gone from vice comedy to deadly serious police work. “Aren't you going to tell me?”
“You know Missouri Irene, don't you?” Winter asked. He was shooting quite the shot here. “How come you raided one brothel last night and not the other?”
“How do you know we haven't raided them all?”
“You haven’t. The holding cell downstairs is a little too sparsely populated and there’s no prisoners from the other side of town telling any such tale.”
Summons lit his cigarette at long last. He leaned forward in his chair, cigarette smoke roiling in the lamp light.
“What did you do in the war, Darryl?”
Winter gazed at Summons. “The Navy. I was aboard the Lizzie Stanton in '43, running cargo to Sicily for the invasion.”
“Did you ever see any combat?” “Planes attacked us for six days.” “Six days. Poor you.”
“We ran back and forth from Norfolk to the Mediterranean, then to England to give support for Normandy. But I wasn't there for that.”
“Sure you weren't. You were out of the war by then.”
“Look, where's this getting us, Summons?”
“I just like to know who I'm talking to.
How much is Irene paying you?”
Winter told him, and Summons let his head drop as if overtaken by the vapors. “I could have told her where Maddy was going,” he said. “For less money too.”
“Guess you don't have her ear like I thought.”
“Here's what we're going to do. We're going to put your little taffy-pulling charge in a file somewhere. And lose it. You can go free. But you'll have to pay for it. You get that money from her, you come directly to me and give it over, and the state doesn't have to hear about your immorality. Catch and release.”
“And my charge does what?”
“It just kinda sorta disappears.” Summons waved his hands like a magician’s.
“But not for good.”
“If you straighten up and fly right, what does it matter?”
The handcuffs came off easily enough. Summons warmed up to Winter, or put on a show that he did.
“You collect, you stop on by at the Prospect and meet me. I'll be there at 9:30 tonight.”
Maneuvering without a car and a lot of money was a tough time, but Winter tracked down Missouri Irene at her office downtown. No women other than Irene around, and the only hint of illegality was a bronze statue of a nude maiden by a birdbath.
Winter stood by her desk and cut to the chase, telling Irene about the Boulder Avenue address Sunshine Maddy had her eye on. “You know, Detective Summons apparently already knew the answer, how come you didn't go talk to him?”
“I like to keep my distance from Dale,” Missouri Irene said, running one hand over her face. “It wouldn't be good for either one of us to be seen talking.”
“But it's a fair connection to make when the police seem to glide over you and go straight to Maddy's rooms for the round up.”
“Who knows where these arrangements come from? Here's your money.”
* * *
Hoppy Andrews and the Galveston Dreamers played again at the Prospect that night. It seemed like they were always playing there. The place was jammed with people and smoke and noise, like the queues at the gates of hell. Summons was at the bar next to his hat. The lawman looked shrunken, deflated because he had no role. It felt wrong to see him relaxed and at ease among civilians.
“Winter, you old bastard,” he said when he saw him. It was as if they were suddenly pals. Winter thought to ask what Summons did in the war but he backed off because he figured he didn't really want to know. Everybody had a war story and Summons' would be intolerable.
Winter put a paper bag down on the bar. “This the scratch?” Summons asked.
Winter nodded. Summons stuck out a hand and like an octopus pulling a lobster into its maw reeled in the bag of money. No guilt. No second thoughts.
And that was how $300 got whittled down to $20.
Winter didn't want to spend a jolly hour with Summons so he left the bar and walked down the sidewalk towards the grocery store on the corner.
It was only after he gave the money to Summons that he felt it, his role as intermediary between the madam and the cop. He was just holding the dough for a little interval before turning it over. A messenger. A safe deposit box for a bribe.
Easy come, easy go. Winter chuckled.
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THE TATTLETALES
Jesse Hilson
Chapter One:
BROTHEL RAIDERS
Winter's office was in a side storeroom attached to the pool hall and he was used to hearing the sharp crack of tightly packed breaks and listening to the rustle of pocketed balls that followed. Murmurs of players in discussions rose and fell like ocean swells. Cigar smoke hung in the air like a stubborn ghost that will never stop its haunting.
He was reading in the paper about Joe Stalin and Korea when a silence overtook the hall. All shots ceased. The floors stopped squeaking and complaining under shifted feet. Only one set of footsteps could be heard.
“Is Winter here?” A woman's voice.
Made him nervous.
Charlie Craps spoke up. “In there.”
Darryl Winter folded up the newspaper on his desk blotter and put it to the side. This woman must have been very important or very beautiful to silence the entire pool hall like that.
When she came through the door, Winter felt fear climb up his throat because of the two options, she turned out to be very important. The woman was uglier than a Calaveras toad. She was squat and dressed in black Great Depression clothing, old timey for 1951. She had on jewelry and feathers, clothes that were uncalled-for in the summer heat.
The woman looked around Winter's office.
“You don't know me?” the woman said
with a smirk. Her voice sounded like a church lady who just had a bad bite of potato salad.
Winter shook his head no.
“They all know me,” she said, gesturing to the pool tables where the sounds of play had returned. “They're my customers.”
“You're the grocer’s wife?” Winter said. “Leave the comedy routine for the Fibber
McGee Hour. They come to my establishment on a Friday night. You've never been to Missouri Irene's rooms?”
“Can't say that I have.”
“Well I must be talking to the wrong private dick. I need somebody who knows this town, all the finer places as well as the dives.”
Winter turned on the fan on the file cabinet next to his desk. After that he went to the bottle of whiskey on the side table and poured two tumblers. He offered Missouri Irene one.
“Just because I don't know whorehouses doesn't mean I don't know Helena,” Winter said. “Maybe your establishment is below my radar.” She shot the hooch to the back of her throat.
“Real estate is an issue,” she said. “Do you know how much legitimate property in this city is owned by proprietors of houses of easy leisure?”
“No,” Winter said. “I guess I don't know much about anything.”
“Maybe I'm talking to the wrong guy. Thanks for the drink.”
She turned to leave and he said, “What do you need?”
She slowly turned back to face him. “I need a discreet inquiry. Into a competitor. Sunshine Maddy. You probably haven't heard of her either. We're competing for the same clientele. I want to know if she's expanding her operations. I suspect she bought a new joint but I don't know where. If she's moving up in the world, well, I need to know that 'cause I may need to move up too.”
“Where can I find Sunshine Maddy?”
“I want discretion. I don't want her or anyone else knowing I'm onto her.”
“Ok, where?”
“Next to the Sand Dollar Hotel, on Last Chance Gulch. You have to give a password at the door. It's Jack Rabbit.”
“You know the password but you don't know about what's inside?”
“I got more than one spy.”
“Ok, let's talk what it'll cost you.”
“You'll need expenses. Sunshine Maddy's girls don't come cheap.”
“Just to be clear, I'm not bedding down with any of them,” Winter said. “I've been dodging the clap my whole life and I aim to continue.”
“You have to make the subterfuge believable. I'll give you $300 dollars, one now, two on completion. You can collect at my office downtown.”
Winter paused. “For that much money I'll go romancing in a leper colony.”
“I thought so.”
* * *
Winter woke up in an alley later that night. His mouth tasted like a sasquatch’s armpit. He didn’t know where he was. He had celebrated with some of the first $100 of Missouri Irene’s money. He felt to make sure his wallet was still on him. It was, but when he opened it to see where he stood, there was only $30 left.
Had he already gone to Sunshine Maddy’s? If he did, he didn’t remember a damn thing. Some investigator.
He staggered out of the alley into the street. It was quiet, no traffic. It took him a minute to figure out he was on Sixth. Nowhere near the targeted brothel. That was a good sign.
Where was his Dodge? Not parked on the street. If it had gotten stolen he’d be fit to be tied. Winter lurched down the street in the direction of Last Chance. His watch told him it was 1:35 in the morning. He could be picked up for vagrancy if he didn’t get somewhere indoors quickly. He pulled his hat down shadowing his eyes and hoped he didn’t look too screwy. His relations with the Helena police were not warm, he would say. He’d been a bother to the cops, fluttering around them like a gnat while they were doing their job, on enough occasions that he wanted to avoid getting swatted in the future.
He stopped for a cup of coffee at an all- night diner he knew. The waitresses, instead of treating him like family and listening to his woes, could smell the hard luck on him and stayed clear. That good cheer had all gone out the window months ago.
Another man who looked like a ranch hand recently converted to city slicker ways sat in the corner smoking. Winter had a stray notion to ask the guy if he knew who Sunshine Maddy was, if he was a customer, and whether she was moving her camp anywhere. But that was bad news. If he didn’t know, what good was that, and if he did know it might be taken as an insult.
He decided he would go there tonight. The night’s prior social engagements were coming back to him: he had spent a few hours at
the Prospect buying everybody drinks and listening to Hoppy Andrews play his steel guitar with the Galveston Dreamers. He sure did love that quaver. He didn’t know what was wrong with himself that he hadn’t gotten to work right away. But that $100 had made him do what he did as sure as buttons on an elevator made it go up and down.
Steadier on his feet than before, he went in search of the Sand Dollar Hotel. When he got there he could see why the madam would want to move out. The door was green and when he knocked and it opened it was more like a barn door, uneasy on its hinges.
A man in a mustache and red vest answered the door. He looked like the devil’s butler.
“What do you want?” the man in the vest said. He didn’t appear to recognize Winter from earlier, another good sign.
“I’m looking for some company.”
“Can’t help you. I got enough friends as it is.”
Just then Winter’s mind went blank on the password. He dangled there like an actor on stage on premiere night forgetting his lines.
“Jackknife? Jack something.”
The doorman in the vest looked Winter up and down. “The cops hiring dinguses these days, eh?”
“Do I look like a cop?” He gestured to his rumpled clothes and crooked hat.
The doorman shook his head at the sight of Winter, as if grieved at what had happened to such a promising young lad. Then he looked up and down the street to see if they were being watched. “Well, come on.”
Winter followed the man up a narrow, dark staircase. He heard a woman laugh up ahead as well as country western music played on a Victrola. The door opened to reveal a parlor with dark red patterned wallpaper with several couples chatting away in the corners. The women were all dressed in fancy evening wear and seemed to be genuinely paying close attention to what the men were saying. The chatter and laughter sounded like it could have been at an actual party. Nothing sleazy, whether appearance or behavior, was on display. Heads turned to look at Winter and the doorman when they came in. The onlookers gauged whether or not they knew Winter, and he feared being recognized but no one seemed to say so.
The doorman led Winter to a woman seated on a sofa. She was younger than Missouri Irene but seemed to exhibit some of the same airs. She wore the same historic clothing and she had blonde hair that might have been a wig. She smiled at Winter in an appraising way.
“I’m Maddy,” she said. “This is my place. You’ve met Todd.” She gestured to the doorman. “If you play nice, you get the nice guy treatment. If you don’t play nice, you get the Todd treatment. You don’t want that. Todd broke a guy’s jaw the other night.”
Winter nodded.
“You see the quality we have here,” Maddy went on, indicating the girls with a sweep of her arm. “You go on and talk to them. These girls will surprise you. They’ve had quite an education. Some of them will even discuss Mozart with you while you get your rocks off, or Shakespeare.”
“I could use some brushing up,” Winter said.
“They’ll tell you their prices. $10 and up.” Winter looked around, acting the part.
“Quite a place you’ve got here,” he said. “How long you been here?”
Maddy gazed at him before saying, “Since before the war. How long have you been here?”
Winter pointed at the floor. “In town? Just after the war.” It wasn’t true, he got to Helena in 1949, just drifting on the wind.
“What took you so long? How’d you hear about this place?”
“A fine fellow at the Prospect.” He was trying to think of ways to ask Sunshine Maddy more about the location and whether they were moving. But he hesitated and all was lost.
A lean young woman with Gene Tierney hair approached Winter, stood next to him, and conspicuously produced a cigarette. Winter lit it. “Feel like a little danger tonight?” she said.
“That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”
“Most of the time.” The hooker had a speaking voice that was world-weary while not being weary of her occupation.
Maddy receded and Winter guided the hooker toward the bar.
“So you like a little talky-talky beforehand,” she said.
“I’m supposed to find out how cultured you are. So are you Mozart or Shakespeare?”
The hooker rolled her eyes. “That old trick. Maddy tells people that. I’ll tell you like this, there’s Juliet, that’s the light touch for $10. Then it’s Desdemona, medium treatment with a kiss, $25. Then Lady Macbeth, $35, the full treatment. Two girls is $50.”
Winter thought for a second, weighing his wallet and his willingness to go all the way with the ruse. He was technically still married although his wife was in Boise and he hadn’t seen her or his son in eight months. But you couldn’t just stand still in a brothel, people might get suspicious.
“What light through yonder window breaks?” Winter said. “I reckon.”
“Follow me. My name is Lula Bird.”
She led him away from the parlor and the music down a long hallway with many doors. At the very end was a small bedroom with an ornate bed and Chinese art on the walls. Lula Bird closed the door and proceeded to push him onto the bed. He wondered if Missouri Irene would want to know how many such bedrooms there were, how much space the place took up, and what they would want out of a new location. Lula Bird undid his belt and then went on to give him what seemed like the best handjob of his life, except that she seemed distracted toward the end, grabbing something from the bedside table. When he was nearing the point of climax, Lula Bird produced from behind her a block of wood the size of a science textbook and without permission or warning, started smacking his johnson hard against the wood like you would smack a trout on a rock to try to kill it. He couldn’t stop, and next was a piece of what felt like the coarsest burlap that she made him shoot into. The awful way she held it tight and moved it over his nerve endings made him yelp and jerk. “Poor old Uncle Wiggily,” Lula Bird said.
“So that was the light touch?” he gasped when it was all over.
“Did you like it?” Her expression was bright and happy.
“Do men ask for that all the time?” “That’ll be $10.”
He gave her the sawbuck and she tucked it inside the neckline of her dress.
“So, you like it here, Lula Bird?” “It’s alright.”
“What if I want to come back to see you again?” He buckled his belt.
“You can.” She lit up another cigarette. “You want more of that?”
“Sure. It was a wild time. But I might not be in the neighborhood again for quite a while. If I came back in a year, would I find you?”
“Well there’s nothing certain in this world. But no, you might not, we’re not going to be here.”
“Where else would you be, Lula Bird?” “We’re moving to a bigger place. It’s above the photo shop on Boulder.”
Winter could feel the $200 in his hands already. “And you think that’ll be a nicer place?” he asked.
“I don’t know, I haven’t been there yet. There’s kind of a high turnaround in this profession. I honestly can’t say where I’ll be in a year.”
“Well, I’ll be sure to look you up.”
Out in the parlor, amongst all the people, Maddy stopped Winter, smiling. “Your eyes rolled back in place yet?”
“You should have warned me,” Winter said. Maddy smiled at Lula Bird.
As if by a magic spell, heads began to turn to the door. Footsteps, an army of them, thundered up the staircase. One fat man in a grey-green suit and a straw cowboy hat turned to Maddy saying, “Is there another way out of here?”
“It's a raid!” someone yelled.
Some of the women broke for the hallway to the bedrooms to hide. Winter watched the fat man thrust Lula Bird behind him and try to open up a window to dodge out of.
Police burst through the door like wasps from a shook nest. Whistles screeched, splitting Winter's hungover eardrums like banshees. Winter sat down on the sofa, knowing there was no way out. The whistles let up for a second and a hand pulled the needle off the country and western record with an awful popping scratch.
Winter didn't recognize any of the cops. He was trying to decide whether that was good for him or bad, when through the door came a wolf of a man, Dale Summons, the plainclothes detective that had made such trouble for Winter last year when he'd been following newspapermen around. Summons had zealously arrested Winter twice, both times released for a lack of evidence, but not before Summons battered Winter, bloodying his eye.
Chatter and chaos broke out all around Winter as he tried to focus on the money Missouri Irene would be handing him soon. He got out a cigarette.
Summons came right over to Winter and slapped the butt out of his mouth. Winter looked up at him.
“Looky here,” Summons said. He was a grimacing young man with a lot of teeth showing all the time. He had circles under his eyes like the lead in a horror picture and a dollop of mayo on his tie. He had just eaten before coming to knock heads. “If it isn't Winter. Getting your knob polished of an evening?”
“I was just here checking on something,” Winter said.
“I just bet you were, you were measuring the cathouse mattresses, you old demoralized rake! Stand up!”
Winter stood.
“Checking on what?” Summons said.
Sunshine Maddy was in the room a few feet away, being harassed, so Winter didn't want to describe his mission from Missouri Irene.
“I'll tell you later.”
“No later for you, just a jail cell.”
“I'm here on an assignment.” Winter kept his voice low.
Summons punched him in the belly button, hard as you would hit a railroad switch lever you wanted to send to Santa Fe. Winter doubled over, gasping, then Summons pushed him back down onto the sofa.
“I think I like you sitting down better actually.”
A woman was dragged out of the hallway by a boy in blue.
“By God, I'm exhausted,” Summons said, looking around. He put his hands on his hips as if surveying a large archaeological dig at Giza.
Winter had his hands on his gut, but the pain wasn't leaving him. He wondered if Summons hit his wife or kid that hard. If only he had left five minutes earlier.
The hookers, with a few exceptions, weren't afraid of the cops. One redhead who was built like a Spanish galleon's figurehead was giving the law such sass that the guy made her sit on the floor in handcuffs. They let Sunshine Maddy get her white fur shawl before they took her down the stairs.
Two of the johns, out-of-towners, were talking in hushed tones to a young cop by the Victrola. One rustled a folded up bill in his hand, full of suggestion.
“Hey, Summons,” the cop called across the room. “This one wants to buy my wife a present. Or wants to finance me doing it at least.” “Why don't you get a cap gun for Junior?” Summons said, rapid fire, channeling Bogie. He walked over to where the men stood. He slapped the bill out of the tourist's hand then knelt to pick it up. “This'll buy fifty cap guns. Don't you know it's illegal to bribe an officer of the law?” He shoved the bill into his inner jacket pocket.
Winter thought about his PI license from the state of Montana. It was history. A soliciting charge, moral turpitude, in this city, in this state. He might be able to convince his lawyer Harrow to help him beat it but who knew for sure.
He asked himself if it was almost a sense of relief at being kicked out of the game on such a low technicality. Not that working as a clerk at the pool hall was keeping his schooner afloat. Still, the game had gotten too rich for his blood.
* * *
Summons' desk at the station was metal and looked more like a display case for the man's dubious accomplishments. A target shooting medal sat next to a framed photo with J. Edgar Hoover’s secretary. It was pretty desperate.
“You ought to get some walls to hang all this on,” Winter said, nodding at the contents of the desk. “You're all alone on your island here.” He was handcuffed and sitting in the chair across from Summons. The bureau was dark, the only light from a lamp on Summons' desk.
“Never mind me,” Summons said, staring at Winter like he wanted to carve him up for dinner. “You're in a lot of trouble.”
“Everybody's in a lot of trouble with you around,” Winter said.
“A moral turpitude charge? You want some more hell, I'll give you hell.”
“Say, do you think you could tell some of your boys to look for my car? I seem to have mislaid it last night.”
“You souse. Everybody's gotta clean up your mess, is that it? You're so all-fired important? Well I wouldn't use you to scrape off my shoe after a parade of German Shepherds went through.”
“Don't you want to hear my side of the story?”
“What story? You got a tug job! That's the story.”
“Exactly, teenage stuff, practically petting.”
“Ok. What's your story?”
“Like I said, I was there on an assignment and I was under cover.”
“Here we go.” Summons sat back. “You know Missouri Irene?”
Summons’ face lost some of its vulpine intensity. “I might.”
“She came to me wanting to know about Maddy. She wanted me to collect information about where they were moving her operations to.”
Summons tapped a cigarette on his desk, real thoughtful. “And?” he finally said.
“So that girl told me.”
“Lula Bird? After she made you spend in her hand.”
“Well, yes.”
Summons looked grave, like it had all gone from vice comedy to deadly serious police work. “Aren't you going to tell me?”
“You know Missouri Irene, don't you?” Winter asked. He was shooting quite the shot here. “How come you raided one brothel last night and not the other?”
“How do you know we haven't raided them all?”
“You haven’t. The holding cell downstairs is a little too sparsely populated and there’s no prisoners from the other side of town telling any such tale.”
Summons lit his cigarette at long last. He leaned forward in his chair, cigarette smoke roiling in the lamp light.
“What did you do in the war, Darryl?”
Winter gazed at Summons. “The Navy. I was aboard the Lizzie Stanton in '43, running cargo to Sicily for the invasion.”
“Did you ever see any combat?” “Planes attacked us for six days.” “Six days. Poor you.”
“We ran back and forth from Norfolk to the Mediterranean, then to England to give support for Normandy. But I wasn't there for that.”
“Sure you weren't. You were out of the war by then.”
“Look, where's this getting us, Summons?”
“I just like to know who I'm talking to.
How much is Irene paying you?”
Winter told him, and Summons let his head drop as if overtaken by the vapors. “I could have told her where Maddy was going,” he said. “For less money too.”
“Guess you don't have her ear like I thought.”
“Here's what we're going to do. We're going to put your little taffy-pulling charge in a file somewhere. And lose it. You can go free. But you'll have to pay for it. You get that money from her, you come directly to me and give it over, and the state doesn't have to hear about your immorality. Catch and release.”
“And my charge does what?”
“It just kinda sorta disappears.” Summons waved his hands like a magician’s.
“But not for good.”
“If you straighten up and fly right, what does it matter?”
The handcuffs came off easily enough. Summons warmed up to Winter, or put on a show that he did.
“You collect, you stop on by at the Prospect and meet me. I'll be there at 9:30 tonight.”
Maneuvering without a car and a lot of money was a tough time, but Winter tracked down Missouri Irene at her office downtown. No women other than Irene around, and the only hint of illegality was a bronze statue of a nude maiden by a birdbath.
Winter stood by her desk and cut to the chase, telling Irene about the Boulder Avenue address Sunshine Maddy had her eye on. “You know, Detective Summons apparently already knew the answer, how come you didn't go talk to him?”
“I like to keep my distance from Dale,” Missouri Irene said, running one hand over her face. “It wouldn't be good for either one of us to be seen talking.”
“But it's a fair connection to make when the police seem to glide over you and go straight to Maddy's rooms for the round up.”
“Who knows where these arrangements come from? Here's your money.”
* * *
Hoppy Andrews and the Galveston Dreamers played again at the Prospect that night. It seemed like they were always playing there. The place was jammed with people and smoke and noise, like the queues at the gates of hell. Summons was at the bar next to his hat. The lawman looked shrunken, deflated because he had no role. It felt wrong to see him relaxed and at ease among civilians.
“Winter, you old bastard,” he said when he saw him. It was as if they were suddenly pals. Winter thought to ask what Summons did in the war but he backed off because he figured he didn't really want to know. Everybody had a war story and Summons' would be intolerable.
Winter put a paper bag down on the bar. “This the scratch?” Summons asked.
Winter nodded. Summons stuck out a hand and like an octopus pulling a lobster into its maw reeled in the bag of money. No guilt. No second thoughts.
And that was how $300 got whittled down to $20.
Winter didn't want to spend a jolly hour with Summons so he left the bar and walked down the sidewalk towards the grocery store on the corner.
It was only after he gave the money to Summons that he felt it, his role as intermediary between the madam and the cop. He was just holding the dough for a little interval before turning it over. A messenger. A safe deposit box for a bribe.
Easy come, easy go. Winter chuckled.
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